|
As Related by Anthony Powell
from
TO KEEP THE BALL ROLLING: THE MEMOIRS OF ANTHONY POWELL Anthony Powell University of Chicago Press, 2001. (pages 161-65)
A somewhat bizarre work which I was responsible for Duckworth's publishing—not without some trepidation on Balston's part—was Tiger-Woman (1929), the autobiography of Betty May; a title highly coloured, if not wholly indefensible, as designation for the author, one of the many professional artists' models from time to time making an appearance in the Charlotte Street pubs. Betty May dated back to pre-1914 Café Royal days (when she must have been very young), and had been represented on canvas by many painters, though best known for the bronze portrait-head by Jacob Epstein.
Even allowing for a good deal of journalistic exaggeration, Betty May must have experienced fairly hair-raising adventures in various underworlds of one kind or another. For some time she had been anxious to have certain newspaper articles (bestowing the sobriquet 'Tiger-Woman') cobbled into a book. A young journalist with whom she was then living was prepared to take this job on.
Betty May, as it happened, linked up with a story much talked of during my first Oxford year, which had involved the magician, Aleister Crowley, and an undergraduate of St John's College, Frederick Charles (renamed by himself Raoul) Loveday [Raoul Loveday]. Loveday, an early member of The Hypocrites Club, like the Scholar Gypsy—though with far more baneful results—had abandoned Oxford halls to learn the secrets of Crowley's magic lore. In the first instance he had met Crowley in London, but, soon after an association between them had been struck up, the Mage moved to Sicily, where he established an abbey [Abbey of Thelema] (in fact, a whitewashed farmhouse of characteristic local type) at Cefalù. There, having first married Betty May, Loveday followed him. While engaged in practising the magical arts, Loveday died at Cefalù; quite how and why, no one seemed to know. That happened in 1922, the year before I came up to Balliol.
The earlier forms of the Loveday myth had centred on a projected undergraduate expedition to rescue this Oxford friend from Crowley's clutches. I think the party was to have included Alfred Duggan and several other members of The Hypocrites. By the time the story was retailed to me Loveday himself had died the previous year; Crowley been ejected from Sicily by the Italian authorities. Nevertheless the circumstances were remembered for their sinister climax.
When, not without some difficulty, Betty May managed to get back to England, she sold to the press a fairly lurid account ('ghosted', of course) of her Cefalù. experiences. The routines of daily life at Crowley's abbey sound thoroughly unpleasant, making the official expulsion of the magician not in the least unreasonable. Among other disagreeable ceremonies, Loveday had been required to sacrifice a cat by decapitation, then ritually drink the animal's blood. This cannot have been good for anyone's health, but—in spite of digestive consequences of such an act, and rumours that he had been strangled by Crowley—Loveday's end seems to have been brought about by the banal indiscretion of quenching thirst by water from a polluted mountain stream.
Betty May, who described herself as of East London costermonger origin, looked like a gipsy, the two elements not at all incompatible. With her hair tied up in a coloured handkerchief, she would not have seemed in the least out of place telling fortunes at a fair. I believe she did undertake a little soothsaying when in the mood. The remarkable modelling of her features, exotic formations somewhat oriental in suggestion, had appealed to Epstein in sculptural terms, but, when asked if she might dedicate the book to him, he refused in a cross letter.
In spite of a reputation for turbulence, Betty May, diffident in conversation, articulating with the utmost refinement, always behaved with complete decorum on the few occasions I met her. Most of the arrangements about the book were made by correspondence with the 'ghost', and, when Betty May herself once came to the office to arrange about illustrations, so far from behaving in a tigerish manner, she was overcome with terror in dealing with Lewis.
Lewis himself, paralysed with shyness at the sight of this figure from the fortune-telling booth on the pier, had taken refuge in a flood of publishing technicalities, uttered in the severe tone that merely meant he was ill at ease: 'Please, please, never, never, make me talk to that thin man again, she said. I fear him. I fear him!' Used as she was to artists, gangsters, magicians, drug-fiends, Lewis had proved altogether too much for her.
Since everything said in Tiger-Woman about Crowley had appeared years before in the newspaper articles, when no legal action had been taken, trouble about libel—an aspect of statements about himself in which Crowley always maintained keen interest—was not much feared. At some stage, however, whether before or after publication, I do not remember, Crowley telephoned the office, inviting me to lunch with him at Simpson's in the Strand. I had never met him in person, but his celebrated near-cockney accent grated at once on the ear, as familiar from stories.
'You will recognize me from the fact that I am not wearing a rose in my button-hole.'
The ring of the old-time music-hall comedian in this observation was much Crowley's style. On the way to Simpson's I wondered whether I should be met in the lobby by a thaumaturge in priestly robes, received with the ritual salutation: 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law'; if so, whether politeness required the correct response: 'Love is the Law, Love under Will.'
The reality at Simpson's was less dramatic. Instead of a necromantic figure, sonorous invocation, a big weary-looking man rose from one of the seats and held out his hand. He was quietly, almost shabbily, dressed in a dark brown suit and grey Homburg hat. When he removed the hat the unusual formation of his bald and shaven skull was revealed; so shaped as to give the impression that he was wearing a false top to his head like a clown's.
This Grock-like appearance was not at all unbefitting the steady flow of ponderous gags delivered in the rasping intonation. Crowley's ancestral origins included more than one dissenting sect (Quaker, Plymouth Brethren), and I wondered whether his cadences preserved the traditional 'snuffling' speech ascribed to the Roundheads. There was much that was absurd about him; at the same time it seems false to assert—as some did—that his absurdity transcended all sense of being sinister. If the word has any meaning, Crowley was sinister, intensely sinister, both in exterior and manner.
Sylvia Gough, a raffish South African beauty of the first was period once remarked: 'Crowley, you've got such a kind face.' The countenance that had thus struck her was dull yellow in complexion, the features strangely caught together within the midst of a large elliptical area, like those of a horrible baby, the skin of porous texture, much mottled, perhaps from persistent use of drugs required for magical experiment.
We lunched off Simpson's traditional saddle of mutton, Crowley drinking a glass of milk, his guest a pint of beer. He began to complain at once about Betty May's book (which suggests it must have been published by then), though not at all violently, almost as if he expected nothing in the way of response. Crowley kept up this monologue for some little time, then gradually moved away from Betty May, her inaccuracies and vulgarities of phrase, to more general consideration of the hard life of a mage, its difficulties and disappointments, especially in relation to the unkindness and backbiting of fellow magicians.
Crowley was full of resentment at the injustice with which the world had treated him. His demeanour suggested that of a general relieved of his command for dropping shells into his own trenches; a mixture of explanation, apology, defiance, self-pity. Throughout luncheon it was never quite clear what he had really hoped to gain from our meeting; perhaps merely hungering for a new listener. I heard him out, and, though no conclusions were reached, we parted on good terms. I did not mention that my mother had met him with friends years before, an experience she had not at all enjoyed.
Several years after this period, Nina Hamnett, who had known Crowley for a long time in Paris and London, produced a volume of memoirs [Laughing Torso]. What was said of him there might have been thought well within his own accepted terms of self-reference, but he brought a libel suit against the publishers. Had Crowley won that case (which he spectacularly failed to do), he would certainly have instituted another suit regarding Tiger-Woman against Duckworth's. Accordingly, I was sent to court to observe the proceedings.
Betty May, one of the witnesses for the defence, was effective in the box as an innocent young wife, who, on her honeymoon, had been trapped into enduring the aberrations of behaviour then taking place at Cefalù. Crowley, on the other hand, giving evidence on his own account, was altogether futile. He seemed unable to make up his mind whether to attempt a fusillade of witty sallies in the manner of Wilde (a method to which Crowley's music-hall humour was not well adapted), or grovel before the judge, who had made plain from the start that he was not at all keen on magic or magicians. Crowley's combination of facetiousness and humility could hardly have made a worse impression. An increased element of knockabout was added to the proceedings by the stage-Irish accent of Counsel for the Defense.
'Mr. Crowley, it ut thrue that ye crucified a toad on therr basilisk's abode?'
To counteract cross-questioning in that vein, Crowley's Counsel read out a poem of inordinate length, written by his client as a young man, each verse of which terminated with the lines:
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, So let it be, in God we trust.
It was of no avail. The reiterated moral sentiment of the refrain did not establish in the mind of the judge or jury any conviction of Crowley's innate goodness. On the contrary, the case was not argued to an end, the foreman of the jury sending up a note to the judge expressing their view that Crowley was a man impossible to libel. Much of the evidence had certainly pointed to that conclusion.
Our tête-à-tête luncheon at Simpson's was the only occasion when I met Crowley in the flesh (perhaps one should say The Beast 666 incarnate), but about a year after the publication of Tiger-Woman (and before the libel case) a letter headed with a Berlin address, written in Crowley's hand, arrived at the office:
The gist of this not always very lucid communication seemed to be that Duckworth's was offered 'the story of our elopement'—entitled My Hymen—for an advance of £500 on a 15% royalty. The signature, a woman's name, was followed by the words: ''Blue Eyes" only to Horace Cole [the well-known practical-joker].' |