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Blind Alley: the sad and 'geeky' life of william Lindsay Gresham - Notes on a Strange World - Biography

Skeptical Inquirer, July-August, 2003 by Massimo Polidoro

"Let me tell you something, kid. In the carny you don't ask nothing. And you'll get told no lies."

W.L. Gresham, Nightmare Alley

One of the best (if not the best) "skeptical" novels ever written has to be William Lindsay Gresham's Nightmare Alley. The story is classic noir, depicting the rise and fill of Stanton Carlisle, an all-around faker who gets his start in a carny ten-in-one show. It opens with a revolting description of a "geek," a word that Gresham claimed he had invented, referring to the lowest of the low: an alcoholic or drug addict who was out of his head all the time. He could be prodded, cajoled, and led into working for more drinks or drugs. His job? To sit and crawl in his own excrement, as the Wild Man of Borneo, and occasionally bite the heads off chickens and snakes.

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In the carnival, Stanton is the assistant to (and then the lover of) a phony medium, Madam Zeena, a perfect ancestor of modern showmen like John Edward and Sylvia Browne. Carlisle learns from her all there is to know about cold reading and is awestruck by how well the technique works with people: "The world is mine! I've got 'em across the barrel and I can shake them loose from whatever I want. The geek has his whisky. The rest of them drink something else: they drink promises. They drink hope. And I've got it to hand them."

And so he leaves the carny in order to reach the big time, but his dreams are shattered by a careless performance in front of his first high-level audience and he sets out to get revenge. He turns himself into a phony pseudo-religious spiritualist and starts preying on the rich and gullible matrons of society.

His fatal step arrives when he attempts a big swindle in collaboration with a female psychiatrist who is even more duplicitous. On the lam from the law, our anti-hero retreats into the bottle and ultimately returns to the carny, where he is forced to take a job as a geek.

It's a dark, sordid story, but beautifully told by Gresham's captivating storytelling. And, apart from a great read, this book also presents a magnificent expose of fake psychics and mediums, with rarely found details on how the cold reading business really works. A magician could pay quite some reward just to learn the ingenious trick used by Carlisle to move the arms of a precision balance placed under a glass case. (Don't worry, I won't spoil the surprise. You'll find it in the book.) Gresham organizes each chapter along the twenty-two minor arcana of the Tarot, a device used by later authors such as Robert Anton Wilson and Umberto Eco.

When Nightmare Alley came our in 1946 it was an instant success. The following year Edmund Goulding directed a film version of it, starring Tyrone Power in the role of the suave Carlisle. Though it turned out to be quite a creepy B-movie, the film is not up to the quality of the book.

However, though Nightmare Alley is a book often mentioned in skeptical literature, it is unfortunately seldom read- for years it was our of print and only recently reprinted in an omnibus edition (Poliro 1997).

Because Gresham was also an amateur magician, student of the occult, and the author of other fine books (including one of the earliest Houdini biographies and a mesmerizing book on the history and workings of the sideshow), I was quite interested in learning more about him and his dealings with magic and the paranormal.

From Depression to War

Gresham, allegedly the descendant of a family that settled in Maryland in 1641, was born August 20, 1909, in Baltimore, Maryland. He moved with his family to Fall River, Massachusetts, and when his father needed to pursue a factory job they all moved to New York City. He graduated from Erasmus Hall High School, in Brooklyn, the year Houdini died, 1926.

Unsure of his career path, he worked at odd jobs and as a folk singer in Greenwich Village cafes. Those were the years of the Great Depression and as America suffered its economic woes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt extolled the virtues of hard work. It was in his acceptance of the Democratic nomination for president in July 1932 that FDR began his conservation movement, proposing putting city men to work restoring the country to its "former beauty." The Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC, a massive salvage operation destined to become the most popular experiment of the New Deal, was born. Gresham promptly joined the CCC.

His time there lasted a few years and, when he met a wealthy woman and married her, he left the CCC. After a brief stint as a reviewer for the New York Evening Post, he worked as an advertising copy writer and in his spare time contributed stories to pulp magazines.

In November 1936, like many idealistic young men in those days, he joined the Communist Party, taking as a name William Rafferty. The following year, after a close friend died at Brunete, he left for Spain where he fought and served for fifteen months as a medic with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, on the side of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. It was during his days at the camp hospital that he met a medic who liked to reminisce about his times in a carnival. His name was Joseph Daniel "Doc" Halliday, a former seaman and male nurse. It was from him that Gresham learned all about the carny culture, habits, mentality, and language.

Blind Alley: the sad and 'geeky' life of william Lindsay Gresham - Notes on a Strange World - Biography

Skeptical Inquirer, July-August, 2003 by Massimo Polidoro

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