City of the Beast, page 22
Crowley attended rehearsals, and “helped with conjuring and stage effects”. At one point, when Faustus began his incantation to conjure up Mephistopheles1 Crowley shouted out that you need a bowl of blood to bring real spirits. Then he added “Even at a matinee…”, and winked.
“He had demystified himself,” says Brook, “and we laughed together.” It was inspired of Brook to bring Crowley on board, getting the greatest magician of the twentieth century to advise on Marlowe's sublime Renaissance tragedy. Crowley had given his life to the Great Work, and almost every year he noted two dates in his diary. One was the death of his father, and how old he would have been, and the other was his own “birth” on 18 November. This wasn't his actual birth in 1875, but his 1898 birth into the Golden Dawn, back in Great Queen Street. That was where he counted the beginning of his great lifelong magical adventure.
The Faustus premiere was on 1 October, and Crowley took Tub and Bayley, his magical student since the old Argenteum Astrum days. As they walked to the theatre Crowley stopped on the pavement to say his ‘Evening Adoration’ but – as he complains in his diary – when it came to Bayley and Alice, “they sauntered on, and pretended not to belong to me. What a herd!”
1 Scene 3, lines 16-25.
92
LEVY’S SOUND STUDIO, NEW BOND STREET
The magical voice
In the same October as Faustus, Crowley wanted to make some recordings. On Friday 16th he went to Star Sound Studios at 17 Cavendish Square (LANgham 2201), where he recorded his ‘Hymn to Pan’ and the First Call in Enochian, the angelic language of Renaissance magicians Dr Dee and Sir Edward Kelley. Perhaps ironically, Star Studios had been the meeting hall of the Theosophical Society, an organisation of which Crowley had a very low opinion. It lived up to this inauspicious start on the following Monday, when Star refused to cut Crowley's 78rpm disc or let him have his recording. There may have been trouble about money, or perhaps they understood enough of ‘Hymn to Pan’ to decide it was obscene.
Crowley did better on his familiar territory of Bond Street, where he went on the 27th and recorded the First and Second Enochian Calls at Levy's Sound Studio, 73 New Bond Street (MAYfair 8521). These survive.1
Louis Umfreville Wilkinson remembers a reading of these same texts after lunch with Lady Aberconway: “more than once I have seen him under the sudden stress of his inspiration. He was controlled, I was sure of it then, by something that was in truth religious, that had the quality, the motive force of Oriental religious ecstasy… he read aloud to us from an enormous Magical Book which he supported on his knees. What he read to us was in a strange language, a language unknown. It was of a singular vibrant beauty and power… ‘What is that language?’ [Lady Aberconway] asked. ‘It is the language of the angels,’ replied Crowley.”
Crowley performed his reading and recordings in a deliberately sonorous, incantatory voice that he called his “Magical Voice”. There are varying accounts of his normal voice. Viola Bankes describes it as light and high, and Yorke remembers his telephone voice was quite high and pleasantly melodious, while his former secretary Israel Regardie remembered that outside of the Magical Voice, “Crowley in reality possessed a thin, effeminate, rather squeaky voice. This was one of the most obvious areas where his homosexual component emerged. I would never have thought that his was a strong masculine voice, capable of booming out a sonorous invocation.”
Arthur Calder-Marshall and Anthony Powell remember his voice as more nasal and Cockney, although Cockney is misleading today. It seemed Cockney to them, compared to the rather extreme, cut-glass standards of pre-war upper class speech. Certainly Crowley wasn't out of the very top drawer (a man as snobbish as Powell would have noticed this at once). But he wasn't today's idea of Cockney either. And to many of the working- or lower-middle-class women he picked up, part of his appeal must have been that he seemed like a ‘real gent’.
1 And can be heard on Youtube. They have been released in several editions over the years, sometimes described as wax cylinder recordings and misdated to 1910-1914, perhaps to give the impression of a man in his prime.
93
93 JERMYN STREET
The Valley of the Shadow of Death
On 16 November 1942 Crowley moved into his last London address at 93 Jermyn Street, behind Paxton & Whitfield's eighteenth-century cheese shop. Alice “Tub” Speller and a friend helped. His new landlady Miss Manning lived in the basement (“Cave-Woman”, in his diary, seems to be a reference to her) and she turned out to be a spiritualist.
Living in a world of numbers, planets and correspondences, Crowley was delighted that his new phone number was 9331 (WHItehall 9331), adding 31 – the numerical key to the Book of the Law that had attracted him to 31 Wellington Square – to 93. He sometimes went to the all-in wrestling – “three hours of sweetness and light”, as he nicely calls it – at the Piccadilly Pavilion by Piccadilly Circus, and he'd been similarly gratified to be the holder of lucky ticket 93, winning him two free seats the following week.
He was at 93 Jermyn Street for almost a year and a half; in the second winter he notes London fog so thick that his powerful torch beam couldn't reach the pavement. It was a street and an area he knew very well by now, and his diaries expand into almost villagey and novelistic detail. Next door was the Savoy Turkish Bath and a chemist called Rawlinson's, where he was puzzled to find a man gazing cluelessly into the window one morning and asking “Do you think they're open?” Across the road was the church of St. James, with the font where William Blake was baptised, where Crowley slipped and banged his head quite badly walking across the churchyard. On a luckier note he records finding a silver threepenny piece there.
Crowley had used Davies, a highly respected tailor ‘By Appointment’ to the King, and even dreamed about them while he was in Torquay, but his main tailor at this late period was called Bright, of Bright & Paul, just across Piccadilly at 8a Sackville Street: Crowley had a phone conversation with Bright when he was clearly drunk (“It's my birthday today, Sir!”; “You sound to me blind drunk!”; “Yes Sir!”). He went bankrupt shortly afterwards; perhaps fortunately, the Tailors’ Benevolent Fund was at 9a.1
Astley's pipe shop was at 109 Jermyn Street (“Pleasant talk with Astley about pipes”) and the whole area is given over to gentlemanly commodities, but more unexpected items include a Nepalese kukri (a Gurkha knife) from Cogswell and Harrison's gun shop at 68 Piccadilly (on the corner with Dover Street, now Korean Air) which Crowley bought after some deliberation with the I Ching. He was also very interested in an image of Pope Alexander VI (“Rodrigo Borgia”, one of the more controversial and notorious popes) which came up at auction not far away. Crowley believed he was Alexander's reincarnation, and made him one of his ‘Gnostic Saints’, crediting him with having stood as a “Satanfather” to the Renaissance. This was sold by Glendinning's auctions at 7 Argyll Street, near Liberty's – they specialised in coins and medals, so it may have been a medallion of some kind – and he was interested enough to trace the buyer.
Being told he looked like Churchill had stimulated Crowley's interest in his own image, and he had a series of photographic sittings with a photographer named – auspiciously enough – William Churchill. He was on the Holborn edge of Covent Garden above a grocery at 42 New Compton Street, and Crowley was impressed with his work, dubbing him “Cambyses Daguerre Churchill”.
Behind St. Giles’ church, up at the quieter end of Shaftesbury Avenue, New Compton Street had already figured on Crowley's mental map: a couple of years earlier, after a day of “futile raids on old yonis” (and “possible later Jeannine REG0775”) he noted in contrast “Interesting hope for real liaison Henriette Mrs. H. Barnitt 56 New Compton St. WC2”.2 But nothing seems to have come of it.
Crowley was still writing and working hard: he was anxious to press on with the tarot project, for which he consulted bookbinders Sangorski and Sutcliffe at 1-5 Poland Street (“most friendly and helpful”) and he published his old poems about Russia, City of God and The Fun of the Fair as independent booklets, with frontispieces of Crowley smoking his meerschaum credited to Cambyses Daguerre Churchill. For a couple of years he had been using a printer called Apex at 53 Monmouth Street, Covent Garden, until they refused to set his additional ‘Political Note’ for Fun of the Fair. Terminating the relationship with a fulminating letter, and signing off with “Yours, really concerned about your future in the workhouse infirmary”, he now had to use a cheap firm called Fermaprint, just across Piccadilly in Quadrant Arcade,3 running beside the Café Royal between Regent Street and Glasshouse Street. One copy went to the Soviet ambassador Maisky, and Crowley was delighted when the bookseller in Jermyn Street's Princes Arcade, Francis at number 6, bought one for himself.
Crowley was also thinking about a further series of pamphlets on various subjects including the politics of Thelema as “golden mean” between the Bolshevik Trotsky and the Fascist Mosley, and on his own poetry, championing himself as the last great poet working in the “classical tradition.” He had no time for the Modernists such as T.S. Eliot; The Waste Land left him “nauseated and ineffably contemptuous”, and by his own understanding of poetry he was the greatest living poet. This made it all the more unjust that he was “England's literary martyr”, after the long unfair blackening of his reputation.
His greatest project of the period began as a series of letters to an Australian seeker named Ann Macky, a musician with an interest in Rudolf Steiner who was living in Britain at Hemel Hempstead. Crowley found her irritating (“imbecile hag”) and thought of her as “poor old Wallaby” and the “Wailing Wombat of Wagga-Wagga”, but there was money in her family and she entered into a contract with him to provide a course of spiritual instruction by regular letter for £26 (well over a thousand pounds today). Written in an avuncular style and originally entitled ‘Aleister Explains Everything’, it became Magick Without Tears.
Louis Umfreville Wilkinson remembers there was a pathos about Crowley in old age: “I had always felt that there was something of pathos about him but in his last years this element seemed to me much stronger and he was in consequence lovable as I had not known him to be before.” At any rate, says Wilkinson, although he felt a sense of failure, at least he never played for pity and “he never resorted to ‘repentance’.”
It was at Jermyn Street that Crowley read to Wilkinson and Lady Aberconway in Enochian. Her later account of it is more patronising than Wilkinson's description would suggest (“Her lovely eyes were large with an emotion that I shared”), but even Wilkinson was struck, amid the grandeur of the moment, with a sense of something picturesque, incongruous and ‘period’:
Impressed though I was by the exaltation, the irradiation… I could not help reflecting on what an admirable subject the scene would have made for a cartoon by Max Beerbohm. ‘Aleister Crowley reciting to Lady Aberconway in the Language of the Angels.’”
He was thinking of Beerbohm drawings like his 1904 ‘Yeats Presenting George Moore to the Queen of the Fairies’.
Crowley's health was still declining, and his heroin habit growing ever more central. His teeth were still bad and – since his friendly dentist Porterfield had joined the army4 – on Hamilton's recommendation he went to a new dentist named Wallis at 93 Cornwall Gardens, Kensington. He was considering one in Welbeck Street, but plumped for the man at 93 as “probably my cuppa tea”.
Socially he still saw people, including Bayley and Frieda Harris, and played word games and spelling bees as well as chess, but he also recorded days of desolation: hardly anyone “bar the Tub”, the loyal Alice; “complete (bar Tub) desolation”. At one point, in the spring of 1943, he felt there was “no news, no tobacco, no friends, no printer, no hope, no bloody nothing.”
Crowley now found that when he was “free of the sexual impulse” a whole group of ideas were now “‘obscene’ ‘disgusting’, and ‘revolting’” – the quotation marks are his, as if he was considering the whole business critically. This included contemplation of the vagina (but the phallus less so, he noted) along with disease, accidents, meat, warfare, and physical pain. From this he concluded “humanitarianism, pacifism – all such feelings – are functions of sexual weakness.” He'd had a related idea back in Berlin, when Bertha Busch stabbed him and Hamilton was appalled to hear about the blood: “This is all his complex – homosexuality and pacifism etc.”
Crowley was an avid cinema-goer in this late period, writing notes and mini-reviews of what he'd seen. He felt This Gun for Hire at the long-gone Blue Hall cinema, 194 Edgware Road (PAD7188) suffered by having its London assassin story (from Graham Greene's novel A Gun for Sale) transplanted to Los Angeles, and that the French classic Carnet du Bal, about an older woman looking back on the lovers in her life with a mixture of nostalgia and disenchantment, was just too sad (he'd gone to it “hoping to cure melancholy”, but now at this age, he said, “I seem to want pleasant things”). Others included Brighton Rock, Derriere la Façade, The Man Who Came to Dinner, Striptease Lady, Margin for Error, Arsenic and Old Lace and the war film Five Graves to Cairo, but his particular favourites seem to have been A Night to Remember (1942), seen at least six times in various places, from King's Cross to the Elephant and Castle, and the 1943 Bob Hope film They Got Me Covered, seen eight or nine times at various places including the Rialto on Coventry Street (now Grosvenor Casino).
Food was an abiding interest: along with the usual haunts there were notable lunches at Hatchett's, with a Hoyo de Monterrey cigar afterwards, The Ivy, and the nearby Ritz (“A1 lunch”), as well as the American-themed Potomac, which was at 40 Jermyn Street (“good appelstrudel!”) and the Chicken Inn (“vile”). Best of all, perhaps, was the classic French fish restaurant Prunier's on St. James's Street, which redeemed a whole day. It was “Another dreadfully blank day till 8,” when his friend Cordelia took him to Prunier's: “Food A1 Green oysters! Joy!!” – then they went back to number 93, and played chess through an air raid until midnight: “A glorious evening.”
There is something endearing about these late flashes of a tweedy lust for life. He was now receiving what must have been cheering parcels from disciples in America, with regular supplies of crystallised fruit, figs, caviar, and Perique tobacco, and they were also sending him money, totalling over £800 a year (towards £40,000 today). In Britain he might have gone from being (in the words of Arthur Calder-Marshall) the Great Beast to the Great Joke and finally the Great Bore, but Thelema was finding more fertile ground in California.
Crowley was in two minds about Americans: on the one hand he could joke about a plan to civilise them – “a 5,000 year plan” (“Sanguine, I know, but I'm always an optimist”) – while on the other he could also say, more sincerely, “Discovered why I like Americans. They are friendly.” Crowley's correspondence with America was subject to attention from the wartime censor, and he fell foul of a rule that forbade people expressing “willingness to receive” food parcels. What should he write instead, he wondered – perhaps “My dear Aunt, I don't want your beastly food: stuff it up your arse.”
Horse meat and whale were both being served in wartime, and Crowley noticed odd meat being served at the Piccadilly Brasserie, where he had “coupe je ne sais quoi” (i.e. a Frenchified fillet of I-don't-know-what). But all things considered, living the life of a West End gentleman, Crowley managed remarkable well with wartime privations: “This desolating war!” he writes cheerfully after a lunch of game pie, grapes, 1858 cognac and a Cabanas cigar.
Crowley leaves a vivid picture of the West End in wartime, with fewer cars in the blackout but travelling faster, and an increase in hit-and-run accidents. The real ordeal was bombing or, as he puts it with classic British understatement, he found the “entertainment value of these raids rather low”. Trying to analyse his “blue funk”, he felt the worst thing was fear of a hit with “HE”, high explosive, particularly the 1000 kg bombs (the so-called landmines) rather than incendiaries and the fire afterwards, because it was random and there was nothing to be done about it. The West End was not a specific target like the docks, but the Jermyn Street hammam at 72 (another Turkish bath) had already been hit and destroyed, with popular singer Al Bowlly killed in a nearby flat, and while Crowley was living there a bomb took out Christopher and Co. wine merchants just to the south at 43 Pall Mall; one night the dreaded “HE” caused great destruction at the foot of nearby Duke Street, blowing out one of Crowley's windows and bringing a rain of small debris down like hail.
Crowley found his fellow tenants at 93 a depressing bunch, especially when they held hands in fear during raids. On one occasion he asked Miss Manning for her Bible and read aloud to them, with the sound of planes overhead and bombs exploding, from the 23rd Psalm: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me…”
Others were not so lucky. There were 81 killed and 248 injured when a bomb struck Putney High Street, hitting the Cinderella Dance Club and the Black and White Milk Bar (both in the same building). It was a site of what would soon be called ‘youth culture’, and Crowley noted rather misanthropically “100 morons killed in Putney”.
Finally he'd had enough, leaving London first for Aston Clinton, near Aylesbury, and then to Hastings for a final decline; he died in 1947. He was cremated in Brighton, with about a dozen mourners, largely from London. Louis Umfreville Wilkinson read his ‘Hymn to Pan’ and remembered the more emotional mourners shouting “Io Pan!” as he read, and then “a beautiful girl” throwing red flowers “upon the coffin as it slid downwards.”
