of my
early novels, which for the same reason I have been obliged to read, did
not. One, indeed, I simply could not get through. Another had to my mind
some good dramatic scenes, but the humour filled me with mortification,
and I should have been ashamed to see it republished. As I read _The
Magician_, I wondered how on earth I could have come by all the material
concerning the black arts which I wrote of. I must have spent days and
days reading in the library of the British Museum. The style is lush and
turgid, not at all the sort of style I approve of now, but perhaps not
unsuited to the subject; and there are a great many more adverbs and
adjectives than I should use today. I fancy I must have been impressed by
the _ecriture artiste_ which the French writers of the time had not yet
entirely abandoned, and unwisely sought to imitate them.

Though Aleister Crowley served, as I have said, as the model for Oliver
Haddo, it is by no means a portrait of him. I made my character more
striking in appearance, more sinister and more ruthless than Crowley ever
was. I gave him magical powers that Crowley, though he claimed them,
certainly never possessed. Crowley, however, recognized himself in the
creature of my invention, for such it was, and wrote a full-page review
of the novel in _Vanity Fair_, which he signed 'Oliver Haddo'. I did not
read it, and wish now that I had. I daresay it was a pretty piece of
vituperation, but probably, like his poems, intolerably verbose.

I do not remember what success, if any, my novel had when it was
published, and I did not bother about it much, for by then a great change
had come into my life. The manager of the Court Theatre, one Otho Stuart,
had brought out a play which failed to please, and he could not
immediately get the cast he wanted for the next play he had in mind to
produce. He had read one of mine, and formed a very poor opinion of
it; but he was in a quandary, and it occurred to him that it might just
serve to keep his theatre open for a few weeks, by the end of which the
actors he wanted for the play he had been obliged to postpone would be at
liberty. He put mine on. It was an immediate success. The result of this
was that in a very little while other managers accepted the plays they
had consistently refused, and I had four running in London at the same
time. I, who for ten years had earned an average of one hundred pounds a
year, found myself earning several hundred pounds a