Perdurabo

by Richard Kaczynski

  On October 9, Crowley moved to Ivy Cottage in Knockholt, Kent. He quickly became popular among the locals and could be seen walking down the streets in his winter jacket and scarf, bellowing old sailor’s songs. Stephensen visited often, playing chess and rummaging through Crowley’s room full of books, manuscripts, and press cuttings. It was here that Stephensen put aside his autobiographical novel Clean Earth to write a defense of the Beast, The Legend of Aleister Crowley. He hoped such a book, issued cheaply to sell, would promote sales of forthcoming books by Mandrake’s star author.

  Marie, meanwhile, became difficult. The new Mrs. Crowley drank heavily, and her suspicious nature blossomed into rabid paranoia. The day before their move to Knockholt, she had made a scene; then, the day after they moved, Crowley recorded in his diary that Marie “had several bad attacks of delusion.” Two days later, during Crowley’s fifty-fourth birthday party with the Germers and Stephensens, “Marie relapsed badly in P.M. & there was a most nerve-wracking scene.”68 When, shortly thereafter, Marie worsened and began having fainting spells, Crowley sent her to a nursing home. “Seven hours’ rest worked wonders,” he noted.69 Crowley’s luck with women was again showing.

  Regardless, that October was important as the press got hold of Crowley’s newest books. While the Birmingham Post panned The Stratagem and Other Stories, Moonchild met with mixed reviews. The Aberdeen Press and Journal called it “one of the most extraordinarily fantastic yet attractive novels we have read,”70 while the New Statesman expressed perplexity, writing, “Possibly the author may know what this nonsense is all about.”71 Finally, the New Age slammed its sensational jacket blurb:

  I had no idea that Mr. Crowley was one of the “most mysterious” of living writers, or even that he was mysterious. What does it mean, anyway? That he writes mystery novels? That it is a mystery why he writes novels? That no one knows who he is? Or what?72

  Mandrake also released Crowley’s autobiography. Although the author titled it The Spirit of Solitude, Stephensen “re-antichristened” it The Confessions of Aleister Crowley after St. Augustine’s autohagiography. It was so long that Mandrake planned to issue it in six volumes. The October 1929 invoice for volume one cited printing costs of £167. The book was handsome, bound in oversize white buckram, and sold for two guineas.

  Unfortunately, October 1929 was the worst possible month to release expensive, privately printed books, for the stock market crash on Black Friday, October 28, meant slow book sales. Furthermore, the Germers lost a lot of money on the stock market, making support of Crowley more difficult.

  Stephensen attributed the difficulty in selling Crowley’s books to his anonymity, which exceeded his notoriety. Since Mandrake had such success with its D. H. Lawrence exhibition, he planned to show Crowley’s artworks. When Goldston skeptically refused to fund the exhibit, Crowley’s people paid to ship and frame his paintings with reimbursement from Mandrake pending a successful show. On Friday, November 1, starting at 10 a.m., the public could pay £1 to see AC’s artwork at the Mandrake offices. With many of Crowley’s works remaining soiled and unframed, it was disappointing and, unlike the Lawrence exhibit, generated no interest.

  Goldston, convinced of Stephensen’s folly, finally closed the Mandrake offices for the winter. Among Mandrake’s last official actions that December were releasing Volume Two of the Confessions, working on Volume Three, and transferring three thousand unbound copies of Magick in Theory and Practice to England for distribution. This last book was supposed to bear a talisman on its cover, but no engraver would take on so ignominious a task; but the four paperbound volumes did include a color plate reproducing the talisman.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Beast Bites Back

  When the Oxford University Poetry Society invited Crowley to speak at the university, AC hesitated at first. Nearly two decades earlier, the dons had banned his lectures at Cambridge; since then, his name had fallen into such disrepute that public opinion made him into a devil-worshiping madman, in much the same way that wealthy French baron Gilles de Rais (1404–1440) had been accused, tried, and executed on the extraordinary charges of satanism, kidnapping, and killing and eating six hundred children. Whether he was a serial killer or victim of witchcraft hysteria is debated to this day. Identifying with the idea of a falsely accused magician, AC accepted the invitation, telling club secretary (and future novelist) Arthur Calder-Marshall (1908–1992) that he would be lecturing on Gilles de Rais.

  Alas, history repeated itself. When Oxford’s chaplain, Father Ronald Arbuthnott Knox (1888–1957),1 learned of the impending lecture by that notorious black magician Aleister Crowley—at whose debased Abbey Oxford student Raoul Loveday had died—he canceled the talk. The Poetry Society defiantly rented an off-campus room, planning to shuttle students to and from the lecture by bus, but Knox threatened to expel any students who attended the talk. Poetry Society secretary Hugh Speaight, remembered as very sophisticated and well-schooled in contemporary arts,2 hoped to become a Dominican monk and was thus beaten just as Mudd had been twenty years earlier. He sent a rueful cancellation to Crowley on January 30, 1930:

  Dear Mr. Crowley:

  I am writing to tell you that we have been unfortunately forced to cancel next Monday’s meeting of the Poetry Society. It has come to our knowledge that if your proposed paper is delivered disciplinary action will be taken involving not only myself but the rest of the Committee of the Society. In these circumstances you will, I trust, understand why we have had to cancel the meeting. I feel I must apologize to you for the trouble I have caused you. I must confess that I had credited the University with more tolerance—or at any rate with a greater sense of humour.3

  This must have been a bitter pill for Speaight, who, in his book of Catholic meditations published the previous year, wrote, “censorship provides the sinner with one of his rare chances of winning a dream of martyrdom.”4

  Oxford University Poetry Society secretary Hugh Speaight. (photo credit 18.1)

  Crowley refused to give in this time, and decided to make his lecture available to Oxford students even if he was forbidden to speak it. On February 1 he wrote to Stephensen:

  I authorize you to take whatever steps you consider advisable to secure the publication of “The Banned Lecture” on the 3rd of February of the present year.5

  Stephensen—a notorious Oxford alumnus because of his Communist views—rallied behind Crowley and arranged to typeset and print Crowley’s lecture on the date of his proposed talk.

  Tremendous hype greeted February 3. In the pages of local papers like the Oxford Mail, Daily Sketch, Birmingham Post, Birmingham Gazette, Manchester Evening Chronicle, Manchester Guardian, Daily News, and Darlington Northern Echo, Crowley fumed to reporters, “I challenge anyone to show why I should not lecture in Oxford today. There is some underhand business behind this”; after an exasperated pause, he smiled. “The authorities are afraid that I may kill and eat eight hundred Oxford undergraduates.”6 Students with sandwich boards marched along Oxford’s High Street, announcing that copies of Crowley’s forbidden speech would go on sale tomorrow. Consequently, various rumors spread around the campus: that Calder-Marshall and Speaight were trying to form a coven; or that Father Knox had refused Speaight Communion in church for inviting Crowley.7 Thus The Banned Lecture enjoyed brisk sales, with curious students who would otherwise never have attended the talk paying sixpence to see what all the fuss was about.

  Believing the current economy could not support a small press, and with Goldston getting cold feet, Stephensen began seeking a prospective buyer for Mandrake. He suggested that Yorke and Germer begin a financial syndicate to produce and sell Crowley’s books. The proposal was ambitious: Germer and Yorke would acquire Mandrake and rename it the Thelema Bookshop and Publishing Co. Ltd. They planned to release The Vision and the Voice, Liber Aleph, the comment on The Book of the Law, 100 Short Poems, Simple Simon (his Simon Iff short stories in two volumes), Golden Twigs (his Frazer-inspired short stories), The
Legend of Aleister Crowley, Collected Short Stories, and the Hopfer color edition of 777. Alas, they lacked the capital for so large a venture.

  Thus they chose the cheaper option, to take over the press as a limited liability company. Germer and Yorke negotiated a loan from Cora Germer, for which Yorke agreed to take out a life insurance policy should he die before repaying her.8 Then Yorke contributed £1,000, Major Thynne £1,000, and Germer £500, to form Mandrake Press Ltd. Painter, surgeon, and psychoanalyst Grace Winifred Pailthorpe (1883-1971) also put in £200 to £300 in exchange for publication of her Freudian book, What We Put in Prison.9 Goldston happily relinquished the floundering press on March 28. Yorke, Stephensen, Thynne, and Thynne’s associate, Major J. C. S. McAllan, formed the board of directors, and Regardie became bookkeeper.

  While Yorke and the others organized business that April, Crowley visited Germany. He planned a fall exhibit of his paintings in Berlin; met with several OTO members, including Henri Birven, whose Hain der Isis had debuted that January;10 and befriended Hanni Larissa Jaeger, a nineteen-year-old spitfire who shared Crowley’s interest in painting.11

  When Germer got his license at the end of the month, he took Crowley for a drive, only to overturn the car into a ditch. In his diary, Crowley humorously recorded the incident:

  What I said during yesterday’s accident. (1) “Ease her up!” He didn’t: so (2) “Are you mad?” He was: so (3) “Take care of the glass.” (4) “Let me lower myself, so that you can get out.”12

  When Maria joined him in Berlin, he took her shopping for birthday presents; when she treated him to another drunken row that evening, Crowley sent her back to Leipzig and, on May 5, returned himself to London.

  That May, the Mandrake Press Ltd. put out its first and only catalog. It included Mandrake’s backlist along with some twenty proposed titles, only a few of which ever appeared. In the following months, however, they did publish a broad range of titles: a translation of Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô; D. H. Lawrence’s posthumous A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover; and Liam O’Flaherty’s (1896–1984) The Ecstasy of Angus. Although finely produced, the books generated little interest.

  On top of slow sales, Crowley’s constant presence in the office was a nuisance. He was suing Goldston for the promised but unpaid reimbursement for the cost of shipping his paintings to London for the Mandrake exhibit (an act that severed Goldston entirely from the press and ensured that the third and future volumes of The Confessions would never appear). He was also attempting to ply another £500 from Cora Germer to purchase the Aquila Press, a venture he eventually abandoned. Plus, his many comments on the ongoing typesetting of volume three of The Confessions and the upcoming Legend of Aleister Crowley made Stephensen believe Crowley was trying to prevent the books from appearing. Stephensen finally insisted that Crowley keep out of the offices and to cease extorting money out of his supporters.

  I want absolute carte blanche for Mandrake Press Ltd. to go ahead publishing, as and how I think fit, in consultation with Thynne & Yorke. I want you to regard Mandrake Press Ltd. solely as your publishers, and not to prejudice the purely commercial side of that purely publishing concern with any of your fits and starts, Thelemite politics, earthquakes, and the other distracting phenomena of art and nature, such as pin pricks, dogmatism, human chess, brawls, faux pas, bravado and braggadocio, pure bluff, brainwaves, and dementia precox, which tend to accompany your too personal intrusion into the world of practical affairs.13

  Despite his joking tone, Stephensen was firm.

  So Crowley kicked back with a copy of the finished proofs to volume three of his autobiography, enjoying the £500 he decided not to spend on the Aquila Press. When Yorke encouraged him to economize, Crowley made a diary entry in his inimitable manner:

  Yorke niggling again, that one must cut one’s coat in accordance with one’s cloth; whereas the meanest tailor knows that one must cut one’s cloth in accordance with the size of the man.14

  Crowley was doubtless full of himself because Mandrake was finally releasing The Legend of Aleister Crowley.

  Although it was ready as early as October, Goldston delayed its publication. When the blue paperback finally appeared, the printer suppressed the “Epistle Dedicatory to James Douglas (editor of the Sunday Express)” for fear of libel; its tone was most unfriendly:

  Investigation reveals that you had neither a sense of responsibility nor a sense of shame nor any substantial reason for attacking Crowley except your own squamous vanity. You had called for the suppression of his book in accents which are more familiar now days than they then were. You followed up this clamour with a campaign of personal vilification more severe than anything of its kind which has yet disgraced even modern gutter journalism.15

  Interestingly enough, Crowley’s old chela Victor Neuburg reviewed the book and defended Crowley in the August 24 Freethinker:

  although in some respects he was perhaps “not quite nice to know,” as the slang phrase goes, we do not think that it is quite fair to charge him with murder, cannibalism, black magical practices, moral aberrations, treachery, druggery; as is the custom amongst the cunninger and more degraded jackals of Fleet Street … Crowley is at least as important a figure as the late D. H. Lawrence and Mr. James Joyce, both unquestionably men of genius; and when we remember the kind of thing said about these artists in our cheaper prints, we hesitate to acquiesce in the Sunday Newspaper verdict on Aleister Crowley.16

  Crowley had been trying to exhibit his paintings in London; a jobber named Hanchant tried to arrange an exhibit at Aquila, but that fell through with the purchase deal. When Crowley turned his hotel room into a gallery, his landlord evicted him. Thus Crowley packed 160 of his paintings and drawings for Berlin, where he hoped for a better reception. “Miss Jaeger fucks every one farewells,” Crowley recorded on his departure from London on August 1. His bon voyage party was quite an affair, with “Marie drunk and vomiting all day.”17

  He arrived in Berlin on August 2 and relegated his alcoholic wife to history, writing to Maria that he wanted nothing to do with her until she stopped drinking. (Yorke meanwhile sent her off to Hampstead.) AC renamed luscious Fräulein Jaeger as the Monster (he also gave her the magical name Anu) and began practicing sex magick with her. Germer, in his reckless manner, motored them about Germany, including a visit to his therapist, Austrian psychoanalyst Alfred Adler (1870–1937), whom Crowley claimed to have helped with his patients. Regarding psychology, Crowley wrote,

  There are only three authors on the subject worth reading, the original Freud, Adler and Jung. Freud is completely obsessed with the nonsense about infantile sexual theories. There may possibly be children in Germany or Austria sufficiently morbid, but nothing of the sort ever crossed my own mind when I was a child—nor have I ever met a child so morbid. Jung appears to me to have gone off the rails by his innate incurable romanticism. To my mind, the best of the three is Adler, whom, of course, I know personally; with him I did actually work when I was in Berlin. He could only come up from Vienna for a fortnight every year, and I handled some of his patients in his absence.18

  Crowley took a manuscript from Adler for Mandrake to publish, thinking it would be a boon for the troubled press whose greatest asset, D. H. Lawrence, had just died; alas, Mandrake never managed to publish it.

  Another notable contact at this time was with writer and critic Aldous Huxley (1894–1963). Although best known for Brave New World (1932), his The Doors of Perception (1954) would serve almost as a manifesto for the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s. He was already an established writer when he and Crowley met. One can only imagine what they discussed, although on the heels of their meeting Crowley wrote to Regardie,

  Please send a copy of Clouds without Water to Aldous Huxley Esq., Athenaeum Club, Pall Mall (with prospectuses etc.) with my compliments—we had a gorgeous 3 days with him in Berlin. Also please set up a figure [astrological chart] for him. Godalming, 4 A.M., July 26 ’94.19

  Mandrake had fallen
on bad times, and Crowley’s absence brought proof correction and other business to a standstill. Owing £2,000 and sitting on £4,000 worth of unsold stock, Mandrake was in no position to repay its creditors. Stephensen, convinced that Thynne and Crowley were both diverting funds into their own pockets, left the business: Packing up the page proofs for The Confessions Volume Three and Golden Twigs, he retreated to his little village in Kent and left Mandrake to its fate. He soon returned to Australia and set up the Endeavor Press with Norman Lindsay.

  Mandrake would go into voluntary liquidation that winter, and ultimately collapse from lack of capital a year after Stephensen’s departure. Although Grace Pailthorpe lost her investment in the press, she harbored no hard feelings; when What We Put in Prison and in Preventive and Rescue Homes debuted in 1932, she mentioned Mandrake in the dedication. This book gained her worldwide acclaim and prompted the psychological treatment of criminals.

  In the midst of Mandrake’s struggle, Crowley was, as Yorke put it, “up to some stunt in Portugal.”20 His scheme was to travel round the world with Fraulein Jaeger on a shoestring budget, writing a travelogue. AC detailed the plans in a letter to biographer and poet Herbert Gorman (1893–1954):

  The Monster & I have started to go round the world on £14.10.10. The question has arisen as to whether we shall not need some more between Lisbon, Madera, Rio Monte Video, Buenos Aries, Volparaiso, the Galapagos Isl (where the turtles come from), the South Seas, China, India, &c, &c, &c & London.

  Style: as Confessions, but more cynical & romantic.

  So cable me a contract from one of your millionaire papers to write it all up.21