The joy of life consists in the exercise of one’s energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience.
To stop means simply to die.
The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.
– Aleister Crowley
There are moments in every man’s life when he glimpses the eternal.
– High Lama, Lost Horizon
I ponder this concept of absolute happiness. Despite my gourmand Himalayan attempts, I know that true perfection in life cannot be maintained at length. But by God, she can be achieved for a few breaths. The real key is to recognise and acknowledge her in our midst, grin and wink at her, breathe her in, sniff, molest and fondle her by all means, but not to ponder her absence morosely like a filly’s blouse and with a dewy, sugary eye when it is too bloody late. Remember that many have never ever had the good fortune to know bliss and experience contentment.
Yet perversely, it is partly my boredom of such bliss that has pushed me to the edge of today’s nonsensical but wholly necessary hara-kiri. The meadow is now full. Of shaved heads, robes, acolytes and young friends. There are many who dress as I do. They are here to wave me on my way.
I smoke a lot more hashish and drift back to London and the time of the court case of the Golden Dawn upon my return from Italy. I had been charged over the Second Battle of Blythe Road. (Did they not remember I had filmed them all? You might be asking.) In truth, it was all MI-1’s doing for larks and the public diet of nonsense around me. It was all a show. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
After years of having listened to obscene charges about me, I was now supposed to remain silent and considered in court, calm and serene, disciplined and well measured. I was able to do this, confident of my own responses, but there are points when the most saintly among us are tested, not by the exposure and revelation of one’s malfeasance and selfish joy, but by the fools one is asked to suffer with gladliness. This weakness caused my only real outburst during that infamous and notorious trial at the High Court that took up much of that year, as I defended myself against my high-jinxed intrusion into 36 Blythe Road. I was not aware that my whispered ‘Oh, eff awff’ had carried to the distant and rippled reaches of the Old Bailey. Such is the echo, I guess, for I even heard it myself seconds later, perhaps even more loudly than when it had passed my disdainful and curled lips. The stenographer allowed herself a coughed giggle, the judge frowned in horror while seeming to allow his juvenile spirit to beam and several of my acolytes rocked forwards and backwards in their seats and in a fluid unison, sensing the Beast was stirring.
Before the jury’s decision, I was allowed to speak, albeit as high as a kite, and only told the judge, ‘Age is not a question of years, but is instead a function of the arteries, as well as knowledge and passion, of course.’ I think he approved of this.
Of course, I was found innocent, but sought no damages, for that would be unseemly and we preferred to cause confusion. There was a new god in town, and I was still not finished with 36 Blythe Road.
I then retreated to Loch Ness for lengthy orgies and mischievous rituals, where I hosted Germans by the score. It was in that late summer when a new daughter of mine was planted in fertile and womanly flesh.
And so, I would like to begin to tell you of my vibrant, whirring and hyperbolically thrumming baby girl. I say begin for she shall follow me to my real end. I will tell of how she and I – through a marvellous childhood grudge of hers and our own clairvoyance of a quite remarkable pitch – helped to save England from certain defeat in the second war. And almost certainly the end of civilisation as we knew it.
Let us go back a short while to those years in London, Cambridge, Scotland and Tunis between those days in Sicily and Germany. And I shall soon begin the tale of my luscious third daughter and my galleon of sailed treasures. Violet Ambrosia Fagg.
Four hours to go.
We arrived back on the Italian mainland a blissful legion of misfits and renegades. I knew that there would be cheap talk in the press back in England. That chap Loveday had fallen ill at the abbey, but it was bugger all to do with me. The same liars who claimed animal sacrifices and goat sex said that Loveday had died from drinking cat’s blood. They perhaps should have noted the doctor’s reports, one of malaria and persistent diarrhoea and one that put down the loss of an eye two months earlier to gonorrhoea. And since none of us had suffered that particular uncomfortable blight in the trouser – nor anyone that I knew of had coupled with the ugly arsehole – then it is a mystery quite easily solved. He was independently poorly.
The papers were still brutal, and a flimsier man than I would certainly have buckled. My own publisher was quoted as saying the ‘vilification was unparalleled in the history of journalism’.
On February the 24th, 1923, the Sunday Express had led on the front page with
NEW SINISTER REVELATIONS OF ALEISTER CROWLEY
VARSITY LAD’S DEATH
ENTICED TO ‘ABBEY’
DREADFUL ORDEAL OF A YOUNG WIFE
CROWLEY’S PLANS
And they followed it week after week, chasing their crippled and lame dragon, like prancing pillocks. Cakes of goat’s blood and honey, I ask you.79
When I finally threatened to sue (just to rattle their cages, of course), they printed this on the front page too.
The Sunday Express promises Crowley that it intends to pursue its investigations with the utmost ruthlessness, and that next Sunday it will endeavour to supply him with considerable further material on which to base any action which he may care to bring.
Oh goody! Vitriol! You shall lose!
With the national press wading in on their side for once, the cretins at John Bull felt unleashed and vindicated, and swaggered like a bitch in heat, presuming that at last she had attracted the attention of those more respected types who found her regular state unworthy and unpleasant.
The headlines that they ran in that spring were dedicated to the man who was really their master.
A WIZARD IN WICKEDNESS (17 March)
THE WICKEDEST MAN IN THE WORLD (24 March)
KING OF DEPRAVITY ARRIVES (11 April)
A MAN WE’D LIKE TO HANG (19 May)
John Bull sank to new desperate depths when they claimed that I had, many years previously, chopped up two young coolies in the Himalayas when provisions were low. Their precise words were,
‘One of the most shameless degenerates who ever boasted of his British birth.’
Even the American newspapers from the New York Times down picked up on the scandal around this time. Of course, the Times story was carefully worded by MI-1.
I sat in my club, lit a girthy cigar and congratulated myself. This was high praise indeed. It would be nice to see their faces, if I were ever to pose on the steps of MI-1 with Churchill and the King, but for now, my pleasure and contentment had to remain an almost personal one, with my eye on the central prize of the twentieth century. One never checks a soufflé until one knows it is ready to be served.
It was even revealed in a half-sensible newspaper (the Manchester Guardian) that there had been a plot, hatched by a chap by the name of Raymond Greene to have come to Cefalù to assassinate me. He was a friend of that unpleasant clap-riddled Raoul Loveday fellow, school pals by all accounts. The article was one of the few decent pieces of independent journalism not crafted by our own chaps in those days.
Greene, however, backed out of the plan to murder me when he received this in the post.
Dear sir,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Forgive me if I suggest, from a little experience that I have in such matters, that when one is establishing a spy system it is rather important to prevent one’s principal plan coming directly into the fat hands and broad dangerous thumbs of the person whom you want watched and/or slaughtered.
Love is the law, love under Will.
Yours truly,
Aleister Crowley
Knight Guardian of the Sangraal
I recalled how I had then invited him to visit, and he, to my slight dismay and my utmost respect, had actually obliged. I remember that we’d sat out in the Abbey’s orchard to discuss sex, drugs, witchcraft and libel.
I had asked him, ‘Did Shelley bring libel actions?’
Before he had been able to answer, I’d said, ‘No, he came to Italy. Did Byron bring libel actions? No. He came to Italy. Did I bring libel actions?’
Greene had fully understood my point.
I remembered how we had chatted for hours over the coming days, and an hour before his return to England, Greene had said to me that he would correspond with Loveday’s parents. He had intended to write that I had been a reasonable and genuine man, that those happy children of Thelema had larked with more of a rapture and ecstasy and persistence than he had ever witnessed, and that his full Sicilian experience had brought to him a true and indescribable joy.
‘I am flattered to the point of silence, but I must ask you never to spread any of this to the newspapers, however,’ I had said.
He had seemed truly puzzled, but, after a dozen seconds, smiled and I had known in that moment the respect he had for me had ratcheted exponentially. I know he had not suspected the full extent of my global shadiness, but I knew that he had been both shocked by and utterly admired my wish to keep my own counsel despite the murderous onslaught at home. He’d then sat alone in the dappled light for a few hours and had appeared to rest his consciousness on the rafts of my own meditations out there in that acre of bliss.
I’d found him inside in the great hall, just before he left, holding a note from one of the children.
Dear Beast,
My first tooth came out. I want you to have it. It is L___ who is writing this.
Beast, I love you.
L____
Greene had been clearly moved, as I had been when he passed it to me with a firm and manly look, full of honour. He’d left a different man, enlightened and admonished by his own proclivity to judge. This always gave me true satisfaction.
Throughout this period of newspaper inspection and intrusion, Hühnerbein was easily convinced that everything I did in those days and months would somehow benefit Germany and her friends. There were even old-style duplicitous missions abroad, as there had been before the Great War. There was the Holy Man’s Rebellion in Siam, the Saudi Conquest of Hejaz, the Nicaraguan Civil War and in Bulgaria, not only the Incident at Petrich (also known as the War of the Stray Dog), but also the September Uprising. Here I sat and advised Germans, mauled their strumpets, ate and drank with them, and took their payment that I insisted be in gold or sterling.
And when I was not playing the role of the visible agent, I moved between Boleskine House, Cambridge, London and Tunis. Passage on the seas was so pleasurable80 and simple thanks to Winston and those obliging sailors. The stories of our evenings in port could sag a shelf.
As I passed through London, I would see Dandylyon, Orr, Prudence and Winston. When I sat on the deck to or from Africa or in the portside cafés of Tunis, I dictated to Leah. We were working on Hag,81 a work I predicted would be in the region of 600,000 words.82
I wrote in the notes:
The manuscript though lively is censor proof. It can be represented artfully in prospectuses as the Confessions of Aleister Crowley. A great fuss can be made about mailing copies to subscribers in a plain wrapping and otherwise ensuring their delivery. There should be no difficulty in selling outright 2,000 copies at $10 a copy. During the issuing of these prospectuses, the Author will undertake some feat which will bring him great extra publicity.
But what would this stunt be?
I consulted my I Ching. I was advised that all I needed was patience, and not much of it.
Within five days, I received a letter at the Tunis house, a sturdy old spot whose vast single key was lent to me by Winston. The place was a marvel, a vast and cavernous affair, laced with incense and spice, in that old African style whose central torso was an astonishing five-levelled library, with the finest collection of naval tomes, pornographic literature, and fruit-growing almanacs. He had dedicated the bulbous hall to his knock-out missus, Clementine, that feisty and majestic rock of his.83
The letter I received had been re-addressed from Cambridge, so it was marginally dated. The information therein was, however, still most relevant. It was a cutting from Variety magazine. My old pal from Le Chat Blanc in Paris, W. Somerset Maugham, had sold the motion picture rights to his recent work, The Magician, whose lead character, Oliver Haddo had, quite complimentarily, been based on me. My words had been used, my manipulative character and even my physical description. I was flattered and thrilled by Maugham,84 a far superior talent to the Yeatses of this world. Now, the chaps at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer were the owners of the property, and had vast plans for the project. And so it seemed to me that this might be the very feat I needed to bring me the very headlines I required to shift those prospectuses for Hag.
And so, I wrote to Maugham on the Cap D’Antibes and to Mr Mayer at MGM in Hollywood to find out what my recompense for this would be, as well as offering my time and energy in helping to promote the picture.85
Maugham was clearly embarrassed and allowed the lawyers to answer first from the States. It soon became apparent that I was to receive no monetary compensation. On the wire, I threatened to file an injunction against the release of the film in Los Angeles, New York City and London. Without these centres, the film would flop, I squawked. A telegram arrived the following day, with an offer for a fairly adequate sum, but by then I had also become quite excited at the prospect of being closely attached to the film, and wished to tie the exposure to my own autohagiography, as well as having become childishly giddy about a contract to make a series of documentary films on magick.
I wrote back, with a purposeful and abrupt tone, but one I hoped a busy (and humorous) man might appreciate.
The lawsuit is a pretext for a grubby-ish business deal. I am now holding out for publicity and power.
Maugham then chimed in,
My Dear Friend,
This now is all out of my hands, Beast. I truly suspect they will claim that your name is already so blackened in those three cities that zero harm can ever be done to your repute.
They will say that it must have been your own True Will to be the Beast, and, of course, a white-washed Beast is a useless commercial vehicle.
You should have collected the cheque, and sodded off, though I know this has never been your motive.
You are portrayed by the most unalluring chap, however. I know you will chuckle. Enclosed is a publicity shot of the lead – keep your pervert’s drooling to yourself – and the obligatorily dull publicity poster.
Yours, bounded in the kindest and lengthiest friendship,
WSM
He was right. The value of the publicised froth around the film had superseded any bona fide connection that I had been fishing for. My name was now in the papers for slightly less soiled reasons, and this made John Bull livid, as they began a campaign to ban the film. This helped me shift my prospectuses, as Leah and I completed the dictation sitting on the ramparts of that medieval house in North Africa, watching the sun set in the West, where Dibdin was already considering my next foray into the motion picture industry, for this, it was abundantly clear, was the propaganda of the future.
On my fiftieth birthday in October of 1925, I was visited in Tunis by a still lively and enthused Dandylyon, with Prudence as close to his side as ever. He must have now been near his seventieth birthday, while she remained youthful and radiant. Orr and Winston came too. By crikey, Prudence was magnificent. My fulfilled boyhood fantasy of her had not only never wavered, but had thrived and blossomed, as she had. Leah and I had supper prepared on the terrace of the house, a flat roof overlooking the port that was three quarters ramshackle and a quarter lordly, a similar ratio to the city itself.
Up there on that serene deck, we enjoyed a broad space that could easily have housed a crowd of two hundred fatties. It was flanked by tall candles laced with marijuana so we all slowly but immaculately got stoned as we ate cous cous royale (no meat for me), drank several bottles of Château Lafite Rothschild ’97 and watched the sun set and then rise, without the aid of any powder. We gossiped, plotted and philosophised.
Winston told stories of Africa and India, I recounted the daring on mountainsides in the Alps and the Himalayas, Prudence revealed herself as the best card trickster I had ever witnessed, all sleight of hand executed, while keeping us all up to date with such schoolboyish tittle-tattle of a list of the quietest perverts, surprising bestial-types and most behaved homosexuals in the worlds of politics, society, literature and stage. She spoke of their private mischief and described it with the most marvellous euphemisms that I had ever heard.
She threw a deck of cards at the ceiling, with the card I had secretly chosen sticking to it as the other fifty-one fell. This was quite a stunt, and as we nodded our approval, she said, ‘You know that L___ M_____ molested his poodle and contracted some unshiftable itch on his vitals?’
For someone who was just about to demonstrate her ability to imitate the deep growls of our Russian monk friend, her normal tones were supremely luscious and feminine.
‘And you might be surprised to learn that the Home Secretary is “quite fond of his mother”,’ she said, as our squawks died down.
Winston nodded with a wisdom, for it seemed he had first-hand experience of this.
‘Oh do go on,’ we all urged.
‘Well, the playwright, S___ S______ has “very smooth elbows”. And Lord P_____, despite the vast beauty of Lady P______, is a “gentleman of the piers”, who “tidies before the maid’s day”.’
‘Fluttersome’, ‘in the way of uncles’ and ‘rides the carousel’ were apportioned to the actor, D__ B______, the newspaper proprietor, H___ H_______ and General O______ respectively, as Prudence appeared to be only just beginning and also becoming quite joyously high.
Her pièce de résistance now neared, as she began to crank out incredible impersonations of Dandylyon, Orr, Me, Leah, Winston and an astonishing likeness to Rasputin, as she rammed a church candle from our dining table down her dress to resemble an erection, and belched and burped Transylvanian invective in an attempt to mount the future prime minister of the United Kingdom, and then her boss of fifty years, then a seven-foot-tall mercenary menace, and finally pushing the wickedest man in the world, who was now unreasonably high on the candle fumes. Prudence pretended to hump me from behind and then force her fat candle into my face, while imitating to perfection the priest’s favoured Romanian line about the licking of an angel’s balls, even achieving the manliness of the tone and inflection, so that if were one to close one’s eyes and nip one’s nose, one would think the over-ripe Holy Man were indeed present.
Dandylyon bellowed, jack-knifed and also crumpled to the deck. His aroused nurse ignored this, while Winston, now His Majesty’s Chancellor of the Exchequer of Great Britain, was moved to crippling glee and merriment, as well as to perhaps less than a tenth of a yard from the sheer drop and falling four floors onto a Tunis chestnut roaster on the street. He was only stopped by a truly concerned waiter, only on the roof at that moment to bring him a chilled cigar from the freezer downstairs with a single malt and a cocaine lozenge, merely for digestive purposes. When the roll call of the Second World War is spoken across Westminster Abbey and Parliament, we should all remember the name of Ali Abu Hasan, for who knows how we should have fared had that oaf of a true chum moved through a portion of the pentagram, a further seventy-two degrees of his wide torso and belly-flopped onto the hot coals a hundred feet below.
Ali Abu Hasan then had several of his colleagues stationed along the edges of the roof terrace for the rest of those ghostly and bewitched hours, though the fog was strong enough for them to be forced to rotate every thirty minutes or so, or they too would have toppled, quite likely to their end. The clouds were potent but aphrodisiacal, and I knew that all of the young Arabs wanted to desecrate Prudence. Ali Abu Hasan had seen her with her candle in situ, and they were not used to such sights. For them, cock had been a youthful and mischievous intrigue, then meanly magnified by the almost norm of pederasty and buggery in Tunis. Well-shafted weapons casting the curved shadow of a scimitar on a white-washed wall were simply their Pavlovian amuse-bouche in life, bless the mucky little blighters. Of course, Prudence was well aware of the projected lust towards her, and she might even have lingered in the ladies’ room marginally too long on three or four occasions as she might just have helped to relieve, one at a time, the intense heat these poor lads felt in an almost identical way to how she had once relieved a suffering wretch, under the spell of scarlet fever, decades before in Redhill, Surrey. I did love her so, she always thought of others.
On one such occasion as she returned to the table, Orr was comforting me.
‘The brutish press will soon be thanking you for decades of service to the cause, Aleister.’
‘You’ve got enemies? Good, it means you have stood up for something some time in your life,’ Winston said back in his comfortable seat, before he fell into further mirth. He continued, words laughed between plumes of cigar smoke, ‘I hope that I am the one to break it to you that such a revelation might actually force you to resign from the Scottish Mountaineering Club, and have to accept a lifelong, and quite public membership, even an honourable chairmanship of the English version.’
‘Thank you, Winston. I am now fifty years old, and all of my instincts, as well as your most pristine intelligence from Whitehall, suggest to me that we are timing our late runs for greatness and glory to perfection, gentlemen.’
Not that it mattered to me in the slightest, but I could, in theory and at any time, expose those John Bulls for their obvious arsery, and grab that comforting victory for me and more importantly my loved ones. The British, especially the English public, do so appreciate a happy ending, the recognition of redemption and, of course, silent strength. And the newspapers, when not bullying, shall fawn to their ultimate power and opinion.
‘You know that it does not have to be this way. There is another way,’ said Dandylyon, stroking his beard, then falling into silence.
‘Stop teasing him,’ Prudence implored.
Dandylyon looked around, and instructed all the waiters to leave us for fifteen minutes.
When they had all gone, it was Winston who spoke of that special place first. The other four knew of it, only Orr had been there.
This was the first time I had ever considered that Shangri-La was actually a real place. The answer had been there all along. I felt ashamed that all my claims to the Godhead had been made while I was quite unaware of the most preposterous, yet entirely feasible direction. Living for ever. There, with the greatest friends of my adulthood and watching the sun rise in the east, stoned and deliriously contented with the power that existed around that table, we hatched a plan.
We few.
It sounded like a perfect plan for one day in the future. There was a flaw, however, and one that I knew immediately I should accept like a man.
‘I want to go there soon. Very soon, for I think I am dying,’ said Leah in my ear, as the others continued to speak.
She smiled like she had not grinned in weeks.
‘What is wrong, Leah darling?’
‘I have King’s Evil.86 I am convinced of it. Orr has assured me that I shall live for years up there in the mountains. Down here, I shall be gone before the daffodils come. I shall meet you there one day soon, my Beast.’
And like that, within three days, she was gone.
‘I shall miss you, Beast. Be happy, my Pimpernelling love.’
If I had become adept in the split personality of the double agent, then I now began to attempt to master my own internal quadrophrenia of international actor for Berlin and MI-1, drug addict, artist and lonely host of Scottish orgies. I withdrew to Boleskine for lengthy periods, often for many months, but could be roused from heroin’s slumber and the selfish fizz of cocaine to do my duty. I sailed with Hühnerbein to witness the Kongo-Wara Rebellion (1928), in ’29, the Women’s War, and then to the Central Plains Mutiny. I went with him to instruct him in the Occult, to lecture him en route and guide him in still the most basic of rituals on the decks of ships at midnight and in large desert tents at dawn. He was an utterly clumsy and cack-handed type, struggled with concentration, and continued to labour with even the more basic concepts of the ceremonies and magickal texts that I both laid out to and wrote for him. His enthusiasm was not in question though, and he would perpetually introduce me as his mentor and guru, and quite giddily so.
In the first half of 1929, he and I instigated the Chittagong Armoury Raid, plotted the Nghe-Tinh Revolt and helped the nationalist League of Blood organise their (purposefully) disastrous coup d’état, known as the May the Fifteenth Incident, against the tipped-off Empire of Japan.
And I really believed Winston when he assured me that these missions were more about Hühnerbein’s schoolboy crush on me than they were about any global politicking. But my life was to change towards the end of that year. It was nearly time for light and love and the squawks of children to reign again. My supreme Violet was almost here.
My daughter was conceived on September the twenty-second, 1929.
Mars was rising above Luna and rather threatening, but there were no close bad aspects either to the Sun or to the Moon, so probably there was not much to worry about. There was no big complex to make the child distinguished. She was likely to develop into a fairly ordinary little whore.87
She was the product of a harvest moon orgy at Boleskine. She was one of those rare creatures: a bastard child who knew her father but did not know her mother. Yes, I had been liberal with my passions as any good host should be. Violet had then stewed and mashed in her mother’s womb to full term and beyond. There is a sound school of thought that suggests this can lead to ridiculously high levels of intelligence, sex drive and/or malice. And greed, I would say, for my daughter was abundant and lush in all three. Genghis Khan had allegedly been in situ for a year. The Dalai Lama, Charles Darwin, Rasputin, Christ and Mother Teresa are also reputed to have gestated for almost a year. Were one to gather such a mob for a dinner party, I suspect it would be Violet sitting in the head chair, recommending that Khan had his steak au point and that the Messiah chose the wine. ‘And do it well and promptly, you scruffy little cunt!’
The young Violet Ambrosia Fagg was an Amadeusian protégée who would evolve past mere bickering by the age of four. Her first name (I hesitate in using the term Christian) had its genesis in the empurpled velvet in which she was swaddled as a newborn. The choice of her middle name was rooted in the fragrant rafts and the spicy tang in that thrumming late summer Scottish evening so long ago. Her recently Violet-free mother had then rejoined with haughty obedience a small squadron of willing sex slaves to this Kurtzian Lord in the tower, who, for days, meandered the battlements and ramparts in the August dusk, pondering how to excel in death and love, and a controversial ancient incantation of real and vibrant nutritional value to welcome in my child. I would be far more careful with this one, I promised myself.
Violet’s mother’s first request after labour and the swift execution of twelve neat-ish stitches in her juvenile perineum had been for a full-strength Capstan cigarette to be rammed into her tiny blood-stained paw and lit. Mauled syllables delivered, in a broad Cockney twang, a rank and shocking sailor’s invective wrapped around each verb, adverb, impersonal pronoun, subject, object, article both definite and indefinite, and noun. As she puffed on the potent tobacco, a surname was thus revealed, and the naming process of her well-brewed, lengthily steeped daughter was complete. Violet Ambrosia Fagg. For those of a bent to interest themselves in the debate of nurture and nature, one might trace a line from her mother’s turd-lined potty mouth to Violet’s seemingly inherited Tourette’s. Biology can possess such a mischievous sense of humour. There was indeed a Loch Ness Monster back then, and it was not I, for most of the time I was the kindly type, someone whom one might invite to the Test match. No, it was the bubbling vitriolic young wench, product of a gloried fuckfest, a fetid bad seed born that bejewelled and sapping night, August the twenty-first, 1930. My new and quite precious daughter.
As her cursing paedophobic mother slipped back into the highly fecund and adolescently firm throng of boyishly buttocked and jasmine-necked tartlets, a facsimile of events was occurring over the suggestive and redolent heather and the saucily wild flowers, petals flapping akimbo, to the south-east towards the North Sea coast near Dundee.
Glamis Castle, ancestral home to Windsorian royalty, was where the malformed but really quite pleasant, King Malcolm88 had been slain in the eleventh century, and where things had remained equally dreary and moribund since.
The newborn at Glamis was a girl too, named Margaret and fourth in line to the throne of the United Kingdom. The memories that I now offer to you of a balmy and pungent night at Boleskine, the sticky air made more uncomfortable by the preponderance of midges, larking summer flies, pollen-fleck bees and frolicking hornets, was a stark contrast to the reports of an evening so chilled towards the sea at Glamis that the boiled water prepared for the Princess’s imminent arrival froze within minutes. ‘Oh father!’ Violet would later chortle at my amateur and reasonably easily executed mischief.
Glamis remains an odd spot for such a wealthy and important family, and it too is reputed to possess its own ghoul: the Monster of Glamis.89
It is an austere yet impressive structure. I was always impressed by its murderous history, as well as the anecdotes of hauntings, telekinesis, apparitions and researchers’ chunky file notes on the poor buggers who’d gone insane there. Tales of princes, princesses and whole branches of families being bricked in to starve to death are well known and perhaps overtold. The internal structure is a confusing one, and still befuddles the more thick-skinned staff that has remained for decades. They often find themselves lost within the corridors and mazed hallways. An attempt to map the house – and to transpose the perceived layout from within which never seemed to correlate with that from the outside – led a small mob of inquisitive souls to hang sheets from all the windows in the rooms that they might access from the inside. When they trooped outside to check upon their work, there were several windows that bore no sheet. The instincts which some had possessed of the existence of darkened vortices within Glamis were not mocked as they had been before. Glamis possesses a black and vicious quality.
As a child of eighteen months, my daughter Violet, the burgeoning filly of disrepute, spent hours staring at and pointing at the moon. She was a maelstrom of turquoise and fire, even then. All the signs were of a hyperbolic romantic, however this arcane sage would hesitate, rearrange himself and perhaps foresee that the lass was preternaturally rammed from the wispy curls of her milky crown to her ten little piggies with concrete realism, for she was already planning her brazen and audacious escape from this planetary, spiritual and mortal realm. But first she would hold her father’s hand and walk him to Greatness.
79 I love my goats.
80 I often caused harmless mischief en route, like the time, ridiculously high on cocaine and chloroform, I faked my own death in the caves of Boca do Inferno – The Mouth of Hell – by Cascais in Portugal, and then, days later attempted to invade Spain, with some crazy toothless Castillians I had met in a tavern on the coast, and who saw me as both mercenary and Dark Lord for hire. They wanted to restore the Jacobites to the throne for some inexplicable reason, and I went along with them until the drugs wore off.
81 Short for Autohagiography – the autobiography of a saint.
82 Over 2,000 dense pages.
83 Hitler should one day be thankful it was Mr – and not Mrs – Churchill, with whom he was going toe-to-toe.
84 He also later admitted that I was the kernel for The Razor’s Edge, the story of a thoroughly principled young man (Tyrone Power in the picture, I shall accept that too) who, having witnessed the horrors of the Great War, puts all temptation of wealth and façades of happiness to one side to seek out the larger truths and the higher path of consciousness. In doing so, he passes up several decades of fucking Gene Tierney. I am not sure I am that principled.
85 I do so wish they would reignite the custom of saying, ‘looking at a picture’ instead of the quite vulgar ‘watching a movie’. I find that it is generally the small and almost imperceptible effort that most boosts style and panache.
86 Tuberculosis.
87 To the Thelemite who venerates the Whore of Babylon (Full name – Mother of Prostitutes and Abominations of the Earth), this is considered a compliment.
88 This murder allegedly offered a blueprint for Macbeth.
89 Vi would have her own thoughts on its identity.