Hou is Harry Houdini?

As we have been reading through Ragtime and discussing the novel, I have developed a particular interest in Harry Houdini. As members of the 21st Century, we are still fascinated by the idea of magic and defying reality - horror movies, virtual video games, and even simple card or object tricks all continue to keep us on the edge of our seats because of their various effects of tricking our brains and tapping into illusions. As children, we have grown up knowing the name “Harry Houdini” and recognizing him as a really good magician/escape artist. However, every person is more than just a name with a label. Who really was Harry Houdini, and for our purposes, how true-to-life is Doctorow’s depiction of him?

To try to answer this question, I started researching (shoutout to Gale and Credo) Harry Houdini. More accurately, I learned about Erich Weiss (real name indeed is mentioned on page 35 of the novel), born in Budapest on March 25, 1874, and immigrated to the US with his poor family during his early childhood. He was in fact truly devoted to his mother, and she was crucial to the development of his interest in magic as he wanted to “ease her hardscrabble life” (“Harry Houdini”). His earliest “tricks” included one in which he ran around begging for coins, hiding said coins into his hair and clothes, and telling his mother to “shake me, I’m magic”. When she did, coins spilled out - and so did his talent.

As a teenager, he began serving as a young circus acrobat (keep this in mind) with the name “Eric, Prince of the Air”. He later focused his attention on locks and lockpicking. As a poor boy trying to succeed as a performer, he had to find additional work outside of his shows. He started working as a necktie cutter, as this was one of the few occupations that Jews were allowed to have at the time. At age 17 (the year 1901), he took the stage name Houdini in honor of Robert Houdin, the French conjuror of the earlier 19th century whom Erich admired dearly. He took the first name Harry because it “was an accepted Americanized version of Erich”. At age 20 (the year 1904), he married Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner, known as Bess, who became his partner onstage. Subsequently, they collectively became known as “Mysterious Harry and La Petit Bessie”. Together, they played at dime museums, medicine shows, and music halls. They also toured with a circus (!!) and Houdini performed tricks like his “Hindoo needle trick” where he seemed to have swallowed 40 needles and pulled them all out threaded together - a big step up from his little coin shake of his childhood. He gained popularity from his tricks and illusions across the world, escaping from handcuffs, straitjackets, chains and shackles, and various compartments using skills such as:

• Dislocating his joints on command to wiggle himself out of cramped spaces
• Regurgitating on command (no gag reflex?????)
• Hiding lockpicks in peculiar places, like the thick sole of his foot or his coarse hair
• Misdirecting attention skillfully so as to the entire audience misses the “how” and focuses on the “what”
• Training himself to hold his breath for much longer than a regular human can/should

However, as we learn in Ragtime, he started to focus on spiritualism when his beloved mother died in 1913. He “became obsessed with ‘making contact with those who had gone behind’”. His illusions became acts of “resurrections”, and he began spending lots of time exposing “fake mediums” of communicating with the dead. This resulted in enemies and outrage across the magic performance industry towards Houdini.

Houdini died from allowing a student to punch him in the abdomen without properly training his body to take the blow. Under the assumption that he was fine, he left his appendix untreated until it was too late, and he died on October 31st, 1926, Halloween day.

While doing this research on Houdini’s life, specific things jumped out at me with resonance from Ragtime. First off, I’d like to touch on the fact that one of his first jobs was performing as an acrobat in a circus. Additionally, he and Bess toured with a circus for some time around the time of their marriage. This reminded me of the encounter Houdini had with Lavinia Warren Thumb and the rest of the Barnum and Bailey circus. We mentioned in class that they were all invited to Mrs. Fish’s poverty ball because, as Houdini quickly realizes, they are seen as petty performances by the upper class. The attendees of the poverty ball do not consider Houdini’s performances as an art, but rather as jokes. Similarly, they view the circus performers as walking jokes that don’t require the level of intelligence that the upper class respects. However, as Mr. Mitchell pointed out in class, Lavinia Warren Thumb dined with Lincoln in the White House but is now being sneered at by privileged people celebrating and idealizing the lower class struggle. With Doctorow’s depiction of Houdini as a rags-to-riches guy with a heart, his persistence in hard work and training to be the best escape artist and magician is the reason why he has gotten so big in the performance industry. Therefore, the fact that the elites saw him as an object of ridicule for his work that actually took extreme physical and mental efforts evokes sympathy for Houdini, and also for the circus acts who had the same potential and starting place as Houdini but were put down by the upper class.

In general, Doctorow’s mentions of real-life events of Houdini’s are legitimate - other than the scenes in which he creates pockets that we will never truly know if they actually happened or not. He does omit details like Bess, early life details other than his lowkey Oedipus complex, and his ways of training. I think that this omittance could be a result of the possibility of skewing the story, a concern for the length of the novel, and the mere fact that Doctorow didn’t have the easy access to info from Google that we (are so lucky to) have.

As a concluding tidbit, I want to add the fact that we haven’t yet heard Doctorow discuss the way Houdini dies because he is still living by chapter 29 for all we know. I read that before Houdini died in real life, he told Bess that he would communicate messages to her if there was an afterlife. Therefore, his wife tried to communicate with him after he died, and tried every year on his death day for 10 years. She proclaimed once that it worked and that she heard from him, but recanted soon after. So because she never heard from him… is that proof that there isn’t an afterlife? Or that there just isn’t a possibility of communication between the afterlife and the real world? If so, does that delegitimize things like Ouija boards and all the people who say they saw ghosts? I’m excited to see if Doctorow mentions Houdini’s death at all in Ragtime. If not, he lives forever in the book...

Sources used:

"Houdini, Harry (1874–1926)." Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained, edited by Una McGovern, Chambers Harrap, 1st edition, 2007. Credo Reference, http://proxy2.library.illinois.edu/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/chambun/houdini_harry_1874_1926/0?institutionId=386. Accessed 27 Jan 2018.

"Harry Houdini." Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed., vol. 7, Gale, 2004, pp. 514-516. Gale Virtual Reference Library, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX3404703082/GVRL?u=uiuc_uc&sid=GVRL&xid=91649a17. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.