|
As Related by Louis Marlow (Louis Umfreville Wilkinson)
from
SEVEN FRIENDS The Richards Press, London, 1953. (pages 39-64)
So much has been written about Aleister Crowley since his death that my first thought before writing about him is of what should be left out rather than of what should be put in. In addition to several magazine articles, five books have been published lately: Crowley’s official Life, The Great Beast, by John Symonds, in which Crowley appears in what many of his disciples feel to be an unjustifiable evil and lurid light: Charles Cammell’s shorter account of him as Poet and Mage, strongly appreciative for the most part, sometimes eulogistic, but not a “whitewash”: three other books in which he figures, Clifford Bax’s Some I Knew Well, with its amusing sketch of Crowley, Arthur Calder-Marshall's The Magic of My Youth, and Denis Clark’s Sword Fish and Stromboli.
Crowley was important in my life, from 1907 or 1908 until he died at the end of 1947. From 1915 to 1919, in America, I got to know him well, better still during the seven years before the second war, and best of all during the five or six years before his death. Unlike most others who have written of him I was not a “disciple”. We hardly ever discussed magic. Nor did we talk much about sex. These two subjects are of course those most closely associated with Aleister Crowley: indeed one might say that there is no other association with him in the public mind, and that his fame, or infamy, rests on those two supports of sex and magic alone, on those two unrivalled magnetic pillars that can always draw so many with such power.
Early in the second war the unhappy William Joyce broad-cast a suggestion that, as our Intercession Services didn’t seem to be doing much good, Crowley should be invited to celebrate a Black Mass in Westminster Abbey. This was about the time when Crowley was gravely ill at Torquay and had written to me that the reporters were lurking in the rose-bushes of the garden of his hotel, “waiting to hear of my death”. I disbelieved him then, thinking that both he and Joyce exaggerated his publicity value, but after the splash in the newspapers that followed his actual death and his funeral I felt that he might well have been speaking the truth. Nearly all the newspaper notices were front-page and they nearly all of them struck the same note: “Crowley Dies”—“ ‘Wickedest’ Man in Britain’ ”—“World’s Worst Man” —“Black Magic Farewell” —“Cremating ‘Great Beast’ ”, and the like. “Crowley’s Doctor Dies” was another headline. He died within a day of Crowley and the suggestion was of course made that a curse had been put on him.
After Crowley’s unusual funeral the press notices were still more excitable than they had been after his death and there were more of them and longer ones. The day before the funeral, which I spent at the Hastings hotel where he died, the telephone rang frequently for answers to enquiries about the impending ceremony and the names of those who were to attend it. This became tiresome, particularly as there was so much that had to be done. I lost patience with one reporter, refused with some acerbity to give any names, and observed that this was “a private affair”.
The ceremony at Brighton, in the undenominational chapel of the Crematorium, can well be described as peculiar and was far from private. On one side were the mourners—most of the women well dressed enough for their clothes to receive detailed mention in the newspaper accounts—and on the other side were the reporters. Facing this sharply divided congregation I obeyed Crowley’s written instructions by reading his Hymn to Pan, then extracts from The Book of the Law which he believed to have been dictated to him by a supernatural being, then Collects from the Gnostic Mass. The Hymn of Pan was occasionally interrupted by ecstatic cries of “Io Pan!” from devotees, and the words with which Crowley began and ended his letters—“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” and “Live is the Law, Love under Will”—were interspersed throughout the reading with religious fervour. Some of the mourners grew more and more emotional as the reading went on, while the reporters looked more and more comically bewildered, or nonplussed. Carnations were thrown by a beautiful girl upon the coffin as it slid downwards. When the Brighton Corporation next met they resolved that no such pagan and blasphemous ceremony—on consecrated ground, too! —should ever again be permitted within their jurisdiction. “Desecrated by Black Magic” was one of the headlines then, There has certainly never been a funeral like Crowley’s in England, not a public one at any rate. No sooner were we out of the chapel than the reporters advanced upon us for information. “Better take care what you write!” my co-literary executor warned one of them. “Crowley will get at you from wherever he is!” What a day! In the Crowley circle, as in the Wilde circle, I have one aspect only: that of “the man who read the Hymn to Pan at the Beast’s Funeral.”
There was a dinner at an Indian restaurant to commemorate the first anniversary of Crowley’s death. The Press got hold of that and most of us who were known to be connected with the Master were rung up during the afternoon. Before the dinner some animosity was shown towards the reporters by disciples who felt that Crowley had been disrespectfully treated by the newspapers in the accounts of his death and funeral. Public interest in him was evidently thought to be still alive later on when his Will was proved (at eighteen pounds). I had then left London, but one reporter managed to get my telephone number in the country and we had a conversation of about twenty minutes that must have cost the newspaper something, as it was not during the cheaper telephone hours. I was moved to go all out for Crowley on that occasion. In reply to the question “What was Crowley’s purpose in life?” I said “The regeneration of the world,” and gave the further information that Crowley’s Temples were scattered all the world over, “even behind the Iron Curtain,” and that his ashes now sanctified the High Altar of the chief Temple in the United States. These statements cannot perhaps be proved to be wholly true, but they are by no means wholly false. “He must have been an extraordinary man,” said the reporter, and he did not seem to say it ironically. “He is an extraordinary man,” I replied.
And so he is, or was. I leave out of count his magical powers of which I know nothing. The pity is that his nose was too small; otherwise he would, I believe, have been indisputably a great man, both as a writer and as a religious leader. Vanity was his handicap. He was too sure of his genius to criticize or to revise adequately his own work. He thought that everything he wrote must be good. Impatient to see his books printed and wishing to have them set up and bound in his own lavish way, he rarely tried to find a publisher, so their circulation was strictly limited. The books of his that were published, such as The Diary of a Drug Fiend and Moon Child, were perhaps his worst. But all his books had by no means inconsiderable faults. His poetry could be very bad as well as very good. He could write mere imitative pieces, he could write superbly, with an exultant vigour entirely his own, but he never seemed to know whether he was doing the one or the other. He could also write masterly lampoons in verse. To a Slim Gilt Soul, his lampoon on Alfred Douglas—“Giton and Judas and Tartuffe” he calls him—is perhaps the best of these. It is published in Oscar Wilde and the Black Douglas. Of his graver vein in verse an example, a timely one, is “Kill off mankind, And give the earth a chance; Nature may find in Her inheritance Some seedlings of a race Less infinitely base.” His happy and high-spirited lines “O for a lily-white goat, Crisp as a thicket of thorns, With a collar of gold for its throat, And a scarlet bow for its horns” are equally Crowleian; and characteristic of his parody vein is “O English girl, half baby and half bitch!”
An anthology should be made of Crowley’s poems, for those that really are poems, his best ones, among which I would doubt if those published in The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse should be included, would fill a fair-sized volume. The anthology, Olla, that he made himself and had printed shortly before his death was planned so as to represent the varieties of his verse-writing: there are good poems in it—notably two that he wrote at the end of his life—but there are many too many inferior poems as well. Crowley wouldn’t take my advice about Olla He always thought I failed to appreciate him as a poet. After reading a book of mine in which I laid perhaps too much stress upon his remarkable gifts for cooking, he wrote these lines on the fly-leaf: “On Crowley the Immortals ironically look, He sought fame as a poet and he found it as a cook.”
Well, I could not understand most of his mystical poetry, though I could respond to some of it—to such lines (I quote from memory) as:
The Universe I measured with my rod, The blacks were even with the whites. Satan dropped down as uprose God, Whores danced and played with anchorites. So in my Book the even matched the odd. No word therein I wrote, But signed it with the Sigil of the Goat.
On the other hand, I could fully appreciate his cooking and his taste in wine and old brandy. I can never forget that 1912 Martinez, perfectly decanted and at a perfect temperature, that he had for me after a dinner to celebrate my birthday; and I have not enjoyed any meals more than those that Crowley has cooked. Curry was, at Crowley’s, the specialité de la maison: those curries were astounding. They were rather too moving for me, though I ate them with joy for their very excessiveness. Crowley cooked steak with consummate skill and with an ardour that did not burn with that same excess of heat, so, although his curries won the wider fame, his steaks gave the larger sum of pleasure. Those steaks, with a bottle of Richebourg or Corton—Burgundy and port were his favourite wines—are what I remember most gratefully. But Crowley could touch no food that he did not adorn.
For all that, no cooking, however strong or subtle, leaves footprints on the sands of time. Crowley’s future reputation must of course depend mainly upon his writings. His book on the Tarot [The Book of Thoth], produced as the Anthology was near the end of his life, was, he felt, one of the most important of these; and on that massive volume I am not qualified to express an opinion. Some of the pictures of the Tarot cards by Frieda Harris are of a terrifying originality and nearly all of them are enthralling. The originals, of which there were exhibitions in Oxford and London, are naturally still more impressive. This Tarot book is sumptuously produced; no wonder it cost ten guineas. Crowley told me that he had made fifteen hundred pounds from it in three months. “Now you see,” he then said, “how idiotic it is to have a publisher.” I pointed out that the very considerable cost of producing the book should be put to the debit account. Crowley looked surprised. “Oh, of course,” he said, “if the author is fool enough to pay for the printing and binding—” I might have reminded him that that was what in the old days he had always been fool enough to do. Then he was a rich man, but as soon as he had spent all his money—his extravagance in many directions was fantastic—his devotees paid the expenses of his books, and whatever proceeds there were, were his.
It was characteristic of Crowley that he took this money as his rightful due. He did quite honestly, and, when you think of it, not unnaturally feel that it was as much a matter of course for others to pay for the production of his magical books, or indeed of any of his books, as it had been for him himself to pay when he had the money. If people who had money, now that he had not, paid also for his personal upkeep, thus enabling him to “accomplish the great work,” that was only to be expected, too. His attitude had nothing in common with that of the vulgar exploiting charlatan. It may be called naive, and so in a sense it was, but it seemed to him entirely natural and right. And, after all, he had a great deal to give that no one else had to the disciples who contributed to the support of his cause and himself.
I was never a contributor, but he had a great deal to give me, and gave it none the less for that. In conversation he gave richly. What a lot of pleasure I have had from his talk during all the periods of my friendship with him; except during the last month or so of his life when he was ill and under the now deadening influence of his drugs. “I am sorry you have wasted your time in visiting a log,” were the last words he said to me, very soon before he died. He had come to the end; his wit, so much his own, and his wakeful, surprising intelligence with its various sudden glancing thrusts, had failed him. But in his youth and in his prime, and long after, he was memorable for his peculiar dynamics of attraction and fascination. I do not believe that he will be forgotten. What has been written about him will materially help to impress him upon posterity, but, as Doctor Johnson would have survived without Boswell, so would Crowley survive without contemporary biographers. He would not like this comparison, for he detested Doctor Johnson and said that he represented all that was worst in the English character. What would Doctor Johnson have said of him?
As to Crowley’s morals, there is no doubt truth in the accusations of unscrupulousness and even of what most people would consider wickedness that have been so freely brought against him. Many of these charges are entirely baseless, but of a few there is proof. None the less, he had his own integrity. When he was living in Paris in the ‘twenties he was offered a substantial sum of money to cast horoscopes for a girl and a man with indications that the two were exceptionally well suited to each other and destined to a happy marriage. This was suggested by a sale individu who would have got a considerable commission if the marriage had happened: the girl was rich. Crowley, at that time particularly hard up, refused. The individual then told him that he could and would prevent the renewal of his visa if he did not cast the horoscopes. Crowley, knowing that this was so, knowing the man’s back-stairs pull with the authorities concerned, still refused, with the result that he had in due course to leave Paris under the Obloquy of having been kicked out.
His integrity appeared also in the last years of his life when he was in need of a trained nurse. A friend suggested that he should have one but he told her that he hadn’t money enough. “But,” she reminded him, “there’s nearly five hundred pounds in that strong box.”
“That’s not for my personal use,” he replied. “It’s money from America, earmarked for the Order.” His friend persuaded him, but with some difficulty, that the health of himself as head of the Order was one of its more important purposes, and he gave way. I might have found more difficulty than I did as executor in persuading the Official Receiver that the cash in Crowley’s possession at his death—then about four hundred and fifty pounds—was money entrusted to him for specific purposes, religious purposes, not his own money, and therefore not liable for distribution among his creditors, but due to be returned (as it was) to its giver in America.
As Crowley has the reputation of having been always utterly unscrupulous about money, any qualification that there is of his unscrupulousness should not be omitted. To me there seemed a good deal that was admirable and attractive as well as reprehensible about his behavior to money. The inheritor in his youth of a considerable fortune, he spent it all on those richly coloured, imaginative manias that can beggar a man more quickly than any mere luxuries. Crowley threw every one of his singular, passionate intensities into spending all that he had. He treated his fortune as a toy. If you fit out mountaineering expeditions and are continually printing sumptuous private editions of your poems and plays and magical works, and buying places in Scotland, and living everywhere like a prince and entertaining like a Maharajah, even a large fortune won’t last very long. But what panache what élan and brio while it does last! Extravagance can be simply silly, but in Crowley’s extravagance there was imagination and even a sort of sublime faith. The most egregiously inappropriate epithet ever applied to him is “sordid”. “Surely the most sordid and shabby of charlatans” is what one reviewer wrote of him. Of course a man can live richly and yet be shabby and sordid in himself, but that was not so with Crowley.
I didn’t know him when he had all those thousands, I knew him after they had all gone, but he always gave the impression of being carelessly rich, he always managed that somehow. Except once, some time in the ’thirties, when I found him living in Paddington Green in some frightful lodging. I never knew how that happened. Very likely it wasn’t because of poverty but for some entirely different reason. He spent a great deal of money for his magic, for his religion; he may have been living in Paddington Green for the sake of his religion. His craziest actions were based on the coldest logic. Even at that time he gave only a momentary impression of poverty. Almost at once his background didn’t exist. There was incense burning, I remember; of course that may have helped. The Paddington Green interlude didn’t last long; very soon it was Piccadilly and Jermyn Street again. I always felt that Aleister was the right sort of man to have money; too many people who have it are the wrong sort.
No doubt he could give the impression of ostentation of “charlatan” ostentation, not only by the grand seigneur air that he sometimes adopted, but by his vagaries of dress, his breeches with eighteenth-century solver buckles, his enormous green scarf, his Chinese beard, and heavy seal with Tarot devices. He has been compared with William Beckford, but “ostentation” is a term that much better fits Beckford, who was always making a show with his money, depended on it and on his social position, exploited his oddity and conceit, and had no real power in himself. He could not have borne to live at all humbly. Crowley, on the other hand, although he had money enough in his last years to live as expensively as he nearly always had, lived instead at an unpretentious boarding-house at Hastings because he liked the proprietor and his wife, both of whom also liked him. He was well looked after there, the place suited him, but it was certainly not a place with which an ostentatious man would have been contented. His going to live there was arranged at my suggestion by my son who was then living at Hastings and who was very soon writing to me of Crowley’s “caressing charm” and “careless wit”. But my son, like many others, influenced by Crowley’s reputation as something monstrous and inhuman, thought him :a very dangerous man”, though he appreciated his humour and his mind and, above all, his strangeness, so they got on well together. To some people he was certainly dangerous, even fatal. But I doubt very much if he ever “disintegrated” anyone’s “personality” unless that personality was well on the way towards disintegration.
Whatever Crowley’s morals or lack of them, I should remember with the same deep gratification that he told me, towards the end of his life, that I was his greatest friend. I was certainly closer to him then than I had been before; partly because I had come to know him more intimately and partly because there was then, to me at least, an affecting pathos about him, a pathos of which he may have been sometimes conscious, though he never played for pity. I had always felt that there was something of pathos about him but in his last years this element seemed to me much stronger and he was in consequence lovable as I had not known him to be before. He knew then he had not done what he wanted to do, that he had done only a part of it: he knew that, during his lifetime at least, he would have infamy rather than fame. When he had been again dangerously ill a year or two before his death he inscribed a book to the man who had devotedly tended him: "To ———, who saved my worthless life,” and it is likely that in some moods he did think of his life as worthless. His vanity, which had amounted to something at least near megalomania, took backward paces.
Success and recognition in the usual sense would, I think, have weaned him from this vanity which was to some considerable extent his substitute for them. He was a great man manqué, and that set him awry. He resorted to a self-advertisement that became more violent as he grew less sure of the power that he had for achieving his end. That end, he had believed, could be gained—and how easily!—by the energies that he knew to be so abundant in himself. Crowley’s tragedy was that, as he aged, he came to know it could not. At any rate, though he had materially failed and was pained by that failure, he never resorted to “repentance”. No such disgusting exhibitionism marked his last days as marked those of the really evil Gilles de Raiz, whose vanity staged scenes of confession and “contrition” almost as nauseating as his crimes were. “I am perplexed”, were the only dying words of Crowley.
That he really did believe himself to be by destiny a great religious regenerator, that he had full faith in the religion which he built upon his “Law of Thelema” to bring the world nearer to what he called “Godhead”, I have no doubt. I knew him well enough not to have any, although I was never, as I have said, even a novice in his religion, let alone an initiate. But more than once I have seen him under the sudden stress of his inspiration. He was controlled, I was sure of it then, by something that was in truth religious, that had the quality, the motive force of Oriental religious ecstasy. One such occasion was during the second war. Crowley and I had been lunching with Lady Aberconway and had gone back with her to his rooms in Jermyn Street where he read aloud to us from an enormous Magical Book which he supported on his knees. What he read was in a strange language, a language unknown. It was of a singular vibrant beauty and power. Christabel Aberconway sat on the floor by his chair with the unwitting grace and ease possible, in such a position, only to a woman of natural-born and fulfilled beauty. Her lovely eyes were large with an emotion that I shared. “What is that language?” she asked. “It is the language of the angels,” replied Crowley. Impressed though I was by the exaltation, the irradiation, Which he had received and communicated, I could not help reflecting on what an admirable subject the scene would have made for a cartoon by Max Beerbohm. “Aleister Crowley reciting to Lady Aberconway in the Language of the Angels.”
At about that same time I tried to get Crowley to tell me what he remembered of his former incarnations. I asked him if it were not a tremendous moment when a former incarnation was first revealed; but Crowley said no, it didn’t happen like that, but a fragment of memory would come, and other memories would come later, the significant ones appearing imperfectly and obscurely and gradually, often with long intervals between them.
“Reincarnation!” “Language of the Angels!” How easy to ridicule Crowley, to make of him a figure of fun. As easy as to make him out a monster. There were certainly aspects of him that could appear comically. He was in some ways oddly innocent, with the innocence of a Pierrot or a Charlie Chaplin. He could not acquire an adult eye for the main chance or an adult view of the world, of which he knew so little that he was incapable of dealing with it. He blundered time after time because he couldn’t learn what the world was like. If he had had any worldly wisdom, or even common sense, he would never have brought that absurd libel action which of course he lost and which made him an undischarged bankrupt for the last twenty years or so of his life.
The same egregious unworldliness appears in him as a writer. He wanted to appeal to the general reader but he never could because he knew nothing about him. Like Robert Browning (whom he much admired), he assumed that he was a specialist. For this reason even if Crowley’s works had all been published, and published effectively, it is improbably that they would have had large sales. In his lighter writing there is often this same baulking erudition, there are references and words that most people would find unintelligible and therefore irritating. When I told him so, he said, “But they can always use dictionaries,” not seeming to realize at all that if you write only for people who expect to have to use dictionaries when they read you, you are not likely to have many readers. Crowley, however, could no more imagine a reader without reference books at his elbow than he could imagine him without a shirt to his back. He had no sort of flair for what puts the reader off or for what puts him on; he knew none of the practical tricks of the literary trade. In planning with me a “popular” edition of his Commentary on The Book of the Law he suggested that a second Commentary, from another hand, should be included.
In his humour, though not in his wit, he was often like a clever schoolboy, and in other ways too. Like many other Englishmen he had in some ways never grown up. He loved to invent and to play ingenious—sometimes maddeningly ingenious—word-games. The same youthful ingenuity would appear when he wrote or spoke sequence after sequence of absurdities so elaborate and so overworked as to become too frequently tedious. He could be terse enough though, as when he wrote a one-line review in The Equinox of a book by a man called Holly: “Holly, Holly, Holly, Lord God Almighty!”
He was terse, too, in a reply that I heard him make to Theodore Dreiser. It was in New York, during the first world was. Dreiser, after protesting earnestly and at length against the dependence of American Letters upon English tradition, asked him, “What have you to offer us?” Crowley replied with the single word “Patronage.” I still remember Dreiser’s rage, it was wonderful. At that time Crowley was experimenting with the drug Ahhelonium [Anhalonium Lewinii] and used to give “anhelonium parties”. I persuaded Dreiser to come to one. He did so with some misgiving. “It will take treble the usual dose to move Dreiser,” said Crowley as he prepared it for him. Dreiser, none the less, drank his glass of “the mixture” at one gulp, with determine bravado. Then he felt a little uneasy. He asked Crowley if there was a good doctor in the neighbourhood, “just in case anything goes wrong.” “I don’t know about a doctor,” said Crowley, “but,” he added in a tone of general reassurance, “there’s a first-class undertaker on the corner of Thirty-third Street and Sixth Avenue.” Dreiser said nothing for a few moments, then he said, “I don’t like that kind of joke, Crowley.” Anhelonium makes you see visions in bright colours: its effects are surprising and exciting, but I found it made me feel sick afterwards so I took it only two or three times. Dreiser was eloquent under its influence and it didn’t seem to make him feel sick. He lay on his back on a bed, side by side with a little English actor who was not taking kindly to the drug, and he described to us in detail, in that ponderous style which always weighed down his powerful genius, the coloured visions of landscape and of figures passing before him. He recited the deranged, fantastic invocations and adjurations—he Dreiserized them a good deal—that range at intervals in his ears. It was like hearing one of his novels read aloud; but certainly with a difference. The little actor all the while continued to give punctuating groans and to be sick into the basin that he held clutched before him on his side of the bed, over which was the inscription “Jesus Wept”. It was a hired room.
Afterwards Dreiser said to me, naïvely: “But isn’t your friend—isn’t that guy Crowley a bit of a crook?”
He met him again, though, and let him cook a curry luncheon at his “apartment”. He enjoyed the curry, but Crowley once again provoked from him that look of wrath so familiar to anyone who knew Dreiser at all well. At a loss for the word for the young of swans, a word that he needed for a comparison in one of his long and rather involved disquisitions, he appealed to Crowley: “What is it? What would you call a young swan?”
“Why not call him Alfred?” said Crowley, tenderly. That, to Dreiser the serious Teuton, was an exasperating example of English frivolity. No doubt it strengthened his wish for our defeat in the first war. Crowley could not resist sticking his banderillas into the hide of this powerful bull.
This kind of irresponsible, light frivolity (English “nonsense”), under cover of a serious tone and manner, often appeared in Crowley’s remarks. When a lady asked him what woman’s college would be the best for her young daughter, he replied, with earnest gravity, “Radclyffe Hall.” Such was the effect of Crowley’s manner that, even though The Well of Loneliness had only recently been banned, the lady gratefully wrote down the name, not for a moment suspecting a joke. Frivolous with a difference was Crowley’s reply when he was asked some forty years ago how one could sleep in Russia without being pestered by bedbugs: “Sift the frontier.” That was very much his own joke, in his own special grand manner, with his own gesture’s special sweep. It was almost a religious joke because of its half-in-earnest indication of faith in the impossible. It was a large, fantastic, extravagant joke, all of a piece with his behaviour to money. Large and fantastic, too, was his declaration that he had a Five-Thousand-Year-Plan for civilizing America. “Sanguine, I know, but I’m always an optimist.” He could be and often was extremely and characteristically funny in print as well as in conversation. In his play Household Gods “A boy? Then what am I?” is, taken in its context, one of the most humourous exclamations in literature.
The extravagance, the excess that was so often in his humour was a deep, essential characteristic. His cult, his mania, one might say, was for excess in all directions: excess in writing, in drugging, in smoking the strongest cigars and pipe-tobaccos, and in drinking—though I never saw him drunk and never met anyone who had. His constitution was so amazingly tough that I believe he could have drunk with impunity a dozen or so of the cocktails made from his own recipe: One part old brandy, one part old Kirsch, one third part absinthe, 6m Tabasco, spirit of ether to taste. Shake through ice.” A letter to me of December, 1912, accepting my invitation to him to come and see me at Chiswick is in the same familiar vein of excess: “Fortunately I have kept together all my old Himalayan outfit, and shall be able to buy all I need in the course of the day, and start early tomorrow, if I can get the mules.” He so much enjoyed the extravagances and exaggerations of W. S. Gilbert who was one of his favourite authors.
He had also a taste for practical jokes, and these too struck the note of excess. Some of them were very funny, as they happened, like the one that a brother-in-law of Crowley told me about. It was in Crowley’s younger days when he was a wealthy man. He was living at Boleskine in the Highlands and was known as Lord Boleskine. At a much later date when living in Paris he called himself merely “Sir Aleister Crowley.” I still have a visiting-card of his from that period, with a coronet on it too.
A Swiss visitor to Boleskine had been boasting to Crowley that he had shot all sorts of animals in all sorts of places. He was very keen, he said, on collecting heads to decorate his house at Geneva. He then asked, “What exactly is a haggis?” “Ah!” replied Crowley, “I am one of the very few people who would dare to answer such a question.” (His voice and intonation were often remarkably like Winston Churchill’s.) A haggis, he proceeded to explain, was in Scotland a “rogue” ram: just as in other parts of the world you have “rogue” elephants who are thrown out from the herd and live apart and are identified with the tribal fetish or tabu. Such animals are sacred. In Scotland, said Crowley, the haggis is sacred and most rare. When found, it must not be touched by any hand save that of the chief of the clan. The visitor was deeply interested and impressed.
As soon as he could, Crowley arranged for the purchase in Inverness of an old, decrepit ram which he had conveyed to Boleskine, and he tethered the animal among the rocks above his house. He then invited the sportsman to luncheon. The meal had hardly begun when one of the gillies, who had been carefully coached, rushed into the dining-room in great excitement and, falling on one knee, cried out, “My Lord! My Lord! There’s a haggis on the hill!” Crowley at once took control. He and his ingenuous guest climbed the difficult rock face. Crowley gave a solemn warning not to venture too close, but the sportsman, now beyond all control, took aim from a distance and shot the “haggis” dead. Crowley gripped his arm. “As you value your life don’t move from where you are! Only I may approach the sacred animal.” He then ascended and with the help of the gillie carried down the poor dead old ram. “I risk the forfeit of my right to be paramount chief in Scotland,” he explained, “for having dared for friendship’s sake to commit such an outrage.” The head of that ram perhaps still hangs with other trophies in the house at Geneva, over a gold-lettered inscription: “Haggis. Shot at Boleskine,” and then the date. The only thing that went wrong was that the gillie made his dramatic entrance too early and Crowley had to go hungry until after the event. But is it possible that something else went wrong? That the Swiss gentleman knew what a haggis was all the time? That the joke was on Crowley?
Another well vouched for story of Crowley’s practical joking takes less time to tell. He once followed close behind a stranger in the streets of New York, keeping step with him, and then he suddenly fell. Unconsciously enforced, the man just ahead fell too. He was supported and comforted by Crowley, and together they searched for the orange peel that wasn’t there. On this occasion, and no doubt on others, Crowley combined the functions of magician and practical joker.
Some years more will have to pass before this man can be seen as a whole in true perspective. Such a view is always especially hard to take of anyone of whom adoration and vilification have both been carried to extremes. The difficulty is increased in Crowley’s case because of the variety and the contradictoriness of the elements in his composition. I do not profess to be able to solve the enigma of his character and his actions. I am glad that he was himself and that I knew him. My chief feeling about him is one of personal gratitude, for I have known very few who, as persons, have impressed me more or rewarded me more than he did. It is true that those who are notable for personality are not always notable for achievement; but this truth seems to me to be better illustrated by Frank Harris than by Aleister Crowley. |