And so the book is mesmerizing, but it's more than that. It's a pulp art masterpiece, a handbook for the aspiring mentalist, and one of the best studies of the mind of the con artist ever penned -- a real Ten-in-One, folks.
Let's start with the handbook. Within Nightmare Alley you will find a complete typology of the tricks of the mentalist's and conjuror's trades, familiar to you if you have ever been a fan of the Amazing Randi, Abraham Kovoor (whose works the inexhaustible Regenstein library kept on its shelves -- bless it!), Houdini or the other great debunkers of psychic phenomena.
Here is described in detail both the "hot" read (in which a mentalist uses real information on a mark that has been obtained without their prior knowledge -- usually via accomplice), and the "cold" -- in which the mind-reader proceeds by a combination of guesswork and near-universal generalities, allowing the mark to fill in the gaps for themselves. "Stock reading-- fits everybody," apologetically explains the novel's Pete -- the mentor-figure/salient warning -- after he has just successfully "cold read" the protagonist Stan. His method of doing so in this instance was to stare into an empty whiskey bottle and describe in portentous terms an image of a young boy and his dog, who suffers loss and despises a male elder.
Here also are favored devices of the "prestidigitator and legerdemainist" (as Randi would describe himself in an outstanding bit of patter) -- the sleight-of-hand that relies on misdirection (as one character in the novel says "a man that will learn misdirection can just reach into his pocket and put something in a hat and then go ahead and take it out again and everybody will sit back and gasp") and on sheer athletic deftness. Hear! in the pages of Gresham's novel, the likes of words such as "outjog." (It's something to do with card tricks.) See! the protagonist somehow manage to convince drawing rooms full of scientists and clergymen that they are seeing ghosts, wielding only a pocket projector and his assistant in glow-in-the-dark makeup to accomplish it.
The greatest coup of Stan's conjuring career, however, takes place when he is asked to make a scale move, thereby forging an electrical connection to turn on a light, all inside an air-tight glass case. How exactly he pulls this off is teased throughout the novel's later portion but never quite revealed. Perhaps we are supposed to guess it from the information provided. It in some way involves a cat, a kitten, a hollowed-out pencil (which Stan has the opportunity of pointing at the electrical workings of the inside of the case), and some fleas. If you can guess the answer from this much, you win this week's puzzler.
The episode is striking not only for its display of wits, however, but for its similarity to a real-life "test" of psychic abilities that was likewise performed under irrefutable "scientific conditions." The James Randi documentary An Honest Liar describes how two of Randi's conjurers-in-training posed as psychics for a group of researchers, and succeeded in making a small rotor spin inside an allegedly sealed glass dome. Only after convincing the researchers that they had just seen real telekinesis did the two test subjects reveal the trick's secret: by propping up the dome by a millimeter or two, after it had been lifted for inspection (why is it always lifted for inspection?), the conjurer had blown softly and silently, forcing an air current under the lip of the dome that spun the rotor.
It was a deception with a point: even "unexplainable" psychic phenomena may in fact have an explanation, and often a foolishly simple one at last. "It was probably something ridiculous," as Stan's treacherous accomplish Dr. Ritter remarks tartly, when he has refused to reveal to her the coveted secret of the glass case trick.
More than what it has to tell us about technique, however, Gresham's book is best for what it teaches about the psychology of deception. This is what raises it to the status of art -- if of the somewhat pulpy variety.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, the book's least convincing psychological sections derive from its author's reading in psychology. As the front-matter informs us in the New York Review of Books Classics edition, the varied intellectual influences in Gresham's life that found their way into the novel included spiritualism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis -- and it is the last of these, I fear, that exercised the most baneful influence.
Our antihero Stan -- otherwise a vivid (if cartoonish) character -- is sometimes plucked by his authorial creator from the midst of some dark and fascinating exploration of human motives and behavior, and suddenly made to mechanically rehearse a bunch of programmatic Freudian insights. He loves his mother. He hates his father. Etc. We are somehow expected to find this revelatory, despite its being prefigured so heavily throughout the novel that it tests the boundary line between prefiguration and downright exposition. Regrettably, this happens too with other characters. Molly, Stan's first love interest, is obsessed with her father. Everybody and their mother -- so to speak -- has witnessed a "primal scene."
I am reminded of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep -- another classic of the Depression, written by another author whose head was stuffed at the time both of Marx and of Freud. It too is a book that alternates between searing psychological insight on the one hand, plainly born of direct human experience (the young David's obsessive compulsions are too strange, too irrational, and yet too convincingly powered by their own necessary logic to be an invention) -- and tin-eared rehearsals of Freudian doctrine on the other. David overhears his mother describe a man she used to know in the old county, and imagines this might be his true father. The scene is as if lifted or transcribed from Freud's essay on "Family Romances." In another scene, David sees horns on the wall and transforms them into a symbol of his father's sexual possession of his mother (what child actually does this sort of thing?), only to defeat his father by the end of the novel and gain mastery of the horns in some symbolic way (I forget how exactly -- I just remember the horns make a heavy-handed reappearance).
The reason these Freudian passages fail to convince in both books is not because they could never have occurred, or because no one ever had sexual neuroses derived in some way from their upbringing and family of origin. It's because these neuroses in real life surely take on too many strange and individual forms to be captured in a single, totalizing theory. The effort to build and test such theories may be worthwhile -- and they may get closer to the truth over time, while most likely never reaching it (Freud's version of these theories has not particularly stood the test of time, but hey -- maybe it got the ball rolling). But surely the task and vindication of literature is not to construct such theories, which sober prose is better equipped to do, but rather to try to bottle within words some individual experience of life that is so distinct that it could never be found in a theory -- that it could never even truly be expressed within words, but only approximated, for words have never been developed to suit the specific case, but only to describe a general form that the particular only resembles.
In this, my aesthetic theory is opposed to that of the D'Alembert character of Andrew Crumey's novel D'Alembert's Principle, who suggests that mathematicians and poets are alike, in that both select and focus on ideal objects of thought from a world of chaotic singularities, because the ideal alone is capable of being understood. I agree that this is true to some extent -- to attach a word to something at all, and thereby to "comprehend" it, is to compare it to a class of things outside of itself. We have no words for the particular case. But the very interest of literature -- unlike mathematics -- is that it does not settle for this reason for the realm of pure abstraction (where everything can be known, except for its bearing on anything real). Rather, it is locked in a hopeless metaphysical struggle with words -- an effort to say things that can't be said -- to describe to other minds what only one mind has ever, in its precise form, felt. This is why we expect better than textbook Freudian orthodoxy from a novel. It is because we are seeking in literature not theories, but those "individual vagaries" that Nabokov describes, in a passage I've quoted before from Ada or Ardor:
“No accursed generalizer, with a half-penny mind and a dry-fig heart, would be able to explain (and this is my sweetest revenge for all the detractions my lifework has met with) the individual vagaries involved in those and similar matters. No art and no genius would exist without such vagaries, and this is a final pronouncement, damning all clowns and clods.”
So, the best stuff by far in the book did not come from Gresham's time on the couch, imbibing Freudian generalizations. Likewise, the psychoanalyst character, the insidious Dr. Ritter (whose first name is -- of course -- Lilith), is perhaps the most preposterous, in a book that does not lack for oddballs and over-the-top archetypes. (The kind-hearted fortune teller Zeena is, by comparison, entirely believable.)
Gresham was far better served by his dabblings in Marxism and the dark arts, it would seem, than in the unconscious. The former makes is presence felt most obviously in the character of a Black labor activist and persecuted "Red" whom Stan meets while bumming around late in the novel, after he has been (spoilers) reduced to penury. This character, Frederick Douglass Scott, is among the most sympathetic in the book (right up there with Zeena and the disabled acrobat Joe Plasky). He is also one of the very few who cannot be "cold read" or otherwise sold on any of Stan's mystical flapdoodle. To his dismay, Stan discovers that this is one fellow who can't be conned.
The reason why seems to be that he has a streak of rationalism that Gresham portrays as level-headed, and with which he obviously sympathizes -- the kind of street-preaching 1930s atheism that Richard Wright in his memoir recalls hearing from Communist Party organizers of the era. When Stan asks Scott how the world got started, according to his philosophy, he offers a demotic Occam's Razor in reply: "Didn't have to start. It's always been doing business. People ask me: how this world get made without God make it? I ask 'em right back: who make God? They say he don't need making, he always been there. I say: well then, why you got to go bringing him in at all? Old world's always been there too."
Thou shalt not "multiply entities unnecessarily," in other words. When confronted with one incomprehensible eternity, it solves no problems for us to assert another one just behind it -- still less to give that other an identity and ascribe to it attributes. When faced with a mystery, it holds no water philosophically to come up with new names for it. Or, as Ezra Pound quotes an unnamed writer at the beginning of his ABC of Reading: "Science does not consist in inventing a number of more or less abstract entities corresponding to the number of things you wish to find out."
F.D. Scott also gives Stan a pretty good argument to use against those (such as the Evangelical computer engineer Dale in John Updike's Roger's Version) who would present it as a mystery insoluble by naturalism that the universe and its fundamental constants are seemingly fine-tuned to our existence. Surely, given how very precisely well our reality suits the fact of our being, the argument runs, we must have been placed here by a greater intelligence? This line of thinking of course is putting the cart before the horse -- we'd never have existed in the universes in which we couldn't have existed, so we shouldn't be surprised by our consciousness of one in which we can --and anyway, we are adapted to the reality we do in fact inhabit. Scott makes the point more straightforwardly: "Way I look at it, we ain't put; we growed."
As plainly as this variety of unbelief resonates with Gresham, however, it makes sense that he was also genuinely interested in spiritualism and a devoted reader of Ouspensky (whom Stan in the novel contemptuously mines for enigmatic phrases that he might use to hoodwink and bamboozle, offering us a great literary depiction of a "hate-read" in the process). The kind of fascination with the deception involved in spiritualism, as well as the need to rehearse and re-learn the arguments for atheism, can only take root in a soul for whom both ghosts and God still seem like a live option. The skeptic and the believer in the occult are locked in the same kind of inescapable dialectic as the modernist and the fundamentalist, or the liberal and the conservative. It is only because they share an epistemic frame that they are able to do battle with one another.
This perhaps is what gives depth to Gresham's evident fascination with the reasons why people are fooled by charlatans. Let's turn to that question next.
As I've argued before, a huge amount of this credulity can be chalked up to plain class prejudice. Stan, in the novel, talks among his carny colleagues and intimates in a 1940s noir argot, which is distinctly proletarian. When he is in the role of the Great Stanton, however, or when he is working behind the scenes to gather private information on his marks for the purpose of a "hot read," he convincingly puts on the dress, manner, and speech of an educated Reverend, a government bureaucrat, a Catholic priest, and so forth.
Most holders of class privilege and expensive educations don't want to believe such a transformation is possible. They want to maintain that our external presentations always reflect what we really are-- and thus in turn that their own outward station in life reflects an inward merit that cannot be imitated. (This is what Shaw's Pygmalion is all about.)
To encounter "ignorant" lads who can write or speak like the learned, therefore, seems to them a supernatural occurrence. This has been the basis of a thousand defenses of allegedly unexplainable "automatic writing" and the like. How could children or country bumpkins who haven't been to college just come up with that stuff on the spot? (In the earlier post, I gave the example of the learned response to Andrew Jackson Davis, the 19th-century "Poughkeepsie Seer")
Even today, it is still a trope among LDS apologists to ask how Joseph Smith could have written the Book of Mormon, when he was merely a New England farm lad with little schooling. The answer to the riddle is simple: because he was smart. And being smart is not the preserve of any one class.
As Erving Goffman -- that great theorist of the outward presentation of the inward self -- once wrote: "Perhaps the real crime of the confidence man is not that he takes money from his victims but that he robs all of us of the belief that middle-class manners and appearance can be sustained only by middle-class people."
I confess that in my own case-- with regard, say, to the trick with the glass dome described in An Honest Liar -- I never could have guessed how it was actually performed. I would have been swayed like all the researchers. Indeed, my first response to any conjuring trick or psychic materialization is generally abject credulity -- I would very much be among the twenty percent of humanity who, Stan tells us early in the novel, are "born chumps."
It's only because the tricksters told us so themselves that I find it possible to believe that, in a split second when they were unobserved, they managed to drop a tiny piece of paper into the rim of the glass dome that enabled it to be wedged open just slightly enough to receive an air current. It just seems so implausible that anyone could be so dexterous and skillful as to pull that off.
I suppose it shouldn't strike me as more implausible than the opposite explanation -- that telekinetic powers exist in the world that have never otherwise been documented -- but it does... until of course the conjurers themselves insist it was all just a successful illusion.
For whatever reason, any truly remarkable skill often strikes us at first as supernatural. We wish to attribute it to muses and djinns, rather than to superior talent -- perhaps to protect our own pride (for, "all men are rivals," as Multatuli says).
This is not the deepest reason why people believe in hoaxes, however. Beneath this is of course the fact that people want to believe. This is the wisdom that Stan's mentor Pete imparts to him in the novel, through a journal he had kept from his more lucid and sober days as a young crystal-gazer. His diary suggests that the fundamental key to the cold read is that people are all very similar at heart -- they want the same things, and fear the same things. And it is to a large extent through exploiting people's desires for "Health, Wealth, and Love" -- and their fear of losing all three -- that Stan scams his marks.
This is the sense in which there must be some element of the con artist in the victim themselves, in order to be conned. The con artist plays first of all on the mark's own greed and/or vanity. As Christopher P. Jones writes in an essay on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife hoax: "For forgeries to succeed there must be an atmosphere receptive to them: a forger will usually not manage to impose on others unless his product, by accident or design, comes into a setting ready to give it a favourable reception."
To give another example similarly embroiling the Harvard Divinity School in ignominy, I recall a time I was tricked into appearing in a comedy video on the internet, while I was walking through Harvard square. A group of men standing on a street corner where I passed pitched it to me as "would you like to answer a question about religion?" It was an ingeniously-selected vulnerability. I -- as a then-divinity student -- of course said yes. Here was a chance to demonstrate my genius and wide learning in the subject. The question they asked was: "How many days are there in Hanukkah?" I, like most of the other goyische dupes in the video, gawped for a while, then hazarded "seven?", then "nine?" Clearly, they chose their mark well.
It is this fact that the victim is often deceived through their own baser motives, hubris, ambition, or presumption, that breeds contempt for humanity in the confidence artist -- and this in turn allows her or him to go on victimizing people with a clear conscience. It is how they justify to themselves what is really a form of gratuitous cruelty. The John Cusack movie Grifters also draws this point out well, in the Annette Bening character's description of "the long con" -- the mark becomes themselves enmeshed in the quest for the quick and dishonest buck, before they are scammed themselves, blurring the line between victim and perpetrator.
Nightmare Alley likewise captures this dynamic, through its portrayal of the inner mentality of Stan. An utter hater of humankind, who regards all the people around him as "chumps" and "Johns," Stan's only affectionate and trusting relationship is with dogs -- including his beloved childhood mutt "Gyp," as well as with a few mongrels he encounters along his picaresque journey (a great dane at a rich couple's house where he is performing a magic show, for one, and a stray who seeks him out while he is hobo-ing for another).
His is thus a kind of Byronic misanthropy -- captured in his Lordship's famous poem on his beloved Newfoundland dog Boatswain:
Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,[...]
Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,
Thy smiles hypocrisy, thy words deceit! [...]
Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.
Ye, who perchance behold this simple urn,
Pass on – it honors none you wish to mourn.
To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one – and here he lies.
Stan embodies the same paradox of misanthropy. He is convinced that everyone else is out to cheat him, which is what makes it okay to return the favor. Yet, in the novel, it is really only he and Dr. Ritter who end up betraying the people around him, and each other. Zeena and Joe Plasky, by contrast, embody an ideal of solidarity. Says Zeena: "A carny's a carny and when one of us is jammed up we got to stick together." Stan's first love Molly tells him that the thing she most admired in her sainted father was that he never violated anyone's trust: "He never crossed up a pal" was what he asked to have written on his tombstone.
Stan regards such noble sentiments as bunk, and he is a keen diagnoser of the hypocrisy in others. "They all want it. Only nobody else must have it," he observes of humanity, early on in the book.
It is a stance toward hypocrisy that is itself hypocritical, however. It seeks to adopt an attitude of moral condemnation, while using this stance to justify the very behavior that is being condemned.
As an ethical position toward life it makes very little sense -- yet it is a common enough psychological fact nonetheless. The current president of the United States, for one, is plainly of the variety of petty cheats who manage to regard themselves as the world's victims, even while they are ransacking their neighbor's homes and making off with their life savings. I recall the character of Maggie's brother in Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets -- he becomes enraged and violent when his sister's honor is violated, though he has done the same to other women in the past. "He was trying to formulate a theory that he had always unconsciously held," Crane wryly and unforgettably observes, "that all sisters, excepting his own, could advisedly be ruined."
It is an attitude that leads to an irresolvable tension between admiring and wishing to be accepted by the strong and powerful -- because they have performed the best at the game of deception and skulduggery in which everyone in the world is supposedly engaged; while also envying and hating them. "A few at the top got all the dough. To get yours you got to pry 'em loose from some of it. And then they turn around and knock your teeth out for doing just what they did," observes Stan.
One imagines this line would make a great deal of inner psychic sense to Donald Trump. It explains as well how he can manage to embody both a supposed revolt against "the elites" while wishing to present himself as the biggest and baddest shark in the tank.
The root of Stan's inability to trust is traceable --in the novel's telling -- to his father's tyrannical and violent tendencies. Here, for once, Gresham's psychoanalytic inheritance doesn't seem so incredibly wide of the mark. I find it persuasive enough to imagine that the Trumpian/Stanton-ian belief -- i.e., that the world is rigged and the only solution is to harm and cheat other people before they can do the same to you -- is rooted in authoritarian family structures. I cite Richard Hofstadter's theory of the authority complex: When a child's normal "resistance and hostility" to the demands of parents are not permitted to find any "moderate outlet in give-and-take," Hofstadter writes, they "have to be suppressed." The "enormous hostility to authority" that results, "which cannot be admitted to consciousness, calls forth a massive overcompensation, which is manifest in the form of extravagant submissiveness to strong power."
This also seems to be what's going on with the Lee Harvey Oswald character in Don DeLillo's Libra. At least as portrayed by DeLillo, Oswald oscillates between a craven submission to authority and a violent revolt against it. He is obsessed with the military, prisons, and their systems of discipline and absolute authority, and finds himself drawn into participating in them. He identifies with authority figures and seeks gratification from their praise, delighting on some level in the punishments they mete out against his fellow soldiers and inmates. Yet he also seeks to subvert them and ultimately to assassinate the country's leader. This is the sense in which he is a "Libra." As the David Ferrie character remarks in the novel, the Libra -- the scales -- could tip in either direction: "We have the negative Libran who is, let's say, somewhat unsteady and impulsive. Easily, easily, easily influenced. Poised to make the dangerous leap. Either way, balance is the key."
Gresham's novel is likewise full of occult symbolism (each chapter is headed with one of the cards of the Tarot deck), and Stan is similarly predisposed to both extremes of behavior -- the desire both to be one of the rich and powerful and the wrathful desire to cheat and overthrow them. He thus -- like Oswald -- has two selves within him. And while it would be easy to see the argot-spewing carny Stan as the "true" face of the character, and the Rev. Stanton Carlisle, member of the United Spiritual League, as the false, Gresham's characterization unsettles this distinction.
In truth, many people who succeed in any profession will find their attitudes to certain institutions and environments changing as they themselves move from being outsiders -- which we all start out as in life -- hence the anger of many teenagers -- and move to being insiders. Perhaps, like Stan, we eventually become outsiders again -- whether we leave in disgrace or otherwise. If or when that happens, we may suddenly discovery within ourselves more of the angry adolescent self than we thought was still there. We may find that our angry self had merely gone dormant, rather than disappeared. Wrote D.H. Lawrence:
Always
at the core of me
burns the small flame of anger, gnawing [...]
Always
in the eyes of those who loved me well
I have seen at last the image of him they loved
and took for me,
mistook for me.
We may find that "maturity" was not so much the inward transformation we took it to be, as an adaptation to outward circumstances. When those circumstances change abruptly, the mask of adulthood falls from us. (Trantrömer captures the experience in "Solitude": My name, my girls, my job, all/ slipped free and were left behind, smaller and smaller,/ further and further away. I was nobody:/ a boy in a playground, suddenly surrounded.)
In one of Nightmare Alley's most insightful passages, set in a flashback episode to Stan's childhood, he recalls a time he caught out his mother in a lie: "He said nothing and neither did she. But she wasn't a grownup any more. [...] There were no more grownups. They lied when they got scared, just like anybody. Everybody was alike only some were bigger."
Many who enter adulthood find that they regard themselves on some level as imposters in the role. When trauma comes, they find that their past selves have been waiting just below the surface. They were outsiders all along, donning the mantle of the inside. This is the sense in which we all have a bit of the Rev. Stanton within us. We are putting on roles that may approximate, but never encompass the full extent of, our true selves. This is what makes us vulnerable to the flim flam artists. We on some level wish to be things we are not. The con man always sees this and exploits it -- catering to our desire to deceive ourselves. We wear the mask that grins and lies, Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote. We wear the mask.
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