Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  Bishop now resolved that the boy’s full recovery required plentiful open-air exercise, including fishing and mountain climbing jaunts in Wales and Scotland. These delighted Crowley. As for academics, Bishop made an experiment of blending private tutors with a day school in nearby Streatham. The day school regimen resulted in two signal experiences. The first was the boy’s tardy discovery of the masturbatory vice that had so obsessed Champney. As Crowley observed, “Here was certainly a sin worth sinning and I applied myself with characteristic vigour to its practice.” The second was Crowley’s creation of an inadvertent but highly effective explosive device. The same astonishing tunnel-vision science that led to the nine-time killing of the cat was at work, only in this case the victim was Crowley himself. It began with his budding interest in chemistry, in which subject he was a star pupil in the school. In the autumn of 1890, the young Crowley packed a large jar with ingredients including a full two pounds of gunpowder. The site was the Streatham school playground. The intent was to launch a schoolboy rocket. The impact was literally shattering—windows on the nearby buildings were left in shards. As for Crowley, he was forced to have dozens of bits of gravel surgically removed from his face and was blindfolded until Christmas Day out of fear that he would lose his sight by using his traumatized eyes. Crowley’s summation: “Strangely enough, I was the only person injured. Throughout I enjoyed the episode; I was the hero, I had made my mark!”

  Bishop resolved to find suitable role models for the impressionable adolescent—pious young tutors who would instill not merely knowledge but the eternal principles of the Evangelical spirit. If Crowley is to be believed, Bishop’s efforts at screening tutors were an abject failure. With one of these tutors, a Reverend Fothergill, Crowley engaged in a pitched argument while the two were off on a fishing expedition at a loch near Forsinard, Scotland. Crowley threw first Fothergill’s rod and then Fothergill himself into the loch. The reverend retaliated by capsizing the rowboat in which Crowley sought to make his escape and then attempting to drown the lad. That night, hostilities were further intensified when Crowley flagrantly wooed and won a local girl. Fothergill, a broken tutor, returned with the boy to London; there was, as Crowley tells it, a further sexual dalliance en route in Carlisle, as a way of repeating his “victory.” A subsequent tutor joined in sexual battle with the boy in an altogether different mode by making homosexual advances. “I did not allow him to succeed,” Crowley wrote, “not because I could see no sin in it [conscious sin, be it remembered, was at this time the keynote of Crowley’s adolescent rebellion] but because I thought it was a trap to betray me to my family.”

  The tutors did succeed in helping Crowley to progress rapidly in mathematics, literature, Greek, and Latin. Equally important, however, was the freedom to read what he wished, which had previously been denied him. At Forsinard, Crowley discovered certain old folios of Shakespeare and pored over them night after night, convinced now that “poetry was of paramount importance.” Crowley went on to make a survey of English verse. Of the Victorian poets, he embraced Swinburne, the sweep and sonority of whose lyrics had a lasting influence. The yearning to achieve greatness as a poet took hold in the boy.

  From amongst the unavailing tutors there emerged, in Crowley’s eyes, one shining figure who befriended the boy at a time when friendship must have been badly needed. Archibald Douglas was a young Oxford graduate whom Bishop hired in 1891. Douglas and Crowley traveled together to the English town of Torquay on what was to have been a bicycle outing:

  Though Douglas called himself a Christian, he proved to be both a man and a gentleman. I presume that poverty had compelled the camouflage. From the moment that we were alone together he produced a complete revolution in my outlook upon life, by showing me for the first time a sane, clear, jolly world worth living in. Smoking and drinking were natural. He warned me of the dangers of excess from the athletic standpoint. He introduced me to racing, billiards, betting, cards and women. He told me how these things might be enjoyed without damaging oneself or wronging others. He put me up to all the tricks. He showed me the meaning of honour. I immediately accepted his standpoint and began to behave like a normal, healthy human being. The nightmare world of Christianity vanished at the dawn. I fell in with a girl of the theatre in the first ten days at Torquay, and at that touch of human love the detestable mysteries of sex were transformed into joy and beauty. The obsession of sin fell from my shoulders into the sea of oblivion.[ … ] It was a period of boundless happiness for me.

  Crowley’s pointed insistence on the immediacy of his transformation from a sin-ridden soul to a pagan embracer of life is typical of his approach to psychological issues. The evidence of his later life resoundingly contradicts this claim. But there is no reason to doubt that Crowley did indeed experience a rapturous psychic release. Bishop soon thereafter dismissed Douglas; but, as Crowley later wrote, “it was too late; my eyes were opened and I had become as a god, knowing good and evil.” Crowley returned to a public school room-and-board setting in the second or middle term of 1891. The choice of Malvern College, an esteemed school, was based in part upon the perceived need of a bracing climate to bolster the boy’s still delicate health.

  * * *

  But Malvern, at which Crowley remained for three terms concluding in 1892, left no great impression upon Crowley, and Crowley reciprocated in kind, failing to win any academic prizes or to place on the Honors list. When, after three terms, he had come to dislike the regimen at Malvern, he invented “abominations” concerning conditions at the school such that mother Emily gladly withdrew him. Crowley looked forward to the greater freedom of private tutors. But Emily thwarted him here, promptly enrolling him in the Tonbridge School, where he remained for the Lent, Summer, and Christmas terms of 1892.

  Crowley, who turned seventeen while at Tonbridge, now at last—through holidays filled with vigorous fishing and climbing—recovered his physical health. As a result, he was exultantly feeling his oats. “By the time I reached Tonbridge I had developed a kind of natural aristocracy. People were already beginning to be afraid of me and there was no question any longer of bullying.”

  Again, Crowley failed to win academic honors. The problem was lack of application. Crowley, who had no doubts as to his intelligence, could not bring himself to work to please his masters. But if the masters of Malvern and Tonbridge failed to inspire Crowley, at least they did not terrify him as Champney had. This eased the need to lash out at all things Christian. As Crowley explained it: “The problem of life was not how to satanize [ … ] it was simply to escape from the oppressors and to enjoy the world without interference of spiritual life of any sort.” The boy who had always lived in an atmosphere of acute spiritual tension—whether under his mother, his uncle, or a strict schoolmaster—was now resolved upon exploring the sexual realm.

  But not even sex—one might better say, sex least of all—could remain outside of the spiritual domain for Crowley. As Crowley himself put it: “Pleasure as such has never attracted me. It must be spiced by moral satisfaction.” The most delectable moral satisfaction came from defying authority. But his inexperience led to a sexual mishap that necessitated withdrawal from Tonbridge at the end of 1892. Crowley contracted gonorrhea from a liaison with a Glasgow prostitute. There was nothing unusual in young male members of the British upper class seeking out prostitutes. Yet Crowley felt a lasting embarrassment over the incident, as evidenced by the fact that he never directly spoke of it in his published writings. In one account, he blames the “vile system”—Victorian Evangelicalism and its refusal to educate young men as to the facts of life—for handing him over “bound and blindfold to the outraged majesty of nature.”

  Crowley may have been compelled ignobly to depart Tonbridge, but his family maintained its resolve to keep him in a school setting. A compromise of a kind was reached. He would live with a Brethren tutor in Eastbourne, but he would also attend day classes at Eastbourne College. Predictably, Crowley found the tutor restrictive and
once engaged in an all-out fistfight with him. His studies at Eastbourne were more productive, especially in chemistry and in French language and literature. He also joined the chess team. Crowley had learned the game at age six, but Eastbourne was his first competitive setting and he shined, beating the adult town champion and writing a chess column for the local paper.

  Also at this time, Crowley blossomed as an athlete. The sport of rock climbing now became both an escape and an ecstatic employment of physical and strategic skills. In 1892, at age sixteen, during a visit with his mother to Skye, he devoted himself in earnest to mastering technique. By the following summer, he had progressed sufficiently to scale the four highest fells in the vicinity of Langdale in a marathon single-day climb. But Crowley’s favorite site for climbing was Beachy Head, a chalk cliff face near Eastbourne. As he later explained: “Chalk is probably the most dangerous and difficult of all kinds of rock. Its condition varies at every step. Often one has to clear away an immense amount of debris in order to get any hold at all. Yet indiscretion in this operation might pull down a few hundred tons on one’s head.” It was on Beachy Head that Crowley perfected a style of climbing that would set him apart from his contemporaries. As sudden movements could lead to disaster on chalk, Crowley—who as a young man was lithe of build, but without exceptional strength—was forced to adopt a sinuous approach, with his body in continuous movement. As he wrote: “One does not climb the cliffs. One hardly even crawls. Trickles or oozes would perhaps be the ideal verbs.” Crowley enjoyed the Beachy Head setting so greatly that he resided there for some weeks in a small tent. “It was,” he enthused, “my first experience of camp life which is, one thing with another, the best life I know. The mere feeling of being in the fresh air under the stars when one goes to sleep, and of waking at dawn because it is dawn, raises one’s animal life ipso facto to the level of poetry.” It would be one of Crowley’s later marks, as a magician, to test his capacities in rigorous outdoor settings.

  Crowley joined the Scottish Mountaineering Club in 1894 and made his first trip to the Alps that same year. The Alps would become Crowley’s favorite vacation site during his years at Cambridge University (from 1895 to 1898), and it was on the Alpine slopes that Crowley formed influential friendships—and animosities—within the climbing community that would shape considerably the course of his early manhood. His impressive list of Alpine climbs included the first guideless traverse of the Monch, the first descent of the west face of the Trifthorn, and a challenging ascent of the north-northeast ridge of Mont Collon. Amongst the prominent British climbers who would testify as to Crowley’s skills during this period were T. S. Blakeney, Norman Collie, Sir Martin Conway and Tom Longstaff, who deemed Crowley “a fine climber, if an unconventional one.” Collie, with Conway as a second, proposed Crowley for membership in the prestigious English Alpine Club in 1898. But Crowley was rejected—a snub he never forgave.

  In October 1895, Crowley turned twenty. He now cut a distinguished figure as a young man of means. It was to Cambridge that Crowley was sent for his final polishing as a gentleman. His subsequent three years at Trinity College, Cambridge, were among the happiest of his life, and constituted the seal of his emancipation from family authority and the Brethren creed. Crowley never took a degree at Cambridge, declining to take the final formal steps to receive his diploma on the grounds that it was unbefitting of and unnecessary to a gentleman: “I had no intention of becoming a parson or a schoolmaster, to write B.A. after my name would have been a decided waste of ink.” Nonetheless, his identification with Trinity College was intense. His first rooms were at 16 St. John’s Street, overlooking St. John’s Chapel. During his opening term, Crowley resolved to devote himself to English literature. His reading during these years is striking both for its breadth and for the persistence of its influence. The greatest of his passions at this time was the poet Shelley, whose exaltation of individual freedom thrilled him. Sir Richard Burton, the late Victorian scholar, poet, and travel writer who had, in mid-century, journeyed in disguise to Mecca, emerged as a model against whom Crowley could measure his own future course. Burton wrote enthralling accounts of his adventures, both physical and spiritual. He also composed The Kasidah, an English poem in which Burton, under the pseudonym Haji Abdu el-Yezdi, successfully took on the style and outlook of classical Sufi poets such as Hafiz and Omar Khayyam. Crowley would adopt, in certain later works (particularly those dealing with his bisexual range of desire), this same pseudonymous approach to the framing of controversial ideas, playing with the preconceptions of the reader as Burton had done by adopting a romantic name from the East.

  With ample funds at his disposal, Crowley the student purchased books (often in fine printings, such as the Kelmscott Press edition of Chaucer) in great quantity and lined his rooms with them from floor to ceiling, further filling four revolving walnut bookcases. Having perfected his sanctum, Crowley nonetheless shied away from the role of a bookish intellectual:

  I spent the whole of my time in reading. It was very rare that I got to bed before daylight. But I had a horror of being thought a ‘smug’; and what I was doing was a secret from my nearest friends. Whenever they were about I was playing chess and cards. In the daytime I went canoeing or cycling. I had no occupations which brought me into close touch with any great body of undergraduates. I even gave up the habit of going round to see people, though I was always at home to anyone who chose to call.

  It was in his private quarters (he remained at 16 St. John’s Street his first two years, then divided his time between 35 Sidney Street and 14 Trinity Street in the final year of 1897–98)—and not in the lecture halls—that Crowley carried on the bulk of his studies at Trinity. In his general examinations, which focused primarily on mathematics and the classics, he always earned a respectable “second class,” but for one “first class” showing in the Easter Term of 1897.

  Crowley cut an impressive enough figure when he did go forth from his rooms, adopting the fashionable Decadent style. His wardrobe was replete with pure silk shirts and outsized floppy bow ties; he favored gaudy rings set with semiprecious mineral stones. While Crowley later described himself as largely indifferent to his classmates, this seems to have been a retrospective romantic pose. Crowley was, in fact, active in the Magpie and Stump, a Trinity debating society that met weekly in the lecture rooms of the Old Court. The Magpie and Stump had the ambiance of a gentleman’s private club. Crowley wrote in his Confessions that he could not take the Magpie and Stump seriously: “It seemed to me absurd for these young asses to emit their callow opinions on important subjects.” But the weekly records disclose that Crowley was an active member with an all-but-perfect attendance record over the period 1895–97; only in his final year at Cambridge did his devotion begin to wane. As members could choose their sides on debate, the record of Crowley’s stances is of some interest in determining his views as a young man. He defended the proposition “That genius is only a manifestation of insanity”; this was a commonplace theory in the nineties, fostered by the then-influential writings of the German thinker Max Nordau, and it was one that long continued to intrigue Crowley. He opposed the proposition “That black is white”, though he would soon enough come to regard the union of contradictions as the keystone to spiritual progress. Regrettably, there is no record of Crowley’s participation on the night of February 19, 1897, when the members of the Magpie and Stump voted—by an 11–8 margin—in favor of the proposition that “This House sympathizes with Satan in his sorrows.” This vote by his peers casts light on the tendency, common within Crowley’s generation, to regard Satan as more a romantic than an evil figure. Crowley was far from alone in his rebellion against Christian morals, though he distinguished himself in the lengths to which he would carry it.

  Crowley was also active in the university Chess Club. In his freshman year, he promptly triumphed over its president. It was then arranged for him to play H. E. Atkins, who would go on to become the seven-time amateur champion of Englan
d. Atkins trounced him, and Crowley had for the first time encountered his decisive better at chess. Undeterred, Crowley went on to devote two hours a day to the game by his second year at Cambridge. His frank ambition was to become a world champion. But during the long vacation of 1897, Crowley visited Berlin while a major chess conference was underway. The sight of his ultimate ambition promptly cured him of it:

  I had hardly entered the room where the masters were playing when I was seized with what may justly be described as a mystical experience. I seemed to be looking on at the tournament from outside myself. I saw the masters—one, shabby and blear-eyed; another, in badly fitting would-be respectable shoddy; a third, a mere parody of humanity, and so on for the rest. These were the people to whose ranks I was seeking admission. ‘There, but for the grace of God, goes Aleister Crowley,’ I exclaimed to myself with disgust, and then and there I registered a vow never to play another serious game of chess.

  The sermons of father Edward as to the limits of worldly ambition had once again shown their power. A similar realization deflected Crowley from the only practical career choice that he entertained during his Cambridge days: that of entering the British Diplomatic Service. Crowley could afford to ignore the problem of earning a living once he left Cambridge—he was due to come into an inherited fortune of some £40,000. But politics, dressed in the conservative forms of courtly intrigue and romantic ritual, held a sufficient allure for Crowley to consider a diplomatic career. While at Cambridge, he took up the study of Russian in order to qualify himself for service at what he regarded as the most brilliant of European courts, that of the Czar at St. Petersburg. Indeed, Crowley journeyed to St. Petersburg to study Russian on its native soil during the long vacation of 1897, though he seems never to have progressed in the language. The special lure of diplomacy for Crowley—as he wrote in the Confessions—was that it afforded “the greatest opportunities for worldly enjoyment, while at the same time demanding the highest qualities of mind. The subtlety of intrigue has always fascinated me.”