The Corny Lot
Memoirs of a Sword-Swallower. By Dan Mannix. (Harnish Hamil- ton. 12s. 6d.) ONE is bound to feel a great deal of curiosity about those men whose occupations appear to be remote from ordinary experi- ence and imaginable habits—gaolers and embalmers, hangmen, slaughterers, wizards, astrologers and acrobats for example, and those who prefer work in the cavernous metropolitan sewers to any other mode of earning a livelihood. These people are clearly differentiated in a startling way from ordinary folk. What are they like in their daily colloquies and encounters, and how do they behave at home ? Mr. Mannix, a young American who swallowed steel and who vomited fire in a travelling side-show, obviously belongs to the category of those to whom strange occupations are
preferable to any other. His monstrously diverting book displays for the excited reader—and if you read it at all you are bound to be excited—the inconceivable world of • the carnys and the ballys, where the tricks and ingenuities"5f the modern age are combined with a coney-catching, Bartholomew-Fair simplicity that would seem to belong more properly to the days of Robert Greene and of Ben Jonson.
For this world the young Mannix appears to have been well fitted by nature. He had a hard mouth, a long oesophagus, and the gifts of a first-rate and inquisitive journalist. He started with a genial, prowling interest in the pseudo-occult, cautiously disposed to believe that there might sometimes be something in it, but ultimately con- vinced that what was not due to suggestion was brought about by purely mechanical means. A certain company in Chicago, he tells us, produced an annual catalogue of " 780 pages of fine print listing paraphernalia used in sorcery." So much, then, for sorcery.
But sword-swallowing and fire-vomiting are perfectly genuine per- formances. They are neither more nor less than what they appear to be. What is extraordinary is that anybody should want to do such things and that anybody should want to see them done. Of course there is always the danger, or the chance, of a distressing accident—either by filling a lung with ignited petrol or by dropping the point of a sword through the wall of the stomach. The possi- bility of seeing an accident, perhaps a fatal accident, is a sure draw, and the merest rumour of such a thing (Mr. Mannix tells us) will attract enormous crowds ; or at least " the type of crowd that usually turns out for a lynching." And then, even more spectacular, there is the swallowing of neon tubes which illuminate the performer from within. Naturally these performances are accompanied by very curious and sometimes alarming sensations, but I do not understand what Mr. Mannix can possibly mean when he says that he has felt the end of a neon tube hit his breast bone (from the inside), and tells us how " the tip of the tube slid off the bone." This is an anatomical impossibility. The heart and the great' arteries- fill most of the space between the breast bone and the spine, and the gullet passes down behind them—close to the vertebral column. One has to assume that Mr. Mannix is describing a sensation, not a physiological fact.
Mr. Mannix varied his performances by escaping from coffins, picking locks (as an entertainer) and having a shot at " mentalism " or bogus " thought-reading." But the central interest of this amazing book is the life of the carny (carnival) as a whole, the strange mingling of effrontery and of genuine skill, of something very like sheer roguery and something richly and even virtuously human. And whether we are told about the Model Show, the Crazy House, the bottle embryos or the effectiveness of a " torture " turu, the contest of wits between the quick and the quack, the same gusto and energy run without a pause or lapse through the entire book. It is a most invigorating presentation, and I have enjoyed it immensely, in spite of occasional scepticism. My enjoyment will not be shared.by every reader, but I heartily commend the story of Mr. Mannix to those who are not afraid of consuming some well-
seasoned and unfamiliar slices of real life. C. E. VULLIAMY.
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