Confessions of Aleister Crowley

494 My best essay was "The Green Goddess" written in the old Absinthe House itself, and adorning its main theme the philosophical reflections suggested by absinthe with descriptions of the inn, its guests, and the city. From New Orleans I went to stay with my cousin Lawrence Bishop on his orange and grapefruit plantation in Florida. I shall describe elsewhere the spiritual abyss in which these lost souls were plunged. I cannot think of Florida, but in my ears rings the exceeding bitter cry of poor little sixteen-year-old Alma, "I've found it doesn't pay to tell the truth." This visit opened up an expanse and depth of heartache which I had thought impossible. Cousin Lawrence saw how ill I was. The family fed on offal which I would not have thrown to a decent pig. He had stayed with us in England and realized that I could not be expected to eat such garbage, so he asked me kindly what I would like to eat so as to build up my strength. I said, "Don't bother about that. All I need is plenty of fruit and milk." It seems too rotten to be true but his wife made a point of cutting me off from milk as much as she dared, and went to the utmost pains to hide the supply, so as to cheat me out of the glass of milk I was supposed to have before going to bed. (I always stayed up late working.) The mean malice of his hag is too dreadful to contemplate, yet all things serve the poet's turn. She gave me the idea of one of my best Simon Iff in America stories, "Suffer the Little Children". Let us hurry back to New York. I arrived there in the spring still sick of some malady which produced depression and weakness and took the spirit out of me without showing any obvious symptoms. I found once more that I was a stranger. I had nothing definite to do, no plausible plans. I wandered wearily through the weeks utterly powerless to concentrate on anything, to interest myself in anything: I simply suffered. Things got worse and worse. My resources came to an end. One of my old disciples, Leon Engars Kennedy, a portrait painter, had arrived from Europe. We renewed our friendship. Indeed he needed my {778} help badly enough. His moral tone, never high, had been almost destroyed by the war. The trouble with him was that he had never grown up; he was in receipt of an ample allowance from his family, but it was always gone before it arrived, and he dragged on from month to month borrowing a dollar here and a dollar there from everyone he met. I remember a scene almost too humiliating to tell. The janitor of his studio was a crippled lad, with a large family --- a half-starved creature with the pathetic eyes of a wounded fawn. It was horrible to hear Kennedy, the adopted son of a multi-millionare, pleading almost on his knees with eloquent appeals for pity, mingled with the cunning arguments of a confidence man, for a loan of two dollars. I am glad to think that I helped the boy both spiritually and practically. I badgered him into working regularly at his art, arranged an exhibition for him, interested a number of influential people in him, persuaded others to help him out, wrote him up in The International, and otherwise pulled him through. I failed, however, to keep him out of the clutches of a very beautiful red- headed Irish typist, hysterical from sexual suppression. She finally persuaded him to marry her, and I am afraid his last chance of a career is among the dusty documents in the files of the marriage bureau at City Hall. At least, I have heard no more of him since his return to Holland. He, in his turn, showed me great kindness. When it came to the point where I could not pay for a bed, he let me sleep on the sofa in his studio. This was a garret in an old half-decayed house on Fifth Avenue, lacking even a water supply. But to me it was a paradise. Its poverty and discomfort were transformed into luxury by the thought of Kennedy's kindness. I slept here for quite a long time. My health picked up gradually and, as the result of a Magical Operation on May 27th, became suddenly perfect. I was thus able, on May 28th and 30th, to perform two important Magical Operations completed by a third a few days later, with the object of giving effect to my will to establish the Law of Thelema. The result was that I secured control of The International and became contributing editor (implying practically sole responsibility for the contents) in August.