They met while Neuburg was up at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1906. He dabbled with agnosticism, and vegetarianism until he settled on the paganism and ritual magic of Aleister Crowley. He felt the call to be a poet and nursed an enthusiasm for fads. At the age of sixteen and a half, he joined the family firm, which imported canes, fibres and rattans, but it quickly became apparent a conventional life was not for him. When he was an infant, his father returned to Austria, so his mother raised him with the help of doting aunts. Neuburg was born in Islington on into a Jewish family of Viennese extraction. Throughout his life, Neuburg inspired extreme reactions in those who knew him. Yet far from being a solitary instance, line upon line of Dylan’s letters of the mid-Thirties explode with bile against Neuburg, his companion Runia Tharpe, and the poetry group they presided over at their home in Swiss Cottage. “Vicky” was Victor Benjamin Neuburg, who as poetry editor of the Sunday Referee had been the first to publish Dylan’s work.
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