Notes of Jane Heap

Privately published in 1983, this extraordinary document has now been reissued by A. L. Stavely, a student of Jane Heap's during World War II. Before speaking of the book, first a sketch of the life of this remarkable woman who in the Gurdjieff pantheon is in some ways most reminiscent of Vitvitskaia. Jane Heap was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1887. Her father was the warden of a lunatic asylum. She experienced a deep sense of isolation and loneliness: "There were no books to read in this place except the great volumes in the Patients' Library and I had read them all," she remembers. "There was no one to ask about anything. There was no way to make a connection with 'life.' Out there in the world they were working and thinking; here we were still. Very early I had given up everyone except the Insane."

In such an atmosphere she found the one thing that could take her out of this world—art. "Who had made the Pictures, the books and the music in the world?... And how could you tell the makers from just people?" she asked herself in wonder. Later, inspired by Sarah Bernhardt, she resolved, "Some day I would go to Paris. Other people had got that far. I would go on living for that."

Little is known of her education or early life, but in Chicago, 1916, at the age of thirty-six, Jane Heap's lifeline crossed with that of twenty-seven-year-old Margaret Anderson. An emotional woman of great beauty with a strong sense of independence, Margaret Anderson would say of herself—"I am no man's wife, no man's delightful mistress, and I will never, never, never, be a mother." In her Jane found a friend whose interests in art matched her own. "There is no one in the modern world whose conversation I haven't sampled, I believe," wrote Margaret Anderson fourteen years later, "except Picasso's. So I can't say that it isn't better than Jane Heap's. But I doubt it in spite of his reputation."

Margaret convinced Jane to help her with her two-year-old magazine The Little Review, which exalted the role of the artist as a creator and savior of culture. It became the literary magazine of its time publishing such writers as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and James Joyce. The two co-editors not only cut a unique image for the magazine but themselves as well. Margaret, being as one man put it, "one of the handsomest [women] I have ever seen, very high-spirited, very courageous and very fine." Jane, on the other hand, was mannish to an extreme. According to Margaret, she had "handsome features, strongly cut, rather like those of Oscar Wilde in his only beautiful photograph." Others put it less delicately. Said one: "She's a full-blown lesbian case." As Jane told C.S. Nott, "I'm not really a woman." It was a cause of much depression and thoughts of suicide.

In 1922 Margaret Anderson, no longer believing art as salvation, withdrew from active participation in The Little Review, and fell into a depression that led to a nervous breakdown. Meeting Georgette Leblanc, former mistress of Maurice Maeterlinck, the two formed a relationship and sought God.

In January 1923, Anderson and Heap first learned of Gurdjieff through a lecture at an avant garde bookstore, the Sunwise Turn. Both women became life-long students of Gurdjieff. In the late 1920s both women lived in France. Gurdjieff asked Jane to lead a group. It met irregularly at Jane's apartment in Montparnasse until 1932. Among the group, besides Margaret and Georgette, were Kathryn Hulme and Solita Solano who was to become Gurdjieff's secretary. In late October 1936, Gurdjieff had Jane Heap go to London to take over C.S. Nott's group. After the war in 1946, she brought her pupils to Gurdjieff. She continued to teach in London until her death in 1964.

Though blessed with a fine mind and the skills of a professional writer and editor, Jane Heap published nothing about the teaching to which she gave her life. The Notes of Jane Heap is simply the notes of a dedicated student's experience with the Work. But these are the observations of a mature seeker who brooks no compromise and keenly investigates self-remembering and self-observation and their hindrances. The reader who does not have "hands-on" experience of the Work may have to stretch at times, but for those who have struggled to see the person as well as past the person, the book offers insights worthy of a latter-day Vitvitskaia. Here are just two gems: "Yes and No—Try the taste. This is No. This always says No to the work. You have your preparation—you have said yes to the best of your ability. For the moment it was sincere you wished it—but that process has begun and it says No. The yes was forgotten. There has been no realization at the moment that anybody was saying No. The No is to make the Yes remembered. No and Yes have to become more inseparable—the one without the other is not profitable. I can have a moment of wonderful Yes—I know that moment will not give me a very great deal. Yes without No—the angel without the devil means impotence. Both are the beginning of man. That is very difficult to remember. It is absolutely different from anything ever experienced. If it were not so—it would not lead you to something—it would be romance—fallacious." Lastly: "I am my burden—this is what I am meant to carry."