{"id":28211,"date":"2012-03-21T08:00:59","date_gmt":"2012-03-21T12:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=28211"},"modified":"2012-03-20T20:01:17","modified_gmt":"2012-03-21T00:01:17","slug":"hocus-pocus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/03\/21\/hocus-pocus\/","title":{"rendered":"Hocus Pocus"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Karpeles Manuscript Museum in Charleston is housed in an old Methodist church, a grandly columned Greek Revival building with a rusty front gate and a pipe organ still intact in the back. It’s home to a revolving series of manuscripts culled from the private collection of real-estate magnates David and Marsh Karpeles, a couple with very eclectic and expensive taste in papers: in any given season the glass cases wedged around the pews and pulpit contain anything from pages of Roget\u2019s original thesaurus to Sir Ernest Shackleton\u2019s sketched map of the Antarctic. The February afternoon I visited, a gregarious man with a low-country accent and a flair for displaying pamphlets announced the winter exhibit with pride: \u201cThe letters of Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini, an odd pair if ever there was one.\u201d<\/p>\n

The dozen or so letters and scraps of free-written scrawl were from Conan Doyle and Houdini\u2019s brief but spectacular relationship, one that was founded on and destroyed by a shared interest in the possibility of contacting people in the afterlife. It began, as friendships often do, with a book exchange. In 1920, Harry Houdini, on a tour of the British Isles with menagerie of rabbits, trunks of shackles, and his intrepid wife Bess in tow, introduced himself to Arthur Conan Doyle by sending him a copy of his The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin<\/em>. The volume was a biting criticism of Houdini\u2019s magician namesake and an expos\u00e9 of other hucksters who claimed to have the power of mediums. It was part of Houdini\u2019s ongoing crusade to unmask those whom he considered contemptuous imposters. By then, Conan Doyle had shed the world of Holmes and Watson to explore other pursuits, jumping headlong into ethereal studies of Spiritualism after his brother and eldest son died in World War I. Houdini\u2019s book intrigued him; he sent his own volley of work on prominent mediums back.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Their missives are debates over the nature of Spiritualism, examining the ways that psychics could be snookering their audiences. Houdini takes the role of the cynic, always searching for the telltale mirror hidden in the room, the trick latch, or a hidden set of aces. \u201cYou will note that I am still a skeptic, but a seeker after the Truth,\u201d Houdini explained to Conan Doyle. In another letter, he put both his meaning and his doubts about Conan Doyle more plainly: \u201cAs a rule, I have found that the greater brain a man has, and the better he is educated, the easier it has been to mystify him.\u201d For his part, Conan Doyle was an advocate for the supernatural, wanting badly to prove the world of spirits existed beyond doubt, to lay the case as bare as his most famous literary creation had time and again.<\/p>\n

But the exchange is more than just lively disagreement. You can also read signs of warmth in their literary one-upsmanship. \u00a0\u201cI digested all the material,\u201d Houdini wrote back after the initial book trade, \u201cAnd when you say there are 96 volumes on your desk, it may interest you to know that I travel with a bookcase containing over 100 volumes.\u201d Arthur Conan Doyle, not to be outdone, retorted in his next letter, \u201cI have 200 [books] now, and have read them too!\u201d In later letters, Conan Doyle affectionately pokes fun at his friend\u2019s death-defying stunts: \u201cI hope to see you\u2014your normal self, not in a tank or hanging by one toe from a skyscraper.\u201d<\/p>\n

The appeal of their relationship isn\u2019t difficult to suss out. It has the same charmed, fairy-tale element of the drinking tales from the Algonquin Round Table or the photograph of Elvis Presley shaking hands with Richard Nixon. Discovering their interaction is a moment of pure delight, as when you introduce unexpectedly connected acquaintances at a party. In the age of the cultural mash-up, when zombies can be recruited at will to populate Jane Austen novels and rap songs are dense with references to 1980s movies, pictures of the world\u2019s most famous illusionist strolling along with the inventor of Sherlock Holmes while discussing fairies seem too good not to have been retroactively photoshopped.<\/p>\n

Indeed, many writers have found material in the Conan Doyle\u2013Houdini friendship. There\u2019s Harry R. Squires\u2019s What Rough Beast<\/em>, a horror movie that has both gentleman solving a magic-related homicide. Gabriel Brownstein\u2019s Man From Beyond<\/em> vividly imagines Houdini and Conan Doyle in New York City, their relationship souring. Luminaries<\/em>, an e-book published last year by Timothy Brennar, throws director Orson Welles into the mix as all three go on a mission for the British Government, and the 2003 Necronauts <\/em>sets up H.P. Lovecraft with Doyle and Houdini to venture into the underworld. A self-published graphic novel about the pair, Among the Spirits<\/em> by Steve Valentine, launched both an upcoming movie project from Dreamworks and a mystery series on Syfy. Houdini\u2019s lawyer, Bernard M.L. Ernst, actually published the first nonfiction analysis of Conan Doyle and Houdini\u2019s rapport in 1932, a mere eight years after Houdini\u2019s death. Since then, there have been at least half a dozen books written on the subject, most recently Christopher Sandford\u2019s absorbing Masters of Mystery<\/em>. Almost all of the accounts have a variation on the same subtitle, remarking on the story of a \u201cstrange friendship.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>But is the Conan Doyle\u2013Houdini partnership so strange? Physically, the two look almost comically mismatched. Houdini was short and sharp to Conan Doyle\u2019s generous English frame and affable walrus mustache. In one often-circulated picture of the two together, Houdini wears a white suit and Conan Doyle a black one, as if emphasizing the disparity. But the coexistence between the doubter and the believer is a relationship dynamic we know well. It\u2019s the foundation underneath many a television show: Houdini was the Scully to Conan Doyle\u2019s Mulder, so to speak. Their friendship illustrates the warring impulses of intellectual life\u2014the need to pick apart things to eliminate falsehoods, and the heartfelt want to be bamboozled sometimes, to acknowledge some sort of truth with a capital T. Certainty grounds us, but doubt is more interesting. The gap between them is why both great detective stories and great magic tricks work. What are magic tricks anyway except for pretty little fictions about doves evaporating into thin air and smiling assistants being sawn in half without consequence, humans casually violating the insufferably strict laws of science?<\/p>\n

Conan Doyle and Houdini fell out over a s\u00e9ance. Conan Doyle\u2019s wife Jean, acting as a medium, scribbled down a loving note that she claimed had been written through her, from the beyond, by Houdini\u2019s late beloved mother. Houdini took a look at it and excused himself. The note Jean had written was in English, a language his Hungarian mother had never learned. Wounded, Houdini went to the press with his disillusionment over the whole affair, and Conan Doyle in turn accused him of being a petty showman. They remained in a kind of spiritualist cold war until Houdini\u2019s death in 1926. But Houdini went to his grave with tendrils of hope in communication with the dead. Every year for ten years, on the anniversary of Houdini\u2019s death, the widowed Bess carried out his wished by attempting\u2014unsuccessfully\u2014to commune with his spirit. The phrase that Bess used in each effort was an adaptation of the stage language they had devised in a vaudeville mind-reading act, \u201cAnswer, tell, pray, answer, look, tell, answer, answer, tell.\u201d It translated into a single word: \u201cBelieve.\u201d<\/p>\n

Margaret Eby<\/a> is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Karpeles Manuscript Museum in Charleston is housed in an old Methodist church, a grandly columned Greek Revival building with a rusty front gate and a pipe organ still intact in the back. It’s home to a revolving series of manuscripts culled from the private collection of real-estate magnates David and Marsh Karpeles, a couple […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":230,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[6866,3965,6855,6865,6861,6853,6860,6858,6864,6862,6852,6857,6863,6854,6856,6867,6859],"class_list":["post-28211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-among-the-spirits","tag-arthur-conan-doyle","tag-charleston","tag-christopher-sandford","tag-h-p-lovecraft","tag-harry-houdini","tag-luminaries","tag-man-from-beyond","tag-masters-of-mystery","tag-necronauts","tag-sir-ernest-shackleton","tag-spiritualism","tag-syfy","tag-the-karpeles-manuscript-museum","tag-the-unmasking-of-robert-houdin","tag-the-x-files","tag-what-rough-beast"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHocus Pocus by Margaret Eby<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 21, 2012 \u2013 The Karpeles Manuscript Museum in Charleston is housed in an old Methodist church, a grandly columned Greek Revival building with a rusty front gate and a\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/03\/21\/hocus-pocus\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Hocus Pocus by Margaret Eby\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 21, 2012 \u2013 The Karpeles Manuscript Museum in Charleston is housed in an old Methodist church, a grandly columned Greek Revival building with a rusty front gate and a\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/03\/21\/hocus-pocus\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2012-03-21T12:00:59+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/friendship.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"574\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"323\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Margaret Eby\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Margaret Eby\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/03\/21\/hocus-pocus\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/03\/21\/hocus-pocus\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Margaret Eby\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/ec3febf884221d8dc0377023410cb052\"},\"headline\":\"Hocus Pocus\",\"datePublished\":\"2012-03-21T12:00:59+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/03\/21\/hocus-pocus\/\"},\"wordCount\":1284,\"commentCount\":10,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/03\/21\/hocus-pocus\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/friendship.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Among the Spirits\",\"Arthur Conan Doyle\",\"Charleston\",\"Christopher Sandford\",\"H.P. 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