IN THE SWIM

Dylan Thomas visits Victor Neuburg on June 11th, 1936.

On a rooftop, the wreckage of the front end of a London bus was still smoking. The metal was scorched, and along the buckled side panel an advertisement for Capstan Full Strength was appositely singed. Wondering how it had been blown there, Victor Neuburg looked from bus to sky and saw tethered over London scores of barrage balloons nosing their way through banks of magnificent cloud.

A voice was calling, banishing the images that had left him white‑faced and tensed in the armchair. As usual, the vision had possessed a film-like quality. It was with a less than cinematic precision that the familiar articles of his study - the chipped desk, the portrait of Chaucer with its wormholed frame, the tattered folios on the shelves - reassembled before him like old friends. Victor Neuburg was a bony individual with a head too big for his body, a prominent nose, whose ridge was perforated by eczema, and brown hair shorn so close the curls were only once more beginning to unfurl. He was wearing a dark green shirt, a tea-stained tartan tie, fawn corduroy breeches flecked with cigarette burns, and after a careless square of skin, rucked grey socks that disappeared into a pair of dilapidated slippers.

He lived in his study these days with only visions for company, which alarmed him much less than they used to. If anything, they brought some relief from the tedium. Mostly, though, he remembered: the Algerian desert with its fountains of stars, the chain by which his master led him chafing his neck as they trudged across the sand. Or he witnessed again the uncanny light dancing with shadow in the Paris hotel room where they invoked Jupiter. (The face of the God, awesome and unbearable). Except for such memories, there was only the slow drag of time. Nothing remarkable would ever happen again. His adventures were finished, as were the receptions and public readings, the mentions in the press, the eager young poets vying for praise. He had become the curator of his youth.

The voice called again, and the door swung open. Runia hovered on the threshold like a wet weekend.

‘You’ll be late for the printers!’ Her tone was curt these days. She was losing faith.

‘Ahem, is it today, my dear?’ bleated Vicky.

He was forcing himself to rise when the doorbell rang. They both looked surprised. There were very few visitors these days. Runia went to answer it and returned a moment later. She had that pinched look on her once handsome features that unsettled him so much.

‘Dylan’s here,’ she said in a flustered tone. ‘Drunk, I shouldn’t wonder. I told him you were working, but he insisted on coming in.’

More nervous of her than of his visitor, Vicky went out into the hall, which in turn gave onto the conservatory he entered. Dylan was standing by the bookcase, squinting at the titles. He had grown a little plumper in the year since Vicky had seen him, but was still cherubic, his nest of curls tousled, though not by wind, for it was one of those temperate days in early June when London flings off its overcoat and apes Marseilles. Instead, his stubbled chin, bloodshot eyes and rumpled blue check suit - with the telltale bulge in the right‑hand pocket - spoke of a night of it. Yet there was something in his look that seemed haunted by more than drink.

‘Do you think a man can read another’s mind, Vicky?’ he demanded, without preamble, in that singsong voice in which only the lilt was Welsh. ‘I mean, gambol about, rummaging like a burglar?’

The first question would have sufficed, but Dylan, as ever, was flush with words. It had been more than eighteen months since he had outgrown Vicky’s defunct Poet’s Corner in the Sunday Referee. Now, the Adelphi and Tom Eliot’sCriterion championed his astonishing verse. Eighteen Poems, his first book, whose publication Vicky had fostered, had been hailed as nothing short of a miracle by several critics, including the great arbitress of the new, Edith Sitwell. The cub was roaring like a lion.

‘I was in the Swiss last night,’ Dylan went on a little breathlessly, ‘ in cahoots with this Polish girl I’d met at Pop Kleinfield’s. We’d put back a few, and she was laying into me something chronic. I’d heard that sort of guff before, so I just stood there doodling on the bar. Then I noticed a man sitting in the gloom, staring up at me. Large fellow, thickset, looked like a stockbroker, apart from his head, which was shaven, oh, and the very dainty hands. In one, he was clutching a brandy; with the other, deliberately, as though he wanted me to notice, he took a pen from his jacket and began drawing on a napkin. The cheeky bugger’s mimicking me, I thought.’

‘Shaven head, you say.’ Vicky’s voice was jerkier than ever.

‘Except for a peculiar patch of hair growing like a horn from his skull. When I had finished drawing, I saw he had as well. He lumbered over like an eclipse, hovered next to me and tried to hypnotise me with the pin on his swaying tie. It was a large ebony brooch in the shape of the head of a stork-like bird with a long bill curved like a boomerang. And did he stink! There was this sweet, cloying stench like cheap French perfume. “I think we artists should compare productions,” he wheezed and waved his drawing under my nose. Bugger me black if he hadn’t drawn the same as me!’

Dylan was too good a writer not to pause there. Sunlight was embossing the goldfish as they broke the surface of the fountain pool. A bird chose that moment to sing. Vicky asked the obvious.

‘It was a face, Vickybird. A Pan-like face, a stranger might have called it, but anyone who knew your bony nose and tumbling locks, which I see you’ve now had shorn, would have taken it as yours. He’d drawn your curls like pricks, I, of course, like hyacinths, but the absent sitter was the same: you! That’s why I had to come. No offence, I hope.’

None taken, at least not from him, though Vicky found it disturbing to hear his old nickname again, reminding him of the days when the house had been full of callers. If anyone, he resented Runia, who had insisted on the haircut. He asked Dylan if he’d discovered the identity of the man. He hoped he hadn’t, and, after a few platitudes about Telepathy and the Ether, he could send him on his way. But this was not to be.

‘The greasy Pole said she’d met him before in the Wheatsheaf.’ Though Dylan mispronounced the first syllable, rhyming it with “crown”, not “crow”, Vicky was grateful that Runia was not in range to hear a word so long outlawed in their house.

‘The brooch bore the ibis head of Thoth,’ Vicky said hurriedly, as though presenting his credentials. ‘The scent was the unguent Ruthvah, so rich in musk that horses whinny when they smell it.’

‘I almost did myself,’ said Dylan. ‘But why your face?’

Vicky moved closer to the bookcase as though among the many volumes on magic, it contained a solution to the riddle, which, in a sense, it did.

‘I was his student for five years before the Great War. He was not then as you see him now. He was a poet of great promise.’

He turned to the shelves, and after a little time, for his habits were louche and this disorder extended to his library, he took down a folio‑size volume that he flourished at Dylan. It was The Oxford Book of Mystical Verse, an anthology more prestigious than any the Welshman had yet graced. Instead of reading one of the three poems it contained by Crowley, however, Vicky extracted a yellowing sheet flattened between the pages which bore, in scrawled and rapid autograph, an early draft of one of them, “The City of God’, which he had always considered one of the Beast’s finest. Unfolding it, he began to recite in the sonorous voice he reserved for readings:

Gold upon gold, dome above dome, faint arrow

Kindling sharp crescent, as the sunrays swept,

Save for one midnight moment when one narrow

Fierce ray, exhaling from no eye that slept

Of God, our God, the sun ‑ gold upon gold...

‘Verse,’ barked Dylan, the worst judgement in his canon.

Somewhat unwillingly, Vicky agreed. ‘We were poetasters,’ he confessed, ‘besotted by obsolescent words and forms. With you, it is so different.’

Dylan, who was not big-headed, ignored the flattery. ‘Besides, what meaning does it have? It’s just a bouquet of pretty lyrics.’

‘Coming from you, I find that most ostrobogulous.’

This curious word was to be Vicky’s sole legacy to the English language. Even today, in certain dictionaries, it is defined as “pornographic”. An inventor is permitted liberties, however, and Vicky also used it for anything he found odd or contradictory.

Dylan groaned. ‘You’re not one of those who thinks I sit down with a tumbler of Bass and reel off torrents of heady spiel? Accuse me of muddle-headedness, if you will, cruelty to rhyme, a top-heavy imagery that sways like Babel, but please get one thing straight: every line is meant to be understood.’

‘As is his,’ countered Vicky. ‘But to understand The City of God, you have to know something of the Qabalah and the splendid lights.’

‘I saw a few of them in the Plough last night,’ muttered Dylan.

‘Picture a tree, which has at its crest a sphere of unbearable brilliance. Beneath it are a further nine spheres, which end in this gloom where our spirits are caged. Twenty-two Paths zigzag down like lightning bolts. Each is mirrored by forms as vague and treacherous as a tree reflected by the dank waters of a lake.’

Dylan blinked and gazed out at the garden, wondering if beech or elm was the Tree of Life. ‘It exists then, this Cable Wallah. I can see it, feel it, slap it across the shoulders and bid it a hearty good day?’

‘You can discover it through its attributes: planets, emotions, colours, etc. The Qabalah is a frame of reference; a Pantacle that furnishes the glyphs that describe the universe.’

‘I might just take a fancy to “glyph”,’ said Dylan, turning the word on his tongue like a wine buff savouring a new vintage. ‘So, it was this you studied with Great Raven?’

The name puzzled Vicky. Then he chuckled as he caught the pun. It was not a great leap from Crow to Raven. He glanced out of the window. In a gap between the facing houses, a horse-drawn milk float was shambling down Belsize Road. Sunlight fleeced gold from the foil that stoppered the bottles.

‘And other forms of magic,’ he said.

Dylan looked at him askance. The word summoned vampires and demons. He had a childlike fear of such things. ‘Did it work this magic?’ he demanded

Vicky thought of the forms of shadow, or the shadows of form - he had never discovered which ‑ of Mars, whom he had danced down. He remembered that sly and shifting shape they had summoned, mouthing its obscenities in the desert; and last of all, Ione’s face, always pale, in death more so, the blood caking her waist-length tresses like lurid henna.

‘Only too well,’ he said.

Hurriedly, the Welshman pulled a bottle of pale ale out of his pocket and unstoppered it with a penknife he produced after further rummaging. He took a deep swig. ‘Like the way he knew what I was drawing,’ he said so breathlessly that beer mingled with the spittle. ‘Or the feeling you get in a shadowy room, with a feeble worm of light wriggling through the window, when you fix your eyes on the face of another. Slowly, the jaw sags, the brow merges with the cheeks, and the face is an eerie, blanched oval hemmed by darkness. Then new features appear: the dribbling maw of a goat, wicked fangs, eyebrows that curl upwards like the devil’s tail. ‘

‘I saw that face in the Sahara a quarter of a century ago.’

‘And who might that be, dear?’ Runia had entered as noiselessly as the goldfish in the pool.

Already one name had been uttered that had lain like a curse on Vicky these past twenty years; now he was called upon to pronounce another so terrible it should never be said, one, furthermore, whose bearer knew him and might by its utterance be summoned back. The beer Dylan was toasting her with, however, diverted Runia. Vicky observed her lips purse, widen to a “Dis ...”, stopper the “gusting”, then say instead: ‘I hope you’re not going to drink that here. Victor finds the smell repugnant.’

Tight-lipped, Dylan stood there, the bottle dangling in space. Runia must cup her farts under the blanket in the fond delusion their stink resembled the aroma of Wordsworthian daffodils, he thought.

‘I really don’t...,’ Vicky began, but Runia put paid to his ‘mind’ with her more forceful own.

‘You know how the fumes upset you, Victor!’

It had been like this for seven years now: a despotism more total even than that he had endured under Crowley. Once the Beast had bidden him to avoid saying “I” for a week, making Vicky punish each transgression by a self-inflicted slash with a razor. But Runia, “progressive” Runia, had gone one step further: she forbade him to be himself at all. Like a colonial administrator dealing with surly natives, her tyranny cloaked itself in the fiction that all was in his best interests. A visit to a shoe shop resulted in the assistant asking her, not him, if the shoes fitted: a request for his opinion would invariably elicit hers, couched, of course, as authentic Neuburg. It was her income, however, that maintained the house and had financed Comment, the magazine they had launched the previous year after The Sunday Referee had lurched down-market and his column had been withdrawn. It was about this she began to speak, in a tone that made Vicky cringe.

‘Victor took you up, young man; he first published you. Without him, you’d still be twiddling your thumbs in Swansea. Yet when he needed you, you let him down.’

Vicky spluttered. This just wasn’t true. Dylan had sent them a story and several poems for no fee at a time when he could sell his work and needed, as he always needed, money.

‘Oh, there might have been a few droppings from your table,’ she conceded. ‘But in the elevated circles you now move in, you could have done so much more.’

‘True enough,’ agreed Dylan cheerily, who, when attacked, often resorted to ridicule, even if he made himself its object. ‘I’m well in with the racketeers. Riding shotgun with Pope Eliot and Dame Sitwell. Glutted with money and fame by the muses, and invitations galore to academies of the Super‑real. “Tell me, Mister Inkwell, what was your first word? Is Germany an ogre? Do you believe Wordsworth was a woman?” Lobster for tea, white wine every night, a shrine in Westminster Abbey, and a pit of black earth beneath it.’

Typically, Dylan had concluded with his shield against hubris — death. ‘The function of poetry is to address the higher realms of spirit and nature. It should enhance man, not debase him,’ insisted Runia. ‘Your poems mostly make no sense, and when they do, the import is disgusting. All that doggerel about worms and wombs.’

Her companion had himself castigated Dylan in the pages of The Referee for the excessive number of references to worms in Eighteen Poems. Vicky’s school, that of Rossetti and Swinburne, favoured lilies over tadpoles, yet practically every poem submitted to Poet’s Corner in the wake of Dylan’s slim volume had a worm or maggot in it. Nevertheless, he was a long way from seconding Runia’s vitriol. He was convinced the Welshman was authentic and was about to say so when the Welshman forestalled him. Runia could have made fun of his liking for loud suits, his unkempt hair, and his size, and Dylan would have happily agreed. In attacking his poetry, however, she had maligned the one thing he considered sacrosanct. Taking a defiant swig of Burton’s, then drawing himself up to his full five feet six, he laid into them:

‘You provided a lot of sheep with Horlicks, eh, Vicky. Odes to Persian cats or lines like “Violet skies all rimmed in tune,” send Creative Lifers like you into spasms of ecstasy, though they’re nothing more than tears streaking the powdered cheeks of a ghastly Pantomime Dame. The truth is your tipsy muse is never tanked up enough to push the buttons nor sober enough to tell anybody anything real or true!’ With a theatrical flourish, Dylan indicated the little platform Runia had had erected before the French windows, from which aspiring poets such as he himself and David Gascoyne now no longer recited, and declaimed in his actor-manager’s voice: ‘I call on Theobald Cocaine to recite his Sonnet to Watercress.’

How changed was this exuberant man from the gangling youth Vicky had summoned to his office two summers before so that the Referee’s editor could grill him, for nobody could understand how one so young could produce such a body of work. For over an hour, Vicky had stood beside his protégé, pulsating like an electric wire as he recited, until the Editor had had to concede that this was the author of the amazing poetry they’d published. Yet this new persona, Vicky sensed, was not just the result of celebrity or drink. Perhaps he’d met a woman who possessed a quality that completed the partial in his being: Dylan’s yolk had found an egg — an excruciating image but one that came without apology.

‘I have never heard anything viler in my life,’ said Runia, though in fact she had, when she first met Vicky, and he confessed to her his adventures with the Beast. ‘Of course, not all Victor published was of the same evenness. He was nobly seeking to lend a helping hand...’

Poet’s Corner had been his nursery, Vicky wanted to say; he’d always found it hard to pluck out weeds.

‘A hand to who?’ spat Dylan, now all venom. ‘Anyone with a smattering of the English and a watering can of images to sprinkle over their flowery lines. They couldn’t leave their droppings in a private spot. You had to provide a pile of public manure for them to dump in!’

Runia was no match for this brilliant, if unreconstructed bile. In seven years, Vicky had never seen such a pleading look on her Valkyrie face as the one she gave him now. He began to stutter a reproach, but Dylan was ahead of them.

‘Throwing me out is a popular hobby among many of my acquaintances, but before you do, let me tell you I have always loathed your notion that poetry’s a milk pudding of word-tinkling designed to lull the listener. I want to make symphonies out of the blood of the womb, to unwrap the winding sheet and find an overture. You blubber on about some lofty region where poetry attains its pinnacle. You say the artist must be a Socialist and sermonise accordingly. The artist is under no such obligation; in fact, he is not required to do anything at all. The nutshell of image is his kingdom. He has only one boundary and that is the mightiest of them all — form.’

‘But formlessness is precisely what we complain of,’ chattered Runia. ‘You and your fellow Apocalyptics indulge in such antics with rhyme and employ such horrid metaphors that everything good or noble is left out.’

‘I am not a scientist distilling words in a test tube and boiling up images with a Bunsen Burner, hoping to invent some outrageous effect — that article you wrote about me in the Referee was bilge, Vicky. My little breakthroughs are not the spoils of theory or a school, but of the fact that I have no other way of negotiating the brambles and barbed wire of the pit I burrow in. My theme is vermin and putrefaction, you see, because I believe man is at root wicked and life a maggot. I will tip poetry into its grave tomorrow and dance on its tumours. ‘

Dylan moved to the door and exited in a huff. There was a moment’s scrambling in the hall, then the front door slammed.

Runia turned to Vicky; her relief palpable. Now they were to collude, scold Dylan for his dreadful behaviour and then, after much twittering, blame it on the beer and find it in their generous hearts to forgive him. But something stopped Vicky; something more than the scorn with which Dylan had blasted their circle. The truth was that the glittering forum of young poets that had gathered in this same room stopped coming when Comment flopped. Damozel, their tortoiseshell cat, was nibbling at some half-eaten kippers on a plate beneath the table. A warming pan lay alongside these, as useless on this hot June day as his contribution to English letters.

Vicky had always craved to be in the swim. It was that desire that had attracted him to Crowley. But that river had taken him over rapids from which he had been flung, first to the Western Front, and then to Sussex, where he had spent the twenties printing fine editions of his own poetry and of others that no one had wanted to buy. Poet’s Corner had given him another chance after the Vine Press went under, but now that too had gone. The day stretched ahead with a chop for lunch, Marmite for tea and a trip to the printers to check the proofs of a volume that was to be the best of Comment, paid for by Runia, which no‑one would read and no critic review, unless, of course, it were he himself under the ludicrous pseudonym Alfricobas, in a column loaned as a favour in The New English Weekly, in which, if he were honest, he should damn the contents as surely as Dylan had. Eliot, Auden, and perhaps Thomas were the rivers of his time. Vicky was a pool of stagnant water, albeit choked by lilies. He belonged with those whose sole admirers were maggots. He was starting to sound like Dylan.

With a resolve unnatural to him, he left the room, and with Runia squeaking in the hall behind, exchanged his slippers for shoes and donned a Norfolk jacket, too hot and bothered for the season. He unlatched the door and loped down the steps.

The appalling discovery of his own insignificance was not all that drove him, however. For twenty-two years, he had been in hiding from a man whom he still could not decide was the best or worst that had ever lived. Crowley had ruined his life and killed his love, Ione. It was believed, mistakenly, that when Vicky broke with him, the Beast had cursed him and changed him into a camel. When, in fact, it had been a goat. He was sure he was still the butt of jokes about this in the studios of Chelsea and Notting Hill; more crucially, several organs would not carry his work because of the stink.

Yet when he looked back on his years with the Beast, he beheld a realm of colours, a city, if you like, of God. Everything after had been monochrome, and until that Thursday morning, he had submitted as cheerfully as he could to the tyranny of Runia and the humdrum. In debunking his muse, however, Dylan had alerted him to the possibility that the sole significance of his life resided with Crowley. Rogue and charlatan, rightfully vilified by the yellow press or the greatest prophet of the age, whose disciple he had been? And his Holy Guru was out there, in London, today! Vicky had been summoned by a doodle.

Above is the first chapter of Aleister Crowley MI5 (originally published as Sybarite among the Shadows).

‘McNeff’s book is so different from anything else you’d normally find on a bookshelf that it should perhaps be a compulsory purchase.’ Independent on Sunday

‘Exhilarating, extravagant, irresistible, a continuous cocktail of truth and fiction, this novel is an extraordinary portrait of 1930s London; a daring odyssey of pubs, prostitutes and occult sciences, a poetic art deco thriller, seen through the bluish haze of cigarettes and opium, in a nightclub that remained open until dawn.’ La Repubblica

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