JAMES W. COOK
The Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader: Nothing Else Like It in the Universe

P.T. Barnum was one of the most influential men in 19th-century America, an innovator in dozens of different fields, from opera promotion to zoological exhibition. During his lifetime, his autobiography, “Struggles and Triumphs,” was a best-seller. Yet today, to most people, he is a sort of a one-liner, known chiefly as the man who said (though he probably didn’t), “There’s a sucker born every minute.” To set the record straight, we now have “The Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader” (University of Illinois Press, 264 pages, $50), a compendium of writings by and about Barnum edited by James W. Cook.

The present volume is intended as a sort of scholarly supplement to Barnum’s autobiography, filling in gaps, providing new perspectives, and correcting some of Barnum’s artful misrepresentations. As might be imagined, the output of the honey-tongued showman was voluminous. The first modern impresario, he is also the father of modern public relations, a skilled wordsmith in the charming, humorous, and seductive style of the 19th century. He wrote (or edited) hundreds of press releases (then done in the form of letters to editors), advertisements, brochures, articles, and even entire books.

Tracking all this down took an admirable amount of legwork, and Mr. Cook has done a service to future scholarship by making this material available to the public. The crown jewel is a series of excerpts from Barnum’s autobiographical 1841 novel, “The Adventures of an Adventurer: Being Some Passages in the Life of Barnaby Diddleum.” Aside from being predictably hilarious, “Adventures” offers the only real portrait of the infamous Joyce Heth episode, which launched Barnum’s career as a showman. Heth, a blind, elderly slave from Kentucky, was promoted by Barnum as the 161-year-old nurse of President Washington.

Barnum’s autobiography, written many years later, is understandably circumspect, even apologetic, about this period. “Adventures,” however, was written fresh from the Heth triumph and is chock-full of cheerful confession of his roguish misdeeds. Barnum, above all, was adept at knowing how to make an attraction pay and pay and pay again. In this case, the writing of “Adventures” (published in serial form in the New York Atlas from April 11-August 15, 1941) was the last payoff of the Heth affair – a tell-all expose guaranteed to keep readers hanging on for juicy details. “I baptized Joyce Heth on paper, and baptized the paper in tobacco juice,” he reports on how he faked some documentary evidence of the woman’s age. It is like Houdini telling us how he got out of the jail cell.

In addition to this valuable section, the book includes Barnum’s journalistic dispatches from London (written when he was on tour with the midget General Tom Thumb); excerpts from his book “Humbugs of the World”; promotional writings for his famous attractions from the Feejee Mermaid to Jumbo the Elephant; a series of Currier and Ives prints of some of Barnum’s best-known living oddities; and writings about Barnum by contemporary journalists. Yet, as illuminating as this all is, the book is not quite as “colossal” as it might be. Mr. Cook restricts himself to Barnum’s (and others’) public utterances about what he calls the “culture industry.” But that’s not the whole story. Missing from the mix are Barnum’s earliest public writings as editor of the Jacksonian newspaper the Herald of Freedom, private personal and business correspondence, speeches on subjects such as temperance and abolition, and his political commentary as Connecticut legislator, mayor of Bridgeport, and Republican candidate for Congress.

For these, we must await the arrival of yet another Barnum book. It seems there’s life in the old humbug yet.

– Travis Stewart

LUIGI PIRANDELLO
Shoot!: The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator

Serafino Gubbio, nicknamed Shoot, is a poor, self-taught philosopher who works as a cameraman at a Roman film studio called Kosmograph. Gubbio’s camera has a hand-crank, and everyone asks him whether someday he might not be entirely replaced by a machine. But he nurses no such fear: He understands that his camera already captures and consumes everything alive in front of it, and that he must play the part of a silent executioner.

Published in Italy in 1915 as “Si Gira” – literally meaning something like “we’re rolling” – Luigi Pirandello’s “Shoot!: The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator,” grabbed the attention of contemporary cultural critics. “Shoot!” explores the question of consciousness in what Walter Benjamin would later call the age of mechanical reproduction. Like Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” this novel contrasts truth and illusion and the relationship between actors and characters.

Against the backdrop of the Kosmograph studio in the early days of silent movies, “protodivas,” jealous lovers, greedy directors and producers, and a veritable army of cast and crew members fashion for themselves and for the faceless audience a new reality that is nothing but a series of fictions. The narrative moves through this obscure, fragmented, and absurdist world by way of Gubbio’s diaries and the lens of his machine,

which suggests on its knock-kneed tripod a huge spider watching for its prey, a spider that sucks in and absorbs … live reality to render it up an evanescent, momentary appearance, the play of a mechanical illusion in the eyes of the public.

In this universe not even nature can escape the spider’s web. Gubbio refuses to look out the window at night, as he begins to see “even in the sky a marvel of cinematography.” Ultimately, straddling the line between reality and artifice can have all too real consequences. The novel’s tragic climax reminds us that Pirandello was writing in pre-fascist Italy at the beginning of World War I, facing a world increasingly obsessed with mechanized warfare and on the brink of the destruction of Europe.

C.K. Scott Moncrieff, who brought us Proust’s magnum opus in English, translated “Si Gira” in 1927. His “Shoot!” is the only English version ever published and proves to be a truly timeless and important rendering of Pirandello’s novel. Moncrieff skillfully re-created Pirandello’s dreamlike prose, which flitters in and out of consciousness, according to the mechanized tempo of Gubbio turning the handle of his machine.

This edition, published by the University of Chicago Press, is part of the ambitious Cinema and Modernity series edited by Tom Gunning. It includes, in addition to an introduction by the editor and an essay by Princeton professor P. Adams Sitney, a famous essay by Pirandello himself, titled “Will Talkies Abolish the Theater?” Here, Pirandello predicts that “Cinema must liberate itself from literature in order to find its own form of expression and accomplish its own true revolution.” It is a daring challenge to filmmakers even today.

– Adele Kudish