CECIL MAITLAND
AN UNWILLING DISCIPLE
BY
BARRY VAN-ASTEN
‘Maitland was a young man who was said to be
always trying to commit suicide’
(Stella Bowen. ‘Drawn From Life’. 1941. [1984 ed. p. 121])
Anyone who is familiar
with the works of the occultist Aleister Crowley will have come across the name
Cecil Maitland as one of the ‘dabblers’ in magick and apparently one of the
many beings of little substance wounded by the First World War and hiding their
remains in the hedonistic superficiality of Bohemia; one of the many wrecked
lives that drifted towards Crowley and his Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu during
1921. Little is known of Maitland and what is known has come from second and
third-hand reminiscences contained in various publications and biographies,
mostly associated with the writer Mary Butts who became Maitland’s lover, in
fact, if it were not for Butts there would be very little source material on
Maitland and one could be forgiven for believing that perhaps he never really
existed at all! But what information on Maitland which has survived appears to
be conflicting and erroneous; even Nathalie Blondel who has written a fine
biography of Butts falls under the same spell as others when it comes to
Maitland’s birth and heritage. With this in mind I set out to investigate the
mysterious Maitland to either confirm or deny some of the allegations as to his
background.
The author, Douglas
Goldring (1887-1960) states in his hugely interesting ‘South Lodge:
Reminiscences of Violet Hunt, Ford Madox Ford and the English Review Circle’
that Cecil’s maternal grandfather was an ‘eminent Presbyterian’ and that
Cecil’s father was an ‘Anglo-Catholic clergyman who for years lived perilously
on the brink of Rome’ and that ‘as a young man Cecil went out to Malaya to
plant rubber and acquired a taste, which never left him, for Singapore gin
slings. He was in the Black Watch during the war of 1914-1918 and was, I
believe, severely wounded at Galipoli.’ (1) Cecil Maitland, although it is hard
to believe when one looks at his life, certainly was an infantryman during the
Great War and there is every indication to suggest he was indeed wounded in
some manner for the years following his military service he was continually at
odds with himself and pre-disposed to attempting suicide; I also believe that
Maitland inflated his own importance and was not averse to straying from the
truth when it came to his ancestry, perhaps it is another indication that he
suffered some sort of mental affliction or breakdown following his time in
military service. For example, we are told by Goldring, an author who seems to
have perpetrated much misinformation on Maitland, that the monocle-wearing Cecil,
that ‘lovable but dilapidated Scotch “aristocrat”,’ (2) was ‘at one time only
separated by two lives from the Earldom of Lauderdale’. (3) The Earldom of
Lauderdale has a long ancestral line of the Maitland family, yet I can find no
evidence as to the efficacy of the statement.
THE ‘RAISING OF DEVILS’
‘His character was charming as few other men I
ever met. His
talent for writing, though limited by his moral
weakness to
trivialities, possessed many admirable
qualities. His expression
was simple and effective, and his fascination undeniable.'
(Crowley
on Maitland. Confessions. p. 881)
Goldring also tells us
that ‘everything to do with esoteric religion and its practitioners, everything
to do with Magic – black or white – had a peculiar fascination for Cecil, in
spite of the fact that he was naturally sceptical and like most Scots, hard
headed. As a boy, scarcely out of his teens, he had attended a Black Mass in Edinburgh, and found it a
dull performance. When I first met him he had for some time past been indulging
– in his basement-bedroom at Belsize
Park Gardens
– in various experiments for the raising of devils. Pentagons and magic circles
were chalked on the floor.’ (4)
Whether he was
hard-headed or not, Maitland was certainly not Scottish. He was born James Alexander
Cecil Maitland in the spring of 1892 in Church Stretton, Shropshire.
(5) His father was Ernest John Winslow Maitland, born in Toronto, Canada
in 1857 and his mother was Annie Barbara Lowson Roberts, born in Hampstead, London in 1862. (6) Ernest
and Annie were married on 29th
March 1891 at St Saviours Church, Southwark, in London. (7) During 1891 Ernest and Annie are
boarding with the Cook family at Victoria
Building in Church
Stretton. (8) Ernest is 34 years old and a ‘Clerk in Holy Orders’. Another son
was born to the Maitland family in Church Stretton in 1893 named after his
father, Ernest John Winslow Maitland; he died in 1916 aged 23. (9) However,
there is a Scottish connection on his mother’s side as her parents were born in
Scotland.
During 1871 the Roberts family are living in Marylebone, London, Cecil’s
mother, Annie Barbara Lowson Roberts is 8 years old and living with her mother,
Mary A Roberts, a ‘Minister’s wife’ aged 37, born in Scotland in 1834 and
Annie’s four brothers and her six sisters, one of which is Katherine E Roberts.
(10) We find Cecil staying with his Aunt Katherine and her husband William
David Cruikshand at the time of the 1911 census in Chingford, Chigwell,
in Essex. Cecil is single, 19 years old and
his occupation is given as ‘Rancher’; his Uncle William is 47, a ‘medical
practitioner’ born in Sydney,
New South Wales in 1864; Aunt
Katherine is also 47 years old. There are two domestics living at the
household: Louisa Ellen Gall, a single, 26 year old cook, born 1885 in South Woodford, Essex, and Emily Victoria Rose Checkman,
a 15 year old housemaid, born 1896, in Northfleet,
Kent. (11)
Maitland served in the
infantry during the First World War from 1914-1916 in Princess Louise’s (Argyll
and Sutherland Highlanders). (12) On 3rd April 1915 Cecil was made a
Second Lieutenant (13) and in 1916 he was in Edinburgh, aged 24 serving with
the London Regiment, 4/3rd Battalion (Military Reg: 5635). (14)
MARY BUTTS
‘I love Cecil because of the delicious state he
evokes in me.’
(Mary Butt’s Journal. 11th December 1920)
Mary F. Butts
(1890-1937) whom Crowley
referred to rather unflatteringly in his ‘Confessions’ as a ‘large, white,
red-haired maggot’ (p. 878) was a minor modernist writer whom nobody seems to
read, anymore, though her work is worth searching out.
Mary, who was bisexual
and had previously been in a two year relationship with a woman named Eleanor
Rogers, who became violent at the thought of losing Mary, was married to the
poet and editor John Rodker (1894-1955); during the First World War John was a
Conscientious Objector in hiding from the conscription and served time in
prison because of it; they had married in 1916 but it appears that John did not
satisfy Mary sexually and she wanted an ‘open marriage’.
Mary first met Cecil
on the evening of 3rd
January 1920 when she visited a fellow writer and friend named
Sally in Bayswater, London.
Living with Sally was her lover, Cecil Maitland, and they all read their
stories to each other. Mary and Cecil found some sort of occult sympathy in
each others’ natures and over the coming months grew closer together, Mary
affectionately calling Cecil ‘Sandy’; they spent much time discussing various
aspects of the esoteric arts, such as the ‘Abyss’ on 6th February –
‘Maitland has looked into it…’ (15) In fact, by February ‘she had realised the
extent of Cecil Maitland’s knowledge of magic’. (16)
By March 1920 the two
lovers were deep in their magical studies, Mary practicing automatic writing
and reading a huge amount of occult literature from Eliphas Levi to the ‘Sacred
Magic of Abra-Melin’ – on 29th March she declared: ‘Maitland and I
are in love with the 4th Dimension’. (17) On the same day the two
adepts seal their union in blood – ‘I made him fetch a corn razor, &
slashed a cross on his wrist & on mine. 3 slashes to each in my eagerness
to draw blood. We sucked each other’s cuts & kissed them, & lay back
licking our own wrists.’ (18)
‘These weeks I have been hindered waiting a
formula. These books on
occultism with their bastard words,
credulities, falsities on facts,
emotion & aesthetic falsities, inwardly revolt me.
Maitland and I
have a mutual imaginative dislike for the
Cabala.’
(Diary: 21st
April 1920. ‘The Journals of Mary Butts’.Blondel. p. 149)
Mary became more and
more infatuated with Cecil who would come to live with Mary at 43 Belsize Park Gardens
in London –
‘Lately I have dreamed of Cecil (he is sitting beside me) as my lover – each
time, with less & less inhibitions. To-day I want it while he is here’ (19)
and ‘I’m satiated with the thought of his embraces. I want to lie with him in
that room & leave there a patch of ivory & gold.’ (20)
The actress Elsa
Lanchester (1902-1986) famous for her portrayal of the ‘bride’ in the horror
classic ‘The Bride of Frankenstein’ (1935) was also lodging at 43 Belsize Park
Gardens during the time Mary and Cecil were there and she writes of Maitland in
her autobiography, ‘Elsa Lanchester, Herself’ (1983), that ‘at the time Mary
was living with a man called Cecil Maitland, who was thickset with rather red
skin and black hair. He was either drunk or seemed to be most of the time, but
maybe he was sniffing something. I didn’t like Maitland at all. He frightened
me. Once, in a playful manner, I suppose, he pulled me onto their studio bed by
the hair. I gave him the knee in the groin and he laughed it off. We were all
having tea at the time in Mary’s studio.’ (21) Elsa goes on to say that ‘for a
short time there was a tenant called “The Lady in Red”. She was the companion
of Aleister Crowley.’ She even relates how once she came face to face with the
Great Beast himself – ‘I saw Aleister Crowley when he came to the house at Belsize Park. He had a bicycle and his head was
shaved. He was wearing a yellow kilt… I helped him find The Lady in Red. She
was down in the kitchen, stirring a large pot on the stove. It could have been
stew or dirty washing.’ It appears that Elsa became troubled by the behaviour
of Mary and Cecil, for she states that they ‘were sometimes very odd, and I
went to visit them at teatime less and less often.’
On 10th November 1920
John and Mary’s child Camilla Elizabeth Rodker was born but already the
marriage was in trouble and slowly disintegrating. On 6th May 1920 Mary had
written in her diary: ‘there are two reasons why my love for Cecil is not
physically consummated yet. Because of the child…’ by December 1920, there was
nothing stopping them becoming sexually intimate. Previously, on 5th July 1920,
Mary mentions in her diary that she had told her husband John how ‘near
“physical” my relations with Cecil had been.’ (22) Also it is worth noting that
in July 1920 Cecil had been very ill and Mary was concerned for his health
after a friend of Cecil’s named Johannes committed suicide – ‘temporarily
insane is what Cecil may very well become.’ (23) Mary says on the 6th
of August that following the suicide of Cecil’s friend, she ‘found him shut up,
with a secret confidence, like a man with his arms round a stone.’ (24)
Through diligent
research I have discovered the identity of Johannes or ‘J F’, Cecil’s friend
who committed suicide. He was in fact a young man named Johannes Jacobus Fagan,
born on 22nd
February 1898 in Tulbagh,
South Africa;
the son of Henry Allan Fagan (1865-1931) and Catharina Susanna Fagan, nee Smith
(1864-1937) who were married in Tulbagh on 22nd March 1887. Johannes was a
student at the Royal College of Music in London, enrolling in 1916 (he returned
back to South Africa after just two terms, staying for two years under ill
health); during his second period of study he became a student of Vaughan
Williams and was deeply affected by the sudden death of his English fiancée
from Influenza in March 1920. Johannes committed suicide on Tuesday 13th
July 1920, aged just 22; he was found ‘dead on his bed’ by his landlady at 13
Colville Road, Bayswater, London, having what states on the death certificate,
‘swallowed Cyanide solution poison’. (25)
‘2.40
a.m. I am waiting the last four minutes for peace.
At 2.45 I shall take the leap to the great
beyond… A
minute and a half and I must pour out the
draught. Can
it be that all this suffering is nearly over.
Good-bye, good-
bye, friends all.’
(The Kensington Express, Notting Hill and West London
Examiner.
Friday 23rd
July 1920. ‘A Student’s Suicide: his letter to the coroner.’ P. 3)
In August 1920 Mary
and Cecil were staying at Welcombe House, Bude, in Cornwall where Mary says in her diary on 11th
August that he has a ‘violent suicidal impulse. Perception of J F [Johannes,
who committed suicide] as an infuriated devil demanding that he instantly
destroy himself.’ The next day she notes that he is ‘exhausted – like a man who
had been fighting for his life.’ (26)
Mary and Cecil perform
a séance using a planchette on 18th
August 1920 and the next day Mary writes that Cecil is ‘a man under
a doom. He has had from his childhood the perception of the dark place in
reality, what we call the “Abyss”.’ Cecil’s despair deepens for Mary writes in
her journal on 27th October that Cecil told her that ‘for the past
weeks he had been crazy with desire for suicide.’ The loss of his friend
Johannes played on Cecil’s mind continuously and even haunted him, for on 17th
November he told Mary about his suicide attempt around the time of Mary’s
daughter being born when he took poison, ‘a bottle of chlorodyne’ and six
grains of cocaine which ‘half killed him’. Crowley makes light of this incident
in his ‘Confessions’ saying that ‘I heard that he swallowed a bottle of poison
– not even a decent poison, such as a self-respecting suicide might be expected
to use. I forget the precise ingredients. I think it was some sort of
disinfectant, such as is sold without restriction because legislatures had
failed to imagine anyone asinine or abject enough to make it a beverage. The
luck still held. I don’t know whether it disinfected him, but it certainly made
him as sick as a sewer.’ (27) Cecil attempted suicide again on Sunday 19th December 1920
when he tried to shoot himself with his friend Johannes’s revolver and was
taken to Paddington
Hospital in London. Once again Crowley had an unkind
word to say about it – ‘He had tried to shoot himself in the heart with a
revolver. One would imagine that it would have been safe to bet on his doing
some damage. But no! His pistol was spiritually his twin. The bullet thought that
it might hurt itself if it happened to hit a bone, so it skipped nimbly round
his ribs and sought repose from the tribulations of existence in a comfortable
cushion.’ (28)
The incident is also
told by Cecil’s friend, the Scottish lawyer and translator, Brian Lunn
(1893-1958) but Mr. Lunn tells a very different story suggesting that it was a
suicide pact between Maitland and himself; it is worth quoting: ‘On his saying
that he [Maitland] had an old revolver of his father’s and some cartridges at
home, we decided to go there later in the evening and toss up, the loser to do
the shooting… Maitland tossed up and lost, but instead of shooting me he put
the gun to his own left breast and fired. He staggered back on to the divan and
groaned. Then he got up; his waistcoat had a hole about an inch in diameter
with sparks… I did not see Maitland until he came out of hospital, when he told
me that the doctor had to call the police as there had been shooting, and that
they had accepted his explanation that he was fiddling with the old revolver
when it went off by accident.’ (29) Lunn was another damaged man by war and
therefore this account cannot be wholly reliable.
OCCULT PERSPECTIVES
‘A sensual intelligent boy, clairvoyant but
only to the “dark
perceptions”. Suggestible - …because of a certain pace and
madness
in him, he worked average preoccupations to intensity…
I know
what followed – his ghastly illness, drink, cocaine,
more brooding, more
agony, a feeling round after death…’
(Mary on Cecil. 3rd January 1921. Mary Butts:
Scenes from the Life. Nathalie Blondel. p. 95)
Matters came to a head
in February 1921 when John left Mary; the two determined occultists went to
Swanage of all places yet letters from John pursued them, being particularly
abusive against Cecil. Mary had had enough and handed her wedding ring to Cecil
so that he may hurl it into the sea, a grand and romantic gesture to break the
matrimonial bond with just a touch of magic about it; it was stormy, as it
should be with all grand gestures. ‘He went out. When he came back and said “it
is done”, a cold breath blew across me. I thought John was a demon.’ (30)
In March 1921 they
travel the continent, and in Paris
where Mary declared ‘I am now going to have the best part of my life’, they met
the artist Nina Hamnett (1890-1956) who knew absolutely anyone who was anyone
worth knowing!
Crowley was wandering around Paris like a ghost in search of a house to
haunt when Nina Hamnett told Mary and Cecil about the occultist and his Abbey
in Sicily –
Crowley ‘stayed in the Rue Vavin at the Hotel de
Blois. I asked him if I could bring some friends to see him and he asked us to
come in one day before dinner and have some cocktails. He said that he had
invented a beautiful cocktail called Kubla Khan No. 2. He would not say what it
was made of.’ (31) Apparently the cocktail, which contained gin and vermouth, also
consisted of Laudanum in a bottle marked ‘Poison’ – it was ‘supposed to be an
aphrodisiac but it had no effect at all on any of us except Cecil Maitland, who
was there also. After we left he rushed into the street, and in and out of all
the cafes behaving in a most strange manner, accosting everyone he came into
contact with.’ (32)
On 11th
March Crowley initiated Mary in the 1st degree of the O.T.O. (33)
and on 18th March Crowley taught her the Gnostic cross; she also
makes the observation that ‘Cecil needs magical protection’, but before Crowley
left for Sicily he also taught his anxious new disciples in the making other
magical practices such as yogic asanas (postures), pranayama (breath control)
and mantras as well as astral travelling. He obviously saw in Maitland an
intelligent man worth cultivating with a great enthusiasm for magick much as he
had seen in Victor Neuburg and would see again later in Raoul Loveday, despite
such men’s obvious failings; in the case of Maitland Crowley found that the fundamental
root of his weakness was the lack of any will-to-live which was absent and
through magical training a fine and disciplined magical assistant could be
made. In fact, he saw both Cecil and Mary in great need of his magical
assistance and tuition, saying they were ‘both in very bad health and very
hard-pressed for money.’ – ‘They therefore came to me. With my invariable
optimism, I picked out all the promising points and overlooked the faults, or
promised myself that I could easily correct them. Their wretchedness kindled my
pity and I invited them to spend their summer in the abbey at Cefalu. I really
believed that a month or two of simple life, free from temptations and
distractions, with the quiet discipline of our regulations, might put them on
the right road.’ (34)
By 6th
April Crowley was back at the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu like a beetle
returning to his dung heap, but the truth of the matter was that he was bored
and in search of magical stimulation, which would not be too long coming.
At the beginning of
June 1921, following a few days when Cecil became ill with some sort of eye
problem, Mary and Cecil had decided to join Crowley at the Abbey of Thelema! Mary wrote
to her husband John Rodker on 1st June: ‘Cecil and I have something
particular to do together… I’m going South to Sicily with him to find out what it is.’ (35)
Mary Butts and Cecil Maitland
Italy 1921
THE ABBEY OF THELEMA
‘Some day I shall be an adept.’
(Mary Butts Diary: 12th April 1920)
In late June 1921 the
two ‘adepts’ left for the Abbey of Thelema, Cefalu.
Life at the Abbey was
certainly not what they expected, in fact, Mary was decidedly concerned about
the lack of proper sanitation; Cecil probably had other concerns on his mind,
such as the lack of cigarettes because Crowley ‘offered us every drug in and
out of the pharmacopaea, and tried to take away Cecil’s cigarettes. This to a
man who had recently cured himself of what looked like dipsomania and had reduced
his count of fags from fifty to twenty-five a day.’ (36) It appears hashish,
cocaine and opium were perfectly acceptable and freely available at the Abbey!
They would have to rise at dawn and perform their yogic asanas (postures), go
on ‘astral journeys’ and meditate upon magical symbols while perhaps listening
to a lecture by Crowley on certain techniques, along with keeping an open diary
of all their thoughts and studies.
‘The day following his
arrival, Cecil went for a swim in the bay (the Caldara) with the Beast, who
seems to have tried his best to drown him.’ (37).Crowley has an altogether
different story to tell and perhaps a more accurate one:
‘They arrived.
The very next day I
got the shock of my life. I must mention first that, some time earlier,
Maitland had had some sort of job mining or planting in the East. On his
journey out, his ship was standing off Colombo
pending quarantine inspection. He was sitting on the rail talking to a girl.
Suddenly he fell backwards and was pulled into a boat by Singhalese pedlars who
had no consideration for the perfectly justifiable feeling of the local sharks,
or any philosophical care for the welfare of humanity.
He [Cecil] told this
story to excuse his aversion to water. It was, however, of vital importance to
his health that he should learn to swim. We went down to the Caldara alone,
took off our clothes and started round the rocks. I showed him how to proceed
without the slightest need for swimming, by letting the water take most of his
weight, and using his hands to hang onto the large convenient knobs of rock
which abound everywhere. He showed the most abject fear, but I supposed that a
few minutes would give him confidence. On the contrary his terror increased and
I had infinite trouble to get him to come even a couple of hundred yards. We
reached the breaking point. He found a ledge, scrambled ashore and shivered. I
gave up and swam back. I dressed and smoked. No sign of Captain Webb. I climbed
to the top of the cliff, where I could see the whole edge. There he was like a
cat on hot bricks, with all due apologies to the feline race. He had chosen to
try to find an overland route, stark naked on sharp rough rocks – and there
really wasn’t a way. He reached, at last, a cave, which possessed a fairly broad
opening above water, so that I could throw him his sandals. He had merely to
walk home on a broad flat shelf which would not have asked him to wade more
than waist high. But he insisted on the most excoriating and dangerous scramble
across slimy crags. An hour or so later, he finally got to his clothes. The
unfortunate wretch was bleeding all over. We then walked home and he took
occasion to thank me for the most unpleasant afternoon he had ever spent in his
life.’ (38)
Symonds also says that
the next day after the near drowning – ‘the ceremony of preparing the Cakes of
Light took place’; this was at 2 p.m. on 5th July 1921 and it lasted
over two hours: the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram was performed before, as
Crowley states in his ‘Magical Record of the Beast’ for 5th July, ‘a
young cock’ was ‘baptised Peter Paul into the Catholic Church by C. J. A.
Maitland, the son of an apostate Romish Priest, and therefore the ideal ‘Black’
Hierophant. Mary Butts and I are its sponsors. Peter and Paul are the founders
of the Christian Church, and we want its blood to found our own church.
Alostrael [Leah
Hirsig, the Scarlet Woman] then dances against the will of Mary, on my swearing
to give to her the half of my Kingdom. She demands P. P.’s head on the Disk.
I behead him, and the
blood is caught in the silver ‘charger’ on the Disk. In this charger is the
meal etc. for the Cakes of Light, ready except for the blood.
I conjure the spirit
of P. P. to serve these Cakes to found our Church with, as we may use them.
The cock is slain in
honour of Ra-Hoor-Khuit, who is invoked before the killing.’ (39)
Mary (whose magical
name was Soror Rhodon) declined the Cakes of Light (the Thelemic Eucharistic
Host) when Crowley
offered it her which caused her to remark later that Crowley offered her a ‘goat’s turd on a
plate’, which indeed it was – ‘In my Mass the Host is of excrement, that I can
consume in awe and adoration.’ (‘Magical Record of the Beast’. 5th July 1921) Following
the ceremony Cecil and Mary both took their Oath of Affiliate and signed the
Abbey’s record.
On 7th
July; Crowley reads Mary and Cecil’s destinies in the Yi King.
At the end of the
summer (1921) the Thelemites at the Abbey conducted a ceremony involving a
goat; Leah Hirsig acted as Priestess who presented herself to the goat in an
act of sexual congress. The goat, with what little dignity was left, showed
good taste and declined the advances of the Scarlet Woman and refused to mount Hirsig.
‘To save the ritual from utter failure, Crowley
took the goat’s place with Leah, as he recorded in his diary: “I atoned for the
young He-goat at considerable length.”’ (40) Mary and Cecil were witness to the
attempted ritual intercourse by the Virgin He-goat upon the Body of Babalon
[Hirsig] and when Crowley cut its throat and the blood spurted over Leah’s
back, Leah turned to Mary and asked her ‘what shall I do now?’ and Mary
casually replied: ‘I’d have a bath if I were you!’
‘C(ecil) M(aitland)
said last night: they are making a sacrifice of personality to personality. He
said that it makes A(leister) C(rowley) tragic because he is kind, wise,
honourable man crucified by his belief in his own teaching.’ [‘Journal
of Mary Butts’. Cefalu, 1st
August 1921]
On 14th September 1921 Mary
and Cecil signed their Probationers’
Oaths. Two days later on 16th September they left the Abbey of
Thelema and returned to Paris.
TWO GHOSTS HARDLY RECOGNISABLE
Part of the problem at
the Abbey which attributed to Mary’s disillusionment of Crowley and his magick
was the fact she believed Crowley was attempting to come between Cecil and her
which certainly makes sense; Crowley saw much of Maitland’s failings as a man
due to the nature of the relationship with Mary, draining him of energy like a
vampire. Perhaps there was some truth in this as Cecil seemed to be subordinate
to Mary who almost always seemed to get her own way. In Paris they met their friend Nina Hamnet, who
commented that they looked like ‘two ghosts and were hardly recognisable.’ (41)
By 28th September 1921
Cecil and Mary are back living in London
at 43 Belsize Park Gardens,
terrifically damaged by the Cefalu experience and with sizable drug habits.
They had ‘emerged from their sojourn with him [Crowley] considerably shaken and in poor
health. Neither of them discussed their experiences, and when Mary was asked,
by ribald friends, “what happened about the goat”, she always changed the
subject.’ (42)
WHAT HAPPENED ABOUT THE GOAT?
Mary Butts, Cecil Maitland and Douglas Goldring,
Paris 1922
In February 1922 the
Scarlet Woman, Leah Hirsig visited Mary and Cecil at 43 Belsize Park
Gardens, staying a while before
leaving on 27th February – the grip of Crowley
was reluctant to relinquish his ‘adepts’. Mary and Cecil still practiced magic
together, performing séances, automatic writing and astral travelling and even
using (which seems almost incomprehensible to any sane magician) the squares of
Abra-Melin.
On 12th May 1922
Mary, Cecil and a few friends went to visit Badbury Rings and five days later
they were back in London
before going off to Germany
and then Paris
in early June when Cecil, deep in fever, succumbed once again to suicidal
thoughts and took an overdose of veronal [a barbiturate]. They encountered Leah
Hirsig in Paris
who was seeking financial help for Crowley
back in England.
In Paris on 13th
June Mary notes that she and Cecil had both stopped using heroin, but on their
return to London
they quarrelled over drugs – when Mary met Cecil in 1920 he introduced her to
opium and she smoked it for the rest of her life.
Crowley’s novel ‘The Diary of a Drug Fiend’ was
published in the autumn of 1922 and he based his characters of Peter Pendragon
on Cecil and an unnamed character upon Mary, ‘a fat, bold, red-headed slut.’
They both felt insulted, particularly Mary who went to the Press and related
with relish the filthy goings on at the Abbey in an anonymous interview; it was
published in The Sunday Express on 26th November under the headline:
‘Complete Exposure of “Drug Fiend” Author’.
ULYSSES
Cecil Maitland proved
himself to be quite a perceptive scholar of modern literature when he found
time between attempting suicide, particularly the works of James Joyce, yet
very little of Maitland’s written work has survived. Something which has
remained is his piece on James Joyce and I make no apologies for re-producing
Cecil’s essay reviewing Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ published in the New Witness (4th
August 1922. p. 70-71) as an example of his critical literary analysis:
MR. JOYCE AND THE CATHOLIC TRADITION
… It would be absurd
to try to make a thorough analysis of Ulysses in a short article, and I shall
not attempt to do so here. For the convenience of readers unacquainted with Mr.
Joyce’s early work, I shall try briefly to indicate his place in the modern
movement of literature and then to make an analysis of one particular aspect of
the book…
This gap between
literature and reality Mr. Joyce has tried to fill. An effort of this sort
would have been interesting in any case, but Mr. Joyce succeeded in making
works of art of his experiments. His first novel tells the story of the
infancy, childhood and youth of Stephen Dedalus, an Irish writer, in a style
that admits of the presentation of half-thoughts, broken images, emotions,
vivid or obscure, and each dirty, profound, trivial or obscene thought that
passes through his mind. This book is, however, only a prelude to Ulysses.
Masterpiece of compression though it is, the Portrait was experimental. Ulysses
shows the author in absolute control of his medium, and with this book he has
definitely produced a new form of novel that owes nothing to tradition. A
superficial critic might assert that Mr. Joyce owes something of the elasticity
of his prose to Sterne. Personally I should not be surprised if he has never
read Tristram Shandy. The resemblance between the two writers is more apparent
than real, for while Sterne’s style is an affectation, designed to display his
wit and conceal his superficiality, Mr. Joyce elicits the subtlest processes of
the mind, so that they are actually present to the reader and not merely
recorded.
Ulysses is the Odyssey
retold, episode by episode, as the story of a day’s life in the streets, pubs
and brothels of Dublin,
and is an attempt to give a complete account of the nature of man. It is
apparently almost miraculously successful, for he has reproduced the minds and
impressions of his characters so vividly that the reader finds difficulty in
separating his consciousness from theirs; and thus his conception of humanity
from the author’s, the boundaries of whose imagination become his own. The
boundaries are very wide; at times Mr. Joyce gathers the thoughts of his
characters into a whole that represents the consciousness of Dublin; but though municipal they are not
cosmic. Indeed, these frontiers of the imagination are very rigid, for though
there is in this book enough fun to make the reputation of a dozen humorous
writers, there is no hint of a conception of the human body as anything but
dirty, of any pride of life, or of any nobility but that of a pride of
intellect. This vision of human beings as walking drain-pipes, this focussing
of life exclusively round the excremental and sexual mechanism, appears on the
surface inexplicable in so profoundly imaginative and observant a student of
humanity as Mr. Joyce. He has, in fact, outdone the psycho-analysts, who admit
‘sublimation’, and returned to the ecclesiastical view of man.
There is an idea
prevalent among English Catholic converts, Roman and Anglican, that the
Catholic life is one of simple devoutness, tempered by beer, carols and jollity
in public houses, with perhaps an occasional good fat sin to be expiated by a
thumping penance thrown in. These devout souls will probably gasp incredulously
at being told that Aquinas would probably be more at home with Freud than, for
instance, Mr. G. K. Chesterton. No one, however, who is acquainted with
Catholic education in Catholic countries could fail to recognise the source of
Mr. Joyce’s ‘weltanschauung’. He sees the world as theologians showed it to
him. His humour is the cloacal humour of the refectory; his contempt the
priest’s denigration of the body, and his view of sex has the obscenity of a
confessor’s manual, reinforced by the profound perception and consequent
disgust of a great imaginative writer.
If we consider Mr.
Joyce’s work from this point of view, it becomes clear that while his study of
humanity remains incomplete, the defect is not due to any inherent lack of
imagination on his part. Rather it arises from the fact that to a Catholic who
no longer believes that he has an immortal soul, fashioned in the image of God,
a human being becomes merely a specially cunning animal. I suggest then that
Mr. Joyce’s failure is not his own, but that of the Catholic system, which has
not had the strength to hold him to its transcendentalism, and from whose
errors he has not been able to set himself free. (43)
On 28th August 1923
Mary and Cecil completed their joint novel ‘Backwards from Babylon’ before Cecil went to Paris with Mary in
November and then on to Florence
for four months. Mary’s friend, the artist, Stella Bowen (1893-1947) gives a
charming description of Maitland at a party while in France during 1924 – ‘Once
at midnight as I was coming up from the dungeon with a dish of hot dogs, I saw
through the open front door that Maitland was in the garden with his face all
covered with blood. Now Maitland was a young man who was said to be always
trying to commit suicide, and Mary Butts, who had brought him to the party, was
usually able to prevent it. Imagine my annoyance when I saw what I believed to
be another attempt, and at my party! I foresaw the police and what it is usual
to call “des ennuis”. So when I found that it was nothing worse than a bloody
nose, inflicted by a hefty American who had been brought by an English girl who
had just come through a particularly sensational divorce with a long list of
dazzling co-respondents, I was mightily relieved, and took no further notice.
It appeared merely that a person called Pat had smacked Mary unceremoniously as
she danced past him, and she had demanded that Maitland should avenge her. But
Pat’s friend pointed out that he was much too drunk to defend himself, so the
American stepped forward and offered to take Maitland on instead.’ (44)
On 13th November 1924 Cecil
dined with Evelyn Waugh in London.
(45)
Towards the end of
1924 they were living at 7 St. James Terrace, Regents
Park, London, renting rooms from their friend Douglas Goldring and Mary and
Cecil’s relationship was beginning to break down, mostly through Cecil’s need
for other lovers – ‘Cecil does not care much for me, and is a disappointing
man.’ (46)
In January 1925 Mary
and Cecil wrote some amusing light verse under the title ‘House Rhymes’, poems
which featured Mary, Cecil and Douglas Goldring.
They separated around
February 1925 and Goldring casually informs us that Cecil went to live in a
Breton fishing village with a group of friends, but the truth is he was
probably severely depressed and struggled with suicidal feelings.
James Alexander Cecil
Maitland died towards the end of 1926 in Hastings,
Sussex; he was
34 years old. (47) Goldring rather delicately tells us in ‘South Lodge’ that he
died in London of consumption, complicated by alcohol, with only one of his old
friends to look after him (p. 164) but the fact of the matter is that Cecil
took his own life and when Goldring told Mary in early December 1926 of Cecil’s
suicide, ‘for the next few days she was stunned.’ (48) She realised that Cecil
had been the greatest love of her life and following his death he would assume
an almost saintly reverence; loved more in death than in life it seems. Cecil
was a delicate man and life events took an unfortunate toll on his frail mind,
as the suicide of his friend Johannes had done. But 1926 would prove too much
for him, having lost Mary and just a few months before this his father, Ernest.
Cecil’s father died on 29th
August 1926, aged 69 in Kensington, London (49) and it is my opinion that,
already in a fragile state, this was a major contributing factor in his own
death.
His mother Annie
Barbara Lowson Maitland (nee Roberts) died on 21st January 1941 in Brentford,
Middlesex. (50)
Cecil Maitland has
proven to be quite an elusive fellow, in life and in death, yet like an
exquisite butterfly, perhaps time will help fix him firmly to the page of
literature and label him appropriately!
NOTES:
1. South Lodge:
Reminiscences of Violet Hunt, Ford Madox Ford and the English Review Circle. Douglas Goldring.
1943. p. 163.
2. South Lodge. Goldring.
p. 147.
3. South Lodge. Goldring.
p. 155.
4. South Lodge. Goldring.
p. 158-9.
5. Birth Record for England and Wales: 1891, volume:
6A, page: 579, affiliate line number: 366. Mother’s maiden name: Roberts.
6. Birth Record for England and Wales: 1862,
volume: 1A, page: 505, affiliate line number: 31.
7. Marriage Record for
England
and Wales:
1891, volume: 1D, page: 11, affiliate line number: 287.
8. 1891 Census for England and Wales: page:
12, reg number: RG12, piece/folio: 2089/10. The head of the household is: Lucy
Cook, a single woman and a ‘stationer of fancy goods’ aged 44 (born 1847,
Shropshire); she is living with her single sister Elizabeth Cook, an
‘assistant’ aged 41 (born 1850) and their nephew, Tom Cook aged 8 (born 1883)
and niece, Rose E Cook aged 10 (born 1881).
9. Birth Record for England and Wales: 1893,
volume: 6A, page: 593, affiliate line number: 183. Mother’s maiden name:
Roberts. Death Record for England
and Wales:
April-June 1916, Richmond,
Surrey, volume: 2a, page: 592, affiliate line
number: 41.
10. 1871 Census for England and Wales:
affiliate line number: GBC/1871/0187/0125. Annie’s brothers are: Alexander, 15,
born Scotland 1856; George B, 12, born Hampstead 1859; Thomas C, 5, born
Hampstead 1866; Stuart, 1, born Marylebone 1870; Annie’s sisters are: Elizabeth
H, 13, born Hampstead 1858; Margaret S, 11, born Hampstead 1860; Marion, 9,
born Hampstead 1862; Katherine E, 7, born Hampstead; Ada, 3, born Hampstead and
Alice M, 2, born Hampstead 1869.
11. 1911 Census for England and Wales: page: 1,
reg number: RG14, piece/folio: 3, affiliate record identifier:
GBC/1911/RG14/09773/0003/3.
12. Military Records
held at the National Archives, Kew: Reference:
WO 339/40176. Former Reference in original department: 107643.
13. The London Gazette. 2 April 1915. p. 3252.
14. W.W.1 Service
Records. Affiliate number: WO 364; G.S. film number: 007270778, digital folder
number: 007270778, image number: 00118.
15. Mary Butts: Scenes
from the Life. Nathalie Blondel. 1998. p. 72.
16. Mary Butts: Scenes
from the Life. Nathalie Blondel. 1998. p. 72.
17. The Journals of
Mary Butts. Nathalie Blondel. 2002. p. 144.
18. The Journals of
Mary Butts. Nathalie Blondel. 2002. p. 144.
19. 2nd April 1920. The
Journals of Mary Butts. Nathalie Blondel. 2002. p. 145.
20. 7th May 1920. The
Journals of Mary Butts. Nathalie Blondel. 2002. p. 152.
21. Elsa Lanchester,
Herself. Elsa Lanchester. 1983. p. 65-66. The following quotes pages 66 and 67.
22. The Journals of
Mary Butts. Nathalie Blondel. 2002. p. 155.
23. Mary Butts letter
to her Aunt Ada Briggs. 21/22 July 1920, quoted in ‘Mary Butts: Scenes from the
Life.’ Nathalie Blondel. 1998. p. 85-86.
24. The Journals of
Mary Butts. Nathalie Blondel. 2002. p. 166.
25. Death
Record for England
and Wales:
July-Sept 1920. Kensington, London.
volume: 1a, page: 132, affiliate line number: 138. The Inquest took place on Friday 16th July 1920
at Kensington Coroners’ Court. ‘Dr. Marks Golding, of Dawson Place, who was fetched, said death
was due to poisoning by cyanide of potassium. Witness had attended the deceased
for a year, and, in his opinion, he was insane and suicidal, especially since
the death of the girl he was engaged to. Mr. Oswald said the young man was
evidently contemplating the idea of his death with pleasure and recorded a
verdict of ‘Suicide during temporary insanity.’ (The Kensington Express,
Notting Hill and West London Examiner. 23 July 1920. p. 3) [Probate
23 August 1920.
Grahamstown, Albany, Cape Province, South
Africa]
26. 12 Aug 1920. Mary
Butts: Scenes from the Life. Nathalie Blondel. p. 87.
27. The Confessions of
Aleister Crowley. p. 881.
28. The Confessions of
Aleister Crowley. p. 880.
29. Switchback. Brian
Lunn. 1948. p. 131-2.
30. Mary Butts: Scenes
from the Life. Nathalie Blondel. 1998. p. 96.
31. Laughing Torso.
Nina Hamnett. 1932. P. 174.
32. Laughing Torso.
Nina Hamnett. 1932. P. 174.
33. The Journals of
Mary Butts. Nathalie Blondel. 2002. p. 179.
34. The Confessions of
Aleister Crowley. Edited by John Symonds and Kenneth Grant. 1969. (1989 edition
p. 879)
35. Mary Butts: Scenes
from the Life. Nathalie Blondel. 1998. p. 102.
36. Mary Butts: Scenes
from the Life. Nathalie Blondel. 1998. p. 105.
37. The Great Beast.
John Symonds. 1951. Chapter 19: ‘Cakes of Light for Mary Butts’. (1973 edition
p. 299)
38. The Confessions of
Aleister Crowley. Edited by John Symonds and Kenneth Grant. 1969 (1989 edition p.
879-880)
39. The Great Beast.
John Symonds. 1951. Chapter 19: ‘Cakes of Light for Mary Butts’. (1973 edition
p. 299-300)
40. Perdurabo: the
Life of Aleister Crowley. Richard Kaczynski. 2002. [revised and expanded
edition. 2010. p. 373]
41. Laughing Torso. 1932.
Nina Hamnet. p. 177
42. South Lodge:
Reminiscences of Violet Hunt, Ford Madox Ford and the English Review Circle. Douglas Goldring.
1943. p. 148.
43. ‘Mr. Joyce and the
Catholic Tradition’ by Cecil Maitland. New Witness. xx. 4 Aug 1922. p. 70-71. See ‘James Joyce
the Critical Heritage, volume I, 1902-1927, ‘Cecil Maitland on the Catholic
Tradition’. Edited by Robert H. Deming. 1970. p. 272-273 and ‘James Joyce: A
Definitive Biography’. Herbert Gorman. 1941. (1949 reprint, p. 293-294). [also
quoted in ‘South Lodge’. Douglas Goldring. 1943. Chapter xii, ‘Mary and Cecil’.
p. 162]
44. Drawn from Life.
Stella Bowen. 1941. (1984 edition p. 121).
45. The Nineteen
Twenties. Douglas Goldring. 1945. P. 159-160.
46. Mary Butts: Scenes
from the Life. Nathalie Blondel. 1998. p. 137.
47. Death Register for
England
and Wales:
Oct-Dec 1926. volume: 2b, page: 14, affiliate line number: 51
48. Mary Butts: Scenes
from the Life. Nathalie Blondel. 1998. p. 174.
49. Death Register for
England
and Wales:
July-Sept 1926. volume: 1a, page: 175, affiliate line number: 117 [Probate: 18 September 1926.
Middlesex]
50. Death Register for
England
and Wales:
Jan-March 1941. Volume: 3a, page: 603, affiliate line number: 74 [Probate: 27 March 1941. London]
