Confessions of Aleister Crowley

565 To keep a straight story, I have admitted that at Warner's suggestion two roundabout ways were tried. I was to make a fictitious sale of the stock to another man, and he, having taken them away, could transfer them to me. When he called he was assailed in the most intemperate language and the delivery refused. The second idea was to get my tailor to obtain judgment against me for the few hundreds I owed him, to be executed by seizing the stock. But the sheriff received the same treatment as everyone else. Warner started at once to heap insults upon, and hurl defiance at, the representatives of the law. What interests me most in all this is the problem of how such a man ever does any business. In my own case, part of my original plan involved the placing of large orders with his firm. When a stranger calls to bring him gold he is thrown out. It beats me altogether. My next important business was to re-establish my connection with editors. I called on the English Review. Austin Harrison welcomed me as warmly as ever, and asked me to write the centenary article on Shelley and some minor work. I signed the Shelley essay "Prometheus". I created a furore in literary London. They were stupefied. Who the devil could have written it? There were not three men in England anywhere near that class. It was the best boost the English Review had had since Frank Harris and I had left England. Mond had withdrawn his support, turning over the Review, lock, stock and barrel, gratis, on his attention being called to the fact that Harrison possessed a letter from Lord Roberts denouncing Mond in such terms that its publication would have probably been followed by the wrecking of Mond's house in Lowndes Square, and, as likely as not, a lynching. Sir George Lewis called at the office (Harrison boasted to me that Lewis never went outside his lair for anyone less than a royal duke) and concluded the deal on the terms stated above on Harrison's giving his word not to make public the letter. It went through. But when Harrison looked for the lethal letter he failed to find it, and believes that Mond had arranged for someone {892} to pay an unauthorized visit to his sanctum and extract it. This hypothesis involves the assumption that Mond harboured doubts as to the value of Harrison's word of honour, which is too painful to think of. Deprived of financial support, and of the guidance of Frank Harris and myself, he was left to plough his lonely furrow and a crooked furrow it was. The English Review lost interest for the educated classes whose taste it was designed to please. The circulation sagged lower every month. Its dullness became devastating. Harrison's own work is always amazing and sometimes first-rate. But other contributors fell off. They got tired of being asked to write at nominal rates, and at that to have to extract the cheque with a Big Bertha corkscrew. He paid me five pounds for my Shelley essay. Subsequent articles were even less adequately remunerated. And it was not only a task which Jove would have thrown up to get paid at all, but after prolonged humiliating haggling over the price, the ultimate cheque was more annoying than agreeable. He would argue for an hour that he had said pounds and not gunieas. I put up with the pest because it amused me. I can hardly explain why I enjoy watching such contemptible wrigglings. I suppose it is the same sort of fascination as makes one stop to watch a street squabble between two prostitutes. A further unpleasantness was that he always wanted to mutilate what I wrote by removing the strongest passages or reshaping them so that my style was spoilt entirely and diluted with his journalistic commonplaces and clich‚s. I made the best of a bad job. My reply to Rabbi Joel Blau, "The Jewish Problem Re-Stated", for example, seemed to me so important that any sacrifice was worth making. I doubt my wisdom. His emendations reduced a masterpiece of reasoning and eloquence to a comparatively unremarkable pleading, and it fell almost flat. My real plan was to put persistent pressure upon Harrison. I thought that in time my moral superiority and intelligence would convert him to a course by adopting which thoroughly and enthusiastically, the stone might be rolled away from the sephlchre, and the English Review regain its preeminence as the only organ in England with a soul of its own. In fact, so long as I stayed in London I made a good deal of headway. But the moment the cat was away, the mice began to play. I ran over to France for a fortnight in August, and when I got back he had broken his word on every point. My return restored order, but on leaving for Sicily, it was the same story. He had promised to publish something of mine every month and send me not less than eight pounds every time the first