Crowley took forty dollars south, thinking New Orleans closer to a hoped-for opportunity with Keasbey in Texas. It was an act of faith, of willfulness, and was not rewarded with an O.T.O. lodge in Austin but rather with other goods that would have to wait many years to surrender any return. He was walking into considerable hardship.
Choosing his billet with customary wisdom, Crowley checked into a hotel on Dauphine Street and began to explore New Orleans. Crowley found a city reminiscent of Cairo, divided by a wide thoroughfare, scored by trolley-car tracks, with one side offering the delights. Unsurprisingly, Crowley adored the old French-Spanish quarter of the city, finding its redlight district on the outskirts particularly delightful: its sultry streets had a civilization of their own. There he met “Irene Standfield,” an extremely voluptuous prostitute of the “greatest possible skill and goodwill,”1 and “Eleanore Jackson,” who “claimed to be ‘pure American’ (!) but is I think a mixture of Negro and Japanese. Slim, normal, excessively active, and passionate.” An “excellent” operation with Eleanore for “wealth” yielded only a pleasant memory.2
It was said that along with San Antonio, New Orleans was the sole repository of soul left in an American city, though Crowley felt it already under shadow of banishment at the behest of moral hypocrites, prohibitionists, and dollar-mad, mindless development. In 1916 the city was still imbued with distinction of time, with its fascinatingly ramshackle elements, its balconies, pillars, arched windows, continental-style shutters, colors, charming manners, clothes, customs, and cookery. He said nothing of the music (he liked raucous tunes but had been spoiled by Wagner for much else), but he very much appreciated the “Old Absinthe House,” reminiscent of better days he’d witnessed in Paris. There he wrote “The Green Goddess” about the addictive drink that had drowned many a poet, and of its cradle.
It lies in New Orleans, between Canal Street and Esplanade Avenue; the Mississippi for its base. Thence it reaches northward to a most curious desert land, where is a cemetery lovely beyond dreams. Its walls low and whitewashed, within which straggles a wilderness of strange and fantastic tombs; and hard by is that great city of brothels which is so cynically mirthful a neighbor. As Felicien Rops wrote,—or was it Edmond d’Haraucourt?—“la Prostitution et la Mort sont frère et soeur—les fils de Dieu!” At least the poet of Le Legende des Sexes was right, and the psycho-analysts after him, in identifying the Mother with the Tomb. This, then, is only the beginning and end of things, this “quartier macabre” beyond the North Rampart with the Mississippi on the other side. It is like the space between, our life which flows, and fertilizes as it flows, muddy and malarious as it may be, to empty itself into the warm bosom of the Gulf Stream, which (in our allegory) we may call the Life of God.3
Reclining comfortably at 238 Bourbon Street, the Absinthe House’s two-story exterior resembled an old Parisian café, while its interior possessed the prana-soaked character of a well-worn pub in London’s Soho. A cozy, pleasant saloon opened within, bounded with pattern-tiled walls, mirrors, and, most importantly, a very solid wooden bar running its length, bounded by welcoming bottles. Slender pillars supported cross beams, and a marble floor led to arched doorways onto the streets. Crowley spent as much time in the Old Absinthe House as possible, writing, writing, writing . . .
He saw a great deal of life in New Orleans, too much really. He could see clearly its life and soul were under threat from puritanical maniacs and other forces of global standardization of product, atmosphere, architecture, even clothing. Crowley had enjoyed the costumes of many races in distant places, all gradually being turned over in appearance by featureless, cheap, shoddy versions of Western dress and drab cuts that rendered living beings into sad mannequins in a reflective world of materialist vacuity. God! How he wanted to see a world where men walked as kings and women like goddesses!
It is necessary to live in the United States and know the people well to get a really clear view of hell with the lid off. I had already been some time in the country, but the truth about New York had been camouflaged. I, being who I was, had come into contact with the very cream of the city, and on my travels about the Union, I had seen little more than the superficial life of the people as it appears to the wanderer whose tent is a pullman car, a swagger hotel, or the abode of some friend who by that very fact is not truly representative of his community.4
Stickups with revolvers were common, “frame-ups,” internecine murders of husbands and wives, arson, unemployment, suicides of the young, infant mortality: all regular occurrences. The churches were of course full. It is hardly surprising that brothels appeared a soft target for the politically ambitious to demonstrate a social poultice to uphold Christian decency. One local “noise” decided that he was called by civic duty to “clean up” the city, which meant leaning on the whorehouses.
Emerging from the library in Lee Circle, Crowley was accosted by a woman, begging for cents. He recognized her from the red-light district, an environment more in tune with her skills. Morality had put her on the streets to beg. He thought her surprisingly cheerful considering the circumstances. Oh, she said; she was all right. She was starting a job soon: looking after a comfortably off couple’s children.
What would they learn from her?
In retrospect, Crowley believed the gods, as part of his initiation, were going to give him a protracted taste of what ordinary people experienced and of what poverty drove the degraded to do. And he saw the spiritual wasteland up front, in full color, sufficient to invade the citadel of his soul and desecrate it with the despair, depravity, and disease of individual human misery. He saw humanity in the raw, and he had to take his medicine as his dollar account dwindled to starvation level.
That, of course, is not the way it appeared to people in New Orleans, who accepted their reality for what it was. Had Crowley consulted the papers, he would have seen on the front page of the December 7, 1916, Herald a city gearing up for Christmas jollity.
SANTA CLAUS IS IN TOYLAND
Come on back to Toy Town—joy town! Come on back, you grownups, and bring the little folks, and feel again the thrill and wonder of it. The gates are open wide and it’s a sparkling, shining Fairyland for the kiddies—and for the grown-ups too, who are able to “come back.”
The toys are new, ingenious, clever, wonderful, and they are all ready and waiting for your visit.
You owe the children a visit to Toy Town at Maison Blanche. It’s one of the greatest pleasures of the festive season. The whole town fairly beams with the holiday spirit, and if happiness is “catching,” you’ll certainly absorb it.
Come on, everybody! Because Christmas is coming, and we ALL believe in Santa Claus.
We Will Gladly Cash Your Xmas Savings Checks
NO CHARGE BRING THEM HERE
Maison Blanche
GREATEST STORE SOUTH
Crowley had only been in New Orleans for a week when it all suddenly became too much for him. On December 15, he informed the masters that while he had recently received two subs of cash, both times he had been within a dollar of starvation, and after years of this kind of perpetual insecurity, he could bear it no longer. He would go “on strike,” and if he starved, it was the gods’ own responsibility. He felt he’d come to the end of himself. He wanted a guarantee that all would be well in the future—as well as a competent stenographer. Hope had died in his heart; he would do no work for brethren of the orders he led.
One thing he didn’t know about was that the very next day, far across the sea in Rotterdam, O.T.O. member Leon Engers Kennedy, an artist, bid his wealthy father, Mozes Engers, farewell and set sail on the “Nieuw Amsterdam” (Holland-America Line) for New York.
Also that day, Hugo Münsterberg dropped dead at the Harvard women’s annex, Radcliffe. Were the gods on the job, or were they on the job?
Crowley realized that he’d probably been stupid to try to push fate where Keasbey was concerned. But he had lessons to learn. His first teacher was not experience,
whose fees can be very high, but the hotel maid Georgie, “a little negro girl.” When Crowley moaned to her that he had to go out to fetch a registered letter, she told him she didn’t have to go out if she didn’t want to. The “madam” could go out herself! It was like a scene from Gone with the Wind. Talking of the Civil War, D. W. Griffith’s now controversial, then extraordinarily popular, movie The Birth of a Nation, starring Lillian Gish, was packing them in with its thrilling tale of the Ku Klux Klan, with prices reduced at the Tulane Theater, New Orleans. Crowley couldn’t afford a ticket.
On December 22, as Christmas approached, he received a passionate wire from the Monkey, begging him to come to New York for the festive season. For some reason, Crowley did not heed the appeal; perhaps he suspected her husband’s hand in it. He would receive a letter from Coomaraswamy in January that convinced Crowley the “Worm,” as he called him, was a “Black Brother.” Crowley confided to his diary that he was glad to have had the opportunity to study such a one closely.
He kept up the strike. He was sure the masters had the ability to shape events in relation to his own awareness, and he did not feel he was simply punching the air. No, he was pitting himself against beings whose intelligence exceeded his own as much as his did Hereward Carrington’s!—as he joked to himself. He had not lost his sense of humor. The night after Christmas—five days after he recorded receiving £5 from Cowie and that Hugo Münsterberg had dropped dead in class—he asked: “What is man? A soap-bubble blown by a spermatozoon,” then ten minutes later, added, “Yet every act we do, however foolish or futile, goes branching on for eternity—an infinite heritage.”5 So he really ought to have been watching his step where the gods were concerned.
Indeed, the following day, resigned at having made his protest and having paid his debts, Crowley picked up the cudgels of life and decided to work again. He had neither proper paper, nor money to buy it. He had seventy cents.
TWENTY-SIX
The Butterfly Net
The year 1917 would see a turnaround in Crowley’s fortunes, as it would the fortunes of the world. By summer, the United States had entered the World War; by Christmas, a defeated Russia collapsed in chaos: revolution hit with hammer and sickle.
On January 2, with Crowley languishing in Louisiana, painter Leon Engers (Frater T.A.T.K.T.A.) arrived in New York. Immigration records give his destination as the Equitable Trust Company, which company, part of the Morgan “syndicate,” had in 1915 moved into the brand-new, dizzying, forty-story Equitable Building at 120 Broadway, between Pine and Cedar Streets. Neoclassical, double-towered, the Equitable cast a seven-acre shadow and boasted more window space than any structure in Manhattan, with the largest floor area of any building in the world, but whether Engers occupied any of it, at least on arrival, is unknown.*126
According to Richard Kaczynski (Perdurabo, 258, 313), Engers joined the AA in London on September 23, 1912. The previous December, John Middleton Murry (1889–1957), editor of Rhythm, sent a copy of Victor B. Neuburg’s Triumph of Pan to Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) for review (Rhythm 2, no. 2 [July 1912]: 70). Mansfield inquired as to Neuburg’s whereabouts. According to Murry (January 27, 1912), Neuburg had quarreled with Crowley, who was now with “Kennedy.”1 Neuburg and Crowley did not in fact part until early 1914. Crowley made “Kennedy” Patriarch Grand Secretary General of the Ancient & Primitive Rite, Great Britain and Ireland, at a Convocation of the Sovereign Sanctuary of Memphis and Mizraim at 33 Avenue Studios, 76 Fulham Road, June 30, 1913 (Kaczynski, 262), and dedicated poetry in The Equinox to Engers.
Fig. 26.1. Leon Engers’s “psychochromes” announced in the Fort Wayne Journal, January 1919 (image courtesy of Frank van Lamoen)
It is perhaps coincidental that in 1916 the very wealthy Mozes Engers’s import-export firm (“Firma M. Engers”) had its Dutch offices and ware-house (from 1910) at de Boompjes 70b,*127 along Rotterdam’s dockside, next door but one to the Uranium Steamship Co. Ltd: headquarters of Mansfield Cumming’s British intelligence network in neutral Holland, MI1c, at 76 Boompjes. Between them stood the De Nederlandse Bank at 72–74, which had a policeman guarding the front door, according to author Edwin Ruis.2 As Ruis states, generally speaking, we only know about unsuccessful spies. Presumably, Engers’s contact address in New York was linked to his father’s business (Mozes had homes in Rotterdam, and Kurfürstendamm 24, Berlin). In 1911, Firma M. Engers also had branches in London, Hull, Hamburg, and Bremen. It is interesting that Crowley in his Confessions maintained that Engers had morally degraded himself somehow since their last meeting, but this may simply have meant that Engers had what Crowley considered unsuitable romantic attachments, as Crowley was curiously critical of Engers’s wife, whom Engers married in May 1919. Perhaps Crowley would have liked Engers for himself.
The day after Engers’s arrival, the Fatherland published what was probably the most devastatingly effective piece of “disinformation” propaganda Crowley ever produced. Appearing prominently as its first-page editorial, Delenda Est Britannia (“Britain must be Destroyed”)3 purported to be a review of Count Ernst zu Reventlow’s hateful anti-British book, The Vampire of the Continent, recently delivered to New York to the Fatherland on the Deutschland. German naval officer Reventlow was a militant expansionist committed to U-boats and extreme measures. He loathed England, seeing her as Germany’s greatest enemy, during and after the war.4 The editor introduced Crowley’s “prologue and epilogue to The Vampire of the Continent” by informing the reader (again) that Crowley was a Cambridge-educated Irishman and “poet of fine distinction” (“the first metrical artist in English since Swinburne,” attributed to Austin Harrison at the English Review).
Crowley went to town with the material at hand, enthusiastically egging on von Bernstorff to approve the unleashing of unrestricted submarine warfare (which would tip the scales for America’s entry into the war), ascending new heights of the ridiculous, such as, for example, that all Englishmen, because islanders used to snatching fish, were compulsive “pirates” whose country would become a German colony! “England,” Crowley insisted, “must be divided up between the continental powers. She must be a mere province, or better still, colony of her neighbours, France and Germany. Peace with England at this time would be a crime against humanity.—We must die, that humanity may live. Now there is only one way to destroy the power of England: the country must be conquered. . . . There is only one way to do this: it is by ruthless prosecution of submarine warfare.” Germany must build more submarines; “if it takes ten years—or one hundred years—it must be done. From the broadest standpoint of humanity, nothing else is really worth doing. Let Germany make peace with France and Russia—if we must talk peace . . . that she may be able to concentrate her whole power against the vampire.” Crowley ludicrously describes the method for killing vampires utterly. “If one precaution is omitted, the vampire lives again, to prey upon the innocent and the just. Britannia est delenda [Britain must be destroyed].” The issue went on to advise that “The Vampire of the Continent may be procured through the Fatherland, price $1.35 postpaid, per copy.”
Crowley boasted of the article’s impact in his Confessions.
The argument [of the article] is quite in the style of a real German professor. I advocated the “Unrestricted Submarine Campaign.” I secretly calculated, rightly as the gods would have it, that so outrageous a violation of all law would be the last straw, and force America to throw off the burden of neutrality.
My German friends were loud in their congratulations. It was confidently whispered among the cognoscenti that von Bernstorff ’s judgment swayed at its impact. He withdrew his objections to that brutality, that insane savagery that brought America into the war.
But there’s a tick in every sleeping-bag. My countrymen stayed right with me to the finish! In what high glee did I not keep my secret rendezvous with a friend from a certain British consulate, waving my article, and crying, “The damned fools have printed it—and it’s going to turn the trick
!”*128 He read it; his face fell; he turned disgustedly and growled, “I didn’t know you were a German.”5
“Berlin Orders Ruthless U-Boat War; Puts Rigid Limit on American Ships; Washington Fears Break Will Follow”—so thundered the New York Tribune on February 1, 1917. The next day President Wilson was reported ready for “Final Action”: “Ultimatum to Germany expected as Next Move—Bernstorff Still at Post; Hasn’t Prepared to Leave.” On February 2, Washington announced the certainty of a rupture in diplomatic relations with Germany; this had always presaged war. Crowley’s diary for that day used Enochian code to convey the message “USA [symbol of Mars = War] Germany—success.” In his Magus diary The Urn, Crowley wrote for February 2, “My 2 ¼ years’ work crowned with success; USA breaks off relations with Germany.” Germany’s official warning to the United States, presented by von Bernstorff to Secretary of State Lansing on January 31, which rescinded all previous understandings while declaring Germany would for its “own survival” mount unrestricted submarine warfare involving summary torpedoing of any suspected ships, without warning, was the last straw that gave Crowley’s summary apologia its title. Crowley’s diary notes prove his longstanding intentions and record his belief that his efforts had encouraged Berlin to believe that the United States could be cowed because the American people would not vote for war. Indeed, they probably would not have, but the country backed the president, who would never put the question to the population.
On February 14, sensing the wind, the Fatherland changed its name to the New World on the principle of “My country, right or wrong; if right to be kept right; if wrong to be set right (Carl Schurz)”: the country being America. On April 6, America declared war on Germany, the government announcing that the navy would be tripled in size, and an army of a million would be raised to fight the “military state” that the day before was accused of fomenting war in Mexico against the United States.
Aleister Crowley in America Page 50
