Black Gate

Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley, poet, mountaineer, religious mystic and self-proclaimed prophet, member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, drug addict, braggart, sexual adventurer, the self-named “Beast 666” and, according to the popular press, “The Wickedest Man in the World,” was one of the most notorious and controversial figures of his era and remains so even today, three quarters of a century after his death.

W. Somerset Maugham, physician, world-traveler, wildly successful playwright (at one time he had four plays appearing in London’s West End theaters simultaneously) and sometime British secret agent, prolific short story writer and novelist, author of such acclaimed works as Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, and The Razor’s Edge, was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century.

These two very different men may seem an unlikely pair, but Maugham met Crowley in Paris in 1905 and (like virtually everyone who encountered the man) was strongly impressed by him. In Maugham’s case the impression was a highly negative one, though he did concede that the occultist had some unique qualities, so much so that he made a thinly-disguised Crowley the central figure in his 1907 novel, The Magician.

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Piranesi (Bloomsbury paperback reprint, September 28, 2021)

I stopped apologizing about preferring old books over new ones a long time ago. One of the best things about reading, after all, is that it’s a kingdom over which you are an absolute sovereign. You alone can confer the Order of the Garter; only you can shout, “Off with their heads!”

Nevertheless, while consistency is required of lesser beings, it need not be considered by monarchs, and so I decreed that the first book I read in 2022 would be Susanna Clarke’s fantasy Piranesi, which was published a little over a year ago, in September 2020. In this I was merely keeping a promise I made a few years ago here on Black Gate when I rhapsodized about Clarke’s previous novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I said then that when Clarke finished her next book, I would line up to read it the day it was published. I think I came reasonably close; that I missed it by fifteen months I can always blame on COVID. Why the hell not?

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Everyone is looking for something, and the things that most people are seeking are the easily identified, common currency of life, everyday ambitions like love, security, peace, wealth, happiness. But a certain select few are looking for… something else. That something else is the subject of the Scottish writer Muriel Spark’s 1970 novella The Driver’s Seat.

Someone once described being guillotined as experiencing “a short, sharp shock.” Leaving aside the question of how anyone could possibly know, that phrase is a perfect description of Spark’s novels and stories, each of which is as brief and cold and merciless as the nip of what the French once called the National Razor.

To name just a few examples, in Memento Mori an aging group of silly, self-obsessed men and women receive a series of mysterious phone calls in which an unfamiliar voice says one simple thing before hanging up: “Remember you must die.” Eventually some of them come to believe that their caller is not a prankster or a blackmailer, but is in fact Death himself.

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