April 23, 2020 31
novelists for whom English was a sec-
ond language—in Kang’s case, third
or even fourth, as he wrote poetry
in Chinese and studied in Japan.
Given that The Grass Roof and East
Goes West precede Nabokov’s Amer-
ican debut, The Real Life of Sebas-
tian Knight (1940), by nine and three
years, respectively, it’s worth asking:
Was Kang the first exophonic Ameri-
can to execute such highwire English
prose? Regardless of whether he’s theright answer to this parlor game, Kang
wrote a vast, unruly masterpiece that
is our earliest portrait of the artist as
a young Korean-American, at a time
when hardly any Americans had heard
of, let alone seen, a Korean. His insis-tence on the value of his own identity
to a modern world that had essen-
tially condoned the foreign takeover
of a sovereign nation brings to mind
West’s tribute: What a writer—what a
man. QAmerican Humbug
Nathaniel Rich
Barnum: An American Life
by Robert Wilson.
Simon and Schuster, 341 pp., $28.00
Since his heyday in the mid-nineteenth
century, P.T. Barnum’s name has been
shorthand for ebullient humbuggery,
maximalist entertainment, inexhaust-
ible self-promotion, rags-to-riches indus-
triousness—for fun. After The Greatest
Showman (2017), a highly fictionalized
musical that defied studio expectations
to gross a Barnumesque $435 million,
fades to black, the screen fills with
a sober epigram: “The noblest art is
that of making others happy.” Barnum
wrote this at the end of his life, during
a period in which he referred to him-
self as “The Children’s Friend.” He
groomed himself to look like Santa
Claus.
Yet the images that animate his bi-
ographies—of which Robert Wilson’s
Barnum is at least the fifteenth, not
counting Barnum’s own serially re-
vised and overlapping memoirs—are
united by an eerier quality, suspended
between the pitiful and the grotesque.
The most indelible of these includes
the Fejee Mermaid, a three-foot mon-
strosity composed of the lower half of
a large fish stitched to the upper half
of a small monkey scowling at the in-
dignity of its afterlife. The What Is It?
was a mentally disabled, microcephalic
eighteen- year-old black man, four feet
tall and fifty pounds, dressed in an ape
costume, ordered by Barnum to speak
in gibberish, and touted as the “con-
necting link between man and mon-
key.” The gargantuan elephant Jumbo,
upon being purchased by Barnum and
forced to leave the zoological gardens
at London’s Regent’s Park, blurted a
trumpet call, lay down in the road out-
side the park’s gates, and refused to
budge for a full day. “Let him lay there
for a week if he wants to,” said Barnum
at the time. “It is the best advertise-
ment in the world.”
There were also the catastrophic
fires, five of them, that destroyed Bar-
num’s museums, circuses, and most op-
ulent estate, yielding horrors equal in
their majesty to any of his exhibitions:
the pair of squealing white whales
burned alive after their tank was shat-
tered in a failed effort to douse the
flames; the escaped tiger roaming the
streets of lower Manhattan in a snow-
storm; the white elephant that, having
been led to safety, repeatedly charged
back into the inferno in frantic deter-
mination to commit suicide.
Wilson is the editor of The American
Scholar and the author of two previ-
ous biographies of nineteenth- century
pioneers, the Civil War photographer
Mathew Brady and Clarence King,
an explorer of the American West.
When Wilson set out to write a new
life of Barnum, he made a point of
courting his predecessors. The most
distinguished of these is the historian
Neil Harris, whose Humbug: The Art
of P.T. Barnum (1973) uses Barnum’s
story to examine the birth of modern
American culture. Harris gave Wilson
his blessing, telling him that “each gen-
eration seems to need its own” study
of Barnum. Harris’s own thesis, how-
ever, suggests otherwise. Barnum built
his legend, he writes at the beginning
of Humbug, on “the myths and values
of a self-proclaimed democracy.” This
is what makes Barnum’s insights feel
timeless: as long as Americans boast
of the triumphs of our democracy (the
wisdom of crowds, the beneficence of
a free market, the promise of equality
for all), his story will continue to mock
such ideals as deranged humbug.Like most great entertainers, Barnum
was a born cynic. He grew up in Bethel,
Connecticut, a poor rural village in
which survival demanded cunning, wit,
and ruthlessness—traits known collec-
tively at the time as “Yankee cuteness.”
Barnum was proud of his upbringing,
which encouraged in him an insatiable
appetite for wealth from the moment
he learned to count. Wilson begins, asBarnum’s memoirs do, with the story
of a practical joke played by Barnum’s
beloved maternal grandfather, Phineas
Taylor, for whom he was named. At
Barnum’s christening in 1810, Phineas
“gravely handed over” a gift deed to
“Ivy Island,” five remote acres that his
grandson was to inherit upon reach-
ing his majority. For the next decade,
as Barnum tells it, he was “continually
hearing” about how he owned “one of
the most valuable farms in the State”—
from his grandfather, parents, even his
neighbors, all of whom warned him
against the perils of immodest wealth.
“Now Taylor,” said his mother, “don’t
become so excited when you see your
property as to let your joy make you
sick.” When Barnum finally treks to his
inheritance at the age of ten, he discov-
ers that Ivy Island is a waste of muddy
bogs plagued by hornets and snakes.
He shrieks and runs home.
A challenge for Barnum’s biogra-
phers is that the most entertaining and
least reliable record of his life comes
from his own memoirs, the first edi-
tion of which was published before his
forty- fifth birthday. Known to friends
as “Tale” and standing six foot two,
Barnum was a walking tall tale. In 1869
he published a “new and independent”
autobiography, which he continued torevise and amend for the next twenty
years, the “franker details” falling
away in favor of what one later editor
called “an atmosphere of pompous
self-satisfaction.” To the memoirs Bar-
num added separate biographical vol-
umes about his museum, the art of the
humbug, a children’s book, and anec-
dotes from his travels.
Wilson faithfully repeats Barnum’s
Ivy Island bit, as well as the boasts
of arithmetic genius at the age of six
and the account of a first trip to New
York City at the age of eleven, where
he stayed alone for a week at a hotel
and squandered all his money, even
bartering his own socks, on molasses
candy—another Horatio Alger hom-
ily about the value of a buck. Wilson
believes Barnum about the chiseling
practiced at the country store where he
clerked, which taught him the art of the
con—“our ground coffee was as good
as burned peas, beans, and corn could
make, and our ginger was tolerable,
considering the price of corn meal”—
and does not question the authorized
version of events until he reaches an ep-
isode dating from Barnum’s brief stint
as a newspaper editor.
Barnum was drawn to the trade not
by journalistic passion but by his early
realization that popular success was
impossible without overwhelming the
public with advertising. He earned his
first windfall in the lottery business
after he invested in newspaper ads
and tens of thousands of handbills and
placards bearing “striking prefixes, af-
fixes, staring capitals, marks of wonder,
pictures, etc.” At twenty-one he used
his profits to buy a printing press and
founded a broadsheet, the Herald of
Freedom. He wrote editorials attack-
ing the frenzy of Christian revivalism
in Connecticut and the hypocrisy of
the parochial class. “A number of cler-
gymen and deacons” were among his
lottery customers, he liked to boast;
he often related an anecdote, likely in-
vented, about a pious churchgoing hus-
band and wife who each bought tickets
from him in secret, on the condition
that he not inform the other.
His attacks on religious leaders drew
libel charges, an effective promotion
of his lottery business. After one suit
led to a conviction, Barnum rejected
a bond in favor of a sixty-day jail sen-
tence, figuring that his imprisonment
in the service of freedom of the press
would make for good publicity. “The
excitement in this and the neighboring
towns is very great,” he wrote another
editor, “and it will have a grand effect.”
With the apparent acquiescence
of local authorities, Barnum turned
his cell at the Danbury Common Jail
into a communications shop, receiv-
ing a near-constant stream of visi-
tors, well-wishers, and newspaperP. T. Barnum