Houdini, for his part, was not really gullible at all. He was an illusionist and knew that it was easy to trick people, even himself. So he always observed and prepared carefully, recognizing that he would have to be careful to catch someone cheating. This is not to say that he didn’t want to believe that the claims of spiritualists were true — quite the contrary.
But he wanted it to be true enough that he was determined not to be fooled. Thus he exposed charlatans wherever he went, challenging anyone to provide clear proof of spiritualist powers. No one ever met this challenge and no one ever managed to demonstrate that they could communicate with spirits without cheating. One of his methods would involve putting soot on trumpets which were intended for playing by the spirits. When the so-called “spirits” started twirling the trumpets Houdini turned on a flashlight and pointed out the person with soot on his fingers.
The cause of the final rift in their friendship came during a vist the Doyles made in 1922 to America. Lady Conan Doyle, who did “automatic writing,” offered to try and get a message from Houdini’s mother. After putting herself in a trance, Lady Doyle drew a cross at the top of a piece of paper then wrote: “Oh, my darling, thank God, thank God, at last I’m through.” The message also claimed that Houdini would soon “get all the evidence he is so anxious for.”
Houdini rejected the message’s authenticity — it had been written in English, but it was no secret that Houdini and his mother, a Jewish-Hungarian immigrant, didn’t know that language. Such an observation would have been child’s play for Sherlock Holmes, but Doyle rejected it emphatically, arguing that language had no significance to spirits.
Houdini certainly didn’t think that the Doyles had deliberately deceived them. Instead, the thought that they were simply deceiving themselves with their naive gullibility. He didn’t push the issue, but when he later wrote that he had never witnessed any authentic spiritualist demonstration, Doyle realized that Houdini didn’t believe Lady Doyle and took it as a personal insult.
For a long time Houdini had taken pains to avoid making such an insult and had avoided revealing the true depths of his skepticism and disbelief regarding Spiritualism. But, once made, the insult could not be taken back. Houdini could no longer hide his real feelings, and the rift between him and Doyle was never healed. Right to the end, Houdini kept working to expose fakes, and, right to the end, Doyle believed that Houdini possessed supernatural powers which he wouldn’t admit to.
Polidoro has written a truly fascinating book which works on a number of levels. It explores the character and nature of two famous men and their famous friendship. It explores not only the nature of Spiritualism and paranormal beliefs in Europe and America in the early 20th century, but also how the various feats are faked for an audience. And it explores the tension between gullibility and skepticism which everyone must face.
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