In Manhattan later that day (July 24) Frank Burke, head of President Wilson’s hush-hush intelligence unit deputed to keep an eye on German intrigues, together with a subordinate, followed George Sylvester Viereck and paymaster Dr. Heinrich Albert onto an uptown electric train. Viereck alighted near Crowley’s address. Burke followed Albert, identifiable from saber scars and a small dark mustache. Having fallen asleep, Albert stumbled out of the train, leaving his briefcase. Burke shared the contents with British naval attaché Captain Guy Gaunt. Contents included Albert’s schemes for establishing phony armaments companies to divert Allied funds and frustrate arms shipments. With what Spence calls Washington’s silent approval, excerpts from the trove’s incriminating evidence were leaked to the New York World and published on August 15.2 The ensuing flap would signal the beginning of the end for Albert, and Germany’s military and naval attachés Franz von Papen and Karl Boy-Ed. Not to be outdone in the spying game, the coup was also claimed by one of Gaunt’s principal agents, Emanuel Voska, leader of a Czech spy ring. It was the kind of thing Crowley would like to have been able to claim for himself: he was that close.
At July’s end, while not pursuing his writing, Crowley undertook a brief series of Operations with Helen Westley aimed at freeing Jeanne from constraints to what Crowley had interpreted as her “True Will.” “Thy will be done, Hilarion,” was the Object of the first. The second, “Freedom of action for Hilarion” looked to the future. Jeanne said she wanted “out” from a marriage to Matlack Foster contracted in 1897 when he was forty-seven and she eighteen. Another opus with Helen on August 1 envisioned a “canoe trip with Hilarion,” perhaps inspired by the Sun’s July advertisement for pleasure trips up the Hudson River, deep into New York State. “You’ll enjoy these Trips up the Hudson, steamers SS Trojan Newburgh Poughkeepsie & connecting there with SS Rensselaer.” Crowley “firmly visualized” a “mental picture” of Jeanne and himself in the canoe “among the woods, or by our camp fire.” Six months later Crowley had to observe, “Nary a canoe yet!” Crowley would not find himself in a canoe up the Hudson between Poughkeepsie and Newburgh until summer 1918 when he took a “magical retirement”—without, alas, Hilarion. Operations culminated on August 2 with the Object “Marriage with Hilarion.” The “Result” was added considerably later in more bitter than sweet mode: “This came off, so far as it was possible. At the same time, it was not my True Will, but a romantic idealistic folly.”3
Well, Crowley’s “all or nothing at all,” black-and-white, in-or-out haste to secure everything for himself suggests that he never believed absolutely in the love of a man and a woman as sufficient for himself, “the wanderer of the waste” and “prophet of the lovely Star,” so inclined was he to dismiss on the basis of a small disappointment, forever impatient, curiously spoiled, harshly critical, and always proud.
A reading of Jeanne’s impressive poetry collection, Wild Apples, published by Sherman in 1916, offers insights into Jeanne’s emotional and spiritual concerns at the time, which Crowley, had he been less driven and egotistical perhaps, might have benefited from listening to and heeding, but Crowley could not endure the pains of closeness for long. If Jeanne’s poem Heartache refers to him, Crowley’s sharp, cynical tongue found an occasional target in Jeanne’s vulnerability.
Beloved, since love’s insight gives to thee
Such power to wound, some secret way to find
The one sad, aching spot within my mind,
That from old custom is not quite set free
(Yet holding promise of some grace to be),
Canst thou not with sweet salve this sore wound bind,
And with a soft excuse be gently kind,
Knowing thou hast my staunchest fealty—4
Crowley was used to the cut and thrust, was in many ways battle hardened, inured to opposition, his feelings long since stripped and shaved to necessity, removed from sentimental tenderness. And yet, he loved femininity, and his virility was also his defense against passivity, fear of weak-ness, himself. His first marriage to Rose Kelly had ended in protracted misery and heartbreak. It had scalded his reserves of sympathy: the sores were encrusted.
It may be the case that Jeanne’s affecting poem The Second Wife Speaks, if it was not about Albert Shaw, refers to Crowley’s first marriage. Jeanne had never experienced the ideal love marriage of which romantics dream. She had had the passion but not the fulfillment with Albert Shaw, and it grieved her that the men she fell for could so easily “burn the lips of another,” still bound, like her, to the past. She would like to have been the first wife, pure and perfect.
THE SECOND WIFE SPEAKS
Aye, tell me of those days in Italy
With her; for I would hark the magic strain
That bridehood sings; no premonitioned pain
Warps its great hope that feeds on ecstasy
And thrills with shapes of wonder yet to be.
Measure for me each hour, and once again
Look deep within my eyes, that once were fain
To veil from thee a woman’s ardency.
Findest thou not one day that I may keep
From out oblivion, where all days run,
Nor yet one leaping hour to make me glad.
Within my breast a poignard stabbing deep,—
That day of days when, proud and all love-mad,
She kissed thy lips and told thee of thy son.5
As for any hope in bearing a child, Jeanne’s poem “The Answer” holds the clue that her child was a spiritual dream. The poems evince a gnostic sensibility that to be attracted to earth through lust of body is not that consummation most devoutly to be wished, and better for the unborn soul not to be born, and better even for the enfleshed soul not to drag down immortality to mortality and pain. Jeanne is sad, resigned to the facts of life, pleasures brief and fleeting, and the best thing to do: put self aside and serve while one can.
THE ANSWER
My babe must wait within the shadows where
Burn souls unborn, dim points of amber flame.
He cannot hear my voice; he has no name
That tongue can syllable upon the air;
His home, alas, it is not here—nor there;
And yet I know that unto me he came,
A blessed spirit free from mortal blame
And all the sorrow that the earth-born bear.
I would not bring him to mortality
To know Promethean pain. Why should he come
(This sun-bright elfin of Eternity),
The depths of all my misery to plumb?
Better that ’twixt me and Desire’s hot word
Stood Eden’s angel with the flaming sword.6
Sex magick with Jeanne on August 9 had no Object. “I forgot all about everything. This appears no accident; I had expected the Perfect Union on the seventh occasion; and behold it was so.” He felt her influence was preparing him for the Grade of Magus. “It is very curious to notice how I am being reconstructed in many inward ways . . . My shyness, too, is slowly wearing off. I think shortly all will be well.”7
One wonders if the Object of their ninth act of sex magick three days later came from Jeanne. It was “You.” Very romantic . . . Crowley’s cynicism turned in to a sniff when he wrote it up. “This type of operation is unnecessary and frivolous in my opinion.” He added another cynical note, or was it a momentary note of dawning realism?—“When she says ‘you’ she means ‘everything.’”8 He was nonetheless pleased to be showing her the ropes and getting her over some of her inhibitions. “It was however a very great success. The elixir obtained with difficulty despite elaborate schooling during the day was of A1 quality.”
August 15 was a Sunday, and Crowley and Jeanne went out to Long Island for a day’s bathing in very hot weather. Interestingly, he notes a “long quarrel about sex-magic at dinner.” One would love to have eavesdropped on that one! Jeanne was a Theosophist and would have understood that sex had a spiritual dimension, but it seems clear th
at IX° theory was alien to her romantic nature. For Jeanne, passion was a longing of the heart, not an orgy, and even with her Rosicrucianist imagination it seems doubtful whether she would have been at ease with calling her vagina a cucurbit or thinking of her loved one as a Holy Phallos. But Crowley thought she’d “come through” the veil of respectability and find in her true self the Scarlet Woman he dreamed of and prayed for, and thought he’d been granted.
While the lovers splashed and swam and kissed and tried to let them-selves go at Rockaway Beach, Sunday’s edition of the New York Tribune (August 15) unleashed the whirlwind story leaked to the New York World. If Crowley found the revelations exciting, it didn’t impinge one whit on his magical life, which reminds us that it is an error to see Crowley in this period only through the prism of his technical diaries.
The first headline in two pages of reports could not have made worse reading for Viereck and the Propaganda Kabinett, or their masters in Berlin.
BERLIN ACCUSED OF STIRRING UP DISCORD IN US
Charges include Fomenting Strikes and Subsidizing Newspapers
The story on pages 1 and 2 took off from Burke’s getting hold of Dr. Albert’s briefcase, revealing secret undertakings performed by Count Johann von Bernstorff, German ambassador to Washington; military attaché to the embassy, Captain Franz von Papen; Dr. Heinrich F. Albert, chief financial agent of the German government in the United States; Hugo Schweitzer, German American chemist; S. Sulzberger, Frankfort banker; Herr Waetzoldt, German trade representative; agents of the German Bureau of Information (Secret Service); and various other agents not officially identified, in the public view, with the German government. The weekly budget for German intrigues in America was said to be $2 mil-lion. The Tribune revealed that documents showed the German govern-ment was “financial backer of the Fatherland,” the “pretenses of which to be loyal to the American people are offset by vicious attacks on President Wilson.”
U.S. authorities had discovered “a most elaborate scheme to control and influence the U.S. press, to establish newspapers and news services, finance professional lecturers and moving picture shows, and to enlist the support of American citizens and publish books for the sole purpose of fomenting internal discord among the American people to the advantage of the German Empire.” A covert attempt to buy the American Press Association, keeping the appearance of its existing head, had been uncovered. It was confirmed that the German government arranged with disloyal union leaders to foment strikes, as well as a plan to acquire a munitions firm to supply the Allies, with no guarantees/liabilities for nondelivery. Karl Boy-Ed took part in negotiations to foment strikes at ammunition and car plants—$50,000 was allocated for the purpose. Dr. Albert was named as “the general clearing agent of his government in the U.S.” There were also recruitment plans for covert acts. Albert had “taken over from Dernburg and Dr. Meyer-Gerhardt when they returned to Germany a couple of months ago.”
One can barely imagine the pressure on Crowley at this point, knowing full well the main newspapers were not only sympathetic to the Allied cause but had cause to associate the Fatherland with subversion in America. It must have been something of a mild relief when his nonpolitical, witty article “A Hindu at the Polo Grounds” appeared in Vanity Fair that month. One can only wonder what Jeanne might have been going through as she must have known that Crowley was writing anti-Allied material for the Germans while Crowley himself could not explain to her what he was actually trying to achieve.
Performing sex magick with Helen Westley on August 21 for “Hilarion’s Freedom,” freedom was defined as “freedom to carry out the Great Work without let or hindrance as she will. And her will is mine.”9 The frustrated lover seems to have been caviling at the limited amount of time her professional commitments permitted her to be with him, for the “result” simply expresses relief. “I had given up all hope of seeing H[ilarion] today. At 6:00 she suddenly ’phoned, and we drove together in Central Park for an hour and a half.” Whether Jeanne needed substantial breathing space from Crowley is not a question we can answer, but Crowley was trying, by his lights, to accommodate Jeanne’s will so that it might eventually be fulfilled, and perfect freedom, as he understood it, could be theirs.
Late the following afternoon, after a warm, moist day with rain and thunder, the air cleared, and behind drawn blinds Crowley asked Jeanne to what Object they might dedicate their love, or, if preferred, she could eschew any Object and “fall into the arms of God.” One might guess her choice. The ensuing operation was “perfect in all points,” though “the Joy of these operations clouds the observation.” Result: “As God wills.”
Interestingly, given all the tension one perceives in the air, Jeanne suddenly left New York, without farewell or warning of any kind, the next day. Crowley fell into almost uncontrollable panic, all but fainting in the office. Assailed by pangs of lover’s anxiety, he took refuge with Helen Westley, whose opinion of all this drama is, sadly, unknown. So shaken was he by Hilarion’s sudden absence, so intense was his fear of losing her, that he took as his Object “Faith in God.” Surely, surely, all would be well. He concentrated hard and turned a hot afternoon’s sex into a prayer. Crowley recorded a “great repose of spirit” as the operation’s result. “The test will be whether the pangs return before a reason-able interval has elapsed.”10
The next day faith developed into thanksgiving: he received a reassuring telegram from Jeanne. It was the following day’s operation of Thanksgiving with Helen that was the genuine occasion of Crowley’s vision of “Pure Love” (August 24), where, after offering “Thanks to God for Hilarion”—even if she did prove to be false and had trampled on him, befooled and betrayed him—he awoke to “the fresh feeling of early boy-hood,” devoid of fear or attachment. It was, he wrote, “one of the big experiences of my life.”11
Before Jeanne finally returned to him on September 8, he had performed only two operations with Helen Westley, the Object of the first being “Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gifts” and the second, nearly a fortnight later, “Praise and Glory to God.”
The atmosphere was thunderous when Hilarion returned to her lover, the night hot. The Object: “Thanksgiving to God and love toward him,” though the words used at the “consummation,” Crowley noted, came from the first line of his twentieth hymn to Hilarion.
LOVE IS ONE
I love God only when I love thee most.
Censing the altar with the whispered shower
Of worship, I approach the holiest hour
When in the monstrance burns the blessed Host.
Landed on life’s chryselephantine coast,*105
I make the godly gesture of pure power.
The silence shrouds me like a folded flower
When all life lapses in the Holy Ghost.
How could I love God if I loved not thee,
Or love thee if I were not lost in God?
Could there be three unless those Three were One?
There is no shore to the celestial sea;
There is no pylon to the last abode,
The temple of our truth, Hilarion!12
The Elixir, Crowley observed, “was of surpassing quality, though obtained surreptitiously, owing to the reluctance of the Soror.”13 Jeanne and A’s love swoon continued into September, with hot days, warm nights, and joyous trips out swimming. They discussed going together on a trip to Alaska and tried hard to conceive, though Crowley seemed unaware that conception is exceedingly unlikely during menstruation.
Nevertheless, Crowley had never experienced lovemaking like it in his life. There was a purity about their relations reflected in the exalted Objects of the acts, such as, on September 19: “The main idea [is] to trust the future to the All-Father.” They were clearly trying to find a common language of spiritual discourse. That operation was “supremely good” but followed by what he called in his Rex de Arte Regia: a “Note on Human Nature.”
Here I am enjoying freely the most beautiful and voluptuous
woman I have ever known. In addition, she delights me immeasurably in every way, and inspires me constantly to write poetry. She is one with me, more-over, in Spirit. And I am losing sleep wondering (a) whether she loves me (b) whether she enjoys sexual intercourse and (c) whether she has ever had another lover. If she were a simple whore I should be perfectly happy. I need medical care.14
He probably did. If he did not doubt Jeanne’s promise to be his wife, why would he perform Opus CVI on September 21, whose Object was “This woman for my wife”? The night before he had had the following bizarre dream. “The previous night H[ilarion] came to me. She was Titan—covered a furlong at least. Her mouth and vulva were blazing scarlet squares, and I performed this IX° fully. Yet I was more than half awake, and there was no physical emission of semen. This I call a highly magical experience.”
On the whole, Crowley was amazed at what he called the “simple piety” of the operations with Jeanne. The twenty-second rite celebrated together, for example, had as its Object as “Thanksgiving to the Father, the Lover of All, for the love of this woman.” He felt he had inherited a “new Kingdom,” though by October 3, three days before leaving New York with Jeanne (and Matlack Foster) for Chicago, he complained of “feeling myself too much led away.” He felt the “Holy Phallos” deserved the right to “assert its Omnipotence,” and giving as the Object of Opus XCI—with Odette Colcock,*106 “a rather flabby and decayed French whore from Bordeaux; but expressive and fairly sensual”—“Power over Hilarion,” he declared, “Henceforward let her take her right place!”15
Oh dear! Jeanne wasn’t a feminist in the modern sense, but if thiswas a dominant line in Crowley’s thinking about her, he was asking for trouble. Nevertheless, this strain dominated only when Crowley felt most vulnerable. That is, it was self-defense; in this case, because, as he noted in the record, “I had divined rightly that H[ilarion] was avoiding me (through kindness for L[eila] W[addell] as it appeared later. So I was justified.” This seems to suggest that Jeanne knew of Crowley’s relationship with Leila Waddell and was giving her a chance! It’s difficult not to conclude that Jeanne Foster was as perturbed by Crowley’s fidelity, as he seems to have been about hers, for some time after Crowley added to this record, “P.P.S. Christ what a bloody young ass I was. She was after some other stupid booby!” While this may refer to Leila, it makes more sense in context if Crowley became aware that Jeanne had loving eyes for another, which of course she did. One must presume that Crowley’s lifetime experience of the vision of “Pure Love” detached from all desire or object, while perfect at its level, was not his constant companion on Earth. Whether or not Crowley liked it, he was hook, line, and sinker in love with Jeanne Robert Foster and could feel forcefully that that gave her the power.
Aleister Crowley in America Page 36