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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Gerald Kelly
[Undated: circa 1901]
O incomparable Gerald.
A thousand congratulations on your flight from Mecca. The cause and the effect are alike worthy of my illustrious boy! I hope you are now following the programme I laid out for you in the matter of the Q.L. and the various lady modifications of your mind.
I go to India to-morrow. Herewith all of B[oo]k I of O [Orpheus] save the living creatures. I must get a Zoology before I can write that. Also I shall go and sit in a jungle and hear what they say.
Did you see the Daily News? And the others? I am on ten pinnacles of fame all at once. And K.P. [Kegan Paul] go out of their way to tell me that Tann [Tannhäuser] (I have the proofs here now) is miles ahead of any of my other work. And we know Orphy [Orpheus] will be better still!
Hooray! Now for the drama! Why don't you come out with us to the nameless goal as artist to the expedition? Beardsleyesque sketches of natives and Hortonesque landscapes! You ask Eckenstein [Oscar Eckenstein]. He thinks you a decent artist—and the trip you would make twenty six times the man you are. You mustn't let him think that I urge him to admit you—I have no voice whatever in such a matter as per agreement we have made.
But if you think more of this, ask Eckenstein straight out and do it quickly. Your people wouldn't mind a couple of hundred to keep you out of the way in good hands and out of temptations for a year!
Later. Well as to Art. Your worthy letters tell me little or nothing of your own work—I hope it is rather from superabundance of material and not knowing where to begin. But I doubt it somehow. Now your devotion to literature and to Me is beyond praise were you any one else: but being a genius, it's in some ways a mistake—should be any how kept in most rigid subordination to the main thing. You're really lazier than I am in some ways, I believe, belief-baffling as such a statement may seem I've been down with malaria—expect a return to-night—and don't feel like writing letters.
I shall bank down my fires.
Yours ever.
A.C.
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