The Vapour Trail

A dapper Jasper Maskelyne 

White Magic:The Story of the Maskelynes (1936), is a memoir written by Jasper Maskelyne in honour of his English family’s magic dynasty. Most of it concerns Jasper’s grandfather, John Nevil Maskelyne (or “J.N.”, as the family called him), who first gave a magic-show as an amateur with George Cooke, a friend, in 1865. In the early seventies, J.N. and Cooke went on to transform the Egyptian Hall into London’s premier magic venue. It remained so for almost two decades.

The magical life was an obsession for J.N. His grandson tells us that he laboured at it an incredible twenty hours a day.  He was in his workshops by 6am, “experimenting with the apparatus for new illusions, or whittling away at one of his innumerable non-theatrical inventions”. He then worked all day, “either in the shops or on stage rehearsing… He played in the theatre every afternoon and evening, and stayed up till two o’clock next morning dealing with business correspondence, arranging his affairs, or puzzling out new turns”.

Something about the world of stage magic seems to breed fanaticism of J.N.’s kind. Not sharing it myself I find it hard to imagine what exactly it might be. Part of it at least, in his case, was a relentless commitment to rationalism: a conviction that the universe worked as mechanistically as one of his own elegant contraptions. He had first been inspired to go into magic to prove that the celebrated Davenport Brothers were swindlers (they had claimed to perform feats through spiritualist agency on stage, until Maskeylne and Cooke demonstrated otherwise). Throughout his career he staged similar revelations of spiritualist humbug. In his time, he claimed to have unmasked the levitationist Daniel Home; Charles Williams, famed producer of spirit apparitions; the slate-writer Dr Slade; and the glamorous blonde medium, Eva Fay.

Fancy my surprise, then, when Jasper Maskelyne relates a strange incident in the life of that determined materialist, J.N. (This may well have been the inspiration for the mystic-mongering in The Prestige, one of the subjects of my last post). For the life of me, I can’t work out why this following episode is included in the book, given Jasper’s own hyper-rationalist belief in the lightness of being.

At one time, Jasper tells us, his grandfather began dabbling in ancient books of magic, looking for inspiration for an act called the “Black Magic Well”. Early one morning he was tinkering with an apparatus beneath the stage, and he noticed the distinct smell of burning. Looking up, he saw a man clad all in black silk standing not far away. The man looked like one of the actors he had engaged for a magical playlet in which the Devil appeared. “When J.N. asked what he was doing there, he did not reply”, Jasper says, ”and when my grandfather took a step towards him, he vanished”.

Convinced that he had chosen this dramatic way of introducing a new disappearing-trick, J.N. called to the man, and after a moment or two tried to find him. “The door to his office, which had been open, was now shut, and J.N. heard movements inside. He strode in, meeting a stench of sulphur, but the place was empty. Also, a pile of books on the Black Arts which had been open on the table were flung hastily about. One of them was missing. It was never found”. 

“What was it?”, the younger Maskelyne asks us. ”Elaborate practical joke? Insane terror at a petty theft? Or something blacker and more mysterious than either? The problem has never been solved; but J.N. took Black Arts playlets off as soon as could after that, and would never dabble with witchcraft again”.

In March 1880, the stage magician, Professor Haselmayer, performed at the Sydney School of Arts. The Professor is “light of tongue”, wrote one reviewer. “He is in continuous talk with his audience, dazzling their ears as well as their eyes” (Bulletin, 27.3.80). 

To be dapper of tongue was an obvious boon for a Victorian stage magician. It came in handy as a form of misdirection (listen to what I say, pay less attention to my sleight-of-hand). But it also reflected a particular style of performance, which glorifiied the light touch in all things. It was a style which reached its apogee in twentieth-century American vaudeville, with its white cravats and its soft shoe shuffles – but which was associated with the upmarket magic-show well before the 1900s. Dinner suits. Plush seats. Orchestral music. Female assistants in anodyne flesh and filmy clothes.

With its aesthetic of sequinned frippery, the well-heeled magic act emphasised its distance from the circus or concert saloon. Performers didn’t holler themselves hoarse in a magic show. They didn’t stand ankle-deep in mud or sawdust, competing with a noisy crowd to be heard. Instead, they spoke with a silver patter, backed by electric light and violins.

According to cultural historian Simon During, late-19th C magic acts played an important part in the modernisation of Western reality. Magicians such as Prof. Haselmayer were committed to “the enlightened point of view which became official in modernity”, he says. They campaigned against superstition and spiritualist humbug, advocating a rigorously agnostic worldview. The airy aesthetic of the magic act was part of this message of modern enlightenment. Its whole point was to make light of the ‘dark arts’, giving them a newly-styled razzle dazzle in place of superstition and fear. Magicians such as J. N. Maskelyne and George Cooke, who performed in the turn-of-the-century period, glossed over mystery with slick talk and sophisticated mechanicals. When they whipped away the curtain from the spirit-cabinet, there was nothing inside but air.

(John Nevil Maskelyne with one of his celebrated automatons, late 19thC)

If the magic show was notable for its light touch at the turn of the century, today it is much more likely to be memorialised in a deliberately noir way. Take The Prestige, for example. Set in Edwardian London, with sets modelled on Maskelyne and Cooke’s gilt-velvet Egytpian Hall, starring Scarlet Johannsen as the ultimate in sequinned glamour, the whole point of The Prestige is to put the dark back into the ritz and patter. The razzle dazzle of Edwardian magic was a ruse, the film insists. Magicians of that era were drawn by something much more fierce and black-hearted than a frivolous love of illusion. Who is to say that there wasn’t something mystical about their art of enchantment after all, in spite of their rational claims?

That’s also the message of the far darker Carnivale, the HBO TV series, although that, of course, is set rather later: in America’s dustbowl thirties. I saw two episodes for the first time last night, and was so unsettled by their mystic undertow I couldn’t sleep for a couple of hours afterwards. If to be modern was to celebrate solidity melting into air, then these latest offerings insist that we have moved beyond modernity, and that something weightier at work in the universe should be contemplated after all.

While I waited at the hospital yesterday to have my wisdom teeth cut out (a succession of waiting-rooms of diminishing size, each opening Russian doll-like onto the other), I read chunks of Albert Facey’s A Fortunate Life.

The book was published in the 1970s, nine months before Facey died in his late eighties. As an Australian historian, I can’t quite believe I hadn’t read it before – it is, after all, one of the few iconic works of Antipodean social history. Somehow I had passed over it, however, as too hokey (or something), until a few days ago. Once I began, it was hard to stop. I kept reading it even after I woozily returned home, and finished it when I woke at 3am, in a business-as-usual bout of insomnia.

A Fortunate Life is a tonic for anyone with petty ailments and the ordinary run of minor dissatisfactions – far more profoundly so, it seems to me, than today’s self-helperama. The bodily privations and gruelling loneliess Facey endured in his early life are delivered with such a shocking lack of rancour that it is impossible not to feel chastened, reading of them. Envy, frustrated ambition, resentment, bitterness: all these emotions are stunningly absent from his story. Such feelings are so integral to contemporary sensibilities that it is hard to imagine this man not falling prey to them, whether during the course of his exploitation as a child labourer, or his sufferings after the Great War. 

Stoicism is not an unmitigated good. It can lead to kind of haplessness I see in some of my older relatives, a weary fatalism (the kind of culture of consolation that Gareth Stedman Jones wrote about of the late-Victorian English working class). But Facey was never just numbly resigned to his lot. In later life he was committed to an active labour politics, and to efforts at civic improvement. Nonetheless, he had an aptitude for quiet happiness – the very best kind of stoicism, it seems to me – and this was precisely because he did not believe himself entitled to good fortune.

You hear plenty about how chronically underslept the kids are these days, compared to some unspecified days of yore – sometime before social networking sites and PSPs, presumably. But go back a little more than a century, and outside polite society there wasn’t a lot of early-to-bed going on. No doubt I have a skewed vision of this, having read police courts for inner Melbourne’s seamy Fitzroy and Collingwood during the 1880s so recently. The knockabout demographic in those places was hardly representative. But still, it’s astonishing to think of how many young children and teens wandered the streets there in the small hours.

What about Thomas and Walter Cahill, for example, two waifs who were picked up among a swarm of ‘little outlaws’, crouching in an outhouse sometime around three in the morning? Or the four larrikin boys caught throwing stones at the market-gardener, Joshua Ah Ken, around four in East Melbourne? And the eight year old hauled away by police after stealing a pitcher from a back lot at 3.30am? And then there were the kiddie labourers – like Albert Facey in A Fortunate Life – who worked twelve hours or more a day, or who were performing nights before the theatre industry was regulated, as dancers and conjurors’ assistants. It makes SMSing your friend some hours after dinner a little less drastic, no?

Butchery in Smith-street, Collingwood, with kiddies & others loitering outside (SLV, 1860s).

Is it just me, or does the hyperbole of political campaign reportage get to you? Anyone reading journalistic coverage of Hillary Clinton’s win in the New Hampshire primary would swear that something truly extraordinary had happened if they didn’t know otherwise. Here in Oz, the Sydney Morning Herald hailed the win as a resurrection, no less, and peppered its columns with talk of her near-death and coming back to life. “This is a tidal wave” for Obama, Al Gore’s former campaign-manager apparently claimed.

Now please. Is this a way for political commentators to give themselves a misplaced machismo, posturing as men of steel in the only way they know how? Do we have to keep hearing talk of massacres and deaths and tsunamis every time someone gets a few more votes than someone else in the early stages of a political campaign?

Even more than the historical accounts I was talking about last post, this kind of hackneyed exaggeration degrades the language. It isn’t possible to talk about real deaths and catastrophes, and to capture something of their horror and significance, when the vocabulary to describe them is constantly reduced by cheap metaphor.

I’m currently writing a chapter for a book to be called Crucial Moments in Australian History (edited by David Roberts and Martin Crotty for UNSW Press). My “moment” is the Maritime Strike of 1890, when 60,000 unionists went on strike for a few months across a large part of Australasia.

One of the things I’m grappling with is the fact that it’s difficult to talk about the Strike without replicating the kind of military cliches beloved of labour historians. During the 1940s and beyond, the Marxist-inspired historians of Australia’s Old Left wrote about the Strike as war. Here is Brian Fitzpatrick, for example: “class warfare on the scale of 1890 … had never taken place in Australia before, and has not been repeated”.

The phrase “the sinews of war”, used by union leaders in 1890, and the command of an anti-union militiaman to “fire low and lay them out”, are quoted over and over again in the literature. Everywhere, you find the Stendhalian tints of red and black: intimations of blood, fear of after-dark violence, the treachery of the “black-legs” (non-union workers who refused to strike). And as the ever-empathetic historian Bruce Scates points out, the whole story of the Strike is skewed because it focuses on the struggles of the men at the picket-lines to the exclusion of those who scrounged for food to keep the pickets going. There are no women in the history of the Strike (except in Scates’ article, that is) – both the focus and military language of labour historians exclude them.

Having said this, I don’t want to downplay the potency of the Strike, and the sense that it was indeed cast in warlike terms among many who participated at the time. The Strike was a gripping conflict for the men and women involved. And the issues which animated them – the extent to which “freedom of contract” should replace collective bargaining by unions with employers – obviously remains pressing today.

My problem at the outset is, then: how to convey a sense of the moment of the Strike, of the effort and conviction and other passions involved, and also the urgency of the industrial issues underlying it, without falling back on the same tired vocabulary? How to find a language to describe labour conflicts which does not trundle out the same metaphors of war, and the same heroic tonality?

(See Brian Fitzpatrick, A Short History of the Australian Labour Movement; Stuart Svenson, The Sinews of War, and Bruce Scates’ chapter in Jim Hagan and Andrew Wells, eds, The Maritime Strike: A Centennial Retrospective).

The Australian Historical Association has its annual conference in Melbourne on 7-10 July this year. Called Locating History, it will explore the interconnections between history and place. Here’s the abstract for the paper I intend to write for it:

Mother and Moonshine: The Minstrel Home-Song in Australia

To a hostile reviewer for the Bulletin, the blackface minstrel show was all about “moonshine and mother”. Songs about mother languishing by the hearth as her sons roamed, or about the love of Kentucky, or Dixie, or Ireland, were a regular feature of the late nineteenth-century Australian minstrel show. Most often these nostalgic songs have been explained as a way to draw middle-class audiences to minstrelsy; a way of pandering to the cult of the home among the Victorian bourgeoisie. It is intriguing, however, that the popularity of sentimental minstrel-ballads continued into the twentieth century, at a time when middle-class men are said to have been renouncing domesticity, and the relationship between women and the home was similarly in the throes of change. Rowdy audience members also loved the hear-em-and-weep songs about home and mother on the Australian minstrel-show stage.

This paper is an attempt to come to terms with minstrels songs about home in a way which avoids a simplistic class-based interpretation of their appeal. In it, I explore what the continued appetite for these songs has to tell us about popular Australian attitudes to sentimentality, to nostalgia and to place at the turn of the twentieth century.

It’s better to admit when you’re wrong and move on, right? I’ve just changed the style of Vapour Trail, because even I was sick of the modish white-on-black font, especially as it text seemed to smudge whenever the fatigue set in.

Another album on high rotation here (so to speak), is Beirut’s The Flying Club Cup. What antic melancholy and nostalgia this music is party to, with its air of autumn in old Europe – a bittersweet air of summers past – and its accordions and mandolins and flugel horn. All that waltz-time makes me want to skip up the sepia path on the back cover, past the Parisian women in their 1920s dresses, and onto the stony beach beyond. “What melody will lead my lover from his bed?”, the singer, Zach Condon, intones. “What melody will see him in my arms again?”

I’ll sing of the walls of the well and the house at the top of the hill
I’ll sing of the bottles of wine that we left on our old windowsill
I’ll sing of the years you will spend getting sadder and older
Oh love, and the cold, the oncoming cold.

They are playing in Brisbane at the Zoo on 6 March (2008): can’t wait.

So I’ve heard plenty of people say that sometimes you can spend your whole time searching for something when there are answers right in front of you. But as a 19thC historian, I’ve never really thought about that applying to my own research.  

Last night my grandparents were over for dinner and I said casually, “so were there ever medicine shows when you were young?” “Oh yes”, my grandmother answered serenely. Turns out in Nundle in the 1930s and 1940s, before she moved to Sydney during the war, there were always medicine-sellers who pulled up in town. They sold lineaments and proprietary medicines – Watkin’s was a big one, she said – plenty of bottles laced with eucalyptus oil. Before their song-and-conjuring acts, the medicine showmen would string up toffee-apples for the children, inviting them to an eating-contest with their hands tied behind their backs, drawing a crowd.

Turns out, too, that my grandfather’s father was actually a door-to-door salesman of his own medicines during the Depression (!). He gave them the profoundly unromantic name of Rulecko (his surname was Rule) – nothing so glamorous as Dr Wistan’s Balsam of Wild Cherry, or as exotic as Wa-Hoo Bitters - so perhaps he didn’t do so well out of them. Apparently there are still some bottles of the stuff at their home. On Friday, then, I am going to begin a little oral history, turning interviewer for a change.