Oliver’s address is only a twenty-minute walk from here, due north. We arrived at half past five, and found the door, but couldn’t get any reply. So we went and had tea in the café opposite. Carlotta was being an absolute bitch—I don’t know why she came to see me in such a mood—but I didn’t really care, because I felt she was giving me an excuse for avoiding her in future. Kept saying she wished she was back in Germany, how she hated England, what swine Englishmen were, etc. Looking at her, I thought of that time she fell off the ladder, and my excitement, and thought what a damned swindle it is.
Then I looked up, and who should be walking into the place but Oliver.
I called to him and went over. He looked older than the last time I saw him—he actually had some grey in his hair—and his face looked more skull-like than ever. Yet I think he looked happier than the last time I saw him—there was no longer the same sense of strain hanging about him. I believe this must be the result of his success. He stoops just as much, has the same red stubble on his chin, and wears what appears to be the same paint-stained roll-neck sweater. His manner is also as abrupt and ungracious as ever—particularly with Carlotta.
As we went upstairs with him, he said: ‘I want to introduce you to a remarkable man.’ We went up to the third floor—up well-carpeted stairs (the house is several cuts above anything he’s lived in before)—and into a room. Oliver said: ‘This is Caradoc Cunningham.’ And the man who came forward to shake hands was the big, bald-headed man I saw in the library a week ago. I was staggered. Cunningham saw that I looked astounded, and said: ‘Haven’t we met somewhere before?’ As I didn’t want to bring up the library episode, I said I didn’t think so. But afterwards, as we talked, I noticed that he kept glancing at me in a curious manner, as if trying to place me.
My first impressions of Cunningham in the library are verified; he is certainly one of the strangest men I have ever met. On the surface, he is something of an actor—big, rather fat, very tall, bald, an almost hypnotic stare from eyes that seem to be round. I suspect that he deliberately cultivates a way of making his eyes bulge slightly to intensify this impression of will-power. He has something of an actor’s voice, with a faint lisp, and a booming way of talking. He also has various habits, like dropping his voice and narrowing his eyes when he says certain things, to give himself a sinister appearance. Altogether, the first impression he made on me was a bad one—of a charlatan, a man without self-discipline. But after ten minutes’ conversation, this impression vanishes completely, and he seems to emanate a definite and rather sinister strength. There can be no doubt that his culture is very wide indeed, but it isn’t used—as a charlatan would use it—to impress. For example, we started discussing Plotinus, and he began to quote Plotinus in Greek. I said impatiently that I didn’t know Greek; he immediately dropped it, and didn’t once more revert to it.
Finally, he said to me: ‘Look here, won’t you tell me where I’ve seen you?’ Oliver said jokingly: ‘I thought your memory was infallible.’ ‘Not my memory,’ Cunningham said, ‘my insight.’ He closed his eyes, placed his hand on his forehead, and said: ‘Egypt, Athens . . . Alexandria.’ He opened his eyes, and looked at me in a puzzled way, repeating: ‘Alexandria.’ Then suddenly he looked pleased. ‘Alexandria, library! Of course!’ He looked at me cunningly. ‘Yes, now it all comes back to me. You were sitting in the corner.’ I was disappointed in him. I was certain that he had recalled where he had seen me about ten minutes before, and had deliberately staged this little exhibition of thought-reading (or whatever it was supposed to be). And yet before the evening was out, I was convinced that I had done him an injustice. I will explain why in a moment.
Oliver tells me that he met Cunningham in the Lake District, where he was showing two rich young men the rudiments of mountain-climbing on the east side of Helvellyn (I gather one of them nearly broke his neck, and went home rather hurriedly). Cunningham liked Oliver’s work, and offered to get him an exhibition. I don’t know how he talked Oliver into it. However, the results seem to have been excellent; Cunningham showed me some of the notices, which were splendid, comparing him to Munch, Vlaminck, Soutine and god knows who else.
Oliver’s admiration for Cunningham is obvious. This is curious to see. Oliver naturally has a suspicious nature; I’d like to know how Cunningham won him over so completely. One more thing is obvious: Cunningham is using Oliver to make himself money. From something Oliver said, I gather that Oliver hasn’t yet seen much of the cash from his pictures. And yet I am fairly sure Cunningham is no ordinary confidence-swindler.
There was one curious episode that I find difficult to account for. After introducing me to Cunningham, Oliver said he wanted to go down to his studio (which is apparently on the floor below). Cunningham gave Carlotta a very long and quite unambiguous glance; he was obviously stripping her mentally; Carlotta bridled at this, and he grinned sarcastically. Cunningham then began to tell us that he had just returned from some mountain-climbing expedition in Tibet, and talked about Tibetan Buddhism. It always irritates me to be lectured on a subject I already know fairly well, so I lost no time in letting him see that he wasn’t telling me anything new. He then went on to Tibetan magic; but as I’d just finished the David-Neel book,[1] I was able to checkmate him here too (I derive an absurd and rather discreditable pleasure from these stupid episodes of one-up-manship). At this, he became very friendly, ‘as between two brother adepts’, and turned on all the charm and flattery. At this point, he suggested that we should have a drink, but after rummaging in a cupboard, could only produce half an inch of whisky. I had noticed a wine shop close by, so I offered to go down and get a bottle of wine. Cunningham insisted on paying, and handed me a £5 note—but made no attempt to go himself! This is somehow typical of him—he does everything with a kind of affected princeliness. He said to Carlotta: ‘You can stay; he won’t be a moment,’ but she jumped to her feet and said that she couldn’t trust me to buy decent wine! As soon as we were outside, she said: ‘I can’t bear that man. He exudes the nastiest kind of sex.’ I pressed her to explain what she meant, and she claimed that, all the time he had been talking to me, she had felt an unpleasant sensation, as if she were naked, and he was running his hands very lightly over her. I said that I should have thought this might have been pleasant, but she said it was no more pleasant than having frogs walking over you. We bought the wine, and returned to the room. Cunningham said we would have to warm it, and stood it in front of the fire (it was a fairly good Beaune). I wanted to go down to the bathroom, which is on the floor below, and he asked me to knock on Oliver’s door and tell him there was wine. I did this, and Oliver immediately asked me: ‘What do you think of him?’ I said that I wasn’t yet sure whether he was a charlatan or a man of remarkable talent, and Oliver said excitedly: ‘That’s how I felt when I first met him. But he has amazing powers—quite unusual.’ I pressed him to tell me what they were—thinking of the library episode—but he said that Cunningham would probably show them to me when he’s ready. I decided to go back up again, remembering Carlotta’s feeling about Cunningham, so I left Oliver to come up when he felt inclined. When I walked back into the room, I was amazed to see Cunningham bending over Carlotta, apparently kissing her, with one hand quite definitely up her skirt. As I opened the door, he straightened up very casually and started pouring the wine. I didn’t like to look at Carlotta—she looked so embarrassed; so I went past her to look out of the window; but as I passed her, I glanced down at her, and to my astonishment saw teeth marks on her neck. Cunningham is certainly the fastest worker I’ve ever met!
[1]Magic and Mystery in Tibet, by Alexandra David-Neel.
As we drank, Cunningham turned the conversation to the subject of Satanism. I made it fairly plain from my manner that I thought it a lot of nonsense. He asked me very smoothly how it was possible for a man of my obvious breadth and culture to take such a poor-spirited view. As by that time
I’d had several glasses of wine (I had bought three bottles) and was feeling talkative, I tried to explain to him my true position: that nineteenth-century materialism is shallow nonsense, because although it acknowledges that ninety per cent of the world is a mystery to us, it still insisted that the world is pointless and purposeless, a matter of chance and blind physical laws. I said I was convinced that the world is largely made up of unseen forces—but that no amount of magical mumbo-jumbo will place us in contact with them.
At this, Cunningham seized on my phrase ‘unseen forces’ and became very excited. He asked me if I wasn’t admitting that there are probably intelligences in the universe that are superior to our own. I admitted grudgingly that this was likely, but that I would have to define what I meant more precisely. But there was no stopping him now; he said that although it was probable that all the magic and alchemy of the Middle Ages was nonsense, this still did not mean that an educated modern man might not learn to tap the ‘unseen forces’. At this point Oliver came up, and we continued the argument in front of him. Suddenly, Oliver said: ‘Why don’t you give him a demonstration?’ Cunningham said: ‘Very well, I will.’ He then produced a pack of Tarot cards, all of them circular, and handed them to me. He told me to sit with my back to him, take a card at a time, stare at it, and concentrate on it. I did as he told me, with Carlotta standing beside me, and Cunningham on the other side of the room. I took one—a picture of a man hanging by his foot—and concentrated. Almost immediately, Cunningham said: ‘The Hanging Man,’ and described the card in my hand. I tried three more. The first two, the juggler and the star, he got immediately. The third one—the chariot—he got wrong, saying it was the devil. He also got the next one wrong—it was The Pope, and he said it was Justice. At this point, he claimed that something was interfering with the transference—probably Carlotta being present, he thought—and suggested that we go down into the street. Here, he showed either a remarkable ability at guesswork, or some kind of second sight. We walked down to a small side street, and he went into the side street, and told me to stand on the corner, looking along the Hackney Road. It was about half past six, and there were a great many people about. Cunningham told me to look at the people who approached along the pavement, and think hard about them. He himself stood about five yards from the corner—it was a blank brick wall—and closed his eyes. He then started to tell me who was approaching: ‘Two men, walking side by side, and an old woman. Now there is a young girl further away, and a child—I can’t tell whether it’s a boy or a girl.’ On the whole, what he said was accurate, but I couldn’t tell whether it was simply guess-work, or whether he might have been helped out by some reflections in a window on the other side of the street. For example, there were two men approaching, more or less side by side, but they were obviously not together. There was also an old woman, further back, and there was a child in the distance. On the other hand, there were several other people between the old woman and the child, and he didn’t mention these. At one point, he said: ‘There is a policeman approaching.’ I could see no policeman, but a moment later, a uniformed man came out of a shop only a few yards along the pavement, who might easily have been mistaken for a policeman if you looked at him casually (he was actually some kind of a foreign naval officer). As he became visible, Cunningham remarked: ‘Ah, his uniform misled me.’ On the other hand, if Cunningham was really reading my mind, then he had spoken about the officer before I actually saw him.
Oliver and Carlotta were standing nearby as all this went on, and were obviously both much impressed. But I couldn’t help feeling that this proved very little. If Cunningham had drawn a chalk mark on the pavement and then said: ‘An old man is now crossing that mark,’ I might have agreed that he had second sight. But in a crowded street, it isn’t difficult to make good guesses if you don’t specify how close the people are supposed to be.
We went back up, and Cunningham promised another demonstration later if he felt like it. Carlotta hung behind with me, as Cunningham and Oliver went on ahead, and said: ‘I feel so ashamed of myself. But I think that man is really a magician. . . .’ At this moment, Cunningham turned round and grinned at us in a most knowing manner, as if he knew what she was saying and Carlotta immediately shut up.
After spending an evening with Cunningham and Oliver, there is no doubt in my mind that he’s a most remarkable man—although I still can’t decide how far he is simply an actor. He seems to be a great boaster, and talked casually about a yacht he sank off the coast of Africa, about mountain-climbing records he has broken, about another magician whom he killed in a ‘magical battle’ when he was in Marseilles and the other magician was in Paris. He told us all this in a nearby restaurant where we ate a pleasant meal, and since he had insisted that we were his guests, I didn’t feel inclined to contradict him. There can be no doubt whatever about the man’s generosity. When Carlotta said that she wanted to leave her present job, but couldn’t afford to spend several weeks searching for another, he immediately offered to give her enough money to support herself, and offered her ten pounds on the spot! Carlotta, I’m glad to say, refused. (If she left Kentish Town, I’m afraid she’d spend most of her time at my place. At present it’s too far for more than occasional visits.)
Cunningham paid me a flattering amount of attention—rather to Oliver’s annoyance, I thought, although Oliver was also fairly obviously pleased to be able to show both myself and Cunningham that he had intelligent friends. Before the evening was over, I was pretty drunk; Cunningham, although I know he must have drunk at least three bottles of wine to himself, seemed relatively unaffected.
We left the restaurant at about ten, and walked back towards my place. I asked them if they’d like to come in for a drink, and they agreed. Then Cunningham agreed to try another demonstration of his ‘magic’. This one was rather remarkable. He made us wait in a side turning, while he stood in the middle of the pavement, looking in a shop window. There were a great many people around. An oldish man came along—looked like a senior clerk in a bank—and Cunningham turned round, and walked close behind him. The man was apparently unaware that he was being followed. Cunningham fell into step with him, and got closer and closer. We all walked along just behind Cunningham, who, by this time, was only about six inches behind the man, but in such perfect step that they didn’t touch each other. Suddenly, Cunningham allowed his knees to buckle under him, and almost fell to the pavement. At the same moment, the old man, although apparently untouched, also stumbled, and almost fell. Cunningham caught him and said he hoped he was all right. The old boy looked rather dazed, looked at the pavement, as if to see what he’d stumbled over, and muttered that he felt all right. Cunningham watched him walking away, and said: ‘You see, I didn’t touch him, did I?’ I had to admit that, although I couldn’t actually see whether Cunningham had touched him, the old man would probably have said so.
As we walked down towards my place, I told Cunningham and Oliver about my insane musician. He showed little interest until I told him about Kirsten’s ‘invention’, the organ. Then he asked me several questions, and when I said I knew nothing about it, said he’d like to meet Kirsten. So when we got in, we banged on Kirsten’s door; oddly enough, he was out.
In my room, we opened another bottle of wine, and got into a rambling argument. Cunningham irritated me by explaining that he believes in total freedom—Blake’s ‘Do what you will’. I said I thought this was totally meaningless, and appealed to Oliver. To my surprise, Oliver said he agreed with Cunningham, and that he thought the chief problem is that too many people live as if they have no will-power. He also said that he couldn’t see why I disagreed, since I was so fond of quoting Mr Polly’s ‘If you don’t like your life you can change it’. At this, I tried to explain to them, as briefly as I could, exactly what I feel about human beings: that the trouble with men is not merely that they have no absolute standards built into them, but that they have almost no consiste
nt standards at all. A nihilist or a hedonist can take this as an excuse to live for the moment. But the fact remains that, in a limited, animal kind of way, we do have permanent values. Even the most despairing nihilist will jump up if he sits on a pin. If we read a case of murder that is particularly silly and pointless, we feel that the murderer has somehow wasted his own life and that of the victim. Well, if we have a concept of ‘waste’ in-built in us, then we must also have a concept of purpose. The real problem, I said, is the diffuseness of human consciousness. If only it could be concentrated—if only we could discover the secret mechanism in the unconscious that makes it narrow and focus—we could easily become gods. But ‘Doing what you will’ isn’t likely to help at all; on the contrary, it’s likely to destroy self-discipline and diffuse the consciousness still more. I gave Aleister Crowley[1] as an example of this kind of thing. But it turned out that Crowley had been a close friend of Cunningham’s (as if I couldn’t have guessed) and Cunningham immediately launched into a defence of him.