Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  With respect to that occasion, it can have done no harm at all to Crowley’s potential allure that June’s issue of Vanity Fair featured a complimentary article on Crowley by “Arthur Loring Bruce,”*96 adorned by a specially made copy of Augustus John’s pencil portrait of the subject (a favor to Crowley from Quinn who owned the original; see below).

  ALEISTER CROWLEY

  Mystic and Mountain Climber

  All the Britons who are not fighting in the Great War seem to be coming to New York this year. One of the most extraordinary of our recent British visitors is Aleister Crowley, who is a poet, an explorer, a mountain climber, an “adept” in mysticism and magic, and an esoteric philosopher; in short a person of so many sides and interests that it is no wonder a legend has been built up around his name. He is a myth. No other man has had so many strange tales told of him.

  He is an Irishman, and was educated at Malvern and Trinity College, Cambridge, as a preparation for the highly respectable and sedate Diplomatic Service. But such a mission was not to his taste. He soon found that he had no liking for the beaten tracks in life. So he became an “adept,” a mystic, a wanderer on the face of the earth.

  Fig. 15.4. Vanity Fair, June 1915, drawing of Aleister Crowley by Augustus John

  The Equinox, his work on occultism is only a part of the gigantic literary structure which he has built up in the past five years, yet the work contains the stupendous number of two and a half million words.

  Mr. Crowley has a habit of disappearing suddenly from Paris, only to bob up again in Zapotlan, Tali Fu, Askole, Hambantonia, or Ouled Djellal. To him a long journey is an achievement, a satisfying thing in itself, like the “hidden knowledge” which he is forever in search of. In 1900 he explored Mexico without guides. Two years later he spent three months in India at an altitude of 20,000 feet. In 1906, he crossed China on foot. The success of his magic-drama, “The Rites of Eleusis” in 1910 in London, did not tempt him to settle down there for long as he was next heard of in the heart of the Sahara.

  As a naked Yogi he has sat for days under the Indian sun, begging his rice. Like every true magician he has experimented with hundreds of strange poisons in order to discover the Elixir of Life and the Elixir of Vision. He has devoted much time to the art of materializing divine influences, which he does by the aid of secret incenses; of invocations; and of rituals inherited from the Gnostics and Rosicrucians. He once masqueraded through a Cairo season as a mysterious Persian prince. He shocked the orthodox by his book “The Sword of Song”—which was virtually an attack upon everything established—but soon compelled to forgive him because of the religious fervor of his next volume—a book of devotional hymns. He holds—like all good mystics—that “All thought, or speech, is false: Truth lies in divine ecstasy beyond them.”

  He lives in Paris when not on his travels. One of his friends is Augustus John, the painter, one of whose beautiful sketches of Mr. Crowley we are privileged to print.

  Another article by Crowley appeared in Vanity Fair in June: BERNARD SHAW ON SELF EFFACEMENT, “by Another Irishman.” Anxious to get in with the Germans, Crowley was pushing the “Irishman” bit for all it was worth.

  Now Vanity Fair had nailed a Crowley pennant to its mast; Viereck had no qualms about pushing Crowley hard himself. Page 14 of the June 2 Fatherland featured a prominent ad for that month’s issue of the International (billed as “The Brainiest Magazine in America”).

  You will be stunned by THE END OF ENGLAND By Aleister Crowley. AUSTIN HARRISON, the editor of the English Review, called Aleister Crowley the greatest poet in England. It is the most terrific arraignment of Great Britain ever written. With powerful and brilliant strokes Crowley depicts the corruption and hypocrisy of England. He reveals secrets never hitherto told. He holds you breath-less and spellbound by his recital of England’s shame. After you have read this article you will have to readjust your opinions.

  Fig. 15.5. Helen Westley (1875–1942), actress in costume

  According to Crowley’s Confessions account it was the invitation of a “journalistic friend” that ended “the oppression and obscurity” of the previous seven months. On June 10 he was introduced at the dinner to two very striking women, who, in their turn, were equally struck by Aleister Crowley. The first was prominent poet Jeanne Robert Foster, whose speech, Crowley recalled, “was starry with spirituality,” and her looks “beautiful beyond my dearest dream.” The other lady was forty-year-old, Brooklyn-born character actress Helen Westley (1875–1942), seductive doyen of Greenwich Village theater and luminary of plays by George Bernard Shaw, which rather suggests the dinner had something to do with Vanity Fair.*97

  Crowley had found Babalon in the flesh; she was two, and good to be true.

  SIXTEEN

  Jeanne

  Did she really break my heart?

  ALEISTER CROWLEY, MAGICAL DIARY, MAY 31, 1920

  According to Crowley, the attraction between himself and Jeanne Robert Foster was instantaneous. But there was an instantaneous problem. The other lady the host wished Crowley to meet was equally drawn to the famous magician.

  A magnetic current was instantly established between the three of us. In the Cat [Jeanne], I saw my ideal incarnate, and even during that first dinner we gave ourselves to each other by that language of limbs whose eloquence escapes the curiosity of fellow guests.1

  Jeanne had already “clicked” that she had a rival. Reminiscing about Helen Westley’s theatricality, the ever-colorful Beast veered in the direction of Edgar Allan Poe: Helen, he wrote, “set herself to encompass me with the coils of her evil intelligence.”

  The following afternoon Crowley accepted Jeanne’s invitation to take tea with her at the National Arts Club, Gramercy Park, the same place she had taken her close, older friend John Butler Yeats and where she had listened in an audience, spellbound to her poetic idol, William Butler Yeats.

  And here lay Crowley’s problem as far as Jeanne was concerned.

  Like poor William Blake, who, arriving in Felpham, Sussex, in 1800 at patron William Hayley’s suggestion, found himself, unbeknownst to himself, gatecrashing a longstanding “love-in,” or charmed circle, consisting of Hayley, Lady Hesketh, Reverend John Johnson, and the late poet William Cowper, Crowley too had stumbled upon a tight-knit, high-minded, mutually adoring artistic circle, replete with erotic undercurrents. Matlack Foster, John Butler Yeats, William Butler Yeats, Albert Shaw: they all admired, and fancied, Jeanne Foster, with the latter three tending to operate as if Jeanne’s marriage to Matlack was an unfortunate, albeit not inhibiting, incident. In 1918 a jealous John Quinn—already patron to the Yeatses—would join the maypole. What is even more remarkable per-haps is that the circle around Jeanne—poet, brain, high-minded beauty—would carry on after all the protagonists were dead. Witness these lines from relatively recent biographies.

  Trying to account for his subject and friend Jeanne’s attraction to Crowley, Richard Londraville wrote how “her marriage to the elderly Matlack Foster, always problematic, did not satisfy her yearning for a more traditional role as muse and helpmate to a powerful intellect.”2 Crowley was the “latest flavor to sophisticated New Yorkers.”3 Markedly partisan, William M. Murphy related how Jeanne’s “dear and devoted friend” John Butler Yeats was to “watch in horrified fascination as his son’s old enemy proceeded to captivate the sensitive and vulnerable ‘loveliest of women ever.’”4 “For a time he [Crowley] succeeded in duping Jeanne Foster, who was betrayed by his ugly good looks, his charisma, his position as leader of a magical cult, and his reputation as poet.”5

  Jeanne, in her late eighties when consenting to spoken, not recorded, interviews with Londraville, appears to have been guarded and “general” about the relationship. It is difficult to tell if it was from her that Londraville obtained the idea that Crowley “was in need of her professional talents”—as a ghostwriter! If the story came from Jeanne, it may have been a simple way of explaining one reason why they would part company; that is, that
Crowley’s idea of her role was beneath her talents. If so, she, or Londraville, was confused by cross currents. Crowley certainly had no need for a professional writer! He was the ghostwriter, preoccupied at the time with writing a major astrology tome for Evangeline Adams. Perhaps he asked Jeanne, in her capacity as literary journalist, if she could help with editing (something he loathed to do) or take some dictation at some point. This might have jarred, though hardly if Jeanne really did seek, as Londraville asserts, the “traditional” role of “muse and helpmate to a powerful intellect.” Enough speculation! There has been too much supposition by biographers already.

  Londraville suggests that Crowley asked Jeanne to give up her work on the Review of Reviews to work for him. Because this work brought her an income, and Crowley a useful connection, it seems unlikely to have been the case, at least at the time, and was perhaps something Jeanne chose to say more than fifty years later. She had herself offered her resignation to Shaw six months earlier. Crowley and Jeanne probably quarreled about how much time she would spend away from him. Jeanne’s memory was quite understandably imperfect in recording details of events that had taken place more than fifty years earlier. In a letter to her biographer Richard Londraville, dated January 13, 1968, for example, Jeanne has W. B. Yeats as a member of the “A.A.”: “When you [Londraville] come next summer you must look at the document I have—Yeats’ correction of certain things pertaining to the occult Society the ‘A.A.’ (London Society) of which he was a member.”6 The “AA” was Crowley’s magical Order, the successor, as he saw it, to the Golden Dawn of Yeats and his friends; Yeats was not a member. Jeanne’s memory might have been imperfect, but she had lost none of her remarkable sensitivity and mysticism. Letters to Londraville reveal that she was convinced that her knowing him had revived in her mind “the appearance to me of certain things of that far past. I have been confronted with a glimpse of my ‘Mask.’”7 The “Mask,” from her description of it in the same letter to Richard Londraville, appears to be theosophically reminiscent of what Crowley called the “Holy Guardian Angel.” According to Jeanne Robert Foster, writing in 1968, “In Theosophy the Mask is the ‘causal body’—the body or self that contains all that a man has been from the beginning of a primordial self. Occultists and men of vision have observed that when a man—necessarily he must have genius—confronts even a semblance or a vision of the Self, his work changes or he creates a double self.”8 Jeanne had experienced visions of Londraville “heavily swathed in black robes” officiating in an ancient rite “always as long ago,” but usually appearing around 2 p.m. Jeanne informed Londraville that he was beginning to confront his “Mask.”

  In a moving letter of November 15, 1968, the elderly Jeanne described the first appearance in her house of W. B. Yeats “as he looked in 1913,” quite recently at about 2 a.m. Aged about forty-eight, Yeats’s hair was dark “and beautiful his eyes brilliant, his smile reassuring.”9 Appearing physically real, Yeats placed his arms around her, saying, “I have come to thank you about John Quinn. He did so much for me. I know I never gave him sufficient appreciation but now I know how much he deserved.” Deeply moved, Jeanne described herself as “trembling with joy and worship,” convinced that “the seed will flower” and that she might yet be able to do something “that will prove to you [Londraville] that the barrier of time has indeed been broken.”10

  The problem with accounts of Crowley in the context of Jeanne Robert Foster’s career is that they were composed “without fear of contradiction,” for when written, a historical consensus had long since coagulated into a respectably established notion that Crowley was mad, bad, and dangerous to know, and historically and artistically insignificant to boot. Therefore, if a beautiful, intelligent, historically significant lady got involved with him, she must have been “duped.” Dark forces! Dracula! One feels biographers should have taken a little more notice of what an experienced lawyer had to say about Crowley. While opining to William Butler Yeats that Crowley was “a perfect misfit here of course” whose “writings have no popular appeal,” John Quinn was professionally quick to dismiss hear-say. “One hears awful things about him but beyond a capacity for strong drink I have seen nothing crooked about him.”11 One would think a top corporate lawyer would have had an experienced nose for crooked goings-on! The worst William Butler Yeats could throw at Crowley, when complaining to his father, was a tale he said he picked up in Cambridge about Crowley being made to leave his college dining room for telling obscene jokes! Even if true (which is doubtful), such might qualify him for a role in Saturday Night Live (as was) or National Lampoon’s Animal House, but not a virgin-sucking shreck-film!

  Back in 1915, or in his own lifetime, so to speak, Yeats wrote again to Quinn on June 24 from 18, Woburn Buildings, Euston Road, London.

  I send you with this a weekly paper with an article upon Frank Harris which will amuse you. He and Crowley and Moore*98 are literary outlaws—unscrupulous in differing degrees with the one virtue of courage. Moore is the best of the three, I imagine. I would never however, have made his acquaintance if I had known that he had red hair which fills me with alarm in man or in woman, but unluckily time had blanched it when we met.12

  Crowley’s own reflective or reactionary account of their relationship in his Confessions also suffers from the passage of years and the bitterness of love thwarted. He had by the 1920s got used to his own rationalization of their relationship as being a part of the path that led him to the grade of Magus; thus Jeanne is presented as “the Cat Officer” or “Pasht,” as well as “Hilarion” (a name she herself chose, linked to a mahatma of Theosophical lore): the Scarlet Woman. He would come to think of the key women of the period as participants in an Egyptian temple drama where animal-masked figures played roles in magical initiation. This mytho-manic model hinders understanding of events as they happened at the time.

  There is a notably sour rendering of their first private meeting at the National Arts Club.

  We lost no time. She told me—a string of lies—of her loveless marriage with an old satyr [Matlack Foster] who had snatched her almost from the cradle. She was about to divorce him; and having loved me at first sight, not sensually, but as my spiritual sister, we could be married quite soon. We sealed the sacrament with a kiss; and there was no reason why, in the ordinary course of events, we should not have proceeded to an immediate liaison.13

  One presumes the meeting was rather pure pleasure, with interesting undercurrents. What is notable is that Crowley never once mentions the fact that Jeanne had been involved for years in a painful, guilty love affair with the married Albert Shaw. Crowley would complain of a nagging intuition that Jeanne, despite his enormous love for her, and despite all her promises, was somehow “false,” a fissure in love’s mirror somehow reflected in the dye Jeanne applied to keep her fabulous red and gold locks pristine. This idea of Jeanne’s falseness led Spence to suggest it could be accounted for if Jeanne had been observing Crowley on behalf of British intelligence. No evidence has emerged that British officials regarded Jeanne as any more than a useful, friendly journalist, though friendly journalists were very useful indeed to the British propaganda effort. Crowley never let on about his secret role, and if she had one, she never did either. However, in context, the accusation of falseness from a romantic man must surely relate to the lady’s capacity to be true to Love, to surrender all to Love and count the world well lost. What I suspect Crowley observed was that she was holding back something significant from him, something that, behind his back, relativized the absoluteness of her loving words.

  Jeanne was a “player,” a professional, ambitious early twentieth-century woman who knew the transactional value of her precious beauty and recognized the need for linking herself to strong, influential men to get on in life and secure her future (Matlack was the first of a select line). No doubt Jeanne was a thoroughly charming player, of exemplary sweetness, warmth, and idealism, but she was also fascinated by the mystery of her own being and believed tha
t magic unlocked secrets in that regard. Here, with Aleister Crowley, was an opportunity to learn new things at many levels that interested her: art, poetry, magic, psychology, England—and power. And if Crowley’s suppressed suspicion was right about her being false—that is, willing to deconsecrate their love if necessary—the painful intuition would be proved right, eventually and devastatingly.

  We can be certain that Jeanne was false about declaring an exclusive love for him, insofar as she was still involved, and tied emotionally, sensually—and financially—to Albert Shaw, though she knew that relationship could never flower in marriage so long as her and Shaw’s spouses lived. Nor, in the recesses of her heart, had she forgotten Willie Yeats, nor would she ever. Furthermore, her husband, a pastor’s son whose mind she did not respect, though an invalid without attraction now, had made her New York life possible; he had brought her from humble status to the gates of professional paradise. How would it appear if she dropped him now?

  For the duration of the passion, Crowley expected complete spiritual commitment, or at least a shameless honesty. Jeanne wanted to appear modest; she had an ideal of herself as a good and noble creature, sent into the world to care, to minister to the needs of others, above all to find herself spiritually. Her personal feelings could either help or obstruct that. But she was also a woman who loved adventure, personal freedom, carefree changes of direction, enjoying an ambivalent relationship with her own manifest sensuality. If it was a choice between Art and “love,” her mind said Art must win. Crowley always liked a woman who was “proud of her whoredom,” but Jeanne had never gone to the limits in this regard, as far as we can tell, though she had modeled her staggering nudity for a photographer dedicated to Art: an amazing step itself given the character of the times. She well understood how men desired to gaze on . . . beauty. But beauty was an ideal, and flesh, flesh could be troubling, offering bliss and pain and guilt and longing, and distraction from the business of life: survival. She was an Adirondacks girl, tough from the hard woods. Still, for that vital component of happy whoredom (in the old English sense of the term), Crowley had Helen Westley, while still clinging to a conviction that Jeanne represented the poetic ideal he had long sought. Indeed, he would come to see his being pulled between the two women as an ordeal between the ideal (wisdom) and the foolish/selfish, and while he would eventually damn Jeanne herself for failing to be ideal, in his eyes he satisfied himself that he had, at least, chosen the ideal over the vain, even if the “ideal” had not. How he manifested this choice will seem most bizarre, even perverse.