Confessions of a Conjuror

by Derren Brown

  My mother had brought home from her secretarial work two reams of paper for me, one yellow and one white, and this gift of a thousand shining blank sheets has never been surpassed in terms of the unsullied exhilaration they provoked. I riffled through them and ran my fingernail up the sides of the pile to make long pale lines that would break like a straw refracting in water if you cut a block of paper from the top and placed it beneath. I turned the sheets like pages in a book; even indulged myself by throwing some away with a single line drawn on them, or before they had been used at all, thrilled at the naughtiness of the purposeful wastage.

  Several of these sheets were used to practise drawing the nose. I sat at the little writing bureau that I remember as being on the landing but which I presume was actually in a bedroom and tried to draw this befuddling appendage that grew impossibly out of the paper. I started my pencil on the paper; lifted it above the surface of the sheet and drew the length of the nose in the air; then brought the pencil back down again for the final short line that suggested the underside of the nose. I then compared my effort with that of Alex Graham in the newspaper. His unnamed dog-owner still looked out at me with a three-dimensional nose. On my page, two dots. I tried again, this time pressing into the paper rather than lifting above it, to see if that worked. I bore down heavily on the page, ripping the sharp graphite point of my pencil right through it, tearing the paper, then bringing it back up to finish back on top of the sheet. This did not work either: again, no nose pointed forth.

  I do not remember whether perseverance or parental intervention solved the mystery. Somehow the nose was drawn, and the conflation of illusion (a three-dimensional nose) and reality (a cartoonist’s technique; a kind of foreshortening)* brought with it something profoundly satisfying, triggering a passion for drawing, and eventually for painting portraits that play with caricature – a love perhaps born that afternoon on my parents’ landing-or-bedroom, trying to learn how a nose could be flat and stick out.

  The interest in Lego may have come later. Certainly the grown-up Technic variant, with its gears and cogs and motors, fascinated me the most, and presumably some way into adolescence, as I remember constructing a colourful mechanical Wanking Machine during long periods upstairs in my room. The inevitable problem of round pegs and square holes sadly rendered this particular project fruitless, on many levels, but the manufacturers might like to take note of the idea when planning other themed kits for their teenage boy demographic.

  Tracing a path from childhood pleasures to adult skills is an exercise in hindsight and pattern-finding similar to the way most of history is made: in the light of the present we pick and choose events which lead most conveniently to the desired end point of the here and now; we then mistake that all-too-convenient narrative for truth. We are always blinkered by a desire to find confirmation of what we already believe. Without this tendency we would doubtless be unable to operate amid the infinite, conflicting data with which we are constantly bombarded. We confirm our suspicions all too readily but need to harness considerable effort to shake them; we bring our pasts darkly before us and then, attempting to answer a question as to why we are how we are, watch certain segments light up like an interactive museum display to provide an answer. Ask a different question and those lights extinguish, and different parts illuminate in their place. My own portrait-painting narrative begins with a basset hound’s owner’s nose, but that may be wrong: it may in fact have murkier beginnings elsewhere that I do not remember.

  An autobiography is a triumph of selective personal stories, which is why unauthorised biographies can be so painful: it is not that they present necessarily harmful information, rather that they present a different story. They compromise a new narrative as seen by a hack or a fan, different from that told by the subject, and therefore create a disturbing, posturing clone: one who walks and talks as you, but who isn’t you; who does not hold your memories; who punctured neither paper to draw noses nor the enrapt stillness of a legendary pianist’s concert with sniffing.

  This fraction-of-a-second thought process had been triggered when I caught myself flicking a playing card unnecessarily during the trick. It then had me consider for a moment my own incomplete and faulty ‘How I became a magician’ narrative. As I held the card aloft in a moment of mediocre triumph, it occurred to me that the plot would run along the following lines:

  * When I talk about a flight of steps, I can only view a ‘step’ as consisting of a horizontal plane (upon which we place our feet) and an attendant vertical, but if you wish to include the upper level as a step too (which, in the case of a single step, might be a necessary measure, and therefore confuses the distinction between step and not-step), then you may have to read ‘final step’ as ‘penultimate step’. Clearly, the word ‘step’, although defined happily in this context by my Microsoft Office for Mac’s dictionary as ‘a flat surface, esp. one in a series, on which to place one’s foot when moving from one level to another’, has in its heart an action of moving from A to B, and is therefore impossible to pin down to any one of the flat surfaces involved. In the case of a single step that cuts across a corridor, which flat surface counts as the step? The lower or upper level? Presumably neither and both. The term ‘step’ calls into being the vertical interruption to a plane, and alights trickily on the horizontals. But if you asked me to take the teapot that at the moment sits upon the table before me, and place it on the single step in this corridor that we imagine, and I only had this one step to consider, I would be rightly considered a fool to try to adhere it to the vertical surface. Instead, I would place it on the lip of the upper level, which, I suppose, has its concomitant vertical plane attached and is easily thought of as a step in a way the lower level isn’t. Certainly, if you asked me to sit on the step, it’s clear that my bottom would rest on that upper surface and not on the lower one. If we take the uppermost level to be a step, I suppose it may indeed be more accurate to say that it is the penultimate step that I would omit in the private game described above, and that to ‘miss out the final step of a flight’ would involve somehow never alighting on the upper level, but rather to remain floating above it, forever in search of another step. (Only when I found one would I be able to safely place my feet on the current level, for that would no longer be the last step, and then I would be obliged to take that next step again, but only to hover once more; and so on, ad infinitum. You can understand that this is not what I mean when I say that I would miss out the top step.)

  * Or a secret underground vault, very much like Batman’s, but which contains all of my mentalism tools, mind-control devices and general secrets. It depends whether I’m going up or down.

  † Which translates, of course, as ‘bad house’, ‘wrong house’, or even ‘House of Evil’. There is a Napoleonic history to the name, but it always struck me as a strange one for a hotel to choose for itself. French was never my strongest subject at school, but even to my mind Bonnemaison seems a preferable alternative.

  * Skateboarders, when ‘grinding’ on marble, tend to report a similar tactile satisfaction. This trick, which involves riding the board with the wheels’ trucks up on the edge of a kerb or step, is a move commonly included within the often astonishingly balletic performances given by these slack-trousered, recalcitrant pedestrian-botherers wherever steps and smooth surfaces are juxtaposed in town centres. The more common granite stair does not offer the cool, frictionless feedback of a marble edge, and thus the shiny, veined pedestrian planes of Barcelona, Prague and some other European cities are to many skaters as Bayreuth or Graceland are to lovers of Wagner or Presley. Skateboarding is performance art for the prototypically nonchalant. Aside from the great names of the scene, immortalised in a thousand independently produced DVDs and showcased online, most of these performers seem to present a series of rapid stop/start non-sequiturs: eternal private practice sessions that never culminate in complete performances. As soon as a trick is successfully performed, the skater is likely to stop, or me
rely try to repeat it. There is some desire for audience approbation, usually in the form of a few supportive sounds and handshake variants from the skater’s coevals, but perhaps the lack of showmanship and concentration instead on sheer technical skill is part of the saturnine teenage embarrassment regarding full-blown engagement with society.

  * Upon discovering how the nose was drawn, and that it was simply a matter of copying the line rather than thinking of it as a nose, I felt a little of the joy that I like to imagine the artist who first discovered foreshortening may have felt. Until around 700 BC, judging from the art of the time, people stood with their face and feet turned to the side and shoulders square on – an uncomfortable position made fashionable by the Egyptians, and one which took pains to display the clearest view of all limbs (a sensible if contorted measure, as the purpose of art had been to protect the spirits of the departed in the afterlife, and doubtless to show every part so unambiguously was an advantage in making sure that no aspect of the revered ruler or warrior was forgotten). Then, around that time, an early Greek artist working on a vase dared to depict a foot facing directly frontwards: we see a warrior, taking leave of his wife, standing perhaps for the first time with one foot foreshortened. The five little circles of his toe-ends signalled the discovery of depth in art. When I look at that vase, and contemplate that quietly momentous occasion in art history, I am sometimes, self aggrandisingly, reminded of struggling with the Fred Basset nose at such an early age. I wonder whether Euthymedes, the Greek artist, sweated and maddened himself to create the illusion, and whether he threw down his tools and stared in incredulous rapture at the detail on the pot: a small foot, but one which was to constitute such a giant step in art history. We are so accustomed to the idea that an artist can recreate what he sees; had no artist possessed, until that point, an internal representation of a foot drawn from the front? Or alternatively, as the primary focus of art moved towards something less utilitarian and more decorative, perhaps to paint a foot in this way might have only felt like a relaxing of an outdated rule.

  If my own naive experience with trying to capture the nose has any relevance, then there is certainly a disorientating perceptual shift in working out for the first time the tricky conflation of three dimensions into two. Remembering my strange experience, I like to imagine that it was a dizzying experience for the artist. I cannot understand why I was not able simply to copy the line on to the page, and why it was so baffling: in other words, I do not know what I was really seeing when I looked at the face printed in that comic-strip panel.

  Over a thousand years after the toes appeared on the Greek vase, Brunelleschi was to take this foreshortening to the next stage and change the world by discovering the formal rules of perspective, teaching artists the mathematics of the vanishing point. Again, does that mean that before him, people could not see that objects converge in the distance? What did it mean to unearth such a fact? When young Masaccio unveiled his extraordinary painting of the Holy Trinity on a wall of the Santa Maria Novella and tricked the Florentine congregation into thinking they could see a deep recess in the wall, arched in the latest style and seemingly with figures and a tomb placed solidly before it, was it something the pious crowd could easily comprehend? Did it feel like a trifling amusement, as 3D cinema does to us today, or was it an overwhelming assault on their senses? Did they rush forward to touch the wall and assure themselves of its flatness? I like to think so.

  Part One: The Magic Hat

  Twice (once when aged four and again when six) I accompanied my mother’s side of the family on a Christmas trip to the Water’s Edge Hotel in Bournemouth. I have just now carried out a Google search with the aim of finding pictures of the interior of the hotel and to feel, in turn, a sweetly melancholic rising of nostalgia. This has proved to no avail, so I presume it has since been renamed, or pulled down. Perhaps it eventually slipped from its precarious location into the water. I was hoping to see again the regal staircase where I made a friend called Darren; the ballroom where the comedian Mick Miller performed (my parents, aunt and uncle would laugh heartily at his jokes while I asked my mother to repeat them or explain why everyone was laughing); the room in which I played under the table with Nikki, my adored cousin of roughly the same age. I had entered fancy-dress competitions during both these stays, once wrapped entirely in white toilet paper, with the head part painted black. Unable to move my arms or legs in this mummified state, I had to be carried to the stage by my father. Mick Miller, I think, was judging, and asked me exactly what I had come as.

  ‘A match,’ I answered, correctly.

  I don’t remember how I was placed.

  The highlight of the stay in the hotel was the unwrapping of presents on Christmas morning. The night before was generally filled with my draining questions about how Father Christmas could know in which hotel I was staying, and then how he would be able to get into the room upon arrival, given the absence of a chimney (did he collect all the door keys from reception? A skeleton key seemed the most likely answer, although the very term ‘skeleton key’ played on my imagination and made the image of the bearded old man creeping into the room even creepier), and whether he had a list of which children were staying in which rooms. The first year, I awoke in the fold-out bed in the corner to find that a pillowcase* had appeared, as promised, at its foot during the night, stuffed with gifts. I can remember something of the opening, but most vividly I remember the treasure inside. Father Christmas had bought me, among a few other rewards for my year’s worth of goodness, a magic set.

  This was no ordinary magic set housed in a cardboard box with a plastic insert to hold rings, coin-holders, lengths of rope and cheap cards. The tricks were inside a large plastic magic hat. This hat looked like a black top hat – a little too large and uncomfortable to wear, but one which yielded special secrets. The label on the bottom surface of the inside lifted up to reveal a secret compartment from which small objects, if previously hidden in there, could be produced, or conversely, into which they could be vanished. A long, thin panel that ran down the inside from rim to base, but which was carefully hidden within the design of the interior, could be pulled open to mysteriously bring into being a wand, right after the hat was shown to be empty. This wand had a sliding white end that allowed the initiated Svengali to create the illusion of it growing longer and shorter. Aside from these built-in gimmicks, the hat was filled with the familiar tricks of the colourful card and plastic variety.

  I had never considered magic tricks before. I believe that I was taken aback by the promise of being able to perform impossibilities as described on the outside of the box, not realising that they were mere artifices, relying on secret ways of cheating. My faint memory involves a moment of confused disillusion as it was explained to me that I would not be able to perform real magic with the set, despite the contrary rhetoric printed by the manufacturers on their misleading packaging.

  I took the hat everywhere with me. I showed Nikki the few self-working tricks I could perform, and immediately, excitedly, explained the secrets to her. In fact, I have no doubt that the explanation of the secret hat-panels and strange reversible handkerchiefs was of far more interest than performing the tricks themselves, and probably preceded them every time. Above all, my memory of the hat is as something huge and unbelievably extravagant. No doubt it would be tiny if I were to see it now, and the memory of the awe I felt upon removing it from the box, pulling it up and out with both hands, mouth agape, looking back and forth between it and my grinning parents, would be permanently diminished. It would shrink in the way that certain things do shrink, most notably your parents’ house upon visiting again after a university course has pulled you away for so long, or your own house in between viewing it as a prospective buyer and the day you move in. Size is such a quantifiable, seemingly objective quality; yet even the feet and inches in which it is measured seem themselves to be subject to the whimsy of age and circumstance. I think of those chairs and writing desks at primary sch
ool, and the memory of being sprawled across them when struggling with long division (my cheek flat against the cool pine of the desk top, running my fingernail along deep scratches in the wood, sleepily pushing rubber-shavings along the long furrow designed for holding dip-pens and watching them fall through the big ink-well hole and disappear) – pieces of furniture which seemed so imposing at the time yet which years later made my eyes well up when I saw how tiny they were; those living-room shelves and the cupboards on the wall of my bedroom, which shrunk to a third of their size while I was gaining my degree.

  I cannot remember if my interest in the hat was sustained long enough to produce any magic performances; nor can I tell you what happened to it. I presume it was broken and eventually thrown away, for I have no memory of it lingering in my bedroom or being left in the bottom of my wardrobe, which became a gloomy graveyard of surplus playthings for many years. I was certainly spared the experience of performing magic for family and friends. The hat and its secrets came and went, and I forgot all about conjuring for many years.

  Part Two: After Eight Mints Box

  My parents would from time to time throw small dinner parties. Somehow these do not seem to relate to the gatherings my friends and I now host as adults, brimming with hearty intimates, mirth and uncertain wines: these were the dim dinner parties of parents, known only peripherally to our memories through stifled sounds and rare, illegal glimpses.

  The memory of such occasions shifted from the barely conscious to a place of focused awareness one evening about eight years ago, in Bath. I was at the house of a friend who had young children, sat talking late after the kids had been packed off to bed, enjoying a Scotch and discussing grown-up things, when we noticed one of his offspring appear at the doorway. Jeff, the boy in question, was perhaps eight years old; he stood in the dim light, clutching his duvet around his colourful pyjamas, rubbing his eyes with a practised pretence of insomnia, asking for a drink of water, clearly hoping to be invited to sit with us (I suspect I was a favourite guest among the kids and Jeff was hoping for further magic tricks or some such). His father leapt up to send him back to bed with a reluctantly poured glass of water and a scolding manner.