|
Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Montgomery Evans
The Ridge, Hastings.
28th November 1945
Mr. Montgomery Evans, 421, Field Point Road, GREENWICH, Conn.
Dear Monty,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Thanks for yours of Nov. 6th, it has been lying waiting for an answer for over a week, so that shows that air mail at least is getting across with a reasonable speed again at last.
Many thank for sending Jean Phillips the information I suggested that Joseph Bernard Rethy was the person for the International, but his name is not in the New York Telephone book. Of course he may be dead; he always appeared to me on the frail side. An interesting child, and seemed to be doing rather well in the dramatic line when I left. Have you heard anything of him within recent years?
What you say about luck is all very true; but really you know, it is going a little too far to ask the gods to after a person with no more sense than to marry a Russian. Hysteria and treachery, plus a curious type of cruelty, is at the base of the nature of every one of them. I think Anastasia Philipovna is a perfect picture; I think the scene where she toys with the packet of bank notes, and that other scene where, after building up a marriage for months, she leaps out of the carriage at the last moment, are the most perfectly typical of all Dostoevsky's creations.
I don't know if you remember Marie Lavroff with whom I played a short game in New York in 1919. One experience should be enough for any person of intelligence; and I am amazed that anyone with your experience of the world should have been trapped!
You talk about temperament; but it is something a good deal deeper than that. Anyone can have a temperament, most of the nice people do; but the Slavonic madness is quite a different thing. In temperament there is an element of rationality with which one can learn how to deal, but the Russian mania is a fundamental of the Russian nature, and there is nothing whatever that anyone can do about it.
I should be very glad indeed to hear that you had got an assignment, if that means that you would be coming to England for a bit. It is far too long since I last saw you. That place in Jermyn Street (where one or other of us was always taking a flat) was shut up at the beginning of the war. It was the first place I went to when I tried to find out what had happened to you. I also asked those two super Alibaba's; but nobody seemed to know anything about you at all. and then the letter arrived with all the data about the Athenia. I must say I did hate Hitler when I thought of your library.
You mention Farrère, but I thought he was dead some years ago! I am very glad to hear that it is not so. At the same time I imagine that the last of the fire will have flickered out on his hearth. I don't think a man of his character was at all fitted to go through the collapse of his country, and the daily obscenity of the occupation.
Thanks very much for your booklet. I have read one or two of the features, and they seem to me pretty good; but I have been so busy this last week or two that I have really had no chance to sit down to it.
Glad to have news of Rayner, but I suppose she too is no longer what she was.
I am in a funny mood this afternoon. I have got a nostalgia (or something like it) for old times and haunts, and yet I feel that there is something to be done with them; that I must keep my mind fixed on people who are not merely still active, but who are more or less at the beginning of their activities. This, I suppose, is a sign of something or other, but I am hanged if I know what.
I am very glad to hear Lallouel is still at it. I shall certainly make him cook me a tench if I ever go over there, but that does not seem very likely. So many people that I know have expressed themselves as eager to get back to the old haunts; but I cannot fool myself to that extent. I think Paris died when they decided not to fight it street by street. In fact I wrote a Sonnet (in French) to that effect. I cannot persuade myself of anything better. It seems to me as if the Bourbon spirit had prevailed; the war has meant nothing to them: they have forgotten nothing and learnt nothing.
No. Monty, everything you say only increases my heartache. What I hear from people who have been there and come back only makes the pangs worse. The knavery is more barefaced and brutal; even the mask of politeness seems threadbare. Perhaps at the bottom it is that they know how hopeless everything is for them. In any case, they are acting as if they thought so. There is a callous spirit with regard to pulling themselves out of the mess. Why should they do it when they can squeal a bit, and get your country and mine to pull them out? But that is a thing which has never yet been done in history—without spiritual regeneration no one ever comes back.
"One thing is certain and the rest is lies, The flower that has once blown for ever dies."
I am sorry to end on such a doleful note, but as I look round, and the more I look around, the darker seems the sky.
Love is the law, love under will,
Yours fraternally,
Aleister
|