2003.59, The Mother’s Tragedy, 1901. NMIEG 2003.56, Tannhäuser, a Story of All Time, 1902. NMIEG 2003.57, An Essay in Ontology with some remarks on Ceremonial Magic., 9 December 1903. NMIEG 2003.58, The Star and the Garter, 1903.
56NMIEG 2003.59, Crowley, Aleister, The Mother’s Tragedy, London, Privately Printed, 1901.
57The Warburg Institute Archives, the Yorke Collection, OS D6, letter from Aleister Crowley to Gerald Kelly, 12 August 1903. Crowley denies to Kelly in this letter that they were lovers – however the fact that he gave her the brooch was an indication of affection on his part. It is insinuated that Gray and Crowley were engaged.
58NMIEG 2003.56, Crowley, Aleister, Tannhäuser, a Story of All Time, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd, 1902, pp.13-15.
59NMIEG 2003.58, Crowley, Aleister, The Star and the Garter, London, Watts & Co, 1903.
60Ibid, Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, p.371.
61Ibid, Crowley, pp.371-2.
62Musée Rodin Archives, Aleister Crowley papers.
63NMIEG 2003.57, Crowley, Aleister, Berashith: An Essay in Ontology with some remarks on Ceremonial Magic, Paris, Clarke and Bishop, Printers, 1902.
64Ibid, Adam, p.40.
65Ibid, Adam, p.38.
66Maugham, William Somerset, The Magician, London, Vintage Books, 2000, p.19.
67Ibid, Adam, p.40.
68Ibid, Crowley, p.364.
69Tate Gallery Archives, Prunella Clough Collection and Archive, letter from Alden Brooks to Denys Sutton, 12 July 1936.
70Bennington, Jonathan, Roderic O’Conor, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 1992, p.95.
71Ibid, Bennington, p.93.
72TCD Archives, Paul Henry Papers – 7429.2, transcript of Paul Henry’s autobiography.
73TCD Archives, Paul Henry Papers – 7432/71-109, letter from Stephen Haweis to Paul Henry, undated, and letter from Stephen Haweis to Paul Henry, 4 March 1952.
2
A Moveable Feast: Stephen Haweis, Students and Paris
Throughout Eileen Gray’s life she kept many publications, letters, articles, magazines and photographs of people whom she knew and who shaped her life, both personally and professionally. Included in this interesting contemporary milieu were Wyndham Lewis, Aleister Crowley, Gerald Festus Kelly, Clive Bell, Kathleen Bruce, Jessie Gavin, Roger Fry (1866-1934), Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972), Nancy Cunard (1896-1965), Loïe Fuller (1862-1928), Lucie Delarue Mardrus (1874-1945), Chana Orloff (1888-1968), and Gabrielle Bloch. It is through the diaries, notes, letters and archives of those family, friends, acquaintances and associates who featured in her life during this time that a fuller understanding of Eileen Gray, from art student to artist emerges.
2.1 Eileen Gray, 1898-1900, black and white photograph © NMI
Gray’s library also contained a number of publications by the writer and painter Stephen Haweis and letters from his niece René Chipman (1903-1986).1 Haweis was described, by some, as a suitor and a fellow student who emigrated to Dominica and kept writing to Gray all of his life, sending her ‘unasked for’ photographs ‘looking like a very, very old chimpanzee’. Gray commented, ‘No sense of pudeur (modesty)’.2 However, Gray wrote to Haweis until Haweis’s death on 17 January 1969. It is through Haweis’s memoirs and those of his circle that one gains more insight into Gray’s Paris of the early 1900s, into the teachings of the various art schools, and into their friends and student life. Haweis’s memoirs and correspondence are a veritable anthology of who was who in Paris at that time. He kept in touch with many from both their London and Parisian days. His memoirs and letters describe in depth their circle, and the correspondence with Gray reveals much about her personality, beliefs and ideas.
2.2 Loïe Fuller dancing the Tanz de Lilie, 1896, black and white photograph © IMAGNO/Austrian Archives/Topfoto
Eileen Gray and Stephen Haweis had much in common. Haweis, like Gray, came from a distinguished family which was also marked with controversy and scandal. His maternal grandfather Thomas Musgrave Joy (1812-1866) was a fashionable portrait painter who gave drawing lessons to Prince Albert and did portraits of the royal children and their pets at Windsor Castle. Mary Eliza Haweis, Stephen’s mother, was born in 1848. When she was eighteen, she sold a painting to the Royal Academy and painted two portraits on commission. The following year she married the renowned Reverend Hugh Reginald Haweis of St James’s Church, Marylebone. The young couple became very popular in London society and were presented at Court. Mary Eliza became an arbiter of fashion during the 1870s and 80s and was one of the cognoscenti. The couple’s first child died in infancy, and thereafter his parents had two sons and a daughter. Like Gray, Haweis was the youngest; he was born Stephen Hugh Willyams on 23 July, 1878.
2.3 Stephen Haweis, 1923, sepia tint photograph © Photo courtesy of the Marine Biological Laboratory Archives and the History of Marine Biological Laboratory website (history.archives.mbl.edu)
The Reverend was a little over five feet tall, crippled from childhood in one leg because of a pony riding accident, and of an ivory complexion (his grandmother was a native of the British Indian province of Baluchistan). Like Stephen, he became renowned for his small stature. He became a spellbinding preacher, wrote many popular religious books, and was in great demand as a public lecturer. His sermons drew admiring crowds for decades. Gray said to Haweis, ‘About your father I remember my mother and eldest sister (Ethel) eleven years older than me used to go on Sunday evenings (was it to Camberwell I can’t remember) to listen to your father preaching, immensely impressed and convinced of his importance’.3 Gray recalled ‘hearing people speak of him as a brilliant seductive person!’4