3 I’m all right for a and b. For c I should be all right if I were all right as to d.
4 Given, therefore, that I am safely entrenched at Hardelot or some such place, I think there should be little or no trouble in stopping either suddenly or gradually, as may seem desirable.77
Yet the same letter contains more rationalization: “a little solid heroin (the first in that form for two months—immediate violent activity) have made me better than my normal good form. I have certainly recovered my drug-virginity; which is clear proof that I can stop at will, the moment physical conditions permit of my throwing a little temporary strain on my constitution.” In the end, it would be the summer of 1924 before his drug addiction was broken.
Back at the Abbey, Jane received instructions from Beast to spend two weeks in a brothel to get a healthy idea about sex. Interpreting this as a great spiritual ordeal, she applied to the local brothel to find the madam only interested in career whores. Undaunted, Jane propositioned la Calce; the landlord, however, had his eye on Ninette and promised to bring by some friends who might be willing. Although he did bring one or two men to meet her, none returned for her favors. Thus Jane, unwilling to walk the streets, resigned herself to failure.
In May, Crowley joined Leah, who was waiting for him in London. Having nothing but £10 and some Highland garb he had put into storage before the war, he pawned his watch and tried to raise money. His first thought was to sell his stock of unsold books. Since Jacobi had published them, however, Chiswick Press had changed owners, and the new company refused to release the books because they found their imprint irregular. Try as he may, Crowley could not convince them to release his books.
He next called on English Review editor Austin Harrison (1873-1928), hoping to get back in touch with London’s editors and sell some manuscripts. Harrison was the same man who had introduced Crowley to Viereck in London before the war and who had rejected Crowley’s “King of Terrors,’ thinking it was an unsubstantiated factual account.78 Although Crowley was now unpopular in London, Harrison agreed to buy some pieces out of friendship and publish them pseudonymously. Some of them—the centennial article on “Percy Bysshe Shelley,” “The Jewish Problem Re-Stated,” and “The Crisis in Freemasonry”—showed Crowley up on some soapbox or another, but failed to impress. As Michael Fairfax, he offered the poems “Moon-Wane,” “The Rock,” and “To a New-Born Child.”79 More interesting were two pieces he wrote on his newly enlightened view of drug addiction. “The Drug Panic,” by a London Physician, was Crowley’s attack on the recent Dangerous Drugs Act, which made illegal the sale of drugs to which Crowley was accustomed to purchasing from his local chemist. In a telling autobiographical passage, Crowley complained, “The public is ignorant of the existence of ‘a large class of very poor men’ who would die or go insane if morphine were withheld from them. Bronchitis and asthma, in particular, are extremely common among the lower Classes.…”80 Crowley had but little experience with morphine; in a 1932 letter he wrote, “I have not touched morphine in any form bar about a dozen minute doses by the mouth in 1917.”81 He claimed that ignorance inspired the Dangerous Drugs Act and called instead for compulsory education.
Crowley’s article “The Great Drug Delusion” (written under the pseudonym “a New York Specialist”) described his own drug delusion: “Though I obtained definitely toxic results, I was always able to abandon the drug without a pang.”82 He again advocated legalization of drugs, claiming it would eliminate underground traffic. Toward the end of the article appeared the germ of a new idea brewing in Crowley’s mind:
In the author’s private clinic, patients are not treated for their ‘habit’ at all. They are subjected to a process of moral reconstruction; as soon as this is accomplished, the drug is automatically forgotten. Cures of this sort are naturally permanent, whereas the possible suppression of the drug fails to remove the original causes of the habit, so that relapse is the rule.83
Of course, AC had no private clinic, and he treated no patients. But he had a theory: that drug use guided by morality and Will was harmless, and addiction occurred from casual or indiscriminate use. While this was not his own experience, it was his interpretation of The Book of the Law’s “To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, & be drunk thereof! They shall not harm ye at all.”84 It worked on paper; he just needed to test it.
On May 24 he met with book publisher Grant Richards (1897–1948) and tried to sell him on a book idea. Richards’s firm had published books by Crowley’s old Le Chat Blanc acquaintance Arnold Bennett, as well as G. K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw. Offered Crowley’s autobiography, however, Richards demurred, doubting its marketability. Offered a shocker about drug addiction, Richards again declined, referring him to Hutchinson or Collins. On his way home, Crowley therefore moved on to the firm William Collins. There, science fiction novelist, essayist, and literary advisor John Davys Beresford (1873–1947) liked the idea of a drug shocker. Beresford, who started as an advertising writer, knew Crowley from his days as the editor of What’s On:
We had one remarkable contributor during my editorship, I may add, none other than Aleister Crowley, who was supplying a serial narrative something in the manner of Tom Hood, speckled with problems and puzzles, for the best solution of which a money-prize was offered.85
Beresford had recently written articles on metaphysical topics for Harper’s magazine.86 His recommendation, and Crowley’s forthcoming articles in the English Review, convinced Collins to take the book. On June 1, 1922, AC received a £60 advance on the manuscript. He later admitted that, aside from a few chapter titles, “I had in fact no detailed idea of how the story would develop.”87
Crowley summoned Leah to his side and began dictating immediately. In twenty-seven days, twelve hours, and forty-five minutes, Crowley dictated the entire 121,000-word text of The Diary of a Drug Fiend, a story of wretched pharmacological excess and the redemption of its drug-crazed protagonists by the philosophical code of Thelema. The book is inelegant and unimpressive; but, written in under a month, it was never intended as more than a potboiler. Throughout it appear thinly veiled caricatures of acquaintances and Abbey residents. For instance, Crowley modeled the hero of the story, Pendragon, after Cecil Maitland, who supposedly became an addict at the Abbey. Crowley himself was Mr. King Lamus. Most interesting was the book’s note to Part II:
The Abbey of Thelema at “Telepylus” is a real place. It and its customs and members, with the surrounding scenery, are accurately described. The training there given is suited to all conditions of spiritual distress, and for the discovery and development of the “True Will” of any person. Those interested are invited to communicate with the author of this book.88
When he wrote “The Great Drug Delusion,” his drug treatment clinic was just a theory. With this manuscript, Crowley prepared to make it a reality.
When Crowley appeared in Collins’s office with the manuscript, the publisher couldn’t believe anyone could have written an entire novel since they last spoke. But there it was on his desk. Impressive. When Crowley asked about his autobiography, Collins considered the offer and paid him a £120 advance on the manuscript. They also offered to publish Crowley’s Simon Iff stories, promising an advance by November 9, but this compilation never materialized.
With the novel completed, Leah returned to the Abbey to recover from illness and to help Ninette, who was pregnant by their landlord. Crowley remained in Paris, visiting friends like writer Jane Burr (b. 1882–1958)89 and banker-patron of the arts Otto Kahn, hoping to find new students.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Adonis
“I shall kill myself and I shall kill you, too, if you don’t marry me,” Raoul Loveday insisted, thus becoming Betty May’s third husband in the summer of 1922.1 They were wed at the registry office in Oxford, where the groom was a student. Raoul was nervous, fumbled the wedding band, and dropped it on the floor. A photo of the newlyweds, taken in the gardens of St.
John’s College, featured above Raoul’s head the apparition of a young man lying horizontally in slumber or death. All in all, it was an ominous affair.
Born Charles Frederick Loveday (1900–1923)—he would adopt the name “Raoul” while a student at Oxford—he was a frail youth with an unhealthy pallor. Born in Rangoon on July 3, 1900, he was one of two children to Royal Navy officer George Loveday (born c. 1859) and his wife, Amelia Ann Lewendon (b. 1859).2 Sickly since birth, malaria struck Raoul as a child while still living in Rangoon. They later moved to South London, raising their family at 112 Barry Road in East Dulwich.3
On Aug. 2, 1918, at age eighteen, he enlisted in the Inns of Court Officers Training Corps. Nicknamed “The Devil’s Own,” the Inns of Court were a volunteer battalion, part of the London Territorial Force based in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, from September 1914 to June 1919.4 From there, Loveday attended St. John’s College, Oxford, where he studied history, played football (Raymond Greene said “he was very good”), wrote poetry, and became interested in the occult.5 Betty May reported that his poetry had attracted critical attention, but Greene deemed it “remarkably bad.”6 One example appears in the journal Oxford Poetry:
Sing now of London
At fall of dusk;
A summer dragonfly—
Crept from the husk.
Dragonfly, on whose wing
Run golden wires;
So, down a street pavement,
Lamps throw their fires.
Dragonfly, whose wing is pricked
By many a spark;
Electric eyes of taxis
Bright through the dark.
Dragonfly, whose life is
Cold and brief as dew,
Drone now for London dusk,
Soon dead too.7
Loveday was also an early member of Oxford’s Hypocrites Club, whose later members included writers Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966), Anthony Powell (1905–2000), and Terence Lucy Greenidge (1902–1970). Originally the least fashionable of Oxford’s clubs—devoted to the discussion of philosophy—it soon developed a raucous reputation. According to Evelyn Waugh, it was “notorious not only for drunkenness but for flamboyance of dress and manner which was in some cases patently homosexual.”8 Loveday was in fact the club’s secretary;9 after one late night of drinking, he returned to Oxford after hours and tried to climb back into the college, managing only to impale himself on the gate railing, where he hung upside down by his thigh and nearly bled to death before help arrived. His extracurricular activities distracted the youth from his studies so much that he was nearly sent down from St. John’s; to everyone’s surprise, he managed a first class in history, graduating in 1922.10
Raoul Loveday. (photo credit 15.1)
Betty May. (photo credit 15.2)
Betty May has been described by her friends as “A bad girl with a beautiful face and a good heart.”11 Crowley uncharitably called her “a half-crazy whore, who had been twice married and once divorced.”12 Born in Limehouse as Betty Marlow Golding,13 she grew up in poverty. She worked as an artist’s model for a time, sitting for Augustus John, Jacob Kramer, and Jacob Epstein.14 Enjoying some celebrity, she moved to Paris, became a heavy drug user, and claims to have been known among Apache robbers as the “Tiger Woman,” a name that stuck when she returned to England. Her first husband, an addict, left her a widow, and the second divorced her over her own cocaine addiction before she was able to cure herself.15 Although she reports that she met Raoul at the Harlequin, a Soho pub where she sang, Raoul’s sister gave a less romantic account: he attended an undergraduate’s party where all the men present placed their names in a hat to decide by lottery who would marry Betty May. “Unlucky Raoul was the one,” she lamented.16 In any event, they married three weeks later, in September.
Loveday had discovered Crowley through reading The Oxford Book of Mystical Verse and struck up a correspondence with the poet.17 That fall, in 1922, he met Betty Bickers, wife of Sheridan Bickers, at the Harlequin. When she learned that Raoul had been studying The Equinox for two years, she told him Crowley was staying with her at 31 Wellington Square, teaching her magick and giving lectures on Thelema. To Raoul’s delight, she arranged a meeting. Betty May, who had been unimpressed with Crowley when she met him at the Café Royal in 1914, refused to accompany Raoul on the visit. So he went alone, and never came home that night. Nor the next.
A scraping at her third-story bedroom window woke Betty May out of a sound sleep. Switching on her light, she walked to the window, pulled aside the curtain, and nearly cried out when she saw a face pressed up against the glass. Then she recognized the eyes that pleaded to her. They were Raoul’s. Betty threw open the window to find her husband, covered with soot and stinking of ether, hanging from a drainpipe thirty feet off the ground. She grabbed his arms, pulled him inside, and undressed him. Although he passed out before he could answer any of her questions, answers were unnecessary. Raoul had obviously spent three days with Crowley, who had exposed her husband to the vices that had wrecked her previous marriages. Seduced by the romance of Betty’s bohemian days, Raoul was eager to experience the wild life that she now shunned. Crowley pointed the way for him. Raoul became devoted to mysticism and, even though he had a £1,000 a year job lined up, lost his ambition for anything but magick. Betty’s fears came true when she answered her door one day to a portly, middle-aged bald man with a bottle of wine. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” he said.
Raoul rushed up behind her and replied, “Love is the law, love under will.”
The Beast smiled and politely kissed Betty’s stiff hand. He offered her the bottle and explained, “I’ve come to dinner.”
She turned around to find Raoul simultaneously beaming at the Master and looking sheepishly at his wife. Fury boiled over her face in the form of a furrowed brow and tautly pressed lips. She grabbed her hat and coat and, passing AC in the doorway, fired off one last shot. “I shan’t cook any meal for you.”
She was scarcely two steps away when Crowley replied, “The day will come when you will cook all my meals for me.”
Contrary to the preceding account of drain-climbing and menacing meals—drawn from Betty May’s memoirs18—Crowley paints a strikingly different picture of the couple. From his perspective, Betty wasn’t living the clean life that her memoirs claim she was, and the indulgent lifestyle to which she was exposing Raoul appalled Crowley. Recognizing the youth’s capacity for magick, AC wished to groom him as his successor, and so he invited the Lovedays to Cefalù:
I hope you will come p.d.q. and bring Betty. I honestly tell you that the best hope for your married life is to get out of the sordid atmosphere of ‘Bohemian’ London.…
Does it surprise you that the notoriously wicked A.C. should write thus? If so, you have not understood that he is a man of brutal commonsense and a loyal friend. So come and live in the open air amid the beauty of Nature.… Beak Street and Fitzroy Street are horrors unthinkable even in Rome; and Rome is a cesspool compared with Cefalù.
The society of Scholars, of free women and of delightful children will indeed be a great change for Betty; but it is what she needs most. There is in her not only a charming woman, but a good one; and she will develop unsuspected glories, given a proper environment. In London she has not one single decent influence, except your own; and however deeply and truly she may love you, she won’t be able to resist “la nostalgie de la boue” for ever.19
Raoul accepted enthusiastically, promising to join him later that month, and Crowley returned to the Abbey on November 4.
In November, The Diary of a Drug Fiend appeared in bookstores. The press responded cooly to the book, the Times Literary Supplement calling it “a phantasmagoria of ecstasies, despairs, and above all verbiage,” and the New York Times Book Review deeming it nothing more than a tract on Thelema.20 Few copies sold, and the book would ordinarily have vanished into obscurity had James Douglas of the Sunday Express not seen it. A proponent of the suppression of James J
oyce’s Ulysses, he dubbed Crowley’s novel “A Book for Burning” in his November 19 article.
I have therefore determined … to do my best to secure the immediate extirpation of The Diary of a Drug Fiend (Collins, 7/6 net) by Aleister Crowley. It is a novel describing the orgies of vice practised by a group of moral degenerates who stimulate their degraded lusts by doses of cocaine and heroin. Although there is an attempt to pretend that the book is merely a study of the depravation caused by cocaine, in reality it is an ecstatic eulogy of the drug and of its effects upon the body and the mind. A cocaine trafficker would welcome it as a recruiting agent which would bring him thousands of new victims.
He called for the immediate suppression of this repulsive, blasphemous, obscene book.
The Sunday Express followed with a sensational front-page exposé:
Black Record of Aleister Crowley
Preying on the Debased
His Abbey
Profligacy and Vice in Sicily
The article reviewed the controversial aspects of his past: the suggestive titles of books (such as The Honourable Adulterers), his Rites of Eleusis, and his pro-German propaganda. It summed up Crowley’s literary record as “blasphemy, filth, and nonsense,” calling his books “either incomprehensible or disgusting—generally both. His language is the language of a pervert, and his ideas are negligible.” Adding to the controversy was that a portrait of Crowley, by Ukrainian expatriate artist Jacob Kramer (1892–1962), was currently on display at the Goupil Galleries. At the request of a Chelsea hostess, he agreed to do Crowley’s portrait; but after meeting his subject, Kramer avoided working on it until, after much prodding, he produced it in a single sitting.
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