Books: Fool’s Paradise Lost

Gus THE GREAT (703 pp.)—Thomas W. Duncan—Lipplncotf ($3.50).

Thomas Duncan, a down & out ex-Harvard man, has written a rags-to-riches story, and as a result is about to enjoy a rags-to-riches life himself. His novel is the Book-of-the-Month Club selection for September (touted by Book Selector John P. Marquand as “head & shoulders . . . above any fiction [we] have examined this year”). It has already been peddled to Hollywood.

A jug-eared, sardonic lowan of 42, Harvard cum laude Author Duncan spent ten years on Gus the Great and was nearly broke much of the time. An itinerant writer, teacher and Chautauqua actor, he is the author of three previous novels, all poor sellers. He retired to a trailer to finish Gus the Great, wandering through the West and Southwest. When the money ran low, Duncan hacked out short stories on a 1924 Corona; his wife, Actea, took a secretarial job. The Duncans’ first purchase with their new riches: a shiny new Chrysler convertible.

Gus the Great is a roisterous, freewheeling and often very amusing story about a four-flushing circus owner. It straddles two generations of easy-money mischief and scalps a whole zoo full of roguish characters. It is as blusteringly improbable as a W. C. Fields movie, and has some of the same appeal. Beneath the bluster, Gus the Great skillfully satirizes the great American success story.

Its hero, “Honest Gus” Burgoyne, was born over a saloon and “christened … in honor of two men, either of whom might have been his father.” As a small-town reporter, he learned how to shake down politicians; as city editor, he gained the confidence of the town’s financial wizard, then bedded down in the bovine arms of the wizard’s only daughter, Flora. “Brilliant things coruscated about her face and hair: flashing dollar signs.”

Moo & Moola. They blinded Gus to Flora’s shortcomings, but they could hardly conceal her size. “Although a large girl, Flora was scarcely more muscular than a hundred and fifty pounds of jelly. . . . She had the even disposition of a milch cow . . . and [admired] Gus as if he were a bale of clover hay. . . . When Gus spent an evening at home she mooed with happiness.” Gus liked the moos, but not as much as the moola. With an elephant borrowed from the city’s amusement park, he hoisted himself into the circus business.

From then on, Author Duncan’s ragtag, bobtail characters resemble Betty MacDonald’s farmers, except that his chickens lay golden eggs. In the tinseled, brutal world of prancing ponies and pickpockets, Gus acquires money and mistresses. He sells the pickpocket privilege in the show, trims his partner, boosts his own name into stud-horse type. “When business was high the money rolled in so fast there was no time to sort it, so [it was] shoved into a bushel basket. . . . Gus enjoyed picking up the basket and feasting his gaze on that green currency. Sometimes he plunged his hands deep into the basket, like a bear pawing wild honey.”

Hankerings & Hush Money. At 50, Gus was “a large man . . . with a great hog belly and a gross scarlet countenance,” a derby and a heliotrope necktie. His downfall comes when he starts making passes at a lion-tamer’s wife. Gus’s bodyguard tries to shake him down for hush money: “Gus, I’ve never had no good breaks, to speak of. My mother was a whore, Gus, and I’ve been on the bum since I ran off from reform school. I never had a decent drink till I was twenty—just this Goddamned canned heat. I never had more than fifty bucks at once—even when I was sticking up filling stations. I always kind of hankered for a thousand bucks all together at once, Gus.”

Gus gets out of it by pulling the house lights during the lion act and making off with Marybelle, the tamer’s wife. The lions ruin an arm, a leg, and a kidney for their master; Marybelle removes what is left of Gus’s fortune. The circus collapses with a whimper, Gus with a bang.

As a literary performance, Gus the Great is frequently slick, gaggy and sentimental. But it has a kind of animal vigor about it and it is never dull. Its picture of mountebank morality is in the tradition of The Great Gatsby and Pal Joey, though Duncan is neither an F. Scott Fitzgerald nor a John O’Hara.