Confessions of a Conjuror

by Derren Brown

  This is the elemental structure of drama that takes us explicitly back to Aristotle in the West, but deeper into the mental processes of all struggling human beings throughout our history. Wherever and whenever we have seen ourselves as the protagonists in the dramas of our own lives, beset with conflicts but with a desire to satisfyingly overcome them; ever since we have told stories that reflect that drive, and enjoyed tales of adventure, this structure (reflected in the final card-to-blindfold plot of this trick’s third stage) has been our guide:

  One – protagonist sets out to achieve a goal (or the magician sets out to transport the card to the top of the deck)

  Two – his expectations are not met, and difficulties beset him (the card is not where it should be)

  Three – conflict is resolved, he achieves an unexpected final position that resonates more than the one he set out to achieve (card is found somewhere even more unlikely)

  Three creates story, and allows for struggle and resolution. In magic, One is empty. Two is repetitive and pedestrian. Three is dramatic, stylish, and rhythmical.*

  When Joel had finished shuffling, I took back the cards into my left hand and complimented him on his skill, asking him if he had played cards professionally. He clearly hadn’t (all but the most modest professional player probably would use a riffle shuffle, maybe even in the hands rather than on the table, and would have checked the deck for abnormalities upon taking it), but this flattering question led the group to look across at him, empathically feeling his gentle embarrassment and anticipating his answer with a slight communal smile.

  As they looked away from me, I took the deck from above with my right hand, and in the action of bringing the deck forward and on to the table in order to spread the cards for the necessary selection I quickly ran my thumb up the short edge nearest me. I applied just enough pressure to make the cards quickly and lightly snap off my thumb, until I felt, midway through the deck, the location of the Queen of Hearts, from whose length I had shaved an otherwise imperceptible half a millimetre that afternoon while working in the deck for use. The absent sliver caused the modified court card to miss the thumb-pad and fall with the card beneath it, creating a slight tactile inconsistency. Having found this card, I slightly raised the upper half of the pack at this point, enough for the tip of my left little finger to enter just above it (hidden under the cover of my right hand, arched over the whole deck), and lifted the top section, held between the shiny curve of my left little fingernail and the middle two fingers of the same hand, while my right shifted its grip to wedge the bottom half against my left thumb. In this position I performed the previously mentioned ‘pass’, better than before but still sadly far from perfect, more or less imperceptibly reversing the two halves of the deck to bring the shortened Queen to the top, the larger forward-movement of my hands to the table hiding the smaller action of transposing the two packets.

  The deck arrived at the table with my one altered card in a position where I could make sure it wasn’t chosen. This single, unremarkably doctored, indiscernibly deficient card, lying otherwise flush with and directly above its fifty-one fellow pasteboards, able to be located among a shuffled deck and controlled in an instant due to this diminutive discrepancy, was to be a mole in the ranks; a spy to signal the movements and positions of other cards; one small but vital part of ensuring the hoped-for successful conclusion to the trick that had now commenced. With my right hand I swept the deck across the table in a wide arc, releasing cards evenly to form a crescent of card-backs: white borders alternating with flashes of the white-on-red rococo filigree that wrought itself into the ornamented Bicycle back design.

  ‘Joel, Charlotte, Benedict, perhaps you’d pick a card each.’

  I turned away to my right, bringing my gesturing left hand casually around to hover over the few cards that now lay at the far right of the sweep. The rightmost of these was the shortened Queen, and this seemingly accidental blocking of those cards ensured it wouldn’t be selected. I enjoyed the feeling of a trick commencing, and this one in particular: it comprised a long series of effects, each more baffling than the last. It was not of my devising,* though I had adapted and altered it for my own use and made it a staple of my repertoire.

  Pick a card. In those words resides everything tiresome about conjuring: the geeky kid at the party; the irksome enthusiast with his pockets full of props; the promise of a gently embarrassing few minutes while someone else’s fatuous friend fumbles to find a card unconvincingly lost in a fingered, filthy deck. Magic has both feet planted in cheap vaudeville and childish posturing; in dishonesty and therefore not in art. The magician cheats, and this truth runs cold through the craft’s bloodless veins. Because he cheats, and because tricks are not tricks unless they are inherently impressive, it is hard for anyone other than another magician to tell whether he is really any good or not. The typical novice magician is regularly told by startled spectators that he is of a suitably amazing standard to, say, appear regularly on television, when that can logically only be the case for a very small number. (This is an encouraging illusion but an illusion nonetheless, rather like the way most men believe themselves to be better than averagely endowed, and most people believe themselves to have a better than average sense of humour. It is a difficult exercise to imagine most people having a more than average anything.) Therefore magicians starting out are prone to falling victim to a rather convincing trick being played on them: that they are better than they are. Compare them to people starting out in stand-up comedy. A comedian is not a comedian unless he is on stage telling jokes. If people don’t laugh, then he isn’t any good, and it’s a painful, self-evident truth when that occurs. In magic, anyone with a shop-bought trick deck is a magician, and if people aren’t fooled they usually pretend to be, and they are understandably likely to mistake being fooled as a sign of being in the presence of an excellent magician. Comedians starting out do also tend to think up their own jokes, whereas it takes a long time for conjurors to work out tricks and methods for themselves.

  Those – and I have seen a few – who elevate magic to something artistic are those who overcome the innate puerility that besets the craft, and bring to it a performance personality that an audience would feel is almost enchanting enough on its own. The best magicians, or at least those I most like, do not merely do one trick after another at you, appreciating instead the value of light, shade, and even understatement. In the best performances, the trick itself is often not the primary pleasure: the finest pieces soar not necessarily because they are the most bamboozling in and of themselves, but because they are performed by an utterly captivating character, or imbued with a theatrical sensibility that turns a puzzle with a disappointing solution into an experience of genuine drama, fun or enchantment. These are not qualities synonymous with glitz and sensational production values. For what it’s worth, I most readily identify such exemplary magic with Chan Canasta, David Berglas, Mac King and Penn and Teller. Not all of these names may be known to the reader and none has embraced the Vegas aesthetic, even though King and P&T are must-sees for visitors to that extraordinary, sweltering city of confection.

  Although personality plays a huge role in stand-up comedy, a joke can work well enough written out in a joke book or shared online, separate from any voice other than the reader’s. Perhaps this is because a naked joke can still tell a story, or at least make us laugh; we are engrossed, surprised, and made to feel good. A bare trick, on the other hand, may surprise us but is unlikely to engross or delight without a performer and a thought-through presentation. This means that better tricks do not for a moment make a better magician.

  For a successful magician, beneath the huge amount of attention paid to presentation, and the attempt to create something theatrically powerful, there may exist an embarrassment about the unavoidable presence of deception that binds it all together. Many bright and talented magicians (spurred on by a misjudged desire to show themselves to be knowledgeable performers), treat the notion of
cheating as a great leveller when in the company of those more successful than themselves. I dined with a veteran and true genius of magic who compared this point to a kid bearing holiday snaps approaching a famous photographer to give critical notes on the latter’s work. This discourteous self-regard typifies a certain type of amateur conjuror and of course exists in other arts – a very famous actor once told me that earlier that day a drama student had confessed she felt he was ‘struggling to find the character’ during a rehearsal to which her class had been invited – but the singular problem of cheating makes this impertinence very common within magic. (Being now in the position of the successful performer, I meet any number of otherwise perfectly lovely hobbyist magicians who, upon meeting me at the stage door, are only too happy to give unsolicited notes and launch into criticism of the show – a strange business that I am sure happens with far less frequency in the roughly parallel world of the touring comic. The peculiar mists of magic can severely obscure the judgement of how to ingratiate oneself socially, which is, touchingly, what these magicians at the stage door are most likely seeking to do.)

  All too aware of my own excruciating personality as a young magician, it is clear to me that a craft that is largely about designing quick, fraudulent routes to impressing one’s peers is unlikely to encourage much in the way of genuine likeability.

  The desire to impress is an efficient means of bringing out one’s least impressive qualities. It is related to a phenomenon known as negative suggestion, and many people with a fear of heights know a common example: that of struggling with the desire to throw oneself into the abyss. The panic or paralysis of a sufferer is normally not so much caused by the height itself but by an internal battle with a ludicrous, powerful temptation to leap into it. It is classic negative suggestion, encapsulated in the instruction ‘Don’t think of a green elephant’: the trying not to do some particular thing flusters the mind and leads one towards doing exactly that.

  I have no particular fear of heights, but in a similar way to that described above I seem to perversely enjoy the profound disorientation and panic induced by carrying out the following exercise when faced with a balcony railing overlooking some panorama, particularly at night. I recommend imagining this sequence rather than actually trying it out:

  1. Sit on the railing but face inwards, towards the building.

  2. Lock your legs into the vertical struts of the ironwork.

  3. Start to lean backwards, keeping your eyes open, rolling your eyes upwards.

  4. Arch back as far as you can, watching as the ceiling of the balcony opens into the vast starry sky, and then (if you can keep going as your centre of gravity shifts to the wrong side of your support and threatens to pull you over) feel the horizon dizzily swing inverted into view from the furthest reaches of your vision as, struggling against every impulse to pull yourself back to safety, you strain your head back to take in the swooping-up ground beneath you.

  This nauseating vertiginous experience, usually effective by the early stages of number four but woozily and effectively recreated here in a comfortable reclining library chair as I act out the process in microcosm by means of reference, is bizarrely addictive. The very knowledge that it is idiotic, transparently dangerous and gut-heavingly repellent to lean backwards as far as I can over a balcony edge only has me all the more eager to try it whenever I find a suitably precipitous balustrade. And it is that impulse to perform the act one knows one should avoid that not only makes smoking so hard to give up but also has us fail miserably on social occasions with our peers. The deadly formula ‘I must not . . .’ puts the prohibited act foremost in our minds and allows the idea of its execution to quietly blossom and flourish until we concede defeat and let the proscribed word slip from our mouths, or, through frantic over-compensation, achieve for ourselves the exact end we had wished so dearly to avoid.

  I am acutely aware of this happening in company. This is partly because I sometimes find people acting oddly when meeting me, and also because I am aware of my own tendencies to over-compensate for my weaknesses. Returning for a moment to the theatre stage doors, it is not uncommon to meet there a small band of truly devoted people who follow me from show to show. Among this group are numbered an even smaller handful who, having stood in the rain and cold with many other patient and delightful people awaiting my arrival, usher everyone else forward before them so that they themselves can spend more time with me after the others have left, as if they and I enjoy an exclusive relationship not extended to ordinary ‘fans’; and then, out of this same eagerness not to appear obsessive (as if the other people were being anything other than entirely flattering), they finally feign indifference and exaggerated nonchalance to the point of actual rudeness, wordlessly thrusting across photographs to sign and then looking away with a grand display of apathy while I accede to their requests. They are kind enough to have spent their money on several shows, sufficiently sweet to follow me from city to city and queue in unfavourable conditions when they should be getting home, yet in a misjudged effort not to seem like a loony, they act exactly like one. I have spoken about this with many performers, and it seems a very common occurrence – a wonderful, predictable glitch in our natures that makes us behave quite antithetically to how we would like to appear.

  I have, of course, made the same mistake. A few years ago I met Hugh Grant at a party. It was, as can be imagined, quite an occasion: a huge marquee with glittering chandeliers, fifty beautifully set tables, and the guest list enough to leave you standing motionless, in awe of the people in whose midst you have found yourself.* Thus I found myself mingling with the great and the good. Knowing his then girlfriend, I was introduced, and of course I asked the only question I could think of: was he enjoying the party? His answer made me laugh: ‘I think it’s a complete disaster.’ It was a brilliant response, and although we barely spoke after that, it left the impression of a liking for inappropriate humour, which of course was very endearing.

  Some months later I was dining on my own in London after a show when Grant came in, along with the lady I knew, and a second couple. They spied me and invited me to join them. Imagining at that point that my life would never be visited by a finer or prouder moment, I took few pains to insist that I would be interrupting their evening and bounded over like a drooling Labrador.

  I was introduced to the other couple and offered a glass of wine. It was a charming gathering, and it was lovely to see the lady with whom I was already on friendly terms. However, seeing as it was only my second encounter with Grant, I wanted to impress him. I decided that the best way to do so would be to make an inappropriate comment.

  Now, upon reflection, I understand the impulse. I have on a number of occasions listened to people trying to ingratiate themselves to me by telling me how fascinated they are by some aspect of interpersonal psychology. I can see why they might imagine such topics would appeal, even as I try to steer them away as quickly as I can from such well-trodden ground. Of course we all imagine what might appeal to another person based on the limited knowledge we have – or imagine we have – of his character, and seek rapport in the way that seems to make sense. What made sense to me as I sat next to Hugh Grant was that if I made some rude comment I would endear myself to him. I’d make him think, Hey, this guy’s like me. Maybe we shall become friends.

  I seized the opportunity as soon as it was presented. Until the moment in question I had been speaking mainly to our mutual friend. We were discussing the show I had given that night close by, in which I had walked upon and ground my face into broken glass. Hugh, kindly, said he could not imagine doing such a thing.

  Aha! The chance to make a new friend has presented itself!

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘with the company you’re in tonight, glass in your face would be preferable.’

  I had, lacking confidence at the vital moment, mumbled a little, so his response was ‘Hmm?’

  I think at this point I already hated myself entirely, but still held on to t
he faint possibility that the comment might work as a joke so startling that he would sense a kindred spirit in me. So I repeated the line, all joy or irony now absent from my voice: ‘I said, with the company you’re in tonight, it’s probably preferable.’

  I do not remember if the rest of the party heard these words. The incident blends into a single stinging moment of self-loathing that pains me deeply to this day. I believe he offered, after a moment, a courteous laugh, to politely show that he at least hoped I was joking.

  I excused myself shortly after that and returned to my table, all appetite lost.

  On other occasions I find it hard to bring out the best in myself when around people with huge, domineering personalities. As the more single-mindedly successful celebrities generally fall into this category, I watch myself, as if from afar, shrivel up into a dull, vacuous shadow when I occasionally find myself hopeless in their overwhelming company. I emerge appalled at what I perceive as my own incapacity to contribute interestingly to a conversation. After all, I am perfectly capable of being the life and soul of a gathering, as long as . . . what? That I’m the most impressive person in the room? Hateful.*

  Those rare colossi aside, most people who enjoy some mid-level fame through their work are likely to be looking out on the world no differently from before they became known, and will be just as bewildered by strange behaviour as anyone else. And irrespective of what type of people we meet, famous or otherwise, it is comforting to know that we all warm to largely the same qualities in people. Typically those qualities boil down to one main quality: one single character trait which we all possess to one extent or another; one attribute which is a pleasure to foster and the greatest pleasure for others to feel in us. This was the simple point that I missed, in all my excitement, when I found myself sat with Hugh Grant in that restaurant. This is the quality which has been missed in all the generations of self-help books and get-what-you-want volumes and seminars; the single most valuable element of character which is most likely to win us friends, influence people and leave us untroubled as we consider our lives at three a.m., yet which has been routinely ignored by the industries devoted to improving our lives with quick-fire magical techniques. For those of us who feel a little uneasy when we hear the rhetoric of self-improvement courses, and more so when we meet those whose selves have been improved by them, recognising the absence of this one quality is the answer to understanding why such courses so often don’t quite seem to achieve their goals.