In Ragtime, after Houdini’s mother’s death, Houdini goes through a super depressed streak. During this time he visits his mother’s grave every day, to make up for not being there when his mother called for him. Each day he would add a stone to a pile, eventually making a small pyramid over the grave. Wanting to learn what his dead mother had to say to him, he became obsessed with spiritualism. It is important to remember that Houdini was primarily a showman and cultivated a certain image for himself. It is more likely that he just flirted with the idea of talking with the dead rather than actually placing any hope into it, unlike what he showed the public.
Doctorow is very close to reality in this section about Houdini. As he said, spiritualism started growing in popularity starting in 1848 and grew in popularity until about the 1920’s. After that it morphed into a more established religion. The same year Houdini’s mother died (1913), the first spiritualist church opened in Australia. This really goes to show how widespread the idea of conversing with the dead had become.
Houdini really did go on a spree of debunking mediums, even going so far as trying to outlaw the practice in congress. One story that really stuck out to me (I wish Doctorow could have somehow included it) is Houdini’s friendship with Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes. Though Sherlock Holmes is a very rational character, Doyle himself was a big believer in Spiritualism. One day he convinced Houdini to attend a séance led by Doyle’s wife. Doyle’s wife was an amateur medium and at the séance used a mistake riddled version of auto writing (though both she and Doyle believed it). Auto writing is a divination technique where the medium writes something without consciously thinking about it, giving the impression that a “spirit” is writing with their hand. It is often accomplished in a trance or while paying attention to something else. Of course with Houdini’s background he already knew many tricks of the trade but this séance had some glaring problems, first and foremost being that Houdini’s Italian mother guided Doyle’s wife to write in English. Doyle was so proud that afterwards he went to the press and said that he managed to convince Houdini that spiritualism was real. With Houdini being such a prominent anti-spiritualist this would have made big news. Though Houdini had previously just been pretending to go along for his friend, after this statement he publicly denounced The Doyles’ séance resulting in a broken friendship.
So far I have enjoyed all of the passages with Houdini and he is probably my favorite character in the book. The point of this blog has just been to flesh out a part of Houdini that I had not known of before Ragtime. If you have any further questions or anything is missing, please ask down below.
The Houdini-Conan Doyle story is good, and it is surprising that Doctorow didn't use it in _Ragtime_! It's a bit like how he holds back on Ford's anti-Semitism and support for the Nazis, which would be relevant in this novel that's so concerned with Jewish-immigrant struggles. He gives Ford that one awkward reference to "the Jews" when he's talking to Morgan--which readers will recognize as an allusion to/acknowledgment of his anti-Semitism, but in terms of drawing on history to construct a more damningly ironic portrait of Ford, Doctorow mostly leaves this stuff on the table. (With Houdini, he does get in the reference to his death, after challenging someone to punch him in the stomach as hard as they could. I don't know whether the story of him getting cursed out by a New Yorker while hanging upside down over 42nd St. is apocryphal or not . . .
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