Arthur Calder Marshall and Aleister Crowley

With reference to the earlier post in which Julian Maclaren-Ross recounted meeting Arthur Calder Marshall at a party in the 1940s I discovered that Calder Marshall had written an autobiography The Magic of My Youth in which Crowley features heavily. It's a very readable, amusing and interesting account that should be read by anyone interested in Crowley and his associates; there are other moving accounts of strange characters at Oxford and Calder Marshall comes across as a decent chap.

As a youth in the West Sussex village of Steyning he befriended an eccentric local poet and publisher who he calls Vickybird who dominates much of the book - he was in fact an earlier friend and sexual partner of Crowley, Victor Neuberg (see Jean Overton Fuller The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuberg, 1965 - I see that my old university has a Neuberg Collection).

Calder Marshall grows up familiar with the notoriety of Crowley, a fairly constant presence in the press of the period and eventually gets to meet him in 1929. This, of course, contradicts Maclaren-Ross's memories, where he writes that CM had not yet met AC in the 1940s. Two encounters with the Great Beast take place, one in the famous Eiffel Tower restaurant in Percy Street and another during a period when AC was living in the village of Knockholt (1929-30) in a cottage with his then wife Maria de Miramar.

Calder Marshall paints a suitably sinister picture of Crowley who appears to be trying to ply him with brandy and hypnotise him into possibly working for him and staying the night, when Lord knows what devilry might take place - but he manages to steel himself to leave.

'I looked across at the old man bent over the table with the brandy bottle at his elbow. He was scowling as much at me as at Eleanor [CM's girlfriend]. "What would you say we have been doing, sir?" I asked.
"I'd say I'd been wasting my time," he said, and he picked up the brandy bottle and carried it to the cupboard. "But at least, sir," I said, "I must thank you for saving a great deal of mine." 'p.193

Calder Marshall had also asked Crowley to deliver a lecture at Oxford which he agreed to do, choosing medieval child murderer Gilles de Rain as his subject. The lecture never took place as the university authorities banned it - Crowley later had it printed as The Banned Lecture (1930).

The book is also worth reading as yet another account of Fitzrovia and its pubs and characters, where he encounters other Crowley associates such as Betty May and Nina Hamnett.

Extracts from book were read by Alan Rickman on BBC radio in 1985 and thanks to the miracle of YouTube you can hear all of them - quality is not great but audible. Here's a link to episode 5 where he finally meets Crowley (whose surname Rickman pronounces correctly).