Donald Cammell sat on Aleister Crowley’s lap when he was a little boy. His father, Charles Cammell, knew Crowley personally and was a great admirer of his.
This is the Aleister Crowley biography Charles Richard Cammell, Donald Cammell’s father, wrote.
Charles Cammell’s relationship with Aleister Crowley is expressed in the bookflap of this book:
“This bold, intimate un-prejudiced study of an extroardinary personality is written by a distinguished man of letters who knew him well – not as most of those who knew him, in the relation of a disciple to a master, or of a seeker after sensation, but as one poet, one author, one neighbor knows another.
Mister Cammell observed Crowley at close quarters for five years (1936-1941) and has some remarkable things to say of him. He insists on Crowley’s position as a great lyric poet. He sees him as an original and powerful thinker. Unbalanced by the effects of a pitiful childhood and a tragic love, morally and materially ruined by a lifelong addiction to the story of magic.
But Aleister Crowley was a man of action as well as a man of vast and varied learning, and he acheived world fame as a mountaineer. There is, too, a lighter side to this book: intimate pictures of Crowley en pantoufles, anecdotes of his wit, humor and humanity, his eccentricities and stoicism.
This is a personal memoir, a work of observation, analysis and appraisement of a man of undeniable and extraordinary genius. Some other remarkable personalities connected with Crowley, are also graphically portrayed.”