Fakirs and fakers
Nicholas Harman
THE RISE OF l'HE INDIAN ROPE TRICK by Peter Lamont Little, Brown, £1499. pp. 288, ISBN 0316724300 Everybody knows what unicorns are, and everybody knows there is no such thing. It is much the same with the Indian rope trick. Mr Lamont offers a painstaking definition of it, by a sceptical inquirer from the Magic Circle, the illusionists' club: 'A fakir throws a rope into the air where it remains suspended, defying the laws of gravity. A boy climbs up and disappears. The rope falls down and the boy reappears, none the worse for his experience.' Optional extras include cutting the boy to pieces and reconstituting him.
A few perfectly respectable people, and many others, have claimed they saw it with their own eyes. giving rise to endless miles of newsprint which might have been used for less absurd purposes, and substantial bits of several books. People like a bit of bunkum in their lives; they like to believe that the impossible may be possible, they like immemorial legends, old saws, archetypes, founding myths and, especially, the inscrutable mysteries of the Orient.
That is why it is funny to be told that the whole thing was unheard of before the year 1890. Lamont says it began in the Chicago Tribune, then locked in a circulation war with the rival Herald, when one John E. Wilkie described the trick in an unsigned piece about the experiences in India of a non-existent Yale man called Fred S. Ellmore (sell-more, get it?). Wilkie may have got the general idea from two 14th-century travellers, the Venetian Marco Polo and the Moor Ibn Batuta, but neither of them described the full trick or said it was Indian.
Nobody paid attention when the Tribune admitted it was a spoof. The story was eagerly taken up by fashionable spiritualists, including the frightful Madame Blavatsky who so impressed the poet Yeats. More sceptical inquiries were pursued by professional illusionists, wanting either to replicate the trick or to show that anything done by Indian fakirs must be less impressive than their own feats. (One such was the celebrated Maskelyne who, Lamont incidentally tells us, gave a
euphemism to modern English by inventing the penny-in-the-slot catch for public loos.) The illusionists' standards were, and perhaps still are, maintained by the Magic Circle. Its president at the time was Lord Ampthill, a former viceroy of India; its secret Occult Committee, for weeding out frauds and superstitions, was chaired by Lt. Col. R. H. Elliot, retired from the Indian Medical Service. He interrogated an unfortunate Lady Waghorn, who claimed to have seen the trick performed, and Sergeant Secrett, who claimed he had seen Earl Haig witness the trick. Lady Haig denied it.
The papers kept the interest warm; as Lamont remarks, 'Truth and commonsense do not sell newspapers.' Various English fakers browned themselves up and tried to bring in customers. Anthropologists got to work, tracing antecedents in ancient Chinese lore, in the dream-time of precolonial Australia, among the shamans of Siberia. The nonsense spread as fast as the refutations.
The story, trivial enough, presents a wonderful variety of hokum, credulity and false evidence keenly believed. Lamont tells us only slightly more than we want to know about it, and restrains himself from milking it for laughs; he is from Edinburgh, where they might describe his jokes as pawky. He ends with a hilarious account of beach-life in Kerala, where the tourists, the gap-year travellers and even he himself faintly wonder through the cloud of hash whether the impossible may conic true.
Wilkie, the true begetter of the rope trick, had an interesting career ahead as chief of the newly created United States Secret Service, forerunner of the FBI, where the author suggests that 'he entered a whole new world of fraud, deceit and propaganda'. The literal-minded may note Lamont's preliminary remarks, in which he jokily commends the historians' rule of checking that footnotes refer to verifiable sources. This reviewer didn't bother. If the book were as much of a hoax as its subject, that would not make it less amusing.
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