Aleister Crowley in America Page 6
Largely apocalyptic in tone, Crowley’s imagery is redolent of the prophet Isaiah, combined with flashing imagery of crashing waves, vast oceans, stars, brilliant sunsets, and sunrises. It is “the song of the Sea”: the Mother, freedom, death. Its subject is destiny, and the first destiny on the horizon is of course the poet’s own.
Reeling from the Golden Dawn’s duplicitous intrigues against Mathers, the Celt Crowley finds himself caught “in the storm of lies and tossed,” but his opponents should know that while a spiritual exile, he is no coward, running away. / “I was born fighter. Think you then my task is done, My work, my Father’s work for men, the rising sun?” He is about his heavenly Father’s business. The poet makes explicit his continued support for Don Carlos as Spain’s redeemer. He sees God judging his native land, likening England to “the ancient whore.” Crowley gushes language and syntax redolent of one of Blake’s less successful prophetic poems, “The French Revolution” (1791, unfinished). As with Jesus’s judgment of the Temple, no “stone of London” will be left standing on another. The Saxon race will fail, for the country is rotten and therefore unfruitful, and the “fair country” will be given to those who have suffered long exile: “Yea, they shall live! The Celtic race!” Then there is ambiguity about his true position: “And I give praise, and close mine eyes, cover my face, and laugh—and die” (my italics). He can’t help seeing the other side, the funny side, and can laugh himself to scorn; he will not always show his true face.
In the second part of the poem, Crowley is in the hands of a power from within, analogous to his position in 1904 when, in his account of writing down The Book of the Law from direct voice dictation, he heard the mysterious voice. “I see thee hate the hand & the pen; but I am stronger” (AL II:11).*30 The muse of Carmen Saeculare commands, “Take up thy pen and write! I must obey. No shrinking at this terrible command! . . . Their fire impulses the reluctant hand. My words must prophesy the avenging day / And curse my native land.”6 As a prophet, he must give voice, whether he wills it or no. Isaiah also had to curse his native land, Israel, but for love of that land and desire that it turn to God. The true patriot does not deceive his country with nationalistic praise when its roots are in danger from lack of harsh, unwelcome truth. “How have I loved thee [England] in thy faithlessness / Beneath the rule of those unspeakable!”7 A footnote to “unspeakable” indicates “The House of Hanover.” Here the “bigoted legitimist” of 1899 strikes again. Crowley would remain a spiritual Jacobite, one with a longing for a vanished England of cavaliers, flush-faced bawdiness, bosomy hostesses, rural delights, and spiritual idealism. In his “Simon Iff” stories, written in New Orleans, Titusville, and New York in 1916 to 1917, Crowley’s detective hero would find his London home at the Hemlock Club, with its customs amusingly founded on Jacobite history, such as the moleskin tie, for it was a molehill that tripped the horse that “King Billy” (William III) rode, so bringing the Dutch-born Protestant scourge of Irish Jacobite rebels to eventual death in 1702.
The next verse predicts the end of Empire and her independence. “O England! England, mighty England, falls!” And taking a leaf from Chamberlain’s Birmingham speech of 1898—“She hath not left a friend!”8—echoes Chamberlain’s warning that England could not go on in isolation, without pacts of friendship, preferably with Germany and the United States.
The oracular muse turns Crowley’s attention to the effect on England of the Boer War raging at enormous expense in manpower and money ever since the two Boer republics opened hostilities on October 11, 1899: “Her days of wealth and majesty are done: Men trample her for mire!”9 Crowley sees Britain’s capital power diminishing: “Mammon”—“The temple of their God is broken down.”10 Britain’s boast of ruling the waves will in the end ring hollow. In June 1900 the German Bundesrat was busy voting the mighty sum demanded by the Kaiser for the greater expansion of his navy. Maintaining naval superiority would cost Britain dear; social reform and charity came second to imperial ambition.
Crowley addresses the German Empire: “Let thy sons beware, / Not crowding sordid towns for lust of gold. . . . / Not arming all men in an iron mould. / Peaceful be thou: with watching and with prayer. / Be not overbold.” If only, we might think, Germany had taken this advice to heart! As for Austria: “Fall, Austria!” “I see thy rotten power Break as the crumbling ice-floe in the thaw. / Destruction shatters thy blood-builded tower.” This was spot-on. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had but eighteen years to live, and the poet isn’t sorry at all. “Stand, Russia! Let thy freedom grow in peace.” The poet believes Russia will be saved from invasion by her climate: “And Frost, the rampart of thine iron ease, / Laugh at the shock of war.” Addressing Constantinople, capital of Turkey: “O Gateway of the admirable East! / Hold fast thy Faith! / Let no man take thy Crown!” “Mad Christians see in thee the Second Beast, but shall not shake thee down.”11
The prophetic frenzy next looses the poet’s voice on the United States, with no punches pulled: “foul oligarchy of the West, / Thou, soiled with bribes and stained with treason’s stain, / Thou, heart of coin beneath a brazen breast, / Rotten republic, prostitute of gain!” He recalls the deliberated carnage of the American Civil War (1861–1865) that wasted the Confederate South and its youth. “Thou, murderer of the bravest and the best / That fringed thy southern main!”12 Crowley isn’t whistling Dixie here; his tone is quite different from the previous year’s “Appeal to the American Republic,” written, he said in his Confessions, after meeting two charming Americans on a train between Geneva and Paris. It is difficult to account for the apparent change, other than his own state of mind. What might have turned his vision of the United States from the city on the hill to a gutter of wanton waste? The Civil War wasn’t exactly recent news.
A reading of American newspapers for the time Crowley left England in June 1900 elicits only continuity since the time of Crowley’s 1899 “Appeal.” In 1898, New York governor Theodore Roosevelt was winning laurels with his Rough Riders cavalry’s heroic feats in Cuba; in June 1900, a first ballot at Philadelphia’s Republican Convention secured Roosevelt’s nomination as vice president to run with President William McKinley in the election. Poor McKinley would be assassinated in Buffalo fifteen months later by an anarchist inspired by Emma Goldman’s incendiary rhetoric; we shall encounter “Red Emma” again.
Mainstream American newspaper reports of the Boer War were gener-ally, though not exclusively, sympathetic to the British side, and serious, balanced news from England peppered New York’s front pages most days. When British generals Methuen, Sir Redvers Buller, and Lord Roberts suffered very hard strategic blows and bloody losses from sharp Boer tactics in the Transvaal and Orange Free State, the New York Tribune’s descriptive tone was not markedly different from that covering the struggles of U.S. generals Grant and MacArthur against insurgents in and around Manila the same month.
The New York Tribune did regard with great skepticism a British idea that success against the savagery of the then very current Boxer Rebellion against foreigners in China might best be achieved if one country (America), rather than a coterie of other interested parties (Russia, Britain, Germany, and France), assumed the main role of reestablishing the status quo in China. American policy was squarely against any alliance with British or European forces. While in June, Britain had already committed her marines to protect the European and American (mostly missionary) population in China from massacre, President McKinley ordered five thousand of his own troops to Peking in response to horror stories of men, women, and children being hacked to death by the “Boxers” in China’s world-shaking breakdown of law and order.
Prophet Crowley seems to get more to the point in ensuing verses. The finger of judgment is pointed against the “politician and the millionaire” who for the “maternal dung” of money have enslaved American workers. However, “Thy toilers snare thee in thine own foul snare.” He doubt-less refers to trades union strikes sparking in the American steel and coal industries.
America, the poet cries, must return to its true principles of freedom, humanity, liberty for all—this at a time when lynchings of negroes in the South regularly made broadsheet front pages—freedom for all men and women, enlightened by spiritual vision, lest the dollar-obsessed incur the wrath of “thine own children.” When America recovers its founding vision, “Then only shall thy liberty arise; / Then only shall thine eagle shake his wings, / And sunward soar through the unsullied skies, / And careless watch the destiny of kings. / Then only shall truth’s angel in thine eyes Perceive eternal things.”13 Crowley saw America’s position in the world as one of greatest responsibility; it must not shirk it by gazing inward, mindful only of immediate profits.
Such is the judgment. That is not the end. “The Reign of Darkness hath an end. Behold!” Young Crowley points to eight planets together in the fiery sign of Sagittarius at the close of 1899. “This is the birth-hour of the Age of Gold; / The false gold pales before the Gold divine. / The Christ is calling to the starry fold / Of Souls—Arise and shine!”14 Crowley says his own “face is shining with the fire of heaven. I move among my fellows as a ghost.” Crowley is the outsider, the “Irishman.” “Only I see the century as a child. . . . Stormy its birth; its youth, how fierce and wild! Its end, how glorified!”15 This is the Aeon of the “Child!”
The penultimate section of the poem “In the Hour before Revolt” makes it clear that to reach the glorified end, there is going to be war, lots of it.16 Mars, or Horus, the child avenger, is the god presiding over transformation. The poet invokes him, “Hail! Hail to Thee, / Lord of us, Horus! [Egyptian god of sun and war] / All hail to the warrior name! / Thy chariots shall drive them before us, / Thy sword sweep them forth as a flame.” Crowley sees his own deepest desires instrumental in the change: “My cries were the cries that awoke Thee . . . whose footsteps are in the Unknown: / Look down upon earth and behold us / Few folk who have sworn to be free.” The poet appeals for “Africa’s desperate sons” and for “We, Ireland,” who “look upward and yonder” for the time when “The tyrant is shaken and scattered, / And Ireland is clear to the Sea! / Green Erin is free!” Crowley’s ruddy tone of force and fire strongly suggests sympathy, or at least familiarity, with the prevalent anarchist cause, by which all rulers and orders were to be brought low in the name of freedom.
As for the prophet’s advocacy of the cause of militarily outnumbered Dutch settlers of the South African Boer (literally “farmer”) republics, though backed by German weapons and munitions, he might best have first absorbed June’s New York Tribune review of twenty-five-year-old Winston Churchill’s latest book London to Ladysmith via Pretoria. The American reviewer accepted that New Yorkers might already feel strain from so many new books clamoring for attention about the Boer War, but if they had to read one, this one by London’s Morning Post correspondent Lieutenant (resgnd.) Churchill was the best. In it, Churchill described his world-famous escape from a Boer prison camp (dramatized in Richard Attenborough’s 1971 movie Young Winston). Talking to Boers about why they would not accept living under British rule, Churchill found, when he scratched the surface, that the predominant motive was fear that British governance would give “Kaffirs” (black native inhabitants of South Africa) equal rights to themselves as subjects. Equality with their old enemies was religious anathema to Boers. Students of prophecy might find Crowley’s prophetic muse somewhat partisan in judgment.
The poem’s epilogue is addressed to “the American People on the Anniversary of their Independence.”17Independence, cries the poet, involves a duty, for if one calls oneself “son of the free,” that is not to be alone. “Sons of the free” must have common cause with all who are, or would be, sons of the free, for freedom is a state of being, not a state. The poet suspects the “day of your oath to the world” has been forgotten, or taken for granted and rendered mute or meaningless. “Is its flame dwindled down to an ember? / The flag of your liberty furled?” Freedom comes with a price, that being the meaning of the word redemption, the fee paid by, or for, the slave freed. “The price of your freedom—I claim it! / Your aid to make other men free! / Your strength—I defy you to shame it! / Your peace—I defy it to be Dishonoured! / Arise and proclaim it / From sea unto sea!” The idea implies that America should challenge England to stand up for the freedom of Ireland, of India “By famine and cholera shaken,” and of the Boer republics in South Africa who offer their lives rather than accept surrender of liberty for the sake of British financial interests (gold and diamonds beneath the land). If America should operate on kindred principles, namely that profit is all, and not seize the time of freedom and justice for all, then “Columbia” will share “the shame and the stain,” then “Your stripes are the stripes of dishonor; / Your stars are cast down from the sky; / While earth has this burden upon her, / Your eagle unwilling to fly! / Loose, loose the wide wings! / For your honour! Let tyranny die! / I demand it of ye, / Man’s freedom! Arise and proclaim it, the song of the sea!”
Well! There were doubtless radicals of various hues in the United States who might warm to Crowley the prophet’s sentiments, but one can imagine the kind of short shrift he would get from the American who had ground from hard earth his and his family’s wealth with his own hands, by sheer hard work, against all odds, by distinguishing himself from his competitors or opponents by grit, individualism, and graft. One thinks, for example, of the tough, if fictional, character Daniel Plainview, played brilliantly by Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie There Will be Blood (2007), itself based very loosely on socialist Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! Plainview—inspired by Sinclair’s self-made oil millionaire “James Arnold Ross,” involved with greedy businessman colleague “Vernon Roscoe” in a real-life government bribe scandal—would glare coldly into the eyes of Crowley’s high-flown prophecy then spit with contempt. For such a one, independence meant just that: not relying on anybody. Independence for such an American meant the individual was free to do what was necessary to do within the law to attain goods and status. There were bound to be losers, dammit. But in fact, Crowley’s own individualist, anarchic streak was not so very far from this bristling position, but for this: Crowley questioned the values on which such freedom or independence should be based. For him, wealth and attainment were not ends, only means. Death nullified attainment; heaven was not further recompense for the labor of the wealthy. Curiously, in terms of what we shall soon discover, Upton Sinclair’s “Ross” has been considered, in his turn, to be based on real Californian oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny (1856–1935), cofounder of the Pan American Petroleum & Transport Company. Doheny was currently busy seeking concessions for oil exploration in Mexico, and Mexico was where Crowley would very soon find himself among authentic American speculators and gamblers.
As a mournful dawning sun rose on the morning of July 6, 1900, SS Pennsylvania steamed slowly passed Liberty on Bedloe’s Island to dock at the HAPAG pier, Hoboken, on the Hudson River’s west side, opposite midtown Manhattan. No longer plying poetic waves, the reality of America hit Crowley like a blast of hot air. Indeed, it was precisely very hot air that hit him, for the horror awaiting his arrival might seem uncanny fulfillment of his own freshly penned prophetic invocation: “In the hour of Revolt that burns nigher / Each hour as it leaps to the sky, / We look to Thee, Lord, for Thy Fire.” Fire was the fatal element of the hour.
THREE
Out of the Frying Pan, into New York
SHIPPING NEWS. PORT OF NEW YORK–THURSDAY, JULY 5, 1900. ARRIVED Steamer Pennsylvania (German). [Capt. H.] Spliedt, Hamburg June 25 and Plymouth, [Tues.] 26, with mdse [merchandise] and passengers to the Hamburg-American Line. East of Fire Island at 7:49 p.m.
East of Fire Island. This sighting on Thursday, July 5, 1900, of the SS Pennsylvania east of Fire Island on page 16 of the following day’s New York Tribune is the first authentic, if indirect, reference to Aleister Crowley’s arrival in America. As Fire Island lies more than 35 miles from Hoboken, these few li
nes confirm Crowley’s account that he arrived in New York on July 6.
A glance across the columns from the shipping announcement would have revealed something of the atmosphere greeting him. “Hoboken was a city of mourning yesterday.” Pressed by grim circumstances, the HAPAG Line’s German rival Lloyd Company had been obliged to inter the largely unidentifiable remains of 102 workers killed in “last Saturday’s fire” in a specially bought lot at Hoboken’s Flower Hill cemetery. With Lloyd’s temporary offices draped in black, Hoboken’s business had been abandoned for the greater part of the day, while all over the city flags flew at half mast. The Lloyd line lost three of its vessels, burned or sunken. Headlines on the Tribune’s front page announced: Bodies of 102 WORKERS IN HOBOKEN OIL TANK FIRE BURIED. STANDARD OIL WORKS FIRE AT CONSTABLE HOOK STILL BURNING. OVER $1MILLION LOST. LLOYD TERMINAL DAMAGED.