Robert-Houdin is known to most Americans simply because Eric Weiss stole part of his name and added an ‘i’: Houdini. And even those who know that rarely know that Eric Weiss, that strange neurotic, wrote a book in which he supposedly “unmasked” his idol as a pilferer of other people’s tricks. Robert-Houdin has become one of those quiet sites of American-French rivalry – as the French know, Robert-Houdin’s house was lit by incandescent lightbulbs with a filament he invented decades before the Wizard of Menlo Park got around to experimenting on how much of an electrical charge the human hair follicle could take.
His memoirs were once popular, and still are popular among magicians. They are
also popularly debunked. As is, for example, the story of how Houdin got into
the magic biz in the first place.
Here it is. Houdin was a young man, away from home, an apprentice watchmaker,
and son of a watchmaker. One day he got a bad case of food poisoning. He’d
nearly collapsed by the side of the road, trying to reach home, when a
traveling magic show passed by. The magician was a once famous conjurer named
Torrini now in the dumps, accompanied, of course, by a faithful servant,
Antonio. Torrini and his servant took the delirious Houdin in, and nursed him
back to health. Torrini was so affection because, it transpired, Houdin looked
like Torrini’s son. A son about which there was some obvious dark cloud of
mystery, since every time Torrini mentioned him, he’d burst into tears. While
Houdin learned the mysteries of the craft, he did not learn the mysteries of
Torrini until one night he gradually wormed it out of the old man.
Seems like Torrini hadn’t always been just a sawdust floor wizard – at one
time, he was a conjuror to princes and popes. He was born into the nobility,
you see. But as the years went on, his card tricks began to bore his audiences,
and so he searched around for something more… shall we say, more s-sensational.
At this time, Torrini was married and had a boy. His son assisted him,
especially in an act Torrini had entitled, Son of William Tell. Torrini claimed
to have invented it – like all stage showman, he had a weakness for bogus
originality. It was quite simple, really. The boy bit into an apple, and held
it there in front of his mouth, and his father shot at him. The bullet,
especially marked, lodged in the apple.
Here’s how the bullet catch trick is done. “The bullet was molded of hollow
wax, mixed with soot to give it a dark, metallic look. The wax bullet was
crushed in the barrel of the pistol and the magician was careful to stand a
great distance away.”
It is an old trick. According to James Randi, it was first described by
Reverend Thomas Beard in Threats of God’s Judgment in 1631. Anyway, here is how
Torrini lost his mind: he kept these wax bullets in a box. All very simple. And
yet somehow a leaden bullet was insensibly mixed into this box, and one night
the leaden bullet was selected, the boy stood with his apple, and his father
took aim and slew him.
And you wondered where William Burroughs got the idea…
After six months in jail and his wife’s desertion, Torrini then wandered the
byways of Europe, playing to gawping plebes, out of his head. And then, just as
Saul was cured of his Godrogenic madness by David, Torrini met Robert-Houdin.
Jim Steinmeyer, in his biography of Chung Sing Loo, writes that Torrini never
existed. Or nobody has ever found a record of him. But it is an excellent
story.
Incidentally, Houdini was famously advised never to do the bullet catch
himself, and never did. It is a simple trick, but usually it involves a
momentary loss of control of the instrument. Rather than the magician shooting,
the magician usually selects someone from the audience to shoot at him.
When Hobbes wrote about nature blood in tooth and claw, he was referring,
allegorically, to the audience at magic acts. The first magician who brought
the bullet catch trick to America turned around, and in that moment the
spectator who held the gun filled it with tacks – and must have had the tacks
on hand, too. Anyway, of course, the magician was pelleted. Chung Sing Loo died
of the bullet catch act too.
…
Now – interlude for some History channel overview re magick – magic in the
sixteenth century, whether performed by the savage or the sage woman, was the
same kind of stuff, derived from the devil. But by the eighteenth century,
there was a fold. At that point the belief in magic, for the governing class of
European, fell by the wayside. And so the native magician became ignorant, and
the peasant became a tool of some more powerful personage playing on his
credulity. Magic as a means of taking and keeping power produced a variation on
the reading of the chief, the shaman, the ‘medicine man’, the figure flinger,
but of course these figures were now to be found outside the “West” – that mythical
region which consisted of urban elites who gradually inducted the peasant
masses into their geography in Europe, and the white colonies outside of
Europe. Political magic of a high order.
Bringing us on the wings of white magic angels to the nineteenth century, and
Robert-Houdin, born in 1805 to a watchmaker. It is emblematic that nineteenth
century magie blanche should arise from the same cadre that produced steam
engines and cotton gins. At the beginning of his memoirs, Houdin breaks out
into a nice bit of poetry that tells us a good deal about the 19th century:
“How often, in my infantile dreams, did a benevolent fairy open before me the
door of a mysterious El Dorado, where tools of every description were piled up.
The delight which these dreams produced on me were the same as any other child
feels when his fancy summons up before him a fantastic country where the houses
are made of chocolate, the stones of sugar-candy, and the men of gingerbread.
It is difficult to understand this fever for tools; the mechanic, the artist,
adores them, and would ruin himself to obtain them. Tools, in fact, are to him
what a ms. is to the archaeologist, a coin to the antiquary, or a pack of cards
to a gambler: in a word, they are the implements by which a ruling passion is
fed.”
My brothers have the same unconquerable passion for the El Dorado of tools. Of
course, nowadays, we can drive to it. It is called Home Depot.
Houdin’s memoirs are full of these Stendhal like touches. Perhaps this is why
Henri Bergson read him. There is a passage in Energie spirituelle by Bergson –
the biography of whom, by Emily Herring, is on my to be read list for this
year.
“In one of the curious pages of his Confidences, Robert Houdin explains how he
proceeded to develop an intuitive and instantaneous memory in his young son. He
began by showing the child a domino, the 5/4, asking him the sum total of the
points without letting him count them. To this domino he added another, the
4/3, demanding once again an immediate response. He stopped his first lesson
there. The next day, he succeeded in adding in the blink of an eye three and
four dominos, the next day after five: in adding each day some new progress to
that of yesterday’s, he ended up by obtaining instantly the some of the points
of a dozen dominoes. “This result acquired, we busied ourselves with a task
that was difficult in another way, to which we devoted ourselves for more than
a month. We passed, my son and I, rapidly enough before a children’s toy shop,
or some other shop which was furnished with various merchandise, and we plunged
an attentive look into it. Some steps latter, we drew from our pockets a pencil
and piece of paper, and we each competed separately to see who could describe
the greatest number of objects that we grasped in passing… It often happened
that my son listed fourteen objects…” The purpose of this special education was
to get the child to grasp with a glance, in the seating area of the theater,
all the objects carried into it by all the assistants, which meant that, a strip
of cloth tied over his eyes, he could simulate second sight … “
Things my old man never did for me… Behind Houdin’s plan
stands Rousseau – spacing the secondary intelligence of culture after the
primary intelligence of the senses, with memory that strange human faculty straddling
the divide between them, a rodeo rough rider subject to falls. And I should
say: this is an excellent education for writing. Robert-Houdin's memoir's are
supposedly ghostwritten -- but like Torrini, the Ghostwriter has apparently
been the victim of one of Robert-Houdin's vanishing acts. Nobody has a name for
him, or a record of him.
2.
As a footnote both to Houdini and the imperialist magic act
of making a territory disappear and reappear under another name: Robert-Houdin,
like Berlioz and Georges Sand, led his life as though it were a sold out
engagement for a 19th century French audience – so it was natural that he would
gravitate towards the memoir.
In 1856, acceding to the demands of Colonel Neveu of the
Political office, Houdin went to tour Algeria. The tour was not simply about
showing French magic in the colonies to a bunch of poilus – it was about using
that magic for political ends. Specifically, Houdin was the point man for the
battle of white magic against black.
“It is known that the majority of revolts which have to be
suppressed in Algeria are excited by intriguers, who say they are inspired by
the Prophet, and are regarded by the Arabs as envoys of God on earth to deliver
them from the oppression of the Roumi (Christians).
These false prophets and holy Marabouts, who are no more
sorcerers than I am, and indeed even less so, still contrive to influence the
fanaticism of their co-religionists by tricks as primitive as are the
spectators before whom they are performed.”
The government sent Houdin around both to de-mystify and to
mystify – although Houdin would, of course, dispute the latter description of
what his mission was about:
“The governments was, therefore, anxious to destroy their
pernicious influence, and reckoned on me to do so. They hoped, with reason, by
the aid of my experiments, to prove to the Arabs that the tricks of their
Marabouts were mere child’s play, and owing to their simplicity could not be
done by an envoy from Heaven, which also led us very naturally to show them
that we are their superiors in everything, and, as for sorcerers, there are
none like the French.”
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