Warlock and Friends

Coincidental with ordering The Tregerthen Horror I was reading the biography of The Lamberts by Andrew Motion (am I the only reader who gave up on his biography of Philip Larkin as I found it too dull?). I didn't realise that some of the characters appear in both books, including Cecil Gray, Michael Ayrton and old AC of course, albeit tangentially. The lives of Constant and Kit Lambert were mostly a sad story of talented and successful people self-destructing through alcohol and drugs, Constant in the world of classical music as a composer and critic and Kit, together with Chris Stamp, as manager of The Who in the early days - he also helped oversee the writing of Tommy. I've listened to some of Constant's music, but it isn't really my cup of tea.

Motion writes that Constant (bottom picture) became increasingly immersed in the occult and I was interested to see that one of his good friends was composer and critic Cecil Gray, (encountered in an earlier blog post here), who is also said to have dabbled. Constant met Gray through Philip Heseltine (1894-1930), who wrote music and criticism under the name Peter Warlock, the most famous of many pseudonyms and is a fascinating character in his own right. There are also links between Warlock and Crowley, although it seems they never met.

Heseltine/Warlock (top picture) was much more serious in his occult studies. From early 1925 he lived with the composer EJ Moeran opposite the village pub in Eynsford, a time when the Warlock legend evolved of a hedonistic, sexually voracious toper and larger-than-life-character who appeared in various guises in several novels including those by Lawrence (Women in Love) and Huxley (Antic Hay). Visitors to Enynsford included Constant Lambert and Nina Hamnett (see earlier posts). His drinking anthology Merry-Go-Down was published by Mandrake  Press, who also published works by AC; Warlock was a friend of poet and publisher Victor Neuberg, a former lover of Crowley. Another of his friends was artist Adrian Allinson, whose louche portrait of Alan Odle adorns the cover of Decadent London (soon to be republished).

Warlock died on 17 December 1930 at 12a Tite Street, Chelsea, a street once home to Wilde and Whistler amongst others, by coal-gas poisoning, generally believed to have been suicide. Seven months later a baby was born who grew up to be the plummy-voiced provocateur Brian Sewell, famous for his Evening Standard art criticism and racy autobiographies. At some point after the composer's death Crowley acquired his copy of Levi's History of Magic (See Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism ed. Henrik Bogdan & Martin Starr OUP 2012 p.253 n.9).

Crowley also wrote in Magic Without Tears (ch.XX): 'You must on no account attempt to use the squares given in the Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage until you have succeeded in the Operation. More, unless you mean to perform it, and are prepared to go to any length to do so, you are a fool to have the book in your possession at all. Those squares are liable to to get loose and do things on their own initiative; and you won't like it. The late Philip Heseltine, young composer of genius, used on of these squares to get his wife to return to him. He engraved it neatly on his arm. I don't know how he proceeded to set to work; but his wife came back all right, and a very short time afterwards he killed himself.'

According to Motion, Cecil Gray hero-worshipped Warlock - he wrote his biography in 1931 and co-edited the controversial music journal Sackbut (1918-21) - his 'submission' typified by 'his willingness to share Heseltine's interest in sinister aspects of the occult. He was prepared, as Constant never was, to set aside the constraints of practical good sense. Gray's daughter Pauline remembers - without being able to provide details - that her father practised black magic, and that he was sympathetic to Heseltine's view that "if one were to make use of a certain magical formula believing in it implicitly, in order to obtain something which one knew to be otherwise unobtainable, that one's powers of attaining it would be increased and one could almost inevitably attain it." Gray and Heseltine usually created those formulae to inflict distress on an enemy,  or to help further an amorous adventure, but Constant could never quite share the spirit in which they worked. The (to him) ridiculous figure of Aleister Crowley loomed too large in his mind's eye, and any efforts he made to invoke supernatural aid were usually devoted to hilarious ends.'

Pauline Gray's book about her father is Cecil Gray - His Life and Notebooks (Thames, 1989). On p.29 she describes a letter from Brigit Patmore to HD (American poet Hilda Doolittle who had lived with Gray on Cornwall and had a child with him, which he refused to support) about Cecil and his circle: 'He and Philip were involved with a particularly unpleasant group of people which included the infamous Aleister Crowley and were smoking hashish.' She also notes (p62): Cecil once told me of an incident which occurred in 1918 or 1919 when he and Philip and some friends pretended to 'offer' up a naked young woman as a sacrifice on the altar of a quiet country church. In the middle of the 'ceremony' a sudden bolt of lightning hit the church tower, sending the participants fleeing in terror. Cecil and Philip's preoccupations in the occult world waned somewhat after that!'

Michael Ayrton, in a broadcast quoted by Pauline Gary said: 'I remember once coming out of a pub in Albany Street with Constant, who said, "I will now produce a Scottish midget on a tricycle' and believe it or not, a midget in full Scottish costume on a tricycle came riding down Albany Street. It made him laugh uproariously. Cecil, I think, had a somewhat deeper feeling for magic than Constant did, or certainly a less hilarious one ... They were non-believers in the strict sense of occultists today, but they had a sense of the occult which is, I think, one of the ways in which derives some kind of inspiration for whatever art one produces, especially if flavoured with humour and not taken too seriously, and both Cecil and Constant were masters at that.'

The Lamberts is another book with no footnotes or references (from Faber), making tracking down quotes very difficult. I get the impression that Kit was the Lambert that Motion was least interested in and he's not that keen on rock music: apparently punk happened in 1979 and Pete Townshend's guitar smashing antics were influenced by an artist called Gustav Metzke [sic].

Gray was later criticised by the composer's friends for propagating the idea that Heseltine/Warlock was a Jekyll and Hyde character, destroyed by his 'dark side'. Reading a biography by Barry Smith (OUP 1994) it's clear that Warlock was a profoundly troubled manic depressive, who could be incredibly sociable, generous spirited and funny (although he hounded certain music critics he disliked with a disturbing fervour). With a school boy's humour he was skilled at writing limericks and once compiled a list of classical composers with 'amusing' names - something I once did with a musician friend of mine ('and now on Radio 3, an evening of Schytte') - including Johannes Bacfart, Johann Fux, Andreas Crappius, Samuel Scheidt, Nicolas Ponce and Antoine Piis. He was a major figure in the revival of Early Music and his works, especially the Capriol Suite are still performed today; he's mainly known for his songs. The Warlock Society can be found here.

Gary wrote an autobiography Musical Chairs (1948) - a quick skim read revealed nothing of his 'occult' interests - Crowley is mentioned once when Gray visits Sicily and notes that the 'famous mage' later achieved notoriety at Cefalu (p.155, also see earlier post here). The biography of mutual friend of Gray and Lambert, Michael Ayrton (mentioned in another post) claims that Gray knew Crowley and introduced him to Ayrton, but this does not merit a reference in his autobiography (AC died in 1947), which you thought it might have done.

I've said before that Crowley is a Zelig-like figure who pops up in the most unlikely places and is name checked in a large number of biographies and autobiographies of the early-to-mid-twentieth century, often spuriously, to add lustre and a whiff of the arcane or risqué to an author's recollections (just one example is Henry Miller's claim to have met Crowley in Paris in the mid-1930s and lent him money, and there are many more).

Hilary Spurling in her biography of Anthony Powell (2017) has this to say about Gray: 'Taciturn, morose, occasionally manic, Gray was another heavy drinker, a Calvinist Scot and practitioner of black magic with a colossal ego and a cocaine habit. Like many misogynists of his destructive sort he devoted disproportionate amounts of time to the pursuit of women, or in his own words, "painted and powdered whores, and perfumed bitches." He was married three times and said before the death of his third wife, "While I do not defend the practice of wife-killing, I can understand better than most the state of mind that leads to it."

In his defence, he did once describe the Second World War as being 'fought between two second-rate watercolour painters - Hitler and Churchill.'  In 1941 Gray wrote a play about Gilles de Rais with 'decorations' by Michael Ayrton (see title page above). Crowley was invited to speak, on 3 February 1930, at the Oxford University Poetry Society and chose as his subject Gilles de Rais; on hearing of the engagement the chaplain of Oxford cancelled the event; ever the self-publicist, AC later had the text of his talk published as The Banned Lecture (1930).

Constant Lambert died at the age of 45 in 1951 from broncho-pneumonia and undiagnosed diabetes - his ashes are buried in Brompton Cemetery. There is a curious incident recorded by his friend Anthony Powell, who recalled that they regularly enjoyed long telephone conversations between 11.30 and 12 at night and that the day after Constant's death the phone rang at the usual time, but when Powell answered it there was a click and the line went dead, as if the person at the other end had hung up. Lambert appears as the composer Hugh Morland in Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, which also incidentally features a fictionalised Crowley as Dr Trelawney. Powell's memoirs (including his meetings with Crowley) are essential reading for anyone fascinated by the Soho and Fitzrovia of the Twenties, Thirties and Forties.