BY G. CONNOR SALTER

Clark Sheldon has long been a writer and researcher fascinated by “the other.” The other may be outsider authors who aren’t discussed much or “freak” characters who surprise readers. For over a decade, Sheldon has been exploring a subject that allowed him to do both: the odd life of William Lindsay Gresham.

Gresham’s reputation varies widely depending on who you ask. To Inklings fans, he is the first wife of Joy Davidman, who later married C.S. Lewis. To crime fiction fans, he is the author of Nightmare Alley, a harrowing story about addiction, carnivals, and “spook shows.” To fans of stage magic, he is the writer of a well-remembered Harry Houdini biography and various nonfiction works exploring what goes on inside a circus or carnival community.

Gresham also affected popular culture in a way that not many people know today. As Nick Tosches puts it, Nightmare Alley centers on “a carny attraction called a geek, a drunkard driven so low that he would bite off the heads of chickens and snakes just to get the booze he needed.” Decades later, geek has to mean something very different, but it appears in mainstream American slang only after Gresham made it famous.

While Tosches and Perry C. Bramlett both hoped to bring Gresham’s life to new readers, they passed away before their biographies reached publication. Sheldon is currently revising his Gresham biography, which he hopes to publish soon.

He was kind enough to give a few thoughts on Gresham, and what he hopes to see next in scholarship on this unique man.

Sheldon was kind enough to provide citations for quotes he included in his responses. Those citations appear in endnotes. My notes begin with “Salter” and provide background information and links to further research.

Interview Questions:

How did you become interested in Gresham?

My interest in Gresham dates right to the New York Review Books edition of Nightmare Alley from 2010. Working in a bookstore, I grabbed it the first day it hit the shelf. I was already into carny lit—if that is a thing. I love noir, and the more jagged the story, the better. I think my reaction to the book was what a lot of people wonder: who could write such a dark, twisted thing? That led me to look up the author. Basically, all you could find on the internet back then was that he wrote Nightmare Alley, killed himself, and that his only obituary was in the bridge column of The New York Times. That was it—such a weird bio! I was hooked. Of course, 14 years later, I know that was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the weird life of Bill Gresham.

I was surprised to find when going through a list of his work that Gresham wrote fantasy and sci-fi short stories for magazines. What do we know about these works?

Gresham wanted to be a professional writer, and to do that, he needed to sell what he wrote. Once Nightmare Alley went out into the world and he had to get back to work, he began to realize that detective fiction didn’t sell as it once did. He and Joy were both trying to sell their writing then, and they read widely in the magazines on the newsstand. They realized the market was moving to sci-fi and fantasy, and so Bill turned his hand to that. For that reason, you see his writing move from noir tales like “The Case of the Blind Witness” and “The Corpse From Nowhere,” both published in 1946, to space tales like “The Dream Dust Factory,” which first appears in 1947.[1]

To be honest, his attempts at sci-fi or fantasy were pretty short-lived. Though he published some of those stories into the mid-1950s, he wrote most of them in about a two-year span. Before long, he was off fiction altogether.

Gresham’s experience in the Spanish Civil War seems to be a turning point in his life—Abigail Santamaria has suggested he “returned from that war a different man.”[2] Any thoughts on that?

He went off to war an idealistic, robust, outgoing young man. He came home destroyed physically, mentally, and ideologically. Bill wrote that he returned from Spain with “a light attack of tuberculosis and a long nightmare of neurotic conflict within me.”[3] He never held firm political beliefs again. He would be hampered by physical issues for the rest of his life—but those paled in comparison to the mental trauma he suffered.

Before he went to Spain, Bill was already a big drinker, so he likely would have become an alcoholic regardless, but the Spanish Civil War absolutely tore Bill apart psychologically. He knew he was broken when he returned to New York, but found his old comrades in the Communist Party not only didn’t know how to help him, but thought that talking about his troubles was somehow betraying the Party. To suggest that the Party might not be perfect was a thing not done among the rank-and-file members. His first suicide attempt came shortly after he returned from Spain. He spent most of the rest of his life either distracting himself from his brokenness with alcohol or women, or searching for something that would make him whole again.

Bret Wood suggested in Grindshow that Gresham politically shifted after the Spanish Civil War—not quite the committed Communist Party member he was in 1937. Any thoughts on that?

That is correct. Gresham saw some horrendous sights in Spain, and was very frustrated that many upper party members seemed content to let people die in the name of ideology. Gresham couldn’t fathom that—he was there to help people, not push a viewpoint. He was among the last members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to get out of Spain—he felt abandoned by the people in the Party. There was some talk that America wouldn’t even allow the Lincoln Brigade back in, so he also felt betrayed by his country, too. He knew when a game was rigged: he saw that the political systems were as much a con as any carny game of chance.

I think he still saw worth in the Communist ideology for a while longer: he continued to lobby against war, for example, but he was never dogmatic in his beliefs after Spain.

I’m told there was a point in the 1940s-1950s when the FBI investigated him for being a Communist. Has anyone confirmed that?

Early in my research, I stumbled across a rumor of an FBI file on Gresham. However, when I requested the file, the response was that a file that may—or may not have—been relevant had been destroyed. So, unless one of the earlier researchers like Bramlett or Tosches managed to get it, we may never be able to prove there was a file. Though we may never know if the FBI had a file on him, we do know they had an interest in him because Bill himself said he had been visited by “FBI fellows.” Their interest, they said, was mostly in his former lover Jean Karsavina, but Bill simply shut down their requests by saying he’d changed his political views, and that his conscience wouldn’t let him rat on old comrades.[4]

Since you bring up Jean Karsavina, I wonder if you can clarify how many times Gresham married, legally or otherwise? Paul Duncan reprints a quote near the end of Gresham’s life, bewailing “three busted marriages”[5] as if Davidman was his third failed marriage. Santamaria notes the FBI report allegedly listed Gresham and Karsavina as “living as man and wife” in 1939-1941.[6] So, was Karsavina his common-law wife?

Gresham had three legal marriages: the first to Beatrice McCollum.[7] They broke up long before they divorced. They were officially married from 1933 to 1942. It looks like she sought to divorce him so she could marry someone new, but by that point, they hadn’t cohabitated in years. Bill didn’t show up to the divorce proceedings. Still, being married to Beatrice might have been one of the reasons he didn’t officially marry Karsavina. Bill lived with her for a few years as man and wife–Bill sometimes counted it in his marriage tally and sometimes didn’t, but they were common law at most. When McCollum divorced him, he was ready to marry again: but to Joy, not Jean. I think Bill registered his divorce from Joy and his marriage to Renée on the same day.

Joy Davidman is an interesting figure—they were married for years and had two children, but they don’t come across as very compatible. What do you think drew them together?

I actually think they were quite compatible… at first. They could have done worse. Married for 12 years, and seemingly happy for about half of that. They were both brilliant people who wanted to save the world, and who thought the Communist ideology could do that.

Abigail Santamaria’s biography on Joy shows that she was attracted to smart men—and Bill was definitely smart. He was also gregarious, something that Joy also respected, even though it wasn’t her own personality. My perception of Joy is that she was academically brilliant, tended to be driven on a particular project, and discarded anything that didn’t take her in that direction. Bill needed some rigor to offset his tendency to be all over the place. Bill was more naturally smart than academically sound. I think he drew Joy out of her shell and brought to her a slew of people she might not otherwise have met. So, they really did assist with each other’s shortcomings. But certainly, they would discover that some of their traits worsened traits in the other.

So, it might be fair to say they were compatible when their careers were going well, and they had all the money from the Nightmare Alley movie. But when that dried up, the little cracks in their relationship widened into chasms.

Nightmare Alley seems to have been the high point in his career. What made it so significant for him?

Bill wasn’t quite a one-hit-wonder, but nothing ever stuck in the culture like Nightmare Alley. His life experiences and interests meant he was likely the only one who could have written such a book, and at a time when America was somewhat receptive to it. It was significant for two reasons. The easiest to think of is the money from the book sales and from the movie rights: he earned something like $70,000 that year. The money was nice, but the confidence it gave Bill was the biggest boon of the whole project. The critical esteem and robust sales of the book meant to Bill that he’d “made it” as a writer. It did wonders for him: shortly after the success of Nightmare Alley, Bill was the least neurotic he ever was. Sadly, the confidence wore off in lockstep with the money.

However, Nightmare Alley lets Bill make it in another way. Tosches proved that Nightmare Alley was the first time the word “geek” was used in popular culture. At that point, Bill could talk the carny talk, but not walk the walk. There was a barricade between “normal” folk and circus folk. Nightmare Alley proved to be the “postern gate in the wall”[8] that let him gain the respect of true carnies. More than literary accolades or movie money, that meant the most to Bill: he earned the respect of carnival people. Without Nightmare Alley, he wouldn’t have been able to go behind-the-scenes to write Monster Midway.

Why was Monster Midway a significant book in Gresham’s career?

It was a horrible failure as a book—I don’t think it earned out its meager advance. Though some of the pieces collected were articles Bill had already written, he got to use the book as an excuse to introduce himself to some performers he didn’t previously know. And he threw himself into the “research”—so if he was talking to a motorcycle daredevil, he’d get on the bike (or at least in the sidecar) himself. If he talked to a knife-thrower, he learned how to throw blades himself. He handled snakes when talking with snake-handlers. He met people where they were, if that makes any sense. He didn’t judge anyone; he just tried to understand them, and often, their passion became his passion. Bill met a lot of people he’d remain friends with through his work on Monster Midway.

Given how many stories Gresham wrote about crime and carnivals (sometimes together, sometimes separately), he could probably have written novels like Nightmare Alley for a while. Any thoughts on why he didn’t take that path?

I’m not sure he had more than one Nightmare Alley in him. Nightmare Alley was written in a fever. He pounded it out, working in a glorified shed outside his growing family’s apartment. At the very least, he drank heavily during most of the writing, and there are suggestions in his letters that he used more than alcohol to keep himself banging away at the typewriter.

He gave everything he had to produce that book—it took more energy than any human can be expected to give once, let alone twice. Bill spent a lot of time plotting Nightmare Alley: he’d had it in his head since Doc Halliday said the legendary line to him in Spain that “Kid, you don’t find a geek. You make a geek.”[9] It had lived in his mind since that moment. Writing Nightmare Alley was a way to get rid of the demon that Doc put in his head: he had literal nightmares about it. The only way he could get rid of it was to pass it on, and to do that, he had to tell the story of the geek. And so he did – and since then, he’s infected a lot of us with it: me, Tosches, Bramlett—even Tyrone Power, the actor from the first version of the Nightmare Alley film, who re-christened his private plane “the Geek.”

On the more technical side of things as to why he didn’t continue writing books like Nightmare Alley, Bill really did “lose the plot” later in life. He began to find it increasingly difficult to write stories, let alone full novels. It’s hard to say how much Joy helped him with that aspect when they were together. She claimed she helped considerably: Bill said she helped with Nightmare Alley, but he wrote Limbo Tower on his own. That’s true, but doesn’t exactly prove Bill could still outline a novel: Limbo Tower is notable for being demonstrably devoid of any plot at all. He managed some short stories after Limbo Tower, but really, in the last decade of his life, he produced very little fiction at all.

It’s hard, perhaps impossible, to talk about Gresham without talking about the movie Shadowlands, which casts him as the alcoholic ex-husband who creates a little melodrama before the movie becomes about Davidman marrying C.S. Lewis. Any thoughts on how the movie has informed how we see Gresham?

So, a little secret about me that maybe I shouldn’t admit to in this forum… I’ve never bothered to watch Shadowlands in its entirety. I still talk about Bill Gresham until people beg me to stop. If you approach Gresham through the Inklings, then, of course, Gresham is a dark, peripheral figure. That’s the bill of goods that’s been sold in some circles.

People who study Gresham take most of what Davidman told Lewis with not just a grain, but a pound of salt. She had an agenda: a particular story to tell. Shadowlands reinforced that narrative. About all I have to say about that is—how many children did she have in the movie? How many did she have in real life? So perhaps Shadowlands isn’t the most trustworthy source. They made choices to streamline and simplify the story. Part of that process was to make Bill more of a problem than he really was. As I said earlier—he had his demons, but he was not a devil, and Joy was not a saint.

It’s interesting that Gresham doesn’t go back to writing for pulp magazines after Nightmare Alley. Any thoughts on why that is?

Bill used the fame from Nightmare Alley to leverage the best bylines he could. Before Alley, he was publishing stories in Master Detective magazine and a few others. But after Alley, he appears in Collier’s, Esquire, Saturday Evening Post, and Redbook. He did his best to turn himself into a “literary” writer. But after he bought the house in Staatsburg with Joy, and particularly after she had a piece done on her announcing that she’d converted from communist to Christian, Bill nearly became untouchable in the top-end mags. It could have been political fallout. It could have been that Bill wasn’t as good of a writer as he once was. But in terms of pulp, I would argue that he published pulp as long as he could. When the A-list mags dropped him, he kept going in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Bluebook, and others. When he couldn’t write fiction anymore, he turned to writing non-fiction. In some ways, his non-fiction was as lurid as his short fiction. He moved to True and Saga magazines: still pulp, just non-fiction pulp.

Eventually, even those fell away, and he began to write for pocket digest magazines. Their titles likely speak for themselves: Bold. Male Point of View. Dude. Gent. Rogue. Climax. If men of the day told their wives they bought the magazines for the articles, not the pictures, then they were buying them for Bill Gresham’s writing.  He went from sharing pages with Hemingway and Asimov to filling space between Bettie Page and Lili St. Cyr.

Recently, I interviewed Diego Domingo, and we talked about how people often seem to treat Gresham as the third wheel in the Davidman-Lewis story. What are some things that make him worth studying in his own right?

If you come to Gresham from the Inklings side of things, of course, he’s the third wheel. But I came to Bill for Bill. So, for me, the Davidman-Lewis duo is the third wheel. You can see Joy as the figure Bill endured before he found happiness. And he did, in his way. Bill and Renee seem to be among the most loving couple you could imagine. Renée knew Bill needed to write and that they couldn’t count on that to bring in enough money to support the family. And so she went to work—and worked like a dog to keep them fed while Bill wrote. She lifted Bill up in a way that made him think he deserved it, and that was no easy task. That’s not to say Bill was a freeloader. He banged away hour after hour on the typewriter, writing whatever people would pay him to write.

It’s tempting for Gresham people to give Joy the same sort of treatment that Shadowlands gave Bill: that she was just an unsuccessful alcoholic writer[10] that rode Bill’s coat-tails until she decided to steal his kids on her way to grab Lewis’ coat-tails instead. That is an unkind way to look at her. I think Bill deserves more kindness than he sometimes gets: the truth is between the two extremes.

Lewis was a brilliant writer, both on Christian topics and in Narnia. He is interesting and worth studying. But Bill, in my estimation, is worth much more rigorous study than he’s gotten so far.

In terms of his oeuvre, his scope of work speaks loudly. He had a hit with a grim, character-driven, plot-pushing, smash-hit novel. Then wrote a literary novel with no action at all. He wrote a book of true-life pieces on carnies, freaks, and midway workers. Then produced the best biography of Houdini written at the time. Well over 100 short stories and non-fiction pieces in magazines, ranging from high-end literary magazines to the lewdest cheesecake rags. And, to top it all off—a book on weight training long before it was a common type of exercise.

He was a communist and a Christian, an early Scientologist and a Buddhist, a loyal husband and an adulterer, a teetotaler and an alcoholic, a success and a failure. He was a soldier who never fired a shot. He was an illusionist practiced in fakery, a skeptic that debunked Spiritualists—and yet still believed in true magic. He was a cold-reader, a fire-eater, a knife-thrower: he knew all the carny tricks. By his own count, he was married either three or four times. He was a loving father who went the better part of a decade without seeing his own children, while helping to raise two children he hadn’t fathered. He was a man who struck it big with the grimmest novel of his age, and a man who lost it all in a year. He was a man who’d learned from a psychic that you ought only to give hopeful readings because “you’ll never get rich peddling gloom.”[11] He was a man who couldn’t help but do precisely that. He loved a woman so much he killed himself so she didn’t have to watch him die.

A few books have talked about Gresham as a hardboiled or noir writer, which puts him in the same company as writers like Raymond Chandler or (closer to Gresham’s generation) Jim Thompson. Any thoughts on how he fits into that group?

Gresham is noir—if anything, he is actually too cynical to be noir, and that’s saying something.  Not only did he write noir stories, but he edited a crime fiction magazine for quite a long time. He published widely in detective magazines of the day. And really, Nightmare Alley is a trench-coated, chain-smoking gumshoe short of a hard-boiled crime novel. I often look at it like Stan’s own conscience is the detective that catches him out.

In terms of being part of a group of writers, he corresponded with and visited dozens of other authors in all sorts of genres: John Dickson Carr, Clayton Rawson, Fletcher Pratt, L. Ron Hubbard, Robert Bloch, Henry Kuttner, and C.L. Moore are only a small sampling of them.

One curious fact that stands out in Gresham’s life is that he mentions several times that he tried a career as a folk singer in Greenwich Village. Curiously, he brings it up, so it’s important to him, but he says very little about it. Has anyone dug into that story?

I don’t know of anyone who knows much about it. I poked around a bit, but it’s a pretty shallow grave. There’s not much room to dig before you hit the body, and it’s a skeleton that doesn’t have much meat on it. As a young man, Bill knew he wanted to live as an artist in some way. He’d taught himself to play the guitar as a teen, so he tried singing first. This is long before Nightmare Alley—we’re talking circa 1931. It may be during his singing stint that he met his first wife, actually. Bill’s brand of folk singing was “cowboy ballads.” One of his favorites was “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” Bill wrote of this later, and his typically self-deprecating description of his songcraft was that “Greenwich Village cellar joints had been puzzled and annoyed by his ‘material’—this was long before the folk-music deluge.”[12]

Though singing didn’t make him famous, it was a hobby he kept during most of his life. His son Douglas recalled him singing quite often in the Staatsburg house and thought he had a pleasant voice. If Doug’s word isn’t enough—maybe some guy named Pete Seeger is good enough for you. Pete, when asked about Gresham, recalled Bill fondly. “He had a nice bass voice,” Seeger remembered. “Taught me some Spanish Loyalist songs. Played a little guitar.”[13] When Bill came back from Spain, he actually taught the Spanish songs to Pete Seeger, who then taught the lyrics to the rest of his band, including Woody Guthrie. You can’t call Bill a founding member of the Almanac Singers in any way—but he does have his fingerprints on a generation of American folk music.

What are some things you’d like to see more people study about Gresham’s life?

In the past decade, I’ve done a pretty deep dive into Bill’s life. He can basically be tracked from 1929 to the end of his life. There are a couple of brief black spots in that time frame, but mostly enough correspondence exists to let us get a good idea of his goings-on. Where uncertainty remains is his early life: he was born in 1909 in Baltimore and was in New York by about age 9, but there is some question on his exact path for the first few years. It would be nice to get a grip on his childhood and his relationship with his father, mother, and brother.

I’d love to know what he actually experienced in Spain, and especially in the Battle of Brunete. It left him with lifelong trauma, so while it can’t have been pleasant, it would help us all understand him better to know what he endured.[14]

And, lastly, what I’d really like to know is more the purview of the bibliographer rather than the biographer. I know he published under a number of pseudonyms in his pulp publishing days. But in his last decade, when he was writing for what were essentially skin mags, there are a number that didn’t even bother to mention who wrote the articles. I’ve read some pieces that I am pretty sure Bill wrote, but it appears there is no way to prove that. If anyone did a deep analysis to figure out who wrote what in “gentleman’s” magazines of the late 1950s and early 1960s, it would be interesting—and definitely put Bill’s publishing credits well into the hundreds of unique titles.

Readers and researchers seeking to connect with Clark Sheldon can reach him through Connor Salter or through contacting the community at the William Lindsay Gresham Facebook page.

Notes

[1] “The Case of the Blind Witness” first appeared in the January 1946 issue of Master Detective magazine. “The Corpse From Nowhere” appeared in the June issue. “The Dream Dust Factory” appeared in Atlantic Monthly in October 1947.

[2] Salter: This is quoted from Santamaria, Abigail. “Biographical Miscellany.” William Lindsay Gresham Papers, Box 2, Folder 123. Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College.

[3] Gresham, W.L.” From Communist to Christian” in These Found the Way: Thirteen Converts to Protestant Christianity, ed. David Wesley Soper. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1951, p 69.

[4] Letter to Thel Greenhaus. William Lindsay Gresham Papers, Folder 60, Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College.

[5] Salter: See Duncan, Paul. Noir Fiction: Dark Pathway. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2000, p50.

[6] Salter: See “Biographical Miscellany.”

[7] Salter: There has been some past discrepancy on this. Bret Wood reports that Renée mentioned in a September 30, 2002, interview that Gresham’s first wife was named Beatrice McCall (Grindshow: The Selected Writings of William Linsday Gresham. Lakewood: Centipede Press, 2013, p13). Sheldon has accessed the marriage certificate and found the surname was McCollum.

[8] Gresham, W.L. Monster Midway. New York: Rinehart & Company, 1953, p12.

[9] Monster Midway, p14.

[10] Salter: Sheldon is pointing out this is an unfair misconception, probably based on the fact that Santamaria mentions several times in her biography that Davidman kept hard liquor in the Staatsburg home, even after Gresham began attending Alcoholics Anonymous in the mid-1940s.

[11] Salter: Robert A. Heinlein includes this quote, which he apparently heard from Gresham, in Expanded Universe (Riverdale: Baen Books, 2003, p22). Much thanks to John A. Rateliffe for tracking down the quotation.

[12] Monster Midway, p81.

[13] Santamaria, Abigail. Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C.S. Lewis. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015, p122.

[14] Salter: for a summary of Gresham’s military record, see Brooks, Chris. “The Road to Nightmare Alley: William Lindsay Gresham in the Spanish Civil War.” The Volunteer, February 11, 2022. albavolunteer.org/2022/02/the-road-to-nightmare-alley-william-lindsay-gresham-in-the-spanish-civil-war/.