THE WEST LONDON OBSERVER

London, England

11 January 1952

(page 4)

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

Mr. Calder-Marshall Reminisces

About the Beast

That prolific Kensington author, Arthur Calder-Marshall, has apparently enjoyed a youth that was full not only of magic, but also of mumbo-jumbo.

Bernard Shaw said, “Youth is such a wonderful thing, what a pity to waste it on the young.”

One could not say this of Mr. Calder-Marshall after reading “The Magic of My Youth” (Hart-Davis 12/6d.) which recounts with fervour, with and a wealth of minute detail the impressions made by Oxford and Bloomsbury on a perceptive young man infected from an early age with the itch to write (and an accompanying taste for the bizarre).

On his leisurely and ironic style Mr. Calder-Marshall reminisces about the Bloomsbury period in English letters and about such extraordinary characters as The Beast, Aleister Crowley, and Vickybird [Victor B. Neuburg], the poet, and Auntie Helen, the queer, pathetic astrologer who lived, amongst a profusion of esoteric symbols, in the outskirts of Oxford.

But if the book has magic it is because of Mr. Calder-Marshall’s engaging way of reconstructing scenes and etching in the light and shade of forgotten emotions—not through being pre-occupied, sporadically, with ritual sacrifices, the transformation of poets into zebras and other such forms of charming devilry.

For Mr. Calder-Marshall’s acquaintanceship with The Beast was very slight, and gives him insufficient pretext to write a book about this strange character, based as it largely is on hearsay and (from Crowley’s point of view) heresy.

FOOTNOTE: Arthur Calder-Marshall was educated as St. Paul’s School, Hammersmith, and Hertford College, Oxford. He is married and has two daughters. Novelist, journalist, broadcaster and traveler, his books include: “Two of a Kind,” “About Levy.”