SOURCE: "Gurdjieff and the Literary Cult," in The University of Windsor Review, Vol. 21, No. 2, 1988, pp. 46-51.

[In the following essay, St. Andrews examines the group of literary figures, including Katherine Mansfield and Jean Toomer, that followed Gurdjieff's teachings.]

Many and strange are the tales from the literary crypt. As any quick look at James Sutherland's fascinating Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes or Donald Hall's American corollary proves, writers seek the ever-elusive Muse in some strange places. Almost with abandon, they delve into cults and the occult; they pursue spiritualists and mystics, sometimes finding inspiration, often times not. But the quest seems a worthy one, no matter how questionable the result.

Not one of the movers and shakers (or the preachers and fakirs) who have created popular cults in our century is more controversial than one George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, an Armenian mystic. Nor has any cult figure, with the possible exception of one Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky of the still flourishing Theosophical Movement, maintained a greater influence over literary seekers.

Yet while Madame Blavatsky's influence may seem to have influenced, in positive ways, the mature consciousness and, in turn, poetry of such notables as W. B. Yeats, the influence of Gurdjieff on major writers is roundly proclaimed a negative one. And, students of both British and American letters might insist, for a multitude of reasons. Gurdjieff, in fact, as Antony Alpers recalls is his engaging study, The Life of Katherine Mansfield, is still widely considered to be "the man who killed Katherine Mansfield."

Not that she would have thus accused him; indeed, Mansfield sought Gurdjieff out as a healer and lifegiver. With her fear of tuberculosis a confirmed reality, she began a frenzied search for a miracle; she needed to believe that Gurdjieff held some power, some secret for her physical restoration. Mansfield willingly accepted that her spiritual health, too, needed regeneration. So, in 1922, having attended a lecture by Gurdjieff's most eloquent disciple, P. D. Ouspensky, Mansfield committed herself to Gurdjieff's "Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man" which, she apparently believed, could as harmoniously develop Woman. In a chateau in Fontainebleau, France, Mansfield lived with "the Master" and his devotees.

There, according to her own correspondence, Mansfield shared the chores and the cold. Despite sometimes scant foodstuffs and rigorous schedules, she foreswore any other form of treatment than that prescribed by the Gurdjieff encampment: work, dancing, and "balancing the centers." Gurdjieff defined these 'centres' as the intellectual, the emotional, and the moving; he later added, according to Ouspensky's voluminous study, In Search of the Miraculous, the instinctive centre and die sexual centre.

Mansfield did indeed find some balance at Fontainebleau, spiritually if not physically. She quieted her life-long friend, Leslie Moore's fears about Fontainebleau, asserting on December 22, 1922: "My existence here is not meagre or miserable. Nothing is done by accident." So, it was surely not by accident that, on the evening of January 9, 1923, Katherine Mansfield enjoyed the music, the dancing, the good company at Fontainebleau; her guest and husband, J. Middleton Murry, was among that company, as was one Olga Ivanovna. Ivanovna later married the eminently 'balanced' architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, but, more to the point, Ivanovna befriended Mansfield at the Institute and rendered one of the most moving accounts of the writer's last evening.

Mansfield was "transformed" by a spirit of love: "Her face was shining with inexpressible beauty, and when she left the party in the great hall she was so full of joy that she must have forgotton her physical weaknesses and she ran … up the stair." Within half an hour of her joy, Mansfield suffered a massive and fatal hemorrhage. None of this was caused by "the Master;" Gurdjieff neither killed nor cured Mansfield. He extended to her, by her own accounts, both courtesy and kindness. Yet he became the center of recriminations and anger as the literary community reacted to the loss of a considerable young talent: a writer compared favorably with the great Chekhov. Nor was this the last of Gurdjieff's supposed sins against the literary cult.

His unpopularity in British literary circles was easily matched by American disfavor when Jean Toomer, the brief, bright light of the Harlem Renaissance defected, to join Gurdjieff's band the following year. That year, 1923, was monumental for Toomer; he met Gurdjieff and published his own masterwork, Cane. Most critics of the Harlem Renaissance, from Charles Davis to Arna Bontemps, consider Toomer's book the trumpet fanfare of the literary period. As Darwin T. Turner puts it in his introduction to the novel, Cane was both "a harbinger" of the renaissance and "an illumination of significant psychological and moral concerns of the early '20's."

Among these concerns was the great spiritual longing of that time, reflected in works by T. S. Eliot, Toomer, and others. Little wonder that their generation sought out—much as the cult generation of the 1960's later would—the spiritual wisdom of the East. The unsettling pronouncements of Darwin and Nietzsche, as well as the turbulence of World War I, had considerably depleted the spiritual stockpile of the West. This longing for harmony filled many Americans and Europeans in the time between two wars; into this partial vacuum walked George Ivanovich Gurdjieff with his system of cosmic and earthly order. Looking himself like "something between a carpet dealer and a spy," Gurdjieff invited these, the spiritually beleagured, into his system.

Toomer entered. He, too, joined the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, leaving behind a burgeoning literary career where he had been embraced by such established notables as Sherwood Anderson and Langston Hughes. Toomer took a leap of faith, one might say, from literary fame to spiritual obscurity. Gurdjieff—that harmless mystic, that dismissible cult figure—had struck again; he had disrupted the literary community a second, unforgiveable time. Toomer's essays, poems and plays, which never again received the acclaim of his first work, have been collected by Darwin T. Turner under the title The Wayward and the Seeking; one nearly epic poem called "The Blue Meridian" offers an image appropriate to Toomer's quest: despite losing literary fame he "found / A river flowing backward to its source."

Yet, while Toomer declared his profound conviction that he had, thanks to Gurdjieff's system, gained a balanced center, Gurdjieff again appeared to be more spiritual culprit than spiritual guide. Condemned by some, extolled by others, Gurdjieff remains enigmatic; the stories about him provide a portrait of a pompous man, an independent one; an inspiring personality, an insulting one. Gurdjieff is charlatan and saint, shyster and sage.

Perhaps Katherine Mansfield best characterized Gurdjieff as being "not the least what I expected. He's what one wants to find him, really." This odd notion of the plastic personality may best suit Gurdjieff, the man. The confounding facts of his life enhance this enigmatic image. His obituary in the London Times (November 12, 1949) lists his birth in 1872; his passport declares him born in 1877, yet he insisted on having been born in 1869. As Kathleen Speeth and Ira Friedlander note in their almost devout study, Gurdjieff: Seeker of the Truth, a series of such confounded facts make Gurdjieffs life read like holy runes. The conflicting details invite, that is, apocryphal interpretations which becloud yet enlarge the man himself.

For example, Gurdjieff was born at the foot of fabled Mt. Ararat; as a boy, he responded whole-heartedly to tales of adventure and mystery which filled his native Armenia. Chief among these stories, according to Speeth and Friedlander, were tales of the "Imastun," a society of initiates who wandered the planet after the disappearance of Atlantis. Gurdjieff, inspired by the arcane tales, undertook religious study with a group of like-minded adventurers. In the major religious centers of the world, he studied Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Islamic, and Lamaist thought, integrating these many systems into one of his own.

Gurdjieff created, in doing so, a personality loaded with practical insights about people, on the one hand, and impudent repudiations of established religious orders, on the other. Emblematic of his growing confidence is one story involving Gurdjieff's saving of a Yezidi boy which is recorded by Speeth and Friedlander. At the center of this possibly apocryphal tale is the idea of the "sacred circle" which is complete and inviolable. Within such a circle drawn by the Yezidi tribe of Iran sat a boy who could starve there or await religious enlightenment forever, according to the will of those who drew the circle. In a brazen act, a spiritual correlative to Alexander's handling of the famed Gordian knot, Gurdjieff erased part of that circle and led the boy to freedom. That he did this with impunity added to his growing reputation as a holy man of irresistible force.

As controversial as his violations of sacred ritual were Gurdjieff's abilities to manipulate people, either singly or in groups. He could deliver a verbal insult the equal of Dorothy Parker, destroying even the strongest facade of self control or self delusion with a single phrase. An example of this odd ability to humiliate others yet prove himself indispensable at the same time is recounted in a lively and highly amusing way by Arthur "Fritz" Peters in Gurdjieff Remembered. Greeting a collection of wealthy and influential New Yorkers, Gurdjieff acted the harmless, humble foreigner. Having put them at their ease, he quite deliberately turned the dinner conversation to sex, rousing them to a frenzy by recounting, in detail, the sexual customs of cultures both familiar and exotic.

As Peters recalls, "after about two hours of unadulterated four-letter word conversation, their behavior became completely uninhibited." An orgy ensued, after which Gurdjieff insisted that "he deserved to be paid for this lesson." He promptly collected several thousand dollars from his already spent guests.

New Yorkers and other species of Americans rarely encourage those who abuse, chastise, or mock them. Yet, far and wide, Americans found this strange man fascinating and, often, inspiring, Despite their lavish monetary contributions to his cause, however, Gurdjieff maintained a low opinion of his American followers. He considered Americans to be, as the tale of the party-goers sufficiently suggests, genitally insecure. He warned, as early as the Thirties, that the "new American gods" of psychiatry and medicine would further dupe and divide the American psyche. He considered, quite simply, that none of these scientists understood the balances in Nature and in human nature. He—George Ivanovich Gurdjieff—did. He offered into the criticism the one element which has proved alluring since Dante and Blake and Yeats and, for that matter, Christ: a formulated system of cosmic order.

Ironically, the best written presentation of this system may well have been written not by "the Master" himself but by his talented and intelligent disciple, P. D. Ouspensky. Gurdjieff did write, however, and the stories surrounding his compositions and their sales invite affirming sighs from the true believers and rueful glances from everyone else. Many people familiar with book publication and promotion might well find his methods direct, honest, and innovative. Consider his pitch for An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man or its alternative title, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, gleaned from fifty years of thought. He gathered together his followers from many different nations, classes and professions. He urged those who had "gained personal help from contact with (his) ideas" to buy a copy of his book for the tidy sum of one hundred pounds, the equivalent of four hundred American dollars, at that time.

Those not under the influence of "the Master" might find either this approach to advanced sales or the price quite unacceptable. In any case, such were the book parties of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and his disciples. This anecdote comes from a memoir containing a guileless and therefore complicated portrait of Gurdjieff as writer and as spiritual leader. Best known as the writer of A Nun's Story Kathryn Hulme composed a book entitled Undiscovered Country which should be better known not only because of its study of a spiritual quest but also because of Hulme's talent for bringing an historical moment alive.

Her recollections begin with meeting Gurdjieff, but she also recreates the Paris of the Thirties and Forties. She includes fascinating accounts of her patriotic service welding ships as a "Rosie the Riveter" as well as of her administrative service to the European relief efforts after the war. These facts and impressions about the millions of "D.P.'s"—displaced persons—from Poland and the Nazi concentration camps prove to be as compelling as her recollections about "the Master."

Yet her details about Gurdjieff and his only occasionally merry band bring up, quite unintentionally, serious questions about the nature of discipleship. Any reader not under the spell of "the Master," that is, might find some of her precise recollections somewhat disturbing. Her records even make Gurdjieff's followers seem somewhat dim-witted, yet she recounts these incidents with neither resentment nor embarrassment. For example, Gurdjieff liked to propose toasts to "the diverse categories of 'idiots' in which he classified his guests." These gatherings were always dramatic, well-staged, and eventful: Gurdjieff at his theatrical best. Even those "idiots" who felt disillusioned by Gurdjieff's personal behavior and performances—Toomer, for example, experienced this negative conversion from "the Master,"—still praised Gurdjieff's ideas and influence.

To study this attitude of "true believers" is to examine something as complex as "the Master" himself. Certainly, as Eric Hoffer noted long ago, the disciple is aware of moving against the mainstream of orthodoxy and fervently fights upstream anyway. The choice of spiritual guide or guru or confessor rarely makes serene good sense to anyone other than a fellow "true believer." The "idiots"—from Toomer to Mansfield to Ouspensky to Hulme—were simply too talented and intelligent to be conveniently dismissed. They each found spiritual well-being within Gurdjieff's system. For these diverse people, the quest led them to an American mystic with a cunning sense of physics and metaphysics. To dismiss him merely as "the man who killed Katherine Mansfield" or as the man who robbed the Harlem Renaissance of its crown jewel seems to avoid the deeper issue.

Gurdjieff is, rather, a figure emblematic of the baffling and endless quest for the spiritual certainty; many seekers are drawn magnetically to those who proclaim, "This is the way." Further, this search seems absolutely endemic to the creative life; whether this trait is considered foolish, tragic, or transcendent is, of course, significant. Cults can create or destroy personalities and, as the story of Jesus and his cult of followers rather convincingly attests, transform culture, as well.

In his astute article for Nation entitled "Skepticism and the True Believer," Theodore Roszak remarked that the issue of spiritual seeking remains one of monumental import in a world where "conducting autopsies on dead gods is a Freshman philosophy assignment." The writer is always, consciously or unconsciously, searching for the Muse; this fusion of the mystical and practical sources of writing has an age-old credibility still. That such a sacred Source might find embodiment—for Mansfield, Toomer, Hulme, and other writers—in one George Ivanovich Gurdjieff may seem lamentable to the literary cult but perfectly lucid to his devoted defectors.