by Robert Lax
Copyright
First published in the United States in 2000 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster St
New York NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
Copyright © 2000 by Robert Lax
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-46830-766-5
To Bernhard Moosbrugger and Gladys and Tessa Weigner with thanks and love
and
to the memory of my sister Gladys Lax Marcus
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment for their support, advice, and friendship to Peter Mayer and Tracy Carns of The Overlook Press; to Robert Wickenheiser, Paul Spaeth, and Barbara Carr of St. Bonaventure University; and to Michael and Rebecca Daugherty, Judith Emery, Cammy Brothers, Marcia Kelly, and Connie Brothers.
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Circus of the Sun
Morning
The Morning Stars
Afternoon
Acrobat’s Song
Penelope and Mogador
Ortans
La Louisa
Evening
The Dust of the Earth
The Midway
Snake Charmer
Dog Act
Colonel Angus
Night
Acrobat About to Enter
Rastelli
Mogador’s Book
Voyage to Pescara
The Juggler
A Lover of Cats
Fritzist
The Devils
Children
Circus at Twilight
INTRODUCTION
Whenever the circus would arrive in town (in those days by train), there was usually a small boy who had been brought to the station by his father to witness and experience the event. The town was Olean, in southwestern New York State, and the small boy was Robert Lax. The circus presented the chance for the two to meet new people and to see them perform acts of daring, humorous acts, and acts filled with beauty and grace. But most of all, for the father and for the child, the circus filled them with a sense of awe at the wonderful thing that was coming into their town.
Robert Lax never lost that sense of wonder whenever he was around a circus. He went to see these wandering caravans of performers as often as he could, long after he had ceased being a child (at least as far as physical age went).
It was in 1943, when Lax was twenty-seven years old, that he first met the family of circus performers that were to become the centerpiece of both Circus of the Sun and Mogador’s Book. When Lax’s friend Leonard Robinson was sent to write a short piece on the Cristiani family for the “Talk of the Town” section of The New Yorker (“Waiting for Lucio,” v. 19, no. 16, June 5, 1943, p.15–16) he took Bob with him. Bob got along well with the family members. So well, in fact, that he kept in touch with them from that point on. But a special friendship was struck up between himself and Mogador Cristiani, the handsome acrobat/equestrian son who handled the family affairs.
Ten years later Lax wrote his own article on the family for Jubilee magazine (“The Incomparable Cristianis,” v. 1, no. 1, May 1953, p. 52–55). In the decade in between, Lax not only corresponded and visited the family, but also traveled with them during the summer of 1949 through western Canada. Mark Van Doren wrote, concerning this time:
He [Lax] talked more and more about the circus—a small one named for the Cristiani brothers who performed most of its acts—which he had adopted as a multiple and ever moving friend. He followed it one year to Canada, writing me from there about the unearthly sweetness and grace of the people who had taken him in as a poet and philosopher without portfolio. He spoke particuliarly of Mogador, a bare-back rider whose father, Papa Cristiani, had named him for the place in North Africa where he happened to be born.
(Voyages, v. 2, nos. 1–2, 1968, p. 62–64)
During his travels with the family, Lax occasionally let himself be made up as a clown. He used the name “Chesko.” In an unpublished remembrance, he writes of one such occasion:
I walked around the ring. I hardly looked up at the crowd at all at first. Then I looked a little, scanning through the sea of faces for one familiar, for one that was watching me. When I found a pair of eyes watching me, I watched them back, watched and waited, waited for anything. When they changed, I changed. If they smiled, I looked quizzical; if they looked angry, I looked shocked. If a child put both hands to his ears and waggled, I’d make a face at him and walk away.
Sometimes I layed down in the track … singling out a beautiful lady in the grandstands, or the fair flower she wore at her shoulder, looking at her wistfully, thinking, and not thinking, of all the dreams of romance. Lady, I am a beggar at the door of your castle. Your beauty has smitten me through the eyes and to the heart. You are Eleanor of Navarre and I am a troubadour.
She laughs.
I pick myself up slowly, Brush myself off, with a distracted gesture. I walk away looking back sadly at the fair flower on her shoulder.
In an interview in New York Quarterly (no. 30, 1986), Lax talked about the need to be immersed in life in some way in order to be able to write poetry. Although he had known the Cristianis for a number of years, the experience of traveling with the family provided the necessary impetus to bring to conception a series of poems and remembrances of the family. But it was in that same interview that Lax also spoke of the need to withdraw, “at least enough to sit quietly and write.”
When Lax did withdraw in order to set to work on the group of poems which became Circus of the Sun, he had already filled up a portion of a composition notebook with thoughts about Mogador and the Cristianis. It was in the spring of 1950 that the text of Circus of the Sun was actually composed. This was done for the most part in a room in the lower level of the library of St. Bonaventure University (a place that now houses the largest archival collection of his work to be found anywhere). Lax was comfortable on the campus, for he had been coming to it for many years. He had not come to take courses, but rather to talk to the Franciscan friars and to use the library. The advice given to him by one of the friars was to write at the same time and in the same place each day. Lax followed that advice.
After finishing the text of Circus of the Sun, Lax made preparations for a trip to France. Before leaving, he showed the text to a number of friends. Of those friends it was Robert Butman, whom Lax had first met years before at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who helped most with the process of editing. But it was almost ten years before the complete version of Circus of the Sun was finally published.
In talking about Lax, Mark Van Doren has said, “His chief secret … was a sort of bliss he could do nothing about. Least of all could he express it.” If Lax did express this bliss anywhere in his writings, I think it comes out most clearly in Circus of the Sun.
Circus of the Sun is a blending of devotional poetry, in the Catholic tradition, with the eye of a journalist and the delight of a child. I use the term “journalist” in the sense of being a reporter but also in the sense of one who keeps a journal or diary. Lax, the reporter seeing things with childlike grace, at times relates his vision like an Old Testament prophet, at times like St. Francis composing a new “Canticle of the Sun,” and at times like
a kid wandering through the circus grounds eating popcorn.
What we are presented with is a group of poems that are thematically rather than formally related to one another. The poems are drawn together by imagery which is most often taken from the Bible. The whole is firmly tied together with an ending that echoes the beginning.
This aspect of the beginning found in the end brings to mind another means of coherence. The poems form a cycle that can be interpreted in a number of ways. The most obvious cycle is that of the day, for all events presumably happen within that temporal framework. The set of poems is divided into five sections (morning, afternoon, evening, the midway, night), four of which designate periods of time. Lax intended these sections to correspond to the canonical hours of the day in the Roman Catholic Church which are set aside for prayer and meditation (especially matins, lauds, vespers, and compline).
There is a further cycle that is cosmic. For the circus, when it appears in a new town, is in a sense a new creation. This analogy is one of the main metaphors employed by Lax. Lastly, there is a cycle that relates to the Christian doctrine of redemption and resurrection. The circus can be said to “die” when it leaves one town, but is “reborn” in the next. The resurrection that occurs is by means of grace imparted to the performers, and that grace is reflected back to the giver with each performance; as it says in one poem, “The circus is a song of praise, a song of praise unto the Lord.”
Instead of invoking some pagan muse, Lax prefaces his work by quoting a passage from Proverbs in which Wisdom is personified. Wisdom is there spoken of as being present, with God, at the time of creation. The first short poem we encounter says this:
Sometimes we go on a search
and do not know what we are looking for,
until we come again to our beginning.
The question, or quest, of the search is here answered by pointing to our beginning. We need only turn to the next text for Lax to talk about that beginning. Here we have a reworking of the Genesis account of creation. The void is scribed by compasses and in this way given order. The compasses inscribe circles; later to be seen as the circles of the circus ring, the circles of the spheres the jugglers use, the circles of the acrobats somersaulting onto the backs of horses. The inscribed circle of the compass marks out a line where “beginning and end were in one”; the one being the creator God who, with wisdom, brings into existence all things.
What was the motivation for this creation? The motivation was love; “Love made a sphere.” Out of the love of God flows a fountain; the fountain of the fecundity of God that gives birth to all things.
From this cosmic perspective, Lax takes us to the field where the circus is to be set up. We read here that even the grass in the field waits in anticipation for the wonder that is the circus. Indeed, the six days of creation are present in the setting of the circus; “We have seen all the days of creation in one day.” And just as all of creation praises its creator, so the circus people moving over the field “are coming to praise the Lord.”
Toward the end of Circus of the Sun, Lax gives us an explanation of his poetic intentions:
Now in telling the story
of the Cristianis …
we tell of creation and glory,
of rising,
and fall:
and again of the rising
where we are all risen;
for each man redeemed
is risen again.
Here we have the microcosm of the circus, which, in moving from place to place, rises, falls, and rises again, each time creating itself anew. That microcosm is compared to the macrocosm of the universe created in all its glory and wonder by God. And again, the circus is also likened to the Christian doctrine of redemption, where the fall of each person into sin is counteracted by the sacrifice of Christ on the cross and his resurrection from the dead. Because Christ conquered death by rising again, we also can have the hope of resurrection.
The “morning” section ends with the appearance of Mogador. Although Lax describes different family members, it is Mogador who is the centerpiece. Indeed, this set of poems was originally going to be called “Mogador’s Book.” That title came to be used later for the second collection of materials published in this volume.
The friendship that developed between Lax and Mogador is shown most fully in the long journalistic portion of Mogador’s Book, where the conversations of the two are recounted as they ride together at night between towns in one of the circus trucks. The whole of Mogador’s Book can be seen as a companion piece to Circus of the Sun: both a commentary and an expansion.
When the larger-than-life figure of Mogador makes his entrance in Circus of the Sun, it is said that “He walks the earth like a turning ball.” The imagery used in this passage is like that of the prophet Ezekiel when he relates his vision of the angelic beings each of whose movements were accompanied by a wheel within a wheel (Ezekiel 1:15–21): “The moment is a sphere moving with Mogador.”
When asked by Penelope, the tightrope walker, how Mogador performed the acrobatic feats he did on horseback, Mogador responds,
It is like a wind that surrounds me
or a dark cloud,
and I am in it,
and it belongs to me
and it gives me the power
to do these things.
The wind can be likened to the description that Jesus gave of the movement of the Spirit of God (John 3:8), and the dark cloud like the one that sat on the top of Mount Sinai when Moses received the law (Exodus 20:21). The melding of these images points to Lax’s own background, as he entered the Roman Catholic Church after an upbringing in Judaism.
We can also relate Mogador’s performance to the ideas of redemption and resurrection. Although Mogador falls off the horse three times (remember, Jonah was in the belly of the great fish three days and nights: the same period of time that Christ lay in the tomb), he literally rises again to complete his routine. When he says that “it was nothing,” he means that the feat was accomplished through the grace of God moving him like a wind and enveloping him like a dark cloud.
The poem which has received more attention than any other is “The Sunset City.” This poem moves us more by the sound of its words than by their meanings. R. C. Kenedy called it “one of the greatest poems in the English language—and its pulse is surely one of the most blood-curdling rhythms yet devised by poet” (Art International, v. 15, no. 1, January 20, 1971, p. 62–65, 68). Denise Levertov described the poem in this way:
It is composed—as music may be out of a certain set of tones—from a relatively small number of key words which are used over and over, not in idle repetitions but in a progression of phrases which take resonance and increased meaning from one another.
(Voyages, v. 2, nos. 1–2, 1968, p. 93–94)
“The Sunset City” appears nearly in the center of Circus of the Sun and, because of the time imagery of that text, is also set in the turning point of the day, when daylight turns to dusk. The daytime work of setup and practice turns into the nighttime activities of the midway and the main performance. Day turns to night as the microcosm of the circus completes another cycle. Lax says of the circus, “Like civilizations and everything that grows, it holds in perfection but a little moment.”
Three years after his travels with the Cristianis, Lax was in Europe. In the summer of 1951 Lax was in Rome. He went there for the holy year and to visit a Trappist monk whom he had met when visiting his friend Thomas Merton at the Abbey of Gethsemani. Lax stayed for a short time with the Trappists, but then found himself in the city with little money and no place to stay.
Lax met an old friend from Columbia University, and this friend introduced him to a man named Peter (who was the son of someone from the diplomatic corps). Peter and his wife invited Lax to stay with them in their large apartment. The place was large enough to accommodate an art studio, which at the time was being used by the Chilean-born surrealist painter Roberto Matta. Another acquaintance
at the time was the painter Georgio de Chirico. It is interesting to note that although de Chirico was Italian, he had been born and raised in Greece, which later became Lax’s home.
While in Rome, Lax again was given the opportunity to travel with a circus. This time it was the Alfred Court Zoo Circus. He met up with them in Rome (at the empty field when they first pulled into town) and, after ingratiating himself to the circus people, went with them to the other side of the Italian peninsula to the port city of Pescara, on the Adriatic. Lax again turned this experience into a memoir laced with both poetry and prose, which he called Voyage to Pescara.
The Pescara River rises in the Apennines and flows past Aquila and Populi before it reaches the Adriatic at the town of Pescara. The circus went first to Rieti, in the valley, before it ascended into the mountains to follow the route of the river to the sea. Lax was befriended this time not by the star of the show, but rather by one of the workers, whose name was Fritz. The narration of this journey is much more concrete and journalistic than Circus of the Sun. But while there are differences in tone and treatment, there are also some similarities.
One of the central metaphors which Voyage to Pescara presents is that of the circus as the Tabernacle which Moses and the Jewish people traveled with in the desert. The Tabernacle itself was a tent surrounded by an open court and was placed in the center of their enormous camp. Just as the priests ministered to the people out of the Tabernacle in the wilderness of Sinai, so the performers and workers of the circus are depicted as modern-day priests ministering to the needs of the people who come to watch.
