Aleister Crowley (5 page)

It may have been his mother’s reaction to Coleridge that led Crowley to poetry’s door, but it soon became of “paramount importance.” Oddly, Crowley avoided Shakespeare—England’s other “greatest poet”—precisely because he was allowed to read him, and came to him only by chance. Milton’s
Paradise Lost
bored him, but it at least allowed him to “gloat” over the figure of Satan and chortle
about his sin. Longfellow and Tennyson, however, were, according to him, not even poets.

Crowley was expected to become an evangelist, but he also had to adopt some profession, and a medical career was suggested. This sparked an early poem about an ailing woman who was “rotting away.” “The lupus is over her face and head / Filthy and foul and horrid and dread / And her shrieks they would almost wake the dead /Rotting away!”
⁴⁴
The execution improved but the theme—death, decay, “the worms gnawing the tissues foul”—would not alter much. It is the kind of thing we might expect from a clever, talented schoolboy, but Crowley produced verse like this for the rest of his life. Another early work took the side of Florence Maybrick, who was accused of murdering her husband in 1891 because of an adulterous affair she was having. She was sentenced to death but this was later commuted to life imprisonment. The evidence against her was inconclusive and the case became a cause célèbre on both sides of the Atlantic (Florence was American). Many believed Florence was innocent, yet Crowley’s inspiration for writing the poem had nothing to do with a miscarriage of justice but with Florence being an adulteress. “The mere fact” of this “thrilled” Crowley “to the marrow.” Adultery was the “summit of wickedness” and that was enough for him.
⁴⁵

After his expulsion from Eastbourne in the summer of 1895, Crowley took a trip on his own to the Bernese Oberland in Switzerland. Crowley had already visited the Alps the year before and he had joined the Scottish Mountaineering Club, but although he was certainly qualified, he was refused membership to the prestigious English Alpine Club. Crowley suggests the club was jealous of his ability, but most likely his self-assertive personality put them off; throughout his life, Crowley had nothing but disdain for them. As
with his natural talent for science, Crowley seems to have been a born climber, and the solitude, quiet, and freedom seem to have brought out the best in him. There he discovered that “the problem of life was not how to satanize, as Huysmans would have called it”—he refers to J. K. Huysmans’s decadent Satanic classic
Là-bas
—but “simply to escape from the oppressor and enjoy the world without any interference of spiritual life of any sort.” Crowley found that his “happiest moments were when I was alone on the mountains,” and that this happiness in no way derived from mysticism. “The beauty of form and colour, the physical exhilaration of exercise, and the mental stimulation of finding one’s way in difficult country formed the sole elements of my rapture.” At this point Crowley achieves an insight into his psychology that one can only regret did not register more firmly. “So far as I indulged in daydreams,” he tells us, “they were exclusively of a normal sexual type. There was no need to create phantasms of a perverse or unrealizable satisfaction”—the “forbiddenness” and “ultimate sin” he pursued. “It is important to emphasize this point,” he continues, “because I have always appeared to my contemporaries as a very extraordinary individual obsessed by fantastic passions. But such were not in any way natural to me. The moment the pressure was relieved every touch of the abnormal was shed off instantly. The impulse to write poetry disappeared almost completely at such periods.”
⁴⁶

This is a remarkable passage. Not only does it tell us that poetry did not come naturally to England’s other “greatest poet,” but that his incentive for writing it had little to do with his “real self” and practically everything to do with his “self-image.” Crowley’s insight is tantamount to an admission that he was not really a poet. What real poet wouldn’t sing the beauty of the heights? It also tells us
that Crowley’s persona of the Beast 666 was a response to
other people.
This was a problem he was saddled with throughout his life. Crowley was always conscious of other people and how they perceived him; hence the alter egos he adopted. He needed to “show off,” to get people to agree that he was something special—Ernest Becker’s “object of primary importance in the universe.” It was Crowley’s awareness of other people—“the pressure”—that drove him to “satanize,” that is, to shock and scandalize. His poetry did not come from a natural spring within him but was wholly rooted in his
desire to have an effect
. This is why he is not a great poet and only occasionally a good one. The fact that Crowley didn’t feel the need to write poetry when in the mountains suggests that for him poetry was welded to his personality. We need solitude to escape from our self, because solitude means being alone with your “real self,” not the one obliged to interact with others. Crowley escaped from his self when he was in the mountains, but when he came down to the lowlands, the “pressure” returned and he fell back into the habit of “satanizing.”

In 1895 Crowley turned twenty. He entered Trinity College Cambridge, taking the Moral Science Tripos, believing that it would help him “to learn something about the nature of things.”
⁴⁷
After the first lecture he never attended another. Crowley spent three years at Cambridge but at the end came away without a degree. To do so, he said, was “unbefitting of and unnecessary to a gentleman.” That Crowley was perfectly qualified to earn a degree is undoubted, but his reasons for not doing so have more to do with his inflated self-regard and natural laziness than anything else. It was not the work that stymied him. It was more an attitude of “I can’t be bothered.”
This becomes clear in a remark he made in his diary while recovering from his expulsion from Sicily. He is speaking of chess, but his comments are apt for his entire life. “Once I am sure I have won,” he writes, “I lose interest. I feel the other man ought to resign; I should like to hand the game over to a secretary to finish off for me. This is of course a fault in me, especially as it extends to other matters.”
⁴⁸
It was a tendency to “rest on my oars at the very moment when a spurt would take me past the post,” a feeling that “I needn’t bother about that anymore,” that had its roots in his spoilt childhood.
⁴⁹

Nevertheless, Crowley’s years at Cambridge were the happiest of his life. For the first time he was entirely on his own. No tutors, no Uncle Tom, no mother. He was triumphant. From now on Crowley could do what he wanted. He took rooms at 16 St. John’s Street, overlooking St. John’s Chapel, and from that moment “an entirely new chapter” began in his life.

—

C
ROWLEY
CAME
into his inheritance in 1896 when he turned twenty-one. Exactly how much he inherited has been debated, but the figure usually mentioned is £40,000. A pound sterling in 1896 equaled roughly £90 ($150) in today’s currency; by our standards, Crowley would have been a millionaire. But even before he came into his inheritance, Crowley had no money worries, and he blames his later spendthrift ways on his upbringing. “I was taught to expect every possible luxury. Nothing was too good for me and I had no idea what anything cost.” As a youth he was kept short of pocket money, to prevent him from spending it on forbidden things like tobacco, books, or women. But if he wanted to give a dinner party every day
of the week, he could. At Cambridge he “still had everything paid for” and he found himself with “unlimited credit.”
⁵⁰

Crowley certainly used his unlimited credit. At Cambridge he dressed as a typical decadent in expensive suits, silk shirts, floppy bow ties—a stylish extravagance shared by his exceedingly sober contemporary Rudolf Steiner—and with large rings adorning his delicate fingers, and he appointed his rooms lavishly, buying many books—Carlyle, Swift, Coleridge, Fielding, Gibbon, Swinburne, Burton, everything forbidden at home. For better or worse, no one applied any brakes to Crowley’s expenditure. He “was never taught that effort on my part might be required to obtain anything I wanted,” and so he “had no sense of responsibility in the matter of money.” With the result that when he did come into his fortune he was “utterly unprepared to use it with the most ordinary prudence, and all the inherent vices of my training had a perfectly free field for their development.”
⁵¹

Most writers on Crowley find the roots of his later philosophy in his reaction to his “repressive” Plymouth Brethren upbringing. Yet how repressive could his childhood have been if he was taught “to expect every possible luxury”? To my mind this privilege was even more responsible for Crowley’s later profligacy. Crowley’s biggest problem was that everything came to him too easily. He never had to work for anything, and when he finally found himself penniless and left to his own resources—during his difficult years in New York—he was in his forties and the experience was shattering. In the
Confessions
Crowley wrote that he had “never outgrown the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck”; it was a full, maternal breast waiting for him to feed upon.
⁵²
This conveys a fundamentally
passive attitude toward life, as if he expected to open his mouth and food would simply fly in.

Crowley’s excesses at Cambridge, however, were not limited to fancy dress and luxurious furnishings. He also found an ample field for pursuing his favorite sin, sex. “My sexual life,” he tells us, “was very intense. My relations with women were entirely satisfactory.” They gave him the “maximum of bodily enjoyment” and at the same time “symbolized my theological notions of sin.” “Love,” he declares, “was a challenge to Christianity” and every woman he met enabled him to defy the “tyranny of the Plymouth Brethren.”
⁵³
Crowley was now on his own and free from this tyranny: why did he still feel the need to “defy” anything? As other independent young minds were doing, couldn’t he jettison the religion of his past and simply enjoy sex for the pleasurable experience it was, rather than as some diabolical act? “Free love” and other sexually “liberating” ideas had been topics of heated debate for some time. Annie Besant, a leading Theosophist and one of Crowley’s later bêtes noires, had even been arrested for publishing a book on birth control (with Charles Bradlaugh in 1877), and Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and other writers were openly arguing for more modern, “liberated” attitudes toward sex. But taking this progressive, reasonable approach would have meant weaning himself from the spice of sin, and by now Crowley was too hooked to give it up.

Crowley’s appreciation of women was entirely of their ability to satisfy his sensual appetite and to inspire his poetry. That is, as sexual objects and as muses, certainly not as human beings, an attitude that remained with him throughout his life. “Morally and mentally,” he writes, “women were for me beneath contempt. They had no moral
ideals. They were bound up with their necessary preoccupation, with the function of reproduction . . . Intellectually, of course, they did not exist.”
⁵⁴
Yet this did not deter him. “On the contrary, it was highly convenient that one’s sexual relations should be with an animal with no consciousness beyond sex.”
⁵⁵
Crowley found forty-eight hours of abstinence “sufficient to dull the fine edge of my mind” and complained of the time he had to spend in hunting down “what ought to have been brought to the back door every evening with the milk!”
⁵⁶

How this attitude affected the women in his life may be imagined, but Crowley’s sexual relations were not confined to the intellectually vacant sex for long. An experience in Stockholm on New Year’s Eve 1896 seems to have revealed to Crowley his predilection for sex with other men. It was then that he was “awakened to the knowledge that I possessed a magical means of becoming conscious of and satisfying a part of my nature which had to that moment concealed itself from me.” The experience was one of “horror and pain” and “ghostly terror,” but it also provided the “purest and holiest spiritual experience that exists.”
⁵⁷
Crowley does not go into detail and his language is purposefully obscure, but with Crowley, “magical” is often a code word for “sexual.” When he writes of seducing the parlor maid on his mother’s bed, he speaks of making his “magical affirmation.” At this point in his life, however, Crowley had yet to begin his magical career, and so his use of “magical” in speaking of his Stockholm experience cannot be taken literally. The conjunction of “horror,” “pain,” and “terror” with the “purest and holiest spiritual experience” is suggestive of the way Crowley wrote about his homosexual magical “operas” later on. In later years Crowley took the
passive role in his XI
^o
or homosexual magical workings, an expression of his appetite for masochism and humiliation; one remembers his early thrills in fantasizing about Nana Sahib and his “proud, fierce, cruel, sensual profile.” Most likely what happened on New Year’s Eve in Stockholm in 1896 was that Crowley allowed himself to be sodomized and discovered that he enjoyed it.
⁵⁸

—

H
IS
RETICENCE
ABOUT
this mysterious awakening also informed his first homosexual relationship. In October 1897 Crowley met Herbert Charles Pollitt. He was four years older than Crowley—typically, in the
Confessions
Crowley says he was ten years older—and had earned notoriety as a female impersonator. Pollitt performed for the Cambridge Footlights Dramatic Club, posing as “Diane de Rougy,” a pastiche of the Parisian dancer Liane de Pougy, a Folies Bergère entertainer famous in her day. Crowley wrote of Pollitt’s hair: “he wore it rather long . . . its colour was pale gold, like spring sunshine, and its texture was of the finest gossamer.” Yet Crowley says Pollitt had a tragic face that emphasized the hunger of his eyes and the sadness of his mouth. Crowley downplays the physical relationship between them, and speaks of the “first intimate friendship” of his life, “the purest and noblest relation I had ever had with anybody.” There is no talk of making “magical affirmations” with Pollitt. But one gets the impression that, however intimate, Pollitt was a separate addition to Crowley’s life, and that he went on pursuing his other interests—poetry, mountaineering—“as if I had never met him.” Eventually he broke from Pollitt. Pollitt was close friends with the artist Aubrey Beardsley, who, with Oscar Wilde, was a leading figure of the
“decadent movement.” Like many of that generation, Pollitt “represented eternal dissatisfaction” and had a desperate outlook on life.
⁵⁹
Crowley, however, was “determined to make my dreams come true.”