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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Gerald Yorke
Hotel Metropole, Bruxelles, Belgique
April 17th, 1929
Care Frater:
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
I arrived here shortly after the novel experience of having been accused of a crime which I really committed and had to pay for.
You must please understand that I am now definitely on the map; and that nothing can possibly hush up the inquiry on which I shall insist. It is the time for you to declare yourself definitely on the side of the angels. I hope you will manage to get over here on Saturday. I have a great deal to tell you of extreme importance, which it would be unwise to write.
I enclose cuttings from Le Journal and the Petit Parisien, two of the three most widely circulated morning papers in Paris.
I wish you would subscribe to a Press Cutting Bureau and see that you get all the other stories which I, in this abode of terror, am liable to miss. But be here on Saturday at any cost. And now is the time to come forward! It is just this row which is going to sell the book [Magick in Theory and Practice] by thousands. Carney wanted to telegraph America for a definite answer about the Memoirs [The Confessions of Aleister Crowley], and I told him to wait to get the scandal widely circulated over there, and then to ask four times the price. He saw the point, and agreed.
The only bad point in the situation is that Estieu of the Lecram Press was upset about the article in the Paris Midi. But Cope [Stuart R. Cope] came round last night, and I talked with him for over an hour. He says that Estieu is the stupid kind of Frenchman—
All these matters will have to be managed rather by you than by me, for various reasons, which I will explain when you come.
There is another awkward point. The fact that I have become a considerable personality means that I have to live like an arch-duke of the best period. And though we have plenty of money at the moment, we shall want more, and a lot of it, pretty soon. For one thing, our French supporters will probably require a good deal more cash to hand round in the proper quarters, although they have not at the present said anything about it.* But the point is that if we were to make a "poor face," as the Americans say, we should be simply wiped out. We have got the chance of our lives. Don't miss it by any weakness or timidity.
Love is the law, love under will.
Yours fraternally
666.
* And we owe God knows what to the Amexco [American Express Company].
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