by Chris Barker
This became quite a battle; letters went back and forth for almost a year. ‘I fear,’ wrote John Salisse, secretary of the Magic Circle, ‘that the thing may blow up into a holocaust.’ As the letter trail advanced, so the secrets of the trick emerged. One expert witness claimed Walker’s case was futile, ‘unless you claim that the whole idea of the penetration of a living person originated with you.’ I felt a sadness as I read about the subtleties of the art, and about the great care invested in each illusion. I felt that great magicians shouldn’t be allowed to vanish just like that.
In the autumn of 1968, Val Walker briefly re-emerged into the spotlight. He attended a magic convention in Weymouth, where he watched a man called Jeff Atkins perform his Radium Girl for the final time. ‘I can never be sure whether it was 1921 or 22 when I built the original in Maskelyne’s workshop under the stage,’ he wrote. ‘PT Selbit watched it in rehearsal and sometime later asked if I minded him using the basic idea for a different effect, which I certainly did not. It was his Sawing Through A Woman that emerged, using the identical cabinet dimensions. I have been both saddened and amused at the plethora of variations on the theme which the public has had to swallow during the intervening 40-odd years. I do not think my version of a penetration has been bettered in this long time.’
Walker informed the weekly magic magazine Abracadabra that now he had returned to the fold he was already looking forward to the next convention in Scarborough in a year. But he didn’t make it. His letters show a progressive illness: ‘I’m not sure I can attend . . .’, ‘I may not be able to meet you, try as I might.’
A few days before he died, he sent his last letters from a hospital on the south coast. In one of them, at the close, he said he could be ‘reached at the address above’. He didn’t actually write the word ‘at’. Instead, in February 1969, more than two years before what is widely acknowledged to be the first standard email between two computers, he used an old but generally unfamiliar symbol in its place. The symbol was @.
* It’s difficult not to mention Wilde’s idiosyncratic postal system without also mentioning the exalted letter he could not send. De Profundis, written on 20 sheets of paper in Reading Gaol in the last months before his release in May 1897, is a study of sorrow, beauty and the position of the outcast, and it begins with plaintive regret: ‘Dear Bosie, After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself, as much for your sake as for mine, as I would not like to think that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment without ever having received a single line from you . . .’
What follows is an unapologetic account of an aesthete’s life – his search for the exquisite in all things, his extravagances, his questing passions with Lord Alfred Douglas – and an account of the artistic consolations of a life devoted to Christ. Unable to send the letter from jail, he gave it to his friend Robbie Ross on his release, with instructions for it to be typed twice, whereupon certain passages were misread and excised. The original manuscript is held at the British Museum, where we may marvel at the succulent depths of his language and the calm certainty of his convictions.
‘I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age,’ Wilde writes. ‘There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. When we begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is bitter so bitter, that we inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasures, and seek not merely for a “month or twain to feed on honeycomb,” but for all our years to taste no other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be starving the soul.’
* A married couple from Australia famed for their ‘telepathy’.