36 Facts About Louis Wilkinson

Louis Wilkinson formed close friendships with Frank Harris, Somerset Maugham, and the notorious occultist and magician Aleister Crowley.

Louis Wilkinson began to write seriously in 1915, and during the next forty years produced a substantial quantity of fiction and biography.

Louis Wilkinson's books were usually well received by the critics, although their overall impact was modest and stirred little scholarly interest.

Louis Wilkinson married four times, being twice widowed and twice divorced.

Louis Wilkinson was born on 17 December 1881, in the Suffolk town of Aldeburgh, the only son of a clergyman, the Rev Walter George Louis Wilkinson and his wife Charlotte Elizabeth.

At the time of his son's birth, Wilkinson senior was running the Aldeburgh Lodge preparatory school, where Louis received his early education.

At Radley, Louis Wilkinson became fascinated by the case of Oscar Wilde, who in May 1895 was convicted of perjury after two trials and imprisoned for two years.

Louis Wilkinson discovered this address and in December 1898 wrote to the exile, ostensibly to ask for permission to mount a dramatised version of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Lindsay Smith, in Oscar Wilde and the Cultures of Childhood, suggests that Louis Wilkinson was a proxy for Wilde's son Cyril, with whom by law Wilde was not permitted contact.

On leaving school in 1899, Louis Wilkinson was accepted at Pembroke College, Oxford to study classics.

Louis Wilkinson's stay at Cambridge was happier and more fruitful; after his Oxford experiences he took care to avoid being publicly associated with anything that was scandalous or blasphemous.

In 1904 Louis Wilkinson met Somerset Maugham when the latter's play, A Man of Honour was performed in Cambridge.

Maugham was not yet well known; Louis Wilkinson found him "unobtrusive, rather wary, unusually good-looking", although the play impressed him.

Dissatisfied with the financial terms arranged for him by the American Society for the Extension of University Teaching, in 1910 Wilkinson combined with G Arnold Shaw, Powys's manager and publisher, to form the University Lecturers Association of New York.

Louis Wilkinson had first met the occultist and writer Aleister Crowley in about 1907, and the two became closer friends after 1915, when they were both living in America.

Louis Wilkinson observed that Crowley's voice and intonation closely resembled that of Winston Churchill.

Louis Wilkinson had by this time become acquainted with Frank Harris, the Irish-born journalist, editor and biographer of Wilde, who after a turbulent career in Britain had moved to America at the outset of World War I and later taken American citizenship.

Harris was sufficiently taken with Louis Wilkinson to include him in the third volume of his Contemporary Portraits series, published in 1920.

Since 1915 Louis Wilkinson had been associated with New York's Greenwich Village literary set, and acted as an unofficial mentor to the future poet, essayist and scholar Kenneth Burke.

Louis Wilkinson was a constructive critic of the younger man's early literary efforts, advised him what to read, and introduced him to Theodore Dreiser and other established writers.

In 1934, Louis Wilkinson published a different kind of book, the autobiographical novel Swan's Milk, in which he represents himself as "Dexter Foothood", and depicts many of his real-life acquaintances, including the Powys brothers, Maugham, Oscar Browning and others.

Louis Wilkinson wrote nothing of substance in this period; after his friend's death, he edited The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, which was published in 1943.

In 1944 Louis Wilkinson produced his single venture into the science-fiction genre, The Devil in Crystal, described by The Observers Alan Pryce-Jones as "an odd little fantasy", in which the protagonist, through a warp in time, is able to relive a part of his past life.

In 1946, Louis Wilkinson wrote his last full-length novel, Forth, Beast, a sequel to Swan's Milk, in which he reprised his Dexter Foothood persona.

When Crowley, in failing health and virtually penniless, was in need of a new home in 1945, Louis Wilkinson was instrumental in finding him a place in Nethercott, a large boarding-house in the English south coast resort of Hastings.

On Crowley's death in December 1947, Louis Wilkinson became one of the estate's three executors.

Crowley had requested that there should be no conventional religious service at his cremation, but that passages of his works be should be read, which Louis Wilkinson agreed to do.

John Symonds, Crowley's biographer, records that "the tall and dignified figure of Louis Wilkinson" read Crowley's poem "Hymn of Pan", extracts from The Book of the Law, and finally Collects from the Gnostic Mass.

In 1948, Louis Wilkinson was sufficiently well regarded to be photographed for the National Portrait Gallery by Walter Stoneman.

Louis Wilkinson characterised Sackville as "obstinate, arrogant, coarse-grained, lacking all statesmanlike vision, almost every word and act reported of him contradicts the case that Mr Marlow so gallantly endeavours to put up".

Louis Wilkinson enjoyed a brief return to the public arena with several BBC Radio broadcasts of reminiscences, between February 1964 and May 1965.

Louis Wilkinson died on 12 September 1966 at the home of his son Oliver, at Westcott Barton, near Oxford.

Louis Wilkinson was sometimes chided for the apparent dullness of his themes, and on one occasion for his "galvanic mode of expression", but was generally respected in the literary world, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Louis Wilkinson is unlisted in modern works of literary reference such as The Oxford Companion to English Literature, although the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature supplies a list of his principal works.

The Times obituarist thought that Louis Wilkinson had the qualities to be a leading literary critic, had he been prepared for the hard grind of regular reviewing.

Louis Wilkinson then married Diana Bryn; his fourth wife was Joan Lamburn, a writer of children's stories, who died in 1956.