I first read Quin’s Shanghai Circus around my freshman year in college, when I was hot off devouring the whole series of Vonnegut’s novels in their Dell paperback editions. I found a used copy of the Popular Library paperback edition of Circus and was convinced to buy it from the first three sentences alone:
Some twenty years after the end of the war with Japan a freighter arrived in Brooklyn with the largest collection of Japanese pornography ever assembled in a Western tongue. The owner of the collection, a huge, smiling fat man named Geraty, presented a passport to customs that showed he was a native-born American about as old as the century, an exile who had left the United States nearly four decades before. The collection contained all the pornographic works written in Japan during the last three hundred and fifty years, or since the time when Japan first closed itself to the West.
I took the book straight home and proceeded to read it in the space of about two days. It was wild, complicated and constantly over the top in its details: Geraty’s penchant for stuffing gobs of wasabi up his nose; Baron Kikuchi, the Japanese aristocrat and spymaster who could sleep with his glass eye open, making others believe he had superhuman powers of concentration; Father Lamereaux, the pederast priest; the horrifying account of the Japanese army’s atrocities in its rape of Nanking. Whittemore made Vonnegut seem tame in comparison. The book remained in my memory as one of my most intense reading experiences and that paperback has traveled with me through a dozen moves since then.
So it was on my books to devote a long post to when I started working on this site. I felt certain I would be offering up a wonderful box of treasures in bringing it to light again.
I was wrong–others had already written posts about it, even before I started the site: Jeff Van Der Meer on the SF Site in 2002; the late Bob Sabella on his Visions of Paradise blog in 2005. Others followed thereafter: Dan Schmidt on his Dfan blog in 2009, Chad Hull on his Fiction is Overrated blog in 2010. And it turned out that a small press, Old Earth Books, had reissued Circus, along with the four books in Whittemore’s subsequent Jerusalem Dreaming quartet, with an introduction by novelist John Nichols, in 2002.
Still, with such a vivid memory of the book, I knew I had to give it a second reading.
Ah, there are some experiences best left in memory.
Quin’s Shanghai Circus is, without a doubt, an impressive work of story-telling. Although the novel is set mostly in Japan and China, Whittemore’s approach more resembles the intricacies of the most ornate Islamic scripts, in which one wonders how anyone could manage to unravel a text from the twists and coils and overlapping strokes. It’s not surprising that he shifted his setting to the Middle East after this book.
According to his biographies, Whittemore spent some years working in the Far East for the CIA. Doing just what is never revealed. Personally, I find the fact that he let this be mentioned revealing. From my experience, people who consider themselves espionage professionals are exceptionally tight-lipped and discreet. There’s a joke in the DC area that you can always tell that someone works for the CIA when they respond, “I work for the government,” to questions about what they do for a living.
On the other hand, I’ve run into ex-GIs who weave elaborate accounts of their “black ops” days, who describe suitcases full of cash and unbelievably precise surveillance technology, who seem to have inhabited a world where everyone was on the take and nothing was as it seemed. Personally, I have become a great skeptic of conspiracies and secrecy. If conspiracies were managed as well as they’re usually claimed to have been, then it seems to me that the easiest way to solve the world’s problem would be to make everything a conspiracy. Do we really save our most extraordinary ingenuity and very best organizational skills for conspiracies, making do with second-best for everything else in life?
Which leads me to suspect that Whittemore was only a very accomplished version of those ex-GIs whose bullshitting verged on the rococo. Reading Quin’s Shanghai Circus as a middle-aged father and mortgage-payer was a considerably different experience than it was when I was a virgin teenager. Today, the book seems to belong with what I call the Playboy Magazine school of fiction.
Back in the days when men would claim that they read Playboy for the writing, there was a certain type of brittle sophistication to the stories it would publish. Brittle like the magazine itself, for poke through the ads for Scotch and cigarettes and English sportscars, and you would find each month’s installment of Little Annie Fanny.
Probably a big reason I thought better of Quin’s Shanghai Circus in recollection was Whittemore’s graphic description of the horrors of the assault on Nanking (you can find a long excerpt in Jason Lundberg’s post on the book). It is so brutal, it has the effect of giving the rest of the novel a solid base of seriousness. But reading it for second time, I found the passage more offensive in its use than in its contents. To be honest, it seemed to have been included more for its shock value than for its function in developing the story, and I questioned Whittemore’s right to appropriate the event for what would otherwise be just an entertainment (here I’m appropriating Greene’s use of the term).
I’m sure that not everyone would have the same reaction to the novel or Whittemore’s other works. At least one thesis (“Opening the Window to Edward Whittemore: Systems that Govern Human Experience”, by Joseph Winland, Jr.) has been published, and more will probably follow. Anne Sydenham has created a website, Jerusalem Dreaming, devoted to his work. There you will find numerous expressions of praise, including this quote from Tom Robbins: “One of the best-kept secrets in American literature, the novels of the mysterious Edward Whittemore are like bowls of hashish pudding: rich, dark, tasty, amusing, intoxicating, revelatory, a little bit outlandish and a little bit unsafe.”
All I can say is: if a bowl hashish pudding sounds good to you, go right ahead and dig in. Don’t let me stop you.
I read Circus the year it was published..1974 and couldn’t wait for more. Now in my late 60s I read the set at least once a year. I find them absolutely riveting. RIP Edward Whittemore
I read Whittemore’s quartet about four years ago, and while one image still haunts me–one no doubt similar to your description of his narrative of Nanking–the rest of the books seemed repetitive, a bit overblown, thin and melodramatic. Indeed, except for a vaguely exotic feeling, I can’t really remember either events or characters, and my memory for books is usually much better than that.
I beg to differ. Somehow or other Whittemore has always “clicked” with me, and everytime I read his novels, I am deeply moved by them, and relish his exquisite prose style. I have read all five novels multiple times since my first encounter with Sinai Tapestry in the late 1970s, and am still not disenchanted.
Funny how the internet works and connects us all together; thanks for the mention. I can appreciate your comments and feelings toward the book. I read Whittemore before I tried Vonnegut and I think you’ve made me understand why I felt Vonnegut was kinda hollow.
Great blog.
Thanks for the comment, Scott. It’s nice to know I’m not alone in my response to the book.
I’m immensely grateful for your second reading (and for your comments about the value of second readings). Now I don’t feel so bad for having not finished this novel despite a valiant attempt, though I could well imagine that had I read it at 18 or 20 I might have felt otherwise. I’d had such high hopes given all the praise that had prompted me to hunt a copy of this down, but, as Isak Dinesen’s narrator says in The Old Chevalier, “In middle age, though, you arrive at a deeper humility, and you come to consider it of importance that the person who sells or grows your wine shall be of the same religion as you yourself.” Alas, the religion of hashish is one I gave up quite a lot of years ago.
Well, Quin’s was published in 1974, so I’m not sure that qualifies as “lately.”
On the bright side, we’re not seeing many “Cyber-something” titles these days.
Dan–Thanks for the comments. I think you hit the problem on the head: there are some interesting parts in Quin’s and the Jerusalem Dreaming quartet, but they fail to come together as anything more than, well, a collection of interesting parts. I have some old computers in my basement like that–and they’re essentially useless, of course.
Lee–Thanks for the feedback. Whittemore clearly had some remarkably interesting ideas floating around his head, but I think his success in realizing them in print was superficial.
Don’t give up on old favorites–even if you find they don’t stand up to a second reading, you learn something from the process. And if it’s, “Wow, my taste had become much more discriminating”–isn’t that a fairly pleasant lesson to learn?
Seems like there’s a rash of “circus” novel titles lately.
A reflection of our times?
Ha, I’m the dfan whose 2009 blog entry you linked to. I have all five of Whittemore’s books, incited by Jeff Vandermeer’s accolades, and having read 4+ plus of them, while always thinking I should be enjoying them more than I did, I now wonder whether the fault is with him rather than with me. I do love the Catch-22-style jumping around in time, although it makes for a tough read the first time through, but they never quite add up to the more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts epiphany I keep expecting, perhaps unfairly. I’m still glad they exist, though.
By an odd coincidence, I just happened to pick up a copy this week of Sinai Tapestry, the first volume of Whittemore’s Jerusalem quartet — a book I’d read and loved when I was in college. Exactly the same negative reaction as you had: it’s dreary, smug, and obnoxious. I lasted for ten pages. It makes me hesitate to pick up any of my old favorites… (except that a few months ago I reread one of my oldest favorites, a Freddy the Pig novel, and it was even better than I remembered).