Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  As the bell sounds both men spring to the center of the ring. Without a moment’s hesitation McGovern lets fly with left, right, and left on head and face. Gardner covers himself and backs away. McGovern is anxious. They clinch and Gardner lands three lefts on body. They break cautiously. McGovern lands left and right on face. McGovern cops a short left on Gardner’s jaw. Terry is very eager and lands a brace of lefts and rights on jaw and nearly drops Gardner. McGovern is too anxious, and misses left swing. He then lands hard right on body. Terry lands left and right on head. Gardner places two lefts on body, but McGovern’s attack is not stayed. McGovern tries to catch Gardner on jaw in the breakaway. Terry hits Gardner on jaw and turns him over. Gardner rises and Terry is after him like a demon, but is fighting wild. Gardner is dropped again, but is soon up and Terry is wildly anxious to finish him. Gardner hits low and Terry says, “Oscar, you’re hitting low,” and Gardner answers, “I did not mean it.” Terry appears anxious to finish his man and lands a blow on the head that turns Gardner completely around. Terry is fighting very wild. He lands a hard straight left on Gardner’s body as round ends. McGovern is fighting as he always fights—anxious to finish his man as quickly as possible. He is the perfect type of a fighting machine, combining qualities of quickness in the style of heavy artillery. He is a little anxious to commence proceedings. Gardner simply was the receiver general, displaying splendid gameness. Round Two . . .

  Terry hooks right on jaw and follows up with a brace of rights knocking Gardner through the ropes. Gardner turns a complete somersault in his journey. He is helped back into the ring. Gardner is taking a severe beating. McGovern is fighting carefully. The bell sounds, otherwise Oscar would have been out. Terry goes back to his corner confident while Gardner shows signs of the severe punishment he has undergone. Oscar’s training is standing him in good stead. Round Four. Terry is first up. He lands left on stomach and sends right to head. Terry smothers Gardner’s wild swings. Terry plants a hard left on stomach. Terry puts right on jaw and knocks Gardner backward. Terry follows up quickly and sends hard left to stomach and whips in right on face and Gardner falls. George Harting, the official timekeeper, counts ten, and Gardner is out, but Referee Corbett makes a mistake, and does not declare Terry the winner. Oscar rises again and is helped to his feet. He is sent down a moment later and while on his knees, Terry sends a left that brushes Oscar’s hair. There are cries of foul from the spectators, but no foul has been committed. Terry smiles and shakes Oscar’s head. Gardner is up again and they are again at it. Terry wants to end it here but swings wildly. Gardner lands a good right, but Terry is not to be deterred. He watches his chance and puts a terrible right on body and Gardner drops to the floor a beaten man. The time of round is 2:35. Gardner is unable to rise and his seconds fan him while he is lying on the ground. The body blows hurt him.

  With Gardner knocked out in four rounds, Terrible Terry had done it again and retained his featherweight title.

  While Frisco’s fight fans took in the news, Crowley added a few lines to his letter to Kelly of the previous day.

  Lyric mine seems played out now. Anyway today I am doing none. Write me A. Crowley c/o Arnhold & Karberg, Hong Kong, China.

  Ever,

  Aleister Crowley7

  Perhaps the previous night’s fight had knocked the lyric flight out of him. Boxing and poetry don’t mix.

  Hawaii was next on Crowley’s agenda. There were natives in Hawaii who would not mourn McKinley’s death, for Hawaii in 1901 was far from becoming America’s fiftieth state. Newly dubbed the “Territory of Hawaii,” the islands had been illegally annexed as such by the United States in 1898 with McKinley’s support, against native wishes. The natives and their rightful monarchs had over the century seen their population dwindle from imported diseases while the general population was artificially expanded by foreign plantation owners’ importation of cheap labor from the Far East and Puerto Rico. There was plenteous bitterness among native Hawaiians, and among other inhabitants of the islands bound to sweated labor.

  At San Francisco’s bristling port, Crowley inspected steamship Nippon Maru, bound for Honolulu on Friday, May 3, a cargo liner that had first attracted the San Francisco Call ’s attention on January 15, 1899: “New Japanese steamer Nippon Maru in port.” Owned by the Toyo Kisen Kaisha (Oriental Steamboat Co.), she had arrived the previous day on her initial voyage. Like sister ships American Maru and Kongkong Maru, she was “not a very handsome boat,” but her officers told the paper that she was “fast and very comfortable.” In supreme command was Captain F. R. Evans, and under him served three European and three Japanese officers. While the ship went into commission in England, Japanese law insisted that its officers hold a Japanese certificate, which Englishmen couldn’t take; hence Japanese officers were added to the crew. Heavily subsidized by the Japanese government, the Nippon Maru was run in conjunction with vessels of the Pacific Mail and O & O companies. She brought up sixty cabin and eleven second-class passengers, “besides 19 Japs and 17 Chinese in the steerage.”

  Four days into the voyage, oblivious apparently to all but his increasingly successful concentration exercises, Crowley “went to Devachan.” Theosophical Society founder Madame Blavatsky informs us that Devachan means the “dwelling of the Gods.” Crowley recorded curious astral visions, perhaps assisted by opium, though he does not record such. His imagination encountered a world of “pearly lustre,” with trees of “superbest plumage” and bright birds. “Saw sea-captain on his ship, lover contemplating bridge, etc. The Real inhabitants were as if of flame; the imaginary ones appeared physical. Saw mountaineer, etc. My father preaching; with me in his old home; my mother, etc. Saw a man doing raja-yoga on white god-form.” Crowley had been reading The Astral Plane, Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena, written in 1894 by C. W. Leadbeater, then secretary of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society. In that book the author referred to the work on Earth of what he called the “Life Wave.” Crowley wrote in his diary, “The Wave (see Leadbeater) was of pale light of rather silky texture. It passed through and over me. One of the habitants passed through me, unconscious of me.”8

  Back on planet Earth, the Nippon Maru docked at Honolulu two days later. The past eighteen months had seen dramatic events in Hawaii’s new era of U.S. control. Indeed, the very ship that hosted Crowley’s astral travel had been an unwitting instigator of tragedy. The Nippon Maru had brought bubonic plague from China to Honolulu in late 1899. Plague spread through Honolulu’s Chinatown. If Crowley had thoughts he could pursue his admiration of things Chinese there, he would not find much left to explore.

  The administration attempted to control the plague by burning selected houses in the area, by renovating sewers, and by putting the Nippon Maru’s sister ship America Maru into costly quarantine, for fear it carried rats, but in January 1900 one of the induced fires whipped out of control when high winds carried the flames to “clean” buildings. A mighty conflagration engulfed Chinatown for seventeen days, destroying thirty-eight acres as selected burnings at thirty-one other Chinatown sites continued. Seven thousand homeless people were crammed into detention camps and quarantined until April 30; forty died of plague. Crowley arrived only a year after the quarantine’s end.

  Crowley did not observe anything untoward. All he had to record was a local paper’s announcement of a “White Lotus Day” to commemorate a decade since Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s death on May 8, 1891. Crowley determined to visit local Theosophists during his twenty-seven days in Honolulu. He must by now have caught the paper-reading habit, despite risks to his intellect.

  On May 10 he moved into the Hawaiian Hotel Annex on Waikiki Beach, whose brooding volcanic past inspired him to poetry. He considered imitating Gauguin’s trip to Tahiti a decade earlier—that is, to find himself a hut and a girl and commit himself to art—but while he felt fired up for art, much of his romantic dreams were swiftly swept up into an interest in a “pretty widow or divorcee with kid.” She was Alice Rogers, né
e Mary Alice Beaton, and she came with her thirteen-year-old son, Blaine Rogers. Of Scottish descent, she had left her husband at home in Salt Lake City and was in Hawaii to recover from hay fever. Crowley was smitten, but not so much as to lessen his commitment to concentration exercises and “physical astral projection,” a technique for conscious astral projection while in asana, taught to him by his closest colleague in the Golden Dawn, Allan Bennett, at that time studying Buddhism and raja yoga in Ceylon.

  On May 12, Crowley practiced magical ceremony in his hotel room at his shrine with its ivory Buddha bought in San Francisco, making the comment, “I am inclined to believe in drugs—if one only knew the right drug!” He was thinking of the age-old magical requirement to “loosen the girders of the soul” so that invocations could focus sufficient inner force. He recalled the cocaine corpse in San Francisco with a cold shudder he would eventually get over, to his detriment. He devoted himself to all the occult studies relevant to his grade in the Golden Dawn, Adeptus Minor, including adopting god-forms as a way of channeling spiritual energies for conscious application in willed outcomes.

  Wednesday, May 22, marked Aleister’s first kiss with Alice. They cuddled. He told her that he loved her and kissed her. The kiss was returned; the affair began. He tried to persuade her to come with him to Japan. She agreed, and changed her mind. But Crowley booked her passage anyway, and she changed her mind again.

  On June 1, Crowley reread Esoteric Buddhism (1883) by Blavatsky’s colleague A. P. Sinnett (perhaps borrowed from Honolulu’s Theosophists), while Alice attempted to avoid full sex with Crowley, claiming she had uterine cancer. The next day she confessed that she’d been lying about the cancer and agreed to go to Japan. Part of Crowley was surely in a romantic swoon, but as ever there was another part, quite ruthless about such things: “I was a silly shit not to fuck her Monday, quarrel and part,” he confided charmlessly to his diary on June 4.9 But in his own way, he loved her, and that meant lust had to be satisfied so they could get to the higher aspect of the feeling.

  One might think that in Crowley’s haste to see Mrs. Rogers alone and without clothing that he took no notice of her son, Blaine (one wonders what became of him). It took some twelve years before his mother’s seducer’s thoughts about Blaine found literary expression in a controversial critique titled “Art in America” published in the English Review in November 1913, a work to which we shall return in due course. Fortunately for the lad, he was not named, as Crowley used him, outrageously, as a means of assessing the education “common” to American youths and its inadequacy for preparing the mind for creating art of the first rank.

  I once talked with a boy of thirteen years old [Blaine Rogers], as bright and intelligent as I ever met. He knew no Latin or any modern language; he did not know where Berlin was; he knew the names of only eight of the States in his own country, although he was getting “a quarter” for every one he could name; he knew no arithmetic beyond the first four rules, and those he knew badly; his history was confined to George Washington and [American statesman] James G. Blaine, to the exclusion of such insignificant characters as Napoleon; and his other mental bunkers were equally empty of coal. He had excellent machinery; nothing for it to work with.

  Now, one might expect a boy of this type—a type almost universal in America—to develop into an artist. He lived in Salt Lake City, but spent most of his year in California and Honolulu. Having nothing else to feed on, one would expect him to feed on his surroundings; and I cannot conceive of anything much more sublime. The Mormon adventure is one of the most romantic in the world’s history; the ghastly grandeur of Utah is an epitome of death as Oahu and the Golden Gate are of life. The finest island in the world; the third finest harbour in the world; the most wonderful valley in the world; and the most admirable climate in the world; one of the most intoxicatingly varied populations in the world—what comes of it?

  Wednesday, June 5, found the randy English poet, taken-by-storm Alice, and hapless son Blaine at the port at Honolulu. Before them was docked the SS America Maru,*52 Yokohama bound, or as Crowley’s diary put it, “Started with Alice for Hell.”10

  Everybody plays a role in the great drama of life. Crowley saw Mary’s role as the muse for his sometimes witty and effective, bittersweet sonnet cycle, Alice: An Adultery (1903), which covers in almost documentary fashion each day of the affair to its wizened end: “Thank God I’m finished with that foolishness!”

  Marcel Schwob considered it a “little masterpiece.” One feels Crowley went through the lows and highs specifically with a work of art in mind, and Alice had more reality for him as poetry than flesh, for Crowley has put the soul of their lightning love adventure into rhyme. This tendency of Crowley as artist and magician would intensify in time to become a full-blown way of perceiving life, especially in the United States from 1914 to 1919. Crowley pursues human symbols on a metaphysical journey. Not surprising that he will come to think of his American years as a “dream,” and he and reality somehow lost in it, for every significant person he met there was treated as a symbol, masked by a specific mythical role. Little wonder Crowley felt so often adrift on the sea of soul, which is where we must leave him for the time being as he sails out of American territory to the East in quest of fresh experience.

  Still, if we are to entertain the hypothesis that Crowley’s extraordinary foray into the Far East launched in the Americas was, even in part, some kind of directed “intelligence mission” we must consider strong indications in his personal letters to Gerald Kelly that the adventures of 1900 to 1902 could, and perhaps should, all have gone differently. This is not a skein of feeling discernible in Crowley’s Confessions, which are predominantly assertive and seldom admit weakness or sentiment, being the Olympian product of middle age, a thousand disappointments, frustrations, persecution, and battle-hardened steel of purpose.

  Aged twenty-five, Crowley wrote to Kelly from Yokohama about his affair with “Mary Beaton.” He debated with himself whether it was really a good idea to go to Ceylon to put himself under friend Allan Bennett’s tutelage in raja yoga, for until then he had been his “own master.”

  Shall go as far as Colombo [Ceylon, where he would meet Allan at the end of July 1901]. There I am not my own master for a while. Maybe I shall come practically right through to London. Quien sabe? [“Who knows?”] It depends on occult considerations, or climbing considerations, or on poetry considerations. . . . You will not recognize my mind when I get back. I am very calm and happy and fairly energetic all at the same time.11

  From Yokohama, Crowley sailed to Shanghai, then Hong Kong, only to find that Elaine née Simpson, now Witkowski, his old comrade, had just had a baby and was embroiled in ordinary colonial life. Elaine had apparently worn her GD robes at a fancy-dress ball, a sort of blasphemy for Crowley. He felt alone in his personal quest, so hurried to Colombo to a man equally alone. To improve Allan Bennett’s fragile health, Crowley suggested that they go higher up, to a bungalow called Marlborough, above Kandy. There, amid the sun-kissed, humid hills, the men pursued the most demanding, assiduous exercises and experiments in raja yoga trance in a Buddhist philosophical framework. For all that—and Crowley achieved much—he wrote to Kelly, on August 2, 1901, a letter permeated by bittersweetness about the whole effort of “exile,” now into its second year.

  You say [C. S.] Jones told you “my news between Cambridge and Mexico.” You don’t say how fully. I was a fool to go; but glad I went [my italics]. . . .

  The Cosmic Fuck! (This is a new invention of mine, which would take too long to explain. [He is referring to Orpheus again.] The drama of MEDEA is played by request of Eurydice as a warning to Orpheus if he screws elsewhere. [Crowley put an entire play—The Argonauts—within his overkilled verse epic, Orpheus!]12

  Nor did the mood pass. Kelly received another letter from Kandy where Crowley seemed to regret or half regret what he was doing. The strain was beginning to tell. “What a fool I was not to come home instead of this maniac jaunt.
‘Excuse me, sir, I think I’m going mad.’”13

  POST SCRIPT: THE LAST LAUGH

  The Mother’s Tragedy that gives this chapter its title is certainly not that of Alice Mary Rogers. She escaped the mystical adventure and went safely back home from Japan to her ordinary earthbound comforts and contented (perhaps) historical obscurity as, to all socially required appearances, fine wife and mother, a lady to her fingertips. No, The Mother’s Tragedy is perhaps not a tragedy at all but rather a leg-pull at the expense of those who thought they had Crowley over a barrel of their own corrupt and cocksure self-assurance. History has conceivably waited more than a century for this joke to become visible. Now it can be told.

  In his surviving “Writings of Truth” record, written in Kandy, Crowley made a single entry for August 18, 1901: “By concentrating the mind on any point of the body, a throbbing becomes evident in that part. This even in a mathematically formed point whose very name one is ignorant of.”14

  As Crowley wrote that entry, a story appeared on another side of the world, in the Mexican Herald, a paper you may recall that found the Chevalier O’Rourke something of a challenge, concluding that the sporting thing was to sport with him. In the Chevalier’s now four-month absence, one of its journalists clearly imagined a fine opportunity had come the paper’s way both to “out” the Chevalier and to get its own back, with little fear of contradiction. His snappy little story purports to be a review of Crowley’s very interesting poetic drama, The Mother’s Tragedy (1899).*53

  AN AWFUL BOOK

  The Noted Chevalier O’Rourke Out-Swinburnes Swinburne

  When the Chevalier O’Rourke was in Mexico we thought him Awfully Simple; now he has written a Poem which shows he is Simple Awful. So is the Poem. It is so Morally Unhealthy that it had to be quarantined on the Way to the land of the Aztecs: and of so Burning a Nature that the Covers are of Asbestos, and it Carries a Fire Insurance Policy. It is a Book which no Self Respecting Girl would permit her Mother to read: and One which few real Respectable men would permit themselves to Overlook.