Christy Edwall on Victor B Neuburg’s life after Crowley
Walking along Church Street into Steyning, you could miss Vine Cottage, with its dove-grey door, a slit for the post, and its matching shutters wellbolted. In the weeks before Halloween, and in comparison with Beltane Cottage with its wicker star across the road, or Saxon Cottage with its chalky horned animal skull, Vine Cottage looks quietly respectable. There’s nothing to see here under the pitched eaves: no blue plaque to commemorate the printing press that was started here in 1919, nor the press’s founder, the poet and occultist, Victor B Neuburg. You’d never guess by the cottage’s frontage that its occupant was the lover and disciple of Aleister Crowley, with whom he had crossed the Moroccan desert doing sex-magick, danced the Rites of Eleusis in London, and survived a gruelling fortnight of ‘the Paris working’.
Reading Jean Overton Fuller’s rivetingly bonkers biography, The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg (1965), one has the feeling of falling into a story by HP Lovecraft: Rosicrucians, the Knights Templar, yogis, fascists, opium, orgies, sado-masochism. ‘It’s mostly rubbish,’ Caroline Neuburg, Victor’s granddaughter, told me over the phone. ‘It’s not accurate.’ Still, the early decades of the 20th century definitely quivered with experiment and a hunger for transcendence. Such experiments came with a cost. According to Overton Fuller, Neuburg was haunted by an affair with a woman who called herself Ione de Forest, who was rumoured to have killed herself after he’d been cruel to her under the influence of the god Mars. Crowley was rumoured to have turned Neuburg into a camel. Another time, he neglected (or refused) to release Neuburg from his possession by the spirit of Hermes. When the pair finally separated in 1914, Crowley ritually cursed Neuburg, an encounter that his friends agreed left a permanent mark. Having served (sort of) in the First World War, Neuburg arrived in West Sussex in need of recuperation.
With its position on the South Downs, under the eye of Chactonbury Ring, and with rumours of ancient temples and druidic sacrifices, Steyning offered Neuburg access to a landscape still haunted by ancient significance. ‘Who comes must love lone/ places,’ he wrote in ‘Downlands’, ‘Where long-forgotten bone/ Lies in the old spaces’.
The more you read about Steyning, the more it seems to sit at the convergence of multiple leylines. Everyone seems to have come through. Doomed saint of Irish nationalism, Charles Stewart Parnell, married his mistress Kitty O’Shea in Steyning. Yeats came to Steyning, and the painter Gluck. Eventually Crowley himself came prowling around Steyning to look for Neuburg, appalling locals with his sexual antics.
Neuburg had the sense to lay low. From the start, Vine Cottage was a refuge. The only son of an observant Jewish family who made their fortune in rattan furniture, Neuburg grew up near money, but seemed unable to actually generate any of his own. The cottage had been bought by Neuburg’s uncle Edward for his sister Teresa, and it was Aunt Ti who helped to finance the purchase of the letterpress. (On the condition, writer and musician Justin Hopper has suggested, that Neuburg publish his own work anonymously.)
The period saw a surge in private and independent printing presses: the Golden Cockerel Press in Berkshire, St Dominic’s Press in Ditchling, Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in Richmond. ‘We get so absorbed we can’t stop,’ Woolf wrote to her sister Vanessa in 1917. ‘I see that real printing will devour one’s entire life.’
Unlike the Hogarth Press, the Vine Press only lasted ten years or so. Vaguely successful, it was undermined by its founder’s tendency to give books away. Still, its titles – collections of strange, pastoral poetry written or collected by Neuburg, and work by his friends –found their cultural niche. Printed on fine paper and handbound in part by Neuburg’s wife, Kathleen, the books were visually distinguished by the wide W and looped Os of the antiquated typeface and what Hopper has called their ‘unmannered, outsider black-andwhite prints’.
The prints – or rather woodcuts – were produced by three local men, brothers who had returned from the war and
Above later opened a shop on Steyning High Street. 23-year-old Eric and 21-year-old Percy West contributed woodcuts to Lillygay (1920), and their older brother Dennis illustrated Swift Wings: Songs in Sussex (1921), Songs of the Groves (1921), and Larkspur (1922).
When I went to see the two volumes, Lillygay and Larkspur, held by Steyning’s hospitable local museum, I recognised the images’ family likeness. The images are primitive and thick; the faces of the figures recall the passive menace of cult masks, or the gouged lines of a Jack O’Lantern. According to Caroline Neuburg, it may have been Victor Neuburg himself who taught the Wests to use woodblocks.
Aside from the woodcuts, however, little of the brothers’ distinctive personalities remains. In an image illustrating ‘Bonfire Song’, from Lillygay, smoke from a hilltop bonfire streams out of the frame – like branches in a strong breeze, or human hair. The tangled strands of smoke are set in opposition to the parcelled lines of land on which it stands, and the stark colours of the woodcut thrive on stark compositional divisions.
Elsewhere, other images – like the smirking, bonneted girl next to ‘Lilly-white’, her hands clasped over square panniered skirts – have a tattoo’s crudeness. The image of a whigged, jabotted man printed next to ‘Johnny Faa’, on the other hand, quivers slightly, like a ghost glimpsed in a mirror. The illustration for ‘Rantum-Tantum’ is similarly eerie. Here, the rigid Jacobean figures have bruises for eyes. The stiffness of the couple’s joined hands, and the black bone-like trees above the figures, give the image a Halloween air of hostility.
There is silliness too: a puppet-like figure vomiting out dark blobs next to ‘Sick Dick; or, The Drunkard’s Tragedy’. A white woman waiting by an open window (‘Burd Ellen and Young Tamlane’) looks like a crumpled handkerchief. The author’s inscription –
‘For Lett
With wett
(Not gross)
Close Approbation
Salutation!’
– suggests an enterprise which is not set on taking itself too seriously.
Dennis West’s work in Larkspur seems slightly less polished than the best of Lillygay. He is more at ease with natural objects than human figures, as the crabbed crone figure of Eve (in ‘Sharing Eve’s Apple’) and the itchy-footed shogun figure (in ‘I mun be married on Sunday’) reveal. His landscapes gain in confidence. Potently constrained by the frame, they push against downland curves into tree-clotted corners. It’s hard not to see such trees in the image accompanying the ‘Ballad of Lyonesse’ as an echo of Chactonbury Ring, even with the streaked wave at its base.
Reviews of Vine Press books suggest the contemporary appeal of the woodcuts. On one hand, it emphasised the bespoke and highly crafted aesthetic of the press; as one of just over 500 copies, each book was rare: a pricy seven shillings. (Today, a copy will still set you back several hundred quid online.)
A contemporary review, published in June 1923 – the same month that Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway walks the streets of London – praised the Vine Press’s books as having ‘the pleasant crudity of the chapbook’. They held ‘an ancient simplicity without being merely archaic’, wrote the reviewer, possessing both a ‘decorative beauty’ and a ‘sly humour which is altogether delicious’.
That combination of slyness and deliciousness is brought together in the press’s imprint: a handsome rectangular woodcut of five horned satyrs dancing hand-in-hand in a clearing. Was it Neuburg’s nostalgic nod to his membership of the Pan Society as a student at Cambridge, or his muchadmired first poetic collection, The Triumph of Pan (1910)? Or was it a recognition of submerged currents? Satyrs stand for wildness, for the mythic past, and for Dionysian – even devilish – pleasures. The ‘sensual leer’ that Justin Hopper sees in the Wests’ woodcuts hints at the presence of the ostrobologous, Neuburg’s preferred word for sexual material, a neologism which avoided the moral censure or shame of pornography.
But for a man with such a daring sexual history – and Overton Fuller’s account of Neuburg reveals the homophobic prejudices circulating even within the bohemian circles he moved in – Neuburg struck his friends as ethereal and birdlike. Like his own body, the Vine Press wasted away. By the time Neuburg moved to London to live with his lover, Runia Tharp, and take up the role of editor of the Sunday Referee’s Poet’s Corner – where he would go on to champion a young Dylan Thomas – the Vine Press proper came to an end.
He died in 1940 of tuberculosis, contracted years before, Overton-Fuller suggests, during a masochistic experiment with Crowley in the Highlands. ‘In my youth I was too great a sensualist,’ he told Overton-Fuller on his death bed. For his biographer, Neuburg was a ‘genuine mystic’, a ‘well’ who made himself available for other students and artists to draw on. ‘If that is not true magic,’ she writes, ‘I do not know what is.’
And, as with the occult in general, I suspect, once you start looking for Neuburg, he turns up everywhere. He’s in the first letter John Middleton Murray sent his future wife Katherine Mansfield. The artist Nina Hamnett knew him. Ezra Pound was always one degree of separation away. When I came across Neuburg by chance last month, I was surprised. I’d never heard of him at Cambridge, or come across him in any books on Sussex modernism. As singularly weird as he is, Victor Neuburg had his finger on the pulse of his time. There’s been something of a revival of late, however, in the form of Justin Hopper’s fine collection of Neuburgiana, Obsolete Spells.
Caroline Neuburg’s forthcoming biography of her grandfather, Vickybird, which is to come out with the Vine Press imprint through Strange Attractor Press, is sure to widen Victor Neuburg’s orbit. There are letters to see, translations of Horace to come into print.
Suddenly, Steyning’s sleepiness starts to seem like a simmer.
Christy Edwall is the author of the novel History Keeps Me Awake at Night (Granta, 2023).
Many thanks to the Steyning Museum for access in seeing first editions of Larkspur and Lillygay and to Caroline Neuburg for her generous permission to reprint the woodcuts.