Boomschmidt's Stupendous and Unexcelled Circus, or as it is sometimes called, Boomschmidt's Colossal and Unparalled Circus, is featured in eight of the Freddy novels. As Kevin Parker discussed in his analysis of Freddy the Detective in the last newsletter, there are many elements of continuity which link the Freddy novels together. Certainly the circus is one of the elements that make the Freddy books a series, and not just a number of books written by the same author.
In the first five books, Brooks seems to be feeling his way. The connection between Freddy Goes to Florida and Freddy Goes to the North Pole is obvious enough, but he really makes an imaginative leap forward when he gets to Detective and concentrates solely on life at the Bean farm.
For many people, then, the books that follow Detective, the Story of Freginald and The Clockwork Twin, seem extraneous to the series because the center focus of those books is not Freddy, or even the Bean farm. While in many ways The Clockwork Twin is a fascinating and enjoyable book -- and the circus and Freddy do make appearances in it -- the novel is something of an anomoly in the series. The Story of Freginald, however, is key to the development of the Freddy series. It is one of Brooks's most fanciful, imaginative books and far lighter in tone than Detective, where Jinx is placed on trial for murder, or even North Pole, where, for this adult reader, Santa Claus barely manages to erase the feelings of anger and anxiety brought about by the scenes of child abuse and the long trek through the North woods.
Freginald is more about the circus than it is about Freginald, and it is the circus that shows up at regular intervals throughout the series, not Freginald. Indeed, we meet the key circus characters almost immediately. Leo is introduced right at the beginning of the book. Louise, the male bear who only later is known as Freginald, has been wandering through the woods feeling lonely and isolated from his peers because of his name. When he comes across Leo, lying in the middle of a glade, his curiosity gets the better of him:
"Hello," said Louise. And added politely: "I'm sorry I disturbed you when you were asleep."
"Asleep?" said the animal. "Who's asleep?"
"I -- you were snoring," said Louise, "so I though you were asleep."
"I was not asleep!" said the other indignantly. "I was purring."
"Oh," said Louise. "Excuse me. But you're not a cat."
"I'm a lion," said the animal, "I'm the chief of the cat family and the King of all the animals." He tossed his mane self-consiously . . . . "My name is Leo.. . And what might your name be?"
The little bear looked embarrassed. "Well -- I -- that is, well, it's Louise." he stammered.
But the lion didn't laugh. Instead he sat up suddenly. "Louise!" he exclaimed. "Well, dye my hair! Why that's amazing! Amazing? It's magnificent! By George! What a find for Mr. Boomschmidt. There's a drawing card for you! A bear named Louise!" And he began to purr again, so loudly that the near-by branches trembled.
"You mean -- you mean that you don't think it's a funny name?" asked the bear.
"Funny!" exclaimed Leo. "It's --" he waved a paw hopelessly. "I haven't the words for it!"
In this first introduction of Leo, we get almost all of Leo's traits and they remain unchanged throughout the series: his pride -- "the chief of the cat family and the King of all the animals"; his vanity, his loyalty to his friends, his bombastic personality, and his interest in word play. Most telling, though, is that he recognizes Louise's difference, but rather than isolate him in that difference by laughing at him as so many others have done; he thinks the difference is something to celebrate. Not only does he celebrate it, he thinks everyone else will celebrate it as well.
It is this joyful inclusion -- kept free of sentimentality by Brooks's amusing depiction of Leo's personality, especially his flaws -- that comes up again and again in the series. When Louise meets Mr. Boomschmidt, Mr. Boomschmidt's response exactly parallels Leo's:
"My word!" exclaimed Mr. Boomschmidt, smiling delightedly and pushing his silk hat still farther back on his head. " A bear named Louise! That'll bring 'em! . . . .
"Excuse me, sir," said Louise. "I can't help that name. I think it's just as funny as you do."
"Funny!" interrupted Mr. Boomschmidt. "It's magnificent! You'll join us, of course?"
And, of course, Louise does join them, just as taken up by the spirit of adventure and affability of Leo and Mr. Boomschmidt as are the readers. The bars on the circus cages are meant to keep the people out, rather than keep the animals in. They can come and go as they please and are fed anything they want, just so long as it doesn't give them a stomach ache. Indeed, it isnot unusual for a buffaloto attend a dinner party, or for a tiger to escort a woman to the movies. The adventures of the circus animals are linked with those of the Bean animals and allow Brooks a way to expand his creative world -- both by creating distinctive circus charcters and by having those characters interact with the Bean animals.
Many of the more minor circus animals become known to us in Freginald and then continue to make appearances throughout the series. Jerry, the rhinocerous, has a starring role in Freginald when he helps defeat a rogue band of wild animals by charging quite literally through the walls of their house (a problem the Bean animals face in Politician and to a certain extent in Dragon). Jerry's major role, however, is in Freddy, the Pied Piper. He is positively touching when he shows up at the Bean farm in mid-winter with a terrible cold, seeking help for Mr. Boomschmidt whose circus has fallen on hard times because of the war. Later in the same book, Jerry is so trusting and so (let's face it) dumb, that he allows a thief to take money out of the saddlebags he is wearing -- money Freddy has made to help Mr. Boomschmidt. No recriminations are made by the other animals, (they understand Jerry's limitations as well as we do), but Jerry himself is able to vent his anger at the villain by engaging in the same headbanging destruction of a house that he pulled off with such success in Freginald.
We also meet Oscar, the ostrich, in Freginald. Oscar's superior attitude apparently is such an engrained ostrich characteristic at one point in the Perilous Adventure Leo says to him, "You're getting so stuck up that sometimes I wonder if you'll even talk to yourself." Oscar's attitude also gets him into trouble with Freddy in The Baseball Team from Mars when Oscar calls these lines of Freddy's "vile doggerel.":
The Martians are comin', Hooray! Hooray!
The Dodgers and Yankees they'll play, they'll play!
They'll mop up th earth, then they'll tackle the planets,
Constantly yellin' Hooray! Hooray!
Oscar comes around however, and ends up displaying so much team spirit he actually swallows a fly ball in that crucial final game between Tushville and the Martians.
Hannibal and especially Louise appear in Freginald. Louise is absolutely precious as a lisping young girl elephant in Freginald, but we meet her again in Perilous Adventure when she, all grown-up, helps Hannibal tow the balloon back to the circus, despite Mr. Boomschmidt's concern that she might get in another traffic accident. The last time she was out at night a truck had hit her, and while it hadn't hurt Louise, Mr. B had to pay for the damages to the truck.
Of course, besides Leo, the key figure in the circus is Orestes Boomschmidt himself. Many of Mr. Boomschmidt's qualities are made evident in Freginald, but it is only later that he really becomes the Mr. Boom we know so well.
In Freginald, the circus is facing competition from a rival circus and Mr. Boomschmidt is losing a great deal of money. The animals try to think of a solution, but Mr. Boomschmidt says to them, "My goodness,' he said, 'it's bad enough to have nobody coming to see the show without having all you animals acting this way. I wish you'd stop it. You don't catch me thinking, do you? I guess not! I've got enough trouble without doing that!"
Actually, Mr. Boomschmidt is a very clever man, and perhaps one of the most complex characters in the series. Here is a man who dresses in a blue and yellow checked suit and a stovepipe hat, and yet works very hard at being self-effacing. He faces hundreds of people every day, works side by side with Mademoiselle Rose for years, and yet in Freddy the Pilot, the villain, Mr. Condiment, has to explain to Mr. B that Mademoiselle Rose is in love with him.
Mr. Boomschmidt receives the same high level of respect from the circus animals that Mr. Bean gets from the farm animals. It is not only Mr. Boomschmidt's kindness that earns him this respect, but his bravery and intelligence -- after all, it is Mr. Boomschmidt who devises a way to determine Mr. Mendoza from Mr. Hackenmeyer in Freginald after being threatened with a rifle.
Of course, Mr. Boomschmidt is best known for his word play. Sometimes he uses this ability to play with words to control the situation. In Freginald, for example, the narrator notes, "This was the way Mr. Boomschmidt always settled quarrels. He got both sides so mixed up by pretending to be mixed up himself that they usually forgot what they were fighting about."
Often, though, it seems that Mr. Boomschmidt is simply having fun. In Perilous Adventure, he is explaining to Freddy and Jinx how he was having trouble getting volunteers to be shot out of the cannon. Finally, five young blackbirds came forward.
"Instead of shooting birds out of trees, we'd shoot 'em into trees. Wasn't that a good idea? Eh, Leo, you tell 'em what a good idea it was."
"You tell 'em boss," said the lion. "It was your idea."
"Well," said Mr. Boomschmidt, "it was anyway. But just as we were all ready, the birds mother came over, and my, my, what a rumpus she made over it! She said I had no business to hire young innocent birds hardly out of the nest for such dangerous work, and she said she was going to have the law on me because they were miners."
He stopped and thought a minute. "Now that was a funny thing to say, wasn't it? I never thought of that until this minute. Miners, indeed! I guess I know a miner when I see one. He has a little lamp in his hat and a pickaxe and a dirty face. Now what did she mean --"
"She meant 'minors,' chief. With an O. Meaning they were too young to work."
"With an o?" said Mr. Boomschmidt. "Oh. -- That is, I mean: Oh, exclamation point. Why yes, of course. Well, I'm glad to have that cleared up. It bothered me."
A consistent theme throughout the Freddy books is that of friendship -- we see it especially in the circus with the relationship between Mr. Boomschmidt and Leo and between Leo and Freddy. This brand of friendship is one of loyalty -- even in the face of extreme danger. It is why Freddy learns to fly in Freddy the Pilot. It is a given that you should do everything necessary to help your friend -- yet sentimentality is nonexistent in the books. The animals like one another, they enjoy and respect their friends, but they also recognize that their friends are not perfect. As often as not, they do laugh at their friends, but only when their friends have developed large egos. Leo, for example, shows tremendous courage many times throughout the series. His friends rely on him, but they also understand that he has his foibles.
Leo first visits a beauty parlor in Freginald, after a rabbit tells him his mane would look nicer if he had it "combed and curled every day the way [a little girl he knows] does." Here we have an example of how Wiese's illustrations add so much humor to the text. Brooks presents Leo's first perm as something very matter of fact, but the illustration captures the hilarious absurdity of the notion. Leo endures a certain amount of ribbing from his fellow animals when he comes back to the circus with a permanent, but he thinks it looks wonderful and taking proper care of his mane soon becomes a preoccupation with him. In Pied Piper, when Freddy rescues Leo after months of captivity in Mrs. Guffin's house, his first thought is not about freedom, but about his looks. Rather than guard Mrs. Guffin, he runs upstairs to shampoo his mane!
Leo's preoccupation with his mane also provides an opportunity for some humorous instruction on Brooks's part. In Freddy the Magician, Leo's mane gets tangled full of burs. Freddy tries to convince him to have it shaved off, saying, "you'll look forty times more like the King of Beasts." After Leo acts on Freddy's advice, he tells Freddy:
"It's cooler and of course it's a lot less trouble and expense. But I keep having a feeling it isn't me. . . . When I pass a mirror or a store window -- you know how you just glance in to see if you're looking as dignified as you think you are? Well, I catch sight of myself and for a second it sort of scares me."
"You mean you think it's another lion?"
"Not exactly. It's sort of hard to say just what I mean. You see, when I see myself, I think I look one way, and then I find out that I look quite different. And it makes me wonder if when I think I look sort of noble I'm not really looking just sortof half-witted. Like when I'm talking to you, now, for instance -- I think I look probably worried, but reasonably intelligent. But -- do I? I just can't be sure. Maybe I'm really making idiotic faces at you. You got a mirror handy?" And he looked around anxiously.
"You look all right," said the pig. "And it isn't a good idea to be watching yourself in mirrors all the time." . . . .
"You, being a lion, I suppose want to look dignified and interesting, with just a little touch of ferocity. I, being a pig, want to look clever and good-humored, with just a dash of romance. Probably neither of us will ever look the way we want to. But if we forget mirrors we may get somewhere close to it. Watching mirrors all the time just makes us look anxious and a little foolish."
This kind, sensible advice does not keep Leo from succumbing to vanity, however, for later in the book we find him wearing a wig on his bald head -- a wig of long "pinkish orange" ringlets. The moral lesson is tempered by the sight of Leo in sunglasses and wig, reclining in the back seat of Mr. Boomschmidt's limosine. Who can resist the absolute silliness of it all?
It is this whimsical humor that attracts so many readers to the books, and it's one of the reasons Brooks kept returning to the circus over and over. The circus simply provides him with many opportunities to indulge his sense of humor.
One prime example of this occurs in Freddy the Pilot -- in a vignette that has absolutely nothing to do with the plot, Mrs. Wurzburger, otherwise a character that barely registers on the screen, plays a starring role. One of the circus acts is that of a chariot race -- three black horses against three white horses. When one of the white horses has to pull out of the race because he develops hiccups, Bill Wonks asks Hank if he will be a substitute. Hank demurs, citing the arthritis in his off-hind leg and Mrs.Wurzburger volunteers.
Bill shook his head. "You couldn't keep up. Those horses run fast."
"So do I," said the cow. "I won the two-twenty free-for-all at the Tushville Fair last fall, and there were two horses in it and a boy who's on the track team at Hamilton College." And as Bill still shook his head, she said, "All right, I'll prove it. I'll race you out to the gate and back."
So Hank said: "Ready, get set, go!" and they started. They were about even when they reached the gate, but Bill Wonks wasn't in training, while Mrs. Wurzburger always kept herself in pretty good shape and dieted and went to bed early. So after they turned back, Bill began to fall behind. But when the elephants saw a cow running, with Bill in pursuit, they thought that Mrs.Wurzburger had crashed the gate, and that Bill was chasing her to make her pay up.
"Hey, you; stop! Where are you going?" they yelled, and started to head her off. And then Mrs. Wurzburger did something which won her undying fame. One of the elephants was directly in her path. But she didn't stop. She just put on a burst of speed and leaped. She leaped right over that elephant, and went on into the tent.
It is in Pilot that the Martians are first mentioned. A plane lands on the Bean farm and Sniffy Wilson yells, "The Martians have landed! Run! Hide! These are terrible creatures from another planet." He scares Uncle Wesley so much that Uncle Wesley disappears into the woods for nearly a week. The books after Pilot are Space Ship, Freddy and the Men From Mars, and Freddy and the Baseball Team From Mars. In the last two books, the circus plays a center role.
It seems that the two fantasies -- the circus and the Martians -- formed a natural combination for Brooks, and just as soon as he established the real Martians in Freddy and the Men From Mars, they return in Freddy and the Baseball Team From Mars. Of course, in Men From Mars, the Martians begin not as actual Martians, but as the rats dressed up as Martians. The real Martians only show up because they have heard that Martians are being kept at the circus, and perhaps because the plot needs a little extra-terrestial boost at that point. Once they appear, though, Brooks is reluctant to let the Martians go home and in the next book they stay on with the circus, even staying at Centerboro instead of moving south for the winter. After the Baseball Team From Mars, the Martians disappear without an explanation, and the circus makes no further appearance in the series.
By the time of Freddy and the Men From Mars, the books have become very well-defined. Readers approach a Freddy book with certain expectations -- Freddy, of course, will play a central role in a plot which revolves around a problem which almost certainly endangers the well-being and happiness of either Mr. Bean or Mr. Boomschmidt. There will be a lot of humor, a lot of word play, and somewhere along the line, Freddy, or perhaps one of his closest friends, will be in danger, and it will be up to Freddy to put on his Great Detective expression (which at one point is described as "a sort of combination of George Washington and Winston Churchill") and solve the case.
In Freddy and the Men From Mars, not only do we have the familiar plot outline, including the crate to Montana sequence, but also making appearances are the First Animal Bank, the First Aninmal Republic, the original trip to Mars, Freddy's days as a football player, Mac the wildcat, and even Freddy's horse, Cy. So the introduction of the Martians, foreshadowed as it was by Sniffy Wilson's interest in comics in Pilot, was probably a lot of fun for Brooks because it meant playing with something new. Yet by the time of Baseball Team From Mars, the novelty, perhaps, had woren off. Perhaps Brooks simply tired of trying to please the imaginary reader and decided to leave the Martians and even the circus behind, and return to the Bean Farm and the rats in his next book, Simon the Dictator, going back in a way to the origins of Freddy.
A hint of this desire to return to the farm is offered at the end of Baseball Team From Mars, when Leo, Freddy and Jinx indulge in a conversation not terribly complimentary about humans.
Jinx says, "Had I my way / I'd put the skids / Under the whole darned race of kids."
Leo responds,
"On the whole, I agree. Particularly when I think of the years I've spent in a cage, having my tail pulled and paper bags burst in my ears and things thrown at me. But I remember what my Uncle Ajax used to say. 'Children,' he said, 'are not strictly speaking animals at all. They're not grown-ups, either. More like some kind of very active bug. A bug with a habit of making loud noises that don't mean anything. But you can get along with them if you can forget how funny they look, and if you remember to treat them as if they had a lot of sense. That, of course,' Uncle Ajax said, 'is important in dealing with grown-ups too. In fact,' he said, 'although in theory kids and grown-ups are different species, in practice there ain't enough difference between 'em to fill the hole in a doughnut.'"
Now, is Brooks complimenting children, saying that they are virtually adults, or is he criticizing the entire human race, calling them bugs, "with a habit of making loud noises that don't mean anything"? The animals, it appears, have had enough of the human world, at least for awhile, and are ready to beat a retreat back to the farm, where Brooks, and many of us, would gladly join them.