As for Neuburg, he would no longer serve as support or as lover. Something changed drastically between the two men shortly after the Paris Working. Crowley did not speak directly of their break in the Confessions. But according to a memoir penned decades later by Neuburg’s son (born well after these events), the break was spurred by Neuburg’s lingering remorse over the suicide of Joan Hayes in August 1912: “The association with Crowley ended in 1914, and the events of the previous two years pushed him into a nervous breakdown. The two following years of his life are almost a blank, but he probably spent some time with his mother, who was then living in Hove, Sussex.”
Neuburg did not spend the remainder of his life in a shattered condition. By 1916, he had recovered sufficiently to enlist in the British Army as a private. He later married, raised a family, and founded a distinguished small publishing enterprise, the Vine Press. In 1933, while working as a literary editor for the London Sunday Referee, he “discovered” Dylan Thomas. But Neuburg’s own poetic energies were clearly diminished after the break with Crowley. Until his death in 1940, Neuburg retained a lingering fear of his onetime magical master.
What caused the final break? At some point, in late September or early October of 1914, Crowley and Neuburg met in London. Neuburg informed Crowley that he would continue no longer as his disciple. By some accounts, Crowley responded by ritually cursing him. Neither the reasons offered by Neuburg nor the nature of the curse, if uttered, are known—for neither Neuburg nor Crowley left a record of this meeting. There is no question, however, as to its psychological impact on Neuburg. The “nervous breakdown” attested to by his son followed at once.
World War One commenced on July 28, 1914. Crowley later attested that, in late summer, he offered his services to various British governmental agencies on behalf of the war effort but was rejected on two primary grounds: his phlebitis (which flared up in September) and negative rumors as to his character. The fact that he was nearing forty could not have helped his chances. Still, there were private volunteer means by which Crowley could have served his country. Certainly the opportunities open to him in England exceeded, in real value to the war effort, those he would pursue in America.
To what extent the break with Neuburg, or the intrusions of war, played upon his mind at this time is unknown. There is no clear reason for the next dramatic step in Crowley’s life.
On October 24, 1914, he embarked for America on the Lusitania—the U.S. passenger vessel the sinking of which, in 1916, by a German submarine, would precipitate America’s entry into the war. Crowley was carrying some fifty pounds in cash and an eclectic baggage of magical texts and documents.
For the next five years, in America, Crowley would endure—for the first time in his life—the dark desperation of an impoverished exile.
CHAPTER SEVEN
In Exile in America, Crowley Endures Poverty and Accusations of Treason as Ordeals Necessary to Becoming a Magus (1914–19)
Upon arrival in New York in late October 1914, Crowley was already something of a celebrity, thanks to a lurid account of his London doings which preceded his arrival.
The account appeared in the August 2, 1914, The World Magazine, a publication of the New York World newspaper. The author was Harry Kemp, an American poet whose reputation has since gone into eclipse, but who was at the time a renowned bohemian. Kemp limned a portrait of forbidden practices at Crowley’s Fulham Road studio in London:
One by one the worshippers entered. They were mostly women of aristrocratic type.[ … ] It was whispered to me that not a few people of noble descent belonged to the Satanists.[ … ] Then came the slow, monotonous chant of the high priest: “There is no good. Evil is good. Blessed be the Principle of Evil. All hail, Prince of the World, to whom even God Himself has given dominion.” A sound as of evil bleating filled the pauses of these blasphemous utterances.
Kemp privately acknowledged that the piece was “a turgid bit of sensational journalism.” Crowley termed it “rubbish.” The World Magazine ran a subsequent piece on Crowley (by a different reporter) in its December 13, 1914, issue. Crowley was now described—with admirable accuracy—as “a man about whom men quarrel. Intensely magnetic, he attracts people or repels them with equal violence. His personality seems to breed rumors. Everywhere they follow him.” Crowley answered back at Kemp, declaring that he had made Kemp “dream a scene of black magic, and he thought it was actually happening and that I was participating. I don’t practice black magic.”
Shortly after his arrival, Crowley met with John Quinn, the wealthy lawyer and arts patron to whom Crowley hoped to sell some of his own limited editions. He further desired to win over Quinn as an ally, as Quinn was influential in intellectual circles both in America and in England, and in correspondence with the leading figures of literary modernism, including Pound, Yeats, and (a few years later) James Joyce. But by late February, Quinn resolved to sever relations. As he wrote to Yeats (who had crossed swords with Crowley in 1900): “Frankly, his ‘magic’ and astrology bored me beyond words. Whatever he may be, he has no personality. I am not interested in his morals or lack of morals. He may or may not be a good or profound or crooked student or practitioner of magic. To me, he is only a third- or fourth-rate poet.”
This rejection by Quinn effectively ended Crowley’s chances of forming sympathetic social ties with the modernist movement—for which Crowley, a poetic traditionalist, would always express a visceral contempt. In turn, Crowley was anathema to Pound, Yeats, and their circle. Thus in 1917, Pound, writing from London to the influential American quarterly The Little Review, objected strongly to the presence of a favorable footnote on Crowley in an essay by H. L. Mencken on “Puritanism as a Literary Force.” The mention, Pound insisted, was an “awful slip [ … ] that would queer his [Mencken’s] effect at once over here.” Mencken and Crowley had been in friendly correspondence. But when they finally did meet, some years later in London, Mencken came over to Pound’s camp, viewing Crowley as “surrounded by a group of idiots who regarded him as inspired and almost, indeed a god.”
However wayward his quest for public recognition, Crowley continued privately to devote himself to experimentation with sexual magic. Crowley’s written record of practice was entitled “Rex de Arte Regia,” or “The King on the Royal Art,” a phrase that draws from alchemical imagery of the androgynous conjoining of the king and the queen (the male and the female) in the work of spiritual transformation. The record included physical details of the sexual acts in Latin, thus to convey a sense of dignity. Many entries addressed the preparation and use of “elixir,” the commingled male and female fluids that Crowley regarded as quintessential to the O.T.O. IX° ritual. This was by no means a universal approach to sexual magic; numerous writings of Hindu and Buddhist Tantrism and of the Chinese Taoist tradition call for retention of semen by the male, even in the heights of mystical sexual union. Crowley followed that alchemical tradition which regarded the fluidic commingling as an “elixir” which, when imbibed, could heighten both one’s physical and spiritual state.
His belief in the practical efficacy of sexual magic was, necessarily, put to a severe test during the war years in America, when for the first time he would endure poverty. Revile English society as Crowley often did, he was a product of that society and had relished his status as a gentleman. In America he had no such status, and no funds to obtain it. Small wonder, then, that many of his sexual magic operations during these years—as documented by his diary—were devoted to the obtaining of money, or the gift of oratory, or a wealthy marriage, or other means of obtaining a practical success.
Crowley was aware that practices of this sort could be viewed as sordid, ego-ridden deviations from the path of attainment. But in an essay from this period—“The Revival of Magick,” a condensed autobiography written in a popular style—Crowley boasted of the efficacy of his “Magick” (its sexual nature was not disclosed here) in obtaining wealth or anything else that the magician might desire. The final �
��secret of high Magick” was within his reach:
For example, one performs an operation “to have $20,000.” A few days later a prospect of obtaining that exact sum suddenly arises, then fades slowly away. Exactly what to do in such a case is a problem of which I have not yet found the perfect answer. Fortunately, it rarely happens that this trouble supervenes. In five out of six times the desired event comes naturally to pass without further disturbance. But I confess that I should like to make that sixth time safe, and I believe that in another few months [he was writing in 1917] I shall have done so.
At the time Crowley penned those words, he was living on a tenuous and minimal income, incapable of even once—much less five times out of six—summoning up $20,000. Crowley was never able to conjure money—or any other desired practical benefits—at will.
However, as to access to the mystical Knowledge and Conversation of his Holy Guardian Angel, Crowley felt himself frequently successful. Especially during the first year of his stay in America, he experimented with an array of partners—female and male—in the respective IX° and XI° rituals. These included prostitutes from the streets of New York and men who he met in Turkish baths. But also included were women for whom Crowley felt a serious friendship or a deep romantic attachment. One of the strongest myths surrounding the persona of Aleister Crowley was that he was prodigious in his sexuality, with appetites and energies beyond the norm. But as the diaries from this American period confirm, Crowley was, at least at this stage (he turned forty in 1915) quite ordinary in the frequency of his sexual acts, if not in their method and intent. His friend Gerald Yorke made some tabulations based on the sexual operations meticulously recorded by Crowley. For example, from September 1, 1914, to June 16, 1915, there were sixty-eight operations, eleven of which were VIII° solitary masturbations. From February 26, 1917, to March 4, 1918, there were a mere eighty-seven operations. Yorke observed that, “It is rare for there to be more than one emission in a numbered working.” The tabulations go on, but the point is made—Crowley’s appetite and endurance were disappointingly normal.
A number of his operations—including some of the VIII° autoerotic variety—had as their explicit object the obtaining of a new Scarlet Woman. As for his desire for men, it was a source of discomfort within and social vulnerability without. Shortly after his arrival in New York, Crowley recorded in his diary his hope of attracting to himself a man like Jerome Pollitt, the love of his Cambridge youth. In his picaresque novel Not the Life and Adventures of Sir Roger Bloxam—written in the period 1916–17 and described by Crowley as a “Novelissim” (innovative curiosity)—Crowley offered a disguised paean to Pollitt that echoed his love poems in the pseudonymous Scented Garden (1910). Crowley never sought to publish Bloxam in his lifetime; had his fortune held out, it is likely that he would have pursued the same course (a private and limited printing) as with The Scented Garden. The main characters of the novel—bawdy in content, archaic in tone, with brief episodic chapters in the manner of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy—are Sir Roger Bloxam (Crowley), Porphyrria Poppoea (Crowley’s anus), Cardinal Mentula (Crowley’s penis), Signor Coglio the Florentine and brave Don Cojone of Legrono (Crowley’s balls), and Hippolytus (Pollitt). Porphyrria Poppoea—a feminine persona, in keeping with Crowley’s preferred role with Pollitt and other male lovers—offers up this testimony of enduring love: “Many a lover has possessed her since Hippolytus; but she has scorned them even while she abandons herself to their caresses. She loves Hippolytus. Hippolytus!” Not even the break with Neuberg had eclipsed the loss of Pollitt. Publicly, however, Crowley continued to play the part of the strict heterosexual.
In January 1915, Crowley had his first meetings with George Sylvester Viereck, a writer and editor who would play a pivotal role in Crowley’s life during these war years. Viereck is remembered as the most influential propagandist for the German cause in America during both World War One and World War Two. Born in 1884 in Munich, Viereick moved with his family to America in 1896. A poet and memoirist, Viereck enjoyed a triumph with Confessions of a Barbarian (1909), which Crowley admired. In this memoir, Viereck praised German culture while affirming his attachment to his adopted American homeland. This would serve as Vierck’s consistent strategy in addressing German-American issues in the prewar years. Viereck founded two influential journals—The International in 1912 and The Fatherland in 1914. Crowley’s wartime livelihood came primarily from these two journals, to which he contributed literally dozens of pieces in the years from 1915 to 1917.
Viereck and Crowley first met in the London offices of Austin Harrison, editor of The English Review, prior to the war. Once in New York, Crowley renewed the acquaintance. With the war under way, Viereck and The Fatherland had a twofold political propaganda agenda: to argue the German cause in pro-British America, and to keep neutral America out of the war that Britain wished her to enter. In pursuit of these aims, Viereck was badly in need of credible British and American voices. The opportunity to wield genuine influence was there for Viereck. The circulation of The Fatherland went as high as 100,000 in its first year of publication. But a New York World expose in August 1915 had damaged Viereck’s alleged independent standing as an editor by reporting substantial funding by the German government for his propaganda efforts.
Viereck was understandably intrigued, then, by the willingness of Aleister Crowley, an “Irish” man of letters, to write for The Fatherland. Crowley’s first appearance, on January 13, 1915, was entitled “Honesty is the Best Policy” and excoriated British hypocrisy in claiming justice as the motive for its mercenary wartime aims. Crowley had an undoubted talent for vituperating his native land:
We are in for one of our periodical orgies of Cant. Right (and God, of course, thank God!) struggles gallantly in its tiny way against Armed Might, Tyranny, Barbarism; the Allies pit their puny force against the hordes of Huns.[ … ]
My own view is simpler. We have waited for a long while to smash Germany and steal her goods. We have taken a first-class opportunity, and we shall never regret it.
The question, of course, is why Crowley should have taken on such a public role. Was he a traitor to the British cause? A good many persons have believed so. Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary during the war, was one of these. Crowley claimed, however, that he deliberately cultivated the trust of Viereck to gain a prominent voice in The Fatherland that would—paradoxically—frustrate German aims by carrying the style of its propaganda to ludicrous extremes. In sum, he alleged to have played the role of a double agent, albeit one without official sanction from British intelligence, so as to poison the German propaganda apparatus by methods that today would be called “disinformation.”
To gain the confidence of Viereck, Crowley argued, it was necessary for him to play the role of anti-British activist to the hilt, even to the point of claiming a fictitious Irish ancestry and making a public declaration of Sinn Fein sentiments. Thus it was that The New York Times reported, in its July 13, 1915, issue, under the headline “Irish Republic Born in New York Harbor,” the pronouncements of “Aleister Crowley, Irishman—poet, philosopher, explorer, a man of mystic mind—the leader of an Irish hope.” Crowley, the Times reported, had torn up his British passport in a ceremony held in a hired motorboat just off Bedloe’s Island, the site of the Statue of Liberty. Crowley then called not merely for Irish independence but for full-scale war against England. In the Confessions, he explained that his fiery speech was a parody of the Declaration of Independence, and that the shredded passport was merely an old envelope. “The New York Times gave us three columns and Viereck was distinctly friendly.”
Extravagant flattery was another means of gaining Viereck’s trust. As a fellow poet ten years Viereck’s senior, Crowley encouraged Viereck to become the great voice of America. His private views on Viereck, in the Confessions, were quite different. Crowley was frequently cruel in his assessments, but seldom as hypocritical as in his portrayal of Viereck, whom he pilloried as being “homosexual
at heart—though I believe not so in practice—and conscious of this inferiority, which makes him timid.” This alleged homosexuality became the pretext for a sermon by Crowley on the pitfalls of living with so dire a burden:
The homosexual is comically innocent, and cannot understand the loathing with which the average man regards what to him is a natural impulse.[ … ] But Viereck had learned his lesson. He had learned to deny everything. Even to me, knowing my reputation, totally undeserved as it happens to be, for similar abnormalities, he would admit nothing. This is a most remarkable circumstance, for the persecution attached to this passion has created a freemasonry among its devotees which makes them frank to the point of indiscretion when they think they recognize sympathy in an acquaintance. Bitter must have been Viereck’s initiation that it should have taught him to be so extravagantly cautious; but it fitted him to handle the German propaganda.
This passage, while addressed to Viereck, reveals the bitterness that underlay Crowley’s own concealments. Rather than risk disclosure, he adopted the persona of a pitying heterosexual to describe the humiliation of being classified amongst the “abnormalities” of society.
While suspecting Viereck of canny concealments, Crowley trusted in Viereck’s naïveté as an editor. He later asserted, as a key refutation of the charge of treason, that his political writings of this time were so obviously ludicrous as to leave no doubt of his insincerity. This claim has some merit—but only some. There were a few essays which were blatantly “over the top.” These include “The New Parsifal” and “The Crime of Edith Cavell.” In the former piece, Crowley bathetically compared the German Kaiser to Jesus Christ; in the latter, he defended the brutal murder by the Germans of Cavell, a private British citizen. But the majority of his essays were not outlandish. In truth, they merged nicely with the overall tone of The Fatherland. Crowley himself acknowledged that “(on the whole) I took few chances of letting the Germans perceive the tongue in my cheek.” He also averred that “Americans do not understand irony at all.” But one might forgive them this incapacity, given subtleties such as this endorsement of The Fatherland by Crowley, the “Great Irish Poet,” in the August 11, 1915, issue:
Do What Thou Wilt Page 33
