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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Gerald Yorke
1a Würtzburgerstr Berlin
Feb 1 [1931]
C∴F∴
93
Thanks for your nice long gossip letter of the 22nd [illegible].
You must be getting on splendidly with your [illegible] for the soldiers to be able to spare so much time.
Your vanity has misled you—there is no 'demon Yorke' series—only an idea of you as a background figure in a story projected by another man. You have some way to travel yet to get into the Mussolini class!
I asked Regardie [Israel Regardie]—months ago—to consult Mcalley[?] on my legal position re Marie [Maria de Miramar]. Why should I want to involve you? Or are you a 'co'???
I can't understand Nick [Lieutenant Colonel John Carter]. But when I come to England I shall give him a severe scolding about talking over my confidential letters with other old ladies.
The pictures muddle was dreadful; nearly knocked me out. How you interpreted Germer's [Karl Germer] letter as "send the lot" I can't understand. But I note that he has avoided shewing me the letter! He has a complex about the fallibility of the business man.
I don't believe much in the Thynne [Major Robert Thynne] libel action. Does it refer to a new article?
N.J.N.F. I'm not surprised. He owes me £7 actual money lent. It's time I let him pay his own 'bus fares on numerous occasions when I invited him to Simpson's or Oddy's [Oddeninos Restaurant]—Pah!
I enclose a letter which followed you round. I expect the contents are very much what I said in my last, and which you have not answered.
1. What of the real story of the Desert? Did you get anything big? and clear up your whole mind about the G∴W∴ [Great Work]. From your last letter I get no encouragement.
2. I have always felt that you did not take the G∴W∴ seriously enough, except in one bit of you that was hardly ever on a full-time job. I find that you enjoy too much the sheer fun of running around after all these curios[?] and [illegible]-curios[?]. I don't find the cold-blooded deadly determination to attain as a dominating force. You have seemed to lack the earnestness which burnt fiercely in people like Ananda Mettaya [Allan Bennett]. The passion for attainment burns like the Desert Sun; it burns out every other love. I can't see in you that fierceness as of a famished wild beast: you have always led a sheltered life, and must find it hard to go out resolutely and once for all into the storm.
And yet I hope that recent ordeals physical and moral may have decided you—I write as perhaps I should not, on strict technical grounds; but frankly I am anxious about the carrying-on of the G∴W∴. This can only be done by a man who has honestly and fully faced the Universe and held his own against it. My hope is that the severity of the tests you have undergone is evidence of something more than your ambition—of more than a possibility of its fulfilment.
Well, you can divine the rest.
93 93/93
Fraternally
666.
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