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Correspondence from Norman Mudd to Montgomery Evans
Tunisia Palace Motel, TUNIS December 23, 1923.
Montgomery Evans 2nd, 900 Dekalb Street, Norristown, Pennsylvania.
Dear Sir,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
This is just a preliminary letter to acknowledge the receipt of your most interesting letter of Nov. 30. I am at present acting as Mr. Crowley's "nomadic" secretary, during his withdrawal into the Tunisian Sahara where he is recuperating from the tremendous strain of writing the 600,000 words of his Autobiography—or rather Autohagiography, affectionately known as "The Hag" [The Confessions of Aleister Crowley]. I am hoping to see Crowley back in Tunis by the end of the year. He will be more than pleased to read your letter, and will write you himself no doubt. If his return is delayed I will write you myself more fully. For the moment I will give you the first few items of information that come into my mind which I think may interest you.
1. I enclose a list of Crowley's Works complete, almost to date.
2. There is a very remarkable stock of nearly all of these, in all forms—editions de luxe, first editions, Mss. etc. in the charge of our American colleague
Mr. C. Stansfeld Jones [Charles Stansfeld Jones], P.O. Box 141, Chicago.
This stock was specially selected by Mr. Crowley, and taken out from London to America in 1914 for the consideration of American bibliophiles and connoisseurs.
Mr. Jones is anxious to sell of course, and will be delighted to let you overhaul his stock, and to take what pleases you.
3. There is a similar even bigger stock in London, stored with the Chiswick Press. I cannot get access to this till I can get to London.
4. As regards unpublished work—work of the last 5 years, which represents Crowley's highest genius, there is no reason, I think, why you should not have bonus typescripts of any of these provided you are prepared to go through the trouble and expense of having them made. But do come over to London this summer and look A.C. up. Very little can be done, or even profitably told, by correspondence, even if we were not all so dreadfully busy.
It will be possible to find Crowley pretty easily during all the summer of 1924 through almost any one of the following persons: I give them in order of probably utility.
α) Mr. J. G. Bayley [James Gilbert Bayley], 37 A Tressillian Road, Brockley, London S.E. 4.
β) Mr. E. H. Saayman [Eddie Saayman], New College, Oxford.
γ) Crowley's lawyers:— Parker Garret & Co. St. Michael's Rectory, Cornhill, London.
δ) The English publishers of the "Fiend." [The Diary of a Drug Fiend] Wm. Collins Sons & Co. 48 Pall Mall. London.
ε) The Hon. Ralph Shirley, Rider & Son. 8-11 Paternoster Row. London. E.C.4.
ζ) Mme. Aimée Gouraud, 20 rue Viveuse, Paris.
Also the following persons usually know his address. Mr. C. S. Jones, above mentioned. Mr. J. T. Windram [James Windram], P.O. Box 613, Johannesburg, South Africa. Mr. W.B. Seabrook [William Seabrook], International Feature Service, 246 West 59th Street, New York.
(I may say that Mr. Seabrook intends to come over in May and back A.C. up wherever he may be. He was Crowley's host for a time in New York and Georgia and is one of his best friends.)
Finally, letters for Crowley will reach him if addressed to Villa Santa Barbara, Cefalù, SICILY—the old "Abbey of Thelema" (Cefalù is, of course, historically, the old Telepylus of the "Odyssey".) But for the next month or two, the best postal address is c/o Bayley, as above.
(I have dropped notes to Bayley and Jones in connection with your letter.)
I hope to establish a permanent central office in London at the beginning of the year; and Crowley himself is not likely for some years to be more than an hour or two's journey from either London or Paris. Fontainebleau is his most probable home.
I think I will risk A.C.'s displeasure by telling you frankly that his inaccessibility and the difficulty of procuring his works are both due simply to his poverty. He has been in very difficult material and physical conditions for 10 years past. The trouble is that he is, notably, perhaps unbusinesslike, and has never been able to arrange sanely, either for the sale or the publication of his work. This would, of course, in any case have been difficult owing to its uniquely original and non-popular nature. (The "Fiend" was strictly a pot-boiler. He wrote it in 27 days for £25 when he was practically starving. It does not represent his present genius.) This pressure of unpublished work is frightfully heavy and discouraging. Do you happen to know any person of wealth who might be interested in publishing (or printing) Crowley's work, as you are in collecting it? I doubt if there's much money to be made out of it, during the present generation, at least. But we hardly want that, primarily; we just want to get it worthily printed for the use of that not very large public that can appreciate it.
If you know any such person, someone like Otto Kahn, say, you could do us (and, I think, humanity) a tremendous service by interesting him in our problem in any way you feel moved to do. The problem is getting pretty desperate. We came out of Tunis to get the "Hag" written, as a contract with Collins who published the "Drug Fiend". They have come within an ace of smashing us, materially and spiritually, by crying off their contract in the end. "Both quantity and quality transcend their scope." This is true, of course; for no such self-revelation has ever been made in the history of literature. It is essentially a book for a private edition de luxe, to begin with. Afterwards, no doubt, a much larger public will sell their shirts to get it.
I wish to goodness you could read it. I've got it in a portmanteau, not six feet away, as I write, by no means so safe as it should be; and I have not the ghost of a notion, so far, how to get it safely printed, and into the hands of those who want it for their use and delight.
Love is the law, lover under will.
Ever yours sincerely,
Norman Mudd (Secretary)
postal address:— c/o Mr. J. G. Bayley. 37 A Tressillian Road. Brockley, London, S.E.4.
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