Reviews for Life and Letters: The Works of George Eliot

The average rating for Life and Letters: The Works of George Eliot based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-12-27 00:00:00 Susanne Fjellseth Some friendships survive all vicissitudes, even periods of dislike. Most notably the two American Revolutionary figures Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Close friends from 1776 onward, to the point that Jefferson left his daughter with John and Abigail Adams for a few years in the 1780s, the two would split when Adams became the first Vice President under the U.S. Constitution, and Jefferson the first Secretary of State. Adams was a Federalist, but Jefferson founded the Democratic-Republican Party to confront Federalist policies, and their friendship cooled, and then worsened into a mutual dislike when Jefferson became Adam's Vice President and then his successor as President. The campaigns in 1796 and 1800 were quite vitriolic. Adams left Washington and did not attend Jefferson's inauguration. This situation of mutual dislike lasted until 1813 when a mutual acquaintance (Dr. Benjamin Rush) managed to get the two ex-Presidents to start writing each other - a correspondence that lasted until they both died (on the same day) in 1826. That is a special exception. Most great friendship rifts remain permanent. And one of the oddest but most noteworthy is chronicled in "Final Séance" by Massimo Polidoro. A writer and historian on occult subjects (and an editor of "The Skeptical Inquirer", of which he has written articles in, he is fully competent to delve into the events behind the friendship of Harry Houdini, the greatest escapologist in recorded history (closest rival for a different reason was the English housebreaker/burglar Jack Sheppard), and the writer and creator of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. John Watson, and Professor George Edward Challenger, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Beginning with an exchange of letters, when Conan Doyle and his wife came for a tour in the U.S. in 1920 he and Houdini finally met, and even spent some weeks vacationing together in Atlantic City. Both were among the most famous figures in the world of the day, and both had many similarities. One which they shared as an interest was spiritualism. Houdini (as a magician) was interested in the occult, and in particular this interest increased when his mother died. Conan Doyle had also long been intrigued by it, but it took a back seat to his writing (look at his story "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire", which debunks the concept of vampirism to the point that Holmes reading his material on the issue dismisses it as rubbish. But by 1917-1918, the Great War, and the deaths of his oldest son, his mother, his brother-in-law, and millions of his fellow Europeans in the war, convinced him to make spiritualism into a new religion that the writer felt would give closure and comfort to the millions of survivors of the war dead. The two friends could see that both showing interest in the subject was not the same thing as sharing an enthusiasm for the subject. Conan Doyle would have found a kindred sprit in the enthusiasm of British scientist Sir Oliver Lodge. But this was based on real personal losses, and Sir Arthur's big heart - so many were mourning their dead, and only spiritualism, with it's promise of communicating with the departed, and eventual reunion with them offered solace and peace to millions. To be fair the 1920s and early 1930s was an age when spiritualism was spreading and finding some degree of social acceptance. People WANTED to believe to feel better. Houdini was more skeptical. He had tried the use of spiritualists in an attempt to communicate with the spirit of his mother, but he was a showman/magician and could spot evidence of pre-planning of effects, and outright physical lying that ruined the performance of spiritualists he saw. In a way he is like the author's fellow editor of "The Skeptical Inquirer", James Randi (also a great magician), who can demonstrate how an occult "effect" was faked. The fakery which occurred so many times to Houdini on his personal quest angered him, and made him determine on a new career of revealing how the spiritualism racket actually worked. This resulted in a collision course between the friends. Conan Doyle was always big hearted, and he saw the new religion he would serve for his last decade of life as a key to happiness for millions now in sorrow and agony due to their loss of dear ones in the war. He felt he HAD to believe. And Houdini felt equally he HAD to show the fakery. The final blow came in a stupid kind of way (as these usually do). Sir Arthur and Lady Conan Doyle (who also believed in the occult) learned of the secret sorrow of Houdini seeking to communicate with his mother. So Lady Conan Doyle actually held a séance Houdini attended and she spoke to the dead Mrs. Weiss (Houdini's original name was Erich Weiss). At the time Houdini seemed curiously neutral on the subject of the séance and the message from the dead. But later he wrote a letter to Conan Doyle explaining why he had to reject the message and Lady Conan Doyle's performance as a medium in the event. It seems Houdini's mother gave the message to Lady Conan Doyle in English. This was odd to the magician as his mother only spoke Yiddish and Hungarian all her life - even in the U.S. The letter implied, though Houdini did try to soft pedal it, that Lady Conan Doyle was a liar. This struck Conan Doyle in the heart, as he loved his second wife deeply, and she was acting with the best of motives when she acted as a medium at this time. But Houdini was secretly wounded too, as the subject of this fakery (whether the intention was well meant or not) was one of the two women in his own life (the other being Mrs. Houdini) he was really close to. The tear finally was in the friendship, and only widened as the years past, until Houdini's death in 1926, and even in Conan Doyle's last work, "The Edge of the Unknown" in 1930. Conan Doyle even claimed that Houdini had secret magical powers which enabled him to perform his amazing escapes - a view Houdini would never have accepted as he knew his feats regarding practice and planning to succeed. In the end one wishes the two could have had a happy middle to meet at, but the viewpoints were too opposite to ever bridge the distance. Conan Doyle wanted to believe despite the evidence of for the sake of the hurting survivors of the worst war in history, while Houdini could only see the mediums and their assistants as the worst type of criminal. And once the good names or the figures of their dearest relatives got involved nothing could restore the mutual pleasure the friendship had initially created. Yet it was potentially salvageable. After all, Houdini's admirers still try to see, every October 31st (the anniversary of his death) if he will speak the hidden message he left in an envelop with his wife if he could talk from the great beyond. Well, if anyone could have done so, one imagines it would have been the great escapologist. It could have been different, had the two men been different themselves. One writer would suggest that both were right and wrong at the same time, as one saw the mediums and others like them as in the forefront of great hope and promise, while the other only saw sordid greed and fakery in the same group. Conan Doyle could not believe there were self-interested fakes involved in spiritualism and creating a racket of his crusade. Houdini could not see that a gentler view would be that some of these mediums were frauds, and others possibly were honest. Today many would probably share the skepticism, but seeing how such things as daily horoscopes and belief in "New Age" studies such as ESP are part of the world too shows that the split still exists, and probably always will. Houdini would make many enemies in showing up the frauds, and some were of more influence than Conan Doyle. One couple who had found some slight happiness from mediums were President Calvin Coolidge and his wife Grace, who used mediums to "communicate" with their younger son Cal Jr., who died from blood poisoning in 1924. Houdini's crusade involved exposing the medium that gave them the comfort. They were not happy as a result. And Sir Arthur would hurt his own reputation as a writer of substance for decades after his death due to his crusading spirit. Indeed, the creation of the "Baker Street Irregulars", "The Sherlock Holmes Society", and myriads of similar groups in the 1930s onward probably stemmed in part from separating the author's then reputation as a type of crank from his greatest creation. Ironically, to do this, a pleasant fiction was created that Holmes and Watson, Irene Adler, Moriarty, and the rest were real people, and that Dr. Conan Doyle was a well known writer of stories like "J. Habbakuk Jephson's Statement" (about the mystery of the Mary Celeste - called "Marie Celeste" in the 1883 story), and was simply a middle man "literary agent" for Dr. Watson. Conan Doyle would have been up in arms about that type of reaction to his own writings. Definitely a worthwhile read for fans of two great, flawed men, who were too separate and strong minded for their friendship to survive . /

Review # 2 was written on 2019-04-07 00:00:00 Michael Krismer Really enjoyed this book! Very interesting and well written. Of course I knew about Conan Doyle's spiritual writings and beliefs but here I found out so much more as well as reading about the fascinating Harry Houdini.