From Srinagar, Crowley returned home by stages: first to Baramula, where he hunted bears for a week; then to Bombay, his ambition for sightseeing withered by sickness and exhaustion. On October 4, he sailed for five days to Aden, where Yemini authorities quarantined him in case he had caught cholera in Bombay. By the time he reached Cairo on October 14, his ennui had swelled: he had been away from London for sixteen months, climbing mountains, learning mysticism, and writing poetry. Although he felt certain he had attained greatness in all three areas, he found no comfort in the knowledge when pondering his next move. Rather than see the pyramids, Crowley visited Cairo’s flesh pots, muttering “I won’t have 40 centuries looking down on me.” On November 5, 1902, after three weeks in Cairo, Crowley resumed life in France.
He called on Mathers, who, in the process of moving to Butte Montmartre, received him warmly. Crowley eagerly described his journeys, only to find Frater SRMD uninterested in tales of mountaineering, concentration, and yoga. Disappointed with his master, he concluded they had grown apart. Moreover, he believed Mathers had lost contact with the Secret Chiefs, and with it any mystical power or authority he may have claimed.
CHAPTER FIVE
A Rose by Any Other Name
While Crowley circled the globe, Gerald Kelly moved to Paris to become an artist. As early as 1900, William Dalton, principal of the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, had advised Rev. Kelly, “Let your son go to Paris; you’ll never regret it.” Once he accepted the idea of his son being a painter, the clergyman supported Gerald’s endeavors. The budding artist arrived alone in Paris in 1901 and took a studio on the rue Campagne-Première in Montparnasse. He rubbed elbows with local luminaries like Monet, Degas, Rodin, and Renoir, finding himself a portrait painter, a realist, in the Impressionistic hotbed. At the urging of a friend, he reluctantly submitted his first two portraits—both of his sister Rose—to the Salon, where they were put on display. From there, he quickly gained a reputation as a talented painter with an encyclopedic knowledge of art, and in 1903 the French government bought one of his pictures. Gerald Kelly had arrived. So, too, did Crowley, who decided to stay with him.
Crowley’s empty feeling about his achievements wilted into what he called his “cynical bonhomie” phase. He completed “Ahab” on December 9 and dedicated it to G. C. Jones, his mentor in the GD. From the manuscript, he printed the sonnet “New Year, 1903” in gold capital letters on a folded sheet with a crimson border. It bore the message, “From Aleister Crowley, wishing you a speedy termination of existence.” His next publication was an edition of two hundred copies of Berashith, his first published work on magic. The Paris printing firm Clarke & Bishop did the job.
His nihilistic attitude emerged from a desire for the trance of nonexistence—of union with the godhead. This sentiment runs through his works from this period, including “Science and Buddhism,” “The Excluded Middle,” and his disenchanted treatment of Buddhism, “Summa Spes”:
Existence being sorrow,
The cause of it desire.
A merry tune I borrow
To light upon the lyre:
If death destroy me quite,
Then, I can not lament it;
I’ve lived, kept life alight,
And—damned if I repent it!
Let me die in a ditch,
Damnably drunk,
Or lipping a punk,
Or in bed with a bitch!
I was ever a hog;
Muck? I am one with it!
Let me die like a dog;
Die, and be done with it!
This poem, like Berashith, appeared in early 1903, with Alice: An Adultery following it into production. He showed the manuscript of Alice to several acquaintances, one of whom was aspiring artist Sybil Meugens (born c. 1877), who was helping to distribute his books.1 To Crowley’s surprise, both she and Kelly claimed no lady would kiss her suitor so early as the thirteenth day of his wooing. He felt vindicated when, shortly thereafter, Sybil’s lover went to Brussels for a week and she became intimate with Kelly. The artist was, in fact, so smitten that he proposed. Only a hasty visit from his sister Rose, who warned him his allowance would be cut off if he went ahead with the marriage, caused him to wait. Eager to put a twist onto the situation, Crowley offered to match the allowance if Gerald were to go ahead and marry her. By then, the matter had degenerated to the point that Gerald reconsidered matrimony altogether.
Meanwhile, Crowley found himself enamored of an Irish friend of Gerald’s from the Slade School of Fine Art, Eileen Gray (1878–1976). Kathleen Eileen Moray Gray had come to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and Académie Colarossi, and she lived near Montparnasse. Kelly was painting her portrait, so she spent a good deal of time in his studio, where she met Crowley. Something about the poet with silk shirts, floppy bow ties, and ostentatious rings appealed to her. Perhaps it was his sense of luxury, or his fashionable interest in occultism, or because she thought “he was very lonely.”2 For whatever reason, she patiently sat and listened to his discourses on magic, while he denied Kelly’s assumption that they were lovers: “She was never anything of the sort, nor within a million miles of it. Never wished it, nor she.”3 Regardless, Crowley soon proposed and gave her a diamond brooch.
One day, while sitting for Kelly, Eileen asked about her intended. Reading in The Sword of Song that Crowley had read Lévi and the cryptic Coptic, she wondered, “What does Coptic mean?” The painter told her, “It’s the language spoken by the ancient Copts.” When she asked, “What does cryptic mean?” he stopped painting and smirked. “The language spoken by the ancient Crypts.”
Much of Crowley’s writing from this period concerns his fiancée: In Rosa Mundi and Other Love Songs, poems 3, 14–16, 18, and 21–28 are all about Gray. Even poem 13 of the “Lover’s Alphabet” series is titled “Eileen.” In number 27, her full name appears as an acrostic. Like Kelly’s hasty proposal to Sybil Meugens, Crowley’s marriage to Eileen Gray failed to materialize. Although Gray would go on to become a successful furniture designer and architect, the importance of her reputation and contributions are only recently being appreciated: At a February 25, 2009, auction from Yves Saint Laurent’s art collection, Gray’s “Fauteuil aux dragons” armchair sold for a record £19.4 million, the highest price ever paid for a piece of twentieth-century design.4 Likewise, the Irish Times quipped that 2009 “might be called The Year of Eileen Gray.”5
Another of Crowley’s works, “The Star and the Garter,” commemorated his entire circle of women at the time: fiancée Eileen Gray was the star, while the garter was three other ladies, most likely Kelly’s fiancée, Sybil Meugens; model Nina Olivier; and sculptress Kathleen Bruce. Olivier—of whom, as Crowley wrote, “I loved and loved so well and sang so passionately”6—would reappear in “The Ordeal of Ida Pendragon” and in Rodin in Rime, while Bruce, as will be seen, featured in numerous works.
Kathleen Bruce (1878-1947)—born Edith Agnes Kathleen Bruce—was Eileen Gray’s close friend. The youngest of eleven children, she was orphaned in infancy, raised in Edinburgh by a strict grand-uncle, and sent to an equally strict convent school from age fourteen to eighteen. She became an art student at age twenty-one and in 1901 began attending the Académie Colarossi in Paris. Starting with paint—she loved the work of Augusts John—she soon discovered clay was her medium. As a friend and pupil of Rodin, etched in her memory was the day she went from being called chère élève (dear student) to chère collègue (dear colleague). Within months of graduating with the Colarossi’s highest honors, her sculptures were displayed by the Salon.
During a sitting, Kathleen Bruce’s Highland flamboyance and seductive beauty captivated Crowley. Characterized by some biographers as a misogynist because the frailties of her female friends exasperated her, Bruce was not the easy conquest Crowley had hoped. “She took delight in getting married men away from their wives,” Crowley wrote bitterly, and “initiated me into the torturing pleasures of algolagny on the spiritual plane.”7
Of their “sexless love,” Crowley remarked that she “made me wonder, in fact, if the secret of puritanism was not to heighten the intensity of love by putting obstacles in its way.”8 As it turns out, she was simply remaining chaste until she found Mr. Right: As she recalled her artist friends and potential lovers in Paris, “I kept my goal, my star, firmly fixed. None of these was the right, the perfect father for my son.”9 Crowley’s later poems “The Black Mass,” “The Adept,” and “The Vampire” recount his ambivalence toward her with lines like:
Spit in my face! I love you. Clench your fists
And beat me! Still, I love you. Let your eyes
Like fiery opals or mad amethysts
Curse me! I love you. Let your anger rise
And your teeth tear bleeding bits of flesh
Out of my body—kill me if you can!10
After she married Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Scott (1868–1912) in 1908, Crowley concluded he had always disliked her. Bruce bore her husband a son, Peter, in 1909; Scott and three others died tragically on his second Antarctic expedition, two months after reaching the South Pole.
Whatever Crowley’s feelings about her may have been, Kathleen Bruce nevertheless commanded much attention in his writings: His later books Why Jesus Wept and Rodin in Rime would bear dedications to Kathleen Bruce, as would his poems “The Muse” and “Song”11 and the short story “The Vitriol Thrower.”12 The namesake of “The Ordeal of Ida Pendragon”13 was based in part on her, as were the poems “Ovariotomy” and “The Gilt Mask.”14 Much of his later work Clouds without Water, although not overtly dedicated to her, was written in her memory.
Near the Gare Montparnasse, a circle of artists and writers clustered into Le Chat Blanc, a restaurant in rue d’Odessa with a reputation for excellent yet inexpensive food. The clique was closed, the same people dining nightly around the horseshoe-shaped configuration of tables that claimed most of the first floor. Those outsiders who unwittingly visited the English, American, and French painters quickly found themselves unwelcome. Gerald Kelly was part of the “in” crowd at Le Chat Blanc, and introduced Crowley to the assorted personalities who frequented it.
One of these was a young doctor named Willie who aspired to be a writer. Although he had recently published Mrs. Craddock (1902)—and his first book, Liza of Lambeth, in 1897—the name William Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) would not enter the ranks of literary greats for some years. Maugham was brother-in-law to one of Rose Kelly’s best friends, and through Gerald gained an introduction to Le Chat Blanc’s circle. Maugham was fond of Kelly, finding him talented, loquacious, and enthusiastic. When he wrote Of Human Bondage (1915), Maugham based the character Lawson on Kelly, creating a knowledgeable and aggressive artist who says, “Raphael was only tolerable when he painted other people’s pictures. When he painted Peruginos or Pinturichios he was charming; when he painted Raphaels he was … Raphael.”15 Maugham, however, was not so impressed with Crowley, writing of him:
I took an immediate dislike to him, but he interested and amused me. He was a great talker and he talked uncommonly well. In early youth, I was told, he was extremely handsome, but when I knew him he had put on weight and his hair was thinning. He had fine eyes and a way, whether natural or acquired I do not know, of so focusing them that, when he looked at you, he seemed to look behind you. He was a fake but not entirely a fake.… He was a liar and unbecomingly boastful, but the odd thing was that he had actually done some of the things he boasted of.16
Despite his reservations, Maugham admired the boastful yet worldly raconteur in Crowley enough to base the title characater of The Magician (1908), Oliver Haddo, on Crowley. This unflattering parody—discussed later—is balanced by a more sympathetic portrait of him as Cronshaw in Of Human Bondage.17 Cronshaw was a poet, an extraordinary fellow and an excellent talker. He was at his best when drunk, but taking “a devil of a time to get drunk.” Despite his worldliness—he knew everyone worth knowing—he spoke French with an abominable accent. Stout but not fat, his round head was so small compared to the rest of his body that it “looked like a pea poised uneasily on an egg.” Maugham describes one incident which is typically Crowley:
“I wrote a poem yesterday.” Without being asked he began to recite it, very slowly, marking the rhythm with an extended forefinger.18
Whether or not he liked Crowley, Maugham thought enough of him to portray his character in two books.
Another acquaintance was Marcel Schwob (1867–1905), French author, translator and one of the great scholars of the nineteenth century. Although Schwob reputedly called Crowley “ridiculous and a bad poet,”19 the poet himself says Schwob called Alice: An Adultery a little masterpiece. Crowley considered him one of his best friends in Paris, and greatly admired him. Although Schwob was only eight years older than Crowley, he was quite sickly and would die two years after their meeting, at age thirty-seven.
Through Schwob, Crowley met novelist Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) and writer and poet William Ernest Henley (1849–1903), both natives of England. Crowley had read and admired Bennett’s recent The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902) and was surprised to find Bennett somehow offended by his praise; he concluded Bennett was “very ill at ease to find himself in Paris in polite society.”20 Henley—the original of Robert Louis Stephenson’s Long John Silver—was ailing from tuberculosis, but nevertheless invited Crowley to his house near Woking for a lunch of Chablis and roast lamb. Crowley appreciated the consideration Henley showed to a young unknown writer. He died three weeks after the visit, and Crowley recalled him fondly:
And here his mighty and reverend high-priest
Bade me good cheer, an eager acolyte,
Poured the high wine, unveiled the mystic feast …21
Best known for the poem “Invictus” (1875), Henley had several books of poetry, including A Book of Verses (1888), Poems (1898), Hawthorn and Lavender (1901), A Song of Speed (1903), and In Hospital (1903). However, the work that Crowley admired most was the one he edited with John Stephen Farmer: Slang and Its Analogues, Past and Present: A Dictionary, Historical and Comparative, of the Heterodox Speech of All Classes of Society for More than Three Hundred Years; with Synonyms in English, French, German, Italian, etc., was privately published in 1903 for subscribers only, and its catalog of vulgarities ceaselessly entertained him.
He also met Dr. Ivor Gordon Back (1879–1951), an observer and appreciator of the circle of writers and artists. Crowley described him as a “great surgeon, and true gentleman.… Handsome as a god, with yet a spice of devil’s laughter lurking there, he would sit and enjoy the treasures of the conversation, adding at the proper interval his own rich quota of scholarly jest.”22 Like Crowley, his friendship with Kelly gained him an introduction to Maugham and the rest of the circle. British author Frank Arthur Swinnerton (1884–1982) remembered him as “solid and dark,” “a racy talker without illusions or moral refinement,” and possessing a curious habit: Whenever they met, the doctor would approach, point to his chest, and say, “Back. I met you at Willie Maugham’s,” even though Sinnerton had never been to Maugham’s.23
Dr. Ivor Back (1873–1959). (photo credit 5.1)
Back was one of Crowley’s few Paris acquaintances with whom he continued a friendship after returning to England, dedicating In Residence: The Don’s Guide to Cambridge (1904) to him. Back was a proud descendant, through his grandmother, of the Duke of Wellington, to whom he bore a striking resemblance. Entering Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1898, he graduated with his BA in 1901, and when he met Crowley he was doing his clinical training at St. George’s Hospital. As a colleague recalled,
Ivor Back came to St. George’s from Cambridge with a great reputation as an anatomist, as those who attended his admirable demonstrations in the dissecting-room at St. George’s in his early days have good cause to remember. From the first he decided to become a surgeon and his desires came to fruition by his early appointment to the surgical staff.24
He was also an avid Mason—wheth
er he joined before or after meeting Crowley is unclear; he would go on to reach a high grade in Freemasonry and eventually be Past Master of the Lanesborough Lodge. His wide range of interests—including literature, criminology, and fly-fishing—earned him a reputation as a superb after-dinner speaker. “Whenever one met him,” another colleague remembered, “there was the ever-ready spontaneous friendly smile and greeting which would banish gloom and depression.”25
Crowley made various other acquaintances in the Le Chat Blanc circle. Painter Eugène Carrière (1849–1906), recovering from an operation for throat cancer when they met, told him, “If it comes back, I shall kill myself.” Norwegian landscape painter Frits Thaulow (1847–1906), whom he met several times, he recalled as a “jolly, bearded senior on whom life had left no scars.”26 Canadian painter James Wilson Morrice (1865–1924) was “invariably mellow drunk all day and all night.”27 And he would parody sculptor Paul Wayland Bartlett (1865–1925) in Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden (1904) as a “brilliant but debauched sculptor, caustic of wit, though genial to his friends.”28
When Crowley met Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), the gray-haired, sixty-two-year-old artist was being attacked for his sculpture of Balzac, which Crowley considered “the most interesting and important thing he did.”29 He was so impressed that he wrote a sonnet praising it:
Giant, with iron secrecies ennighted,
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