As Related by Louis Marlow (Louis Umfreville Wilkinson)

from

FORTH, BEAST!

Faber and Faber Limited, 1946.

(various pages throughout)

[page 82]

Soon after we met in Somerset Dexter [Louis Umfreville Wilkinson] told me that he was anxious that I should make it very clear that he had changed in one respect since his appearance in Swan's Milk, which was written before the new German menace became obvious: and in which he was represented as moving towards the Right Wing and as a pacifist, certainly as a pacifist in relation to the 1914-18 War: as he was. 'Well, perhaps I was right,' he said, now in 1945. 'We could hardly have been in a worse case just before the present War if we hadn't come into the last one and if Germany had won it. I felt in my bones,' he said, 'that the last War wasn't going to do any good, and I was determined to keep out of it, as I did. A man fights only for what he lives by, and I didn't see that the destruction of anything that was really valuable to me was going to come out of a victory for the Kaiser.' But he added that he often doubted now if he had been right to feel like this, that he was often inclined to agree with Aleister Crowley, who felt sure that he was wrong, and that the Kaiser's Germany dominating Europe and expanding over colonial territory would have been less disastrous only in degree than Nazi Germany doing the same thing.

'Yes, I was wrong!' Dexter said then, sharply and suddenly. 'I haven't any doubt about it at this moment, none whatever. Crowley was right. He went to America and hoodwinked Bernstorff and the rest of them and did all he could to get America in on our side. Why did I say, a moment ago, "Perhaps I was right"?

[page 83]

. . . He Dexter [Louis Umfreville Wilkinson] hated almost all the political leaders of the 'twenties and 'thirties, and I shall not easily forget his delight when Aleister Crowley, at a party in Paris, was asked what he considered the foulest, most disgusting, loathly, and obscene word in the English language, and instantly replied by pronouncing the name of one of the most eminent politicians of that time.

[page 87]

He [Dexter (Louis Umfreville Wilkinson)] spoke of the remarkable resemblance, as he considered it, between Winston Churchill and Aleister Crowley, in voice, in intonation, and in appearance. The general impression, he said, of both men was strikingly similar, and if you shut your eyes when Crowley was speaking you might think it was Churchill on the wireless, pursuing an entirely new line of thought. 'But their political standpoints are really much alike, fundamentally,' Dexter asserted; 'and each of them has the same right violence, the same right lack of scruple, the same sort of capacity for contempt and hatred. And they're both of them gentlemen in the same sort of way, not conventional "gentlemen" because they both have so much else mixed up with their breeding and their approach to life.

[page 130]

He [Dexter (Louis Umfreville Wilkinson)] spoke then of Selena Donovan with her life so often obstructed and hampered by her three young children; of his daughter with her baby of less than a year; both of these young women enslaved by 'home duties' from which they could find little relief in paid service—sometimes, indeed, none at all. He quoted with satisfaction Aleister Crowley's description of the Family as 'Public Enemy Number One'.

[pages 140-142]

Dexter [Louis Umfreville Wilkinson] has, it was clear, undergone full re-conversion. When he was veering towards the 'Right', it was towards a 'Right' of his own, a 'Dexter-Right', which he soon saw was unattainable. 'Tell me more about Crowley,' I said, when he had come to the end of his peroration.

'I've just had a letter from my son Oliver [Oliver Marlow Wilkinson] about him,' said Dexter, complying. 'He's living at Hastings [Netherwood] now, and so is Oliver, who, I'm glad to say, appreciates him. He writes enthusiastically of his "caressing charm", his "careless wit". He went to tea at my son's cottage last Tuesday, wearing breeches with eighteenth-century silver buckles, an enormous green scarf, a Chinese beard, and heavy seals with Tarot devices. Oliver considers him "a very dangerous man," he says their cat and dog swooned before him, but I gather they swooned for joy. Perhaps he is "dangerous", I don't know, most people seem to think so, but I've no reason to suppose it, though I hope it's true. He's certainly far-sighted. Do you know, he's got a Five-Thousand-Year-Plan for civilizing America? Not only far-sighted, but sanguine.'

'Do you like Crowley?' I asked. 'Of course I know that you've always been greatly interested in him and enjoyed his wit and his humour and his mind and perhaps most of all his strangeness, but it's difficult, when one thinks of his reputation, to imagine anyone really liking him.'

'You mean his reputation as something monstrous and inhuman? But of course that's all rubbish. Or I expect it's just one of Aleister's jokes to have got himself that reputation. Of course I like him. Lots of people like him. I've a great affection for him, and have had for more than thirty years.'

'How about his magic? After all, that's what he's chiefly known for.'

'I know nothing about it,' said Dexter decisively. 'I can't understand a word of it. So I think he ought to be chiefly known for his poetry. I know he's a poet, and so do some others of whom there'll be a great many more when he's dead. A lyrical and erotic poet as well as a mystical and religious one—and then there's his poetic invective, and humour. Yes, I like Aleister's jokes, those deflating ripostes of his.'

'By word of mouth, too, do you mean?'

'Yes, of course. When Theodore Dreiser, after protesting earnestly and at length against the dependence of American Letters upon English tradition, asked him, "What have you to offer us?" Aleister replied with the single word "Patronage". I still remember Dreiser's rage, it was wonderful. And how characteristic, that reply of Aleister's when he was asked some forty years ago how one could sleep in Russia without being pestered by bed-bugs: "Shift the frontier". That was so completely his own joke, in his own special grand manner, with his own gesture's special sweep. It was almost a religious joke because of its half-earnest indication of faith in the impossible. It was a large, fantastic, extravagant joke, all of a piece with his behaviour to money. Oh, and those six words in his play Household Gods—"A boy? Then what am I?" That's one of the most humorous exclamations in literature.'

'Surely,' I said, 'Crowley can't "behave to money" now as he used to?'

'No. But his attitude is still just the same. I told him the other day that I couldn't get a diary, not one large enough; and he said that was easy, he always had his made for him since the war-time diary shortage and it cost only about five pounds. Imagine me giving five pounds for a diary! But he really seemed to think I would. the diary he showed me certainly was superb. He still thinks like a rich man, you see, and I expect he can't think like that really convincingly unless he thinks all his friends are rich too. Well, if I ever do come into that huge fortune we were imaging, I shall leave myself enough to buy a few things like that five-pound diary.'

I asked Dexter if he thought there was anything in the comparison that has sometimes been made between Crowley and William Beckford.

'Not much,' he said. 'That Fonthill Abbey ass! He certainly made a show with his money, but he was more than a bit of a fake, a pseudo-romantic, a frightfully sentimental sensationalist, and a very amateur occultist. He had no power really, none in himself, as Aleister has; it was all his money and his social position, working in with his oddity and his conceit. You can't think much of him. He was extravagant, but not in Aleister's way, not with that complete disinterestedness and unworldiness, not with that passion and power, no, nothing like, Beckford, as might have been expected, died a rich man, for all his little indiscretions—unquestionably rich.'

'What about Tommy Earp?' I asked. 'What do you make of the way he threw his fortune out of the window?'

'Nothing but good,' Dexter replied instantly. 'I make nothing but good of it. I didn't know Tommy then and I can only guess at why he treated his money like that—I can guess from what I knew of him afterwards. I think his money was a toy to him, too, but not as Aleister's was. Partly because he had a good deal less, so it was a much smaller toy, only fit to be broken quickly. It was more fun to do that with it and less trouble and more derisory. I think Tommy entertained as he did in Paris and gave money away as he did partly out of his extraordinary natural benevolence and partly as a gesture of contempt for money—one of his calm, indifferent, critical, clear gestures. It had nothing whatever to do with the ordinary sort of weak, unimaginative spending, of course it hadn't. It couldn't have been like that with Tommy. How absolutely unlike anyone else he is, in every particular. What an individual! Brought up without parents, that's one reason. I admire him, I admire all three of them—Maurice and Aleister and Tommy—for the way they've behaved with money. Thank God there are a few who can treat money like that, I never could, no, never! It's either in your blood-stream or it isn't.

[page 183]

He [Dexter (Louis Umfreville Wilkinson)] could not drink cold milk—that was the only drink that upset his digestion—and he would not drink strong tea or temperance beverages, so whether they would have given him indigestion I don't know. They would certainly have given him some vexation of spirit. He did not often drink whisky, but that was because he thought poorly of most current whiskys: he enjoyed good whisky when he could get it, as he did when he was Aleister Crowley's guest. Also he enjoyed Crowley's vodka, and Crowley's '65 and '75 brandy; but he was never addicted to spirits.

[page 189]

Since that port-tasting at Vintner's Hall Dexter [Louis Umfreville Wilkinson] was convinced that, of comparatively recent years, 1912 was the best port year. He told Crowley so, and Crowley, behaving like himself, gave him a 1913 Martinez for his sixty-third birthday in December 1944. Such a present at such a date! Dexter was deeply moved.

[pages 190-191]

Dexter [Louis Umfreville Wilkinson] was fond of food, but he didn't talk much about it. I have known him moved to some eloquence by oysters but not as he was moved by wine. He could go on and on eating oysters: the most he had ever eaten at a sitting was six and a half dozen. After six dozen he doubted if he really wanted any more, and decided, after two or three minutes' hesitation, that he did. So he ordered another half-dozen and that was exactly enough. It was not too many; but more would have been excess. It rather startled me that this should have happened at Bradford.

Crowley he considers one of the best cooks in the world; there were no meals that he had ever enjoyed more than those that Crowley had cooked for him. Curry was, at Crowley's, the specialité de la maison: those curries were astounding. I know, for I have eaten them. They were rather too moving for me, and , I think, for Dexter too, though he ate them with joy for their very excessiveness. Crowley cooks steak with consummate skill and with an ardour that did not burn with that same excess of heat, so, although his curries won the wider fame, his steaks gave the larger sum of pleasure. Those steaks, with a bottle of Richebourg or Corton, are what Dexter remembers most gratefully. But his opinion is that Crowley can touch no food that he does not adorn.

[pages 196-197]

Dexter [Louis Umfreville Wilkinson] counted Theodore Powys and Aleister Crowley as his two most religious friends, 'but Aleister's religion is of course sometimes quite different. His Law of Thelema. He wants to bring us nearer to what he knows as "Godhead". His white magic that everyone thinks is black. Many think so, including "Lord Haw-Haw", with his broadcast gibe about Crowley's "Black Mass in Westminster Abbey".' Crowley's magic had in it, Dexter said, the quality or motive-force, of Oriental ecstasy: no-one who had seen him when he was under religious inspiration could doubt that. One such occasion, during the Second War, that Dexter described to me, was when Crowley, after he and Dexter had been lunching with Lady Aberconway, took them back to his rooms in Jermyn Street [93 Jermyn Street] and read aloud to them from an enormous Magical Book which he supported on his knees. What he read was in a strange language, a language unknown. It was of a singular vibrant beauty and power. Christabel Aberconway sat on the floor by his chair with the unwitting grace and ease possible, in such a position, only to a woman of natural-born and fulfilled beauty. Her lovely eyes were large with an emotion that Dexter shared. 'What is that language?' she asked. "it is the language of the angels,' Crowley replied. Dexter was impressed, but he could not help reflecting on what an admirable subject the scene would have made for a cartoon by Max Beerbohm. 'Aleister Crowley reciting to Lady Aberconway in the Language of the Angels'.

Dexter, at about that time, tried to get Crowley to tell him what he remembered of his former incarnations. He asked him if it were not a tremendous moment when a former incarnation was first revealed; but Crowley said no, it didn't happen like that, but a fragment of memory would come, generally some insignificant fragment, and other memories would come later, the significant ones appearing imperfectly and obscurely and gradually, often with long intervals between them.