A Day at the Circus

CAT MAN (310 pp.)--Edward Hoagland--Houghton Mifflin ($3.75).

Reading this novel about circus life is a little like lifting a splendid rug and finding that unspeakable things have been swept under it. In this case the sweepings are human beings. Author Hoagland, a young Harvardman now serving in the Army, has written a first novel that falls far short of real consequence, but is alive with very real people and very real animals. It makes the circus world itself as startling and brutal as the sudden roar of a lion at five yards.

Author Hoagland does not deal with the gay and colorful spectacle that can be observed by the dazzled ticketholders. His hero is a young alcoholic who has hit the end of the trail, takes a job helping to feed and look after the "cats"--the lions, tigers and leopards. From the first he is called "Fiddler," because it has been so long since he had the price of a haircut. Down-and-outer that he is, he still has enough fundamental decency in him to be shocked by the human derelicts who do most of the work of the circus. Here is a collection of winos as far removed from John Steinbeck's amiable guzzlers as Skid Row is from cafe society, and much more believable. Sick, filthy and brutal, they see in the circus a last chance to earn the price of a bottle. White or black, they are driven by a tough core of boss men who see that the circus gets set up, that the animals are fed, that the whole complicated, split-second job of keeping the show on the road is done at whatever human price.

Eating, sleeping and working with men who fill him with disgust helps to shock Fiddler out of his own alcoholism. But he has another reason: he has come to be fascinated by the cats, and he knows that working around them drunk means death. His boss is an Indian simply called Chief, a violent, powerful man with an instinctive way of handling the animals, who warns Fiddler not to become too friendly with them. As his respect for most of his fellows declines, his love for the hand some, graceful and proud animals be comes almost a passion. In a final bloody scene of raw horror, poor Fiddler's loyalty to his cats ironically becomes the cause of his death.

The weakness of Cat Man is the glancing, one-dimensional approach to its characters: perhaps Author Hoagland understands the cats better than the men. But his book is a flashing, at times inspired job of observation. Few who read it will ever have quite the same old romantic about the circus. But what is remarkable about Hoagland's hard look is that the circus seems more fascinating than it ever did from the grandstand. Hoagland, who has himself worked at jobs like Fiddler's during summer vacations, gets off a series of brilliant set pieces: the big top going up, a sudden flare-up of fighting among the elephants, the sadly hilarious wedding day of a stupid wino and a used-up prostitute; and all through the book he weaves descriptions on the big, handsome cats that top anything of the kind in fiction.

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