Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  Spence is convinced that the most significant factor in the addling of Crowley’s egg came from negotiations with the J. P. Morgan Bank, begun by British Treasury representatives Basil Blackett and George Paish in mid-October with final arrangements concluded in London in 1915, whither traveled Morgan partner Henry Pomeroy Davison (1867–1922) in late November 1914.9 It is a reasonable proposition, but negotiations with Morgan were not concluded within “forty-eight hours” of Crowley’s or of G. M. Booth’s arrival. Negotiations were difficult, partly because the money markets were so unsettled, the figures enormous, and the City of New York had to justify its creditworthiness in gold, movements of which on the high seas were subject to panic and war restrictions. Furthermore, British Prime Minister Asquith did not want the British public to think that the empire needed financial assistance.

  It may have been a gold transaction that Crowley was initially involved with. Henry Davison as a Morgan senior partner was closely involved in establishing the city’s gold reserves.10 As Thomas W. Lamont writes in his account of Davison’s brilliant handling of the foreign exchange situation in London in the winter of 1914–1915, the Morgan bank was the crucial player in enabling the British and French governments to purchase credit, stock, and matériel in New York.

  Early in the War the members of the Morgan firm realized the benefits which accrue to America’s export trade, if the Allies were able to find adequate credit facilities here. This a leading consideration which prompted J. P. Morgan & Co. to undertake the burden of leadership in practically all of the public loan operations in America, of the British and French Governments during the first three years of the War. It was manifestly to the distinct advantage of the American community to extend credit on such a scale to the Allied Governments as would enable the latter to continue their enormous purchases of American grain, cotton, copper, steel, leather, and other products.11

  Fig. 11.3. Belle da Costa Greene (1883–1950)

  Expunged for some reason from Symonds and Grant’s edited version of Crowley’s Confessions was Crowley’s statement that one of the first people he met in New York was Belle Greene. Judging by a diary entry in Crowley’s Magical Record for May 31, 1920, he had enjoyed a limited romance with Belle da Costa Greene (1883–1950), proud manager of the Pierpoint Morgan Library, 29 East 36th Street. His excitement to love could have flowered into complete romance, confided Crowley to himself, but for one flaw that put him off: Belle’s “manner.”

  Daughter of Richard Greener, first black American to enter Harvard but who, due to racial prejudice, remade herself and her name into an exotic Portuguese, Belle only dated men of standing, such as the late John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) and art scholar Bernard Berenson (1865–1959). But there must have been something between Crowley and her to begin with. Her late beau’s son, financier Jack Morgan, was now deeply involved in securing Allied financial services, while her job was to run Jack’s late father’s library and art collection, buying, researching, and assessing value of books and artworks. What brought Crowley to Belle is not known. It might have been the books he would agree to selling to Quinn on November 12; that is, because Quinn did not buy all Crowley was offering, Quinn might have suggested Crowley sell rare works to the Pierpont Morgan Library. Quinn and Belle knew each other well. Spence suggested that Belle da Costa Greene was probably part of Morgan’s private intelligence service, run by Martin Egan, Morgan’s “publicity chief” who was a good source for forty-four-year-old British naval attaché Guy Gaunt, running Naval Intelligence Department (N.I.D.) schemes from the British Consulate at 44 Whitehall Street. High up in this Morgan-N.I.D. nexus was, according to intelligence scholar Thomas Troy, a “Mr. Green,” identified with surprising confidence by Spence as Belle Greene’s code name.12

  While Spence’s numerous hypotheses linking Crowley to alleged intelligence-related figures carry weight in speculative terms, little is known for certain, though the critical mass of related circumstantial data cannot be ignored in fairness to the historical record. One thing is certain: when a person arrives pretty fresh in a big city, he or she will know soon enough whether they are “in” or “out.” Judging by Crowley’s string of contacts encountered in New York in November and December 1914, he was definitely “in,” and, despite frustrations tantalizingly expressed in his unique sex-magick diary, he had just sufficient money and status to make an impact, even if Quinn was, as he asserted defensively to William Butler Yeats, immune to Crowley’s glamour.

  We know for sure that Crowley met the following lights of New York media and culture within two months of stepping off the Lusitania: out-spoken Irish novelist and pro-German Frank Harris (whom Crowley had known in London), John Quinn, Belle da Costa Greene, magazine and newspaper editors Frank Crowninshield and John O’Hara Cosgrave, John Butler Yeats, multimillionaire Aimée Gouraud (née Crocker), astrologer Evangeline Adams, and New York World journalist Henry Noble Hall. That’s not bad going for a man who claimed that he only expected to cook an egg and scarper home in a fortnight.

  It may be the case that it only required Crowley to make one key contact to ensure the string of contacts that appeared in fairly rapid succession. Take the following link, for example. We earlier mentioned Crowley’s “Affidavit” of 1917 wherein, failing to get a decent response from Guy Gaunt of the New York N.I.D. operation, he was advised by high society beaux arts sculptor Paul Wayland Bartlett (1865–1925), then working in Washington, to contact London Times correspondent and S.I.S. man Arthur Willert, also based in Washington.

  Later knighted for services to His Majesty, Sir Arthur Willert wrote The Road to Safety: A Study in Anglo-American Relations, in which Willert described Quinn as one of the “staunchest supporters that the Allies, especially the French, had among the Irish-American leaders.”13 Quinn himself in due course effectively confirmed this. “I have given my time and my strength and my money to the pro-Ally causes of all nationalities.”14 It must be said that if it was the gaunt, bald dome of slim John Quinn who set Crowley’s social ball rolling, then it is extremely unlikely that Quinn did it purely out of gratitude for Crowley’s selling him copies of his rare books and manuscripts! Of course, as Quinn had been sympathetic, though in a highly qualified manner, to Sir Roger Casement, he might have taken an interest in Crowley had Crowley played his “Irish” card strongly. William Breeze has observed that had Crowley opted for posing as Irish in Quinn’s company, the ever-sharp Quinn would not have been fooled for a second. Decent-minded as Quinn undoubtedly was, he was not obliged to provide Crowley with working funds in exchange for Crowleyana and could easily have suggested that Crowley’s place was in England, unless, that is, Quinn was given to understand that for some reason Crowley was useful in New York. Just how “useful” Crowley could be, and to whom, we may now begin to explore.

  TWELVE

  Lower into the Water

  The first days of November 1914 were pleasant in New York. The temperature reached the high fifties around midday, permeated occasionally by a chilly breeze from the sea, and all was generally fair, peppered with a few clouds in high-pressure, dry conditions that had spread up from the south. Crowley’s first taste of New York in eight and a half years might have been a surprise insofar as so much had changed, but a temporary suite in the elegant St. Regis was doubtless reassuring. The hotel’s seventeen stone stories rose majestically into the peaceful skies dominating everything below them, and, were he not anxious and still suffering some irritation in his leg, he might, briefly, have felt on top of the world.

  The streets below the huge stars and stripes that fluttered above the hotel’s crown were crammed with considerably more motorized vehicles than he would have seen in 1906; this was the new, hard steel land that Henry Ford had made, and the horses and carriages and hansoms and carts had vanished from most of Manhattan, bar Central Park, leaving single-celled cabs, smelly trucks, and motor buses to course up, down, and across the city’s clogged arteries. The city had not one heart but millions, beati
ng, pulsing, in and out of strange times full of strangers.

  One wonders what hat Crowley would have worn. Would he have taken a bowler to blend in with the regiments of merchants and insurance men, or sported a silk top hat like a senior banker? Perhaps he wore a homburg; they were very common in Manhattan in 1914, as were felt derbies and soft flat hats like boaters among a few modest-brimmed stet-sons. Service staff wore spotless, bright-trimmed uniforms; cabbies wore peaked caps like seamen; women wore all kinds of exotic and plain broad-brimmed creations above the general fashion for stiff, single-breasted jackets tapered at the hips above long, dark skirts of substantial fabric. Ladies wore as much fur as they could afford, from fur lapels to mink stoles. Did Crowley, in an effort to blend in, conform to club collar, tie, and studs? One wants to doubt it; he loved big, bohemian bow ties and spacious jackets; he was a poet, after all, though he could look the dude when he wanted to.

  And it was doubtless as a poet that Crowley called on novelist and journalist Frank Harris (1855–1931), reckless Irish rake who had endured and enjoyed a life both tough and self-indulgent, having been a penniless migrant to America in his youth, who worked in hotels in Chicago and the cattle industry in Kansas before studying and returning to London, where he enjoyed success as a newspaper editor and at some point met the equally reckless and self-indulgent Crowley. Harris had been a guest at Winston Churchill’s wedding, though politically the two Edwardian characters were at some remove. Harris had taken to socialism, and this colored his journalism. There was a hunger for change, fundamental change; it was perhaps the one thing that united artists and workers.

  Crowley did not have far to go to find Frank Harris, for Harris was staying at the St. Regis himself; he’d been back in America since the outbreak of war and had brought the chip on his shoulder with him. It is likely that Harris introduced Crowley to figures of his acquaintance, among whom stood out the fascinating, urbane English lecturer and budding novelist Louis Umfreville Wilkinson (pen name “Louis Marlow,” 1881–1966).*70

  Wilkinson appealed to Crowley; here was a man who had been sent down from Oxford for blasphemy in 1901 and who had corresponded with Oscar Wilde when Wilde was jailed in Reading for homosexuality—not that Crowley was a Wilde worshipper, by any means. Wilkinson, who would pen a portrait of Harris—and of Crowley—in his book Seven Friends (1953), dwelled in New York’s borough of Queens, at Rockaway Beach, on Long Island’s south side, a short train ride away.

  Harris has also been credited with introducing Crowley to William B. Seabrook, Hearst journalist with a powerful penchant for voodoo and S&M. Emily Bertha Crowley would doubtless have preferred more respectable friends for her son, but, like Jesus, Crowley could not eschew the company of despised people and whores. As he would later observe, “You can be respected, or you can be respectable, but you cannot be both.” He placed this distinction in the context of medieval virtus, virile strength of character, or chivalry: the proper meaning of virtue. No artist could afford to be respectable; it was a barrier to the wells of truth. Not that Harris, in particular, cared to sup from those wells as a way of life. As Max Beerbohm observed, Harris only told the truth when his invention flagged.

  However, there is one person that I suspect Harris may have provided a direct path to. This was a man who respected truth very much, for he knew precisely how to twist it. George Sylvester Viereck (1884–1962) was editor of pro-German propaganda weekly the Fatherland, run from an office at 1123 Broadway, financed from official German funds through Heinrich Albert. Crowley’s Confessions relate that when he came face-to-face with him, Viereck reminded fellow poet Crowley that they had met formerly at Austin Harrison’s offices in London; Crowley was blasé about Viereck’s recollection. He obviously preferred not to get on the subject of the English Review, for which he had contributed patriotic verse and recommendations as to how to win the war!

  Fig. 12.1. George Sylvester Viereck (1884–1962)

  Crowley’s account of how he got mixed up in German propaganda is as amusing as he could make it and, as told in his Confessions, began “One day, I think, early in 1915” with an accidental conversation on a bus begun by a stranger called “O’Brien” with the words “Do you believe in a fair deal for Germany and Austria-Hungary?” to which the sporting Englishman replied that he believed in a fair deal for everybody. Unfortunately, there is a problem with this account. Crowley’s first article for the Fatherland appeared in print on January 13, 1915, and, as we shall see, was remarkable because the editor introduced its writer—new to the magazine—as “the pro-British poet.” Anyone familiar with the accepted tale who has not consulted the issue should be surprised at this, for, allowing for a natural run-up period from introduction to publication, Crowley’s contact, or desire to contact, the German propaganda apparatus must have pre-dated early 1915. As for the line about “a Fair Deal for Germany and Austria-Hungary,” this was, in fact, the official strapline to the Fatherland’s masthead.

  Fig. 12.2. The Fatherland’s masthead

  Three weeks after Crowley’s Fatherland article was published, “Snobbery in Excelsis” appeared on page 8 of the magazine (February 3, 1915). The article stated that England’s claim to be fighting for “freedom” was a lie, because freedom was what she denied to her own and to Ireland. Nor could her claim to be fighting “militarism” hold water, for Great Britain was “the proud despot of the world.” The “truth” was rather that Britain envied Germany, and wished to reduce her greatest commercial rival and to plunder her goods by naval blockade and other violent means. H. G. Wells was quoted: Germany’s advances, instead of chastening England, simply irritated her.

  The writer of this distinctly pro-German piece was Frank Harris. A report from British ambassador Cecil Spring-Rice flew to London complaining that Harris expressed “a profound detestation for England and a contempt for France.”1 The British ambassador’s view is borne out eloquently in a letter of January 25, 1915, from John Quinn to W. B. Yeats.

  There is another more or less cracked “man of letters” out here now also, whom you perhaps know, Mr. Frank Harris.*71 Intellectually, he is as crooked as the biblical ram’s horn, if there was a ram’s horn in the bible, and from what I heard financially he is as crooked as two rams’ horns.

  I happened to wander into a lecture by him one night, taken there by my friend, Mitchell Kennerley, who loaned him a floor in his building, without rent, and found Harris delivering a violently anti-English and ecstatically pro-German speech. At the end of his speech I punctured him flat by asking whether, assuming all that he had said about England to be true, that she was autocratic, undemocratic, snobbish, caddish, unhygienic, unscientific, backward in her business methods, made little or no provision for mothers or babes, and further assuming all he said about Germany were true, that she produced the greatest synthetic chemists, the greatest scientists, physicians, philosophers, musicians, and statesmen, and that she was the great and ideal state of the future—assuming “Mr. Harris,” I said, “all these things to be true, do they give Germany any right to invade her neighbours’ territories and murder her neighbours, plunder their cities and steal their territory?” Harris replied that “the gentleman’s question implies a quarrel with God.” I said, “Ah, yes, you ape the Kaiser ‘Me unt Gott!’” Harris said: “No, I mean your quarrel with the law of evolution.” I replied that all of the things that he boasted that Germany excelled in, art, science, government, music, philosophy, chemistry, research, institutions, everything that went to make the civilized state, all those things existed to mitigate and frustrate nature’s law of the survival of the fit-test; that Germany claimed to be a nation of culture but still he was harking back to the law of the brute, to the stone age, as a justification for Germany for taking and doing what she wanted. Harris is a clever writer, an exasperating liar, has considerable power of sarcasm, but he is not reasoned. I did not intend to interrupt him, but when I got through there was nothing left to do. He was punctured as flat as a collapsed b
alloon.

  Kennerley says that he is a Jew and that his name is Cohen. He was introduced that night as having Welsh blood, but born in Galway. I have heard of his claiming to be Welsh, to be Irish, and to be American. . . . But a hundred Harrises could not change public opinion in this country, 90% of which is with the allies.2

  The British embassy clearly had its eye on Harris, and on the Fatherland. And so, we might surmise did Crowley, for Crowley lets another fact slip unnoticed into his fragmentary narratives of early life in New York.

  In chapter 77 of the Confessions, Crowley says that what kept him in New York beyond the initial fortnight allotted for “special business” was the “prominent collector’s” purchase of more than £100’s worth of first editions, followed by the collector’s expressed wish for a complete collection plus “two or three hundred manuscripts.” It is worth recalling that the collector was the same John Quinn who undertook to purchase installments of manu-scripts from W. B. Yeats for the ulterior motive of funding John Butler Yeats’s life at the Petitpas boarding rooms. Was Quinn looking for ways to justify funding Crowley—ensuring he at least got something in return?

  Not following Quinn’s train of thought perhaps, Crowley expected a complete deal for the lot, all in one, which would have yielded, he calculated “at least five thousand dollars” (the rate of exchange was about $4.70 = £1).3 “So,” writes Crowley, “I cabled for the stuff and hung around, with the result that my political opportunity came along. When the books arrived from England, the collector changed his mind and only bought a small proportion of the consignment. This left me flat, and besides, I was getting into my stride in countermining Münsterberg. So I stagnated in New York, getting lower in the water every day” 4 [my italics].