Crowley and the Portugal Poet
There is controversy brewing in Portugal over the heirs of famous poet Fernando Pessoa auctioning off his “Crowley Papers”, a collection of correspondence between Pessoa and British occultist (and fellow poet) Aleister Crowley.
Aleister Crowley and Fernando Pessoa playing chess.
“When the poet died in obscurity in 1935, he left a trunk full of documents that included extensive correspondence with the eccentric English astrologist and magician Aleister Crowley, a practitioner of the occult said to have inspired satanism in Britain. Portugal’s National Library fiercely opposes the private sale of documents considered vital to the nation’s literary heritage, and warns it will take all legal measures to stop the sale and dispersal of the archive, the Lisbon daily Publico reports.”
Scholars are worried about how this will affect academic study of the poet, while collectors are salivating over the prospect of getting their hands of the papers, which includes a never-completed novel about Crowley’s faked suicide attempt.
“The dossier includes voluminous correspondence with Crowley, and hundreds of pages of an unfinished novel about Crowley’s faked suicide. The work is called Boca do Inferno, (Hell’s Mouth) after a rocky inlet near the Portuguese resort of Cascais. Pessoa, intrigued by Crowley’s mysticism, struck up a correspondence with the Englishman. The flamboyant Crowley visited Lisbon in 1930, and the friends played chess together. Crowley then disappeared, leaving his cigarette case and a handwritten suicide note on the clifftop above the crashing waves at Hell’s Mouth. It was a trick, apparently to elude a discarded lover … Pessoa mounted a polemical play about the “suicide” and doubts swirled over his role in the affair, and the nature of his relationship with Crowley.”
Poets? Jilted lovers? Faked suicide? Sounds like a far better premise for a movie about Aleister Crowley than the recent “Chemical Wedding” train-wreck. As for the papers, the Portugal National Library is considering invoking laws that prohibit the international sale of documents thought to be of “national heritage” value if a private arrangement can’t be reached with Pessoa’s heirs.
One response so far
You might be interest in knowing that the foundation House of Fernando Pessoa and Lisbon’s City Hall have moved foward with a massive scanning project that plans to create a virtual database where every single one of Pessoa’s manuscripts, plus all the still preserved books and magazines he had in his library, can be made available for free consultation online. “Crowley Papers” included.
According to this article…
http://ultimahora.publico.clix.pt/noticia.aspx?id=1332219&idCanal=14
… it’s been done as fast as possible in case the auction goes ahead.