World of Wonders

by Robertson Davies

  “Roly is right, Jurgen. This man is just right for looks. He compels belief. He can’t go wrong. It is God’s good luck, and we mustn’t quarrel with it.”

  Now Lind’s nose was out of joint. He had been trying to placate a prima donna, and his associates seemed to be accusing him of underestimating the situation. He was sure that he never underestimated anything about one of his films. He was accused of flying in the face of good luck, when he was certain that the best possible luck that could happen to any film was that he should be asked to direct it. The heavy lip fell a little lower, the eyes became a little sadder, and the emotional temperature of the room dropped perceptibly.

  Ingestree put his considerable talents to the work of restoring Lind’s self-esteem, without losing Eisengrim’s goodwill.

  “I think I sense what troubles Eisengrim about this whole Robert-Houdin business. It’s the book. It’s that wretched Confidences d’un prestidigitateur. We’ve been using it as a source for the biographical part of the film, and it’s certainly a classic of its kind. But did anybody ever read such a book? Vanity is perfectly acceptable in an artist. Personally, I wouldn’t give you sixpence for an artist who lacked vanity. But it’s honest vanity I respect. The false modesty, the exaggerated humility, the greasy bourgeois assertions of respectability, of good-husband-and-father, of debt-paying worthiness are what make the Confidences so hard to swallow. Robert-Houdin was an oddity; he was an artist who wanted to pass as a bourgeois. I’m sure that’s what irritates both you men, and sets you against each other. You feel that you are putting your very great, fully realized artistic personalities to the work of exalting a man whose attitude toward life you despise. I don’t blame you for being irritable—because you have been, you know; you’ve been terribly irritable tonight—but that’s what art is, as you very well know, much of the time: the transformation and glorification of the commonplace.”

  “The revelation of the glory in the commonplace,” said Lind, who had no objection to being told that his vanity was an admirable and honest trait, and was coming around.

  “Precisely. The revelation of the glory in the commonplace. And you two very great artists—the great film director and (may I say it) the great actor—are revealing the glory in Robert-Houdin, who perversely sought to conceal his own artistry behind that terrible good-citizen mask. It hampered him, of course, because it was against the grain of his talent. But you two are able to do an extraordinary, a metaphysical thing. You are able to show the world, a century after his death, what Robert-Houdin would have been if he had truly understood himself.”

  Eisengrim and Lind were liking this. Magnus positively beamed, and Lind’s sad eyes rolled toward him with a glance from which the frost was slowly disappearing. Ingestree was well in the saddle now, and was riding on to victory.

  “You are both men of immeasurably larger spirit than he. What was he, after all? The good citizen, the perfection of the bourgeoisie under Louis Philippe that he pretended? Who can believe it? There is in every artist something black, something savouring of the crook, which he may not even understand himself, and which he certainly keeps well out of the eye of his public. What was it in Robert-Houdin?

  “He gives us a sniff of it in the very first chapter of his other book, which I have read, and which is certainly familiar to you, Mr Ramsay”—this with a nod to me—“called Les Secrets de la prestidigitation et de la magie—”

  “My God, I read it as a boy!” I said.

  “Very well. Then you recall the story of his beginnings as a magician? How he was befriended by the Count de l’Escalopier? How this nobleman gave a private show in his house, where Robert-Houdin amused the guests? How his best trick was burning a piece of paper on which the Archbishop of Paris had written a splendid compliment to Robert-Houdin, and the discovery of the piece of paper afterward in the smallest of twelve envelopes which were all sealed, one inside the other? It was a trick he learned from his master, de Grisy. But how did he try to make it up to l’Escalopier for putting him on his feet?”

  “The trap for the robber,” I said.

  “Exactly. A thief was robbing l’Escalopier blind, and nothing he tried would catch him. So Robert-Houdin offered to help, and what did he do? He worked out a mechanism to be concealed in the Count’s desk, so that when the robber opened it a pistol would be discharged, and a claw made of sharp needles would seize the thief’s hand and crunch the word ‘Voleur’ on the back of it. The needles were impregnated with silver nitrate, so that it was in effect tattooing—branding the man for life. A nice fellow, eh? And do you remember what he says? That this nasty thing was a refinement of a little gubbins he had made as a boy, to catch and mark another boy who was pinching things from his school locker. That was the way Robert-Houdin’s mind worked; he fancied himself as a thief-catcher. Now, in a man who makes such a parade of his integrity, what does that suggest? Over-compensation, shall we say? A deep, unresting doubt of his own honesty?

  “If we had time, and the gift, we could learn a lot about the inner life of Robert-Houdin by analysing his tricks. Why are so many of the best of them concerned with giving things away? He gave away pastries, sweets, ribbons, fans, all sorts of stuff at every performance; yet we know how careful he was with money. What was all that generosity meant to conceal? Because he was concealing something, take my word for it. The whole of the Confidences is a gigantic whitewash job, a concealment. Analyse the tricks and you will get a subtext for the autobiography, which seems so delightfully bland and cosy.

  “And that’s what we need for our film. A subtext. A reality running like a subterranean river under the surface; an enriching, but not necessarily edifying, background to what is seen.

  “Where are we to get it? Not from Robert-Houdin. Too much trouble and perhaps not worth the trouble when we got it. No. It must come from the working together of you two great artists: Lind the genius-director and Eisengrim the genius-actor. And you must fish it up out of your own guts.”

  “But that is what I always do,” said Lind.

  “Of course. But Eisengrim must do it, as well. Now tell me, sir: you can’t always have been the greatest conjuror in the world. You learned your art somewhere. If we asked you—invited you—begged you—to make your own experience the subtext for this film about a man, certainly lesser than yourself, but of great and lasting fame in his special line, what would it be?”

  I was surprised to see Eisengrim look as if he were considering this question very seriously. He never revealed anything about his past life, or his innermost thoughts, and it was only because I had known him—with very long intervals of losing him—since we had been boys together, that I knew anything about him at all. I had fished—fished cunningly with the subtlest lures I could devise—for more information about him than I had, but he was too clever for me. But here he was, swimming in the flattery of this clever Englishman Ingestree, and he looked as if he might be about to spill the beans. Well, anyhow I would be present when, and if, he did so. After some consideration, he spoke.

  “The first thing I would tell you would be that my earliest instructor was the man you see in that chair yonder: Dunstan Ramsay. God knows he was the worst conjuror the world has ever seen, but he introduced me to conjuring, and by a coincidence his textbook was The Secrets of Stage Conjuring, by the man we are all talking about and, if you are right in what you say, Mr Ingestree, serving! Robert-Houdin.”

  This caused some sensation, as Eisengrim knew it would. Ingestree, having forced the oyster to yield a little, pressed the knife in.

  “Wonderful! We would never have taken Ramsay for a conjuror. But there must have been somebody else. If Ramsay was your first master, who was your second?”

  “I’m not sure I’m going to tell you,” said Eisengrim. “I’ll have to think about it very carefully. Your idea of a subtext—the term and the idea are both new to me—is interesting. I’ll tell you this much. I began to learn conjuring seriously on 30 August 1918. That was the day I descended
into hell, and did not rise again for seven years. I’ll consider whether I’m going to go farther than that. Now I’m going to bed.”

  (3)

  Liesl had said little during the quarrel—or rivalry of egotisms, or whatever you choose to call it—but she caught me the following morning before the film crew arrived, and seemed to be in high spirits.

  “So Magnus has come to the confessional moment in his life,” she said. “It’s been impending for several months. Didn’t you notice? You didn’t! Oh, Ramsay, you are such a dunce about some things. If Magnus were the kind of man who could write an autobiography, this is when he would do it.”

  “Magnus has an autobiography already. I should know. I wrote it.

  “A lovely book. Phantasmata: the Life and Adventures of Magnus Eisengrim. But that was for sale at his performance; a kind of super-publicity. A splendid Gothic invention from your splendid Gothic imagination.”

  “That’s not the way he regards it. When people ask he tells them that it is a poetic autobiography, far more true to the man he has become than any merely factual account of his experience could be.”

  “I know. I told him to say that. You don’t suppose he thought it out himself, do you? You know him. He’s marvellously intelligent in his own way—sensitive, aware, and intuitive—but it’s not a literary or learned intelligence. Magnus is a truly original creature. They are of the greatest rarity. And as I say, he’s reached the confessional time of life. I expect we shall hear some strange things.”

  “Not as strange as I could tell about him.”

  “I know, I know. You are obsessed with the idea that his mother was a saint. Ramsay, in all your rummaging among the lives of the saints, did you ever encounter one who had a child? What was that child like? Perhaps we shall hear.”

  “I’m a little miffed that he considers telling these strangers things he’s never told to you and me.”

  “Ass! It’s always strangers who turn the tap that lets out the truth. Didn’t you yourself babble out all the secrets of your life to me within a couple of weeks of our first meeting? Magnus is going to tell.”

  “But why, now?”

  “Because he wants to impress Lind. He’s terribly taken with Lind, and he has his little fancies, like the rest of us. Once he wanted to impress me, but it wasn’t the right time in his life to spill the whole bottle.”

  “But Ingestree suggested that Lind might do some telling, too. Are we to have a great mutual soul-scrape?”

  “Ingestree is very foxy, behind all that fat and twinkling bonhomie. He knows Lind won’t tell anything. For one thing, it’s not his time; he’s only forty-three. And he is inhibited by his education; it makes people cagey. What he tells us he tells through his films, just as Ingestree suggested that Robert-Houdin revealed himself through his tricks. But Magnus is retired—or almost. Also he is not inhibited by education, which is the great modern destroyer of truth and originality. Magnus knows no history. Have you ever seen him read a book? He really thinks that whatever has happened to him is unique. It is an enviable characteristic.”

  “Well, every life is unique.”

  “To a point. But there are only a limited number of things a human creature can do.”

  “So you think he is going to tell all?”

  “Not all. Nobody tells that. Indeed, nobody knows everything about themselves. But I’ll bet you anything you like he tells a great deal.”

  I argued no further. Liesl is very shrewd about such things. The morning was spent in arrangements about lighting. A mobile generator from Zürich had to be put in place, and all the lamps connected and hung; the riding-school was a jungle of pipe-scaffolding and cable. Kinghovn fussed over differences which seemed to me imperceptible, and as a script-girl stood in for Eisengrim while the lighting was being completed, he had time to wander about the riding-school, and as lunchtime approached he steered me off into a corner.

  “Tell me about subtext,” he said.

  “It’s a term modern theatre people are very fond of. It’s what a character thinks and knows, as opposed to what the playwright makes him say. Very psychological.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “Do you know Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler?”

  He didn’t, and it was a foolish question. He didn’t know anything about any literature whatever. I waded in.

  “It’s about a beautiful and attractive woman who has married, as a last resort, a man she thinks very dull. They have returned from a honeymoon during which she has become greatly disillusioned with him, but she knows she is already pregnant. In the first act she is talking to her husband’s adoring aunt, trying to be civil as the old woman prattles on about the joys of domesticity and the achievements of her nephew. But all the time she has, in her mind, the knowledge that he is dull, timid, a tiresome lover, that she is going to have a child by him, and that she fears childbirth. That’s the subtext. The awareness of it thickens up the actress’s performance, and emphasizes the irony of the situation.”

  “I understand. It seems obvious.”

  “First-rate actors have always been aware of it, but dramatists like Shakespeare usually brought the subtext up to the surface and gave it to the audience directly. Like Hamlet’s soliloquies.”

  “I’ve never seen Hamlet.”

  “Well—that’s subtext.”

  “Do you think the circumstances of my own life really form a subtext for this film?”

  “God only knows. One thing is certain: unless you choose to tell Lind and his friends about your life, it can’t do so.”

  “You’re quite wrong. I would know, and I suppose whatever I do is rooted in what I am, and have been.”

  It was never wise to underestimate Magnus, but I was always doing so. The pomposity of the learned. Because he didn’t know Hamlet and Hedda I tended to think him simpler than he was.

  “I’m thinking of telling them a few things, Dunny. I might surprise them. They’re all so highly educated, you know. Education is a great shield against experience. It offers so much, ready-made and all from the best shops, that there’s a temptation to miss your own life in pursuing the lives of your betters. It makes you wise in some ways, but it can make you a blindfolded fool in others. I think I’ll surprise them. They talk so much about art, but really, education is just as much a barrier between a man and real art as it is in other parts of life. They don’t know what a mean old bitch art can be. I think I’ll surprise them.”

  So Liesl had been right! He was ready to spill.

  Well, I was ready to hear. Indeed, I was eager to hear. My reason was deep and professional. As an historian I had all my life been aware of the extraordinary importance of documents. I had handled hundreds of them: letters, reports, memoranda, sometimes diaries; I had always treated them with respect, and had come in time to have an affection for them. They summed up something that was becoming increasingly important to me, and that was an earthly form of immortality. Historians come and go, but the document remains, and it has the importance of a thing that cannot be changed or gainsaid. Whoever wrote it continues to speak through it. It might be honest and it might be complete: on the other hand it could be thoroughly crooked or omit something of importance. But there it was, and it was all succeeding ages possessed.

  I deeply wanted to create, or record, and leave behind me a document, so that whenever its subject was dealt with in future, the notation “Ramsay says …” would have to appear. Thus, so far as this world is concerned, I should not wholly die. Well, here was my chance.

  Would anyone care? Indeed they would. I had written an imaginative account of the life of Magnus Eisengrim, the great conjuror and illusionist, at his own request and that of Liesl, who had been the manager and in a very high degree the brains of his great show, the Soirée of Illusions. The book was sold in the foyers of any theatre in which he appeared, but it had also had a flattering success on its own account; it sold astonishingly in the places where the really big sales of books are achieved—ciga
r stores, airports, and bus stops. It had extravagantly outsold all my other books, even my Hundred Saints for Travellers and my very popular Celtic Saints of Britain and Europe. Why? Because it was a wonderfully good book of its kind. Readable by the educated, but not rebuffing to somebody who simply wanted a lively, spicy tale.

  Its authorship was still a secret, for although I received a half-share of the royalties it was ostensibly the work of Magnus Eisengrim. It had done great things for him. People who believed what they read came to see the man who had lived the richly adventurous and macabre life described in it; sophisticates came to see the man who had written such gorgeous, gaudy lies about himself. As Liesl said, it was Gothic, full of enormities bathed in the delusive lights of nineteenth-century romance. But it was modern enough, as well; it touched the sexy, rowdy string so many readers want to hear.

  Some day it would be known that I had written it. We had already received at Sorgenfrei a serious film offer and a number of inquiries from earnest Ph.D. students who explained apologetically that they were making investigations, of one kind or another, of what they called “popular literature”. And when it became known that I had written it, which would probably not be until Eisengrim and I were both dead, then—Aha! then my document would come into its own. For then the carefully tailored life of Magnus Eisengrim, which had given pleasure to so many millions in English, French, German, Danish, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, and had been accorded the distinction of a pirated version in Japanese, would be compared with the version I would prepare from Eisengrim’s own confessions, and “Ramsay says …” would certainly be heard loud and clear.

  Was this a base ambition for an historian and a hagiologist? What had Ingestree said? In every artist there is something black, something savouring of the crook. Was I, in a modest way, an artist? I was beginning to wonder. No, no; unless I falsified the record what could be dishonest, or artistic, about making a few notes?