Tag Archives: Haxby’s Circus

An A to Z of Katharine Susannah Prichard: F is for… Fay’s Circus

16 Monday May 2022

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Fay’s Circus is the greatest Katharine Susannah Prichard novel almost no-one alive today has read. Or at least in one sense. It was published in the USA in 1931 by William Norton and is the complete version of the novel better known as Haxby’s Circus. Through an unfortunate mistake, the full version has never been republished.

In 1917, Katharine held the hand of an acrobat who had broken her back at a circus performance, trying to comfort her. They were waiting for Katharine’s brother, Dr Nigel Prichard, to return to his surgery and treat the woman. The incident stayed with Katharine and finally bloomed into a novel a decade later after she travelled with Wirth’s Circus for two weeks through the Wheatbelt and Mid West of WA. Haxby’s (or Fay’s) Circus follows Gina the acrobat after a terrible accident as she is transformed into a worldly and world weary middle-aged woman, adept at the business of circuses and reinventing herself.

Katharine called it Fay’s Circus and was finishing it to enter in a novel competition in 1929 when her son and nephew (who was living with her) got measles. To meet the deadline, she left out a big chunk from her plan and sent it off anyway. It was short-listed and contracted for publication, but the publisher insisted the name be changed to ‘Haxby’s Circus’ and wouldn’t give her the time to finish the missing section. It was hard to negotiate by post to London, and the book appeared like that despite Katharine’s unhappiness.

When US publisher William Norton wanted to publish it, he gave her time to write the missing section and allowed her to keep her original title. She was much happier with the result and grateful to Norton. However, in 1945 when the novel was selected for reprinting in a cheap Australian war edition to be sent to troops on the frontline, Katharine forgot to send the publisher the US edition to reprint from. The many reprints since have followed the mistake. I ordered in Fay’s Circus on inter-library loan, and the missing section truly does improve the novel, taking away the abrupt change of fortune and mood late in the story.

The full story is in Red Witch chapter 23, “The Circus”. Carol Hetherington wrote a great essay on Fay’s Circus and Katharine’s relationship with Norton – https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A158838200/LitRC…

Writing the circus chapter

04 Friday May 2018

Posted by in Katharine Susannah Prichard, Katharine Susannah Prichard's writings, My KSP biography

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Wirth's ad

The ad for the performance Katharine attended on 5 September 1927. (Swan Express, 2 September 1927, 5). I really like the warning about leaving things in your  motor car.

This month I’m writing the circus chapter of my Katharine Susannah Prichard biography, chapter 24 in the current structure. It’s focused on the writing and reception of her novel Haxby’s Circus (1930). The novel was written at the end of her five year creative peak from 1924 to 1929 and is usually regarded as one of her better novels but less accomplished than the other two novels of this period, Working Bullocks (1926) and Coonardoo (1929). Whatever its flaws it’s an engaging and moving novel. I reviewed it in July 2014, writing that it ‘has the most powerful scenes I’ve yet encountered in KSP’s work, scenes of beauty, darkness and insight’. More recently, Lisa has reviewed it on ANZ Litlovers.

It’s a pity that the edition reprinted several times has always been the British one. The American edition, Fay’s Circus (Katharine’s original title) – published a year later – contains an extra section of 9700 words which scholar Carol Hetherington believes resolves the structural flaw late in the novel. Katharine was writing for a competition deadline and her sick child meant she didn’t write this section as planned in the first version. (Carol Hetherington, ‘Authors, Editors, Publishers: Katharine Susannah Prichard and W.W. Norton’, Australian Literary Studies 22, no. 4 (October 2006): 417–31.) Continue reading →

Haxby’s Circus: Lisa’s review and origins

29 Saturday Apr 2017

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Lisa Hill of ANZ Litlovers has reviewed  Katharine Susannah Prichard’s novel, Haxby’s Circus (1930). It’s a sympathetic and astute review, giving a good sense of its themes and characters.

It comes the same week I’ve been writing about Haxby’s Circus in my biography. In the comments on Lisa’s review, Fay Kennedy mentions the origins of the novel in an incident when Katharine was at her brother’s surgery comforting a trapeze artist with a broken back. She writes about it in her autobiography, Child of the Hurricane. The incident was reported in a number of newspaper digitised on Trove, including the last paragraph in this article “District News” Cohuna Farmer’s Weekly (Vic), 23 November 1917, 3:

 

Perrys-circus

It comes right in the middle of the second conscription campaign, and an intense time in Katharine’s life. So much happened in Katharine’s life in 1917 – two deaths, a broken heart, and political development. It’s been a big month trying to cover it all.

Haxby’s Circus: a review

27 Sunday Jul 2014

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Spoiler Alert

Katharine Susannah Prichard’s seventh novel, Haxby’s Circus: The Lightest, Brightest Little Show on Earth (1930), is a portrait of a circus family across a couple of decades and the transformation of the central character, Gina Haxby, from an agile, innocent acrobat to a world-weary and overweight middle-aged clown.

The circus wanders around Australia, right up and down the eastern states, into the small inland towns as well as the cities, and even across to Perth and then Geraldton. The narrative itself wanders as well, and any particular direction it has taken is often veered away from or even completely doubled back on. This is no weakness, but comes to be part of the novel’s charm. An example: in the first half of the novel, the antagonist is Dan Haxby himself, the patriarchal head of the family and circus. He seems too hard and too cruel, driving his wife and children to extremes. Gina breaks her back in a fall, and resolves to save her mother and her younger siblings from Dan. When she succeeds in escaping with her pregnant mother, they live in hiding to bring up the child, Maxine (Max), whose life will not be ruined by the circus. Yet years later, Dan comes to the same town and the family are reunited, the circus reformed and Gina’s resolve wavers. Over the rest of the novel, Gina’s relationship with her father softens, and he becomes slightly more reasonable; Max becomes an acrobat and it seems Gina’s fears and determination may even have been unwarranted. In this subtlety of character, it rings true with life for me. (Interestingly, the transformation from tyrant to a somewhat gentler man is the opposite of Hugh in Coonardoo, the novel KSP was writing in the same period.)

John Hay astutely calls the novel ‘episodically tragic’, but judges it the lesser work next to Coonardoo, and notes that it received little critical acclaim. Coonardoo is a more concentrated tragedy, with a smaller cast of characters and the profundity of tackling race relations in a more progressive way than contemporaries. Yet Haxby has the most powerful scenes I’ve yet encountered in KSP’s work, scenes of beauty, darkness and insight. The most profound is in the final chapter as Jack confronts Gina, asking why she is ‘running amuck’, hitting the drink and sleeping around. Gina responds ‘I want to know if there’s anything in this business of living, I think.’ She goes on to remember what Billy had said years earlier:

‘Billy was right after all. He said to me once: “Life’s a three volume novel, Gina. The first’s the book of ideals and illusions ; the second’s the book of realities and noble resolutions; the third’s the book of the senses and breakdown of the will.” I think he was right, Jack. It’s the third book I’m up to now.’ (312)

This cannot be KSP’s own philosophy; she lived her whole life in the book of ideals, perhaps with some noble resolutions from the second volume. Jack’s response is more in line with how KSP lived her life; it echoes a similar line in the autobiographical Wild Oats of Han: ‘I’d like to crock up and run off the rails. It’d be a relief somehow; but I won’t let life beat me that way. I’ve got to stand up to it, somehow.’ (314) Out of this existential scene, Gina finds the will to live meaningfully again; but, perversely, it’s by transforming herself into a clown, restoring the circus by humiliating herself.

KSP wears her politics more lightly in this novel. There are no Communist characters who turn up to challenge the system. Interestingly, when Gina inherits a fortune and finances the expansion of of the circus, she tells Dan ‘it must make a profit’. Yet all the family now have a share in the circus, and it’s this communal ownership which gives a taste of KSP’s politics. The other taste comes in the fact that again in this novel she successfully depicts a community, something few other novelists have done as well. There is a sense of the dignity of all the characters, and the goal Gina is striving for is not her own personal freedom or benefit, but the benefit of all in her circus community.

Haxby is in print in the Angus and Robertson Classics series, available both in print and as an ebook. I was fortunate enough to find a 1932 edition in the Florin Books series by Jonathan Cape at Robert Muir Books in Nedlands; Florin Books are, the ad says ‘the right size for all times and the right price for these times’ – at two shillings, that is. I liked my copy so much I didn’t write in it, and thus I have no annotations.