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Correspondence from Norman Mudd to Montgomery Evans
Tunisia Palace Motel, TUNIS December 26, 1923.
Montgomery Evans 2nd,
Dear Sir,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Mr. Crowley has suggested that I should write a covering letter to his. This is perhaps necessary since our material dispositions are at present mainly in my hands. I will make therefore one or two brief notes.
1. As regards addresses.
It is possible that by the time you get these letters Mr. Crowley will be at Nice. Frank Harris wrote about 10 days ago from the address (c/o The American Express Cp., 2 Rue du Congrès, Nice) asking Mr. Crowley to stay with him for a time. This is the actual programme, and I am straining every resource merely to enable him to get from Tunis to Nice. If I can do this I shall feel that I have won a desperate battle, but for the moment we are fast here. It is still true, I am afraid, that our best postal address is
No! for a letter to Crowley himself c/o Mons. Bourcier 50 Rue Vavin Paris is better.
I will arrange as best I can with him how to forward letters with the least possible delay.
2. Mr. Crowley refers to "proper legal action". When I get to London, if ever I do so alive, all this London business is likely to be in my care, and I want to say that there is no question of taking expensive legal action of any kind. The vitally urgent matter is to get safe possession of this old Chiswick Press stock, which is in constant peril owing chiefly to our enforced absence from England. There is no possibility of contesting our legal ownership of the goods. A sum of perhaps £100 is required to meet a fantastic, if not dishonest, demand for the alteration of the imprints of the old firm. No suit is necessary, and the claim itself will probably not be maintained. As regards attacks, by the gutter-press, on Mr. Crowley's honour, he has, during his absence from England, been grossly libelled several times. But the English law of libel is so insane that I shall not waste time or money in seeking legal redress. The plan is to publish positive truth, rather than fight shadows. In particular, we want to get published the great Autobiography [The Confessions of Aleister Crowley], and two or three books of work done in the past five years. Several publishers are interested, in all this work, but we must have a little working capital; best, of course, a business partner. However, the chief point is that we are not going to spend any resources we get on legal suits.
3. I hope my last letter reached you safely. I don't seem to have mentioned that Mr. Crowley has in storage (London, Naples, Palermo, Cefalù) some hundreds of unique paintings and drawings which have never been exhibited and which represent a new branch of his genius. He discovered his power to paint, somewhat in the spirit of the Chinese primitives (Tang and Sung), during the last two years of his stay in America. A small exhibition of this early work produced a tremendous sensation in artistic circles in New York. Quite a small capital would enable us to collect his artistic opera from the various places where they are stored, and exhibit them in London and Paris. One unique feature of those exhibitions would be the depth and completeness of the exposition of the spiritual meaning of these pictures which Mr. Crowley, both as Poet and Prophet, could give in words. It is an achievement of twofold art which only Blake has hitherto attempted.
Here again you could help us and mankind enormously by letting this fact be known to any person of wealth and leisure who is interested in bringing artistic work of original genius to the notice of the cultured public.
Love is the law, love under will.
Yours sincerely,
Norman Mudd (Secretary)
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