THE BYSTANDER

London, England

28 August 1929

(page 459)

A PLEA FOR SUPPERS.

Malvern is not only a sort of Salzburg for Bernard Shaw and the nursery of about a platoon of healthy cricketing Fosters. Educated there was that strange being, Aleister Crowley, who has just got himself married. Crowley must be well over fifty now, and of late years very little has been heard of him. But at one time certain undergraduates and certain of the youth of Chelsea regarded him as a sinister figure, as a sort of 20th-century Marquis de Sade, a reputation in which, I believe, he took great joy. He had lived abroad for years. I once met him and came to the conclusion, rightly or wrongly (I fancy the former) that his bark was worse than his bite, and that he was a far more respectable member of society than he would like his immediate circle to believe, although a few years ago he was the central figure in a series of “exposures” which appeared in a certain weekly paper which devotes much space to the exposing of lurid slices of life. Anyway, he’s a personality of sorts, and Augustus John has painted his portrait.