Correspondence from J.F.C. Fuller to Aleister Crowley

 

 

 

 

89 Overstrand Mansions

Battersea Park. S.W.

 

 

May 2nd 1911

 

 

Dear Crowley:

 

For biographical purposes I have little doubt your letter of Sunday last is an interesting document, but from a common sense rational point of view it might have emanated from a raving maniac. If you wish to hooroosh down on a fixed bayonet, like a howling dervish, well good, it really is no business of mine.

     

Up to October last we were, I think, intimate friends, subsequent cooling off is surely of your making by refusing to stand by your own better judgment, as well as any advice—viz: to prosecute the Looking Glass for criminal libel. Your Waterloo [illegible] the day you dropped the prosecution, but you differ from Napoleon in that you ran away directly the first gun was pointed at you: you cannot hope to rally your rabble in the defiles of [illegible]. Through your own folly you now find yours self at St. Helena; it may be a serious thing for you but your friends are perhaps to be congratulated.

     

I am extremely sorry that Jones [George Cecil Jones] [illegible] be the sufferer for your want of pluck. He lost, not because the enemy used fair means or foul, but because his own case was shockingly got up. Outside the actual costs of the case I do not think he loses much, for modern journalism is so constructed that unless you happen to be a Crippen or a Home Secretary, your identity, within a week, is lost in a Nirvana of senseless sensational headlines.

 

Yours

 

J.F.C. Fuller

 

P.S. I said the other day I admired your works. I do: but you have never written so fine a line as this of Blake's—"a little mooney night and silence."

 

 

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