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As Related by Martin Birnbaum
from
The Last Romantic: The Story of More than a Half Century in the World of Art Twayne Publishers, New York, 1960 (pages 69-72)
Herbert Edmund Crowley should not, of course, be confused with Aleister Crowley, a drug addict who was often referred to as The Beast and the wickedest man in the world, but he also claimed to be an artist. No dealer, I feel certain, would have had the audacity to exhibit his phallic, erotic output. In the ordinary course of events I would have met Aleister Crowley in Chelsea, in the sympathetic apartment overlooking the Thames occupied by my friend Gwendolyn Otter, one of the most entertaining hostesses in London, and the last of Chelsea's bohemians, if we except the painter Augustus John. But, curiously enough, I met Crowley, the self-styled "Laird of Boleskine," through my staid and sober schoolmate David Keppel, the younger son of the print dealer and publisher of etchings, Frederick Keppel. By that time the name of Miss Otter, fortunately for her, had been scratched from the list of Crowley's strange women friends, whom he almost invariably tried to seduce.
When David Keppel introduced us, this singular man wore huge finger rings which made it dangerous to shake hands with him. He reminded me of Ezra Pound, not only sartorially, but also because he was a voluminous poet and student of oriental cults. Crowley was taken seriously by writers like Alice Meynell. At one time he and William Butler Yeats were active members of an occult society called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Quite recently an early novel by Somerset Maugham, The Magician. was reprinted with a new preface; it aroused fresh interest in Crowley, who was the model for the hero. A few recollections of him may therefore be in order.
He was certainly not a mere poseur or charlatan. He was, in fact, a man of considerable erudition, and his exploits as a mountain climber in Central America and India were admirably spoken of at the Explorers Club. Especially famous was an almost completely successful attempt to climb, without proper equipment, Kantchenjunga, one of the most formidable Himalayan peaks. Augustus John made magnificent portrait drawings [Drawing #1 / Drawing #2] of him which are now in the Grenville Lindall Winthrop collection at the Fogg Art Museum, and John also devoted a few paragraphs to Crowley in his autobiography, Chiaroscuro. The list of his printed works is impressive. Many are devoted to "Magick" and the Cabala, but their meaning is beyond me. I found his bulky confessions [The Confessions of Aleister Crowley] full of tiresome efforts to appear perverse and diabolical, and the poems and stories rather dull, but they are now being collected by many bibliophiles. One handsome volume of privately printed poems, Rodin in Rime, flattered the great French sculptor, who presented Crowley with some good water color drawings and unique small cire perdue sculptures. Crowley first came to see me in connection with these, and I persuaded Sir William Van Horne, the Canadian collector, to buy them. When Crowley made an appointment to thank me for my efforts, he wrote in his usual extravagant style:
This effusion was followed by others, and I shall quote one other because it is typical of many.
On every occasion when we met, he tried in vain to induce me to take hasheesh, cocaine and other drugs which he assured me would bring on unbelievably pleasant hallucinations. Such attempts and more questionable activities often landed him in law courts before he died in England, at Hastings, in 1947, at the age of seventy-two. Once I had a rather serious talk with him, and I could not decide whether he really wanted to detach himself from the world and exalt his spirit like an Indian mystic, or was he just "an enormously entertaining fake," as Maugham described him, a man who sedulously fostered a sinister reputation as a satanist, a black magician and symbol of evil. Perhaps, like the Roman Emperor Heliogobalus, he was slightly mad, and thought himself a divinity who was free to indulge in any vice or crime. |