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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Gerald Yorke
55 Avenue de Suffren, Paris, VII
December 28th, 1928.
Care Frater:
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
I hope to get the Geomancy Box[1] to the model makers on Monday, expecting that your special sigils reach me by about then.
At the expense of the publication fund I had Mr. George H. Slocombe to lunch. He is the Paris representative of the Daily Herald. He thinks that the elections will show a fair equality between the Conservatives and Socialists, so that the little tail of Lloyd George will be able to wag the dog, more or less as the Irish did in the days of Parnell. He further agrees that our hearts are likely to be still further excoriated by the decease of our beloved monarch, and that the young Rehoboam will begin by cleaning out all the prehistoric Teutons who have been running the court for so long.
I give you this for what it is worth. It is the opinion of a very shrewd man, whose political judgments are curiously devoid of prejudice. By this, I mean that the fact of his being professionally of a given shade of opinion does not interfere with his independent judgment of probabilities.
I should not have bothered you with all this nonsense if it were not for the fact that he is dining tonight with a man named Frazier Hunt, who is Hearst's general man in Europe. He is called "Spike" Hunt because of his being unusually tall and thin. He comes from Indiana, and is said to be a very simple soul with a vocabulary not exceeding 2,000 words. He worries, for example as to what "pornography" means. Everyone he knows talks about it all the time, and wonders so much that he reminds one of the late John Keats who stood on his toes and he wondered and wondered, and he stood on his toes and he wondered.
Mr. Slocombe's information is that the aforesaid Mr. Frazier or Spike Hunt has been in Berlin for the past fortnight, and therefore could not have seen Ogden [C. K. Ogden], (whom I understand, is familiarly called "Og" in reverent memory of the late King of Bashan) during the week in which you assevrate that he was seeing him.
The aforesaid Hunt is leaving for London tomorrow morning, and (unless I am deceived) will have been prepared by Slocombe, in respect of the Memoirs [The Confessions of Aleister Crowley], for a favourable interview with this Og of Bashan.
I have to acknowledge with thanks the receipt of the typescripts of the parts of the Memoirs which Cape [Jonathan Cape publishing firm] had.
It appears that Cape made a perfect fool of himself by appealing to Jix[2]. It reminds me of Paul who might have been set at liberty if he had not appealed unto Caesar. His doing so was a bluff, which was no good, because Jix had a secret bluff much deeper than anything Cape can produce. For Cape is fundamentally an honest man, and Jix is fundamentally the offspring of Kasimira [Kasimira Bass]. Cape should have relied on the good reviews of the "Well of Loneliness", which appeared in the Times and similar papers of reasonably good standing, and not been perturbed by the pornographic nonsense of James Douglas. The opinion of all decent people is quiet sufficient protection; and if you go out of your way to ask the grocers' assistants whether the Bible is indecent, they will naturally pick out all the passages which excite them sexually, and which are the only ones they know (as in the case of my Cefalů diaries) and decide that the author is every kind of a criminal.
There is a lot of wisdom in the above remarks, incoherent as they may appear. What we have to do is to rally commonsense and decency to our banner.
The mistake you have been making is to appeal to people whose experience connects them with this canaille, whose sole interest is the obscene, and they naturally give you the reactions of just that kind of public, whose sole function in life is to damn everything decent. It is the sole satisfaction of their suppressed instincts.
You are an intelligent man with diplomatic qualities, and I am an ass. It is therefore your particular job to put these things over with the wisdom of the Serpent, I reserving to myself the innocence of the Dove.
Love is the law, love under will.
Yours fraternally,
666.
1—[This refers to a Geomancy Box he was trying to market. The geomancy box was first called The Finger of Fate. The needle as of a compass in the centre of a circle. You approach your forefinger nearly to it until your body heat causes the needle to swing round. Withdraw finger and the needle stops, pointing to a number. You look up the number in the pamphlet and the word is your answer. It failed: the delicate balance broke down when the box was moved about—G.J. Yorke.] 2—[Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, 1st Viscount Brentford.]
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