being just contaminates the void

Some of these essays were more interesting to me than others, of course! I really enjoyed the section on “Women’s Occulture.” Caroline Tully breaks down Irish actress and Golden Dawn member Florence Farr’s channelled/imagined writings about mummies in the British Museum, comparing them with the archaeological realities. Andrew Radford analyses the critique of Crowley in Dion Fortune’s The Winged Bull and lays out its conservative and heteronormative view of ideal sexuality. Dennis Denisoff takes an interesting tack on Pamela Colman Smith (artist of the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck) and how synaesthesia played a role in her work.

Somewhat less interesting to me (but maybe interesting to you) were chapters on Annie Besant’s internal struggles with Theosophy, the impact of occultism on Victorian science-fiction, and the Theosophists’ attempts to have paintings made of their “Ascended Masters” by telepathically beaming the correct images into the artists’ minds (I would have been more into this if there had been more pictures included, but they only showed a couple).

I liked how many lesser-known works were quoted or discussed here, which led me to seek out a bunch of books I otherwise wouldn’t have thought to try, such as the novels of David Lindsay (which sound appealingly weird) and the pseudonymous Ghost Land: or, Researches into the Mysteries of Occultism.

Check this out if you like gothic and magical weirdness from this period!

They Return at Evening Herbert Russell Wakefield

Case in point, I picked this 1928 anthology of ghost stories up because it contains the short story “He Cometh and He Passeth By,” which the above book described as “one of the finest inter-war stories of black magic.” It is, in fact, pretty good, with a believably sinister magical hook and a number of well-turned lines like this:

It seemed to Bellamy that someone was developing wavy, wicked little films far back in his brain, and a voice suddenly whispered in his ear with a vile sort of shyness, ‘He cometh and he passeth by!’

The others are mostly quite serviceable, and even the less interesting ones usually have a sentence or two that hits the spot, but they’re marred by some pretty unpleasant misogyny (particularly in “That Dieth Not”, although perhaps excusable as being in character for the wife-murdering narrator). The racism has one florid passage that made me laugh to think about how the borders of whiteness have changed:

What a region! I have cruised the Mediterranean fairly extensively, and it is no Sea for me. What merits the Southern Latins may once have possessed is a matter of opinion; that they retain any today seems to me untenable. A breed of pimps, parasites, and horse-torturers, the choicest surviving examples of that cretin civilisation which is Catholicism’s legacy to the world. And it has always seemed to me that members of races vastly their intellectual and moral superiors become debased and degraded when brought into contact with them, though I know the region attracts the worst.

Dude couldn’t even enjoy himself in the Riviera without a Lovecraftian crashout.

Character development felt uneven and mostly rather bad. The owner of the house is Scylla Taverner—short for Drusilla, and as she says, she’s sometimes a witch and sometimes a bitch. Not the worst name in the book but still: lol. Scylla somewhat resembles a real person, but she’s also the only woman in the group and therefore everyone else has to act like she has the proverbial beer-flavoured nipples.

Sadly, although Butts was bisexual (god I’m trying so hard not to be juvenile about her name but it’s killing me inside), this book does not pass the Bechdel test.

The American, Carston, has two personality traits—he’s American, and therefore a rootless dolt who could never possibly understand the beauty of Englishness, and he’s in love with Scylla.

Scylla’s brother Felix is a nonentity until the latter half, when it’s revealed that what he really wants is to be a Lost Generation bon vivant full of romantic despair. Ok.

There’s Clarence, who’s gay and crazy. There’s his boyfriend, Picus—

Now, hang on. This is very important. Did you notice that name? Picus is Latin for woodpecker. There’s a mythological king named Picus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses who gets turned into a woodpecker.

Got that?

Are you sure? Let’s go over it again.

What you need to know about Picus is that he’s rather like a bird, you see. Hence the nickname. Quite a lot like a bird, old chap. Bit of an avian sort, what. Flies about and such. Do you follow me? Very symbolically like a bird. Metaphorically too. Quite tall. Hollow bones. Eats bugs. Bird-type fellow, him.

Okay, that’s all you need to know about Picus.

Yes, okay, sure, he has some kind of undescribed war trauma, and his mom committed suicide, and he’s in love with Scylla (free bingo square), but the thing Butts really wants you to be dead clear on is that Picus is like a bird. I lost track of how many times this was repeated in the text. It got to the point where I couldn’t even form a mental image of Picus except as the Bird Person from Rick and Morty:

Oh, and there’s Ross. Ross paints. Literally doesn’t do anything else. I think we’re supposed to be impressed by his self-sufficiency in not having any personal desires.

Out of this lot, I found myself often sympathising with Carston (despite his unpleasant obsession with Scylla) because at least he correctly points out that these people are a snobby clique of self-important losers. This was very naughty of me as a reader, and Butts took care to set me straight. Much of the book is written in third-person stream-of-consciousness, but unlike Joyce or Woolf, Butts just can’t resist editorialising what the characters should be thinking:

From a window seat he saw their bodies straining to be away. And hated it. [...] The american [sic] appears to the english everything that is implied by saying over-sensitive, touchy, or abnormally quick to take offence. Our reaction is usually bewilderment, grief that our intentions have been misunderstood. Followed by a desire to give them something to cry about. Carston thought that they had seen him, could not have understood that no one was seen in that room. And they had not seen him. If they had, they would have supposed that he was there not to be seen.

That last construction, appealing to the subjunctive they would have, appears again later: “They had not let him into their lives. They would not believe his innocence. [...] He felt very lonely. It did not cross his head that they would believe what he told them. Still less that it did not matter whether they believed him or not.”

And:

How many years had he been living in this chinese box of tricks? If he could have believed in their belief of the possibility of a possible sanctity, gone down to them and said: “Here is something that may be precious,” he would have walked into their hearts. But that would not have served him, because he did not want their hearts. Did not want hearts. Wanted scalps.

If this exploration of alternatives had been expanded to other characters besides Carston, I might have dug it more—the Grail legend does indeed have that sense of wondering what would have happened if you had acted differently in a critical moment.

But instead it just comes off like the author trying to protect her precious English characters from appearing like assholes, as if nobody but Carston is making any missteps. She can’t even just trust the reader and let us deduce for ourselves that Carston is communicating poorly and being unfair to his hosts. It kept me from connecting with anybody, because one minute you’re immersed in a person’s thought process and the next you’re yanked out and reassured that this character’s thoughts are simply wrong. Made me keep everyone at arm’s length.

Perhaps that’s the idea, one of those dreary literary ways of undoing the power of the novel for thematic reasons. Good job, I guess?

An interesting but somewhat incoherent thing you might notice in the above quotes is that for much of the novel, Butts uses lowercase letters for nationalities, but not for the names of places. So we get “english” and “american” and “european” but “Dorset”, “London”, “Paris”, and so on.

This seems to suggest an internationalist outlook that seeks to minimise the differences between people of different backgrounds, but that’s precisely not what the book is saying: Butts puts it to us that Americans and the English are extremely different, and even after Carston’s redemption arc of sorts, he still isn’t accepted into the Taverners’ circle and doesn’t want to be.

The sentiments about the English landscape are nauseatingly Völkisch and often just selfish or fatuous—Butts wants people to get back to the land but has contempt for tourists and hikers who come from the city to “spoil” her precious countryside, like girl which is it??

Confusingly, later in the book she starts to irregularly drop this lowercase tic, and we get “russian” and then “Russian”, “french” and then “French” in the same chapter. It’s not linked to any particular character’s viewpoint, and I couldn’t make out any rhyme or reason to it. Would have driven me nuts if I were copy-editing.

With all that said...after about the midpoint of the book I kinda got into it. It sometimes reminded me of Evelyn Waugh but without the viciousness and humour, although in all fairness here’s a moment that did make me laugh, a series of internal questions from Felix in Paris that sound like 1920s Google searches:

How to pretend to be the devil you are afraid to be. How to be a grand seigneur on nothing a year. How to be yourself when you do not know that self, and are afraid to find out. How to get tight when you don’t do it regularly.

The book also sometimes reminded me of a more tolerable Djuna Barnes. The prose is crisp and often lyrical but not suffocatingly dense, and characters have mostly plausible conversations rather than declaiming speeches at one another. Scylla does get one monologue that felt like an actually useful insight into the book’s viewpoint:

“If the materialist’s universe is true, not a working truth to make bridges with and things, we are a set of blind factors in a machine. And no passion has any validity and no imagination. They are just little tricks of the machine. It either is so, or it isn’t. If you hold that it isn’t, you corrupt your intellect by denying certain facts. If you stick to the facts as we have them, life is a horror and an insult. Nothing has any worth, but to tickle our sensations and oil the machine. There is no value in our passions and perceptions, or final differences between a life full of design and adventure and a life crawled out in a palace or a slum. [...] But notice what is happening now people have become used to the idea. [...] Everyone gets the age’s temper. With results on their conduct—’Why be good any more’ they say, and the youngest ones not that. [...] Even when I was new we tried the bad to see if it might not be good. But the new lot aren’t interested. Don’t give a button for the good any more.”

This is a frequently expressed vibe in the modernists, of course, but I always enjoy hearing it wheeled out again because it feels so apropos to the current moment of “We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine and the machine is bleeding to death.”

The ending is more conclusive than I was expecting, given the thematic thread of ambiguity and the fact that the book had a sequel (The Death of Felicity Taverner). Something does happen at the end and it more or less makes sense, so points for that. The characters even grow a little! Also loved the Penguin edition cover with the Man Ray photograph Juliet masquée.

As a young woman, Jean Overton Fuller met Neuburg later in life, when he edited literary magazine columns and supported new poets with salon-like meetings at his house. Neuburg’s most famous discovery was Dylan Thomas, who submitted early poems like “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” to Neuburg’s poetry column.

Fuller was completely taken with Neuburg, and it’s easy to see why: he was apparently an unfailingly kind person, encouraging to new artists, a genuine feminist, open-minded and tolerant. Perhaps tolerant even to a fault, since he allowed at least one avowed fascist to attend, although his own politics were left-anarchist. Fuller’s infectious youthful crush on Neuburg makes the early part of the biography particularly compelling.

Because Fuller was only twenty years old at this time, people tried to hide from her Neuburg’s reputation for “homosexuality” (he seems like a textbook bi to me, but this book was written in 1965). Neuburg himself did not hide it, and allowed her to know a few things about his past while still trying not to shock her. After Neuburg died in 1940, Fuller tried to gather papers and testimonies from people who had known him to put together a more complete portrait.

Crowley put Neuburg through physically harmful ascetic practices (cutting, scourging, sleep deprivation, little food, sleeping naked on a floor covered in thorny gorse branches, etc.) as well as emotional abuse (insults, anti-Semitic language, and humiliation). He taught yoga asanas and breathing exercises incorrectly, causing Neuburg pain and occasional blackouts from lack of oxygen.

They travelled together to Algeria where they performed Enochian magic in the desert. The Kaczynski biography of Crowley, Perdurabo, relates an incredible detail that Fuller missed: in order to “impress” the Arab locals, Crowley shaved Neuburg’s head except for two tufts of hair that he twisted into horns. He then led Neuburg around on a chain, claiming him to be an imprisoned djinn.

They also had ritual sex many times in Paris while invoking Mercury and Jupiter. Fuller holds back a number of details as “unprintable” (probably some of this is Crowley’s well-known penchant for, ahem, spermatophagy), but nevertheless she reveals a lot of interesting material about these rituals.

Despite his gentle nature, Neuburg often resisted Crowley’s abuse and threatened to leave, and finally he did after the suicide of a mutual romantic interest—Neuburg claimed that Crowley murdered her, magically or through manipulation, although Fuller could find no evidence of this. Crowley responded by ritually cursing Neuburg, who had a nervous and physical breakdown.

The remainder of Neuburg’s life was more peaceful but, of course, rather less spicy to read about. He maintained his mystic beliefs but stopped practising ritual magic. He wrote a lot of poetry, and sad to say I did not like most of what was quoted; despite having the eye to recognise someone like Dylan Thomas, he preferred rhyming verse and much of his work seemed dated and a little cheesy to me. Still, you have to respect his commitment to poetry and his love for helping other artists succeed.

Once Herbert [Corby] committed a sin. He read aloud, in tones which made it sound ridiculous, a rejected poem about a goldfish swimming around inside a bowl. Vicky [Neuburg] cried out in pain. ‘That’s not funny! That’s tragic! That’s a poor little old lady, with nothing else to love. Can’t you see her? You’re a little beast, Herbert! Give it back to me. I must write something nice on the slip.’ Some of the entries were not printed because they were ostrobogulous. This was a wonderful word of Vicky’s. It was used in the place of indecent or pornographic, and had the advantage over these words that it implied no moral attitude towards the subject. He would speak of an ostrobogulous tale or a passage in the classics.

Writing in 1965, Fuller seems anxious to explain Neuburg’s sexuality to her audience while not really understanding it very well. She’s not outright homophobic, just out of touch and noticeably antsy on the topic. For instance, she writes that Neuburg identified himself at one point as “an old queen,” which she sees as incompatible with his multiple relationships with women. Someone points out to her that being an old queen can just be a state of mind (true!) and that one can be a heterosexual old queen, which…yes, but that’s clearly not the case here. Like girl, no straight man is having months of gay sex for solely magickal reasons, I’m sorry.

With the usual caveats about labelling dead people, I think it’s clear that Neuburg (and Crowley himself, for that matter) would have likely identified as bi or pan or some similar label, but there are also interesting hints of gender nonconformity. Neuburg often wrote about “androgynes” or “hermaphrodites” as spiritual metaphors, and he translated Catullus 63, a mythological poem in which a young man castrates himself in honour of the goddess Cybele. There was a viewpoint at the time that being queer meant you were androgynous in this way, but like…all I can say here is that I had similar preoccupations as a young person, including Catullus 63, and it was very much a trans thing. Neuburg didn’t seem to view himself as a woman, but it’s possible that he might have been very curious about nonbinary genders if that language had been available.

(Interestingly, despite Crowley’s generally overbearing attitude, he preferred to have Neuburg top him.)

Crowley is an energetic but egotistical writer who tends to be completely deluded about how his characters are coming across. His hero Sir Peter Pendragon (lol) is a fantastic moron who, in his total stupidity and self-importance, I can only compare to Homer Simpson.

I think a lot too much; so did Shakespeare. That’s what worked him up to write those wonderful things about sleep. I’ve forgotten what they were; but they impressed me at the time. I said to myself, “This old bird knew how dreadful it is to be conscious.”

He constantly gets confused about basic facts (like how many ounces in a pound), attempts to quote great writers and fails because he can’t remember shit, and flies into temper tantrums for no reason. Sir Peter is an aviator, which he makes his entire personality, but the only time we see him fly (while zooted on cocaine for the first time), he runs out of gas over the Channel and plummets harmlessly into the sea.

Sir Peter falls in love at first sight with a woman with the incredible nickname of “Unlimited Lou”. As he watches Lou singing (she appears for the first time singing an occult litany written by noted fascist J.F.C. Fuller), he accepts a sniff of cocaine from a mutual friend, which gives him the energy to seduce Lou.

They soon elope and begin a long coke-fuelled honeymoon. It appears in the beginning that Crowley’s writing is disjointed and overheated in order to convey the feeling of a coke binge, which it does, but later sections are kinda the same. Lou receives a beautiful kimono as a wedding gift from their enabler friend, and she discovers packets of cocaine sewn into the hems...and some other packets which aren’t cocaine but heroin.

Interfering in their newlywed bliss is the figure of Crowley’s self-insert character, Basil King Lamus (lol). King Lamus is a local cult leader, said to be over a hundred years old, who tells Lou and Peter that they can come to him if they ever need help, and that it’s totally okay to take coke and heroin as long as they can control it.

As always happens in these books, our heroes take a shitload of coke and heroin, run out of money, get scammed, and have to move from their posh hotel rooms in Paris to a dirty room in a neighbourhood filled with racial inferiors (Greeks! Italians!). In the middle, the book switches from Peter’s perspective to Lou’s, perhaps because Crowley couldn’t bear to write his male hero in this kind of vulnerable position. Peter becomes physically abusive to Lou, and in one particularly nasty sequence, he knowingly sends her to get heroin from a crooked doctor who wants to fuck her. Lou is nowhere near as mad about this as she should be. They retreat to his country house to go cold turkey, where they both succumb to psychosis.

I saw the Spirit of heroin to-day when I went up to the magic room. It is tremendously tall and thin, with tattered rags fluttering round it, and these turn into little birds that fly off it, that come and burrow in one’s skin! I just feel the prick of the beak, and then it disappears. They were messengers from the other world. There is a little nest of them in my liver. It is very curious to hear them chirping when they want food. I don’t know what they’ll do so far away from their mother.

Normally, in a book like this, the characters realise that they have to quit, they get help, and they learn something about themselves. Instead, after multiple relapses and Lou fiiiiinaallyyyy threatening divorce, they get help from King Lamus, who continues to enable them. He feeds them smaller doses of heroin as well as mysterious “white tablets” (which might be codeine, although it’s unclear) to ease the withdrawals. He keeps telling them that they don’t need to quit drugs, they just need to learn to take them in moderation, while also preaching his cult teachings.

King Lamus “helps” Peter recognise that his true will is to become an engineer and design a helicopter, and Lou’s true will, wouldn’t you know it, is to stay married to him and help him. Of course, coke and heroin are very helpful to aeronautics, so it’s okay for him to keep taking them, while Lou needs to stay sober to serve her true purpose of being a good wife.

Crowley himself never quit heroin either.