In this concluding instalment of the three part series, Encountering Aleister Crowley by Richard Boyle, Crowley meets the debonair sholar Ananda Coomaraswamy
At the start of the First World War, when Crowley discovered that he was unable to serve his country because of phlebitis in his leg, he accepted an invitation to go to New York. With only £50 in his pocket, and disadvantaged by the fact that nobody knew him, things did not go too well at first. Writing was one of the few ways he could earn some money, but initially nobody wanted to look at his work. Crowley admits that he was 'nearly down and out' when he was introduced to Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Vanity Fair. Soon afterwards, however, Crowley became a regular contributor to this magazine, writing on subjects as diverse as baseball and haiku poetry.
It was in New York during 1916 that Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy made a memorable appearance in Crowley's life. These two remarkable men were dissimilar in many ways - Coomaraswamy's scholarly and institution oriented approach contrasted starkly with Crowley's eccentricity and anti establishment attitude. Yet they had certain things in common. Both were around 40 at the time, and both tended to dress in a flamboyant manner. More importantly, the tall, handsome, debonair Coomaraswamy was, like Crowley, a keen admirer and collector of the opposite sex.
Although Crowley was not handsome, his physical appearance, especially his hypnotic eyes, made a strong and sometimes long-lasting impression on most people, especially women. But he made an impact on men, too. For instance, he had taken Richard Burton's advice that a star sapphire was universally venerated by Moslems, and on one of his visits to Ceylon had purchased 'a very large and fine specimen of this gemstone and made it into a ring with a gold band of two interlaced serpents'. Once he stopped a violent quarrel among Arabs by drawing occult signs in the air with this magic ring while intoning in Arabic from the Koran.
Crowley had one underlying problem with Coomaraswamy: the fact that he was Eurasian. Crowley disliked Eurasians in general, confessing that they got on his nerves, and even describing them as 'anaemic abortions'. At one point in his autobiography, after recounting an unfortunate incident with a Eurasian in Burma, Crowley digresses in order to malign Eurasians in more detail. He states: 'Even the highest class Eurasians such as Ananda Koomaraswamy suffer acutely from the shame of being considered outcast.'
For some unexplained reason, Crowley consistently spells Coomaraswamy with a K, although the name appears correctly in the index. Did Crowley perhaps change the spelling to avoid having the same initials as the man he ended up referring to as The Worm?
Coomaraswamy was then married to his second wife, Ratan Devi, who was a musician from Yorkshire. He had recently arrived in New York after a spell in India and, according to Crowley, 'introduced himself to me, knowing my reputation on Asiatic religions and Magick'. Coomaraswamy wanted to launch Ratan Devi's career in New York, and asked Crowley for his advice. Crowley invited the couple to dinner at his apartment so that Ratan Devi might perform part of her repertoire of Indian Songs.
He was impressed, for he describes her as possessing 'a strange seductive beauty and charm, but above all an ear so accurate and a voice so perfectly trained, that she was able to sing Indian music, which is characterized by half and quarter tones imperceptible to European ears'. Crowley introduced the Coomaraswamys to several influential people and wrote a prose poem about Ratan Devi's singing for Vanity Fair. Soon afterwards the singer made a successful debut, for which Crowley largely took credit, claiming that he had 'taught her how to let her genius loose at the critical moment'.
It was predictable that Crowley and Ratan Devi should fall in love. According to Crowley it was a situation that suited Coomaraswamy perfectly. 'The high cost of living was bad enough without having to pay for one's wife's dinner,' writes Crowley. 'All he asked was that I should introduce him to a girl who would be his mistress while costing him nothing. I was only too happy to oblige as I happened to know a girl with a fancy for weird adventures'.
There was even a suggestion of divorce, but when Ratan Devi's career began to blossom, Coomaraswamy apparently changed his mind. After that the relationship began to develop complications, especially when Ratan Devi became pregnant. Coomaraswamy persuaded her to go to England for the confinement against Crowley's will. The voyage caused a miscarriage which is what Crowley suspected Coomaraswamy wanted to happen.
When Ratan Devi returned to America, Crowley was in New Orleans and she wrote daily imploring him to go back to her. Crowley would only do so under one condition: that she make a clean break from Coomaraswamv and the past. This she was reluctant to do, for as Crowley explains, "Her unhappy temperament kept her at war with herself. She wouldn't burn her bridges. I maintained firm correctness and it all came to nothing'.
This is not the end of the saga, however. When writing of his relationship with Ratan Devi some years later, Crowley admitted that 'my heart is still not wholly healed'. Nevertheless, soon after their relationship had foundered, he had relieved himself of some of the pain in a calculated act of revenge. Crowley had invented the character of a detective named Simon Iff, whose method of discovering the solution to a crime was 'to calculate the mental and moral energies of the people concerned'. The adventures of this detective were published as a series titled "The Scrutinies of Simon Iff" in a little- known New York periodical, The International: a liberal magazine of literature, international politics, philosophy and drama. Crowley was the contributing editor of this publication.
According to Crowley, he used his convoluted and colourful relationship with the Coomaraswamys, exact in every detail, as the background for the fifth Simon Iff story called "Not Good Enough", which was published in The International in January 1918. Crowley made one superficial change. Coomaraswamy became Haramzada Swami; Haramzada being the Hindustani word for bastard. 'The publication of this tale came as a slight shock to the self-complacency of the scoundrel,' gloats Crowley.
It is of interest that the bibliophile H.A.I. Goonetileke, while he was in America in 1973 as a Senior Specialist Fellow of the John D. Rockefellor III Fund, undertook some research at the New York Public Library. Goonetileke made a request to see The International, but when the relevant volume was produced for his perusal, he found that the issue with the damning narrative was missing from the sequence. Fortunately he was able to acquire a precious photocopy through the Library of Congress. The question is, was the magazine deliberately excised by someone? And if so, by whom?
Before closing the chapter - in both a literal and metaphorical sense - Crowley could not resist taking one last swipe at Coomaraswamy. He claims that the mistress Coomaraswamy was preoccupied with at the time had made a revealing confession to Ratan Devi. The mistress had told how she had been ordered by Coomaraswamy to copy out a number of poems from Crowley's Collected Works and hawk them to a publisher. When Ratan Devi told Crowley of this deed, he wrote immediately to the firm concerned a letter he described as 'the last word in savage contempt'. Crowley's parting barb sums up his attitude: 'So ended my adventures with these fascinating freaks.'
There is, however, one further reference to things Ceylonese in Crowley's autobiography. While in New York Crowley was recommended by a friend 'a Singalese joint on 8th Avenue where they made real curry'. Crowley was a Westerner who had a passion for curry. For instance, of the variety he sampled in Singapore he writes: 'They sting like serpents, stimulate like strychnine; they are subtle and sensual like Chinese courtesans, sublime and sacred, like Cambodian carvings'. Crowley began to frequent this restaurant where he met yet another of his many mistresses - a girl he called The Dog because she appears in one of his poems as the "Dog headed Hermes or Anubis".
Crowley had not neglected his magical activities in America; During his affair with Ratan Devi he assumed the exalted Grade of Magus. He was then ready to proclaim his word, thelema, or do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law, which is suppose to usher in the New Aeon of Liberty. At the end of the First World War, Crowley briefly returned to England before travelling to Sicily with several new mistresses. At Cefalu he rented a villa, consecrated a temple to the New Aeon in one of the rooms and painted on the front door DO WHAT THOU WILT.
Crowley's objective was to create a world centre for the study of occultism, but in the end few availed themselves of the opportunity of going to Cefalu. (One who did, Cecil Maitland, had the distinction of falling off a ship in Colombo harbour). Addicted to heroin, and suffering from lack of impetus, life suddenly started to look bleak for Crowley. His spirits were revived with the commission of a novel, the infamous Diary of a Drug Fiend, published in 1922. However, after the novel appeared there was an attack on Crowley and his creed in the Picture Post, and he had the ignominy of being expelled from his own "abbey". But by then Crowley was unconcerned. He had uttered his word, and it remained only for him to publish his magnum opus, Magick in Theory and Practice.
Crowley, about whom it was once said that 'he behaved as if the world was only an exhalation of his own being', died in 1947. How does one judge a man who on the one hand exhibited a high degree of intelligence, unfettered thinking and originality of vision, while on the other demonstrated a fascination for depravity, cruelty and exploitation?
There is no doubt that Aleister Crowley was a riddle of immense proportions. Arthur Gauntlett, who analyzed Crowley's character from his horoscope considered him to be 'one of the most enigmatic personalities of our times'. John Symonds, one of Crowley's biographers, believes that the answer to the riddle of the man lies in do what thou wilt: 'The many roles which Crowley chose for himself show that he had taken this precept literally. He did not make any distinction between one thing and another; he was not restricted that is to say he was not contained within any particular border.'
This border hopping was probably the source of Crowley's greatest merit, which, Symonds writes, 'was to make the bridge between Tantrism and the Western esoteric tradition and thus bring together Western and Eastern magical techniques. He lived through the night, not the day.'
Interest in Crowley and his ideas was rekindled in the late 1960s with the advent of the youth revolution and the quest for alternative thinking. Even the Beatles, who were then at the apogee of their collective career, made public their admiration for him. In a composite photograph of "People we like" that decorates the sleeve of the seminal album Sqt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Crowley stands between an unnamed Indian mystic and Mae West. Who knows whether he would have approved of this positioning.
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