|
Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Gerald Kelly
Bol. [Boleskine] Foyers.
Aug 12 1903.
My dear G.
Your note touched me close. I will do what you desire, though I hope you may yet know me better.
If I must weary you, let it be my excuse that I cannot let pass your statement that Miss Gray was my mistress. She was never anything of the sort, nor within a million miles of it. I never wished it nor she.
Likewise you are utterly unjust to me in the motive you ascribe to my action of yesterday and to-day. It is grotesquely untrue. I may have been a pig-fancier in my youth; but for that very reason I should not attempt to make a sow's ear out of a silk purse. It is the ignorant that make such mistakes. I have been trying since I joined the G∴D∴ [Golden Dawn] in [18]'98 steadily and well to repress my nature in all ways. I have suffered much, but I have won, and you know it. Coffin-worms and their like are as much chips (as opposed to coins) to me as to you. I wanted to seal my victory with a very mighty blow. If I failed, it is of over-generosity, over-trust in your real friendship for me, which you have after all. There is such a place as Inverness, and an early train thither: don't think me Guido passportless and for you, don't let pleurisy get start of Providence.
Let me say one thing; even in so good a cause as yours there are limits to the liberties one should take with another's property. You are fond of appealing to Back [Ivor Back]: in this? Did your sister [Rose Kelly] want to hear the true history of my past life, she should have it in detail; not from prejudiced persons, but the cold drawn stuff of lawyers. And English does not always fail me.
If your worst wish came true, and we never met again, my remembrances of you with or without a beard would, as you say, be good enough to go on. But I am ambitious (like the ornithoryncus of Mrs. Malaprop) I hope one day to convince you that I am not only a clever (the 4 [?] have 'mentally deformed') man but a decent one and a good one. Why must nine tenth's of my life i.e. the march to Buddhism, go for nothing; the atrophied one hundred thousandth always spring up and choke me, and that in the house of my friends? For my method I ought to apologise; I had my reasons; but I told you precisely, and you might have seen the Ring, even if you distrusted the Book.
All luck, and the greatest place in the new generation of artists be yours,
So sayeth Aleister Crowley, always your friend, whatever he may do or say. Vale! till you Ave!
|