Interview With James MooreACTIVE IN THE WORK SINCE 1956, JAMES MOORE has written the definitive Gurdjieff biography, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth. He lives in London where he leads several groups. Telos: A biography of Gurdjieff is something of an heroic task, certainly a rash task. Can you say just why you took it on? JM: I felt compelled to. In 1975 Madame de Salzmann told us in London: 'The time has now come to meet the confused, inaccurate and sometimes hostile ideas about the Work the Work has to emerge, appear in the world in a certain way.' Already she and Peter Brook and Michael Currer-Briggs were wrestling, against tremendous odds, to set up the film Meetings With Remarkable Men, but this would only present the young Gurdjieff. Secretly, I began to wonder -- half aghast at my own temerity -- if I could one day contribute something. So, in a sense, the long, long fuse for this biography was lit by Madame de Salzmann's unexpected challenge. Telos: But had the writing no personal dimension for you? JM: Well, yes. At risk of sounding pretentious, it is connected with the parable of the talents in the Gospels. I don't particularly want to speak about it. Telos: Aside from biography's classic difficulties, did you run into any special technical obstacles? JM: Perhaps you have in mind Work secrecy and a-historicism? Well, despite Michel de Salzmann's generous blessing, given when I spoke with him in Paris on 12 March 1988, several key witnesses 'took the Fifth'. The moral right of someone like Lise Tracol [Mr. Gurdjieff's young pupil and housekeeper during his last years in Paris] to maintain silence is unassailable but don't imagine it helps the biographer. Vital unpublished texts I also found embargoed. I knew their scope. I knew who 'owned' them. I knew their vibrancy -- Tchekov Tchekovitch's account of Mr. Gurdjieff's 1924 accident is absolutely electrifying. But I simply could not lay lands on them. Piquantly enough, immediately my book was published, three or four Work eminences who had withheld specific stuff wrote me pained but controlled letters pointing out material omissions from my text! Telos: We well recognize this secrecy but what do you mean by 'a -historicism'? JM: My first teacher, Kenneth Walker, was a professor, a highly cultured man. Yet he said in Venture with Ideas that Gurdjieff was born in Alexandropol, 'near the Persian frontier of Russia'. For literally decades this geographical solecism re-appeared on the cover of Meetings with Remarkable Men. Could no one distinguish Persia from Turkey? Could no one look at a map? Telos: Does it really matter? JM: Not a fig, from the standpoint of our inner work. A teaching which elevates Here and Now to its highest potency is supra-historical; the perennial Gurdjieff will remain an enigma, at right-angles to history ... However, if you are simply struggling to write a 'good householder' biography, it matters tremendously that in 1930 your subject infuriatingly burnt his passports, memoranda, certificates and correspondence. It matters tremendously that, day after day, you find yourself mining a literature strewn with intentional and unintentional inexactitudes.
Telos: What about historical surprises? Did you turn up anything revolutionary? JM: Revolutionary is an apt word. I vividly remember the instant in Kensington Reference Library when the unh3known sculptor 'M' suddenly swam into focus as Sergei Dmitrievich Merkurov. The fact that Gurdjieff's own cousin, the very pupil who introduced Ouspensky, later took Lenin's death mask forges an almost preposterous link between Ashiata Shiemash and Lentrohamsanin. Perhaps Russian archives hold other unconsidered gems of Gurdjieffian history. Even KGB files are now relatively accessible and I am attempting proxy searches on Merkurov and on Dr. Alexandre Salmanoff, who was first Lenin's physician then Gurdjieff's. There's probably an entire new book here if I could raise a sympathetic publisher . . . and if I had the time. Telos: Yes, Heropass is the enemy. Just how long did the Gurdjieff biography take? JM: Research: effectively all my adult life. Actual writing: nearly four years. I began the first chapter 'The Arousing of Thought' in May 1987 and completed the last chapter 'Au Revoir, tout le Monde' in October 1990. Then came the notes, chronology, etc. I enjoyed a brief sabbatical in the fall of 1988, when I took Mme de Salzmann's last film Danses Sacrées to the Katherine Mansfield Centennial Conference in New Zealand -- but that is another story. Telos: Tell us a bit about the book's reception. You gloomily predicted that some critics would accuse you of lése majesté and others of sycophancy. Was this pessimism borne out? JM: Oh yes, if you want to win friends and influence people don't write a biography of Gurdjieff. A British editor named Nicolas Albery, in his acidic review 'Gurdjieff -- a hagiography', accused me of 'Bending over backwards to make every explanation possible for his guru's outrageous behaviour, except the obvious one: a rogue is a rogue is a rogue' -- by virtually the same post came a manuscript copy of Jeffrey P. Zaleski's highly positive notice for Parabola. But this latter piece was killed, spiked, never published. Why? According to Jeffrey because the protective hand of The Gurdjieff Foundation hovering over Parabola wields the blue pencil of censorship. The relevant Work editors -- we all know their names -- evidently considered my portrait of Gurdjieff unforgivably 'iconoclastic'! I am tempted to give them Mr. Albery's fax number so that they can argue it out with him. Telos: Gurdjieff warned us that everything only lasts for a finite time. Do you yourself suppose your book will 'live' ? JM: Yes and no. Lucy, Lady Pentland -- despite my blunders apropos Lord Pentland, which incidentally I have set to rights in the paperback -- has generously predicted it will become an 'authorized standard source'. Personally however I should be astonished if it were not leap-frogged factually by A.D. 2000. Russian sources may throw up undreamed of surprises. The Ushe Narzunov mystery may be resolved. In any case, many primary memoirs seem already in the pipeline: Tchekov Tchekovich, Dr. Conge, Dushke Howarth, Lord Pentland -- perhaps even something from Mme de Salzmann... So, as the definitive history, my book may soon be on 'skid row'. Yet as mythopoesis it could perhaps have a longer shelf-life assuming passages like Gurdjieff's imagined deathbed reverie retain their 'shimmer'. Nor will things like my Gurdjieff-Soloviev hypothesis date so fast.
Telos: This Gurdjieff-Soloviev equation is intriguing. How did you come to it? JM: It's just my personal hypothesis reached by textual comparison and intuition. But interesting, isn't it, that Gurdjieff in Meetings brings Soloviev with him like an alter ego across the rope bridge and into the Sarmoung Monastery -- whereas Peter Brook and Mine de Salzmann persuade their wild camel to jump the starter's gun and 'terminate' Soloviev with 'extreme prejudice'. Telos: So would it follow that Gurdjieff, like Soloviev, was an alcoholic -- as Oscar Ichazo suggests? JM: Did Gurdjieff ever drink too much in youth? Far too much? I daresay he did occasionally. He was a man, not the Little Lord Fauntleroy of Brook's film of Meetings. 'If you go on a spree go the whole hog including the postage.' But anything remotely resembling alcoholism? No! No! No! My Soloviev parallelism should not be extrapolated mechanistically. Gurdjieff's self-eviscerating confession in the Prologue to the Life is Only Real Then, When "I Am" does not mention abuse of alcohol . . .. Well, Gurdjieff will never lack calumniators to multiply ignoble accusations; that is part of the inevitable play of forces. He foresaw it, even courted it. Telos: Well, now that the book is behind you, how do you see the bigger picture of Gurdjieff today?
JM: A difficult question! In 'situating' Gurdjieff one actually situates one's self. I suppose Pierre Schaeffer's ironic predictions are variously coming true, aren't they -- Gurdjieff as scarecrow, old fossil, Pope, philosopher. So the bigger picture is kaleidoscopic and not without some very positive facets . . .. But what a down-market picture frame! -- all that New Age spiritual candy-floss; all that indulgent wiseacring about 'The Fourth Way'; all that endlessly salable mish-mash of recycled tradition; and, nowadays, all those tone-deaf sociological papers. Gurdjieff is surely not that. He is something far more elemental. Telos: Is there any particular presentation of Gurdjieff which makes your blood boil? JM: How did you guess? Each time I hear him called 'charlatan' negative emotion surges. The literati who libel Gurdjieff, themselves glisten with fraudulence; their critique has no hinterland; occasionally they cannot even spell his name. He 'had their number' of course -- only read his introduction to Meetings. Nevertheless it hurts that some promising youngsters first encounter 'Gurdjieff' only in spiteful caricature . . .. So how shall we, his 'grandsons', intelligently answer his call: 'I need soldiers who will fight for me and the New World'? I stress the word intelligently. Telos: How do you see Gurdjieff 's teaching -- especially in this period of history? JM: As a very good thing: providential, potent, and perennially true . . .. But would your rider admit some local variation, I wonder? The history of San Anselmo is not the history of Sarajevo. Is Gurdjieff the avatar of awakening subsumable to the 'American dream'? Perhaps this becomes your closest question? I am no Alistair Cooke but I suspect that America's social orthodoxies squarely contradict Gurdjieff's. Convince me by textual reference, if you can, that Gurdjieff stands for democracy, progress, egalitarianism, feminism, and gay rights. Despite the exceptional trust which he placed in a handful of dedicated women pupils, first and foremost Mine de Salzmann, the fact remains that the whole of Beelzebub contains not a single significant female character; in Meetings there is only Vitvitskaïa. And what has your star-spangled Political Correctness got to do with the man who deliberately jumped on people's favorite corns?... So what are you planning to do- revalue your values or revalue his? Telos: Then the chief threat to Gurdjieff's teaching today is . . . what? JM: Who can say? The real external threat may still lurk in ambush. My immediate concern -- and I am deeply concerned -- is with an internal danger, you could call it a dialectical danger. Telos: A dialectical danger? Define it. JM: Unconscious revisionism; unconscious domestication; a strange new 'orthodoxy'. Just now I rashly hinted at your 'Americanisation' of Gurdjieff. Let me promptly admit that we in the London mainstream groups seem in an equal galosh. When I entered the Work in 1956, we received a recognizably Gurdjieffian teaching based unapologetically on effort and impelling one towards individuation -- 'self-perfection in the sense of being' . . .. Today, by contrast, we receive a quasi-mystical doctrine of illuminism heavily reliant on supernal grace and tending to the annihilation of individuality. Gurdjieff, the man, is seldom mentioned; his cosmology is never mentioned.. . . This is a big, big difference and what increasingly chills my blood is that virtually no-one seems to notice it. Telos: Surely this is a local anomaly. JM: I fervently hope it is a temporary anomaly but it is certainly not a local one. The 'new orthodoxy' emanates from Paris. The French -- by virtue of their wartime contact with Gurdjieff and their palpable 'being' -- enjoy ascendancy throughout Europe; and, I suspect, potently influence America, especially East Coast America. Many people have reason to be grateful for that rich dispensation and do not look beyond it. But there are others -- and I am one of them -- who now hunger to see a fuller scope given again to the historical Gurdjieff and his actual teaching, as set out in Fragments and, above all, in Beelzebub. Time is short. From worldwide correspondence, I can detect with some misgivings the seeds of a reforming 'Protestant' movement within the Work.
Telos: Your scenario carries disquieting implications. If it's accurate, I can appreciate your dilemma. So what would you say generally about today's organizational structure of the Work? JM: Nothing. Telos: Nothing? JM: What can one usefully say? Today's global panorama defies precis; the diversity of groups and splinter groups makes the brain reel. Even when Mme de Salzmann still constituted a centrum, organizational structures were at sixes and sevens riddled with contradictions, special cases, regional variations, bits of fossilized history; and, dare one add, permeated by nepotism.. . . A pluperfect organizational structure? Did Gurdjieff himself license it? Perhaps we are more realistic to see the Work as a living organism -- healthy in parts, sclerotic in parts; spitefully plagued by colorful little parasites; vulnerable, breathing, growing; browsing on fresh generations of seekers, sloughing off layers of defectors, ingesting the honored dead.. . . Yes, a very mysterious organism moving forward through time, slowly gathering momentum; and -- I cannot deny it -- excreting a dubious secondary literature to which I have contributed. Telos: Yes, since you say it, our literature is amazingly mixed and must give the public a mixed impression. How do you see the Work's 'outer face'?
JM: I am tempted to reply: 'A microscope is necessary!' Gurdjieff's very name seems to stick in the throats of some of those best qualified to speak it. What is the mainstream Work vehicle called in Washington, D.C. -not 'The Gurdjieff Foundation of Washington'. Until very recently it was the same droll story even in Paris. Thanks be, of course, for occasional overt efforts like Peter Brook's film and the 'Driscoll' bibliography. Very good. Yet, by and large, I question if our master's paradigm of reciprocal feeding, his emphasis on a way in life has been sufficiently translated into any Gurdjieffian 'Outreach'. So often we seem inbred, introverted, self-immured, self-regarding -- solemn little angels in rapt concentration on becoming Archangels. By contrast, flamboyant 'Work' pretenders -- the Shah-Gold-Cox-Burton- Chicoine-Ichazo species -- blare out their megaphone self-advertisements. And over-confident academics increasingly trade theoretical evaluations which are necessarily imbalanced and sometimes downright preposterous... Altogether it is far from a healthy situation. Telos: No indeed. But all the Work's problems today cannot be blamed on outside forces... Confession time: what about the Work's blind spots? JM: [pause]... Oh dear. I particularly feared this question. A blind spot is necessarily bigger in the eye of Tyrannosaurus Rex than in a mouse. The gratitude, respect, even awe, I feel for Mme de Salzmann, after decades in her groups, falls short of according her Papal infallibility. Her blind spot when, in the mid-50s, she sanctioned and instigated New York's covert bowdlerisation of Beelzebub seems commensurate with her scale -immense. Today we grapple with its results: the irreparable deformation of Gurdjieff's Legominism and the polarization of the English-speaking Work. Judging by letters still pouring in to me, this event has struck the Work like the comet Kondoor, creating an asphyxiating stink; yet Gurdjieff does not condemn the 'unforseeingness' and miscalculation of Sacred individuals, and nor should we. All our energies should now be dedicated to restoring to unchallenged pre-eminence the 1950 text, written and approved by Gurdjieff himself. Working with slender resources, Annie Lou Staveley and her Oregon group are spearheading this endeavor. Others too, like the Nyland people at Chardavogne-Barn, are trying what they can. It is savagely ironical that the full weight of 'orthodoxy', of The Gurdjieff Foundations, is bestowed on the other side... Those whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad.
Telos: Is it possible that Mme de Salzmann's approval of the revising of Beelzebub was meant as a 'defensive action'? You mention before, for example, how at odds many of Gurdjieff 's societal ideas appear to be when contrasted to the new format ideas of egalitarianism, feminism, gay rights and the like which are shaping today's world view, and whose hidden intent is to completely overturn the values and perceptions of the past (a la Guénon's "reversal of values"). Is the revision, in essence, a retreat to more secret and secure ground in face of today's neo- barbarians? JM: An answer of real dimensionality would require an entire book! Your apologetic is decidedly ingenious but personally I can't swallow it. The new Beelzebub's un-Gurdjieffian emollience is not ideological but stylistic; it panders not to debased societal norms but debased comprehension thresholds. The rationale of its editors -- as trumpeted in Parabola -- is that they have made 'the reading smoother; the material seem lighter, more approachable'. Hence the 'ground' of the bowdlerised edition, far from being 'more secret and secure' is in practice more exposed and vulnerable to neobarbarian trespass. In the reduction of our sacred text to a dilettante or lumpen- Gurdjieffian comprehension level, Gurdjieff 's deeply meditated cadences and nuances, which have nourished generations of his faithful pupils, have been junked. Of course I have no personal animus against the team of bon ton New York editors responsible, but how I wish I could detect in them the tiniest shred of remorse or even self- questioning. On the contrary, they offer the extraordinary rationale that they are 'genuinely distinguished'. I desperately hope that our younger pupils, Gurdjieff's 'grandchildren', will awake to active mentation. Let each of them take it as a Work task to sight and study the Oregon group's telling 'Protest' against the revision. Let them voice in group, bookshops, libraries and universities a calm but unapologetic demand for the restoration of the authentic text... Nothing less than the rescue of Gurdjieff's profoundest Legominism is now at stake.
Telos: Well at least we have tempted you into a strong value-judgment. So imagine you were suddenly put in change of the whole Work. What would you say are the necessary next steps? JM: A five year plan! For that you would have to ask Michel de Salzmann; only he can empower aspirations on quite this scale; only he has the lateral and vertical connections. Despite his staggering weight of group responsibilities, he has courageously embarked on a rolling program of international Work conferences... His avowed aims cohesion, reconciliation, working together -- are positive to a fault. Yet will it not be a fool's bargain if fraternity is purchased at the cost of jettisoning the historical Gurdjieff and his actual teaching -- psychological and cosmological? Such is precisely my fear. The unity of a lingering, shared silence, of an intermingled Pentecostal attention, is immaculate, unassailable. But a unity challenged and proved in the arena of manifestation; a unity with a doctrinal and methodological spine; a unity which prevails beyond the airport departure lounge -- that is another thing altogether. Telos: Thank you for your time. There is plenty of food for thought here. Any final advice? JM: No, Polonius gave good advice and look what happened to him... It would be a gross impertinence for James Moore to add anything to Gurdjieff's Obligolnian Strivings. Already we are rich beyond the dreams of avarice; our good luck is almost absurd. We have life; we have the earth; we have each other. We have a Sacred Book; we have the Movements and the music. Above all we have a master so near to us in history and compassion that we can almost touch him. The Work is waiting for workers -- that is all. |