The Magician

Maugham’s enchanting tale of secrets and fatal attraction
The Magician is one of Somerset Maugham’s most complex and perceptive novels. Running through it is the theme of evil, deftly woven into a story as memorable for its action as for its astonishingly vivid characters. The novel, concerns The Magician Oliver Haddo, who studies the occult, ancient alchemy and modern biology, and successfully creates a homunculus. Haddo is closely modeled on Aleister Crowley, and the character of Margaret Dauncey is based on Crowley’s first wife, Rose Kelly.

“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.”
— W. Somerset Maugham

In fin de Siecle Paris, Arthur and Margaret are engaged to be married. Everyone approves and seems to be enjoying themselves—until the sinister and repulsive Oliver Haddo appears. Haddo fascinates Margaret’s spinster friend, Susie Boyd. Yet it is not Susie who ultimately falls prey to his peculiar charm. It is Margaret, and a fate worse than death awaits her in the form of the evil Haddo.

“The Magician was basically the story of [the marriage between Rose Kelly and Aleister Crowley]. . . and of the strange domination of Crowley over his future wife” (R.L. Calder, W. Somerset Maugham and the Quest for Freedom, London: Heinemann, 1972, p. 75). Crowley wrote a review of THE MAGICIAN and signed it “Oliver Haddo”; as well, Oliver Haddo was the name of the protagonist in Louis Wilkinson’s biographical novel FORTH, BEAST (Faber, 1946, written under the pseudonym Louis Marlow – Wilkinson was one of the executors of Crowley’s will).