Aleister Crowley in America
Page 42
A letter from Quinn to Crowley (now living at 224 West 52nd Street), written on April 17, the day after Crowley’s first sexual experience with Mrs. Coomaraswamy came to an ecstatic climax, shows even John Butler Yeats’s tale-telling about Crowley held little influence over Quinn’s personal judgment. He may well have known things about Crowley’s activities the Yeatses did not.
Dear Mr. Crowley,
I received yours of the 16th this morning. The large decoration by Augustus John is at the Coffee House, 54 West 45th Street. Sometime when I am less rushed than I am now, I am sorry to say, I might take you in there for tea and show it to you. It is worth seeing.
I have heard nothing new in the other matter. I passed it along but did not give your address. I told the person if he was interested he could call me on the telephone and that I could make an appointment for a meeting, but I have heard nothing since about it.
Yours very truly,
John Quinn20
What the “other matter” may have been, we are in no position even to guess.
THE SPYING GAME
According to Spence, before Crowley arrived in San Francisco in late 1915, Commander Mansfield Cumming, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, operating at the time as MI1c, picked Sir William Wiseman to run the increasingly important British intelligence effort in the United States of America. When Wiseman arrived on the east coast, Captain Guy Gaunt, fearing loss of status, complained.
Wiseman returned to London and reported, but was back in Manhattan in January 1916 with full Foreign Office support to establish MI1c, Section V, at the Consulate, 44 Whitehall Street. It is still not clear when, or even if, Crowley contacted Wiseman, directly or otherwise, but Wiseman probably knew something of Crowley’s activities either from Gaunt, the foreign office,*114 or from Lieutenant Everard Feilding’s communications with his N.I.D. superiors after the Statue of Liberty incident.21 Spence takes it that some time in 1916 Crowley operated in a “loop” including Wiseman, Gaunt, and new British Consul in New York, Charles Clive Bayley, whom Crowley knew from friendly meetings at Moscow’s British Consulate in 1913.22
Fig. 20.1. Captain Guy Reginald Archer Gaunt (1870–1953), British naval attaché, New York, 1914–1917
In an affidavit on “my [Crowley’s] Political Attitude since August 1914,” written shortly after March 8, 1917, and intended to clarify his activities for both British and American intelligence purposes, Crowley (as we saw in chapter 10) maintained that while he was in Washington, he wrote a letter of sympathy to naval attaché Capt. Guy Gaunt R.N., over the Fatherland’s attacks on him for “bribing the office boy” (a great embarrassment for Gaunt; see below), while offering Gaunt his help and service. Though Gaunt’s reply was “cordial,” Crowley understood it to indicate Gaunt regarded the Fatherland ’s activities as unworthy of his interest.
Fig. 20.2. U.S. news report (October 2, 1915): Charles Clive Bayley appointed British Consul General in New York, succeeding Sir Courtenay Walter Bennett. Crowley met Bayley in Moscow in 1913.
Crowley’s affidavit then asserts that after a conversation with Otto Kahn, Crowley applied to Gaunt formally for work relating to the Fatherland, to Irish American agitation, and to Indian revolutionary activity, insisting that he had “ever since” kept Gaunt informed of his address, “so as to be ready if called.” Gaunt apparently did not reply, so Crowley took the advice of his friend Paul Wayland Bartlett23 and spoke to Arthur Willert of Washington, D.C., about the matter.
A further “Memorandum” in the same document indicates Crowley’s seizing the opportunity of getting inside the Fatherland.
I saw a chance to be useful. I wrote him [Viereck] a lot of articles, and proclaimed the Irish Republic. I pointed out the possibilities of this course to Feilding, and urged him to get me some more work, officially. Still nothing doing, but I made him reports on the activities of von Rintelen [sabotage agent implicated in the attempted assassination of Morgan in June 1915; see here], and some other matters. I was much handicapped by lack of time, but did my best. I saw Capt. Gaunt, and suggested that I could be of great use in keeping track of the Irish-Americans, and so on; but I have not yet heard definitely from him. . . . The idea in all this was to encourage Germany to brave the USA and so force the breaking-off of relations.24
It is reasonable to assume Wiseman received this information at some point.
Crowley refers specifically to the time he wrote to Britain’s naval attaché: it was when the Fatherland was attacking Gaunt for “bribing the office boy etc.” Tracing relevant articles reveals much about the Fatherland ’s busting of Gaunt’s operation in New York, making Wiseman’s arrival even more apposite, and Gaunt’s well-known dismissal of Crowley as “small time traitor” in circa 1950 more comprehensible.25 Having been roundly exposed by the Fatherland, Gaunt would have found it hard or impossible to trust Crowley, who was so close to it, and whom he might well have thought was baiting him. In this sense, the dynamic of Crowley’s scheme worked against him. His “freelancing” would easily suggest the potential of his playing double-agent. Crowley’s reputation would hardly have assisted his cause.
What was meant by the “bribing of the office boy”? On May 24 the Fatherland published a sensational coup: “The Criminal Methods of Capt. Guy Gaunt CMG Naval Attaché of the British Embassy, HOW THE BRITISH SECRET SERVICE RIFLES U.S. MAIL.”
Not long ago Capt. Gaunt requested a mutual friend to introduce him to the editor of the Fatherland. He expressed the desire to meet Mr. Viereck as “a matter of curiosity.” Evidently, Capt. Gaunt was unable to restrain his curiosity, for before it was possible to arrange a meeting he attempted to bribe an office boy in the employ of Dr. K. A. Fuehr to rifle Mr. Viereck’s mail.26
Gaunt obtained thereby “letters passing between Dr. Fuehr and Dr. H. F. Albert, Financial Attaché of the German Embassy, and other matters of interest to His Majesty’s Government. . . . How long will the American Government tolerate the criminal methods of Capt. Gaunt and his cohort of spies?” The paper requested “the President to ask the British Government forthwith to relieve us of the noxious presence of the head of its spy system, Capt. Guy Gaunt.”
The story appeared in an edition whose cover showed a woman in jail with a ball and chain, gazing to the light beyond the bars; the caption, “Ireland”—her only hope being German victory, now April’s Easter Rising of Irish Republicans in Dublin27 had reached a bitter end.*115 “Forgeries of the British Secret Service” was the Fatherland’s editorial on May 31, 1916.
Last week the Fatherland showed larceny, bribery, and theft in the operations of Capt. Guy Gaunt, Naval Attaché of the British Embassy and head of its Secret Service. This week we show how English agents resort to forgeries, fakes, and the “planting” of spurious letters [and] exposed the criminal plottings of Capt. Guy Gaunt, Naval Attaché of the British Embassy. It showed how one of his agents hired an employee of Dr. K. A. Fuehr to betray his employer, turn his letters over to the agents of Capt. Gaunt, and even to go to the extent of robbing his employer’s office.
The Fatherland is informed that Capt. Gaunt is uneasy in his mind over this exposure, and that when he consulted his counsel, Frederick R. Condant, member of the American Rights Committee, the lawyer advised him: “Keep your nerve. Laugh it off.” The Fatherland can assure Capt. Gaunt that this is no laughing matter.28
Readers will recall Frank Burke’s obtaining the briefcase of Dr. Albert on the electric train in July 1915 (see here), and the claim of one of Gaunt’s principal agents, Czech spy ring leader Emanuel Voska, that he, not Burke, was responsible for nabbing the incriminating briefcase. Page 260 of the Fatherland accused Voska “of forgery in cahoots with Czech spies” in producing propaganda for J. Rendstoke Rathom’s Providence Journal to the effect that Germans in the United States reported to Mexico’s General Juarez and intended to fight America should the German ambassador be withdrawn in event of war. This forgery, asserted the Fatherland, was part of a British plot to show t
hat Germans were waging war against the United States. The paper noted that both Gaunt the spy and Rathom the spy-catcher came from Melbourne, Australia: linked by blood and British colonialism!
Gaunt’s role in the British Secret Service in the United States was announced in the New York Herald, April 30, 1916, with the byline “The British Diplomatist and the Office Boy”—hence Crowley’s sympathy over the “office-boy” affair. The “boy” was Alfred Hoff, bribed by Gaunt to take letters between Fuehr and Albert to be photographed. Precise details of the bribe were exposed. Hoff wanted $250 for a motorcycle. When Gaunt and Hoff went to the McAlpin Hotel to undertake the exchange, a Herald detective followed them. The detective got Alfred Hoff to squeal, and Gaunt’s position was painfully compromised. Fellow spooks Wiseman, his number two Norman Thwaites, and Robert Nathan (with special duties for locating networks of Indian revolutionaries) succeeded in avoiding attention. It is possible, but mere conjecture all the same, that Gaunt nursed the idea that Crowley may have been involved in his discomfiting public exposure.
Before we leave early spring 1916, with Crowley on the verge of fresh adventures in love, magick, and spying, we should hear a word for the woman Crowley lovingly described as “a regular streetwalker,” who had kept him going through the worst of his heart’s desolation. Reflecting on the character of Rita Gonzales in the early 1920s Crowley wrote:
She had been familiar with hardships, callousness, obsession, shame, and poverty from her cradle; but she possessed every noble quality to the full. Hers was the true pride, generosity, purity, and passion to which the Cat [Jeanne] so basely pretended; and hers also the clearinsighted intelligence, the wide experience and deep insight of the Snake [Helen Westley]. Yet she had faced and conquered her foes, instead of acquiescing in despair.29
No sentimentalist who swooned over individual prostitutes as “angels in the mud,” Crowley had found many in his experience victims of their own defects. Rita, however, was special. “Indeed, I failed to realize consciously the sublimity of this girl until long afterwards.” He came to see she exercised a mission of care for him, whose time was limited to need. Rita disappeared at the end of March “without a word and all my efforts to trace her were fruitless.”30 Here’s looking at you, Rita . . . wherever you are.
TWENTY-ONE
The Owl and the Monkey Went to Sea
The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
‘O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!
EDWARD LEAR, “THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT,” 1871
During the summer of 1916, Crowley reflected on the roles that women were playing in his life, deciding that they were sent as part of the initiation to the grade of Magus. He had in his mind familiar images of ancient Egyptian ritual. As the initiate passed through the pylons, the stages would be guarded by priests and priestesses wearing animal masks who could pass him if he responded correctly to a choice or ordeal. Jeanne Foster became “the Cat.” Gerda von Kothek he called “the Owl,” while Alice Ethel Comoaraswamy was “the Monkey Officer,” or just the Monkey. Typically, monkeys won’t leave you alone.
As usual he symbolized relationships as the ordeals; thus, the Cat represented the “ideal,” as against the Snake representing the earthly, cynical, and attainable, with despair at the end; similarly, the Owl represented “social acceptance,” and the Monkey, the hard road of “continual disquietude and almost certain disappointment.” This is interesting because for all Crowley’s regular talk of the “past Aeon of Osiris” accepting a formula of redemption by death and sacrifice, his own experience incorporated the idea. Willingness to “die” was the condition for life and new consciousness, and although sacrifice of the ego’s desires was symbolic, it nevertheless entailed real hardship and severe denials, and death is as much a transition in the new, as in the old, Aeon. Crowley’s repugnance for evangelical atonement doctrine (based, in his opinion, upon “savage superstition”) accounts for his need to emphasize a fundamental distinction between old and new. Crowley refused to accept sorrow as the characteristic of life’s essence. He would doubtless have been moved by the recent rediscovery of the Gnostics’ “laughing Jesus.”
We don’t really know how Crowley came to meet Sri Lankan art critic and historian Ananda Kent Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), recently arrived (February 24, 1916) in New York from England with his English wife, but Spence reckons that Coomaraswamy was a man British intelligence would want to keep tabs on and that would be sufficient for Crowley to take an interest.1
Thanks to an introductory letter from Irish literary figure, T. W. Rolleston,*116 John Quinn became acquainted with Coomaraswamy soon after his arrival, inviting him and Mrs. Coomaraswamy to dinner with himself and journalist and old schoolfriend of W. B. Yeats, Charles Johnston, at 58 Central Park West on March 14.2 Quinn gave Coomaraswamy introductions and commended Coomaraswamy’s scholarship, citing his monograph on “Rajput Painting” (published by the Oxford University Press), among other scholarly works on Indian art, not only to W. B. Yeats (February 26, 1916)3 but also in a letter of March 9, 1915, to president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert W. DeForest, suggesting that DeForest encourage Coomaraswamy to give a talk at the Metropolitan Museum.4
Child of a Sri Lankan father and English mother, Coomaraswamy favored radical Indian nationalist politics. In 1917 he was only permitted to leave England for America so long as he did not speak or write against England.5 His early works on art theory were informed by William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement and anarchic, anticapitalist, anticolonial sentiments, inspiring him to see industrialism as the root of many of the world’s evil: a point of view with which Crowley would have sympathized. He looked to post-industrialism as an objective critique combined with a need for revolution.
Having divorced Ethel Mary Partridge in 1913, Coomaraswamy married Alice Richardson (1885–1958), who had already borne him a son, Narada, in 1912; daughter Rohini joined the family in 1914. A sergeant major’s daughter, born in Yorkshire, England, Alice Ethel Richardson was early on captivated by Indian music. More than fifty years before George Harrison studied with Ravi Shankar, Alice trained as a singer of Hindustani classical music and took the stage name “Ratan Devi” to bring India’s classical music to non-Asian audiences.
One can see plenty of meat for conversation between Crowley and the couple. Spice was added to the dish by Crowley’s meeting a woman whom Mr. Coomaraswamy also lusted after. The woman was, according to Crowley—with how much strict veracity is unknown—a “German prostitute.” There may have been an intelligence angle here also. Calling herself Gerda von Kothek (1896–1967)—the surname a permutation of her mother’s maiden name of Koth6—she was born Gerda Sofie Schumann into a prominent Dresden family of journalists and critics. Gerda lived in the States from 1902 to 1920, and at the time Crowley knew her was married to Rudolf Gebauer, a New Jersey chemist who shared Gerda’s communist fervor and had links to radical socialist paper, the New Yorker Volkszeitung (“People’s Daily”).7 Like Hugo Münsterberg, Gebauer was a member of the German University League. Following intelligence from an unnamed source, the U.S. Bureau of Investigation investigated Gebauer inconclusively in April 1917.
Crowley first performed sexual magick with Gerda on April 12, followed three days later by an ecstatic coupling with Mrs. Coomaraswamy. In fact, the opus only began on April 15, continuing on to the next day: the “most magnificent in all ways since I can remember. The Orgasm was such as to have completely drowned the memory of the Object, but after, I found myself saying ‘Namo Shivaya namaha Aum’ [celebratory Hindu mantra praising Shiva, god of universal dissolution].”8
According to Crowley, Ananda Coomaraswamy tried to unload his wife on him. He did this as though he might obtain something from Crowley in return and was completely taken aback when, informing Crowley that he might have to consider divorce, Crowley simply said, “I have no personal feeling in the matter.” Crowley was not going to get attached to anyone unless he decided it. He’d had enough of the pains of clinging love, and he saw through Coomaraswamy.
PHILADELPHIA
Alice clung tightly to Crowley on his trip to Philadelphia in mid-May, shortly after German saboteur Captain Friedrich Hinsch’s men had blown up part of the Du Pont munitions plant at Gibbstown, Greenwich Township, to Philadelphia’s southwest. Whether Crowley went to Philadelphia with this in mind is unknown, though there is no doubt he was well informed when it came to German sabotage, knowledge evinced in fictional form in the lively Simon Iff story The Natural Thing to Do, written in late 1916 or early 1917. Its main line is sleuth Simon Iff ’s “busting” of German maritime sabotage in the United States and a series of apparently disconnected murders of key people related to the politics of naval supply. In an unusual scene for Simon Iff, the Thelemite know-all magus of criminal investigation gets very drunk in New York with “Mollie Madison,” a witty female friend closely based on Jeanne Foster.