A CENTRAL THEME OF MR. GURDJIEFF'S Life
Is Real Only Then, When 'I Am' is the defection of Alfred Richard
Orage, the noted English literary editor and writer who replaced P.D.
Ouspensky and J.G. Bennett as the "helper-instructor" who would
help step-down the teaching through founding and leading of Fourth Way
groups in America.
Why Orage left has never been entirely clear. Now the publication of Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium by Paul Beekman Taylor, a friend of the Orage family and the first to be given access to Orage's and Gurdjieff's letters and the diaries of Orage's wife Jessie, provides important new perspectives. In his previous book, Shadows of Heaven: Gurdjieff and Toomer, Professor Taylor's studied ambivalence toward Gurdjieff and his admiration for Jean Toomer (who adopted and helped raise Taylor) attempted to resurrect Toomer's reputation while slighting Gurdjieff's. The attempt here is more evenhanded, but, again, Taylor's perspective is more that of an apologist. That said, this is a welcome and important new study of the influences at work in Orage's leaving the teacher and man for whom he had thrown over his whole life to follow.
Orage first met the teaching through Ouspensky, who arrived in London in September 1921. Orage, after years of study of Theosophy, and now hungry for a practical means of self-transformation, immediately accepted Ouspensky as his teacher. However, the following February after hearing Gurdjieff for the first time, Orage afterward declared: "I knew that Gurdjieff was the teacher. Ouspensky for me represented knowledge—great knowledge; Gurdjieff, understanding—though of course Gurdjieff had all the knowledge, too."
Nine months later, forty-nine-year-old A.R. Orage—the man whom T.S. Eliot called "the finest critical intelligence of our day," and whom Bernard Shaw declared was the most brilliant editor of the past century—arrived at the Prieuré, Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, located in Fontainebleau-en-Avon, southeast of Paris.
Obese, his long fingers stained yellow from years of chain-smoking, Orage expected perhaps to be given the keys to the teaching (just as Gurdjieff had done with Ouspensky and others in Essentuki in July 1917). Instead, he was handed a shovel and told to dig. And this Orage did day after day, often in the afternoon filling in the trenches he had dug in the morning. Brought to his psychic knees, Orage soldiered on, not surrendering to self-pity. One day came a breakthrough into higher mind. Now Gurdjieff—with Ouspensky, Maurice Nicoll and J.G. Bennett refusing to help him—chose Orage to help introduce and establish the teaching in America. Though the choice was de facto, Orage—whom Gurdjieff considered "a brother"—was clearly the best choice.
Like a latter-day John the Baptist, Orage sailed to the New World on December 15, 1923. Magnetic, charming, erudite and worldly, Orage's easy but profound explication of the teaching so captivated the cream of New York's literati that when Gurdjieff and his troop of dancers arrived the following month their public performances drew a large and ready-made audience. When Gurdjieff returned to Paris, he left Orage behind to form and lead groups. With the Prieuré packed with students and the American trip such a success, Gurdjieff's mission of establishing The Fourth Way in the West looked exceptionally bright.
But in July came a terrible shock. Gurdjieff's car crashed into a tree, leaving him in a coma for days. Upon reviving, Gurdjieff radically changed course. Recognizing that despite the high level of students he had drawn to him, the properties of Kundabuffer were too strong and his time too short to train "helper-instructors." He decided to close the institute and hurl the teaching into the future through the creation of a Legominism, entitled All and Everything, a series of three initiatory books.
While Gurdjieff wrote in Paris, Orage in New York taught upwards of 200 pupils who attended his groups and paid monthly dues of ten dollars. With this money, Orage supported Gurdjieff's efforts. The union of the two men was perfect except for Orage's chief feature. As Taylor delicately phrases it: "He seemed to have a roaming eye for female charms." There was no seeming about it. Only a day after his first talk in New York Orage met twenty-two-year-old Jessie Dwight. Attractive, well-bred, and descended from a long line of Connecticut clergymen, she was, says Taylor, "intelligent, strong-willed, and sure of her desires. She brooked no nonsense from anyone. Her major fault, perhaps, was an unreasoned recklessness. This trait was intensified when she drank, and from her late teens, she had been enjoying alcoholic beverages." More than enjoying, she had a drinking problem. With her ardor, skills and intellect, she became indispensable and soon became Orage's personal secretary. The close working relationship had the predictable result. Orage fell in love. "She is an absolute darling and G will love her," Orage wrote. "He loves 'all or nothing' people, and that disposition, apart from the question of tact, is the first condition of everything 'good.'"
If anything, Jessie was certainly "all or nothing."
She meant to have Orage at any cost. From the very first, she saw Orage's
allegiance to Gurdjieff as a threat. Orage wanted her to share his life
in the Work, but Jessie had no real interest. However, she understood
that the way to Orage was through the teaching. Her ambivalence can be
seen when she and Orage went to the docks to see Gurdjieff off on his
way back to France. In her diary she wrote:
"You come now, very important," Gurdjieff said."Not now," she said on the verge of tears. "Not now. September I come with Orage."
"No, now," Gurdjieff said "—very important—now—no Institute maybe in September."
"I hate you," she cried.
Then, he sailed, having grown a beard and wearing a grey soft hat which covered his shaven head. He looked handsome and dashing—an adventurer. He leant over the rail and made signals to his disciples on the pier.... Somehow Gurdjieff attained a mystery and an aloneness—a figure isolated because of his position far above.
"I should not wish," I said to myself, "never to see him again, but why should I go to Fontainebleau?"
And then when the Prophet had sailed from the land of his Abundance or from the land which Orage had made abundant for him, I found that I in truth must go. Orage said so—he did not wish it—he said it had to be done.
"Must I?" I said. "Why should I do anything I do not want to do? Why?"
"You see," he said, "I am dedicated to this. I have given up everything for this. You must go now without me. I will come in September."
And so I went.
At the Prieuré, Jessie almost immediately attracted attention. She wore trousers and smoked in public. One day, after Gurdjieff recovered from his car crash, he asked if she had heard from Orage. She had. The next day a notice was posted stipulating that all outgoing letters must be put in a special box and all incoming letters must be signed for and names of correspondents given.
"All my Americanism rose," wrote Jessie. "I walked down the garden with Gurdjieff. I sputtered with rage. 'What do you mean—how dare you?—my letters, I?' Gurdjieff said, 'I not understand.' His English never failed to desert him in someone else's need."
Instead of understanding that Gurdjieff was working with her, and her identification with Orage, Jessie began what would be an all or nothing battle with Gurdjieff for Orage's attention. Orage tried to make her see. In response to her first letter to him, a long list of complaints, he wrote: "The theory is quite simple: to change effectively, one's old moulds of habits must be broken up. One can no more do this for oneself, or by one's own inclination, than one can 'Stop!' oneself. It must be done for us. The institute is just a 'Stop!' exercise for all one's former habits and preoccupations of oneself; and it enables us to see ourselves in a new light.... I have had my reward. I felt centuries older, years younger and infinitely stronger; and I do not despair of one day being a real and really human." It did little good. A steady stream of complaint letters issued from the Prieuré.
In late August Orage arrived. Gurdjieff would not allow them to share quarters. Taylor gives no diary entries for this period but Jessie's state takes no great imagination. A month later the couple sailed back to New York, where Orage, who had been separated from his wife Jean since 1906 but had not obtained a divorce, moved into Jessie's new flat at 19 East 56th where he stayed for a year or so before finding an apartment close by.
Among those Orage drew to him was the intellectual, psychologist and scientist C. Daly King, who after some time was appointed to lead a group in Orange, New Jersey. Attracted to Orage and the teaching, King was ever ambivalent toward Gurdjieff. He would later help Jessie sow seeds of doubt with Orage, challenging Orage's manhood in regard to Gurdjieff.
The next August when Orage and Jessie visited the Prieuré Gurdjieff gave Orage the bulk of the First Series with instructions to put it into publishable English. Gurdjieff had dictated the early text in Armenian to Mme Galumnian Chaverdiian who turned it into Russian. After Gurdjieff's review of the Russian text, Thomas de Hartmann, with the help of Bernard Metz, turned it into literal English.
At some point, Orage became aware of Jessie's, as Taylor puts it, "immoderate drinking." Drinking could make her belligerent, even violent. As she wrote in her diary, after she and Orage had dinner with friends: "I got really drunk... when I got home I was going to kill myself, but Orage grabbed the gun.... I am frightened." This dark affinity between drinking and guns would later cause her to storm down the hall at the Prieuré to Gurdjieff's room, a pearl-handled Browning revolver in hand, only to be dissuaded by Eve Taylor, the author's mother. Jessie and Orage had just returned from a car trip with Gurdjieff who had given Orage caviar of dubious age and Orage had gotten sick. At the Prieuré Gurdjieff also made fun of Orage's "American stomach." To defend her man, Jessie thought a gun would solve matters.
Caught between his erratic lover and a demanding teacher, Orage found refuge in the editing of Gurdjieff's book. "It's really a 'Bible,'" he told Gurdjieff, "for the 'Bible' is also a parable with 'history' as its material, and the Biblical history is much less plausible than Gurdjieff's." He said that Gurdjieff had purposely made it fit history when he could. Later, Orage wrote:
Suppose 'God' were to begin observing himself, reviewing his past, and trying to put Himself normal—that is, what Beelzebub seems to me to be doing. He is God—coldly, rationally, reviewing himself—but, of course, his 'past' extends back to creation. Beelzebub is a 'brain-cell' of God, depicted, on the strength of his dislike of God, to make God's review of himself—seems to me to be rather an interesting idea and appears confirmed by many things Gurdjieff says of both Beelzebub and himself. Also, there should be, as there are, many analogies in consequence between God's self-observation, etc., and any one person's.
In 1927, three years after his arrival in New York, finding he was nearing the end of what he had been able to understand of the teaching, Orage began to introduce psychological exercises he had experimented with before meeting Gurdjieff. In other words: he began to invent, not transmit. It was then, too, that he first broke his personal bond with his teacher. That September, in London for the finalization of his divorce, Orage knew that Gurdjieff expected him to come to the Prieuré afterward. Instead he sailed for New York where on September 24th he and Jessie married. The die was cast. Orage had chosen "the native," Gurdjieff's term for Jessie. Presumably what he meant was, despite her many enviable gifts, she was a person of the earth, one who denied spiritual potential. Orage summed up the situation: "Gurdjieff regarded me as someone who had, so to speak, come with him from another planet with a task to carry out. But I fell in love with a native, and this interfered with his aim." The following April, the fifty-six-year-old Orage became a father.
Their relationship increasingly divided, Gurdjieff apparently believed that only a major shock could free Orage to rededicate himself to stepping down the teaching. On November 13, 1930, Gurdjieff arrived in New York. What ensued is given in Gurdjieff's Third Series, but, as Taylor makes much of, Gurdjieff got "the month, year and sequence of events wrong." But, of course, Gurdjieff took literary license with the "facts." The Third Series is the most esoteric of Gurdjieff's books in which facts serve to open to something deeper.
How Orage really saw matters can largely only be intuited, as he never spoke or wrote about what transpired between himself and Gurdjieff at any length. The little he did say, however, is very revealing, and oddly Taylor fails to quote this:
'Lord,' I say, 'I believe'; but I have to add, 'Help thou my unbelief.' Because, in truth, my belief is not absolute.... I can see clearly that from his [Gurdjieff's] point of view, believing in himself so absolutely, my half or three-quarters belief in him is titillation, and results only in the titillation of others. He cannot but wish either that I shall be absolutely faithful, or cease to be regarded or to regard myself as his chief 'minister' in America. I accept this without reproach. But what I pray for is that my own friends, the best I have on earth, the New York group, may not only not suffer on my account, but that, through me, like another Moses, they may find themselves led to the Jordan and transported across by Joshua Gurdjieff!
On January 15th, Jessie records in her diary that Gurdjieff sent Orage a note asking to see him and saying "how seven years ago he threw out Ouspensky, and now he will do the same to Orage for the same reasons." Orage sent Gurdjieff a letter explaining that "he and Ouspensky were different," and later went to see Gurdjieff and resigned, saying he would hold no more group meetings nor would he attend any. "Gurdjieff told him" Jessie writes, "that his great fault was naiveté—that he [Gurdjieff] had observed him for seven years and he had not yet gotten over it." One can only presume that the naiveté to which Gurdjieff refers is Orage's weakness for the feminine; or perhaps it's something more.
Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, Taylor never follows up on this. He might have, for example, quoted Orage's friend Philip Mairet's book A.R. Orage: A Memoir. Wrote Mairet:
The acute sensibility and responsiveness of mind in which lay so much of his personal magnetism was due to a feminine element in his character of which he was well aware, though he never wholly accepted it. He feared it, as men often do, and made matters more difficult by additional efforts to stiffen his character and harden his mental texture, which, as is usually the case with such efforts, especially if undertaken in mature years, were far from achieving their object but brought on tortured and precarious feelings. He became unable to miss a shot at golf without glancing round anxiously in fear that some stranger had noticed the blunder.
The perspective we get of Gurdjieff and Orage
in Taylor's book is largely Jessie's, the woman Gurdjieff characterized
in the Third Series as a "young American pampered out of all
proportion to her position." By the end of January—after Gurdjieff's
open denunciation of Orage to his groups and Gurdjieff's demand that they
renounce him—Jessie completely lost patience. One day she warned
Orage, who was on his way out the door to see Gurdjieff, that if he saw
Gurdjieff again—despite the vituperative group meetings against Orage,
he had been meeting with Gurdjieff virtually every day—it would be
the last he would see of her. Orage shrugged and stayed. Later, however,
Orage and Jessie met Gurdjieff at a student's apartment and Jessie said
something so rude that it forced Orage to tell her to shut up. When Orage
next met with his teacher, Gurdjieff observed: "Interesting thing
Orage—while group sheep, but Jessie not sheep—she dog. Sheep
follow Orage because he too much like them—a bigger sheep."
By March, Jessie's anger boiled over at what she considered Gurdjieff's lewd behavior toward her and told Orage that he should act like a man and defend her. Writes Taylor, "Orage replied coolly that he would react that way with any other man, but that he did not regard Gurdjieff as a man." The two men continued to meet every day until March 13th when Gurdjieff sailed for France. What transpired between them is not known, but it would seem likely that Gurdjieff was doing everything in his power to keep Orage as a student and helper-instructor, for there was no one to replace him. Taylor brings up the idea, self-servingly expressed by J.G. Bennett and then used as an excuse by others who left, that Gurdjieff intentionally forced Ouspensky and Orage out. But this is to refuse to understand Gurdjieff's aim and its urgency—to introduce The Fourth Way as widely as possible.
Gurdjieff, not understood in his own time, over fifty years later still awaits a perspective that gives him and his mission the significance he and it deserve.
Notes
1. Shadows of Heaven. See review in Telos, Volume 4, Issue 1. Taylor's not so hidden animus toward Gurdjieff which played out heavily in that book, is not so evident here but does crop up from time to time. Among the most glaring, for example, is to report that Gurdjieff had done "a shocking thing" to his niece Lucie who threatened to tell "unless he sent her home—so he did so—but the poor child is living in a state of fear." Taylor then explains in a footnote that Nikolai de Stjernvall (who was there at the time) said that the so-called scandal was a "row [that] Gurdjieff had with Lucie in his room over a minor incident of misbehavior."
2. "I knew that Gurdjieff was the teacher." See C. S. Nott's Teachings of Gurdjieff (New York: Samuel Weiser Inc., 1961), pp. 2778–28. Curiously, Taylor gives no account of this signal event, as well as a number of others.
3. Keys to the teaching. See P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, p. 346. "Gurdjieff unfolded to us the plan of the whole work. We saw the beginnings of all the methods, the beginnings of all the ideas, their links, their connections and direction."
4. Filling in trenches. This is reminiscent of how Marpa first taught Milarepa.
5. A brother. This comment of Gurdjieff's apparently leads Taylor to consider that Gurdjieff and Orage are equals. This viewpoint is augmented with Taylor's comparison at the book's end of the thought of the two men. That Orage, like Ouspensky, Bennett and Nicoll, or any other of Gurdjieff's students, ever saw themselves as equal in being and knowledge, that is, in understanding, to Gurdjieff is not supported by anything any of the men wrote or said.
6. Charming. Albert Camus, known for his great charm, gives a cogent description of the word in his book The Fall (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959). "They found me charming, imagine that. You know what charm is? A manner of hearing others reply yes when one asks no specific question!"
7. Public performances. Ouspensky mentions in Search that the first obstacle a would-be student has to overcome is to find the teaching. Taking this as unquestioned policy, the mainstream work has always kept a very low profile. But clearly Gurdjieff did otherwise. Ouspensky's book is representative of Gurdjieff's Russian period, a time of upheaval when secrecy was necessary.
8. Female charms. Camus, who also had an eye for the ladies, writes in his Notebooks, p. 279: "Sexual life was given to man perhaps to divert him from his true road. It's his opium. Without it, things come back to life."
9. Ambivalent toward Gurdjieff. See C. Daly King's The Oragean Version, an unpublished manuscript.
10. Gurdjieff regarded me. See James Moore, Gurdjieff: Anatomy of a Myth (London, Element Books, 1991), p. 215.
11. Naïveté. This is likely a code word for Orage's chief feature. Intellectually, of course, Orage was aware of it. As he wrote in the New Age: "Long after the liability to complete subjection to female illusion is over, men sometimes continue to experience perturbations of their equilibrium in the presence of women. In few instances are these perturbations violent enough to overthrow the mind entirely, but for the moment they undoubtedly do cause the judgment to reel and stagger and the resulting conversation and actions to become distorted. These residual phenomena, however, are to be distinguished from the similar phenomena of adolescence by the fact that they no longer inspire hope but disgust or, at least, annoyance." See William Patrick Patterson, Struggle of the Magicians (Fairfax, CA: Arete, 1996), p. 106.
12. 'Lord,' I say. See Louise Welch, Orage with Gurdjieff in America (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.,1982), pp. 11578–17.
13. The acute sensibility. See Philip Mairet, A.R. Orage: A Memoir (New York: University Books, 1966), pp.78–79.