Perdurabo

by Richard Kaczynski

  As early as 1892, Pollitt was a member of the Footlights Dramatic Club, where he wowed audiences as a female impersonator. Although his stage name “Diane de Roughy” was an homage to French actress-courtesan Liane de Pougy (1869–1950), American avant-garde dancer Loie Fuller (1869–1928) was the model for his trademark serpentine scarf dance, which became so famous at Cambridge that it featured in two of Arthur Pilkington Shaw’s plays: The Mixture and The Mixture Remixed.28 Pollitt’s performances would reputedly “make many women green with envy.”29 According to Hobbs,30 Pollitt was, in his day, one of the most talked-about undergraduates at Cambridge, his rooms hung with the works of Rops, Whistler, and Beardsley, and his bookshelves stocked with the Decadents.

  Decadence was a fin de siècle literary and artistic movement dealing with social and physical decay, originating in Paris with Theophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1834), which juxtaposed beauty against gross and corrupt events. A generation later, Gustave Flaubert—best known for Madame Bovary (1857)—populated his series of set pieces in The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874) with androgynes, sphinxes, paganism, and the devil such that the pieces, taken as a whole, formed a cohesive tale. In 1884, two more influential offerings focused on moral decay, sexual perversity, materialism, Satanism, and nihilism: the Rosicrucian Joséphin Péladan’s Le Vice Suprême and Joris-Karl Huysman’s classic A Rebours (Against Nature). The movement became so influential that many authors contemporary with Crowley—Arthur Symons (1865–1945), Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), and 1923 Nobel laureate W. B. Yeats (1865–1939)—incorporated Decadent themes into their work.31

  Herbert Charles Jerome Pollitt (1872–1942), in and out of stage costume. (photo credit 2.2)

  Pollitt was not only a close friend but also a patron of Decadent artist Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898), collecting many of his originals, including drawings from Lysistrata (1896). Beardsley, meanwhile, designed a bookplate for his friend Pollitt. It is probably through Pollitt that Crowley met the ailing Beardsley and commissioned a bookplate from him;32 he also asked Beardsley to provide a cover illustration for one of his books, for that December the artist wrote to Pollitt, “Your Cambridge bard must indeed be decorated and issued from the Arcade. I will protect him with the finest cover.”33 Alas, Beardsley died in January 1898, before he could finish either commission. (Coincidentally, Beardsley’s father had worked for Crowley’s ales as personal assistant to Edward Crowley up until the time the business was sold in 1877.)34 Pollitt and Beardsley had a mutual friend in Leonard Charles Smithers (1861–1907), publisher of Beardsley and Oscar Wilde; from him Pollitt sometimes purchased items for his sizable collection. According to Low, Pollitt

  always bought three copies of his favourites. Two of these would have the bookplates designed for him by Beardsley, one of these he would read, and the other keep mint. The third copy was to lend and give away, as Pollitt was sure he would have to.35

  Beardsley, on his deathbed, sent an urgent message to Smithers, “I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings. Show this to Pollitt and conjure him to do the same. By all that is holy all obscene drawings.”36 Being collectors, neither Smithers nor Pollitt complied.

  Pollitt was also a collector and patron of American expatriate artist James McNeil Whistler (1834–1903). Around September 1896, and again in July through September 1897, he sat for sketches and portraits by Whistler; although “splendidly begun,” the portrait was ultimately destroyed. However, copies of two lithographic sketches survive.37

  Edward F. Benson’s 1897 novel The Babe B.A. paid tribute to Pollitt’s Cambridge celebrity by modeling its title character after him:

  The Babe was a cynical old gentleman of twenty years of age, who played the banjo charmingly. In his less genial moments he spoke querulously of the monotony of the services of the Church of England, and of the hopeless respectability of M. Zola. His particular forte was dinner parties for six, skirt dancing and acting, and the performances of the duties of halfback at Rugby football. His dinner parties were selected with the utmost carelessness, his usual plan being to ask the first five people he met, provided he did not know them too intimately. With a wig of fair hair, hardly any rouge, and an ingénue dress, he was the image of Vesta Collins, and that graceful young lady might have practised before him, as before a mirror …

  The furniture of his rooms was as various and as diverse as his accomplishments. Several of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations from the Yellow Book, clustering round a large photograph of Botticelli’s Primavera, which the Babe had never seen, hung above one of the broken sofas, and in his bookcase several numbers of the Yellow Book, which the Babe declared bitterly had turned grey in a single night, since the former artist had ceased to draw for it, were ranged side by side with Butler’s Analogies, Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour, and Miss Marie Corelli’s Barabbas.38

  On the book’s publication in early 1897, Beardsley wrote excitedly, “Have you seen Dodo Benson’s new novel? It contains three immortal references to your humble servant. There will be a statue yet.”39

  Crowley met Pollitt at Cambridge in October 1897, in the midst of his trance of sorrow. Jerome lived in a Kendal, Westmoreland, house called the Green Window, and had returned to his alma mater to dance again for the Footlights Dramatic Club. Offstage he wore a plain and tragic face: his most striking features were afflicted lips and starved eyes, framed by a pale golden mane; but, onstage, he resembled “one of Rossetti’s women brought to life.”40 Crowley thought he was beautiful.

  Jerome, who was twenty-six to Crowley’s twenty-two, soon became the first intimate friend in AC’s sheltered life. They saw each other daily, enjoying, as Crowley put it, “that ideal intimacy which the Greeks considered the greatest glory of manhood.”41 His personal copy of the book clarifies the thinly veiled metaphor with the handwritten note, “I lived with Pollitt as his wife for some six months and he made a poet out of me.”

  AC was certainly no stranger to the notion of homosexuality: his father had warned him against it upon his introduction to boarding school; he had been accused of it at Champney’s school for Plymouth brethren; a Plymouth tutor had attempted to seduce him; and Malvern housed among its star athletes a host of sodomites. But there was something different about Pollitt. Jerome was an artist, an educated man, someone he respected and learned from. And Cambridge represented unlocked doors, boundless horizons, and open minds. Although Crowley was a passionate artist, his upbringing left him tremendously naive. He doubtlessly proved to be an easy, if not willing, conquest.

  Christmas vacation 1897 found Crowley in Amsterdam, the spiritual emptiness and hunger he began experiencing just two months before now at its peak. He was restless, sleepless. On December 23, having walked the streets all day, he watched the sun set by the docks, cradling in his hands his crucifix, pondering the martyred God, and finding no comfort therein.

  I contemplate the wound

  Stabbed in the flanks of my dear silver Christ.

  He hangs in anguish there; the crown of thorns

  Pierces that palest brow; the nails drip blood;

  There is the wound; no Mary by Him mourns,

  There is no John beside the cruel wood;

  I am alone to kiss the silver lips;

  I rend my clothing for the temple veil;

  My heart’s black night must act the sun’s eclipse;

  My groans must play the earthquake, till I quail

  At my own dark imagining; and now

  The wind is bitter; the air breeds snow;

  I put my Christ away.42

  He was having a crisis of faith, seeking spiritual truths but afraid of releasing the sacred creed of his upbringing. So he struggled with reverence and disillusionment, writing two days later a cynical account of “The Nativity.”43

  Turning his back on the God and Jesus of his upbringing, the only alternative he knew was the devil himself. Thus in March 1898, Crowley visited a Deighton Bell bookshop and purchased a likely sound
ing reference: A. E. Waite’s (1857–1942) The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts (1898). The book, he soon discovered, was no Satanic primer, but a sensationally titled anthology of medieval books on magic. The text described a spiritual alternative hitherto unknown to the sheltered poet. Moreover, Waite’s introduction was riveting; salted throughout were pieces of a larger picture:

  There stood the source of such authority, the school or schools that issued, so to speak, the certificates of title which the records of the expounding master are supposed to shew that he possessed … That there was, as there still is, a science of the old sanctuaries.44

  The idea was anything but clear, but he caught the gist: there existed a school of mystic knowledge that throughout the ages instructed seekers after spiritual truth. He sent a letter to the author requesting more information.

  Waite’s kind reply came in April, urging Crowley to prayer and purity. He also encouraged him to read German mystic Karl von Eckartshausen (1752–1813), whose Der Wolke vor dem Heiligthume (1802) had recently been translated as The Cloud upon the Sanctuary (1896). Although Crowley always seemed to have a disparaging word or twenty about Waite’s occult scholarship,45 he admitted Waite’s impact upon his own life at this juncture:

  Waite certainly did start a revival of interest in Alchemy, Magic, Mysticism, and all the rest. That his scholarship was so contemptible, his style so overloaded, and his egomania so outrageous does not kill to the point of extinction the worth of his contribution. If it had not been for Waite, I doubt if, humanly speaking, I should ever have got in touch with the Great Order. You may of course, if you like, go one step further, back to Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland,46 but their work, superior as it is to him, lacked one great asset. They gave us no idea of the bulk of medieval literature. To go back further still, H. P. B.,47 genius as she was, was far too “oriental” to produce the necessary effect. Waite occupies a position not unlike that of Samuel Johnson. There is an omnivalence about him, which did just what was necessary at the time.48

  Crowley took the man’s advice and purchased a copy of the book to read during Easter vacation.

  That holiday at Wastdale Head with Pollitt was clumsy and awkward. Although they walked the fells together, they spent much of their time apart. Pollitt refused to join AC in any climbing, and Crowley spent the rest of his spare time reading. Although he admired Crowley’s mind, Pollitt feared that his spiritual pursuits would drive them apart. As Crowley recalled, Jerome “fought most desperately against my increasing preoccupation with the aspiration in which he recognized the executioner of our friendship.”49

  That hangman was Eckartshausen’s book. Written in the form of six letters, The Cloud upon the Sanctuary spelled out the existence of the mystic academy that Waite had hinted at. Toward the end of the first letter, AC read:

  A more advanced school has always existed to which the deposition of all science has been confided, and this school was the community illuminated interiorly by the Saviour, the Society of the Elect, which has continued from the first day of creation to the present time; its members, it is true, are scattered all over the world, but they have always been united by one spirit and one truth.

  The second letter was more explicit:

  This community possesses a School, in which all who thirst for knowledge are instructed by the Spirit of Wisdom itself; and all the mysteries of God and of nature are preserved therein for the children of light.50

  In this school, knowledge was presented dressed in symbol and ceremony, so the student learned spiritual truths by degrees. It was exactly what he wanted. But how to find it? Crowley took the only tack he could imagine: he prayed and petitioned to God and the masters to lead him to the Sanctuary. As if on cue, he met Oscar Eckenstein (1859–1921)—a skilled mountaineer seventeen years older than Crowley—who would unwittingly set him on the right path.

  Oscar Johannes Ludwig Eckenstein was born in Canonbury, Islington, on September 9, 1859, to the German Jewish refugee Frederick Gottlieb Eckenstein (c. 1821–1891) and his wife Julie Amalie Antonia Helmke (born c. 1831).51 Frederick fled Bonn in 1848 to avoid prosecution for his socialist activities,52 and in London he started the firm Kumpf & Eckenstein, exporting seeds, grain, oil paints, turpentine, and machinery to continental European cities like Antwerp, Paris, Bordeaux, and Hamburg.53 Oscar was the sixth of seven children,54 attending University College School and studying chemistry in both London and Bonn. Although he worked as a chemist, Eckenstein is better known as a civil engineer with the International Railway Congress Association.55 According to H. W. Hillhouse, he was “years ahead of the times in thought and scientific invention of devices for the betterment of railroading.”56 Crowley’s Confessions recount several of Eckenstein’s professional anecdotes.57 His line of work indeed gave Eckenstein something in common with Crowley’s uncle Jonathan, but it was his skill as a mountaineer that first impressed Aleister.

  Below the Pen Y Pass youth hostel in North Wales sits the Eckenstein Boulder. As a new climber, Oscar Eckenstein applied his engineering skills and fascination with arithmetic puzzles to this modest-sized object, and in doing so he pioneered the hold and balance techniques that would later revolutionize the sport of climbing. Although he scaled his first mountain in 1872, his first Alpine climbs aren’t recorded until 1886.58 He evidently made up for lost time, and in 1887 made numerous first ascents with various climbers, including the famous Alpine guide Matthias Zurbriggen (1856–1917). Many of these peaks are documented in The Alpine Portfolio, an album of one hundred heliotype photographs of the Swiss Alps edited by Eckenstein and August Lorria.59 Around this time he also began the first of several first ascents of Y Lliwedd (2,946 feet) in North Wales.

  By most accounts, Eckenstein met art historian and mountaineer William Martin Conway (1856–1937) while climbing at Zermatt in 1891. However, Oscar’s sister Lina—a feminist polymath and budding cultural historian in her own right—had already been working for Conway as a transcriber and translator on The Literary Remains of Albrecht Dürer,60 and this connection may well have played a role in the climbers’ meeting. Conway invited Eckenstein to join his 1892 expedition to the Karakorams, which was being subsidized by the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Society.61 Their mutual acquaintance Zurbriggen was also part of the team, and Eckenstein gladly accepted. Alas, Oscar wound up leaving the expedition early and returning to London. Conway consistently reported that Eckenstein was forced to leave the expedition due to ill health.62 However, Eckenstein’s account in The Karakorams and Kashmir: An Account of a Journey (1896) reveals there had been tensions between the conservative Conway and the unorthodox Eckenstein. Ultimately, Eckenstein felt that they spent too much time reconnoitering and not enough climbing in their two and a half months among the mountains, and in a meeting with Conway it was decided that he should leave the expedition.63 A tacit competition brewed after that, with Conway knighted in 1895 while Eckenstein remained in relative obscurity.

  Those who knew Eckenstein agreed that he was “cultured but eccentric,” an opinionated and sometimes didactic individual with no interest in conforming to convention.64 It was the at root of his conflict with Conway. It was the reason he, like Crowley, disdained the Alpine Club, which he perceived as staid and conventional. It was even clear from his dress: he preferred his full beard, straw sandals, and old fisherman’s hat to well-appointed clothes, leading more than one acquaintance to the mistaken conclusion that he was poor.

  One characteristic of Eckenstein that would prove very influential on Crowley was his love of the works of Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890). According to Guy Knowles (1879–1959), Eckenstein—with whom he climbed the Weisshorn (14,780 feet), Lyskamm (14,852 feet), Dent Blanche (14,291 feet), and Matterhorn (14,692 feet) in 1898—was an avid collector of Burtonania, buying it whenever he came across any.65 Indeed, Eckenstein’s collection of Burton documents and first editions (including rare variants of the first editions) was so significant that N. M. Penzer relied upon it
when compiling his Burton bibliography; it was posthumously donated to the Royal Asiatic Society’s Burton memorial in 1939 by Lewis C. Lloyd and was referenced for the first time by a Burton biographer in Godsall’s The Tangled Web.66 Dean considers it unlikely that the men ever met, pointing out that “Burton died in 1890, aged sixty-nine, when Eckenstein was 31; and during the previous eighteen years Burton had been consul at Treiste.”67 Nevertheless, Hillhouse asserts that his friend had indeed met Burton:

  O. E. often spoke of him [Sir Richard Burton] to me, in our talks about the philosophies of India and the East, and I do know that it was O. E.’s and Burton’s intense interest in Eastern philosophies, especially mental telepathy, which brought them together at one time.68

  This statement is doubly significant: First, it indicates that Eckenstein was the second mountain-climbing chemist with mystical tendencies to cross Crowley’s path. Second, Crowley was also a great admirer of Burton, who would inspire Crowley’s subsequent adventures in the middle and far east, as well as his book The Scented Garden (1910). In later years, Crowley would recommend Burton’s The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night and Kasidah to students in Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), and even canonize Burton as a saint in his Gnostic Mass (1918). Crowley’s Confessions don’t reveal how he first discovered Burton, but it may have been through Eckenstein … much as Crowley’s classmate H. A. Adamson introduced him to Shelley. Regardless, Crowley certainly equated the two men: Burton and Eckenstein were two of the “Three Immortal Memories” to whom he dedicated his Confessions, and within its pages he would say, “Sir Richard Burton was my hero and Eckenstein his modern representative.”69