7

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff: A Messenger Between Two Worlds

Anderson and Heap were clearly intrigued by the highly eclectic spiritual paths followed by the women published in the Little Review. They soon found a teacher who promulgated a complex but unified source of wisdom that made sense to many artists and writers in the early twentieth century. In addition, a series of financial and personal setbacks for both women set the stage for a new direction in their lives. They were exhausted and questioning their mission of introducing the finest of modern arts and letters to the American public. As Anderson saw it, the Ulysses trial was simply another nail in the coffin of her brazen enterprise—the magazine she had started a mere six years earlier. If Americans could not appreciate their herculean efforts to educate them, so be it; it was time to fold. Yet the Little Review would survive for another eight years and became increasingly radical as the decade of the twenties proceeded. Part of that success was due to their introduction to George Gurdjieff, who initially provided a spiritual school that introduced new departures in critiquing modernism.

By 1921 Anderson concluded that the Little Review had run its course. The oppressive combination of financial worries, the Ulysses trial, and the deterioration of her relationship with Heap reinforced her decision to withdraw from her creation after seven years. John Quinn had revoked his Little Review subsidy, and the financier and art patron Otto Kahn’s promise of four thousand dollars evaporated, creating “a disaster” that mystified Anderson.¹ She proposed a plan to raise five thousand dollars by appealing to one thousand Little Review subscribers to donate five dollars each. It was unsuccessful. The journal then appeared in double rather than monthly issues, resulting in only four numbers from May of 1920 to March of 1921. The Autumn 1921 issue was reorganized as a quarterly with an increase in price from forty cents to two dollars for a single issue and from four dollars to seven dollars for a yearly subscription. The winter recession of 1921–22 undoubtedly aggravated hard times.

Anderson felt it was appropriate to end the Little Review with Ulysses since it was “the epoch’s supreme articulation.” Much to her surprise, Heap’s response was “staggering resistance.”² Anderson’s version of the disagreement states that she had grown weary of the tension between them, but Heap argued that this very friction gave her the inspiration to create. That Anderson was genuinely distressed cannot be in dispute. In Thirty Years, she wrote, “I didn’t know what to do about life—so I did a nervous breakdown that lasted many months.”³ Years later, Anderson clarified that she did not have “a real nervous breakdown, I exaggerated slightly in Thirty Years’,” but that she was “exhausted” by her efforts to encourage Heap to write.⁴

There is evidence that Heap was spreading rumors that Anderson had suffered an actual nervous collapse. In July 1921, she wrote to Hart Crane saying that Anderson “was crazy.”⁵ As Crane wrote a friend, “It looks like the Little Review is done for, and perhaps poor Mart. Doesn’t the way jh puts it make you feel rather uneasy. I wish I knew more details, whether it is mere rumpus that is all the matter, or whether Mart Anderson has worn herself out in vain assaults against the decision against her in the Ulysses trial. I wish I could get in touch with her direct, but as she hasn’t answered any letter for the last six weeks she probably cannot write.”⁶ Crane’s comments indicate that the strained relationship between the two women was public knowledge and that he felt he could not accept Heap’s word concerning Anderson’s health. “I happen to know too much inside information on the two women’s mutual relationships to feel certain of any direct truth about Mart from jh,” he wrote Gorham Munson. “If you hear anything about them or their plans,” he continued, “please let me know. You know my admiration and (yes) affection for Margaret Anderson is very strong and I detest nothing more than such as this thing jh just sent.”⁷ A few months later, Crane again wrote Munson stating he had received a postcard from Heap saying Anderson had recovered her “sanity.”⁸

There was perhaps another reason that Anderson felt on the mend. In 1920 she met the French opera singer Georgette Leblanc. That year, the former star of the Paris stage arrived in New York and began a relationship with Anderson that lasted for over twenty years until Leblanc died in 1941. Leblanc was well known when she came to New York following the termination of an eighteen-year love affair with the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. She had made her professional opera debut at the Opéra-Comique in 1893 with notable performances in Bruneau’s L’attaque du moulin and in Bizet’s Carmen. She began her collaboration with Maeterlinck in 1896, often playing characters written for her. From 1912 to 1913, LeBlanc sang at both the Manhattan Opera House in New York and the Boston Opera Company, where she sang the role of Mélisande in Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande, based on Maeterlinck’s play. She also acted in Marcel L’Herbier’s 1924 experimental film L’Inhumaine (The Inhuman Woman).

Leblanc had many admirers for her unusual beauty, intelligence, and abilities as a conversationalist. She was openly bisexual even during her long relationship with Maeterlinck. Patrick Mahoney, Maeterlinck’s biographer, pointed to a “clearly autobiographical” novel written by Leblanc, Choice for Life, in which the protagonist reveals her preference for women over men. Leblanc, wrote Mahoney, was “noticeable to others … especially the way she would acquire ascendancy over some attractive young woman and retained it until she decided to give it up.” Mahoney also repeated a story told to him by a British woman who was a houseguest of Maeterlinck and Leblanc at their Normandy chateau. After everyone retired for the evening, the woman received visits from both hosts who “separately paid calls by knocking at her door and asking permission for her favors.”⁹ Leblanc came to New York after Maeterlinck left her and married a younger woman. Anderson and Leblanc were introduced by their mutual friend Allen Tanner; Anderson was thunderstruck, and their long relationship began. Anderson tended towards hyperbole when describing the various women in her life. Still, her account of her first impressions of Leblanc indicates she firmly believed their meeting was pre-ordained. In The Fiery Fountains, Anderson wrote, “We cannot have met by chance, Georgette and I, since we knew at once that we were to join hands and advance through life together. Ah, I said, when I first saw her marvelous mystic face: this is the land I have been seeking, I left home long ago to discover it.”¹⁰

Georgette Leblanc was entirely unlike Jane Heap; lavishly feminine, she cut a figure of glamour that was the antithesis of Heap’s masculine countenance. Her friend Jean Cocteau described her poetically as “the model for a lyric saint—one of those strange great beings who move through the crowd, headless and armless, propelled only by the power of their soul, as immutable as the Victory Samothrace.”¹¹ Where Heap was acerbic and depressed, Leblanc exuded gentleness and optimism. Anderson wrote, “To Georgette there was no human conflict, between friends, which couldn’t be resolved by a glance between understanding eyes.”¹² One reason for Leblanc’s natural sense of tolerance of others may have had to do with her age; when they met, she was fifty-one years old—twenty years older than Anderson. This age difference was something Anderson asserted the two “never thought of.”¹³

Heap predictably was not happy with Anderson’s new relationship. Anderson complained that Heap was “spreading nasty rumors” about Leblanc around New York, causing mutual friends to turn against her. Determined to start a new life, Anderson wrote Tanner, “Beginning with Jane I’m finished with the whole lot of them.”¹⁴ In the summer of 1922, Anderson and Leblanc escaped New York to a rented house in Bernardsville, New Jersey. Staying with them was Tanner and the modernist composer George Antheil, soon to be famous for his score for the avant-garde film Ballet Mécanique. Also accompanying them was Leblanc’s personal assistant, a woman named Monique, a former Belgian schoolteacher who was so entranced by Leblanc’s performances that she came to work for her, and stayed until Leblanc’s death.

Heap would soon take command of both the Little Review and other aspects of Anderson’s responsibilities. Anderson’s sister Lois, her companion for the summer idyll on Lake Michigan, was a divorced mother of two sons, Tom and Fritz Peters. Plagued by mental illness for significant stretches of her life, Lois had turned the children over to Anderson and Heap, who legally adopted them. Fritz, who later wrote of his unorthodox upbringing, stated that Anderson flitted in and out of their lives after commencing her relationship with LeBlanc. The boys were supervised mainly by Heap. This may seem like an odd decision by Heap, who had never exhibited a maternal side, but her commitment during this period of the boys’ s lives was firm.¹⁵

Although their romantic relationship had ended, Anderson and Heap made their first trip to Paris together in the spring of 1923. Anderson wrote, “May 1923 was one of those springs where everyone was in Paris.” She described the famous debut of Cocteau’s Les Maries de la Tour Eiffel and the disapproving boos he received, as well as other avant-garde happenings.

Juan Gris was making beautiful dolls. Gertrude Stein was buying Andre Masson. Man Ray was photographing pins and combs, sieves, and shoe trees. Ferdinand Léger was beginning his cubists’ cinema, Ballet Mécanique, with music by Antheil. The Boeuf-sur-le-Toit (names by Cocteau) had a negro saxophonist, and Milhaud and Jean Weiner were beginning to worship American jazz. The Comte de Beaumont presented his Soirées de Paris, including Cocteau’s Roméo et Juliet with Yvonne George. The Dadaists gave performances at the Théâtre Michel where the rioting was so successful that André Breton broke Tzara’s arm. Ezra Pound made an opera of Villon’s poetry and sung in the old Salle Pleyel (where Chopin fainted long ago). Yes, everyone was in Paris that wonderful spring.¹⁶

They visited with several past and present contributors to the journal who were now expatriates. Both My Thirty Years’ War and Heap’s letters chronicled their meetings with Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Constantin Brâncuşi, Tristan Tzara, Gertrude Stein, Cocteau, André Gide, and Ernest Hemingway, among others. Anderson’s impressions were somewhat harsh toward many of her collaborators. Joyce, Cocteau, and Brâncuşi are all afforded sympathetic treatment, but she was taken aback by Pound and what she described as his nervous and self-conscious behavior. His photographs, she recalled, could not have warned her of his “high Rooseveltian voice” or his “agitation,” which reminded her of “watching a large baby perform its repertoire of physical antics gravely, diffidently, without human responsibility for the performance.”¹⁷ Heap was not much better; she described Hemingway as “a rabbit—white and pink face, soft brown eyes that look at you without blinking. As for his love of boxing and bullfighting—all that thrashing up the ground with his hind legs.”¹⁸

Later that year, Anderson and Heap would soon be thrown from Little Review concerns and personal dramas into the world of mysticism. George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was influencing scores of intellectuals and artists abroad. In 1923 his message came to America, and the two women seized on it with the passion of converts; it was a philosophy and a guru that influenced them for the rest of their lives. They were not alone in the discontent that led them to a seemingly sweeping departure from life as they knew it. The women were very much affected by the political tensions of the moment. The insanity of the Great War and the post war miseries depleted the forces of political rebels. Their fury at the Goldman trial leading to eviction from their home and suppression of “Cantleman’s Spring-mate” left them exhausted and sorrowful. They were among other rebels who began to withdraw from the seemingly ineffectual practice of politics. The social liberalism of the twenties was marred by the ascendency of Republican presidencies, the Scopes and Sacco-Vanzetti trials, and the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan. Political activism was increasingly relegated to the sphere of hopeless earthly concerns that ultimately led nowhere. Or, as James Webb concludes, “an entire milieu was introverting.”¹⁹

Once Heap and Anderson became aware of Gurdjieff and his philosophy, they quickly adopted his principles. While staying at Brookhaven, they read Tertium Organum: The Third Canon of Thought: A Key to the Enigmas of the World by P. D. Ouspensky and concluded that they “had found a contemporary author with a great mind.”²⁰ The book is replete with references to the fourth dimension and the argument that humans must expand their consciousness to advance to even greater heights on the evolutionary scale. Ouspensky, a mathematician, and philosopher, met Gurdjieff in Russia in 1915 and crisscrossed the country during the pre-Revolution turmoil with his small band of followers. His later book In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching details their meeting and is considered one of the best expositions of Gurdjieff’s thought. Tertium Organum was published in 1920, and the following year Ouspensky traveled to London, where he was financially supported by Lady Rothermere.

In London, Ouspensky met A. R. Orage, the editor of the New Age journal and a onetime contributor to the Little Review. Orage became intrigued with Ouspensky’s account of Gurdjieff’s teachings. When Gurdjieff came to London in 1922, Orage accepted his teachings wholeheartedly and served, according to Heap, as a “John the Baptist” for Gurdjieff.²¹ In the fall of 1922, Gurdjieff established the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in France near Fontainebleau-Avon. Orage resigned as editor of the New Age and, along with other followers, moved there from England to immerse himself in Gurdjieff’s teachings. Gurdjieff soon ordered him to go to America, form a group devoted to his teachings, and, not incidentally, recruit interested parties for much-needed cash.

Two circumstances made Orage crucial to Anderson and Heap’s road to Gurdjieff. As editor of the New Age, he was not an unknown quantity. They had corresponded for years, and he had contributed to the Little Review’s 1918 Henry James issue. He had also written sympathetically about the travails of the Little Review’s publication of Ulysses in the New Age. Orage was both a Theosophist and Nietzschean; he had already written two books on Nietzsche, including the first full-length treatment of his thought in English. Orage, Anderson, and Heap had been feasting on the same intellectual and esoteric fodder and were immediate fellow travelers in the Gurdjieffian universe. Once converted, they never looked back.

Gurdjieff has always been a mystery figure to those who have tried to trace his origins and the influences that merged to produce what he called “the Work.” The novelist Henry Miller described him as “a cross between the Gnostics of old and the latter day Dadaists.”²² His “Fourth Way” groups were somewhat similar to other associations such as Yeats’s Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in that they emphasized the transfer of ancient knowledge via mentors who had already absorbed it. Gurdjieff’s followers have historically been reluctant to advertise his thought publicly and much of his esoteric philosophy has been passed down verbally within groups. The exact date of his birth has been disputed, with accounts speculating it was anywhere from 1866 to 1877. He was born to an Armenian mother and Greek father on the border of Russia and Turkey, in present-day Armenia. In his autobiography, Meetings with Remarkable Men, he tells us that as a young man he traveled extensively throughout the world with a small group of compatriots called “Seekers of Truth,” traversing Europe, the Middle East, India, and Tibet, searching for esoteric knowledge taught by masters of the “Hidden Wisdom.” The Seekers, he wrote, encountered the Sarmoung Brotherhood order, an ancient monastery founded in 2500 BC on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. While Gurdjieff criticized Theosophy, scholars have noted striking parallels between his purported background and those of Helen Blavatsky, who also claimed far and wide travels leading to connection with the “Masters of Ancient Wisdom.” Both also engaged in what David C. Lane calls “genealogical disassociation,” deliberately making it difficult to verify their supposed origins, travels, and the adepts they claimed to have met.²³ Although both philosophies were offshoots of the occult revival in the late nineteenth century and Western esotericism, one significant difference is that while Blavatsky claimed to be in touch with the Masters, Gurdjieff insinuated that he was one of them.

The Fourth Way refers to Gurdjieff’s belief that the three traditional paths to self-realization—the ways of the Monk, Yogi, and Fakir, corresponding to the emotional, intellectual, and physical centers of human beings—were destined to fail. If properly attained, his way, the Fourth Way, incorporated all the elements of mind, body, and emotion, making it the only course for a genuine and thorough transformation. At its most basic, Gurdjieff’s philosophy states that people in their daily lives function on a level little better than “sleepwalking.” Exercising no absolute freedom, they operate as unconscious automatons throughout life. Crucial to Gurdjieff’s language is the metaphor of the machine. Individuals use their mechanical somnambulism to hide their genuine, authentic personalities; it acts as a buffer to conceal their essence. They must work ceaselessly observing their own character to determine the most troubling aspects, the combined effect that keep them imprisoned in this sleeplike state. To do this successfully, individuals must unite in a group under the leadership of a sage who provides directions, including shocks to awaken them. “The Work,” as the Fourth Way is also called, involves a variety of methods including manual labor, dance, and psychological exercise, all of which create friction for pupils that leads to “intentional suffering” and hence “objective consciousness,” Gurdjieff’’s term for the highest level of transformation.²⁴

Gurdjieff’s psychological scheme has nine basic animal “types” people must learn and identify within themselves to understand their essence and purge themselves of the negative traits blocking them from illumination. Gurdjieff himself assigned these animal types to his followers. Each person had an inner and outer animal that described their idiosyncrasies. Anderson’s outer animal was a yak, which she described as “a strong animal capable of killing when angered—going berserk.”²⁵ Her inner animal was a tapeworm, “a lazy animal who seeks a comfortable place for himself and then feeds on other people’s efforts.” What Anderson’s reaction to these labels was when she received them is hard to say, but years later, she described her tapeworm identification as “very true, I’m sure.”²⁶

For both Anderson and Heap, Gurdjieffian principles served as another tool in their search for self-knowledge. It enabled them to take the inventories of one another they had engaged in with psychoanalysis during their Brookhaven discussions to new heights. Gurdjieff undertook a psychological rather than a theoretical approach, similar in method to Anderson and Heap’s idol Nietzsche. As we have seen, one of the reasons Nietzsche had such allure for the two women was his divorce of philosophy from metaphysics—the road to the Superman was through the will to power exhibited by each individual. Like Nietzsche in his will to power or Bergson in his vitalism, Gurdjieff claimed the road to self-realization was through an inner evolution—the conscious work on oneself. Both Nietzsche and Gurdjieff emphatically stated that Seekers must verify their own experiences—not depend on the Master to validate their success. Gurdjieff explicitly told Anderson, “I cannot develop you. I create conditions in which you develop yourself.”²⁷

Gurdjieff used a cosmological scheme to further elucidate his interpretation of human psychology. He argued that there were seven types of cosmoses or stages of evolution related to what he called The Ray of Creation, each based on a musical note determined by the Law of Octaves. The Law of Three were the three forces of “affirming, denying, and reconciling,” similar to the Christian trinity and Hegel’s dialectic. As achieved individually via immersion in the Fourth Way, these processes would lead, Gurdjieff argued, to a collective mass consciousness that would alter the course of the universe—hopefully derailing it from its apparent destructive path.

Theodore Roszak has described Gurdjieff, Blavatsky, and Rudolph Steiner as occult evolutionists who implemented “the first Western effort to ground psychotherapy in the evolutionary image.”²⁸ However, their conception of evolution contained dramatic differences from Darwin’s strict theory. Whereas Darwin saw evolution as mechanical, random, and devoid of creativity, Gurdjieff, Nietzsche, and Bergson reconfigured it as intentional and innovative. As individuals evolve, they connect to the divine mind and can influence the universe. Gurdjieff referenced the Hermetic tradition in his writings; his cosmology reflected the sentiment of “as above, so below” written on the legendary Emerald Tablets of Hermes Trismegistus incorporating the micro (man) and macro (universe) into his teaching. According to Gurdjieff, the tragedy of the cosmos is that only a small group of Seekers will find their way here, as the mass of humanity cares not. The superiority of the Nietzschean Superman that Anderson endorsed in the early years of the Little Review and the creative evolution of Bergson and Pound’s secret society of initiated artists all paved the way to Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff taught that spiritual initiation into his tradition had taken place over the centuries through the prism of art and literature, as revelations had been preserved and handed down in written texts and in the oral traditions of communities and adepts—now Anderson and Heap had a new community with new texts.

Gurdjieff’s writings were collected into three books published after his death under the title All and Everything. In addition to Meetings with Remarkable Men, he also authored Life Is Real, Only Then, When I Am, and Beelzebub’s Tales To His Grandson—An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man. He began his magnum opus, Beelzebub’s Tales, which comes to over twelve hundred pages, in 1924 and completed it four years later. His students, including Anderson and Heap, read chapters aloud while Gurdjieff observed their demeanor and commented on their progress. Heap and Orage were tasked with editing it for publication in 1950, one year after his death, and it is now considered the bible of Gurdjieffian thought. Beelzebub is a banished extraterrestrial returning from exile with his grandson Hassein and faithful servant Ahoon in their spaceship Karnak on their way home to the planet Karatas. Due to youthful rebellions, Beelzebub was exiled by God (His Endlessness) to Mars, which he leaves on six occasions to visit Earth where he observes the trials of the “three centered beings.” These sojourns are hundreds of years apart, taking the protagonist to Atlantis, ancient Babylon, Afghanistan in the seventeenth century, Russia during the Revolution, and America in 1922. Beelzebub is considered a hero because he tries to help the three centered earthlings fulfill their cosmic destiny. His Endlessness rewards him by terminating his banishment and returning him to his home planet in the center of the universe. On the way, Beelzebub relates the lessons of his sojourn to his grandson in hope that he will understand the composition of the universe and feel compassion for the foibles of humanity.

Beelzebub’s Tales is an allegory on several levels. First, the journey is a metaphor for life—the outward voyage parallels the inner transformation, the wise Master who learned his own lessons from the travails of exile schools a naive youth. The Tales have been described as similar to Gilgamesh and Odysseus: long wanderings punctuated by painful experiences, lessons learned, and returning home. The story in the book is also an allegory of the fall and redemption of humankind, with the lessons learned applicable not only to the hero but to all.

The Tales resonated with Anderson and Heap due to their understanding of Ulysses; it was as though Leopold Bloom was placed in a Jules Verne story. In Tales, Beelzebub was to Bloom as Hassein was to Stephen. Reading the Tales does not guarantee understanding. Gurdjieff recommended reading the text three times; however, many veteran followers have claimed that it takes several readings before achieving genuine comprehension, if then. This is partly due to Gurdjieff’s creation of his own vocabulary and his penchant for interminable sentences. In the chapter “Art,” for example, he writes, “Not only absolutely nothing whatever reached them of all the various fragments of general knowledge already then known on Earth, which the learned beings the Adherents-of-Legominism indicated the lawful divergences from the sacred law of Heptaparaparshinokh, or, as they called it the Law of Sevenfoldness, but in the interval of time between these two civilizations of theirs being-rumination has so deteriorated that they now already do not know nor even suspect the existence of such an all-universal law on their planet.”²⁹

As Gary Lachman writes, “The outrageous claims, the jaw-breaking neologisms, and boa constructor syntax are enough to put off the average person, and even the most dedicated Seekers have a difficult time discovering what Gurdjieff is trying to say, let alone understanding it.³⁰ Gurdjieff’s students argue that he deliberately made it difficult; indeed, he makes that clear in the first chapter of Tales when he writes that his intention is “to destroy mercilessly without any compromises whatsoever in the mentation of the reader, the beliefs and views, by centuries rooted in him, about everything existing in the world.”³¹ Like Joyce, Gurdjieff employed allegories, myths, and parables in his writing; his deliberate acts of obfuscation are reminiscent of Joyce’s boast that Ulysses would confuse scholars for years to come. Satire, humor, and wordplay were also standard practices of both writers—Gurdjieff employed the trope of “the sly man” as an example of someone who understood the Fourth Way. Both employed the concept of the trickster, the mythological character who possesses esoteric knowledge, to disrupt conventions and flaunt disobedience to social norms. The tricksters Hermes and Odysseus, who gained knowledge of esoteric wisdom during their travels, were central to the work of both men. Stephen’s proclamation in Ulysses that “history is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake” corresponded to Gurdjieff’s “terror of the situation,” or the weight of centuries of iniquitous social, political, and religious tradition.

When Orage arrived in New York in December of 1923, he found willing adherents in Anderson and Heap and other Village inhabitants; his easy erudition was an attractive feature to the American literati. In addition to being intellectually akin to Anderson and Heap, Orage was highly skilled in gathering converts. Anderson stated bluntly that he “was the most persuasive man I have ever known.”³² Orage’s task at hand was to give introductory talks on Gurdjieff’s philosophy and pave the way for a visit from the Master himself in January. When Gurdjieff arrived in early 1924, he commanded attention by directing performances of one of his physical disciplines to enlightenment—dancing.

The dances were very specific steps choreographed by Gurdjieff and performed to the music he composed. Gorham Munson described the types of performances he attended with Anderson and Heap; they included “two sets of six ‘obligatory exercises,’ the Initiation of a Priestess, several Dervish dances, a pilgrimage movement called ‘measuring the way by one’s length,’ several women’s dances, the Big Seven dance, the ‘stop exercise,’ and a number of folk and manual labor dances.”³³ Anderson wrote, “Orage would discuss the dances, explaining that they were taken from and based upon, sacred temple dances which Gurdjieff had seen in the monasteries of Tibet, and their mathematics were said to contain exact esoteric knowledge.”³⁴ Whatever their origins, the dances had a profound influence on those who saw them. They “had a strange impact that can only be described as awakening,” recalled Munson. “The design and the detail were extraordinarily precise, and one could well believe that they were an exact language to convey knowledge.”³⁵ Hart Crane, who was briefly swayed by Gurdjieff, wrote to his mother that he had witnessed: “some astonishing dances and psychic feats … I can’t possibly begin to describe the elaborate theories and plan of this institution, nor go into the details of this single demonstration, but it was very, very interesting—and things were done by amateurs which would stump the Russian ballet, I’m sure.”³⁶ In a letter to Florence Reynolds, Heap conveyed a similar sentiment: “Now dear it doesn’t matter whether there is a Swedish Ballet or a Russian Art Theatre or any of these things. Gurdjieff is the thing. But that’s too much for a letter. The intelligentsia is koo-koo and dazed—Orage spoke again the other night. I told you about the demonstration called ‘movement’ didn’t I? No advertising—no admission—and people go about with their eyes fried and their tongues out—trying to get an invitation.”³⁷

Among those who found themselves just as enamored of Gurdjieff as Anderson, Heap, Munson, and Crane were Mabel Dodge Luhan, Jean Toomer, Muriel Draper, Waldo Frank, and Herbert Croly. However, not everyone was convinced of Gurdjieff’s powers. Heap, aware of the skeptics, was unmoved. She wrote to Reynolds, “Let the man be a charlatan or a devil—but we have had the leap and the hippodrome of new ideas and sights, I don’t rave about this—I have been waiting for it.”³⁸ By the time Heap had written Reynolds, both she and Anderson had met the Master himself. Anderson wrote of her first glimpse of Gurdjieff backstage after a performance, indicating the personal charisma that many others commented on. “I had just time to look carefully at a dark man with an oriental face,” she wrote, “whose life seemed to reside in his eyes. He had a presence impossible to describe because I had never encountered another with which to compare it.” Both she and Heap, Anderson wrote, “immediately recognized Gurdjieff as the kind of man [they] had never seen—a seer, a prophet, a messiah?”³⁹ A massive man with a shaved head, handlebar mustache, and, according to almost everyone who encountered him, intensely dark, hypnotic eyes, Gurdjieff was indeed a formidable figure. In The Fiery Fountains, Anderson wrote, “We looked upon this man … as a messenger between two worlds, a man who could clarify for us a world we had hoped to fathom.”⁴⁰

Anderson and Heap decided to follow Gurdjieff to France to study at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, with Tom and Fritz in tow. Leblanc had also converted to Gurdjieff’s teachings and sailed with Anderson to her homeland in the spring of 1924. Heap, who had made peace with Anderson about her relationship with Leblanc, followed them to France in the summer. Anderson later wrote, “We knew the import of our decision: we had prepared to ‘cast our nets aside’ and follow.”⁴¹ The Institute was an eighteenth-century chateau sometimes called “the Prieuré,” meaning “Prioress,” due to the fact it was a former Carmelite monastery. The grounds consisted of seventy-five acres that overwhelmed the women when they arrived. Heap wrote Florence Reynolds, “The place is too lovely—lovely chateau, old furniture and many fountains.” She described a “feast” prepared with “a whole sheep buried in the ground in ashes, much wine.”⁴² Replete with cows, goats, and chickens, the expansive grounds were on the edge of a forest. The structures included the Study House and a Turkish bath; favored guests slept in “the Ritz,” a sumptuously furnished wing, while students settled in the spartan section called the Monks’ Corridor. The Study House was the center of instruction—a large building capable of holding up to three hundred people who could watch performances of Gurdjieff’s dances on a specially constructed stage. One visitor described it as an eastern-influenced theater where the center was marked by “a fountain, illuminated by constantly changing coloured lights, and making pleasant music; the floor carpeted with costly Eastern rugs. Around the walls are divans, with here and there an alcove with rich tapestries. The windows are painted over with Arabic designs, and soft light comes from hidden electric globes.”⁴³

Anderson and Heap joined a group of roughly sixty disciples, mostly emigrants from the Russian Revolution, along with a cluster of British converts to Gurdjieff. In addition to Orage, the Prieuré had housed other prominent literary figures, most notably Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield had been suffering from tuberculosis, searching for a cure until Orage, who had published Mansfield’s work in The New Age, convinced her to go to the Prieuré in the summer of 1922. Ouspensky recounted a conversation in which Mansfield told him, “You know that I have long since looked upon all of us without exception as people who have suffered shipwreck and have been cast upon an uninhabited island, but who do not yet know of it. But these people here know it. The others, there in life, still think that a steamer will come for them tomorrow and that everything will go on in the old way. These already know that there will be no more of the old way. I am so glad that I can be here.”⁴⁴ In a letter to her husband John Middleton Murry, she wrote, “One has, all the time, the feeling of having been in a wreck and by mercy of Providence got ashore—somewhere … Simply everything is different. Not only languages but food, people, music, methods, hours—all. It’s a real new life …”⁴⁵

In January 1923, Mansfield died at the Institute and was buried near Avon near where Gurdjieff was later laid to rest. One woman who tended to Mansfield was Olga Ivanovna Lazovich Hinzenberg, a trained dancer from Montenegro who met Gurdjieff in Russia and followed him to France via Constantinople. When Anderson and Heap arrived, she was there, demonstrating Gurdjieff’s dance movements and becoming especially friendly with Heap. She left that same year for the United States, where she met and married Frank Lloyd Wright, who had given Anderson one hundred dollars in 1914 to help establish the Little Review. Hinzenberg would later help run Wright’s Taliesin in Wisconsin and later Taliesin West in New Mexico, incorporating Gurdjieffian tenets among the student architects there.⁴⁶

On arriving at the Prieuré, Anderson and Heap delved deeper into Gurdjieff’s teachings, observing the Work’s unique approaches to enlightenment that many visitors have recorded. As in the Nietzschean will to power, Gurdjieff’s edict to his students to work on their weaknesses to achieve objective consciousness included unpleasant experiments. E. Bechhofer Roberts, a journalist for Century Magazine, published an article about the Institute one month before Anderson and Heap arrived and described the trials Gurdjieff put his pupils through. In “The Forest Philosophers,” he described a place where students master themselves first by breaking their mechanical habits. He observed that in the case of Orage, who was a chain smoker, Gurdjieff “promptly cut off his tobacco. If anyone expresses a preference for sweet food, he is suddenly put on an unsweetened diet or is surfeited with food that is all sweet, until he sickens of it … If a man is proud, Gurdjiev (sic) humiliates him deliberately before all the other pupils. If he has a special affection or aversion, it must be eradicated. There was for instance, a man in the Institute who when he entered, hated the sight of blood; he was at once set the task of slaughtering the animals for the stock-pot.”⁴⁷

Outsiders who heard of these practices roundly denounced Gurdjieff as a money-grubbing fake. Mary Butts, a Seeker herself, wrote in her diary that “he induced women of beauty & wealth to clean the drains & live on refuse at the price of sixteen guineas a week.” D. H. Lawrence, who once visited the Institute, called it a “rotten false, self-conscious place of people playing a sickly stunt.“⁴⁸ Taken all together, Gurdjieff’s approach seems to justify Theodore Rozack’s description of “therapy by ordeal.”⁴⁹ By his admission his tactic was to “step on the corns” of his students; without painful recognition of the mechanical nature of their false personalities, they would never find their essence or climb the ladder of evolution.

Anderson and Heap arrived shortly before Gurdjieff had a serious car accident and were not given individual instruction. They were, however, assigned to light duties in the gardens and kitchen. Anderson’s nephew Fritz Peters later recollected this period in his book My Journey with a Mystic. The Master engaged in several conversations with the eleven-year-old, making Peters feel understood by an adult for the first time. Specifically assigned by Gurdjieff to mow the considerable expanse of lawns, Peters recalled that “He did not do this by threats, promises of rewards, or by asking me. He told me to mow the lawns. He told me it was important. I did it.” He later realized that this labor taught him to get over his “horror” of physical work. He recalls that he had “simply one aim[:] … to be like Gurdjieff,” describing him as “strong, honest, direct and uncomplicated—an entirely ‘no-nonsense individual.’ ”⁵⁰ Later assigned to be Gurdjieff’s personal assistant, he saw the Master as an essentially benevolent force who presided as the paterfamilias, surveying the grounds and his students in his red tasseled fez and carpet slippers, smoking Gauloise cigarettes and imbibing significant quantities of Turkish coffee.

After a day of chores there was a communal dinner where the assignments continued in the evening, albeit with a Dionysian twist. After a meal of Persian soup, lamb, calf brains, chicken, rice, and figs, Gurdjieff performed his “Toasts to the Idiots.” “Idiots” referred to a range of twenty-one archetypes; students were led in an exercise to discover their own particular brand of Idiot. The categories included including “Enlightened Idiot,” “Compassionate Idiot,” ‘Swaggering Idiot,” and “Born Idiot.” This toast was made with quantities of vodka or Gurdjieff’s favorite beverage, Armagnac, as each student was instructed to do shots around the table. As in many accounts of Gurdjieff there is conflicting testimony on whether students were forced against their will to consume the spirits. Nevertheless, Orage defended the practice by saying, “Gurdjieff, who had an unusual capacity for drink, made a careful distinction between ordinary drinking and conscious drinking which could free the ‘I’ to think, feel, talk and act; that is, to expose ‘essence.’ ”⁵¹ The practice was in accordance with his overall approach—to cause discomfort and friction.

After dinner, the movement exercises and dances that Anderson and Heap observed in New York were demonstrated for students and visitors. Gurdjieff created over one hundred exercises accompanied by the music he wrote with the assistance of Thomas de Hartmann, a Russian composer who had an esteemed reputation in his native land, particularly for his 1907 ballet The Pink Flower, which had been performed by Nijinsky in Moscow. The discipline of dancing was intended to refine the practice of self-observation and to reincorporate the three centers of the mind, body, and emotion into the fourth-way path. These dances made an impression on professional practitioners; Lincoln Kirstein, the co-founder with George Balanchine of the New York City Ballet, wrote in the introduction to his book on Nijinsky, “As in everything I do, whatever is valid springs from the person and ideas of George I. Gurdjieff.”⁵²

Although Anderson would at times claim fatigue and even uncharacteristic self-doubt, she threw herself into Gurdjieff’s program without reservation. She wrote, “To understand—that was the necessity. Understand your nature and the nature of your type. All the qualities which had composed our superiority now emerged unrelated to that need of being born again.” The religious language of being “born again” was not incidental; Anderson clearly stated, “If anyone had asked me exactly what I wanted to find out, and if I could have answered as simply as a child, I would have said I want to know what is God.”⁵³ Although she does not overtly connect the early religious curiosity of her Protestant youth to Gurdjieff, all of these experiences may have established a Christian foundation that helped make Gurdjieff’s ideas seem familiar. Gurdjieff himself said the Fourth Way was based on Christian principles or characterized as “esoteric or inner” Christianity. Referring to her Gurdjieffian quest, Anderson described herself as immersed in a “pilgrim’s progress.”⁵⁴

While Anderson wrote prolifically about Gurdjieff in her last two autobiographies and her book The Unknowable Gurdjieff, it was Heap who would become the more astute student. She impressed the Master with her nuanced understanding of his thought and emerged as a leader among his students. He would eventually send her to London to teach groups, which she did for the next thirty years until her death. Heap wrote nothing about Gurdjieff for publication, but her teaching notes have been preserved by her students, who idolized her and reproduced them in privately printed books.⁵⁵ When Gurdjieff taught he often spoke in aphorisms, and many of Heap’s comments recorded by her students follow suit. We see in these comments the same droll, sometimes caustic manner she displayed when she was jh in the Little Review:

People go straight from being infantile to being senile with no pause to be an adult.

The world has been destroyed by fire and has been destroyed by flood but this time a sea of human mud is rising.

When you meet this work, you must leave the bride at the altar and the dead disinterred.⁵⁶

To some observers, Gurdjieff was little more than a self-serving, obnoxious fraud who bamboozled Anderson and Heap along with other members of the literati. Since then, many contemporaries and others have characterized Gurdjieff as a con artist who deliberately referred to Americans as “sheep to be shorn” while he taught them spiritual advancement.

Why were so many artists besotted with him? Part of the allure was the person of Gurdjieff himself; nearly everyone who encountered him had the same impression as Anderson: he seemed to embody a “messiah.” Pamela Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books and a lifelong follower, wrote of her meeting with him in 1938, “He was a serene, massive man who looked at one with a long, contemplative, all-knowing glance. I felt myself in a presence.”⁵⁷ Katherine Hulme, who would later join an all-women Gurdjieff study group with Anderson and Heap, recalled, “He looked like a broad-shouldered Buddha radiating such power that all the people between him and me seemed dead.”⁵⁸ The reference to Buddha appeared more than once in recollections; Frank Lloyd Wright used similar imagery, writing, “He affected us strangely as though some oriental buddha had come alive in our midst. Notwithstanding a superabundance of personal idiosyncrasy, George Gurdjeef [sic] seems to have the stuff in him of which our genuine prophets have been made.”⁵⁹

Max Weber noted that many religions have used the “legitimation strategy” in which faith is underscored by various appeals, including those of charisma and rationality. The appeal of Gurdjieff’s charisma as a factor has already been noted. The appeal of rationality is used by religious traditions that argue their systems are based on scientific evidence. This strategy was used by Victorians experiencing a crisis of faith as they attempted to meld centuries of belief with the assault of industrialization. As James R. Lewis notes, “Given the rhetorical strength of science in contemporary society, an appeal to a concord between science and religion would seem an attractive way to provide a warrant for religious claims. This is in fact what we observe in a vast array of religious traditions.” Lewis points out that “adherents of dozens of new religious movements, esoteric and New Age currents all affirm that science is in fact in agreement with their own world views. Their scriptures are scientific documents, their practices in agreement with the latest advances in neurology or particle physics, and their cosmologies resonant with the most up-to-date discoveries in the natural sciences.”⁶⁰ This was an appeal for Anderson. “Gurdjieff would teach as a science—an exact science of man and human behavior—a supreme science of God, world, man—based on sources outside the scope, reach, knowledge or conception of modern psychologists.”⁶¹ Another appeal to rationality for Gurdjieff students was they were told to verify his teachings with their own experience.

There were other more pedestrian enticements; Gurdjieff students may have studied at the Institute, but they came and left on their own accord. They were not expected to have a monasterial tenure, give up their careers, or rearrange their personal lives. Finally, what of his egregious personal behavior? Many observers including William James have noted that religious teachers were often eccentric or at worse psychopathic. It is clear that Ouspensky, who eventually ended his personal relationship with Gurdjieff yet continued to teach his method, was able to separate the behavior of the unholy guru from his teachings. Given their experience with all varieties of quirky and maladjusted artists—Pound being exhibit A—it is not difficult to imagine Anderson and Heap doing likewise.

Gurdjieffian students then and now are highly educated, erudite, cosmopolitan, and accomplished individuals. Many of the studies written about Gurdjieff since his death have been sophisticated treatments by scholarly practitioners in physics, metaphysics, comparative religion, literature, music, film, and theater. Much of this work has dealt with his teachings in the context of specific religious categories such as Sufism, Theosophy, and Gnosticism. Gurdjieff’s psychological theories have influenced prominent psychotherapists such as Charles T. Tart and Robin Skynner, especially his views on multiple subjectivities, defense mechanisms, rationalization, and compartmentalization. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which emphasizes the impact of thoughts on behavior, has much in common with Gurdjieff’s approach. Many of his concepts, particularly “self-remembering,” are similar to those of the contemporary Mindfulness Movement, founded by Jon Kabat-Zinn and popularized by Eckhart Tolle, among others. Even Gurdjieff’s writings, abstract and bizarre as they appear to many, have resonance with literary scholars. Paul Beekman Taylor describes Beelzebub’s Travels as “a modernist text … not unlike Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake.”⁶² Roger Lipsey argues that the challenges of Gurdjieff’s writing are unfairly lambasted. He writes, “In a century when intellectuals have prized difficulty—difficult texts like Ulysses, difficult theories like deconstruction, difficult technologies of all description—Gurdjieff was still too difficult, perhaps because he presented not just an intellectual but a moral and existential difficulty: he asks us who we are, he founds his insistent interrogation on ideas and insights which are in part discontinuous with Western culture, and he is impolite.”⁶³ Gurdjieff’s system has profoundly influenced the arts, culture, and scholarship, a record that makes it difficult to dismiss as yet another bogus guru.⁶⁴

Anderson’s conversion to Gurdjieff led to a radically different interpretation of art. “My dissatisfaction coincided with the new experience we were just beginning. As I look back at what now happened to me, I see that this experience was as inevitable as the one which made me start the Little Review in the first place. And now it wasn’t the Little Review that mattered; and it wasn’t Art that mattered any longer.”⁶⁵ She wrote these words in the early fifties; by the time of her third autobiography, published in 1969, Anderson was waxing even more philosophically. “In spite of my hallucinatory love of Art,” she wrote, “I can at least write of how Gurdjieff’s teaching led me to a different understanding.” Art was no longer “man’s highest aspiration, it is merely one of his greatest pleasures.” It did not “lead to the evolution of the soul.” Art was like being in love hence, “not to be taken too seriously. Being in love is a situation of frenzy, trance or madness. Real love is something else. Art is also a trance and frenzy. But, as Gurdjieff said, it began by being something else—a revelation concerning the development of the soul. The Art we know today—have known for how many centuries?—has lost its motivation and message.”⁶⁶ This was an exaggeration on Anderson’s part; the certitude of a recent convert was no doubt at play. Nevertheless, until her death she was still writing of the ecstasy that certain books and music had brought her, while simultaneously cleaving to Gurdjieff’s teachings.

Anderson’s engagement with Gurdjieff led to an increasing disengagement with the Little Review and Heap became its chief steward. Perhaps because she was an artist herself, Heap still believed in the Little Review’s mission and did not share Anderson’s increasingly depressing view on the futility of art. Under her tutelage, the journal became increasingly radical, emphasizing reproductions of avant-garde art, sculpture, modernist architecture, and new literary and artistic schools such as surrealism and Machine Age aesthetics. Some of her editorial decisions from 1921 to 1922 prefigured Gurdjieffian themes, while after her stay at the Prieuré, we see explicit connections between her new philosophy and her editorial decisions. After Anderson’s valiant assaults against the status quo in the world of the avant-garde, it was the ascension of Heap that led to the Little Review fulfilling its promise as a truly revolutionary journal.