About a head taller than Wheatley and far better spoken, Tom Driberg was securely upper-middle class and quite left wing; he went into politics and ended up as Chairman of the Labour Party. At first sight his politics make his friendship with Wheatley unlikely, but only at first sight. He was also a member of Andre Simon’s Wine and Food Society, eating turtle fins with the likes of David Tennant and Sacheverell Sitwell, and at his birthday party, as an old man, he crowed “One duke, two dukes’ daughters, sundry lords, a bishop, a poet laureate – not bad for an old left-wing MP, eh?”
Along with High Church ritual – he could have made a memorable bishop – Driberg adored the aristocracy and working-class men, but he hated the middle classes and women. In his posthumous autobiography he flaunted the amount of time he spent haunting public lavatories, and he became a friend of the Kray twins, who supplied him with East End youths. When he wasn’t chasing the lower orders he could be foul to them – his rudeness to waiters reduced them to tears, and his friends were embarrassed to go into restaurants with him – and yet he genuinely seems to have wanted to bring a more Christian ethic into public life. Psychiatrist Anthony Storr described him as the only person he ever met who could truly be called “evil”.
In later life Driberg developed a face and manner that would do credit to a Wheatley villain, but at this time he was a personable and charming young man. He lived at 5 Queen’s Gate Place Mews, in Bino Johnstone’s old house, with a former lavatory attendant as his manservant. This was just around the corner from Wheatley and Joan, and one night – Driberg having made an enemy of some kind – Wheatley was pressed into service to escort him home. The two of them walked into the dark mews with some trepidation, Wheatley armed with his swordstick, but fortunately there was no one there.
*
When young, Driberg had been an associate of Aleister Crowley, the self-styled Beast 666. He considerably misrepresents their relationship in his autobiography. According to Driberg, he was an undergraduate at Oxford when Crowley read something in a newspaper about Driberg’s avant-garde poetry performance, ‘Homage to Beethoven,’ and invited him to lunch. He thought Crowley was eccentric, but they continued to see each other occasionally.
What really happened was that Driberg read Crowley’s novel, Diary of a Drug Fiend, and sent him a fan letter. This was the beginning of their association, which for a time amounted to discipleship on Driberg’s part (thanking Crowley for a photograph, he writes it “will be an inspiration … it does convey, if I may say so, a distinct impression of power and wisdom, and of the presence of a Master”).
This discipleship could be quite grovelling: at one point Crowley delegated Driberg to buy some aloes, needed for the preparation of a magical incense, and Driberg bought the wrong sort:
Dear Sir Aleister,
Thank you so much for your letter: it really is good of you to bother about anyone as ignorant and disappointing as myself – and I am sorry about the aloes: they gave me “black” aloes, and said it was exactly the same as lignum aloes!
On surer ground within his own field of interest, politics, Driberg assured Crowley that democracy was over – it was a “a sham” – and firm leadership was the order of the day: the strength of the Communist Party (of which Driberg was a member) was that “the majority could always be led and controlled by an intelligent and clear-sighted minority.” This would have struck a chord with Crowley: from his own far-Right ‘Thelemic’ position, he desired that the “few and secret … shall rule the many and the known.”
Crowley had some ‘Forms of Acceptance’ of the Law of Thelema (in effect Crowley’s own religion) but filling them in seemed so much like the traditional signing away of one’s soul that Crowley had difficulty getting people to put their names on them. Driberg signed, and was entrusted with recruiting others: “I enclose a copy, filled in, of the ‘Form of Acceptance’: I am taking great care of the copies, and will only show them to really promising people.”
*
As Driberg grew older, the balance of power shifted. Increasingly washed up and short of money, Crowley would tap Driberg for cash and meals, but Driberg didn’t always respond and Crowley complained in his diary “Tom Driberg’s unforthcomingnesses are really unschooltiesome.”
By the time Driberg put Wheatley in touch with Crowley, the latter’s fortunes were ebbing: he was sliding from being The Great Beast to the great joke and finally the great bore, and his reputation wouldn’t revive until the Sixties, when occultism became part of the counter-culture and he appeared on the cover of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper.
Crowley was always on the look out for promising young men to spread the word and if possible subsidise it. He was an indefatigable self-publicist, and his magnum opus, Magick in Theory and Practice, has a distinctively modern and almost transatlantic air of hucksterism when it announces Magick is for all, including “the Poet”, “the Golfer” and “the Stenographer”.
Wheatley would certainly have known Crowley’s reputation for depravity and wickedness, fostered by the yellow press of the Twenties. It was bold of Wheatley to meet this potentially distasteful character, even though he had become a somewhat pathetic figure by 1934. People meeting him for the first time often feared that he would make indecent advances, but in practice he was more likely to borrow a fiver. Wheatley invited him to lunch in May 1934 at the Hungaria restaurant on Regent Street.
Wheatley and Crowley both liked good food and drink, they were both rather Edwardian, both high Tories, and in later life they were both proud of their resemblance to Churchill. They should have got on. So it is remarkable that Wheatley never says anything whatsoever about this lunch; it provided him with not a single anecdote, and he never even describes Crowley’s appearance, although he sometimes exaggerates their acquaintance to the extent of claiming he and Joan had Crowley round to dinner several times.
At the time of their lunch Crowley was preoccupied with a court case. Hoping for damages, he had launched a libel action, in the course of which he was the last man in Britain to wear a top hat in the witness box. He lost. Anthony Powell lunched with him within a week or two of Wheatley, finding him absurd and yet “intensely sinister, both in exterior and manner.” He reminded Powell of an old time music hall comedian, with a “steady flow of ponderous gags.” Powell was struck by his great bald head, “so shaped as to give the impression that he was wearing a false top to his head like a clown’s.” Beneath it his features were “strangely caught together within the midst of a large elliptical area, like those of a horrible baby.”
Powell would occasionally see him in the street afterwards, often wearing green plus fours. He was wearing these, set off with an enormous tartan bow-tie, when he lunched with Maurice Richardson. As was his wont, Crowley began with his own grace, “Do What Thou Wilt Shall be the Whole of the Law”, and they ate and drank prodigiously while Crowley indulged his ponderous humour: indicating a piece of lobster in the bisque, he said “Looks like a devil roasting in hell, does it not, Mr Richardson?”.
Meeting Crowley again in a public house, Richardson noticed a smell of old operating theatres: this was because Crowley had started the day with half a pint of ether. Asked what he wanted to drink, he plumped for a triple absinthe, not in honour of the 1890s – although in many ways this would have been appropriate – but because by this time he was more or less an alcoholic: he had two more triple absinthes before a gourmand lunch washed down with a bottle of burgundy and several further brandies.
As well as the bald head and the grandly dated clothes (this time a tail coat and sponge-bag trousers, “like a Duke in a musical comedy”) Richardson couldn’t help noticing Crowley’s famously hypnotic eyes: “it was difficult not to keep staring at them …”
Like Richardson, Arthur Calder-Marshall was struck by those notorious eyes. Calder-Marshall found Crowley sordid and disenchanting, from his having checked Calder-Marshall’s family in Who’s Who (“you have great possibilities … Have you any money of your own?”) to his attempt to get him to stay the night. In the end it came down to “this shagged and sorry old gentleman trying to outstare me across a table.”
It was a great anti-climax for Calder-Marshall, who had wanted to meet Crowley for reasons not irrelevant to Wheatley’s fiction: “In a world where blacks and whites were breaking up so fast into various shades of grey, The Beast was the last of the graven images, an obsidian monolith of evil, a simple and reassuring devil.” In the event, he was forced to conclude that “Evil was never Pure.”
*
Overshadowed by the court case, lunch with Wheatley doesn’t rank a mention in Crowley’s diary, although he does mention meetings around the same time with Driberg and fellow occultist Rollo Ahmed. Soon afterwards however, he did give Wheatley a specially customised copy of Magick in Theory and Practice. Where the title page read “Published for Subscribers Only 1929”, Crowley altered it to “This unique copy … Published for Dennis Wheatley only 1934 e.v.” [era vulgaris], added a photograph of himself captioned “The Beast 666” and inscribed the book to Wheatley “in memory of that sublime Hungarian banquet.”
He drew a diagram of the Qabalah at the back of the book, with a squiggle representing the Babe of the Abyss, and wrote in the inside cover “Recommendations to the Intelligent Reader humbly proffered,” which included “Study Liber XV pp.345 etc” – his ‘Gnostic Catholic Mass’ – “with a view to putting on this ritual in London as it is done in Hollywood. Amen” and “Read ‘Hymn to Pan’ aloud at midnight when alone with INTENTION to get HIM.” Wheatley was not tempted to try this.
*
Wheatley wrote a polite thank you letter (it was a “magnificent gift”, a “delightful addition” to his collection, especially due to the “kindly” inscription; he was looking forward to reading it “with the greatest interest”) and he sent a couple of his own books: “I fear that in interest and value they can in no way be a fair exchange but if you like a thriller, The Forbidden Territory may serve to while away an evening and as we agreed on Charles II being the most intelligent of English Kings, I hope Old Rowley may find favour with you.”
This agreement on Charles II is one of only two things we know about their conversation. The other is that Crowley wanted to sell some manuscripts – he may have tried to sell them to Wheatley – and Wheatley recommended he should try the bookdealer Percy Muir, from whom Wheatley often bought first editions.
A letter from Crowley hopes that Wheatley’s work is “swift and successful” and leaves him “some leisure soon,” which suggests he had been using work as an excuse not to see Crowley.
In lieu of any experiences of his own, Wheatley had two stories about Crowley that he never tired of telling. When Crowley was an undergraduate at Cambridge he wanted to put on a production of Aristophanes, but the Master of his college forbade it. Crowley and his “coven” met in a moonlit field, and Crowley went to stick a pin in a wax image of the Master, but one of his comrades scrupled to jog his arm and he only pierced the figure’s foot. Next day, the Master slipped and broke his ankle.
There seems to be no truth whatever in this, even as an exaggeration or a coincidence. It is very vulgar, magically speaking: pin in doll, moonlight, coven; this is witchcraft, or its popular image. Crowley’s principal undergraduate interests were chess, mountaineering, and writing poetry. Magic came slightly later, from the end of his time at Cambridge, and it was magic of a relatively exalted sort, writing a letter to A.E.Waite for advice and joining the Order of the Golden Dawn. Not pins in dolls.
This story seems to come from Driberg, as did Wheatley’s second story. Wheatley told Driberg he thought Crowley was intellectually wonderful, but harmless; he didn’t believe he could harm a rabbit. Perhaps not now, Driberg said, but he used to have real power, before that terrible affair in Paris.
Crowley and the other twelve members of his coven – an obviously bogus detail – were in a hotel in Paris when Crowley and a disciple attempted to raise Pan in an upstairs room. The others were ordered to wait downstairs and not intervene whatever they heard, while applying themselves joylessly to a “cold collation” and getting “stale tight”. Shouting and banging was heard and the temperature dropped, but it was not until morning that they went up and broke down the locked door: the disciple was dead, and Crowley was reduced to lunacy, after which he had to spend six months (or sometimes four months, as if for a greater ring of circumstantial truth) in an asylum.
Driberg himself – named only as Member of Parliament “Z”, in one of Wheatley’s accounts – was supposed to have been one of the party downstairs, and “an eye witness”. In Wheatley’s introduction to Crowley’s novel Moonchild this “friend of mine who later became an MP” is quoted at length in his own voice, telling Wheatley how he went up, broke the door in, and found Crowley “a naked, gibbering idiot in one corner.”
The most likely apportioning of blame for this extraordinary farrago of nonsense is that Driberg’s presence in the story is a Wheatley invention – the temperature dropping in the presence of evil, getting “stale-tight”, and Satanic cold collations are all suspiciously like Wheatley’s fiction – but that Driberg did tell Wheatley a fantastically garbled account of ‘The Paris Working.’ This was a series of sexual invocations performed in Paris in 1913–14 by Crowley and his then magickal partner Victor Neuburg, primarily concerned with invoking Jupiter and Mercury.
Nobody died and it all took place without the attendance of eleven people downstairs, but Neuburg did have a nervous breakdown of sorts afterwards: he went into psychotherapy with Dr E.T.Jensen, an early Freudian with magickal leanings, after which he got married and took good care to avoid further dealings with Crowley.
One of the main objectives of the ‘The Paris Working’ was money, Jupiter being associated with its arrival, and Crowley noted in his magickal diary that since they had begun operations a letter had arrived “which should bring in £500 within the next two months”, and moreover the bank rate had fallen to three percent and Consols had gone up, bringing him a profit of over £1,400. So the Working was good news not just for the magickal duo, as Crowley’s biographer John Symonds notes drily, but for the public at large; or at least, for those members of it with overdrafts, mortgages or Consols.
Crowley and Neuburg had earlier invoked Bartzabel, the spirit of Mars – oddly germane, as we shall see, to The Devil Rides Out, where Crowley is a model for Mocatta – and here the news was not so good. Speaking through Neuburg in 1910, Bartzabel had prophesied war involving Germany. In fact, looking back over his magickal record for ‘The Paris Working’, Crowley felt the two of them had perhaps been responsible for the outbreak of the First World War.
*
Leafing through the French Fascist paper, Gringoire, George Orwell noticed no less than thirty eight advertisements for clairvoyants. He remembered this when he was trying to fathom the relationship between occultism and right wing politics. For one thing, occultism replaces the idea of progress and the untidy reality of change with a timeless and reassuring vision of eternal myth, instead of real history, as if nothing essential had changed since the days of ancient Egypt. Secondly, occultism and fascism share a sense of spurious elitism, esoteric knowledge being the dominion of a special few and the guarantee of their superiority. More than that, it offers a transcendence of ordinary life, and an idealist fantasy of pure mental power without normal economic or social restraints. In a larger sense, it is no coincidence that Crowley’s magickal philosophy was centred on the notion of the Will, and that Leni Riefenstahl’s immortalisation of the Nuremberg rallies was entitled The Triumph of the Will.
Crowley’s diary entries from the Thirties show he had hopes of Hitler’s Germany as a possible vehicle for his own philosophy, and he had dreams about Hitler: in one of them the Fuhrer, who was very tall, had all Crowley’s books translated and made official reading in Germany. In another one, more elaborate, Hitler figured along with cigars and the idea of Magick, and in this dream Crowley was actually running Germany on Hitler’s behalf.
In 1904 Crowley had received a communication from his Guardian Angel, a being called Aiwass. Aiwass and Crowley proclaimed the coming of a new Aeon, the Aeon of Horus; the era of war. Crowley was not a vulgar Satanist – in any case virtually non-existent until the 1960s – but he did identify Aiwass with the Egyptian god Set, a forerunner of Satan notorious as the first of the dualistic “bad” gods, and pivotal in The Devil Rides Out.
“Deem not of change”, Aiwass said in The Book of the Law; “The kings of the earth shall be Kings forever: the slaves shall serve.” Aiwass believed in strength and joy: “We have nothing with the outcast and the unfit: let them die in their misery. For they feel not. Compassion is the vice of kings: stamp down the wretched and the weak: this is the law of the strong: this is our law and the joy of the world. […] on the low men trample in the fierce lust of your pride, in the day of your wrath. […] Pity not the fallen! I never knew them. I am not for them. I console not. I hate the consoled and the consoler.”
War for its own sake was a central theme: “I will give you a war-engine. With it ye shall smite the peoples; and none shall stand before you. […] I forbid argument. Conquer! That is enough … worship me with fire and blood; worship me with swords and with spears. […] Mercy let be off: damn them who pity! Kill and torture; spare not; be upon them!”
And so on. Crowley’s friend Gerald Yorke annotated a copy of Mein Kampf, noting its similarities with The Book of the Law. It has to be said, Crowley’s book is the kind of thing that gives Fascism a bad name. It is a Nietzschean rant, and inasmuch as it lacks the socialistic elements of actual fascism it is, in a real sense, well to the right of Hitler.
The next of the people Wheatley met through his researches, however, and the man who probably had more influence on him than anyone else, was the Reverend Montague Summers. He hated Satanists and witches with a vengeance, and on unexpected grounds. He thought they were engaged in a Bolshevik conspiracy.