As Related by Frederick Carter

from

Apocalypse in England: A Critical Study of Frederick Carter

Richard Glenville Clark, Jerusalem Press, London, 2024.

(various pages)

Cocktails at Crowley's:

Anna [Anna Wickham] aboarded me at the bar of The Plough [at 27 Museum Street, Bloomsbury, London] to ask about the farewell party for Crowley's departure into exile from scandal here and police expulsion in Sicily and Paris saying to my surprise that she was once a disciple, admirer or worshipper . . . She had like many women writers an aggressive seeming untidiness, a large sloven formidable in presence because of her natural feminine timidity and forced aggressiveness—a bulky sense of violence in manner and argumentative speech. I liked her verse as one of the best of contemporary poets, a minor of course, but very agreeable reading as against the exalted exhibitionists of that day's first rank.

They had their parts in the public performance and I could see them satirised in mass as separate terms on the stage—the music halls boards; magicians, prophets, antichrists, hierophants, curate comedians whose solemn discourse was interlarded by vulgar catch phrases to catch a guffaw unawares: they all belonged to the excess of caricature and a strain of the grotesque in reaction against tradition. Anna was of an uneasy temper towards the habit of life but her poems were easy to read and enjoy. She had a simple girlish soul in them.

The Plough had long been the place for news and literary gossip lying behind Mudie's; it made a centre for publishers, travellers and authors coming across from their refuge in the Reading Room [of the British Museum] to confer on selling and scandal or publicity. More, the Mandrake Press was just over the road where 'Inky' Stephenson [P.R. Stephensen] would be wrestling with the libels in Crowley's Confessions [The Confessions of Aleister Crowley] which they had engaged to produce. This I had assumed was the result of the successful production of D.H. Lawrence's large volume of reproductions in colour from his amateur oils. Their uproarious repression by authorities distressed Goldston [Edward Goldston] who earlier had backed the business as a neighbouring bookseller doing well on trade in imported books on art and artists. He got out when he discovered himself already committed to exploiting pictures and prose by Aleister as a partner and also perhaps because at the same time a pair of adventurous directors had also returned from abroad to invest their gains in the literary field. Goldston backed out sufficiently promptly to be a little damaged in the county court although sitting beside him I observed that he kept his fingers crossed and was incoherently unaware of the result of the proceedings—a victim of racial superstition I guessed about magic and spells.

Hearing of Crowley's general invitation to a party of farewell he returned to his exile in Berlin as the persecuted poet prophet Master Therion—she told me that although once an admirer and disciple, diffidence stopped her from coming. As one of the Mandrake's freelance illustrators, she knew I'd be informed and I told her that there followed yet another final farewell and suggested that the Great Beast would be pleased to see any familiar face of literary distinction as guest at this last adieu.

So Anna duly turned up, a bulky sloven in disorder of dress and mind timorously aggressive in proportion to the disconcerted company's reaction. I was already there talking with Hanchant [Wilfred Hanchant] working his way to become manager wince the new directors and Stephenson were not hitting it off too well in their takeover of [The Mandrake Press]. Their background was too adventurous; a vague flavor of the piratical hung about their manner. The hostess, a South American [Maria de Miramar] of dark smouldering good looks, was hospitably prompt in handing one of her formidable cocktails without turning a hair. She had other matters on her mind for I learned that Crowley would return without her companionship, a cast-off mistress whose muttering Spanish occasionally traversed the general buzz of talk.

But this atmosphere of preoccupation left Anna, glass in hand, to look after herself which with desperate promptitude she did effectively enough. In this small flat (hired from an admiral's lady I heard) a dining table occupied most of the space but there was a Hyde Park Gardens Louis Quinze settee on which snugly established at one end sat Ethel Mannin, a severe parting in her hair and a reserved manner to match Herbert Gorman, an American literary columnist sitting back easily getting on terms for doubtless a nearer approach to the day's best seller group of novelists. There was an opening on the only seat and bold to desperation, Anna precipitated herself into the inviting group and opened conversation vigorously—the thunder on her host's brow failing to catch her attention. She was comfortably anchored for the time being and her neighbour's perturbation hardly penetrated—her satisfaction at having opportunity for literary gossip, the perfect combination of critic, poet and novelist thus happily thrown together at least for the simpleton in the middle.

So, between debate and news (Anna herself providing nearly all) and with her exotic hostess attentively providing renewed doses of that dark brown esoteric brew to invigorate the vociferous interrupter of the host's ease of temper, still muttering her sultry spells indistinguishably but vaguely sinister. The woman scorned went her rounds and naturally there was a strained feeling in the air for the guests grouped in cliques whilst the preoccupied host conferred with his select directors—the odd pair of adventurers from the wilder reaches of the unknown who were in process of taking over the Mandrake Press symbolised by the imaged vegetable which, uprooted, delivered a deadly mortal scream.

Here was the background of Crowley's last throw in the great gamble of theocracy—the prophetic hot-gospelling threatened by Lawrence's democratic sex-secrets for all as against the grand initiatory promise of a broaching of the mystery of lingam and yoni and kundalini. The schoolmaster was in the way to take over from the hierophant. And he was the better poet: the days of the earlier conflicts before the war, the Equinox quarterly and its gibe "What are Yeats?" gone on the wind. But the voice of doom in the background was becoming ever more clearly articulate, the muttered incantation fully formulated at last. The time to pronounce it aloud as the hour that ended the party approached had come. Her voice was full measured and gently reflective as she retired towards the door of the kitchen over her shoulder pronouncing the words of judgment: "It should be in the British Museum—the phallus of the Master Therion, the Great Beast of Revelation—it is like an anchovy." And so, a silence fell but there was no lightning and no thunder and no laughter. Chat resumed.

Frederick Carter gives an example of an Aleister Crowley practical joke:

Even though there were other trends in Crowleyanity. . . I heard another tale of the past upon his tricks and posturings told by an art critic whose small picture gallery lay at heart the Adelphi approach to G.B. Shaw's apartment, an intellectual cross-roads, about the queerest visitor to call unannounced.' Apparently, Crowley, 'a herald in a kilt of tartan with a queer walking stick of iron with a spiral coil about it', appeared at George Bernard Shaw's apartment and announced he was 'the emissary of the grand master, or premier hierophant of a great secret order here in London who, now residing in Paris, sent him as his envoy to correct certain rebellious initiates who had assumed unauthorised powers as directing hierophants. He was here as envoy or legate although youngish for a sage and master of occult arts. His kilt was MacGregor in tartan pattern, the outlaw clan of the grand master which he wore as herald and bore in hand as he showed my mystified art critic, the iron rod encoiled by its serpentine spiral—the hermetic wand.' Crowley suggested he could launch 'controversial thunderbolts of mental strife.

The affably voluble stranger departed without leaving any clue furthering ready identification. His warrant was permission from Mathers [MacGregor Mathers] as chief to wear the Gregor tartan a dispossessed and hated clan of whose race, long nameless, in due time would come the world saviour according to some dark superstition. His mission—a struggle for dominance with the now more eminent Willie Yeats [W.B. Yeats] both a rival hierophant and poet—and that iron rod or staff was presumably a modern variant on the wizard's traditional rod of authority over the intangible powers evoked in the practice of magic. The Order they strove to rule had been known as the Golden Dawn which since had been in gradual liquidation. Crowley was more than a little of a mesmerist and a showman and as one of that trade had a vast contempt for the mob of humans and their credulity of which naturally he took the fullest advantage.