Crowley's Apprentice - Gerald Suster

 Israel Regardie (1907-85) was secretary, pupil and sometimes friend of Aleister Crowley, The Great Beast 666.   Gerald Suster (1951-2001) was pupil, friend and ultimately memoirist of Israel Regardie.  Regardie broke with Crowley before World War II and after the war qualified as a doctor of psychology and licenced chiropractor, settling in the USA.  Suster visited him there as a very young man and stayed with him in California and Arizona on many occasions.

This memoir therefore, is one notorious occultist (Suster got money out of News International when they defamed him in one of their scandal rags) writing about another.  Regardie had become notorious during the height of Crowley's time as self-described Wickedest Man in the World, and had been banned from entering England even though, like Suster, he was born in London.

In occult circles Regardie was praised and despised in equal measure because he was the one who wrote it all down and made the secret rituals of the Golden Dawn available and comprehensible to outsiders.  It was his writing, of course, that initially attracted Suster.

Crowley's Apprentice is interesting in many ways.  For the generalist it offers valuable insights into the rebirth of magic around 1900 and leads to other sources.

Memoirs of a British Agent - Robert Bruce Lockhart

 

The title night suggest a secret agent, but that would have been impossible in 1933 when Lockhart published.  The title is strictly accurate.  Lockhart was the agent of the British government to Moscow in 1917 and 1918 when the British did not recognise the revolutionary regime but desperately needed them not to side with Germany in what turned out to be the second half of World War I.  Lockhart was at the time just thirty years old.  He had been with the British Consulate in Moscow before the war (the capital was St Petersburg, hence that is where the Embassy was) but had suffered a nervous breakdown early in the war and had returned to Britain.  He, however, had the social skills, the contacts and the gift for languages needed as the only British representative in critical times.  More importantly, he had a genuine love of Russia and the Russian people.  He was friends with Kerensky and arranged his escape when the Bolsheviks took over.  He then met with Trotsky on a daily basis and was greatly impressed with Lenin.  It was Lenin, on his sickbed as he recovered from the assassination attempt by Dora Kaplan, who freed Lockhart from the Kremlin where he was held prisoner during the Terror.  Whilst in prison Lockhart encountered the mysterious head of the Cheka Jacob Peters, who may have been Peter the Painter, leader of the anarchists in Sidney Street, London, during the infamous siege.  Peters gave Lockhart a present on his (Peter's) birthday in 1918 - his (Lockhart's) mistress, Moura, who herself became an infamous femme fatale.  Also of dubious allegiance was Sydney Reilly, supposedly an Englishman but actually came from Odessa.  Lockhart tells us everything he knew about Reilly - the 'Ace of Spies' - but that is almost nothing.  Nobody knew everything about Reilly.  Lockhart concludes that Reilly almost certainly set him up by concocting and releasing to the Russian Press the so-called 'Lockhart plot'.  Why Reilly might have done so remains a mystery.

There is no other English witness to these events which shaped the world we still live in.  This should be a set book for advanced level history.  Lockhart is scrupulously honest.  He was a married man when he consorted with Moura but he tells us about it nonetheless.  I have never read elsewhere about the assassination of German officials in Russia who were trying to win over the Russians to their cause.  I would have liked to learn more about the British military 'mission' sent to Archangel, but Lockhart was half a continent away in Moscow and only knew anything at second hand.

The Pigeon Tunnel - John le Carre

As I noted last week, the curious thing about John le Carre (or, rather, one of several curious things) is that no sooner had he cooperated with Adam Sisman on the unfortunately flawed biography than, within a matter of months, he produced his own memoir, complete with the title he has given to almost all his earlier books at one time or another.

It goes without saying that he covers much of the same ground - his con-man father Ronnie, his brief career as a spy, working on the films of his books. It's no great surprise that he does it better, because he is a far superior writer. He also does it in exactly half the length, which surely cannot be a coincidence and - this is the surprise - he reveals the aspect of himself which Sisman insisted upon (at length) but could not demonstrate. That is to say, his humour. Yes, after fifty years in print, John le Carre proves himself to be not only witty but, on occasion, laugh out loud. At eighty-four, moreover, he shows himself to be a born raconteur, something he perhaps inherited from his father.


What he has done is perhaps cruel. Sisman obviously sweated blood building his tome. Fact is, though, if you want to know anything about the man behind the pseudonym, or if you simply want an entertaining tour round the life of a successful author in the second half of the 20th century, forget the back-breaking biography and take up the memoir.