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Correspondence from Karl Germer to Gerald Yorke
[EXTRACT]
[10 September 1931]
All the money Cora [Cora Germer] has left in the world is just enough to live on for another year. Two years ago, she had enough money to live on her income. But in order to carry out the claims on her money, she had to touch the capital, the result that she had to sell stocks. Unfortunately this had to be done at low levels. The outcome is the present position. I myself had up to 1926 given all of my money [to Crowley], plus that of my first wife; in addition I have pawned my part of my inheritance due after my father's death by taking a loan of several thousand dollars from my sisters.
Your offer, when it came some weeks ago, came as—let me call it—a last straw, so tight was the situation then. And it is more so now. The exhibition opens October 11. The pictures have been selected and the catalogue will go to print next week. Some 30-40 pictures have got to be framed. I have to pay the last installment of 500 Marks (£25) on the date of the opening. And we have no money either to pay these expenses, or to pay rent, or even to live on after October 1. She cannot sell now a single share, as all he stocks are held against $11,000 loan on collateral, and the Bank has 4 times, by cables and letters, refused to give her more money unless she sells the total of her holdings.
£50 would not save us at all. So it was proposed after very serious calculation that you send us £100, leave payment of the storage [of Crowley's unsold books, etc.] for a little later. The unfortunate thing is that in Germany you cannot make debts. You are sued at once.
I, personally, think that A.C. has done a lot of mischief by creating false impressions. I know he has all along misrepresented Cora's true motives, for the simple reason that his nature is utterly incapable of understanding a real and spontaneous generosity. In many letters I have noticed remarks from you which showed a perfect misjudgment of Cora, and I thought I would usually trace them back to A.C.
. . . the great pressure which we all seem to have had to undergo for the last 12 to 15 months. A.C.'s boundless optimism, his impatience and lack of true perspective for all the failures in the past. In the last 6-8 months I have had by sheer force of circumstances to restrict A.C. financially and with regard to many other things, which he considered absolutely vital. There is no 'magick' in business but the magic of doing all business things in a purely businesslike manner. This is not what A.C. considers it to be. And just because he is so obstinately convinced that he possesses the exclusive understanding of business methods, it has taken and, I'm afraid, it will yet take, such a long time to make him yield to other people's judgements.
He has been forced to restrict himself in quite a lot of ways as perhaps never before. He revolted against it in the most violent way and I had, and still have, to be firm and hard in all violent scenes.
After all the women [he has had] who only cost money and did more damage than ever he did, there is now a woman [Bertha Busch] who seems to have common sense, grit, connections, business instinct to do help instead of damage. An apartment has been rented for the next 3 months. There A.C. will have a home after September 15 and a woman who can make him comfortable, keep things together and enable him to do some productive work.
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