The Magician | Page 2

to Paris. I took a room in a
cheap hotel on the Left Bank.
A few months before this, I had been fortunate enough to make friends
with a young painter who had a studio in the Rue Campagne Première.
His name was Gerald Kelly. He had had an upbringing unusual for a
painter, for he had been to Eton and to Cambridge. He was highly
talented, abundantly loquacious, and immensely enthusiastic. It was he
who first made me acquainted with the Impressionists, whose pictures
had recently been accepted by the Luxembourg. To my shame, I must
admit that I could not make head or tail of them. Without much
searching, I found an apartment on the fifth floor of a house near the
Lion de Belfort. It had two rooms and a kitchen, and cost seven
hundred francs a year, which was then twenty-eight pounds. I bought,
second-hand, such furniture and household utensils as were essential,

and the concierge told me of a woman who would come in for half a
day and make my café au lait in the morning and my luncheon at noon.
I settled down and set to work on still another novel. Soon after my
arrival, Gerald Kelly took me to a restaurant called Le Chat Blanc in
the Rue d'Odessa, near the Gare Montparnasse, where a number of
artists were in the habit of dining; and from then on I dined there every
night. I have described the place elsewhere, and in some detail in the
novel to which these pages are meant to serve as a preface, so that I
need not here say more about it. As a rule, the same people came in
every night, but now and then others came, perhaps only once, perhaps
two or three times. We were apt to look upon them as interlopers, and I
don't think we made them particularly welcome. It was thus that I first
met Arnold Bennett and Clive Bell. One of these casual visitors was
Aleister Crowley. He was spending the winter in Paris. I took an
immediate dislike to him, but he interested and amused me. He was a
great talker and he talked uncommonly well. In early youth, I was told,
he was extremely handsome, but when I knew him he had put on
weight, and his hair was thinning. He had fine eyes and a way, whether
natural or acquired I do not know, of so focusing them that, when he
looked at you, he seemed to look behind you. He was a fake, but not
entirely a fake. At Cambridge he had won his chess blue and was
esteemed the best whist player of his time. He was a liar and
unbecomingly boastful, but the odd thing was that he had actually done
some of the things he boasted of. As a mountaineer, he had made an
ascent of K2 in the Hindu Kush, the second highest mountain in India,
and he made it without the elaborate equipment, the cylinders of
oxygen and so forth, which render the endeavours of the mountaineers
of the present day more likely to succeed. He did not reach the top, but
got nearer to it than anyone had done before.
Crowley was a voluminous writer of verse, which he published
sumptuously at his own expense. He had a gift for rhyming, and his
verse is not entirely without merit. He had been greatly influenced by
Swinburne and Robert Browning. He was grossly, but not
unintelligently, imitative. As you flip through the pages you may well
read a stanza which, if you came across it in a volume of Swinburne's,
you would accept without question as the work of the master. 'It's

rather hard, isn't it, Sir, to make sense of it?' If you were shown this
line and asked what poet had written it, I think you would be inclined
to say, Robert Browning. You would be wrong. It was written by
Aleister Crowley.
At the time I knew him he was dabbling in Satanism, magic and the
occult. There was just then something of a vogue in Paris for that sort
of thing, occasioned, I surmise, by the interest that was still taken in a
book of Huysmans's, Là Bas. Crowley told fantastic stories of his
experiences, but it was hard to say whether he was telling the truth or
merely pulling your leg. During that winter I saw him several times, but
never after I left Paris to return to London. Once, long afterwards, I
received a telegram from him which ran as follows: 'Please send
twenty-five pounds at once. Mother of God and I starving. Aleister
Crowley.' I did not do so, and he lived on for many disgraceful years.
I was glad to get back to London. My