Confessions of Aleister Crowley

369 It was time for me to get back to England. Neuburg was to join his relations at San Sebastian, and as soon as he was gone, I wrote The Soldier and the Hunchbac, ! and ? on the thirteenth of December. Two days later I left Plymouth by the Marlborough. {593} 65 In London I put my foot down at once by taking away my daughter until Rose agreed to follow the doctor's instructions and get rid of her dipsomania once and for all. She capitulated and the necessary measures were taken. This left me free for my proposed Retirement, which I decided to undertake in Paris rather than London. The details of every single minute of my life for the next fortnight are accurately recorded in "John St. John". Here I need only say that the work was successful beyond all expectations. I not only achieved my stated object, but obtained access to a reserve of energy which carried me on for years, performing Herculean labours without conscious effort. My time was in fact very fully taken up with the preparation of The Equinox. I had to be constantly seeing Fuller, who was editing my Magical Records and the vast mass of material connected with the G.'. D.'., besides which I had my own work to do preparing the books of instruction on a special and scientific basis. Besides this, I was writing a good deal of poetry. Some of my most important work belongs to this period. "The Wizard Way", "the Garden of Janus", "After Judgment" and "Bathyllus" are especially notable. I was seeing a good deal of Frank Harris, who was publishing much of my best work in Vanity Fair. It was the first encouragement I had ever had, and in a way it came too late, since I was already entirely disillusioned with regard to fame. The approval of Frank Harris was another matter; it was something, and something very great, to know that my work gained me the respect of the very few men on the planet who knew the difference between Keats and Lewis Morris. I had been recognized as a poet of the first class by my peers and the applause of the mob would leave me as cold as its neglect or hostility does at present. I kept hard at work in London until after the publication of the first number of The Equinox. There was, besides, much work to be done in reorganizing the order, to which many people were anxious to obtain admission. My domestic tragedy was coming to a crisis. The disease seemed incurable. The doctor said that the only hope was for Rose to sign away her liberty for two years, and as she refused to do this there was nothing for it but for me to obtain a divorce. There was no sense in my being plaintiff, though I had plenty of ground. To me it seemed a breach of the pledge to protect one's wife, which is the first point of a husband's honour. It was consequently agreed that Rose should be plaintiff and the necessary evidence was manufactured in the usual way. {594} My year was very much broken into by the vicissitudes of this wretched business. Rose was always begging to be taken back and it was very hard for me to be firm. I made things as easy as possible for her by spending as much time with her as I could. The marriage having been in Scotland, there was no King's Proctor to cause one's knees to tremble, and it was unlikely that any spies would discover that we were living together, to all intents and purposes, the whole time the divorce was pending. Apart from short trips to Paris, I was in England till autumn, when I thought it best to keep well out of the way during the actual time of the trial. I took Neuburg to be my chela and we left London on November 10th. In the meanwhile I was doing comparatively little personal magical work and my lyrics were all of lesser importance. The fact of the matter was that I had got to the end of my tether. The gods had put their foot down --- thus far and no farther! I felt myself my life had become broken up into a succession of insignificant adventures. But I did not know why. The reason was that one cannot work beyond a certain point in a New Aeon on a formula of the Old, and I had sealed my stubborn refusal to make The Book of the Law the basis of my work by taking advantage of the technical excuse that I could do nothing in the absence of the manuscript. And that had been lost for years.