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As Related by Bernard Bromage
from
Light Magazine, Vol LXXIX 1959 (pages 149-161)
I well recall my meeting (almost the one and only) with the 'Worst Man in the World'. It was, I confess due more to the want of something better to do than the fulfilment of any long-awaited 'thrill'. A Saturday night was 'free'; and I had promised some medical friends to give the 'Worst Man' the once-over and to report conclusions."
The "Beast" by all reports, had fallen upon somewhat evil days; and he was inhabiting the ground-floor flat of an old and rather dilapidated house in Great Ormonde Street (between the tail-end of Holborn and Southampton Row). It was a cold, damp night; and any port in a storm might, one felt, be welcome. Even the flaming Pit!—although one had little hope of contacting anything genuinely dark and deadly in the decidedly neutral-tinted London of the decade immediately preceding the Second Great War to End all Wars.
I knocked. There was a slow shuffling in the passage. The door opened to reveal a rather corpulent figure dressed in plus-fours and exuding an unmistakable smell of strong waters.
He peered at me with momentary suspicion, as if I had been the police or the Archbishop of Canterbury. Then, reassured, he became all affability and requested me to step inside.
He opened a door on the left. His voice was rather high-pitched and wheezy (rather reminiscent of a certain type of University don. "I have found", I said to myself, "what I expected to find!") He showed me in.
"Here we have the Blessed Virgin!" announced the voice. I must admit that this was startling; but, long inured to shocks, I bowed in the direction of a chlorotic-looking lady sprawled nonchalantly on a divan. (To say "Miss" or "Madam" would have been under the circumstances, inconclusive, so I just said "How do you do?").
The room into which I had been ushered was of the "furnished" variety; and there was nothing in the conventionally dingy appointments to suggest anything but a faded history of the shabbily genteel.
But there was nothing resembling gentility about my hosts. As though I were a friend of long standing the pale, neurotic lady poured into my ear a long story of how they had both been treated recently by a harsh uncomprehending world. They had been forcibly ejected it appeared, from a flat in the neighbourhood of the Regents Park Zoo and their furniture dumped in the middle of the road; the author of this inhospitable gesture being a retired army officer who had taken a sudden quite irrational dislike to his tenants.
Both Crowley and the lady expressed uncomprehending indignation. How could anyone be so lacking in a sense of the "convenances?" What was there in their personalities to warrant such an outrage? I shrugged my shoulders non-committally and made a French gesture as if to imply that the world was full of the oddest people, and sat down.
Then the lady told me a great deal about herself which I thought had much better been left unsaid; but I listened politely while Crowley walked round me studying me from all angles. Among other antics he did a breathing exercise down the back of my neck. (The way he did this testified to some knowledge of the Tantrichypnotic system with which I happen to be more familiar than most; more familiar, in fact, than was Crowley. So I was able to counter this move with a little astral dexterity of my own devising; and the Master retreated to the curtained window!).
There was a few minutes' silence. Then, would I try a piece of toffee? Courteously, I would not (having heard far too many stories concerning the Beast's partiality for trying out drugs on the unsuspecting to risk being "put under" in this summary fashion. I wished to study the situation clearly and detachedly). Nor would I like a cup of Turkish coffee: I had already taken my evening meal.
Crowley began to exhibit symptoms of acute discomfort. He retired into an inner room. It was, the pale lady informed me, "his asthma". Curious sounds through the panelling suggested the use of one of those breathing-machines constructed for the alleviation of the sufferer.
The most intimate details of a liaison were showered on me by the pale lady. I controlled my blushes as best I could. The "poor thing", she said, "needs someone to mother him". He was, after all, "only a child". As for her, she had left her husband and travelled all the way from foreign parts to succour the misunderstood and persecuted Crowley. It was, she said "her mission". What would have happened to him if she had not been there, she dare not think, I gathered that tradespeople had been vulgar enough to insist on the payment of bills, and there had been some tiresomeness with the house-agent. (This latter informed me subsequently that he had discovered the Beast and the Blessed Virgin stark naked putting on a "Rite of Pan" act in the area basement; and, on calling in a legal person to read the Riot Act, had been astonished by Crowley's power, hypnotic it would seem, to mollify and talk over a highly reputable solicitor!)
Crowley reappeared. He was more cheerful now. (Even mighty adepts are subject to the infirmities of the flesh, it would appear!) He seated himself in an arm-chair opposite to mine and asked me who had suggested that I call on him. He affected not to remember the names of my friends, "They come and go! " he said, rather after the manner of an oriental potentate casting his mind back on those who had been permitted to approach "the Presence".
He paid me what I suppose should be regarded as a compliment. He told me that I was "intelligent". If I had nothing more to go on than the first half-hour of his subsequent remarks to me, I should not have been able to return the compliment.
He was, he told me, projecting a book in which would be exposited for all time the true nature of Christianity. (This made me prick up my ears as I am an incurable addict to theological discussion!). But, alas, all that issued from the lips of the Beast could have come from the mentality of any pseudo-theosophist or delirious spiritualist. His attitude was certainly dominated by some measure of sheer spite. He singled out the Catholic Chaplain to Oxford University for some particularly slanderous and certainly false allegations (this learned and industrious cleric had recently been instrumental in persuading the authorities of the University to cancel an advertised lecture on the sex-maniac and murderer Gilles de Rais which Crowley was about to deliver to a group of eager students at the Home of Learning).
The pale lady had been yawning. She suddenly came to life at the mention of Father Knox and added her own contribution to the spate of calumny. I contented myself with such remarks as "it takes all sorts" and "there's no accounting for tastes". Whereas the pale lady announced her intention of seeking her chaste couch, saying that she would "leave us to it".
Relief prevailed over gallantry! I was grateful for her departure; for, to put it mildly, her remarks and confidences had made neither for edification nor for knowledge. I hoped that Crowley, freed temporarily from the Eternal Feminine might show some signs of that intellectual and cultural profundity with which he had been credited by some of my informants.
I think that when he saw that I was not being impressed by his "mastery" of the Christian problem, he became his natural, more unpretentious self, and, as if miraculously, more intelligent.
We discussed subjects of mutual interest: the Hindu and Tibetan Tantras of which I was making a special study at the time; the relation of the Kabalah to the Sanscrit magical system; certain Egyptian occult rites and the progress of alchemical knowledge. On this type of subject he could speak with more than confidence. He had travelled very widely in the East; and he obviously knew a great deal about the Oriental approach to the sex question.
On the whole subject of astrology too, he talked like a master. He had the terms at his fingers ends; and, more than the terms, their significance and application.
He questioned me very closely on the inner meaning of the Tantric symbolism and suggested some highly interesting parallels between the occult "ganglia" of the secondary nervous system and planetary directions. Here one could learn something.
Hours passed so conversing. It was early morning before I left him, a battered, weary, yet strangely courageous figure with his curiously-pointed head and staring hypnotic eyes (a little like those of a deceased Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, with whom I had once dined, although I doubt if Crowley would have thanked me for the comparison!).
Back home in my flat just round the corner, I spent some time analysing the impression made on me by the Beast. During the whole evening, I noticed that he had been studying me as closely as I had been studying him and trying out a few "mental-control" tricks which, as they say, might have "pulled a fast one" on me, had I not been armed by much practice and experience with the necessary prophylactics. But undoubtedly, he was a hypnotist, both natural and trained, of no mean order. I could credit some of the tales I had heard of his immense fascination for women; how, granted the time and the date and the loved one all together, they would surrender all they had, money, titles, social position, to take up their burden and follow him!
He had begged me to call again. I had given a non-committal reply, determined that the visit should be my last. But he was persistent!
The next morning my telephone bell rang. Could he borrow a rare volume of his own Equinox which, as he had guessed, was on my shelves. As I was fully aware that I should never see it again, if it went out of my keeping, I prevaricated and made no effort to find it. Would I dine with him one evening in the near future? I made my excuses; a meal with the Borgias, would, I said to myself, be less dangerous!
I saw him two or three times after this, wandering about Piccadilly wearing the same suit of brown plus-fours with the silver buckles at the knees which had clothed his rather ungainly form when I called on him and his Blessed Virgin. An ageing, disillusioned magician, crossing from pavement to pavement like some antediluvian monster, lost in a world of superficial irrelevances and transitory values.
One afternoon I collided with him in the entrance to the National Gallery. Recognising me immediately he seized my arm and we walked together to look at the Wilton Tryptich which had recently been exposed to the public gaze. We admired the miracle in concert. I recall being pleased with his grasp of aesthetic values; his insight into the problems of the painter's craft. I preferred him as an art critic rather than as an occultist.
Came the Second World War. I was intensely busy visiting ambassadors on behalf of the Government and instructing a dozen army units as well as naval personnel and L.C.C. students in the Russian language. I had little time for occult investigation. But Crowley, still in London it seemed (although from all accounts reacting very badly to the bombing), still remembered me.
I well remember discussing the character of Crowley with Dom Gregory Dix, O.S.B., one of the most eminent of modem Anglican authorities on the Mass. He could not have been more vehement and definite. "That man is evil, really evil." he declared. "There is deadly peril in his company!"
I wonder! It is not easy to judge others; nor is it, according to orthodox Christian standards of morality, a fit and proper thing to do. One should seek instead to understand, to ponder the causes which have led to the effects: to trace the hideous pattern which frustration and heredity and the perception of the mindlessness and gullibility of others may figure in a temperament not remarkable for fastidiousness or control.
Personally I prefer to regard Crowley from a predominently sociological angle as primarily a creature of his times; the product of a crumbling civilisation and the crystallisation of an entire epoch's furtive search for the cheapest kind of Philosopher's Stone.
Frustrated himself from boyhood, he embarked on the world with too much money, too little family and tutorial guidance, a dangerous inadequacy in moral perception and moral principle. He saw an immediate "cure" for his frustration in the glib assumption of powers outside those of normality; of the donning of the magician's raiment and the cultivation of the pose of a kind of "Black" Papal infallibility in matters concerning negative faith and eccentric and perverted morals. He became a playboy of the Cimmerian Darkness: a cicerone for those with an accentuated nostalgic de la boue.
But for this game, as for most others, two players are required. If there had not been the open-mouthed, sensation-avid public, the screaming; Journalists, the homosexual authors, the idle dilettantes with far too much sex on the brain and not half enough where they need it, the possessive and unspeakably unattractive pseudo-virgins, where would Crowley have been? In a madhouse I suppose, suffering from lack of response! Or perhaps he might have seen the error of his ways and applied his undoubted gifts in directions which might have been illuminated by an original intellectual and aesthetic effulgence.
For that he had a mind, and that a constructive one after its fashion, there can be no denying. My friend, Charles Richard Cammell has paid a glowing and deserved tribute to his gifts as poet. There was hardly any technique which he had not mastered; and his verse at its best is incandescent with that ecstatic appreciation of the phenomenal universe which it is the prerogative of the greatest poetry to perpetuate and enshrine. The compilers of the Oxford Book of Mystical Verse have, very rightly and properly, included two excellent specimens of his Muse.
But all aesthetic claims must fade before the hypothesis that such a being as Crowley could, in actual fact, "magick" the sentient universe, change the course of Nature (the Devil, it must be remembered, can, according to theologians, interfere with the climate, the forces of gravity, the recurring tides of the sea!) hold intimate converse with entities vowed ineluctably to the destruction of mankind. One is faced with the question: was the Beast a real Beast or was he only a pretender?
Speaking for myself, I am not convinced. It is true that the story of his life reveals a marked ability to complicate and disrupt the lives of others; a most unengaging tendency to corrupt and denigrate and deny.
But whom did he corrupt? What was the nature of his victims? To what extent were they destined for a higher path before his arrival? Might these branches have grown full straight had it not been for the stealthy incursion of the Worst Man in the World? Did those who swam into his ken manifest health and normality? Were they footballers and cricketers, loyal charwomen and conscientious and devoted mothers of families?
The answer is that Crowley corrupted only the already corrupted. His world was the world of the dying and the already dead. (I am sure that his Satanic Overlord would not have thanked him for the "bags" he brought home from his shooting expeditions! )
Moreover I have a feeling that the Devil is not in the least bit like Crowley. The Devil, I think, is a gentleman! He is courteous and cultivated and ineffably suave. He is complete master of his emotions and does not smoke or drink. He has abjured the more lamentable forms of sex indulgence and is respected and admired by the whole of society.
But then, I have always asked a great deal for my money! And when will it enter the thick heads of the "magicians" that the only "magic" worth a tinker's curse is that founded on the love of God and one's neighbour, on kindness and decency and continence; on the forsaking of Self; on the constructive and consistent endeavour to enrich, not pervert, the store? |