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As Related by Maurice Richardson
from
Michael Joseph Limited, 1979. (pages 113-119)
I have never been able to understand how anyone in his right mind could begin to take Aleister Crowley seriously. I had seen him several times over the years; and heard his strange, rather cockneyfied nasal voice in bars, intoning, 'Triple absinthe, please', when asked what he would have to drink; and once, at the Eiffel Tower, saying to Stulik, the proprietor, 'I trust Lady Dean Paul hasn't been putting cocaine into your soup today'. But I did not meet him until 1939.
I had written a review of some Soho rapscallion's autobiography, Ironfoot Jack, I think, he was called, and ended it by saying: 'He reminds one of a more agreeable Aleister Crowley in a minor way of business.' Crowley wrote on his phallic-headed writing paper to protest: 'Perhaps in future before you pass animadversions on my character you will take the trouble to make my acquaintance.' I thought this was fair enough and telephoned him. He seemed pleased, and asked me to luncheon. 'I shall not be too hard on you Mr. Richardson.'
He was living in a furnished flat high up in a house on the borderland between Pimlico and Belgravia. He opened the door himself. He was wearing a suit of green plus-fours and an enormous tartan bow tie. It was an ensemble that suggested the music-hall stage rather than the golf course, but I made the appropriate comment. 'I used to be plus 4 at Hoylake', he said. It was typical of him to overdo it. If he had said his handicap was 4, I might have believed it, knowing that he had his sporting side, and I would have been impressed. But plus 4 at Hoylake was altogether too much.
Crowley was sixty-four. His once athletic physique had become blurred by fat. He was bald as a stone, and his huge expanse of naked hairless yellowish face was faintly suggestive of an enormous penis, which no is no doubt why the adjective 'obscene' has often been applied to it. His eyes protruded like gooseberries. The only comparable eyes seen were those of J. L. Garvin, the formidable editor of The Observer. It was difficult not to keep staring at them, though the hypnotic effect clashed with the tartan bow tie.
He poured me out a large glass of vodka and turned on the gas fire, one of those self-lighting ones. 'Magick', he said, as it popped into flame. 'Is not that magick, Mr. Richardson?' He pronounced 'magick' with the 'k' at the end. He made little jokes about magick all through lunch. I think he had taken my measure as a rationalist sceptic, not to be conned by mumbo-jumbo, but capable of being charmed by jocular eccentricity.
Luncheon was brought in after several more glasses of vodka by his housekeeper, a Scots Lady so indeterminate as to age, status, and nubility that she seemed like one of those anthropological reconstructions with 'conjectural parts in black.'
'Kathy, say Will with me', said Crowley. He began to recite his well-known slogan, 'Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law. Love Is The Law, Love Under Will.' I joined in politely. 'Hurry up, Aleister,' said Kathy, 'the potatoes will be burnt.'
The first course was a lobster bisque. Pointing to the scarlet tip of a crustacean appendage sticking up out of the beige soup, Crowley said: 'Looks like a devil roasting in hell, does it not, Mr. Richardson?'
The diabolical bisque was followed by roast duck, then a deliquescent brie. We drank several litres of tolerable white chianti. Kathy brought coffee, Jamaica Blue Mountain, which Crowley made in a Cona with much muttering and incantation for my benefit, a bottle of Cyprus brandy that would take the shell off an egg, and strong black Mexican cigars.
I can't recall the conversation in any detail. Crowley spoke slowly with long pauses in between sentences, words, even syllables. I distinctly remember him saying that D. H. Lawrence knew nothing about women because he was homosexual and that Freud knew even less. Getting back to magick, he said it was his duty to protect the gullible, the oh so gullible public. from the depredations of rival occultists like Major Yeats Brown and Dr. Alexander Cannon. I wanted to clap. At some time or other I know I started on a diatribe about fear being the root of all evil.
It was five o'clock and we had drunk a great deal of brandy. Crowley for me was now just a benevolent old freak. I said how much I had enjoyed myself and I was sorry to have animadverted on his character. There was just one thing, said Crowley: could I, would I, do him a great personal favour and write him a little note of apology? He handed me a writing-block and his fountain pen, which was inscribed 'Baphomet' in gilt lettering. I found I was too drunk to write. 'Mr. Crowley', I said, 'your hospitality has overwhelmed me.'
In that case, said Crowley, since it had been such a happy encounter could we repeat it in a week's time? I said I should be delighted and made my way unsteadily down the stairs.
I had every intention of writing Crowley some sort of apology but a knowledgeable friend forewarned me. 'For heaven's sake,' he said, 'how can you be such a mug? If you write any apology for what you said in print, that's admitting liability. He'll take it to a solicitor and he'll bung in a writ. They won't get much, of course, probably settle out of court for a couple of hundred, but it won't do you any good with your paper. That's what the lunch was all about.'
At the next lunch there was another guest, Gerald Hamilton, famous as the original Isherwood's Mr. Norris. He and Crowley were old friends. They had lived in the same house in Berlin. Hamilton told me later that they had each been paid some very small sum by British Intelligence for reporting on each other's activities. This was the first time I had met Hamilton, though I had heard about him and knew him by sight. His appearance with another bald head and naked face of quite exceptional ugliness, was as unforgettable as Crowley's. I suppose he was there in the role of consultant con man.
Vodka, food, wine and brandy were as profuse as before. Hamilton paid elaborate compliments to Kathy and her cooking. Crowley brought up the subject of Berlin and Mr. Norris Changes Trains. He assured me that 'the real Mr. Norris, my dear Mr. Richardson, is a far more vicious person. Now, if I were a real magician, I would be able to produce him for you at this table, would I not?' Hamilton muttered nervously. I did not let on that I knew.
We went on drinking brandy until late in the afternoon. Again I was asked to write a note of apology, and Baphomet and the writing-block were produced. Again I pleaded intoxication. I saw Hamilton shaking his head. 'But next time, Mr. Crowley', I said, 'you must have lunch with me.'
I had arranged to meet Crowley at the York Minster in Dean Street, He arrived, preceded by an overpowering smell as of an old-fashioned operating theatre. This, he told me, was his daily eye-opener, half a pint of ether. He was dressed like a duke in a musical comedy in swallow-tail coat and sponge-bag trousers. Asked what he would drink, he announced automatically: 'Triple absinthe, please.'
It was summer and war was getting very near. Various dug-outs from the Kaiser's war were starting to appear unexpectedly. One of these, a genial naval captain in uniform, greeted Crowley:" 'Aleister, old top! I haven't seen you since the days of the Ragged Ragtime Girls!' These, I learnt, were a troupe of English violinists and dancers, whom Crowley had managed on a tour of Tsarist Russia in 1914. They opened up vistas of an improbable swinging Crowley phase.
Two more triple absinthes followed the first. At luncheon in the Escargot he ate three dozen snails, wild duck pie, and camembert, drank a bottle of burgundy and several brandies. The cigars weren't strong enough and a waiter had to be sent out for his favourite black Mexicans. We parted on the friendliest terms, and that was the last I saw of him. Once by way of a Christmas card he sent me a book entitled Little Essays Towards Truth by 'Baphomet'. I found it incomprehensible. I did not know then that Crowley had been a heroin addict for some time and was on the Home Office list. He was to survive on his customary diet of rich food, large quantities of the strongest possible drink and tobacco, and dangerous drugs galore., to the age of seventy-three. His physique must have been exceptional. And here, I am convinced, lies an important part of the explanation of the Crowley phenomenon, that curious combination of manic paranoid charlatan and mystic mountebank. Crowley was a perfect example of what the American psychologist William Sheldon calls over-endowment, both physical and temperamental. He was carrying too heavy a load. As for his blood stream . . .
Another aspect of Crowley, which people are apt to overlook, is that when you got used to his eccentricities, and so long as you were not impressed by his mystical pretensions, he was apt to become a fearful bore. He had no capacity for selection, no notion of when to stop. How sinister was he? Obviously he would con a mug, pluck a pigeon. He treated those unfortunate consorts of his, the Scarlet Women, abominably. He is said to have had a nasty streak of cruelty. Isherwood told me a story of Crowley in a Berlin night club gratuitously raking a boy's chest with his talons. I can only say I found him quite amiable. I have never believed in his magical powers, even though I did once hear Nina [Nina Hamnett] warn a young man: 'You be very careful if you have anything to do with A.C. my dear. He once made fire come out of my studio floor, my dear.'
Somerset Maugham met Crowley, as he explains in his introduction to later editions of The Magician, which was first published in 1908, in Paris in 1897. Crowley was then twenty-five. He was introduced to him at a restaurant in Montparnasse by Gerald Kelly, whose unfortunate sister, Rose, Crowley later married. Maugham took an immediate dislike to him, but gave him credit for being a man of parts: first-class mountaineer, champion chess and whist player. 'He was a fake but not entirely a fake.' He dismisses his poetry, quite rightly, as inferior imitation Swinburne. He does not mention Crowley's short stories. Some of them had merit. One in particular about the daughter of a puritan evangelical bank clerk who brought home from her art class a statuette of the Venus de Milo with appalling consequences, is extremely funny.
After their Paris meetings Maugham saw no more of Crowley, though years later he got a telegram from him: 'Mother of God and I starving. Aleister Crowley.' When The Magician, in which Crowley figures under the name of Oliver Haddo, appeared, Crowley reviewed it in Vanity Fair and signed his review 'Oliver Haddo.'
The style of The Magician is apt to be, as Maugham himself says 'lush and turgid with many more adjectives and adverbs than I should use today'. You can detect the influence of his master, Maupassant, of course, but there is a profuse inlay of ninetyish romanticism. What does surprise one, is that he should have given his chief character supernatural powers, so that what might have been an interesting case history turns into an occult shocker, and a crude one at that.
Oliver Haddo is very closely modelled on Crowley; almost the only physical difference is that he is much taller. Otherwise he is Crowley to the life, though viewed sensationally. His clean-shaven face has 'a disconcerting nudity', also 'the look of a very wicked sensual priest', His glance is 'uncanny' and 'looks straight through you'.
Another strange thing about him was the impossibility of telling whether he was serious. There was a mockery in that queer glance, a sardonic smile upon the mouth which made you hesitate how to take his outrageous utterances. It was irritating to be uncertain whether, while you were laughing at him, he was not really enjoying a joke at your expense.
At the beginning of the book, Haddo is an entertaining grotesque. He insists on ordering his dinner backwards, tells a preposterous and typically Crowleyan story about his lion-shooting exploits. Soon, however, his magical powers assert themselves. At a fair, he is bitten by a snake-charmer's viper; he mutters an incantation over his wrist and comes to no harm. A foil to Haddo is Dr. Porhoet, a benign student of magic and the occult who acts as a kind of chorus. Maugham must have done a lot of reading, for he covers the whole field very thoroughly from Paracelsus to Eliphas Levi.
The ploy turns on Oliver Haddo's revenge on Arthur Burdon, a young surgeon engaged to Margaret, and English art student who finds Haddo infinitely repulsive. When her dog bites Haddo, instead of muttering incantations, he kicks it savagely. Arthur knocks him down. Haddo gives him a look of 'inhuman malignancy, satanic hatred', but he apologizes for kicking the dog and slinks away.
Next day Haddo pretends to have a fainting fit outside Margaret's flat. She takes him in and he proceeds to put a spell on her, beginning with a recitation from Pater. She becomes his slave and starts using strong acrid oriental scent. 'It was as though fiends of Hell were taking revenge on her loveliness by inspiring in her a passion for this monstrous creature. She trembled with the intensity of her desire.' A few days later she elopes with Haddo.
After this the story starts to collapse. Margaret tries to break away from Haddo, and she is helped by the faithful Arthur, but Haddo lures her back. She dies mysteriously. Finally, Arthur, Dr. Porhoet and Margaret's friend Susie break into Haddo's country house in England, taking various occultist precautions. They find Oliver Haddo strangled, and several bottles full of homunculi in various stages of atrocious liveliness. 'Was it for these vile monstrosities that Margaret was sacrificed in all her loveliness?' asks Arthur, before setting fire to the house. I suppose you could say that the last laugh was with Crowley for inspiring Maugham to write such rubbish.
Incidentally, I wonder what has become of little Aleister Akhnaton Crowley? I remember, now, that Crowley showed me with paternal pride a photograph of this infant at our first luncheon. He was sitting on a rock at Mousehole. He should be thirty-nine today, an age of significant mystical potency, I believe. |