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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Frank Harris
[undated: circa mid February 1924]
I have drifted back from a weekend at F[ontainbleau]. I want you to forgive me for everything. I am in a most extreme mental state. It is quite beyond language in the ordinary sense of the word, I can only say that I feel that I am being born. All my thoughts are analysed into apparently ultimate elements. Practical action beyond mechanical reactions to eating and sleeping is almost inhibited. I feel that I owe you pages of explanation of how things stand, and am too infantile to compose them. I can give no reason that my mind is not going entirely. I simply know that it is not.
I take a stimulant and make a violent effort to inform you that I will take Rusking to-morrow to either Hearst or the Times (Bertelli has just seen Hearst general manager passing through Paris on a vacation. Hearst is having "one of our pen fits of economy". Won't buy anything at the moment. B[ertelli] who likes several of my suggestions very much thinks they should be offered rather to magazines. I am writing to N. Hapgood with numerous suggestions including yours. I know him personally and hope for good results. I will also mention the matter to the N.Y. Times, but here arises the question as to whether they may not harbour rancor against you. I will let you know what they say.
My second operation has been put off till Sat the 16th so you must consider me semi-crippled till the 20th at the earliest. Te critical point is that I am really so helpless physically that I need someone to look after small necessities for me, and owing to that unexplained law of Nature which prevents people being in two or more places at once, that means that my right hand has to stay in my pocket instead of reaching to London and getting something out of someone else's.
Is there any real hope of your Prince making good? I could, thanks to the assistance of my right hand aforesaid do 100 useful things about the proper capitalisation of the paper. I could negotiate with all sorts of prominent people, but what with the drain on my time and the strain on my nerves especially in my present physical condition due to the eternal preoccupation about to-morrow's food I am rendered quite helpless. If I had 10,000 francs next week I could put things in quite decent order in a very few days, I feel sure.
I told you already how strange were the almost daily incidents that baulk the most promising plans in the most incomprehensible manner. I will quote just two incidents.
1. A sum of money is cabled to Tunis on Jan 10. Neither ourselves nor the sender (apparently) can get any information as to what has happened to this cash. We cannot even get a reply to urgent letters and telegrams who lives close to London and is a friend of 20 years standing.
2. An old friend turns up unexpectedly, about 3 weeks ago manifests the utmost sympathy and good will, lends me some money to go on with, regrets that it is not more and leaves Paris saying he will return in a fortnight and gives me an address to write to. (He is connected with the G[erman] bank of which I wrote. He is my Pandarus with the G.[erman Bank]. He has not returned. We get no answer to four letters and two telegrams. One letter is returned by the Post Office. Of the rest we have no news.
Really I can't help feeling sometimes that I have got into a world where the laws of cause and effect no longer obtain. It is of course easy to think of any number of explanations for any one incident of this kind. But when the same lack of rationality applied to all of them the law of probability gives undoubtedly a sinister laugh and declines further responsibility in the matter.
Just got another rotten go of dyspnoea. Must break off. Hope to report definite good or bad news in 48 hours.
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