Read an Excerpt
SHADOWS OF HEAVEN
By Paul Beekman Taylor Samuel Weiser, Inc.
Copyright © 1998 Paul Beekman Taylor
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60925-406-3
CHAPTER 1
Memory and Design
Expand the fields, the specializations, The limitations of occupation, The definition of what we are That gain fractions and lose wholes— I am of the field of being, We are beings.
—"The Blue Meridian"
According to what a man is called, so will people respond to him.
—Essentials
The subtitle for this book, Gurdjieff and Toomer, suggests that I am scanning the direct relations between two men. Yet Nathan Jean Toomer spent little time in the physical company of Georgii Ivanovich Gurdjieff between 1924, when he saw him for the first time, and 1935, when he saw him last. Nonetheless, during that period, Toomer spent the greater part of his energies in the service of Gurdjieff, teaching, raising funds, and organizing study groups. In fact, he considered himself attached to Gurdjieff until 1939, when he finally turned away from his master, and in 1953, only three years after Gurdjieff's death, he reengaged himself in the Gurdjieff work in New York City. Toomer's life with Gurdjieff is, indeed, a major topic of this book, but my title alludes as well to intricate connective relationships that the association between the two men engendered. One strand is Toomer's relationship with my mother, Edith Taylor, and another is his relationship with me, both of which grew out of his participation in the Gurdjieff work. Other strands in the fabric of this story include those experiences of my mother with Gurdjieff which Jean Toomer influenced directly as well as indirectly, and my own brief participation in Gurdjieff's world, which my mother encouraged. Therefore, although I have assembled the text of this book, I am more reporter than author, for the pages that follow record many voices, among which the most telling are those of Toomer, Gurdjieff, and Edith Taylor. Behind the scenes, the intertwining relationships of these three people were orchestrated and mediated by the English critic and editor, A[lfred] R[ichard] Orage, and his second wife, Jessie Dwight Orage. They are part of Toomer's story, while my voice is but a narrative frame.
My own intent in writing this book is to understand how Toomer has shaped the lives and thoughts of people. This effort, as I discovered quite young, is necessarily shaped in turn by the ways in which Gurdjieff shaped Toomer's and my own life and thought, both directly and indirectly. My own written recollections of Toomer were begun long ago, with a brief record of my life with him. I found then that I could appreciate much of Toomer's teaching through the filter of my experience with Gurdjieff in my late teens, when the moral aspects of Gurdjieff's teaching were already as familiar to me as Toomer's. I hesitate to qualify either man in any banal sense as guru, thinker, writer, or "teacher," because my views of both men are stubbornly bound to my own experience with each of them. It is enough for me to say at the outset that both Toomer and Gurdjieff were concerned with the fate of humanity, and both dedicated their talents to the task of making others aware of their own capacities to change things for the better.
As I pursued my quest to understand the bonds of feeling and thought between these men, and between them and myself, I discovered my mother's relations with Gurdjieff in France between 1923 and 1935, and with Toomer between 1923 and his death. Alfred Richard Orage was an important advocate for Toomer and my mother tomitigate their unstable stances in the Gurdjieff work. I retain only a vague image of Orage, who died just before my 4th birthday, but his name and his ideas became known to me through his family and his New York friends, who populated my youthful environment. Jessie Orage was my mother's best friend and provided moral support during her turbulent involvement with Gurdjieff. The two remained close friends for their entire lives. My own relationships with Toomer and Gurdjieff were prepared by my mother, and the intensity of her earlier involvement with both men shaped their relations with me, as well as with my sister. This book, then, explores the complex inter-relations between Edith Taylor, Jean Toomer, A. R. Orage, Jessie Dwight Orage, and Georgii Ivanovich Gurdjieff. I am what, in French, would be called an insérend: witness, narrator, and occasional participant in their stories.
Toomer, Gurdjieff, and Orage were three of the most extraordinary personalities of the 20th century. Toomer, born in Washington, DC on the day after Christmas in 1894, made his mark on American literature in 1923 with the publication of Cane, a lyrical celebration of the moral and artistic energy of the black in the American South of the early '20s. Georgii Ivanovich Gurdjieff, born sometime between 1866 and 1874 in Alexandropol, Armenia, lived and was educated in Kars, and made his mark in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the second decade of the 20th century as a master of dances and a mystic in possession of secret Asian lore. In 1912, he founded the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, which attracted Western notoriety in 1922, when it was transplanted to a château south of Paris, not far from Fontainebleau. Orage, born in 1873 in the north of England, joined Gurdjieff in France in October 1922, after resigning his post as editor and publisher of The New Age.
In the mid-1920s, all three men became intricately bound to each other in what they called "The Work," consisting of mastering, living, and teaching a psychological and philosophical system of self-development to which each had committed, for different lengths of time, their full intellectual and moral energies. My mother, born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1896, met all three men within a short span of time between February 1922 and the beginning of 1924. She visited Gurdjieff at his château, the Prieuré, sometime in the winter of 1922-1923, though she had seen and heard him in London on the eve of Saint Valentine's Day, 1922. She probably saw Orage on the same occasion, but she recalled talking with him for the first time after he spoke in New York City on January 2, 1924, and she saw him continually over the next eleven years in France, England, and the United States. Her bond with him was tightened by a growing friendship with his second wife, Jessie Dwight Orage, who died in 1983 at the age of 82.
When we were very young, my sister and I heard from our mother that she had met Jean Toomer with Waldo Frank on a train, traveling along the Hudson River sometime late in 1923. She saw him at a distance at Orage's lectures in January 1924, and both Orage and Toomer were with Jessie Dwight at Gurdjieff's Institute in the summer of 1924, when Gurdjieff suffered an automobile accident that almost cost him his life. In the spring of 1926, Edith and Jean began a love affair that originated in New York, continued in France, and returned to New York, ending in the late winter of 1927. They remained close friends for the rest of their lives. In late 1928, Edith bore Gurdjieff a daughter. Seven years later, she moved to the United States, where she placed her daughter and a later-born son with friends. I was sent to live with Toomer, his 3-year old daughter, and his second wife, Marjorie Content, first in New York City and later in Bucks County, PA. Edith depended upon Jean as a moral support and counselor for the next thirty years. Though she told me more than once that Jean was the only man she had "really" loved, she had said this of other men at different times.
As infants, my sister Eve and I lived for irregular periods of time at Le Prieuré des Basses Loges at Avon, near Fontainebleau, where Gurdjieff operated his Institute. We visited him frequently in Paris, where he continued his teaching after the sale of the château in 1934, and we were with him often during the last year of his life, from December 1948 through September 1949. Orage had died in 1934, but he was alive in conversations through his wife, children, and former pupils, whom we saw continually during World War II. By the time I finished my university studies, I had read whatever of his writings were available in local libraries.
Toomer and Gurdjieff were the most imposing male figures in my life and the two most influential among the many men in my mother's life. She loved the first and bore a child to the second, but, curiously, though she claimed to have loved many men, she never admitted even token affection for Gurdjieff, for whom she repeatedly expressed, according to the occasion, scorn, amused detachment, or distant respect. "He was not a nice man," intoned slowly and gravely, seems to sum up her considered judgment. Both men shaped my moral and intellectual growth, though they touched me, as they had my mother, in very different ways. Jean Toomer had a direct, central, and major role in my education. I knew and loved him as my own father. His image and voice loom and boom large in my memory. Throughout the almost thirty years since his death, I have probed the depth of his impression upon me, while I have both wondered about and questioned the inextricable bond between his teaching and the character and thought of Gurdjieff. My personal experience with Gurdjieff and Toomer often belied the stories others told about them, particularly those of my mother, who had been intimate with both. When I was in my early teens during the war years, I listened as many visitors to our house delighted in shocking, amusing, and amazing a credulous and impressionable boy with their anecdotes about Gurdjieff, "G," Georgivanich, the "Old Man." At the time, I had no reason to wonder why so little was ever said about Toomer in the same company, because I did not know then that Toomer had anything to do with Gurdjieff. My mother was reserved in her conversations about him, even to my sister and myself. Only many years later did she situate herself and Jean together at the Institute.
Over the years since then, I have read, more often out of curiosity than intellectual purpose, many personal accounts of Gurdjieff and Orage, methodical expositions of their teaching, and some of the many critical biographical and literary studies of Jean Toomer. None of these has significantly altered my personal appreciation of their combined influence on my own thought, though I have often regretted some of the things written and said about both that appear to me misinformed and unjustly demeaning. Toomer and Gurdjieff have been particular targets of scandal-mongers and sensationalists, but none of that has eroded my personal image of either of them, though it has incited me to express publicly my own feelings here. Concerning Toomer, there are three aspects I have struggled to reconcile: the man I lived with, the one others saw and spoke of, and the one he envisioned himself to be in his writings and conversation. Perhaps I should add a fourth—the Toomer I now see retrospectively—but I cannot dislodge this figure from the one who impressed me as a young boy.
There are numerous recollections of Gurdjieff, Orage, and Toomer in circulation today. Many of Gurdjieff's early followers and Orage's New York group have written personal accounts of them, though I know of none from Toomer's Chicago group except in a book which Fritz Peters wrote of his experiences with Gurdjieff, in which he does not even mention Toomer's name. More recently, critical biographies and studies of Toomer and Gurdjieff have appeared by scholars who did not know either man personally. Many of these are based on careful and sound research, but the frequent unreliability of sources and the apparent necessity to accept dubious reports are unfortunate and inevitable failings common to them all. In Feet of Clay, Anthony Storr has denounced Gurdjieff as a dangerous charlatan, and Frank Kermode, an otherwise cautious critic, in a recent review of Norman Mailer's gospel of Christ, says that some gurus are wrong and others are dangerous; Gurdjieff is both wrong and dangerous. Earlier, James Webb reviewed Gurdjieff's relations with a number of his illustrious followers, including Orage and Toomer; Peter Washington traced Gurdjieff's part in the shaping of the "New Age"; James Moore has scanned Gurdjieff's career with scrupulous detail. The Kerman and Eldridge biography of Toomer documents a gap between his racial identity as an Afro-American and the many roles he played in his public and private life. Toomer's daughter and I are both saddened by the suggestion in that book that he failed in his role as husband, father, and teacher. Arnold Rampersad's review of the book in the New York Times assumes from the portrait that Toomer was a negligent husband to Marjorie Content, who apparently "never took on ... domestic chores in recompense; instead, he indulged himself with self-serving beliefs about the natural inferiority of women, and took their money. He seems to have demoralized his only child." If this is the impression given by what is considered Toomer's definitive biography, the truth of Jean Toomer is grotesquely distorted. Though his daughter, Margot [Toomer] Latimer, prefers to keep her own memories from public view, my recollections and research would temper this impression and restore the image of Jean Toomer to just proportions.
Rudolph Byrd has written a rich, sympathetic, and impressive study of Toomer's writing in the context of Gurdjieffian ideas, as Robert Jones had done before him in his introduction to Toomer's collected poems. Both show that Gurdjieff did not so much introduce Toomer to a new view of himself in the world as he nurtured and strengthened seeds of thought already present in Toomer's childhood. There is perhaps more to be written by those who knew both Gurdjieff and Toomer personally at the end of their productive lives. I am one of these. Though I was an indifferent student of Gurdjieff's system, I was and remain attentive to Toomer's ideas and to the part Orage and Gurdjieff had in shaping them. The image of the man and the echo of his words have worked deep into the grain of my being. I will be richly rewarded if I can balance some of the weight of unflattering portraits of Toomer, while complementing and correcting something of the public record of Gurdjieff. In a sense, then, this book is an adjunct to Moore's and Kerman and Eldridge's excellent biographies.
Though I have lived on the periphery of Gurdjieff's circle and within Toomer's, my own story is ancillary to the fuller and richer experience of my mother with both men. Her scant record sheds light on Toomer's life as a "pupil" of Gurdjieff's and her own as a sadly abused member of Gurdjieff's clan. Important to both stories are Orage's relations with both men and Jessie Orage's detailed observations of these three and her husband between 1926 and 1931, when Orage saw Gurdjieff for the last time. For those concerned with the reasons for the break between Gurdjieff and Orage, Jessie's and Orage's notes are an invaluable testimony to a tense competition for Orage's commitment and affection between family and Gurdjieff. Orage's communications with Toomer and my mother make quite clear the character of Toomer's collaboration with Orage, both for and against Gurdjieff's declared interests. These convergent views of Toomer and Gurdjieff together reveal much that has not been known and expose much which has been misrepresented in published accounts.
I owe my reader a word of caution. As both observer and actor in the merger of recollection, my own point of view is slanted. Despite what I may think of Gurdjieff's ideas now, I had little conscious use for them almost fifty years ago, and Gurdjieff remains a mystery to me. I supposed then that he had little use for me. If he befriended me out of deference to his connection with my mother and sister, he had little if any obvious reason to tolerate me, though he was known to encourage children's potential. He accused me more than once of being an unhealthy element among his pupils, not so much because I appeared to him, perhaps, as a skeptic who rarely accorded him the respect he must have thought his due, but because I distracted other young people from the "work." Nonetheless, he was extraordinarily patient and generous with me. The case was different with Toomer, because I was from the first moment alert to his every gesture. Every moment with him strengthened the emotional bond between us. I loved him as a father; his home was my haven. Whatever his motives for taking me into his care and confidence, I responded to his person and to his teaching because I found myself in a domestic context in which I was led to exult in the kinds of human contact he nurtured. Because of the space we shared and the intense magnetic power of the man at its center, even if the sense of his words often slipped by me, it was inevitable that I should absorb his ideas.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from SHADOWS OF HEAVEN by Paul Beekman Taylor. Copyright © 1998 Paul Beekman Taylor. Excerpted by permission of Samuel Weiser, Inc..
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