World of Wonders
( The Deptford Trilogy - 3 )
Robertson Davies
This story of Magnus Eisengrim, master illusionist, the most illustrious magician of his age, has been called “a spectacular, soaring work, an astounding tour de force unequaled in recent literature.” World of Wonders is the final volume in Robertson Davies’s celebrated Deptford Trilogy, which began with Fifth Business and The Manticore.
Robertson Davies
World of Wonders
I. A Bottle in the Smoke
1
“Of course he was a charming man. A delightful person. Who has ever questioned it? But not a great magician.”
“By what standard do you judge?”
“Myself. Who else?”
“You consider yourself a greater magician than Robert-Houdin?”
“Certainly. He was a fine illusionist But what is that? A man who depends on a lot of contraptions—mechanical devices, dockwork, mirrors, and such things. Haven’t we been working with that sort of rubbish for almost a week? Who made it? Who reproduced that Patissier du Palais-Royal we’ve been fiddling about with all day? I did. I’m the only man in the world who could do it. The more I see of it the more I despise it.”
“But it is delightful! When the little baker brings out his bonbons, his patisseries, his croissants, his glasses of port and Marsala, all at the word of command, I almost weep with pleasure! It is the most moving reminiscence of the spirit of the age of Louis Philippe! And you admit that you have reproduced it precisely as it was first made by Robert-Houdin. If he was not a great magician, what do you call a great magician?”
“A man who can stand stark naked in the midst of a crowd and keep it gaping for an hour while he manipulates a few coins, or cards, or billiard balls. I can do that, and I can do it better than anybody today or anybody who has ever lived. That’s why I’m tired of Robert-Houdin and his Wonderful Bakery and his Inexhaustible Punch Bowl and his Miraculous Orange Tree and all the rest of his wheels and cogs and levers and fancy junk.”
“But you’re going to complete the film?”
“Of course. I’ve signed a contract. I’ve never broken a contract in my life. I’m a professional. But I’m bored with it. What you’re asking me to do is like—asking Rubinstein to perform on a player-piano. Given the apparatus anybody could do it.”
“You know of course that we asked you to make this film simply because you are the greatest magician in the world—the greatest magician of all time, if you like—and that gives tremendous added attraction to our film—”
“Its been many years since I was called an added attraction.”
“Let me finish, please. We are presenting a great magician of today doing honour to a great magician of the past. People will love it.”
“It shows me at a disadvantage.”
“Oh, surely not. Consider the audience. After we have shown this on the B.B.C. it will appear on a great American network—the arrangements are almost complete—and then it will go all over the world. Think how it will be received in France alone, where there is still a great cult of Robert-Houdin. The eventual audience will be counted in millions. Can you be indifferent to that?”
“That just shows what you think about magic, and how much you know about it. I’ve already been seen all over the world. And I mean I’ve been seen, and the unique personal quality of my performance has been felt by audiences with whom I’ve created a unique relationship. You can’t do that on television.”
“That is precisely what I expect to do. I don’t want to speak boastfully. Perhaps we have had enough boasting here tonight. But I am not unknown as a film-maker. I can say without immodesty that I’m just as famous in my line as you are in yours. I am a magician too, and not a trivial one—”
“If my work is trivial, why do you want my help? Film—yes, of course its a commonplace nowadays that it is an art, just as people used to say that Robert-Houdin’s complicated automatic toys were art. People are always charmed by clever mechanisms that give an effect of life. But don’t you remember what the little actor in Noel Coward’s play called film? ‘A cheesy photograph’.”
“Please—”
“Very well, lets not insist on ‘cheesy’. But we can’t escape ‘photograph’. Something is missing, and you know what it is: the inexplicable but beautifully controlled sympathy between the artist and his audience. Film isn’t even as good as the player-piano; at least you could add something personal to that, make it go fast or slow, loud or soft as you pleased.”
“Film is like painting, which is also unchanging. But each viewer brings his personal sensibility, his unique response to the completed canvas as he does to the film.”
“Who are your television viewers? Ragtag and bobtail; drunk and sober; attentive or in a nose-picking stupor. With the flabby concentration of people who are getting something for nothing. I am used to audiences who come because they want to see me, and have paid to do it. In the first five minutes I have made them attentive as they have never been before in their lives. I can’t guarantee to do that on tv. I can’t see my audience, and what I can’t see I can’t dominate. And what I can’t dominate I can’t enchant, and humour, and make partners in their own deception.”
“You must understand that that is where my art comes in. I am your audience, and I contain in myself all these millions of whom we speak. You satisfy me and you satisfy them, as well because I credit them with my intelligence and sensitivity and raise them to my level. Have I not shown it in more than a dozen acknowledged film masterpieces? This is my gift and my art. Trust me. That is what I am asking you to do. Trust me.”
2
This was the first serious quarrel since we had begun filming. Should I say “we”? As I was living in the house, and extremely curious about everything connected with the film, they let me hang around while they worked, and even gave me a job; as an historian I kept an eye on detail and did not allow the film-makers to stray too far from the period of Louis Philippe and his Paris, or at least no farther than artistic licence and necessity allowed. I had foreseen a quarrel. I was not seventy-two years old for nothing, and I knew Magnus Eisengrim very well. I thought I was beginning to know a little about the great director Jurgen Lind, too.
The project was to make an hour-long film for television about the great French illusionist. Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin, who died in 1871. It was not simply to mark this centenary; as Lind had said, it would doubtless make the rounds of world television for years. The title was Un Hommage a Robert-Houdin—easily translatable—and its form was simple; the first twelve minutes were taken up with the story of his early life, as he told it in his Confidences d’un prestidigitateur, and for this actors had been employed; the remainder of the hour was to be an historical reproduction of one of Robert-Houdin’s Soirees Fantastiques as he gave it in his own theatre in the Palais-Royal. And to play the part of the great conjuror the film-makers and the British Broadcasting Corporation had engaged, at a substantial fee, the greatest of living conjurors, my old friend Magnus Eisengrim.
If they had filmed it in a studio, I do not suppose I should have been involved at all, but the reproduction of Robert-Houdin’s performance demanded so much magical apparatus, including several splendid automata which Eisengrim had made particularly for it, that it was decided to shoot this part of the picture in Switzerland, at Sorgenfrei, where Eisengrim’s stage equipment was stored in a large disused riding-school on the estate. It was not a difficult matter for the scene designers and artificers to fit Robert-Houdin’s tiny theatre, which had never seated more than two hundred spectators, into the space that was available.
This may have been a bad idea, for it mixed professional and
domestic matters in a way that could certainly cause trouble. Eisengrim lived at Sorgenfrei, as permanent guest and—in a special sense—the lover of its owner and mistress, Dr. Uselotte Naegeli. I also had retired to Sorgenfrei after I had my heart attack, and dwelt there very happily as the permanent guest and—in a special sense—the lover of the same Dr. Uselotte, known to us both as Liesl. When I use the word “lover” to describe our relationship, I do not mean that we were a farcical manage a trois, leaping in and out of bed at all hours and shrieking comic recriminations at one another. We did occasionally share a bed (usually at breakfast, when it was convenient and friendly for us all three to tuck up together and sample things from one another’s trays), but the athleticism of love was a thing of the past for me, and I suspect it was becoming an infrequent adventure for Eisengrim. We loved Liesl none the less—indeed rather more, and differently—than in our hot days, and what with loving and arguing and laughing and talking, we fleeted the time carelessly, as they did in the Golden World.
Even the Golden World may have welcomed a change, now and then, and we had been pleased when Magnus received his offer from the B.B.C. Liesl and I, who knew more about the world, or at least the artistic part of it, than Eisengrim, were excited that the film was to be directed by the great Jurgen Lind, the Swedish film-maker whose work we both admired. We wanted to meet him, for though we were neither of us naive people we had not wholly lost our belief that it is delightful to meet artists who have given us pleasure. That was why Liesl proposed that, although the film crew were living at an inn not far down the mountain from Sorgenfrei, Lind and one or two of his immediate entourage should dine with us as often as they pleased, ostensibly so that we could continue discussion of the film as it progressed, but really so that we could become acquainted with Lind.
We should have known better. Had we learned nothing from our experience with Magnus Eisengrim, who had a full share, a share pressed down and overflowing, of the egotism of the theatre artist? Who could not bear the least slight; who expected, as of right, to be served first at table, and to go through all doors first; who made the most unholy rows and fusses if he were not treated virtually as royalty? Lind had not been on the spot a day before we knew that he was just such another as our dear old friend Magnus, and that they were not going to hit it off together.
Not that Lind was like him in external things. He was modest, reticent, dressed like a workman, and soft of speech. He always hung back at doors, cared nothing for the little ceremonials of daily life in a rich woman’s house, and conferred with his chief colleagues about every detail. But it was clear that he expected and got his own way, once he had determined what it was.
Moreover, he seemed to me to be formidably intelligent. His long, sad, unsmiling face, with its hanging underlip that showed long, yellow teeth, the tragedy line of his eyelids, which began high on the bridge of his nose and swept miserably downward toward his cheeks, and the soft, bereaved tone of his voice, suggested a man who had seen too much to be amused by life; his great height—he was a little over six feet eight inches—gave him the air of a giant mingling with lesser creatures about whom he knew some unhappy secret which was concealed from themselves; he spoke slowly in an elegant English only slightly marked by that upper-class Swedish accent which suggests a man delicately sucking a lemon. He had been extensively educated—his junior assistants all were careful to speak to him as Dr. Lind—and he had as well that theatre artist’s quality of seeming to know a great deal, without visible study or effort, about whatever was necessary for his immediate work. He did not know as much about the politics and economics of the reign of Louis Philippe as I did, for after all I had given my life to the study of history; but he seemed to know a great deal about its music, the way its clothes ought to be worn, the demeanour of its people, and its quality of life and spirit, which belonged to a sensibility far beyond mine. When historians meet with this kind of informed, imaginative sympathy with a past era in a non-historian, they are awed. How on earth does he know that, they are forced to ask themselves, and why did I never tumble to that? It takes a while to discover that the knowledge, though impressive and useful, has its limitations, and when the glow of imaginative creation no longer suffuses it, it is not really deeply grounded. But Lind was at work on the era of Louis Philippe, and specifically on the tiny part of it that applied to Robert-Houdin the illusionist, and for the present I was strongly under his spell.
That was the trouble. To put it gaudily but truly, that was where the canker gnawed. Liesl and I were both under Lind’s spell, and Eisengrim’s nose was out of joint.
That was why he was picking a quarrel with Lind, and Lind, who had been taught to argue logically, though unfairly, was at a disadvantage with a man who simply argued—pouted, rather—to get his own way and be cock of the walk again.
I thought I should do something about it, but I was forestalled by Roland Ingestree.
He was the man from the B.B.C., the executive producer of the film, or whatever the proper term is. He managed all the business, but was not simply a man of business, because he brooded, in a well-bred, don’t-think-I’m-interfering-but manner, over the whole venture, including its artistic side. He was a sixtyish, fattish, bald Englishman who always wore gold-rimmed half-glasses, which gave him something of the air of Mr. Pickwick. But he was a shrewd fellow, and he had taken in the situation.
“We mustn’t delude ourselves, Jurgen,” he said. “Without Eisengrim this would be nothing—nothing at all. He is the only man in the world who can reproduce the superlatively complex Robert-Houdin automata. It is quite understandable that he looks down on achievements that baffle lesser beings like ourselves. After all, as he points out, he is a magnificent classical conjuror, and he hasn’t much use for mechanical toys. That’s understood, of course. But what I think we’ve missed is that he’s an actor of the rarest sort; he can really give us the outward form of Robert-Houdin, with all that refinement of manner and perfection of grace that made Robert-Houdin great. How he can do it, God alone knows, but he can. When I watch him in rehearsal I am utterly convinced that a man of the first half of the nineteenth century stands before me. Where could we have found anyone else who can act as he is acting? John? Too tall, too subjective. Larry? Too flamboyant, too corporeal. Guinness? Too dry. There’s nobody else, you see. I hope I’m not being offensive, but I think it’s as an actor we must think of Eisengrim. The conjuring might have been faked. But the acting—tell me, frankly, who else is there that could touch him?”
He was not being offensive, and well he knew it. Eisengrim glowed, and all might have been well if Kinghovn had not pushed the thing a little farther. Kinghovn was Lind’s cameraman, and I gathered he was a great artist in his own right. But he was a man whose whole world was dominated by what he could see, and make other people see, and words were not his medium.
“Roly is right, Jurgen. This man is just right for looks. He compels belief. He can’t go wrong. It is God’s good luck, and we mustn’t quarrel with it.”
Now Lind’s nose was out of joint. He had been trying to placate a prima donna, and his associates seemed to be accusing him of underestimating the situation. He was sure that he never underestimated anything about one of his films. He was accused of flying in the face of good luck, when he was certain that the best possible luck that could happen to any film was that he should be asked to direct it. The heavy lip fell a little lower, the eyes became a little sadder, and the emotional temperature of the room dropped perceptibly.
Ingestree put his considerable talents to the work of restoring Lind’s self-esteem, without losing Eisengrim’s goodwill.
“I think I sense what troubles Eisengrim about this whole Robert-Houdin business. Its the book. It’s that wretched Confidences d’un prestidigitateur. We’ve been using it as a source for the biographical part of the film, and its certainly a classic of its kind. But did anybody ever read such a book? Vanity is perfectly acceptable in an artist. Personally, I wouldn’t
give you sixpence for an artist who lacked vanity. But it’s honest vanity I respect. The false modesty, the exaggerated humility, the greasy bourgeois assertions of respectability, of good-husband-and-father, of debt-paying worthiness are what make the Confidences so hard to swallow. Robert-Houdin was an oddity; he was an artist who wanted to pass as a bourgeois. I’m sure that’s what irritates both you men, and sets you against each other. You feel that you are putting your very greatfully realized artistic personalities to the work of exalting a man whose attitude toward life you despise. I don’t blame you for being irritable—because you have been, you know; you’ve been terribly irritable tonight—but that’s what art is, as you very well know, much of the time: the transformation and glorification of the commonplace.”
“The revelation of the glory in the commonplace,” said Lind, who had no objection to being told that his vanity was an admirable and honest trait, and was coming around.
“Precisely. The revelation of the glory in the commonplace. And you two very great artists—the great film director and (may I say it) the great actor—are revealing the glory in Robert-Houdin, who perversely sought to conceal his own artistry behind that terrible good-citizen mask. It hampered him, of course, because it was against the grain of his talent. But you two are able to do an extraordinary, a metaphysical thing. You are able to show the world, a century after his death, what Robert-Houdin would have been if he had truly understood himself.”
Eisengrim and Lind were liking this. Magnus positively beamed, and Lind’s sad eyes rolled toward him with a glance from which the frost was slowly disappearing. Ingestree was well in the saddle now, and was riding on to victory.
“You are both men of immeasurably larger spirit than he. What was he, after all? The good citizen, the perfection of the bourgeoisie under Louis Philippe that he pretended? Who can believe it? There is in every artist something black, something savouring of the crook, which he may not even understand himself, and which he certainly keeps well out of the eye of his public. What was it in Robert-Houdin?
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