by Colin Wilson
So, she accepted. During the next month she lived in the tent, wearing only a woollen robe, eating bread and grapes brought to her by a boy. During the first few days she was nervous and uncomfortable, angry and resentful. Then she became ‘calm but bored’. Then, after the nineteenth day, she suddenly plunged into a mood of ‘perfect calm, deep joy, renewal of strength and courage’. Suddenly, she understood what Crowley had meant when he told her that she had the sun, moon, stars, sky, sea and the universe to read and play with.
Seabrook's explanation is that she had ‘let go of herself’ in New York, and ‘gotten hold of herself’ in solitude. But the truth is almost certainly the reverse. In New York she had become accustomed to stress, tension, endless hurry, until she had lost contact with her instincts, the ‘forces of the right brain.’ She had forgotten how to relax. In the tent, it gradually dawned on her unconscious mind that there was no need to hurry. Quite suddenly, her mind relaxed and her tensions dissolved away. It was a trick Crowley had first learned years ago on a long train journey from New York to Mexico City. He admits that he has always found journeys of more than half an hour tedious, and that even travelling from Edinburgh to Inverness he often felt on the verge of insanity. But after two or three days on the train, the boredom had vanished and he felt completely relaxed.
Since Jane was unsuitable (either for sexual or masochistic purposes) Crowley had to fall back on Leah. Two days after Jane's arrival, the diary contains a long entry in which Crowley bares his breast and admits his shortcomings. It seemed that:
…the first hour of my vow of Holy Obedience to Alostrael [Leah] proved Her to be the Scarlet Woman; she could have used her power in trivial ways; but She sprang instantly to Goddess-stature…First, She discovered the physical cowardice and dread of pain which I had sunk [i.e. buried] so deep by means of daring death-mountains…She held a lighted cigarette against my breast. I shrank and moaned. She spat her scorn and puffed at it and put it back. I shrank and moaned. She made me fold my arms, sucked at the paper until the tobacco crackled with the fierceness of its burning; she put it back for the third time. I braced myself; I tightened lip and thrust my breast against it.
Leah apparently saw through all his bluffs—saw that his erudition was a fake, that ‘my worship was half pose, my miracle half craft’. She called his bluff and demanded the ‘Eucharist’—that Crowley should eat her excrement, which lay on the consecrated plate on the altar. Crowley finally obeyed:
My mouth burned; my throat choked; my belly retched, my blood fled whither who knows, and my skin sweated. She stood above me, hideous in contempt…’ [And he admits]: Simple enough, all this: in a word, I'm a Coward and a Liar.
The next morning, his tongue and throat were still sore.
The warm season was, on the whole, pleasant and peaceful, although drugs were weakening Crowley's health—he even had bronchitis in the middle of summer. Life with his concubines alternated between orgies of love and orgies of screaming—on one occasion Ninette threatened him with a revolver. The baby Poupée was sick—she had never been strong since birth. Oddly enough, Crowley had turned into a doting father. When the baby died in mid-October, he was shattered, and Leah, who was six months pregnant, had a miscarriage a few days later. ‘I can only say that my brain was benumbed. It was dead except in one part where slowly revolved a senseless wheel of pain.’ It was Leah who revived his courage and convinced him that he must live in the present, ‘wholly absorbed in the Great Work’. He decided to go to Paris for a magical retirement. There he was overcome with grief, which became acute when he passed the hospital where Poupée had been born. But in the forest of Fontainebleau, ‘the universal sorrow of nature flooded me and I broke out into strong sobbing.’ Finally, the misery exorcised, he went back to Paris.
It was there that he met the mathematician and music critic J. W. N. Sullivan, who was travelling with a beautiful girl called Sylvia, a talented musician. Sullivan had acquired her from a literary critic, who had warned him that she suffered from one curious drawback; some lack of self-confidence that made her incapable of being happy. Sullivan had already discovered that this was true, and that it made their lives together oddly pointless. Predictably, Sylvia was fascinated by Crowley's powerful presence. He and Sullivan played chess together, talked all night, and discussed the law of Thelema; Sullivan ended by pledging himself to discover his True Will and to do it. Crowley then advised him to go off on his own to try and discover it, and rushed Sylvia off to his bed. He claims in the autobiography that Sullivan asked him ‘point blank to take her off his hands for a time’. At all events, Sylvia became pregnant. As they made their way back to Cefalu, Sullivan demanded that Crowley return her, and Crowley, probably greatly relieved, promptly handed her over—to Sylvia's fury. Sylvia was to die shortly afterwards of typhoid, and Sullivan was to begin his writing career with a book in which he attempted to understand the meaning of the tragedy—the autobiography But for the Grace of God, which was to become a minor classic. He makes no mention of Sylvia's affair with Crowley.
Back in the abbey, Crowley's health continued to deteriorate and he suffered from boredom. He made an effort to break the heroin habit, and experienced constipation, sleeplessness and a return of his asthma.
The abbey now had a new recruit, a young American named Cecil Frederick Russell, who had read Crowley's articles for an American magazine and introduced himself to him in New York. Russell had been thrown out of the navy after taking forty grains of cocaine and trying to set a piece of glass on fire with will power. He had arrived just before Crowley left for Paris, and although Crowley welcomed him, hoping to seduce him—or rather, persuade Russell to seduce him—the new recruit proved to be more trouble than he was worth. Like Crowley, he had a pathological hatred of authority, and reacted with rage to anything that sounded like an order; he had attacked Leah twice in Crowley's absence. When another member of the OTO (Frank Bennett) was due to arrive, and Crowley asked Russell to give up his room, he met with a flat refusal. He finally had to order Russell to give up his room or leave the abbey—a sad expedient for a born anarchist like Crowley. When Russell's moods became a nuisance, Crowley suggested a magical retirement, and Russell hurried off to the top of the great rock of Cefalu and took a vow to starve for eight days. While there, he became convinced that he had been initiated into a higher grade than Crowley's, and came down more unstable than ever. They all heaved a sigh of relief when he finally left for Australia, even though Crowley reproached himself for his failure to cure Russell of his ‘complex.’
By contrast, the case of Sir Frank Bennett was a triumph. Bennett was a Lancashire bricklayer who had joined the A.A. and the OTO, then emigrated to Australia. Now—like Sullivan's mistress Sylvia—he felt that he was totally unable to discover his True Will. The failure had profoundly depressed him. One day, as Crowley, Bennett and Leah were walking down to the beach, Crowley proceeded to expound his own Thelemite psychology. ‘I want to explain to you what the Real Self is.’ What he said was basically a variation on Freud. The subconscious mind is our true self, the Holy Guardian Angel, which experiences all that happens to us. It then does its best to persuade consciousness to act in accordance with its desires and needs; but consciousness, under the influence of society, is inclined to ignore or repress this advice. Sex is mankind's strongest need, and no amount of repression can prevent it from expressing itself. Freedom, said Crowley, consists in learning to stop suppressing the subconscious mind, and instead, learning to do its will.
For some reason, this simplistic and Freudian view electrified Bennett, who rushed downhill and plunged into the sea. After the swim, he asked in an awed voice: ‘Please tell me again what you said just now.’ Crowley had some difficulty in remembering, but finally succeeded. Bennett listened in silence, and when they came back to the abbey, went into a trance that lasted for three days. (This is Crowley's account; according to Bennett, he wandered about the mountain in a state of delirious torment before his mind grew ca
lm.) Then he came to Crowley looking like ‘an incarnation of pure joy’, and told him that he had given him the key to the inmost treasury of his soul. What Crowley had done, said Bennett, was to teach him that doing his true will merely consisted in listening to the voice of his subconscious mind and doing what it directs. So, Bennett concluded triumphantly, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law is true.
The reason for Bennett's excitement may not be immediately obvious; after all, Crowley had merely repeated the standard Freudian theory on sex, and had—in effect—told Bennett to ‘let it all hang out.’ But he had also grasped that Bennett's central problem was a confusion about the nature of his ‘true will.’ Bennett was a self-made man, a man who was used to taking conscious decisions and carrying them out. But he was also a deeply dissatisfied man, driven by a feeling that there had to be more in life than mere ‘success’—hence his membership of the A.A. and the OTO. Yet the conscious will that had brought him material success seemed incapable of fulfilling his deepest needs. In telling him to listen to the voice of the subconscious, Crowley had shown him another way out: to stop willing and relax. It is unlikely that Bennett really went into a trance for three days. What is far more probable is that he was doing precisely what Crowley told him to do: sinking into a state of quiescence—like Jane Wolfe—and listening to an inner voice, of whose existence he had suddenly become aware.
So one man, at least, saw Crowley as he saw himself: as the great teacher and liberator. Bennett wrote in his journal:
Twelve years ago I first saw the Beast, then I decided, half-heartedly, to follow him. But since I have seen him, and lived in the Abbey with him I have seen something. If his inner life; and his great disappointment, not with his work, but with those who ought to be carrying out his work…I am determined he shall not be disappointed in me; for I will spend the rest of my life in spreading his teaching. I may not be able to do much. But by the help of him, the Beast, and of my own Real Self, which he had given me an insight of—I may do much. For he alone led me to the knowledge of my real subconscious self…3
It is too easy to see Crowley as an overgrown juvenile delinquent with a passion for self-advertisement. But there was another Crowley, the Crowley recognized and admired by Frank Bennett. Unless we understand this, we totally fail to grasp the extraordinary influence that Crowley could exert on women like Rose and Leah, and on men like Neuburg, Sullivan and Bennett. They came to believe that Crowley was exactly what he claimed to be: a great teacher, the messiah of a new age. And this was not the gullibility of born dupes; Sullivan, at least, was one of the most intelligent men of his age (as his book on Beethoven reveals). Crowley was, in part, a great teacher, a man of profound insights. Mencius says: ‘Those who follow the part of themselves that is great will become great men; those who follow the part of themselves that is small will become small men.’ But Crowley was a strange mixture who devoted about equal time to following both parts of himself, and so became a curious combination of greatness and smallness. A summary of his life, and his extraordinary goings-on, makes us aware of the smallness; but it would be sheer short-sightedness to overlook the element of greatness that so impressed Bennett.
Other visitors to the abbey were Ninette's two sisters, Mimi (her twin) and Helen, as well as the novelist Mary Butts, and her lover Cecil Maitland. Crowley was impressed by Maitland's intelligence, but made the penetrating observation:
The great value of such men as Maitland and Neuburg to me has been to strengthen my conviction that in the absence of willpower the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless. You must have a fulcrum, not only to move the world, but to move a feather.
Mimi was deeply impressed by Crowley, and only prevented from joining the abbey by her middle class upbringing. Helen, on the other hand, loathed Crowley and all he stood for, without having the strength of personality to tell him so to his face. She tried to influence the children—or ‘corrupt’ them, as Crowley saw it—and when Crowley found out, he ordered her to leave. Helen then went to the British consul in Palermo and ‘swore to a long list of lies.’ But, claims Crowley, she could only think of one thing that was actually illegal—Crowley does not specify what it was—and the police called at the abbey and could find no evidence. Possibly Helen had complained about an act of intercourse between the Scarlet Woman and a billy goat, which had culminated in Crowley cutting the animal's throat—possibly because it had shown an insulting lack of enthusiasm for the operation. Whatever it was, it had the unfortunate effect of drawing the attention of the law to the Abbey of Do-What-You-Will.
Crowley had spent the legacy that had enabled him to move to Cefalu; now it was necessary to think of ways of earning money. This would obviously be impossible in Cefalu; so in January 1922, he went back to Fontainebleau. Drugs had undermined his health, and the magical diary is full of accounts of his miseries. A disciple named Augustine Booth-Clibborn seemed to hold out a promise of renewed fortune, but he declined to sign Crowley's solemn pledge to undertake the Great Work—perhaps alarmed by Crowley's demands for money—and vanished. Crowley found Paris oddly disappointing. ‘All the old enchantments had somehow vanished.’ So he recovered some clothes he had left at the cleaners in 1914, donned highland costume, and set out with Leah for London. He had only £10 in his pocket, and was greatly amused when he was mistaken for a financier wanted for embezzlement and arrested near Boulogne; he was able to prove his identity by showing the police his photograph in Guillarmod's book on the Chogo-Ri expedition.
In London, his luck took a turn for the better. The novelist J. D. Beresford, the literary adviser of the publisher William Collins, succeeded in getting Crowley a contract for a novel to be called The Diary of a Drug Fiend. It was Crowley's first venture into commercial authorship, all his earlier books having been published at his own expense. He dictated the novel to Leah, who took it down in longhand, in twenty-seven and a half days, at a rate of just under five thousand words per day.
For a month's labour, Diary of a Drug Fiend is rather an impressive piece of work: the story of an ex-airman named Sir Peter Pendragon who becomes a heroin addict, and is saved by a meeting with ‘Mr King Lamus’ (Crowley) who invites him to his Abbey of Thelema at Telepylus, and cures him. It is unashamedly a roman à clef, and John Symonds’ edition4 has footnotes identifying almost all the characters. Pendragon is based on Cecil Maitland, and in the opening chapter, which takes place in the Café Royal, we meet Frank Harris, Lord Alfred Douglas, Augustus John, Jacob Epstein and many others, including Crowley, who introduces himself to Pendragon with the words ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’—one of Crowley's more tiresome habits. Each of the characters is introduced with a thumbnail sketch. Mary Butts is a ‘fat, bold red headed slut’ who reminds the hero of a white maggot. Lord Alfred Douglas gives an impression ‘of some filthy creature of the darkness—a raider from another world looking about him for something to despoil’, while the journalist T. W. H. Crosland is ‘a huge bloated, verminous creature like a cockroach…his face bloated and pimpled, a horrible evil leer on his dripping mouth, with its furniture like a bombed graveyard.’
This acidulous way of descibing his characters is strongly reminiscent of Frederick Rolfe, ‘Baron Corvo’, the virulent, frustrated homosexual who wrote Hadrian the Seventh; it also has much in common with the method of Wyndham Lewis in novels like The Apes of God. And these comparisons are highly revealing. Both Rolfe and Lewis were bad novelists because they were so self-absorbed that they totally lacked the kind of objectivity that comes naturally to a born novelist; they were simply unable to get outside their own skins. Shaw once said that our interest in the world is the overflow of our interest in ourselves, and that until our interest in ourselves has been satisfied, we find it hard to pay attention to the world. Most people outgrow this stage in childhood or adolescence; but Crowley, like Rolfe and Lewis, never succeeded in satisfying the appetite, and remained in this state of self-absorption all hi
s life.
Equally striking is the unselfconscious way in which Crowley can paint an immensely self-magnified portrait of himself in King Lamus (in fact, a character in Homer's Odyssey who rules over the cannibal giants, the Laestrygonians). Inevitably, Crowley produces the impression that, since nobody else is willing to blow his trumpet, he will do it himself. Diary of a Drug Fiend is an accurate measure of the immense, unsatisfied craving for recognition that dogged Crowley from youth to old age. It also explains why the British, when they finally became aware of Crowley, rejected him with such finality; his temperament was the reverse of everything the British admire. But for Crowley, the commissioning of the Diary of a Drug Fiend seemed a turning point in his life, the reward from the gods foretold by his guardian angel. And, to some extent, this view seemed to be justified. Collins accepted it immediately, and went on to commission Crowley's autobiography for an advance of £120—twice as much as they had paid on Drug Fiend. When Drug Fiend appeared, in November 1922—complete with a note explaining that the Abbey of Thelema really existed, and that the author would be glad to hear from prospective disciples—it was not greeted with the howls of derision that Crowley's smug self-portrait might have provoked. Critics found it a little too verbose, but gave Crowley high marks for good intentions in denouncing the use of heroin. When Crowley returned to Cefalu later that month, it looked as if he might anticipate a modest but continuous income from the use of his pen—he had also contracted with Collins to publish a series of stories about a detective called Simon Iff, and with another publisher to translate The Key to the Mysteries by Crowley's earlier incarnation, Eliphas Lévi.