My Dear Bessie (50 page)

I learnt from Walker's letters that the girl in the Radium Girl illusion concealed herself behind a panel before the blades went through, and that the box was deeper than we perceived, but this didn't make me a magician. I wasn't particularly interested in how the tricks were done. I was interested in who had done them, and why, and how these people lived their lives. By the date of the auction I had become determined to buy Walker's letters, and so, on that Thursday afternoon I exchanged my credit card details for a cardboard bidding paddle and sat in the middle of the room as the lots tumbled towards mine.

First there were books to sell. These didn't have much to do with magic, or not directly. There was Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge, known to his readers as Lewis Carroll,
Alice's Adventures in Won-derland
, 1930, the Black Sun Press, short split to head of upper joint, glassine dust jacket, chipped at spine ends and corners, estimate £4,000 to £6,000 – unsold. There was Wilde, Oscar,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, first edition in book form, 1891, first issue with misprint on p. 208 (‘nd' rather than ‘and'), darkened, corners bumped, estimate £750 to £1,000, sold for £700.

Walker in a straitjacket.

When it was time for the magic, one name kept recurring like marked aces. Bayard Grimshaw, who had died in 1994, was a recipient of a great many letters in the sale, and he appeared to be one of magic's few super-groupies. He was a magic correspondent for
World's Fair
, the weekly newspaper for showmen, and he became friends with many of magic's stars. Perhaps seeing a gap in market, and a gullible public, he also became a performer himself, touting a mind-reading act with his wife Marion. In so doing he achieved an illusionist's connoisseurship and the trust of the Magic Circle, and amassed a large hoard of oddments and correspondence. Perhaps he thought they would be valuable one day.

As a keen collector – stamps, tube maps, the usual male detritus – I had been to a few auctions before, but none were as sparsely attended as this. By the time the books had been sold there were about 15 of us left, and I recognised half of
them from the preview the previous day. Most of those who had attended for the books portion had drifted away, and although a few others joined us on the phone and online, the prices rarely exceeded their upper estimate, which filled me with hope. And those who were there seemed predominantly interested in the props and physical tricks rather than documents. But just as I began to feel confident that I would get the Walker letters for a steal, or at least something near the lower estimate of £300, a few of the items started going for three or four times their estimate, and a handful went for more than £1,000. One of these was a vast hoard of card tricks, the earliest dating from 1820, an array of ‘forcing decks', ‘moving pip cards' and ‘waterfall shuffle' packs, the names themselves so alluring that I had to check my urge to buy them on impulse.

The lot simply titled ‘Mentalists' was a collection of letters relating to mind-reading, with a detailed account of an act performed by The Great Nixon, and one letter from 1938 suggesting that The Great Nixon was such a phenomenon that he might be worthy of investigation in a laboratory. The Great Nixon was a sham, of course, and only as great as his stooge in the audience. But such was the allure of the performers in this period that I imagined an audience where few were prepared not to believe; they wanted the trick not to be a trick, but to be magic. The world held enough impending horrors in 1938, so why be cynical when you could be amazed? It wasn't like today, when magic can only be a trick, and the pleasure is not in the illusion but in figuring it out.

The auction wore on, through several items featuring Madame Zomah and seven letters mentioning the Piddingtons.
*
Surely it was only a matter of time before Henry the Horse danced the waltz. But then it was my time, lot 512. The bidding started slowly. No one was interested in the Radium
Girl anymore, much less Aquamarine Girl. But then of course it picked up. The bidding was soon at £200. I had promised myself and my wife I wouldn't go above £400. It went to £260, then to £280. I was so hooked now that I didn't even lower my hand between bids when a higher counter-bid came in. I just kept on going. I didn't even know who I was bidding against – an anonymous voice on the phone taken by an auction house staff member. Then the bidding stopped, and I was the last one interested. The gavel came down at £300 to no reaction whatsoever, no gasps, no applause, just another lot sold, and immediately it was on to lot 513. But I had triumphed: I got his letters, and his letters got me.

When I got them home I read again how to saw a girl in half (a trick box, a very supple assistant, a pair of electronically controlled feet at one end) and also how to make it look as though a cabinet was smaller than it was (black tape, a crafty angle to the audience, an assistant who can really hold her stomach in). But not all knowledge can be written down, and the art of magic, rather than just an explanation of it, cannot be taught but must be learnt, by example and crushing hours of practice. Even a full written explanation, quite apart from breaking the Magician's Code, would be like showing someone the cockpit of a plane and expecting them to fly. But occasionally the letters would preserve a record of well-honed stage patter:

A tricky judgment: The Magic Circle intervenes in 1966.

Metal blades and an 18-inch square wooden tube are passed through the centre of the phone booth and, ostensibly, Honey Duprez. ‘Pull out the tube and blades in the reverse order, crashing them to the back. Turn cabinet once to give girl time to collect knots and conceal them. Then with deliberate moves knock off the three catches and pull open box. Girl steps out. Let her come down front and bow. Then take her place and bow off after her.'

But the tricks were old and almost unperformable now; they belonged in a museum in Vegas. The descriptions reminded me of an old song Clive James wrote with Pete Atkin called ‘The Master of the Revels', in which a showman has blueprints in his office of ‘the first exploding handshake' and ‘the charted trajectories of custard pies'. Where is Honey today? Where is that phone booth?

When it wasn't mourning the former careers and lost illusions of others, the bulk of Walker's correspondence was concerned with defending his own. Looking back at the end of a life, he had begun to worry about his reputation, and about how his cabinet tricks would be remembered after he was gone. Walker had heard that a young magician had begun performing a deep cabinet trick that sounded very like the Radium Girl, and that the trick had been supplied by another magician. Walker became convinced, without seeing the act in question, that the patent for his illusion – which he had registered in 1934 – was being infringed.

This became quite a battle; letters went back and forth for almost a year. ‘I fear,' wrote John Salisse, secretary of the Magic Circle, ‘that the thing may blow up into a holocaust.' As the letter trail advanced, so the secrets of the trick emerged. One
expert witness claimed Walker's case was futile, ‘unless you claim that the whole idea of the penetration of a living person originated with you.' I felt a sadness as I read about the subtleties of the art, and about the great care invested in each illusion. I felt that great magicians shouldn't be allowed to vanish just like that.

In the autumn of 1968, Val Walker briefly re-emerged into the spotlight. He attended a magic convention in Weymouth, where he watched a man called Jeff Atkins perform his Radium Girl for the final time. ‘I can never be sure whether it was 1921 or 22 when I built the original in Maskelyne's workshop under the stage,' he wrote. ‘PT Selbit watched it in rehearsal and sometime later asked if I minded him using the basic idea for a different effect, which I certainly did not. It was his Sawing Through A Woman that emerged, using the identical cabinet dimensions. I have been both saddened and amused at the plethora of variations on the theme which the public has had to swallow during the intervening 40-odd years. I do not think my version of a penetration has been bettered in this long time.'

Walker informed the weekly magic magazine
Abracadabra
that now he had returned to the fold he was already looking forward to the next convention in Scarborough in a year. But he didn't make it. His letters show a progressive illness: ‘I'm not sure I can attend . . .', ‘I may not be able to meet you, try as I might.'

A few days before he died, he sent his last letters from a hospital on the south coast. In one of them, at the close, he said he could be ‘reached at the address above'. He didn't actually write the word ‘at'. Instead, in February 1969, more than two years before what is widely acknowledged to be the first standard email between two computers, he used an old but generally unfamiliar symbol in its place. The symbol was @.

*
It's difficult not to mention Wilde's idiosyncratic postal system without also mentioning the exalted letter he could not send.
De Profundis
, written on 20 sheets of paper in Reading Gaol in the last months before his release in May 1897, is a study of sorrow, beauty and the position of the outcast, and it begins with plaintive regret: ‘Dear Bosie, After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself, as much for your sake as for mine, as I would not like to think that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment without ever having received a single line from you . . .'

What follows is an unapologetic account of an aesthete's life – his search for the exquisite in all things, his extravagances, his questing passions with Lord Alfred Douglas – and an account of the artistic consolations of a life devoted to Christ. Unable to send the letter from jail, he gave it to his friend Robbie Ross on his release, with instructions for it to be typed twice, whereupon certain passages were misread and excised. The original manuscript is held at the British Museum, where we may marvel at the succulent depths of his language and the calm certainty of his convictions.

‘I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age,' Wilde writes. ‘There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. When we begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is bitter so bitter, that we inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasures, and seek not merely for a “month or twain to feed on honeycomb,” but for all our years to taste no other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be starving the soul.'

*
A married couple from Australia famed for their ‘telepathy'.