City of the Beast, page 13
Crowley's diaries frequently record dishes at home such as “Zambar of Lobster: Iced”. That was one hot day in the summer of 1936 (zambar was ready-made spiced lentil powder he bought in tins, along with tins of Madras curry powder and jars of vindaloo paste; and eating curry chilled seems to have been a once popular practice). Sometimes the boat was really pushed out: “Altogether my lunch was memorably exotic: cooked by host himself in a Bloomsbury flat”.
chilli con carne – Mexican dish so hot that it makes strong men weep. With it were four “side-dishes” – concoctions based on (a) red macassar fish & poppy-seed (b) tamarind-fish (c) Burmese balichow made from rotten prawns (bottled, very Spilsburyesque) (d) Kasoondee – minced mango in spiced oil.
“Spilsburyesque” is nice: Sir Bernard Spilsbury was a leading forensic pathologist, and his famous cases included identifying Dr Crippen's wife from her remains.
He was always devising new dishes, typically with chillies and cayenne pepper:
Pot au feu Ang-Kor…4 Cocotte: bed of bhindi with chillis. Middle layer: prawns and chillis in vindalu; top, chillis and Chinese onions.
My new savoury. Fried rye bread smear with Chinese chili sauce grilled sardines top with egg fried in olive oil.
My savoury. Fried bread smeared with tamarind fish paste. On this grill anchovies and sardines alternate. Over this yolk of egg scrambled with cayenne.
Gold fish toast. Brown bread and dripping nearly toasted. Add stripes of red chilli and anchovies: finish.
My Almond Chicken. Steep cold chicken in red & green (or bird's eye) chillis. Add Bamboo pickle (in oil), Col. Skinner's Chutney,5 & lots of almonds. Stew it all up. Oh boy!
1 Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004), a distinguished Indian writer and novelist who knew the Bloomsbury Group. He was also interested in tantra and the unconscious, looking back on the inter-wars period in his memoir, Conversations in Bloomsbury: “Romanticism led to the unconscious as in the new vital works of D.H. Lawrence… I wanted to liberate the unconscious via the Shakti-Shakta Tantric thought and dig down to the depths.”
2 Curries and Other Indian Dishes (Harmsworth, 1932)
3 Louis Umfreville Wilkinson (1881-1966), writer and novelist who wrote as Louis Marlow, was certainly Crowley's most literary friend. His works include the novel Swan's Milk (1934), a memoir of Crowley in Seven Friends (1953) and an inspired parody of Henry James, ‘The Better End’.
4 As in Angkor Wat.
5 A Fortnum's preparation; they still sell it.
50
WESTMINSTER ABBEY
A past life
While they were living in Berlin, Bertha Busch stabbed Crowley with a carving knife just below the shoulder. He lost a good deal of blood, and it made him sufficiently aware of his own mortality to draw up a will on 22 December 1931, in which he wanted his body to be embalmed in Egyptian fashion or, failing that, his ashes interred in an urn placed either at Boleskine, or Cefalu, or Westminster Abbey. The Abbey – a joke, since burial there is not at the wish of the deceased – is about a desire to be recognised as a truly great poet, interred in Poets’ Corner with the likes of Shakespeare.
Westminster Abbey had already figured in his longer story. When he recovered his previous incarnations, he remembered being Eliphas Levi (1810-1875), the French occultist who played a major role in the 19thC occult revival. Levi visited London in 1854, where he met with Bulwer-Lytton and other students of the esoteric, and one day he found a note at his lodgings. It contained half of a card cut in two, with half of the Seal of Solomon, and a scrap of paper which read “Tomorrow, at three o’clock, before Westminster Abbey, the other half of this card will be presented you”.
Levi stood there holding his half card as nonchalantly as possible, and saw a carriage standing before the Abbey. A servant beckoned him to the carriage, where he met a woman in black, with a veil, who showed him the other half. Unveiling, she told him (“with a very strong English accent” – she was evidently speaking French) that she knew he had been asked for magical demonstrations before, and had declined. “Perhaps you have not the necessary things,” she said; “I will show you a complete magic cabinet.” Swearing him to secrecy, she showed him a collection of magical instruments and robes, ”even lent me some curious books that I needed” and wanted him to carry out a full necromantic evocation of a dead spirit. They agreed to evoke Apollonius of Tyana, a first-century Greek, and ask him two questions, “of which one concerned myself and the other interested this lady.”
The ‘cabinet’ for the evocation was in a small tower of her house, with four concave mirrors. There was a sort of altar with a marble slab, on which was a little brazier, and there was another brazier on a tripod in front of Levi, who held a sword and a ritual to be read. Levi felt he had invoked the clear shade of a man, larger than life-size and not looking as Levi had expected, before he passed out. The shade had not spoken, “but it seemed that the questions which I wished to ask it answered themselves in my mind. To that of the lady an interior voice replied in me, “Dead!” (it concerned a man of whom she wished to have some intelligence). As to myself I wished to know if reconciliation and pardon would be possible between two persons, of whom I thought, and the same interior echo answered pitilessly, “Dead!”
The effect of all this made a deep impression on Levi, who writes that after it, “I was no longer the same man…”
There is a coda to Crowley and Westminster Abbey in the 1940s, during the war, by which time he was a slightly comic figure in Britain. William Joyce, “Lord Haw-Haw”, regularly broadcast wireless propaganda at England from Berlin. In his distinctive hectoring tones, he said that prayers and church services were clearly failing to help the British cause – so perhaps Crowley should be invited to celebrate a Black Mass at Westminster Abbey.
51
ALBEMARLE STREET, MAYFAIR
Magick
After a couple of years largely in Berlin, Crowley returned to London with Bertha “Bill” Busch in July 1932. Before settling in they had to visit Colney Hatch (more of that later) and they also spent eight days at the celebrated and rather louche Cavendish Hotel on Duke Street, just south of Jermyn Street, popular with ‘fast’ members of the upper classes and run by the formidable Rosa Lewis. She figures as “Lottie Crump” in Evelyn Waugh's novel Vile Bodies, and Crowley writes in his diary “Shifted our Vile Bodies to the Cavendish hotel.”
Lewis was not a woman to be trifled with, and she embarrassed Cyril Connolly at a wedding by shouting “Ere's the man wot owes me money!” After Crowley's stay ended with an unpaid bill, he and Bertha then took a flat in Albemarle Court, service flats at 27 Albemarle Street, off Piccadilly. This was near Crowley's old Mayfair haunts, joined to Bond Street by the Royal Arcade and just round the corner from Stafford Street and memories of Whineray. They were opposite the Royal Institution (“for the diffusion of mechanical and scientific knowledge”) with its impressively-pillared classical façade modelled on a Roman temple. It was here that Faraday had first demonstrated electromagnetism. A century earlier Bishop Berkeley, the idealist philosopher who believed the apparently material world existed only in the mind (and therefore figures in Crowley's A∴A∴ reading list – “The classic of subjective idealism” – and in Magick) had also lived on Albemarle Street.
While Crowley was here, on 17 August 1932, the bookshop Foyle's asked him to come and give a talk on ‘Magick’ in September, so on 2 September he consecrated a magical fuck to the task: “Opus 140. Success to 15 Sept. speech.” 1
1 Opus 140 because it was the 140th such opus, dedicated to a purpose, that year.
52
GROSVENOR HOUSE HOTEL, PARK LANE: FOYLE’S LITERARY LUNCHEON
An herd of many swine
Crowley had a good business-like relationship with the well-known London bookshop Foyle's, which was then in its enormous flagship premises opposite the Phoenix Theatre on Charing Cross Road, abutting Manette Street (now moved to slightly smaller premises next door at 107 Charing Cross Road). In Crowley's day, and until recently, Charing Cross Road was the centre of London's secondhand book trade – a couple of shops still survive, valiantly hanging on – and when Crowley was looking for a book, Thomson's City of Dreadful Night, he told a friend he was going to “ransack Charing X Road”.
As for Foyle's, he was on almost social terms with Christina Foyle, and was a familiar face in the occult department, buying as well as selling, although selling was important: after being asked to speak, he manage to sell them 200 copies of Magick on account at 5/- each.
Foyles Literary Luncheons were something of an institution: they were held at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane, and sometimes attended by several hundred people. “Where are ‘literary lunches’ mentioned in the Gospels?” Crowley asks in his diary. And the answer is “An herd of many swine feeding.” 1
And so it came to pass that on 15 September 1932 Crowley gave his talk about ‘The Philosophy of Magick’, and was able to record in his diary “Made a good speech!!!!!!”.
1 King James Version, Matthew 8:30 and Luke 8:32.
53
PRAED STREET, PADDINGTON: THE MODERN BOOK COMPANY
Libel discovered
After a couple of stormy months in Albemarle Street, Crowley and Bill started moving to shorter-term addresses: towards the end of September 1932 Crowley moved to the Queen's House Hotel at 20 Leicester Square, and after more moves they checked in to the Park Lane Hotel on Thursday 5 January 1933, by which time things were coming to an end.
Bill's health was bad, physical as well as mental – she had to go to the Grosvenor Hospital For Women in Vincent Square, Westminster – and on Saturday 7 January Crowley packed her off to Brighton to convalesce and found himself in the Paddington area. Like several of London's railway termini, including Victoria and Marylebone, the Paddington area was by now an equivocal zone where faded Victorian gentility met transience and vice. A man called A.G. Macdonell, writing in 1933, discusses what we would now call psychogeography, with his protagonist walking the streets and trying to understand the lines where the qualities of one district give way to another, like the elusive “exact spot where the influence of Nude Picture Post Cards in Praed Street wanes before the empurpled major-generals of Petersburg Square.” 1
Crowley was walking along Praed Street, possibly looking out for prostitutes, when he looked in the window of a bookshop at number 23 called The Modern Book Company. The nondescript but progressive name would suit a miscellaneously sensational-sleazy bookshop – perhaps like yesterday's ‘Read and Return’ book and adult magazine shops – but in fact it specialised in books on popular science and wireless technology, for radio enthusiasts, with just a few spicier and more interesting items. One of these was Crowley's novel Moonchild, in the window with a display placard that said “Aleister Crowley's first novel, Diary of a Drug Fiend, was withdrawn after an attack in the sensational press.”
“Discovered libel,” Crowley wrote in his diary. Clearly the bookseller, Mr Gray, was trying to sensationalise his work: Crowley went to his solicitor to sue, and the case came to court on 10 May. Fortunately the judge had recently arrived from another planet, and declared “There was not the smallest ground for suggesting that any book Mr. Crowley had written was indecent or improper.”
He decided the case in Crowley's favour, awarding him £50 damages.
1 A.G. Macdonell, England Their England (Macmillan, 1933)
54
CUMBERLAND TERRACE: PEARL BROOKSMITH
The flame of fornication
In July 1933, during a run of short-term addresses, Crowley met Pearl Brooksmith, 34-year-old widow of an older naval officer, Captain Eldred Stuart Brooksmith, who had died in 1931. She drank heavily, as Crowley noticed, and not long after their meeting he wrote an imaginary epitaph:
Here lies a Pearl of a woman
Who lived in open sin.
One end collected semen,
The other guzzled gin.
She lived at number 40 Cumberland Terrace, just near the western edge of Regent's Park. He called to see her on 9 August, and before too long they began having sex: on the 15th he records Opus 1, “i.m.d.” (in manu dominae; in the hand of the mistress) and that it was “A.1”, a favourite Crowley expression. Next day Opus 2 took place, and on the 19th he moved in with her.
Further works were consecrated to ‘Success’, ‘Lust’ and ‘Love’, and it was business as usual with Opus 7: “Sell Magic to Selfridge at a good price”. Pearl was an intense sexual partner, and their bouts included shouting, screaming and clairvoyance on both sides, while Crowley's notes include “marvellous lust”.
It was Pearl who produced the memorable line “I feel the flame of fornication creeping up my body.”
55
CARLOS PLACE, MAYFAIR: OFFICE OF ISIDORE KERMAN
Abominable libels
Readers of Crowley's Magick found a flyer inserted, telling them “Your interest in Magick should be the dawn of a new life,” and concluding “To assist the Master Therion in his Great Work, the Establishment of the Law of Thelema, Your first step will be to write to Aleister Crowley, 9 Carlos Place, London W1.” This was not Crowley's address but discreetly ‘care of’ his solicitor, Isidore Kerman, and number 9 Carlos Place was a door that Crowley saw far too much of for his own good, leading to eventual bankruptcy.
Crowley felt ill-used in memoirs by old friends, and in particular by Nina Hamnett's 1932 autobiography Laughing Torso, published by Constable. This had recollections both tragic and light. She recalled how desolate Crowley and Hirsig had been over the death of their daughter Poupée. And she recalled Crowley in Paris, wanting to sleep with a particular woman; when he succeeded, Hamnett had seen him next morning at the Dome café when someone said “Hullo A.C., what was it like?” and he said glumly “It was rather like waving a flag in space.”
Crowley saw a copy of Laughing Torso in September 1932 and he was not amused – “abominable libels,” he wrote in his diary. Next morning he was at Carlos Place. The passage he particularly objected to was about Cefalu: “He was supposed to practice Black Magic there, and one day a baby was said to have disappeared mysteriously.”
The case of Crowley vs Constable publishers finally came to court in April 1934, and included Betty “Tiger Woman” May as a witness on the side of Constable. As ever, the press had a field day with the “Black Magic libel case”, as it became known, and Crowley seems to have been one of the last men in Britain to wear a top hat in court. He writes in his diary as if he'd won, with the “collapse” of the opposing side, and “General joy – the consternation of Constable & Co.”, but he had in fact lost. He made an appeal, and in November 1934 he lost that as well.
Meanwhile he had lost another case against the writer Ethel Mannin. In her Confessions and Impressions she had described Crowley at Gwen Otter's as a man “who likes nothing better than to be regarded as His Satanic Majesty the Prince of Darkness”. He sought an injunction, which came to court in July 1933 and failed, on the grounds that the book had come out in 1930 and he had made no objection earlier.
When it came to legal action, Crowley never seemed to learn from experience (his victory over the Praed St bookshop may have given him a misplaced confidence). In 1935 he wrote an article called ‘My Wanderings in Search of the Absolute’ for a paper called The Sunday Referee. When they declined to publish any more in the series he was hoping for he sued for breach of contract, and once again he lost.
All this had to be paid for, and when Crowley was unable to pay his legal fees he had to give Kerman books, manuscripts, magical regalia and jewellery, some of which finally surfaced at Sotheby's in 1996.1 On at least one occasion he managed to buy his property back: in 1939 he bought back a piece of tribal art, his “old South Sea stick”, an Easter Island staff, at the auction house of Miller, Paxton and Fairminer at 34 Chancery Lane. It figures in photographs of Crowley and ended up in the Yorke collection catalogued as a “Maori walking stick.”
Like Crowley, Kerman was a character. He had charm, good looks and chutzpah. He had started up in business as “Forsyte and Kerman”, but there was no Forsyte: he'd taken the name from The Forsyte Saga. The firm's cable address, “Kybo, London” has the generic look of such addresses, but in fact stood for “Keep your bowels open”. And where Crowley went bankrupt, his lawyer died (in 1998) worth £14 million.
1 See Henrietta Street.
56
UPPER MONTAGU STREET
Explorer Granted Bail
Crowley and Pearl left Cumberland Terrace just before Christmas 1933, and Crowley checked in to the Cumberland Hotel on 20 December. He didn't like it, and although he seems to have been with Pearl he wrote “Oh so bloody lonely! I cannot stand the Cumberland any more.” In slightly higher spirits, he thought the hotel was geared towards a ‘sales rep’ lifestyle. Quoting Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, he wrote that it was “run on the assumption that every ‘traveller from the cradle to the grave through the dim night of this immortal day’ is a Commercial Traveller.”
This was the beginning a welter of short-term addresses largely in the Marylebone area, including the Grand Central Hotel.1 On 11 June he took considerably less grand digs at 21 Upper Montagu Street, Marylebone, near Montagu Square. There is a side door by the corner with Crawford Street, behind the Victorian chemist's shop of Meacher, Thomas and Higgins, still there with its beautiful Victorian wall-lamp just by Crowley's door.
