Confessions of Aleister Crowley

544 And then she struck a snag. She had taken it for granted that my love for her would make me forget my friendship, cancel my obligations and abrogate my affection. She was amazed and angry to find that my attitude to the Ape had not been altered in any way whatever by my liaison with her. She supposed the conventional stupidities, cruelties and crimes were laws of nature; not understanding the Law of Thelema and hankering after exclusive possession, she fell into a frenzy of mistrust and jealousy. It made things worse that I smilingly accepted her tantrums exactly as an alienist with the outbursts of a maniac. I refused to quarrel; my kindness, tenderness, affection and nonchalance were inexpugnable. She went from bad to worse during the following months, but I maintained firm correctness and at last she gave up trying to drag me down to her ignoble ideal. In the depths of her despair there grew a glimmer. She began to understand that love was not necessarily accompanied by meanness, falsehood, callousness and selfishness. Beholding beauty afar off, she staggered stumblingly up the ragged rocks towards the light, and in the end cast off the chains of selfish lust and became a free and happy woman, as she is today. "He must teach; but he may make severe the ordeals." In her case, she had to suffer indescribably anguish to attain salvation, because her ignorance and animal appetite had usurped the throne of her soul and reigned so long unchallenged. Yet even of this came a marvel. Her command of English was imperfect; her spelling and grammar very defective. She had read little and that little worthless. Nor had she any ambition to learn to write. I had, of course, insisted on her recording her experiences in a Magical Diary, and what was my amazement, on reading the first section, to find it an unsurpassed masterpiece! This ignorant untrained {858} nursemaid had analysed herself so deeply and accurately, had dramatized her tragedy so powerfully, and had expressed her experiences in intense and emphatic language, eked out by metaphors derived from direct observation, that this record is more pitilessly truthful than Marie Bashkirtseff at her best; the stark savagery, the naked cruelty of her passions, is no less fierce than anything in Wuthering Heights. She had plumbed the bottmless pit of damnation and ravaged the heights of heaven with rage and rapture. Some passages in this marvellous manuscript contain expressions which propriety declares unsuited for publication. She had no skill in polite euphemisms and, of course, no idea that her work would ever be read, save by me. In fact, she tried to destroy it on my asking to see it and I only secured it after physical struggle. We must, I fear, bow in the temple of Rimmon to the extent of editing such passages, which I hate to do; their brutal obscenity is an essential element in her character. Should a tiger describe his sensations while eating a man, we should lose by amending his account so as to make it as elegant as that of a city banquet. I will either publish it in a country with common sense or edit it in such a way that the intelligent reader, by the use of a little imagination, will be able to reconstruct the text. (How ridiculous and disgusting this mealy-mouthed morality is! We print Mark Twain's schoolboy smut about Sir Walter Raleigh at the court of Queen Elizabeth --- it circulates under the rose among the most prominent people in society. Why balk at a masterpiece, sublime by virtue of its naked truth, and its spiritual intensity and exaltation, in every way the greatest work ever yet achieved by a woman? I say, emphatically, on my honour that I know of nothing in the whole range of literature which compares with it for all those qualities which are the root of beauty and power, and so saying, I am mindful of my exaggerated enthusiasm about my own achievements in precisely these directions.) {859} 89 I go back in time to Fontainebleau. The winter was superb. It rained rarely, and the sun was so strong that even in February we used to picnic in the forest and snatch an hour's sleep upon the hillside. Everything went well.