Victor Benjamin Neuburg
- This article is about a Thelema personality
Victor Benjamin Neuburg (6 May 1883 – 31 May 1940) was an English poet and writer. An intimate associate of Aleister Crowley, he wrote on occultism, including Theosophy and Thelema. He edited "The Poet's Corner" column in the Sunday Referee and also published the early works of Dylan Thomas and Pamela Hansford Johnson.
Early life
Neuburg was born into and raised in an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Islington. His father, Carl Neuburg, who was born in 1857 in Plzeň, Bohemia, and was a commission agent based in Vienna, abandoned the family shortly after his son's birth. Victor was brought up by his mother, Jeanette Neuburg, née Jacobs (1855–1939), and his maternal aunts. He was educated at the City of London School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied medieval and modern languages.
Relationship with Aleister Crowley
When he was 25, in around 1906, Neuburg came in contact with Crowley, also a poet, who had read some of Neuburg's pieces in the Agnostic Journal. Crowley's description of him was:
- He was an agnostic, a vegetarian, a mystic, a Tolstoyan, and many other things all at once. He endeavored to express his spiritual state by wearing the green star of Esperanto, even though he could not speak the language, by refusing to wear a hat, even in London, to wash, and to wear trousers. Whenever addressed, he wriggled convulsively, and his lips, which were three times too large for him and had been hastily attached as an afterthought, emitted the most extraordinary laugh I had ever encountered; in addition to these traits, he possessed an impressive breadth of reading, an overflowing sense of exquisitely subtle humor, and was one of the best-natured people ever to walk this planet.
Crowley initiated Neuburg into his magical Order, the A∴A∴, where he adopted the magical name "Frater Omnia Vincam." Additionally, Crowley began an extended romantic and sexual relationship with Neuburg. In 1909, Crowley took Neuburg to Algiers, and they ventured into the desert, where they conducted a series of occult rituals based on the Enochian system established by Doctor John Dee, which was later chronicled in The Vision and the Voice. Amid these rituals, Crowley combined the ideas of sex and magick, performing his first sex magick ritual. Neuburg's anthology of poems, The Triumph of Pan (1910), was created shortly after these events and reveals a distinct influence of Crowley:
Sweet Wizard, in whose footsteps I have trod
Unto the shrine of the most obscene god,
So steep the pathway is, I may not know,
Until I reach the summit where I go.
Crowley was highly impressed by Neuburg's poetic ability:
- ...in the next few years he produced some of the finest poetry of which the English language can boast. He had an extraordinary delicacy of rhythm, an unrivaled sense of perception, a purity and intensity of passion second to none, and a remarkable command of the English language.
Back in London, Neuburg showed potential as a dancer, so Crowley gave him a leading role in his proto-performance art piece Rites of Eleusis. Neuburg also pursued a doomed relationship with the actress Ione de Forest, who committed suicide shortly after their break-up.
In 1913 Crowley and Neuburg again joined forces in a sexual ritual magic operation known as "the Paris Working". According to one of Crowley's biographers, Lawrence Sutin, Crowley subsequently used anti-Semitic epithets to bully Neuburg and compared Neuburg to a dromedary. This spurred Neuburg to break with Crowley sometime in 1914, describing the slurs as "ostrobogulous piffle" and inventing the word 'ostrobogulous' for the occasion.
The Vine Press
Neuburg served in the British Army From 1916. After the First World War ended, he moved to Steyning, Sussex, where he ran a small press, the Vine Press. In 1920, he published a collection of ballads and other verses under Lillygay. Many of these were adapted from earlier ballad collections. In 1923, Peter Warlock set five of these verses to music under the same title.
"The Poet's Corner" and Dylan Thomas
From 1933 onwards Neuburg edited a section called "The Poet's Corner" in a British newspaper, the Sunday Referee. Here he encouraged new talent by awarding weekly prizes of half a guinea for the best poem. One first prize was awarded to the then-unknown Dylan Thomas, and the publisher of the Sunday Referee sponsored Neuburg's publication of Thomas's first book, 18 Poems.
Another poet who contributed to the column was Pamela Hansford Johnson. For many months, Johnson and Thomas seemed to alternate as first prize winners. In 1937, Jean Overton Fuller submitted a poem to "The Poets' Corner" and was drawn into Neuburg's circle, eventually becoming his biographer.
Personal life
Neuburg married Kathleen Rose Goddard in 1921, but their marriage eventually ended. They had a son, Victor Edward Neuburg (1924–1996), who became a writer on English literature.
Neuburg later started a relationship with Runia Tharpe and moved to Swiss Cottage, London, to live with her.
Death
Victor Benjamin Neuburg died from tuberculosis on 30 May 1940. Dylan Thomas declared on hearing of Neuburg's death:
Vicky encouraged me as no one else has done ... He possessed many kinds of genius, and not the least was his genius for drawing to himself, by his wisdom, graveness, great humor, and innocence, a feeling of trust and love that won’t ever be forgotten.
Notes
Further reading
- Calder-Marshall, Arthur (1951). The Magic of My Youth. London: Rupert Hart-Davies.
- Christie, W. (2014). Dylan Thomas: A Literary Life. Palgrave Macmillan UK. ISBN 978-1-349-45843-1.
- David, Dierdre (2017). Pamela Hansford Johnson: A Writing Life. OUP Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-104592-9.
- Johnson, Pamela Hansford (1965). "The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg". Listener and BBC Television Review (book review). 73. British Broadcasting Corporation: 792–3.
- Kaczynski, Richard (2010). Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley. North Atlantic Books. ISBN 978-1-55643-899-8.
- Lindblad, Ishrat (1982). Pamela Hansford Johnson. Boston: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0-8057-6762-2.
- Neuburg, Victor E. (1983). Vickybird: A Memoir of Victor B. Neuburg by his Son. London: Polytechnic of North London. ISBN 978-0-900639-27-2.
- Thomas, Dylan (1967). FitzGibbon, Constantine (ed.). Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas. New Directions.
- Wigginton, C. (2020). Modernism from the Margins: The 1930's Poetry of Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas. University of Wales Press. ISBN 978-1-78683-726-4.
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