I’ve had books about Houdini since I was a kid (and fumbled around with a few magic tricks myself too). Now I have Google Earth, so it was only a matter of time before I got around to tracking his greatest escapes around the world via satellite photography. That tour is now online here, and this website, “Houdini Reappears”, pretty much follows its wanderings. It’s wonderful to see the places where these things happened a century ago, but there’s so much more to his story that even Google Earth can’t possibly gets its arms around.

I’m not implying that this website can tell the whole story, either. In fact it’s far from comprehensive. There is much, much more to Houdini’s story, so many incredible things that really did happen — and on the factual side of legend — that a genuinely wonderful movie still waits to be made about him. I have no idea how they could fit everything in to just two hours, of course.

The purists of stage magic always grumble about Houdini. Even if they allow that he was the greatest escape artist in history, they’re fond of belittling his skills as a conjuror. The public didn’t even regard him as a magician so much as a “man of mystery”, a showman who specialised in stunts, said Walter Gibson, who collaborated with him on books. “Some of his magic was comparatively mediocre,” he said, adding, “Today the fame of Houdini is more exaggerated than ever. From this it may be concluded that the alchemy of time can transmute gross publicity into golden legend.”

The critics are right. His sleight-of-hand wasn’t all that sleight. There was little finesse to his stagecraft. “It was awful stuff,” Orson Welles moaned. Better illusionists abound in the story of magic, their fame living on despite the curmudgeonly Houdini doing his best to denigrate his rivals and exaggerate his own prowess. But for all the probable truth in these charges, I think Welles and Gibson and the rest are shortchanging the legend.

Harry won’t go away. There’s so much more to this man’s tale that other biographies of magicians pale in comparison. It’s not the bright glow of his well-stoked celebrity that continues to attract interest so much as the resonant and recognisable revelations that can be found in the Houdini history. Everyone can find something in it that’s meaningful to them personally — meaningful and often moving.

As I searched on Google Earth for the locations where Houdini hung from skyscrapers, leapt off piers, slipped free of leg irons and chased the spooks who haunted him, it became gradually clear that most of the structures where his magic took place are now gone. The theatres long ago turned into cinemas and were then torn down so that something slicker could be built for a modernising world. Even the hospital where he died has vanished like a million-pound elephant.

I still have three Houdini books (and wish I had more). One is Walter Gibson’s collection of Harry’s writings about magic, with a lot of the tricks explained but in a couched, manneristic language that I’ve never found helpful or very interesting. I don’t think Harry’s intention was to reveal his secrets at all. The other two books are biographies: Harry Kellock’s “His Life Story” from 1928, written with the help of Houdini’s widow Bess two years after he died, and Ruth Brandon’s 1993 “The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini”.

A quick synopsis: Brandon took Kellock’s book, sometimes almost word for word, and wrapped it in amateur psychology. With forays into Nabokov, Yukio Mishima and the Greek gods, she ran the facts through a mythology scanner, trying to answer the questions I’ve posed in the introduction at the top of this page. She is very good at placing Harry’s Jewish faith in context regarding his approaches to both life and the stage, and wonderfully describes the paradox of a man who had so much personal vitality and yet was obsessed with dying. “It was as if he sucked life from the jaws of death,” she writes.

And Brandon is no doubt right when she suggests that Houdini reached moments of transcendence and catharsis in the lead-up to and execution of his most daring stunts. I think she gets carried away with speculation on shamanism, about Harry’s possible sexual thrill in bondage, and with statements like, “His life was tolerable only if he could reassure himself, time after time, that he could defeat [death].” The results of all of her Freudian analysis are intriguing … but ultimately heartless. Ruth Brandon is no Joseph Campbell.

Nor am I, but I’m going to sift through those same facts, consider the places where the big events took place, weigh up what was poking at Houdini, and see if a more recognisable human being doesn’t come through from beyond. I believe the answers to the questions lie in the muscle and sinew as much as the mind and the soul.

I have the benefit of a few additional facts, as well, some gleaned from the fans on the Net, others delivered in the news, like the announcement in 2007 that some people want to dig Houdini up again and make sure about what killed him. He always said that, if it were possible, he’d stay in touch after he died. He’s certainly keeping his word.

For much of 2007 I’ve had Google email me news alerts on “houdini”, and there were several items every single day. Most by far were mundane uses of his name in the sense of someone pulling off an unforeseen escape, often a sports team evading relegation or a particular athlete cutting through a line of defence to score. Sometimes it was a politician avoiding doom, or failing to, such as Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe in September, of whom a rival said colourfully, “We are watching Houdini finally drowning in his chains.”

The two paintings accompanying this post are by Whitney Bedford, exhibited at the Cherry and Martin gallery in Los Angeles in the autumn of 2007. The concept is extraordinary: art as magic. Bedford used oil paint and unstable inks on unprimed paper, so that the works will eventually disappear, that is to say, escape.

The portraits, says the gallery’s website, “complement the ‘adventure of death’ found in Bedford’s previous shipwreck series. Here, however, the possibility of death is condensed into this enigmatic persona who enraptured audiences with dangerous feats and uncompromising artistry during a tumultuous time in our country’s history.

“Bedford’s timely investigation into Houdini reflects the existence of a new audience for fatalistic showmanship and self-made celebrity, especially as a metaphor for an artist’s career within the art world.”

Occasionally the news items funnelled my way from Google were “about” Harry himself, as when a burglar was caught after breaking into the Houdini Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania. But of the big news I was waiting for — a court ruling on whether his body was going to be exhumed for the autopsy that wasn’t performed when he died — I’m still waiting. One wonders if this is what it feels like to attend those Houdini seances every Halloween.

News is expected and does not arrive … but that’s not to say it will never come. There is always the possibility.

Paul Dorsey
Bangkok, Thailand
October 2007

This post is being uploaded on October 31, 2007, the 81st anniversary of Houdini’s death and, as usual, big names in magic and people who are in some other way linked to him will gather for a seance, their forgiveable amusement hidden behind a sheen of sombre respect for his memory and his hard-earned fame.

Meanwhile, this past Saturday, professional and amateur illusionists right around the planet paid tribute to Houdini in the second Worldwide Escape Artist Relay. About 90 rope and lock specialists in at least 13 countries took part, nearly doubling the scale of the inaugural WEAR two years ago.

The event’s registration was organised by Ring 362 of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, whose website had predicted that “men and women, young and old, novices and seasoned pros emerging from retirement, will unite to restore the Art of Escape to its rightful place in the public imagination!” The registration page itself is an eye-opener about the state of escapology today.

And all this past week, in Harry’s memory, it was Magic Week in Maine — at least unofficially, because for the first time in four years the state’s Democrat governor, John Baldacci, refused to formally proclaim the celebration. His rationale: “Due to the high volume of requests we are receiving for proclamations, our policy has been reviewed and we are no longer able to issue proclamations for hobbies.”

The word “hobbies” set off a firestorm in the area’s magic community, whose professional prestidigitators protested that, not only do they make a living doing tricks, such collective events raise a lot of money for charity. They responded to the political snub with — what else — magic: They held a seance in Bar Harbor, Maine, a town that had gone ahead and designated its own Magic Week, and raised the spirit of Percival Proctor Baxter, who was state governor back in Houdini’s day, and he happily proclaimed the week “for eternity”.