by Colin Wilson
As I left him, he told me that he intended to get Carlotta into a trance again at midnight, to find out how successful he has been in defeating his ‘enemies’. I immediately said that Diana had declared that she wouldn’t take part in any more magical ceremonies. He said: ‘I hope you don’t feel the same?’ I said no . . . although I realized that I was being a coward. There’s nothing I want less than to have to spend another two hours listening to Cunningham deceiving himself with gibberish and imagining he’s conjuring up spirits. However, he said he wouldn’t need any help tonight, as he only proposes to hypnotize her.
When I left, I noticed that Gertrude’s car was parked round the corner, so I presume she is still nursing Kirsten’s genius.
Dec. 1st.
Odd things happening. Yesterday I had a visit from Radin, who asked me if I would go with him to see a man in St John’s Wood. Out of curiosity, I agreed. On the way there, Radin offered me money—five pounds a week—to keep him informed about Cunningham. Naturally, I refused.
The interview was brief. Wise was there, and a tall, skinny man in a Scots kilt, to whom I took an instant dislike. The skinny man—whose name is Doughty—told me that he had reason to believe that Cunningham intends to publish various secrets of his magical order—secrets that Cunningham had once been pledged not to reveal. I suppose this must be the order that Cunningham once tried to dominate. I said I had no idea what Cunningham intended (the man’s bullying manner annoyed me). He then asked me—as if he was a prosecuting counsel and I was in the dock—if I had had any experience of Cunningham as a ‘mage’. Since I had already told Radin something about our experience the other night, I didn’t try to deny this. He immediately began to ask me questions about the ceremony. I hadn’t told Radin about the ‘sex-magic’ part, but it now slipped out—to Radin’s evident delight. Doughty shouted: ‘Just as I thought—he’s deliberately distorting our ceremonial with his filthy abominations.’ By this time, I was just about ready to explode. So I said that, if he wanted to know, I thought Cunningham’s magic was all self-deception and mumbo-jumbo, and that I thought anyone who took magic seriously should be put in a lunatic asylum. At this he smiled very thinly and very wickedly, and said: ‘Thank you, sir. You have told me what I wanted to know. Good-day to you.’ I strode out without even speaking to him. But I was also in a filthy temper with Radin, who was bursting with curiosity about the ‘sex-magic’, and obviously wanted to flatter and propitiate me. So he began by saying that he thought it was all rubbish too, and that Doughty was a bit mad—however, he had a great deal of money and influence in certain circles, and no journalist could afford to ignore the possibility of a good story, etc. By this time, I was almost bursting with loathing. So I said: ‘Look here. I don’t care if Cunningham is mad, or even if he’s a crook. But he’s given me no reason to sell him—either to you or Mr Doughty.’ By this time, we were near Baker Street tube, so I insisted on getting out and taking a train—claiming I had other things to do before I went home. Radin refused to be offended, said that he would keep in touch with me, and that I wouldn’t regret being frank, etc.—and drove off.
Dec. 3rd.
I’ve been working hard on my book for the past two days, and so have had no time for keeping this journal. Cunningham has been around several times in high good spirits. He certainly knows a tremendous amount about magic and its history. I am adding a chapter on the great charlatans—Cagliostro, Saint-Germain, etc. I intended to include Nostradamus, and for that purpose got Laver’s book on him from the Whitechapel Library. But I’m amazed to discover the almost creepy accuracy of his prophecies. I was glad to have a chance to discuss all this with Cunningham. His view is that concentration on any faculty will develop that faculty, even if it had not existed before. He cites the case of the Fox sisters, the founders of spiritualism—how, as soon as they made table-rapping fashionable in the States, the craze spread all over America, although it was almost unknown before.
Nostradamus predicts the end of the world for 1999. I hope he isn’t as accurate about this as he was about the date of the French Revolution, etc. The only consolation is that he seemed to be most accurate when predicting things in the near future, and became less so with more distant epochs.
I have also decided to include Crowley in my charlatan chapter. Cunningham knew him well in the thirties, and is of the opinion that Crowley definitely possessed certain powers, although most of his magic was wishful thinking. This is the thing that startles me about Cunningham—that he can be so detached and sceptical about magic, while apparently holding the most fantastic beliefs. He criticized a sentence of mine in which I said that a kind of mental blindness is necessary to swallow the extravagances of Cagliostro. He said: ‘My dear boy, you need hardly any credulity to become interested in the occult. The minimum working hypothesis is very simple. The first thing you know is that you’re bored and tied hand and foot. Everybody agrees about that. The only other thing you need to accept is that there are great powers in the universe, outside yourself, and that in rare moments you can make contact with them and feel like a god. As soon as you study the methods of making contact, you become interested in magic.’
The magicians are the ideal subject for the last chapter of my book, because they stand in the way of a simple, wholesale solution of the problem. It is tempting to agree with Schopenhauer and the Buddha that all men are adept at self-delusion, and that there is no reality except death. But the magicians make it apparent that this would be an over-simplification. They represent such a strange blending of illusion and reality. Is it possible to believe in illusions so fiercely that they turn into realities? I am sure it is. By the power of total belief, we summon up powers we didn’t know we possessed. This must be the answer to all magic, spiritualism and the rest. It is the summoning of the unknown life forces from our own depths.
Later: Was seriously distracted from my book when Cunningham met Radin on the stairs, and threw him all the way down. Radin was on his way to visit me. He went off swearing to sue Cunningham for assault and battery; I expected him to return with a policeman, but he didn’t. Cunningham claimed that he had received a sudden ‘psychic message’ to the effect that he must hurry to my flat to prevent some serious mischief. I wish I could believe everything he tells me; half the time I suspect it’s wishful thinking.
But later on, he showed me an interesting trick. Diana came in very tired after doing the shopping, and I persuaded her to go and sleep. Cunningham came about half an hour later, and I heard him throwing Radin downstairs. We made tea, and sat talking about magic, fairly softly, so as not to wake Diana. He suddenly offered to give me a demonstration of ‘psychic force’. He took off his shoes, and crept into the room where Diana lay asleep. He stood at the side of the bed, stretched out his hand over her head, and concentrated on her. After a few moments, she rolled over on to her back, and her lips parted. Suddenly, her hips began to move, and it was quite obvious to me that she was having a sexual dream. Cunningham concentrated more, bending over her, and she began to look worried. Then she woke up, saw Cunningham bending over her, and shrieked. It took me about five minutes to calm her. Cunningham went out of the room, smiling to himself, and I explained that he had offered to give me a demonstration of psychic force (as a matter of fact, I felt embarrassed, and wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d lost her temper and walked out on me—I wouldn’t have allowed it if I’d known what Cunningham intended to do). However, when she calmed down, she said that she had been dreaming that she was being embraced by a tall, blond man who reminded her of me. Suddenly, he began to change into Cunningham, and at this point she woke up.
Cunningham told me that this was a simple trick of thought transference and suggestion, that anyone can master with a little effort. He claims that people can communicate on several different levels, besides ordinary conversation. We all have the potentiality of becoming telepaths. He thinks that, in the next s
tage of evolution of the human race, certain ‘magical’ faculties will be quite common—intuitions of danger, telepathy, seeing around corners and through walls, etc.
All this strikes me as of immense importance. Even in my family—about the least psychic I’ve ever known—I’ve heard of odd things that can’t be explained except by some kind of thought transference—for example, my father suffering my mother’s labour pains, although she was a hundred miles away, and the baby wasn’t expected for another fortnight—so he could have had no idea when her labour would begin. This kind of thing is fairly common, I believe, and supports Cunningham’s contention that all ‘paranormal phenomena’ like second-sight, clairvoyance, precognition, etc., are simply examples of faculties that will seem perfectly ordinary to our remote descendants. I also remember examples in Jim Corbett’s books on tiger-hunting—how he would suddenly be quite certain that a tiger was waiting for him on a particular stretch of road, although there was no concrete evidence to account for his certainty. This, I think, is also fairly common—that a man who spends a great deal of his life meeting certain kinds of danger develops a ‘sixth sense’ about the danger. This sixth sense is partly unconscious observation; but I do not think this accounts for all such instances.
The thing that irritates me is that these faculties lie so close to us, and yet I remain encased in this stupid, insensitive body, and there seems to be no way of escape.
Dec. 4th.
The talk with Oliver about boredom seems to have crystallized something in me, and I have been sitting around all day in a curious state of depression; no, the right word is oppression, a sense of gathering storm. I walk up and down, look out of the window, read a few pages of a Moravia novel, and feel my senses coated with a thin, sticky boredom. No doubt Moravia is not the ideal person to read under these circumstances, since his favourite topic is boredom, and he writes about his dyspepsia as if it was a universal condition or a mystical insight. This is the trouble with all these apostles of suicide and nausea—they all write with a naïve egoism, assuming that their weakness is universal.
And yet my misery alternates with moments of intense certainty, when it seems to me that, like Arjuna, I was born to conquer.
I understand, I understand it all—the unfulfilment, the meaninglessness; the ennui. I know that our basic experience of the world is of pointlessness, matter leading back to itself, denying the reality of mind. I contain in myself all the most suicidal pessimists of the past hundred and fifty years, from Werther and Childe Harold down to the latest hero of Moravia or Beckett; yet in spite of all this, I am the most incorrigible optimist I know. The men who can do something for this age will recognize one another; the others do not matter. I know that we shall finally create a race of men who are incapable of boredom, men in whom values and vitality are synonymous, who never find their appetite for life diminishing, negating the values of yesterday.
But I am tired. And this tension oppresses me. I wish it would rain.
Jan. 15th, Shannon Cottage, Galway.
It has been more than a month since I last wrote in this journal. It arrived this morning in a parcel, together with proofs of the extracts that will appear in the Sunday Star. The extracts they have chosen are stupid and unrepresentative, but at least they might counteract some of the stupidities that have been quoted in the other newspapers. So much has happened in this last month that I’ve had little time for writing, although even so, I managed to post off the manuscript of Methods and Techniques of Self-Deception four days ago, and this morning received the hundred pounds advance that Lloyd promised me. Also, the local representative of the Sunday Star tramped out here last night to tell me that Cunningham is definitely in South America, and to get my comments.
The day after my last entry, Gertrude came to see me. She told me that she had seen Cunningham with Christine, and that she was convinced that his intentions were definitely ‘wicked’. I dissuaded her from going to see Christine’s parents, and said that I would speak to Cunningham myself about it.
Cunningham wasn’t at all pleased when I went to see him. He looked as if he was suffering from a hangover (actually, as I discovered later, he was waiting for a delivery of drugs, and was in a state of tension because they were delayed). He had a violent outburst about interfering women—about Diana as well as Gertrude. He said: ‘I will tell you frankly, Gerard, I’m disappointed in you. It’s one thing to steal another man’s wife to sleep with her, but quite another to decide to marry her. You’ll be unfaithful to her within a fortnight of being married. Why can’t you be like Oliver, and remain a lone wolf?’ I told him about Gertrude’s suspicions about Christine, and he readily admitted that she would consider his intentions wicked. His intention was—quite openly—to get Oliver to overcome his inhibitions about Christine. What is more, he had carried out the first part of his plan—had Christine in to tea, and told her that Oliver was actually romantically in love with her, and hoped to marry her as soon as she was old enough. He said she was obviously overwhelmed and delighted, but pretended not to believe him. She was too shy to see Oliver again, but had agreed to come back to tea the following day.
I had to agree that this didn’t sound too wicked—on the contrary. I know Oliver well enough to know that he wouldn’t take advantage of the child; on the other hand, to see her again would probably have an excellent effect on his work, and I could see no reason why he shouldn’t marry her in five years’ time if she still wanted to. So I agreed to do what I could to help. That is, I went down to see Oliver, and told him that Christine had been to see me and wanted to see him again. His first reaction was rage—he stormed and swore, and called the poor child names that made her sound like the whore of Babylon. I then laid it on thick—told him about her devotion to him, how she had tried to contact him through me—and finally pointed out that the fact that he had returned to live in the same area proved that he subconsciously wanted to see her again. The result, as I expected, was to calm him down. He asked me to go away so he could think about it, and I left him in an obvious state of excitement and perplexity. I didn’t tell him that she was invited for tea the following day. But Oliver came to see me the next morning, saying that he had thought it over, and could see no reason for refusing to be friendly with the child, although he had no intention of assuming their old relations.
There was, however, a delicate situation that had to be faced. Christine’s father had separated from her mother—she got sick of his drunken rages, and called in two of her brothers to bully him. It ended in the father stamping out of the house, and the mother suing him for maintenance.
But although this apparently simplified Christine’s life—it was her father who once had Oliver arrested on a charge of raping her—it actually made things more difficult. He was alleging that his quarrels with his wife were about the children’s morals, and that she was no fit guardian for them. Christine was his favourite child, and he was trying to get her away from her mother. This idea horrified Christine. If her father found out about Oliver and Cunningham, he would probably use it to prove that she was under ‘dangerous influences’. So it was important that she should be on her best behaviour until her father gave up the idea of having her to live with him.
At all events, Christine came to tea—I wasn’t there, but Cunningham told me about it—and finally went downstairs to see Oliver. I gather there was a great reconciliation scene, that ended with Christine sobbing on Oliver’s shoulder, and Oliver promising that he would never leave her again. Cunningham was delighted by all this. He obviously expected that a Lolita situation was the next obvious development. I didn’t disabuse him of this idea.
The next important development was that Kirsten found out about Diana. I hadn’t seen much of him for several days—I was working hard, and I gather that he was working on his opera for the Washington Opera Group (I note from this week’s Radio Times that some of his chamber music is
being done in the Thursday concert).
One day, I met him on the stairs at Cunningham’s, and asked him how things were going. He gave me a most odd look, and then said quietly: ‘You don’t have to try to deceive me any more, you know. I know about Diana.’ I felt embarrassed about this, but since he knew, decided I would rather explain it to him. So I asked him if he’d let me explain, and we went up to his room. I noticed immediately that he wasn’t angry. And when I saw the state of his room—incredibly tidy, with a neat pile of newly-laundered washing on the table, and not a speck of dust anywhere—it wasn’t difficult to guess the reason. Not that I believe there’s any romantic relation between Kirsten and Gertrude; I’m sure she feels that she is helping a great musician as impersonally as Nadezha von Meck helped Tchaikovsky, and is revelling in the feeling of selflessness. Still, this made it all much easier; I told Kirsten about the bookmaking type, and this seemed to please him. He showed a definite attitude of bitterness about Diana. When I said I wanted to marry her, he asked me how I could ever be sure she wouldn’t treat me as she treated him. Finally, he ended by admitting that he now felt better off than ever before, and that he was glad it was all over.