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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Tuesday, 2 September 1930
Tues[day] 2.
Still much fog, but crept on. Cleared about 2 P.M. Tied up in Lisbon [Portugal] 3.45. Pessoa [Fernando Pessoa] met us: a very nice man. Hotel de l’Europe.
Lisbon, to judge by the noise, is a Greater London. Like a boiler factory with all the workmen caught in the machinery. Squalid, ill-paved, dirty, narrow, dull. Super-radio in cafe: a literal hell of noise. Good food in hotel.
Professor [William A.] Spooner[1] died—on the very day that Monster [Hanni Jaeger] said “If you want to lock my cunt, you’d better lick the door”.
1—William A. Spooner (1844-1930) was a professor at New College, Oxford, and a priest of the Church of England. His name is linked to the linguistic phenomenon of “spoonerism,” i.e. the transposition of parts of words (letters or syllables) within a sentence, so that the sentence acquires a totally different meaning. Crowley’s subsequent quotation of Hanni offers an interesting example of spoonerism, although it can be doubted that Reverend Spooner would have found it amusing. He had died a few days before, on 29 August.
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