Sun 12 Dec 2021
Pulp Stories I’m Reading: TOD ROBBINS “Spurs.â€
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Stories I'm Reading[8] Comments
TOD ROBBINS “Spurs.†First published in Munsey’s Magazine, February 1923. Collected in Who Wears a Green Bottle? And Other Uneasy Tales (Philip Allan, UK, 1926). Reprinted in Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy & Otto Penzler (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), as well as several other anthologies. Film: Freaks (1932; produced and directed by Tod Browning).
There is no doubt that the Tod Browning’s notorious cult film Freaks is far more known than the short story it’s based on. The film takes the basic story and expands on it by a magnitude of three or four, if not more, but the story itself still manages to hold its own as a small gem of comeuppance and pure edginess.
To wit: When a dwarf in a traveling sideshow inherits a small fortune from an uncle, he decides it is full time he declared his love for the star of the circus’s high wire act, a veritable Amazon of a woman. To perhaps the reader’s surprise, if not Jacque Corbeé’s, who in spite of his size, is superbly confidant that she will say yes, she does indeed. Say yes, that is.
Of course it is his money she is after, but fate being what it is, things do not progress anywhere near what she envisions. The other members of the circus — freaks, if you will – play only a secondary role in the story, mostly during the dinner after the wedding, in which a small melee breaks out – each of the participants convinced that the success of the show depends largely to their presence in it.
December 12th, 2021 at 9:29 pm
Some of that sense that everyone involved thinks they are the star of the show gets into the movie just barely, but the story becomes more about the revenge of the powerless than the human frailty of everyone involved.
December 12th, 2021 at 9:51 pm
There is only a bare bones resemblance between the story and the movie. You can read a lot more into the movie than you can the story, for example. I tried to be somewhat vague about the story, not wishing to reveal all, which would be very easy to do.
December 13th, 2021 at 8:45 am
The bearded lady from Freaks was profiled by Joseph Mitchell in the New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1940/08/03/lady-olga/amp
December 13th, 2021 at 8:48 am
The internet archive has a pdf of “Spurs†that I’ll be checking out forthwith…
https://ia800202.us.archive.org/1/items/Spurs_by_Tod_Robbins/Spurs.pdf
December 13th, 2021 at 8:54 am
Thanks for the links, Tony, especially the online copy of the story itself, but for me, it looks as though you have to be a New Yorker subscribers to be able to access the Bearded Lady profile.
December 13th, 2021 at 9:43 am
Steve, yeah—I couldn’t find an online accessible version of the lady Olga story. But I give my highest recommendation to the complete Joseph Mitchell collection ‘up in the old hotel’, which has ‘lady olga’. https://archive.org/details/upinoldhotelothe00mitc
January 2nd, 2022 at 9:06 am
As I mentioned on Rara-Avis, in reply to Tony posting about his reading of it, I’ve never quite believed the conclusion of “Spurs”, as underjustified (in terms of what the afflicted party puts up with, rather meekly as I recall it from decades ago) as it seemed to me, vs. the OTT conclusion of FREAKS, unsatisfying in its opposite way. Melodrama quotient exceeded, both have for me a sense of a more competent Ed Wood production.
January 2nd, 2022 at 10:21 am
I don’t believe Robbins was aiming for realism in his story, especially, as you say, the ending. I never cared for the movie.