Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  While the diplomatic storm gathered over Washington and Berlin, penniless Crowley relaxed into the damp and soft airs of low-lying New Orleans and let his imagination rip into a Simon Iff novel he had begun on January 15, tentatively called The Butterfly Net. He wrote like a demon. In the three months beginning January 14 he not only hammered into his first novel but also penned six Simon Iff short stories (nearly 50,000 words), an essay, three other short stories, an unfinished quasi-fictional homosexual autobiography (Not the Life and Adventures of Roger Bloxam, unpublished), some minor things, and a treatise on the government of the O.T.O. for second-degree members. Taking the mick out of himself, he said this all gave “the other masters” opportunity for a good laugh at his expense, for had he not struck, complaining work was “hampered” by circumstances?

  The Butterfly Net pitted sleuth Simon Iff and white magician Cyril Grey against a circle of wicked “Black Brothers” who do everything they can to prevent Cyril’s dream of incarnating an ethereal lunar spirit in a young lady, Lisa la Giuffria, for the betterment of humankind. It would have made an excellent “Hammer” movie with a sympathetic director and cast (being not a million miles away from the successful Rosemary’s Baby, 1968, though with a reverse plotline), and who knows, it may yet. Crowley’s feeling for the Allied cause is notable throughout, and there are some effective scenes set in wartime command centers on the Western Front, consistent with the “author’s note” written in London in 1929 that opens a work whose first publication called for a new title, Moonchild (Mandrake, 1930), rather than The Butterfly Net.

  The book was written in 1917, during such leisure as my efforts to bring America into the War on our side allowed me. Hence my illusions on the subject, and the sad showing of Simon Iff at the end. Need I add that, as the book itself demonstrates beyond all doubt, all persons and incidents are purely the figment of a disordered imagination.

  Moonchild opens with an unusual and strangely moving sketch of London (one feels a hint of nostalgia in Crowley’s mind, perhaps thinking of old haunts while nursing an absinthe in faraway New Orleans) and closes with a stroke of genius as a German battlefield plan is thwarted by Crowley-like Cyril Grey’s reading of German psychology, resulting in an Allied victory because the French general listens to advice the British have rejected, because the British rejected it! Care to guess what that’s all about?

  Many of the characters are based on the Beast’s familiars. Lord Anthony Bowling plays a significant part; he is a fictional version of the Honorable Everard Feilding. Lisa de Giuffria is Mary d’Este; Lavinia King is Isadora Duncan; Douglas is Samuel Mathers; Sister Cybele is Leila Waddell; Mahathera Phang is Allan Bennett; Wake Morningside is Hereward Carrington; Dr. Balloch is Dr. Edward Berridge of the Golden Dawn; Gates is William Butler Yeats; and numerous other acquaintances, friends, and opponents of Crowley are depicted in a novel that furnishes the reader with a theory of “modern occultism.” It is hard not to like it because it is easy to enjoy.

  The same goes for Crowley’s other Simon Iff stories, such as Nebuchadnezzar, which has Paul Powys as the real Otto Kahn, and Mollie Madison as Jeanne Robert Foster.

  “I am always bothering you,” murmured Miss Mollie Madison, apologetically. “You are,” admitted Simon Iff; “but I suppose I am old enough to like it.”

  It is possible that he might have tolerated her even had he been young. There was never hair so plentiful, so irrepressible or so golden red as hers; and it framed a face warm, creamy flushed, round and innocent and laughing as a Greuze, with an impudent nose, and a mouth, perpetually pouting, which was redder even than her hair. Her body was slim and snake-like, every gesture sinuous and seductive. And she had no trace of self-consciousness or vanity. She never put a price on herself, but gave freely as a queen should do.6

  Crowley seems to have come to terms with his feelings over Jeanne, who a few pages later he/Simon Iff addresses more directly, in Latin: Mollior cuniculo cinaede! “Mollie! Fuck-doll softer than a rabbit!” Ah! There’s love!

  Four days into The Butterfly Net, Crowley reflected on card games he’d played with himself at Lake Pasquaney—scat, piquet, and bridge—and where he’d come up with a variant of auction bridge he called “pirate bridge” (with his Fatherland review in mind, perhaps). Crowley’s surviving magical diary, whose cover bears a gold Baphomet stamp on its cover,*129 indicates that on November 3, 1916, he had made an agreement with U.S. cards expert R. F. Foster that he was to share 50 percent of the profit if the game was marketed. Crowley sent his idea to Frank Crowninshield at Vanity Fair, suggesting that Vanity Fair Publishing bring in cards expert R. F. Foster to define the rules. Crowninshield went with the idea and ran a monthly article about it. Pirate Bridge became a mild sensation, under Foster’s name; Foster even published a book about it that year—but as far as is known, not a cent went Crowley’s way.†130

  Desperate, yet resigned to the hard lesson the Secret Chiefs were, he believed, teaching him—that is, how the world really looked to the average social outsider—Crowley wrote a plaintive, moving letter from New Orleans to editor John O’Hara Cosgrave.

  323 Dauphine Street,‡131

  New Orleans 26 January 1917

  My dear Cosgrave,

  Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law

  I’m sending you an article which Frank Crowninshield thought might suit you. I do hope so; I have struck a bad patch, and have been starving for a month.

  If you could spare me $50 for the article, or as a personal loan which I can repay as my royalties on “Pirate Bridge” come in, I shall take it very kindly. It would enable me to get on from here to some friends who have offered to put me up for a month or so.*132

  I have written over 100,000 words fiction in the last month. The Metropolitan is interested in me, and talks of taking up my work wholesale (this is confidential to you) but in the meanwhile I am up against it as I never was before.†133

  Do let me have a line, and if humanly possible a check, by return mail. If I can only get away from here I’ll be all right; but in this place I get deeper in every hour.

  Let me have good news of you, moreover. If all goes well, I’ll turn up in April, and will hope to see you.

  Love is the law, love under will. Yours very truly, Aleister Crowley

  The article should illustrate extremely well; you may think it needs padding out; if so, fiat. A.C.7

  Unless “Eleanore Jackson” was particularly generous, Crowley must have had some money in his pocket, because he performed the IX° degree with her on January 31, dedicating himself “to be High Priest of the Most Holy Phallos.” The long abstinence from such operations was “due to complete absorption in creative work”; even so, it was, he thought, fairly good with excellent mental concentration.8

  Crowley strolled five blocks southeast down to the wide Mississippi, where an unusual hypothesis struck him amid the humidity. Could it be significant that such a combination of damp and soft airs always bred the “Taoist passive-love type of mysticism”?9 He cited as illustrations of his theme the birth of Taoism in the Yangtze delta, Buddhism in the Ganges valley, Sufism in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, and Christianity’s “languid, mystic bits” mostly in Alexandria in the Nile delta. And Mormonism too: Was that not invented in the Mississippi valley? He thought the theme could be worked up, comparing religions born in the plains and on heights. Perhaps these thoughts inspired him that first day of February for his late afternoon encounter—devoted to “Magical Energy”—with “Sister,” a “big black muscular negro whore,” which effort brought “immediate success.”10 Next day, Washington broke off diplomatic relations with Berlin.

  After one more trip into “Sister’s” sultry boudoir, Crowley left New Orleans on February 9 for a very different world: Titusville, Florida.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Suffer the Little Children

  An erudite, artistically sensitive, anticonformist genius like Crowley was unlikely to have found solace in Titusvi
lle, Florida, in February 1917. One might associate the state with incessant sunshine; one might be wrong. A week before Crowley arrived (February 9), freezing weather had hit Florida from the northwest astride a 60 mph gale. Temperatures dipped from -6° to -12°F. Fruit growers assessed damage in millions of dollars wrought by frosted citrus fruit, especially in South Florida; Dade County being hardest hit. Temperatures in the low 20s and driving rains followed the ruinous two days of deep freeze. And one need hardly guess what business Crowley’s cousin Lawrence Bishop was in.

  Situated midway between Fort Lauderdale in the south and Jacksonville in the north, Titusville squats across the Indian River from what is now the Kennedy Space Center, something undreamed of in 1917, when most airplanes were biplanes made of wood and canvas. Lawrence and Birdie Bishop lived with their two children at a citrus grove about fifteen miles north of Titusville itself, on the remote-feeling east bank of the St. Johns River.

  To explain the relationship, Crowley’s mother, Emily Bertha née Bishop, was the daughter of Elizabeth née Cole, second wife of John Bishop. Crowley’s cousin Lawrence Bishop (1872–1961) was grandchild of John Bishop and first wife, Joannah. Lawrence’s father William had emigrated from England to the United States, where his son Lawrence met and married Kentucky-born Birdie Love (1876–1956). In Crowley’s imagination, the Bishops of Titusville became the “Thorpes” of his Simon Iff story, Suffer the Little Children. The story’s title gives a good idea of its content, as Crowley gives a devastatingly sad picture of children growing up under grim weights of low expectation and repressive prejudice. Crowley’s Mr. and Mrs. Thorpe are not the age of their real counterparts, but one can feel Crowley’s gathering disgust with what he found in his description of the place and its residents.

  Thorpe’s grove is ten miles from the next inhabited dwelling. He employs several men to work for him. . . . Thorpe is a bluff bearded fellow of fifty or so; his wife Birdie is not yet thirty. They are intensely religious, devoted to I don’t know quite which of the warring sects of Baptist. The grove is a large and flourishing concern; Thorpe has plenty of money in the bank, and owns real estate in Titusville to a considerable value. A rich man for these parts, you may say. . . .

  The house stands on the east bank of the river; access from the west is almost impossible—the stream is shallow, a mere trickle over thick banks of soft mud; it flows through many and changing channels; the swamp extends for many miles. A rough track leads through thick jungle to the grove; thence it becomes a little wider and smoother as it winds towards Titusville.1

  Crowley disliked intensely the Bishops’ conversation, an acrid blend of capitalism, materialism, and religion. Simon Iff, contemplating the inhabitants, was driven to cynical song.

  What though the spicy breezes

  Blow soft o’er Titusville,

  Though every prospect pleases,

  The people make me ill.

  “Do they ‘bow down to wood and stone?’” laughed Miss Mollie Madison. . . .

  “They do,” said Iff.

  “But surely they are Christians?” tittered Mrs. Mills, with surprise.

  “They are,” crashed the magician. “They worship wood in the head, and stone in the heart.”

  “Oh dear!”2

  Crowley was particularly concerned about the effect of their life on the three children—Mamie, Alma, and Russell—whose constant cry, according to Crowley, was, “I don’t want to grow up to be like mother!” The boy was withdrawn, driven to “secret indulgence in the most wretched vices” while his sisters were drudges to the thought of being married off at eighteen, old and wrinkled and wan through abuse at twenty-five, when at least one had a voice that would make her a queen anywhere else, and all had innocent aspirations constantly thwarted. They were spied on, discouraged from seeking education by which they might escape from the “swamp” and its crocodiles, animal and human. “I cannot think of Florida,” wrote Crowley in his Confessions, “but in my ears rings the exceeding bitter cry of poor little sixteen-year-old Alma, ‘I’ve found it doesn’t pay to tell the truth.’”3

  Add to that he was fed on “offal” (presumably chitlins, or pig’s intestines), even though Lawrence had visited the family in England and knew an Englishman would not “be expected to eat such garbage,” but it was all in tune with what he called the “mean malice of this hag.” What can you do with suffering? Turn it into art. Crowley got his revenge on Birdie in his Simon Iff story.

  Perhaps fortified by XI° devotions of “Glory to God!” with Titusville prostitute “Maddie” on March 5, and not being an entirely ungrateful visitor, Crowley, by exercise of will, held back a bad frost that would otherwise have destroyed the family’s groves.

  March 6. Threatened severe frost. I averted same, to repay my cousin for his hospitality. The Operation was very remarkable. I went out at noon, in bitter cold and high wind; and I willed. I then slept very deeply for three hours, and woke in still, warm weather, with the sun shining. The forecasts had given several days of cold; and forecasts in America are very different to those in England; they rarely go wrong.4

  Crowley spent his remaining time in Florida finishing off The Butterfly Net, editing O.T.O. religious rituals, and deepening his understanding of his grade. Then, on the night of Wednesday, March 28, Crowley received a letter from Frater Fiat Pax (“Let there be Peace”); that is, O.T.O. treasurer George Macnie Cowie, in London. Crowley’s eyes darted across the letter’s contents with mounting alarm.

  It was only on Saturday last that I [Cowie] learned the cause of the recent action of the authorities, and of which I was in absolute ignorance. It has come as a severe shock. I assume you know, though you could not have meant that use to be made of your stuff. I learn that it is only my known probity of character etc. etc. which has satisfied the authorities, etc. Otherwise, I have no doubt that we should have been closed down . . . until you vindicate yourself, as promised me, and can return to England, etc.5

  The authorities had informed Cowie that the British Order Head was a traitor, working for the Germans in America. The action referred to was a police “bust” of the O.T.O.’s meeting rooms, 93 Regent Street in London’s West End. That the Order’s Outer Head, Theodor Reuss, was a German, also (as it happened) involved in his country’s clandestine activities, was no help. Present at the bust, Mary Davies, lodge master and fortune-telling “spiritist,” was arrested, it being illegal to ask questions of the departed lest military secrets be inadvertently revealed.

  Presumably ignorant of the fact that his name had been bandied about the Home and Foreign Offices since the previous June, or that a Scotland Yard representative had interviewed his Aunt Annie in Croydon, Crowley wondered whether the fuss was belated action stimulated by Everard Feilding, at Crowley’s request in 1915, to convince the Germans that Crowley really was persona non grata in England. If so, the plan had backfired calamitously. Crowley may not have known that Feilding had been in the Middle East for more than a year on intelligence work.

  Flabbergasted at what looked like Crowley’s treachery, Cowie, as treasurer, intended to sell off all O.T.O. property, including Crowley’s house at Boleskine (mortgaged in the British Order’s name), whose location had a place in O.T.O. ritual as the Order’s “Kaaba,” or orientation. Financial plans, agreed upon with Cowie shortly before leaving for the United States in 1914, were blown asunder—this on top of everything else!

  Crowley confided to his diary:

  A new and powerful impulse arrived last night, a letter from Fiat Pax. The Stupids have misunderstood my whole attitude, and raised trouble. Now I go direct to Washington to straighten this out; if I fail this time to get them to listen to sense, at least I can go to Canada and force them to arrest me. My hand is therefore at last upon the lever.6

  Crowley quit Titusville at 8:03 a.m. on March 29, possibly for the British embassy in Washington. It seems likely that a key, surviving document from the period belongs to Crowley’s efforts to get a Washington contact, or co
ntacts, to put the “Stupids” in London right about his “attitude,” and about his attempts to secure backing from Guy Gaunt for intelligence beneficial to the Allies. It may also be the case that Crowley was already actively cooperating with William Wiseman’s MI1c networks but that, to protect their intelligence loop (one must always assume the possibility that other loops have been subverted by the enemy), Crowley’s actual position had not been conveyed to London—this would make sense—and further, British Naval Intelligence was not lending its information (via Feilding) on Crowley to Mansfield Cumming (“C”) in “Military Intelligence,” soon to become the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). As Cumming had good working relations with Basil Thomson, Head of Special Branch at Scotland Yard, it should have been, in theory, a relatively straightforward matter to get Cumming to request of Thomson that the Home and Foreign Offices “leave off” Crowley, and this seems to have occurred at some point before Crowley returned openly and uninhibitedly to England in 1919.

  THE AFFIDAVIT

  Crowley’s typescript affidavit, subtitled “Memorandum of My Political Attitude since August 1914,” reviews his motive and his activities since 1914. He first deals with “Motive,” making it clear that he is not in fact Irish nor has anything in common with Germans.

  My parents on both sides come of families resident in England for over 300 years. I was born and educated in Great Britain. My home is there. My family and property (both personal and real) are there. My business is there.

  I have never been to Germany, except to pass through it on my way to or from Russia, Scandinavia, or Switzerland. I speak very little German, scarce enough to talk to waiters and guides! And I cannot read even a newspaper. I have no German friends whatever, save one with whom I correspond on religious matters. I have met many German tourists. I dislike their manners, their habits, and their language. I have nothing to hope from Germany. I could not and would not live there. There is therefore no possible motive for any disloyal action on my part.7