Well. That was quite the ride, I’d say.
Not one I’d necessarily recommend unless you have some sort of professional interest or completist determination.
In great art, it seems to me, the artist’s particular vision – and it indeed, might at times be quite particular and peculiar – manages a connection of some kind with the greater world and other human beings. That seems obvious. It’s why we are still reading Greek tragedies and Shakespeare, right?
I don’t know how one does that, but it also seems obvious when it doesn’t happen.
So, with Nightmare Alley. Which wasn’t awful and was quite compelling and readable, but also wasn’t a book that said to me either, That’s a world and aspect of life that I recognize or This is all new to me, but still rings true.
I had heard about this book in my noir forays, but never made space for it until I noted recently that Guillermo del Toro has directed a new film adaptation, due to be released in December. Here’s the trailer.
Well, okay, I thought. Let’s take a look. I read a lot of American noir fiction, so it’s probably obligatory.
By the way, there’s an earlier film adaptation, recently re-released by Criterion, with the screenplay co-written by Gresham, the novel’s author. It also stars Tyrone Power, who was my mother’s absolute, deepest Hollywood heartthrob back in the day. I’ll probably try to see it soon, although our library lists it only as “on order” at this point.
I want to say, first off, that this novel is not what you might expect, either from any synopsis or from the trailer. There’s not a bit of the supernatural about it – well, not any “real” supernatural elements, although plot points do revolve around faking the supernatural. It’s not a detective tale nor is it the traditional noir tale of a man caught in evil, struggling to make the choices that will get him out of the mess.
It’s the story of a con man.
I suppose I shouldn’t give too much away of the plot, since, even if you’re not going to read this book, you might want to see the movie – and even thought the teaser trailer is sketchy, the scenes that pop up do indicate that it will follow the book.
(Although Bradley Cooper is way older than Stan in the novel, who begins our story in his mid-twenties at the oldest. And is – as the novel tells us over and over – blonde. This seems to be quite important and also seems to be ignored in the film, just judging from the trailer. .)
Remember what I said up there about great art being the fruit of a particular, peculiar vision having a universal appeal? In order to get at how Nightmare Alley fails that test, in my mind, it’s helpful, then, to spend some time on the source of that particular, peculiar vision – author William Gresham.
And this is what I didn’t realize before I started the novel: that Gresham is the “Gresham” who was the first husband of Joyce Davidman, who, in the early 1950’s, became fascinated with C.S. Lewis and eventually crossed the sea with her two sons to be near him, married him and then died in 1960. Lewis fans know, then that the literary fruits of this are Surprised by Joy and A Grief Observed and that one of the sons – Douglas – has been instrumental in preserving Lewis’ literary legacy.
Knowing all of that, reading Nightmare Alley takes on a whole other dimension. For the contrast between the vision behind this novel and Lewis’ works is about as extreme as you’re going to get.
(Gresham was also an alcoholic and, by the time Joy left, was involved with her cousin, whom he would marry. I am not a Lewis acolyte, do not put the man on any sort of pedestal, and so was interested, rather than disturbed this article about his marriage to Davidman. YMMV.)
Synopsis, as per usual, written by someone else, because I’m lazy:
Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a carnival-show geek—alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd’s gleeful disgust and derision—going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There’s no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him.
And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak of ruthlessness, soon enough he’s going places. Onstage he plays the mentalist with a cute assistant (before long his harried wife), then he graduates to full-blown spiritualist, catering to the needs of the rich and gullible in their well-upholstered homes. It looks like the world is Stan’s for the taking. At least for now.
Nighmare Alley is rough, sexually forthright and extremely dark. Which doesn’t bother me, since I’m a rather dark and cynical person myself. But I do appreciate a little hope (as I do find in Greene), and there’s none of that here.
There are two figures that dominate Nightmare Alley: the Conman and the Geek.
Stan – our main character – evolves into a master conman. We meet him as a magician, and then he moves into the world of Spiritualism, exploiting the pain of loss for what he hopes will be great gain: manipulating a woman whose daughter died and a man whose youthful paramour died from the abortion of his child decades before.
But why is he conning? Because, Gresham implies, Stan himself was conned. By whom? By life itself.
Conned into believing that the life into which he was born was solid and real and characterized by authentic love and support for his own ambitions, dreams and talents – and would last. It wasn’t and it didn’t.
(Enter a lot of Freudian psychosexual allusions)
Betrayed by this con as a child Stan is tossed out into the world and so begins the journey the only way he knows how: by the con.
And then we have the Geek – not just the sideshow freak, but the person (usually a man) who, at the lowest of the low points, is manipulated to perform low, dehumanizing acts – in this case, biting the head of a chicken. Aside from Stan, he’s the first figure we meet in Nightmare Alley, and he and what brought him to that point hover above the whole novel and inform Stan’s own journey, both as a conman and a victim:
We live in pain and need. The canny and the sharp see this – and will exploit it and use us. The outright conmen, but also the corporations, the industrialists, the religious, the advertisers and the (Lilith is a psychologist):
The next moment Lilith’s hand was through his arm, pressing it, turning him across the avenue to the apartment house where she lived, where she worked her own special brand of magic, where she had her locked files full of stuff. Where she told people what they had to do during the next day when they wanted a drink, when they wanted to break something, when they wanted to kill themselves with sleeping tablets, when they wanted to bugger the parlor maid or whatever they wanted to do that they had become so afraid of doing that they would pay her twenty-five dollars an hour to tell them either why it was all right to do it or go on doing it or think about doing it or how they could stop doing it or stop wanting to do it or stop thinking about doing it or do something else that was almost as good or something which was bad but would make you feel better or just something to do to be able to do something.
From childhood, Stan had a dream – the dream of that Nightmare Alley – running, running running on a narrow path between darkened buildings, with a light glinting and the end – but he never reaches it. Ever.
But the canny and the knowing are fully aware of the hunger for love, acceptance and peace that drives that run – and they’ll use it.
And there you’ll be – the mark, the geek, blood at your feet, blood on your hands, blood at the edges of your mouth.
You might get the idea from the trailer and from the synopsis that Nightmare Alley is all about carnivals. It’s not. Maybe a third is set in that world. The rest takes us to two different worlds: that of mid-twentieth century psychology and, more importantly, pop Spiritualism – both of which interested and involved Gresham a great deal.
Both Brighton Rock and Nightmare Alley present a vision of suffering humanity, seeking to have its needs met, fears assuaged, hurting comforted, along with a vision of a world that is perfectly willing to meet, assuage and comfort – but at a price. For Greene, it is the transitory salvation of mechanical attractions and entertainment as well as greed and lust. For Gresham, it’s the charlatan and the conman. But perhaps the two are seeing the same realities, in the end.
For Greene, at least, there is hope. In Gresham’s world, there really isn’t a spot of it. It’s interesting to rattle around in his head for a few hours, but in the end, it’s just him and his obsessions I’m getting acquainted with, and nothing beyond: We’re all needy marks – the only way out, even for a short time – is to recognize it, defend yourself, and turn it around. And even so – the book’s chapters are titled by tarot cards, which tells you all you need to know. There’s no chance, boys. We’ll never reach that light, will we?
Because it’s not actual light. It’s just a dead thing, tricking us here on this dying earth:
The moon brightened concrete steps leading down the terrace where the grass was ragged. Stan’s legs felt stiff as he descended to the street where the arching maples closed over him, moonlight showering through their leaves now black with night. A sound came from the house he had left, an old man weakly crying.
In a patch of silver the Rev. Carlisle stopped and raised his face to the full moon, where it hung desolately, agonizingly bright—a dead thing, watching the dying earth.
Random, amusing note: I started reading this book online, then noted that one of my local libraries had a copy. So a couple of days ago, I headed down there – because I prefer to read “real” books. I went to the fiction section, got distracted, and wandered over to a special display labeled something like “Humorous English Novels.” And there was Nightmare Alley, right in between Wodehouse and Kingsley Amis. Someone needs to do some more homework, I think……
