The pleasures of the Parisian boulevard were far more amenable. Crowley was a guest, through the winter of 1903, at Kelly’s studio in the Montparnasse quarter on the Rue Campagne Premier. Crowley wasted little time in making the rounds and striking up a liaison with Nina Oliver, an artist’s model. Crowley would later claim that his “adoration of Nina made her the most famous girl in the quarter for a dozen years and more.” According to the later testimony of Kelly, “Crowley was widely unknown in the Montparnasse quarter. His French was poor. He was, for the most part, I fancy, disliked by the few whom he met.” Still, there was a rather eminent circle in which Crowley certainly made an impression. It was made up primarily of expatriate Englishmen soaking up the ambience of Paris. These included the British novelists Arnold Bennett and W. Somerset Maugham, the Bloomsbury art critic Clive Bell, the American sculptor Paul Wayland Bartlett, and the Canadian painter James Wilson Morrice. Crowley sought to become one of them, but could not: “It had already been branded on my forehead that I was the Spirit of Solitude, the Wanderer of the Waste, Alastor; for while I entered with absolute spontaneous enthusiasm into the artistic atmosphere of Paris, I was always subconsciously aware that here I had no continuing city.”
The response to Crowley bears out his sense of having been branded. He won into their circle by his audaciousness and exotic tales of magic and the remote Himalayas. But their fascination was mingled with great unease. It was Maugham who left the most vivid portrait of Crowley (now age twenty-seven) in this period. Indeed, Maugham devoted an entire novel to him. The Magician (1908) had its genesis in meetings between Crowley and Maugham—one year Crowley’s senior and already a known writer—at Le Chat Blanc, a cafe on the Rue d’Odessa favored by the circle. In an introduction to The Magician written late in his life, Maugham recalled his impressions of Crowley, the model for the nefarious villain, Oliver Haddo:
I took an immediate dislike to him [Crowley], but he interested and amused me. He was a great talker and he talked uncommonly well. In early youth, I was told, he was extremely handsome, but when I knew him he had put on weight, and his hair was thinning.[ … ] He was a fake, but not entirely a fake.[ … ] He was a liar and unbecomingly boastful, but the odd thing was that he had actually done some of the things he boasted of.
Maugham did not write The Magician until 1907, and the novel draws from events in Crowley’s life not only from this time in Paris, but also from the intervening years. In his later introduction, Maugham was careful to note that he drew the evil Haddo in a manner “more striking in appearance, more sinister and more ruthless than Crowley ever was.” For his part, Crowley would acknowledge the accuracy of the “shirt cuff” method of characterization employed by Maugham: “The hero’s witty remarks were, many of them, my own.[ … ] Maugham had taken some of the most private and personal incidents of my life [ … ] He had added a number of the many absurd legends of which I was the central figure.” The Magician—for all its weakness (acknowledged by Maugham himself) as a work of fiction—exemplified the gothic treatment of Crowley subsequently followed by a host of fiction writers, from M. R. James to Christopher Isherwood to Dennis Wheatley: sensualist, satanist, possessed of a hypnotic gaze and a riveting power over women, driven by the purest of evil hearts. Here is Haddo upon his first entrance into the “Chien Noir” (Maugham’s fictionalized name for the Chat Blanc):
He was clearly not old, though his corpulence added to his apparent age. His features were good, his ears small, and his nose delicately shaped. He had big teeth, but they were white and even. His mouth was large, with heavy moist lips. He had the neck of a bullock. His dark, curling hair had retreated from the forehead and temples in such a way as to give his clean-shaven face a disconcerting nudity. The baldness of his crown was vaguely like a tonsure. He had the look of a very wicked, sensual priest. Margaret [the heroine whom Haddo seduces, marries and destroys], stealing a glance at him as he ate, on a sudden violently shuddered; he affected her with an uncontrollable dislike.
The story of the clash between Maugham and Crowley upon the novel’s publication in 1908 must be reserved for Chapter Five. But it may be noted that Crowley left a vivid corroborating portrait in his pseudonymous novel Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden (written in 1904 and published in a private limited edition in France, probably in that same year). Snowdrops may best be described as a satire—and wildly lewd celebration—of Victorian pornography. In an ironic foreshadowing of Maugham’s novel, Crowley also changed the feline Chat Blanc into a canine “Chien Rouge.” It is further ironic that the character of “L…”—whom Crowley based on himself (with Gerald Kelly as “D…”)—so closely paralleled that of Oliver Haddo. Both characters were cutting cafe wits who relished humiliating their adversaries: “D…’s cold acumen and L…’s superb indignation, expressed in fiery swords of speech, would drive some luckless driveller from the room. Or at times they would hold down their victim, a bird fascinated by a snake, while they pitilessly exposed his follies to the delighted crowd.[ … ] They were feared, these two!”
But Crowley was far more deferential, this same winter, in his relations with the great sculptor Auguste Rodin. While Crowley liked to give the impression of a friendship between them, the truth was that, as a devotee of Rodin’s work, Crowley was permitted a brief visit to his studio at Meudon and a chance to talk with the master about his art. The underlying circumstances were as follows: When Crowley first arrived in Paris, he learned of the acrimonious debate surrounding Rodin’s recently completed Balzac, a sculpture which expressed the spirit of the novelist, but strayed from the realistic poses of the man already familiar to the French public. Crowley rushed to the defense of Rodin by composing a sonnet, “Balzac,” which was (along with another Crowley sonnet, “Rodin”) subsequently translated into French verse by Marcel Schwob, a Parisian writer of Crowley’s acquaintance. Rodin’s admiration for Crowley’s verse, in translation, included high praise for “its unexpected flower of violence, its good sense and its irony.” Some have argued that it was Schwob’s excellence as a translator, not Crowley’s as a poet, that elicited this praise. But to be fair to Crowley, Rodin’s comments pertain to matters of content and stance innate to the English originals. Further, Rodin in Rime does contain examples of Crowley the poet at his best, briskly rhythmic and enraptured, as in his sonnet in honor of Rodin’s La Femme Accroupie (The Crouching Woman), which begins:
Swift and subtle and thin are the arrows of Art:
I strike through the gold of the skin to the gold of the heart.
As you sit there mighty in bronze I adore the twist
Of the miracle ankle gripped by the miracle wrist.
Rodin in Rime was ultimately published privately by Crowley in 1907, in a volume that included lithographs by Rodin.
In other writings, of this period, by contrast, Crowley displayed a darkly skeptical outlook. For example, in a poem sent as a New Year’s 1903 greeting card to friends, he held out the prospect of Nirvana as the only escape “from the fatal mischief of the world”—a world Crowley deemed equivalent with “Hell.” But in “Science and Buddhism,” an essay finished during this same winter, Crowley argued, in a more hopeful tone, that an empirical approach to Buddhist teachings could lead to expanded scientific knowledge of human consciousness. The alternative—to conduct science within narrow materialist confines—would lead only to intolerance and a futile split between science and the spirit: “If Science is never to go beyond its present limits; if the barriers which metaphysical speculation shows to exist are never to be transcended, then indeed we are thrown back on faith, and all the rest of the nauseous mess of mediaeval superstition.” In recent decades, the view urged by Crowley—quite ahead of its time—for the application of scientific method to the study of the nature of consciousness has earned broad interest.
In April 1903, Crowley left Paris to return to Boleskine—the site, three years earlier, of his proposed Abra-Melin Operation. But now, Crowley found himself at a loss. As he
later wrote, “It is strange to look back on myself at twenty-seven, completely persuaded of the truth of the most extravagant claims of mysticism and magick, yet completely disillusioned with regard to the universe.” That May, Crowley wrote a summary memorandum of his spiritual progress over the prior four years. In his world travels, he had passed through a stage first of Hinduism and then of nominalist philosophy, in which all deities were viewed as unimportant. His present stage was that of “orthodox” Buddhism and the “Path of Research” into consciousness—the viewpoint expressed in “Science and Buddhism.” In that essay, the disparagement of magic was thorough—his prior devotion to that path “has now no particular meaning.”
But a philosophical escape hatch, as it were, was provided for in the memorandum. Crowley posited two “reservations” to “orthodox” Buddhism. The first, an affirmation of the value of Hindu meditational techniques, was a minor matter. But his second accorded to magic a unique reality. As Crowley put it: “I cannot deny that certain phenomena do accompany the use of certain rituals; I only deny the usefulness of such methods to the White Adept.” Magic was, in short, useful only for black—that is, ego-ridden—purposes. Nonetheless, this latter reservation shows that Crowley could not quite forget the heights and raptures of magic. As an all-but-convinced Buddhist, Crowley was finding himself, despite himself, desperately bored. Magic—with its eloquence, ritual drama, and deliberate intensification of emotion—had been precisely suited to his predilections. He could not, even now, place it in the same dull box of appearances as the rest of the phenomenal universe.
Magic remained on Crowley’s mind, however, as evidenced by his completion, in July 1903, of an essay grandly entitled “The Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic.” This would serve as the introduction to an edition, published by Crowley in 1904, of the Goetia, a famed sixteenth-century grimoire attributed to King Solomon. Crowley claimed to have “employed” Mathers (no financial terms are mentioned) to translate the Goetia from various extant Hebrew, Latin, French and vernacular English manuscripts. But in his edition of the Goetia, Crowley accorded credit for the translation not to Mathers but to a “dead hand.” To add injury to this insult, it is doubtful that Crowley ever “employed” Mathers. According to J. F. C. Fuller, who would become an intimate friend of Crowley in the years ahead, Crowley had simply helped himself to a copy of the translation in April 1900, during the time of the London revolt, when he had enjoyed brief but unrestricted access to the Golden Dawn files stored in the headquarters of the rebels, the Isis-Urania Temple. If so, then Crowley published the work with neither proper credit nor payment to Mathers—a rank and grievous theft.
But returning the focus to July 1903, the central question becomes: Why bother with the Goetia at this point, when Crowley had already stated in his May 1903 memorandum that magic was of no use to a “White Adept”? In “The Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic,” Crowley allowed that the Goetia could afford satisfactions on the human plane, but claimed higher aspirations for himself: “For me these practices are useless; but for the benefit of others less fortunate I give them to the world, together with this explanation of, and apology for, them.” And yet, for all this insistence on the uselessness of magic, Crowley was careful, in his edition of the Goetia, to claim preeminence (specifically, over Mathers) as “ye Wise Perdurabo, that Myghte Chiefe of ye Rosy-Cross Fraternitye, now sepulchred in ye Vault of ye Collegium S.S.” Magic may have been a toy to Crowley, but it was a cherished toy.
His “apology” for magic in the essay was a brilliant extension of the spiritual-minded empiricism championed in “Science and Buddhism.” There, Crowley insisted that: “The spirits of the Goetia are portions of the human brain.[ … ] Our Ceremonial Magic fines down, then, to a series of minute, though of course empirical, physiological experiments, and whoso will carry them through intelligently need not fear the result.” The experiment consists, fundamentally, of an intensified focus on a particular desire. As for the literal-minded, who ask if one ever obtains such fantastic results as, for example, to “understand the voices of nature” or “obtain treasure”—Crowley responded by way of analogy and allegory. Analogy: A naturalist learns the significance of many animal sounds that a layperson cannot even distinguish; so may a magical practitioner, through careful observation, develop enhanced understanding of “the voices of nature.” Allegory: One’s business capacity (ability to “obtain treasure”) can be enhanced through the rigorous training of one’s mind. In sum, then, in “The Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic,” Crowley had leveled magic to the usefulness—for others—of a psychological self-help tome. As he later commented in the Confessions, “My interpretation conformed with the mechanical theory of Victorian physics.[ … ] It was long before I understood that all explanations of the universe are ultimately interchangeable like the geometries of Euclid, Riemann and Lobatchewsky.”
One mere earthly desire that Crowley still did possess was for sex. During this summer, he wrote—as Laird of Boleskine Manor—a terse letter to the Vigilance Society in London complaining “that the prostitution in this neighborhood [the small nearby town of Foyers] is most unpleasantly conspicuous.” A representative from London was sent up to investigate and found nothing. This finding was communicated to the Laird, who then fired off this postcard as a final salvo of mockery: “Conspicuous by its absence, you fools!” In mid-July, Crowley took matters into his own hands by going to Edinburgh and picking up a woman whom he referred to only as the “red-headed Arabella.” It was arranged that she would come to take residence at Boleskine in August.
But then, in early August, Crowley received an invitation from Kelly to join him, along with his sister Rose, his mother, and a few other acquaintances at Strathpeffer, a Scottish locale not far from Boleskine at which they were vacationing. The red-headed Arabella had not yet arrived, and Crowley was bored. He accepted the invitation, though it seemed to promise little. He had met Kelly’s sister Rose before. She was a highly attractive woman, three years younger than Crowley, with thick, tumbling auburn hair and a passionate nature. He regarded her as “a charming woman but hardly an intellectual companion.” And so, when they conversed together at lunch on August 11, and Rose explained her plight—that she had conducted an unwise but passionate affair with a married man, and that now her family was pressuring her, so as to avoid any further embarrassment, to enter into a marriage with a man she did not love—Crowley felt that he could offer an utterly dispassionate solution.
He himself would marry Rose. It would be a marriage of form only. He would return to Boleskine, and she could return untrammeled to her affair.
If Crowley’s offer lacked seriousness, it was sincere enough in terms of a disdain for the Anglican piety personified by Rose’s father, the Reverend F. F. Kelly. More fundamentally, as Crowley allowed in the Confessions, his suggestion showed an astonishing ignorance of “the elements of psychology” and “the mysterious force of human nature,” in that he failed to foresee that the sheer drama of the gesture could induce—as it did in Rose and himself—a genuine love and passion. But his real naïveté was in failing to plumb his own motives for making the suggestion in the first place. For example, Crowley gave no thought to linking his proposal to Rose with his brief engagement to an unnamed English woman eight months earlier, in January 1903, or his engagement to the American opera singer, Susan Strong, in 1899. Marriage was something he both wanted and yet shied away from—a common enough pattern for a man in his twenties. But could not a spur-of-the-moment proposal to Rose—dispassionate in context—be viewed as a subconscious means of evading the fear while reaching the desired state of marriage?
To accomplish the elopement while forestalling interference by her family, the two traveled at once by train to the nearby Scottish town of Dingwall, where the next day—August 12, 1903—a simple declaration of vows before the town lawyer sufficed, under Scottish law, to render the marriage legally binding. Crowley retained sufficient aplomb to
dress the part of a Scottish Laird—complete with a dirk which he kissed during the ceremony so as to pledge his faith. As for the bride, Crowley wryly admitted: “I never thought of kissing her!”
The two had informed Gerald Kelly of their plans the previous day, before setting off to Dingwall. According to Crowley, Kelly had taken it as a joke and gone on with his game of golf. Their extended absence had sufficed to persuade him otherwise, for, as Crowley tells it with obvious relish, an outraged Gerald Kelly burst into the lawyer’s office just after the ceremony was completed and, upon learning that Crowley had married his sister, aimed a futile blow at his new brother-in-law: “I am ashamed to say that I could not suppress a quiet smile.”
This later patronizing tone is in marked contrast to a letter written by Crowley to Kelly on the very day of the wedding. As the letter alludes to accusations made by Kelly the previous day, Crowley’s later account of Kelly jocularly going on with his golf may be taken as a fabrication. Crowley was fiercely determined to justify himself; he included in this letter a veiled threat of a libel action, perhaps against Kelly himself, to defend his good name. But there was an element of frank sincerity as well. Crowley acknowledged a wanton element in his past. But he insisted upon his essential purity of intention, both as to Rose and as to Buddhist attainment. The letter is, at root, a frank admission of Crowley’s shame over his sexual nature—in particular, his bisexuality:
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