by Colin Wilson
[1]Aleister Crowley. Labelled by journalists ‘the world’s wickedest man’, Crowley (1875-1947) was a curious mixture of charlatan and man of genius; he claimed to be a magician, and was the founder of a cult of ‘Crowleyanity’. His life has been written by John Symonds, under the title of The Great Beast, and by Charles Richard Cammell; Symonds has also written a study of the magic of Crowley.
Still, we got something good out of the discussion finally. I mentioned that the sexual orgasm has this power to narrow and concentrate the beam of consciousness, but that it appears to be done by some trigger-mechanism. No one who experiences an orgasm, and then tries later to produce the same intensity of concentration by ordinary will-power, can deny that there must exist in the human mind some kind of a switch that can intensify the consciousness; a few men—like Sri Ramakrishna—learn the secret of this switch, and can plunge into a state of ecstasy at a moment’s notice. But most of us never learn where it is situated, and have to rely on the sexual orgasm, or perhaps on the power of music, to reproduce it.
Cunningham now became very mysterious, and hinted that he had some other means of producing this intensification of consciousness. Being rather drunk, I was in no mood for being polite, so I said I didn’t believe anybody had such a secret—even if he could see round corners. My scepticism seemed to annoy him, and he declared that he had discovered the secret by means of ‘sexual magic’—various tricks taught him by Crowley. Crowley, he claimed, had introduced a completely new form of yogic discipline that involved all kinds of sexual practices. In its early stages, the devotee has to practise masturbation, and try to understand the way in which his ‘intensifying faculty’ works. Cunningham likened a man having an orgasm to a man who suddenly sees a landscape below him, lit by a flash of lightning. If he sees the landscape often enough, and diligently tries to make maps every time he sees it, he will eventually begin to gain a real familiarity with the landscape. Most human beings, he said, accept the pleasure of the orgasm without trying to analyse it. The devotee of ‘sexual magic’ keeps his attention awake and concentrated while receiving sexual pleasure, and strives to develop a kind of phenomenology of sex. He used a rather good image. He said that we all find ourselves in this more or less dark and meaningless universe, but that each sexual orgasm is like a flare that can help us find our bearings. Unfortunately, even if a man had two orgasms a day, this still wouldn’t mean that he can reckon on more than about thirty thousand orgasms in a lifetime. Thirty thousand flares sounds a lot—enough to explore any landscape—but it is really totally inadequate. For example, by the age of twenty-five, most men have had at least five thousand orgasms. Yet how many of us can say that we understand life or sex any better after the five thousandth time? Life slips through our fingers; we learn nothing of its meaning and purpose, even though each orgasm gives us an overwhelming sense that it has meaning and purpose. Every work of art, every poem, every symphony ever written, is an attempt to try to prevent life from slipping away. And yet, with millions of books in the world, we still know as little about the meaning of life as the earliest human beings.
At this point, I heard the Kirstens come in downstairs, and Cunningham insisted that I ask them up. I went downstairs (feeling very drunk and very sleepy) and knocked on their door. They had apparently been out to a cinema, but they were also tired, and said they didn’t want to have a drink. However, I persuaded them to come and meet Cunningham. I immediately felt sorry I had, because Cunningham took one look at Diana, and obviously formed ambitions of practising sexual magic on her. And she was like a rabbit with a snake. Kirsten seemed to notice nothing. He protested he was tired, and finally accepted a small glass of wine. Cunningham tried to draw him into our discussion by recapitulating what he’d said about music as an attempt to stop life from slipping through the fingers, but it was no good; Kirsten refused to be drawn. However, Cunningham proceeded to flatter him in the manner I now recognized, having had it practised on me; said that he’d heard from me about Kirsten’s music, about his magnificent playing, about his intelligence, etc., etc., and that he couldn’t wait for a chance to verify all this for himself. Finally, Kirsten said that he’d be glad to see Cunningham some other time, but that at present he couldn’t keep his eyes open. He then went off to bed, leaving Diana with us. Cunningham immediately began to question her about her husband’s invention; but either she knew nothing about it, or wasn’t willing to talk. However, she invited Cunningham to call the following evening (today). Then, to my surprise, Cunningham said that he was tired too, and would go home. I had expected him to talk until five in the morning (and I’m sure he meant to before Kirsten came in—I suspect he has some reason for holding himself back—perhaps he wants to ‘save himself’ up for this evening). Cunningham also got Carlotta to go with him on some flimsy excuse—saying he thought his next door neighbour would drive her home in a car (it was now too late for the tubes). So they went, at about midnight. I have no doubt that Carlotta was instructed in the finer points of sexual magic. I didn’t mind—I was glad Cunningham took her with him (but she looked oddly frightened, as if she expected to be eaten).
Diana went with them, and I immediately opened a window to let out the cigarette smoke, and climbed into bed. A few minutes later, Diana came back into the room, without knocking. She immediately asked me about Cunningham, and if I thought he could be of use to her husband. I said that he probably could, and told her about Oliver’s exhibition; but then, being in a bad mood (or perhaps only jealous) I added that I thought Cunningham had been rather struck by her. She startled me by her frankness; she said she felt this as soon as she came in, and that it repelled her. I was curious, after the experience that Carlotta mentioned, and pressed her to elaborate. She said that she had felt a kind of sexual blow, just here (she indicated her solar plexus). But she hadn’t had Carlotta’s experience of feeling undressed in front of him—perhaps because his attention was elsewhere.
I must have been pretty drunk, because I asked her bluntly if she’d sleep with Cunningham if it could help her husband. She looked offended, said I had no right to speak to her like that, and started to leave the room. So I then mentioned that I’d walked behind her up Petticoat Lane the other night, and seen her with her bookmaker type. At this, she blushed, but tried to put a bold face on it, and said that she didn’t think this was any concern of mine either. I felt the time for frankness had arrived, and said that it only concerned me because I found her so attractive myself, and hated to think of other men having her. She said very primly that no other man ‘had her’; but it was obvious that she wasn’t annoyed any more. I even persuaded her to sit on the edge of the bed, and managed to take her hand. I said that if I wanted to pry into her relations with other men, it was quite straightforward jealousy. She said that I was obviously drunk; but for all that, she seemed disposed to be frank, and said that sometimes, living with a man like her husband was worse than living alone. His ideas were all very ‘noble’, and she respected him as a great man; but she could never feel that she was essential to him. The bookmaking type, whose name, apparently, is Tom Drage, wanted to marry her when she was in her teens, and had come to live in the East End to be near her. She isn’t even sure of his profession (she thinks he’s an auctioneer), but says that he’s generous and good-hearted. I said I appreciated all this, but that I couldn’t be expected to approve of him much, since I wanted her myself. She said she’d have to go or her husband would wonder what was happening; I held both her hands and tried to persuade her to kiss me good night. She wouldn’t, but didn’t seem annoyed. When I let her go, she turned out the bedside lamp, then laid her hand on my forehead for a moment before she went out. As she stood in the doorway, I asked her to promise that she wouldn’t go to bed with Cunningham; she said: ‘I promise,’ then closed the door. I felt that this was a long step forward, but went off to sleep in a state of frustration. Probably Kirsten was already fast asleep when she climbed
into his bed. If she’d climbed into mine, I wouldn’t have slept for hours. But this morning, I felt very ashamed of myself; I must have been drunker than I realized.
Later: I thought I’d seen Cunningham’s name on book jackets some time, so this afternoon I went to the British Museum to look him up. Sure enough, there are about ten volumes by him in the catalogue, mostly verse. I got them out—all of them—and spent a couple of hours with them. He’s an atrocious poet, who seems to possess no sensitivity to language, and shows no sign of having read anything later than Coleridge, except possibly Swinburne. There’s a great deal of rather juvenile blasphemy, deriding of the Church and religion in general, praise of whores, and all the other fin-de-siècle paraphernalia. It seems to me that he must be in reaction against an incredibly old-fashioned family who kept him firmly suppressed. But to me—and I haven’t been to church more than twenty times in my life—all this is a fantastic waste of breath. Cunningham has some comment in one of his books: ‘Some people accuse me of flogging dead horses, but I can think of more interesting things to do with dead horses.’ (I think he’s invented a new perversion there.) But flogging dead horses is exactly what he does for ninety per cent of the time in these books of his. There are, admittedly, a few pleasant lyrics. There was also a book of magic, purporting to be a translation from Abrahamelin the Mage.
It’s curious that a man can be as personally impressive as Cunningham, and yet be so obviously a show-off on paper.
Nov. 16th.
I was interrupted yesterday by the arrival of Christine, who wanted to tell me that she’d seen a picture of Oliver in a newspaper. I felt badly about this—I didn’t want to have to admit that I knew Oliver to be in town. So I insisted on going out and buying some iced cakes while Christine made tea, and talked to her about other things, and generally did my best to make her feel ‘wanted’. This, I think, is the root of the problem; it’s not that she cares particularly about Oliver, but that she feels that a man she liked and respected suddenly turned on her and threw her out. My difficulty is that I can’t really comfort her without telling her that Oliver isn’t as ‘solid’ as she thought him. I can understand her position. I gather that her family are a completely crazy lot, always having fights and getting drunk. Her father’s a prison warder—and exactly the kind of stupid brute you’d expect to take a job like that—and one of her brothers has already got himself into serious trouble with the police and is on probation; her sister is married to a Pole who beats her up, and she comes and sleeps with Christine when her husband’s in a murderous mood. But she’s a decent little kid, and she needs a better sort of environment, and the feeling that people take an interest in her. Oliver gave her a sense of security for a while, and the kind of attention she needs, and then quite abruptly withdrew it. Naturally she’s upset; she feels it’s something wrong with her. But how can I tell her that Oliver was probably projecting into her something that didn’t exist—a kind of primal childish innocence—a combination of wife, daughter, angel and good fairy?
While we were having tea, and I was explaining to her about the pictures of demons in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, there was a knock on the door, and Cunningham arrived. He has quite a way with children. It was curious to see him chattering to Christine, then to think about his blasphemous poems and all his talk about sex-magic. He was like a clever elder brother. What’s more, he seems to understand her psychology better than I do. He suddenly asked her: ‘Would you like me to tell you a story?’ She said ‘Ooh yes,’ and he immediately launched into a fairy story about a giant and a dwarf who went into partnership to free a country of dragons. I would have assumed she’d feel herself too old for this kind of thing, but she listened with a fascinated stare, and didn’t breathe until half an hour later. When she finally said she had to go home, he bent over and kissed her, then gave her a half-crown, for all the world like a Santa Claus in some big store at Christmas. I found this an unexpected and most likeable side to his character. In fact I felt so warm about him that I told him I’d been reading his poetry, and was hypocritically complimentary about it. This delighted him—it was evident that I’d touched his amour propre—and he immediately launched into extravagant praise of himself as a poet. I commented on his being born near Leamington, and he said: ‘Yes, I have often thought it strange that Warwickshire should have produced England’s two greatest poets—for we must not forget Shakespeare.’
He hadn’t been in the room for five minutes before he declared he needed a drink. As I had nothing in the room but a foul Spanish burgundy, he sent me out for some decent wine (I didn’t mind playing errand boy—he was paying). He stood this in hot water to take off the chill, and we drank for nearly an hour. He had some interesting things to tell me. When he began to boast to me about his sexual prowess, I tried to jar him by asking him bluntly how he’d obtained such a hold over Oliver. He startled me by replying: ‘By saving him from suicide.’ He claimed that he was in the Preston Art Gallery, looking at a painting by Oliver, when he had a sudden overwhelming intimation that the artist was in danger. He was so urgent that the authorities of the gallery gave him the address. He took a taxi there, announced to the landlady that he was an old friend of Mr Glasp, and rushed up to the room she indicated. Without even knocking, he tried the door, found it locked, and burst it open with his shoulder. Oliver was asleep, and looked amazed as his door burst open. Cunningham said he thrust out a finger at him and said: ‘You are not to do it. I have been sent to stop you.’ He claims that Oliver’s immediate reaction was to collapse, and then admit that he had been steeling himself all day to the idea of cutting his throat, and had just that minute decided that he would walk into the bathroom and do it.
I have no idea at all whether Cunningham invented this story, partly or wholly. All his stories about himself and other people are somehow so much in ‘character’ with the way he sees things that he might almost be accused of being a novelist who invents his life in the act of living it.
And yet how otherwise can I explain the influence he possesses over Oliver? He told me that he made Oliver go out with him to an Indian restaurant, where he forced him to eat huge quantities of very hot food, washed down with wine. Oliver was so awe-stricken by this ‘messenger from God’ that he did whatever he was told. Cunningham talked at him for two hours, and ended by getting him to sign a paper agreeing to let him arrange an exhibition at a London gallery and deal with the whole financial side of the venture.
I asked Cunningham what arguments he used to bring this about. ‘I didn’t argue. I just staggered him with my insight into his condition. I told him that he felt as if he was sliding down a slope, but that he could arrest his motion at any moment.’ Cunningham now became very confiding and philosophical, but what he said excited me immensely. It went deeper than anything he’d said in his books, and made me wonder if he really does possess strange powers. He talked for more than half an hour, but what he said, in summary, was this: we all react immediately to pain and discomfort by struggling to be free of it. But the strangest thing about human beings is that when this negative stimulus comes to an end, they immediately devalue life by slipping back into boredom. Therefore, the ‘divine forces’ (he either used this term, or simply ‘the Powers’) have made stimulation-by-misery the secret of their method of driving men to become gods. The greatest sin is the attempt to escape this ‘goad’ of the Powers by sinking into apathy. Men who have no reason whatever to fear pain or discomfort sometimes commit suicide from boredom.
There is only one way to escape the ‘goad’ of misery. Not the Buddha’s perfect detachment, which is nonsense. Simpler than that. To go in the direction in which Fate is trying to goad you at such a speed that it can’t catch up.
This was the essence of what he said, but he used a hundred illustrations (and I interrupted him to supply some of my own). He talked as if he was receiving inspiration (perhaps the wine). That we take all our moods and
feelings for granted, as something ‘sent to us’. In fact, we seem to assume that they are us. We are passive. We wake up feeling gloomy; we are contented to wait until fate sends events to cheer us up. The desire for life is stimulated by a crisis, but subsides when the crisis is overcome, and we are content to let it subside. And yet we are always more detached from our feelings than we realize; otherwise, how could you feel ‘happy to feel happy’, or even feel ‘happy to feel sad’?
Our first duty, he said, is to maintain a sense of gratitude for being alive. Any other attitude is a sin, to be immediately punished by the Powers. All those fin-de-siècle poets condemned themselves to death by refusing to be happy, by sitting around, gloomily waiting to be coaxed and patted into smiling.
Cunningham then, with immense conviction, went on to point to himself as one of those who are ‘loved by the gods’ because he never allows a morsel of despair to settle anywhere on him. People like Oliver observe that he seems curiously favoured by destiny, more vital, more magnetic than other people, and assume that fate has been kind to him, while in fact, he simply lives according to the invisible law that states that boredom and lack of enthusiasm for what you are doing is a mortal sin. He doesn’t worry about scrutinizing the universe for signs and portents. He said (and the image astounded me) that most men live as if they are the audience in a theatre when they don’t realize that they’re actually on the stage, and the gods will throw things if they don’t start acting.
I can imagine the effect that all this must have had on Oliver—especially Cunningham’s conviction that you have to act and radiate vitality at all costs, send out waves of charm and enthusiasm, even when you can see nothing to be charming and enthusiastic about. ‘Such a man is a magnet to good fortune,’ he said. He went on to say that he never allowed himself to worry. He was born rich, and spent more than a hundred thousand pounds in his twenties. Since then, he has had no regular income, and yet has probably spent another hundred thousand. ‘For example, I spent a month in the Lake District trying to teach two rich young men the rudiments of mountain climbing. They got scared and went home, paying the hotel bill but leaving me without a penny. I did the first thing that came into my head—took a bus to Preston, and went into the art gallery. Now, within six weeks, we’ve made over two thousand pounds from Oliver’s painting.’ This sum staggered me, but I couldn’t help asking him how much of it would find its way to Oliver’s pocket. ‘What does it matter if he never gets a penny of it? For a paltry two thousand pounds, he’s learned the secret of greatness. He’d be dead if I hadn’t stopped him.’ I had to admit that this reasoning seemed accurate. And yet I couldn’t help thinking of the irony of the thing. Oliver may be a manic-depressive, but he also has genius. Cunningham has the vitality of ten men and the audacity of fifty, yet he can’t write a line of decent poetry. This was not a subject I could discuss, after my extravagant praise of his poems. (Come to think of it, I suppose I owe his confidences to my praise!)