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Correspondence from P.R. Stephensen to Gerald Yorke
[EXTRACT]
[26 January 1954]
I was sitting with A.C. one evening in Kleinfeld's Fitzroy Tavern, drinking pernod, when Betty May came in. This was in 1929 or 1930 . . . she came up to A.C. with a kind of adoration in her eyes and whole demeanour, and spoke to him with the naive respect one would expect in a fourteen-year-old girl speaking to a bishop after a confirmation service. She was evidently in awe . . . How different was the version the journalists extracted from her!
The real or 'magical' explanation was that A.C. did not want the Third Volume [of The Confessions of Aleister Crowley] to be published. He frightened Hell out of Goldston [Edward Goldston], and in some way I don't remember made me feel discouraged . . . [he] made a damn nuisance of himself instead of leaving me alone to get on with the serious business of publishing the Hag [The Confessions of Aleister Crowley].
If you and Cora Germer had made the capital available to me and Goldston, without interference from Thynne [Major Robert Thynne] and A.C.'s silly goings-on, it would have been put into the production of books, instead of into dinners at Oddenino's and Simpsons for Thynne and A.C., which is where I now think most of it went.
[I would write another] literary evaluation of the dear old Beast, plus my personal recollections of him in the Mandrake Press phase of his career . . . to prepare the way for an edition of Golden Twigs.
I still retain the most affectionate memory of A.C. as an essentially loveable character, and undoubtedly a man of outstanding intellectual and literary ability: possibly one of the greatest writers England has ever produced, and certainly a man of extraordinary mental courage. I think that all who ever came in contact with him benefited from that contact, except those . . . who tried to play a game of their own, or "use" Crowley for some ulterior purpose. Those who . . . liked Crowley and tried to help him, without seeking gain, were benefited greatly by the contact with his amazingly original mind. Such benefits came indirectly, and perhaps belatedly, but were non the less real. At any rate, no man was ever quite the same after knowing Crowley! Acting foolishly himself, he could purge folly from others, and this may be the ultimate effect of his life and works when they are seen in the perspective of time.
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