Aleister Crowley in America Page 7

  Fig. 3.1. The SS Pennsylvania

  At 4 o’clock in the afternoon of Saturday, June 30, while the Pennsylvania steamed southwest of Greenland, a fire had broken out amid cotton bales and barrels of oil and turpentine at Hoboken’s Pier 8. Within fifteen minutes high winds spread the blaze along a quarter of a mile of port. Fire engulfed four Lloyd steamships moored at company piers. Amid scenes of desperate anguish, men below the Saale’s deck strained to squeeze out of the portholes, but the windows to life were too narrow; forced back into the choking corridors and fatal cabins, most of the 150 crew burned to death. While the Bremen was badly damaged, the Saale and Maine were wrecked, and only a timely tow into the middle of the Hudson saved prize liner SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse from the gluttonous flames and asphyxiating black smoke that devoured the river’s east side. Struggling against fierce odds, Hoboken and New York fire departments could hardly prevent the death toll from rising to 326.

  As Crowley stepped onto ash-coated American soil for the first time, the New York Tribune carried the following bittersweet weather report.

  WEATHER CHANGES FOR BETTER. There was a change for the better in the weather yesterday [July 5], but the early hours were as discouraging and as seething almost as those of the fourth. When the sun rose the heavens were hung with black, the great smoke cloud from the Standard Oil fire at Constable Hook spreading over the Bay and ocean and over the green hills of Staten Island, darkening the scenery into mournful gloom. . . . As on the fourth, the mercury stood at 76 [degrees Fahrenheit] at 8am; at 11:35am it had reached 84 degrees, and the worst of the day was over. The humidity at both hours was 63 percent.

  As if the Hoboken Pier fire was not grisly enough, on July 4, only four days after the Lloyd Company catastrophe, as Crowley brought his fiery invocation Carmen Saeculare to a climax, lightning hit Standard Oil’s refinery tanks at Constable Hook by Upper New York Bay. The tanks exploded, sending flaming oil into surrounding waters. Fire still licked the skies as Crowley arrived. It would take another day to extinguish. Casualties this time were relatively few—nine injuries—but insurers staggered beneath an eventual $2.5 million of damages.

  There is no mention whatever of the Standard Oil or Lloyd Company fire disasters in Crowley’s account of his arrival, even though the detritus was impossible to miss. The wreckage in the Hudson was still smoking while the Constable Hook fire darkened the very sky. What Crowley did consider worth mentioning was the weather.

  Till this time I had never been in any reputedly hot country. I was appalled to find New York intolerable. I filled a cold bath, and got in and out of it at intervals till eleven at night, when I crawled, panting, through the roasting streets and consumed ice-water, iced watermelon, ice-cream and iced coffee. “Good God,” I said to myself, “and this is merely New York! What must Mexico be like!” I supposed that I was experiencing normal conditions, whereas in point of fact I had landed at the climax of a heat wave which killed about a hundred people a day while it lasted.1

  Fig. 3.2. Hotel Imperial on Broadway and 31st

  Crowley exaggerates. Had he, as he himself noted, read a newspaper he would have understood that the high temperatures that drove him out of his suite at the eight-story Hotel Imperial on Broadway and 31st Street in quest of iced anything were relatively untypical.

  He insisted, however, that being merely informed of conditions by a newspaper would hardly have compensated for the risk of condescending to consult one.

  I had already learnt that even the finest mind is bound to perish if it suffers the infection of journalism. It is not merely that one defiles the mind by inflicting upon it slipshod and inaccurate English, shallow, commonplace, vulgar, hasty, and prejudiced thought, and deliberate dissipation. . . . People tell me that they must read the papers so as to know what is going on. In the first place, they could hardly find a worse guide. Most of what is printed turns out to be false, sooner or later. Even when there is no deliberate deception, the account must, from the nature of the case, be presented without adequate reflection and must seem to possess an importance which time shows to be absurdly exaggerated; or vice versa. No event can be fairly judged without background and perspective.2

  Contemporary U.S. newspapers undoubtedly offer us background and perspective for penetrating Crowley’s otherwise seductive rhetoric. Rather than “about a hundred” dying a day, we find in the New York Tribune on the day of his arrival that “Julius Hartenstein, 28 years, of 402 East 18th Street” was “overcome by the heat at 128 William St., and removed to the Hudson St. Hospital,” while “Kate Roesen of 219 73rd Street” was also “overcome at her home and removed to the Presbyterian Hospital.” The official forecast for July 6 was “partly cloudy, stationery temperature.” If generous, we may suppose Crowley’s mind had over two decades confused the death tolls from the disastrous fires with the weather. Of course, the oil fires were not disastrous to him.

  It is undeniably exciting to see Crowley’s quest for the benefits of cold water confirmed by delving into the news. A Tribune headline on page 6 the day of Crowley’s arrival announces: “CITY USING STORED WATER. LITTLE FALL OF RAIN IN CROTON WATERSHED IN JUNE AND JULY..” While New Yorkers feared a water shortage, officials claimed there was enough stored for another 100 to 150 days. Temperatures were expected to ease toward the end of the month. The highest temperature for July 6 was 82°F, the lowest 73°. “Forecast for Friday and Saturday: partly cloudy and warmer today, continued warm. West New York State, showers and thunderstorms. Average temperature 77½°.”

  It was hot—as was the latest news. The Tribune’s main headline that day reported that violence perpetrated by fanatical Chinese Boxers (“Righteous and Harmonious Fists”) had reached crisis point since the Dowager Empress Cixi’s June 21 declaration of war on all foreigners. The Chinese Guangxu emperor and his wife—under house arrest at Empress Cixi’s bidding in Beijing—were reputedly dead by poison: a report conforming precisely to Crowley’s assessment of news accuracy. (They were both alive.) Meanwhile, hostile Chinese had severed the international forces’ retreat from Taku. The interests of the United States, Germany, France, Great Britain, Russia, Japan, France, and Italy were at stake: all compelled to demonstrate rare unity of purpose. While things looked bad for the international legations under siege in Beijing, things looked better for William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, whose nominations as president and vice president, respectively, were heartily endorsed by the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.

  At the Democrats’ National Convention in Kansas, meanwhile, William Jennings Bryan received presidential nomination with Adlai Ewing Stevenson as his running mate, the nomination delayed over conflict concerning Bryan’s “16 to 1” ratio of silver to gold proposition—as against McKinley’s insistence on “sound money” (gold). While the Tribune lampooned Bryan with a cartoon of him sporting a crown asserting “I am democracy!” standing high on the shoulders of figures representing “Anarchy” and “Spoils” (Trusts), Bryan’s rhetoric remains noticeably in tune with Crowley’s poetic strictures as to the United States’ future. Advocating resistance to the temptation of imperialism, while embracing the social advantages of “free silver,” Bryan declared, “The nation is of age and it can do what it pleases; it can spurn the traditions of the past; it can repudiate the principles upon which the nation rests; it can employ force instead of reason; it can substitute might for right; it can conquer weaker people; it can exploit their lands, appropriate their property, and kill their people; but it cannot repeal the moral law or escape the punishment decreed for the violation of human rights.” Republicans, in their turn, propagandized that Bryan was a dangerous fanatic, a religious nut supported by anarchists.3

  The Tribune, with some Republican bias, reported Theodore Roosevelt generating great enthusiasm by stirring speeches at Hannibal, Missouri, and Quincy, Illinois. Elsewhere, the paper reflected current concern over “Imperialism” in U.S. policy and the government’s support of Great Britain, though the p
aper was generally warm toward Britannia. Missouri governor Roos in a speech at Hannibal seemed to be groping either for spiritual values or a sense of imperial destiny when he reflected that “we have seen during recent years marvelous material prosperity in this country, and material prosperity must be one of the foundation stones on which we build. But we must have more than that if the nation is to rise to what it should be and will be.”

  A small patch of a Tribune column publicized calls for help to alleviate famine in British India while another minor notice reassured American visitors to the mighty Paris Universal Exhibition, running from April to November to demonstrate a century of progress, that the Tribune could be purchased daily at Monsieur Louis Vuitton’s establishment at 1 Rue Scribe, opposite the Grand Hotel. Crowley had left Paris the day before the exhibition opened on April 14, with instructions from Mathers regarding the London rebellion. While there, Crowley had probably read specialist Parisian journal l’Initiation, edited by “Papus” (Gérard Encausse), head of the dominant French esoteric orders, which that month announced provisions of Papus’s “Martinist Order” for the Universal Exhibition.

  ORDRE MARTINISTE

  During the duration of the Exhibition, the Martinist Order will hold several formal sessions in Paris, all lodges uniting, and will invite to these sessions Brethren with passage to rites affiliated to the Order [such as the “Gnostic Church”]. A special room has been prepared for the purpose.

  The Velléda Lodge has inaugurated its obligations by invitations for a conference with projections on Symbolism taking as an example the church of Notre-Dame de Paris. The first meeting of this kind*31 was a lively success.

  Crowley might envy Papus who had created an international, spiritually oriented movement, as much a part of the real world of 1900 as the Universal Exhibition. It might also be noted that the initials of Crowley’s detective creation “Simon Iff” are in fact the acronym for the highest grade of the Martinist Order: SI—that is, Supérieur Inconnu, or Unknown Superior. The inspirational source of the Martinist Order, Louis Claude de St. Martin (1743–1803), was known, so to speak, as “the Unknown Philosopher,” a role Crowley saw repeatedly as his own, even as the “Unknown” backed into the limelight.

  According to Crowley’s Confessions, it was while reporting to Mathers in Paris that the latter introduced Crowley to “two guests, members of the Order.”†32 Crowley records, “They had just come back from Mexico. The fancy took me to go there. I wanted in particular to climb the great volcanoes.”

  This disingenuous introduction to Crowley’s embarking for New York requires a key to unlock it. Several Crowley biographies have mooted that Crowley headed for New York in quest of famous opera singer Brooklyn-born soprano Susan Strong (1870–1946), wealthy daughter to the late New York senator Demas Strong. An erroneous supposition, it derives from confusion between Strong and her operatic understudy, Lucile Hill. As a recent neophyte (0° = 0▫) to the Golden Dawn—whose initiation was undertaken by Crowley and Kelly as officers—Crowley sought out Lucile Hill when she played Venus in Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London, which ran May to July 1900. Remarkably, we may catch the occasion from a never-before-published note sent by Crowley on Cavendish Hotel, Eastbourne, note-paper to Gerald Kelly.

  Care Frater,

  I go back to Great Central Hotel [symbol for Wednesday-Mercury’s day] for the Tannhaüser. Our 0° = 0▫ is singing Venus*33 . . . I shall come to Cambridge for my motor [car] and ride up.4

  Crowley obviously intended to impress by rolling into Covent Garden in command of his automobile—a very rare sight indeed in London in 1900.†34 What a scene that must have been!

  Tannhaüser enjoyed seven performances at Covent Garden in 1900, with only one on a Wednesday, so we may date Crowley’s arrival there precisely to May 30, 1900.5 We get a glimpse of Crowley’s peculiar view of Lucile from Gerald Kelly’s copy of Crowley’s combination of poetry and metaphysical essays, The Sword of Song (1904), where in a complex section called “Pentecost,” to the left of a note indicating “Advice to poet’s fat friend,” we find the following not entirely complimentary verses.

  While for you, my big beauty, (Chicago packs pork)

  I’ll teach you the trick to be hen-of-the-walk.

  Shriek a music-hall song with a double ong-tong!

  Dance a sprightly can-can at Paree or Bolong!

  Or the dance of Algiers—try your stomach at that!

  It’s quite in your line, and would bring down your fat.

  You’ve a very fine voice—could you only control it!

  And an emerald ring—and I know where you stole it!

  But for goodness sake give up attempting Brünnhilde;

  Try a boarding-house cook, or coster’s Matilda!

  Still you’re young yet, scarce forty—we’ll hope at three score

  You’ll be more of a singer, and less of a whore.

  A pencil note by Crowley to the right of the verses states clearly the reference is to “Miss Lucile Hill of the Opera,” while next to Crowley’s versified hope that she mature into “more of a singer, and less of a whore” we find the note: “This hope has been disappointed. A. C. 1911.”*35 Because Tannhaüser had still to run until July 27 in London, it is inconceivable that Crowley went to the States in pursuit of Lucile. Error regarding Crowley’s motive stems from failure to note that Susan Strong shared the role of Venus with Lucile Hill, combined with a cross-reference in Crowley’s Confessions, wherein chapter 23 (p. 204) informs us that his poem Tannhaüser was inspired by meeting a girl in Mexico City who aroused him to such an extent that he returned from her “slum” with feelings so intensely insatiable that they assumed in his imagination proportions reminiscent of Wagner’s opera lately dignified by Lucile Hill.

  Something in Lucile’s overall performance had undoubtedly stimulated a passionate romance, revealed in Confessions.

  Yet my principal achievement [in Mexico] had its roots in Europe [hence the biographical confusion regarding Crowley’s motive in going to America]. At one of Mathers’s semi-public ceremonies [in Paris], I had met a member of the Order, an American prima donna.*36 She took me by storm and we became engaged [meaning sexually]. The marriage could not take place immediately, as she had to get rid of some husband that she had left lying about in Texas.†37 But I heard her sing Venus in Tannhaüser at Covent Garden; and she courteously insisted on my sampling the goods with which she proposed to endow me. The romance of an intrigue with so famous an artist excited my imagination.

  Fig. 3.3. Lucile Hill

  What Crowley did find in New York in July 1900 was not quite the New York we think of today. Hear his response to the city’s surprising 1900 skyline:

  In those days one was not bored by people who had never seen a real skyline boasting of the outrage since perpetrated by the insects. A mountain skyline is nearly always noble and beautiful, being the result of natural forces acting uniformly and in conformity with law. Thus, though it is not designed, it is the embodiment of the principles which are inherent in design. New York, on the other hand, has been thrown up by a series of disconnected accidents.6

  New York was not a city of skyscrapers. Even the famous Flatiron wedgelike building on 5th Avenue would not obstruct light of day until 1902. Nevertheless, after the mid-1870s, with Manhattan Island’s size imposing prohibitively high rents for office and living space, new technology answered the call for upwardly mobile constructions on the grand scale. Chief among early users of high-rise construction were the masscirculation dailies. At 260 feet, the New York Tribune Building of 1875 dominated 154 Printing House Square on Nassau and Spruce Streets for fourteen years, after which it gained a superior and all too visible rival when the New York World Building at 53–63 Park Row began its ascent to beat height records for five years after its twenty stories were finally stacked like a winner’s chips in 1890. The days of Trinity Church’s 284-foot spire dominating the skyline were over. Business meant business
. Until 1903, when the paper moved to Longacre Row (now Times Square), the New York Times made its home in the New York Times Building at 41 Park Row (today “Newspaper Row’s” last survivor).

  Only two years old when Crowley sought iced water in July 1900, the Empire Building had arisen in all her Classical Revival splendor at 71 Broadway on the corner of Rector Street. Considered a skyscraper by contemporary standards, she boasted twenty-one stories and a steel frame curtain-wall construction. Such scale was, however, fairly rare in the New York of 1900. Most of Manhattan’s commercial buildings were between roughly five to twelve stories in height and enormously varied in architectural quality, depending on the whims and income of individuals and companies.

  The view from the decks of liners arriving at Manhattan was not particularly stimulating in itself: brown and gray warehouses jostled up to the river’s edge in abundance, with many a monotonous flat roof jigging up and down like a digital signal to no great purpose, but the positive effect of so much compressed activity gradually thrusting upward would doubtless have been heightened after rough Atlantic crossings without modern stabilizers.

  The magnificent Brooklyn Bridge wasn’t in quite the right position to lend the dramatic dominance that would have enhanced the city’s splendor as, say, the Sydney Harbor Bridge does so effortlessly, but it definitely contributed atmosphere. Taking the sidewalks along Manhattan’s bustling, but not overfilled, streets would have been a noisy affair, with horse-drawn cabs and carts competing for road space with the city trams, rattling along, with the occasional impertinence of one of the new motorized buggies butting in with its barking klaxon like a warning from history. Arriving at Central Park would have been a ghostly shock for the New Yorker of today, transported back in time. For the most part, the tallest things to be seen were the trees: the skyline was largely sky. The unique Dakota residential building, stubbornly, forbiddingly eccentric and resembling somewhat a rather grim, oversized French chateau stretched upward and, denied harmonious wings, to our eyes would have looked almost surreal by itself. Built 1850 to 1854, it had emerged, or imposed itself, on 72nd Street when the Upper West Side was hardly developed at all, and from the parkland would have reared up solitarily as a massive, uncanny, outsize stately home set upon its own grounds like an austere visitation from a madman’s dream.