J

"Look, I'm sorry to cut you off-it's just that I

really can't stand listening to other peO'Jle's dreams."

with shacldes, 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,callcd "The Chinese Water
Torture Cell, "he was lowttcd,head fust,
into a laige glass-fronted box .filled with
watei: Sometimes knowingly, sometimes
not, Houdini evoked actual crudties-
slavcry and imprisonment, people cast
into filthy cells and tormented for years.
Of the glass box, he said, "It smacks of
the Dark Ages." He burrowul into the
unconscious of the human race, evok-
ing types of public sadism that had been
suppressed, only to reemerge in later
eras: his stunts looked backward to the
ducking stools of the witch t:rWs and
forward to such pmctices as watcrboard-
ing and "enhanced interrogation" under
the George W. Bush Administration.
There are daredevils who scale the
Eiffd 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

68 THE NEY~ MARCH 30, 2020

stuntmen retire into knobby oblivion.

Houdini's strangeness and ambition-

the nakedness, the liberationist tri-

umph&--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 havt: 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 cult:ists---who gather in clubs

and at conventions, rendering homage,

repeating stunts, exchanging the tini-

est details of Houdini's life. In "Hou-

dini: The ElusiveAmerican"(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."

Md Brooks: 'Tm just an entertainer.j

It is impoeStole, however, not to make

a symbol out of a man hanging upside

down in a straitjacket, sixty feet above

T'l.ffies Square.Almost from the begin-

ning, Harry Houdini suggested some

larger principle of being.

H

e\WS born Erik Wea Oater Amer-

icanlzed, sort of; to Ehrich Weiss)

in Budapest on March 24, '1.874-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 :Oat 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 shaw business as the t

way out of ghetto jobs like stitching ~

garments and rolling cigars. It was the ~

:first of his escapes. ~ z

There is a photo of him as a skinny, B

angry-looking teen-age& Like TModore 0

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 ii: