English, a language that Cecilia never
spoke. Houdini sat there quietly, thanked
his hosts, and departed.
He wanted to reach his mother, but
he knew that Spiritualism was a con. In
the eighteen-nineties, he and Bess had
dabbled in it themselves, researching
names at local graveyards the night be-
fore summoning the dead in public. In
the wake of the Atlantic City disaster,
Houdini, now thoroughly enraged, de-
cided to expose the entire movement.
He took on.f.amous mediums and began
lecturing on "Fraudulent Spiritualistic
Phenomena." He testified before Con-
gress about the Spiritualist menace.
Travelling all over the country, he in-
tem.tpted ~.sometimes in disguise
(beard,hump),shouting, "I am Houdini!"
He flipped over tables and demanded.
that the lights be turned on, trashing
the event for performers and hopeful
listeners alila:.. Why did he care so much?
He and the Spiritualists were both en-
gaged in show business. But the Spiritu-
alists, he thought, preyed on the emo-
tions of people in mourning. At the
same time, he may have seen Spiritualism
as a covert personal assault. Any sug-
gestion of miracles, of God interven-
ing, of spirits getting into the act, took
away from the self-generated powers
of the Great Houdini.
What he believed in was the art of
magic. Starting when he was young, he
assembled books, posters, leaflets, and
artifacts from magic history, which he
loaded into his Harlem town house-in
effect, his own museum. He set himself
up as the arbiter of who mattered and
who didn't. More than a half century
later, Ricky Jay did the same thing, with
equal fervor; magic, an art based on
ephemeral moments and illusion, needs
its historians. But Harry Houdini was
too egotistical to be fair to everyone. He
attacked his progenitor, Robert-Howlin,
and hounded his own imitators, as ifhis
risk-taking earned him the right to be
the only man on the stage. Although he
was the president of the Society of .Amer-
ican Magicians for almost a decade, he
had no serious disciples-just people ob-
sessed with him, an obsession that, in re-
cent decades, has taken in some reckless
kids who have died trying to do their
own versions of his stunts. Less griev-
ously, the Houdini cultists, as Posnanski
chronicles, devote themselmi to the de-
70 THE NEY~ MARCH 30, 2020tails of his schedule, estimating the truth
of this or that rumor about him. They
compare notes and try to top one an-
other. They won't let go of him; they ap-
pear to be conducting a seance that's per-
petually in session.T
he climber, it has been said, assaults
the mountain "because it's there."
But for Houdini nothing was there, ex-
cept the extinction that he teased and
eluded with more and more bizarre fuats.
For him, a failure of nerve might have
been worse than any calamity. Begley
lays to rest the legend that Houdini's
death, in October, 1926, resulted from a
punch to the stomach, though there were
punches that month, administered in
a Montreal hotel room by a McGill
student who (with Houdini's consent)
sought to test the popubr myth that the
great man could withstand any blow. But
Begley convincingly argues that Hou-
dini was ill beforehand. A couple of days
after the Montreal incident, he took the
train to Detroit and, refusing to go to
the hospi121, performed his opening-night
show in feverish agony. He died, of a
burst appendix and peritonitis, at the age
of fifty-two, on October .]1st.
He left behind many unfulfilled long-
ings and a legion ofinteipxetets.In a 2001
study, "Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect
Man," the cultural historian John F.
Kasson noted that a man or a woman
held naked by uniformed police exists
in a state of abject humiliation, with only
punishment or death in store.. Houdini
not only escaped; on a couple of occa-
sions, in penitentiaries, he moved pris-
oners tiom one locked cell to another.
He was a showoff, a tease, a provoca-
teur. "The people over here, especially
Germany, France, Saxony, and Bohemia,
fear the Police so much, in fact the po-
lice are all mighty," he wrote home, when
he was twenty-seven, "and I am the first
man that has ever dared them, that is
my success." As Kasson says, Houdini's
mockery of the police may not have been
political in its intent, but it remains stir-
ring as an anti-authoritarian flourish. In
Michel Foucault's inescapable tcxt"Dis-
cipline and Punish," the philosopher's
vision of modernity centers on the sub-
jection of bodies to the protocols of vi-
olence and submission; Houdini, as if
anticipating his future imprisonment by
theory, defied those protocols.How much of the chained-beauty act,
with its bondage-and-discipline over-
tones, was a case of necessary stagecraft
stumbling innocently into perversion?
And how much of it was a knowing
lure? On the sw:race, innocence reigned:
women were barred from the naked
performances in city jails and prisons
(men, ostensibly, would not have 1nst:ful
thoughts). Houdini himself seems not
to have attached sexual meaning to any-
thing he did, and perhaps we shouldn't,
either. The male torso is a common
enough sight. What's c:xtnordinary in
Houdini's case is that he presented a
naked body bound. Looking at photo-
graphs of these events, you inevitably
think of Michelangelo's "Bound Slave"
and "Rebellious Slave" sculptures. The
figures, as many have said, appear to be
struggling to emerge from the stone they
are carved. in. Houdini sculpted his own
body, and reCnacted the annihilation and
renewal of that body.
He was, for many, the ultimate immi-
grant su.a:ess story--a sort of diminutive
Liberty holding aloft a pair of empty
handcuffs as his torch. He was the out-
sider who :fights his way out of obscure
and even sordid circumstances and finds
distinction and public acclaim. He freed
the Jewish body from immigrant restraint,
giving rise to forlorn hopes that he could
have led another kind of exodus. In
"Humboldt's Gift," Saul Bellow has his
hero, Qmlie Citrine, remark about Hou-
dini, "I once speculared whether he hadni
had an intimation of the holocaust and
was working out ways to escape from the
death camps.Ah! If ooly European Jewry
had learned what he knew. "One can hear
in that remark a note of mordant disap-
pointment as well as awe.
Begley, countering Bellow, writes, a
little 80UI'ly, "Houdini was not interestM
in the meaning of his stunts, and in a
sense they were meaningless. They ac-
complished nothing. They advanced no
cause, proved no point. ..• He h1>erated
only himsel£" And yet Begiey's vivid ac-
count can't help but invite us to see met-
aphor, and meaning. "Out he popped,"
Begley says, describing the end of the
water-torture act, "gasping, eyes blood-
shot, lips flecked with foam." At a cer-
tain point of danger, the queasily erotic
spectacle passes over into images of re-
birth, a limitless freedom that neverthe-
less has to be asserted again and again. •