Houdini is one of those select few who have managed to transcend mere mortality. He died 75 years ago, but lives on as a part of speech. In death, as in life, his name is in the news daily, metaphorically invoked in connection with politicians, sportsmen or financiers who, Houdini-like, wriggle free from some seemingly fatal trap.
Symbolic figures such as this are a kind of narrative shorthand. They are also an integral part of the literature of psychoanalysis. We are all familiar with Oedipus, Daedalus, Icarus and the rest. They, of course, are myths. And it is this mythic quality that imbues Houdini with literary and psychological interest. His bald day-to-day doings are mere raw material, as dull and anti-climactic as the plodding explication of one of his tricks.
The magic is elsewhere; and it is the magic, the source of myth and metaphor, that interests Adam Phillips in Houdini's Box, a meditation on escape, imprisonment and that elusive ability that Houdini possessed and his competitors did not, to embody an aspect of the human condition. Who and what was he? (Who-dini was not, to Phillips's psychoanalytic eye, by any means a chance selection of stage-name.) What are we trying to escape from, or to? "A person who is running away from something . . . is also running towards something else."
Phillips points out that Houdini's heyday coincided with the birth of psychoanalysis, most of whose early practitioners were, like Houdini himself, central European Jews. Fortunately for him, however, his path and theirs never crossed. If it had, we should certainly never have heard of him. His breathtaking absence of self-awareness lay at the very heart of his charisma. "I am what would be called a mother's boy," he once wrote, but this was the merest statement of fact: as to why it should be so, or what its consequences might be, he displayed not the slightest curiosity. The same was true of his control-freakery, his desperate desire to be admitted to the confraternity of the learned, his loathing of spiritualist fakery, above all, his compulsion to be confined and to burst from his chains. Onstage he favoured nakedness, for professional and perhaps sexual reasons; but this was simply (or not so simply) a reflection of his inner nakedness. He communicated unveiled, holding his audience at some deep level never enunciated but thrillingly felt by both parties.
Houdini's Box is not only about Houdini. Interwoven are two case-histories, of a little girl and her excessive games of hide-and-seek and a man in his 50s who compulsively runs away from any woman who attracts him; and the book ends with a figure who is Houdini's diametric opposite, the reclusive Emily Dickinson, poet of self-awareness. Dickinson chose not to spring the trap: for most of her adult life she declined to leave her house, preferring to contemplate in confinement and isolation.
It is Houdini's life, though, that frames the whole; and this gives the book an impetus missing from some of Phillips's earlier work, which I, for one, found unreadable, an impenetrable heap of densely-thought, perfectly-honed sentences as untakeable, en masse, as La Rochefoucauld's maxims. Houdini's Box, by contrast, has a compulsive, novelish quality. Perhaps this is not so surprising: what are most literary novels but casehistories in one form or another?
Part of the book's interest, particularly for the untherapized, is to glimpse what goes on during those hours on the couch. I had imagined (judging from psychoanalysts of my acquaintance) intimidating silence and a lone voice bleating. But the interaction chez Phillips bats back and forth like a Wimbledon final, never less than challenging.
HOUDINI, of course, cannot answer back, but he gets the treatment nonetheless. And what more enticing hero for a psychoanalytic tale? The man himself may be dead, but his life is copiously documented, much of it in his own uncensored words. He is a case ripe for analysis, a myth awaiting deconstruction - not just the personal smoke and mirrors, but the whole many-layered edifice of magic - culminating in our hero's ultimate spirit-busting incarnation as the honest deceiver, the magician you can trust.
It's been done before, inevitably - I'm thinking particularly of Bernard C. Meyer's A Mind In Chains, a volume straight from the pen of Beachcomber's Dr Hiram J. Pipesucker (complete with cover photograph of the author sucking his pipe) - but never so intricately, so subtly, so glancingly. Houdini would be mystified, and probably appalled. But then words were never his thing.
Ruth Brandon is a biographer, historian and novelist. Her books include The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini and Surreal Lives: The Surrealists 1917-1945