"Shadowlands" (C.S. Lewis) & "Nightmare Alley" (film noir)

[randomuser]

Shadowlands is a 1993 British biographical film about the love-relationship between Oxford academic C. S. Lewis and American poet Joy Davidman, her death from cancer, and how this challenged Lewis’ Christian faith.

As for Joy Davidman (who was played by Debra Winger to Anthony Hopkins’ C.S. Lewis): she was evidently divorced from William Gresham, who wrote “Nightmare Alley,” which was adapted into the 1947 film noir starring Tyrone Power.

“Returning to the United States in 1939, after a troubling period that involved a stay in a tuberculosis ward and a failed suicide attempt, Gresham found work editing true crime pulp magazines. In 1942, Gresham married Joy Davidman, a poet, with whom he had two children, David and Douglas. Gresham was an abusive and alcoholic husband. Davidman, although born Jewish, became a fan of the writings of C. S. Lewis, which led eventually to her conversion to Christianity. Davidman eventually fled her marriage to Gresham and later married Lewis, their relationship forming the inspiration for the play and movie Shadowlands.”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lindsay_Gresham

That said, I gotta know – is there anything about Gresham or/and “Nightmare Alley” in “Shadowlands”? “Nightmare Alley” is well-regarded by many magicians and mentalists (the movie and book exposes a lot of ‘secrets’), and now the connection to C.S. Lewis has really piqued my interest.

 

[Arizona_Mike]

I wrote a biography on William Lindsay Gresham back in the late 1970s/early 1980s but never followed through on getting it published (and no longer have the manuscript or most of the research/interview notes, unfortunately.) I interviewed some of Gresham’s associates, who were pretty wide-ranging and were pivotal figures in a lot of the twentieth century’s spiritual turmoil. (Which is why I found his life so fascinating, if sad.)

I interviewed his friend, the magician and escape artist James Randi, (“The Amazing Randi”) who is still alive and now heavily involved in the atheist and skeptical movements. Randi was the key informant for Gresham in his Houdini biography, which was the first HH bio that discussed how he performed many of his effects. (Randi also did the sketches for Gresham’s book on bodybuilding.) I interviewed - and I hesitate to admit this on this forum, but in my defense, I considered myself an agnostic during this period in my life - Anton Szandor LaVey, (nee Howard Levey) founder of the Church of Satan in San Francisco, who was an old confidant of Gresham from LaVey’s circus days as a calliope performer and sometime lion tamer’s assistant. That interview was a bizarre experience in itself. (LaVey named his two children after characters in Nightmare Alley.)

William and Joy were also actively involved with L. Ron Hubbard (with whom I requested an interview, but which was predictably declined, albeit with a friendly note that may or may not have been signed by Hubbard from who knows where) at the beginning of the Dianetics/Scientology movement. He was also close friends with Daniel P. Mannix, the former sideshow performer and author of Confessions of a Sword-Swallower, a book I found in the library that led me as a teen-ager into a poorly-thought-out attempt at fire-breathing that nearly set fire to my long-suffering mother’s kitchen. Gresham was also an early adherent of the practices that are now lumped together as the New Age movement, including Yoga, spiritualism, the I Ching, and Tarot card readings (Gresham used the arcana figures of the Tarot as motifs in his novel Limbo Tower which was a not-very-successful attempt at building on the critical and popular success of Nightmare Alley which also used Tarot symbolism. (Gresham dedicated Nightmare Alley to both Joy and Lewis.)

Earlier, both William and Joy were members of the Communist Party of the United States of America, which encouraged and sponsored Gresham’s combat service in the Spanish Civil War, but they became disillusioned with CPUSA party politics and resigned to join the Presbyterian church. Christianity stuck with Joy but for William, it was just another spiritual way-station he tried and soon discarded. The 1951 collection of conversion stories “These Found The Way” included essays by both William and Joy.

Gresham was talented and intelligent, but obviously a deeply troubled man. He was obsessed with magic, the carnival sideshow, scams, and unfortunately, suicide, which he attempted once before, after returning from the Spanish Civil War with TB. Two chapters in his non-fiction book Monster Midway about sideshows, magic, and the carnival world focused on the similarly talented but troubled mentalist Ted Annemann, who took his own life, as well as the many magicians who died attempting the very dangerous Bullet-Catching Trick. In a weird coincidence, a magician and mentalist who was a friend of my family’s knew Gresham as well (and was an additional source for my research) was killed a few years later while performing a variation of the bullet catching trick on stage.

 

[Arizona_Mike]

Gresham’s long-term suicidal fascination and ideation, as well as the long-term illness (TB), clinical levels of depression, and substance abuse (drinking) that Gresham experienced was a very dangerous combination. The domestic violence and Gresham’s adultery also drove Joy further away from him, finally culminating in his affair with Joy’s cousin, which was the final straw for her. Her cousin became Gresham’s third and last wife. He became an Alcoholics Anonymous member, which seemed to help him, but he took his own life in a flophouse after contracting cancer of the tongue. (He was a heavy smoker.)

It’s been decades since I saw Shadowlands and can’t remember how much discussion there was in the film, if any, of William, or in “A Grief Observed,” the book on which it was more-or-less based. I recall that he remained generally friendly towards Lewis after Joy left him, and felt that Lewis was providing good care for his two sons when he travelled to England to see them (after Joy’s death), although a little distressed that Douglas Gresham had so quickly turned “English.”

In Douglas Gresham’s autobiography “In Lenten Lands”, he described the meeting as follows:

*My father, Bill Gresham, visited us in 1960 shortly after Mother’s death, and I now know that the apparent coolness of my greeting and our subsequent relationship caused him a considerable amount of pain. I regret that; it was not intended. I was an English schoolboy by then, however, so I shook his hand and said “How do you do, sir?”. In truth, I confess I felt no emotion for him at all. He was a stranger; we could not bridge the gap of the years of separation. We spent considerable time together and became friends, but really that was all. When he left to go back to America and his new family, I missed him less than I had before he had come

Jack [C.S. Lewis] was really the man to whom I looked, in respect and admiration, and, without in the least trying to, he had taken the place in my mind that a father should fill, and it was Jack, who, gently and kindly, told me in September of 1962 that my father had taken his own life. Dad had cancer of the tongue, and had no wish to face, or to face his family with, the prospect of a long, ugly death. My feeling for Jack developed from liking and respect through admiration to, at last, some degree of understanding. It was not until quite recently that I realised that I loved Jack, and very deeply at that.
*

Gresham did not contest C.S. Lewis’s custody, I think, after making a half-hearted offer to take the children back to the U.S. with him, which Lewis reacted strongly against, threatening legal action against Gresham in a letter if he attempted to take the children back to America. William and C.S. Lewis did correspond during Joy’s illness and some of their letters are contained in Out of My Bone: The Letters of Joy Davidman, edited by Donald King.

Hope this is helpful to you.

 

[7_Sorrows]

I saw Shadowlands in the theatres when it was released. it was a long long time ago. I don’t remember very much of the movie other than it starred Hopkins and Winger and she died at the end. I think it was good she got out of the marriage and married Lewis.

 

[randomuser]

Two chapters in his non-fiction book Monster Midway about sideshows, magic, and the carnival world focused on the similarly talented but troubled mentalist Ted Annemann, who took his own life, as well as the many magicians who died attempting the very dangerous Bullet-Catching Trick. In a weird coincidence, a magician and mentalist who was a friend of my family’s knew Gresham as well (and was an additional source for my research) was killed a few years later while performing a variation of the bullet catching trick on stage.

Well, significantly, that’s someone who (much like Dunninger) never resorted to the occultism that is more than a little prevalent in “Nightmare Alley.” For Dunninger, it was because of the radio and TV network censors that prohibited it. For T.A., it was likely because so much of his work was with memory and playing cards and blindfolds – there was simply no reason for him to go all out ‘spiritualism’ on people. Oddly enough, some of the scenes in “Nightmare Alley” look exactly like the illustrations in the posthumous compilation of his work.

I do wonder what views C.S. Lewis held, if any, of magic and illusion and the ‘spiritualism’ that Houdini, etc., sought to debunk.

 

[Arizona_Mike]

Well, significantly, that’s someone who (much like Dunninger) never resorted to the occultism that is more than a little prevalent in “Nightmare Alley.” For Dunninger, it was because of the radio and TV network censors that prohibited it. For T.A., it was likely because so much of his work was with memory and playing cards and blindfolds – there was simply no reason for him to go all out ‘spiritualism’ on people. Oddly enough, some of the scenes in “Nightmare Alley” look exactly like the illustrations in the posthumous compilation of his work.

I do wonder what views C.S. Lewis held, if any, of magic and illusion and the ‘spiritualism’ that Houdini, etc., sought to debunk.

That’s an interesting question and I’m not sure if Lewis ever discussed stage magic. He certainly addressed “magic” in the supernatural sense but not the stage/conjuring sense. I’m not an expert on his writings by any means, but he certainly discussed the possibility of a non-Christian supernatural world that exists parallel, although subordinate to the Christian elements of the supernatural, although how much of that was a literary device and how much he may have held as a real possibility, I don’t know . It’s likely that he at least held to the possibility of such things as a mythic representation of real truths. The great Catholic writer Father Robert Hugh Benson (best known for his early 20th century science fiction novel “The Lord of the World”) expressed the idea in one of his novels (“A Mirror For Shalott”) that there is a vast supernatural world all around us, only some of which has been revealed to us in holy scripture and Catholic teaching, because that’s the only part we really need to know for the purpose of salvation. Whether there are ghosts, afreets, poltergeists, disembodied non-demonic spirits, vampires, etc., which appear frequently in supernatural fiction and in which some people believe as “real,” isn’t really addressed, nor need it be, in Church teachings, other than to warn people they shouldn’t get involved in occult practices. The medieval Church went out of its way to discourage belief in the power of witches, wizards, and black magic because it gave too much power to Satan, was more than a little Manichean, and was ultimately false.

(Fr. Benson himself did write a horror novel about the popularity of spiritualism and its dangers (The Necromancers), (1909), interestingly.)

I suspect that Lewis, who enjoyed a lot of non-Christian literature and mythology (and even modern science fiction, of which he was a fan) that used the trappings of the supernatural and the fantastic to create innocent pleasure and ultimately point the way towards the ineffable and ultimately the one true God, would probably enjoy a good magic show.

He probably didn’t have such kind feelings about Spiritualism - he noted in Surprised By Joy that he abandoned his Christian religious beliefs at age 13 due to the influence of a school mistress who was involved in “Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Spiritualism; the whole Anglo-American Occultist tradition.” He also disapproved of Bill Wilson’s Alcoholics Anonymous movement for its too-easily ecumenical view of God, and told an acquaintance that due to Wilson’s involvement in the Spiritualist movement and use of Ouija boards, "“This is necromancy. Have nothing to do with it.” (as quoted in Susan Cheever’s Wilson biography, My Name is Bill.)

How far across the line a mentalist can go in suggesting real supernatural powers is a big ethical issue, of course. Uri Geller took a big flying leap across that line. Kreskin seems to have danced back and forth across it and has drawn fire from other magicians for it. Others (like Penn and Teller) take pains to express that they do not have supernatural powers to the audience, which from a theatrical standpoint tends to break the suspension of disbelief a magician wants to establish - it’s rather like an actor periodically telling the audience that he is not really Hamlet at all, but only pretending to be him.

As you said, Ted Annemann’s style of performing didn’t really lend itself to a spiritualist patter.

As a side-note It’s interesting to me that Harry Houdini himself is often claimed as an atheist on numerous atheist websites, because he took a skeptical and debunking view of spiritualism, after initially participating trustingly in seances due to his overwhelming grief at the loss of his mother. Yet he remaining an observant and practicing Jew throughout his life, was the son of a Rabbi, participated in religious services and prayers, paid for Jewish religious burials for indigent Jewish entertainers, requested Jewish religious services upon his death, and most tellingly, testified under oath before the U.S. Congress that he believed in God and believed in an afterlife (which statements are in the Congressional Record), so Houdini was either a theist or a perjurer.

Another prominent skeptic in the magic community, Martin Gardner, eventually transitioned from atheism to at least a deism. Skepticism is not incompatible with Faith, oddly. It may even be a requirement, in some respects.