As Related by Arthur Calder-Marshall

from

THE MAGIC OF MY YOUTH

Sphere Books Ltd., 1990

(pages 175-193)

The Fitzroy Tavern in those days was the headquarters of most undergraduates with Bohemian tastes. I should inevitably have gone there in any case. But its appeal was deeper to me than to any of my friends, because of those nights I sat in my bedroom grinding out hexameters with the aid of a Latin Gradus, listening to the Fitzroy crowd moving to the Plough past my window, of the time I called out to my brother to stop, and the day-dreams I had when going to the Fitzroy was the symbol of manhood.

After my brother's death, though it may appear an improbable shrine, my visits to the Fitzroy Tavern were in the nature of a pilgrimage. He had stood at that horseshoe bar, beside the portrait of Kleinfeld by Augustus John. He had sat on the stuffed horsehair sofas, listening to Nina Hamnett talking about Gaudier and Modigliani. He had put pennies in the stridulent mechanical piano.

Occasionally I would ask people if they had ever met him, people I knew, from what he told me, he had met. "Oh, I remember," they would say. "He was a big chap with a beard, wasn't he?" or "Didn't he have red hair." His short trim figure, his blonde hair and white face, his light wit, had left no more impression on Fitzrovia than a bare foot on quicksand.

I enormously enjoyed evenings at the Fitzroy, the Marquis of Granby and the Plough, and the companionship of painters, writers and models older than myself. The illusion that I was at the centre of the intellectual and artistic tavern life of the great city was at first complete; then gradually it began to dawn on me that the painters and writers whom I met there were only part-time artists and their main occupation was drinking. Towards closing-time, becoming short of cash, they would draw on the capital of experience, and in return for a whisky or a pint of bitter, they would treat me to the cautionary tales of their careers, the moral of which always was, "For God's sake, don't make a habit of this place or you'll get no work done."

Betty May was the exception; for her there was no heart-searching, nor sense of failure. It was a life which she enjoyed enormously, and when she got bored with it she retired for a time or moved from one circle to another.

It was she who told me that Crowley had returned to London and was staying at the Eiffel Tower, not fifty yards from the Fitzroy. I begged her to introduce me, but she refused. "We're not on speaking terms," she said, "but if we were, I still wouldn't introduce you. That man is utterly evil."

That was the reason why I wanted to meet him. In a world where blacks and whites were breaking up so fast into various shades of grey, The Beast was the last of the graven images, an obsidian monolith of evil, a simple and reassuring devil. "If you ever got the chance to meet Crowley," I once asked my brother, "would you do it?" This was when I was fifteen.

"No," he said, after a time, "it would be too risky."

I sounded various people at the Fitzroy, and at last one, a young poet who at twenty-seven rightly considered himself a failure, promised he would try to arrange the meeting.

"But will he consent," I asked; "will he see a complete nobody like me?"

"He'll see anyone who'll see him," said the poet, "but watch out he doesn't land you with the bill."

The next day at lunch-time I was told that The Beast would see me at the Eiffel Tower that evening after dinner at nine o'clock.

"What d'you want to meet him for anyway?" asked the poet. "Isn't there enough trouble around without looking for it?"

This cynical attitude to evil seemed to me rather like blasphemy; but it brought home the realisation that I could not avow my real motive in coming to him, the desire to see what the Devil Incarnate looked like.

I had never dared to enter the Eiffel Tower, because it was reputed to be fabulously expensive. A meal for one person might cost anything from five shillings to seven and sixpence, which was a fortune in those days when you could have a fours-course blow-out for half-a-crown.

I realised that The Beast would not be dining in full vestments; kilt and sporran would be hidden by the table-cloth, and if he had his five-foot wand with him he would probably have put it in the hat-and-cloak room. But I was sure a character as singular as The Beast's would stand out anywhere.

The small restaurant of the Eiffel Tower was almost empty. The only man sitting by himself was a bald and elderly stockbroker, apparently working out on the back of a menu calculations from the day's Closing Prices or the next day's form at Newmarket.

The waiter were playing dominoes at a table at the back. One of them looked round, laid his dominoes face down and donned a soupy jacket. "A table for one, sir?" he asked, as he came over.

"I was supposed to be meeting Mr. Crowley," I said, "but it seems . . ."

"There is Mr. Crowley, sir," said the waiter, pointing to the stockbroker, who looked up at the mention of his name.

'One Must Not Judge by First Appearances,' I said to myself, as I went over to his table. And sure enough, he was not bald entirely. In certain parts his head was closely shaven; and elsewhere his hair had been allowed t grow slightly longer. There were the cabalistic tufts that Betty May had spoken of. They were, I thought, a shade too reticent to be fully effective; but perhaps it was a ritual modification for town wear.

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," he remarked.

"Love is the law," I said in what I hoped was a casual voice, "love under Will."

He was a large, heavy man; and he sat down faster than he had got up. He had a paunch, I noticed. The waiter came over and stood by the table.

"I'm drinking Armagnac," The Beast said. "What would you like?"

"Armagnac would suit me fine," I said, drawing my chair forward so that I could see what The Beast had been writing on the back of the menu. I expected to see a series of hieroglyphs; but it was a shopping list with the figures of cost carefully noted against each item. "And why not?" I asked myself. "Even a magician has to make both ends meet. Don't be so romantic!"

The Beast handed me a knobby cheroot and, remembering my father's maxim, "In an interview, let the other fellow start first. It puts him at a disadvantage," I took a long time to get it going to my satisfaction.

"Are you related to Robert Calder-Marshall of Shanghai?" he asked.

"He's my uncle," I said. "Have you been to Shanghai? Do you know him?"

"No," he said, "I was looking someone up in Who's Who this morning and the name happened to catch my eye."

I wondered if the name for which the black magician who kept such neat accounts was looking had been my father's. And yet why shouldn't he? Every business man had a copy of Who's Who; so why not a magician?

The Beast's reputation so overawed me that I refused to accept the evidence of my eyes. In youth or middle manhood he might have looked remarkable, but the stamp of age had obliterated his individual pattern. He had the same dewlaps as actors who play corrupt senators in American films, a skin that was rough as a calf's tongue, a tired, used face, sagging with satiation.

The only thing that set him aside from others who have lived not wisely but too well was the upward twist, a conscious mephistophelian touch, which he had given to his eyebrows and which drew attention to his eyes. These must at some time have been powerful. I could imagine that the stories I had heard of his hypnotic powers had once been true.

"Why do you want to see me?" he asked.

"I am the secretary of the Oxford University Poetry Society," I said. "I wanted to know whether you would come to Oxford next term to lecture."

He laughed. "You know perfectly well that they would never let me do it."

"That didn't seem to me any reason why you should refuse." I answered. "Unless of course you agreed with them."

"Agree?" he said, with a sudden change of manner. "Of course I don't agree. But a man in my position has calumniators. Have you read this cheap, shoddy, lying nonsense that some Fleet Street fellow wrote for Betty May? That's the dirt that sticks."

"Why should we worry what the Authorities will say until they say it? After all, you and I aren't the Proctors."

Slowly his brain took in the suggestion. "That is perfectly true," he said. "This shall be a blow struck for Truth and Beauty. Yes, all right, I shall come and carry the war right into the enemy's camp."

I got out my diary and we fixed a date. The idea, once it had taken root, started to grow rapidly; and towards me his attitude, which had been distant, if not to say cagey, suddenly became expansive. "How did you come to be interested in magic?" he said.

I told him that I had known Vickeybird [Victor B. Neuburg] for many years.

"Ugh, a weakling!" he said. "He had considerable gifts, but no stamina at all. I expect he's told you a lot of lies about me."

"He says that you have great magical powers," I answered, "but that you have consistently abused them."

"Bah!" he said. "He got mixed up in the suicide of some girl he'd put in the family way, and then he tried to blame the whole thing on to me. He's a neurotic; well you've seen him." He stubbed out his cheroot. "You know, quite apart from this lecture, we ought to have a long talk sometime. Why not come down to my place in the country next vacation?"

"I'd like to," I said. "And by the way, we haven't fixed the subject of your lecture."

"What shall I talk about? Nothing too esoteric. What about Gilles de Rais? You ever heard of him?"

"Yes," I said, "and what you have to say about him would interest me very much."

When lecturers are asked to select their own subjects, most of them choose something which will enable them, however obliquely, to talk about themselves. This was why I was interested in Crowley's choice of the young Marshal of France. The life of Gilles de Rais might in Crowley's eyes me a monstrous skiograph of his own career. Perhaps the thirty thousand pounds which he had inherited in youth from Crowley's Ales was comparable to the vast estates which came to the young Gilles from Jeanne de Rais and Marie de Craon. The period of soldiering with Jeanne d'Arc was paralleled by the assault on Kanchenjunga. The young Marshal became a mystical writer and patron of the arts, who to meet the liabilities of his generosity was driven to alienate his lands and sell estates. Like Crowley, he had run through his patrimony by an early age.

To redeem his fortunes Gilles turned from mysticism to alchemy and necromancy, in the same way that Vickeybird said that Crowley foreswore the true discipline of the unworldly MacGregor Mathers to make money and indulge his own senses.

In the personality of Gilles de Rais there seemed an interesting split. The more he spent on the cultivation of the black arts, the more extravagant he became in his charity and the celebration of the rites of the Christian Church. Perhaps it was a cloak. Perhaps he thought he could buy the indulgence of the clergy. Or was he trying to drive a bargain with God as well as the Devil?

That was a question which I wanted to hear The Beast answer, for the light it would throw on his own attitude to Christianity. I suspected that, for all his talk of Magic, Crowley had come to primitive magic through the worship of the Christian Devil. "You know perfectly well they'd never let me do it" was, I imagined, more than a statement of fact; it was an acceptance of Christian values as implicit as a thief's acceptance of the laws of property.

At his trial Gilles de Rais was accused of kidnapping a hundred and forty victims, mostly boys, and of torturing them. He was a powerful landowner in an age when the Lord of the Manor was the minister of the central laws. But even so, it is hard to believe that a terror so extensive could have passed for so long unpunished. From the Beast's explanation I hoped to find some clue to the mysterious deaths met by Crowley's own followers.

At the beginning of term the Proctors receive the Fixture Cards of all University Societies; and rather to my surprise no objection was raised to the name of Aleister Crowley or the subject of the lecture. "Perhaps," I said to Hugh [Hugh Speaight], "they're getting wise and realise the way to explode a myth is to exhibit the reality."

I was wrong. The lecture was banned a few days before Crowley was due to speak. The Proctors were just slow readers.

Immediately telegrams flew backwards and forwards between ourselves and Crowley, who was all set to strike his blows for Truth and Beauty. "Protest Scandalous Violation of Civil Liberties," he wired wildly, "Banning Slanderous Aspersion on Moral Character."

We discussed the possibility of hiring the private room at the Spreadeagle, Thame, and chartering a beastly fleet of buses. Hugh reported that John Fothergill was ready for anything barring a Black Mass. But the Proctors intimated that even if the meeting was held outside Oxford, it would be raided and anybody attending would be liable to be sent down.

"Demand Lecture be Printed Sold Streets Oxford," The Beast roared back. "Else Legal Action stop Text in Post."

Hugh was delighted. "This should be bigger than the Balloon Story.

Together we went to the offices of the Oxford Mail and interviewed Charles Fenby. "Give me an exclusive on the Banned Lecture story," Fenby said, "and I'll have five hundred copies of the lecture on the streets within twenty-four hours of getting copy."

The lecture arrived first post the next morning. I began it eagerly, and as soon as I had succeeded in finishing it, I went round to the Oxford Mail.

"You don't expect me to print this trash," Fenby said. "Any hack in Fleet Street could do better than this in half an hour on a pint of bitter."

"That's the lecture you promised to print," I said.

"But this stupid, hypocritical nonsense!" Fenby said, hitting the manuscript with annoyance. "Crowley must be mad."

"Perhaps he wrote it especially for the Proctors," I suggested, "to prove that he's not the sinister old beast, but a silly old fool."

"All right," Fenby said. "I'll publish the bloody thing, as I promised to. But next time you come to me with a proposition, there'll be no strings attached."

Whether the publication of the Banned Lecture raised Crowley's stock with the Proctors is doubtful; it certainly deprived him of any sympathy he had won with undergraduates at being banned. About fifty copies were sold before word got round that it was trash; then sales dropped dead.

But The Beast was exultant. "You have done great work for me," he wrote. "Let me know when you want to come to my place at Knockholt and I will send you full directions. There are Matters of Grave Import we should discuss together . . ."

We had driven through the purlieus of south-east London, skidding in tramlines, nosing between the kerb and trams, trying to ignore the infiltration of rain through the weak spots in roof and windscreen, and had emerged in bleak sunlight into the dank fields of north Kent.

"The next place we come to according to this map is Knockholt," I said.

"I don't know why we're going to see this Black Magician, do you?" Eleanor asked. "A cinema would have been warmer, and probably funnier."

I pointed to a desolate platform. "That must be Knockholt Station." I said.

"That must be why they've written up KNOCKHOLT STATION," she said. "Now where does this warlock live?"

I pulled out his letter. " 'The cottage, which is very charming, is rather off the beaten track.' Ah, here we are! 'Approaching from the Station, take the first to the left' . . ."

When we reached the very charming cottage, it was clear that The Beast had rented the week-end residence of some spinster of moderate means and ghastly good taste at a nominal rent for the off-season. He cut a strange figure against copper warming-pans, ships-in-bottles, a Cosy Stove and comfy cretonne-covered armchairs.

The Beast opened the door to us, holding in his left hand a palette and brushes. What pleasure he had at seeing me was overlaid by his surprise at the presence of Eleanor. "Where are your bags?" he asked.

"We have no bags."

"But you are staying two or three days, surely," he said.

"It was never mentioned," I answered; "we're dining in London."

He clicked his tongue in annoyance. "I took it for granted," he said. For a moment he stood in the doorway as if it weren't worth our while to cross the threshold except for a protracted session. Then he went into the living-room, leaving us to follow. By the time I had joined him, he had opened the door on to a winding oak staircase and was calling up in a tongue I did not understand. He closed the door and scowling slightly waved his palette at Eleanor. "I am painting," he said. "Trance-states."

Round the walls, between the horse-brasses, hung a number of livid canvases, which despite their lack of design gave off a sullen aura. He picked up the picture on which he had been working. It looked like a pair of buttocks one of which had been flayed and the other beaten with hose-pipe. "You've never seen anything like this before," he said; "it amazes me."

The room above was separated only by oak boards laid over beams, and in our room it sounded as if a fawn was trotting backwards and forwards over our heads.

The Beast began rummaging among a pile of canvases stacked in a dark passage. He lugged them out, held them up in the half-light for an instant and then returned them to their precious obscurity. "This is what Blake was striving for," he said simply.

From the noise above it was clear that the fawn was trying to come down the staircase, but finding it difficult. Eleanor and I looked at one another, prepared for the appearance of almost any familiar. The door creaked open and on the bottom stair for a moment, framed in the doorway like a full-length picture, stood one of the most remarkable women that I have ever seen. She wore a black-and-white satin dress, which lubriciously emphasised the exuberance of her hips and bust. Its singular chic brought into the living-room of that furnished cottage during the off0season the brilliance of Rio de Janeiro in the sunlight, the colour and ton of the Avenida Rio Branco or the Rua do Ovidor in the high season. Black open-work stockings and tapering four-inch heels gave the illusion of slenderness and length to typically South American Indian legs.

"My wife!" said The Beast. "She is Brazilian, but she has a little English."

"Ow are you?" asked The Beast's wife, investing the three words of welcome with unclubbable aloofness. She held out a plump white hand whose stubby fingers had been lengthened by cultured talons, lacquered the red of venous blood.

"What a pity you aren't staying overnight," said The Beast. "My wife is a magnificent cook—in the Brazilian manner."

"Really!" I could not believe that the art and labour which had gone to the preparation of her appearance could be diverted to dressing food. She did not look a kitchen-body.

Even in Brazil she would have seemed exotic, but in Knockholt in December she was fantastic. Her hair, like many an Indian woman's, was fine, black, straight and glossy, growing with such luxuriance that hr face was like a small clearing in a jungle only prevented from reverting to secondary scrub by intensive cultivation. Her pupils were dark and large by nature. By the use of kohl upon her eyelids, and the beading of her long lashes with mascara, she had produced an effect which would have been magnificent on a map twice the size of hers. As it was, the enlargement emphasised the struggle which each of her features had for Lebensraum. Nature had found room only for thin short lips, but over them she had painted a generous cupid's bow in carmine.

In consequence her nose, in itself regular and proportionate to her natural features, appeared almost desperate in its struggle to survive.

Standing by Eleanor with her long, clean body, her finely cut and scarcely made-up features, she was like one of the extravagant dolls which tarts keep on their beds and suburban women on the cottage-grand piano.

I turned back to the Lover of Truth and Beauty standing flanked by trance-states. His ventral muscles, like perishing elastic, were sagging worse than ever.

"Calder-Marshall and I have matters to discuss," he said to his wife. "Put some water on to boil for tea." Then he turned to Eleanor. "Now that it has turned fine, I expect you would like my wife to show you round the estate."

Eleanor looked bleakly through the cottage window at a garden patch on which the winter sun shone without conviction, at the yellowing Brussels sprouts, the rain-soaked broccoli and the mud.

"Moment," said the Brazilian. "I change my shoes, yes."

The four-inch heels clattered up the stairs and over our heads.

"Is the estate very large?" asked Eleanor.

"You can walk for miles," said The Beast brightly. "It isn't mine, of course."

The heels clattered down the stairs again, but this time they were five inches in height. "Is better, yes?" she asked Eleanor.

As soon as he had sent the women out, The Beast locked the door. Then he went to a cupboard and took out two glasses and a bottle of brandy. "This is better than tea," he said, setting them on a table and pointing to a chair. "I'm sorry you brought that girl down. One can't talk seriously with women around." He poured stiff brandies and handed me what looked like two inches of coarse grass doubles over at each end.

"What do I do with this?" I asked.

"Brazilian cigarette," he said. "Purest tobacco in the world."

It certainly had the highest nicotine content. As I sucked the dry maize husk desperately to keep it alight, a repulsive stream oozed on to my lips and fingers.

"Drink up," he said.

I drank up, and he poured two more brandies. "I was pleased at the way you handled that lecture," he said; "you have great possibilities. You know nothing, of course, but at your age that doesn't matter. That will come with time and study and experience. Have you any money of your own."

"No."

"And your parents wouldn't make you any allowance?"

"Certainly not."

"It's a pity, of course. Nut it's not an insuperable difficulty. Money can always be found." He leaned forward with his elbows on the table. "What do you intend to do when you come down from Oxford?"

"I'm going to write."

"But if you have no money and your father won't make you an allowance," he said, "how are you going to live?"

"I don't know."

"I could give you work while you were learning to write," he said. He leaned forwards with his elbows on the table with even more than the fixity which I had noticed at the Eiffel Tower, I suddenly realised, not that he had once had hypnotic powers, but that in this furnished room in Knockholt, having sent the women out into the vegetable garden, he was trying as quickly as possible to hypnotise me.

"Have another brandy," he said, raising the bottle without looking away from me and filling my glass but not his.

I drew my chair in to the table and leaned forward on my elbows gradually so that our eyes were only about a foot apart. His, weak and rather rheumy, were trying desperately to shine, like the bulb of a torch whose battery is failing.

I had cherished the idea of a devil incarnate for six years as a relic of childhood and it had stood up to every test except meeting The Beast himself. His shoddy fight for 'Truth and Beauty', his trashy lecture, his arrogant, inferior painting, and now this attempt to hypnotise me with the aid of brandy produced a revulsion in me against the childishness which I had pampered all these years. When I came down to it, all it amounted to was this shagged and sorry old gentleman, trying to outstare me across a table.

"It's very kind of you," I said. "Is this an offer of employment?"

"Would you like to work with me?" he asked.

"There is only one thing I want to do and that is to write well," I said. "You have been practicing magic for a long time. But your movement has produced no literature."

It was a strange conversation because, though it was all above board, it existed on three levels. The ground floor was the table on which our glasses and the brandy stood. The first floor was our verbal conversation, and the attic was this queer, visual contest, like two animals trying to stare each other into submission.

"You have read my works?" he said.

"I have," I said; "they may be wonderful as magic, but I can't believe that anything which is so badly written could be."

He showed no more anger than when Betty May poured the bowl of water over his head at Cefalu. "Why don't you stay the night?" he said. "You can tell that girl of yours to go home by herself."

I found that instinctively I was being more and more rude to The Beast before I realised that for all these years I had been looking for Milton's idea of Satan, a figure of Pure Evil; and that this impure character, trying rheumily to hypnotise me, was the genuine article. Evil was never Pure. I began to let myself go.

The brandy with which he plied me at a remarkable speed provided me with the fire and the justification for attack. But he did not mind. "You are really interested in magic," he said, "but you are frightened. That is why you are saying these things. I've heard it so often. Why don't you just stay till tomorrow morning? There's such a lot to talk about. And there's plenty of brandy."

A handful of hail struck the window, and in a moment there was a rattling at the back-door. "Shouldn't you open the door?" I said.

The Beast continued to look me in the eyes, but he threw the doorkey on the table. "You do it," he said. "You're young. You can do anything, eh?"

I took the key. But I didn't get up. It was more difficult than I had expected. "My offer still stands," The Beast said. "I don't mind how rude people are provided that they say what they think. Why not stay the night?"

I got up and went to the back-door. As I fumbled getting the key in the lock, I said to him, "You don't know how grateful I am for your entertainment." I opened the door as the rain came pouring down. La Senhora and Eleanor tumbled into the room.

"What on earth have you been doing all this time?" Eleanor said.

I looked across at the old man bent over the table with the brandy bottle at his elbow. He was scowling as much at me as at Eleanor. "What would you say we have been doing, sir?" I asked.

"I'd say I'd been wasting my time," he said, and he picked up the brandy bottle and carried it to the cupboard.

"But at least, sir," I said, "I must thank you for saving a great deal of mine."