Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  EVA TANGUAY

  Crowley’s Confessions account of this period elicits a certain confusion, as if he’d begun to “lose the plot” somewhat. Luckily he had his Chokmah day rationalizations to add structure to teetering chaos. He wrote of three symbolic “scorpions” on the Magus’s mystic journey through the symbolic desert: Dorothy Troxel (Wesrun), Marie Lavroff, and “supreme artist,” Eva Tanguay. How America’s greatest star of vaudeville got involved in Greenwich Village’s occult naissance is unclear. We only know that she was back in New York and between theatrical engagements in May. What is also not clear, according to Crowley’s own account, is whether he dealt with the scorpions as he should have, implying that Amalantrah had a plan for the feminine triumvirate that he did not take seriously enough.

  Hugely popular sensational solo singing and performing personality Eva Tanguay (1878–1947) spent her first six years in Quebec, before the family moved to Holyoke, Massachusetts, whence Eva embarked on a career in performing arts that at its height around 1910 brought her as much as $3,500 a week, an enormous sum, which she spent lavishly. Her energetic songs and frenetic dance routines were whimsical paeans to devil-may-care liberties, earning her the soubriquet the “I don’t care girl” after hit song “I don’t care,” which you can hear on YouTube. The Tanguay broad humor and libertarian, down-to-earth sexuality paved the way for Mae West and many others, and Crowley recognized her genius in an enthusiastic article in April 1918’s edition of the International, his last. Surely, she never had an admirer so ardent, so keen to venerate her in the pantheon of Art.

  The American Genius is unlike all others. The “cultured” artist, in this country, is always a mediocrity. . . . The Genius is invariably a man without general culture. It seems to stifle him. The true American is, above all things, FREE; with all the advantages and disadvantages that that implies. His genius is a soul lonely, desolate, reaching to perfection in some unguessed direction. It is the Fourth-Dimensional Component of force. It always jars upon the people whose culture is broad and balanced and rooted in history. . . .

  Eva Tanguay is the perfect American artist. She is alone. She is the Unknown Goddess. She is ineffably, infinitely, sublime; she is starry chaste in her colossal corruption. In Europe men obtain excitement through Venus, and prevent Venus from freezing by invoking Bacchus and Ceres, as the poet bids. But in America sex excitement has been analyzed; we recognize it to be merely a particular case of a general proposition, and we proceed to find our pleasure in the wreck of the nervous system as a whole, instead of a mere section of it. The daily rush of New York resembles the effect of cocaine; it is a universal stimulation, resulting in a premature general collapse; and Eva Tanguay is the perfect artistic expression of this. She is Manhattan, most loved, most hated, of all cities, whose soul is a Delirium beyond Time and Space. Wine? Brandy? Absinthe? Bah! Such mother-milk is for the babes of effete Europe; we know better. Drunkenness is a silly partial exaltation, feeble device of most empirical psychology; it cannot compare with the adult, the transcendental delights of pure madness. (I suppose I ought to couch these remarks in the tone of an indictment; but though the literary spirit is willing, the fountain pen is weak.) Why titillate one poor nerve? Why not excite all together? Leave sentiment to Teutons, passion and romance to Latins, spirituality to Slavs; for us is cloudless, definite, physiological pleasure!

  Eva Tanguay is—exactly and scientifically—this Soul of America. She steps upon the stage, and I come into formal consciousness of myself in accurate detail as the world vanishes. She absorbs me, not romantically, like a vampire, but definitely, like an anaesthetic, soul, mind, body, with her first gesture. She is not dressed voluptuously, as others dress; she is like the hashish dream of a hermit who is possessed of the devil. She cannot sing, as others sing; or dance, as others dance. She simply keeps on vibrating, both limbs and vocal chords, without rhythm, tone, melody, or purpose. She has the quality of Eternity; she is metaphysical motion. She eliminates repose. She has my nerves, sympathetically irritated, on a razor-edge which is neither pleasure nor pain, but sublime and immedicable stimulation. I feel as if I were poisoned by strychnine, so far as my body goes; I jerk, I writhe, I twist, I find no ease; and I know absolutely that no ease is possible. For my mind, I am like one who has taken an overdose of morphine and, having absorbed the drug in a wakeful mood, cannot sleep, although utterly tired out. And for my soul? Oh! Oh!—Oh! “Satan prends pitié de ma longue misère!”*173

  I could kill myself at this moment for the wild love of her—(Love? It is Poison! I say the love of her)—that sets my soul ablaze with fire of hell, and my nerves shrieking; at my left hand is my eighth Absinthe, and at my right a nearby empty ounce bottle of cocaine; I am using this combination of drugs as sedative, not as stimulant. She is the one woman whom I would marry—oh sacrament and asymptote of blasphemy! There is a woman of the Ukraine, expert in Mystic Vice, coming to destroy me body and soul, in an hour’s time; to make of me a new Mazeppa. But I know that she will not absolve me nor assuage me. I shall still writhe in the flames of my passion for America—for Eva Tanguay.13

  At which the writer lapsed into a rhapsody of French exclamations of desire closing on a swoon of love’s conquest. Whether literature was realized in physical passion, no history records, but when some six years later he considered Eva’s place in his life, he decided her “self-worship” had spoiled things. Eva appears by acronym in the Rex record but not in person as assistant.

  Eva was at the time going through a protracted divorce from accompanist John W. Ford, who vigorously contested her affidavit, filed in Chicago the previous December. This did not stop Crowley, of course. The first reference to Eva in the Rex record occurs on May 10, 1918, when a sex-magick operation with Roddie was dedicated to “Success through Eva.” On the twelfth Crowley asked Amalantrah for a “geometric figure” of his—presumably intended—relations with her; on the eighteenth he asked the wizard for Eva’s magical number. Sex magick with Roddie again on the twenty-first: to marry “E.T.” A week later, similarly, this time for Eva Tanguay’s “favour.”

  Fig. 31.2. Hot Stuff: Eva Tanguay in The Wild Girl (Selznick Pictures, October 1917)

  Amalantrah’s advice concerning three “Dragons” on June 3 obviously applies to the “scorpions” since Crowley summed up the advice as “an astonishingly good description of Darola [Eva’s magical name, revealed by Amalantrah on May 18], Wesrun [Troxel] and Olun [Marie].”14 The wizard used Chinese trigrams with numerical equivalents to delineate the dragons and what to do with them. Thus, the first, “Bold Woman”: treat with humility and integrity, but also flatter; second, “Docility”: marry; third, “Pleasure—still water”: maintain harmony, satisfaction. The problem is that it is not clear which dragon was which. Eva might have been first or second dragon. Crowley hoped to redeem Dorothy Troxel from a state of fundamental confusion, she being the “maid” or virgin, of Crowley’s trio, with Marie the “wife” and Eva the “whore.”

  It would appear the “whore” did not stick around Crowley’s circle for much longer as her name slips from the record. She had a pressing theatrical career and valued her personal freedom highly, as her filing for an increasingly acrimonious divorce indicates. If Crowley did raise the issue of marriage with her, it could have been his undoing; or, possibly, it was that he did not offer her marriage. Crowley never let on what the “great miss” was that he thought he’d made as regards his relations with the three women. And Eva probably didn’t care.

  A new arrival into the Beast’s lair appeared on June 9. Fresh faced and cheeky, Midshipman Cecil Frederick Russell (1897–1987), from Annapolis’s naval academy, had been inspired by Crowley’s International account of the “Revival of Magick.” It was his twenty-first birthday, and he celebrated by signing the AA probationer’s oath. Crowley chose his motto, “Genesthai,” Greek for “to have been born,” in the sense of spiritual becoming. That evening, C. S. Jones and wife, Ruby, assisted Crowley in rushing Russell thro
ugh the O.T.O.’s first three degrees. Crowley had high hopes for Russell, seeing that he possessed willpower, devil-may-care energy, and native intelligence. He also rather fancied the “sailor boy” and, according to Russell, made abortive homosexual moves on him after the war when Crowley invited Russell to his experimental Thelemic community at Cefalù, Sicily. In 1922, Russell founded the “Choronzon Club” in Chicago, its secret inner name being the “Gnostic Body of God.” While marketing Crowley’s books and teachings, Russell, like Jones, went increasingly his own way and attempted to sell an anti-Crowley series of articles to the Hearst Press in September 1922.*174

  The Amalantrah operation wound up in the middle of June, with Roddie feeling “fucked out” generally, a condition that by the twenty-third had degenerated into a temporary “Vision of the Demon Crowley.”15 This was Crowley’s standard expression for something that occasionally overcame acquaintances or followers. Crowley maintained that he had no wish to dominate others’ freedom, but certain persons’ deeper fears could be triggered into involuntary projection upon him, which, given his offbeat wavelength, philosophy, strangely spiritual vibe, and apparently fearless, unrestrained, and psychedelically tolerant psyche, is not very surprising. He might have entertained an “enlightened” view of the word Satan, and a positive accommodation of “pagan” antiquity, but for most people, the first absorbed meaning of those words went very deep to become synonymous with fear of evil, disintegration, punishment, or the abysmal unknown per se. Most got over it; some never quite did, or do. Beast and Camel agreed to break up the menage, while remaining in touch, and when Crowley began his “Great Magical Retirement” on July 19, she joined him early on, bringing supplies, goodwill, hugs, and jugs.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Island

  It is not clear when Crowley first met Hearst yellow journalist and proto-Hemingway literary personality, William B. Seabrook (1864–1946), but acquaintance had blossomed into friendship by mid 1918. Whether Seabrook’s employer’s isolationist, anti-British, and soft-on-Germans stance influenced Crowley’s interest in the Greenwich Village habitué is unknown, but it was pro-German Frank Harris who introduced them. And it was Seabrook who provided Crowley with canoe and tent, with which elementary accoutrements the Magus began paddling some 90 miles up the Hudson through New York State in the general direction of Staatsburg on July 19 for his “Great Magical Retirement.” He had the princely sum of two dollars and twenty-five cents, and the mind-set of Prince Gautama voluntarily quitting “luxury” for penniless Nirvana. Except, as far as we know, the founder of Buddhism was not spying on the side.

  Two days before Crowley’s modest departure upstream, Attorney General Alfred Becker summoned him to offices at the six-story brick Murray Hill Hotel on Park Avenue, between 40th and 41st Streets, close to Grand Central.*175 Operating in a Gothic nest below the hotel’s castellated corner towers, Becker was hot on the trail of German attempts to exploit firebrands sparking off the Russian Revolution in subversive plots. Manhattan’s Russian consulate was a hive of competing factions, reflecting Moscow and Petrograd’s power struggle. According to Spence, Marie Lavrova (or Lavroff) was ward to Apollonarii Semenovskii, linked to Russian counterintelligence, assigned by Kerenskii’s Russian provisional government to New York’s consulate general.1

  Department of Justice, Bureau of Investigation agents were out to bust a group of female agents with Russian links working for Germany. One such was Russian-Jewish Despina Dawidovitch Storch, in touch with “corrupt Russians” also being spied upon by Semenovskii and by Crowley’s friend anti-tsarist and anti-Bolshevik Ivan Narodny. Spence observed that the B.I., led by Superintendent Charles de Woody, discovered Storch’s spying on munitions shipments shortly after Crowley encountered Lavrov in late 1917. Storch’s operation infiltrated, she was picked up in March 1918. Having named accomplices Baroness von Seidlitz and Maria de Victorica, Storch promptly died of mysterious causes in custody.

  On July 17, Becker’s agents questioned Crowley2 about the Propaganda Kabinett and his part in Viereck’s schemes, exhibiting particular interest in Viereck’s correspondent Edward Rumley, pro-German editor of the New York Evening Mail.3*176

  Crowley’s Confessions gives a very fine description of the difficulties encountered ascending the Hudson by canoe, a task “not so simple as it sounds.”4 Some 25 miles south of Esopus Island, his destination, Crowley ran into a perilous squall, which took him all his native sense to survive, reaching the shore in darkness at Newburgh, a town straddling both sides of the broad river, joined by a ferry. Crowley makes light of the denouement of the adventure, which Spence thinks more significant.

  Having become acquainted by helpful boatmen with the kind old captain of the boat club, Crowley, deeply sunburned with an inch of beard and looking like a ruffian, was introduced to an Englishman. Amazingly, wealthy businessman Jonathan T. Whitehead, owner of a summer home on the Hudson, was acquainted with Crowley’s aunt Annie, having known her when he worked at a school in Coventry, Warwickshire. He also had good connections with New York’s consulate, which makes Spence think the chance too improbable to be chance at all. Whitehead later visited Crowley at his camp on Esopus Island, a long strip bounded by rocks, low cliffs, and creeks, bringing with him prawns, which Crowley had just dreamed about. “If Crowley needed a cut-out to stay in contact with New York, Whitehead fit the bill perfectly.”5 Spence has another theory to explain, at least in part, Crowley’s choice of the Newburgh-Poughkeepsie-Staatsburg area.

  On July 9 assistant secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt went to Europe on a U.S. destroyer. Arriving in England, he was guest of N.I.D. head Admiral “Blinker” Hall, who showed Roosevelt around British Naval Intelligence, Roosevelt having cooperated with Guy Gaunt and Norman Thwaites before the United States entered the war. While Roosevelt was in Europe, N.I.D. officer Guy Varley Rayment, with an admiralty brief for intelligence on Indian sedition, was a recent arrival to New York. According to Spence, Rayment, who assisted with details of Roosevelt’s trip, chose the unlikely billet of Greenwich Village’s Hotel, on arriving on July 4. A favorite dining place of Crowley’s, the Brevoort,*177 frequented by the village’s bohemian literati, was close to West 9th Street.6

  Interestingly, the Brevoort features in a casual note written by Crowley in 1923 to follower Norman Mudd regarding what Mudd needed to know to understand an allusion in one of Crowley’s poems.

  I complained (1918 or 19) on the steps of the Brevoort Hotel that Kate Seabrook’s lips-rouge was permanently staining my glans penis. I did this in metaphor, of course, with all possible decorum of speech; but the cognoscenti understood, and the incident became famous all over New York.7

  Fig. 32.1. Esopus Island, in the Hudson River, upstate New York; (below) the northern tip of the island. Crowley camped at the island’s southern end. (photos by Gregory von Seewald, courtesy of James Wasserman)

  Kate Seabrook was W. B. Seabrook’s wife, a relationship mostly platonic, sufficiently so anyway for Seabrook to “lend” Kate to Crowley while Seabrook himself explored a compelling penchant for sadomasochistic fantasy sex games with fellow enthusiasts.

  Roosevelt’s home “Springwood,” in Hyde Park, was only 4 miles south of Esopus Island, on the Hudson’s eastern banks, between Poughkeepsie and Staatsburg, which combination of coincidences leads Spence to wonder, not entirely implausibly, whether Becker, who was familiar with Roosevelt through state politics, or Rayment, put Crowley on the case of watching Roosevelt’s home in his absence, lest a Münter-style attack assail Springwood as it had Jack Morgan’s Long Island residence three years earlier. Far-fetched perhaps, but, as we shall see, Crowley’s magical retirement was not all meditative R and R; he carried a revolver.

  When Crowley suffered slanderous attacks in the British press in 1922 and 1923, which led to personal catastrophe, he felt sufficiently confident that he would get a hearing from the U.S. Justice Department in his favor that he asked Norman Mudd to request that they comment in Crowley’s
defense as he could not afford the thousands necessary for a proper libel action in England. Mudd began by indicating how Crowley had penetrated Viereck and J. Bernard Rethy’s propaganda operation.

  He camouflaged himself in the most thorough-going way, taking, for instance, all possible steps to get the English press and his own personal friends in England to denounce in earnest his apparent treachery. His positive policy was to encourage the pro-German group in America to state quite openly its true moral principles and its real attitudes to the Government and people of the United States.

  He did this firstly by personal influence on Viereck, Rethy, and Münsterberg, partly by contributing articles in the Fatherland and partly by editing the International. After the entrance into the war of the US, he was in communication with your Department and supplied it with information as to the underground activities of many organizations. In particular he helped in the break-up of the group which worked under the name “The Agricultural Labor Bureau.”

  I have no doubt that you will have in your archives some dossier dealing with all the activities with Mr. Crowley in the period November 1914 to December 1919. Apart from these reports to your Department he was necessarily compelled to maintain the greatest secrecy as to his motives and proceedings, but I think that Mr. Otto Kahn knew a great deal about them and advised Mr. Crowley from time to time. I do not think that any other private citizen was ever in Mr. Crowley’s confidence in the matter.