I had faced down those dreams and intended to forget them … But sometimes there are things you are willing to forget, which, nevertheless, will not be forgotten! And after a little while I had begun to find that my dreams were more real to me than life.
~Where the World Folds Up at Night, Dixie Willson, 1932, p. 23
~Where the World Folds Up at Night, Dixie Willson, 1932, p. 23
Just twenty pages into Dixie Willson’s circus memoire, I was very certain that I was going to like this endearingly ardent Midwest debutante turned circus performer turned novelist. The feeling only deepened as I became acquainted with, if only through yellowed and musty pages, a kindred spirit who also had dreams that would not be forgotten.
It was while researching Bird Millman, that the archive librarian in Colorado sent me excerpts of Where the World Folds Up at Night. Reading what Dixie Willson had written about her dear, dancing highwire friend, I grew as interested in the author as her subject—an author whose career in children and young adult literature took off during her time with the circus.
Dixie Willson today is not nearly as famous as I think she deserves to be, so her books can be hard to come by. Luckily there were a few libraries around the country willing to loan me their nearly hundred-year-old volumes. Soon I had in my possession creaky, canvas-bound tomes, their uneven pages feather-soft from countless thumbings, their tattered library card stamps detailing four generations of reading.
The novels Little Texas and A Mystery in Spangles were light, happy circophile fiction. Having to return Where the World Folds Up at Night though was so heart-wrenching that I eventually found and purchased my own antique copy—one that, I found out later, had been retired from Dixie Willson’s hometown library.
If you’re not particularly interested in the golden era of train-traveling circuses, I’ll warn you now that this is my longest blog post to date, so you may wish to skim or skip to the end. But if you want to feed the fantasy of running away to join the circus, I would like to share the highlights of Dixie’s memoire. She didn’t write of the well publicized tragedies and triumphs in the ring, but rather of the scenes and scenery behind the curtains and beyond the show tent, the unique microcosm, which each night packed up and traveled on—because, in her own words,
A circus performer’s day began waking up in curtained bunks, the train still barreling along. After a turn in the washroom, as the train pulled in, it was time to disembark and trek to the showgrounds, or “lot” as it was called.
Naturally, food was next on the morning priority list. Breakfast, lunch and dinner were served in the cookhouse, whenever the white flag with “Hotel” written in blue was flying. Waiters were attired in white coats, ready to pass inspection by the most fastidious of maître des. Gentlemen were required to wear coats, ladies required to wear better than everyday housedresses. (p. 16-17) The food and etiquette remained constant as the scenery accompanying the meal constantly changed:
As a new performer with no specific skill set, Dixie was hired to be one of the hundreds of “bit” performers. In parade she made up the ranks of the red, white, and blue section of cavalry. Luckily her horse knew well enough what to do, because Dixie had never actually ridden before. Later, when another performer broke her arm, Dixie would take a turn as Cleopatra in a golden wagon drawn by eight camels, reclining on pillows and singing and playing popular tunes on an electric piano keyboard built into the golden floor (p. 89). Twice she also had the honor of leading the parade alongside the equestrian director.
Dixie had no complaints when Charles Ringling had asked if she would be willing to parade on horses and elephants. Surrounded by some of the best acrobats and performers of the 20th century, Dixie was soon ambitious to be more than another body in the grand spectacles.
Dixie did not join the afternoon iron-jaw epidemic. Her restless ambition found an outlet when the “boss elephant man” took her aside to try her out “working the bulls.” For three weeks she learned “style” and handling, while the elephants, keen to return to where eager children fed them peanuts, hurried through their routines.
After the last show of the day came the trek from the lot back to the railyard. The cars had been moved since morning, so flares were set up along the way to guide performers to their section.
Throughout the book, what struck me most was how Dixie reveled in and vividly captured the picturesque in everyday circus life. Not every inhabitant of the traveling cavalcade saw life as Dixie did. Even Mr. Charlie Ringling, who “loved so many simple things which men of less conspicuous success pass by” (p. 9), at times saw a life of “[h]ot, dusty working days and mud holes and railroad tracks” (p. 195). In Dixie’s reply to Mr. Charlie and his to her, we find the real gift of her book:
From Dixie I was reminded of the powerful everyday magic radiating from simply loving life.
May we remember to look at the world through wide windows.
It was while researching Bird Millman, that the archive librarian in Colorado sent me excerpts of Where the World Folds Up at Night. Reading what Dixie Willson had written about her dear, dancing highwire friend, I grew as interested in the author as her subject—an author whose career in children and young adult literature took off during her time with the circus.
Dixie Willson today is not nearly as famous as I think she deserves to be, so her books can be hard to come by. Luckily there were a few libraries around the country willing to loan me their nearly hundred-year-old volumes. Soon I had in my possession creaky, canvas-bound tomes, their uneven pages feather-soft from countless thumbings, their tattered library card stamps detailing four generations of reading.
The novels Little Texas and A Mystery in Spangles were light, happy circophile fiction. Having to return Where the World Folds Up at Night though was so heart-wrenching that I eventually found and purchased my own antique copy—one that, I found out later, had been retired from Dixie Willson’s hometown library.
If you’re not particularly interested in the golden era of train-traveling circuses, I’ll warn you now that this is my longest blog post to date, so you may wish to skim or skip to the end. But if you want to feed the fantasy of running away to join the circus, I would like to share the highlights of Dixie’s memoire. She didn’t write of the well publicized tragedies and triumphs in the ring, but rather of the scenes and scenery behind the curtains and beyond the show tent, the unique microcosm, which each night packed up and traveled on—because, in her own words,
In this story of the glamorous unreal (yet so real) little world, I have wanted to tell the things you do not know. … My hope is to bring you a sense of just nomadic, happy circus days and nights, sunny mornings, busy afternoons, gentle twilights. (p. 62)Dixie Willson came from a respectable, well-to-do Midwestern family. While other girls her age were settling into marriages, she joined the first wave rebellion of the Roaring Twenties, and pursued her childhood dream to “join out” with the circus. Serendipity landed her an interview with Charles Ringling—Mr. Charlie—himself. With a little persuasion, he agreed to grant her citizenship in the backstage world of the 1921 Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Great Combined Shows.
And so I came to the circus back door, a kaleidoscope, it seemed, of a thousand sectors! Tents of every shape and size; a troupe in pink tights and jeweled collars; a boy toreador with a dozen yapping poodles on scarlet leashes; … the Queen of Egypt wrapped in gold veils swaying solemnly by on a camel; floats glaring under the white sun; working men bringing, taking, moving, shifting, meaningless pedestals and hoops and wheels and baskets. (p.12)If Dixie’s first impressions of circus life resembled a kaleidoscope, so too does her narrative as she flashes from one scene to the next. While it begins as she joins out and ends on the last day of the season, through the middle I frequently lost track entirely of the route her pleasant memory meanderings had taken. In deference to modern readers’ desire for (relative!) brevity and linear narratives, I’ll try to put together a few highlights following Dixie through her typical circus day.
A circus performer’s day began waking up in curtained bunks, the train still barreling along. After a turn in the washroom, as the train pulled in, it was time to disembark and trek to the showgrounds, or “lot” as it was called.
Naturally, food was next on the morning priority list. Breakfast, lunch and dinner were served in the cookhouse, whenever the white flag with “Hotel” written in blue was flying. Waiters were attired in white coats, ready to pass inspection by the most fastidious of maître des. Gentlemen were required to wear coats, ladies required to wear better than everyday housedresses. (p. 16-17) The food and etiquette remained constant as the scenery accompanying the meal constantly changed:
Sometimes your feet are on baked yellow dust, sometimes on a carpet of wild violets; sometimes you are wearing rubber boots and a slicker, the table in a puddle halfway to your knees. But it is all the same. The mint sauce comes up just as properly with the lamb, the potatoes are just as brown, and everybody just as happy. (p. 56)"Twenty-Four Hour Men" had already come through the day before to plaster the town with fliers. Still, one of the first orders of business for the circus was to even more thoroughly announce its arrival. The morning main street parades were extensive: riders on horses, decorated carriages, wagons with wild animals. Crowds lined the streets waving and cheering, but like the most stoic imperial guards and proper British footmen, the performers kept resolutely in character, knowing they would be fined for looking at anyone in the crowd as they passed. (p. 44).
As a new performer with no specific skill set, Dixie was hired to be one of the hundreds of “bit” performers. In parade she made up the ranks of the red, white, and blue section of cavalry. Luckily her horse knew well enough what to do, because Dixie had never actually ridden before. Later, when another performer broke her arm, Dixie would take a turn as Cleopatra in a golden wagon drawn by eight camels, reclining on pillows and singing and playing popular tunes on an electric piano keyboard built into the golden floor (p. 89). Twice she also had the honor of leading the parade alongside the equestrian director.
My most vivid memory of Chicago is parade, as I saw it there. …again I remounted the blue-eyed horse…ahead of the first section. … Since I was first, I was first to break line and cross the bridge [onto the island and into Grant Park where the circus sat on the banks of Lake Michigan]. But instead of going on to the pad-room, I stopped and looked back. And saw, coming down two miles of that avenue, two miles of parade. … A two-mile ribbon of a thousand colors! (p. 125-126)Preparation before and downtime between parade, matinee, and evening show would be spent on the “back lot”—the showground behind the public areas. With the sleeper cars on some distant switchyard during the day, the dressing room contained a performers’ small square of personal real estate: two buckets of water, a chair, and a trunk.
A hybrid combination, the ladies’ dressing room of the fantastic and the domestic. Side walls fluttering with bright, light sparkling skirts and gay, iridescent bodices; … and in the shadow of this, the busy laundry buckets, the ironing, the baby tending; a lady in calico and kid curlers solemnly fitting a Sunday silk; … someone resplendent in the flags of all nations busy getting buttons sewed on their husband’s shirt and exchanging apple pie recipes with somebody else standing in a bath bucket clothed in soap suds. (p. 38)Like the cookhouse, the backdrop of the dressing tent and back lot was ever changing.
At the lot maybe you will find cowslips growing by your trunk, a brook babbling behind the padroom. Maybe your day is spent among the seared weeds of a vacant square in a city, your trunk balancing uncertainly across the broken cement blocks and cinders of some discarded sidewalk. Perhaps dressing-tent and big top are crowded against a row of bungalow porches, or maybe you find yourself in some whispering, surprised little grove, protesting acorns tapping all day on the roof. (p. 84)Both the matinee and evening performances under the big top began with “spec”—the grand opening spectacle or “entry” parade—that circled the big top. For this, Dixie dressed as harem girl in yellow satin trousers and jeweled veils and rode in a howdah on an elephant named Fanny. Interestingly enough, Fanny had a lot to do with Dixie’s literary success.
I looked for a place I could be quite alone—and found it in the howdah of my elephant, when I mounted early for tournament. … Always afterward when any one would speak of this story or that one of mine which they had read somewhere…I would smile to myself and feel again the hard little wooden seat of that rocking, shifting howdah, a blistering sun beating down upon my spangle-dressed back; … [Writing a climactic scene in the story] would be interrupted by the equestrian director’s whistle, the back door would fling open, the band would begin, and I would put my paper and pencil on the floor, arrange my hands along the gold lotus lilies carved along the sides of my howdah, and we would swing into the big top, my feet carefully on the story so as not to lose the sheets of it. [p. 49-50]Those climactic scenes she so jealously guarded with a satin-slippered foot were not about the circus at all. Though Dixie wanted desperately “to capture the heart throbs, the humor, the fantasy, the nobility, and most of all the simplicity,” of life in the circus, while she was living in the midst of that “riotous bazaar,” it was “too vibrant, too pulsating, too brilliant” to capture in words (p. 48-49). So she wrote instead stories of Russia peasant girls and pants-wearing puppies named Pinky…and she got them published.
Dixie had no complaints when Charles Ringling had asked if she would be willing to parade on horses and elephants. Surrounded by some of the best acrobats and performers of the 20th century, Dixie was soon ambitious to be more than another body in the grand spectacles.
I was feverishly eager to be part of everything. I wanted to swing from the highest trapeze. I wanted to enter the cage of the fiercest lion. I wanted to try my mettle and measure my grit with the rest. I wanted to fit into a place where that steady fearlessness and never-failing courage would be required of me too. If a disregard, a contempt, for the white feather were the only thing the circus has taught me, I should consider it, for that alone, a magnificent association. (p. 99)Dixie wasn’t the only bit performer that season ambitious to learn. For the next season’s opening act, Mr. Charlie wanted the ceiling of the big top decorated as a human chandelier, filled with dainty, dangling, sparkling iron jaw performers—and he had offered a salary bonus. Many of the women who had bit parts so they could accompany their husbands began training to hang by their teeth from the top of the tent. During the afternoon practice time in between shows, in the deserted big top there would be groups of men who, after having hoisted their pretty wives up “three or four or ten or twenty feet” off the ground and set the rigging ropes swaying, would sit lounging, smoking cigarettes and chatting, keeping one eye trained on their wives, waiting for the signal to lower them back to the ground. (p. 106-108)
Dixie did not join the afternoon iron-jaw epidemic. Her restless ambition found an outlet when the “boss elephant man” took her aside to try her out “working the bulls.” For three weeks she learned “style” and handling, while the elephants, keen to return to where eager children fed them peanuts, hurried through their routines.
[A]t last, one day, the girls crowded around the back door to watch me go in, riding the rocky valley of Java's head with all the dash my shaking legs and arms could muster! In eleven minutes it was over, and I was back in the dressing room, hot and cold… Without disaster and in fact with a certain appearance of ease, I had presented an act of trained elephants … I had thrilled to the flash of my spangles in the light, to the feel of that spongy sawdust under my new yellow boots; I had felt a consuming pride in riding a saluting exit, swinging in the crook of Java's up-raised trunk; but best of all was the steadily rising lump on my head—the gentle side-swipe I had received … as [Java] had given me a subtle reminder with the natural baseball which finishes every elephant's tail, that I was at one end of him when I was expected at the other! (p. 100-101)
After the last show of the day came the trek from the lot back to the railyard. The cars had been moved since morning, so flares were set up along the way to guide performers to their section.
Across the stretch of dark, others were coming “home” too, shadowy figures in two’s and three’s. Nothing dramatic, nothing spectacular; just people quietly coming home. Yet it set my heart racing. The very lack of drama in a thing so fantastic was drama. The simple thing of those people crossing that border of dark from the lot to the show train; murmur of voices; chairs gathered around outside the cars; panels of pale light under the windows. (76)Train porters had come through while the performers were away. After dusting and tidying, they tied back the aisle curtains, so the performers returned to sun warmed and aired sleeping quarters each night. Dixie loved her four feet by six of Car 91.
I found I could forget everybody in the car, when I chose, and pile up my pillows, close the dark green curtains between myself and the aisle, and read or write or sew, the train traveling maybe, standing along a country lane maybe, or maybe in the bustling railroad station of a city, which last was always a little exciting. It always gave me a delightful superior feeling to look out of my rose-colored nest at travelers hurrying on and off trains… (p. 81)And while she lounged or slept in her bunk, the train rumbled on. The travel was simply part of life.
Perhaps [people] think it is hard to move from one hundred to three hundred miles every day. But of moving, except the changing interest, you are not even conscious. Both in the cars and at the lot everything is quite the same in Illinois in the morning as you left it in Indiana the night before; exactly the same in little Chico, California, in September as it was in New York City in March! … It would, of course, be a luckless life for those who cannot sleep on a train. The circus performer’s difficulty along that line comes on Sunday, when we have already arrived in Monday’s town, and most of the night is spent in a vain effort to sleep without that motion, that singing hum of traveling wheels which come to be a lullaby. (p. 82)And so ended a circus day as it had begun: with the lullaby of train on track.
Throughout the book, what struck me most was how Dixie reveled in and vividly captured the picturesque in everyday circus life. Not every inhabitant of the traveling cavalcade saw life as Dixie did. Even Mr. Charlie Ringling, who “loved so many simple things which men of less conspicuous success pass by” (p. 9), at times saw a life of “[h]ot, dusty working days and mud holes and railroad tracks” (p. 195). In Dixie’s reply to Mr. Charlie and his to her, we find the real gift of her book:
I shall never forget Mr. Charlie’s answer that day, when I told him how little I had been aware of heat or dust or mud or cinder tracks. He looked at me a long minute and gradually over his face came a little smile. “The only measure a man can have for life is the size of the windows through which he looks at it. I am sorry to think I have been caught looking through little windows”. (p. 195-196)
From Dixie I was reminded of the powerful everyday magic radiating from simply loving life.
May we remember to look at the world through wide windows.
