88
HANOVER SQUARE, MAYFAIR
Tamasha dreaming
After Richmond, Crowley spent the winter of 1940-41 down in Torquay, attended by the usual troubles with money. At first he moved in to the Grand Hotel (“Food excellent – beyond praise!”) but he was unable to pay: “No money, Paul, manager Hotel, most kind, let me go.” While in Torquay he tried to establish a more modest Abbey of Thelema, with all members pooling their resources in “aristocratic communism”, but noted all too realistically that the “worst snag in England about the Abbey is the social gap between classes, as regards members… it is hard to extend the [Thelemite] principle to menials.” He also went on “shikar” quite purposefully, and was directed by a sympathetic taxi-driver to the evocatively named “Belgravia Club”.
In July 1941 he returned to London, taking a serviced flat for 3½ guineas a week (about £200 today) at 10 Hanover Square W1, in the area of Mayfair between Regent Street and Bond Street. Now completely redeveloped, the large house at number 10 on the corner with Princes Street was then akin to a cheap hotel, with a telephone switchboard and meals.
Crowley lost no time being back in town, going to the nearby Café Royal, Oddenino's, and the French Pub (on one occasion too crowded, so he went on to the Fitzroy Tavern). Soho was just across Regent Street, and one afternoon, with an associate named Morrison, he had tea at Maison Bertaux, a long talk in Soho Square, and a drink at the Shakespeare's Head pub on Great Marlborough Street: all “Very pleasant.”
He also visited the famous, or notorious, publisher R.A. Caton of the Fortune Press at 12 Buckingham Palace Road, a publisher associated with Montague Summers. Along with a couple of famous names such as Dylan Thomas, his list had a strong leaning towards more niche-market gay titles, and sadistic books such as Nell in Bridewell and the like. He combined this with a career as a slum landlord, boasting that he owned 91 houses and not one with a bathroom. Crowley visited him several times and hoped he might re-publish his Diary of a Drug Fiend and his earlier pornographic novel Not the Life and Adventures of Sir Roger Bloxam, as well as his tarot project, but found him to be a “seedy fraud” who finally admitted he had no interest in tarot and just wanted books about “torture and flagellation.”
His local pub was now the Mason's Arms on Maddox Street (where the landlord took two copies of his patriotic poem England Stand Fast to display in the pub) and it was on Maddox Street at Christmas 1941 that he records the Epiphany-like fragment of someone (perhaps a street vendor of some kind; perhaps Italian) saying “Take ‘ome a Chreesmas pooding?”, working it up into a short comic poem.
Crowley's main sexual partner through this period – seemingly the last of his life – was Alice Speller, a secretary in her early fifties whom he had met up in Highgate in October 1939. She lived in Effingham Road, Crouch End. John Symonds changes her name to Alice Upham: she was still very much alive when his 1951 biography came out, not dying until 1969. One wonders if she ever knew her Aleister was on the cover of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
On their first date in town, two days later, they had gone at lunchtime to the Yorkshire Grey in Langham Street, and then had difficulty finding a room to go to bed; they finally managed “chez Jeanette”, a woman he'd met a while earlier, who was at 72 Shaftesbury Avenue. She was possibly involved with a club there called the 72 Club (no doubt by analogy with the notorious or glamorous “43 Club” just behind it at 43 Gerrard Street) or Ida's Club.
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!
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