I never read a book in America

I like every kind of book, though I draw the line at the poems of Alexander Pope. I still have fond childhood memories of Biggles, Bulldog Drummond, Sax Rohmer, and Roderic Graeme, whose collected Black Shirt stories I recently re-purchased on Kindle.

I particularly like old books; the language, their archaisms and rhythm. The language demands patience, something easier to say than attain in a world of instant gratification. There’s the initial struggle, like pushing a reluctant door into a dark and dusty room, until the author’s voice takes hold, and you find yourself in the mindscape of earlier centuries, and you become part of it. 

There’s real joy wandering through the world of Fenimore Cooper, the muscular, sometimes over-pious language transcending the limits of film. I remember reading Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond, struggling with it at first, until gradually drifting through deep-hedged lanes, cow parsley and wild roses. 

It was the same with Middlemarch, read when I was seventeen trying to impress my first girlfriend who went on to press Crime and Punishment into my hands, introduce me to Rachmaninov, and then moved on to a boy with better prospects.  

That’s the peculiar things about books, the significant ones at least. You remember who gave or suggested them, and you remember where it was you first read them. Middlemarch and the Brothers Karamazov I read in our freezing cold front parlour—the fire only put on when we had guests. 

I remember reading Romany Rye, Lavengro, and Rookwood in a sunny Uplands flat in Swansea, Joni Mitchel’s Blue playing in the background. 

 

 On a darker note, I remember reading Great Expectations in the middle of a break-up. The Brittany cycling holiday pre-booked and paid for, we cycled some distance apart and I read Great Expecations in a small tent alone. The irony didn’t escape me.  

I still have my James Bond paperbacks, Thunderball of especial significance. School-yard rumours that an obscure newsagent two and half miles away had copies in stock. (In pre-Amazon days you depended on such rumours along with a degree of commitment) After school and through pouring rain I cycled there and returned home late but triumphant, and wet.

Then there's my collection of 'Saint' paperbacks bought in competition with Billy Shaw, the son of our 

local chemist. Boys tend to be completist, and some like to hoard.

 It’s why I can’t get rid of books, even those I may never read again. They each tell a story. 

Then there’re the books bought, but never read; harder to defend perhaps, unless like me you’re quietly convinced you have decades yet to live. Four years ago, I won a vicious bidding war in an auction and returned home with the collected works of Sir Walter Scott—twenty-two beautiful blue leather volumes and all for £32. I stroke them now and again, occasionally open a page at random and admire the quality of the paper or browse several evocative engravings before closing the book with a sigh. One day.

Walter Scott - still to be read

                                               A book at random, Quentin Durward

Gilded pages gleam a pale gold

Published in 1904, these editions boast thin, but pristine white pages and evocative engravings. Book porn. Mea culpa.

At this point, you may be wondering about the title of this piece—I never read a book in America.  You may be tempted to think it was some kind of snide and ill-informed comment on American culture. Far from it. The truth is that my year teaching in America was the culmination of a childhood dream. (Teaching not so much.) The experience of just living there meant I had no time to read! Escapism wasn’t called for. I had escaped. The weekend edition of the New York Times for which you needed some serious weight training and accept grey fingers from the ink, was more than enough.

When I am really old and perhaps blind, I’ll know where my books are shelved, and touch will bring back memories.

Belia

Yes, it is marketing time, which is much more difficult than writing and nowhere near as much fun, marginally better than toothache, especially for one as lazy as me.

Here goes.

Belia is a young adult novel and can be summed up in a sentence: an ex-highwayman and his daughter are cast into a demon haunted future, where they battle carnivorous moss, haunted forests, demons, and Belia—a witch out of time.

 

It is also a triple time-slip novel taking the reader from C18th Newport to the C21st and Newport in the far distant future. It also features the iconic Murenger pub, which plays a key part in events. Newport then enjoys a leading role and those fortunate to live there will recognise many landmarks both past and present—none though in that distant future, where the landscape is one of rolling hills and meadows.

 

For those who want more than a one sentence summary: …when in the winter of 1710, the highwayman Rafe Sadler steals an opal from a malignant woman of power, he is cast into the far future, an apparent ‘Golden Age,’ but one haunted by demons, and a dark secret acknowledged reluctantly and with pious guilt. This far future is a ‘paradise built on bones,’ the result of an engineered cull in a previously overpopulated and ravaged world—a world now threatened by demons.

Rafe’s daughter, Rosie, attempts to follow him but lands in twenty-first century Newport, where she meets a fellow time traveller—a refugee from that distant future. The three time periods play their part in the story as our heroes battle against carnivorous moss, demons, and Belia—a ‘witch’ out of time.

 

Though Belia is complete in itself, there is a sequel Tai-Lin which explores the same three time-periods, and takes us from an C18th America, a demon ravaged future, and the wilds of Tartary and Tibet. 

I hope you enjoy Belia, and Tai-Lin when it's released later this year..

City of the Beast

Aleister Crowley remains an enigma, for some a romantic, the last burning ember of revolt against Victorian conformity, for others, something more sinister, an ardent Satanist, for others again a deluded charlatan deftly deceiving the gullible.

He has long since become a literary commodity and figures in The Gift Trilogy largely because of his association with another who dabbled in the dark arts, Evan Morgan, Lord Tredegar. 

There is only one recorded account of a Crowley visit to Tredegar House, but there are rumours of other, longer visits when blood flowed in the cellars. 

I have no doubt that there are those who have sold their souls for fame, wealth and power, so it seems mighty strange that Crowley died an ailing addict in a Hastings boarding house. There is though, another way of looking at it. For the Christian ascetic or saint, material wealth means little in comparison to their communion with God. And so, it may prove with the practising Satanist, communion with the devil a reward in itself.

It’s a perspective that helped me in reading Phil Baker’s book, City of the Beast. The London of Aleister Crowley. On one level, the book is intensely depressing albeit with unexpected nuggets of gold. 

The book falls into the  psychogeography genre, detailing Crowley’s peripatetic life in London from grand hotels to every shabby bedsit that housed the great man.  It describes the restaurants and clubs he frequented and above all his sexual conquests. The man was obsessed, on the prowl night after night. It makes you wonder how much time he was able to indulge in ‘magic,’ though it helped that he was able to bring sex into it. The key was to focus on a profound need before and during ejaculation. So now you know. 

How did he attract so many women? It may have been his ‘sexual magic,’ a magnetic personality or, perhaps, his perfume: a concoction of musk and civet on a base of ambergris, which Crowley rubbed on his skin and into his eyebrows. ‘It gave him a sweetish smell and made horses whinny after him in the street.’

Some argue satanism too narrowly defines Crowley, but it’s undeniable he shared key Luciferian qualities: over-weening pride, deceit and manipulation. His most well-known dictum, ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Every man and every woman is a star. Love is the law, love under will. For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.’

His reference to ‘love under will’ is far from wholesome or pure.

He was, for example sexually attracted to black women but showed nothing but contempt for their ethnicity, each of them listed in his diary: ‘Phyllis. The poor zebu (a type of humped cow) …quite upset when I pointed out that her chief charm was her musky nigger stench.’

He was a merciless sponger talking quite viciously about his various benefactors behind their backs. He referred to one Australian benefactor as an ‘imbecile hag’ and as the ‘Wailing Wombat of Wagga Wagga.’

He was outraged by the idea of state pensions. They discouraged ‘honest ambition,’ increased taxation, and took away from what should be spent on military defence. He wanted the death penalty to be extended to cover lesser crimes and championed the expulsion of ethnic minorities. 

Pride, an almost childish conceit, dominated his life along with food, drink and drugs.

The writer Maurice Richardson met Crowley at the French Pub in Dean Street, the great occultist smelling of ether having just drunk half a pint of the stuff. Asked what he wanted to drink, Crowley opted for a triple absinthe, followed by two more triple absinthes before setting off for a gargantuan lunch at L’Escargot. 

On another occasion, ‘After a few large vodkas (he enjoyed) lobster bisque, roast duck, and a runny Brie, washed down with several litres of Chianti followed by Cyprus brandy.

And talking about drugs, his diary extols  the virtues of heroin, comparing it to: “…thirteen masturbations, a menstruation orgy, a five-man buggery competition, sixteen rapes of assorted quadrupeds … and a pot of marmalade thrown in.”

Marmalade!

Despite a life of drugs, alcohol and every kind of excess, he achieved the quite respectable age of 72 before dying in the obscurity of a Hastings boarding house. The year December 1947, the month and year I was born – a good enough reason to reject reincarnation.

Accounts of his final words vary, which is par for the course with Crowley: 

I am perplexed.

 Satan get out. 

Sometimes I hate myself.

Whatever he thought of himself at these final moments, I suspect he may have been 'cancelled' today. Then again, maybe not.

For those interested enough to read a more sympathetic analysis of Crowley I can offer this.