Editor's Introduction Wilde's Edwardian Afterlife

Wilde’s Edwardian Afterlife: Somerset Editor’s Introduction Maugham, Aleister Crowley, and The Magician Jennifer Birkett University of Birmingham

Nick Freeman Loughborough University

‘Anything processed by memory is fiction,’ maintains Paul Fussell, and his remark undoubtedly applies to the brief memoir Somerset Maugham appended to reprints of his 1908 novel, The Magician, in 1956. Maugham had been made a Companion of Honour in 1954, and while he would live on until 1965, ‘A Fragment of Autobiography’ gives the impression of a seigneurial placing of affairs in order. Picturesque in its evocation of the bohemian world of Paris, vague to the point of duplicity in its recollections of the novel’s reception, the fragment is most notable for its description of Edward Alexander ‘Aleister’ Crowley (1875–1947), the English occultist who inspired The Magician’s monstrous villain, Oliver Haddo. From 1908 onwards, Crowley would make regular appearances in fiction and journalism, eventually attracting the sobriquet ‘the wickedest man in the world’.1 In this essay, I argue that although an awareness of Crowley’s reputation is important for an understanding of The Magician, the novel actually uses his public image, the larger-than-life Haddo, as a front for a more subversive engagement with the literature and culture of the fin de siècle. Magic and the occult may provide a frightening (or alluring) backdrop to the novel, but its true anti-hero is a figure far more unsettling to Edwardian ears than the then little-known Crowley: Oscar Wilde. The Magician emerges as a profoundly ambivalent work that both pastiches the decadent writing of the 1890s and recoils from it in fascinated horror. First Impressions There is no doubt that, to a certain extent, Haddo is a version of Crowley, whom Maugham had encountered in Paris while staying with his friend, the painter Gerald 16

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Wilde’s Edwardian Afterlife Kelly. Kelly in turn had known Crowley since his student days at Cambridge in the late 1890s. In 1902, Crowley was a frequent visitor to Kelly’s Montparnasse studio, later recalling that he ‘entered with absolute spontaneous enthusiasm into the artistic atmosphere’ of the city.2 Crowley regarded himself as a cultural ambassador, meeting such figures as Rodin, Theodore Dreiser, Arnold Bennett, Roger Fry, and the painter Roderic O’Connor, all of whom frequented Le Chat Blanc near Gare Montparnasse. It was here that Crowley and Maugham first met, probably in the winter of 1902–3, with Maugham recalling in his ‘Fragment’ that the occultist, 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…. He was a fake, but not entirely a fake…. He was a liar and unbecomingly boastful, but the odd thing was that he had actually done some of the things he boasted of.3

Crowley intrigued Maugham, but their acquaintance was a limited one. Soon, Crowley was once more afflicted by his habitual wanderlust and returned to Boleskine, his mansion on the shores of Loch Ness, and an importunate marriage to Kelly’s sister. He seems not to have given Maugham a second thought, and the appearance of The Magician in November 1908 came as a considerable surprise. ‘Late in 1908, I picked up a book,’ he recalled, drawn to its title for obvious reasons. It was a lurid tale. Innocent beauty Margaret Dauncey is studying art in Paris. Her fiancé, Arthur Burdon, is a young doctor. Visiting Margaret, Arthur crosses swords with Oliver Haddo, a flamboyant bohemian who is rumoured to be a black magician. When Haddo is bested in a bout of fisticuffs, he revenges himself by hypnotically enslaving Margaret, whom he then marries. This is not simply male rivalry. Haddo’s true desire is to use the virginal Margaret as a sacrifice in a magical rite and despite the desperate efforts of Arthur and his friends, she perishes in appalling circumstances. Retribution follows, but the overall effect is one of bitterness and terror. Crowley was immediately fascinated: 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! … the Magician, Oliver Haddo, was Aleister Crowley; his house ‘Skene’ was Boleskine. The hero’s [sic] witty remarks were, many of them, my own…. 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.

Some may have been tempted to sue for libel, but Crowley professed himself delighted with the novel, since it ‘attributed to me certain characteristics which he meant to represent as abominable, but were actually superb’: 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 … The Magician was, in fact, an appreciation of my genius such as I had never dreamed of inspiring.4

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This Wildean estimation of the novel’s significance dates from 1929. He was, however, less flattering when reviewing it for Frank Harris’s Vanity Fair shortly after its publication. Adopting the pseudonym ‘Oliver Haddo’, one he used intermittently for the rest of his life, Crowley delighted in pointing out The Magician’s frequent plagiarism. Not content with transcribing Kelly’s reminiscences and Crowley’s witticisms, Maugham had borrowed from contemporary fiction and from Kelly’s extensive library of magical works. S.L. MacGregor Mather’s The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887) and Eliphas Lévi’s Rituel et Dogme de la Haute Magie (1854, 1856) jostled for precedence with H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and Mabel Collins’s The Blossom and the Fruit: A True Story of a Black Magician (1890). By placing Maugham’s borrowings beside their source texts, Crowley rendered his debts embarrassingly obvious, belittling his invention, impugning his literary and personal integrity, and reawakening controversies about his originality that dated back to the appearance of Liza of Lambeth in 1897. He finished with another twist of the critical knife: ‘After studying The Magician, we are constrained to wonder whether any of Mr Maugham’s numerous plays have been composed in the same way.’5 The review was a damning one. In writing the novel Maugham had, Crowley suggested, sought to deceive the public about both the workings of the occult and his own knowledge of them, choosing ‘a vague subject – one on which everybody is curious and almost nobody well-informed.’ 6 Whether he was writing about magic or art, Maugham’s erudition amounted to mere crumbs illicitly gathered from more illustrious tables. Such borrowings might have escaped the attention of uninformed readers, but Crowley’s harrying was relentless. Maugham claimed not to have read the review, adding that ‘I daresay it was a pretty piece of vituperation, but probably, like his poems, intolerably verbose’ (x). Such recollections are, however, disingenuous, since he confessed to the thefts immediately, and even tried to make light of the matter by admitting to others that had escaped Crowley’s notice.7 Maugham conceded that Crowley was the ‘model’ for Haddo, though the novel was not a transparent roman à clef since Haddo was ‘by no means a portrait of him’ (ix). Both Crowley and Haddo dress flamboyantly, delighting in extravagant hats, waistcoats and jewels, and essaying both epigram and aristocratic hauteur. They share a powerful physical presence, though Crowley, unlike his literary counterpart, was by no means obese. Each is a well-travelled raconteur with a fondness for tall stories, as well as being daring, witty, and sexually charismatic in ways that defy outward appearances. Finally, both have become notorious during their student years, though Haddo’s at Oxford, reminiscent of those enjoyed by ‘Tubby’ in G. S. Street’s The Autobiography of a Boy (1894), have yielded greater fruit than did Crowley’s at Cambridge. These obvious parallels between fictional and factual magicians are now firmly established in the mind of the reading public, especially since the revival of Crowley’s reputation in the late 1960s, and what might loosely be termed the ‘Crowley industry’ continues to prosper, despite, or perhaps because of, its associations with Satanism. What the neat equation of Haddo with Crowley conceals, however, is a set of allusions to late Victorian culture that suggests Maugham’s aims were rather more 18


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Wilde’s Edwardian Afterlife ambitious than penning a ‘feast of horrors’.8 Crowley’s convenience as a bogeyman sui generis occludes his links with the 1890s and the ‘decadence’ that many hoped had been banished from British life with the downfall of Oscar Wilde in May 1895. By using him as a smokescreen, Maugham is able to pay homage to the transgressive art and literature that he admired while avoiding unwelcome identification with it. Crowley and Decadence Crowley was nineteen when Wilde brought his ill-judged libel action against the Marquess of Queensbury, and was already in revolt against high Victorian values. His early literary idols were Swinburne, who influenced his poetry for the rest of his life, and Baudelaire, whose work he translated and from whom he acquired a fondness for ‘Satanic’ flourishes which appalled his devoutly Christian mother. Going up to Cambridge in 1895, he did little formal study and failed to complete his degree. He did, however, take full advantage of the university’s stock of esoteric books, including the manuscripts of the Elizabethan magus John Dee, which had been catalogued by M.R. James.9 He also embarked on a homosexual relationship with H.C. Pollitt, a confidant of Aubrey Beardsley (who designed his bookplate) and the supposed inspiration for E.F. Benson’s popular comic novel, The Babe, B.A. (1897).10 Pollitt, who preferred Jerome to his more prosaic given names of Herbert Charles, was a mildly scandalous figure best known as a former President of the Footlights Dramatic Club. Here he had gained notoriety for his performances in drag as ‘Diane de Rougy’, a character modelled on the Parisian dancer and courtesan Liane de Pougy. Pollitt may conceivably have introduced Crowley to Beardsley, for, as Timothy d’Arch Smith records, one of the two vellum copies of Crowley’s first book, Aceldama, a Place to Bury Strangers In (1898), published by the notorious Leonard Smithers, is inscribed to the artist.11 For reasons which remain obscure, Crowley and Pollitt fell out in 1899, with Crowley denouncing his former friend’s ‘harlot’s face’ in a series of vituperative sonnets. Ivor Back, a Cambridge colleague of Crowley’s, noted in his annotations to Crowley’s Collected Works (1910) that Pollitt ‘headed in that University a movement parallel to that which at Oxford was associated with the name of Oscar Wilde.’12 Whether this ‘movement’ is homosexuality or aestheticism, and whether Back even distinguishes between the two, is less important than the naming of Wilde in the first place.13 To equate anyone with him in the aftermath of 1895 was to make all too obviously sexual innuendoes. Crowley was particularly sensitive to these in the light of his relationship with Pollitt and the sexual and ‘magickal’ partnership with Victor Neuberg that began in 1907.14 He therefore concealed the homosexual element of his character beneath a veneer of ‘manliness’, cultivating a persona in which the artistic and cerebral – writing poetry, playing chess and collecting rare books – was counterbalanced by daring mountaineering expeditions and ostentatious whoring. Despite his sexual secrets, Crowley refused to be cowed by the erratic moral realignments that followed Wilde’s disgrace. Peter Mendes argues that Wilde may 19


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even have read his volume of homosexual erotica, White Stains (1898).15 His work was published in lavish editions by Smithers, his dress and public persona were extravagant, and he delighted in playing practical jokes on the Vigilance Society and similar bodies.16 There are other points of contact between Crowley and the ‘decadents’ of the 1890s, for he too was caught on the horns of what Kelsey Thornton has termed ‘the decadent dilemma’. ‘The Decadent is a man caught between two opposite and apparently incompatible pulls,’ he writes: ‘[O]n the one hand he is drawn by the world, its necessities, and the attractive impressions he receives from it, while on the other hand he yearns towards the eternal, the ideal, and the unworldly.’17 Crowley was never able to resolve the complexities of this position, and his behaviour suggests that he took to heart Wilde’s remark, ‘The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.’18 His experiments with alcohol and drugs, and attitudes to women that oscillated between reverence and vicious misogyny, place him securely in the world of Dowson and Arthur Symons. Like Symons, Crowley was a compulsive traveller who felt he was ‘The Wanderer of the Waste’ and beyond the pale of everyday society. ‘The Decadent finds himself ejected from the society of Man and forced to wander aimlessly from one place to another in search of a home he knows he will never find,’ claim Fletcher and Martin in what might be a consideration of Wilde’s final years. ‘[T]o follow the path of true Decadence means to condemn oneself to a lifetime of rootlessness.’19 Crowley’s adoration of Swinburne, Baudelaire and Richard Burton, along with his relish of sensation, even incline one to believe that he was the type of reader Walter Pater feared would be ‘misled’ by the conclusion of Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). His guardian angel may have instructed him to usher in a New Aeon of Horus in his The Book of the Law (1909), but in artistic terms the magus belonged to a generation of rebellious aesthetes that was flexing its creative muscles during the fin de siècle. Crowley followed a very different path from those such as Wilde who converted to Roman Catholicism, yet both his literary and personal performances owed much to their example. Maugham advertised his decadent affiliations far less openly than did his dandified rival, but he too had suggestive connections with the world of the 1890s. He had begun the decade by having a homosexual affair with Ellingham Brooks, a Paterreading aesthete and Cambridge graduate he caricatured as Hayward in Of Human Bondage (1915).20 He had followed Wilde’s trials with keen interest and being, as he later termed himself, ‘a promising young writer [and] member of the intelligentsia’ (v), found himself able to meet Wilde’s old allies. ‘It was as if by cultivating them he could establish a link with a writer whose life-style he admired but dared not emulate,’ Ted Morgan suggests, noting Maugham’s friendships with Robert Ross, Mabel Beardsley, Ada Leverson, and Robert Hichens, amongst others.21 Maugham’s early work, chiefly the pastiche of Gissing and Morrison that was Liza of Lambeth, ploughed a naturalistic furrow, but the novelist retained a keen interest in Wilde. In 1901, he read Salomé and looked at gemstones in the British Museum. He took plentiful notes, just as Wilde had from the jewellery cases in the South Kensington Museum when composing Dorian Gray, and experimented 20


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Wilde’s Edwardian Afterlife with a suitably contrived style in his notebooks. At the same time, his one-act play, Marriages Are Made in Heaven, performed in Berlin in January 1902, unsuccessfully grafted Wildean quips on to the moral content of Ibsen and a plot from Pinero.22 Undaunted by its failure, Maugham published the play in The Venture, a magazine in The Yellow Book mode that he co-edited with Laurence Housman, himself a Yellow Book contributor, in the autumn of 1903. The Venture cost five shillings, just as John Lane’s magazine had done, but it was far less successful and ran to only two issues. Both Maugham and Crowley can thus be linked to fin de siècle decadence, yet each was inclined to break away from its associations. For Crowley, its shift from an exuberant paganism to Roman Catholic conformity signalled its spiritual orthodoxy and its limited use in the propagation of his radical theories of magick and morality. For the more cautious Maugham, with his horror of scandal and a sexual code that he summarised in Of Human Bondage as ‘Follow your own inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner’, decadence was, by contrast, too overt.23 To espouse its tenets would be ruinous for a writer at once more commercially minded and less able to employ comic effects than contemporaries such as Saki and E.F. Benson, who were drawing on the yellow decade’s mannerisms and sexual subversion in the early twentieth century. When Maugham encountered Crowley, he was forced into a confrontation not only with an ‘unbecomingly boastful … liar’ (vii) but also with unmistakable connections to an artistic and even (homo)sexual world with which he could not afford to publicly associate himself. The Unmentionable Oscar Asked about his ambitions on graduating from Oxford in 1879, Oscar Wilde offered what Montgomery Hyde terms ‘a remarkable prophecy’. ‘I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist,’ Wilde remarked. ‘Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious. Or perhaps I’ll lead the bios apaulostikos [life of pleasure] for a time and then – who knows?’24 The prophecy applies equally well to Crowley, who would also see his artistic productions eclipsed by self-propelled notoriety. Both men would come in time to be viewed as heresiarchs, Wilde as ‘the High Priest of the Decadents’, Crowley as a self-styled messiah born to lead men into a new aeon, and both would endure derision and disgrace.25 When The Magician appeared in 1908, Wilde’s crimes were still unutterable in polite society.26 Beverley Nichols records how, as a teenaged boy in the early years of the 1914–18 war, his father beat him for reading Dorian Gray. When he asked what Wilde had done, he received a piece of paper on which his father had written in Latin, ‘The horrible crime which is not to be named’.27 It is telling that although Maugham’s novel is filled with allusions to the literature and culture of the late nineteenth century, Wilde’s name, though not his work, is conspicuously absent from it. It is instead the Crowley figure, aided and abetted by memories of the extravagant corpulence of Wilkie Collins’s Count Fosco in The Woman in White (1860), who serves as the embodiment of alluring evil. In an impressive feat of 21


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moral prestidigitation, Maugham is able to denounce Crowley and feed the prejudices of his readership, while yet implying the superiority of ‘decadent’ existence to the pragmatic world of Arthur, the novel’s nominal hero. Wilde had honeymooned in Paris, and had threatened to emigrate there and become a French citizen when the Lord Chamberlain refused to licence Salomé in 1892. Eight years later, he had died in a miserable Parisian hotel and been buried in Bagneux, claiming that the sight of him had driven English tourists away from the Paris Exhibition of November 1900.28 Paris therefore had both Wildean and more generally ‘decadent’ associations for Edwardian readers which are exploited to dramatic effect throughout The Magician. Maugham knew Paris well, having been born there and in childhood spoken French as his first language. However, the novel’s metropolis elides the ‘real’ city and that of popular association by recognising the French capital as at once a centre of legitimate cultural authority and a site of moral abandon. The latter belief was etched on the popular imagination by a Victorian disdain for French frivolity, by the controversy attached to naturalist fiction and art, and by Edward VII’s frequent visits to the city when Prince of Wales: Crowley summed it up as ‘the cockney idea that Paris is a very wicked place.’29 In setting the novel in ‘bohemian’ Paris, a world he confines to a café, a fairground, and repeated references to art schools, Maugham draws inspiration from these events and from the city’s representation in popular fiction such as Marie Corelli’s Wormwood (1890) and George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894). He may also have profited from the success of Puccini’s La Bohème, the operatic adaptation of Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème (1847–49), which had been performed in Manchester in 1897 and London two years later. Had The Magician appeared in 1894, Oliver Haddo could have held court beneath ‘the painted and pagan ceiling’ of London’s Café Royal, surrounded by a decadent entourage and the ‘exuberant vista of gilding and crimson velvet’ evoked by Max Beerbohm in ‘Enoch Soames’ (1912).30 By 1908, however, Maugham’s audience preferred to believe that such contagion had been banished across the Channel, just as Wilde had been on his release from prison. For sensation-seeking yet conservative English readers, Paris was the ideal theatre for dramas of transgression, since it was both morally lax enough, conventional wisdom believed, for such activities to be possible, even commonplace, while being removed from English life and thus viewable at a safe distance. ‘There’s no place like Paris for meeting queer folk,’ says Margaret’s friend, Susie Boyd. ‘Sooner or later you run across persons who believe in everything’ (36). Yet while The Magician is set largely in Paris, only one important member of its cast is French, Porhöet, a doctor and student of the occult. This may explain why the novel’s cultural allusions are invariably backward looking, dwelling on the art of a previous generation rather than on contemporary movements such as Fauvism. Maugham did not move in advanced circles – he confessed that he ‘could not make head or tail’ (vii) of Impressionist art – and while Gerald Kelly would eventually acquire a knighthood and, in 1949, the presidency of the Royal Academy, he was a fashionable portrait painter rather than a visionary. Maugham treats the art world primarily as local colour, probably realising that refer22


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Wilde’s Edwardian Afterlife ences to genuinely new art would only bewilder a readership still struggling to come to terms with Impressionism, let alone its successors. Early in the novel, while the denizens of the café are arguing in French about ‘the merit of the later Impressionists’, Susie compares one of their number to ‘an Aubrey Beardsley that’s been dreadfully smudged’ (18). In recalling the radicals of a previous generation, The Magician forges links between the Edwardian present and a late Victorian past conservative opinion would have preferred to forget. This provides a titillating and transgressive edge to the book even as it condemns the attitudes and movements that make such subversion possible. From the very beginning of the novel, Maugham configures Paris as sympathetic to decadence. The Luxembourg Gardens are ‘scattered with fallen leaves’ whose ‘wan decay little served to give a touch of nature to the artifice of all besides’ (1). When Haddo appears, Arthur asks Porhöet, ‘Who’s your fat friend?’ (7), echoing ‘Beau’ Brummell’s famous quip about the Prince of Wales that saw the dandy exiled from the English court. Arthur intends a comic insult, but the reference to Brummell also serves less immediate purposes. That he died wretchedly in France, and that his downfall was seen by respectable Victorian society as God’s judgement on his dissolute life offers another Wildean parallel. Brummel and Wilde are wits and men of fashion dying beyond their means in a foreign land, denounced by some, the subject of a cult for others. The allusions to fin de siècle decadence proliferate once Haddo strides into Le Chien Noir. His Oxford career, clumsily recapitulated in a letter from one of Arthur’s friends, establishes damaging parallels between Haddo and Crowley, as well as offering a selection of more general decadent behaviour and associations. His ‘magnificent figure’ then resembled ‘one of those colossal statues of Apollo in which the god is represented with a feminine roundness and delicacy’ (60), a suggestion of his ambivalent masculinity as well as being reminiscent of depictions of a similarly fleshly Wilde. Haddo is rumoured ‘to intoxicate himself with oriental drugs, and to haunt the vilest opium-dens in the East of London’ (62), reminding one both of Dorian Gray and of the tales Symons told of Dowson and hashish. All this material is second-hand in every sense and related by an unsympathetic witness, but Haddo’s own effusions and later activities equally link him to a past generation of aesthetes. He attends a dinner-party in the costume Wilde had worn in the 1880s, complete with knee-breeches, velvet collar and frilled shirt (138). He also shares Alfred Douglas’s fascination with low life, being stricken with ‘a lust for the gutter’ (146). Perhaps, through his friendship with Robert Ross, Maugham had seen the full text of Wilde’s prison letter to Douglas and read its bitter observation, ‘The gutter and things that live in it had begun to fascinate you.’31 More obvious allusions become manifest when Haddo hypnotises Margaret in chapter eight. He first recites Pater’s famous description of La Gioconda from The Renaissance – Richard Ellman notes that Wilde had ‘much of the book […] by heart’. He then waxes lyrical on Renaissance art in ‘subtle words’ (87): the adjective is typically Paterian.32 He praises Gustave Moreau, the favourite artist of Des Esseintes in À rebours (1884), the ‘sodomitical’ book that Wilde had read on his honeymoon 23


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and that had played so influential a role in his trials, before aspiring to the condition of music and turning to his piano.33 His improvisations are ‘barbaric, with a plaintive weirdness’ (89), suggestively akin to the ‘passionate, curiously-coloured things’ Wilde attributes to Dvorák in The Critic as Artist (1890).34 Haddo’s music possesses Margaret, and in an extraordinary scene, she recites ‘the words of the poet’ (89), that is, Salomé’s speech to Iokanaan from Wilde’s play. ‘There is nothing in the world so white as thy body. Suffer me to touch thy body,’ she concludes (90), before Haddo ceases playing and the spell is briefly broken.35 ‘I shall begin to think that you really are a magician,’ Margaret comments (90). Haddo’s seductive rhetoric is modelled on the jewelled style deployed by Pater and by Wilde in his fairy tales, Dorian Gray and the self-pitying recollections of his prime in De Profundis (1905). A little later, other Paterian adjectives and cadences combine to evoke the ‘curious magic’ and ‘honeyed fervour’ (102–3) of Haddo’s speech: He spoke of the dawn upon sleeping desolate cities, and the moonlit nights of the desert, of the sunsets with their splendour, and of the crowded streets at noon. The beauty of the East rose before her. He told her of many-coloured webs and of silken carpets, the glittering steel of armour damascened, and of barbaric, priceless gems. The splendour of the East blinded her eyes. He spoke of frankincense and myrrh and aloes, of heavy perfumes of the scent-merchants, and drowsy odours of the Syrian gardens. The fragrance of the East filled her nostrils. And all these things were transformed by the power of his words till life itself seemed offered to her, a life of infinite vivacity, a life of freedom, a life of supernatural knowledge. … Her soul yearned for a beauty that the commonalty of men did not know. (103)

This is the rhetoric of a depraved and dangerous man, and yet, for all its synthetic, derivative quality, it suggests the style Maugham himself had attempted a few years earlier, one which had cast its own spell over Wilde’s listeners at the dinner tables of the early 1890s.36 ‘The style is lush and turgid,’ he said of The Magician in 1956, ‘but perhaps not unsuited to the subject’ though ‘there are a great many more adjectives and adverbs than I should use today’ (ix). By attributing the most heightened moments of the story to Haddo, Maugham was able to indulge in and condemn such writing simultaneously, distancing himself from the hothouse artificiality of these episodes while polishing their composition. ‘I have come to the conclusion that it is very dull and stupid,’ Maugham told J.B. Pinker in October 1906, later remarking that ‘It was all moonshine. I did not believe a word of it. It was a game I was playing. A book written under those conditions can have no life in it.’37 Despite such asides however, the novel is closer to regretful pastiche than outright parody. Haddo’s fragrant orations, with their synaesthetic power to evoke smells through spoken words, ensnare and destroy Margaret, yet ‘freedom’ and ‘infinite vivacity’ still seem preferable to Arthur’s worthy dullness. Margaret’s recitation from Salomé is a startling moment in the novel. Salomé was, of course, a key figure in fin de siècle culture, but while writers and artists from Flaubert and Huysmans to Klimt and Richard Strauss used her as a means of escaping 24


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Wilde’s Edwardian Afterlife into an ancient world of stylised eroticism, Maugham takes Wilde’s princess and positions her in contemporary Paris. Appropriating Wilde’s words to signal her own transgressive desire, Margaret becomes a means of praising male physical beauty, even if here, it is the effect of Haddo’s glamour rather than his bodily realities to which she responds. Salomé’s words, entirely distinct from conventional contemporary speech, suit the heightened mood of magic and ungovernable sexual attraction, but they also expose the hypocrisy of quoting from Wilde without naming him: even Crowley’s exposure of Maugham’s unscrupulous borrowings is silent on this point. Wilde’s play is therefore present while its creator is absent, or rather, becomes a disembodied or ghostly presence, ‘the poet’, who haunts the scene and the novel as a whole.38 Also present by implication are Beardsley’s illustrations, which conjure monstrous Wildes and a succession of freaks and grotesques that echo the loathsome homunculi of Haddo’s experiments. Faced with the combined effect of Wilde, Beardsley and Pater, we might ask who has transformed Margaret into a symboliste femme fatale? Is it Haddo’s magic or her own reading which equips her with a rhetoric for expressing that which cannot be said in everyday speech? Has an earlier exposure to Wilde made her especially susceptible to Haddo’s influence, just as Beverley Nicholls’s father feared that reading Dorian Gray was the first step on the primrose path? Or is the transgressive power of Wilde’s prose magical in itself, and capable of destroying all those who encounter it? An infusion of Wilde’s poetic prose and Haddo’s magic certainly transforms Margaret. She acquires ‘a new, enigmatic savour to her beauty’, and associates with ‘painted’ women of ‘notorious disreputability’ and ‘queer people’, notably ‘strange men overdressed and scented’ (128). While such a world may seem beguiling for some readers, at least when seen from across the Channel, Margaret later confesses that she has ‘no purity’ left in herself, is ‘sullied through and through’ and has become ‘a sink of iniquity’ (144). Seduction has brought her not happiness but despair, and Haddo suggests the Wilde lambasted by Lionel Johnson as ‘cold corrupting fate … The destroyer of a soul’.39 However, whatever else Margaret has undergone, she remains ‘the wanton soul in the virgin body’ (144), since Haddo needs her to remain virgo intacta if the magical ritual he is preparing is to succeed. Margaret confesses that ‘[m]y flesh cries out for him’ (144) but the marriage remains unconsummated. Haddo’s celibacy is at once sinister and suggestive, since it leads one to speculate as to whether he foregoes all sexual experience – there is a later reference to his consorting with prostitutes – or simply the marital bed. If his sexuality is not governed by marriage, further parallels with Crowley and Wilde suggest themselves, both in the use of prostitutes and in the whispered implication of more audacious vices. Though it verged upon the prurient at times, Maugham’s deployment of Wilde’s play and image was in some ways a daring act of homage from a writer seeking to construct his own stylistic and sexual identity in the early twentieth century. But it may also be a guarded, even hypocritical response to an artist that he had once greatly admired and continued to respect for what he later termed his ‘elegant artificiality’.40

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The Parting of the Ways The Magician was a watershed for Maugham. His subsequent work would find subtler ways of treating sexual transgression, and time would soon render the decadence of the 1890s quaint rather than threatening. Eager to remain abreast of literary fashion, Maugham would turn against his former idols after the First World War, dismissing The Yellow Book as ‘jejeune’ and Pater as ‘as dull as a picture of Alma Tadema … a feeble creature … filled with the conceit of culture.’41 In later life he regarded The Magician with embarrassment, though the novel remained popular. It was adapted for the silent screen in 1926, although the story was changed considerably and even given a happy ending. Crowley meanwhile was to develop from an eccentric Englishman into a figure of international notoriety. He would offer a partial reworking of The Magician in his own novel, Moonchild, written in 1917 but not published until 1929. He would also publicly link himself with Wilde in his unsuccessful 1934 libel case against Nina Hamnett, when, after counsel had read from his collection Clouds Without Water and asked him ‘is that not filth?’, Crowley had inverted Wilde’s famous witticism and answered, ‘As you read it, it is magnificent.’42 More significant, however, was the role he played in the controversy surrounding Wilde’s funerary monument in Père Lachaise. Wilde’s remains had been moved to the cemetery in 1909. Jacob Epstein’s striking memorial statue, complete with naked penis, was unveiled two years later. Much to Crowley’s disgust, the statue’s genitals were soon muffled by a tarpaulin. He at once began a campaign to have this removed, notifying the press in November 1911 that he would do it himself unless the authorities renounced their puritan strictures. He was as good as his word, upsetting Epstein, who had no wish to be the subject of an ‘unofficial unveiling’.43 When a bronze butterfly was commissioned to conceal the offending organ once more, Crowley stepped in a second time, stealing the insect and bringing it in triumph to Wilde’s old haunt, the Café Royal. He did this, he later maintained, ‘to uphold the privileges of the artist’, since he had felt ‘indignant at the insult to Epstein and to art in his person’.44 Lawrence Sutin claims that Crowley ‘cared neither for Wilde’ nor for Epstein’s sculpture, but that his intervention won him ‘a degree of respect in the London artistic circles he alternately reviled and longed to enter’.45 This was short-lived, and Crowley was soon on his travels once again. One might read this affair as another example of Crowley’s self-publicity, or his insistence on his own artistic and social privileges, but it has wider resonance. The emasculation of the figure by a butterfly, the emblem of Wilde’s great rival, J.M. Whistler, was at best tactless – Crowley called it ‘the most obscene insult’ – while the sexual concealment that butterfly and tarpaulin represented was bound to be an affront to Crowley’s credo. Most significant, however, was Crowley’s claim to be acting on behalf of Epstein’s art rather than Wilde’s memory. In 1911, even the iconoclastic Crowley was wary of identifying himself too closely with the dead dramatist, anxious to conceal his bisexuality, and unwilling to be seen as a ‘nineties’ aesthete by being drawn into the internecine warfare fought by Wilde’s friends over 26


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Wilde’s Edwardian Afterlife his legacy. It was far safer to pose as Epstein’s spokesman and defend modern art from the philistines than it was to invite discussions about Wilde’s significance or to be publicly associated with him. It was also important for Crowley to be notorious in his own right rather than being overshadowed by Wilde: perhaps The Magician’s disquieting if disguised parallels between the aesthete and the occultist had affected him more powerfully than he was prepared to admit. By 1934, he had no such worries, but in 1911 the British public was unfamiliar with his determined infamy. When Maugham was writing The Magician in 1905 or 1906 (not ‘the first six months of 1907’ as he later claimed [viii]), Wilde was a writer whose name attracted opprobrium and whose works were difficult to obtain in Britain, even in pirated editions. By the time the novel appeared at the end of 1908, his reputation was undergoing a limited revival. The comedies had all been performed in London, Salomé had been a success in Europe as a play and an opera, and had been danced by Maud Allen in The Vision of Salomé at London’s Palace Theatre. Methuen had published a fourteen volume Collected Works edited by Robert Ross, and the Bodley Head had issued Salomé with sixteen of Beardsley’s seventeen original drawings in 1906.46 Wilde the man may still have been unmentionable, but his dramatic output was not. In the light of such developments, Maugham’s deployment of Wilde and fin de siècle culture emerges as subtly ambiguous. First, it needed to be recognised by readers, no easy task when even the actress playing Cicely in the 1911 production of The Importance of Being Earnest could claim never to have heard of the play and admit to knowing ‘next to nothing of Oscar Wilde’.47 Next, the significance of the allusions had to be deciphered, and it was here that mixed messages emerged most tellingly. If one found Haddo monstrous and perverted, or simply Crowley in slightly fancier than usual dress, one could denounce his favoured artists as similarly diseased. If however one responded to his charisma and wit at the expense of the noble but plodding Arthur, the doctor Maugham might have become, the novel assumed a very different character. Maugham’s attitude to Crowley may have been easily categorised, but his relationship with Wilde remained an elusive one. Notes 1 See, for example, H.R. Wakefield’s ‘He Cometh and He Passeth By’ in They Return at Evening (1928), Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out (1935), and Dion Fortune’s The Winged Bull (1935). Timothy d’Arch Smith argues that Crowley is the model for Dr Trelawney in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–75) in The Books of the Beast: Essays on Aleister Crowley, Montague Summers and others (Oxford, 1991), pp. 79–85. 2 Aleister Crowley, Confessions: An Autohagiography, ed. John Symonds and Kenneth Grant (1929: London, 1969), p. 334. 3 W. Somerset Maugham, The Magician (1908; London, 1991), pp. vii–viii. All quotations are taken from this edition. Subsequent page references are given in the text. 4 Crowley, Confessions, pp. 570–71. Crowley neglects to mention that Maugham was actually slightly older than he was, having been born in 1874, and that he had been a published author since 1897. 5 ‘Oliver Haddo’ [Aleister Crowley], ‘How to Write a Novel! After W.S. Maugham’, Vanity Fair (London) LXXXI, 30 December 1908, pp. 838–40. W. Somerset Maugham: The

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Critical Heritage, ed. Anthony Curtis and John Whitehead (London, 1987), p. 56. 6 Ibid., p. 45. Crowley later claimed that the review had been ‘cut down by two thirds for lack of space’, Confessions, p. 572. 7 Ibid., p. 572. 8 Unsigned review, ‘A Feast of Horrors’, New York Times, 13 February 1909, p. 88, in Maugham: The Critical Heritage, p. 57. 9 There is no direct evidence that James based Karswell, the sinister occultist of his story ‘Casting the Runes’ (1911) on Crowley, but he did however know Crowley’s tutor in Classics, A.W. Verrall, and may have met Crowley during the latter’s undergraduate years. 10 Pollitt corresponded with Wilde from 1898, and ‘became an associate’ of Crowley at about the same time. The Letters of Aubrey Beardsley, ed. Henry Maas, J.L. Duncan and W.G. Good (London, 1970), p. 102. Wilde’s letters to Pollitt are notably flirtatious in response to the photographs Pollitt had sent him. See The Collected Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (London, 2000), pp. 1106–7, 1115–16, 1120. 11 d’Arch Smith, The Books of the Beast, pp. 22–23. 12 d’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English ‘Uranian’ Poets from 1889 to 1930 (London, 1970), p. 97. The sonnets appeared in Jephthah and Other Mysteries, Lyrical and Dramatic (1899). 13 Wilde’s sexual life at Oxford during the 1870s is discussed by Neil McKenna in The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (London, 2004), pp. 15–28. See too Linda Dowling’s Homosexuality and Hellenism in Victorian Oxford (New York, 1994). Crowley later announced that if Walter Pater and Wilde had been at Cambridge as he had been, ‘the nonsense would have been knocked out of them’. Confessions, p. 167. 14 Crowley used this spelling to differentiate his spiritual philosophy from the commonplace trickery of stage conjurers. 15 Peter Mendes, Clandestine Erotic Fiction in English 1800–1930: A Bibliographical Study (Aldershot, 1993), p. 309. 16 John Symonds, The Great Beast: The Life and Magick of Aleister Crowley (St Alban’s, 1973), p. 73. 17 R.K.R. Thornton, ‘“Decadence” in Later Nineteenth-Century England’ in Ian Fletcher (ed.), Decadence and the 1890s (London, 1979), p. 26. 18 Wilde, ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young’, The Chamelon, December 1894. 19 Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray [Alex Martin and Jerome Fletcher], The Decadent Traveller (Sawtry, 2000), p. 19. 20 Brooks married the painter, Romaine Brooks (Beatrice Romaine Goddard) in 1905. The marriage was short-lived. 21 Ted Morgan, Somerset Maugham (1980; London, 1981), p. 60. 22 Ibid., pp. 116–17. 23 Maugham, Of Human Bondage (London, 1915), p. 285. 24 Wilde to Hunter Blair in H. Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde: A Biography (1976; London, 2001), p. 38. 25 National Observer, 6 April, 1895, in H. Montgomery Hyde, Famous Trials: Seventh Series: Oscar Wilde (London, 1962), p. 156. Recalling Wilde’s downfall in Oscar Wilde: A Summing Up (1940), Lord Alfred Douglas termed him ‘a most powerful and convincing heresiarch’. Rupert Croft-Cooke, Bosie: The Story of Lord Alfred Douglas, His Friends and Enemies, (London, 1963), p. 72. Crowley himself termed Wilde ‘the high priest of the cult which had already conferred a kind of aristocracy upon the undergraduate.’ Confessions p. 343. 26 Robert Tanitch notes how the first London performances of Lady Windermere’s Fan

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Wilde’s Edwardian Afterlife and The Importance of Being Earnest in 1901 did not have Wilde’s name on their programmes. By 1908, critics were tentatively enjoying some aspects of Wilde, though in what now seems a defensive distancing mechanism, they insisted that the comedies were dated and thus not part of the Edwardian world. Oscar Wilde on Stage and Screen (London, 1999). Salomé was quite another matter, being far more controversial as a result of its Biblical setting and overt eroticism. 27 Bryan Connon, Beverley Nichols: A Life (London, 1991), p. 40. 28 Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde (London, 1987), p. 545. 29 Crowley, Confessions, p. 344. 30 Max Beerbohm, Seven Men and Two Others (1919: Harmondsworth, 1954), p. 10. 31 The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, p. 684. 32 Ellman, Oscar Wilde, p. 46. 33 Merlin Holland, Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (London, 2003), p. 100. 34 The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London, 1994), p. 1109. 35 Wilde has the less agonised ‘Let me touch thy body’, but the quotation is otherwise accurate. 36 See for example, Table-Talk – Oscar Wilde, ed. Thomas Wright (London, 2000). For Crowley’s less-than-flattering estimation of Salomé as scripture stirred by ‘perverse imagination’ and poor French, see Confessions p. 343. 37 Maugham to Pinker, 1 October 1906, in R.T. Stott, A Bibliography of the Works of W. Somerset Maugham (London, 1973), p. 51; Maugham quoted in Robert Calder’s Willie: The Life of W. Somerset Maugham (London, 1989), p. 99. 38 Florence Farr, who had performed magical rituals with Crowley and W.B. Yeats during her membership of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, directed the first London performances of Salomé for the New Stage Club at the Bijou Theatre, Bayswater in 1905. ‘[A] singular combination of puerility and putrescence,’ fumed the Daily Telegraph. The following year, Farr played Herodias in a private production by the Literary Theatre Club at the King’s Hall, Covent Garden. This was boycotted by the press, and according to Tanitch, ‘no illustrated paper would publicise the photographs.’ Oscar Wilde on Stage and Screen, pp. 141, 144. 39 Lionel Johnson, ‘The Destroyer of a Soul’ from Poems (1895). The poem deals with Wilde’s corruption, as Johnson saw it, of Alfred Douglas. 40 Maugham, The Summing Up (London, 1938), p. 160. 41 Ibid., pp. 89, 174. 42 Symonds, The Great Beast, p. 436. 43 Jacob Epstein, letter to The Times [London], 8 November 1911, in Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (New York, 2000), p. 218. 44 For Crowley’s account of the affair, see Confessions, pp. 644–48. 45 Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt, p. 218. 46 The original John Lane edition of 1893 had seen three designs suppressed, two bowdlerised and another omitted. 47 Gladys Cooper, Gladys Cooper (1935) in Tanitch, Oscar Wilde on Stage and Screen, p. 264.

Address for Correspondence Nick Freeman, Department of English and Drama, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leics. LE11 3TU; email: [email protected]

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