|
Correspondence from David Garnett to Montgomery Evans
Birrell & Garnett 30 Gerrard St. London W.1.
Feb. 25, 1924.
Dear Montgomery Evans,
Thank you very much for your letter and all the kind offices you have done for us. I think we shall let Cabell stand for a bit. Perhaps he will have something more in our line later on. About Aleister Crowley. I send you a volume of verse.
I have met the man and didn't like him. He used to be a mountaineer and a friend of Oscar Cyriase. He also was a Rosicrucian and now is the most eminent exponent of Black Magic in Europe. He eats whole bales of hashish. Opium, cocaine, heroin, morphine, etc. are to him what lucky strikes or gold flake are to us—that's the legend. He feeds his disciples on drugs and they lose their will power and die in squalor. He crucifies cats at midnight and gibbering ghosts mock his terrified guests with demonic laughter. That is the legend.
Actually all I know is that he had an abbey [Abbey of Thelema] in Sicily at Taomino not long ago, and that a young man called Loveday [Raoul Loveday] went out there from Oxford.
Loveday was a desperate character. He once climbed onto his college at night, drunk, and impaled himself on the railing where he hung for a couple of hours head downwards. He was picked off the spikes and recovered. He took up with Betty May—an old friend of mine—who used to be a drug fiend, but after five years of doping gave it up of her own free will. She is a remarkable character who has literally hurled money away whenever she has had it. She has been starving off and on for some years.
Loveday was interested in Black Magic and went out to Taomino with Betty. After a few weeks Loveday dies and Crowley refused to have a doctor and then tried to detain Betty. However she got away and came back to with a wonderful story which delighted the young men at Oxford where she lived in glory until she got bored—or they did.
Crowley was reported to have been kicked out of Sicily by the Italian govt. But he is now in Italy. Crowley is bald as an egg and looks rather the worse for wear. He wrote a shocker about a year ago about drug fiends called "The Diary of a Drug Fiend." Beresford accepted it for Messrs. Collins and it was violently attacked. After selling out all they could for a week Collins withdrew it. He is a pious fellow, a stationer, who has got himself made a knight.
Crowley has of course written a number of volumes most of which he published himself.
He has a hold over a woman called Mary Butts whom I have met, and she is now in Italy with him. (He always has a colony of disciples). If she returns I will find out something more definite.
Interest in Crowley in England is confined almost entirely to Oxford as the Loveday affair made a sensation there.
There is also a certain interest in Bohemian circles particularly if they go in for drugs or black magic. I believe Crowley does know something about the history etc. of the Black Art and isn't a charlatan.
But though I'm always ready to hear any dreadful story I can't feel much interest in Crowley as when I met several years ago—in 1913—I though him a horrible fellow and time has not effaced the impression. But I scarcely spoke to him or he to me.
Yours ever,
David Garnett
|