As Related by James Laver

from

MUSEUM PIECE: or the Education of an Iconographer

Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964.

(pages 115-119 & 226-231)

It was impossible to go the Chelsea parties without, sooner or later, encountering 'Gwen'. Her full name was Gwendoline Otter; she was sometimes referred to as 'the Last of the Chelsea Hostesses', but everyone called her Gwen. I had been watching with some curiosity the strange little figure dressed in the extreme fashion of the 'twenties (a fashion she retained until her death): short, tubular dress, short hair and long strings of amber beads. She was extremely plain; some of her friends said she looked like a rather sad chimpanzee. She herself claimed to be descended from Pocahontas, so perhaps it would be kinder to say that she resembled an Indian squaw.

For some reason, I made a remark about the Marquis de Sade, and she took to me at once. Anything odd, or unconventional, had an immediate appeal to her. Had I known any practising sadists? I said 'No', which seemed to disappoint her a little. However, she invited me to lunch, and, the following Sunday, I presented myself at the house in Ralston Street where she lived alone, with 'a couple' to look after her. It was as well that somebody looked after her, for she was quite the untidiest person I have ever met.

The drawing-room had a blue ceiling studded with golden stars. There was a grand piano, and a large quantity of books. On the walls were reproductions of the more sinister Beardsley drawings, and a framed portrait by Augustus John. She believed it to be a drawing, but it was, in fact, a lithograph. The sitter had been drawn with his head thrown back and his eyes closed. His name, she told me, was Aleister Crowley.

Had she known Crowley? Yes, indeed, and for many years. A friend had said to her one day: 'I know you like extraordinary people. I will take you to see the most extraordinary man I have ever met.'

He took her to a studio in Victoria Street where there were a lot of people dancing round a brazier. Crowley was 'in robes' and when Gwen arrived she thought: 'What has happened here? This is the most sinister atmosphere I have ever known.'

Later Crowley moved to another studio in Fulham Road, and Gwen said to him:

'You haven't got the same atmosphere here. That other place was very peculiar.'

'Ah, you noticed it, did you? said Crowley. 'You see, we'd forgotten to do a banishing rite.'

Crowley had formerly been married to Grace Kelly [sic] [Rose Kelly], sister of Gerald Kelly. She was already engaged to somebody else when he saw her at the party. He walked straight up to her and said:

'I hear you're engaged to be married. Within a month you will be married to me!'

And she was! Who shall say where 'personality' ends and 'magic' begins?

When Gwen met him he was with a woman named Lela [sic] Waddell [Leila Waddell]: 'a perfect darling, with a strong Australian accent'. Her official title was 'Mother of Heaven', and Crowley used to say to her: 'Oh, Mother, I wish you'd get rid of your Australian accent. It sounds so bad in the ceremonies.' And poor Lela said to Gwen: 'Will you tell me when I sy anything in Austreyelian?' She called Crowley 'I.C.' and said to Gwen: 'I.C. wants me to devote my life to magic, but I don't think I want to.'

Gwen had attended the Mass of the Phoenix and the performance Crowley put on at the Caxton Hall called the Rites of Eleusis. Gwen thought them 'rather beautiful', but she had no illusions about Crowley himself. Victor Neuburg once said to her: 'How lucky you are to have known Crowley for so long, and he has done you no harm.' 'How could he?' said Gwen. 'I was not in love with him, and I have never lent him money.'

Crowley took Lela to Paris and when they were short of cash would send her out to get some. 'Crowley was really rather a pig,' was Gwen's comment, and I marvelled at her moderation. But Lela continued to be devoted to him and was genuinely distressed when she found herself replaced. She used to play the violin 'rather indifferently, and it was a rather indifferent violin.' It was arranged that the new woman should give her a new violin, and have Crowley. Lela took to the stage and went to Russia with the 'Seven Ragged Ragtime Girls'. Ultimately, she found her way back to Australia and died there. I thought it a sad story.

Crowley's disciples used to tale analonium [sic] [Anhalonium Lewinii], the effect of which was to enlarge the consciousness and give 'a different dimension'. Even those who weren't exactly disciples were sometimes given packets of the drug. Katherine Mansfield was a friend of Gwen's. They even wrote a little play, or sketch together called Mimi and the Major, which they acted, with Gwen as the Major and Katherine Mansfield as Mimi, at the Passmore Settlement, an idealistic institution, the hall of which could be hires for special performances.

Gwen gave a party afterwards at which Crowley, Lela, and others, were present. Both Gwen and Katherine took a dose of analonium and for a while nothing happened. Crowley, Lela and Katherine left together, but Crowley brought Katherine back again.

'The stuff is beginning to work,' he said. 'She's not going to be interesting; she's only going to sleep.'

Katherine lay on the sofa and lit a cigarette. She threw the match on the floor and it lay crookedly on the carpet. This caused her such acute distress that Gwen put it straight. 'That's much better,' said K.M. 'Pity that stuff had no effect.'

Then she began to talk, about a princess who lived at the edge of the sea and when she wanted to bathe she just called the waves . . . It was as wonderful in its creation of atmosphere, thought Gwen, as one of her short stories.

Gwen got rid of the last guests and returned to find K.M. standing rather unsteadily in the middle of the room. 'Where are the others?' she said. 'Have they gone on deck? It's lucky it is such a smooth night. Pity that stuff had no effect.'

Gwen lent her a nightgown and helped her into it. 'But we can't do up all those buttons,' she said.

'Oh yes, we can,' said Katherine, 'if we talk to them very gently.'

Gwen got ready for bed herself. She washed in a basin that seemed miles away, and brushed her teeth with an arm that went out to infinity. The upper part of the body was very cold. She could not sleep and when the dawn came at last she was frozen. She got up and went to see Katherine Mansfield, who said she was hungry. While munching biscuits she remarked: 'A pity that stuff had no effect.'

When my book on Nostradamus was finally published, towards the end of the War, it brought me letters from all over the world; and the writers of some of these letters were more than a little cracked. One of them offered to introduce me to Jesus Christ who, he said, lived in the next Breton village. There were letters from the United States and South America, even from India. But the letter which interested me most bore the Hastings postmark. It began:

'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law . . .' I turned to the end of the letter and read:

'Love is the Law, love under will.

Yours fraternally,

Aleister Crowley.'

The 'yours fraternally' gave me rather a turn. But Crowley said he had read my book on Nostradamus and found it most interesting. He was living in a small hotel near Hastings, and would I care to come and see him?

I went to Hastings (it was towards the end of March, 1947), took a cab about four miles into the country and was set down as a small Regency house, now a private hotel. Crowley was called and came downstairs to greet me. I was shocked by his appearance. When I had met him at Gwen Otter's in the 'twenties he was still the Crowley of John's [Augustus John] first portrait. A large man he seemed, and rather bloated. Now he seemed to have shrunk both in height and girth and he wore a little straggly beard, like an old bonze. His face was the colour of grey mud. His clothes, a tweed coat, a double-breasted waistcoat and voluminous plus-fours of different material seemed to hang loosely about him. He greeted me with great courtesy, explained that, as he was 'on a diet', he could not lunch with me, but I was to come up to his room afterwards.

We went into a sitting room until lunch was ready and I tried to establish contact. I asked him about the third volume of his Confessions and he told me it was withdrawn on the eve of publication. Only two or three copies existed; he did not possess one himself and could not tell me where to find one. The fourth and fifth volumes, he said, existed only in manuscript—'deposited with trustworthy friends'. They carried the story 'up to Cefalu'.

After the meal I went up to Crowley's room, wondering if he had purposely chosen No. 13. I found him sitting on a divan bed with a little table before him. On another table was his luncheon—a boiled egg which he had not touched. He was drinking a glass of brandy and offered me some. It was excellent. He was in his shirt sleeves and the sleeves were marked with little spots of blood. A few books were on the shelves and on the mantle-piece. Above was his self-portrait in the Chinese manner. Two of his water colours of the Himalayas were on other walls; also a reproduction of John's new portrait. On a chest of drawers stood a painted Egyptian stele and on the little table before him a pile of books, an empty tin to serve as an ashtray, a pipe, several bottles of medicine and a small box containing a hypodermic syringe.

He gave me coffee and a cigarette. He himself smoked a pipe incessantly, only pausing to give himself an injection from time to time. He asked me about my interest in occultism. I said I thought the essence of Magic was summed up in Blake's phrase: 'Push imagination to the point of vision, and the trick is done.'

'Ah,' he said, 'you realise that Magic is something we do to ourselves. It is more convenient to assume the objective existence of an Angel who gives us new knowledge than to allege that our invocation has awakened a supernatural power in ourselves.'

I went on to discuss the power of the mind over the body, and remarked that, if we added to the power of suggestion the possibility of telepathic communication, a rational approach to magical phenomena became possible. Crowley declared that his own approach to Magic was completely rationalistic.

I mentioned certain recent examples of the stigmata, and Crowley told a curious story of one of his pupils, Elfrida Tyrell, who, growing alarmed by his teaching because it was not sufficiently Christian, was told to go away and, using meditations prescribed for her, to concentrate upon the crucifix. After a few days she implored him to go and see her and he found that she had the stigmata on her hands. They do not seem to have been actual wounds because he described them as 'rosy'.

Hardly pausing in his conversation he took up the syringe, dissolved a little scarlet pellet in the glass chamber, rolled back his sleeve and gave himself a piqure. The heroin injection seemed to give him new life. The muddy look in his face vanished, and the wonderful brown eyes glowed. From time to time he turned them upon me, and I began to understand the hypnotic fascination he must once have possessed.

Anxious to stimulate his memory, I brought up the names of several people known to have been interested in Magic. I mentioned MacGregor Mathers. I knew I was treading on dangerous ground. Probably we shall never know the full truth of Crowley's duel with MacGregor Mathers, Head of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, but it seems to have resulted in a complete victory for Crowley. He was admitted to the Order in 1898 when he was only an apprenti sorcier. 'In those days I was only bluffing,' said Crowley, and I refrained from asking him when the bluffing had stopped and the real Magic had begun.

His teacher had been the magician George Cecil Jones and he made such rapid progress that he was able to mix on terms of equality with such redoubtable occultists as Dr Woodhouse, Dr W. Wynn Westcott, Mathers, Florence Farr and the mysterious lady whose real name was Fräulein Sprengel but who called herself 'Sapiens Dominabitur Astris'. The mystery is made more opaque by Crowley's remark in his Confessions that there was a certain Madame Horos who pretended to be Fräulein Sprengel and 'deceived' Mathers. Whatever that may mean Crowley and Mathers soon became enemies, and when Crowley threatened to publish the rituals of the Order in the third number of The Equinox, due to appear in March, 1910, he was served with an injunction issued on behalf of Mathers. Crowley successfully appealed, and The Equinox duly appeared. After that, as may well be imagined, it was war. Eric Maclagan once told me that Crowley had blackmailed Mathers with such effect that the latter had to leave the country.

Crowley was also at war with the O.T.O. or Ordo Templi Orientis, and apropos of this conflict Crowley told me the following strange story. Once, he said, when he had just published a book (he would not tell me the name of the book—'that would cost you a hundred and fifty pounds') he was visited by three men who accused him of having violated the secret of the O.T.O. He denied it, and one of them, striding across the room, pulled down a book from the shelf, opening it and pointed to a certain passage. The men threatened him with the direst penalties unless he at once took the oath and became a member of the O.T.O. He agreed. The curious thing was that years afterwards—and there should, he said, be no possible illusion about this—he realised that there was a discrepancy in the dates. The threatening visit had actually taken place two years before the publication of the book. I could make nothing of this and to conceal my embarrassment asked him if the O.T.O. still existed. 'Of course,' he said, 'I am the Grand Master in England'.

Now, to my surprise, he spoke of MacGregor Mathers with respect; of Waite [A. E. Waite] with contempt (he called him 'pompous'). He implied that most modern occultists had simply borrowed from him (Crowley) without acknowledgement, but he excepted Dion Fortune, who had always admitted her debt. I mentioned Stanilas de Guaïta and he said he found his works incomprehensible. He told a story I couldn't understand of some woman who had taken one of his book to Germany. Hitler had got hold of it and had used its technique; but he had misunderstood it and so brought himself to disaster.

Feeling that the conversation was leaving reality behind, I asked him if he had known William Seabrooke, the author of Magic in the Modern World. 'Yes,' he said, he had known him and had even stayed with him in a shack somewhere in America. Seabrooke stole all his material, particularly that used in The Magic Island. He had disgusting habits, even allowing his dog to lick his face. Crowley seemed particularly shocked by this. Seabrooke drank himself to death. He always travelled with a case-load of chains, being a masochist as well as a sadist.

We spoke of the Tarot and he seemed surprised that I knew so much about it without having read his book. I replied that I gad read Papus. 'Ah,' he said, 'my opposite number in France.' This was a bloomer; Papus has been dead for about fifty years. He produced The Book of Thoth, his own work on the Tarot, and allowed me (for a price) to take a copy away with me. It had elaborate coloured illustration, by Lady Harris. 'I inspired them all,' said Crowley. 'I made her do some of them five times before I was satisfied.'

I had read enough in occultist literature to be able to talk the language. We spoke of the Body of Light and the methods of its projection, the vibration of God-names' the evocation by deosil circumambulation, the banishing by the same process widdershins, the consecration of the circle. At last Crowley growled, 'It seems to me that you know more than you have any right to know, without being one of us.'

Rather foolishly, I asked him if he was acquainted with the Chinese divining rods. He produced a set from a cigar box and spread them out on the bed. 'I must ask you not to touch them. They are full of my emanations. I use them every day.' I did not touch them. He saw me to the door with great courtesy, and I returned to London.

I still do not know what to think about Crowley. He has been called by many opprobrious names: traitor, blackmailer, fraud. I do not think he was a traitor, in spite of his activities in America during the First World War. It is true that he edited the Fatherland, and had staged a dramatic 'Declaration of Irish Independence', in which he publicly tore up his British passport.

Crowley himself maintained that he was all the time acting in the British interest; and indeed some of the articles in the Fatherland were so plainly tongue-in-check that it is astonishing that even the Germans accepted them. That he was a blackmailer is, I think, more than likely; that he was a fraud is certain. But was he nothing but a fraud?

He died shortly after my interview with him and the story was current (I do not vouch for it) that, shortly before his end, his doctor had said to him: 'I am going to cut off your heroin.' Crowley replied: 'If you do I shall die—and I shall take you with me.' He did die, and the doctor died a fortnight later. One could not help feeling in dealing with Crowley that there was a real touch of diabolism. Shortly after Crowley's death I was present at a conversation between Louis Umfreville Wilkinson (Louis Marlow, the novelist) and a young man with literary aspirations. They were talking about Crowley and the young man remarked: 'You know, I would like to write the Life of Crowley now he's safely dead.' 'Ah,' said Wilkinson, 'but what do you mean by safely dead?'