by Roger Dobson
One of many amusing passages in Memoirs of the Forties describes how Ross and his sometime friend Peter Brooke (Anthony Carson) collaborated briefly on a surreal Chestertonian thriller, ‘The Monastery of Information’, which Brooke had sketched out: ‘The basic elements included an astrally projected Tibetan lamasery, controlled from the forbidden city itself and invisible to all except those in a state of ecstasy: drunks, lovers, etc; there was also a London bank which financed the nefarious operations of the Tibetan fifth-column with phantom money and was manned by cashiers stuffed with straw. Murders of people who knew too much were committed by a band of trained commando midgets, and the conspiracy’s total aim was world domination, narrowly averted.’ Alas, the book never materialised, and the world of fantasy thrillers is clearly the poorer for it.
Maclaren-Ross died from a heart attack in November 1964, with his memoirs of Fitzrovia only half completed. Alan Ross wrote in tribute to him: ‘These fragments of autobiography [Memoirs of the Forties], his wartime stories, The Weeping and the Laughter and his novel Of Love and Hunger may not be a lot to remember him by, but they are enough.’
‘Someone should write a biography of Julian,’ Mr Ross told the present writer.
BLACK MAGIC AGAINST THE BEAST: EPISODES IN THE LIFE OF THE ‘STRANGE RED-HAIRED GIRL’, ALTHEA GYLES
Althea Gyles.
The Lost Club Journal No. 2, Winter 2000/2001)
pseudonym ‘Edward Murchson’
It is one of the world’s enduring mysteries. Why is it that educated and intelligent women frequently fall head over heels with the lowest of the low and are irresistibly drawn to rogues, villains, cheats, bounders, drunks, charlatans, sharks, pimps, liars, etc? The question was perplexing enough for Robert Graves to consider in a poem. Some revolting specimen has only to bludgeon a poor innocent to death (his wife, ideally), achieve a little notoriety in the media, and sure enough, passionately erotic letters from females will flood into his cell in Broadmoor. While decent fellows such as you and I, gentle reader, go womanless and can’t lay hands on an attractive lady for love or money (‘We don’t like nice men,’ they tell us), axe-murderers on Death Row don’t pass a week without their groupies proposing marriage and signing over all their assets. Wardresses and female psychiatrists from Strangeways to Sing Sing, unable to resist inmates’ sexual power, grovel at their feet and beg to be allowed to bear their children. Actresses of the supermodel variety on prison visits will ‘share the pain’ and ‘discover the real man’ behind the mask of the misunderstood caged beast. When the delusion finally ends and the glamour is lifted from their eyes—after the women have been abused, beaten, tortured and put through the emotional ringer for years on end, they finally see the light and condemn all men as sadists.
While not wishing to fuel the sex war, some unscientific suggestions as to why this lachrymose state of affairs prevails may be speculated upon: (a) nothing is blinder than love; (b) some women may possess a masochistic streak and derive perverse pleasure from being treated appallingly; (c) being involved with a rotter means the woman can at least feel superior and take refuge in martyrdom; (d) there are some peculiar females knocking about. As in life, one sees the pattern repeated endlessly in fiction and drama. The only consolation is that at least women’s bizarre tastes in men have enriched literature and drama. Henry James was probably too embarrassed to reveal the true end of Washington Square: when Morris Townsend called again, he was doubtless welcomed by Catherine Sloper with open arms. In The Lodger (1913) Mrs Belloc Lowndes’s landlady protects her quiet paying guest, even though she realises he is Jack the Ripper. Alida Valli in The Third Man has eyes only for the glamorous sewer rat Harry Lime, while the noble hack Holly Martins gets the cold shoulder and go-by. This is just one infuriating example of the condition that one might dub the ‘Alida Valli Syndrome’. But let us consider an actual historical case. . . .
It is delightful to see Althea Gyles, the 1890s poet and artist, has stepped from the shadows in recent years to feature in biographies of Yeats, Dowson and Leonard Smithers. Roy Foster in W.B. Yeats: A Life I. The Apprentice Mage 1865-1914 (1997) calls her ‘the fey and slightly manic Irish artist’; but she remains one of the 1890s figures one would like to have known. Now not only did Althea have an affair with Smithers, the dissolute publisher of the era, but legend says she became involved with the Great Beast himself. Aleister Crowley and Smithers. This dame sure knew how to pick ’em!
In The Trembling of the Veil (1922) Yeats presents a portrait of Althea, whom he does not name.
On a lower floor [of the Dublin Theosophical Society house in Ely Place], lived a strange red-haired girl, all whose thoughts were set upon painting and poetry, conceived as abstract images like Love and Penury in the Symposium; and to these images she sacrificed herself with Asiatic fanaticism. The engineer [a fellow tenant] had discovered her starving somewhere in an unfurnished or half-furnished room, and that she had lived for many weeks upon bread and shell-cocoa, so that her food never cost her more than a penny a day. Born into a county family, who were so haughty that their neighbours called them the Royal Family, she had quarrelled with a mad father, who had never, his tenants declared, ‘unscrewed the top of his flask with any man’, because she wished to study art, had run away from home, had lived for a time by selling her watch, and then by occasional stories in an Irish paper. For some weeks she had paid half-a-crown to some poor woman to see her to the art schools and back, for she considered it wrong for a woman to show herself in public places unattended; but of late she had been unable to afford the school fees. The engineer engaged her as a companion for his wife, and gave her money enough to begin her studies once more.
Margaret Alethea Gyles, described as ‘the eccentric bohemian offspring of an old and wealthy family in Kilmurry, County Waterford’, was born in 1867. Her mother was Alithea née Grey, the daughter of Edward Grey, Bishop of Hereford. After studying art in Dublin around 1890 and writing an unpublished novel, The Woman Without a Soul, she moved to London, took a room in Charlotte Street and became a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn and ‘one of the Smithers people’. She produced the exquisite cover designs for Yeats’s The Secret Rose (1897), Poems (1899) The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), Dowson’s Decorations in Verse and Prose (1899), and Yeats’s first bookplate. Smithers paid her seventy pounds for her ‘five weirdly powerful and beautiful drawings’ for his pirated edition of Wilde’s The Harlot’s House (1904). Wilde called her ‘an artist of great ability’.
James G. Nelson in Leonard Smithers, Publisher to the Decadents (2000) states: ‘When and how Gyles met Smithers is, as yet, undiscovered—perhaps through Symons or perhaps casually through her frequenting the various haunts of the Smithers coteries such as the Café Royal—but the two were on friendly terms by 1899 when Gyles on several occasions was seen with Smithers on his frequent trips to Paris.’ Professor Nelson writes of Althea’s designs for The Harlot’s House: ‘The highly erotic nature of her drawings and, in particular, the shadowy but obviously nude female bodies with breasts sharply outlined, surely owe something to the amorous Smithers and his predilection for graphically sensual art.’ Althea worked on the illustrations under guidance from Smithers, redrawing and revising after receiving his criticisms and suggestions. She wrote to Yeats: ‘I hope the drawings won’t shock Mr Symons. He won’t see them in a crude state but modified by Mr Smithers.’
The affair seems to have begun, according to Professor Nelson, around the autumn of 1899 as Althea was engaged on the work for the Wilde edition; for in the summer the publisher was ‘Mr Smithers’ in correspondence. ‘Of a little more than a year’s duration, the Smithers-Gyles affair came as a shock to the coterie of artists, writers, and dabblers in mysticism of which Gyles was part,’ writes Nelson. ‘Gyles was seen by her friends as a naïve, virginal, spiritualised sort of figure, utterly devoted to her art. Consequently, her sudden liaison with the fleshly Smithers was universally viewed as nothing less than scandalous.’
; Yeats gossiped to Lady Gregory in November 1899:
A very unpleasant thing has happened but it is so notorious that there is no use in hiding it. Althea Gyles, after despising Symons & [George] Moore for years because of their morals has ostentatiously taken up with Smithers, a person of so immoral a life that people like Symons and Moore despise him. She gave an at home the other day & poured out tea with his arm round her waist & even kissed him at intervals. I told her that she might come to my ‘at homes’ as much as she liked but that I absolutely forbade her to bring Smithers (who lives by publishing books which cannot be openly published for fear of the law). . . . She seems to be perfectly mad, but is doing beautiful work. I did my best last week to make her see the necessity for some kind of disguise, but it seems to be a point of pride with her to observe none. It is all the more amazing because she knows all about Smithers [sic] past. She is in love, & because she has some genius to make her thirst for realities & not enough of intellect to see the temporal use of unreal things she is throwing off every remnant of respectability with an almost religious enthusiasm.
Arthur Symons, who described the artist in a letter to Yeats as the ‘incomparable Althea’, also objected to the relationship, bluntly describing the situation as ‘she got infatuated with a drunken brute whom no one could stand’. Althea complained in a letter to Yeats of their attitude: ‘ . . . it is very wrong to slander so excellent a man as Mr Smithers’. As we have noted, love is blind, etc.
The affair did not endure: ‘the relationship having petered out for all intents and purposes by the time Smithers’s bankruptcy became official in mid-September 1900’, writes Nelson. After Wilde’s death in November 1900 Althea wrote offering Smithers six pounds in order to attend the funeral in Paris.
Faith Compton Mackenzie wrote a novel, Tatting (1957), which dealt with Althea’s relationship with Smithers. Ariadne Burden wins the heart of a noble young man but falls ‘in love with a drunken scoundrel’ modelled on Smithers: ‘an abominable creature of high intelligence, no morals and the vivid imagination which was perhaps,’ states Mackenzie, what her heroine ‘had been waiting for’.
Now Althea’s story passes from recorded facts to apocryphal history. She certainly knew Aleister Crowley for the Great Beast fictionalised her relationship with Smithers in his magically erotic story ‘At the Fork of the Roads’ (published in The Equinox, Volume I, No.1, in 1909) where Althea appears as Hypatia Gay, an artist who loves a poet, Will Bute, based on Yeats. Hypatia takes some of her drawings to a Bond Street publisher. ‘This man was bloated with disease and drink; his loose lips hung in an eternal leer; his fat eyes shed venom; his cheeks seemed ever on the point of bursting into nameless sores and ulcers. He bought the young girl’s drawings. “Not so much for their value,” he explained, “as that I like to help promising young artists—like you, my dear!”’ Her steely virginal eyes met his fearlessly and unsuspiciously. The beast cowered, and covered his foulness with a hideous smile of shame.’ Crowley had a grievance against Smithers after the manuscript of his Green Alps was supposedly lost in a fire at the printers, leaving the poet out of pocket.
Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellmann visited Crowley at Hastings (presumably at Netherwood) shortly before the Beast’s death at the age of seventy-two in 1947. He apparently told Professor Ellmann the story of his involvement with Althea Gyles and how the artist became caught up in the psychic battle between Yeats and Crowley for control of the Golden Dawn. Ellmann published an article, ‘Black Magic Against White: Aleister Crowley Versus W.B. Yeats’, in the Partisan Review in 1948, based on the account Crowley gave him. Ellmann does not mention ‘At the Fork of the Roads’, but his article has much in common with the story. The Partisan Review article begins with the familiar tale of how in 1900, acting as envoy for Samuel Liddell (MacGregor) Mathers, the Celtic mage based in Paris—a learned nutcase who had managed to hook the beautiful Mina Bergson; see (a) and (d) above—Crowley seized the Golden Dawn Vault of the Adepts, the temple of the Inner Order, at 36 Blythe Road, Hammersmith. Crowley was charged with so much magical power, it seems, that on his arrival back in England horses reared at his approach and his mackintosh burst into flames. Later, inconspicuously dressed in a Highlander’s kilt, with a Crusader’s cross on his breast and wearing a black mask armed with a dirk at his belt and a skindoo at his knee, the Lord of Boleskine was confronted by Yeats. ‘Making the sign of the pentacle inverted, and shouting menaces at the adepts, Crowley climbed the stairs,’ writes Ellmann. ‘But Yeats and two other white magicians came resolutely forward to meet him, ready to protect the holy place at any cost. When Crowley came within range the forces of good struck out with their feet and kicked him downstairs.’ A policeman was summoned and ordered Crowley to depart.
Brother Perdurabo (it was surely his wives and mistresses who had to do the enduring) lost control of the Vault of the Adepts after legal proceedings began. He settled out of court and paid £5 costs. Crowley couldn’t risk his homosexual practices being exposed in evidence: it was because of this that Yeats had largely refused him entrance to the Golden Dawn’s Inner Order, describing him as ‘a quite unspeakable person’. ‘He had a low opinion of women,’ writes Crowley’s biographer John Symonds. ‘They should be, he said, brought round to the back door like the milk.’ Naturally this did not prevent seemingly dozens of women falling over themselves to be seduced by the Beast. See (a), (b), (c) and (d) above for possible explanations.
Crowley didn’t give up the fight. Ellmann tells how ‘he was soon infecting London with his black masses and his bulging, staring eyes corrupted many innocents.’ One of these—though perhaps not so innocent by now—was Althea Gyles. (Presumably her involvement with Crowley post-dated her affair with Smithers, and the incidents occurred sometime in 1900 before Crowley gave up his flat in Chancery Lane for Boleskine on the shores of Loch Ness.) Worried by being enmeshed by Crowley, Althea went to Yeats to ask if he could help her. ‘Bring me a drop of his blood and I will exorcise it,’ he said. Althea explained that this might prove difficult. ‘In that case,’ Yeats said, ‘bring me a hair of his head.’ If this were not possible, an object from his rooms would be necessary.
Althea accordingly went to Crowley’s rooms for tea and covertly managed to steal a hair of her host’s head and, for good measure, to hide one of his books under her arm. But Crowley suspected foul play. ‘Before you go,’ he hissed at her, ‘you must visit the sanctum sanctorum.’ Althea wanted to refuse, but dared not. Helplessly she allowed the magician to lead her down a long corridor, dimly lit by the light of one taper, until at last she arrived in front of a tabernacle covered with mystic signs and symbols. Crowley, after invoking the chthonian powers, suddenly pulled open the door of the tabernacle, and a skeleton fell into Althea’s arms. She screamed, dropped the book, and ran off in terror.
Althea had retained the hair from the Beast’s head, and she took it to Yeats, who then ‘cast the requisite spells and exorcisms’. That night Crowley discovered a vampire in his bed: all night long she bit and tore at him. According to the article this went on for nine nights, with Crowley’s sorcery proving ineffective against the entity. He consulted a fellow magician—not named, but doubtless his mentor Allan Bennett, Brother Iehi Aour (Let there be light), who was staying with him. Crowley was given instructions on how to deal with the fiend. ‘On the tenth night, as the vampire appeared, Crowley seized her by the throat and squeezed with all his strength. Just as the magician had predicted, the vampire groaned and disappeared.’
This scenario will be familiar to all those who have read the even more dramatic ‘At the Fork of the Roads’, which Crowley claimed to be a factual account of what transpired between himself and Yeats. The tale begins with Hypatia Gay visiting the rooms of a magician and poet ‘who had concealed his royal Celtic descent beneath the pseudonym of Swanoff’. Crowley had signed the lease for his apartment at 67/69 Chancery Lane using the alias Count Vladimir Svaroff.
. . . the girl passed from the cold s
tone dusk of the stairs to a palace of rose and gold. The poet’s rooms were austere in their elegance. A plain gold paper of Japan covered the walls; in the midst hung an ancient silver lamp within which glowed the deep ruby of an electric lamp. The floor was covered with black and gold of leopards’ skins, on the wall hung a great crucifix in ivory and ebony. . . . Hers was a curious mission, to serve the envy of the long lank melancholy poet whom she loved. Will Bute was not only a poetaster but a dabbler in magic, and black jealousy of a younger man and a far finer poet gnawed at his petty heart. He had gained a subtle hypnotic influence over Hypatia, who helped him in his ceremonies. . . .
Hypatia scratches Swanoff with her brooch to gain some of his blood. At night Swanoff is attacked by a beautiful succubus or demon and only survives through the help of his magical mentor. Hypatia later returns to Swanoff’s rooms to obtain new blood for Bute. The magician takes her into his ‘Black Temple’ where a blood-stained skeleton sits before an evil altar: ‘a round table supported by an ebony figure of a negro standing upon his hands. Upon the altar smouldered a sickening perfume and the stench of the slain victims of the god defiled the air. It was a tiny room, and the girl, staggering, came against the skeleton. The bones were nor clean; they were hidden by a greasy slime mingling with the blood, as though the hideous worship were about to endow it with a new body of flesh.’ Crowley had such a temple and altar in Chancery Lane, though the temple was actually a cupboard. Disgusted yet spellbound, Hypatia embraces and kisses the skeleton which comes to life, and it is suggested that their intimacy goes further: ‘. . . she writhed and howled in that ghastly celebration of the nuptials of the Pit’. Doubtless women have fallen for slimier creatures. At the end of the story she is repulsed by Will Bute, and returns to the publisher. Seeing her degradation, he ‘licked his lips’. Crowley clearly achieved his revenge, in fiction if not in life.