The Circus of Dr Lao and Other Improbable Stories Read online

  Front Cover

  Back Cover

  charles finney’s

  the circus of dr. lao

  has been hailed by critics as a masterpiece

  of fantasy. The SATURDAY REVIEW called it

  “a remarkable excursion into the fantastic” and

  warns that it may “occasionally horrify

  or disgust you ... It isn't a book for babes.”

  “A licentious, irreverent, insolent, amusing book . . .

  a satirical comment on our so-called civilization."

  NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE

  With this famous novelette setting the mood, the

  celebrated science-fiction author Ray Bradbury has

  selected eleven other imaginative stories by

  first-rate writers such as E. B. White, Roald Dahl

  and Shirley Jackson to make a rich, exciting

  collection. Here the reader will get a taste of the

  off-beat, the unusual —the flavor of unknown

  worlds, and the excitement of our own

  world seen in new dimensions.

  The Bestsellers come from Bantam Books

  LOOK FOR THE BANTAM ROOSTER YOUR ASSURANCE OF QUALITY!

  Inside Front Cover

  the circus of dr. lao

  is like no circus you

  ever saw—full of fantastic

  happenings, crammed with

  the wonder and terror of

  the supernatural.

  And the stories Ray Bradbury has

  chosen to go with this famous novel are in keeping

  with this special mood.

  E. B. WHITE

  tells of a machine that easily might

  make man obsolete.

  NIGEL KNEALE

  tells of the very sweet revenge

  of some be-devilled frogs.

  ROALD DAHL

  tells of an imaginative game that~

  turns into a horrifying nightmare.

  HENRY KUTTNER

  tells of a man who thinks he’s

  getting the better part of a bargain

  with the devil.

  These are only a few of the extraordinary

  tales in this volume.

  There goes the calliope, the trumpet,

  the drum . . . Get ready for THE CIRCUS OF

  DR. LAO and Other Improbable Stories — the

  greatest show on—or off—the earth.

  Title page

  the circus

  of dr. lao

  and other improbable stories

  edited by

  ray bradbury

  bantam books new york

  Copyright

  THE CIRCUS OF DR. LAO and Other Improbable Stories

  A Bantam Book

  PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1956

  © Copyright, 1956, by Ray Bradbury. All rights reserved.

  The selections in this anthology are copyrighted, and they may not be reproduced in any form without the consent of the authors, their publishers, or their agents. The copyright notices are listed below.

  Copyright Notices and Acknowledgments

  The Circus of Dr. Lao, by Charles G. Finney, The Viking Press, 1935. Reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright, 1935, by Charles G. Finney.

  The Pond, by Nigel Kneale, reprinted from Tomato Cain and Other Stories by Nigel Kneale by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. and the author. Copyright, 1950, by Nigel Kneale.

  The Hour of Letdown, by E. B. White, reprinted from The Second Tree From the Corner by E. B. White by permission of The New Yorker, Harper & Brothers and Hamish Hamilton Limited. Copyright, 1951, by E. B. White.

  The Wish, by Roald Dahl, reprinted from Someone Like You by Roald Dahl by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and Martin Seeker & Warburg, Ltd. Copyright, 1953, by Roald Dahl.

  The Summer People, by Shirley Jackson, reprinted from Charm Magazine by permission of Brandt & Brandt. Copyright, 1950, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

  Buzby’s Petrified Woman, by Loren Eiseley, reprinted from Harper’s Magazine by permission of the author. Copyright, 1948, by Harper’s Magazine.

  The Resting Place, by Oliver LaFarge, reprinted from The New Yorker by permission of the author. Copyright, 1954, The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.

  Threshold, by Henry Kuttner, reprinted by permission of Harold Matson Company. Copyright, 1940, Street & Smith Publications, Inc., in the U.S.A. and Great Britain; publishers of Astounding Science Fiction.

  Greenface, by James H. Schmitz, reprinted from Unknown Worlds by permission of Astounding Science Fiction. Copyright, August 1943, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

  The Limits of Walter Horton, by John Seymour Sharnik, reprinted from Charm Magazine by permission of Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Copyright, 1954, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

  The Man Who Vanished, by Robert M. Coates, reprinted from The New Yorker by permission of the author. Copyright, 1955, The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 56-10486

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, Inc. Its trade mark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a bantam, is registered in the U. S. Patent Office and in other countries, Marca Registrada

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Bantam Books, 25 West 45th Street, New York 36, N. Y.

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Back Cover

  Inside Front Cover

  Title page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  THE CIRCUS OF DR. LAO by Charles G. Finney

  THE CATALOGUE

  THE POND by Nigel Kneale

  THE HOUR OF LETDOWN by E. B. White

  THE WISH by Roald Dahl

  THE SUMMER PEOPLE by Shirley Jackson

  EARTH’S HOLOCAUST by Nathaniel Hawthorne

  BUZBY’S PETRIFIED WOMAN by Loren C. Eisley

  THE RESTING PLACE by Oliver La Farge

  THRESHOLD by Henry Kuttner

  GREENFACE by James H. Schmitz

  THE LIMITS OF WALTER HORTON by John Seymour Sharnik

  THE MAN WHO VANISHED by Robert M. Coates

  Special Offer to Readers of This Book

  Books Abridged advertisement

  Back Page

  Introduction

  THE CIRCUS OF DR. LAO and the stories which follow are fantasies, not science-fiction. First then, some definitions. Science-fiction is the law-abiding citizen of imaginative literature, obeying the rules, be they physical, social, or psychological, keeping regular hours, eating punctual meals; predictable, certain, sure.

  Fantasy, on the other hand, is criminal. Each fantasy assaults and breaks a particular law; the crime being hidden by the author’s felicitous thought and style which cover the body before blood is seen.

  Science-fiction works hand-in-glove with the universe.

  Fantasy cracks it down the middle, turns it wrong-side-out, dissolves it to invisibility, walks men through its walls, and fetches incredible circuses to town with sea-serpent, medusa, and chimera displacing zebra, ape, and armadillo.

  Science-fiction balances you on the cliff.

  Fantasy shoves you off.

  Why let ourselves be shoved off cliffs by this so-called “escape” fiction?

  Right now, I want to throw that word ‘escape’ out the window. In speaking of these stories, these fantasies, I would like to emphasize instead their contribution toward growth and responsibility, small as it may be. Stories can ony be labeled “escapist” if they solve problems by ignoring or destroying them. Mickey Spillane�
�s characters, for instance, in another genre, shoot first so they will not have to ask or answer questions later.

  Thoughtful men find many things in our civilized order worth—not escaping—but growing away from: the preconceived notion, prejudice, bias, dogma, of any kind whatever. Through our creative arts, including fantastic literature, we can return to the raw stuff of environment for re-seasoning, for an understanding of the wilderness, the animal, the death which tempts us to solve problems with annihilation. Seeking help from literary sources, we often appear blasphemous and “escapist” to those still in the temple, political gymnasium, or school. Actually, we are only ‘standing off for a long clear look at the human situation, preparing to doff old burdens in order to assume the new.

  We all try to sense this world with eye, ear, nose, and mouth; our hand fumbles with the slippery stuff of this material existence which, while mysterious, seems far more understandable, real, concrete, than other men’s minds. We all wish to accumulate sensation and use it to build some temporary redoubt. And perhaps DR. LAO and the stories collected here do remind us that, indeed, all such fortresses must, by the nature of existence, be made of easily broken eggshell and sheddable armour. Man should not live to keep any single political or philosophical architecture neat, clean, and impregnable; rather such frameworks should exist for use, to be razed and burnt, once their time is past.

  Of course, not only the fantasy, but all writing of any quality releases us from conformity, delivers us into other people’s lives, habits and customs, engages our sympathies for alien causes, and revitalizes our senses. Good writing can move in either of two directions. It can set down what seem immediately and absolutely true observations about the real world and mankind. Then, if we desire, a second process can take over, the Romantic process which etches the world and man as the writer would like them to be or as he sees them through a specially ground, a rose-tinted, or a grotesquely warped lens.

  Fantasy, it follows, is a Romantic product. Ignoring evil, it can manufacture outsize sculptures of man toward which he may strive ideally. Or, reversing the order, it can ignore the good, show us the pocks and sores on our ill-lit souls, thus force-ventilating, force-growing, frightening us on toward maturity. It is up to the individual author to decide whether he will call people on with beauty or shock them to action with evil revelation.

  The fantasy, then, attempts to disrupt the physical world in order to bring change to the heart and mind. Lionel Trilling’s definition of Romance seems apt here. He speaks of it as “a synonym for the will in its creative aspect, especially in its aspect of moral creativeness, as it subjects itself to criticism and conceives for itself new states of being.” So the fantasy, like the novel of ideas, handles those parts of reality which Henry James labeled as “the things we cannot possibly not know” and moves beyond them to his “beautiful circuit of thought and desire.”

  More simply, facing a flood, priests and politicians often cry, “I’m made of cork!” The writer of fantasy replies, “You’re made of iron!” After the deluge, only those who prove buoyant of imagination and free of unnecessary religious or political deadweight can be found afloat, softly whistling in the calmed billows.

  Down through history, the fantasist can be heard protesting that, after all, the Emperor is naked, the Mystery is unsolved, so where do we go from here?

  At such times, the fantasy does its job more quickly, more efficiently, than other literary forms. From Dante’s DIVINE COMEDY to FAUST to MOBY DICK, good and evil are rendered in concrete, understandable images ripe for discussion. Such tales as Hawthorne’s EARTH’S HOLOCAUST, here included, shrink pomp and ceremony to mechanical-toy size.

  THE CIRCUS OF DR. LAO’s cargo of mythological beasts approaches, as did Hawthorne, Melville, and countless others, the enigma of good and evil, the real and the romantic, shakes the reader severely, threatens some of his most cherished conceptions, and departs having offered no cure-all solutions. The reader, like the inhabitants of the small desert town, is left with a strewn jigsaw which he must fit together in his own time, according to his own temper, believing or disbelieving the entire menagerie, depending on his real or romantic needs.

  There is a fifty-fifty chance you may emerge from the good Doctor’s tent vaguely dissatisfied with questions posed and left unanswered. But we must examine not what Mr. Finney might have done (and I, for one, am curious to know the circus’s effects on the futures of the people of Abalone, Arizona) but what he really accomplished with his materials.

  Certainly Mr. Finney has given us a long stare at Reality, and done so by dressing it up in fantastic guises. He catches us off guard by pretending to show us something not real, which, at a crucial moment, unshells itself to reveal the raw center of existence. Too late, we turn away. Eyes shut, book closed, we examine his images in private. In the satyr we see animal lusts and actualities; in the Hound of the Hedges we find idealized a “hint of the goal of life,” the “apogee of all that life could ever promise,” the romantic conception of all “beauty and gentleness and grace.”

  “The first to catch a circus in a lie is a boy.” Reversing this familiar saying, we may well observe that the traveling Circus of Dr. Lao catches life in many of its lies.

  The other stories collected here infract, in one way or another, many seemingly durable laws. Shirley Jackson’s THE SUMMER PEOPLE nearly destroys for all time the bromide that when the chips are down, loving kindness lies deep in every human heart. Its element of fantasy surprises the reader like a winter wind blowing quietly on an August afternoon.

  Loren Eiseley’s BUZBY’S PETRIFIED WOMAN proves mind over matter by shaping stone in the likeness of a cherished and most secret dream.

  Most of these stories point a moral, even if as in E. B. White’s THE HOUR OF LETDOWN it is only “prepare your dignity for that future when man, in a machine world, is indeed a minority,” or, citing Nigel Kneale’s THE POND, “do unto frogs as you would have them do unto you.”

  But, morality and symbolism to one side, these stories are recommended, above all, because they are fine entertainment. I make no plea for the moral or symbolic fantasy alone. In spite of world conditions today, we can certainly indulge in even those fantasies, say, of Edgar Rice Burroughs and A. Merritt, whose sole purpose is enchantment and high adventure. In practical terms, they make life worth living, survival important, for millions of boys each year. I don’t recall looking upon Jules Verne’s books as moral classics, but there is no doubt that their imaginative qualities stimulated three boys to grow up, one to invent the first practical submarine, another to become one of our most famous explorers of caves, and the third, Admiral Byrd, to say, on the eve of his departure for the Anarctic, “Jules Verne leads me.”

  So we find that even when we appear to be ruining our minds with what seems completely irresponsible fiction, the end-product is often an electrifying response to the world.

  We feel the need to wake or sleep, eat or fast, accept or reject existence. We embrace the golden cocktail-hour image of ourselves, or tremble at the stark three o’clock of a sleepless morning reflection we find in our bedroom mirror. Somewhere between lies truth. Searching for the mean, our arts follow cycles of vigorous and brutal certainty, or tenuous theory and dream.

  Man lives by creating and creates by alternating wonder with criticism followed by new states of wonder. Here in this book, then, new states of wonder, followed in your own good time, if you desire, by critical assaults which may burn Dr. Lao’s miraculous show to earth. No matter; others, happening by, will raise its tents again. There goes the whistle, the trumpet, the drum: you cannot walk through walls, you can walk through walls; the Indian dead have no tongues, the Indian dead speak to those who listen; petrified rock and the beauty of women are separate things, worn rock and the beauty of women are one, when the desert wind blows.

  The circus moves and, moving, takes us with it from some mysterious beginning to some unknowable end. As privileged passengers, each of us
put here by a blind world to see what it itself cannot see, perhaps this circus and the stories which form its sideshows, may for a time help us put off our personal bickerings to make the journey profitable to the senses.

  This collection is dedicated to Saul David, of Bantam Books, who waited three years for the mountain to deliver forth the mouse; and to William F. Nolan, for suggestions and help all down the line. Because of them, the show is on the road.

  Ray Bradbury

  February 5th, 1956

  THE CIRCUS OF DR. LAO by Charles G. Finney

  In the Abalone (Arizona) Morning Tribune for August third there appeared on page five an advertisement eight columns wide and twenty-one inches long. In type faces grading from small pica to ninety-six point the advertisement told of a circus to be held in Abalone that day, the tents to be spread upon a vacant field on the banks of the Santa Ana River, a bald spot in the city’s growth surrounded by all manner of houses and habitations.

  Floridly worded, the advertisement made claims which even Phineas Taylor Barnum might have hedged at advancing. It alleged for the show’s female personnel a pulchritude impossible to equal in any golden age of beauty or physical culture. The mind of man could not conceive of women more beautiful than were the charmers of this circus. Though the whole race of man were bred for feminine beauty as the whole race of Jersey cattle is bred for butterfat, even then lovelier women could not be produced than the ones who graced this show.