Another of Crowley’s acquaintances in America, Albert Ryerson, recounted: “Crowley really was a secret service man for Great Britain, in the war … German spies were continuously after him. He played a slick trick on the Germans by having himself, a British spy, on their publication. He practically destroyed the Fatherland.”46 While tales of German spies dogging Crowley suggests either Ryerson or AC was exaggerating, this further demonstrates that counterespionage was Crowley’s original intent, not an afterthought.
Crowley’s so-called propaganda actually supports this contention. He purportedly strove to write material so absurd as to discredit the Germans, and in this he seems to have succeeded. His essay “The New Parsifal” immodestly compared Kaiser Wilhelm to the knight Parsifal, searching for the Holy Graal. Meanwhile, in The Fatherland, Crowley made equally absurd statements:
A great deal of damage was done at Croydon, especially at its suburb Addiscombe, where my aunt lives. Unfortunately her house was not hit; otherwise I should not have to trouble to write this article. Count Zeppelin is respectfully requested to try again. The exact address is Eton Lodge, Outram Road.47
Responding to this article, the Chicago Daily Tribune characterized Crowley as “an Irishman who will not be accused of sympathy for England.”48 This absurd humor permeates all of his propaganda writings.
Crowley also pointed out in his defense that he had never been to Germany except passing through, does not speak German, and had no German friends (“save one with whom I correspond on religious matters,”49 i.e. Reuss). Also, he had published poems in The English Review encouraging England’s alliance with America, namely “Chants before Battle” and “To America.”
All this has prompted some of Crowley’s biographers to search for evidence of an official cover-up of Crowley’s full intelligence involvement for reasons of national security. For instance, Booth’s A Magick Life points out that, during his 1913 trip to Moscow with the Ragged Ragtime Girls, Crowley had befriended Moscow Art Theater secretary Michael Lykiardopoulos, who in turn introduced Crowley to British secret agent Sir Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart (1887–1970); Lockhart made Lykiardopoulos head of Britain’s propaganda department in Moscow, and Booth suggests he was also in a position to facilitate Crowley’s espionage activities. However, there is no evidence to suggest Lockhart ever gave Crowley such an appointment.50 Similarly Spence, in Secret Agent 666, dedicates his entire book to exploring the clandestine political activities of Crowley and his numerous acquaintances, and speculating about possible connections with others in the intelligence community. Although the book claims a larger espionage role than Crowley himself reports—sometimes based on tenuous connections—Spence treats this topic with more thoroughness than is possible here; indeed, he has uncovered surprising new information and caused many to reevaluate Crowley’s intelligence claims in a new light. For this, the book deserves a critical read.51
At the end of the day, the most compelling piece of evidence is that, during World War II, Crowley would work for Britain’s secret service, MI5 and MI6: no traitor would have gotten such a job.
Day three.
Turbulent times rocked the world that May: German U-boats sank the Lusitania and killed 1,198. German Zeppelins began their first air raids on London. And German physicist Albert Einstein (1879–1955) published his General Theory of Relativity. For Crowley, however, all was stagnation. He was far from home, far from friends, and far from his business. He had left behind The Equinox and the circle of students that had filled his life for five years. Now alone in America, he felt adrift. His introduction to Viereck was no help in selling literary works, and his efforts at giving lectures or publishing the odd poem or political essay invariably ended in failure. For instance, he enlisted bookman Mitchell Kennerley (1878–1950) to publish The Giant’s Thumb, a collection of poetry that he had had typeset by the Ballantyne Press in England but which was never released owing to the war; however, the project with Kennerley never advanced beyond page proofs. It was a miserable, despondent time.
When dawn broke on day four, oppression and obscurity lifted like morning fog burned off by the sun; and the world lolled its head languorously in Crowley’s palm. The article “Aleister Crowley: Mystic and Mountain Climber” appeared in Vanity Fair; it was attributed to Arthur Loring Bruce, pen-name of Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield (1872–1947).52 One Chokmah-day later, this association would provide Crowley with a valuable literary outlet.
Then, on the evening of June 10, 1915, Crowley met two beautiful women through Fatherland journalist James Keating. The first was actress Helen Westley53 (1879–1942), who reminded him of a snake that glittered
with the loveliness of lust; but she was worn and weary with the disappointment of insatiable desire. Her intellect was brilliant but cynical. She had lost faith in the universe.54
A Brooklyn native, Westley studied at the Sargent Dramatic School, debuted at the Star Theater in 1897, and acted in vaudeville and stock roles until 1915, when she helped found the first company of the Washington Square Players. She began playing the Oyster in Another Interior, and went on to many other productions. Theresa Helburn provides a striking description of her: “She had a theatrical appearance and manner, and dressed rather like a femme fatale—coal-black hair and black, slinky dresses, a little like Charles Addams’ young witch.”55 Although she would later leave her mark on Hollywood as a “fine character actress who played eagle-eyed grandmas,”56 Crowley knew her while she was still in her “Morticia Addams” phase.
The Snake (actress Helen Westley, 1879–1942). (photo credit 12.2)
The Cat (poet Jeanne Robert Foster, 1879–1970). (photo credit 12.3)
The other woman, poet Jeanne Robert Foster (1879–1970), radiated “sweetness long drawn out.”57 The Chicago Daily Tribune had proclaimed that she had “the prettiest chin in the world,”58 John Butler Yeats called her the “loveliest woman ever,”59 and Crowley agreed. An occultist and Theosophist herself, starry spirituality studded her speech. She wore her brunette hair gathered on top of her head, and her dark eyes and full lips gave the impression of a cat, domesticated but wild at heart. The following year, she would release two books, Wild Apples and Neighbors of Yesterday.60
Crowley considered the two women who had become rivals for his affections and mused which he preferred as his “Scarlet Woman”: The Snake, Helen Westley? Or the feline Jeanne Foster? The Snake was already attached to Keating, but Crowley learned from Duranty and Chéron that journalists and their women could be accommodating. Staring across the dinner table at the most beautiful woman he had ever known, his course was clear. He chose the Cat.
As Crowley admired this golden rose of loveliness, his ideal, Jeanne looked back and saw a master of magick, a British poet, and the subject of a Vanity Fair article: her own ideal. She told Crowley that she worked for Shaw’s American Review of Reviews; he asked if she might critique his recent writings and help him improve his prose. She suggested they meet for tea at her club the next afternoon. Although the Snake eagerly tried to work her wiles on Crowley, he was far away in a mutual falling-in-love.
By the end of their teatime conversation, Crowley felt he knew Jeanne intimately: she was born in the Adirondacks, the first child of French-Canadian lumberjack Frank Oliver and his English schoolteacher wife, Lizzy. Jeanne’s mother encouraged her, “Use your mind; new avenues are opening up for women.” In 1896, lumberjack jobs became scarce and her impoverished family moved to Glens Falls. That summer she married Matlock, a family friend who, at age forty-two, was older than her own father. She was seventeen and, within a year, pregnant with a child that would ultimately be stillborn. In the following years, she dabbled in various careers: taking the stage name Jean Elspeth, she acted with the American Stock Company; working for the New York Sunday American, she helped design the fashion pages; becoming a model herself, Jeanne’s likeness appeared in newspapers, magazines, and books, including Vanity Fair’s covers and Harrison Fisher’s art. In 190
7 she attended Harvard, taking philosophy classes from psychologist William James. Finishing school in 1910, she quickly gained a reputation as a writer and in 1911 moved to New York City to edit the Review of Reviews. Thus, she became entrenched in New York’s literary and artistic circles, counting John Butler Yeats among her distinguished friends. By this time, her husband was a sixty-one-year-old invalid, frequenting hospitals and spas in a desperate effort to preserve his health. She learned to live without sex since he was incapable and she was infertile.61
“So,” Crowley attempted a synopsis as he stood in her doorway and bade her farewell, “you are tied to this old satyr who snatched you from the cradle. And where does that leave me?”
Crowley, to her, had a virility and charm that made her head swim. “I loved you at first sight,” she admitted. “As a spiritual brother.” She kissed him, and tea ended.
That night, Crowley found himself obsessed with Jeanne. He performed a VIII° ritual of thanksgiving for meeting her. Masturbating to the thought of “Babalon imagined as Jeanne,” the image was poor as even now her face faded in his memory.
It was July 3, scarcely a month since the Lusitania had been sunk off the coast of Ireland. The sun had barely risen when a small motorboat with ten passengers left the recreation pier near West 50th Street and drifted down the Hudson River. Crowley manned the prow, accompanied by Leila, editor J. Dorr, and political agitator Patrick Gilley. Their plan was simple: sail to the Statue of Liberty and proclaim the independence of the Irish Republic. Crowley determined the most astrologically auspicious time to be 4:32 a.m.
As they approached the docks of Bedloe’s Island, a wrinkle appeared in their plan. The watchman appeared and informed them that, without government permission, they could neither dock nor set foot upon the island of liberty. At first, Crowley and his compatriots shot lost looks at each other. Unable to dock, they floated about the perimeter of the island and awaited 4:32.
Then, at the appointed time, Crowley began:
I have not asked any great human audience to listen to these words; I had rather address them to the unconquerable dream that surrounds the world, and to the free four winds of heaven. Facing the sunrise, I lift up my hands and my soul herewith to this giant figure of Liberty, the ethical counterpart of the Light, Life, and Love which are our spiritual heritage. In this symbolism and most awful act of religion I invoke the one true God of whom the Sun himself is but a shadow that he may strengthen me in heart and hand to uphold that freedom for the land of my sires, which I am come hither to proclaim.
In this dark moment, before the father orb of our system kindles with his kiss the sea, I swear the great oath of the Revolution. I tear with my hands this token of slavery, this safe conduct from the enslaver of my people, and I renounce forever all allegiance to every alien tyrant. I swear to fight to the last drop of my blood to liberate the men and women of Ireland, and I call upon the free people of this country, on whose hospitable shores I stand as exile, to give me countenance and assistance in my task of breaking those bonds which they broke for themselves 138 years ago.
Crowley lifted a roll of fabric and declared, “I unfurl the Irish flag. I proclaim the Irish Republic. Erin go Bragh. God save Ireland.” As he tossed the shreds of his passport into the bay and read the Declaration of Independence of Ireland, a flag with a gold harp on a green field flapped in the wind off the prow mast. They concluded with Leila playing “The Wearing of the Green.” In his diary, Crowley noted that he had first been inspired to do this demonstration on July 3, when he went to “work at 6 as inspired and vigorous as possible, and never stopped until at 4:32 a.m. of the next day I had publicly proclaimed the Irish Republic. Never in history (I imagine) has a political movement of the first importance been conceived, prepared, and executed at such short notice.”62
Although Crowley sent an anonymous account of the stunt to the press, describing himself as an Irishman and a close friend of Irish poet W. B. Yeats, only the New York Times picked up the story, devoting three long columns to it.63 Thereafter, he sent the Times another letter, signed “Alex C. Crowley,”64 clarifying that the Irish flag was not green with a gold harp and that Ireland, like Egypt, was colonized by ancient Atlanteans. (The theory was popular among occult “scholars” like Godfrey Higgins, 1773–1833.)65
This display of political activism has puzzled many biographers. Crowley the chameleon could be fiercely British one moment; then, caught up in the Celtic revival, change his surname to MacGregor; then, at times like these, trace his lineage to the O’Crowleys; at other times, his family tree had roots in France. Those who consider him an opportunist and turncoat see this as Crowley ingratiating himself to the political enemies of England. However, Crowley’s sympathy for Ireland wasn’t taken up suddenly or whimsically. Back in 1913, he wrote a revealing letter with tongue somewhat in cheek:
I am going to hear Larking to-night. Of course, as a man I am an Irish rebel of the most virulent type, and I want to see every Englishman killed before my eyes. I would ship the English women to Germany, as I don’t like Germans either. But, of course, speaking as a man of the world, I am a reactionary Tory of the most bigoted type, although a Pro-Boer; that is to say, my objection to the Boer war was the deprecation of property which it caused.66
The bait cast, Crowley tried to snare a job with The Open Court, a monistic Chicago periodical edited by Paul Carus (1852–1919). While the company had dedicated itself to the “Religion of Science and the Science of Religion” since its 1887 inception, Carus was eager to promote the German views of his ancestry. AC delineated his own war views in a letter to Carus:
It seems to me that Germany stands for everything worth keeping—science, foresight, order, and so on. I am intensely sorry for France; I regard her as having been dragged into it by her rotten statesmen. To put it in a word, I hate England, I love France, I admire Germany, I fear Russia. My hate for England is now being replaced by contempt. But I have always taken care to write as an English Isaiah.
He submitted several articles and proposals—“Cocaine,” “Perhaps Germany Should Take Poland?” “The Darlings of the Gods,” and an article on the occult brotherhoods—but Carus rejected them all. He did, however, pay $10 for Crowley’s “The New Parsifal”; likewise, he hoped to reprint Crowley’s “gem of satire,” “An Orgy of Cant.”67
“The New Parsifal” appeared in the August 1915 issue of The Open Court. Crowley, looking at the world’s rulers, declared Wilhelm II to be the knight Parsifal questing for the Holy Grail.
In the present crisis there are more pigmies than men. Obscure dwarfs like George V, pot-bellied bourgeois like Poincaré, could only become heroic by virtue of some Rabelais magic-wand. Joffre and Kitchener are quiet business-like subordinates with no qualities that can seize the reins of the horses of Apollo. The Czar is a nobody.
But there is no necessity to seek so far. The lavish gods have matched their prophets well with their hero this time. Wilhelm II has always been to a certain extent conscious of himself as an incarnation of Lohengrin, Siegfried, Parsifal.68
Crowley predicted he would become as legendary and famous a humanitarian as Jesus, Mohammed, Arthur, and Napoleon, calling Wilhelm savior of the world out of the twisted corner of his mouth.
Shortly after the issue appeared, Carus’s book agent in England, Bryce, was arrested for carrying The Open Court. The authorities, taking exception to AC’s statements about Edward VII, declared it propaganda, and the distributor, who had never so much as read the issue, spent three months in jail. Britain’s traitorous black sheep—the greatest metrical genius in the English language, as Frank Harris called him—again shocked the nation. Subsequently, Crowley’s mail at the Open Court offices began arriving opened. Paul Carus, having spoken with his British literary representative Mr. Jourdain, ultimately wrote Crowley, “as soon as you step on English soil you will be arrested.”69
While AC’s latest PR spectacle unfolded, Foster wrestled with her heart. Crowley, as a not
orious poet and leader of a magical cult, emanated the forbidden. For years she had avoided John Quinn because she had heard young women were not safe around him; but now Crowley attracted her for the same reasons Quinn repulsed her. She was unable to forget him even in her poetry; her latest, “Wife to a Husband,” expressed her distress over AC’s first marriage. Desperate for advice, she wrote to John Butler Yeats, asking his opinion on her poem, offhandedly remarking that she wanted to learn magic from Crowley, and requesting Yeats’s opinion of the man. Yeats detected the personal nature of the poem and, at least pretending not to connect it to AC, replied:
I have met Crowley and enjoyed his conversation very very much, principally, I think, because of my profound distrust of the talker. I think he is a man to beware of. No one seems to think well of him. He has an ambiguous history—queer happenings, which probably rumour has further distorted. Learn magic by all means, but be careful of the magician. They that sup with the devil must have a long spoon.70
Despite Yeats’s discouraging words, Jeanne returned from a business trip on July 8, promptly taking Crowley to bed. Although she claimed to dislike the physical aspects of love, they made love frequently for the next week.
She left town again just as suddenly. Hurt and infuriated, Crowley confessedly chose the typically male strategy of striking back: he took her rival, Helen Westley, to bed.
Day five.
“My God,” Crowley had thought when Frank Crowninshield (1872–1947) first offered him work writing for Vanity Fair, “a New Yorker is treating me like a human being.” Since then, Crowninshield read and accepted many of Crowley’s submissions. Even when he rejected a manuscript, he explained why and suggested improvements. Looking back on his American period, Crowley saw working for the Fatherland and Vanity Fair as oases in a desolate search for work. And Crowninshield he recalled as a charming, intelligent businessman. As Vanity Fair’s first editor (from 1914 to 1935), he was fearlessly avant-garde, a dilettante, and patron of the arts. These qualities forged Vanity Fair into the top literary magazine of its time. “I can never be sufficiently grateful to Frank Crowninshield for his kindness and patience. My association with him is the one uniformly pleasant experience of dealing with editors that I can quote.”71
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