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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Montgomery Evans
Bankers Trust Company, 3-5 Place Vendôme, Paris.
December 25, 1926.
Dear M.E. 2:
Your letter of December 5th received on Christmas morning. I am very glad you are getting on better: I really hope the turn of the wheel has arrived.
I am glad you agree with me about a Buying-Back Fund.
Fuller [J.F.C. Fuller] [The Star in the West] can be sold at one dollar of seventy-five cents. Why not? The original publishing price was only 5 shillings, and the book was, of course, intended purely for advertisement, though, incidentally, the title was meant as an antithesis to the 'Star in the East', which afterwards developed into the Krishnamurti foolishness.
Generally speaking, I feet that I can rely on your discretion to fix prices. We want the stock in circulation, and we must be reasonable. The objection is to having it slaughtered.
I shall do my utmost to get some of the London stock available to send to you. The difficulty has been that £15, or so, was and is due on the storage, and we simply could not spare the money. That is why, just as soon as we get on our feet sufficiently to be able to indulge in ordinary expenses, everything should go like smoke.
I am glad to hear what you say about Samuels. I think he is an extraordinarily good man, and may be very useful indeed to the Work, even as he is one of the great pillars of Testimony. Incidentally, Miss Olsen in Chicago has a set of the Little Essays [Little Essays Toward Truth] which she thinks she can get published there. Please keep in touch.
I don't quite understand your question. What's the history of the World's Tragedy? Surely the Preface is sufficiently explicit. As to John Yarker, the report of the trial was copied from some official papers; it was fairly widely circulated a the time. But my latest advices are that Besant's [Annie Besant] campaign in the States has been a complete fizzle. I will write to a friend of mine who has been in the T[heosophical] S[ociety] for many years, and has probably quite a number of documents bearing on the subject, to send them along. You must understand that these lawsuits and controversies of one kind and another have been jogging along for something like 20 years. Mrs. Besant being an extremely clever politician, has opposed the minimum resistance to the attacks on her, and it is very hard to corner her. She would never give a definite answer about anything. She would advertise that she was going to do so, and then came out with a vast explosion of rhetoric in which anything whatever that she might have said was completely lost. She modelled herself, in fact, on Gladstone.
"Little Poems in Prose", 1,000 copies in sheets, was never issued. I had one copy put into a buckram case for my own use, but that was stolen or destroyed by Mudd [Norman Mudd].
About any possible journey of mine, I doubt whether your plans would work. New York is a very tiny village, and I should be almost sure to be recognized at once. It is easy enough to arrange all these matters, provided there is plenty of money to spare, and I think there is not much good talking about it until that happens.
To go back to Besant. It won't do at all for me to explode the bomb, if you want a bomb exploded. My role would be to calm the storm, and make a bridge for Besant to get back into good standing after her smash, on condition. But, as a matter of fact, I very much doubt whether she will last long enough to bother with. I gather that she is back in Europe or India, and she came without tambours or trompettes. In other words, with her tail between her legs.
Every best wish.
Yours ever,
Aleister Crowley
P.S. When do you expect to come to Europe.
PP.S. I cannot understand how it is that any graveyard does not contain a fairly good dossier about the Besant business. You must know plenty of newspaper men who would look up these things for you.
PPP.S. About the question of commissions, there seems to be some misapprehension. I never thought for a moment of depriving you of any commission if you wanted it. On the contrary, it would gratify me personally, and be much better business, if we could put you on a good salary, supposing that you were willing to accept one. That is another reason why we simply must find a capitalist to put up enough capital to keep us going for two or three years until the machine begins to run on its own momentum.
Germer [Karl Germer] often writes English which completely misinterprets his thoughts. On the occasion in question he said something about you demanding a heavy expense account which would eat up all the receipts, even if we could have done it at all, which we couldn't. I therefore wrote to that effect. As soon as I can find a backer, I shall arrange for agents of every branch to have drawing accounts.
Now that you understand pretty fully, as I feel that you do, the general situation, I don't see why you can't use your unquestionably persuasive tongue to acquire a capitalist. There are certainly a great many people going about only too glad to put up money, even if they had no idea of ever seeing any of it back, for the social kudos, or the sense of power;—not to mention, out of plain foolishness. And anyhow, if we had 10,000 thousand dollars to start, we could pay back the principle in a couple of years at the outside.
One further remark. In the meantime, as you seem to have enough to live on, and we have not! perhaps you wouldn't mind just crediting yourself with that commission, to be paid when brighter days shall dawn.
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