WHAT ROUGH BEAST
An outtake from Aleister Crowley MI6
25 June 1947
Black clouds massed on the horizon, threatening thunder, but a game of doubles continued undisturbed on the tennis court. Oblivious to the nascent downpour, guests picnicked on the lawns. More apprehensive were the hikers who had set off that morning and were now rambling in the Firehills or Farflight Glen.
In the lounge at Netherwood, a stocky twenty-nine-year-old academic with thick tortoiseshell glasses and thinning hair was drinking tea with the owner of the boarding house. Vernon Symonds was surprised that Richard Ellmann, the visiting American, had not wanted coffee. Aleister Crowley shuffled in, wearing a scarlet blazer that flapped about his shrinking frame, shabby plus-fours and dilapidated purple slippers. Lowering himself creakily onto the sofa, he muttered an inevitable “Do what thou wilt.” Then, more conventionally, he leaned across and shook Ellmann’s hand. The American noted tiny spots of blood spattering the cuffs of the Beast’s soiled white shirt. Crowley’s fingers were white and rendered claw-like by arthritis and nails the length of talons. The heavy seal ring on the middle finger of his left hand was engraved with hieroglyphs.
Crowley immediately went for the jugular. ‘I can’t imagine why you’re wasting your time writing a biography of a second-rate nonentity like Yeats. He could never accept my verse transported readers to realms undreamt of in his Land of Faery. I was incomparably the superior poet! Though the public, who have been resolute in ignoring me for fifty years, might not agree.’
Ellmann had resolved not to pander to this notoriously difficult customer. ‘Yeats is up there with the greats, even though he only died in 1939.’
‘So Weary Willie did a bunk before the war started. How typical! He never liked facing up to things.’
‘Never forget you have three poems in The Oxford Book of Mystical Verse,’ purred Vernon Symonds. He had a soft spot for the old devil.
Crowley grunted. ‘Yeats may be considered the greater poet, but I am without doubt the greater magician!’
The American, who was even more short-sighted than James Joyce, whose biography was to be the making of him, blinked. ‘Magic is exactly what I wanted to ask you about, specifically the Battle of Blythe Road. You’ll remember Yeats had barred you from the inner order because the Golden Dawn was not, as he put it, a reformatory.’
‘Such cheek! I went to Paris where MacGregor Mathers initiated me into the Red Rose and Golden Cross, the inner order, and charged me to return to Hammersmith. 36 Blythe Road housed the Isis-Urania Temple and the Vault of the Adepts. I changed the locks and inscribed my magical name, Frater Perdurabo, on the roll of members.’
‘No faulting your memory there,’ said Vernon.
‘The moment my back was turned, however, Weary Willie and his despicable tribe of inept adepts regained possession. So, I returned.’
‘In a kilt with a dagger at your side,’ prompted Ellmann.
‘It was a dirk. The tartan was MacGregor. I also wore a black mask of Osiris.’
‘You gained entry and went up to the first floor, where Yeats and another member flung you down the stairs.’
Crowley snorted. ‘Total bosh! The landlord was there, a deluded dipsomaniac whom the lank, dishevelled demonologist had bribed with a gallon of Irish whiskey. He called a constable. Sadly, the help I organised had gone to the wrong address.’
‘A cockney thug.’
The Beast scowled. ‘A cockney certainly.’
‘Yeats lived in fear of you after that. He believed you made a waxen doll of him and stuck pins in it.’
‘Just shows what an inferior magician he was! Voodoo is one of the lesser forks on the magical road. One I have rarely taken. There was, however, a sequel: an even deadlier magical battle which I would be happy to expand upon. This clammy air is making my asthma play up. The medicine’s upstairs.’
Vernon heartily seconded that they go their separate ways. He was desperate for a drink.
The fug of stale tobacco in Room Thirteen made Ellmann’s eyes water. His host flopped onto the divan bed, opened the case on the bedside cabinet and whipped out a hypodermic syringe. The American averted his gaze and so made the acquaintance of a cross-eyed hag with a demented smile whose portrait was sellotaped to the wall. Long habituation resulted in heroin acting like a stimulant, at least initially. Crowley brimmed with energised enthusiasm. He waved Ellmann onto a tattered armchair and offered him a drink. The balloon glass was smudged. There was dirt under the Beast’s fingernails as he passed it, but the cognac was good.
‘There was a woman,’ Crowley announced.
There always is, thought Ellmann. ‘Althea Gyles,’ he said before the Beast could.
‘That’s the filly. She did the covers for Weary Willie’s books. He slept with her, but it was me she was after. So, he convinced her I had bewitched her and made her steal a hair from my pillow, which he asserted he would use to break the spell. I woke in the middle of the night, and to my horror found a vampire beside me.’
It was a very tall tale, and its narrator was enjoying it. Ellmann scribbled it all down in his notebook.
‘The fiend had chestnut hair and a stuck-up face just like Althea. She clawed me and scratched me all night long. This went on for ten nights, but on the eleventh, I grabbed her by her throat and squeezed. The vampire vanished!’
‘These days, Althea Gyles casts horoscopes and collects junk. She’s very poor. I interviewed her in her Tulse Hill bedsit. She’s a ghost of the 1890s....’ Ellmann stopped himself adding ‘just like you.’
‘Yet she came from one of the best families in Ireland. They were so haughty that the neighbours called them the Royal Family. But she was never happier than living without a shilling to her name, on bread and cocoa, or biting the hand that fed her, for many tried to help, but they always gave up. Yeats was jealous because he knew she fancied me more than him. God knows what he thought when she got mixed up with the dreadful Smithers!’
‘Leonard Smithers? Your first publisher?’
‘A lascivious, lecherous, lustful, leering, libidinous libertine,’ ranted Crowley, blind to the irony.
‘Yeats believed his wife Georgie was a channel for higher powers. Your former wife, Rose Kelly, played a similar role with The Book of the Law.’
‘She laid the foundations, but it was Aiwass, the messenger of Horus, who dictated the book to me in the King’s Chamber over three Cairo nights in April 1904.’ Crowley was still in awe of that crescendo.
‘You claim Aiwass was a priest from Ancient Egypt, but the book is packed with echoes of Baudelaire and Wilde. While phrases such as “trample the weak underfoot” anticipate the Nazis.’
‘I made the same connection myself when I read Hitler’s Table Talk. A German follower of mine sent the Führer The Book of the Law. Plagiarism can be added to his other crimes. I should have sued. Not that I had any truck with the Black Brothers, you understand.’
‘Yeats believed in Great Years. You speak of Aeons. You both thought Christianity was in its death throes and a savage god would rule the New Age.’
‘Well, aren’t world events bearing that out! Yeats was a craven wretch, though I have also trembled before the beauty of the coming Aeon, even I, Chief Hierophant of the East and West, Master of the Flaming Door, the rough Beast, my hour come at last, who slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.’
And it seemed to the American that Crowley’s watery eyes held him with a gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun.
