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| We have watched in these pages the metamorphosis of Ehrich Weiss from devoted (if adventurous) son to street-corner conjuror to driven, chain-rattling vaudeville freak (20 shows a day, often) and seen him become Harry Houdini, the greatest magician who ever lived. We've been awed by the magnificent effects and stunts and then been disenchanted to see him hiding a key and angling a mirror just right to fool us. We've been rubes – and yet we can't resist applauding.
Imagine: The greatest showman of his era, revered on three continents. America's Mysteriarch, as they called him in Europe and Australia and far-away Fiji, "the Master of the Impossible". Tens of thousands of good people believed there was genuine magic in his magic act.
They've thought the same about other illusionists, of course. The debate has never died as to whether Howard Thurston, in particular, wasn't a better craftsman than Houdini. Tune in to any online magicians' forum and listen to to the chatter about Harry – there is griping, sniping, debunking, backhand compliments, respect allowed only grudgingly ... but always an appreciation for what he gave a business, which in such discussions tends to make the business sound more like professional wrestling than the art form we prefer to behold.
Harry survives every slapdown, every chokehold, and slips out of every armlock like a well-greased pair of handcuffs that someone forgot to fasten. He is still, by far, more famous and admired than any other entertainer of his kind and, even with the fiery fresh talent now arising in what looks like a new golden age of stage magic – like David Blaine and Criss Angel – he always will be.
There is a boom in magic at the moment. Some say it's because times are scary again. In a troubled world we need all the diversion we can get, and who better to turn to than magicians, the masters of diversion? |
 | In a 2004 teaching exercise for Wisconsin's state curriculum, the Outagamie County Historical Society, based in Appleton, Wisconsin, where Harry grew up, noted that Houdini was the product of a world in the throes of unprecedented change. "There were a lot of things from which Americans wanted to escape," it said, including the legal shackles that repressed workers and denied women a say in politics. At the same time there was a reaction to the Industrial Age, and a lot of people, even then, sought to simplify life and rediscover the freedom of earlier, less mechanical times.
"Houdini was a symbol of freedom for many people because he made people believe that there was always a way out of difficult situations," the society said. "It is for this reason that Houdini was so well-loved as an entertainer."
Now, in a terrified moment of history, we again beg to be deceived. |
| Hollywood obliges, as it always has in wartime and crisis: In 2006 the Oscar-nominated "The Illusionist" with Edward Norton and "The Prestige" with Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman, in 2008 "The Great Buck Howard" with John Malkovich starring alongside Tom Hanks and his son Colin, and, at some undefined future date, Tom Cruise in "Carter Beats the Devil", a now-you-see-it-now-you-don't movie since 2001.
In 2007 there was "Death Defying Acts", in which Guy Pearce plays a Houdini who has an affair with Catherine Zeta-Jones in Scotland. Director Gillian Armstrong garnered praise for the look of the film and scorn for turning Harry into a spiritualist. Maybe if we keep prodding Houdini with such heresies he will come back from the dead. |
| Meanwhile in Paris in 2007, Jean Paul Gaultier used an old Houdini trick in a fashion show seeped in magic: He got the reporters involved. Lucinda Chambers of Vogue was sawn in half, Michael Roberts of Vanity Fair shrunk Catherine Russo of Elle and Gaultier himself levitated Virginie Mouzat of Le Figaro. Who was left to write about the clothes, or did no one care about that anyway? Magic, Gaultier said, is the mode du jour.
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The books about prestidigitation and those who prestidigitate continue to pour off the presses. The more prominent ones I've looked at on other pages, but there are many others – you have to wonder how it is that so many can find buyers. I was amused to come across an article online written a few years ago by Houdini Historical Center curator Benjamin Filene, about how Harry has fared in the past in children’s literature, because it brings us to the central theme of this commentary: mythology. |
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| Of the 14 biographies of Houdini for young readers that Filene surveyed, almost all "stray from historical fact into the territory of legend and, often, outright fiction". By way of examples, he said one had Harry ensuring that his trunks were loaded onto a train by throwing himself in front of it while it was still moving, and another gave Harry the inspiration for his packing-case escape while he was cooking a poor man's meal of potatoes in a fire made from a packing case. In fact, both of these episodes come straight from the original Houdini biography, which Harry Kellock published in 1928 with Bess' input (and, no doubt, her imagination). |
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But Filene does credit the children's authors for fueling youthful hopes and dreams. He quotes Brian Selznick from 1991's "The Houdini Box":
Everyone was wonderstruck by Houdini, but children were especially delighted. Children want to be able to escape from their rooms when they are sent there for being bad. They want to make their dinners disappear and their parents vanish. They want to pull candy from their pockets without putting any in, turn their sisters into puppies and their brothers into frogs (although some children want to turn their puppies and frogs into sisters and brothers). Children like Houdini because he could do the unexplainable things that they wanted to do. Houdini was a magician. Magicians can do anything.
And, again, Adam Woog in "The Importance of Harry Houdini" from 1995:
"It is not because of Houdini’s sheer skill that he remains famous. He has become part of the world's collective dreams."
And so it seems to me. The collective unconscious as repository for what we know about Harry Houdini – and for what we think we know and what we wish we knew to be true.
There are different ways of approaching the hypothesis, and childhood is a natural place to start. Why did Ehrich Weiss become a magician?
He needed to make money, for one thing, and his physique was suited to manipulation and the trickery it enables. The money could get him and his family out of their financial malaise and, more importantly, get him out of the banality he'd been plunked into from an exotic realm of duelling princes in old Hungary. (His insistence later that he was born in Appleton, rather than Budapest, was merely a means of fitting in to the American Way.)
With magic tricks he could build on the deceptions he concocted early on about his background. And if he could fool others, he could fool himself.
~ ~ H H ~ ~
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There's a 2002 article from the Hindustan Times that's reproduced on the website of the Magic Times, headlined all too melodramatically "The child magicians of Sakkardara slum". It's about kids in one particular district of the jam-packed central Indian city of Nagpur who drop out of school (or don't go at all) and don top hats, get themselves magic wands and go around parlaying sleight-of-hand into spending money.
"Belonging to a tribe where magic is a family vocation passed down from generation to generation, the children have no choice," the article says, though I'm always dubious about such claims. "Most fathers feel committed to teach magic rather than the alphabet to their children, with training starting as early as the age of six."
A village of pre-adolescent illusionists. They deceive others with cards and paper flowers as they deceive themselves that life is something other than what it is. |
| Was Harry a bodhisattva, a Buddha in the birthing? He knew how to control his breathing and pulse, as well as his mental state. His occasional flares of rage might even suggest the righteous outbursts of holy men, Jesus included. But no, I found myself out on a creaking limb with Conan Doyle, arguing over Houdini's divinity or lack thereof, and had to settle for this photo or him admiring a Buddha statue rigged by some medium to mysteriously answer believers' questions.
I toyed with the thought that Houdini might have been a lamed wufnik, one of the "36 righteous men" who, according to ancient Jewish tradition, unknowingly justify by their behaviour the existence of all mankind in the eyes of God. Lamed wufniks (sometimes rendered as lamed-vovniks or lamed-vavniks) are, as one source puts it, "the secret pillars of the universe. Were it not for them, God would annihilate the whole of mankind. Without knowing it, they are our saviours." |
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| If a lamed wufnik discovers his true purpose, the belief goes, he immediately drops dead, and his role is automatically assumed by another person. Did Harry find out?
In the context of Houdini, though, I didn't get far with the notion, even if he did once have this to say in a discussion about the afterlife:
"Possibly the Great Intelligence that rules the universe [and] plans beyond our ken knows what lives shall be most essential to the well-being of the world and sends them back to finish what they have begun and have been forced to lay down before the beckoning finger of the Dark Angel."
~ ~ H H ~ ~
Houdini admitted to "a little pecularity": he loved to lay his head on his mother's breast to hear her heartbeat. It was the ultimate reassurance to him. And if you recall the moments you've been in any way confined – hiding in a tiny closet, gripped in a headlock, even held down beneath a pillow or in the clutch of panic, and certainly when you were submerged in water – there was a heartbeat. It was your own, naturally, but it beat with the same rhythm as your mother's heart.
I think this is why Harry liked being locked up. I suggest this is why he dived into rivers and lakes and oceans, in the tight embrace of ropes and manacles. I believe this is how he daily returned to the womb. It's a place where everything is calm and under control, and, quite naturally, we all wanted to go there with him.
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| WATCH THIS SPACE. If they dig up Houdini's bones, this is where he will be. |
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Readers of the New York Herald Tribune learned in late 1927 that Colonel Harry D Weed, the founding inspration for the Weed tire-chain company that once challenged Houdini with its formidable shackles, had died and left all of his money to his stenographer, leaving his
widow penniless.
No, wait, the Tribune reported a few days later: The inventor of the non-skid tire chains wasn't dead, but alive and, yes, "kicking", in Connecticut. He and his wife were happily married, and both still very rich. Evidently the newspaper's correspondent in Jackson, Michigan, had attended the wrong funeral and neither of a pair of editors checked their facts. Nor did a slew of publications that picked up the story, including Time magazine.
It was all an illusion! |
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| In recent years Britons from Edinburgh to Kent have been marvelling – and grumbling – over a 30% swelling of the wild parrot population among them, the result of sets of parakeets (ring-necked, Alexandrine, orange-winged, South American monk, you name it) that escaped their cages and comfortably bred up whole new colonies. |
The Brazilian and Himalayan species managed to undo the locks on their aviary cages, thus earning the description "the Houdinis of the captive-bird world". The BBC reported that they can easily survive freezing temperatures, making new homes in the holes of tree trunks, and hence raising concern that they could displace native starlings, nuthatches, woodpeckers, tits and owls, while gorging on vegetable gardens.
It's a funny story, especially the rumour that the originals were brought to the UK by Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s and, naturally, he set them free. But a funnier story appeared in the New York Times in July 1938, and it had to do with the real Houdini, even though by then he'd been dead 12 years.
Surviving the great illusionist, along with Bess, was Harry's pet parrot, Pat Houdini. That's not him in the photo above – that's Harry pet eagle, which he actually trained to fetch.
In the summer of '38, just a few days after Bess returned to New York following nearly two decades in LA, 25-year-old Pat the Parrot picked the lock on his cage and disappeared, "singing", into the Hollywood hills. Edward Saint, who had been handling Bess' affairs (ahem!), told the Times that the bird used to watch Houdini practising his escapes and obviously memorised a few of the finer points.
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An artefact that would have sorely tempted Houdini the collector, this manual of "real" magic from the first half of the 18th century was placed on auction in Sotheby's sale of "Continental and Russian Books and Manuscripts" in London in July 2008, and expected to fetch up to £2,000.
The 24-page book contains remedies, magical diagrams, a Sator word square, esoteric and Christian symbols, astrological signs, Judaeo-Christian terminology and incantations and spells for such things as preventing witchcraft in the stable, confronting an enemy and putting out fire. | |
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