[There follows a long, satirically garbled version of a magical invocation.]
But if Taph doesn’t come—and there isn’t any record that he ever has—why then the worshippers go over it all again at the next meeting night? It must make Taph feel something dreadful. And they’re all, as has been said, such nice girls, too.
Has any one ever raised the spirits? Well now! Poet Crowley’s book, The Equinox, which relates at length these conjurations, tells of a very earnest seeker who for six months followed the exceedingly rigorous and ascetic course prescribed for the Rosicrucian way of seeing things. What he saw irresistibly reminds one of easier ways of seeing them—and not so ascetic. This is what he says happened:
“In bed I invoked the Fire angels and the spirits on the tablet, with names, &c., and the 6th Key. I then (as Harpocrates) entered my crystal. An angel meeting me told me among other things, that they were at war with the angels of the 30 Aethyrs to prevent the squaring of the circle. I went with him into the abodes of Fire, but I must have fallen asleep, or nearly so. Anyhow, I regained consciousness being there and half there.
“I recovered and banished the spirits, but was burning all over and tossed restlessly about—very sleepy, but consumed of fire. (Note—Nothing is said here about the singular hallucination of a circumambulating bedroom.) Then I had a long dream of a woman eloping, whom I helped, and after of a man stealing my rose cross jewel from a dressing table in a hotel. I caught him, and found him a man weak beyond the natural (I could bend or flatten him at will) and then the dream seemed to lose coherency—I carried him about and found a hair brush to beat him, &c., &c. Query: Was I totally obsessed?”
You were, brother, indeed you were! But many a man could have gone you several better on that vision and not have them six months to hatch it either.
A couple of months after this story graced American newsstands, Jeanne was advised that if she wanted to experience the best show in New York she should get herself down to the unassuming Petitpas restaurant, run by a pair of Breton sisters on 317 West 29th Street. There she could witness the magical voice of old John Butler Yeats (1839–1922), who held regular court over a long table whose main dish was the rich sauce of a conversation stirred and ladled to admirers by the distinguished Irish painter.
J. B. Yeats was father to poet W. B. Yeats, who had rebelled against his occult mentor Samuel Mathers in the Golden Dawn, launched a magical attack on Crowley in 1900, and subsequently gone his own occult way with London colleagues. One of those who declined to go with W. B. Yeats and company, and who became Mathers’s new London representative, Dr. Edward Berridge, was about to turn witness against Crowley’s character in the Looking Glass trial in London, intimating to the jury that Crowley was homosexual (this from a man who had scandalized Order member Annie Horniman in 1899 with his advocacy of sexual relations with “elementals” on the astral plane).
Fig. 8.1. John Butler Yeats(1839–1922),by photographer, Alice Boughton(1866–1943)
In early 1911, following advice, Jeanne seated herself at one of the Petitpas restaurant’s small square tables and began taking notes of the old master’s bons mots. Never one to miss a beautiful thing, or person, John Butler Yeats invited the beauty to join him at table. Soon he was captivated, as was she. Perceiving the depth of his spirit in the girdle of his charm, Jeanne adored the voluble artist, taking him with her to the Poetry Society and National Arts Club, Grammercy Park, JBY being perennially strapped for cash. As Jeanne’s biographer puts it, “Jeanne, as she did with many other men in her life, dismissed or ignored the negative aspects of JBY’s advice and concentrated on what was useful to her.”2 She learned a great deal from JBY, developing through him a fascination with Ireland. She took his advice to visit Yeats’s close relatives in Dublin and became a lifelong intimate of the family. Thus, after her time in Paris, she traveled from England to Ireland in autumn 1911, while her employer and lover, Albert Shaw, observing her progress admiringly, felt encouraged to give Jeanne more responsibility for the Review of Reviews’s literary and art sections. As literary editor, Jeanne developed the “New Books” section, while combining poetry criticism with a burgeoning passion for art.
Hopelessly devoted to JBY’s son’s poetry, Jeanne revisited Ireland in 1912, only to become distressed at the depths of poverty endured by so many Irish people. Intending to interview celebrated writer George Moore (1852–1933), Jeanne approached his door but was suddenly overcome with nerves. Perhaps the cause was Moore’s reputation for womanizing. Perhaps she had read Hail and Farewell ’s sequel, Ave, published the previous year, in which Moore made wry swipes at W. B. Yeats’s alleged intellectual monomania, eagerness to prophesy, and his being one “whose granaries are in the past.” Jeanne withdrew from Moore’s door but, as she told Richard Londraville, determined thenceforth never to permit fear to obtrude between herself and experiences necessary to a journalist, and more, to a budding poet open to reality and the ideal.
In England that same year Jeanne exhibited her genuine social conscience when taking notes on enlightened employers constructing garden cities for their workers: planned estates such as Port Sunlight on the Wirral, near Liverpool. The absence of similar large-scale acts of concern in the United States put her home country behind in this field. Jeanne had already used the pages of the Review of Reviews to highlight “The Case of Women in State Prisons” in July 1911 and would highlight “Woman and the Age Question” in April 1914. Her serious commitment to reform of schools, immigrant conditions, and prisons would last a long lifetime. Maybe Crowley’s sympathy with socialist confrontation with the facts of life would have found some common ground, because both writers were spiritual idealists, though singing in rather different keys.
While Jeanne found herself in Edinburgh in 1912 for the Review of Reviews, interviewing prominent American Rodin-influenced sculptor George Gray Barnard (1863–1938) as he studied Michelangelo’s works, Crowley undertook the first of an intended three-part series of articles titled “Art in America” for the English Review (though not published until November 1913).
Jeanne’s and Crowley’s approach to art criticism could not have differed more. Jeanne wrote with sensitivity, interest, and considerable sentimentality, rather like a schoolteacher exhorting her charges to consider this and consider that when reading unseen texts for homework. She saw it as her task to express the value of what she herself valued, and her critical pieces consequently make for easy, persuasive reading. She introduced subjects with just sufficient earnestness to hold the casual reader’s attention, before expatiating with clarity and notable originality of phrase.
As late as 1921, John Butler Yeats advocated the profound need for serious critics of American art, writing to Jeanne Foster, in whose poetry he took benign interest, “There is plenty of genius in your poetry, indeed for that matter there is plenty in America—but where is the artist? There are no artists because there are no critics—the critic does the analysis, scientifically and coldly—and then the artist discovers himself, comes to birth in the man of genius.”3 Get that: man of genius. With Crowley, of course, you got criticism, as JBY wanted it, and genius: too much for many casual readers.
It should be noted that Crowley’s extant review “Art in America” only dealt with the past; he had planned two more pieces on American art’s present and future, but the title was taken as a blanket criticism and upset a number of American journalists. Crowley did announce his intentions. “We can then fold our wings sadly over our faces when we contemplate the past (in this article I avoid dealing with the present) of American literature.” We shall look at what upset some American journalists presently.
Crowley’s decision to assess the state of art in America was timely, even just ahead of its moment. Indeed, had he waited a few months, and had he been in New York a few months later, the piece that earned him little in America but insults might have been quite different.
In February 1913, Jeanne’s attention was seized by news of a c
ontroversial exhibition of contemporary art, taking place at the Armory of the 69th Regiment in New York City. Its financier was John Quinn, a critical figure in Crowley’s first year in New York from November 1914. A highly successful lawyer, art collector, and sometime friend and admirer of John Butler Yeats, Quinn had not yet met Jeanne Foster, but he had probably heard of her; in time, he would fall in love with her, and vice versa . . .
Sponsored by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, the 1913 Armory Show marked a seminal event in the story of American art. It included all the latest European styles, shocking styles in their day: movements that moved, moved and shoved everything else into the past. There were futurists, pointillists, cubists, vorticists, fauvists, neo-impressionists.
President Theodore Roosevelt, accepting Quinn’s invitation to attend, tolerated much of the “shock of the new” but drew the line at Marcel Duchamp, whose work the president positively hated, affronted by the artist’s obvious dismissal of the viewer’s feelings. Seduction was one thing; the cold, stained enamel of the artist’s shoulder was another matter.
Jeanne Foster eschewed the stance of automatic reaction and did her best to understand. “They seek the inner meaning behind the bodily form—the divine essence in nature.”4 Abstraction could accommodate and express spiritual ideas. Not put off by what many saw as a frightful loss of visual reality, Jeanne bravely observed “that objects in movement multiply themselves (a runaway horse has not four legs but twenty), that space does not exist (a wet street of puddles of water reflecting the lights and the stars is hollow to the center of the earth) . . .” She was mothering a new generation, mindful of her duty to the American mind. Nevertheless, she had a little, matronly lesson for the artists. “While their great imaginative vision makes much of their work interesting and worth attention, they need some common basis of agreement in their interpretations—a common language that will make their work intelligible.”5 One suspects that this stricture would not have gone down well with any artist struggling to project what was imagined to be a new language, but what she was saying was that if the new was unintelligible, then its language was void: artists spoke only to themselves. But of course the weight of expectation of the artist is that the viewer acquires new eyes, and with them, fresh perspectives on language. Crowley’s mature view was that the artist should always try to give the viewer a way in, if he or she wished to communicate at all.
A remarkable feature of the Armory Exhibition was that it housed the most extensive ever collection of contemporary American art (even though these works were not included when the show toured the country). American artists included the intriguing personality of Robert Winthrop Chanler (1872–1930). A scion of the Dudley-Winthrop and Astor families, “Bob” Chanler would befriend Crowley when the Beast came to reside in Greenwich Village in 1918 and would not only paint his portrait but become the first admiring critic of Crowley’s own painting, after the Magus took to the brush in late 1917.
The beauty of Chanler’s screens, exhibited at the Armory, struck Jeanne Foster. “The ‘Leopard and Deer’ screen,” she noted, “resembles a Beardsley drawing in its mastery of the grotesque; the ‘Porcupine screen’ is a symphony of dull blues, silver and white; another reveals a scene of tropical deep-sea splendor, corals, devil fish and the beady phosphorescence of trailing sea-weed.”6 Somewhat toadying up to the prominent financier, Jeanne took her conclusion from John Quinn’s speech at the opening. “If some of the new art fails it is for the reason that John Quinn has given, ‘that it is lacking in intellect and there can be no permanently satisfactory substitute for brains.’” Jeanne Foster wisely accepts change, and more change to come, lest those who shock today, bore tomorrow. “Every generation has a rhythm of its own art and the succeeding generations will break up their rhythm and form as surely as age follows age.”7 Clearly the writer embraced the wisdom of the ages, giving her the perspective of a kindly, encouraging, but somehow just a little bit irritating school marm. But as the Broadway choreographer was heard to exclaim: “With those legs—who cares?” Jeanne could get away with it. She had brains all right.
Appearing in the English Review’s November issue, Crowley’s essay “Art in America” surged through the Atlantic like a racing clipper to stir immediate foam on t’other side of the pond. If Crowley himself was not in America in 1913, some of his critical thoughts certainly were.
The English Review’s editor, Austin Frederic Harrison (1873–1928), former political editor of the Observer, did make the point that these were the opinions of the writer, and the Review was not responsible for them, so Harrison must have anticipated controversy, if indeed he wasn’t courting it; Harrison recognized the value of controversy, demonstrated at the outbreak of war with Germany, as we shall see. Crowley’s letter about the article to Austin Harrison has survived from September 1913 and implies the editor’s uneasiness with the way Crowley expressed what he had to say and his desire to bring its level down to that of the average English reader.
Dear Austin Harrison,
I am afraid you will never acquire literary sense. . . .
on receipt of the £20 I will endeavour to remove any spark of liveliness or wit that may be lurking in the article, and in every other way try to lower it to the standard of the “English Review.” But, if in the course of an honest day’s work I do my best in this matter, and if you then want to put it into poetry or Dorsetshire dialect, or in the style of Tolstoi or Josh Billings, I shall require a refresher.
By this means, I hope, we shall keep as much goodwill in business, as we have in golf. [There follows an argument about a golf match they recently enjoyed; Crowley’s handicap was fourteen.]
If we are not always careful, the millions who have already broken away from Golf by using illegal Clubs will introduce billiard cue putters, and howitzer drivers, and get their balls out of bunkers by electricity. The Rules of Golf should be studied as conscientiously as the study of the works of the Fathers, and the rigour of their application should remind one of the Trappists.
Now it is off my chest,
Yours ever,
Aleister Crowley8
One thing is soon evident in Crowley’s article. While Crowley was genuinely familiar with many works by American writers, poets, painters, and sculptors, his interest was not to criticize in depth individual works but rather to attempt a broad analysis of the way artistic culture functioned socially in America and how it was bound up with the psychology of the developing country. He told it the way he saw it. Thus:
Of American culture, I have one perfect sample. Travelling from Nagasaki to Hong Kong two mature maidens from Massachusetts discovered that I sometimes wrote, and “took me up.” “And who,” I asked, “is your favorite poet?”
A warm flush overspread each sallow cheek as the two thin mouths exclaimed “Rossetti!” “And which” (I tactlessly pursued) “which of his poems do you like the best?”
This remark closed the conversation. They had put the name Rossetti down in a notebook; and right there “culture” ended.
This I found characteristic of many American women. I have seen American girls in Italy laboriously writing down the names of more painters than I shall ever know, without any further comment than the dates at which they painted. To ask a single question on the broadest lines was to court silence; in fact, it became the most useful method in my daily life and conversation.
Crowley, like Symbolist and Decadent artists in general, was a great admirer of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), of his prose anyhow; Crowley considered Poe’s poetry fairly flat by comparison. However, he remarked that Poe’s settings tended to be European, the style likewise. Crowley was amazed that a country founded by people who carried Shakespeare, Bunyan, and the King James Bible with them to lands of such varied and epic grandeur had not, in the past at least, been inspired to greatness in art. He had no difficulty in expressing the virtues of Walt Whitman (1819–1892), his faults likewise.
Whitman is almo
st equally unconvincing as far as scenery goes. The secret of all Nature-poetry is the interpretation of every phenomenon as a direct dealing of God with the soul,*54 and Whitman rarely reaches to be more than a recorder or reflector of Nature. It stirs him at times to big thoughts, but hardly ever in that intimate manner, the sense of necessity, which we see in Keats, Coleridge, and even Wordsworth.
And yet he [Whitman] does something better than all this, he gets as none other ever got it, the sense of vast open space and the vigorous autochthon rejoicing in his strength—man made one with the biggest kind of Nature. . . . In fact, if we are to take the loftiness of the habitual plane of thought to be the first qualification of a great artist, Poe and Whitman stand alone.
Nevertheless, Crowley penetrates to the flaws in Whitman’s writing, when judged in terms of claims to the first rank. “A great mind, perhaps; it seems to me as if that mind had been overwhelmed by the immensity of its material. He obtained such mystic rapture from every object that he could do nothing but scribble down its name!” Crowley notes this curious fascination with names of places: an American song or poem can achieve a response simply through repetition of place-names. Had he heard it in 1912, the song “Route 66” would have served as perfect illustration of this. We learn absolutely nothing about Pomona or Flagstaff, Arizona: it is a chant whose soul is obscured by the blur of chromium-plate; one has zipped through the body of America without the anguish of experiencing it.
Aleister Crowley in America Page 17