To the Editors:
As an amateur magician of long standing, I was naturally interested in Daniel Mark Epstein’s “The Case of Houdini” (October, 1986). His attempt to refute a showman who insisted that magicians always use natural means will convince no magicians because Mr. Epstein’s arguments ignore the best scholarship on magic.
It is true that Houdini left no explanation of his escape from the Siberian Transport Cell, but Milbourne Christopher, a distinguished magician and scholar of magic, has pointed out that “it is likely that he stretched his arm through the barred window until he could reach the lock and opened it with a pick.” (Houdini: The Untold Story, p. 74.) It is not true that “no one has the slightest notion” how Houdini did his Chinese Water Torture Cell illusion. Mr. Epstein seeks to make something out of the fact that Hardeen, who inherited the equipment from his brother, never got in it. But as Christopher points out: “Not that he didn’t know the secret; he was too tall to fit inside it” (p. 265). Moreover, Houdini went to court to stop two German entertainers from copying his illusion, as they had done.
Houdini’s vanishing of an elephant did baffle some magicians (but not all); even so, there’s no mystery about its origin. He purchased the rights to it from the inventor Charles Morritt, who had “vanished” a donkey (p. 153). Mr. Epstein also attempts to find something supernatural about the three-second timing of the Metamorphosis (Substitution Trunk) illusion, but it all depends upon when you start counting. I have seen other magicians do the change that fast also—if you count from the time when you last “see” the magician’s hands on the curtain to the time when it drops to reveal the girl assistant standing on the trunk. Misdirection in the presentation is what allows time for the exchange to take place.
Epstein’s conjuring with Bess Houdini’s letter to Conan Doyle is also misleading. Her “double-talk” about spiritual aid is comprehensible in the context of her writing to a great admirer of her dead husband, an innocent about the methods of magicians, and an uncritical spiritualist. The passage makes it plausible that she is reassuring him that she will not be “offended by anything you say for him or about him,” so she keeps faith with Houdini’s naturalism, while tactfully not stamping too hard or rudely on Sir Arthur’s pet superstition.
Houdini was remarkable as an immigrant, a risk-taker, a showman, and a magician, but it is no tribute to his memory to subvert his own rationalism by specious arguments about the supernatural.
Cushing Strout
Professor of American Studies
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York
Daniel Mark Epstein replies:
The dignity of Milbourne Christopher is ill-served by calling attention to that woolly speculation on the Siberian Van Escape, for it demonstrates the embarrassing lengths to which scholars are driven in an effort to resolve the mystery. That Houdini picked the lock on the van is far from likely. The narrow barred window was out of reach of the lock, as on most “paddy wagons.” Houdini would have to have been a contortionist, which he was, with the arms of a gigantic baboon, which he had not, in order to pick a lock that he could not have seen if he could have reached it. Milbourne Christopher did not make his reputation as an escape artist.
My point about the Chinese Water Torture Cell illusion is simply that Hardeen could not do the escape even after studying the instructions. Hardeen was a working professional, however tall he was, and the trick was worth good money on the circuit. If Hardeen had had the knowledge and the physical resources to manage the escape, it would have been worth his while to rebuild the contraption to fit a colossus. As for the Germans, I have not heard of them. If they had discovered the method of the illusion it would have turned up on the black market in magic tricks that thrives and has ever thrived, and sooner or later some entertainer would have revived it, if he could.
It is true that Houdini purchased the rights to the Vanishing Donkey from Charles Morritt. But need I point out to the Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University that a donkey is not an elephant? Charles Morritt did not vanish a ten-thousand-pound elephant as did Houdini, but a rather meager donkey who might have been hard to see from the balcony if he faced upstage. The trick is just not in the same class as Houdini’s; it is closer in scale to making a dog disappear, which I have done myself.
My essay clearly states that the Houdinis’ perfection of the Substitution Trunk illusion was the beginning of the magician’s own curiosity about the supersensible element of his technique. In action he seems to have experienced moments of unconsciousness in which time and materials lost their accustomed values. This is discussed at some length in Raymund Fitzsimons’s book Death and the Magician, which is by far the most authoritative and up-to-date work on Houdini’s life and career.
The letter of Bess Houdini is ambiguous by any standards, so let Professor Strout make of it what he will. I suspect from the tone of his letter that the Professor is unsettled by the mystery of Houdini’s acts, as most of us are. But it is better to be unsettled by a mystery than comforted by irrational solutions.