Aleister Crowley gets a mention and another imagined relative in this book review

Aleister Crowley gets a mention and another imagined relative in this book review for a biography of poet Peter Redgrove at “A Lucid Dreamer: The Life of Peter Redgrove by Neil Roberts – review

“In person Peter Redgrove was physically imposing, in poetry exuberant and rhapsodic – either way not a man it was easy to mistake. Yet reviewers often treated him as a pale shadow of Ted Hughes, which wasn’t just galling but embarrassing, since he knew and admired Hughes (they’d both been at Cambridge) and didn’t want to have to resent him. Worse was to see or hear himself being called Peter Redgrave, as though one of the acting dynasty.

A sense of injury was there from childhood. Though he grew up in a seemingly comfortable middle-class home in Kingston, he felt scarred by his mother’s incestuous intimacy on one hand (she confided in him about her lovers and abortions), and his father’s overbearing bullishness on the other. Later in life, he persuaded himself that his mother’s lovers had included Aleister Crowley and that he might be Crowley’s child. He also suspected he’d been sexually abused.”