In quest of official employment, Crowley approached his older friend the Honorable Francis Henry Everard Joseph Feilding, former secretary of the Psychical Research Society, fellow graduate of Trinity, Cambridge (1890), son of Randolph Feilding, Earl of Denbigh. Feilding would play a key role in Crowley’s peculiar, attested wartime intelligence activities. Feilding’s uncle, Colonel William Feilding (Coldstream Guards), had also served military intelligence, reported directly to Prime Minister Disraeli, and was given his own secret service department to undermine escalating Fenian violence in Ireland and elsewhere between 1864 and 1867. Crowley’s friend Commander Guy Marston of the Royal Navy was one of the top half-dozen Admiralty officials handling intelligence during the Great War.*62
A very young midshipman in the Egyptian Campaign of 1882, Feilding was called to the bar in 1894. Being a barrister, and lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Feilding qualified for wartime appointment to the Committee of Naval Censors (press bureau): a proper port of call for Crowley’s ambition to serve. Feilding would in due course be transferred to the Special Intelligence Department of Egypt, which lent him to the new “Arab Bureau” (which T. E. Lawrence—“Lawrence of Arabia”—served), based in Cairo, and to the foreign office for political service in Syria. For his pains Feilding would receive the OBE, the Order of the Nile, and the Order of El Nahda from the Emir of the Hedjaz.10 Crowley could only have dreamed of such honors.
According to Crowley, Feilding told the Beast that if he desired a government appointment he would have better obtained a service commission and not developed such a mixed reputation for strange, unpredictable behavior, poses, and interests. Past service to Carlists and following his muse into any number of youthful and mature indiscretions would not open doors to British military intelligence. “But what about propaganda?” pleaded Crowley: something he understood perfectly. “Psychology . . . special knowledge . . .” It was no good. Crowley’s reputation was apparently too colorful, too difficult to place. That was the story: Crowley presented more problems than he might appear to solve. One can imagine the conversation, if it happened that way. Crowley says that he could not understand it. The country was in peril, and his gifts were being cast aside at the very time the country most needed them. Surely Feilding himself had done odd things: studied psychical phenomena all over Europe, investigating medium Eusapia Palladino and Madame Blavatsky’s “hidden masters,” for a start. Ah, retorted Feilding, “I have a locus standi”; that is, a foot in the services. Crowley had crossed China, India, the Algerian desert, Mexico, the United States; explored Russia; scaled the highest peaks from the Alps to the Karakorams; handled weapons; led men; kept secrets; made himself invisible; confronted death, destruction, and the demon “Choronzon,” and what had Fielding to trump his ace in 1914? Time spent on a naval training ship, legal expertise, and a post in the censor’s office! As Crowley put it years later, “My leg and my Sunday School record alike conspiring to keep me out of the trenches, and my deplorable lack of stupidity disqualifying me for the Intelligence Department, I accepted an invitation to go to New York . . .”11
Just how and why Crowley got to New York at the end of October 1914 we must now investigate.
CAP IN HAND, TO THE SAVAGES FOR COWRIES
Mystery has always surrounded precisely what it was that Crowley was doing when he boarded the Lusitania for New York on October 24, 1914. Now, I think, we can make more than an educated guess. Crowley himself gives clues in his Confessions.
An invitation to New York was potentially profitable. “It looked as though there might be fifteen or twenty million dollars in it, and I had a feeling that my country, the richest in the world, would shortly be going, cap in hand, to the savages for cowries. I went to America by the Lusitania, on October 24th, 1914, expecting to stay a fortnight and return with the sinews of war.”12 The reference to the “sinews of war” alerts us immediately to historical context: this was about raising capital, loans, and credits to pay for war matériel. It was certainly not fifteen to twenty million dollars for Crowley himself! Later in the Confessions he reveals that he had expected a “little splash”—that is, a commission—for his part in the business: sufficient to more than reimburse expenses incurred. The reference to “cowries” exhibits Crowley’s usual cynicism about the affairs of officialdom. Cowrie shells were used as currency in West Africa and the Indian Ocean to the middle of the nineteenth century. Crowley was expressing a patrician disdain for the dominant role of banks in war: slavers used cowries to pay for slaves—the price of blood. He “had a feeling,” he writes, that Britain would soon be going to America for finance; he knew damned well what was going on. “I had intended, when I left England, to conclude my special business in New York within a fortnight, to make a little splash in any case, and to get home in a month on the outside.”13
We may wonder what had suddenly led to a situation whereby a controversial occult scholar, poet, mountaineer, and traveler could have assisted a large-scale mercantile war interest. Crowley does not seem surprised, because he took his usefulness for granted. In fact, the territory was familiar to him. He did not live his life in an occult bubble, though he would retire into it from time to time.
The answer may be found in a singular paragraph of the Confessions. In it, Crowley gives the impression he was prophetically advocating opinions about the running of the war of unique inspiration.
At that time any man who suggested the advisability of conscription was regarded as a traitor. Conscription was the very thing we were fighting. Austin Harrison said that we were fighting for our golf and our weekends, Raymond Radclyffe said with, as it seemed to me, some-what more plausibility that if we beat the Germans, it showed that the amateur was better than the professional.14
Though the line is somewhat disingenuous, it reveals the vital parties: prominent journalists Austin Harrison and Raymond Radclyffe, from which leads we may deduce that the stimulus to Crowley’s financial gambit in New York came out of discussions at the English Review. While an impression might have been conveyed that the Review was devoted to poetry, its contents were mostly nonfiction.
Until 1908, Austin Harrison had edited Lord Northcliffe’s broadsheet of note the Observer. There Harrison pursued a longstanding concern with the threat posed by the Kaiser to the British Empire and world peace. Harrison had quit Reuters in 1904 due to German Foreign Ministry restrictions, whereupon he wrote The Pan-Germanic Doctrine (1904) to highlight impending crisis with Germany. So Crowley’s Confessions account understates Harrison’s commitment to the cause, possibly to enhance his own. The English Review would carry Austin Harrison’s series of articles advocating conscription as an urgent necessity to defeat the German war machine in summer 1915, possibly influenced by discussions the previous year and subsequently with Raymond Radclyffe and the not uniquely outspoken Crowley. According to historian Ann-Marie Einhaus, the English Review was very critical of government preparedness for financing the war.15 Thus in autumn 1914, Crowley found himself on the vanguard of critics of government war policy.
Fig. 10.1. The English Review, June 1914. Edited by Austin Harrison, June’s edition contained work by D. H. Lawrence (“Vin Ordinaire”), Norman Douglas, and Aleister Crowley (short story, “The Stratagem,”) praised by Joseph Conrad.
His Confessions account, however, presents his plaint as one of the unheeded “voice crying in the wilderness” type. “From my sick bed,” wrote Crowley, laying it on a bit thick (he had phlebitis), “I dictated an article called ‘Thorough’ in allusion to the plan of the Earl of Strafford in the time of Charles the First [1641]. I said, ‘commandeer every man and every munition in the country.’ I said, ‘This is not a continental quarrel—this is life and death for England. We don’t want debates in the House of Commons, or even in Earlswood asylum.*63 We want a dictator.’” No editor would publish it. While wagging a finger at Harrison for not being, in his opinion, quick enough off the mark, it is clear that Harrison would have sympathized. Pe
rhaps Harrison recognized that the piece needed toning down, especially after the reaction to Crowley’s controversial “Art in America” article a year previously. Spurred by his own strain of war fever, exacerbated by phlebitis, Crowley was indignant and impatient to get on, and get in.
It seems highly likely that the “way out” of Crowley’s dilemma came through Raymond Radclyffe. Radclyffe was responsible for the English Review’s financial section. He was a highly respected financial journalist, operating within a matrix of high-placed commercial networks, with his fingers on the pulse of government economic policy. Indeed, Austin Harrison had poached Radclyffe from London’s Financial Times. Radclyffe’s exploratory tour and assessment of Australia’s mines established him as the sought-after expert in financing this ever-lucrative field of commercial exploration. Critically, Raymond Radclyffe had just written the influential, controversial pamphlet The War and Finance: How to Save the Situation.16 I would imagine the publication of that work stimulated a concerned hand into action, and Radclyffe, knowing of, and sympathetic to, Crowley’s frustration to be useful, recommended him. Raymond Radclyffe was Crowley’s longstanding friend.
Fig. 10.2. Raymond Radclyffe’s copy of Crowley’s Works (1905). Crowley gave it to Sunday Dispatch editor, writer and broadcaster Collin Brooks (1893–1959) on May 26, 1942, inscribing it: “I am sad, for he [Radclyffe] was one of the very best that ever lived; a City Editor straight as Euclid before Einstein attacked him, and one of the best literary critics and friends in the world. But now I am glad, for Collin Brooks to whom I give this copy (which is not mine to give) has restored me to that ‘too much love of living’ which I thought I had parted from. Aleister Crowley 26-5-42 EV.” (Photo: Peter Harrington, Bookseller)
A series of extant letters at the Warburg charts the early period of their friendship.17 On April 10, 1909, Crowley sent a postcard, postmarked Orléans, France, to Radclyffe, then living at the rural village address of The Lines, Abbey Road, Bourne End, Buckinghamshire.
I am sorry not to have written earlier to thank you for the kind invitation. . . .
London will again rejoice at my presence (I hope) on Wednesday or Thursday, and may the Gods grant it!—I should like to see you, and get you to meet Fuller [Captain J. F. C. Fuller, member of the AA and collaborator on Crowley’s biannual journal The Equinox]. Also, I am anxious for your verdict. . . .
Kind regards to Mrs. Radclyffe,
Yours very truly &c.
Radclyffe received another card from Crowley, dated April 23, 1909, written in red ink and posted to Bourne End.
My dear Radclyffe,
So glad you’re back; I hope better. I’m weekending at Brighton; but will hope to see you Monday at lunch. I’m writing Fuller*64 Let it be Imperial Grill 1:30 as usual, if you will.†65
No more; I’m wallowing in work.
Yours,
Aleister Crowley
From an apartment at 21 Warwick Road, Earls Court, shared with wife, Rose, and daughter, Lola, Crowley wrote again in 1909 to Radclyffe, now moved to Golf View, Flackwell Heath, Buckinghamshire.
All right. Thursday 18th. Will Imperial Grill suit you? . . . The Equinox has gone to the binders; I am free from it for ten days, Thank God!
Yours,
Aleister Crowley
Crowley used his Equinox office postcard at 124 Victoria Street to write Mrs. Radclyffe on March 29, 1910, a letter testifying to the familiarity of Crowley and the Radclyffes; he had given Mrs. Radclyffe a thank-you present.
Dear Mrs. Radclyffe,
Not easily shall I forget your kindness at Easter: I enjoyed myself as is rarely possible for one of my melancholy temperament, and was so fortified by your good counsel that I am proud to be able to say that (though hard put to it) I am still NOT engaged.*66
If you attach the Buddha to your neck by a string of Electrum Magicum and say Aum Mani Padme Hum 111 times in the right tone of voice when addressing your ball [crystal?], you will never again miss a fault.
Yours very truly,
Aleister Crowley
Five months later, Mr. Radclyffe would write a glowing, aesthetically responsive report for the Sketch (a “journal of art and actuality” featuring fashion, society, art, theater, glamour, royalty, golf, etc.) of Crowley’s Rites of Eleusis under the headline A NEW RELIGION.
A certain number of literary people know the name of Aleister Crowley as a poet. A few regard him as a magician. But a small and select circle revere him as the hierophant of a new religion.
What perhaps really tips the scales in favor of it being a contact of Radclyffe’s that sent Crowley off to New York, presumably with Radclyffe’s recommendation as middleman or carrier of financial instruments for contracts, is a letter I located recently at the Warburg. Incidentally, Crowley’s not being identifiable as banker, or commercial or government figure, was probably advantageous on account of the burgeoning heat in Washington and New York regarding support for the Allies. The prospective deal probably touched a legal gray area at the time. Encouragingly, on October 15, State Department Counselor Robert Lansing, in line for secretary of state, denied any illegality in free Americans selling war supplies to belligerents, an announcement that swiftly led to British Treasury envoys hot-shipping it to J. P. Morgan at 23 Wall Street.
Two days after Lansing effectively challenged Bryan’s policy, Crowley wrote to O.T.O. Treasurer George Macnie Cowie about immediate disposition of O.T.O. property. The date of Crowley’s letter to Cowie is doubly significant and ties up the sudden process of alert and departure.
We shall become amply acquainted with Crowley’s experimental esoteric record of sex magick called Rex de Arte Regia (“The King on the Royal Art”), commenced on September 3, 1914. From it we learn that on October 14 at 8:17 p.m. O.T.O. Inspector General Leila Ida Nerissa Bathurst Waddell (“Mother of Heaven”) assisted chorus girl Violet Duval in a rite of sex magick with Crowley, whose willed Object was health—an attempt to overcome the debilitating phlebitis. On October 17, “Holy King” of the British “Sanctuary of the Gnosis,” Crowley recorded that the rite’s immediate results were “sudden, rather alarming symptoms the same night,” but afterward there ensued a “great improvement” so that “today, 17 October, I am going about much as usual.” Crowley’s entry for November 1, the day after arriving in New York, connects the sex magick rite of the 14th directly with what followed. “The symptoms [of phlebitis] are still not altogether vanished. But most assuredly some three days after the rite I had the feeling of health—an indescribable but well-known sensation. I began many energetic things, made up my mind, and here I am in New York” (my italics). Those energetic things involved the writing of the following letter to Cowie on the 17th, three days after the rite. The letter is telling and gives us a sense of a flurry over last-minute business plans awaiting a final go-ahead.
The European situation, however, appears very bad, and I do not think that the organized lying of the press will help it. I met a lady yesterday who had come back from Antwerp. She says there is very little of it left, and quite concurs with the criticisms of the Morning Post, the only newspaper left to us with even the smallest regard for ordinary decency.
I daresay you have by now got a copy of Radclyffe’s pamphlet “The War and Finance,” if not, do so; Smith’s book-stalls keep it. . . . There is no doubt that we must have conscription. [my italics]
The doctor called yesterday and said that I might now make experiments in walking, but I must be pretty careful for the next two months. There is some hope too, of mother [“Mother of Heaven” Leila Waddell] getting on again, and if she can get a long tour of S. America, it will be splendid. [Leila toured professionally as a violinist.]
. . . However, in case none of this comes off I think it best to dig ourselves in for the winter, and the first step appears to me is to transfer the lease of the studio*67 to the trustees; I presume you have no objection. . . . I have no plans at present, nor can have, until I know how these various affairs may work o
ut.
By my calculations, the O.T.O. as it stands at present, is just about solvent. The Boleskine rent nearly covers the payment of interest, the rates of Boleskine and the rents and rates of the studio.
. . . Of course, at any moment one might find a really strong, sound man to turn solvency into wealth beyond dreams of avarice.18
One suspects in that last line that Crowley was dreaming of what might just transpire in New York, and perhaps of one man in particular, as we shall see.
Six days later, on the very eve of departure for New York from Liverpool, Crowley wrote again to “the Very Illustrious Sir Knight George Macnie Cowie VII°.”
I hope you will write to mother [Leila Waddell], and keep her happy. Luckily she is booked for next week, and of course that may lead to better things [South America?].19
ELEVEN
My Egg Was Addled
As in the case of hypothetically connecting British construction magnate Weetman Pearson to Crowley’s sojourn in Mexico, I cannot imagine what spark of inspiration made Richard B. Spence look for the name of George Macaulay Booth on the passenger manifest records of New York’s Ellis Island.1 But he is there—on the same ship as Crowley, RMS Lusitania, departing Liverpool on October 24, 1914.
George Macaulay Booth, shipowner (recorded as “merchant” on the passenger manifest), aged thirty-seven, of Airlie Gardens, Kensington & Chelsea, was surely a man with a firm grip on the “sinews of war.” Managing director of Booth & Co., with a fleet of Booth steamships, Booth was appointed director of munitions supply by the British prime minister in early 1915, handpicked for talent and connections as a man who could get things done, a capability reflected in the title of Duncan Crow’s biography, “A Man of Push and Go”: The Life of George Macaulay Booth—the kind of man, one would think, who could answer Raymond Radclyffe’s pamphlet prayer.
Aleister Crowley in America Page 21
