Hiding the elephant
by John-Ivan Palmer
[ bookreviews ]
Aren't magicians a kick? Go ahead, kick one. The Great Jeffo, the Wizard of Ah's, Marvin the Clown. Sneak up and light one with a book of matches and really watch the sparks fly. Bring some pagan mystery into your life.
That's pretty much what magic has come to these days, at least in the gang-infested county fair circuit of Southern California, according to a magician I spoke to recently. But if it all seems cynical, it's no more cynical than what magicians did to each other in Jim Steinmeyer's Hiding the Elephant, his strange history of 19th century stage magic.
Steinmeyer is eminently qualified. He lives in the rarefied world of the illusion consultant, with a precious few of the highest paid magicians as his clients. Stating frankly that he is not an entertainer, Steinmeyer describes his early education as a magic store fruit-fly. In his description of Magic Inc., the shop of wonders in Chicago, he mentions "the old professionals standing in the corner... whispering in a weird sort of shorthand." My father was likely one of those old professionals, and I remember going into Magic Inc. with him many times on one piece of magician's business or another. But I was more interested in Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil than in deKolta's Spring Flower trick, so the cloistered cliquishness of the place made me fidgety and I couldn't wait to get out of there.
I had the opposite feeling, however, when I first read Steinmeyer's Art and Artifice and Other Essays on Illusion (1998), one of only 700 copies hermetically distributed, in which he used the illusion business as a launch point for Nabokovian themes of enchantment and deception. From the mountain of dreck so eagerly snapped up by hobbyists, here was a rarity - a virtuoso work of conjuring literature. Artifice seems to have grown tail, tusks, and toenails to become The Elephant, and as it has expanded to include ever more divagational artifices - interesting as they may be - they sometimes come at the expense of the aesthetic clarity of the first book.
An impressive amount of research, however, went into Hiding the Elephant, and since magic is, by definition, a business of secrets, Steinmeyer has conducted the secret research that only he could do, leading you into the back rooms of magic, and the letters, archival papers, diagrams and fusty memories of old magicians reluctant to share. Those years as a fruit-fly have paid off.
Steinmeyer begins his genealogy of deception with the special effects of early 19th century melodramas - plot-savers involving trapdoors, doubles, and false panels that made forgettable characters disappear. When Henry Dircks discovered how a mirror could put a ghost on the stage, "everything in magic changed." There was a population explosion of spookies in the world's theaters.
Magic quickly plunged into a Euclidian world of sight lines, bisected angles, diagonal extensions, safe zones, and the treacherous no-man's-land of extreme side angles. Real people - not just their reflections - could suddenly appear and disappear with increasingly apparent impossibility. For the first time in human history you could enjoy the sight of a dismembered head setting - alive and talking - on a parlor table.
At the same time, the magic business turned into a mirror house of thievery. Magicians tried patenting their tricks, but other magicians simply flocked to the patent office and helped themselves. Spies and moles skulked into magic theaters and hired themselves out as stage hands in a squalid squid tangle of theft and backstabbing. All that just to put a smile on little Johnny's face.
How could it be any other way? Considering human nature and the money and glory at stake with tricks like Maskelyne's Levitation, or Psycho, the Card Playing Midget, who wouldn't seize the opportunity to plunder first and mumble away the ethics later? Isn't that what sovereign nations do? What magician, even a Harry Kellar, or a David Devant, would be so foolish as to invent their own tricks 100% of the time, and try to stay in business as the only one not stealing someone else's?
Early in the book Steinmeyer tells of how he schmoozed another magician over dinner, not out of friendship, but to weasel out a secret, ending with the comment, "That's the real way to learn about the art." But if that doesn't work, there's always other means.
Steinmeyer adjures from the beginning that to understand the Golden Age of Magic in the 19th century, you should be "thinking like a magician." And apparently that means thinking simultaneously like Thomas Edison and a rat.
For example, John Nevil Maskelyne thought like a magician. The Davenport Brothers had been demonstrating their Spirit Cabinet hoax on a British tour in 1865. They were tied up inside a closed box where "spirits" rattled tambourines and blasted trumpets. At a show in Cheltenham, Maskelyne took a seat in that dreaded area of "the extreme side," and managed to see how the trick was done. He stood up, stopped the show, and announced he would duplicate the séance in that very town, three months later. And did.
Staying one step ahead of the illusion snatchers, Maskelyne modified the Davenport Brothers' cabinet into a bizarre skit, where he and an assistant escaped from the cabinet, Maskelyne in a dress and bonnet and his assistant dressed as a gorilla. With thieves by now literally coming out of the woodwork, the trick soon evolved into a short play called The Mystic Freaks of Gyges, with characters appearing and disappearing all over the place in a plot described as "pure nonsense." Magic is not, alas, a fine art, but a trend in popular entertainment. As Steinmeyer says at one point, "Shakespeare had done pretty well without the Dirckson Phantasmagoria."
Maskelyne battled his competitors in the courts, pontificated from the stage (where he was fond of wearing women's clothes as part of his stunts, mustache and all), and engaged in the most common of all illusions - out and out lies to discredit and crush all those competitors who were no better than him.
One of the more egregious examples of theft and all around nastiness is the iconic Harry Houdini, who never met a magician he didn't like (to kill). Not satisfied with his life as a singing clown in a grubby side show, Erich Weiss stole the surname of the French magician Robert-Houdin, giving new meaning to the phrase, "may I have your name, please?" After Robert-Houdin died, Houdini prevailed upon his distraught widow, hoping to get his hands on her husband's tricks, but when she didn't want to see him, Houdini took revenge on the dead man by writing a book exposing him. He claimed Robert-Houdin was an "ignoramus" who copied other magician's tricks and that his famous memoirs were actually composed by a ghost writer. (They were not.) Steinmeyer points out that Houdini himself was a blatant trick-thief and his book exposing Robert-Houdin was ghost written, and concludes with perfect weld, "Houdini wasn't unmasking Robert-Houdin, he was unmasking himself."
Unkown to the public, but revealed by Steinmeyer, Houdini's escapes were meticulously planned hoaxes with numerous confederates and rigged equipment. In spite of his huge success as an expert self-promoter, Houdini was still regarded by other magicians as laughable. Steinmeyer writes that watching Houdini "trying to play the role of elegant conjurer was like watching a wrestler play the violin."
Few females turn up in this racket. One of them is Jenny, the elephant of the book's title, vanished by Houdini with a clumsy mirror effect copied from Charles Morritt, the alcoholic hypnotist, who loved mirrors so much he literally slept with them. The stereotypical "lovely assistant" is absent from the Golden Age of Magic because Victorian dresses made concealment in boxes and mirrored cabinets impractical. But after legs and short wardrobe became acceptable after the turn of the century, they blossomed forth on-stage generically.
Steinmeyer tells the story of PT Selbit, credited for sawing the first woman in half. Shortly after the 1905 Women's Vote Bill failed in Parliament, Selbit managed to hire the notorious radical feminist, Christabel Pankhurst, to be the human log. She had been jailed numerous times for terrorist bombings and inciting riots and was better known to the public than Selbit. Outside the theater, ambulances chased back and forth with sirens blaring, while stage hands drenched the gutters with buckets of stage blood. When Ms Pankhurst was finally sawed in half, the crowd went wild.
The sawing trick was quickly stolen by the American magician Horace Goldin, whom Selbit dragged repeatedly (and unsuccessfully) into court. Meanwhile, the grisly Richiardi pinched the trick, but when he sawed through his woman, he arranged for fountains of blood and buckets of viscera to fly horrifically all over the stage as she screamed in terror. As Steinmeyer writes, "Magicians have an uneasy, debilitating relationship with secrets."
When Steinmeyer brings this bizarre history to an end in the early 20th century, you feel you are witnessing the extinction of an exotic race of people. World War I put an end to the mysterious tribe of kooky conjurers and their vanishing elephants and donkeys, replacing it with an enduring cynicism that has lasted to this day. Movies and radio invaded the natural habitat of the magic theaters, driving them to extinction. The geriatric Howard Thurston ended up doing six shows a day as opening act for a movie, and literally worked himself to death. Harry Kellar lovingly rebuilt his Levitation of Princess Karnac illusion, but it sat in his garage - unused - until he died in 1922. David Devant, inventor of the incredible Mascot Moth, the illusion where a woman, alone, and on a bare stage, literally disappears, ended up "a sad, crumpled figure in a wheelchair," expelled from the magic society for selling his secrets to make enough money to eat. And to further prove that character is destiny, Houdini finally succumbed to the world of hype and impulse he so effectively created as a present day legacy. After claiming a punch-proof stomach, a college kid in Montreal snuck up and, in one of the more dramatic collisions of illusion and Euclidian truth, buried his fist in the windbag and killed him.
The invention of the impossible in the 19th century is all the more fascinating compared to the impossibility of the same invention in the 21st. The Golden Age of Magic is now the Plastic Age of Gizmos. Houdini vanished the elephant, but modernity vanished magic. Steinmeyer's opus is the retro-shop of lost wonders, flies and all.
