City of the Beast, page 20
84
THE PARAGON, PETERSHAM ROAD
The Holy Grail in Richmond
In August 1939 the Richmond period of Crowley's life began: “I have been guarding the Holy Grail in Richmond,” he later wrote to Yorke. Lady Harris had a rented flat in this famously pleasant southwestern district at number 3 The Paragon, 57 Petersham Road, and Crowley had already been there: “delightful lunch in sunlit room overlooking the river.” It was in the telephone book under the name of Chutney, from her pseudonym Jesus Chutney.
She lent it to him, and on 5 August 1939 he moved into a high room at the back of the building: “lovely flat, big windows, high above Thames”. The next day he had two friends round for lunch, Hamilton and Louis Umfreville Wilkinson, for what he called “Nuncheon”, an archaic word for a light midday snack. Crowley wrote up a little menu card for the occasion, typical of his sense of fun and the trouble he could go to for friends.
The idea that it was just Nuncheon may have been a modest little joke: it was a heavy lunch by any standards, with a starter followed by roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and two veg, all washed down with a serious Burgundy (a 1933 Gevrey Chambertin) then tiger melon and a cheese course before coffee and cognac. The starter was his own “Zakowski Louis LXIX”, for which his recipe was “Herring Roes, Anchovies, Balachow, Curry powder, Red and Green Chillis cooked in butter. Serve hot on fried bread.”
One night he had Tom Driberg round to the Paragon for curry, when Driberg played what he admits was “rather a mean trick”. Unknown to Crowley, he had come into possession of a lost Crowley item (left behind with a landlady, according to Driberg, “either as payment in lieu of rent or in the course of a moonlight flit”). It was a little square book, “bound in red morocco and encased in baroque silver which must have held a missal or breviary” and it contained a Crowley diary.
Crowley would sometimes draw a little pentagram, then ask Driberg to look at the space in the centre and tell him what he could see. Driberg never saw anything. But this time he started speaking in an entranced voice, saying he could see a little book, with red leather, and shining baroque silver, and some writing inside which he couldn't quite read…
I had never seen Crowley so staggered: he leaned forward in desperate eagerness. ”Go on,” he said, “go on.” But the vision faded. Try again, he pleaded. “No” I said. I can't see anything more…
Driberg never let on, and years later he sold it to Jimmy Page.
Other events in the Paragon era include the appearance of Crowley's last significant sexual partner, Alice Speller (more about her later) and – no less important – the start of the Second World War.
85
THE GREEN, RICHMOND
Twenty-one again
Still in Richmond, in May 1940 Crowley moved to number 15, The Green, an eighteenth-century house with a fanlight over the door. The so-called Phoney War – the slow start – had run from September to May, but now things stepped up, with Germany moving on Belgium, Holland and France.
Crowley had already dreamed of Hitler in the late Thirties: “Elaborate dream about Hitler & cigars & Magick & my horse Sultan. I was running Germany for him.” Another night, “I had several long talks with Hitler a very tall man… he was pleased & impressed: ordered all my books translated & made official in Germany. Later, a dusky night in a city. A man in gold-braid went round a corner, saw several horsemen, similarly gorgeous, one fired the first shot of the war.”
In waking reality he had had some political hopes for Hitler and the cause of Thelema, and in May 1936 he met a man identified only as “Slippery Joe” in the Café Royal bar to have lunch and talk about “93 as base for Nazi New Order”. Also in 1936 he asked his old First World War associate Viereck – now promoting National Socialism in America – to use any influence he might have with Hitler to bring The Book of the Law to his attention as a “philosophical basis for Nazi principles.” Crowley was convinced he had influenced Hitler, probably through his German disciple Martha Küntzel. It is unlikely, but the correspondences are still remarkable. Küntzel saw Hitler and Thelema as one, and Crowley noted “astonishing” similarities between Hitler's thinking and The Book of the Law (also noticed by Gerald Yorke). Watching British propaganda, Crowley was impressed for what its makers would have seen as all the wrong reasons: “Saw show of cartoons lampooning Mein Kampf, with appropriate quotations. Taken in these selected doses, what a masterpiece! And how patent & profound a debt he owes to AL!” 1
He felt the same way when he read Hitler Speaks, a 1939 book by Herman Rauschning, and annotated it enthusiastically (“true”; “yes”; “all very sound”; “excellent”; “For ‘German people’ read ‘Thelemites’”). When Rauschning's Hitler says “After all these centuries of whining about the protection of the poor and lowly, it is about time we decided to protect the strong against the inferior” he wrote in the margin “Yes!”
Despite all that, at the onset of war he wrote to Martha Küntzel saying Britain would “knock Hitler for a six” and that Germany owed any high culture it had to Jews. Although he was capable of intense casual anti-Semitism, as we have seen with Michael Houghton at Atlantis, he had no interest in any systematic absurdities about an Aryan master race (“Nordic Aryan nonsense”).
Nor did he like Hitler's “demoniac foaming-at-the-mouth expression”, and he said the trouble with Hitler was that he didn't understand “the rights of the individual”. Above all Nazism, or National Socialism, was too collective for Crowley, and instead he wished Germany had been able to restore the Hohenzollern monarchy.
From now on Crowley was a loud and publicity-seeking patriot, trying to interest the British government in Thelema, writing songs and verses for Britain and France, and claiming to have invented the ‘V for Victory’ sign (more usually credited to Victor de Laveleye, an anti-Nazi Belgian who broadcast for the BBC; Crowley also claimed to have invented the Nazi use of the swastika, having allegedly suggested it to Ludendorff2 around 1925). Nevertheless, one of his most interesting and far-reaching comments comes when he explained to Germer why, in his anti-Nazi propaganda writing, he was still unable to attack Hitler by name: going back to the old Golden Dawn idea of trans-human ‘Secret Chiefs’ (of whom he thought Aiwass was one) he writes that he couldn't attack “a man who may be, for all I know, working directly under one of my own chiefs!”
With his asthma in particular, for which he had started using heroin again, along with heavy drinking and gargantuan eating, Crowley's health was bad and he was not ageing well. At one point he congratulates himself on walking from Richmond Green to Richmond Bridge, which is no great distance. But Charles Cammell remembers his excitement during a bombing raid, when they saw a German bomber shot down in flames by anti-aircraft guns.
Here was a man who had been gasping his life away all through the night; and now at the crack of dawn he ran downstairs two steps at a time, and was shouting Hooray! And waving his arms skyward in a passion of boyish excitement and jubilation. No trace of asthma; it was gone to whence it came. Crowley was twenty-one again…
1 i.e. Liber Al, The Book of the Law.
2 Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff (1865-1937), German general and politician.
86
FITZWILLIAM HOUSE, RICHMOND: CHARLES CAMMELL
Drinks with the Reverend
Charles Cammell (father of Donald Cammell, who made the cult film Performance) was an associate editor of The Connoisseur, the art and antiques journal, and he was an admirer of Crowley's poetry. After meeting at Gwen Otter's they became friends, drinking and eating occasionally at El Vino's and the Café Royal. It was through Cammell that Crowley found his lodging on Richmond Green. Cammell lived across the Green on the Little Green at number 4 Fitzwilliam House, a more modern 1930s building in red brick.
Crowley sometimes went over to Fitzwilliam House – probably trying to cadge a free dinner, says underground filmmaker and Thelemite Kenneth Anger – and on at least one occasion Cammell had him round with the Reverend Montague Summers, the witchcraft and demonology writer remembered for books such as The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1926) and The Vampire in Europe (1929); he also lived in Richmond at 4 Dynevor Road. Summers was a bizarre figure in his own right, affecting eighteenth-century clothing, and he was so High Church that religion was a kind of fetish.
Summers was also ultra-reactionary in his politics and is remembered for his fire-and-brimstone hatred of witches and Satanists, associating them with communism and anarchy. It was less well-known in his lifetime that he was a former practising Satanist himself, of a distinctly 1890s-ish persuasion.1 It was Summers who conducted the first Black Mass in Britain for which there is any real evidence, and later than one would imagine, in Eton Road, Hampstead, on Boxing Day 1918.
In public Summers disapproved of Crowley, but in private things had been more cordial. Dining with Summers in 1929, Crowley recorded “The most amusing evening I have spent in decades!” (they seem to have talked about Crowley's plans for a universal sex-appeal perfume called ‘It’).2 He was less effusive about seeing him at Fitzwilliam House with “Mrs Forbes” – a reference to Summers's secretary-companion Hector Stuart Forbes – and noted only that the sherry was indifferent.
There was also a Continental restaurant called Valchera's, just along from Richmond Station and handy for the Green, where Crowley dined on a couple of different occasions with Cammell and Summers (separately). I can dimly remember it in the 1990s with thickish – possibly velvet – café curtains, and I regret not going in when I had the chance. Symptomatic of the way London has changed, the building is now the Richmond branch of McDonald's.
Like so many of Crowley's friendships, especially if money was involved, his relationship with Cammell ended badly. He bought a quantity of expensive hand-made tweed from Cammell's wife Iona but failed to pay for it, instead writing “Ha Ha” in his diary and selling it on to other people in smaller batches. When she asked for the money he became abusive, and that was the end of friendship with the Cammells.
Under no illusions about Crowley (“No sense of honour, friendship or virtue of any kind”), Cammell nevertheless wrote a fair and even affectionate 1951 memoir of him, Aleister Crowley: The Man The Mage The Poet.
1 And in line with this he was no mean poet, in the decadent-Satanic vein: see Antinous and Other Poems (1907).
2 As in Hollywood “It girl” Clara Bow and her 1927 movie It, in tandem with Elinor Glyn's sensational novel of the same year and title. Glyn defines “it” as “that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes”.
87
DUKE STREET, MAYFAIR: DR THOMSON
Death of a doctor
Crowley's final years were shadowed by heroin addiction. The first doctor to prescribe it seems to have been Harold Batty Shaw, based at 122 Harley Street, whom Crowley had been seeing since 1898 and who prescribed it for bronchitis at Christmas 1919. But Crowley had a longer relationship with opiates: he had experimented with laudanum in 1907, and his diary suggests he was also using heroin by the time of his first Jermyn Street lodging in the same year (he includes it in a list of things ‘allowed’ by his health regime, mainly directed towards dieting).
In a 1924 Paris diary he discusses his astrological and elemental “idiosyncrasy” for heroin, and he also records tremendous pleasure, writing what could be described as happy nonsense: “It has been like thirteen masturbations, a menstruation orgie, a five-man buggery competition, sixteen rapes of assorted quadrupeds [etc.]… and a pot of marmalade thrown in.” Heroin users often experience pleasurable itching, leading to very pleasurable light scratching, and Crowley writes “I itch marvellously lewdly, and to scratch – Ah! But for to scratch, it is to scratch!”
Unfortunately by this time he was addicted: “I seriously dread the failure of supply.” He managed to beat it and stay clean for some years, but by 1936 if not earlier he was driven back to morphine for asthma relief, and by 1939 he was injecting regularly, with the return of a full habit. His most distressing withdrawal symptom was the return of asthma. Crowley obtained heroin from Heppell's chemist, with branches at 169 Piccadilly, 35 Haymarket and elsewhere, and in his final years they posted it to him.
His health – surprisingly delicate all his life – was very bad in later years, with teeth regularly breaking or falling out and an injection abscess on his leg, on top of asthma and lifelong bowel troubles and vomiting, never adequately diagnosed. He would be woken by diarrhoea, and vomited on the floor in theatres and cinemas, attributing it to excitement. A whole troupe of doctors have walk-on parts in the later diaries – Crawshaw (heroin), Lodge (morphine sulphate), Vernon, Peacock, Macdonald and others – but one late doctor in particular is remembered, due to a gutter press story that Crowley had put a curse on him. As James Laver remembers it, “the story was current (I do not vouch for it) that, shortly before his end, his doctor had said to him: ‘I am going to cut off your heroin.’ Crowley replied: ‘If you do I shall die – and I shall take you with me.’ He did die, and the doctor died a fortnight later.” 1
In fact, the doctor coincidentally died not just within two weeks, but within a day. He was found dead in his bath. This was Dr William Brown Thomson, a man Crowley liked (“Charming humorous lowland Scot, very clever and thorough”). He was at two Mayfair practices, 15 Half Moon Street, running between Piccadilly and Curzon Street, and 83 Duke Street (not the one off Jermyn Street), near Grosvenor Square, from where he told Crowley he was going to reduce his dose.
1 The widest circulation for this story probably came from the Daily Express, 4 December 1947, ‘Magician Put Curse On Him’. The version given doesn't really add up: allegedly Dr Thomson had started personally chaperoning Crowley to the “West-End chemist” in the last year of his life (which sounds unlikely anyway, as if doctors have nothing else to do) but Crowley was by then living in Hastings, and even in London Heppell's had started sending his heroin by post.
88
HANOVER SQUARE, MAYFAIR
Tamasha dreaming
After Richmond, Crowley spent the winter of 1940-41 down in Torquay, attended by the usual troubles with money. At first he moved in to the Grand Hotel (“Food excellent – beyond praise!”) but he was unable to pay: “No money, Paul, manager Hotel, most kind, let me go.” While in Torquay he tried to establish a more modest Abbey of Thelema, with all members pooling their resources in “aristocratic communism”, but noted all too realistically that the “worst snag in England about the Abbey is the social gap between classes, as regards members… it is hard to extend the [Thelemite] principle to menials.” He also went on “shikar” quite purposefully, and was directed by a sympathetic taxi-driver to the evocatively named “Belgravia Club”.
In July 1941 he returned to London, taking a serviced flat for 3½ guineas a week (about £200 today) at 10 Hanover Square W1, in the area of Mayfair between Regent Street and Bond Street. Now completely redeveloped, the large house at number 10 on the corner with Princes Street was then akin to a cheap hotel, with a telephone switchboard and meals.
Crowley lost no time being back in town, going to the nearby Café Royal, Oddenino's, and the French Pub (on one occasion too crowded, so he went on to the Fitzroy Tavern). Soho was just across Regent Street, and one afternoon, with an associate named Morrison, he had tea at Maison Bertaux, a long talk in Soho Square, and a drink at the Shakespeare's Head pub on Great Marlborough Street: all “Very pleasant.”
He also visited the famous, or notorious, publisher R.A. Caton of the Fortune Press at 12 Buckingham Palace Road, a publisher associated with Montague Summers. Along with a couple of famous names such as Dylan Thomas, his list had a strong leaning towards more niche-market gay titles, and sadistic books such as Nell in Bridewell and the like. He combined this with a career as a slum landlord, boasting that he owned 91 houses and not one with a bathroom. Crowley visited him several times and hoped he might re-publish his Diary of a Drug Fiend and his earlier pornographic novel Not the Life and Adventures of Sir Roger Bloxam, as well as his tarot project, but found him to be a “seedy fraud” who finally admitted he had no interest in tarot and just wanted books about “torture and flagellation.”
His local pub was now the Mason's Arms on Maddox Street (where the landlord took two copies of his patriotic poem England Stand Fast to display in the pub) and it was on Maddox Street at Christmas 1941 that he records the Epiphany-like fragment of someone (perhaps a street vendor of some kind; perhaps Italian) saying “Take ‘ome a Chreesmas pooding?”, working it up into a short comic poem.
Crowley's main sexual partner through this period – seemingly the last of his life – was Alice Speller, a secretary in her early fifties whom he had met up in Highgate in October 1939. She lived in Effingham Road, Crouch End. John Symonds changes her name to Alice Upham: she was still very much alive when his 1951 biography came out, not dying until 1969. One wonders if she ever knew her Aleister was on the cover of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
On their first date in town, two days later, they had gone at lunchtime to the Yorkshire Grey in Langham Street, and then had difficulty finding a room to go to bed; they finally managed “chez Jeanette”, a woman he'd met a while earlier, who was at 72 Shaftesbury Avenue. She was possibly involved with a club there called the 72 Club (no doubt by analogy with the notorious or glamorous “43 Club” just behind it at 43 Gerrard Street) or Ida's Club.
