THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, March 14 - 15, 2020 |C7
The Mirror and the Light
By Hilary Mantel
Holt, 757 pages, $30BYKATHERINEA.POWERSI
T HAS TAKENHilary Mantel
11 years, three volumes and
more than 1,700 pages to
dispatch, at last, the man
William Cobbett called the
“bloody ruffian, THOMAS CROMWELL.”
Starting with “Wolf Hall” (2009), whose
title sounded the death knell for Anne
Boleyn, a sense of inevitability and
doom has pervaded the novels. Without
turning a page, we have known the
“plot”: who will rise, who will fall, who
will die—and when. Getting there,
however, has been a lengthy meander
through the consciousness of one of
Britain’s greatest statesmen and legis-
lators, a key player in the establishment
of the Church of England and the
creation of the modern state. Along the
way we have been granted chilling
glimpses into the mercurial mind of
Cromwell’s master, Henry VIII, upon
whose fluctu-
ating desire,
uneasy con-
science and
increasingly
corpulent,
ailing body
the fate of
the realm
rests.
A villain
to Cobbett,
a hero to
hagiographer
John Foxe, a legislative genius to
historian G.R. Elton, Thomas Cromwell,
as a person with feelings and private
thoughts, has been a cipher from the
start. His portrait by Hans Holbein
might be summed up as a depiction
of inscrutability, while his lowly origins
caused the great men of his day to
emphasize his nobody-ness. But “sleek,
plump and densely inaccessible” Thomas
Cromwell, as Ms. Mantel calls him, turns
out to have been simply waiting to be
taken up and issued a soul.
In “Wolf Hall,” Ms. Mantel provided
fictional substance to young Thomas
Cromwell, son of a ferocious Putney
blacksmith and brewer. She advanced
quickly to his role as husband and
father and set him up as Cardinal
Wolsey’s righthand man before that
prelate’s precipitous fall. From then on,
throughout the entire trilogy, Ms.
Mantel slips back in time to pick over
Cromwell’s memories, fantasies and
dreams. Under his hat is a twilight
arena of remembrance and regret
peopled by the dead. Wolsey’s disgrace,
his death and his enemies’ gloating joy
are subjects of Cromwell’s ceaseless
rumination, as are the deaths of his
wife and daughters and, eventually, of
Thomas More, whose beheading in July
1535 brings the first volume to a close.
By this time, Cromwell, now principal
secretary to Henry VIII, has made
himself indispensable, most particularly
in managing the king’s break with
Rome, establishing him as the head of
the English church and bringing about
his marriage to Anne Boleyn.
In contrast to the great sweep of
time encompassed by “Wolf Hall,”
“Bring Up the Bodies” (2012), the sec-
ond installment, covers less than a year,
though with the usual forays into the
past. Cromwell’s power grows and he
begins an inventory of church property,
the initial step to seizing and redistrib-
uting it. Still, the problem of Henry’s
marriage is once again paramount.
Anne has lost favor, repeatedly failing
to produce a male heir. Now mousey
Jane Seymour of Wolf Hall has caught
Henry’s fancy and it is Cromwell’s task
to free him to marry again. Moreover,
mutual hatred between Cromwell and
PleaseturntopageC8The finale of
Hilary Mantel’s
‘Wolf Hall’
trilogy brings
the brilliant
statesman to
his bloody end.READ ONLINE ATREAD ONLINE ATWSJ.COM/BOOKSHELFWSJ.COM/BOOKSHELF
THE KING’S FIXERCromwell
(ca. 1532-34) by Hans Holbein.CORBIS/GETTY IMAGESThomas
Cromwell’s
Final Act
more benighted time it would have
pertained. Indeed, it did pertain. Both
men are also aware that a bookshelf
of biographies and studies of Houdini
precedes them—more than 500 books,
according to Mr. Posnanski, at least
three overtly psychoanalytical.
The challenge both biographers
faced—since the last startling revelation
about Houdini came in 1996, when
Kenneth Silverman, in his comprehen-
sive biography “Houdini!!!,”
discovered that the seem-
ingly happily married and
prudish star had had an
affair with Jack London’s
widow—was to find some
useful new approach to
their chosen subject. Mr.
Begley, the author of biog-
raphies of John Updike and
the French photographer
Nadar, had the easier task
in this regard, having been
signed on to do his book as
part of the Yale University
Press series of brief biog-
raphies called Jewish Lives.
His Jewish identity did not seem
particularly important to Houdini. He
learned from his rabbi father to love
books, and his wealth allowed him to
become a formidable collector of vol-
umes on magic and spiritualism, but he
did not inherit his father’s rigorous faith.
He was often unconcerned about vio-
lating the strictures of Judaism, for ex-
ample by demanding that his mother’s
burial be postponed for two weeks until
he could return from Europe and by
ostentatiously decorating her grave. But
Mr. Begley’s book is indeed brief, offer-
ing a brisk passage through the facts so
far as they can be known. The accusation
Houdini made against Robert-Houdin
of “utter disregard for the truth” applied
to Houdini with a vengeance; he lied
not merely as an act of self-promotion,
which could be said about many show-
men and performers of his time and our
own, but also about things that really
didn’t matter. Many writers before
Silverman accepted these lies without
challenging them, but both Mr. BegleyI
F EVER A LIFEcalled
for a brief reversion to
Freudian psychobiog-
raphy, it is that of the
escape artist Harry
Houdini. Born Erik Weisz in
Budapest in 1874, he was “a
mama’s boy all his life,” Joe
Posnanski writes in “The Life
and Afterlife of Harry Hou-
dini.” Years later, long after
the Weisz (now Weiss) family
had moved to America, his
dying father, an out-of-work
rabbi in Manhattan, reminded
Erik (now Ehrich) of an ear-
lier promise to take care of
his mother, Cecilia. Nearly
a quarter-century after his
father’s death, having become
famous as the Great Houdini,
the performer demanded that
one employer pay him in gold
coins, and then took a sack of them
to Cecilia. Reminding her of the com-
mitment he had made to his father, he
asked that she hold out her apron
and, as Adam Begley adroitly
puts it in his “Houdini: The
Elusive American,” “poured
the coins, a tinkling golden
cascade, into his mother’s
lap.” When she died a year
later, Houdini “mourned extrav-
agantly,” Mr. Begley writes,
and was never quite the same
again.
Young Ehrich had recovered
with comparative ease from his fa-
ther’s death, in part because he fixed his
attention on another father figure, Jean-
Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805-71), known
as the father of modern magic. Ehrich
read the Frenchman’s memoirs and knew
what he wanted to do with his life. Soon
he began to perform as Houdini, the
name a tribute to this man he called his
“guide and hero.” But later in life, in best
Oedipal fashion, Houdini published a
book called “The Unmasking of Robert-
Houdin” (1908)—a “brutal diatribe,” Mr.
Begley writes—accusing the long-dead
magician of many sins of which Houdini
himself was guilty, including “supreme
egotism and utter disregard for the
truth,” pilfering his magic tricks from
others, being a mediocre performer of
magic and, most boldly, having used a
ghostwriter, as he was doing in that very
book.
Still later in life, when he met the
author of the Sherlock Holmes stories,
Arthur Conan Doyle, a man he called a
“literarytitan...justly famous as
myself,” Houdini sent him a copy of his
Robert-Houdin takedown. Conan Doyle
should have seen this as a warning, even
if Houdini had not consciously meant
it as such. But once the two men became
close friends, based in part on Conan
Doyle’s belief that Houdini’s act demon-
strated the workings of the super-
natural, the showman began to attack
the older man’s belief in spiritualism.
Toward the end of his life, Houdini was
as famous for unmasking mediums
and other spiritualists as he was for his
dramatic escapes. He and Conan Doyle,
their friendship over, became public
antagonists.
And what was it about Houdini’s need
to escape, to be handcuffed or chained
or both in tight spots or high above
a city pavement or in his signature
contraption, the Chinese Water Torture
Cell, a water-filled box in which he had
been locked? Why the rituals of self-
bondage, the histrionics of self-libera-
tion, the need to flirt with death in this
particular way?
In their new biographies of Houdini,
Messrs. Posnanski and Begley eschew
this sort of overt psychoanalysis, al-
though each is clearly aware that in aand Mr. Posnanski, a sportswriter
who wrote a bestselling book about
Joe Paterno, take pains to separate
truth from myth. Even the stories
about Houdini’s promise to his
father and his keeping of that
promise with the gold coins are
offered with a grain of salt.
Brevity has its rewards and its
challenges. In Mr. Begley’s book,
the necessity to get the basic
facts of Houdini’s life into a
compact series format leaves
less space for the development
of scenes than a reader might
hope for, and also fewer oppor-
tunities to stand back from his
subject and offer historical or
cultural perspective. Flashes
of Mr. Begley’s charm or wit—
“Conan Doyle was so em-
phatically the perfect English
gentleman that it comes as no
surprise to learn that he was
to a degree self-invented”—
create a longing for more such
moments.
Mr. Posnanski’s solution to
the problem of having 500
predecessors is less satisfactory.
His is a book about the writing
of a book about Houdini. We tag
along as he contacts experts on the
great man and the history of magic,
and people whose lives have been
shaped by their helpless infatu-
ation with him. We meet the
only comparable living illu-
sionist, David Copperfield,
and explore his remarkable
collection of magic artifacts,
and are introduced to a string
of lesser magicians and failed
or former or would-be magi-
cians. At one point, we just sit
with the writer at his desk as
he cuts a deck of cards. Scenes
from Houdini’s life are similarly shuf-
fled into Mr. Posnanski’s narrative, but
the overall effect is to put Houdini at
a remove.
More than a few of the people in
Mr. Posnanski’s book were drawn into
magic by a particular poster of Houdini
as the King of Cards, where he is young
and handsomely curly haired, his out-
stretched arms supporting numbers of
cards artfully arranged. But both books
agree that Houdini was probably not a
very good card magician and, except in
one important way, was not
anything special as a magi-
cian in general. That spe-
cialty, which he more or
less invented, was escape.
After touring as a magician
to not much effect with his
young wife, Bess, Houdini
began to seek publicity by
showing up at police sta-
tions, asking to be hand-
cuffed and freeing himself
in less than a minute. Soon
he moved on to multiple
handcuffs and then, billed
as the Handcuff King, pro-
gressed to chains, shackles,
straitjackets, jail cells or some combina-
tion of all of them. The cops, then the
local press and eventually the public
were all impressed by these preternatu-
ral escapes. When suspicions were raised
that he used keys to break free, he began
to perform his police-station demon-
stration completely nude, having asked
the cops to inspect every possible hiding
place.
“He did not of course appear in the
buff with ladies present,” Mr. Begley
writes, “yet no one, man or woman, who
saw his act was unaware of his habit of
disrobing in police stations, and he often
appeared onstage scantily clad—in a
bathing suit, for example.” His sex
appeal was undoubtedly part of his early
fame. He was darkly and exotically hand-
some, powerfully built, and athletically
graceful as he wriggled his way out of
more and more dangerous situations.
His mendacity was linked not just to
his instinct for publicity but also to his
deeply competitive nature, a need always
PleaseturntopageC8BYROBERTWILSONESCAPE ARTIST
Harry Houdini, from an American
vaudeville poster, ca. 1906.ALAMYHoudini:
The Elusive American
By Adam Begley
Yale, 216 pages, $26The Life and Afterlife
of Harry Houdini
By Joe Posnanski
Avid Reader, 316 pages, $28BOOKS
Four for the Road
The first wave of
American foreign
correspondentsC12Rebel Cinderella
Rose Pastor Stokes,
from rags to riches
to revolution C9What made
Houdini tick?
Why the
rituals of self-
bondage, the
histrionics of
self-liberation,
the need to flirt
with death?