by Colin Wilson
These powers disappeared when he went up to Oxford, and began to drink heavily, but, he explained, he was already interested in other aspects of occultism, and did not regard the loss of his second-sight as very important.
While Cunningham told me all this, I had the impression that he was being quite frank and honest; he told it humorously, with no attempt at mystification, as if second-sight was a curious disability like a tendency to sea-sickness.
Since he was in this frank mood, I asked him about Carlotta. (He had already asked me about Diana—some of his questions were so personal that I blushed—but I felt he had a certain right to know, since he played such a part in the affair.) He asked me what Carlotta had told me, and when I repeated her story of the ‘incubus’ in her bed, he was delighted. He told me that as soon as he had seen her, he realized that Carlotta was an exceptionally good subject for his type of power. She possessed a great store of vital energy that had been frustrated and bottled-up for so long that it was easy to ‘use her’ (he didn’t explain what he meant by this). I tried to press him to be more specific, but he only said he would tell me more later. He did say, however, that he had not been in her bed that night—astrally or otherwise.
This puzzles me. Do I have to conclude that Cunningham can somehow influence people at a distance? It is hard to believe—even though I saw him cause that man in the street to stumble. What is more likely is that he somehow took advantage of Carlotta’s hysteria to make her believe in his ‘powers’.
At the end of the lunch, Cunningham explained to me that he feels I am ready to be introduced into the ‘mysteries’. I possess, according to him, an unusual degree of psychological perception; my mind makes persistent attempts to get ‘beyond’ the façade of the everyday world into the realm of the occult. But I still see things in their ‘natural light’; I seek a natural solution to the problems. I have no inkling of the concealed mysteries. He became very confiding, placing his hand on mine and leaning over until his face almost touched me; the waiters must have thought we were a couple of queers. ‘Do you think it coincidence that you have met me at this point in your life? Don’t believe it. The Powers have been preparing you. The Powers arranged that you should meet me. And the Powers ordained that you should help me to bring my work to fruition.’ He also hinted that he had been ‘told’ about me several years ago, warned that he would meet a co-worker, and told how to recognize me. However, he refused to talk about this.
When we left, he told me to prepare myself for two more days, with thinking and meditation—and prayer, if I feel so inclined. I am to meditate on the problem of human boredom. This will prepare me for the revelation he proposes to make.
When we got back—it was after five o’clock, and I was sleepy from the wine—he told me that he intended to take Kirsten out this evening to meet someone who can help him with his invention. I knew what he meant—that I could spend the evening in bed with Diana. I delivered his message to Kirsten, then went up to my room and fell asleep. I woke at about half past seven, took another half hour to wake up fully, and heard Cunningham going out with Kirsten. I went downstairs and knocked on her door. She was alone, but I somehow felt in no mood to take advantage of Kirsten’s absence. We sat and talked for a while about Cunningham, then she said she’d like to hear music, and we came up to my room and played records for a couple of hours. It was a curious situation. I wish I could read her mind. Sometimes I suspect that she doesn’t quite trust me—thinks I’m out for a casual love affair. Anyway, we both felt rather tired and subdued, and I didn’t feel like drinking again. When Kirsten came home, just after ten, I hadn’t even kissed her. I called to Kirsten that we were in my room; he came up, and didn’t seem in the least surprised to find us together. He was full of talk about Cunningham, who had introduced him to a Jewish music publisher; the man was coming back tomorrow to hear the Panharmonicon.
It amused me to notice that Kirsten’s presence seemed to create an intimacy between Diana and myself that had been absent when we were alone. I caught her looking at me several times with a kind of tenderness, and when she finally left, she found an opportunity for touching my hand for a moment.
Now, alone, I think about her, and realize that my feelings of the other day haven’t changed at all. I was afraid then that it was my usual sense of gratitude for a woman who gives herself to me. But it still seems preposterous that she should go off to sleep with another man. I actually feel married to her, instead of feeling that we’re deceiving her husband. Yet I like Kirsten. I wonder if he’d care much if Diana left him? He seems a cold-blooded fish. . . .
Nov. 21st.
Yesterday was a crowded day, and I realize it will take me several pages to write of it in detail. I begin to regret keeping this journal in such detail—it takes me hours every day to keep it up to date. And yet when I read back over the past few weeks, I’m not sorry that I started to describe my life in detail. Even if Cunningham vanished out of my life tomorrow, I’d be glad of the notes I’ve made about him. He puzzles me; I want to get to the bottom of him. There’s definitely something wrong. Power and weakness, knowledge and delusion, are so oddly mixed in him that I’d like to take him to pieces and make a minute analysis. For example, I can’t quite believe that my ‘natural’ vision of life is only a preparation for some occult insight. On an earlier page of Notebook 17, I wrote: ‘Unless the world is richer, unless it has other depths and dimensions, I loathe it.’ Cunningham would use this as evidence that I await some ‘revelation’. Yet I want my ‘richness’ to be natural, not supernatural.
Anyway, to return to what happened yesterday. This morning, I got a letter, addressed simply to ‘Gerard’, at this address. It was from the man I met in the restaurant the day before, and whose card I somehow mislaid. His name is Steve Radin, and he works for the Daily News, doing mostly celebrity interviews. I hadn’t, of course, told him my name when I gave him my address, but he overheard Cunningham calling me Gerard, so relied on his letter reaching me. The letter simply said that he would like to talk to me, and would I ring him at his office during the morning. I was curious, and went down to the phone immediately. His secretary said he hadn’t come in yet, but had left a message for me: if I rang, I was to say what time during the day it would be convenient for Mr Radin to call. I said any time. The secretary then said: ‘Mr Radin said he would like to see you alone.’ So I said I’d be alone all morning, but couldn’t guarantee the afternoon. The truth was that I was curious to know what it was all about, and wanted him to come as soon as possible.
He arrived an hour later—at about eleven. The first thing he said was ‘Are you alone?’ and then, ‘Is there any chance we might be interrupted?’ I understood he was asking about Cunningham, and I admitted there was a faint chance he might turn up. Radin promptly insisted that I go out with him to talk. He had a car there, and took me into a club in Soho. As we passed Farringdon Street, a taxi stopped alongside us, and to my astonishment I saw Father Carruthers[1] sitting in the back. He’s been in Italy all this year for his health, and I never expected to see the poor old boy alive again. We managed to wave before the lights changed.
[1] Father Carruthers. A Catholic priest, friend of Austin Nunne and Gertrude Quincey. At the time of Nunne’s murders, he was seriously ill and thought to be dying.
Radin took me into a club I didn’t know. It was almost deserted. He had refused to talk about Cunningham on the way there—only told me that he used to be a free-lance reporter, and now worked for the News, then we talked about Bill Payne, whom he seems to know quite well. But as soon as we were settled, with drinks, he plunged into the subject. He asked me if I realized that Cunningham was regarded by some people as a highly dangerous man. When I said no, he said: ‘I’m going to take a chance with you. I don’t know why, but I got the impression the other day that you’re not yet very involved with Cunningham. So I’m going to talk frankly to you about him,
and rely on you to make sure it never gets back to Cunningham.’ I promised him—I’d have promised anything, I was so curious by this time. I asked him in what way Cunningham is dangerous—whether he’s a criminal, a madman, or what? He said: ‘No, I don’t think so, although I wouldn’t like to swear to either. But he’s a professional corrupter and wrecker.’
What he then went on to tell me was almost as interesting as what Cunningham had been saying the day before. Radin claimed that, as a journalist, he had a curious way of anticipating stories. For example, he had known a man in various pubs around Chelsea, and as soon as he met him, had a conviction that this man would one day be ‘news’. The man was Neville Heath, and a few months later he murdered a woman in a Notting Hill hotel room. Radin said that this was not ‘second-sight’, but just the instinct of a good journalist. (I seem to remember that Bernard Shaw once saw the murderer Haigh in a South Kensington hotel, and predicted that Haigh would be hanged one day; Haigh had lost his temper over a child.) Anyway, Radin said that he had had the same feeling of ‘news’ ever since he met Cunningham. I asked him if he thought Cunningham would commit a murder, but he said no.
Before he would say any more, he asked me to tell him how I’d met Cunningham. I didn’t see any harm in it, so I told him pretty well everything—except the ‘sex magic’. I think the association with Oliver and Kirsten rather reflects credit on Cunningham anyway. I didn’t know how far I had a right to tell him Cunningham’s plans about the island, but he finally wormed it out of me.
But in exchange, he told me everything he knew about Cunningham, which was a lot.
Cunningham was apparently at Oxford for a while, where he caused considerable scandal by publishing volumes of pornographic verse; one, called Slimy Weapons, got him into the trouble that led to his being sent down. There was also some talk about his having curious sexual tendencies; a local girl who became infatuated with him got badly beaten up one night and two of her teeth knocked out. As she served in one of the cafés, this was rather noticeable. However, she refused to say anything against him. She was apparently fairly obviously pregnant when Cunningham had to leave Oxford. And yet—this surprised me most—it was general knowledge that Cunningham had homosexual tendencies; he hung around with a queer set, and apparently once boasted that he had sodomized a choir boy on the altar in one of the chapels. He was then very rich, and was noted for extravagance. He hung his rooms with expensive tapestries, and made a habit of wearing jewellery—particularly rings. But he was also apparently pretty tough. One night, a group of football-playing hearties decided to break up his rooms. He got wind of this, and pretended to go out. Actually, he waited in the room. When they broke in, he waited until they were all in—about a dozen beefy lads—then closed the door, and went for them all with a heavy stick. Radin told me this story with admiration—and apparently the exploit gave Cunningham a great reputation in the college. He closed the door and switched on the light, and the hearties thought they were in a trap until they realized they only had Cunningham to deal with. Then he went into them like a whirlwind, and the dozen of them couldn’t master him. I gather he broke several heads and managed to bruise pretty well all of them. When one of them managed to twist the stick away from him, he immediately grabbed a short club which he’d concealed, and went on. After five minutes of this, one of them managed to get the door open, and they all made a break for it. But a persistent rumour got around later that Cunningham had taken something—some kind of drug—that acted as a temporary stimulant (I must ask him about this one day). They said he was like a demon. Actually, I suspect that one violently angry man, particularly with a stick, is more than a match for a dozen sheepish louts.
Radin wasn’t sure about the ‘scandal’ that caused him to be sent down, except that it involved the book Slimy Weapons, and pretty open flaunting of the rules. There was also a story that he’d got his tutor drunk and inflicted some indignity with a can of paint, but this was never confirmed.
Apparently Cunningham spent the years just before the war travelling abroad and mountaineering. He is known as an excellent mountaineer, and a man with unusual physical endurance. When he was in India with Sir Harold Clunn, they broke a mountaineering record on one of the peaks, and Cunningham saved someone’s life by some extraordinary bravery. However, he apparently set out with his own team of climbers a couple of years later, and the whole thing was disastrous. Radin said that he thought Cunningham had no gift for command—he was too much an anarchist and a wild-man. Everyone quarrelled, the party split up, and finally three men of the splinter group fell into a crevasse and were buried by a landslide. Cunningham stood by and refused to help them, because he said they deserved whatever they got for rebelling against him. Two of them died before the others could dig them out. This caused something of a scandal at the time, and Cunningham was denounced in the papers, and thrown out of some clubs. There was talk of a prosecution, but he hurried off to South America and stayed there for a couple of years. There, apparently, he went in seriously for this black-magic lark. He went searching around New Mexico, in the Lawrence country, to find tribes who still practised human sacrifice. But again, I gather he made some pretty startling discoveries about Aztec and Maya remains, and I’m told that some things he discovered in the jungle are now in a museum in New York and are regarded as priceless.
This helps me to define what I find so hard to understand about Cunningham. Half the time he behaves like a spoilt child, and shouldn’t be allowed into civilized society. Yet he appears, under certain circumstances, to be genuinely capable of extraordinary self-discipline. Without this freakish element in his character—this tendency to raise hell and thumb his nose at society—I think he could easily be a great man. But he seems to need external challenges to get the best out of him. This makes me wonder whether a combination of my sense of purpose and Cunningham’s vitality couldn’t achieve something worth-while. . . . Is this perhaps why he wants my help?
To return: he had to leave Mexico, again after a scandal involving a death, and he returned to England just before the war. He professed to find politics vulgar and boring, and was quoted as saying that he didn’t object in the least to Hitler’s cruelty, but that he couldn’t bear his commonplace mind.
When war broke out, he apparently served in the army for six months—as a private, oddly enough—and was then discharged on medical grounds. Radin met him in Fleet Street shortly after this. Radin himself was a conscientious objector, and was about to be sent to some awful labour camp in Wales. Cunningham told him that he ought to have spoken to him about it, and hinted that he knew of drugs that could produce the effect of a disease that would lead inevitably to discharge. Cunningham wasn’t specific, but Radin thought he had ‘worked his ticket’ in this way.
He didn’t then see Cunningham again until after the war. Cunningham apparently spent the war years in the north of Scotland, where he bought himself a large house, gave himself a title, and divided his time equally between drinking and practising black magic. His house got itself such a bad name among the villagers that even ten years later, when Radin visited the place on another assignment, he was told that it was haunted by demons, and that no one would go past it after dark.
His only other news of Cunningham during the war came from a Sunday newspaper that revived the controversy about the Loch Ness monster. Cunningham wrote an article for this paper in which he declared that the monster was not a survival from the Jurassic era, but had been ‘conjured up’ by the witches of Boleskin in the time of Charles the Second. Cunningham pointed out that there were no references to the monster before this time, and hinted that he had some ‘inside knowledge’ that confirmed his suggestions. He also hinted that there were still active witch cults in remote parts of the British Isles—and again let it be understood that he had some secret knowledge. His article created an unusual amount of controversy—considering its nonsensical nature—and Cunn
ingham gained a kind of overnight notoriety. This led to his acquaintance with Lord Belmont, who was supposed to be mostly concerned with archaeology, but who was actually studying witch cults and magic. Radin covered the scandal when Belmont’s daughter Clara ran away with a Mediterranean smuggler, and was caught just before they got to Gretna Green, so met her on several occasions. He described her as a very pretty girl, but with an extremely weak mouth and chin, and a fancy that she was an intellectual and a defender of women’s rights (her elder sister got herself half-killed by some American soldier during the war, and Belmont was perhaps stricter with her than necessary). When she met Cunningham, she was drinking heavily and sleeping around as much as she could. For some weird reason, Cunningham agreed to marry her—Radin thinks it was misplaced chivalry. At all events, they managed to get married in Edinburgh before Belmont found out about it, and threw a tremendous tantrum. He even went out looking for Cunningham with a revolver, and wrote his daughter letters saying that Cunningham was insane and a pervert. It was at this point that Radin met Cunningham in London; Cunningham consulted him about whether he thought he could get heavy damages from Belmont for defamation of character. Radin said he thought not because (a) the court would probably sympathize with the father whose daughter has eloped for the second time, and (b) Cunningham’s character might easily be blackened by the defence lawyer if he took the trouble to read up old newspaper reports of the mountain-climbing incident. It was at this point, Radin said, that he suspected Cunningham was losing his money and was getting worried.