Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings

by Craig Brown

  HARRY HOUDINI

  BAFFLES

  PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT

  SS Imperator

  June 23rd 1914

  Houdini is finding it very hard to recover from the death of his mother last year. It has affected him deeply. Spending Christmas in Monte Carlo, he tries to assuage his grief in the casinos. He wins 2,000 francs, but feels no sense of elation. Instead, he is drawn to a special graveyard in Monte Carlo, filled with the corpses of those who committed suicide after losing their fortunes to roulette and cards.

  ‘A terrible feeling pervades the first time one sees the graves, and thinks of the human beings who finish their lives in this manner,’ he writes in his diary. He has heard that the casino workers place money in the pockets of suicide victims so as to suggest that penury has played no part in their deaths; the casino pays for the shipping of the corpses back home in order to keep things quiet. Sometimes it seems that all human life is full of such dirty tricks.

  Harry and Beatrice Houdini celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary by taking a cruise back across the Atlantic on the SS Imperator. The ship sets sail from Hamburg on June 17th, stopping en route at Southampton to pick up more passengers. On the night of June 23rd, two days before they are due to dock in New York, Houdini tops the bill of a charity benefit being staged for the German Sailors’ Home and the Magicians’ Club of London.

  Among the audience is Theodore Roosevelt, the rumbustious former President of the United States.81 The onboard entertainment kicks off with the Ritz Carlton Orchestra playing selections from La Bohème. They are joined by the celebrated soprano Madame Cortesao, who sings an aria from Madame Butterfly. Finally, amidst much excitement, the great Houdini takes to the stage.

  He warms up his audience with a couple of tricks involving silk handkerchiefs and playing cards, before announcing that he will now be performing a séance. ‘I was asked to give an entertainment,’ he later recalls, ‘and the subject of spirit writing came up. A number of other well-known men were present, all of them having intelligence of a high order. Certainly it was not a credulous audience. I offered to summon the spirits and have them answer any question that might be asked.’

  He tells the audience, ‘As we all know, mediums do their work in the darkened séance room, but tonight, for the first time anywhere, I propose to conduct a spiritualistic slate test in the full glare of the light!’ A hum of anticipation ripples through the audience as Houdini distributes paper, envelopes and pencils. ‘If you will be so kind as to write upon the blank paper a question that you would like the spirit world to answer ... then fold the paper and seal it in the envelope so there is no chance whatsoever of my seeing the particular query,’ he says.

  Houdini approaches Roosevelt’s table and asks him to write down his question on the piece of paper, then to fold the paper over, place it in the envelope and seal it. Returning to the stage, he says to the audience, ‘I am sure there will be no objection if we use the Colonel’s question.’ The audience murmurs its consent.

  Houdini now shows Colonel Roosevelt a small wooden frame containing two double-sided chalkboards. ‘Can you confirm to the audience that there is absolutely nothing written on these slates?’ he asks.

  ‘They are blank,’ confirms Colonel Roosevelt.

  Houdini asks him to place his envelope between the two slates.

  ‘Can you please tell the audience what your question was?’ he says.

  ‘Where was I last Christmas?’ states the Colonel.

  Houdini opens the slates, and holds them up for the audience to see. On one slate there is a map of Brazil: the River of Doubt in the Amazon is highlighted. The other slate carries the message: ‘Near the Andes’. It is signed by the committed spiritualist W. T. Stead, a campaigning British journalist who met his death two years ago, on another cruise liner, the Titanic.

  ‘By George, that proves it!’ shouts Roosevelt, jumping up and waving his arms. Last Christmas, he had indeed spent his time exploring the River of Doubt in Brazil. He laughs until tears run down his cheeks.82 The audience gasps and screams in amazement.83

  Houdini’s extraordinary success is the talk of the ship. An account of the evening is transmitted by the radio operator of the Imperator to Newfoundland, and from there to New York. Before the ship docks, Houdini’s extraordinary feat is all over the American newspapers.

  The following morning, Houdini and Roosevelt walk around the upper deck of the ship together. Halfway round, Roosevelt stops and looks Houdini straight in the eye.

  ‘Houdini, tell me the truth, man to man,’ he says. ‘Was that genuine spiritualism or legerdemain last night?’

  Houdini is surprised that someone so clear-headed could be so gullible.

  ‘No, Colonel,’ he replies, shaking his head. ‘It was hocus pocus.’

  Only much later, as a way of undermining the growing craze for spiritualism, does Houdini reveal how he pulled it off. Like so many of his tricks, it had taken elaborate preparation. Some time before, he had been tipped off by a ticket clerk that Roosevelt was to be on board, giving him time to research Roosevelt’s recent voyage up the Amazon. Coming across a map of this trip, Houdini copied it onto a chalk slate, which he then hid behind the blank slate, first signing it with a copy of W.T. Stead’s signature. As the audience was full of Roosevelt’s friends, he was confident that someone – possibly Roosevelt himself – would ask a question about the trip. Nevertheless, he had earlier insured himself by filling the hat with pieces of paper in envelopes, all asking the same question. But by looking at the indentations on the book on which Roosevelt placed his piece of paper, he could see that, by good fortune, Roosevelt had asked the very question he wanted him to ask. Hey presto!

  PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT

  FINDS IT HARD TO GET A WORD IN EDGEWAYS WITH

  H.G. WELLS

  The White House, Washington DC

  May 6th 1906

  One is the most literary of politicians; the other, the most political of novelists. Together, they sit down to lunch in the White House.

  President Theodore Roosevelt – ebullient, big-game-hunting, boyishly unrefined, wildly gesticulative, a Republican at war with big business – has been in the White House for five years. The Works of Theodore Roosevelt – history, biography, criticism, political philosophy, natural history, memoir – now stretch to fifteen volumes, published in a seemingly limitless variety of editions. His pen shows no sign of running out of steam: he has just written two magazine articles – ‘Wolf-Coursing’ and ‘A Colorado Bear Hunt’ – and his new book Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter is due out in the Fall. He is an unstoppable force, or, as H.G. Wells puts it, ‘the Big Noise of America’.

  Since the publication of his first book, The Time Machine, eleven years ago, H.G. Wells has enjoyed success after success, particularly with his science fiction: The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon. His work is futuristic, but always with a present purpose: by constructing an imaginary future, he hopes to alert the world to the potential consequences of current attitudes.84

  Wells has been lionised throughout this, his first tour of America. He has come to lecture, but also to listen; he is writing a series of pieces for the Tribune as well as an instant book, to be called, characteristically, The Future in America.

  From the moment he enters the White House, he feels at home; he appreciates its classlessness, its absence of livery and flummery. As the President enters, Wells, never immune to hero-worship, feels all his preconceptions evaporate. The President, he notes, is not larger-than-life, but ‘of a quite reasonable size, with a face far more thoughtful and perplexed than strenuous, with a clenched hand that does indeed gesticulate’. He also has ‘friendly screwed-up eyes behind the glasses ... like a man with the sun in his eyes’.

  Wells is struck by Roosevelt’s candour; unlike other politicians, he does not check himself, or worry about being misquoted. His talk floods out, ‘provisional and speculative’:
he thinks aloud. Other politicians have closed minds, ‘but any spark may fire the mind of President Roosevelt; he seems to be echoing all the thought of the time, he has receptivity to the pitch of genius ... He is the seeking mind of America displayed.’

  By this H.G.Wells may really mean that the President listens to what he has to say, as it is the interviewer who monopolises the conversation. Wells tells Roosevelt about the creation of a World State, a society driven by science and eugenics, free from nationalism, a world whose citizens advance according to their merit.

  He finds the President receptive to his ideas, if not quite so convinced as he is himself. Roosevelt believes in a loose alliance of nations rather than one single nation, and shies away from socialism. Rather, he is ‘a hearty individualist, convinced that no man who sought work could fail to find it ... and that all that was needed to keep the world going was strenuous “go” with big business and monopolies the only barrier’.

  After lunch, the two men take a walk in the garden. Wells continues to hold forth about the World State, and worries about the future of America. ‘Does this magnificent appearance of beginnings, which is America, convey any clear and certain promise of permanence and fulfilment whatever? Is America a giant childhood or a gigantic futility?’ In short, is the great American experiment doomed to come to nothing?

  The President says he has no way of disproving this pessimistic view of the future. If someone says America will lose the impetus of her ascent, that she and all mankind must pass, then, in truth, he cannot conclusively deny it. On the other hand, it is his choice to carry on living as if this were not so.

  Roosevelt now reveals that he has read Wells’s first novel The Time Machine, a bleak voyage into a future (AD 802701) in which the world is divided between the Eloi, who live effete, carefree lives, and the grim Morlocks, who toil below ground, and, it gradually emerges, feed on the Eloi. Roosevelt’s voice grows higher and more strained, his arms ever more wildly gesticulating, as he argues against the book as a template for man’s destiny.

  ‘Suppose, after all, that should prove to be right, and it all ends in your butterflies and morlocks. That doesn’t matter now. The effort’s real. It’s worth going on with. It’s worth it. It’s worth it even so. The effort – the effort’s worth it!’

  So saying, the President kneels on a garden chair, embracing it to his chest as he argues for optimism. The scene could be from an opera. President and argument are one: he has become Hope. For Wells, he symbolises man’s creative will, his determination to persist. ‘Never did a President before so reflect the quality of his time. The trend is altogether away from the anarchistic individualism of the nineteenth century, that much is sure, and towards some constructive scheme which, if not exactly socialism, as socialism is defined, will be, at any rate, closely analogous to socialism.’

  Twenty-eight years on, Wells is not so sure about his meeting with the late President Roosevelt.85 It is now 1934. The world has advanced. Did his admiration for the President’s swashbuckling character get the better of him? After all, Roosevelt’s plan for America was ‘by our modern standards ... scarcely a plan at all’. Instead, it was ‘a jumble of “progressive” organisation and “little man” democracy’. Looking back, and ‘when one comes to think it over’, he suspects Roosevelt’s belief in the splendour of strenuous effort was, ‘on the intellectual side, not so very strenuous after all’.

  How much more enlightened the world is now, how infinitely more benevolent and progressive! And, looking around the world, which man could be said to personify these advances more perfectly than Josef Stalin?

  H.G. WELLS

  HAS NEVER MET A MORE CANDID, FAIR AND HONEST MAN THAN

  JOSEF STALIN

  The Kremlin, Moscow

  July 22nd 1934

  H.G. Wells has come to the Kremlin to interview Stalin for the New Statesman. A few years ago, he had high hopes for the Soviet Union. ‘I had talked of it, dreamt of it and, if it were possible, even prayed for it.’ Since then, he may have lowered these hopes just a little, but his faith in the communist ideal remains unshaken.

  Perhaps to placate the sceptics, he claims to be approaching Stalin with ‘a certain amount of suspicion and prejudice’. Might there perhaps be something in Trotsky’s view of the General Secretary as ‘a very reserved and self-centred fanatic ... a ruthless, hard – possibly doctrinaire – and self-sufficient man’? Wells fears that his hero may be flawed, and ‘this lonely overbearing man ... may be damned disagreeable’.

  He is led into Stalin’s large, bare office. Stalin is staring out of the window, wearing a baggy, embroidered white smock, black trousers and knee-boots, a kind of designer-version of proletarian garb. As if by magic, Wells’s doubts disappear. ‘All lingering anticipations of a dour sinister Highlander vanished at the sight of him.’ Stalin does not look him in the eye, but Wells puts it down to shyness – the Soviet leader evidently has ‘a dread of self-importance’.

  Stalin speaks no English and Wells no Russian, so a Mr Umansky sits in on their meeting, dutifully jotting down what each man says before translating it out loud. It makes for cumbersome conversation. The interview begins awkwardly.

  ‘I am very much obliged to you, Mr Stalin, for agreeing to see me. I was in the United States recently. I had a long conversation with President [F.D.] Roosevelt and tried to ascertain what his leading ideas were. Now I have come to ask you what you are doing to change the world.’

  ‘Not so very much,’ replies Stalin.

  ‘I wander around the world as a common man and, as a common man, observe what is going on around me.’

  ‘Important public men like yourself are not “common men,”’ retorts Stalin, ‘... at all events you do not look at the world as a “common man.”’

  Wells says he is not feigning humility, but simply trying to see the world through the eyes of the common man. Once again, he hogs the conversation, and wants to promote his enduring belief in an imminent World State. ‘It seems to me that what is taking place in the United States is a profound reorganisation, the creation of planned, that is, socialist economy. You and Roosevelt begin from two different starting points, but is there not a relation in ideas, a kinship of ideas and needs, between Washington and Moscow?’

  Stalin replies, not unreasonably, that the aims of the two nations are entirely different. ‘They are trying to reduce to a minimum the ruin, the losses caused by the existing economic system ... Even if the Americans partly achieve their aim, i.e., reduce their losses to a minimum, they will not destroy the roots of the anarchy which is inherent in the existing capitalist system ... Without getting rid of capitalists, without abolishing the principle of private property in the means of production, it is impossible to create planned economy.’

  He goes on to talk of the contrast between ‘the propertied class, the capitalist class, and the toiling class, the proletarian class’. Wells objects, saying this is an over-simplification: ‘Are there not plenty of people in the West, for whom profit is not an end, who own a certain amount of wealth, who want to invest and obtain an income from this investment, but who do not regard this as their main object?’

  Stalin counters that though there are some in the middle – ‘the technical intelligentsia’ – they are a distraction from the essential divide between rich and poor.

  And so it goes on, though, like circus riders, the two keep switching horses as they pass, Wells attacking capitalism and Stalin defending it. At one point, Wells calls the wealthy financier J. Pierpont Morgan ‘a parasite on society’, adding, ‘It seems to me that I am more to the Left than you, Mr Stalin. I think the old system is nearer to its end than you think.’ To which Stalin counters: ‘We Soviet people learn a great deal from the capitalists. And Morgan, whom you characterise so unfavourably, was undoubtedly a good, capable organiser.’

  Later, Stalin declares that ‘of all the ruling classes, the ruling classes of England ... proved to be the cleverest’.

  ‘You h
ave a higher opinion of the ruling classes of my country than I have,’ replies Wells.

  Presently, they get bogged down in metaphor. Stalin compares the proletariat to a ship: ‘Big ships go on long voyages.’

  But, says Wells, ships need navigators.

  ‘What is a navigator without a ship? An idle man!’ says Stalin. ‘You, Mr Wells, evidently start out with the assumption that all men are good. I, however, do not forget that there are many wicked men. I do not believe in the goodness of the bourgeoisie.’

  Their conversation, scheduled for forty minutes, lasts over three hours.86 Wells’s faith is renewed. ‘I have never met a man more candid, fair and honest. I had thought before I saw him that he might be where he was because men were afraid of him, but I realise that he owes his position to the fact that no one is afraid of him and everybody trusts him.’

  He thanks Stalin for their talk, ‘which has meant a great deal to me’. Though he only arrived in Russia yesterday, ‘I have already seen the happy faces of healthy men and women and I know that something very considerable is being done here.’ He ends by mentioning his hope that Soviet writers will join the PEN club, of which he is president. PEN, he explains, ‘insists on the free expression of opinion – even of opposition opinion ... I do not know if you are prepared yet for that much freedom.’

  ‘We Bolsheviks call it “self-criticism”,’ Stalin reassures him. ‘It is widely used in the USSR.’

  JOSEF STALIN

  GIVES CANDY TO

  MAXIM GORKY

  6 Malaya Nikitskaya Street, Moscow

  Early June 1936

  In the first week of June, Comrade Stalin sends Maxim Gorky a chummy letter: ‘How do you feel? Healthy? How’s your work? Me and my friends are fine.’