“The Circus in the Attic”
The title story of this collection is really more of a novella than a true short story. Bolton Lovehart harbors one great person desire: to simply be the person wants to be. The combination of a submissive father figure and a dominating mother conspires to create tension which results in a lifetime of misguided acts of insurrection against the control other wield over him even to the stereotypical childhood act of rebellion of the era: running away from home to join the circus. He is forcibly brought back and forced to attend college, but the circus remains the symbol of his escape and after an episodic series of continuing dead ends in his attempts to avoid conforming, he begins building his own miniature circus as recompense for an opportunity stolen. In the end, the circus in the attic becomes a refuge from the tragedy of losing everything else which finally made him happy.
“Blackberry Winter”
At one time, “Blackberry Winter” was as anthologized as any other short story by an American writer. It’s fame and recognition faded over the last quarter of the 20th century, but it is still routinely regarded as Warren’s finest work in shorter fiction. This trajectory of lapsing into oblivion is made all the stranger since the qualities of its regard lie not in its barest bones of a plot, but its delineation of character, place and time. The plot, such at it is, revolves around the memory a summer incident by involving a nine-year-old boy told from the perspective of his adult self three decades into the future. Into a story dominated by the lazy and carefree recreation of that summer to fit the recognition that “time is a climate in which things are” is introduced an allegorical element the brings the symbolic into conflict with the realistic. From the woods appears one of literature’s mysterious strange—in this case a somewhat sinister tramp who becomes the agency of the start of the breakdown of the innocence of youth. “Blackberry Winter” seems, paradoxically, more suited to success today than it was at mid-century, yet the opposite has proven true.
“When the Light Gets Green”
This is a semi-autobiographical story that bears much in common with the previous tale in that it lives or dies based on the how deeply immersed the reader is willing to get in its story of tobacco planting, an old Confederate soldier lingering near death for years, the guilt of a grandson who can find no way to establish an emotional connection with a man who seems to belong to an ancient time as seen through the more sophisticated perspective of the child grown to adulthood.
“Goodwood Comes Back”
Loosely based on an actual friend the author knew in his youth, Goodwood seems destined to become a baseball phenom only to quickly reveal he would never actually live up to his potential. So he comes back to the piney woods which he left behind to seek success only to face further failure in his marriage and the subsequent violent feud with brother-in-law.
“The Patented Gate and the Mean Hamburger”
The titular objects actually refer to the two central figures: Jeff York and his wife. The first half of the story is really just a character study of Jeff and the last half is a kind of literary exercise in how a writer can suddenly shift from character to contrived plot on the basis of a single line of dialogue from a single character. Mrs. York’s very first line changes everything and leads to a “Richard Cory” meets O. Henry kind of ironic ending.
“Prime Leaf”
Oddly placed as the final story in the collection, “Prime Leaf” is actually the first short story the author ever published. As the title suggests, it is another tale tobacco country, the farmers who grow it and the business who buy it. Unlike “When the Light Gets Green,” however, this is not another tale told of out of time that transforms a distant event into a recent memory. “Prime Leaf” actually has more in common with the title story in that it is another tale far too long to be categorized as anything less than a novella. Its story of conflict between the growers and buyers of the prized crop is also more complex than any of the true short stories in the collection. That story delves into the mechanics of price fixing, the corruption of law enforcement, idealism versus pragmatism and the dying ways of the old-fashioned gentlemen-farmer in the face of the coming industrialization of the tobacco business.
