Tom, he/him 🏳️⚧️, unthinkably ancient Xennial. Writer and copyeditor. Posting mostly about books! also art, The Bear, Succession, The Terror, Silicon Valley, Veep, Legion FX, other gay nerd shit, a little socialism as a treat
Ex-Fall drummer Dave Milner posted this to his myspace several years ago, the home-demo that, in the hands of MES and co, became “Mountain Energei”. It’s actually a cracking song in its own right.
The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875–1947
Christine Ferguson and Andrew Radford, eds.
Occultober continues! This one does what it says on the tin: really interesting set of essays about occult themes and connections in fiction, plays, dance, visual art, journalism, psychoanalysis, Egyptian archaeology, and politics (particularly eugenics and other fash-adjacent ideologies).
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.
The other fatal flaw in this collection: not one, not two, but three stories feature golf. Golf is not a real sport (Donald Trump can play it), and it’s not interesting except to golfcels, and it’s not scary. That made this collection a 3/5 for me, but “He Cometh and He Passeth By” (fatal curses), “The Red Lodge” (classic haunted house tale), and “Professor Pownall’s Oversight” (haunted chess??) were good fun. If you like M.R. James, a major influence on Wakefield, you should enjoy these.
The modernist writer Mary Butts was another associate of Aleister Crowley; she was also acquainted with Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Ford Madox Ford, Jean Cocteau, and Roger Fry; her great-grandfather was a friend of William Blake. These poshos do get around. In 1921, she spent a few months at Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù, Sicily, where she had a bad time and got addicted to opium.
Armed with Madness was written later in 1928. The basic skeleton of the story felt to me a bit like Donna Tartt or Alan Garner: a callow American joins an insular group of English friends at their country house in Dorset, where one of them finds an object that they (at first) believe to be the Holy Grail...or they almost believe it, or they’re afraid to believe it, or they want to but don’t quite dare. The rest of the story details their collapsing relationships as the legend of the Grail, true or not, erupts into their lives. It becomes “something like a ritual. A find, illumination, doubt, and division, collective and then dispersed. A land enchanted and disenchanted with the rapidity of a cinema.”
I like that premise quite a lot, but the execution of it had some issues for me.
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.
Bottom line: it’s not a widely read book anymore, but I do think it’s worth reading, and in case you’ve already forgotten, it’s very important to remember that Picus is like a bird. Keep your eye fixed on that and you shan’t go wrong, my friend!
The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg
Jean Overton Fuller
I’m still having fun with reading about Aleister Crowley and his circle—I’ve yet to read anything spiritually compelling from him, but he’s interesting because he’s a classic villain who creates plenty of tension in a cast of fascinating eccentrics right at the breaking point between the Victorian–Edwardian world and the modern.
One of these was Victor Neuburg, a young poet whom Crowley met at Cambridge. Neuburg was a progressive freethinker, in rebellion against his conventional middle-class Jewish family, and also a budding mystic. Crowley clocked him as a spiritually sensitive person and magnanimously agreed to become Neuburg’s “Holy Guru,” using him as a scribe, medium, ritual partner, and (later) lover.
I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that Crowley was a very abusive spiritual teacher!
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.)
Neuburg died of tuberculosis in 1940 at the age of 57. Even later in life, he was afraid of encountering Crowley again and struggled to make sense of the abuse, talking about it with other friends who shared similar experiences. But he left a deeply positive legacy. On his death, Dylan Thomas wrote, “Vicky encouraged me as no one else has done ... He possessed many kinds of genius, and not the least was his genius for drawing to himself, by his wisdom, graveness, great humour and innocence, a feeling of trust and love that won’t ever be forgotten.”
Illustrations by John Augustus Knapp for John Uri Lloyd's novel Etidorhpa; or, The End of Earth (1895).
Titles:
Confronted by a Singular-Looking Being. - I Stood Alone in My Room Holding the Mysterious Manuscript. - With Fear and Trembling I Crept on My Knees to His Side. - We Passed Through Caverns Filled with Creeping Reptiles. - Far as the Eye Could Reach the Glassy Barrier Spread as a Crystal Mirror. - Monstrous Cubical Crystals. - I Was in a Forest of Colossal Fungi. - This Struggling Ray of Sunlight Is to Be Your Last for Years.
Al Purdy (1918–2000) is one of those Great Canadian™ poets that Americans have never heard of. In the 60s and 70s, Canada was anxiously feeling around for a sense of national identity and gave a lot of money to its artists, a mistake the country would not make again. These artists did indeed make some patriotic feel-good art to paper over the unpleasant realities of colonialism (anything written by white people about First Nations, for instance), but they also made some good stuff. Al Purdy had a knack for leavening the typical Canadian Poem with offhand humour and metatextuality:
I’m being a little harsh on 60s/70s Canadian poets specifically because I love them and because their patriotism worked on me as a kid. Writing about Canadian specificity in any way gets you pigeon-holed as a provincial writer, and it’s often just easier to try to adopt a “universal” voice that will appeal to New York and London. Al Purdy did not do that, and I like that about him. I like hearing his old Ontario accent in recordings.
This selection includes some poems Purdy wrote after visiting Cuba, and the introduction by George Woodcock (an anarchist thinker as well as a literary critic) is quick to try to absolve Purdy of any communistical leanings, but I found the poems surprisingly sympathetic to Castro and Guevara.
“Where is Che Guevara?” is answered:
deep in Bolivian jungles leading his guerrillas
from cave to cave with scarlet cockatoos screaming
the Internationale around his shoulders
smoking a black cigar and wearing a beret
(like a student in Paris on a Guggenheim)
his men crawling under hundred foot trees
where giant snakes mate in masses of roots
and men with infected wounds moan for water
while Guevara leads his men into an ambush
and out again just like in the movies
but the good guy loses and the bad guys always win
and the band plays the Star-Spangled Banner
Well it is over
Guevara is dead now and whether the world
is any closer to freedom because
of Che’s enormous dream is not to be known
the bearded Argentine doctor who translated
that dream to a handshake among Bolivian peasants
and gave himself away free to those who wanted him
his total self and didn’t keep any
I remember the news reports from Bolivia
how he was wounded captured executed cremated
but first they cut off his fingers
for fingerprint identification later
in case questions should be asked
and I remember his quick hard handshake
in Havana among the tiny Vietnamese ladies
and seem to hold ghostlike in my own hand
five bloody fingers
of Che Guevara
Purdy’s influence is also felt in Canadian music. The Rheostatics song “Me and Stupid” quotes a few lines from Purdy’s “Wilderness Gothic”: “Something is about to happen. Leaves are still. / Two shores away, a man hammering in the sky.”
And Gord Downie’s “The East Wind” quotes “Necropsy of Love”: “No, I do not love you / hate the word / that private tyranny inside a public sound”:
Anyway, I have a hard time reviewing poetry beyond quoting the good ones, but I enjoyed this collection and there were plenty of good ones.
Juvenal and Persius
Ed. and transl. Susanna Morton Braund
Everybody loves a Loeb—nice small palm-filling hardcovers, red for Latin and green for Greek, original on facing pages, high-quality translations. Although I already had a Juvenal translation (Niall Rudd, Oxford World’s Classics), I bought this many years back on the strength of Braund’s wonderful books, The Roman Satirists and Their Masks, Satire and Society in Ancient Rome, and Beyond Anger: A Study of Juvenal’s Third Book of Satires.
(then I left it on the shelf because...I already have a translation I like...)
Almost nothing is known for certain about Juvenal except his name and the rough dates of composition for his satires. It may seem obvious that a satirist speaks through a persona and does not mean everything they say to be literal biographical truth, but that’s not how Juvenal was historically read, up into the twentieth century. Scholars would point to stray details as evidence that Juvenal was from Aquinum, that he was exiled by Domitian, that he was an angry person, that he was a committed moralist, or that he hated women. (Christians also admired Juvenal for these reasons, not because they thought he was funny.) Braund’s books dismantled these ideas and put Roman satire in a much more normal and sensible context—that it was exaggerated for entertainment and critique and that satirists spoke in character using irony. Again, doesn’t seem like a big insight, but it was!
So I like Braund’s work, but I hadn’t read her translations before. This volume also contains the six satires of Persius, who’s more obscure. Braund describes Persius’ Latin as “difficult” and yup, you can see from the Latin facing pages that he’s a tough cookie. He’s a surprisingly modern writer, with a lot of dialogue with imagined opponents. Satire I begins:
“How troubled is humanity! How very empty is life!”
Who’ll read that?
Are you talking to me? No one, for God’s sake.
Persius writes in a compact, compressed style that’s dense with allusions, many of them to poets that have now been lost, so he requires a lot of footnotes. (Great notes and introductions too, btw.) He uses particularly vigorous, physical similes, and a lot of medical language: “Spit out what isn’t you” or “What’s the point of studying if this yeast, this wild fig tree, once it’s taken root inside, can’t rupture the liver and burst out?” or “You can see it’s useless to ask for hellebore when the sickly skin is already getting bloated.” As exciting as the writing is, Persius’s book was probably unfinished when he died, and it feels that way.
Braund’s translation of Juvenal’s sixteen satires follows, and it’s honestly very good, although I personally still prefer Rudd’s verse translation because I find it a little spicier. As an example, here’s a bit from Satire V, in which a rich man invites a poorer guest to dinner and then serves him a worse and cheaper menu. Braund’s:
Look at the lobster that’s brought to the master: look how its long breast makes the dish distinctive, how it’s walled on all sides by fine asparagus, how with its tail it looks down upon the company as it enters, carried on high by the hands of the tall attendant. But you are served with crayfish hemmed in by an egg cut in half, a funereal supper on a tiny plate.
Rudd’s:
That lobster there, adorning the dish on its way to the master—
look at the length of its body and how it is walled around
with choice asparagus; see how its tail looks down on the party
as it enters, borne aloft by the hands of a towering waiter.
You are served with a prawn, hemmed in by half an egg,
crouched on a tiny saucer, a meal fit for a ghost.
These translations are trying to do different things, with Braund’s prose translation being quite precise, but Rudd’s version is (to me) clearly funnier and better conveys the emotion of outrage. But that’s personal taste as much as anything, and I’d definitely still recommend this book!
Technically a novel, this book is a thinly disguised memoir of doing cocaine and heroin in the early 1920s. I love drug memoirs—I like reading about underworlds, shifty people, schemes, crimes, desperate yearnings, and (eventually) self-awareness. A historical setting only makes it better. So I enjoyed this book a lot, even though it’s kinda bad in many ways.
big trigger warning for drugs obvsly!
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.
So yeah, in most of the ways that count it’s a terrible book. But still, dammit, I had a good time. The sections of roaring around Paris on coke are good stupid fun, and the descent into madness at the country house was also a wild ride. I loved reading the torrents of 1920s period slang. When you read it at a remove from the author’s intentions, it’s a mix of hilarious and tragic. The worst parts of the book are every scene with King Lamus (and his/Crowley’s godawful wannabe-Swinburne poetry), and you can skim many of those without much harm. If you have the same fascination I do with this type of book, go ahead and pick it up.
Cherokee–Creek novelist Thomas King detoured into nonfiction for this well-received book; King is the author of Green Grass, Running Water, which I read a few years back and really liked. I bought this while en route to Montreal in 2015, according to a train ticket left as a bookmark in the second chapter, and like a lot of books I buy to read on the train, I never finished it. Don’t know why, I’m just bad at it—maybe I get swept up in the aesthetics of having a nice crisp new book to hold and I don’t want to spoil it with my dirty ape hands.
The book is a historical overview in a conversational, storytelling style, using humour effectively as a device to disarm settler readers while still hitting hard when necessary. It considers both the U.S. and Canada’s relations with Native people (King was born in California and now lives in Ontario), which gives the book plenty of scope. I’m reasonably well informed about Canada’s miserable history on this topic, and somewhat familiar with the American side, but it’s so broad that plenty of King’s examples and anecdotes were still new to me.
King wanted to title this book The Pesky Redskin but was talked out of it, which is fortunate because I already feel racist enough saying Indian. This is a little ironic because all the most racist people I know can put some real stank on the word Native (especially in the colonial formulation ‘the Natives’), and it’s still considered polite. King discusses this language problem early on and admits to using the different terms freely according to vibes.
I was most interested in the cultural angle, as King talks about Hollywood’s role in creating the image of the Native American with reference to Baudrillard. A lot of the actors and movies he talks about have since been forgotten, but the tropes and clichés they created are still in circulation. I’m not a big fan of Westerns but it’s always fascinating to see how load-bearing they are in North American culture.
The book’s legal discussions were also interesting, because the laws are such a mess that every few minutes you read something newly outrageous and ridiculous, a good example being the question of Status in Canada. Americans do things differently, but in Canada Native people receive legal benefits (such as they are) only if they have “status” under the Indian Act. Status is held by individuals if one or both of their parents is registered under the Indian Act, and not all Native groups have Status, for various reasons. One common reason to not have Status is because Native men who married white women could pass Status to their wives and children, while Native women who married white men would lose their own Status and would not pass it on. This has since been reformed, but there’s still a “second-generation cutoff” where after two generations of “marrying out,” children will lose Status, even if they’re still 100% of indigenous ancestry. End result: fewer Status Indians, fewer people on reserves demanding services, fewer worries for the government.
(There’s currently a “collaborative process” to address this, and hopefully they actually do, but our track record on these matters is not good lol.)
Anyway, this book is insightful, fun, and easy to read, and I do recommend it, whether you’re delving into this history for the first time or not.
baratheonpilled
blakekathryn
