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Final Séance
by
Massimo Polidoro
Reviewed by David Britland
Final Séance
is an account of "the strange friendship" between Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan
Doyle, the strangeness coming from the Doyle's passionate belief in Spiritualism
and Houdini's damning campaign against fraudulent mediums in the 1920s.
Ultimately it brought them into conflict but their acquaintance began on much
friendlier terms and it is the growth of that relationship that Massimo Polidoro
charts in this book.
Both were famous, Houdini for his escapes and daring stunts, Doyle for his tales
of adventure and the creation of the world's most famous fictional detective,
Sherlock Holmes. Massimo is unable to pin down exactly how they met but they
exchanged ten letters in two weeks (quicker than email!) and found common ground
in the discussion of Spiritualism. Houdini deliberately played down his
scepticism and Doyle took him to be genuinely "open minded" about the nature of
the After Life. There's no doubt that each respected the other and that their
friendship extended beyond mutual admiration. But Houdini had long been a
debunker of fraudulent psychics while Doyle, for all his literary talent, had a
capacity for credulity that was simply stunning. The Sunday Express said of the
esteemed author, "he is stark, staring mad on the subject of the dead."
The friendship was always fragile, beginning with a bout of one-upmanship. If
one told of how many books on Spiritualism he owned, the second would beat it
and then add that not only did he own them, he'd read them. Each told the other
increasingly bizarre tales of the mediums they encountered. Doyle appears
utterly sincere in his belief of paranormal phenomena, convinced not only that
stage telepathists the Zancigs were genuine but that Houdini too possessed
special powers that enabled him to bring about his escapes. Houdini, on the
other hand, was forced into playing a fine game of trying to retain Doyle's
friendship while at the same time being driven to distraction by the man's
obsession with Spiritualism. Neither was open to persuasion by the other.
The two collided regularly over the demonstrations of individual mediums, Doyle
taking their side, Houdini asserting trickery. It came to a head over the case
of Mina Crandon, otherwise known as Margery the Medium, the wife of a doctor who
had entered a contest set by Scientific American magazine to find a
genuine psychic. There was a prize of $5,000 to be had and Margery had almost
won it when Houdini intervened and demanded that he, a member of the committee
set up to adjudicate the tests, be allowed sit in on the séances. With the great
sceptic in place, events soon took a different turn. Houdini pronounced Margery
a trickster; Doyle in turn denounced the great magician's aggressive tactics,
which he thought were designed to find fraud whether it existed or not rather
then help "fight for the truth."
Massimo has done an excellent job of chronicling the transformation of
friendship to feud and at the same time providing an insight into the
mediumistic phenomena of the time: levitating tables, spirit photographs,
materialisations, ectoplasm and even flower productions. Seen as acts of
showmanship, each medium of the day strove to give a performance of novelties
worthy of top billing on any variety programme. That the dead did make contact
was almost a bonus.
It may seem incredible now that any one believed that mediums hidden behind
screens in already darkened rooms were truly contacting the dead but the fact
that Houdini and Doyle crossed swords over it shows how deeply held and
widespread those beliefs were. Today infrared and low light photography has all
but finished dark room charades but other nonsense has taken its place and
equally eminent men and women argue still over it though the venue is more
likely to be a television studio than a science journal. Meanwhile, the topics
that divided Houdini and Doyle continue to find an audience.
Final Séance is not the first book to examine this topic. Houdini and
Conan Doyle, published in 1932 and written by Bernard M. L. Ernst and
Hereward Carrington, covered the same territory. Indeed Massimo credits the
earlier book for as the source of many of the letters between Houdini and Doyle
used in the present tome. But Massimo has managed to incorporate more recently
published information, especially concerning Houdini, from sources such as
Kenneth Silverman's biography Houdini!!! and Gabriel Citron's The
Houdini-Price Correspondence, weaving them together to provide a more
contemporary retelling of this tale.
Massimo himself is an executive director of the Italian Committee for the
Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, and the book is published by
Prometheus, a firm noted for its sceptical works. So naturally you'll find the
book more sympathetic to Houdini's point of view rather than Doyle's. But the
author rightly concentrates on the tale itself rather than the truth about
psychic phenomena, illustrating it with a good number of photographs and
providing useful references for the material. Doyle and Houdini knew each other
for five years and because of their place on the spectrum of belief much has
been made of their relationship. After reading Final Séance I do wonder
whether that relationship has itself begun to take on mythical status perhaps
taking on greater significance than it ought. Nevertheless, it makes for
enjoyable reading.
The title, Final Séance seems to refer to the final Houdini séance held
in 1936, ten years after Houdini's death and six years after Doyle died. Neither
spirit had the courtesy to turn up for the occasion so don't expect a
spectacular finale. The issues that destroyed their friendship remain
unresolved, both taking their beliefs to the grave. Whether Houdini is even now
apologising to Doyle and admitting what a fool he had been, we will all know
soon enough.
© David Britland July 2001
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