White Stains

 

It is hard for us to fathom now that the knotty, verbose prose of Carlyle was once to the public taste. Similarly, it is hard to appreciate - from this cultural distance - that the florid lyricism of the verse of Charles Alginon Swinburne was once the preferred mode of English poetry. We can appreciate very well the genius and popularity of Keats, and sense something deeply enduring in his work and style, but Swinburne - bar a poem or two - is dated. 

 

So too is the verse of Swinburne's most ardent admirer, the occultist Aleister Crowley. He has appeared previously in these pages as a painter and as the conduit for his pseudo-Koranic Liber al Legis. He is primarily of interest to the present author because he was, amongst other things, a traveler and an orientalist. He was also a poet. His Hymn to Pan is his most celebrated poem; it has also been considered previously in these pages. See here.

 

We have previously ventured the view that Crowley was, by any calculation, a psychopath - but history, after all, is not only full of them but very often made by them. He was certainly of the high-functioning variety. A mountaineer, a chess master, a philosopher, a spy, a prophet; but above all, he thought of himself as a poet. Indeed, by his own estimation - entirely in character - he regarded himself as the best thing to happen to English verse since Milton. 

 

W. B. Yeats, his avowed enemy, once said that Crowley had written maybe six decent lines of verse in his life, but declined to nominate them. Yeats shared Crowley's occult interests, but was, of course, one of the great poets of modern English. Crowley was an imitator of Swinburne and is a poet of the second or third rank at best.

 

The admiration of Swinburne extended beyond his verse to Swinburne's life, or rather his posture in life. Crowley was irredeemably attracted to deviance and its aura of fame. Swinburne was a poet of the "decadent" school and kept himself notable by professing to have committed shocking outrages. He once claimed to have had sex with and then eaten a monkey. Oscar Wilde called his bluff; everybody knew Swinburne had not done half the things he said he had done. 

 

But this was enough for Crowley. In poetry, he adopted Swinburne as his model. By extension, he was also influenced by the French poets of decadence such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine. But largely he adopted the florid, lyrical and  very Victorian style of Swinburne. In painting, he turned to the contemporary style of German expressionism. His paintings are very modern. His Swinburnean verse, on the other hand, places him in another era. 

  

He is an odd figure in this regard. For a man who declared the birth of the new Aeon of Horus he was, in many ways, a man stuck in the nineteenth century. It is remarkable, for instance, that though he lived through the golden age of early cinema, and counted film actresses among his lovers and followers, and courted publicity at every turn, it seems that he never once appeared on film. He had no interest in such a newfangled medium. The extent to which he failed to step into the New Aeon is nowhere more fully on display than in his verse. Why could he not adapt to the poetry of modernism? His lover, Victor Neuburg, was the man who discovered Dylan Thomas. Crowley's poetry is painfully old-fashioned, and notable mainly because it is so obscene. 

Crowley's first publication set the tone for his literary career. Published in limited edition in the Netherlands under a pseudonym, and swiftly banned, it was a collection of erotic poems entitled White Stains. To this day it is widely regarded as the filthiest book of poetry in the English language. It must certainly be a contender. It is said that the original edition included genuine white stains supplied by the poet.

 

Crowley's lifelong taste for mischief, ruse and subterfuge are on display in this volume as much as his passion for decadence and debauchery. The work is presented as a cautionary study of the diseased mind of a certain 'George Archibald Bishop'. At the beginning is the warning:

 

The Editor hopes that Mental Pathologists, for whose
eyes alone this treatise is destined, will spare no precaution to prevent it falling into other hands.

 

 The collection follows a design. We are told in a lengthy introduction that the poems are in chronological sequence and document the decline of poor George Archibald Bishop, a fine Christian man, into the most appalling erotomania. The collection begins with an invocation to the Blessed Virgin Mary and ends with a poem celebrating homosexual necrophilia. Pure Crowley. 

 

 

 

 

 

Probably the most well-known or notorious poem in the collection is 'With Dog and Dame: an October Idyll' (see above) the subject matter of which is plain from the title. It is representative. The obscene subject matter is described with intense, impassioned, but formal, Swinburnian lyric, complete with Swinburnian rhymes. We might not doubt that the lurid scenario has the poet aroused, but the turgid Victorian verse does little to stir the blood of a modern reader. It's not very successful as pornography. Above all, it is not memorable. We cannot help but remember what the poem is about but - as per Yeats - there is not a single memorable line in it."Creamy clouds of latticed light..." Uggh. "Bright children of love debonair..." Dreadful. Though lyric in form, there is no music.  The poet is entirely occupied with finding flowery ways to outrage. A low point in the collection must be the lines:

The burden of caught clap. How sore it is!
The burden of sad shameful suffering,
The bitter bastard of a bloody kiss.

The most modest poems are the most successful. In the shorter poems there is less opportunity for Crowley to drop alliterative clangers like the scatophilic "Dross of the dunghill's most detested dust". Here is a short poem:

 

Unlike Swinburne, many of Crowley's outrages were not idle boasts, and some of the poems in the collection resound with an unquestionable authenticity. According to one analysis, a feature of Crowley's psychopathology was a profound absence of projected imagination. He was pathologically literal. In his autohagiography he relates how, as a child, he was told that cats have nine lives, so he went out and killed one to see. Ordinary mortals, as Freud assured us, might have all manner of vile desires lurking in our darkest corners, but we have the good sense to leave them alone, or leave them as imaginings. Crowley seemed constitutionally unable to do this. 

 

But mainly, he hated Christianity. He once said (it is one of the better things he said) "I never hated God. But by God I hated the God of my enemies!" And for Crowley, enemy number one was his mother, and number two, his father, clergy, Plymouth Brethren, Puritans. Obscenity is never enough for Crowley. It has to be sweetened with blasphemy. 

 

In some ways White Stains sets out his life path. There is no magick in these poems. They were composed prior to his discovery of the occult. Yet his path is mapped out. He has the same fate as George Archibald Bishop. The fictitious introduction describes: "A general exaltation of Priapism at the expense, in particular, of Christianity..." Then at the very end are words that might almost have served as Crowley's own epithet:

 

 He might have been so great! He missed Heaven! Think kindly of him! 

 

The design of White Stains is for readers to lament that such a powerful poet, and upstanding Christian, as George Archibald Bishop should have lost his mind, succumbed to depravity, and fallen into the clutches of the Devil. Crowley fails to pull this off simply because the poetry cannot carry such weight. We are not left thinking that Bishop - or Crowley - was a poetic genius who went astray. There it is, though, in a nutshell. That is who and what Crowley wanted to be. 

 

A kinder appraisal of Crowley is that of Israel Regardie, at one time his secretary, who described him as a man utterly and fearlessly drunk on life. There is that. No other voice in English verse is as nearly Dionysean. Yet the passion is undone by the mischief as much as by the clunky rhymes.

The poems that seem most authentic are homoerotic. A couple of them have found a place in the canon of queer verse. The most notable and perhaps most autobiographical is 'A Ballad of Passive Paederasty'.  Crowley was, amongst other things, a masochist. In homosexual encounters, beginning at Cambridge, he enjoyed the pain and humiliation of the passive role. This might be a poem by any English public school boy. Later in life he claimed a preference for women, but he emerged from Cambridge as a devotee of "that love the Greeks deemed sacred." This brings us to what is arguably the high point - a very modest one - in White Stains, a verse in the aforementioned Ballad that lightens the whole affair with a touch of well-crafted humour: 

 

 

Crowley's one saving grace was his humour and the fact that that, while grappling with a planet-sized ego (as much as with his "gigantic charms") he didn't always take himself seriously. There are a few nice touches of self-mockery in White Stains that raise it above being merely an exercise in pornographic verse.

 

Harper McAlpine Black