City of the Beast, page 2
“But the enemies of life were on guard,” says Crowley, “They saw people enjoying themselves…”. In particular, he cites Christian feminist and social reformer Mrs. Ormiston Chant, who led protests against prostitution and general immorality at the Empire (now the Leicester Square Cineworld) in what became a famous case of 1894, leading to greater restraint.
And now, he says, his student complains he is not serious, but Magick is the subject that takes him back to the gay days of his youth. He set out almost half a century earlier to find “The Stone of the Wise, the Summum Bonum, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness”, and now “I have plenty of trouble in life, and often enough I am in low enough spirits to please anybody; but turn my thoughts to Magick – the years fall off. I am again the gay, quick, careless boy to whom the world was gracious.”
The world was definitely more gracious to Crowley in certain districts. Bernard Bromage, an acquaintance of the Thirties and Forties, noticed “there must still have been supporters, overt and secret. He did not live, in these last crumbling years, in Seven Dials or Poplar or Peckham but in Jermyn Street…”.
Crowley in Peckham would hardly have been Crowley. Writing about navigation in 1909, he cheerfully claims not to know the whereabouts of Haggerston, a poor district in east London just north of Bethnal Green:
Suppose I were to start from Scott's [restaurant] and walk… to Haggerston Town Hall (wherever Haggerston may be; but say it's N.E.), thence to Maida Vale. From Maida Vale I could take a true line for Piccadilly again and not go five minutes’ walk out of my way, bar blind alleys, etc., and I should know when I got close to Scott's again before I recognised any of the surroundings.
Not far from the Empire theatre, between Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus, his starting point here is ‘Scott's Oyster and Supper Rooms’ on Coventry Street (“the hub of the West End of London” says The Gourmet's Guide to London of 1914). It was just behind the Trocadero and the building still has its ‘S’ motifs, with seashells higher up (it is currently Five Guys fast food). A year earlier, as he tells it, Crowley picked up a newly published novel by Somerset Maugham – whom he had known quite well in Paris – entitled The Magician, and took it to Scott's, where he was so pleased to recognise the main character was quite closely modelled on himself “I think I ate two dozen oysters and a pheasant, and drank a bottle of No.111 [champagne]… Yes, I did myself proud, for the Magician, Oliver Haddo, was Aleister Crowley… ”
The Piccadilly area is a definite nexus in Crowley's London. Just south of Scott's is Haymarket, where he stayed in Yeoman House at number 31-32 in the late Twenties, obtained tobacco from Fribourg and Treyer at 34, and heroin from Heppell's chemist next door at 35. At the top of the north-south sloping road was the long-gone Haymarket Stores (25, 26, 29 Coventry Street) where he shopped on account – lobster, pineapple, pheasant, sherry, Stilton, crystallised fruit – until they pursued him for unpaid bills, and in 1934 he stayed briefly at Mapleton House, ‘Bachelor Flats’, 39 Coventry Street.
Just across the Circus he had a more sustained association with Jermyn Street, just south of Piccadilly, over three decades and several lodgings, and he banked with Barclay's (home branch Piccadilly Circus, 52 Regent Street) and Westminster (home branch Piccadilly, 63-65 Piccadilly). He was a regular at the Café Royal, where Regent Street meets the Circus, and at Oddenino's restaurant almost next door (“Oddie's”, where he also stayed at Oddenino's hotel). Regent Street was another well-worn path, and he also knew Bond Street well – like Jermyn Street, an old-style, high-class shopping street, but on a grander scale – where he stayed faithful year after year to ‘Royal Court’ diaries from Smythson's intensely upmarket stationery shop; still there and still expensive.
Inevitably he also knew Soho, for its restaurants and sex trade (and stayed there occasionally) as well as the more down-at-heel and equivocal Paddington and other districts near railway termini. After reduced circumstances forced him into digs in Paddington Green during the 1930s, where he had a brush with what would soon be known as ‘bedsit-land’, he was relieved to escape to the more pleasant quarter of Chelsea, another favoured district along with Piccadilly and Mayfair. Crowley took an interest in the metropolis (telling an American friend he wished he could take him “exploring odd bits of London”) and he was alert to the particular atmospheres, nuances and social gradations of these areas, writing – by way of a metaphor – that “Brixton need not envy Bayswater, or Bayswater Belgravia, if it would only be itself”.
I started this book as a diversion during the 2020 lockdown, not intending much more than a gazetteer of addresses, but it grew into a biography by sites. As well as the social nuances and atmospheric qualities of place, there is a peculiar magic about knowing someone walked through this doorway, looked into that shop window, walked up those stairs. Years ago, spellbound by a novel which mentioned a particular door on Soho's Dean Street, I was driven to go for a walk that night to see if this door really existed, and if so what it was like (very Georgian, as it turned out). Finding it not only added something to the experience of the book, but also transformed that particular corner of Soho with a slightly dreamlike sensation.
One way of thinking about this is through the idea of what has been called “transitional space”, a term describing an area that is not only in the mind or wholly in the external world, but lies in an overlap between the two. This region which is neither totally subjective nor objective is part of why people want to see the Mona Lisa: not because it is beautiful but because they already have it in their heads, so the novelty of finally seeing the real thing brings inner and outer together with a feeling that can be almost uncanny (however banal it might sometimes be in practice). The idea of transitional space is also relevant to the fascination and strange sensation of being in film locations – finding a village pub that is in The Avengers, or a Dickensian alley in Fitzrovia that is in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom – and to the popularity of psychogeography, particularly in psychogeography's more ‘cultural-historical’ aspect and the long tradition of books such as E. Beresford Chancellor's 1933 Literary Ghosts of London (nothing supernatural).
Back in the world of reality, at least relatively, trailing Crowley into a bygone London is also a revealing exploration of social history. Bohemia, prostitution, restaurants, ordinary life during the Blitz and much more all come into focus through Crowley's reportage, as he prowls through the city in his role of the esoteric gentleman at large.
Just as it is hard to imagine Buddhism without the great accretion of Asian culture entwined with it, so Crowley is virtually inseparable from his ‘English gentleman’ aspect. And London, is, par excellence, this particular gent's terrain. Never quite as leisurely or disinterested as the Parisian-style flaneur, he traversed the city on a myriad personal missions, ultimately in service of the long spiritual quest he always dated from one night in Covent Garden in 1898. And as he wrote later, apologizing for not setting an account of his magical adventures in remote exotic Asia, “there are just as many miracles in London as in Luang Prabang.” 6
1 I have written about this in more detail in an afterword, ‘A Word in Wilde Haste’, but relegated it to the back so as not to let this dense essay come between the reader and the book.
2 Alfred Chichele Plowden (1844-1914) was the once well-known Metropolitan Police Magistrate at Marlborough Street Magistrates Court – one of London's major courts – in Great Marlborough Street, off Regent Street.
3 With reference to Pat Harvey of Sinclair Gardens, and Ruby, probably Ruby Butler, of Baron's Court Road. See sites 69 and 75.
4 “Therefore we set out diligently to map and explore these ‘untrodden regions of the mind’” is Crowley's loose quote at the start of his 1908 magical diary, adapting John Keats's “untrodden region of my mind” from his 1819 poem ‘Ode to Psyche’ (“Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane” – a temple or shrine – “In some untrodden region of my mind”). For “inner experience” see Georges Bataille, Inner Experience (NY, SUNY, 1988) [L’Experience Interieure, 1943]. Other writers in this area, but without Crowley's esoteric apparatus, must include William James and Aldous Huxley.
5 Crowley's “strength and beauty” quotation is from Shelley's poem, ‘A Bridal Song’. The Empire itself was the subject of fin-de-siècle poems by Arthur Symons and Theodore Wratislaw, both focused on women: Wratislaw describes “The calm and brilliant Circes who retard / Your passage with the skirts and rouge that spice / The changeless programme of insipid vice, / And stun you with a languid strange regard”.
Following “Soiled doves” in Crowley's next line, a sentimental Victorian euphemism for prostitutes, he gives a spread of women from history and fiction: Byzantine empress and former prostitute Theodora, played on stage by Sarah Bernhardt; Greek Phryne; vicious and depraved Roman empress Messalina, famously drawn by Beardsley; Thaïs, fourth-century Egyptian prostitute with a pure spiritual heart, subject of Jules Massenet's 1894 opera Thaïs; Baudelaire's Haiti-born “Black Venus” Jeanne Duval; and the fictional Nana, Moll Flanders and Fanny Hill from Zola, Defoe and John Cleland respectively.
6 City in Laos famed for Buddhist temples.
1
TOMB OF BURTON, MORTLAKE:
The perfect pioneer
Sir Richard Burton, first of the “Three Immortal Memories” to whom Crowley's Confessions are dedicated, lies in the churchyard of St. Mary Magdalen in this curious tomb. It is an Arab tent in stone, with a ladder and a window to peer in at the two coffins – Sir Richard and his wife Lady Isabel – mouldering gloriously inside. Like Crowley, Burton was a great Victorian malcontent who incarnated the genius and stranger undercurrents of Victorian Britain even as he was transgressing against mainstream Victorian values.
Burton was an Orientalist, explorer, writer and anthropologist with an unfailing ability to shock his contemporaries. Asked by a vicar if it was true he had killed a man in the Arabian desert, he said “Sir, I am proud to say that I have committed every sin in the Decalogue”.1 When a doctor asked him roughly the same question – “How do you feel when you have killed a man?” – he replied “Quite jolly, what about you?”
Burton had a genius for languages, speaking about thirty, and a talent for deep disguise: along with pseudonyms such as Frank Baker he created whole identities such as Haji Abdu el-Yezdi and Sheikh Abdullah, a wandering Sufi dervish who practised medicine (so successfully that he built up a flourishing business as part of the disguise). It was as Sheikh Abdullah that he achieved his most celebrated feat, risking death to visit the forbidden city of Mecca and bring back detailed ethnographic reportage.
Burton also investigated Mormonism in America, interviewing Brigham Young, and his miscellaneous travels range from South America to Iceland, but Africa was a more central interest. He searched unsuccessfully for the source of the Nile, but he did become the first European to see Lake Tanganyika (he “discovered” it, as we used to say) and survived a murderous attack by Somalis at two in the morning. Taking a javelin through the face, he lost four teeth and part of his palate but escaped and made it to the sea, where the spear was removed on board a friendly ship. He also attempted to suppress the slave trade in Dahomey.
Burton's early adventures – smoking opium, sleeping with local women, alligator-riding – are well within acceptable Victorian extremes, but he was felt to have trodden more dubious ground with his exploration of male brothels in Sind (now part of Pakistan). This was undertaken on Empire business, as part of a larger British attempt to stamp out wife-murdering, infanticide and paederasty in the region. Among many eyebrow-raising details, Burton reports of boys and eunuchs that the boys cost twice as much, because “the scrotum of the unmutilated boy could be used as a kind of bridle for directing the movement of the animal.”
Burton's Eastern experiences fed into his unexpurgated adult edition of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (“The Arabian Nights”), published in sixteen volumes (1885-1888). Burton's interest in sexuality led him to found the Kama Shastra Society, ostensibly (for legal reasons) a distant organisation in Benares, northern India, but in fact Burton and his friend Foster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot. They published the Kama Sutra (1883), and The Perfumed Garden (1886). At the time of his death he was working on a book called The Scented Garden: “I have put my whole life and all my life blood into that Scented Garden,” he wrote, “…It is the crown of my life.” He was a day from finishing it when he died, and his wife burned the thousand-page manuscript to protect public morality.
Burton wrote over forty books (“not one dull paragraph”, says Crowley) and he was a friend of the poet Swinburne and of Bram Stoker. Stoker admired him immensely and used him – particularly his unusual canine teeth – as a model for the appearance of Count Dracula. For Edward Said, the opponent of Western ‘Orientalism’, Burton was a wicked imperialist villain,2 but for Crowley he was “the perfect pioneer of spiritual and physical adventure”.
1 (i.e. the Ten Commandments). Disguised as a Muslim pilgrim, Burton was widely believed to have killed a young Arab who saw that he was an impostor in disguise.
2 A “totemic pantomime demon”, even, to borrow the title of John Wallen's trenchant defence of Burton, ‘Sir Richard Burton as Totemic Pantomime Demon in Postcolonial Theory’, International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, Vol.6 no.4, July 2017.
2
THISTLE GROVE, KENSINGTON:
Disapproval of the universe in general
Crowley had a repressive Christian upbringing: his family were Plymouth Brethren, and his father was an evangelist who refused to buy railway shares because there were no trains in the Bible. Nevertheless Crowley admired him, and during his lifetime young Crowley's sense of their religion was less about sin and stifling morality and more about being a member of a vanguard spiritual elite. Along with his later revolt against Christianity, this was another lifelong legacy.
The Crowleys had lived happily enough in Redhill, Surrey, but in 1887, when Crowley was eleven, his father died and his world changed. His mother Emily took him to live with her brother Tom Bond Bishop in Drayton Gardens (formerly Thistle Grove), Kensington, off Old Brompton Road. She had lived there before her marriage in the Bishop family house – their mother's – at number 71, now numbered 20. It was in this new household that Crowley's loathing of Christianity really set in (along with his time at the hateful Plymouth Brethren boarding school of the Reverend Champney D’Arcy, in Cambridge). Bishop was another evangelist, founder of the Children's Scripture Union and the Children's Special Service Mission. “No more cruel fanatic, no meaner villain, ever walked this earth”, says Crowley in his Confessions, and in an ‘obituary’ – published while Bishop was still alive – he writes “To the lachrymal glands of a crocodile he added the bowels of compassion of a cast-iron rhinoceros; with the meanness and cruelty of a eunuch he combined the calculating avarice of a Scotch Jew…”. And on top of all that, Bishop had “a horror of what he called sin which was exaggerated almost to the point of insanity.”
Built in the 1840s, Drayton Gardens is an attractive and classically Victorian street of terraced townhouses with Doric-columned portico front doors. But by the standards of 1880s London, Crowley considered it “nondescript… neither upper nor lower middle-class”, and more than that “The dinginess of my uncle's household, the atmosphere of severe disapproval of the universe in general, and the utter absence of the spirit of life, combined to make me detest my mother's family.” This was the mother who called him the Beast 666 when he was naughty.
Having earlier lived at 71 (20), by 1885 Bishop had moved to 43 (now 48). Crowley remembers the road as Thistle Grove,1 and writes “The name has since been changed to Drayton Gardens, despite a petition enthusiastically supported by Bishop; the objection was that a public house in the neighbourhood was called the Drayton Arms.” To the likes of Bishop, and Emily Crowley, the very idea of a public house would have meant a den of iniquity, and been ‘common’ with it. Happily it is still there, splendidly rebuilt in 1891, on the corner with Old Brompton Road.
When Tom Bishop moved to Streatham, Crowley's mother followed, and took him to number 7 Polworth Road, in what was then a distinctly unfashionable suburb. This was more déclassé, and Crowley – who fully shared the prejudice against suburbs – refers to it contemptuously as “London's most suburban ‘subbub’”
1 It was already officially Drayton Gardens, since 1884, but the earlier name probably persisted for a while. The address has a confusing history because (as well as being totally renumbered in the 1890s, and renamed twice from Drayton Grove to Thistle Grove to Drayton Gardens) there is still a Thistle Grove, a much smaller thoroughfare just on the other side of Old Brompton Road, which was called Thistle Grove Lane until 1907.
3
ROYAL ARCADE, OLD BOND STREET: LEONARD SMITHERS
What all the others are afraid to touch
While still at school, Crowley had developed interests in chess and rock climbing; his talent for chess was precocious, and he devised a manoeuvre where the pawns attack the bishop.1 The horrors of boarding school took their toll on him, and he took up climbing to build his fitness after being bullied; away from the world of school, it must have offered an intimation of transcendence.
