INTRODUCTION: MAGUS ABOUT TOWN

Aleister Crowley hated London, or claimed to:

The very streets testify against the city. On the one hand we have pale stunted hurrying pygmies jostling each other in the bitter search for bread; an ant heap is a miracle of beauty and dignity in comparison. On the other, when it comes to excitement or amusement, we see perspiring brutes belching the fumes of beer; course, ugly parodies of apes. Nature affords no parallel to their degradation. There is no open air life, physical or mental, and there is the ever-abiding sense of sin and shame to obsess these slaves.

But at the same time, it was the capital of the civilization that produced him: he would never have been the man he was without the rich matrix of late Victorian culture behind him. Crowley believed in the invocation of gods and the channelling of spirits, but not least of the forces that spoke through him was the darker genius of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and its cultural and sexual discontents.

Crowley felt a particular antipathy to Queen Victoria and everything she represented. She died in 1902 while he was on a climbing expedition in Mexico with his friend Eckenstein, and a well-meaning Mexican had to give them the sad news; he was then astonished to see the two Englishmen break into singing and dancing. Crowley's formative years were those of a Victorian anti-Victorian, a cultural revolt that was particularly associated with the 1890s. It is a decade remembered as the era of Wilde, Beardsley, absinthe, the Café Royal, and the decadent periodical The Yellow Book. Like the Swinging Sixties, a decade with which it has some affinity, the 1890s had its centre in London, and just as the Sixties are often said to have lasted until 1974, so certain currents of the Nineties persisted well into the Edwardian period, and in Crowley's case far longer; this “post-decadent” aspect was more obvious to his contemporaries.¹

I have drawn extensively on Crowley's unpublished diaries, dense with London detail, which give an exceptionally intimate and human picture of his day-to-day life. In a world of trigger warnings, I should add that they have something to offend everyone, even to appal, and that I don't intend to labour this aspect; Crowley can speak for himself. When he writes in a 1913 letter that “speaking as a man of the world, I am a reactionary Tory of the most bigoted type” he wasn't being flippant. His diaries, letters and even published work are strewn with unapologetically “bigoted” and defiantly transgressive comments, like a product of political Tourette's. As the world dumbs down, it is likely that in fifty years many readers will assume that this is just ‘what people in Britain were like, then’. It is not. Crowley was well out on a limb and deliberately provocative, like a caricature of the mad Tory squire from Hell, and he was aware that he was doing it.

Crowley can joke about transgressive contents when he sends an early diary to a friend to read, “in privacy and confidence. There's about 114, 278, 394 years penal servitude in it if sent to Plowden.” ² But one of the curious things about his diaries is that he wrote them knowing they would be read, and read at various levels. At a personal level he can disguise women's addresses to conceal them from the woman he was living with, so Sinclair Gardens in Hammersmith becomes Jardins de Ste.-Clair, and a horizontal oval with four circles above it – from the standard heraldic image of a baron's crown – stands in for the Baron in Baron's Court Road.³ More actively, going beyond simple discretion, on another occasion he writes a fictional entry for his current partner to find, almost like an alibi or at least ‘his version of events’, and later notes this when he corrects it.

This aspect of writing-for-others is relevant to the testimonials (as they effectively are) that he writes for his own health products, his Amrita rejuvenation pills, and for the rapid effectiveness of magical practices. It might also shed light on his almost inexplicable account of triumph in a court case that he has in fact lost, or another lost court case where he implies that he might have won, if only asthma hadn't “stopped me spilling the beans in the witness box”. These are attempts to present ‘his side’ for posterity, perhaps feeling his diaries would be read long after the day's court reportage had been forgotten.

There is an acute moment in this matter of future readership when Crowley finds himself missing some manuscripts. He then wonders if, rather than someone thieving them for gain, it might be his supernatural masters the Secret Chiefs who were behind their disappearance, as a form of censorship: “There were a great many entries in some of the diaries, for example, which would no doubt be very dangerous to print. I do not think so, myself…”

The man who emerges from the diaries is acutely alive: after a bath he records having “the ‘cat-feeling’ – direct pleasure in the body as such.” Crowley was a great writer on meditation, magic, drug experiences and dreams, his “untrodden regions of the mind” – the whole dimension that has been termed “inner experience”, as a successor to mysticism ⁴ – and there are many flashes of this same intelligence in the diaries. Alternating between exultation and depression, he is also dogged by moments of rather passive superstition (“An awful day. Eleven things went wrong in the queerest way”) while on the other hand there are small gifts of good luck: accidentally “long-changed” by ten shillings in Soho restaurant Chez Victor, he writes “a really charming gesture of the Gods. Made complete difference to my whole day.” Ten shillings was worth having in 1938, but he can also be candidly and almost endearingly small-time. Every day he threw the I Ching for guidance, interpreting his day in the light of it, and one day he observes “‘Small restraint’ [Hexagram 9, Hsiao Khu] at South Kensington Station about my Cheap Day Return ticket. Very curious incident.”

Crowley was financially hard-up for most of his life, but even when he was down on his luck he lived as a gentleman (in the sense of class, rather than good behaviour). Writing from a brief stay in Portugal, where life was cheaper, he says “If I'm in London I have to swank”. London, particularly the West End, was a playground for the Victorian and Edwardian gent, dining well and pursuing women, and Crowley never lost caste or quite fell from the idea of this atavistic, old school, man-about-town: a character we might now see with a dash of Aubrey Beardsley's ‘Diabolic Dandy’ about him.

Crowley was nostalgic for his days as a young man in the West End, as he explained in the 1940s to an occult student. After she complains about the tone of flippancy in the personal correspondence course she is paying for, he first refers her to Max Beerbohm's 1904 caricature of Matthew Arnold, the famously high-minded Victorian, with his little niece asking him why he won't be more serious. Then he looks back to the days of greater freedom, before the forces of social progress cracked down on prostitution and drinking, and particularly to the Nineties pleasure zone of the Leicester Square area:

Far-off indeed those sunny days when life in England was worth living… when we complained that closing time was twelve-thirty a.m.; when there was little or no class bitterness, the future seemed secure, and only Nonconformists failed to enjoy the fun that bubbled up on every side. Well, in those days there were Music-halls; I can't hope to explain to you what they were like, but they were jolly… At the Empire, Leicester Square, which at that time actually looked as if it had been lifted bodily from the “Continong” (a very wicked place) there was a promenade, with bars complete (drinking bars, my dear child, I blush to say) where one might hope to find “strength and beauty met together, Kindle their image like a star in a sea of glassy weather.” There one might always find London's “soiled doves” (as they revoltingly called them in the papers) of every type: Theodora (celebrated “Christian” Empress) and Phryne, Messalina and Thais, Baudelaire's swarthy mistress, and Nana, Moll Flanders and Fanny Hill.⁵

“But the enemies of life were on guard,” says Crowley, “They saw people enjoying themselves…”. In particular, he cites Christian feminist and social reformer Mrs. Ormiston Chant, who led protests against prostitution and general immorality at the Empire (now the Leicester Square Cineworld) in what became a famous case of 1894, leading to greater restraint.

And now, he says, his student complains he is not serious, but Magick is the subject that takes him back to the gay days of his youth. He set out almost half a century earlier to find “The Stone of the Wise, the Summum Bonum, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness”, and now “I have plenty of trouble in life, and often enough I am in low enough spirits to please anybody; but turn my thoughts to Magick – the years fall off. I am again the gay, quick, careless boy to whom the world was gracious.”

The world was definitely more gracious to Crowley in certain districts. Bernard Bromage, an acquaintance of the Thirties and Forties, noticed “there must still have been supporters, overt and secret. He did not live, in these last crumbling years, in Seven Dials or Poplar or Peckham but in Jermyn Street…”.

Crowley in Peckham would hardly have been Crowley. Writing about navigation in 1909, he cheerfully claims not to know the whereabouts of Haggerston, a poor district in east London just north of Bethnal Green:

Suppose I were to start from Scott's [restaurant] and walk… to Haggerston Town Hall (wherever Haggerston may be; but say it's N.E.), thence to Maida Vale. From Maida Vale I could take a true line for Piccadilly again and not go five minutes’ walk out of my way, bar blind alleys, etc., and I should know when I got close to Scott's again before I recognised any of the surroundings.

Not far from the Empire theatre, between Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus, his starting point here is ‘Scott's Oyster and Supper Rooms’ on Coventry Street (“the hub of the West End of London” says The Gourmet's Guide to London of 1914). It was just behind the Trocadero and the building still has its ‘S’ motifs, with seashells higher up (it is currently Five Guys fast food). A year earlier, as he tells it, Crowley picked up a newly published novel by Somerset Maugham – whom he had known quite well in Paris – entitled The Magician, and took it to Scott's, where he was so pleased to recognise the main character was quite closely modelled on himself “I think I ate two dozen oysters and a pheasant, and drank a bottle of No.111 [champagne]… Yes, I did myself proud, for the Magician, Oliver Haddo, was Aleister Crowley… ”

The Piccadilly area is a definite nexus in Crowley's London. Just south of Scott's is Haymarket, where he stayed in Yeoman House at number 31-32 in the late Twenties, obtained tobacco from Fribourg and Treyer at 34, and heroin from Heppell's chemist next door at 35. At the top of the north-south sloping road was the long-gone Haymarket Stores (25, 26, 29 Coventry Street) where he shopped on account – lobster, pineapple, pheasant, sherry, Stilton, crystallised fruit – until they pursued him for unpaid bills, and in 1934 he stayed briefly at Mapleton House, ‘Bachelor Flats’, 39 Coventry Street.

Just across the Circus he had a more sustained association with Jermyn Street, just south of Piccadilly, over three decades and several lodgings, and he banked with Barclay's (home branch Piccadilly Circus, 52 Regent Street) and Westminster (home branch Piccadilly, 63-65 Piccadilly). He was a regular at the Café Royal, where Regent Street meets the Circus, and at Oddenino's restaurant almost next door (“Oddie's”, where he also stayed at Oddenino's hotel). Regent Street was another well-worn path, and he also knew Bond Street well – like Jermyn Street, an old-style, high-class shopping street, but on a grander scale – where he stayed faithful year after year to ‘Royal Court’ diaries from Smythson's intensely upmarket stationery shop; still there and still expensive.

Inevitably he also knew Soho, for its restaurants and sex trade (and stayed there occasionally) as well as the more down-at-heel and equivocal Paddington and other districts near railway termini. After reduced circumstances forced him into digs in Paddington Green during the 1930s, where he had a brush with what would soon be known as ‘bedsit-land’, he was relieved to escape to the more pleasant quarter of Chelsea, another favoured district along with Piccadilly and Mayfair. Crowley took an interest in the metropolis (telling an American friend he wished he could take him “exploring odd bits of London”) and he was alert to the particular atmospheres, nuances and social gradations of these areas, writing – by way of a metaphor – that “Brixton need not envy Bayswater, or Bayswater Belgravia, if it would only be itself”.

I started this book as a diversion during the 2020 lockdown, not intending much more than a gazetteer of addresses, but it grew into a biography by sites. As well as the social nuances and atmospheric qualities of place, there is a peculiar magic about knowing someone walked through this doorway, looked into that shop window, walked up those stairs. Years ago, spellbound by a novel which mentioned a particular door on Soho's Dean Street, I was driven to go for a walk that night to see if this door really existed, and if so what it was like (very Georgian, as it turned out). Finding it not only added something to the experience of the book, but also transformed that particular corner of Soho with a slightly dreamlike sensation.

One way of thinking about this is through the idea of what has been called “transitional space”, a term describing an area that is not only in the mind or wholly in the external world, but lies in an overlap between the two. This region which is neither totally subjective nor objective is part of why people want to see the Mona Lisa: not because it is beautiful but because they already have it in their heads, so the novelty of finally seeing the real thing brings inner and outer together with a feeling that can be almost uncanny (however banal it might sometimes be in practice). The idea of transitional space is also relevant to the fascination and strange sensation of being in film locations – finding a village pub that is in The Avengers, or a Dickensian alley in Fitzrovia that is in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom – and to the popularity of psychogeography, particularly in psychogeography's more ‘cultural-historical’ aspect and the long tradition of books such as E. Beresford Chancellor's 1933 Literary Ghosts of London (nothing supernatural).

Back in the world of reality, at least relatively, trailing Crowley into a bygone London is also a revealing exploration of social history. Bohemia, prostitution, restaurants, ordinary life during the Blitz and much more all come into focus through Crowley's reportage, as he prowls through the city in his role of the esoteric gentleman at large.

Just as it is hard to imagine Buddhism without the great accretion of Asian culture entwined with it, so Crowley is virtually inseparable from his ‘English gentleman’ aspect. And London, is, par excellence, this particular gent's terrain. Never quite as leisurely or disinterested as the Parisian-style flaneur, he traversed the city on a myriad personal missions, ultimately in service of the long spiritual quest he always dated from one night in Covent Garden in 1898. And as he wrote later, apologizing for not setting an account of his magical adventures in remote exotic Asia, “there are just as many miracles in London as in Luang Prabang.” ⁶