Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  The Chevalier O’Rourke is the Stage Name of the English Importation who answered to the Cognomen of Aleister Crowley in the Home of Shamrock II, and who first Stampeded the public of San Francisco Lane [the church of San Francisco, like the Hotel Iturbide, is in Madero Street, Mexico City] by his Inimitable Combination of Knickerbockers, Long Hair, and Inseparable Pipe, and a general Bug-House Make-up. His After-Celebrity came when, with an Alpenstock and his man Friday Eckenstein, he trampled the snowy Breast of Ixtaccihuatl, and chewed bits of the Alabaster Neck of the White Lady, to Quench his Burning Thirst.

  Previous to That he had Prolonged the Horrors of the Spanish-American Pleasantness by a Book of Greeting to the New Republic, which has since Been equaled in its effect only by the long Drought in the Corn Belt and the Steel Strike. But his latest Riot of Rhyme has the War Production Beat a Mile, and Then Some, with the Decameron of Bocaccio Away Back in the Ruck, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox on ice among the Also Rans. It is so bad that the Author is afraid to Read it Again, lest he be corrupted. In short, it is Destined to be Among the Most Popular Books of the Season.

  The Effervescence is Called “The Mother’s Tragedy and Other Poems.” The “and Other Poems” belong just a block beyond where the trolley stops for “Mother’s Tragedy” in Spotted Town. The Chevalier Evidently becomes Intoxicated with the Exuberance of his own Verbosity and seeks to Give Artistic Versimilitude to an otherwise Bald and Unconvincing Narrative. He gets There on All Fours with the Verisimilitude, even if the Art is lacking. “And Other Poems” made the Book so Bad that the Chevalier had to Print it Privately, and the Name of the Printer is as completely Lost as Teddy Roosevelt.

  Dr. A. W. Parsons [a recent 33° in the Díaz-led Ancient and Accepted Rite] is among those in the city who believed in the literary ability of the Chevalier, and to him the author has sent a copy of his book. The doctor compares the general work of the Chevalier to that of the poet Swinburne, for in his better moods he has brought out some of the sweetest songs of love and nature, but his last production seems in a class of badness by itself.

  “The Mother’s Tragedy” is the story of an illegitimate son who has been reared in ignorance of the identity of his parents.

  In time he falls in love with his own mother, whose fondness for her son restrains her from telling him the degrading story of his birth, and he forces the conclusion by a proposal of marriage to his mother. He raves in scenes of beautiful depths of love when she in agony refuses his suit. She is finally compelled to reveal the awful truth to her son to prevent his self-destruction. The denouement is heart-rending.

  Dr. Parsons, remember, was the “live wire” who was running the appendectomy scam with his pal from the home country. One suspects that Crowley surmised the good (?) doctor would not keep to himself the revelation that the Chevalier, late of the Iturbide, was an English poet and would present his findings to the fast-talkin’, wise-crackin’, chip-on-the-shoulder, slave-to-capital smartass hack at the Mexican Herald.

  That the vulgar attack on Crowley’s verses was unmerited—even if he wrote it himself—we may take as read. Crowley introduced the drama with an explanation whose irony has entirely passed by the anything-for-a-buck mentality of the journalist. The story concerns the workings of Fate, which must reach, in this case, their tragic end, regardless of what Crowley calls the “dodges” men try to hide behind, of prayer and false pieties, professions of Christian innocence, professed indifference, or wishful thinking. Conduct yourself in a particular way and the result, however long it takes, will surely transpire.

  In the case of the story, we have a mother, Cora, who earns her living from low prostitution and low entertainment, cash conscious and con-science free. She finds herself pregnant and bears the consequences. Ulric is born, and she loves him passionately, so passionately that she will not compromise their growing closeness by letting him know that she is his mother. Maturing, Ulric finds a nice girl, or shy maid if you like, called Madeline. The mother observes and is glad. Her son will be happy, but she will not lose him; Madeline is an innocent. The day comes for the mother to congratulate the son; but no, the son is outraged. Marry a girl! Never; he loves a woman: Cora. Cora is devastated. She says it cannot be. Why? Ulric demands. She says to explain will destroy everything. How dare she destroy their love! Ulric squeals. He forces her to tell him the truth. He loses his mind, dragging his mother off to have his way. He returns to find Madeline, the purity of innocence, lost. As the “Spirit of Tragedy” watches over all, Ulric kills her, and having killed her, before his mother, cuts his own throat. The mother is left, alone, abject. The Spirit of Tragedy broods eternally.

  The point is simple and awe-full. The journalist thought he was clever, disclosing the truth of Crowley’s identity. But in the process, in the heat of his passion and mindless confidence, he has only revealed himself as the son of prostitution: a money-muddled whore, destined for oblivion. This is perhaps Crowley’s subtle, spiritually power-packed last laugh on the venal qualities of the American gamblers and culture of avarice that had laid its eggs in Mexico City, the city of the eagle and the snake. The eagle had flown, but the snake remained, forever shedding its skin. The “Mexican Herald” was the herald not of Mexicans—a “brave and buoyant people,” as Crowley called them—but of corruption.

  Dr. Parsons had failed his medical. Fate is inexorable, and claiming God is on one’s side means nothing. As Crowley’s dear father, Edward, used to say, “Get right with God.” Ignoring this is the Mother’s Tragedy. Where is Pan-Americanism now?

  SEVEN

  Return to New York 1906

  We left Aleister Crowley in the summer of 1901, his mind stimulated by love, raja yoga, and the works of Theosophists C. W. Leadbeater and A. P. Sinnett, about to undertake a journey across India that would take him to the Karakorams, and the tempests of K2. Crossing India in 1901 to 1902 brought Crowley to profound awareness of the quality of fatality in Nature.

  Lines of fate are generally only drawn “after the event,” but whether or not we see them, or trace them accurately, they are there. There is a line of fate that joins a certain young woman to Aleister Crowley. I should like, as we go, to point out some moments when this line, or fuse, becomes, in retrospect, visible, before reaching its explosive denouement.

  In the year 1906, at the age of twenty-seven, the very remarkable Jeanne Robert Foster (1879–1970) formally joined the Theosophical Society in New York City, a place she frequently visited for work assignments. Otherwise, she resided in Rochester with her considerably older husband, insurance executive Matlack Foster. Pastor’s son Foster was twenty-three years his wife’s senior. Jeanne was seventeen when marriage opened the door to a life free of financial struggle. Determined to work, she took advantage of Matlack’s patronage by studying for a business diploma from Rochester’s Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute. Before her marriage, Jeanne had worked as a teenage teacher in the Adirondacks where many of her boy pupils were taller than her!

  Born Julia Elizabeth Oliver in Johnsburg, New York, eldest of four children of Adirondack lumberjack Frank and schoolteacher Lizzie Oliver, “Jeanne Robert Foster” (her pen name) was raised in the hard, penurious environment of the Adirondack Mountains, northeast upstate New York, west of Vermont. Difficult, sometimes harsh times were ameliorated by a loving family, outstanding characters among the ordinary population, by folktales, songs, and by plenty of rich, if often strenuous, contacts with nature in the densely wooded vicinity of Glens Falls and Chestertown. A photograph of Jeanne, aged eight, immediately evokes antique, sepia-toned daguerrotypes of steely, careworn pioneers heading west, but while the girl is dressed simply in gingham shirt and smock and gives out a don’t-mess-with-me toughness, the wide eyes, mouth, full lips, and broad forehead already betoken Jeanne’s innate intelligence, drive, and the extraordinary beauty that would be hers in maturity.

  In 1900, Jeanne played minor roles for the American Stock Company at 8th and 42nd Streets, New York, staying, at Matlack’s i
nsistence, at the Saratoga Sacred Heart Dominican Convent. The year 1900 also brought a lucky meeting with Vanity Fair editor David Dodge, who insisted Jeanne’s beauty grace the magazine as model “Jean Elspeth” in the Christmas issue. From then on, modeling offers flowed in colorful abundance from the top magazines. In 1903 she became the “Harrison Fisher Girl,” after respected glamour photographer Harrison Fisher seized on her potential to attract business and inspire him. While Fisher guided her through the pitfalls of the job, Jeanne liked the way he portrayed her as an active, can-do-anything kind of girl, refreshing and positive, open to new experience. She put her good money to good use, purchasing a home for her parents in Schenectady, while trading on her mass of red and gold hair and stunning Grecian profile: an immensely comfortable sexiness.

  Fig. 7.1. Jeanne Robert Foster in 1916 (Foster-Murphy Collection, New York Public Library)

  Fig. 7.2. Frank Oliver’s house, Minerva, Essex County, N.Y., left to right: Clara Oliver; Lucia Oliver (Lizzy Putnam; Frank’s wife); Julia Elizabeth Oliver (Jeanne Robert Foster); Frank Oliver (holding Nancy, the mare)

  Fig. 7.3. Jeanne Robert Foster, commercial model

  Fig. 7.4. Jeanne Robert Foster, acting and modeling

  Starring roles at the Madison Square Theatre followed enrollment at the Stanhope-Wheatcraft Dramatic School, but this failed to satisfy Jeanne’s ambition. Having learned to type, she worked as assistant to Miss Grace Gould, fashion editor for the William Randolph Hearst papers, then started attending courses at Harvard and Boston University extension schools. In biographer Richard Londraville’s words, “She was simply too beautiful, too talented, and too ambitious for an elderly husband to keep reined in.”1

  Jeanne had the good fortune to attend lectures by Charles Townsend Copeland, George Santayana, Josiah Royce, Herbert Palmer, and William James, the latter a psychologist and philosopher of whom Crowley would write in his article “Art in America” in 1912, “William James is the only name [among American philosophers] that occurs to me with anything like a feeling of respect.”2 Like Jeanne, Crowley was greatly impressed by James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).

  Boston captured Jeanne’s heart; she would stay there from 1905 until 1910. She wrote for Boston and New York papers, took college courses, and undertook occasional modeling assignments. Despite the glamour, Jeanne held fast to an inner conviction that spiritual life was the primary reality, and messages could come from above, in curious events and unexpected meetings; her world was full of symbols.

  In an interview with Aline Saarinen in 1962, Jeanne related how spiritual teachings unleashed her from a Calvinist heritage. “I escaped set religious belief at fourteen. My father was one of the trustees of a prominent church, and a deacon, but my mother had at first followed the transcendentalists and later became immersed in the cosmography of the Vedantists whose system is a part of the Indian gospels.”3 Jeanne, like her mother, became friends with Vedantist disciples and met the remarkable Indian mystic Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), with whose work Crowley was also familiar and whose teachings Jeanne endeavored to follow. It was a Vedantic tradition asserted by Vivekananda that great souls may sometimes be reincarnated in groups, thus creating spiritual movements with mutual support. According to Richard Londraville, Jeanne thought in her old age that she had been fortunate to have grown into the midst of a group of great minds and great personalities. She wrote in a letter to Aline Saarinen, “I came to accept reincarnation as truth and—as life went on and the mountain girl met—seemingly through special dispensation—great men and women, and when life gave me opportunities I could not have earned in this life, I felt that I had returned to that group.”4

  Aleister Crowley was returning from a breathtaking walk across southern China with his family when it was decided that his wife, Rose, and baby daughter, Lilith, should return westward via the Suez Canal, while he, after revisiting old friend Elaine Witkowski in Shanghai, would take a ship east across the Pacific for Vancouver, cross North America, then sail back to England from New York. Aleister and Rose had a peculiar marriage.

  Jeanne Foster was probably in Boston when thirty-year-old Crowley boarded RMS Empress of India at Shanghai Harbor on April 21, 1906. Built sixteen years previously in Barrow in England’s northeast, and run by the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company, the Empress weighed 5,905 tons and accommodated seven hundred passengers on the Hong Kong– Shanghai–Nagasaki–Kobe–Yokohama–Vancouver route.

  Had Crowley been an ordinary man you might think that his diary contained at least a note about life on board, or even the odd reminiscence of the last time he docked at Yokohama, with Alice Mary Rogers and son in 1901, but no, to judge from his 1906 diary you would never even know Crowley had left his bed in Shanghai all the way to Liverpool, where he would disembark on June 2. Practically every single entry right across the Pacific, across Canada, down to New York, and onward concerns the quality of his attempts daily to invoke the “Augoeides,” or dawning light, the Holy Guardian Angel, the divine being, as the completion (still to be achieved) of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage, first attempted in 1899.

  Fortunately, Crowley gives us some idea of his time in America in 1906 in his Confessions, where he recalls that he had by a few minutes just missed buying the last ticket to San Francisco via Honolulu. This he regretted, not only because he wanted to bathe once more in the beauty of the islands but also because that ship, four days later, arrived at San Francisco just in time to see the entire city aflame, the great earthquake having just taken the ground from under the old city’s pride forever.

  By contrast, Crowley’s voyage was “twelve days of chilly boredom” with no life or stars in sight, followed from Vancouver by an uneventful transcontinental train journey across Canada. Disappointed with his view of the Rockies, the great expanse of Canada seemed to dissolve into what he dismissed as the grayness of Toronto. Finally, his train puffed across the U.S. border at Buffalo, where, in September 1901, President McKinley had fallen to an assassin’s bullet. Keen to be overwhelmed by the elemental grandeur of nearby Niagara Falls, Crowley felt temporarily relieved. Suddenly he was accosted by frantic journalists. Crowley presumed they wanted a story about his China walk or mountaineering exploits on Mount Kangchenjunga on the Nepal-Sikkim border the previous year, but it was all a case of mistaken identity! The pressmen sought a British officer who’d got into trouble and hopped across the border: a somewhat sour start to Crowley’s return to America.

  Catching the next train to New York City, he attended to unexplained “business” and tried to launch Kangchenjunga II. His diary for May 10 reads:

  A poor [Crowley’s daily invocation of the Augoeides]—am really worn out. Asked [the spiritual power of Augoeides] for exceptional vigour and courage and health in N.Y. so as to get my business through. Granted—did all business but the Kangchen[junga] scheme in one day. Most amply granted. Bar the one day’s fever, on a Sunday when in no case could I work, I was boiling over with energy the whole time.5

  The 1905 attempt on Kangchenjunga with Swiss climber Jacot Guillarmod and a continental team had been disastrous. Exceptionally hostile weather led to tragic deaths and bitter recriminations as to who was to blame. Crowley had been in command but maintained that orders had been ignored; nerves shattered, he stormed from the scene in fear and disgust. He nevertheless wanted another go at it and hoped to interest patrons of science. As his Confessions express it, Crowley “spent a rather hectic ten days sampling the restaurants and theatres. But as for interesting people in the Himalayas, I might as well have joined the China Inland Mission. Nobody in New York had even heard of them, unless as meaningless items in his hated geography lessons. No one could see any sport in mountaineering at all, or any scientific object to be obtained by reaching great heights. After the first few days I could not even find a listener.”6

  Crowley had some photographs taken of himself in New York, possibly to drum up publicity. It is thought that the striking prints of Crowle
y the explorer with swept hair and sheepskin jacket, smoking a colossal meerschaum like his friend Eckenstein, looking remarkably “modern” and even “cool,” were taken on this occasion. Of course, New Yorkers did have things on their minds other than the Englishman’s Himalayan adventures. A look at the Sunday edition of the New York Tribune for May 13, 1906, reminds us of the catastrophe that had hit San Francisco and reverberated across the continent while Crowley was snorting at the Canadian Pacific Railroad’s lack of a good dinner or bottle of wine.

  The New York Tribune’s usually relaxed Sunday edition for May 13 was full of pictures of refugees in makeshift shacks in the burned-out ruins of their once fair city. “Homeless San Franciscans facing fate hopefully in spite of earthquake and conflagration,” ran the caption. A “Temporary Home in Howard St” consisted of slats of wood slapped against each other; “Refugees in Jefferson Square”; “Cooking meals in the street”; “A clubless Clubman in Union Square”—the pictures told a grim tale. Odd that Crowley’s return to America should again be accompanied by visions of hell. A week later, however, the Sunday edition was back to its regular evocation of New Yorkers’ leisure pursuits. “Central Park every year at this time renews its popularity with the little folk”—not leprechauns but photographs of children in delightful Edwardian clothes of velvet and lace feeding ducks, riding ponies, and playing with their governesses in the park. One is reminded of early scenes in the mysterious, romantic movie par excellence Portrait of Jennie (1948).