After Dover Street, in May 1942 Crowley moved further west along Piccadilly to Hamilton House, number 140, right down at the Hyde Park Corner end near the present-day Hard Rock Café. Number 140 is on the corner with Hamilton Place. He wasn't impressed to begin with; there was no phone, and “not even brekker in bedroom”.
After a week he moved from suite 105 to a better one at 111, and he praised the location to Germer, with its views: “If I want country, I look over to Green Park; if sculpture, I gaze on the Quadriga; if religion, across to the campanile”.1 More than that, if he wanted a bath he had Lord Byron's old bath to climb into.
He was still on his old territory: up at the Circus end he was going regularly to the Café Royal and Oddenino's, where the stranger told him he looked like Churchill, and occasionally with Hamilton to a large subterranean pub under Piccadilly Circus called Ward's Irish House, while down at this western end he also went occasionally to the Hyde Park Grill inside the Hyde Park Hotel at 66 Knightsbridge, and occasionally went for a now innocent stroll in the park.
Crowley was getting old, and in one of his more sensitive moments he asked himself “Why do I fail to appreciate lovely glass and china? Because I can't get rid of the agony of their perishability.” His health was getting worse, along with his addiction. Regularly logging his doses, he sometimes adds comments such as “This just WILL NOT DO”, while in a less regretful moment he notes that there is no food left, but ample tobacco, and “oodles” of heroin. His regular circle of friends – most of whom regularly disappointed, bored, appalled, and disgusted him – was now diminished in quality as well as quantity. His reliable but stodgy disciple Bayley, Cath when she was in London, and a woman called Deborah Hogg2 all figure regularly in his diaries, along with Hamilton, Alice ‘Tub’ Speller, and a couple of chess-playing cronies. Film makers Paul Rotha and Karl Meyer were supposed to call on him at Hamilton House to talk about a tarot film, but cancelled, but he did have a fruitful visit from theatre director Peter Brook and a more surprising one from actors Tyrone Power and Charles Boyer, who seem to have been sent by American friends as possible investors or backers.
Things were very rocky with Frieda (“sly treacherous vixen”), who didn't want Crowley's presence undoing her work on the tarot paintings. In July 1942 she mounted a show of them at the Berkeley Galleries, 20 Davies Street, just near Berkeley Square, and Crowley found out (“amazing treachery”; “Frieda's sneaking treachery”). She did it again in August at the Royal Watercolours Painters Society, 26 Conduit Street; this time Collin Brooks tipped him off, and on 4 August Crowley walked in and “caught her”, as he thought of it. One of Crowley's less appealing traits was a willingness to take legal action against friends, and he wasted no time going round to consult “Ikey” Kerman.
Louis Wilkinson and his partner Joan Lamburn (eventually to be his fourth and final wife) visited Crowley at Hamilton House one night in June 1942, and Joan included an atmospheric if distinctly odd account of their visit in a letter to a friend. First of all, she was convinced the place was “really a brothel”: as soon as she took in the “cheaply furnished hall with its dusty palm tree in the middle and its Lloyd Loom chairs and insolent looking porter in gold braid I knew where I was.” This doesn't seem to have struck other visitors such as Peter Brook. As for Crowley, they went upstairs and met him in “a sort of ante-chamber with a filthy uncurtained window looking on to Piccadilly” which had a few stuffed chairs and a sofa on a bare wooden floor. Crowley came out of his room to meet them, and sat down: “in the fading light there was a touching dignity in the dumpy little figure by the window.” She knew of his fancied resemblance to Churchill, “but I thought he seemed more like Queen Victoria – an ageing, pettish, harassed queen robbed of her happiness…”. Altogether, and perhaps fearing his influence on Louis, she found him “repulsive.”
That June he felt “Mental state v. bad: no clearness, no power to concentrate… I feel the need of a loyal friend as never before. Not one in England who really cared a nickel” (oblivious of the fact that the loyal Tub was round that same afternoon to see him). And yet at the same time he still took the trouble to make ordinary life sacramental: going to see Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest at the Phoenix Theatre, Charing Cross Road (in the celebrated production with John Gielgud and Edith Evans) he decided to make the whole outing “a magical ceremony”, not stinting: “Chambolle-Musigny for lunch, taxis all the time, melon— all regardless.”
His dreams were still nourishing: “Saw and saluted new moon, very large and very misty. First dream of the kind that I remember.” And whatever life threw at him in the way of disappointments, the almost bipolar glory was still there, and often, in a landscape like the London of Blake or Machen. Looking through his diary, he noticed it was “mostly complaints”, or “odd bits of pleasure or good luck”:
Nothing at all of the reality, of the abiding rapture which makes a ’bus in the street sound like an angel choir!