City of the Beast, page 11
42
MANSFIELD STREET: HOUSE OF GERALD YORKE
Unspeakably treacherous swine
Gerald Yorke (1901-1983) was much on Crowley's mind through the early Thirties. Born in 1901 into a well-to-do family, he was educated at Eton and Trinity Cambridge, Crowley's old college, and was the brother of the novelist Henry Yorke, better known by his pen-name Henry Green. He had been an army officer and he was a serious cricketer, playing county cricket for Gloucestershire.
Yorke had a strange bereavement during his schooldays, as bizarre as it was tragic, when two other Eton boys put a curse on his much-loved elder brother Philip using a wax effigy, and Philip died (one of the boys was Eric Blair, later to write as George Orwell).
In his early twenties Yorke became interested in Crowley's work. At this point he was still based at the family's townhouse1 at 9 Mansfield Street (moving to 5 Montagu Square in 1938). Number 9 is a handsome, late 18thC neo-classical building in a terrace designed by the Adam brothers. Radio producer Lance Sieveking was brought here by Crowley in the Thirties, and (no doubt thinking of the pillared doorway, the fanlight above the door, and the railings in front of the house) he remembered it as “a perfect setting for anything to do with the great Black Magician. Number 9 was indeed just such a house as Dr Jekyll must have lived in, and, from time to time, Mr. Hyde.” 2
After reading Crowley, Yorke had contacted him, met him in Paris, and in 1928 joined the A∴A∴ as Frater Volo Intelligere. The upshot was that he became Crowley's business manager, agent, and trustee, overhauling the chaos of Crowley's affairs and getting him regularly funded with an allowance of ten pounds a week (far more than it sounds now).
For this he was soon rewarded with endless abuse in Crowley's diaries (“rat”, “skunk”, “utter shit”, “heartless cad”, “unspeakably treacherous swine” and so on) and an attempt to sue him for £40,000 (about three million today). This figure was optimistically calculated as the money Crowley would have made, around 1930, without Yorke's interference.
Yorke stopped managing Crowley in 1932 to travel in China and Tibet, and after studying Buddhism he briefly became the agent for the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso. But by the time he left for the East he had studied with Crowley for several years and had a good working knowledge of magic. In later life he knew the Rolling Stones, who came to his country house for tea. Politely declining Mick Jagger's offer of a tea-time joint, he said he had bad memories of being on a ‘magical retirement’ in Tunisia, in his old Crowley days: “Forced to smoke that beastly stuff for nearly a month”.
Remarkably, Yorke and Crowley remained friends. Yorke bore no grudge, keeping up an intelligent and unfazed interest in Crowley's work and collecting books, manuscripts and ephemera. The Yorke Collection is now in London's Warburg Institute. He has a further memorial in the superb volume edited by Keith Richmond, Aleister Crowley, The Golden Dawn and Buddhism: Reminiscences and Writing of Gerald Yorke.3
1 They also had a country house in Gloucestershire, Forthampton Court.
2 Like the black-and-white, vintage Hollywood ideal of Victorian London in the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde film.
3 (York Beach, Maine, Teitan Press, 2011). He is more unexpectedly remembered on the Vincent Price LP Witchcraft-Magic: An Adventure in Demonology, where – about 59 minutes in – Price briefly tells an apocryphal story of Yorke invoking Thoth while at Cambridge.
43
MANDRAKE PRESS, MUSEUM STREET
The man who saw the point
Crowley went through a remarkable period of publishing in 1929-30, consolidating his life's work with Magick in Theory and Practice (Paris, 1929) and his monumental Confessions (Mandrake Press, 1930; it had been cancelled by Collins) as well as his novel Moonchild (Mandrake, 1929).
Mandrake press was at number 41 Museum Street. It had been started by an Australian, Edward “Teddy” Goldston, who had an oriental book and print shop at number 25, but was soon in the energetic hands of Percy Reginald (“Inky”) Stephensen, another Australian, together with Gerald Yorke (Magick in Theory and Practice was printed in Paris by this same team of Stephensen and Yorke). Mandrake had come to the attention of the police for publishing a book of D.H. Lawrence's erotic paintings, and Stephensen – a young Communist sympathiser who had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford – had strong feelings about the need to defy censorship.
He also sympathised with Crowley as a man misunderstood and unjustly vilified – John Bull, for example, had accused him of being a cannibal and eating two of his mountaineering sherpas – so he published his own book of Crowley's outrageous and often ludicrous press coverage, The Legend of Aleister Crowley (Mandrake, 1930), in which he also notes the “’ninetyish romantic bravado” of the younger, Edwardian Crowley's attitude.
Stephensen returned to Australia after the Mandrake Press venture. From being a Communist at Oxford he moved to the far-right, and in 1936 he was running a magazine called The Publicist, which advocated not only monarchy – not universally popular in Australia – but also fascism and anti-Semitism. He later founded the ‘Australia First’ political party, and in the Second World War he was interned for supporting Germany and Japan.
Stephensen is one of three living dedicatees of Crowley's Confessions (“P.R. STEPHENSEN, who saw the point”), the others being Augustus John and J.W.N. Sullivan. Augustus John remained on cordial terms with Crowley all their lives, and he was such an eminent artist in their day that citing him as a friend is almost an endorsement or testimonial. Crowley credits him with “practical assistance”, and John had rallied, in fairly general terms, on Crowley's side against hostile press coverage. Sullivan was an eminent mathematician, introduced to Crowley by Nina Hamnett, and it was for Sullivan that Crowley produced the memorable opinion that “every phenomenon should be an orgasm of its kind.”
44
ATLANTIS BOOKSHOP, BURY PLACE AND MUSEUM STREET
At the Sign of the Beast 666
The idea of Bloomsbury now has a rather refined and genteel ring to it, largely due to Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, but this was not always the case. It once had a more ambiguous character, where cheap lodgings1 and sometimes down-at-heel scholarship met the slumminess of St. Giles, where Centre Point is now. This had long been notorious – it is the setting of Hogarth's Gin Lane, with the distinctive antique-pagan spire of Hawksmoor's St. George's Bloomsbury in the background, modelled on the mausoleum at Halicarnassus – and in more recent times it was home to Madeline Montalban, “the witch of St Giles”. Writing to a friend from Marseilles in 1930, the artist Edward Burra says “I am surrounded by so many negroes and dwarfs that I can hardly believe I am not in the heart of old Bloomsbury.” Add the proximity of the British Museum and the bookishness of the area, and it adds up to the kind of richly marginal area that suits occult business ventures.
One of London's best known occult bookshops (now at 49A Museum Street, along the road from the former site of Mandrake Press), Atlantis was an important venue for Crowley to sell books in the 1930s and 1940s. Founded by Michael Houghton in 1922, it was originally round the corner at 14 Bury Street (now the London Review of Books shop, in the renamed Bury Place; Houghton moved to Museum Street around 1940). Crowley had plans for a small press there in the Thirties, variously imagined as the “Brazen Head Publishers, 14 Bury Street”, the “Banyan Press, c/o Atlantis Bookshop 14 Bury Street”, along with “The Apocalypse Bookshop 41a Museum Street”, adjoining Mandrake Press. His plans have a nice ring to them: “At the Sign of the Beast 666 / Magickal and Occult Booksellers / New and Secondhand / The Trade Supplied”.
Timothy d’Arch Smith knew Houghton slightly and remembers him as “almost a dwarf, his demeanour exactly comparable with that of Grumpy in Snow White.” Atlantis sometimes figures in Crowley's diary just as “Mike” or “Mike's”, with notes of how many books taken, although Crowley was never over-fond of him. In 1934 he wrote a limerick
Atlantis book shop.
A dwarf kike, who called himself Houghton!
– His balls, in his boyhood, were caught on
His mother's false teeth
In a foul slum in Leith
She stewed them with truffles and Corton.
Corton is a Burgundy, and a kike is someone who is Jewish. He notes “This was impromptu, a challenge by Tom Driberg, C.K. Ogden, and McGregor Reid. Line 1 was ‘given’ me. Idea all right, but Corton is a bad rime. I don't know if the incident described is authentic.” It is a bad rhyme if Corton is given its proper French pronunciation. It doesn't reflect well on Driberg – later to be a prominent Labour politician – if he really gave Crowley that first line.
Houghton, whose original name seems to have been Hurvitz or Hurwitz, always tended to bring out Crowley's casual anti-Semitism: “These low Jew thieves justify Der Sturmer” 2 he wrote to German disciple Karl Germer in May 1937, and as late as June 1944, after more dealings with Houghton, he wrote in his diary “Oh God! Send us a Hitler!”
There was a loose occult scene around Atlantis, and Crowley met people there including Jean Michaud, a musician with an interest in Rosicrucianism. Based at 40 Langham Street, Fitzrovia, he also headed a London group called The Order of the Hidden Masters, and went off with Houghton's wife. In the late Thirties, years after his disastrous relationship with Crowley had ended, Victor Neuburg was in the shop with his partner Runia Tharp, looking at secondhand books, when he suddenly moved closer to her. As quietly as possible he said “Let's leave”, and when they got outside she saw he'd gone white. He'd just seen Crowley: “He was standing looking at books. Almost next to us. I don't think he saw me.” It was the last time Neuburg ever saw him.
Crowley already had a history with the Bury Place shop even before Houghton, because it had been the Bury Street Buddhist Bookshop, a pioneering venture established by Lieut.-Colonel Ernest Rost, R.J. Jackson, and Col. J.R. Pain, where Crowley had a run-in of some kind with the management; possibly over money, or perhaps a reluctance to stock his books. Bury Place was the Atlantis Crowley knew best, but he knew Houghton had moved and in February 1943 he writes to a friend, Noel Fitzgerald “Mike still thieving in Museum Street, I believe.”
Crowley also knew the Oriental booksellers that were once a feature of the area – Arthur Calder-Marshall writes of “the Oriental bookshops by the British Museum with their latent mystery as if they were the beginning of a story by Algernon Blackwood” – and along with Goldston's there was Luzac's, which was at number 46 Great Russell Street (now Jarndyce bookshop) from 1890 to 1986, and Probsthain's, still there at number 41. In 1910 Probsthain's distributed Crowley's Richard Burton-influenced, homo-erotic, Persian-style verses Bagh-i-Muattar (The Scented Garden).
Also in the area, along with the Mandrake Press and the bookshops, is the Plough pub, which Crowley drank in (it is mentioned very occasionally in the diaries). It was a moderately Bohemian pub between the wars, sometimes known as the Plug, for obvious reasons, or the Baby's Bottom, perhaps because the outside was painted a fleshy pink.
1 Austin Osman Spare, for example, lodged in Gilbert Place during one of the more impoverished periods of his life, between Museum Street and Bury Place. For more on the character and background of the area see Thomas Burke's authentic if rose-tinted account, Living in Bloomsbury (1939). Famous in his day as a writer of horror stories and potboilers about Limehouse Chinatown, Burke knew Crowley, who wrote in his diary on the 22 September 1945 “Tommy Burke is dead, alas.”
2 Rabidly anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda paper (1923-1945). More about Germer shortly, at site 46.
45
LANGHAM HOTEL, PORTLAND PLACE
Colonel Carter
Crowley's early Thirties time in Germany, initially as an artist exhibiting his paintings, involved numerous women, two of whom achieved Scarlet Woman status: Hanni Jaeger (“Anu”, held office autumn 1930), and Bertha Busch (“Bill”, held office autumn 1931 to autumn 1932). It also involved two rather more unexpected players: Gerald Hamilton, the original for “Mr. Norris” in Christopher Isherwood's novel Mr. Norris Changes Trains, and Lieut.-Colonel John Fillis Carre Carter, C.B.E., of the Special Branch.
After Crowley's expulsion from France there were popular and journalistic calls for him to be charged with various crimes, including murder. This inspired Colonel Carter – who knew Gerald Yorke – to find out how bad he really was (and whether he could be useful). Yorke insisted Crowley wasn't so bad when you knew him, so Carter gave him money to bring Crowley over from Belgium.
One night in June 1929 they had dinner at the Langham Hotel on Portland Place, a grandly Victorian building in ‘Florentine Palace’ style: it is mentioned in several Sherlock Holmes stories, and Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde dined there together with their publisher. Crowley stayed at the Langham occasionally, and this end of Regent Street is another nexus he knew well in the Thirties. Along with the Langham Hotel he frequented the Bolivar restaurant attached to it; two or three of his many dentists were in the area, including Watson Turner at 50 Wimpole Street and Bywaters and Piper at 3 Portland Place, and he was for a while very involved with the Aquila Press at 2&3 Langham Chambers, All Souls Place, run by his associate James Cleugh. Crowley used it as c/o postal address, and around 1930 hoped to take it over, less for its publishing activities than for its premises, to use as a base.
Crowley and Carter got on like the proverbial house on fire, all the way through to brandy and cigars. Crowley was apparently much amused by Carter advising his son to masturbate on Saturday nights, so as to get it out of the way and not interfere with his studies (he evidently thought once was enough, like the bygone practice of having a bath on Sunday night to get clean for the week).
Carter's responsibilities included keeping an eye on ‘secret societies’, and he wanted Crowley to infiltrate the Theosophical Society (not as bizarre as it sounds; Theosophy was associated with anti-colonial tendencies threatening British rule in India). In the event Crowley was too famous for this, but they sent his secretary Israel Regardie1 along, with a subscription paid for by the Special Branch. Carter also wanted to know what was going on in Germany, and here they struck gold with the notoriously corrupt Gerald Hamilton, who was well connected with the Comintern in Berlin.
A physically rather ugly, or at least grotesque, man, with a bald head and lips so full and blubbery they were almost indecent (a friend said he should cover his mouth with a fig-leaf), Gerald Hamilton had a fruity charm and the rare distinction of being interned in both world wars as a German sympathiser. When Crowley first met him he was working for Communism in Germany, but he later drifted to the far-right. He was also well-connected in the European gay underground, with friends in the Vatican. Hamilton was introduced to Crowley by Jean Ross, the original for Isherwood's “Sally Bowles” in Goodbye to Berlin.2 After a while Hamilton moved in as Crowley's Berlin lodger, in a profitable arrangement where Crowley seems to have received money from Colonel Carter for informing on Hamilton's Communist activities, while Hamilton seems to have received money from the German authorities for informing on Crowley, so their flat-share helped pay for itself.
1 Born Israel Regudy in the East End in 1907, Regardie grew up largely in America after his family emigrated, and became Crowley's secretary in 1928 after reading Crowley on yoga. This lasted for a couple of years, after which he became secretary to once-bestselling author Thomas Burke. Crowley and Regardie fell out in 1937 after Crowley ridiculed him for being an East End Jew (“Israel Regudy was born in the neighbourhood of Mile End Road, in one of the vilest slums in London. Of this fact he was morbidly conscious, and his racial and social shame embittered his life from the start.”) Regardie hit back ridiculing Crowley for homosexual tendencies (“Darling Alice, You really are a contemptible bitch!”).
Influenced by Jung and particularly Wilhelm Reich, Regardie later had a successful career in the States as a chiropractor and occult writer: he eventually forgave and appreciated Crowley enough to write The Eye in the Triangle: An Interpretation of Aleister Crowley (1970). This and other esoteric books brought him a large correspondence from the unfortunate and unhinged, which towards the end of his life he was collecting into a private book, ‘Liber Nuts’. There is a biography by Gerald Suster.
2 Whom Crowley was later surprised to bump into in the London restaurant Hatchett's, at the corner of Dover Street and Piccadilly, one day in July 1932.
46
PARK MANSIONS, KNIGHTSBRIDGE
Wife of the Beast
In November 1928 Crowley had met the woman who would become not only the new Scarlet Woman but his second wife; this was Maria Teresa Ferrari de Miramar (“Marie”), a Nicaraguan. She claimed to practise voodoo, and Crowley liked to think of her as “The High Priestess of Voodoo.” She also said she had raised the Devil when younger, and in Paris (without Crowley) she attempted to do this again in a ritual with Yorke and Israel Regardie. This involved her dancing, with a burning fire in an otherwise dark room and a heavy use of Abramelin incense, while all three chanted a mantra. Both men felt a strong presence of some kind, and in Yorke's case, by the end “I was on the verge of some sort of hysteria. My muscles were rigid, jaws champing and face working”; “I sensed a Being, Presence, or Force… something alive and apart from myself, with an atmosphere or will power stronger than mine and alien to me.”
Crowley was refused leave to stay in France in 1929 and returned to England, marrying Maria (partly to overcome immigration difficulties) in Leipzig on 16 August 1929: this was reported in the Times (“ALEISTER CROWLEY MARRIED. CEREMONY IN LEIPZIG AFTER BEING BANNED FROM FRANCE”) as the wedding of “Mr. Edward Alexander (Aleister) Crowley, the English mystic writer…”. The marriage certificate describes him as an author, living at Georgian House, Bury Street. They lived for a few months in Kent, but Crowley had already met her nineteen-year-old replacement Hanni Jaeger (Anu) in Germany before they even moved into apartment 89, Park Mansions, Knightsbridge (SLOane 8534) in the summer of 1930. Crowley seems to have discovered the address through Colonel Carter, who had been living at apartment 8 in 1929.
