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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Wilfred Talbot Smith
10 Hanover Square. London W.1.
24 Jan 42
My dear Wilfred
You really do manage to put me in the most ghastly positions. I have been dreadfully worried this last quarter of a century, and it gets worse.
This letter is just the very faintest hope that I can get you to understand. For you feel, no doubt, wounded by my failure to support you, and I am sure that you can't see why. It must seem completely disloyal on my part, for your own sincerity and devotion are so evident.
I hope that this personal letter may help to make my attitude clear. I am sending it through Germer [Karl Germer], asking him to add his own comments to explain my remarks.
It must puzzle you, what's more, that people shy off after a short experience of you. Let me try to show you why.
"Be it further known that we are not paper soldiers". Anyone who can write a sentence like that is simply impossible in public life.
It makes me want to stamp and howl: it's evidently quite impossible to explain to you what is wrong with it, for if you could ever see in any circumstances, you could never have perpetuated it. It is, of course, the sudden drop "from the sublime to the ridiculous" in style. (I remember a previous letter when a good many hundred people had heard my name in the last few weeks owing to the superb efforts of Jane [Jane Wolfe] and Regina [Regina Kahl]—and so on—and the result is that you are able to send 100 dollars to Germer. It's perfectly right and natural, my dear man; it's the way you put it that is so comic. That was a similar case.)
Then the "manifesto"—it isn't a manifesto, by the way!—goes on to invoke heaven and hell in the most formidable language; you hurl the thunderbolts of Jove and threaten the most terrific penalties; the whole established Universe shakes, crashes at your frown. What, in fact you want, and bloody well never seem to get, is Fifty Cents a Month.
No, I can't hope to make it clear.
The obvious retort is that it is I who am unbelievably stupid, that your aim is to bring the Order into contempt.
There are other points, more serious. You word this nonsense in such a way as to lead people to suppose that it had been submitted to me for, and received my, approval.
It is all dreadful cant and rant, pomposity and platitude. You may say, quite correctly, that there is not a word in it with which I could seriously disagree; somehow, that seems to make it rather worse.
Then you go and declare 'a state of emergency'—which is only possible if you are trying to poke fun at the President! You really must not.
Then you issue a lot of drastic orders, most of them silly, and set the naughty boys to 'copy lines'. I wonder you didn't think to stand them in the corner.
The most mean-spirited hanger-on would resent the whole tone of bombast, the tediousness, the pleonastic and unnecessary divagations—God help me, is there any fault it has not got? It is certainly the worst thing of its kind I've ever read, and the most certain to defeat its object.
We "order a new heaven and a new earth". (Signed: Wilfred T. Smith)
I hope when it comes along there will be some one there to keep you from bringing every thing into contempt. The youngest reporter on the lowest-grade 'tabloid' could have prevented you from this lamentable exhibition.
What is so tragic is that your intention is so fine. What to do about it I really can't see. The best plan would perhaps be for you to be too exalted to hold any intercourse with the profane!
Somebody has got to be found who can be trusted not to go to a funeral in a crinoline and a brown Derby, somebody with natural dignity and modest demeanour. Your ideas are all right; your steady devotion to the Work is an invaluable asset; and this must no longer be wasted, or even turned into antagonism and contempt by those defects of manner and presentation.
Yours, very fraternally as ever, and sincerely distressed about all this, but quite clear that there must be a complete reconstruction made as far as possible without fuss.
Aleister.
In response to the above Smith wired "Worries ended. Understand. Writing Wilfred Smith". —G.J. Yorke.
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