Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  Five days before the canny old painter penned this letter, Aleister Crowley, in financial straits after eighteen years of one-way spending, mortgaged his Scottish property, Boleskine House, by Loch Ness, to be administered by George Macnie Cowie, treasurer of the British branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Crowley might have been watching the pennies, or getting someone else to, but he felt in full flush of health, attributed in part to the experimental sex magick for Jovian health undertaken in January and February in Paris. Crowley had mountaineering on his mind and made exploratory plans for a return either to K2 or Kangchenjunga. Exactly eight years after trying to sell the idea in New York, he made a memorandum to contact the India Office, Fortnum & Mason (London suppliers), King George V, Oscar Eckenstein, the Hon. Everard Feilding, Guy Knowles (who had footed much of the bill for the earlier expedition), financial journalist Raymond Radclyffe, Guy Marston of the Royal Navy, the specialist boot designer Lawrie, and someone called “Bullock.”*59

  Preparation for a projected 1915 Himalayan adventure perhaps explains why in July he went, apparently alone, to the Alps. He also returned to North Africa, where he wrote an effective poem, “The Tent,” about the “Love of God.” Crowley was certainly hurt that Victor Neuburg, his partner in both the Paris Workings and his last North African adventures (1909), had quit his master in occult studies of many years, determined to go his own, nonoccult way. In summer 1914, Crowley ascended all of the 11,371 feet of the Jungfrau in the Bernese Alps alone to encourage, he said in his Confessions, younger climbers to ignore the unmanly recommendations of the Alpine Club. As to what else Crowley may have been getting up to we are chiefly reliant on Crowley’s autobiographical account alone, bar an important affidavit Crowley submitted in 1917 to explain to the U.S. Department of Justice how he came to be active in espionage against German interests in the United States.

  I was in Switzerland on Aug. 1, 1914, and returned at once to England.

  I offered myself to the Government, and hoped to get a commission through the good offices of my friend Lieut. The Hon. Everard Feilding, R.N.V.R. [Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve].

  In September I was attacked by phlebitis, which bars me permanently from active service.6

  This line was consistently held by Crowley throughout his life, with only one additional detail. In an approving, illustrated article about his painting published by the Syracuse Herald, New York, on March 9, 1919 (possibly the story that alerted Quinn to Crowley’s art), the writer asserted that “Mr. Crowley is an Englishman who at the outbreak of the Great War was in the confidential service of the British government. In this service he was shot in the leg, he says.” We may be inclined to take this as a remarkable explanation for the phlebitis that undoubtedly seriously afflicted him September to November 1914 and that gave him a limp for a considerable time afterward. But the news story does not itself make that link and, standing alone, must be regarded as being of questionable value historically. He may have been thinking of the word shot in a quasi-surreal context, as his 1914 diary reveals the phlebitis condition was dangerously enflamed after an experiment of sexual magick with a prostitute to improve his health. The things I do for England . . .

  On August 1, three days before hostilities between Great Britain and Germany were declared, Jeanne Robert Foster landed in England while Americans in London and Paris fought to get back to America. She recalled events more than fifty years later in conversation with Richard Londraville. “I spent much time with the Straus American Committee in London and managed with my credentials, to see the troop movements on Salisbury Plain, ride troop trains about, and send many pictures back to New York.”7 When war was declared, “It was gay—one might have thought a holiday declared instead of war.” Jeanne saw the crowds gather at Buckingham Palace, greeted by the king and queen on the palace balcony. The next day she observed what Crowley would in due course complain about. Jeanne was shocked when confronted by “a startling poster” in John Bull—a jingoistic rag run by Horatio Bottomley, MP, which after the war accused Crowley of treachery to his country—declaring, “To Hell with Serbia!” In Crowley’s postwar account of his wartime activities (“The Last Straw”), written as a rebuttal to Bottomley, he found the Bottomley approach endemic in British propaganda—“fighting à la fishwife,” as he called it, on account of the foul-mouthed abuse hurled at an allegedly inhuman enemy.

  Jeanne felt completely caught up in events, confiding to her diary on August 15, 1914, “One seemed before to live outside history: suddenly history is in the making everywhere.”8 What is particularly interesting is that Jeanne offered her resignation to Albert Shaw at the Review of Reviews so as “to help as well as she could with the war effort.”9 The war effort was Britain’s war effort, and Jeanne was American, ostensibly an observer from an officially neutral country. Shaw did not accept Jeanne’s resignation, advising her to do as she wished but to submit material to the magazine when she could. Jeanne “used her press pass to go where most women were not allowed.”10 This detail is not explained in Londraville’s biography of Jeanne Robert Foster. Jeanne had obviously developed an attachment to Great Britain. Part of the story about her told in local history in the Adirondacks today is that during the war Jeanne was a “secret Correspondent.” The source of the story was likely Jeanne herself. Spence suspected that Jeanne might have eventually returned to New York as a British intelligence asset, working with the British consulate. He even suggests that she might have been given the task of keeping an eye on unpredictable “asset” Aleister Crowley. Certainly, her remarkable access to British military maneuvers is quite extraordinary, except in the framework of a British propaganda and diplomatic effort.

  Jeanne dispatched many pictures of the British mobilization to New York. In one touching story recalled by Jeanne, she was asked by volunteer soldiers gathered in London’s Hyde Park to photograph them. The images are immensely moving: fresh, warm-faced young men in clean uniforms relaxing informally on the summery grass. She sent copies of the developed pictures to the men’s regiments in France not long afterward. They were all returned. The fresh, warm faces of the young men relaxing on the grass of sunkissed Hyde Park were all dead. This memory must have had some effect on her when Crowley felt that he had to maintain, as he would, to Jeanne the following year, that he would, if called upon to choose, fight in a German trench. Crowley’s acutely painful reticence was, he confessed, because Albert Shaw’s literary magazine had a distinctly pro-German slant. This is arguably the case, as we shall see. If Jeanne was working for the Allies, it is unlikely she informed Crowley of the fact, as indeed, vice versa. However, the story Crowley told must also cast doubt on Spence’s suggestion that she was requested to “mind” Crowley (otherwise why should she quiz him on his real loyalties?), unless of course she was not told that he might be a British asset himself, which, of course, complicates the scenario still further! One is inclined to reach for Ockham’s razor.

  That Jeanne was involved with secret information at some level is strongly suggested by her passing reminiscence concerning fears about returning on a British ship to the United States in the light of German determination to sink Allied shipping. She mentioned to Londraville that shortly before departing she heard that the passenger ship SS Belgray had sailed from New York carrying war supplies to a secret destination.11 How could she have learned this confidential fact if her safety was not of interest to British security? In any event, “Jeanne R. Foster,” aged twenty-nine, giving her New York address as the National Arts Club, left Glasgow on September 19, 1914, aboard SS Columbia, docking safely in New York on September 28, a month before Crowley’s own return to Gotham.

  TEN

  The Sinews of War

  To understand Crowley’s curious positioning and repositioning during the first six months of World War I, it is only necessary to grasp the two main issues that dominated British and American government thinking with regard to one another during this period and whose resolutions shaped future policy between
the nations. As will be shown, Crowley understood both issues with crystalline clarity and acted on his conclusions with vigor.

  The first issue was the immediate British need for additional money and matériel to expand its military and industrial war provision so as to prosecute all-out war with Germany effectively. The second issue was the role played by active pro-German propaganda in America in frustrating resolution of the first issue. In face of competition and strong opposition, Britain had to secure hefty loans and credits from American banks, and so did Germany.

  The initial problem for both warring countries was that America was officially neutral. For U.S. government figures like Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925), neutrality meant that Americans should not participate in loans or sell munitions to warring parties. In the war’s first months, Bryan upheld this prohibition as a principle of government, encouraging President Woodrow Wilson to play mediator, a role compromised by favor shown to any particular side in the conflict. John Quinn, for one, considered Bryan idiotic on the issue. Wilson had to listen to public opinion, which was of course divided. The interests of commerce and capital, which desired to profit from the war, had loud voices, and in State Department Counselor Robert Lansing they found a determined spokesman for the economic case of selling war supplies to belligerents.

  German government meanwhile, intensely irritated by the American media’s widespread sympathy to the Allied cause, quickly perceived that the Allies had most to gain from American liberty to sell, and therefore galvanized their propaganda effort to demand strict neutrality from the United States as regards loans and matériel. Propaganda in America was not therefore a minor policy sideline either to the Germans or to the Allies; German propaganda was on the forefront of British intelligence concern with regard to America. With German propaganda in the States went German spying in the States. German exasperation over what it came to perceive as hostile anti-German U.S. policy (permitting loans and arms sales) would lead to precipitous acts of espionage and mass destruction that opened the road to America’s finally entering the war. As will become clear, Crowley played a role in unbalancing the formerly fine-tuned German propaganda effort, but that is to jump ahead.

  If we keep in mind the formidable tensions outlined above, we shall avoid the occasional bouts of confusion that sometimes left Crowley himself reeling, partially overwhelmed by the complexity of events and forces in which he chose to involve himself. We must also recognize that Crowley’s priorities always included long-term spiritual and magical obligations, as he became aware of them; for Crowley, the war was one symbol of the New Aeon’s birth—it was about freedom, and the resistance of the old establishments to it.

  GERMANS COME SHOPPING

  The Germans were quick off the mark. Within a fortnight of war being declared between Great Britain and Germany, two senior German bankers crossed the Atlantic into the heat of mid-August New York. Armed with Kaiser Wilhelm’s blessing, Max Warburg, head of the MM Warburg Bank of Hamburg, and Bernhard Dernburg brought $175 million in treasury certificates to market. Warburg had his connections. Brothers Paul and Felix were partners in Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Company patriarch Jacob Schiff was Felix’s father-in-law. Schiff was happy to oblige his relative from the fatherland but realized adequate funds necessitated cooperation from J. P. Morgan & Co. at 23 Wall Street. Wall Street is not a brick wall, but it can act like one. Pro-Allied Morgan wanted nothing to do with funding Germany’s war effort; rather, Morgan preferred to undermine it.

  In this, Morgan, and British intelligence, enjoyed the generous services of a most useful asset. Investment banker, collector, philanthropist, savior of American railroad finance, and naturalized British subject Otto Hermann Kahn (1867–1934) had joined Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in 1896 when Kahn’s father-in-law, Abraham Wolff, was a partner. According to senior New York–based British Secret Intelligence Services officer Norman Thwaites, Kahn was “whole-heartedly pro-Allied and especially pro-British.”1 And Kahn’s name crops up regularly in Crowley’s wartime and postwar writings as a friend. Crowley even fictionalized Kahn as “Paul Powys” in his “Simon Iff” detective story Nebuchadnezzar, written in 1917. Crowley almost gives the game away in his account of Powys’s enemy “Kuhn.”

  Kuhn, in particular, was noted for his sly secretive methods. He was called “Pussy” on the Street [Wall Street]. Arnheim was of a more obvious type; he was associated with Kuhn in many great enterprises. Next to Paul Powys [Kahn], there was no financier in New York City so dreaded as Theophilus Kuhn; and there had been great enmity between them. With Arnheim’s assistance Kuhn stood a fair chance of pulling down the great little Welshman [Powys]; indeed, he had always held his own, and come out of many a battle with not too unfavourable a draw. But Powys was master of a power not his own; he represented the conservative element, and could always rally the forces of sanity to his banner.2

  According to Crowley’s “Affidavit” prepared specifically to explain past activities to the U.S. Department of Justice and uninformed Allied authorities in 1917, it was Otto Kahn who personally advised Crowley how best to approach British intelligence in New York.

  8. I wrote to Capt. Guy Gaunt, RN [British naval attaché, Naval Intelligence Department, New York] from Washington early in 1916, when the Fatherland [pro-German propaganda magazine] was attacking him personally for “bribing the office boy” etc.,*60 a letter of sympathy and an offer of help and service. Captain Gaunt replied cordially, but as if the Fatherland were not worth notice.

  9. After a conversation with Mr. Otto H. Kahn, I applied to Captain Gaunt formally for work in connection with (a) the Fatherland (b) Irish-American agitation (c) Indian revolutionary activity. I have ever since kept him informed of my address, so as to be ready if called. Not hearing from him, I also spoke to Mr. Willert of Washington, D.C.3 on this matter, on the advice of my friend Mr. Paul Wayland Bartlett.4

  Crowley’s acquaintance with Kahn extended beyond the war. When in 1923 experienced journalist Frank Harris and Crowley attempted purchase of the Paris Telegram newspaper, “my friend Otto Kahn”5 was willing to advance funds to a deal apparently wrecked by Harris’s inflexibility.*61 And in the wake of persecution by hostile British tabloids, assis-tant Norman Mudd wrote to Kahn in 1924 for written confirmation of Crowley’s defense of his U.S. activities; Kahn replied. Curiously, when I recently went to inspect Kahn’s reply, this letter alone had disappeared from its file at the Warburg Institute.

  Disappointed with their banking mission, Max Warburg returned to Germany, but Bernhard Dernburg remained in New York to supervise the German Information Bureau on Broadway and to front the Germans’ secretive “Propaganda Kabinett.”7

  MEANWHILE IN LONDON . . .

  Crowley was always indignant that on returning from Switzerland and Paris to a war-enflamed hysteria in London, none of his efforts to find government employment in his country’s service bore fruit, at least not immediately.

  I was more than ever convinced that I was needed by my country, which is England, and to hell with everybody. In my excitement, I had the hallucination that England needed men. I found, on the contrary, that the guiding stars of England needed “business as usual.”8

  Records prove that Crowley, despite confinement to bed with phlebitis on doctor’s orders in September and October, showed systematic constructive support for the Allied cause. He did this chiefly through his position as literary critic, essayist, and contributing poet to the English Review in full and frustrating knowledge that other British literary figures, such as G. K. Chesterton, Somerset Maugham, Arnold Bennett, and H. G. Wells, were finding employment in propaganda and intelligence services. Crowley saw the war as an opportunity for an exceptionally well-traveled, virile man with linguistic and cross-cultural knowledge and experience to do brave and important things.

  True to form, he kicked off his campaign with ten specially written patriotic poems, three of which appeared in the English Review’s August edition under the title “Chants before
Battle.”9 Crowley’s poems parodied English styles from Chaucer to modern times and included his take on the 1878 hit “Jingo War Song,” whose chorus—“We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do, / We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too!”—brought the word jingoism into the English language. Crowley eschewed the mumbo-jingo and made the refrain more threatening and serious. “We don’t want to fight, but if we do . . .” If we do—giving the hanging phrase “if we do” kindred resonance to Kipling’s haunting “Lest we forget . . .” Crowley himself was doubtful that England did have the money she needed.

  Editor Austin Harrison presented Crowley’s poems amid works by Siegfried Sassoon, John Masefield, and war poetry by serving men. South Australian journal the Register (October 3, 1914) commended to its readers the “August issue of the English Review, which continues to present excellent value for a shilling. Aleister Crowley contributes a series of ingenious ‘Chants Before Battle,’ in imitation of various poets.”

  On September 27, the Observer printed Crowley’s letter suggesting how Germany might, in defeat, make reparation for barbaric destruction wrought by its army in Belgium and France.

  Sir,

  Poetic justice to Rheims is possible. It is well within the power of modern builders to transplant thither Cologne Cathedral, stone by numbered stone. Let this be the symbol and monument of our victory.

  Yours faithfully,

  Aleister Crowley

  33, Avenue Studios,

  South Kensington, S.W., Sept. 22

  In November, with its author now in New York, the English Review republished Crowley’s 1899 “Appeal to the American Republic,” calling on America with fresh meaning to join hands across the water with Great Britain—done with only a single additional consonant: the “traitor Russian” became in the new circumstances “the traitor Prussian.” For the poet, the timely reissue was both symbolic, and, as it turned out, prophetic.