It was thus that I first met Arnold Bennett and Clive Bell.  One of these casual visitors was Aleister Crowley.  He was spending the winter in Paris.  I took an immediate dislike to him, but he interested and amused me.  He was a great talker and he talked uncommonly well.  In early youth, I was told, he was extremely handsome, but when I knew him he had put on weight, and his hair was thinning.  He had fine eyes and a way, whether natural or acquired I do not know, of so focusing them that, when he looked at you, he seemed to look behind you.  He was a fake, but not entirely a fake.  At Cambridge he had won his chess blue and was esteemed the best whist player of his time.  He was a liar and unbecomingly boastful, but the odd thing was that he had actually done some of the things he boasted of.  As a mountaineer, he had made an ascent of K2 in the Hindu Kush, the second highest mountain in India, and he made it without the elaborate equipment, the cylinders of oxygen and so forth, which render the endeavours of the mountaineers of the present day more likely to succeed.  He did not reach the top, but got nearer to it than anyone had done before.

Crowley was a voluminous writer of verse, which he published sumptuously at his own expense.  He had a gift for rhyming, and his verse is not entirely without merit.  He had been greatly influenced by Swinburne and Robert Browning.  He was grossly, but not unintelligently, imitative.  As you flip through the pages you may well read a stanza which, if you came across it in a volume of Swinburne’s, you would accept without question as the work of the master. ’It’s rather hard, isn’t it, Sir, to make sense of it?’ If you were shown this line and asked what poet had written it, I think you would be inclined to say, Robert Browning.  You would be wrong.  It was written by Aleister Crowley.

At the time I knew him he was dabbling in Satanism, magic and the occult.  There was just then something of a vogue in Paris for that sort of thing, occasioned, I surmise, by the interest that was still taken in a book of Huysmans’s, La Bas.  Crowley told fantastic stories of his experiences, but it was hard to say whether he was telling the truth or merely pulling your leg.  During that winter I saw him several times, but never after I left Paris to return to London.  Once, long afterwards, I received a telegram from him which ran as follows:  ’Please send twenty-five pounds at once.  Mother of God and I starving.  Aleister Crowley.’  I did not do so, and he lived on for many disgraceful years.

I was glad to get back to London.  My old friend had by then rooms in Pall Mall, and I was able to take a bedroom in the same building and use his sitting-room to work in. The Magician was published in 1908, so I suppose it was written during the first six months of 1907.  I do not remember how I came to think that Aleister Crowley might serve as the model for the character whom I called Oliver Haddo; nor, indeed,