Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  In the streets Crowley, in his English Savile Row suit, would have passed by businessmen in frock coats and top hats, young men in cream trousers wearing straw boaters, corseted ladies perspiring inside graceful European styles of long, fabric-rich dresses, sporting elaborate broad-brimmed French and English hats with plenteous feathers, their hair hanging loose or in curls at the sides, most becoming. Many men sported a derby and short jackets, trousers, revealing hose, narrow neckties, stiff collars, and collar studs. Boys wore soft caps and knee breeches and could be seen boxing and wrestling in the street from time to time. Policemen were of the Keystone Kops type with bulbous, faintly comical, phallic helmets, swinging truncheons, while a call to the fire brigades brought forth a train resembling a carnival float or chariot flanked by trotting firemen in huge helmets suitable for medieval warfare.

  The spirit of liberty was palpable everywhere, Crowley observed; people minded their own business and looked each other in the eye; there was no deference, and rich and poor and the middlin’ sort got on well enough. The spoken manners, however, Crowley found shockingly uncouth, but amusing too.

  At more than fifty sites on New York’s blisteringly hot streets, Crowley’s huge ears would have felt assailed by piercing yells from poor, often immigrant newsboys hawking the morning and late editions, crying out the headlines. On July 7, Crowley’s second day in Gotham, whether or not he suffered reading the Tribune, he would probably have heard the headline Japan to Have a Free Hand: not the gift of a severed limb courtesy of the Boxers, but Russia’s announcement of her consent for Japan to move 23,000 troops into China. News of “thousands” of Chinese converts to Christianity slain, as well as foreigners, echoed about the city. Crowley had no time for missionaries or converts; he thought traditional beliefs should be understood, not replaced. Splashed across the Tribune’s front page was a dramatic photograph of the Foreign Concession in Tien Tsin, encircled by Chinese troops, redolent of scenes reproduced in Samuel Bronston’s 1963 epic set during the Boxer Rebellion, 55 Days at Peking, starring Ava Gardner, Charlton Heston, and David Niven.

  Fig. 3.4. Skaters in Central Park circa 1890 by the Dakota Apartments, constructed 1880–1884.

  Back in the real July 1900, President McKinley received a cable from Kaiser Wilhelm II thanking the president for his sympathy over the shocking daylight murder of the Kaiser’s representative in the streets of Peking.

  Yes, it would have done Crowley no harm at all to undergo the humiliation of physical contact with newsprint. He might have found that he was not alone in his views and that his philosophy was not unknown either. An interesting piece in the Tribune of July 7 by an American who had recently visited England could have invited comparison with or even served as vindication for his 1899 “Appeal to the American Republic.” While the article’s author was swift to criticize the stuffiness of English conventions and the absurdly dim view held of his clothes taste, and while the writer tried to forgive the “tyranny of 1776,” he was nonetheless hugely impressed by the unity and satisfaction with Great Britain’s government shown by the vast majority of folk, as well as the general pleasure taken in the nation’s victories and in its social and political system.

  Americans and British have much in common and the logic of events must bring the two peoples into closer business and social relations. Even as they dislike Great Britain for its strength and progress, so do most of the Continental countries dislike the United States. This is no figment of fancy. The American isolation of former years, finally made impossible by the growth of steam and electricity, is no longer a factor in our diplomatic problem. Today America is not only in the world, but of it. . . . That Great Britain and America will grow more and more friendly and get closer together is as certain as the sun to rise, although, for political reasons, an official alliance is out of the question.7

  As heartily as Crowley might have endorsed the columnist’s insightful view of future cooperation, he would probably have felt envy had he read of one outcome of the success of Winston Spencer Churchill’s latest book. Churchill’s Boer War adventure had attracted so much favorable notice that New York agent Major James B. Pond engaged Mr. Churchill, “now in the early twenties,” to deliver a lecture series in New York beginning in November. Churchill aroused particular interest as his mother (now Mrs. Cornwallis West) was respected New Yorker Leonard Jerome’s daughter, and the latter’s grandson enjoyed “a good many American affiliations.” Pond considered Churchill to have achieved as much at twenty-six as would constitute a brilliant career for most men aged fifty.

  Crowley’s incipient career as a literary figure had a tantalizingly long way to go. One may ask why Crowley could not bring himself to enter the fray of finding a publisher. Was it pride, impatience, suppressed self-doubt, distaste for publishing as a “trade,” fear of rejection? All of the above, I think. It is not as though he had nothing to say. Though he was on the verge of the first great foreign adventure of his life, even his personal interests would have found an audience. After all, page 10 of the Tribune, in addition to news about Churchill, carried a fair review of French astronomer and Theosophical enthusiast Camille Flammarion’s latest investigation of psychic and occult mysteries, L’Inconnu (The Unknown), just published by C. F. Harper & Bros. in London and New York. This was right up Crowley’s alley, especially as it contained a scientific approach to the issue of the soul and survival after death. Crowley would give his magazine series, The Equinox, beginning in 1909, the rubric “The Aim of Religion, The Method of Science.” There was a market for such things if the author could harness his or her thought to the concerns of the reader.

  It was a tremendous experience recently to have in my hands an extraordinarily rare, and revealing, letter on blue-headed notepaper sent by Crowley to his dear friend Gerald, back in England. Gerald Kelly may have wondered where his older friend had got to. Well, now he could see, for the letter showed a drawing of the “Hotel Imperial, Absolutely Fire-Proof [how appropriate!], Broadway at 32nd Street, New York (Robert Stafford Hotels).”

  Dear Kelly,

  I am an unexpected chap, nicht war? [G. C.] Jones can give you my [forwarding] address. I want you to buck right up and fix the G[olden]. D[awn]. straight. Under V.N. [Volo Noscere: Jones] you can do it, and if your sister Eleanor were initiated she would help a lot. It’s perfect rot the whole thing going to pieces for lack of good manners when there are gentlemen to be had for the looking (I do not mean what you mean). I told Kegan Paul [publishers] to send proofs to you but I am bound to see them myself; so never mind.*38 I am writing him. He will send you duplicates to keep. I shall drop politics a bit [note!]†39—I didn’t start out to be Ovid though God knows our places of exile are far enough apart—as to temperature!‡40 But the people are equally barbarians! I held up the steamer at solo whist—the other passengers had to borrow off me at New York to pay their cab fares!

  It’s too bloody hot here to do anything. I am setting up in business in New York—night houses for casual copulation with icebergs. Damned good thing—pays better than the strong bull movement in Octoroons.§41 When I return I expect you to have done something in pictures better than anybody in the world.¶42 By the way, it is always advisable to transcend the astral plane first before working with it—especially for an artistic purpose. Once or twice I have had a curious experience—entering the astral from below, I found a lot of grand stuff for pomes [sic: archaic for poems]. I wrote it up, and on returning found my verse pure drivel—I had been made a complete fool!

  Was the Crescent a success?

  Best Wishes to you and yours,

  Ever as ever,

  AC8

  Fascinating how he hopes Kelly and Jones might be able yet to “fix” the Golden Dawn, and obviously expressing some regret as to what had occurred, though one may not doubt that a mended G∴D∴ would be an Order shorn of rebellious elements. Kelly would leave the whole business behind him, but Crowley and Jones would go on to formulate the A∴A∴ on adapted, stream
lined, and reformed G∴D∴ lines in 1908. It is also clear that Crowley saw his transatlantic journey in terms of romantic exile; cultural exile would intensify as a keynote of his early career. Note also Crowley’s skepticism regarding what could be encountered while astral traveling, here suggesting an experience akin to someone who has written “inspired words” while ingesting psychedelics, only to find in sobriety that the inspiration was illusory or wildly exaggerated in value. Crowley was neither credulous nor uncritical where magical or spiritual experiences were concerned.

  Crowley says in his Confessions that he stayed in New York only two or three days. Perhaps the weather explains why. If the heat was not challenging enough, he and New York in general were confronted on Saturday, July 7, by a tornado! According to the front page account in the Sun newspaper the following day:

  as the rest of New York City was breathlessly awaiting the thunderstorm that loomed up in the western sky at half past four yesterday afternoon, a well-developed and able-bodied tornado swept across Manhattan Island about Seventieth Street, gave a fillip to a lofty cupola at the river’s edge and swooped down on Blackwell’s Island, where the city keeps its helplessly poor and cages its petty criminals and disorderly characters.

  The main body of the “aerial riot” kept above Manhattan’s rooftops, but its tail “made some extraordinary wreckage of roofs and trees.” This was on top of a severe windstorm that visited Brooklyn at 5 o’clock on Saturday afternoon. According to the Sun, “nearly 100 trees and several telegraph poles were blown down in various parts of the borough.” The next day a “Swirler” tornado hit New Jersey, tearing up everything that wasn’t nailed down and cutting off telephone contact between New York and several coastal resorts. It was observed as being black, balloon-shaped with lightning mixed up with it, and it came from the southwest heading northeast. Long Branch, Lakewood, Oakhurst, Freehold, and Turkey [old name for New Providence] were devastated with fine old trees uprooted and whole houses whipped up into the air. The roaring devastation was attributed as a figure of speech to “aerial conspirators,” a phrase Crowley, had he heard it, would probably have taken literally as his imagination tended to see a storm as involving a demonic spiritual cause, and that despite his scientific outlook.

  Fig. 3.5. Central Mexican Railway train

  Evidently he concluded he couldn’t stand it any longer in New York and caught a train south. Destination: Mexico City. For the purpose, he would probably have had to make two connections. It seems likely he took one of the Southern Railways Pullman trains with drawing room, sleeping car, and dining services for New Orleans that left Pennsylvania Station at 3:25 p.m., 4:25 p.m., and ten past midnight daily. If he fancied the fastest route, he might well have taken the 12:10 a.m. “Fast Mail” train that only called at Atlanta. The Southern Pacific Co. Railroad provided his best connection from New Orleans west through Texas to the U.S. border at El Paso. From there Crowley would have crossed over the Rio Grande to Cuidad Juarez, Mexico, where the Mexican Central Railroad would have chuffed him south to Mexico City.

  The trains he traveled in would have been the kind you have seen in dozens of westerns, with huge funnels trailing black vapor, lamps, bells, and cattle-trap grilles at the front. In his Confessions he observed that normally train journeys more than half an hour quickly become tedious, but after two or three days “one becomes acclimatized.” If Crowley left New York on Sunday, he should have been in Mexico City by the end of Thursday.

  FOUR

  The Eagle and the Snake: Mexico City

  Much as it would be delightful to linger long amid the sunny plains and volcanoes of Mexico, as Crowley did—an extraordinary sojourn lasting nearly ten months from early July 1900 until April 20, 1901—our stay with him must concentrate on matters relating most of all to his long-term relationship with the United States.

  Now, if we take Crowley’s autobiographical account at face value, we have few problems to contend with. His narrative proceeds in this wise: he arrived at the grand-looking Hotel Iturbide to find the hotel offered little in the way of service, while the city seemed devoid either of fine food or vintage wines. People, he says, drank liquor to get drunk. The trainee mage quickly grasped the point and adapted to conditions, soon finding himself spiritually, but not alcoholically, in tune with the Mexican people. He says they had little time for commerce and industry, and their character had not been spoiled by hypocrisy and the Protestant work ethic. They liked gambling, sex, aguardiente, and their own congenial interpretation of the Catholic faith. There was room for enjoyment, because Porfirio Díaz, the president who had ruled from 1876 and would continue to do so until 1911, was damn good, as Crowley puts it, at running the country. It was not at all like England, where sex was a continual problem, shrouded in the sense of shame. In Mexico, even the priests joined in.

  The English colony, he tells us, was disliked by some and despised by others. The British consul was habitually constipated; the vice consul drunk. However accurate this may be, Crowley preferred the American colony, which was substantial in size and dynamism. Indeed, Crowley gives us little idea of just how active that colony was in Diaz’s plans for modernizing Mexico, and American and European schemes for exploiting it. But then, Crowley’s account is of a Mexico serving chiefly as moral exemplar and as a setting for his own reflections and adventures.

  These appear to begin with magical practices. He commenced his exploration of the “Aethyrs”: inner-plane territories ruled by angelic figures of awesome characteristics whose realms were delineated in the sixteenth-century manuscripts of English magi John Dee and Edward Kelley, but Crowley confesses that his limited initiation gave him limited access. Through following his own line of Qabalistic logic, he discovered the true spelling of the famous magical spell, corrected by Crowley to “Abrahadabra,” whose gematria or numerological equivalent was 418. He also worked on “invisibility” and developed, he says, a skill of invisibility by deflection; that is, his state of mind and body concentrated, he could pass by people unnoticed (useful to an agent of course). It was really a kind of trick. He says he passed unnoticed through a city street in a red robe and golden crown. Redolent of a Crowley leg-pull, his display perhaps accompanied an outbreak of that carnival spirit generally suppressed by Diaz.

  He tells us that he acquired a lodging close to Alameda Park (from alamo: a poplar; as well as something to be remembered) in downtown Mexico City. This was doubtless connected to what went on in the park. Here he could concentrate on the benefits of being an exile, for, as he writes with some justice, “the English poet must either make a successful exile or die of a broken heart.” The Alameda Park was an easy place to make easy contact with female, and behavior-coded contact with male, prostitutes. Crowley probably availed himself of both “nymphs and satyrs.” The park, he says, was protected from police. Committed to a part-roué existence, he acquired the services of an accommodating “Indian”—that is, native—girl to keep house, as the expression went, and went on the prowl. After one sexually delirious encounter in a slum with a Mexican prostitute with eyes “of seductive sin,” the thought of his passionate adventure with Lucile Hill came vividly to mind: a typically Crowleyan juxtaposition. This combination of raw sex and high passion led him to pen at an unbroken sitting the verse play named after the performance in which he had last seen Lucile: Tannhäuser. Its theme, which spouted forth from him in the course of a timeless, sleepless night, was, of course, a troubadour’s spiritual and philosophical quest for the absolute. It would be interesting to see it performed properly. It has some very good lines, but not many, though Crowley’s Tannhäuser is still more literate than much that passes critical inspection these days.

  Still sweeter when the Bowman*43

  His silky shaft of frost

  Lets loose on earth, that no man

  May linger nor be lost.

  The barren woods, deserted,

  Lose echo of our sighs—

  Love—dies?—

  Love lives
—in granite skirted,

  And under oaken skies.

  The problem, as with much of Crowley’s early poetry, is that he conceived poetry very much as a technical exercise, a duel of wit and word. Verse and rhyme structure, measurable in terms of expertise, predominate, while into and between these girders he attempts to vent the geyser of his complex thoughts, self-conscious humor, and pent-up ecstasies in search of an elusive poetic breakthrough. Finding rhymes for difficult, obscure, and quite unnecessarily ambitious words and phrases may appear to us an annoying conceit. Much of this poetic masochism is forced, unlike his prose, which benefits from a ribald sense of irony, form, impeccable grammar, and legato, laid-back eloquence.

  Crowley was aware of his need for an editor. When assembling his Collected Works on August 15, 1904, he wrote to Kelly that “in ‘Collected’ there is much careful revision—a fair amount cut out. I gave [Ivor] Back a free hand with the blue pencil. The fact is neither you nor I can tell which is the indifferent work. They may know in AD 2904.”1 Crowley made some interesting comments about style in a letter sent from Calcutta to Kelly, October 31, 1905. He refers to writer Marcel Schwob and sculptor Auguste Rodin, both of whom he met and worked with in Paris in 1902 to 1904.

  For all that, you [Kelly] are wrong in sticking in Paris. You ought to be spending your nervous energies on savagery, rather than on the purely false culture of the “intellectual” prigs. What we have both failed to see hitherto is that we are prigs, worse—because more knowledged—than the crowd that brainsucked Schwob, and that still brainsucks Rodin.