Three Glimpses of Gresham

So,  recently I've seen three passing references to Wm Lindsay Gresham which, while each brief in itself, add up to provide a little more insight into this elusive figure.  Gresham is mainly remembered today, if at all, as a shadowy and slightly sinister figure on the edge of Lewis biographies, the first husband of Joy Lewis and parent of CSL's heirs David and Douglas Gresham.

But Gresham was much more than this: a volunteer who fought fascist in the Spanish Civil War, an up-and-coming novelist whose first book was made into a noir film (staring Tyrone Powers) but whose subsequent books failed to live up to his early promise, eventually spiraling down into a serious drinking problem. He ended by dying relatively young (53) of suicide when his terminal cancer became too much for him to bear. In many cases a sad life, with someone of real talent for the most part unable to focus it to produce the works those who knew him early on believed he was capable of.

He also moved in some interesting circles, and it's from scattered references in reminiscences by others from those days that we get a glimpse of him in his own right, not as a walk-on roll in the Jack-and-Joy story.

First, there's Martin Gardner's autobiography; this one I learned about from Wendell Wagner's posting to the MythSoc list.* Here's how Gardner remembered Gresham:

I met Bill Gresham. Bill was the author of NIGHTMARE ALLEY, the best novel ever written about carnival life. It became a movie starring Tyrone Power . . . Bill once said to me that one day he realized that his geek was a symbol for all the persons who bitterly hate their jobs but have no other way to make a living.

Bill had been married to Joy Davidman, both once active members of the Communist Party. Joy was drama and poetry editor of the party's NEW MASSES magazine. She finally became disenchanted with Communism and wrote a series of articles for the NEW YORK POST titled "Girl Communist." As a result of reading books by C. S. Lewis, Joy became a convert to the Anglican Church. She began corresponding with Lewis, then an elderly bachelor in England, best known for his Narnia fantasies for children, and for his many books of Christian polemics.

One day Joy, who had become increasingly bitter about her marriage, said to Bill she was planning to divorce him and to take her two children to London where she planned to marry Lewis!

Bill thought that was the funniest thing he ever heard. Then suddenly, to his vast astonishment, Joy did exactly what she said she would do. She divorced Bill, took her sons to England, and sent word to Bill that she and Lewis would soon be married!

After the marriage Lewis published a book titled SURPRISED BY JOY . . . Bill once said to me that the book Lewis wrote was wrongly titled. It should have been OVERWHELMED BY JOY. As all Lewis fans know, the joy was short-lived . . .

After Joy's death, Bill visited Lewis to arrange for the care of his two young sons. He took with him a copy of my ANNOTATED ALICE, inscribed to Lewis as a gift. I asked Bill to ask Lewis if he had ever read one of Baum's OZ books. The answer was no. . . 

Bill was a great admirer of L. Frank Baum . . . he wrote a moving essay telling of a time when he was deeply depressed over his divorce from Joy. He phoned a friend who allowed him to spend the night in a daughter's vacant bedroom. In the room Bill found a copy of Baum's THE SCARECROW OF OZ, a book he had loved as a child. He spent the night reading the book again. It got him through the night.

(from UNDILUTED HOCUS-POCUS: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARTIN GARDNER [2013], Chapter 17: "Math and Magic Friends", p.171-172)

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The second glimpse came in a June e-mail from Richard West, who had come across the following sentence when rereading Frederik Pohl's memoir (THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS [1978]) for a book group discussion:

"William Lindsay Gresham was there a lot just at the end of his life, an irascible, mean-mouthed man who was having troubles he could not handle, and one night a little later, checked into a Times Square hotel and killed himself." (ch. 9, p. 216).

By "there" he means "the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute" which in the early 1950s was "an immense house in Highlands owned by Fletcher and Inga Pratt, twenty-three rooms, on acres of land rolling down to the Shrewsbury River. ... some two hundred years old, with sculptured plaster ceilings in the billiard room and immense fireplaces in the drawing room and the dining hall, and a strange, huge painting that went with the house (because there was no way to remove it) on the landing of the stairs." (p. 215) The Pratts hosted many visitors, not only the Pohls (who happened to live nearby) and other science fiction writers and editors (Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, L. Sprague de Camp. Lester del Rey, John Campbell, et al.), but people like Basil Davenport and John Ciardi, so Gresham coming there is not strange, but it's one more bit of information about him. There's nothing else about Gresham in this book, though, and it's now too late, alas, to ask Fred Pohl for any further memories.

The interesting thing here is that it shows Gresham very much at home with the science fiction community gathered around Pratt, which puts him in a different context than we usually think of for him. It also, by the way, ties in very well with Joy Gresham's befriending John Christopher and Arthur C. Clarke, among others, during her time in London following her move to England, before she shifted her base of operations to Oxford.

It's obvious that Pohl and Gresham didn't hit it off, but "troubles he could not handle" sounds a bit harsh as a description of terminal cancer of the tongue, which eventually prevented him from eating and made drinking very difficult. Perhaps Pohl meant Gresham's problem with alcohol (which we mainly know about through Joy's account during the time they were breaking up). The timing of Pohl's account also seems a bit off -- since Pratt died six years before Gresham did, the latter cd not have been dropping by Pratt's house "just at the end of his life"


Thanks to Doug Anderson, who sent me the following link, we also have a somewhat expanded version of Pohl's impression, a piece that appeared on Pohl's blog (under the header "Fletcher Pratt, Part 5: Shadow Over the Ipsy"). The relevant section is as follows:

. . . Remember that I once said that, with all the social drinking that went on of an Ipsy weekend, I had only once seen anyone unpleasantly drunk?

This was that once. The man in question I did not know well, though I had read some of his work. His name was William Lindsay Gresham.

To discuss William Lindsay Gresham, I must first ask if you have ever seen the play or film SHADOWLANDS? Gresham never appears in it, but he is a very significant character all the same.

You see, SHADOWLANDS is the story of C. S. Lewis -- yes, the SCREWTAPE LETTERS man -- and his tradical love for the American poet Joy Davidman. What made that love tragic was William Gresham.



When I heard that William Gresham would be present at the Ipsy that evening, I was pleased to have the chance to talk to him, which we had somehow never managed to have on his previous visits. The title of his signature book was NIGHTMARE ALLEY, a brutal but brilliant novel of life among the carnival workers, which I had enjoyed and respected. But my notion of author-to-author chatting with the man didn't work out. Gresham was too drunk for chatting, and too aggressively foulmouthed for any civilized kind of talk at all. Remember the somewhat quaint and actually endearing pass-the-port-to-the-left fantasy that Fletcher had erected around Ispy-Wipsy weekends? Gresham's presence showed how a single drunk could destroy a fantasy. I left early that night.

And I never saw the man again.

I did heard about him from time to time, and then, some years later, the tabloids published his final chapter. Slowly going blind and recently diagnosed with cancer of the tongue, Gresham had checked into the Dixie Hotel, just off Times Square. There he consumed an overdose of sleeping pills, and died.


In addition to establishing that Gresham attended more than one gathering at the Pratt House (e.g., through the references to not having the chance for discussion with him on previous visits), this portrait agrees with other evidence that Gresham was a mean drunk, not a happy drunk or convivial drunk. This more detailed account also fits in better with the timeline of events as we know them from other sources, and is a good description of Gresham's darker side.

Here's the link to Pohl's blog piece:

http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2011/02/fletcher-pratt-part-5/

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FInally, I knew I'd once run across a brief passage where Heinlein mentions Gresham but I'd not been able to locate the passage again. Once I mentioned this to Doug Anderson, he turned up the relevant quote at once: it comes not from GRUMBLES FROM THE GRAVE, as I'd thought, but Heinlein's EXPANDED UNIVERSE [1980]. The passage begins with a quote:

"You'll never get rich peddling gloom" -- Wm Lindsay Gresham

It then continues

The late Bill Gresham was before consumption forced him into fiction writing a carnie mentalist of great skill. He could give a cold reading that would scare the pants off a marble staute. In six words he summarized the secret of success as a fortuneteller. Always tell the mark what he wants to hear. He will love you for it, happily pay you, then forgive and forget when your cheerful prediction fails to come true -- and always come back for more.

The bit about being forced into fiction by TB strikes a bit of an autobiographical note, this being Heinlein's history as well. The main interest of this piece is, however, that it confirms that Gresham (and possibly also Joy) moved in circles that included the top science fiction writers of the day and that Gresham himself had great personal charm (a point worth stressing, since what we know about him through Lewis channels is mainly to his disadvantage): he was dynamic and had keen insight into what made people tick. And anyone who reads the short story of his Doug Anderson included in TALES BEFORE NARNIA can see that he had talent to an impressive degree. There's now a short story collection of his work, just recently published,*** and the description thereof revealed to me for the first time that Gresham also wrote crime fiction and science fiction. The introductory essay to the collection also looks to be revealing, both about Gresham's career and incidently the disintegration of his marriage to Joy (including an account of how he came home and found she'd not only moved but had sold every piece of furniture in the place).

So, glimpses rather than extended accounts, but still interesting in the ways they contradict the Received Version and in the new light they place on his career and contacts.

Many thanks to Wendell, Richard, and Doug for providing me with the building bricks for this post.

--John R.

* https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/mythsoc/conversations/messages/25301

**for a photograph of the Pratt House, or 'Ipsy-Wipsy Institute', see the follow (with thanks to Doug Anderson for the link):

http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2011/07/the-ipsy-wipsy-institute/


***http://www.centipedepress.com/crime/grindshow.html

D&D NEXT (STARTER SET)

So, a few weeks ago I found out the release date of the new 5th edition D&D STARTER SET and visited a local game store (relatively local: down in Federal Way) and preordered myself a copy. Late Friday afternoon I got a message from them that it was in, and today I combined a work-session down in the Federal Way Barnes & Noble with a visit to the game store and picked up my copy.

At a quick glance, it looks pretty good. In fact, it looks a good deal like the game I've been playing in various playtest versions for the last two years or so (in mini-campaigns run by Jeff Grubb, myself, and, for the last year or so, Steve Winter). And that's reassuring, since the various rule sets sent out for playtesting have swung wildly back and forth during that time, with each new iteration of the playtest rules seeming determined to differ greatly from the one that went before.

This looks good in basics: the basic four character classes (fighter, cleric, wizard, rogue), the four basic player-character races (human, dwarf, elf, halfling), the classic six character stats (Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis, Chr), alignments (which seem to conform to the standard nine-point alignment system), and so forth. I'd say it has more in common with third edition than any other. There are still more vestiges of fourth edition than I'd like, but those shd be easy to homerule out. I'm sorry they left out any character generation rules at all -- something I consider essential to any starter set/beginner rules -- but other than that, this looks good at a first skim.

It looks like my favorite hobby is making a come back.

More later.

--JDR

THE SHIPPEY FESTSCHRIFT

So, Wednesday (the second) marked a great event: the arrival of my copy of my latest publication, the T. A. Shippey festschrift TOLKIEN IN THE NEW CENTURY: ESSAYS IN HONOR OF TOM SHIPPEY, just out from McFarland. I'm both an editor (along with Jn Houghton, Janet Croft, Nancy Martsch, and Robin Reid) and contributor, my piece being called "Inside Literature: Tolkien's Explorations of Medieval Genres". It's a great relief to finally have this out, since it's been a long time in the works (five or six years).

More on this one later. For now, here's a link from the publisher's website that shd, if all goes well, include a Table of Contents listing:

http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/contents-2.php?id=978-0-7864-7438-7

And here's the Amazon listing:

http://www.amazon.com/Tolkien-New-Century-Essays-Shippey/dp/0786474386

No table-of-contents listing here, but there is a paragraph summarizing the book's contents (e.g., mine is referenced as "Tolkien's interest in medieval genres", which gives a pretty good idea of what's in the book.

No reviews yet, but it's early days.

Here's hoping Professor Shippey is pleased by these offerings.

--John R.

current reading: IN SEARCH OF J. D. SALINGER (still)

Tolkien Spotting (The TIMELINE game)

So, at NorWesCon back in April I watched some people play an interesting new game called TIMELINE, which looked intriguing enough that I picked up a copy about two weeks ago and finally had a chance to play it last night.

The rules are simple: each card in your hand represents an invention or discovery or significant event. Your goal is to play your cards into correct chronological position with the cards already in play. Thus if the cards in play are, say, THE INVENTION OF THE WINCHESTER RIFLE [1866] and THE INVENTION OF BLUE JEANS [1873], and you want to play THE INVENTION OF THE TYPEWRITER, you have to decide whether this comes before both events, between both events, or after both events.*  If you guess right, your card joins the timeline, and placing the next card just got that much more difficult. If you're wrong, your card gets discarded and you have to draw another. Since the goal is to be the first to run out of cards, the more cards you place correctly the better you're doing. Cards can range from modern (the computer mouse, the ball-point pen) to ancient (fire, agriculture) to just about anything in-between (corks, crossbows).

But the card that really got my attention when it came up last night was "LORD OF THE RINGS PUBLISHED (FIRST VOLUME)", accompanied by a picture of THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RINGS. They even got the right dust jacket for the first edition Allen & Unwin hardcover and, of course, the date [1954].  Nice to see Tolkien's book ranked with things like THE DISCOVERY OF THE ASTEROIDS and INVENTION OF THE LIGHT BULB.

Here's an image of the card:

I can see that if you play this game a lot, you'll eventually learn the right dates to a lot of things. And it's for this reason, I assume, that the people who make it have put out four or five supplements (Discoveries, Diversity, Historical Events, Music & Cinema), each I assume with another deck of similar but new cards, to keep things challenging. I know one is themed towards the arts (music, literature, the theatre), which I'll probably be picking up.

Since noticing this at a number of booths in the dealers' room at NorWesCon I've seen it at a game store (The Fantasium), at one of the area Barnes & Nobles (the one in Federal Way) but not at another (the one near SouthCenter), as well as available online from Amazon.com and, of course, from the folks who actually make it: Asmodee (this being a French game translated into English).

http://us.asmodee.com/ressources/jeux_versions/timeline_3.php

I see there's an Ipad version but haven't seen or played that yet.

--John R.

current reading: IN SEARCH OF J. D. SALINGER by Ian Hamilton [1988]

P.S.

I shd note that, to my delight, the set includes not just Tolkien but also the invention of rpgs [1974] 

*The correct answer, according to the game, is in this case "before both" [1714], which is much earlier than I wd have guessed

Three (or four) More Points about Paton Walsh

So, there were a few more points I ought to make about Jill Paton Walsh's new Peter-and-Harriet novel, THE LOST SCHOLAR.

(1) I think this was much the best of the four books she's written so far featuring Sayer's characters: I enjoyed reading it, and will probably be getting a hard copy in addition to the Kindle version. I don't know how much is judgment is affected by the fact that this is an Oxford novel, and I'm disposed to think well of books set in Oxford, and how much it's her finally making the characters her own.

(2) It's disconcerting to find that all the novels published by Sayers in the real world (e.g. THE NINE TAILORS, STRONG POISON, GAUDY NIGHT) also exist in the fictional world Peter and Harriet inhabit, except that there they're "Harriet Vane" novels rather than "Dorothy L. Sayers" novels, with titles such as "MURDER BY DEGREES" (= GAUDY NIGHT, I suppose) and "TWIXT WIND AND WATER" (= ?HAVE HIS CARCASE). The only difference seems to be that in Harriet's novels, the mysteries are solved not by Lord Peter Wimsey but by her series detective, Robert Templeton. We're told that the plots of these follow the events of Peter's actual cases very closely, even including having a Harriet Vane analogue (whose name I don't think is ever mentioned). All this seems rather strange, especially when it becomes a plot-point, with a prospective murderer lifting plots from Harriet Vane books as templates for his own attempted murders. That last point is an interesting idea, but Van Gulik did it better (in the last Judge Dee book, MURDER IN CANTON).

(3) I was startled by Paton Walsh's depiction of Peter Wimsey as an atheist ("most of the time").  I can't think of any passage in the original Sayers books to support that characterization, and it struck me as very unlike Sayers.

(4)  Finally, there was an odd scene where a student hoping to become a medievalist explains to Wimsey his course of study: Old English, Middle English, and literature up through Milton, only to have Lord Peter incredulous that anyone would submit to a course of study that failed to include a single Romantic poet. That seems in line with what students like Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis and John Betjeman felt, yet Sayer herself was deeply interested in the medieval, and seems to have had far more interest in Dante and ROLAND and Donne than Wordsworth or Shelly.

So, an entertaining book, but not to be taken as a guide to the personalities or actualities of the time and place. This is a fictional Oxford, where the descriptions of buildings are more true to life than those of the people.

--John R.

Jill Paton Walsh disses Tolkien

So, I hadn't known that the fourth of Jill Paton Walsh's Peter-and-Harriett faux-Sayers series of mysteries was out (or even that a fourth one was coming out, given that the third ended with what seemed a good place to wrap up the series)* until I saw a mention of it on the MythSoc list (thanks to Joe Christopher, who posted a capsule review)**

I got this one on the Kindle because I was troubled by something Joe mentioned, about the way Walsh describes Tolkien. And now, having just read it for myself, I can see that it's even worse than I thought: Walsh explicitly calls Tolkien a misogynist.

Or, to be more accurate, she has Lord Peter Wimsey do it, referring to JRRT as  "this misogynist professor". Here's the passage in full:


[HARRIET:] 'Well, do you know that the Merton Professor of English here will not take women pupils for tutorials? With one exception, that is -- he will tute girls sent to him by Miss [Elaine] Griffiths.'
[LORD PETER:] 'Have I heard of this misogynist professor?'
[HARRIET:] 'Didn't you read The Hobbit to the boys during an air-raid?'
[LORD PETER:] 'Yes, I remember that.'
[HARRIET:] 'That's him -- the Merton Professor is Tolkien'

Tolkien never appears in the book, though he's referred to twice more: once as being one of several medieval scholars at Oxford -- Lewis and Tolkien and Wren*** -- who tried (unsuccessfully) to find out who wrote a damning review in the TLS, and once near the end when a new term begins and life goes on, signalled by mention of new lecture series by Lewis, Bowra, and one J. L. Austin.

So, where did Walsh get the idea that Tolkien was a misogynist?  Certainly it means she doesn't know much about Tolkien, who was well-known at Oxford from his earliest days as a tutor for being unusually welcoming of women as students**** (the exact opposite being the case with CSL, whom she treats more favorably). I suspect the truth is that Tolkien famously once expressed criticism of Sayer's novels, saying that he was thoroughly tired of both Peter and Harriet by the time of GAUDY NIGHT (a sentiment Sayer herself seems to have shared, since she only wrote one more novel in the series after that point), and that Paton Walsh is gratuitously blackening his name as a belated revenge.

By contrast, Lewis is on record saying some good things about DLS, which I think here translates into a warmer depiction, despite the fact that Lewis had some real issues with women as students. It turns out Wimsey's brother-in-law, Inspector Parker, is a SCREWTAPE and NARNIA fan who, when in Oxford, asks to visit the Eagle & Child so he can see the great man go by -- not to meet or talk to or anything like that, but just to see in the flesh. This reminded me of Cripsin's famous "There goes C. S. Lewis -- it must be Tuesday". Perhaps there's now a tradition of characters in mysteries seeing CSL coming or going to that pub (if two examples seventy years apart can form a 'tradition').

As for Elaine Griffiths, it's nice to see a fictional portrayal of someone who played a key role in THE HOBBIT reaching a publisher, even if Walsh's apparent desire to honor an old friend does lead her to present Griffiths as the pre-eminant Old English scholar in all of Oxford, which one very much suspects was simply not the case.

As for Paton Walsh's portrayal of JRRT, technically you can't libel a dead man, so we need to come up for a new word for posthumous blackening someone's reputation with falsehoods. 

--John R.
current reading: THE LATE SCHOLAR by Jill Paton Walsh (2014) [just finished]
IN SEARCH OF J. D. SALINGER by Ian Hamilton (1988)



*spoiler alert:
Duke's Denver catches fire, Peter's brother the duke dies of a heart attack while trying to save it, and Peter inherits the dukedom and family home, or what's left of it.

**https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/mythsoc/conversations/messages/25364

***sic; presumably she means Tolkien's successor as Rawlinson-Bosworth Professor, fellow Inkling C. L. Wrenn

****for the evidence of this, see my forthcoming essay "The Missing Women", which I delivered at Kalamazoo last year.

Visiting a Shinto Shrine

So, Sunday I took a badly needed day off away from my desk and the almost-finished job of proofing and final revisions that's kept me busy for so many weeks* and joined Janice, Anne, and Sigfried (hi Anne. hi Sigfried) for a trip to a Shinto shrine.

We'd heard about the Tsubaki Shrine up north of here for a while now and have wanted to go to their big ceremony held about this time each year, which is open to visitors, but one thing or another has come up. This time we made it, and it was well worth the trip. I was somewhat hindered by not being able to see or hear the head priest very well from where I was sitting, and of course from not speaking Japanese, but aside from unfamiliar details it wasn't really that different from other times I've attended a religious ceremony of a faith or denomination I don't practice** And I do know a little about Shinto from my reading, and rather to my surprise did recognize a lot of elements from my familiarity with anime and manga, which turn out to reproduce the costumes and ceremonial accouterments with great fidelity. Here's a link to their website:

http://www.tsubakishrine.com/home.html

We were rather surprised, last night, to find that some pictures of the event have been posted to the Shrine's Facebook page that include both of us among the crowd. So if like me you're not on Facebook, here are a few of those photos of the two of us very much out of our natural element but being made to feel very welcome.

Pictures! Of these three photos, the first shows the Shinto priest, the second shows the back of my head in the foreground, and the third shows us both stepping through the CHI-NO-WA, or big green woven circle; Sig and Anne can be seen in the background through the circle.

Also have to say that they picked a beautiful spot for their shrine: near Granite Falls and right alongside a wide, shallow, fast-flowing river (the Stillaguamish, I think) into which they threw the KATASHIRO (paper meeples) we'd each written our names on.

All in all, a memorable occasion, and in a good way. I'd gladly go back there again.

--John R.
currently reading THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER [1999] by Stephen Chboski

*now finished, as of about 1 a.m. this morning, so that now I've moved on to Indexing

**e.g., I've been to Catholic Mass a few times when living in Milwaukee, either at Marquette's Gesu or at the downtown Cathedral, seen a Buddhist Temple in Hawaii, gone through a Hindu Temple on the outskirts of London, and visited a Druid stone circle down at Trout Lake (but not while a ceremony was in progress).  We'd also gotten to see a small Shinto shrine in Hawaii, but nothing to match to a shrine complex like this one. And we'd tried to visit the Taoist temple, but turns out they restrict their holy places to adherents of the faith: no tourists. Fair enough.