Confessions of a Conjuror

by Derren Brown

  Once before I had tried this ploy and been discouraged. I had found myself sat not far from Michael Winner in one of said restaurants, and the extraordinary man had come over to say hello. I had enjoyed his company so much that when I came to pay for my meal, I asked the maître-d’ if I might quietly cover Michael’s too; but after some discussion among the staff I was advised that it was a terrible idea: he was, it was tactfully and professionally explained, a generous and proud soul and such a gesture might cause umbrage. Here, clearly, is a man who well knows the pleasure of buying dinner for others. I might have insisted, but upon being cleverly informed that his caviar course alone had come to around ten times my own bill, I quickly acceded to their professional wisdom.

  However, I was assured by an equally knowledgeable staff member that Harold Pinter would not be upset, and I arranged to pick up the playwright’s tab anonymously as I gathered my book and coat to leave. I say ‘anonymously’: I cannot for a second imagine that my name would have meant anything to either him or Lady Antonia, but the last thing I wanted was to provoke the urge of reciprocity and therefore any courteous concern on their part that they should have to respond in some way. The point is only that I left warmed by a happy glow that evening, and that glow was unavoidably a selfish one: for the possibility that this great man might be touched by the gesture – and that therefore I had made some infinitesimal, unattributed impact upon him – was enough to leave me reeling.

  From most kind acts there may stem the potential for reciprocal favours, and intertwined with them a desire for the other person to like us more, but rather than these being embarrassing and confusing truths to torture those seeking purity, they can also teach us a very valuable lesson. Of course it does rather defeat the purpose of being kind if our motives are selfish. But to understand that kindness can genuinely be of benefit to the person being kind, quite aside from any reciprocation, as much as to the person having the benevolence conferred upon him, is to appreciate that it is a richer approach to life than its sickly-sweet overtones may at first suggest. Kindness makes us all happier.

  Since the start of the twentieth century, as Freud’s remarkable ideas seeped into the mainstream, the field of clinical psychology has been far more concerned with the question of how things go wrong, and how problems should be fixed, than with taking the initiative to teach how we can be happier. Until very recently, in the absence of hard research, this task was left to the self-help industry, which is largely content with short-term, quick-fix solutions to life’s problems. This general lack of lasting efficacy is hidden among proud rhetoric, sarcasm towards clinical testing, and an overwhelming reliance on anecdote as evidence – barely different from the alternative health industry. For many, such techniques can be enlightening and useful in the short term, but for the searcher after a longer-term antidote, the only route offered seemed to be one of joining the cult: buying the books, attending the courses, and talking the right language.

  In very recent times, a new movement known as ‘Positive Psychology’ has arisen to fill the gap left by the lack of grownup empirical research and plastered over by self-help fads. It is a serious move to find out what really makes us happy, and then to teach real techniques and approaches to life that make an unfeigned long-term difference. It is also very challenging reading, for the results are often counter-intuitive, or uncomfortably close to home. And there in the middle of it all we find kindness.

  Most of what we think will make us happier does exactly that for a little while, and then loses its power. A bigger house, a new car or any other conspicuous acquirement does give us a buzz of pleasure, but it is a fleeting enough sensation which, once it has subsided, leaves us no happier than we were before. And that place we return to is our default setting: a plateau of general happiness, our state of general contentment. A major key to achieving a fulfilled and happy existence, it would seem, is in raising that plateau by adopting behaviours that continue to generate happiness and make our default level higher. This is, however, an easy point to miss when we are densely surrounded by advertising media that insist we shamefully lack all the things that will, according to their glossy insinuations, make us feel complete. And what are those practices and habits we should seek to put in place? Kindness emerges as one of the most effective. Again and again, experimenters realised that the feeling of pleasure derived from committing an act of altruism far outlasts the pleasure caused by treating oneself. While we quickly adapt to acquiring nice things in our lives, we do not acclimatise to the pleasure of helping others. It raises that default setting of happiness to which we revert when the initial joy of a new toy has passed.

  I write this while eagerly awaiting (and disappointed by the very late arrival of) two new digital cameras ordered online. Both of them – a Canon 5D Mark II SLR and a Panasonic LX3 Lyca-lensed pocket beauty – are currently at the cutting edge of their respective worlds, and in my eagerness to receive them I resemble a child waiting to run into my parents’ bedroom at four a.m. on Christmas morning to bounce on the bed and empty my bladder on to their chests with excitement. I am also extending my apartment by conjoining it with the flat next door, and while the immediate exhilaration is not as charged as that created by the much-anticipated and belated Amazon package, I do imagine I shall enjoy a vastly improved existence welcoming over-awed visitors to my monstrous London über-pad. I delight in new technology on the one hand, and on the other have loved the idea of a sprawling living space ever since seeing the beautifully tangled result of knocking through from one apartment to another when, as a student, I visited the labyrinthine home of Dominic LeFoe, a charismatically anachronistic music-hall impresario who embodied exactly the white-goateed, bejewelled-cane-and-waistcoated Dickensian aesthetic I privately had in mind for myself at that preposterously precocious age.

  I am very aware that neither camera nor expanded flat will really make me happier than I am now. Doubtless by the time I have finished writing this chapter the cameras will have arrived, the flat will be as cluttered with debris as it is now, and I shall realise that, perversely, the most enjoyable aspect of their entry into my life was the anticipation of their arrival.* On the one hand I know these types of acquisitions will do nothing for me after the initial excitement has lapsed; on the other I cannot resist them. Meanwhile, the findings of the Positive Psychologists are a comfort, for if the cameras break or the flat purchase falls through, I shan’t feel that I have seriously lost out.

  Although one likes to imagine that success brings with it a need for, or even a presumption of, social skills, it is a sad truth that the wealthy tend to be among the least kind of us. Witness the successful executive who charms the bespoke pants off his dinner colleague in a restaurant, but treats the waiter with dismissive contempt. Unfortunately, for those of us who live in a world where a personal assistant and similar luxuries are necessary to function productively, an unfair expectation can arise of how easily life should fall into place, and therefore when it doesn’t, a revolting tendency to blame others for not doing their job properly is a common reaction. A diner having a row with a waiter in a swanky restaurant chills the blood in a way that a quarrel over a pizza order elsewhere would never do. Compassion is rarely the custom of the privileged. How different things would be if that were not the case.

  A poet I knew once suggested, while addressing a group of students, that the would-be versifiers improve their skills by writing a poem first thing each morning. When one of the students complained that it took her weeks to write a poem that she was happy with, and that the idea of writing one every morning seemed an impossibility, his answer was brilliant: ‘Lower your standards.’ This is also one answer recommended by the Roman philosopher and statesman Annaeus Seneca: if you have high expectations of how smoothly life will glide forward every day, you will be routinely disappointed and therefore prone to anger. Lower those expectations, and the world becomes a less frustrating and therefore more delightful place.

  When we are custom
arily annoyed by what we see as the failings of others, we are judging them by a ludicrous standard: we are assuming that they fully understand our desires, quite possibly better than we do, and that they have nothing to do but arrange things to fall seamlessly into place around our probably ill-communicated wishes. Part of kindness therefore involves a more realistic appraisal of our impact upon other people, and being aware of our tendency to cast them as cameo roles in the fascinating epic of our own lives. This in turn reminds us of the elusively obvious fact that those we meet are already leading lives as complicated as our own; that people very rarely act or talk in a way that to them seems stupid, cruel or unjustified, and that therefore in arguments with anyone other than the most painfully slow-witted we would benefit far more from understanding and incorporating the viewpoint we find so inconceivable than being outraged at its unreasonableness. Each of us is leading a difficult life, and when we meet people we are seeing only a tiny part of the thinnest veneer of their complex, troubled existences. To practise anything other than kindness towards them, to treat them in any way save generously, is to quietly deny their humanity.

  * Sadly, time constraints have often meant that a trick written and performed in three phases has been edited down to two for the television viewing public. This is a necessary but sometimes frustrating evil. Of course it can add variety to an episode: if everything followed the same structure it would become too obvious, and the subtle pleasures of light and shade would be sacrificed.

  * Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, the extraordinary father of modern conjuring, made the salient point that ‘a magician is an actor playing the part of a magician’. This is a very good description. However, an actor takes for granted how to create drama in every word, movement and look. The average magician is barely aware of its existence.

  * I had learnt it in its original form from a favourite conjuror of mine, Tom Mullica.

  * At one such party I saw Baroness Thatcher talking to a small group of guests. It was all I could do not to eavesdrop: I could not imagine what one discusses with Mrs Thatcher when one meets her at a party. The traffic on the way down? The quality of the canapés? I was desperate to know what was being said. I was not brave enough to listen, so I cannot tell you. I merely note my intense curiosity.

  * On a few occasions I have had the opportunity to meet a hero of mine, and have since learnt to avoid such situations where possible. It is not just that these people are inevitably disappointing when encountered in the real world; more dispiritingly, to find oneself recoiling from a figure one has privately held in such high esteem is to be left unable to enjoy his or her work to the same degree, and therefore with a life a little less pleasant than before. This is especially treacherous in the case of writers. We take such pleasure from particular authors’ works, hunt down their old titles or eagerly anticipate new ones for the private delight of immersing ourselves in their worlds; we have been inspired and moved by their great ideas or turns of phrase which made our lives richer in an instant. As inspiration from such sources normally comes not so much from our discovery of a powerful new idea but instead from a lucid and eloquent confirmation of something we already knew but had never found such perfect words for, there is a tendency to develop a strong feeling of rapport with the author – to believe that he must be the same as us, and that because we share one idea, other aspects of his personality will also echo ours.

  The crushing reality tends to be that this leap is a huge misjudgement, and that he is more likely to seem a regrettably predictable embodiment of the peculiarity of his writing style. An author who is endearingly detached and pedantic in his work is likely to be boringly so in real life. One who writes with unforgiving, unapologetic single-mindedness that thrills on the page will most probably seem merely cold and charmless in the flesh. Equally, the much admired but neurotic artist seems plain rude when we are introduced at a party, and the flamboyant musical genius reveals himself to be a dull, self-obsessed show-off when away from the stage.

  Therefore we find them disappointing for all the same reasons we had loved their work. Now we read those words or listen to those lyrics and can only remember the more pedestrian character we met, and we interpret the once adored idiosyncrasies as symptoms of social ineptitude. We may struggle to banish such thoughts from our minds and view the person as quite separate from the work, but we cannot rid ourselves of the associations, and the work is forever tarnished. Who, after all, could love an author’s works with the same self-abandonment after being blanked by him at a party?

  A luminary at Channel 4 once declined an invitation to dine with Woody Allen, a hero of his, anticipating this disappointment. And I’m sure he continues to enjoy Allen’s films more than if he had attended and been struck by the prosaic humanity of his idol.

  * This is the same impulse that drives women to pay for extensive and unnecessary plastic surgery. They do not achieve their goal of looking more attractive, in the same way that those intent on improving themselves through dedicated courses also miss their ambition of becoming improved people. The women instead achieve the familiar look of one who has ‘had work done’, and in parallel, the self-improved are rewarded with a similarly unconvincing, somewhat caricatured version of what they had hoped for. At least the woman of a certain age who has chosen to greet her world with an unchanging mien of tense astonishment has a curious status about her; typically the person who has been taught how to have a loud, ‘motivated’ personality is simply an embarrassment.

  * I sometimes wonder if Freud killed Dickens. Once the vague notion has filtered down to us that acts of true love and self-sacrifice disguise selfish unconscious desires, we are left to scoff at the florid chronicles of such noble behaviour that form much of Dickens’ heart-tugging, orphan-laden tales, treating them as sadly improbable and two-dimensional. We would be more convinced now by a complex alternative drama of motherless Oliver Twist’s psychosexual development than by Dickens’ broader characterisation of his eponymous hero.

  We may now find the depictions of these do-gooders simplistic and unfashionable, but we flock instead to the uncomplicated narratives of uplifting television programmes – Oprah Winfrey, Secret Millionaire, and so on – to warm our hearts in the same way. And it is a beautiful thing to weep with happiness at the openly engineered scenes of selflessness that frequently play out in this medium, and to be willingly manipulated by superficial, pared-down tales of rewarded goodness, all our cynicism suspended.

  Scientists have studied the particular soul-soaring sensation of elevation we derive from watching these ‘real-life’ events unfold within the far-from-real-life frame of the small screen. It seems that something called the ‘vagus nerve’ may be affected by such experiences, which affects the heart rate and works with a hormone called oxytocin to provide feelings of calmness and a desire for bonding. Interestingly, oxytocin also happens to regulate lactation: in one test worth mentioning, it was found that nursing mothers shown a particularly uplifting episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show produced far more breast-milk than a control group watching comedy clips. I was pleased, when reading of this eccentric experiment, to observe that the scientists in question had had their conclusions poetically prefigured by Lady Macbeth centuries before, in her ‘milk of human kindness’ soliloquy. I wonder if faint memories of early English lessons, shapeless and shifting but nigglingly poignant, stirred within these lab-coated researchers as they collected and measured the warm, watery cupfuls.

  When we witness others being kind and in turn feel this elation, we are surprisingly not especially moved to replicate it. As this hormone produces such calming emotions, we are not prone to be driven to action by its release, despite how much the kind acts otherwise move us.

  In Dickens, as in television, we are thankfully spared the pedestrian layer of meddlesome real life, which would throw the clear variables of a crafted tale into chaos and leave us cold. It takes the careful removal of this unpredictable stratum (and all the unhelpful conflicts and
distractions it contains) to create a coherent contrivance upon which we can intuitively hang our feelings.

  The distinction between fiction-story and real-life-story was brought home to me by an incident related by a friend, L—. He was on a train, returning to London after attending the funeral of his closest friend. His soul-mate, a young man in his early twenties, had lived a richly spiritual life, which he had himself ended in a tragic act of self-destruction. Travelling home, L— was deeply lost in that peculiar wretched reverie which we can imagine the mixed emotions of the service had produced in him. Sat in the carriage, oblivious to the other passengers and the trundling of the train, his mind dwelt on the significance of the loss of his friend; his soul ached within him, and his thoughts and yearnings grew grand and melancholy as his heavy heart reached out across dark expanses.

  And then, at that moment, before him in the air, coloured gold by the soft light from a low London sun which now revealed itself through the window, there appeared a tiny, dancing airborne feather. Impossibly light, it hovered, somehow held, six inches or so from L—’s face, by turns motionless, then spirited into coaxing, winking whirls and pirouettes by the warm air; and far beyond it the silent carriage had slipped into some timeless golden world and nothing moved save for this floating, fleeting apparition.

  L—’s heart surged and lifted; his darkness fell away before the unlikely feather that seemed to have found him there, a token from another dimension. He smiled and went to blow it, playfully, in order to watch it rise and spin and fall before him. His intention, at least, was to blow; but as he drew a preparatory breath he unintentionally sucked the feather into his mouth and, with the full force of floor-fluff flying into the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner, it shot to the back wall of his throat and clung there. A sudden, violent fit of rasping coughing ensued as his body tried to dislodge the intruder. Eyes streaming, he began to gag, and as the other passengers recoiled, he reached into his mouth and tried to scrape it from his throat wall with a fingernail, retching on to his fingers, convulsing spastically as the train heaved into Waterloo.