City of the Beast, page 21
Crowley was alternately amused and appalled by Alice's ignorance and her malapropisms, or “Spellerisms” (“Really I should collect them”). He noted some of them in his diary, and she clearly had a very eccentric and childlike understanding of what jealous, covet and reactionary might mean, for example. In conversation, “she says something and you realise she's not understood a word of the last five minutes”. He was far from romantically engrossed with her (“Saw coloured girl I wanted twice while with Alice. Hell!”) but nevertheless they became old friends (he nicknames her “Tub”); they often ate out together, and she visited him in Torquay.
Crowley liked to birch Alice by way of foreplay, and bought a birch specially, but his erections were failing with age, and increasingly his diary reports “frigged her for politeness sake” (and similar; “on compassionate grounds” or “for human kindness sake”). In December 1941 “Alice generously offered a banquet on her birthday. She didn't care what it cost her – the world well lost for love.1 Cost: sherry 8/4d: lunch £1/3/- : smokes 9/9d: taxi 1/-. Total: £2/2/1. Her contribution 12/6d. Lady Bountiful! Cunnilingus: damned decent of me!” And then on 23 December 1941 he reports “Alice here: frigged her.” This, in Hanover Square, seems to be his last sexual act.
Crowley suffered from poor health and intermittent depression at Hanover Square, but he did have the most extraordinary and vivid dreams. In July 1941 he had
a wonderful novelette-length dream in which I was pursued by an American girl-detective in bombed city. It was all framed by me and her father to get her married to me!
and a couple of nights earlier “one very wonderful dream about an hermaphrodite.” Later he had
Marvellous dream: young strong tall woman and [magical sign] fucking – I gave her (and myself later) to an animal which we called a hog, but wasn't exactly a hog. Intense lust. All this out-of-doors somewhere in the East – N. Africa, I think.
The complexity of a dream from early the following year recalls Clifford Bax on the impressive ‘voltage’ of Crowley's mind. It was an “A1 dream” of what he recognised as a type:
This type of dream begins with presentation of extremely vivid miniature “freaks-of-nature” or sculptures in curious rare gems, usually semi-precious. These objects are then read as symbols of phrases: e.g. “while runs the sacred river” etc.
This is then recomposed into single picture. Gamekeeper, thanking squarson for christening his firstborn (throaty – autumn tints – nutbrown ale – rich dark greens, reds, & browns) “with care & the Church of England, your arse, sir, as you may say, sir, the country's safe.”
This is heard, felt & seen all at once: and understood as the perfect presentation of the poem, as each phrase of that is to be the original sculptures in miniature.
“While runs the sacred river” sounds like an echo of Coleridge's Kubla Khan. One reason Crowley's dreams were so vivid and complex at this stage of his life was that he was using opiates; back in 1915 he had noted “Began morphia… with 1/6 grain. Many dreams at first of the annoying type. Afterwards extraordinarily vivid and delightful.”
His dreaming at Hanover Square (where he also had nightmares) may have been further exacerbated by the fact that he seems to have been constantly on the cusp of withdrawal: he seems to have been scraping by most of the time on never-quite-enough, prescribed not to maintain an addict but to bring temporary relief for his asthma.
Crowley's word for all-out extravaganza-spectacle dreams was tamasha, an Anglo-Indian word for a show:
Woke 2.10 from very wonderful dream: cunt, buggery, cocaine, beautiful places & things – real tamasha.
Dreamt last night that I was with Frieda who told me in a very off-hand way that all the [tarot] cards were finished. After lunch – lots of 1834 Brandy! – slept for 1½ hours. Great Tamasha: very long & full of religious activities: intrigues of vile Christians in a vast country house largely composed of antique ruins.
…terrific Tamasha with Anti-Christian fights. A long series. At one Christian meeting I altered a hymn & a woman got hysterics & vomited – oh! enough to write a long novel.
Woke from long fantastic Tamasha with terrific diarrhoea (I foresaw this) & long fit of savage coughing. 1/6 [grain heroin] restored calm – incomplete – after half hour pretty bad.
His appreciation of vivid and often beautiful dreams continued right through the final years of his life:
Marvellous dream of Himalayan heights & abysses – a train on some high slopes – I am sending a letter, or resending, by affixing stamps of solid gold foil – to Allan Bennett!
Sex-and-naval-war dreams
Quite the most magnificent tamasha of my life. Location: Paris.
Strangest dreams some very gorgeous, some sexual. One about a cable that nearly went astray, owing to an erasure and the name “Bishop”.
Superb dream. With Leah Hirsig? Took room in London slum, low tide. Flood brought royal dolphins majestically swimming past – amid thousands of other marvels.
Crowley's time at Hanover Square was also brightened by Gerald Hamilton moving in as a fellow lodger; he had previously been lodging in Half Moon Street. Hamilton was a very camp and eccentric character in his own right, and like Crowley he lived from hand to mouth while maintaining a serious interest in wine and food. Crowley sometimes grew tired of Hamilton (“Ham like a crazed bluebottle”) but he was more often cheered by him: bored by Alice, and his dull disciple Bayley, he adds “Hamilton dropped in and brightened things up from time to time”.
Hamilton had been a communist when Crowley knew him in Berlin, but he had now gravitated to the far-right and put his faith in the “sacred cause” of absolute monarchy. Hamilton's politics were well off any serious scale: he was not only an obsessive and boring anti-Semite, but he regretted the end of slavery, and in the 1950s he championed apartheid, affecting a black armband when South African premier Johannes Strydom died. Nevertheless he had a certain charm, and John Symonds – who knew them both – records them having a “similar radiance”.
In July 1941 Crowley reports Hamilton foolishly getting himself nabbed under “18B”, the wartime regulation for dealing with individuals who were potential security risks, and Hamilton spent time interned in Brixton prison along with Sir Oswald Mosley, the British Fascist leader. Hamilton made an official complaint when his bottle of Gevrey Chambertin 1916, sent by a well-wisher, was decanted into a tin by prison authorities, and Tom Driberg, who wrote the incident up in his Daily Express gossip column, commented “It's a grim martyrdom.”
It was after his release he moved to Hanover Square and started seeing Crowley almost daily (“Alice and Ham as usual”, Crowley writes). On Easter Sunday 1942 Hamilton was walking past Crowley's room on his way to Mass and Holy Communion at St. James's, Spanish Place, Marylebone, when Crowley – who left his door ajar because of his asthma – heard him and shouted out “Is that you, Gerald? Where are you going?” Hamilton said he was going to communion. “I hope your god tastes nice,” said Crowley, “You're such a gourmet.”
He also gave Crowley his wartime sugar ration, and once when stocks were running low Crowley sent him a note:
I am looking forward to our solitary encounter at 6 on Tuesday. Can you sweeten it literally as well as metaphorically… for of late so many people, encouraged by your report of the deliciousness of Mrs Speller's chatamasha, have thronged my ancestral halls at the strygogemous hour of four,2 that my combinations of Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen in the proportions of 12, 22, and 11 respectively are quantitively inadequate. Angelice, can you bring some shong-shong?
Chatamasha seems to mean Alice Speller's wonderful tea, from the Anglo-Indian “cha”. Cha plus tamasha may be Crowley's own coinage, a tiny part of his larger “high-imperial, occult-exotic” cultural booty from the Empire, along with curry, yoga and yogic meditation, going on shikar, practising quasi-tantric sex magic,3 and dreaming tamashas
1 An allusion to All for Love: or The World Well Lost (1678), Dryden's play inspired by Shakespeare's play about great lovers, Antony and Cleopatra.
2 Four p.m., or teatime. Strygogemous is a wonderfully rare (possibly unknown) word, which may be derived from the Homeric Greek, meaning exhausted or squeezed out drop by drop. I am indebted to Timothy d’Arch Smith for this information.
3 See note to Reuss and 93 Regent Street: site 33.
89
DOVER STREET, PICCADILLY
A very short stay
The set-up at Hanover Square fell to pieces after the manageress, one Lily Hubard, was arrested for fraud. Hamilton was arrested again for bad debts and fraud shortly afterwards.
Crowley then shifted to Arlington Chambers, Dover Street (at number 5, now redeveloped). He was helped to move by a friend or associate of Hamilton's named Eric Jackson, whom Crowley found he rather fancied: “Eric interests the ageing Alys” 1 he wrote; “Is it too silly? Is it merely cerebral?”
Arlington Chambers didn't last – the chambermaid complained about his hygiene, and he was out again within a week – but it was a stopgap address on what had become Crowley's ‘manor’ on the long main drag of Piccadilly with Mayfair behind it.
Crowley sometimes went to Hatchett's restaurant on the corner of Dover Street and Piccadilly, and to a restaurant called Maison Basque, at number 11, where his dining partners included Collin Brooks, an editor he wanted to cultivate. Brooks was a bon viveur and old Café Royal habitué, a friend of Louis Umfreville Wilkinson's, and he had also written a cheap thriller – a “shocker” – called Mad-Doctor Merciful (Hutchinson, 1932) which compared the symptoms of lunacy and mysticism. Not a man to be intimidated by Crowley, he had a rather hearty and hard manner, and one of the intriguing lines lurking in his memoirs is “You don't need a revolver often, but when you do, you need it damned badly.”
Brooks and Crowley also went to what Brooks describes as a “that new Latin Quarter which has grown up around Portland Place” (a mini-Bohemia taking its character from the BBC staff at Broadcasting House) and in particular to a bar and restaurant attached to the Langham Hotel called the Bolivar, which was on the corner of Portland Place and Chandos Place. Crowley already knew this area at the far end of Regent Street well, and this restaurant, and it was here Brooks introduced him to the spy-traitor Guy Burgess and his partner Peter Pollock: “one or two of the younger generation who wished to meet him”, as Brooks calls them.
Crowley pulled out his new party trick of putting methylene blue dye in his drink, perhaps to give the impression it was some strange potion, from a little phial labelled ‘Lady Astor’. The humour of this is a mystery, but probably related to the fact that Lady Astor was famously teetotal.
Brooks writes in his memoirs that by now Crowley could be something of a bore. Nevertheless, after dining, “we would go to his chambers in Piccadilly, where he would produce some exotic wine… he always gave the impression of having somebody hidden in his bedroom, perhaps a virgin goat.”
1 His feminine alter ego.
90
HAMILTON HOUSE, PICCADILLY
The abiding rapture
After Dover Street, in May 1942 Crowley moved further west along Piccadilly to Hamilton House, number 140, right down at the Hyde Park Corner end near the present-day Hard Rock Café. Number 140 is on the corner with Hamilton Place. He wasn't impressed to begin with; there was no phone, and “not even brekker in bedroom”.
After a week he moved from suite 105 to a better one at 111, and he praised the location to Germer, with its views: “If I want country, I look over to Green Park; if sculpture, I gaze on the Quadriga; if religion, across to the campanile”.1 More than that, if he wanted a bath he had Lord Byron's old bath to climb into.
He was still on his old territory: up at the Circus end he was going regularly to the Café Royal and Oddenino's, where the stranger told him he looked like Churchill, and occasionally with Hamilton to a large subterranean pub under Piccadilly Circus called Ward's Irish House, while down at this western end he also went occasionally to the Hyde Park Grill inside the Hyde Park Hotel at 66 Knightsbridge, and occasionally went for a now innocent stroll in the park.
Crowley was getting old, and in one of his more sensitive moments he asked himself “Why do I fail to appreciate lovely glass and china? Because I can't get rid of the agony of their perishability.” His health was getting worse, along with his addiction. Regularly logging his doses, he sometimes adds comments such as “This just WILL NOT DO”, while in a less regretful moment he notes that there is no food left, but ample tobacco, and “oodles” of heroin. His regular circle of friends – most of whom regularly disappointed, bored, appalled, and disgusted him – was now diminished in quality as well as quantity. His reliable but stodgy disciple Bayley, Cath when she was in London, and a woman called Deborah Hogg2 all figure regularly in his diaries, along with Hamilton, Alice ‘Tub’ Speller, and a couple of chess-playing cronies. Film makers Paul Rotha and Karl Meyer were supposed to call on him at Hamilton House to talk about a tarot film, but cancelled, but he did have a fruitful visit from theatre director Peter Brook and a more surprising one from actors Tyrone Power and Charles Boyer, who seem to have been sent by American friends as possible investors or backers.
Things were very rocky with Frieda (“sly treacherous vixen”), who didn't want Crowley's presence undoing her work on the tarot paintings. In July 1942 she mounted a show of them at the Berkeley Galleries, 20 Davies Street, just near Berkeley Square, and Crowley found out (“amazing treachery”; “Frieda's sneaking treachery”). She did it again in August at the Royal Watercolours Painters Society, 26 Conduit Street; this time Collin Brooks tipped him off, and on 4 August Crowley walked in and “caught her”, as he thought of it. One of Crowley's less appealing traits was a willingness to take legal action against friends, and he wasted no time going round to consult “Ikey” Kerman.
Louis Wilkinson and his partner Joan Lamburn (eventually to be his fourth and final wife) visited Crowley at Hamilton House one night in June 1942, and Joan included an atmospheric if distinctly odd account of their visit in a letter to a friend. First of all, she was convinced the place was “really a brothel”: as soon as she took in the “cheaply furnished hall with its dusty palm tree in the middle and its Lloyd Loom chairs and insolent looking porter in gold braid I knew where I was.” This doesn't seem to have struck other visitors such as Peter Brook. As for Crowley, they went upstairs and met him in “a sort of ante-chamber with a filthy uncurtained window looking on to Piccadilly” which had a few stuffed chairs and a sofa on a bare wooden floor. Crowley came out of his room to meet them, and sat down: “in the fading light there was a touching dignity in the dumpy little figure by the window.” She knew of his fancied resemblance to Churchill, “but I thought he seemed more like Queen Victoria – an ageing, pettish, harassed queen robbed of her happiness…”. Altogether, and perhaps fearing his influence on Louis, she found him “repulsive.”
That June he felt “Mental state v. bad: no clearness, no power to concentrate… I feel the need of a loyal friend as never before. Not one in England who really cared a nickel” (oblivious of the fact that the loyal Tub was round that same afternoon to see him). And yet at the same time he still took the trouble to make ordinary life sacramental: going to see Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest at the Phoenix Theatre, Charing Cross Road (in the celebrated production with John Gielgud and Edith Evans) he decided to make the whole outing “a magical ceremony”, not stinting: “Chambolle-Musigny for lunch, taxis all the time, melon— all regardless.”
His dreams were still nourishing: “Saw and saluted new moon, very large and very misty. First dream of the kind that I remember.” And whatever life threw at him in the way of disappointments, the almost bipolar glory was still there, and often, in a landscape like the London of Blake or Machen. Looking through his diary, he noticed it was “mostly complaints”, or “odd bits of pleasure or good luck”:
Nothing at all of the reality, of the abiding rapture which makes a ’bus in the street sound like an angel choir!
1 The Quadriga is the four-horse chariot sculpture on top of Wellington Arch, at Hyde Park Corner, and the campanile is the striped brick tower of Westminster cathedral, visible further across on the other side of Victoria station.
2 Crowley never has anything good to say about the “Hoggess” or “She-Hog”, and doesn't seem to have enjoyed her company. She was an upper-class morphine addict, daughter of a major-general and married to a brigadier-general, Rudolph Edward Trower Hogg C.M.G.
91
WILTON PLACE
Doctor Faustus
In July 1942 Crowley was contacted by a bold and enterprising Oxford undergraduate: it was Peter Brook, later to become one of Britain's greatest theatre directors. Brook was putting on a production of Doctor Faustus, Marlowe's play about a man who sells his soul to the devil, and he wanted Crowley to be the play's “magical advisor”.
Brook called to see him at Hamilton House (“where gentlemen-about-town lived in expensive service flats”) and found him “elderly, green-tweeded and courteous” with an air not of being wicked but of being down on his luck. They met several times and lunched at the Piccadilly Brasserie, inside the Piccadilly Hotel (now Le Meridien). As they walked along Piccadilly, Brook was embarrassed by Crowley raising his walking stick at noon and chanting praise to the sun, and similarly in the restaurant by Crowley declaiming what Brook remembers as “a conjuration” across the soup (more probably his own version of grace).
The Torch Theatre was a theatre club in a private house at 37 Wilton Place, just across Hyde Park Corner from Hamilton House. The Berkeley Hotel wasn't there in Crowley's day, being built over a demolished strip which by the 1960s included Esmeralda's Barn, the Kray Twins’ nightclub, but Wilton Place is otherwise much as it was, with the mews-like Kinnerton Street (where the ubiquitous Gerald Hamilton had been living at the start of the war) just around the corner.
