Unsuspecting Souls

by Barry Sanders

  For thousands and thousands of fans in the nineteenth century, no one, and of course no machine, could surpass the king of the conjurers, Harry Houdini. What they did not know is that he, too, exploited the new technologies to make his act even more impressive and spectacular. Born Erich Weiss in Hungary, a Jewish immigrant, he named himself after the great French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin. Houdini rose in prominence as the highest paid popular entertainer in the nineteenth century, and amassed an enormous fortune by performing his illusions in almost every country around the world, before kings and queens and presidents. In the same way nineteenth-century social conditions made the twin pursuits of the ghost story and motion pictures possible, so those same conditions helped create the phenomenon called Houdini.

  Contemporary audiences made Houdini enormously successful. Just as audiences demanded more spectacular special effects from the Lumières, they demanded from Houdini more and bigger ghosts, and wilder and more miraculous illusions. Fool us, stupefy us, fill us back up with wonder once again, they seemed to be saying. Snatch us out of this dull, mechanical world and show us what reality might look like if the world were re-enchanted and if we truly believed. If Harry Houdini had not appeared on the scene when he did, in the late nineteenth century, audiences would certainly have called forth some other master magician, someone like Georges Méliès, and guaranteed his success, as well.

  Over one hundred years have passed since Houdini’s debut, and still not a single illusionist—not even David Blaine or David Copperfield, with all the state-of-the-art technological support imaginable—has been able to top Houdini as the supreme master of the art. Nineteenth-century audiences crowded into the most elegant theaters, in this country as well as in Britain and all across Europe, to sit spellbound as Harry Houdini made the world disappear. Illusion simply represented the age in a most spectacular way, and Houdini, in fine-tuning his most familiar and formidable tricks, placed the idea of disappearance into everyone’s imagination. Better: He showed it to them in action. His name, like Sarah Bernhardt or P. T. Barnum, became part of common speech. “He’s a regular Houdini,” people would say about someone who seemed to have superhuman powers, or who could slither out of tight situations. He performed high up on that ghostlike structure, the Brooklyn Bridge; deep down underwater; in the cramped space of a jail cell; in the vast expanse of an Indian desert; in the Underground in London; and on the Jungfrau in Switzerland. People were primed, both psychologically and emotionally, for Harry Houdini, or any other master illusionist, to take the most solid objects and have them melt into thin air before their very startled eyes. The nineteenth-century audience was a prime enabler, an accomplice in every staged illusion.

  Houdini holds the title as the most astounding escape artist of all time, but early in his career he performed as a “spirit medium,” raising the dead and making their presence noisily apparent. (It certainly did not hurt his reputation as a conjurer of ghosts that he died on Halloween.) Houdini could cause the departed to rap out Morse code messages from inside the walls of a theater, ring bells, overturn tables, knock off the caps of audience members, and just generally create havoc. Houdini had fun, and audiences had even more fun. And they thanked the maestro by paying him huge amounts of money to make them believe in the invisible and the impossible.

  Houdini never gave up his dedication to ghosts, working almost his entire professional life at perfecting what was for him the ultimate ethereal illusion. For years and years he broadcast his desire to perform what he called the Great Feat. He wrote essays describing its details; he generated a stir in the press about his lifelong theatrical desire. Here’s what he wanted: As he declared over and over again—the consummate showman generating excitement—Harry Houdini would turn one of the largest mammals into a ghost. Or, to put it more directly, he would cause an elephant to disappear.

  Anyone, Houdini believed, could make people disappear. That was no big deal, since they already shared such close associations with the ghostly. And besides, people could willingly collude with the illusionist. But not an elephant. An elephant, as Houdini so carefully pointed out, had a mind of its own. Although he worked on it for almost fifty years, only once, at the height of his career, did he successfully pull off that illusion. Perhaps he could have done it whenever he wanted, but he milked the trick for all it was worth.

  To negotiate his consummate trick, Houdini, ever the showman, demanded the immensity of the Hippodrome and the enormity of its stage, the largest, at that moment, in North America. The elephant he chose stood over eight feet tall and weighed more than three tons, weighing out at 6,100 pounds. In that Moorish-inspired palace on Sixth Avenue, in downtown Manhattan, before a capacity crowd of over 5,200 astonished people, Houdini made a full-grown Asian elephant, Jennie, and its trainer totally vanish. The audience literally fell silent, struck dumb and amazed by the enormity of what Houdini had pulled off. Other illusionists tried, desperately, to repeat the illusion—with absolutely no success.

  A PROMISING STAGE MAGICIAN named Georges Méliès owned the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, in Paris, but when he came across the new cinema, he found a more powerful kind of magic. He very quickly manipulated the mechanics of filmmaking toward what we today would call special effects. Méliès attended the Lumières’ screening of their actualités on December 28, 1895, and the following month bought his own camera, determined to get on film the great magic acts of the period. The connections between magic and film, however, immediately struck him, which led him to exploit in particular the dreamlike quality of motion pictures by using certain techniques like double exposure to create the illusion of people appearing and then quickly disappearing. Born in 1861, Méliès made some five hundred short movies up to 1912, on average almost ten movies a year. He died in 1938. Historians of film rank him as possibly the greatest filmmaker of fantasy and the surreal in all of cinema.

  One reviewer credited his films with exploring “transformations and collisions: among humans, objects, animals and various creatures with unearthly powers; between mechanical and natural forces, and, of course (and so pleasurably), between visual styles. Méliès moves in an instant from stage-set realism to storybook phantasm or mechanical animation.” Speed was essential to his technique. To see a Méliès film is to see stage magic miraculously and wonderfully transposed to the screen. More than virtually any other artist, Méliès saw the potential in the medium he had chosen—in the initial senses of “movies” (those which move) and “films” (those which inhabit the ghostly). The innovation of special effects belongs to Georges Méliès.

  The public’s interest in disappearance—onstage or in film—reflected a general questioning about the nature of life itself. Literature began to explore reality in its own, ghostly way, cracking life wide open to reveal its wide range of unexpected possibilities. Readers responded. They favored stories in which the central character seemed neither alive nor dead, or sometimes acted like a live human being but then transmogrified into an eerily foreign and frightening creature. Did death really exist as a finality? Or, like the beginnings of life, did it hold its own secrets? The word narcolepsy appears in the English medical journal Lancet, in 1888, to refer to a disease in which an otherwise normal person falls into “short and frequently recurring attacks of somnolence.” Catalepsy, too, appears at the same time, as Poe points out, to mean much the same thing. In a time when all definitions of humanity were up for grabs, neither the beginning nor the end of life had a hard and fast meaning. Victor Frankenstein creates life; Dracula beats death. Dorian Gray thinks he may be dead; Roderick Usher thinks his house may be alive. Life had turned into one grand question.

  Mary Shelley, for example, leaves readers in doubt about the exact nature of Doctor Frankenstein’s creation: He resembles a person, although a much larger and much more powerful being than most; but now and again he slips beyond the boundaries of recognizable human behavior. The first lines of her short story “The Mortal Immortal” read this way: “July
16, 1883.—This is a memorable anniversary for me; on it I complete my three hundred and twenty-third year!” Is the main character immortal? Even though the narrator has downed a magic potion concocted by the sixteenth-century Kabbalist Cornelius Agrippa, he still does not know the answer: “This is a question which I have asked myself, by day and night, for now three hundred and three years, and yet cannot answer it.” When the invisible man, Doctor Griffin, first steps foot into the story after having drunk his own potion, Wells describes him as “more dead than alive.” Polidori, too, introduces his vampyre as living in torment beyond life and death, and relegates him to a category that no writer had visited since the fifteenth century, the “undead,” which in the late Middle Ages meant, quite simply, “to be alive.” He, too, must drink a magic liquid—blood.

  To be undead in the nineteenth century, however, implied something entirely different. To be undead in Doctor Polidori’s world, for example, meant that Count Dracula enjoyed a fiendish kind of immortality, one that bypassed Christianity or any hint of the afterlife, and certainly any hint of a representation of Christ himself. A broad range of contemporary authors exploited the idea of the undead and modified it for their own purposes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stands out as a prime example. Doyle met with enormous success, producing a total of four short novels and fifty-six stories, after he first appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887 with A Study in Scarlet.

  In 1893, out of fatigue, or to provoke a reaction, Doyle decided to put an end to his famous detective. To pull off the caper, Doyle enlisted the help of Holmes’s arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarity, whom, some critics insist, Conan Doyle modeled after Friedrich Nietzsche. In a startling episode titled “The Final Problem,” Holmes plunges headlong into the roiling waters of Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, wrapped in the arms of Moriarity. Sherlock Holmes’s literary demise had such a devastating affect on the reading public that, for the first time, a local newspaper carried the obituary of a literary character. In a piece nearly a full page long, the Geneva Journal announced the death of that ace detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, on May 6, 1891.

  But Doyle wrote in that fantastic world of the nineteenth century, where death turns out on closer inspection not to be death at all. And so, because of the enormous and sustained outcry of Holmes’s loyal fans (including Doyle’s mother) and the insistence of his publisher, Conan Doyle felt no compunction about simply raising his hero from the dead—no, from the realm of the nearly, almost, damned-near dead. Sarah Bernhardt for a time returned from her death, it seemed, every other week. In a volume titled The Adventure of the Empty House, Doyle brought Holmes back to life. Rather than his readers crying foul, they rejoiced in having their hero enchant them once again in the pages of yet another Conan Doyle story. As Watson explains, on first seeing the resurrected Holmes: “I gripped him by the sleeve, and felt the thin, sinewy arm beneath it. ‘Well, you’re not a spirit, anyhow,’ said I.” Holmes had not gone over the falls, it turns out, but sidestepped Moriarity’s lunge at the last minute, through the ancient Japanese art of baritsu, and survived—his demise a mere illusion. At the end of the tale, Holmes taps into a deep truth of the period when he laments, “We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands in the end? A shadow.”

  Not just a popular writer like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle but serious novelists like Nathaniel Hawthorne played with people’s desire to conquer death. An age that placed so much importance on awareness and the nature of human sensibilities might be expected to produce such seemingly outlandish ideas. Hawthorne had already toyed with the idea of magic potions for extending life in a short story titled “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment.” Near the end of his life, he became intrigued by the idea once again. In 1863, in failing health, he took up residence in a grand house in Concord named the Wayside, where he began work on a short story prompted by a remark made to him by Thoreau. Thoreau had heard about a man who in the distant past had taken up residence in the Wayside and who desired to live forever. Hawthorne transformed the remark into a story about a seminary student named Septimus Norton who kills a British soldier and discovers on his body the secret formula for eternal life. Ironically, Hawthorne found himself too sick to finish the story. He died a short time later, in 1864.

  Hawthorne’s comments in his journal shortly before he died sound much like the frustration of the scientists of the period, who also desired to find that magic potion that might enable humankind to beat death, and amazingly similar to Holmes’s just after Conan Doyle brought him back to life. In The Adventure of the Empty House, we hear for the first time a lament from that indefatigable character, Sherlock Holmes, about the nature of perception, about the futility of trying to know anything at all: “There seems to be things that I can almost get hold of, and think about; but when I am just on the point of seizing them, they start away, like slippery things.”

  On a trip in London in 1897, Mark Twain received two telegrams from the editor of the New York Journal. The first read: “IF MARK TWAIN DYING IN POVERTY IN LONDON SEND 500 WORDS.” Then the follow-up: “IF MARK TWAIN HAS DIED IN POVERTY SEND 1000 WORDS.” Those two missives prompted from Twain one of his most well-known retorts: “THE REPORTS OF MY DEATH ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED.”7 Twain, a writer seemingly far removed in style, substance, and geography from Conan Doyle, wrote a comedic play late in his career, 1898, about murder, filling each act with death, fake death, and funerals without corpses. Twain titled the play, with a twist on the theme of being undead, Is He Dead? Twain loved such absurdities about the supposed finality of death, most especially about his own. Twain did not shy away from the paranormal. In the December 1891 issue of Harper’s, for instance, Twain published his own ringing endorsement of Britain’s Society for Psychical Research.

  Even Lewis Carroll’s little Alice lives underground in a place characterized neither by life—certainly not by normal life—nor by out-and-out death. The underground is a wondrous land, but Alice continually wonders just where in the world she possibly could have landed, in a place where all the familiar categories have come crashing down around her. Carroll’s fantastical book appeared just when the great American carnage, the Civil War, was coming to a conclusion, in 1865. Which was stranger, audiences had every right to wonder, the fantastical underground or the grim overground?

  Finally, Henrik Ibsen created characters more dead than alive, in one of his most intriguing plays, which he titled When We Dead Awaken. His suggestion seemed to be that most people passed their days as dead men walking, but with some great effort they could come wide awake. A caveat: Like the heroes of medieval romances, the walking dead must ask the right questions, discover the right path, and then summon the courage to forge ahead. The path never presents itself as obvious, the idea of an invigorated life never as apparent or clear as we might prefer. Murkiness and even outright darkness characterize the landscape of the knight of faith. A veil hangs in front of everything.

  That’s the lesson of a good deal of nineteenth-century fiction. As with Ibsen, Shelley, and Polidori, authors chose to explore liminality, in this case the opaque or invisible seam separating life and death, this world from the world beyond. The title of master of the genre must go to Edgar Allan Poe. Everything that can be written about Poe seems to have been written. He is for those with even a passing interest in the macabre a cult figure; people still sit by his grave in Baltimore, guarding his headstone and watching out for the unknown soul who comes each year, unseen and unheard, to place a snifter of brandy on his grave. Poe is scary and he is smart and he nailed the age in tale after tale. Every one of his stories seems to probe another basic interest of the age. I provide a glimpse of only two of them here.

  The first is one of his more obscure stories, titled “The Domain of Arnheim,” which he published in 1847. It is an important tale for it lays bare the almost obsessive intense fascination the age had with the invisible world. In this tale, Poe goes beyond mere ghosts—the most common of the revenants—to fantasize about the invisible
creatures that hold the visible world together and infuse it with logic, order, and meaning. There is indeed a divine plan, but it does not emanate from God. And whatever we interpret down here as disorder and pain and suffering, the invisible creatures, with their commanding vision, see as exactly the opposite. We are deluded because we do not have the higher powers necessary to truly perceive the world. The narrator, a Mister Ellison, puts it this way: “There may be a class of beings, human once, but now invisible to humanity, to whom, from afar, our disorder may seem order—our unpicturesqueness picturesque; in a word, the earth-angels, for whose scrutiny more especially than our own, and for whose death-refined appreciation of the beautiful, may have been set in array by God the wide landscape-gardens of the hemispheres.”

  In the second tale, a truly macabre one, “The Cask of Amontillado,” Poe places the main character of his story quite literally in that space between life and death. The story tells of a master mason who walls up his rival, while he is still alive, in the basement of the mason’s house. In an unforgivable act of inverted hospitality, the host turns hostile and attacks his unsuspecting guest. Trapped in a living death, the guest’s cries of terror slowly fade at story’s end into nothing but a terrifying silence, Poe deliberately turning his guest into a ghost.

  With “Cask,” Poe continued a series of stories involving the deliberate burial of a living person, or the mistaken burial of a person presumed dead. Both kinds of stories explored that oh-so-mysterious and thin line where breathing grows faint but does not cease altogether. Where did death begin? That is, when did breathing actually stop? Equally beguiling: When did breathing actually begin? As astounding as it may seem, we must remember that only near the end of the century, in 1875, in the search for that millisecond when life actually blossoms into being, did a German biologist named Oscar Hertwig stumble on the idea of conception. Only in that year, by observing sea urchins mating, did the scientific community understand the way a sperm fertilizes an egg in order for life to begin.