|
La Presse Paris, France 3 April 1903 (page 1 & 3)
RETURN FROM THE HIMALAYAS—A POET TRAVELER. At the Home of Monsieur Marcel Schwob—The Irish Poet Aleister Crowley— On the Mountains—At a Height of 8,000 Meters—Buddhist?
An old mansion in the rue Saint-Louis-en-l'île. one of those survivors from yesterday that once sheltered princes; today, it's a poet who survives under this roof, Monsieur Marcel Schwob, author of that beautiful translation of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, which was performed at Sarah's [Sarah Bernhardt] house.
A Hindu, bearing of a lantern of red glass, opens the door and introduces me in the drawing room, where the master of the house, entirely clean shaven, making his brilliant, ascetic eyes shine all the more, receives me; Monsieur Marcel Schwob interrupts a conversation with Monsieur Aleister Crowley to introduce us to one another.
Monsieur Aleister Crowley, with whom I was thus acquainted, thanks to Monsieur Marcel Schwob, is a being somewhat apart, in the world; an Irishman, glabrous, skinny and tall, who regards you with dreamy eyes and who speaks in the soft voice of his race, when they are poets; and Monsieur Crowley is a poet; he is also Buddhist; he is, finally, a traveler; but what a traveler! Monsieur Crowley had returned, quite simply, from seeing the Himalayas.
My conversation with Monsieur Crowley was fairly strained; my interlocutor expressing himself in rudimentary French; but Monsieur Marcel Schwob speaks admirable English, and he served as interpreter.
A POET SCIENTIST.
A poet, Monsieur Crowley, aged twenty-seven, first speaks with detachment about his "youth," when, he said, he was a disciple of Swinburne; he goes a lot further today; yesterday a symbolist, he became a scientist; I mean to say that he dreams of works where his poetry would be purged by scientific doctrines. He has already given us a Tannhaüser, whose legendary hero he imagined very differently to Wagner, that was a nebulous work, among others.
Currently, Monsieur Crowley is preparing a work in which he'll try hard to project thoughts that evoke the works of Rodin [Auguste Rodin]; thus he has written verses on the celebrated "Balzac" and here is Marcel Schwob's translation.
BALZAC
Gigantesque, enténébré de fer noir, Emmouflé, Balzac se dresse, et voit.—L’immense Dédain, Le Silence égyptiaque, la Maîtrise des Douleurs, Le Rire de Gargantua, secoue ou pacifie La stature ardente du Maître, vivide. Au loin, épouvanté. L'air frémit sur toute sa chair. En vain L’Incarné de la Comédie Humaine Enfonce aux orbites ombreux l’irradiation géniale de ses prunelles.
Epithalemes, Péans de naissance, Epitaphes S’inscrivent au mystère de ses lèvres. La triste Sagesse, la Honte méprisante, l'Agonie profonde, Gisent aus plis du manteau, pans de montagne et faces de cercueil. —Et la Pitié s’est blottie au coeur. L’âpre science étreint L’essentielle virilité. Balzac se dresse, et rit.
How had this poet, who, in these several verses appear to us, such as he is, a visionary, had the idea of climbing the highest mountains? Is it love of the heights? The bird sings only when perched on high . . . Must the poet wish to see the sky at its closest? Has he had the desire for altitudes, the obsession with summits; is this the "bitter science" which drives him towards the snowy peaks, where there is the "sad wisdom," or again. has he wished to feel "the air in a stupor shuddering on his flesh"?
"My father adored mountains," Monsieur Crowley told me. "I owe my love of peaks to him; as a child I climbed the summits of Ireland, then I went to the mountains of Scotland and Wales, of Switzerland and Austria and of Hungary; later I went to Mexico; I wanted, on the heights to see extraordinary things; the Mexican mountains are high; I climbed them very fast, I broke all the world's speed records. I wanted to do even more, that's why I left for the Himalayas."
—You are a sportsman, then?
IN THE HIMALAYAS.
—"Perhaps, I don't know. I desired to do the things everybody doesn't do; with five men and 200 coolies, I climbed the massif of Mustach in the Himalayas, a group situated on the borders of Turkestan and Baltistan; the highest peak is K2, known to the locals as Chogori; more than 8,000 meters high. I climbed there, the highest ascent possible in the world; in the Himalayas there's Gaurisankar which is 250 meters higher than Chogori, but it's inaccessible.
"To get to Chogori, you must get to Srinagar, the last town inhabited by Europeans; and to get to Srinagar you have seven days' march; after that, you march twenty-seven days until you get to the last village, Askole. After that you march fourteen days and reach the foot of the mountain; then you make your way by paths you carve out yourself, in the midst of deserts strewn with stones, among rare plants, you come to the glacier; nothing to eat; to drink only snow-water; the only living beast, the ibex, a kind of goat the color of stone, ravens and birds that resemble the partridge; it was summer when I was there: we had twenty degrees below zero during the night, and forty above in the sunshine.
"We had to eat wretched tinned food and sleep in sleeping bags.
"To get to the summit required climbing a further fifteen days; a raven and a butterfly had followed us to a peak in Mexico, already, I had seen a butterfly at 5,000 meters, fluttering on the snows."
—Did you suffer altitude sickness?
—"No, when one climbs slowly one doesn't suffer from the rarefaction of the air."
—Were you a long time on the mountain?
—"Sixty-eight days, between 5,000 and 8,000 meters, and amid snowstorms; the vistas were terrific; it was fine; it was grandiose; you couldn't help but admire it all hugely; in life's miseries, in the midst of savage and uncultivated Nature, one loses the aesthetic sense; the absolute concentration of the brain is on the question of life and health; think about our expedition, so close to the Equator, was almost an Artic expedition. We were fifteen days from life; one finds at the Pole the same physical conditions as the Himalayas."
—You had studied your itinerary?
—"I had no guide, but with our friends, we had organized the expedition methodically and scientifically. . . ."
—No one before you had seen Chogori?
—"Six years ago, an Englishman, Conway; but one had no idea how far he had climbed."
BUDDHIST.
Now Monsieur Crowley talked to me of his determinism. He is persuaded that "life is decided in advance"; that's why he's become a fervent Buddhist; he went on pilgrimage to Anurādhapura in Ceylon; one of his friends, Allan Bennett, has done more, having entered as a monk in a monastery; Monsieur Crowley would like to introduce the Buddhist religion into the West in its real and pure form, as practiced in Burma and Ceylon, reliant on the Pali Canon.
Monsieur Crowley's conversion is not only philosophical, it is religious and mystical. Perhaps even, one day, Monsieur Crowley might cease writing and become an apostle of the Buddha's doctrines.
And that Monsieur Crowley told me, with shuddering lips, and fevered eyes. Whilst Monsieur Crowley expressed his fervor for the Buddhist cult, I heard Monsieur Marcel Schwob insist on the sincerity of his conversion.
Has Monsieur Marcel Schwob, who returned to Ceylon, and who also went to Anurādhapura, returned to us, like Monsieur Crowley, a Buddhist?
I did not dare ask him. and I left, with curiosity unsatisfied, directed again to the street by the Hindu bearing a lantern, this time, with greenish hints.
-Fernand Hauser.
|