As Related by Ithell Colquhoun

from

THE LIVING STONES: CORNWALL

Peter Owen Publishers, 2017

[circa Summer 1937]

The nearest I came to meeting him [Crowley] was to see (and hear) him in Watkins Books one day in the summer of 1937, and on that occasion I could only wonder at his reputation as a Déchireur de coeurs.

I saw a squarely built man of medium height who appeared to be in his middle sixties. His skin was the colour and texture of parchment, and thinning grey hair was scraped across the crown of his head; glasses (rimless or steel-rimmed) straddled his nose. People seem to have been puzzled by his eyes, having variously described them as black, brown, yellow, green and 'the colour of horn'; to me they seemed none of these but a transparent grey like water. My guess is that they were the kind of eyes whose pupil dilates and contracts with unusual rapidity, so that the tone and colour of the cornea appears to change with changing conditions, psychological as well as physical, depending as much on mood as on intensity of light. In some of Crowley's photographs the eyes look dark and opaque, in others clear; his whole face varies so much in different portraits that it is difficult to recognize the same sitter in them all. Of those reproduced in John Symonds's biography The Great Beast, only two remind me of the man I saw—that on page 33, which shows him as a boy of fourteen, and that on page 209, posing as the sage Fo-Hi when he must have been sixty-odd.

That day in the bookshop his dress was not particularly eccentric, consisting of a suit of subfusc tweeds somewhat old-fashioned in cut, with knee breeches that were not quite plus-fours. There was a ring of unusual design on one hand, but at this date I cannot recall its exact appearance. I think he carried some sort of shillelagh. His voice has been very variously described—as cockney, nasal, booming; perhaps this, too, changed with his mood and environment. That day it was an Oxford voice (actually Cambridge in his case) with some of those affectations of tone which serve as a password among queers. It was a stagey, exhibitionist voice; he made certain that everyone in the shop would hear everything he said, whether it concerned them or not.

There was no dramatic aura of evil surrounding the man; if I had not known who he was I should have assessed him as a not-too-prosperous country squire with a kink or two. But I did know who he was, at once—though exactly how I cannot say. I did not need the bated-breath identification volunteered by the assistant after Crowley had left. He certainly made an impression on me, though I had made none on him, sitting as I did mouse-quiet with a book in a corner of that penumbral shop.

The only snatch of his conversation which I can now remember is his saying, in regard to a sensational trial then current, that he could not understand the public's morbid curiosity in wanting to see a murderer and shake hands with him. Fastidious distaste and contempt were mingled in the tone of his remarks.