Booze is so strong an element in the novel that it can almost be said to be a character, an essential presence like Fates in ancient greek tragedy. Nothing worth reading was ever written by anyone who was drunk while writing it but Nightmare Alley evinces every sign that its writing was binge-riddled. And against alcoholism in this stage, Freud is powerless.” during years of analysis, editorial work, and the strain of small children in small rooms, I had controlled anxieties by deadening them with alcohol.” He said, “I found that I could not stop drinking I had become physically an alcoholic. He would later say of this time that six years of therapy had both saved him and failed him: “Even then I was not a well man, for neurosis had left an aftermath. Lilith Ritter, the most viciously evil psychologist in the history of literature. It is interesting, too, that while still undergoing psychotherapy, Gresham crafted in Nightmare Alley, in the somewhat heavy-handedly named character of Dr. his deck ends with the hanged man.Īs piercing as the psychological probings of Nightmare Alley are, eerily the tarot alone is bestowed at times with a hint of ominous gravity and credence amid all the other spiritualist cons of the novel that are to Gresham and his characters nothing more than suckers’ rackets. Gresham begins his book with the Fool, but then shuffles the deck. The first trump card is the Fool, which is the card that bears no number, and the final one is the world. In the case of fortune-telling, it is the trump cards, also known as the major arcana, that are primarily employed, and these are the cards which give the titles to the chapters of Nightmare Alley. The deck has been used for centuries for both gambling and fortune-telling. The tarot deck consists of twenty-two figured trump cards, of which twenty-one are numbered, and fifty-six cards divided into four suits of wands, cups, swords, and pentacles. Gresham used the tarot to structure his book. In it, Freud declared: “It no longer seems possible to brush aside the study of so-called occult facts of things which seem to vouchsafe the real existence of psychic forces other than the known forces of the human and animal psyche, or which reveal mental faculties in which, until now, we did not believe.” Freud and Ouspensky then might have walked even more closely together down Gresham’s alley of nightmares. Had only Gresham known of the paper Freud delivered at the Conference of the Central Committee of the International Psychoanalytical Association in September 1921. It was while writing Nightmare Alley that Gresham drifted away from psychoanalysis and became instead fascinated with the tarot, which he discovered while turning from Freud to, in the course of his research for Nightmare Alley, the Russian mystic P.D. He became deeply involved in psychoanalysis, one of the many ways he sought throughout his life to banish his inner demons. Upon his return from Spain, according to his own account, Gresham was not a well man. The novel, of which it was the frame, seemed to horrify readers as much as the original story had horrified me.” Finally, to get rid of it, I had to write it out. as he would later tell it, “the story of the geek haunted me.
he waited and he drank with a man, Joseph Daniel Halliday, who told him of something that took him aback with a scare: 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. This book, first published in 1946, was born in the winter of late 1938 and early 1939, in a village near Valencia, where William Lindsay Gresham, one of the international volunteers who had come to defend the Republic in the lost cause of the Spanish Civil War, was awaiting repatriation. But, to paraphrase Ezra Pound, a little knowledge can do us no harm. I envy the latter, and I don’t want to interfere with the experience that awaits them by delving into matters that would reveal its plot, which grows increasingly more powerful and bizarre from beginning to end. But it is to be hoped that others will be drawn to read this singular work for the first time. Many who read this will have read Nightmare Alley.