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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Gerald Kelly
Calcutta.
31/10/05 [31 October 1905]
My dear Gerald.
You are certainly magnificent and have scored all round.
At last (from what Rose [Rose Kelly] tells me) you seem to have taken another step on the path which leads to glory and the grave. It is well that you should act in this Masterly fashion; what you have done I can't say I know, but it seems to have made people angry.
For all that you are wrong in sticking to Paris: you ought to be spending your nervous energies on savagery, rather than on the purely false culture of the 'intellectual' prigs. What we have both failed to see hitherto is that we are prigs, worse—because more knowledged—than the crowd that bumsucked Schwob, and that still bumsucks Rodin [Auguste Rodin].
You are, I think, worse than I, ostensibly at least; for I have pretended to despise my art, while you have always worshipped it. Though our speech has reversed these roles, this was the truth.
Now Shaw is quite right; people who have achieved a true style are people who have had something to say and were mad to say it. But the something has been assimilated and become instinctive therefore uninteresting or rejected, therefore absurd. Hence the style is the permanent truth as you have always said. Your mistake was in not seeing the cause. And thus the ridiculous Milton and Bunyan are masters as well as the admirable Huxley; and the filthy minded Baudelaire [Charles Baudelaire] as the virginal Crowley.
Poems and Ballads is an orgasm; the later work a wet dream. You can't paint a picture without muscular exertion, though nothing is so calm as a picture. If you try to obtain that calm by going to sleep, you don't get it. Lust after a woman and her imperfections are beautiful; admire her, and she becomes at once a dowdy. A lily achieves beauty by trying to grow. In fact we should paint and write by the New Method.
I suppose you have heard of my Kangchen [Kangchenjunga] trip. It was good fun, made me fit, and I got through some hard reading. Tell Miss Bruce I am hard on her track—for I read Kant's Prolegomena recently and am about to star the Critique of Pure Reason.
My views are changing in many ways—it is in a very limited sense that I can call myself a Buddhist.* If you have not read Burton's Kasidah, do—even if it costs you an effort. It seems to me pretty well the ultimate of human wisdom, as distinguished from my own advance upon the possible.
I wish Eckenstein [Oscar Eckenstein] would wire whether he is coming out or not. In the meanwhile, I hope to go to Burma and Persia: the former for Allan [Allan Bennett], the latter for the book of verses etc with Rose and Lilith to sing in the bloody wilderness.
I seem to myself much more settled and solid: the actual keeping up my end in the fight here has done me good in that way. But I have written damned little, bar a very fine pome on Kali.
Rangoon Nov 6. Too hot to worry to write more: so I send this. Love and luck.
Yrs.
A.C.
* [Note inserted later.] Rangoon Nov 6. Allan, however, had much widened his own views, so that if I am no Buddhist, he is none)
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