68 THENEWYORKER,MARCH30, 2020
with shackles, and would emerge a short
time later, holding them in his hand.
Yet these simple escapes weren’t enough;
he needed to outdo himself and astound
his audience. In a later version of the
milk-can act, called “The Chinese Water
Torture Cell,” he was lowered, head first,
into a large glass-fronted box filled with
water. Sometimes knowingly, sometimes
not, Houdini evoked actual cruelties—
slavery and imprisonment, people cast
into filthy cells and tormented for years.
Of the glass box, he said, “It smacks of
the Dark Ages.” He burrowed into the
unconscious of the human race, evok-
ing types of public sadism that had been
suppressed, only to reëmerge in later
eras: his stunts looked backward to the
ducking stools of the witch trials and
forward to such practices as waterboard-
ing and “enhanced interrogation” under
the George W. Bush Administration.
There are daredevils who scale the
Eiffel Tower, or leap across the Great
Wall of China on a skateboard, or plunge
over Niagara Falls in a barrel, but they
don’t provoke endless interpretation
years after their exploits; most movie
stuntmen retire into knobby oblivion.
Houdini’s strangeness and ambition—
the nakedness, the liberationist tri-
umphs—still fascinate us. A little guy
who always escaped, he flourished in a
century that saw mass incarceration,
mass murder, the humiliation and de-
struction of entire populations. A few
people, in his own time and in ours,
have been convinced that his escapes
were literal miracles. Edmund Wilson,
more soberly, praised him in 1928 as a
disciplined professional, “an audacious
and independent being.” At the height
of his career, he was almost as famous
as Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino, both
of them immigrants who re-created
themselves in a new country eager for
fantasy. Of the three, only Houdini
risked killing himself on the job.
Two recent books have explored and
enlarged the spell of his dominion. In
“The Life and Afterlife of Harry Hou-
dini” (Avid Reader), the sportswriter
Joe Posnanski recounts his time delv-
ing into today’s “Houdini World,” the
peculiar existence of Houdini obses-
sives—some professional magicians,many just cultists—who gather in clubs
and at conventions, rendering homage,
repeating stunts, exchanging the tini-
est details of Houdini’s life. In “Hou-
dini: The Elusive American” (Yale), the
biographer Adam Begley tries to say,
with good-humored seriousness, what
kind of man Houdini was, and what he
represented. It is not an easy task. In
the familiar style of American popular
artists, Houdini refused all interpreta-
tion. ( John Ford: “I make Westerns.”
Mel Brooks: “I’m just an entertainer.”)
It is impossible, however, not to make
a symbol out of a man hanging upside
down in a straitjacket, sixty feet above
Times Square. Almost from the begin-
ning, Harry Houdini suggested some
larger principle of being.H
e was born Erik Weisz (later Amer-
icanized, sort of, to Ehrich Weiss)
in Budapest on March 24, 1874. When
he was four, he immigrated to this coun-
try with his mother and his brothers.
His father had left Hungary two years
earlier and settled in Appleton, Wis-
consin, a mill town near Lake Win-
nebago, where he found a job as a rabbi.
He was no longer young, though, and
he didn’t speak much English. The
fifteen German Jewish families of Ap-
pleton fired him after a few years, and
the family moved to Milwaukee, where
they were often hungry, and then to
Manhattan—to a cold-water flat on
East Seventy-fifth Street (at the time
a slum) and to jobs in the garment in-
dustry, cutting the lining of neckties. In
New York, Ehrich, watching his father
slide into despair and ill health, vowed,
like many immigrant children, never to
be poor—and, even more important to
him, never to allow his mother, Cecilia,
whom he adored, to want for anything.
Like Al Jolson and Irving Berlin, who
were also children of Jewish clergymen,
he launched into show business as the
way out of ghetto jobs like stitching
garments and rolling cigars. It was the
first of his escapes.
There is a photo of him as a skinny,
angry-looking teen-ager. Like Theodore
Roosevelt, the contemporary avatar of
self-transformation, he built himself up;
he ran, boxed, swam (in the East River),
lifted weights, and became both strong
and astoundingly flexible. There’s no
record that he was aware of the Zionist“Look, I’m sorry to cut you off—it’s just that I
really can’t stand listening to other people’s dreams.”