Monster Midway by William Lindsay Gresham

Gresham admiring the midway

William Lindsay Gresham's first novel was his most famous. Nightmare Alley was published in 1946 and adapted into a movie in 1947. An unsuccessful and now forgotten second novel followed in 1949. It was seven years after the publication of Nightmare Alley, in 1953, that Gresham published his third book, Monster Midway, a non-fiction collection of essays about the world of the carnivals. His most famous novel had, in fact, been born of a lifelong fascination with carnies, psychics, and magicians. Gresham shared that fascination in Monster Midway.

Review

Perhaps the most notorious passage from the novel and both movie versions is the sequence where Clem Hoatley explains to Stanton Carlisle how a geek is made. In the opening pages of Monster Midway, Gresham tells us how he learned this bit of carny lore. Gresham, like many young men in his generation, volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War. As he was waiting to muster out of the conflict, he got to know a fellow American who shared his interest in carnival life. "Clem Faraday was a sergeant of medics and my immediate superior... And he was also an old-time carny." The real Clem, it turns out, had worked a ten-in-one in the South that featured a geek show as a blowoff. (If I just confused you with some of that carny lingo, don't worry; the book includes a glossary.) When Gresham pressed for more information about the geek, Clem launched into the explanation of how you find an alcoholic or an ex-soldier who's addicted to morphine and use his addiction to gradually lure him into full-on geeking. That speech went straight into Nightmare Alley.

Each chapter in the book details a different aspect of carny life. Early in, Gresham goes into some detail describing the business side of running a carnival, which I admit I found a little boring; but he quickly moves on to describing the rides, the games, the freaks, the gypsy mind-readers, the motordromes and hell drivers, fire eaters, sword swallowers, snake handlers, and other exciting sides of the carnies. He devotes a long chapter to Houdini and other escape artists. (Houdini would be the subject of Gresham's next book.) Throughout, Gresham treats the reader to glimpses behind the scenes, explaining how it all works, and even revealing the secrets of some of the gaffs and grifts. Want a roadmap for doing the psychic mind-reader act? Gresham gives it to you.

All of his stories are backed up by interviews with real-life carnies, whose names Gresham shares. The chapter on freaks is revealing because it's clear that Gresham had gotten to know many of them personally, and many wisely used the money they earned in the carnies to build comfortable, normal lives for themselves afterward. Gresham also shares tales of how he tried out doing mind-reading and magic acts on his own, gaining some first-hand experience. It all adds up to a fascinating memoir of a world that is long gone. The carnivals, fairs, circuses, and amusement parks that exist today are far more wholesome and legit than the shows that would scrounge their way across America back in the days of the Depression and the War.

The Magic of My Youth by Arthur Calder-Marshall

Calder-Marshall hard at work on a novel

Review

This memoir was originally published by the venerable firm of Rupert Hart-Davis of 36 Soho Square, London, in 1951. In the author's foreword, Arthur Calder-Marshall thanks Rupert (later Sir Rupert) for encouraging him to complete the work. The book opens with an anecdote, a tale told to the author by a friend about an unlikely, seemingly coincidental encounter related to the occult magician Aleister Crowley. Looking back, Calder-Marshall notes that, once you've heard Crowley's name, you tend to hear it everywhere. Indeed, "The Beast," as he was known, becomes a touchpoint whose name recurs throughout the book. 

Calder-Marshall writes about he and his older brother growing up in the small, southern England town of Steyning in the 1920s. Central to this narrative is the friendship the two brothers developed with a local eccentric whom they called Vickybird. The boys' father strongly disapproved of Vickybird, calling him "a crank. And I'm willing to bet you anything you like he's introspective." A former poet who wrote no more, owner of a small press, Vickybird (and his wife Kathleen) lived in penury but were great sources of fascination for the boys. Though never mentioned in the book, Vickybird's real name was Victor Benjamin Neuberg. As poetry editor of a newspaper called Sunday Referee, he had been the first editor to publish Dylan Thomas. Years later, on learning of Neuberg's death, Thomas said, "Vicky encouraged me as no one else has done." Neuberg was also, in his youth, a collaborator with and lover of Aleister Crowley. (Also spelled Vicky Bird, the nickname referred to his halting, birdlike gait.) 

When Arthur went off to study at Oxford, Vickybird insisted that the younger man call upon an old friend known as "Auntie Helen," another aging eccentric who had, through Vickybird, become enamored with magic. The author recounts amusing tales of Auntie Helen, including his own strenuous efforts to keep her ahead of the bill collectors. Her philosophy when it came to borrowing on credit was always "go big," an attitude that eventually forced her to leave town in a hurry. 

The author's musings include the story of former Oxford student Raoul Loveday's suspicious death while staying at Crowley's Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù. Loveday's wife, Betty May, followed him to Sicily, where she engaged in a "struggle with The Beast for the possession of her husband's body." Ultimately she lost that battle. Loveday's death may have been accidental, or it may have been Crowley's sacrifice to Adonis with the complicity of the victim. 

Betty May was, herself, quite notorious, and her autobiography Tiger Woman is still in print. I think it admirable that she did try to kill Aleister Crowley in revenge for her husband's death, but her first shot missed and the gun jammed on the second try. 

I won't recount all the stories told in The Magic of My Youth, but I will describe one more if you'll forgive my wordiness. A fellow student founded the Oxford University Poetry Society (at an earlier date than is currently claimed on the OUPS website), and Arthur Calder-Marshall became its Secretary. Having learned from Betty May that Crowley had returned to London, Calder-Marshall arranged to meet him at a restaurant and was surprised to find "a bald and elderly stockbroker, apparently working on the back of a menu calculations" which turned out to be a shopping list with estimated costs. Calder-Marshall invited The Beast to come to Oxford to deliver a lecture to the Poetry Society. Crowley astutely ridiculed the idea that the University would ever allow it, but Calder-Marshall convinced him to accept. Of course, in the end, the Oxford authorities forbade the lecture. Crowley demanded that it at least be printed or else he would sue. Calder-Marshall subsequently arranged with the Oxford Mail to have it printed as part of an exclusive-to-the-Mail story about the banned event. "You don't expect me to print this trash," protested the Mail editor when he read the lecture. But he had promised and was compelled to print five hundred copies, of which Calder-Marshall estimates about fifty were sold. 

Crowley was impressed enough with Calder-Marshall's initiative that he asked the younger man to visit him at Knockholt. "There are Matters of Grave Import we should discuss together..." The author and his wife met The Beast and his lover, an exotically dressed Brazilian woman, in a modest, borrowed cottage that was filled with Crowley's recent paintings of "trance states." What followed was a tremendous test of wills in which Crowley tried to banish the author's wife, who was of no interest to him, and persuade Calder-Marshall to spend the night and become his new assistant. In the end, Calder-Marshall managed to pull back and to eventually conclude that The Beast was "little better than a pedlar of spells as phony as quack medicines." 

There's more, but I've already gone on at great length describing this slight tome. Arthur Calder-Marshall wrote lovely prose full of insight and wit, and I plan to look for more of his work. (Orson Welles optioned one of his novels to turn into a movie but, as happened all-too-often with Orson, the financing for it fell through.) The Magic of My Youth provides a charming glimpse into a time and place far removed for most of us, along with a small sense of some of the minor actors in the drama that surrounded the famous occultist who was once known as the wickedest man in the world.