Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  Crowley followed his declaration of intention to hear Larkin, with a fascinating, nuanced “confession.”

  Of course, as a man I am an Irish rebel of the most virulent type, and I want to see every Englishman killed before my eyes: I would ship the English women to Germany, as I don’t like Germans either. But, of course, speaking as a man of the world, I am a reactionary Tory of the most bigoted type, although a pro-Boer; that is to say, my objection to the Boer War was the depreciation of property which it caused. I quite understand your [Cowie’s] attitude, but it appears to me quite absurd. You have tried to judge the matter on general principles, without prejudice, and you have consequently no business to meddle with politics, which is entirely dishonest.

  Yours fraternally,

  A. C.9

  Looking through the fog of ironic humor and self-denigration, we can I think see where Crowley’s emotional sympathies lay, qualified by sophisticated awareness of the facts of the real world and a rare ability to see beyond any entrenched position, however attractive at the purely personal or reactionary level. For the “Master of the Temple,” a revolution that failed to get to the absolute root of the problem of Man would only serve to show how far from that root most minds are. And because politics is essentially dishonest, then they can offer no path to enlightenment, save the melancholy lessons of bitter experience. The “freedom of Man” for Crowley meant going beyond what Man was thought to be. While as a man Crowley’s passions could be characterized in the symbol of the Jacobite rebel—Chevalier O’Rourke!—such passions were symbolic, conditional, and relative to essential spiritual attainment.

  JOHN QUINN

  There are currently two schools of thought regarding Aleister Crowley’s relations with John Quinn, one of the most powerful and well-connected corporate lawyers and patrons of modern art and the Irish Literary Revival, in America.

  First, that of Richard B. Spence, adumbrated in Secret Agent 666, wherein Quinn is a moderate, pro-Irish Home Rule asset to the British consulate, Whitehall Street, New York, in which service, according to Spence, Quinn took care of Crowley, virtually on arrival from England on Halloween 1914, providing money and connections as part of Quinn’s ser-vices to the Allies in the conflict with Germany, not out of any personal admiration for Crowley. Their relations are presented as cordial, business-like, but with little or no sign of empathy between the two men, and not thought to extend much beyond 1915.

  Quinn also offered hospitality to Irish radical Sir Roger Casement, who bothered Quinn in that Casement’s rejection of Home Rule in favor of armed rebellion for complete Irish independence appeared to Quinn and his friend John Butler Yeats (who followed Quinn’s lead) to be based on an emotional hatred of the British, exacerbated by signs of instability. That Quinn relayed information about Casement to British intelligence contacts at the consulate is inferred by Spence from British recognition of Quinn as one of the staunchest supporters of the Allied cause among Irish-American leaders for the duration of the war.

  Fig. 8.4. John Quinn (1870–1924)

  The second line on Quinn derives from published correspondence between John Quinn, John Butler Yeats, and the latter’s son, W. B. Yeats, chiefly as interpreted by William M. Murphy’s Prodigal Father, The Life of John Butler Yeats (1839–1922). Murphy’s book demonstrates the vagaries of the occasionally volatile Quinn’s relations with the often difficult Yeatses, painter and poet, father and son. Its lens on Crowley is that perceptible from the aforementioned correspondence, which provides the focus. Because all three men were very fond of Jeanne Robert Foster (and she of them), it is not surprising that once Murphy contrasts this warmth with Crowley’s well-established reputation—mud hardened into stone by 1978 when Murphy’s book was published—then Crowley must be the villain of the piece, a dangerous interloper upon a nice, even cozy artistic scene, with Crowley the unsavory outsider with whom Quinn had inadvertently come into contact.

  At one point Murphy feels at liberty to describe Crowley as physically ugly; why, I cannot properly tell, though the archetypal bogeyman might have something to do with it. W. B. Yeats, a now longstanding enemy of Crowley’s, having heard that Quinn and his father shared a Christmas dinner with Crowley in December 1914, wrote to both his father and to Quinn. Despite the fact that Yeats senior had enjoyed the occasion and found Crowley a witty, “formidable” man—albeit emotionally isolated from those who laughed at his dominant, self-reflexive repartee—Yeats attempted to warn them off a man he accused of having appalling sexual morals and who had only written the odd decent line of poetry amid an ocean of uninspired verbiage. He said he did not “appreciate” Crowley and related a story he claimed to have troubled himself to garner from Cambridge, wherein a porter, allegedly, had once had to manhandle a struggling Crowley out of Trinity’s dining hall on account of his obscene humor. As if questioning Quinn’s ability to make the right assessment, Yeats said Crowley was the “English and French” type, which type was unknown to Quinn’s New York experience, and not to be entertained. To rub it in, Yeats also mentioned that Crowley had once been a “handsome fellow.” This all added up to plain character assassination perpetrated by a former practitioner of what W. B. Yeats himself famously pronounced “dyahbolism” within a closed, friendly circle that Quinn, in particular, valued highly.

  To John Butler Yeats’s recollection, Crowley impressed by erudition, though he felt that while the big man’s mastery betrayed an aloofness that created a space around him, that same attribute rendered him a natural center of attention, with a curious attraction. Quinn’s response to W. B. Yeats’s entreaty that Crowley be shunned appears, by contrast, defensive.

  Quinn professed a cool indifference, somewhat forced: Crowley might be a good or bad magician; Quinn did not care. He could see no obvious moral defect, save indulgence in wine. Denying Crowley any distinction as a poet—he wasn’t going to contend with the great W. B. Yeats where that was concerned!—Quinn thought Crowley out of place in New York, even implying to Yeats that he had no personality! Quinn insisted he had neither interest nor personal tolerance of magic. Crowley’s pet subject was a bore to him. Doubtless concerned with his reputation for advanced good taste, Quinn added that while the man had written much, his works were not popular—this from a man who personally backed the Armory avantgarde show in 1913, the same year he purchased Crowley’s more outré works! Quinn maintained that Yeats shouldn’t be concerned, for he was not “in” with Crowley, nor had he any intention of being so. The implication may be that Quinn had reasons not to explain his indulging Crowley at his house; the question then would be: What were those reasons?

  It might be observed that if Quinn felt as negative toward Crowley as he suggested to Yeats, why had he ever invited him to his house in the first place? Well, he was a warmhearted fellow, no doubt. But why pay good money (Crowley says $700 in November 1914) for Crowley’s works? Did Quinn suspect that they might appreciate? And what made him so defensive in the face of W. B. Yeats’s concerns?

  Spence was aware that on arriving in New York, Crowley’s autobiography stated that after an “addled” business deal, the only thing that kept him in New York, in the first instance, was to oversee delivery to Quinn of a profitable quantity of fine editions and manuscripts of his work and to pick up the cash in settlement before returning to England. This may seem very odd if Quinn was, as he maintained to W. B. Yeats, one who regarded Crowley’s poetry as inconsequential.*58 Spence naturally, given his focus on events, sees this buying-books episode as basically a cover to explain contact with Crowley, with the added inference that Yeats’s unexpected (?) attack on Crowley had somehow rendered Crowley’s cover a little less plausible, thus putting Quinn on the back foot. It should be emphasized that Yeats’s father rather liked Sir Roger Casement (who, after meeting JBY and Quinn, had gone to Berlin to organize German assistance in exchange for an Irish rebellion against wartime Britain). Unlike Quinn, W. B. Yeats cared very little indeed for the Allied cause and simply yearned for
Irish independence.

  His father, John Butler Yeats, had informed Quinn shortly after Britain declared war in August that he would not personally mind if Britain was brought down a peg or two by Germany, even though he couldn’t stand German militarism. According to Murphy, J. B. Yeats began to move his politics more in line with Quinn’s as the weeks drew on; that is, support for the Allies in the name of civilization. By the end of the war, Quinn would express his disappointment with W. B. Yeats for never having written anything expressly positive to support the Allies, in which service Quinn had himself given much time, energy, and money.

  The fact is that John Quinn had been in contact with Crowley’s organization in London since 1913, and from that contact, he would already have known quite well what he was dealing with.

  John Quinn was a devoted collector of manuscripts, books, and artifacts of modern art, with a particular interest in Irish politics and in new Irish work if of a high standard. That is what had first brought the Yeatses into the Irish-American Quinn’s orbit around 1907, and vice versa. In 1913, it seems, someone or something had alerted Quinn to the high-quality publishing exploits of Aleister Crowley, whose Collected Works described their author as an Irishman who ran a countercultural (an anachronism, but accurate) publishing enterprise out of his Equinox magazine offices at 124 Victoria Street, London, that traded under the name E. J. Wieland & Co., after AA member E. J. Wieland, husband of Equinox contributing writer Ethel Archer, and who paid his subs to the Order by working for Crowley and, presumably, taking a cut of profits, if there were any.

  Neither Spence nor Murphy’s work shows awareness of Quinn’s prewar contact with Crowley. Crowley had just returned from an intense sojourn in Moscow when on September 1, 1913, he entered his office to find four letters waiting for him from John Quinn.10 Judging by Crowley’s reply, confirmed by a passage in the Confessions, Quinn was particularly interested in purchasing two works that Crowley described in the latter work as “introuvables”; that is, works difficult to obtain. The reason why the works were somewhat rare, and highly collectible, was that they were both works of decadent, satirical irony involving explicit sexual references of a deliberately shocking nature, at least by the mores of the time. In the argot and mind of the gutter, they might be termed “dirty books.” Quinn was obviously intrigued to know more about their contents.

  In his reply, Crowley explained to Quinn that White Stains, attributed to a “Neuropath of the Second Empire,” despite all appearances, was in fact a serious rebuttal to Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s notorious investigation of sexual science, Psychopathia Sexualis. Crowley says that White Stains was written to demonstrate that it was psychological, not pathological, disease that caused sexual crises. In other words, state of mind was critical. People with peculiar sexual proclivities were not necessarily sick, though lack of understanding of their psychology could cause breakdown of health. Crowley was quite frank that the treatise on “Persian piety” that went under the name of the Bagh-i-Muattar, allegedly taken from a manuscript transcribed by a “Major Lutiy,” and something of a gay parody of Sir Richard Burton’s Eastern erotica, dealt with “paederasty, of which the author [Crowley] saw much evidence in India. It is an attempt to understand the mind of the Persian.” Yes, of course. It is a play on buggery peppered with homosexual euphemisms and double entendres and testifies to the era’s general obsession with sex; Crowley wanted to lance the boil, and got a kick out of doing so.

  An even earlier letter from Wieland & Co. to Quinn survives in the Yorke Collection of the Warburg Institute. Addressed to Quinn at 31 Nassau Street, New York City, it refers to a letter sent to Quinn on February 12, 1913, which the latter had not answered.

  We cannot keep this parcel and must ask you to let us know your decision at once, as this offer can never be repeated. It has meant the labour of months to get together so complete a set of books.

  We are now able to supply the New Year’s card which we have obtained with the utmost difficulty, as it was sent out more than ten years ago to persons whose names and addresses are now lost. Similar remarks apply to many of the smaller items.11

  Furthermore, we must admit some mystery in the relations between Crowley and Quinn, for research reveals that Crowley’s relationship with Quinn extended well beyond the period referred to either by Spence or by Londraville’s biography of Jeanne Robert Foster. Quinn’s phone number appears on Crowley’s address list from 1917,12 while written con-tact extended to as late as 1919, judging from this surviving note from Crowley to Quinn, dated about April of that year. It concerns a show-ing of Crowley’s recent paintings that had been earlier exhibited at the Liberal Club in Greenwich Village, which featured in a number of U.S. newspapers.

  My dear Quinn,

  Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

  I have now got my pictures more or less ready to show you—any day will suit me as long as I know beforehand.

  Love is the law, love under will.

  Sincerely,

  Aleister Crowley13

  Jeanne Robert Foster became John Quinn’s personal editorial assistant, and discreet romantic partner, in 1918. One wonders if he ever broached the subject of his special purchases of Crowley’s condemned works with Jeanne during the years they shared together, and, one would like to know, did he consider them art?

  PART TWO

  THE FURNACE

  NINE

  1914

  On Monday, February 9, 1914, while Victor Neuburg and Crowley successfully invoked Jupiter (that is, to their satisfaction) in number 21 of the “Paris Workings,” John Quinn wrote to W. B. Yeats in Ireland, the latter preparing a New York lecture season.1

  Quinn offered to revive a personal friendship shattered five years previously in 1909 when Quinn accused Yeats of trespassing onto his romantic territory. The unmarried Quinn had at some cost established a liaison with former schoolteacher Dorothy Coates. In early 1914, fearing that she might be dying, Coates urged Quinn to make up with Yeats, of whom she was fond, though she preferred Quinn’s money. Coates and Yeats had met in Paris in 1909, when sparks flew between them. Excited, “Willie” unwisely boasted in Dublin of his effect on the lady. Coates plainly encouraged an amour with the poet favored by Quinn’s patronage but insisted to her official lover that Yeats had been the emotional aggressor.2 Incensed by John Butler Yeats’s son’s conduct, Quinn had expected the younger Yeats to respect what he had paid good money to keep his own! Reconciliation between the men after the prolonged breach finally occurred in March 1914, very much to John Butler Yeats’s relief.

  Quinn had never lost faith in Yeats the poet, and before the latter’s return to Ireland, Quinn arranged for New York’s most fashionable photographer, Arnold Genthe, to photograph himself with the poet. Not only did Quinn join himself thereby to high Art, but he also undertook to buy regular installments of William Butler Yeats’s manuscripts on the understanding that proceeds go to paying off Yeats’s father’s debts and living expenses at the Petitpas restaurant’s boarding rooms, from which coal-heated coziness John Butler Yeats’s family in Ireland could never extract him.

  Before William Butler Yeats returned to Dublin, Quinn gave a lavish dinner in the poet’s honor. Guests received a specially printed edition of nine of Yeats’s poems chosen by Quinn, with another Genthe photograph of Yeats as frontispiece.

  Thus one can imagine that Yeats would have felt threatened on several fronts by news in December 1914 that Quinn had entertained Aleister Crowley, who knew much about Yeats that it is certain Quinn himself did not know. Frequently vain and snobbish, Yeats had every reason to revive the character assassination of Crowley he began with letters to his patron Lady Gregory in 1900 when he took it upon himself to damn Crowley as a “quite unspeakable person.”3

  It is clear that William Murphy has accepted or embellished a story of Crowley as some kind of mercenary character, asserting, for example, that Mathers had “hired” Crowley to close down the London Temple of the Golden
Dawn, possibly conflating the Yeats/Crowley legend with the fact that it was Crowley who hired a “chucker out” from a London theater to assist him and Elaine Simpson in closing the Blythe Road Golden Dawn premises to the London GD rebels on Imperator Mathers’s instructions.4

  A quiet but very determined player, Jeanne Robert Foster undoubtedly kept a close eye on the nexus of Quinn and the Yeatses; reporting the art world was, after all, part of her job. Having at last seen William Butler Yeats lecture at the National Arts Club in late spring 1914, and considering Yeats the most beautiful being she had ever seen, it took very little for Jeanne’s idealism to conflate what she saw with what she thought of his poetry. Judging from a letter of May 10, 1914, from John Butler Yeats to son “Willie,” the father had picked up on hints Jeanne may have gushed forth in her artistic enthusiasm and conveyed by implication, I suspect, that though married, the delectable Jeanne might yet stir herself into Willie’s poetic, unmarried heart, as she had already stirred the father’s. If nothing else, she would be an excellent contact for Willie to cultivate: Jeanne was a “young lady who writes (and writes well) all the poetical criticism in the Review of Reviews.” The young lady already considered him the “only poet.” Who was she? “She is a Mrs. Foster and extraordinarily pretty,” and clever, “and though her husband is old and an invalid the most malicious tongues have nothing to say. . . . She says that since she was a child she has been interested in white magic and wants very much to know something of black magic.” Well, here was an evident entrée for Willie!—and, of course, though Willie’s father had no thought of it, for Crowley the following year. “It is rare,” continued Yeats’s dad, piling on the merit stars, “to find so much really strong intellect with kindness and affection.”5