This memoir of Tully's season as a laborer with a low-end circus originally appeared in 1927, and what we have here is a facsimile reprint, complete with original illustrations by William Gropper, such as this drawing of Lila, the sideshow Strong Woman:
In a Foreword, alt-comix luminary and cultural critic Harvey Pekar identifies Tully as a precursor of hardboiled fiction; Tully's portrait of the circus as a criminal underworld on rails is certainly as brutal and unsentimental as anything I've read in the genre. In my review of Cat Man, I mentioned the purported violence of old-time circus life, and Circus Parade puts that violence on such sordid display that the book was widely denounced on moral grounds and even banned in places.It opens with the lion tamer mauled to gruesome death by hyenas and a bear before a horrified crowd. From there, we get a "Hey Rube" brawl between circus folk and vindictive townspeople, a suicide, a tiger and lion cruelly and wastefully set against each other for sport, a callous gangbang of a young black girl, a fatal tarring, "red-lighting" (throwing someone from a fast-moving train by night) galore, and a final pitched riot between laborers and management when the latter tries to weasel out of payday:
A lot of this and other details (like the owner whose sole obsession is a circus bigger than Ringling Bros.) sounded quite familiar from my reading of Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants; I'd be shocked if she didn't read Circus Parade as research for her own novel--which isn't to say she didn't do a solid job of creative appropriation.In any case, this is certainly the best book I've read for this series of reviews so far. Tully has a gift for "warm" objectivity--he depicts the characters of this ragtag, disreputable troupe with an unsparing detachment that nevertheless powerfully humanizes even the strangest among them and renders them accessible and even sympathetic. I'd highly recommend this, even for readers not particularly interested in circuses.
