Review: The Drug & Other Stories...

CROWLEY, Aleister, The Drug & Other Stories, Wordsworth Editions Ltd., Ware, Hertfordshire, UK, 2010.

Octavo; paperback; 608pp. Minor wear. Near fine.

This book has been for sale at the store for awhile, and I’ve been circling around it with some trepidation. I can’t stand Aleister Crowley; just the sight of him, glooming out of a photograph, or staring wide-eyed while wearing some kind of stupid hat makes my blood boil. He was the biggest snake-oil salesman in a crowd of snake-oil purveyors from the last century. He preyed upon the credulous for the sake of sheer, unadulterated self-promotion and didn’t care who got chopped in the cross-fire. He represents the worst kind of elitist, racist, and sexist thinking of his, or any other, day. To put it very bluntly, he was the consummate wanker.

That being said, the preamble to this volume claims that his fictional writing, distributed as it is across a range of platforms in rare compendia and forgotten journals, has been overlooked as some of the best Edwardian storytelling around. The aim of the editors is to bring together the stories from these disparate sources and allow them to be examined in toto and judged on their merit. Let me say now, so that the wise amongst you can stop here and go about your business without having to waste any more time on this idiot, that there is, in fact, little merit here and certainly nothing to get excited about.

First – some background. Crowley came from an entitled family and went to Cambridge when the time came. There, he indulged himself and fiddled about on the edges of an academic career, meeting members of the literati who - largely – saw him for what he was and stayed clear. He secured the affections of those with money and an impressionable turn of mind, whom he could persuade to idolise him. He wandered in an out of society spending his time in half-arsed educative bouts, sessions of mountain-climbing, and overseas travel. Over time his personal fortune dwindled almost to nothing due to his wastrel ways.

He married, tying some hapless woman’s fortune to his spent one, and they had a child. When this daughter was two years old he took her and her mother on a gruelling overland journey from China’s eastern coast to northern Burma, along three roughly parallel rivers, in an attempt to map them and identify portage locations which would make the waterways a useful trade route. He succeeded. His crowing about the effort was effusive, and one wonders if the deaths of his wife and child even registered with him as a downside to this great achievement.

All through his life, Crowley depended upon the money of impressionable women to get him through. Even after the death of his wife in Rangoon, soon after the burial he flew off to Shanghai to conduct a “magickal working” with an old paramour who was not averse to spending lavishly upon him.

His greatest “working” was a brutal and gruelling session of sexual “magick” in Cairo during which he claimed to have summoned a demon. His partner in the ritual – a wealthy and impressionable young man – died during the event and Crowley wriggled clear of the legal ramifications which should have stopped him in his tracks, but for the haze of lies and misdirection which he spun in his wake.

The rest of Crowley’s life was a constant parade of duplicity, sensationalism, and indulgence. He bounced his way back and forth from America, to Europe, to Britain wasting (mainly other people’s) money and preying on those who swallowed the drivel he peddled. He wrote extensively in his on-again, off-again journal “The Equinox” for which he could rarely get people to write and so, inevitably, wrote most of the articles himself, under a plethora of pseudonyms.

He occasionally set about translating various spiritual works; however, each time he did so, he inevitably perverted the content of these books in order to accord more closely to his own philosophy of “Thelema”. Each translated work which he undertook approached the effort from a position of racial superiority, as Crowley openly and viciously despised all non-Caucasian peoples, and his translations are always patronising first, and self-promoting second.

I could go on.

This notion that Crowley could be a great short story writer, somehow unrecognised by the critics of his time, intrigued me. True, his work appeared mostly in his own journals for which he charged a hefty subscription fee, so his audience was necessarily limited. Also, his ruthless self-promotion as “The Beast – 666” distanced him from all but the most fringe individuals. Arthur Machen despised him, for example, although Crowley, for his part, gushed about Machen’s work. All this aside, he spent so much time writing in order to fill in the blank pages for which others were paying, he obviously had had a huge amount of practise. To my mind it would all come down to ego – could Crowley put himself to one side in order to create a written piece that would entertain and have something of value to impart? Apparently not.

From the first story in this collection right up until the last, Crowley uses the pieces to promote himself and to deride his ‘enemies’. In “The Three Characteristics” he tells the tale of a Buddhist saint (himself) attacked by an envious mage – a thinly-veiled caricature of Allan MacGregor Bennett, one of Crowley’s nemeses from The Golden Dawn movement. The ‘hero’ of the story ingenuously slips free of all attempts to thwart his spiritual progress, with gods and circumstances – even fundamental tenets of the Buddhist faith – bending to enable his attainment. This is Crowley at his most preening and insufferable, and it only gets worse from here.

The editors claim that “The Drug” is the world’s first attempt at transcribing a drug experience; well, this is patently not the case and I’m happy to strip that laurel off Crowley’s list of so-called ‘achievements’. As it is, the title story drips with archaic word-use efflorescing the paragraphs needlessly and thinly camouflaging the homo-erotic subtext. The ‘point’ of the story is clunky, obvious and heavy-handed, delivered after pages of indulgent trip descriptions upon which no-one should have to waste their life. This is adolescent tripe; only those already convinced of Crowley’s ‘stature’ would waste their time with it.

A common feature of Crowley’s stories is a tone of condescension and the assumption that he is talking to those of a less academic, or educated, turn of mind. In one tale (“The Wake World”), he provides footnotes to make his story clear. All the references are to his own made-up philosophy which, where it doesn’t derive from obscure grimoires of earlier centuries and mad scribblers, is pointlessly obscure, in an attempt to prevent any incisive examination. Then there is the story of “T’ien Tao”. Not only is the tale about funny little yellow people, he even gives us a picture, a racially-offensive caricature of a Chinaman! Yay!

Why, I ask myself, do people keep sniffing what this guy is shovelling? With each story I kept returning to the Foreword and the Introduction to try and gauge whether there was some touch of irony in the editors’ thinking. But no: apparently David Tibet and William Breeze (not their real names?) have drunk deeply of the Kool-Aid and are not prepared to diss the ‘Master’, despite the overwhelming evidence.

There are two points about which I feel that this book is a worthy publication and I’m giving it half a Tentacled Horror for each. First, it’s part of Wordsworth’s “Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural” series, which includes – among others – Lovecraft, Hodgson and Poe, placing it emphatically in a fictional category and allowing readers to compare Crowley to actual story-tellers of value and to draw the inevitable negative conclusion. Secondly – and this is particularly pleasing – Crowleyites maintain “The Master’s” writings in an abstruse and self-indulgently complex library system according to “value”, which Crowley dictated on his death bed; this publication breaks that format and throws everything into the mix regardless of its “importance” to Thelemites. That distant rumbling you’re hearing? It’s Crowley spinning in his grave.

It’s hard for me to be impartial about Crowley, and I freely admit that I’m probably not the best person to evaluate this book; however, it has to be acknowledged that – but for Twitter and Instagram – Crowley was the Kanye West of his day (keep spinning, Aleister!). In light of the recent discovery of HPL’s “The Cancer of Superstition” manuscript, we’re hearing all over again how poisonous a racist he was and, to be frank, I’ve had a gutful. To those people out there looking for poor choices of role models in today’s society, here’s your bull’s eye; try looking at this rather than dismissing Crowley as a quirky artefact of a distant time, simply one face among many on a Beatles album. Crowley still influences people across the planet – along with rest of his snake-oil pushing crowd – and has a possibly greater influence on the young and impressionable than someone like Lovecraft whose racist tendencies barely make it to print in comparison. No-one in this world is a saint, but criticise a writer on the content of their writing first before combing through their private correspondence to draw a foregone conclusion. Crowley is a nasty, grubby little cretin with self-adoration issues. It’s right here in black and white.

Thank you, Wordsworth Editions, for allowing us to see clearly.