Confessions of Aleister Crowley

353 Late in 1908 I picked up a book. The title attracted me strongly, The Magician. The author, bless my soul! No other than my old and valued friend. William Somerset Maugham, my nice young doctor whom I remembered so well from the dear old days of the Chat Blanc. So he had really written a book --- who would have believed it! I carried it off to Scott's. In my excitement, I actually paid for it. I think I ate two dozen oysters and a pheasant, and drank a bottle of No. III, one of the happiest champagnes in the famous --- can you say "caterer's"? Yes: --- I mean caterer's cellar. Yes, I did myself proud, for the Magician, Oliver Haddo, was Aleister Crowley; his house "Skene" was Boleskine. The hero's witty remarks were, many of them, my own. He had, like Arnold Bennett, not spared his shirt cuff. But I had jumped too hastily to conclusions when I said, "Maugham has written a book." I found phrase after phrase, paragraph after paragraph, page after page, bewilderingly familiar; and then I remembered that in my early days of the G.'. D.'. I had introduced Gerald Kelly to the Order and {570} reflected that Maugham had become a great friend of Kelly's, and stayed with him at Camberwell Vicarage. Maugham had taken some of the most private and personal incidents of my life, my marriage, my explorations, my adventures with big game, my magical opinions, ambitions and exploits, and so on. He had added a number of the many absurd legends of which I was the central figure. He had patched all these together by innumerable strips of paper clipped from the books which I had told Gerald to buy. I had never supposed that plagiarism could have been so varied, extensive and shameless. The Memoirs of a Physician, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Blossom an the Fruit, and numerous other more or less occult works of fiction had supplied the plot, and many of them the incidents. The Kabbalah Unveiled1 The Life of Paracelsus, The Ritual and Dogma of Transcendental Magic and others had been transcribed, whole pages at a time, with such slight changes as "failed" for "resulted in failure", and occasional additions or omissions. I like Maugham well enough personally, though many people resent a curious trick which he has of saying spiteful things about everybody. I always feel that he, like myself, makes such remarks without malice, for the sake of their cleverness. I was not in the least offended by the attempts of the book to represent me as, in many ways, the most atrocious scoundrel, for he had done more than justice to the qualities of which I was proud; and despite himself he had been compelled, like Balaam, to prophesy concerning me. He attributed to me certain characteristics which he meant to represent as abominable, but were actually superb. He represented me as having treated my wife as Dumas makes Cagliostro treat his, with the object of producing homunculi, artificial living human beings --- "Was it for these vile monstrosities that Margot was sacrificed in all her loveliness?" Well, comeliness is a cheap after all. To discover the secret of life, who would not pitch two thirds of our "maudite race" into the bottomless pit of oblivion, for which, in any case, they are bound? The Magician was, in fact, an appreciation of my genius such as I had never dreamed of inspiring. It showed me how sublime were my ambitions and reassured me on a point which sometimes worried me --- whether my work was worth while in a worldly sense. I had at times feared lest, superbly as my science had satisfied my own soul, it might yet miss the mark of making mankind master of its destiny. Well, Maugham had had his fun with me; I would have mine with him. I wrote an article for Vanity Fair (December 30th, 1908) in which I disclosed the method by which the book had been manufactured and gave parallel passages. Frank Harris would not believe that I was serious. He swore I must be making it up. He could not believe that any man would have the impudence to publish such strings of plagiarism. I had to bring a little library {571}