Aleister Crowley (32 page)

In February 1930, Arthur Calder-Marshall, of the Oxford Poetry Society, invited Crowley to give a talk. Rather than speak of his earliest passion, Crowley decided to lecture on the fifteenth-century child murderer Gilles de Rais. Predictably, when the authorities found out, they banned the lecture. Crowley printed it as a pamphlet and had sandwich-board men hawk it on the streets. The controversy helped sales, but that was the lecture’s only attraction; it is a tedious march over well-trodden anti-Christian ground. Other speed bumps appeared. Later that year Crowley tried to exhibit his paintings, but no gallery would accept them. Even the Mandrake Press refused to hang them; the flack they got showing D. H. Lawrence’s canvases informed their decision. When his estate agent, courtesy of an article in
John Bull
, discovered that Crowley was trying to exhibit his work
near an apartment he wished to rent, he refused to rent him the flat. Crowley got the message. He gathered a large collection of works and decided to return to Germany, where he was appreciated.

By this time his marriage to the High Priestess was kaput. She was drinking heavily, was hysterical, and in general falling apart. On an earlier visit to Germany, she and the Beast quarreled viciously. Crowley consoled himself by discovering nineteen-year-old Hanni Jaegger in the studio of an artist acquaintance. While Crowley predictably fell in love with Hanni, Maria sank deeper into drink. She became unmanageable and he was forced to leave her with Martha Küntzel in Leipzig while he returned to England. When Maria returned too, they took a flat in Knightsbridge, but her days as the Scarlet Woman were over. She had become an embarrassment and made drunken advances to any male who turned up; that Crowley paid her less and less attention may have contributed to this. On August 1, 1930, Crowley headed for Berlin. At his farewell party, Maria drank herself unconscious and he left her on the floor. He cut off all financial ties and instructed his lawyers to start divorce proceedings immediately. “Dismissed wife, without notice,” he noted in his diary. The marriage had lasted less than a year. As he had with Leah, Crowley dumped Maria on others, Gerald Yorke in this instance. Maria was penniless and on her way to a lunatic asylum, and Yorke had to deal with it.

Young Hanni rejuvenated the fifty-four-year-old Perdurabo, who was doing very little magick but much
thelema
. After a romp in Berlin Crowley and his Scarlet Teenager headed to London, the first leg on another magical retirement. Avoiding Maria, who was languishing in Hampstead—Gerald Yorke had found her a place—Crowley and his nymph raced to Southampton, en route to Lisbon. Crowley had
been corresponding with the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. The two had much in common: both played chess, were interested in the occult, and shared an addiction to alter egos
.
In Pessoa’s case, this manifested in the many heteronyms he devised—not mere pseudonyms, but actual other literary personalities, other characters, whom he invented to author his poems.
³⁵
Pessoa was an Anglophile; he had translated Crowley’s “Hymn to Pan” and included it in
Presenca
(1931), one of the few of his works published in his lifetime. At first Hanni proved excellent at opera, especially
p.v.n.
, and Crowley christened her “The Monster.” She had unusual desires and apparently liked Crowley to use her as a WC—a toilet.
³⁶
He had other lovers, too, with whom he enjoyed “psychological cruelty,” but apparently Hanni only complained about being forced to watch Karl Germer masturbate.
³⁷
Unsurprisingly, she was less than stable and soon into their whirlwind adventure, she, too, started to unravel. After a ferocious argument, Crowley and his waif had to leave their hotel. While Crowley checked into a new one, Hanni bolted. She vanished and Crowley confided his concerns to Pessoa. A few days later he found her; she was booked on the next boat heading to Germany. All his entreaties failed; the American consul had advised her to head home as soon as possible. Crowley was desperate. What could he do?

He decided, with the help of Pessoa, to fake a suicide. At the Boca do Inferno (“The Mouth of Hell”), an arched rock formation near the sea, he took a leaf from Sherlock Holmes and left a note weighed down by his cigarette case.
³⁸
“I cannot live without you,” it read. Crowley then headed for Germany. Pessoa spread the story and the press ran with it. Mysterious disappearance of infamous black magician. Had the Beast finally bought it? Was there foul play? In Berlin, Crowley found Hanni and they patched things up, temporarily; he
even got her to write a letter accusing the American consul in Lisbon of sexual harassment. Then, on October 11, the day before his fifty-fifth birthday, the mystery was solved, and the world breathed a sigh of relief. The Beast was back, and his paintings adorned the Gallery Neumann-Nierendorf in Berlin. Among them were portraits of Mudd, Leah, and Aldous Huxley, whom Crowley had met recently. Again, Crowley garnered some press—the main idea—but no paintings sold and things were not exactly wunderbar with Hanni. She was deeply depressed, sobbed constantly, and spoke often of suicide; she would, in fact, kill herself, not long after her predecessor was committed to a mental home.

Maria was not doing well. Even when Colonel Carter advised Crowley to return to London to take care of his wife, the Beast did not respond. Crowley informed Maria that she should file for divorce, and he obligingly admitted to forty-seven acts of adultery with Hanni since August 3 as evidence—not much, he agreed, but he had been traveling. It was around this time that both Yorke and Regardie threw up their hands at the master. Not long before, Maria had had to enter a public workhouse; she had no money and her association with Crowley prevented her from finding work. On June 16, 1931, Maria was admitted to the Colney Hatch lunatic asylum, suffering from paranoia, manic depression, and delusions. She believed she was George V’s daughter and was married to her brother, the Prince of Wales, but she also harbored weird ideas about being the Scarlet Woman of the Beast 666—her doctors were unaware of Crowley’s ministry. By this time Hanni, too, had left.

Crowley was unfazed. He had already met Hanni’s replacement. On Berlin’s Unter den Linden, thirty-six-year-old Bertha Busch—he would call her Billie—approached Crowley. She was just the thing he
needed: into S&M,
p.v.n.
, drugs, drink, and the rest. Crowley threw himself into the Weimar twilight, a grinning golem let loose in
Cabaret
. He and Billie liked to fight. On one occasion, some Nazi Youths roughed him up when they caught him slapping her against a wall. On another she stabbed him with a butcher knife. For a time Crowley shared a flat with Gerald Hamilton, the model for Christopher Isherwood’s Mr. Norris in his
Berlin Stories
. One time Hamilton returned home and found Billie drugged and trussed up with a note saying not to release her. On another occasion, finding Billie stark naked on the freezing floor, Hamilton woke Crowley and asked if she was ill. “Hasn’t that bitch gone to bed yet?” a half-dressed Crowley asked before landing Billie a vicious kick. The flat was usually strewn with broken dishes, Billie’s favorite mode of defense, and on more than one occasion a doctor had to give Billie a sedative, usually a morphine injection. Karl Germer did not like her—she was not, he felt, true Scarlet Woman material—but Crowley paraded Billie around, introducing her to people such as Isherwood and the poet Stephen Spender, who visited Crowley at his flat. Isherwood relates how he once saw Crowley trail his fingernail—long repellent things—down the bare chest of a stud in a Berlin boy bar, and how he just escaped being beaten up. “The truly awful thing about Crowley,” Isherwood wrote, “is that one suspects he didn’t really believe in anything.”
³⁹
The only thing real about Crowley, Isherwood thought, was his drug addiction.

Gerald Hamilton had a history as dubious as his flat-mate’s. Like Crowley, he had been branded a traitor because of his friendship with Roger Casement, the Irish Republic supporter. Hamilton was a communist, and he introduced Crowley to some of the leading Reds in town, whom Crowley did his best to convert to
thelema
. But Crowley
got more than introductions from Hamilton. Colonel Carter had arranged for Crowley to report on Hamilton’s activities; for the sum of £50, Crowley became something of a real-life spy, although of a rather seedy sort. Crowley clued Carter in to anything of note happening with Nazis, nationalists, communists, secret societies, or anything else that would justify his keep. He was, in short, a paid informer. In a case of Spy vs. Spy, Hamilton was doing the same for the Nazis about Crowley; they were keen on any information about occult societies, Freemasons, and Illuminati, and were already taking steps to neutralize these potential threats.

Crowley liked Berlin; it was the kind of place he felt at home in. Everything he really enjoyed was on tap. But eventually he had to return to England; being kicked out of his flat precipitated that. Billie had gone ahead, on a fund-raising tour, but came up empty-handed. Crowley still hunted for a publisher, and was miffed to discover that his student Regardie was having much more luck in that regard. Thoughts of death came to him, and he drew up a will, asking to be buried, once again, like Christian Rosenkreutz, or on a cliff behind Boleskine, or, failing that, in Westminster Abbey. But there was no rest for the wicked. On June 21, the summer solstice, he returned to Britain. After taking a flat on Albemarle Street near Piccadilly Circus, in July he went to Colney Hatch to visit Maria. He wanted her to sign papers releasing him from any financial responsibility, but her doctors advised him against seeing her. It would only upset an already badly unstable woman; Maria remained in care for the rest of her life. At the asylum Billie threw a fit and soon after disappeared from Crowley’s world. He had tired of her anyway; her letters, asking for a reunion, went unanswered. That chapter in his life had closed. Now began the last days of the Beast.

THE SUNSET OF CROWLEYANITY

At first, Crowley’s return to Britain seemed promising. A lecture for Foyle’s Literary Luncheon in September 1932 on “The Philosophy of Magick” was well received, as was another for the National Laboratory of Psychical Research on “The Elixir of Life: Our Magical Medicine” in October. Crowley’s topic for this talk was the benefits of a tonic he had devised using his own semen. Amrita, the Elixir of Life—the name of Crowley’s rejuvenating pills—was, he claimed, 100 percent effective, and for a time his homemade Viagra turned a few bob. But money remained a problem and in the early part of the new year, Crowley found a way to bring some in. In January 1933 Crowley noticed an advertisement for his novel
Moonchild
in the window of a bookseller on Praed Street. It mentioned that
The Diary of a Drug Fiend
had been withdrawn from circulation after it had been attacked in the press. This was technically incorrect; the book was not withdrawn, simply allowed to go out of print. The bookseller aimed to boost sales with a little sensationalism, no doubt, which could only be to Crowley’s advantage; the novel had languished since its publication. But Crowley still smarted from the libels he suffered and would not let this one go unchallenged. Crowley
sued the bookseller and for once the law agreed with him. When the case was heard in May, the judge remarked that there wasn’t the slightest grounds for believing that anything Crowley wrote was indecent or improper. Evidently the judge did not read the Beaverbrook papers. Crowley won £50 in damages with costs. Unbelievably, neither the bookseller nor his defense pointed out that the advertisement only quoted from the blurb Crowley himself had written for the book’s dust jacket.

Crowley already had another, weightier litigation on the boil. The year before, Nina Hamnett, his old friend and onetime member of the A.
^.
.A.
^.
.—they had known each other for twenty years—had published her memoirs,
Laughing Torso
; the title comes from her life as an artist’s model. Before publication she had written to Crowley telling him that he was mentioned in the book. Everything was “very nice and agreeable,” Nina assured him. “No libel, no rubbish.”
¹

Crowley would be the judge of that. He opened the book and discovered that he was said to have practiced black magic in Cefalù. It was also said that a baby had disappeared there, and that something had happened with a goat. Crowley decided that Nina was wrong. There were certainly grounds for a lawsuit in these heinous, if tongue-in-cheek, remarks. But, being a friend, he offered her the chance to settle out of court. Failing that, he even explained how they could both benefit financially by his winning the suit. But Nina disagreed and this time Crowley was taking on more than a single bookseller. Nina’s publisher, Constable and Co., who would be party to the defense, knew their stuff and suggested Crowley do his worst. He did.

Crowley’s solicitors knew he had a shaky case—the remarks were barely libelous, if at all—and asked him to get witnesses to testify to his integrity. J.W.N. Sullivan, J.F.C. Fuller (now a major general), and
J. D. Beresford—who had commissioned
The Diary of a Drug Fiend
—all declined. Beresford even advised Crowley to drop the case. Any trial would amount to an examination of the life and ideas of the Beast and Crowley would not survive it. Crowley ignored Beresford’s advice. But Crowley’s counsel was worried and, considering what might come to light, asked for a copy of
White Stains
. After looking at it they advised Crowley that if it got into the defense’s hands his case was gone.

The case opened in April 1934 and the defense went straight to the point. They asked Crowley if he was bringing suit because his reputation had been damaged, and then made it unmistakably clear that Crowley had no reputation to besmirch. Was he not called the “wickedest man in the world”? And did he not for most of his life openly defy all moral conventions and display contempt for Christianity? (Crowley, of course, had, but he judiciously denied it; it was an abject repudiation of his whole career.) And was he not called the Beast 666 and the Master Therion? Crowley tried to jollify the proceedings when, in answering what “the Beast 666” actually meant, he replied “sunlight” and suggested that he be called “Little Sunshine.” The audience laughed but not the judge or jury. When the defense produced a copy of
White Stains
, Crowley’s lawyers’ fears were realized. After the judge perused it the jury declined; they had no need. And when Betty May testified to the squalid scenes she had witnessed at the abbey—including Crowley’s home decorating for his
La Chambre des Cauchemars
—the end was near. After four days Crowley lost the case, and he had to pay costs. The judge remarked to the jury that in his forty years of service, he had never heard such “dreadful, horrible, blasphemous, and abominable stuff as that which has been produced by the man who describes himself to you as the
greatest living poet.” But this was not all. The case bankrupted Crowley; he could not have won substantial damages anyway, but now he was truly destitute. His debts amounted to nearly £5,000. His nonexistent assets amounted to £15,000 that he claimed he would have earned had Gerald Yorke not been his business advisor; Crowley had recently served writ on Yorke for that sum and of course it would never materialize.
²
And shortly after he was also fined for illegally obtaining letters of Betty May’s that he had used in court. They did not help and only made things worse for him. The judge spared him a prison sentence, but he was put on probation and told if he was brought before the court again, he would receive six months.

Crowley’s own comment on the proceedings was magnificently unrealistic. He noted that its verdict brought “General joy—the consternation of Constable and Co.” This was about as far removed from reality as one could get; it practically verges on the delusional. All his hopes, dreams, plans, and fantasies about being recognized as a great poet, thinker, or prophet had been soundly dashed. Crowley’s reputation was now truly unrecoverable. In court there were no dramatic speeches energizing the few who were ready to “assume Kingship and rule the disorganized and bewildered mob,” only feeble attempts at wit à la Oscar Wilde, and absolutely no clue about how badly these were received. Crowley’s one consolation was the publicity; he clung to the fact that his name was once again in the papers. Being in the spotlight, even as the wickedest man in the world, always gratified him.

Crowley had by now acquired a new Scarlet Woman, his last. Pearl Brooksmith was thirty-five, a widow and, according to the
I Ching
, which Crowley consulted on her account, looking for the Great Man. She met Crowley instead and performed her first opus,
per manu
, sometime in August 1933. Pearl was fond of saying “I feel the flame of fornication creeping up my body” and she did her best to mean it. She, like Rose and Maria, would end up in a mental home. But Crowley’s attentions were soon diverted to nineteen-year-old Patricia Doherty, who had attended the libel trial and thought it was a travesty. The legend is that she had approached Crowley afterward, and declaring that the verdict was the worst thing since the Crucifixion, offered to be the mother of his child. The reality was less dramatic, although she did have a son by Crowley, his only official one, whom he named Ataturk; he was also called Randall Gair, and he arrived on May 2, 1937.
³
Patricia was the mistress of Robin Thynne, who had been on the board of the Mandrake Press. Thynne, in his fifties, was himself an interesting character: a follower of Rudolf Steiner but also a “de-mobbed officer on the make . . . ever on the lookout for thrills and remuneration.”
⁴
John Bull
had targeted him as well, exposing some shady business operations he was involved in; for once Crowley agreed with them, calling Thynne a “swindler and a share-pusher of the worst type.”
⁵
Pat had lived in Cornwall with her grandparents; this is where she met Thynne. They sent her to London to live with a relative, the High Court Judge Lord Justice Slesser, ostensibly to have more opportunities, but also to end the relationship with Thynne. Lord Slesser invited Pat to watch the
Laughing Torso
trial. She did and was taken with Crowley. She did not, however, become his lover until 1936, after Thynne’s sudden death. Why Crowley would have been attracted to her is no mystery, but why she decided to have a child by him is—although she would have several subsequent children, legitimate or not; she, in a way, collected them, and later ran a kind of orphanage.
⁶

Life with Pearl saw Crowley at a low ebb. The libel trial had
shattered him, and many old friends avoided him. Louis Wilkinson told his son Oliver, by now a grown man, not to give Crowley his address; at this point Crowley was living in a slum in Paddington Green, a disreputable part of town.
⁷
The artist and magician Ithell Colquhoun recalled seeing Crowley in a bookshop, and remarked that his skin was “the color and texture of parchment.”
⁸
A visitor to an old, dilapidated house on Great Ormond Street recalled being met by a “corpulent man dressed in plus-fours” who smelled of alcohol. In a shabby-genteel room Pearl, a “chlorotic-looking lady” whom Crowley introduced as “the Blessed Virgin,” reclined on a couch. As Crowley excused himself to use a machine for his asthma, Pearl explained that they had recently been thrown out of a flat near Regent’s Park Zoo. Pearl explained that Crowley needed someone to “mother” him. “The poor thing” was, after all, “only a child,” an astute observation. They had, yes, some trouble with the landlord. He had apparently discovered them naked, in the basement, performing a rite of Pan, and had read them the riot act.
⁹

Alan Burnett-Rae was Crowley’s landlord for a brief period around this time. He had first encountered Crowley in 1934 at the Mayfair Hotel, where the occultist and hypnotist Alexander Cannon tried to levitate the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky’s daughter.
¹⁰
In 1936 Burnett-Rae came into some property on Welbeck Street, in the West End, and the West Indian mystic Rollo Ahmed, author of
The Black Arts
(1936), asked if he had a room for “a very highly evolved personality” who would be a very satisfactory tenant. This turned out to be Crowley.
¹¹
In later years, Ahmed changed his mind about the Beast, calling him after his death a “self-proclaimed High Priest of Black Magic and Satanism,” and castigating his “foul practices.”
¹²
Yet Ahmed himself
was no angel; by the time he met Burnett-Rae he had served two sentences for fraud and would serve time again in 1946.
¹³

Burnett-Rae gave Crowley a room and soon the “satisfactory tenant” was disturbing his housemates with incense and arguments, and generally being a tenant from hell. Burnett-Rae, though, did enjoy the stories; among others, Crowley told him that his walking stick was made of a rhinoceros’s penis. Crowley certainly looked bad. His teeth reminded Burnett-Rae of the black keys on a piano, and in 1937 his infamous Serpent’s Tooth broke off in a Turkish bath. He was overweight, badly dressed, asthmatic, and clumsy. He also tried to get Burnett-Rae to invest in one scheme or another. At one point, while living on Hasker Street—Burnett-Rae had by then thrown him out but Crowley had kept in touch—Crowley asked him to fund a health clinic he was setting up; along with his Amrita pills, he would provide osteopathy, vibrators, infrared lights, and something he called “Zotofoam.”
¹⁴
Other get-rich-quick schemes were a Black Magic restaurant, a board game called
Thelema
, and selling “We Want Our King” buttons to people who were opposed to King Edward VIII’s abdication to marry Wallis Simpson. All came to nothing.

Pearl herself wanted to give Crowley a child, as well as the kind of visions he admired in a woman, but her attempts at astral traveling proved unconvincing and at getting pregnant even worse and soon Pearl’s health suffered badly. In January 1936 she had a hysterectomy, ending the possibility of her providing Crowley with offspring. She began to suffer hallucinations and was removed, as mentioned, to a mental home. From here she wrote to Crowley, begging to be taken away, because the Devil, who was under her bed, wanted to kidnap
her. This sounds like leaping out of the frying pan into the fire and then back again. Naturally, Crowley ignored her. Impregnating Pat, however, was no picnic. Crowley’s impotence had worsened and the necessary opus
required some effort. Later, the mission accomplished, Crowley introduced Burnett-Rae to Pat and his son, Ataturk, at the Café Royal. When Burnett-Rae was unable to locate the little Crowley, the Beast pointed out he was still recumbent in Pat’s womb.