[In the following excerpt from a book of portraits about cultural figures from the 1920's, Frank presents a colorful image of Orage, a man who “despises the world so well that he is at peace with it.”]

With a bird's-eye view of our City, you will have noticed for the past two years growing numbers of little knots of people scattered about town in comfortable places—very intent, largely silent. Closer, you observed that these groups consisted of editors, wives of Wall Street, professors, novelists, shingled girls, restless business men, artistic youths. Here were true intellectuals who despise Greenwich Village. Here were socially elect who looked down on Park Avenue as a gilded slum. Here indeed were men and women dry and fresh, smart and solemn, rich or merely famous—perpendicular extremes of our extremely perpendicular New York. And now if you looked still closer, you saw that they were listening with passionate concern to a man they call Orage (pronounce it precisely like the French for storm): and that Orage was most intempestuously sitting in an upholstered armchair, smoking a cigarette and cavalierly smiling.

He seems a proverbial schoolboy, slightly damaged by the years, yet on the whole intact—as he sits enwreathed in all those seeking brains and eager eyes. He has a hard body in a tight drab suit. He has hair like a cap drawn close upon his skull. The finger tips are yellow with tobacco. The face is gray with thought. And its prominent part is the nose. The nose is the pinnacle of Orage. Intense brow, willful jaw, keen eyes, ironic mouth—they all converge upon this proboscidean symbol of pertinence and search.

Who is he? and what is he telling the good men and ladies, that they should hearken to him—leaders though they are—with humble rapture? He is propounding a simple, matter-of-fact psychologic method. A method too simple, really, to be written down either by him or by me. So what that Method is, you'll have to find out for yourself. What it does—or claims to do—is nothing less than the whole and utter overturning of everything you live by. All your standards—ethical, religious. All your darlings—historical, artistic. From Æschylus to Bertie Russell, he sweeps them off the table. From Pentateuch to Theosophy, he shows them up. All the world's religions are wrong. All the good intentions are bad. All the truths are lies. All self-improvement is vain. With a most humane smile, Orage blights the claims of humaneness. With valedictory sentiment, wipes sentiment off the slate. With logic swift as a machine, he discredits logic. With courteous manner, drops spiritual bombs into the laps of ladies who adore him.

Oh, ho! you say. Another fanatic? Yes—a most cool and balanced one. Another mystifier? Yes—one whose logical gifts gained him, long years ago, the name of the most dangerous debater in all England. He may be a poisoner of traditional wells; but what sweet venom he drips. He may be a revolutionist; but can you gainsay his classical, scholarly words? Perhaps this is a sect. But if the men and women whom he draws are themselves leaders of men and women?

In London they tried to keep pace with Alfred Richard Orage, and they failed. He came to that Metropolis in 1903, from the hinterlands of Birmingham and Yorkshire. He was thirty, then, and already versed in the mysteries of Socialism, Occultism, Nietzscheanism. He had written books on such timid little subjects as The Dionysian Spirit of the Age, Consciousness: Animal, Human, Superman, An Alphabet of Economics. Now he started a magazine with a name similarly modest (The New Age) and proceeded to midwife, prune, or otherwise direct a good measure of the respectable—and some of the infamous—literary reputations of the last twenty years in England. Arnold Bennett, Katharine Mansfield, Ernest Boyd, were discoveries of Orage—and so was Michael Arlen. Between these two extremes, fill in the name of your favorite British writer and most probably you'll find, somewhere upon him, the mark of this unemphatic man. Scores and scores of volumes have been dedicated to him. London knew he was there. Philosophy, poetry, criticism, fiction, knew it. His own essays, signed with false initials, kept a running fire on the world—and made England heartily sick, and Orage heartily hated; and incidentally, gave to English literature a prose that ranks with Shaw's and that, for pure revolutionary thought, puts Shaw in his place as the quite proper Devil of old ladies.

Orage looks like a boy and his shoulders are sharp. They have a way of shrugging—shrugging off fads and facts and systems at a pace poor slow England could not hope to keep up with. Before she knew it, Orage had gone through Socialism and shrugged it off: Nietzscheanism and shrugged it off: had become a psychoanalyst and shrugged it off. (I don't know what effect, if any, this had on Doctor Freud but the Freudians of England awoke one morning and found they had a subtle foe in their midst.) Then, Ouspensky, Russian mystic-mathematician, came to England.

And that is why Orage's shoulders have ceased forevermore from shrugging, and why New York is gathering in eager knots, week after week, season after season, to learn the Method whereby New York, and Culture, and Mortal Life itself, may be successfully shrugged into the ash-heap, in exchange for a Consciousness possibly Mephistophelian, possibly God-like—but avowedly not human.

The Method belongs neither to Orage nor to Ouspensky, but to their Master, Gurgieff, who visited our City several years ago, leaving Orage here ever since, like a pregnancy upon us. And Gurgieff is the Greek with a Polish wife and a Russian name, who was once Prime Minister of Tibet, who has practiced all professions from highway robbery to selling carpets, who trains his neophites in the Sacred Eastern Dances with a brutal perfection that makes Diaghileff a tyro, and who—according to several men whom the world calls great—is the greatest man in the world.

This is no place for Cosmologies. My subject is Orage. Let me say merely this unto the fond who read in the worldly brilliance of certain of Orage's groups an argument against his value: Know your history of religions. There you will learn that the first followers of the Buddha were snobbish Brahmins and rich youth of Benares: and that the society ladies of that day pestered Gotama until—to be rid of them—he opened convents.

Orage believes in no convents. If you dressed him in robe and turban, he would laugh them off. He does not claim the race of Buddhas; and his one incense is the smoke of his incessant Piedmont. He talks more of Behaviorism, Astronomy and Mechanics than of what is commonly called religion. And he believes in literally nothing. Nothing that is, I mean. This is what makes him so detached. He knows all the scriptures from the Māhābhārata to Hart Crane, and he is detached from them all.

Even Buddha believed in the world enough to cry against it, to invent harsh disciplines to combat it. Not Orage. He despises the world so well that he is at peace with it wholly. See him by the hearth, smoking, sipping his liqueur, utterly charming his young hostess, and you will understand the superiority of his unworldiness over a mere Buddha's. Orage accepts the casual graces of the flesh, as doubtless Buddha accepted a springtime zephyr blowing in his face. Orage would no more refuse the pleasures of metropolitan New York, than a Hindu ascetic would decline a sunset.

His sensuous hospitality is the sign of his contempt. Even so, his boy face is the counterfeit of candor; and his language, which for fluent clarity has few peers in England, weaves a mist about him. Orage knows not alone the Pali Canon, but as well the Jesuits and Machiavelli. He barbs you with his words; he swathes and soothes you with his perhaps too unctuous manner—and himself glides by.

Thus, he glided from England—shrugged it quite out of his life, leaving in London Town the smoke of his adventures and the sparks of his electric passage. The Puritan Socialism of Bernard Shaw—dear Shaw who takes liquor, meat, tobacco, coffee, tea and women so seriously that he does not take 'em at all—was not for Orage. Shaw stayed on in England: Orage—who takes 'em all—has come to our wider land.

The man's life and mind is so very full of shifts that I'm justified in shifting metaphors to catch him. Thus: there is light in him, yet he has no heat. He does not push, he invades. You grow aware of him, as you might of a scentless gas when it had filled your lungs—or of a knife so edged that when it cut you, you endured no pain.

And here at last is the key which will unlock him. You recall the pin with which the great Jacques Loeb so wondrously pricked female sea-urchins into fecundity, without benefit of the male? Orage is such a fecundating pin. Neither creative nor intellectually profound, he is both since he has spent his life pricking men and women into fecundity.

This is what he did in England with Socialism, with Theosophy, with his magazine, with Freud. Until these pins grew dull. And until London grew dull. Gurgieff replenished him with sharpness. And then he came to us. Does he love us? Does he want to save our souls because he loves us? What was Loeb's sentiment toward his dear sea-urchins?