Homage to Hoagland: "Tiger Bright"

This is the third post in my series “Homage to Hoagland,” in which I consider seven of Edward Hoagland’s best essays – one per month – and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is “Tiger Bright” (included in Hoagland’s 1973 collection Walking the Dead Diamond River).

Hoagland loved circuses. He worked in one for a few months in the spring of 1951, when he was eighteen. The experience made a lasting impression: see “Calliope Times” (The New Yorker, May 22, 2000; chapter 3 of his 2001 memoir Compass Points). In “Tiger Bright,” he writes about circus tigers and their trainers. The trainer he most admires is Gunther Gebel-Williams, “who constitutes a circus all by himself.” Hoagland calls him “the best animal trainer alive.” 

Hoagland’s descriptions of Gunther’s tiger act are extraordinary. For example:

Gunther’s tigers are mostly males, because a male, though surly and slow, is bigger – “more tiger,” as he says, measuring with his arms. They smell like rye bread smeared with Roquefort cheese. He chants and sings like Glenn Gould as he works with them, swinging back and forth, drawing murmuring rumbles and air-blast roars. Tigers growl softly but roar far more explosively than lions do. He spreads his arms wide so the animals have both of them to keep track of, as well as watching his face; it’s like having two assistants in the ring. He holds his whips in one hand, butt and lash reversed, and pets tiger chins with the other, grinning like a lapsed angel, a satyr – it’s a lean V face, the flat planes cut for mischief and glee, or a big-eyed lemur’s, a tree-dweller’s face. Singing and chattering, he composes their ladylike lunges into a fluttering of stripes, touching his forehead with his fingers in a Hindu salute to acknowledge applause, and kneels theatrically while the tigers sit. Throwing sawdust on their turds so that he won’t slip, he pitches his whip like a jokester, his crucifix bouncing on his bare chest, his eyes big and round, organizing them into a jungle trot. They look bulky as bulls, but when he bats them they rise into a pussy pose, paws up. “Ziva!” he calls, running to one, mimicking the twitch of her white cheeks and black mouth, and stroking her rump. “Hubblebay!” he says, and they all revolve. The band accelerates into a keynote of victory.

And:

Maybe the loveliest moment is when Gunther simply has them walk: not a feat many trainers would consider exciting or could even achieve by the adversary technique. Two leave their pedestals and promenade as they might alongside a water hole. He induces another pair to join them – but counterposed – the two pairs passing in the center of the cage. Then he gets the other four to join in, crisscrossing as in Chinese checkers before lining up in formation like the spokes of a wheel. Round and round they slink, keeping abreast, looking up at him, delaying behind the band to exercise their claws (tigers never “march”).

And this beauty – my favorite of the piece:

Bidding this group good-bye, he welcomes a middle-aged, equable tiger, redder than most, and fluffing and scratching it, introduces two elephants, an African with tusks and an Indian one without. The Indian voices its aversion in squeals, the African is indifferent to the tiger, having perhaps inherited know feelings about it one way or the other. The tiger springs to the howdah that each of them carries, down to the ground and up again, then leaps between them, back and forth, finally mounting a platform near the roof of the cage, and jumps again onto the African’s back. Gunther directs all this choreography only by words, sitting at his ease on the ring curbing and watching. The elephants and tiger mount three pedestals and rotate quietly as he talks to them; he tugs on the African’s tusks and feeds it a loaf of Italian bread. The band plays traditional Spartan brass, the tiger mounts the African elephant again, and so does Gunther, his face in a Pan-like grin. He sits on the tiger, and leaning over, tugs its tufted chin, rubs his eyes and lips, and has it roar elegantly into his face. Then he and the tiger drop down to the ground, the elephants leave the cage, and he fondles the cat, tickling its black lips and its orange rump. Then he sits lightly astride its hips and rides it across the stage at a lumbering gallop, a sight not often seen.

Wow! Wow! Wow! A tour de force of evocative writing! Hoagland unfurls detail after amazing detail. The explosive roars. The fluttering stripes. Gunther’s crucifix “bouncing on his bare chest.” He even tells us what the big cats smell like: “They smell like rye bread smeared with Roquefort cheese.” Hoagland is an inspired describer. “Tiger Bright” exemplifies his art magnificently.