Gurdjieff - Gurdjieff and the Women of the Rope: Notes of Meetings in Paris and New York 1935-1939 and 1948-1949

GURDJIEFF AND THE WOMEN OF THE ROPE

Notes of Meetings in Paris and New York
19351939 and 19481949

2020 Book Studio

All rights reserved.

Hardback ISBN: 978-0-9559090-6-1

Photo Credits:
Gurdjieff, from the Archives Department, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries.

Elizabeth Gordon, from the archives of GJ Blom, Amsterdam.

Solita Solano and Margaret Anderson, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Jane Heap, MSS 258 Florence Reynolds Collection related to Jane Heap and The Little Review, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware.

Alice Rohrer, 1920s, by Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978). Gold toned gelatin silver photograph, Brooklyn Museum. Gift of David and Marcia Raymond in memory of Paul Raymond, 2002.85.2. Copyright transferred to Brooklyn Museum by the Estate of Wallace Putnam.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to Solita Solano, the Library of Congress; Kathryn Hulme, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, and Special Collections, University of Delaware Library. Special thanks to Frank Brck for his assistance and for proofreading the text.

CONTENTS

CHRONOLOGY 18661935

1866 January 13: Gurdjieff is born in Alexandropol (now Gyumri), Armenia.

1869 February 8: Georgette Leblanc is born in Rouen, France.

1883 November 1: Jane Heap is born in Topeka, Kansas.

1886 November 24: Margaret Anderson is born in Indianapolis, Indiana.

1888 October 30: Sarah Wilkinson (Solita Solano) is born in New York.

1900 July 6: Kathryn Hulme is born in San Francisco.

1908 Margaret moves to Chicago.

1912 Gurdjieff begins teaching in Russia.

1914 March: Margaret publishes the first issue of the art and literary magazine, The Little Review .

1915 Summer: Margaret and Jane meet in Chicago.

1917 Margaret and Jane move The Little Review to New York.

1920 Spring: Margaret and Jane meet Georgette Leblanc and Monique Serrure in New York.

1922 Solita settles in Paris with Janet Flanner.

Gurdjieff moves to the Chteau du Prieur in Fontainebleau and founds the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man.

1923 Jane, Margaret, and Georgette attend A. R. Orages presentation of Gurdjieffs teaching in New York.

1924 January: Gurdjieff visits New York to introduce the teaching to America and holds public demonstrations.

June: Gurdjieff returns to France.

Impressed by the demonstrations, Jane, Margaret, Georgette, and Monique follow Gurdjieff back to France to attend the institute.

July 8: Gurdjieff is seriously injured in a car crashwork at the institute is suspended and he decides to transmit his ideas by writing.

1926 The Little Review suspends publication.

1927 February 19: Margaret and Jane meet Solita and they invite her to visit the institute.

It was in 1927 that I first met Mr. Gurdjieff. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap had invited me to go with them to the Prieur at Fontainebleau, saying, There you will see not one man, but a million men in one. The magnitude of this integer excited me. I hoped for a demigod, a superman of saintly countenance, not this strange ecru man about whom I could see nothing extraordinary except the size and power of his eyes. The impact everyone expected him to make upon me did not arrive. In the evening I listened to a reading from his vaunted book. It bored me. Thereupon I rejected him intellectually, although with good humour. Later in the study-house (how annoyed I was that women were not allowed to smoke there) I heard the famous music, played, I believe, by Monsieur de Hartmann. This, almost from the first measures, I also rejected. A week or so later in Paris I accompanied Margaret and Jane, who had not quite given me up, to a restaurant where crevisses were the speciality which Mr. Gurdjieff was coming to eat with about twenty of his followers. He seated me next to him and for two hours muttered in broken English. I rejected his language, the suit he was wearing and his table manners; I decided that I rather disliked him.

Years passed.

In the autumn of 1934, in a crisis of misery, I suddenly knew that I had long been waiting to go to him and that he was expecting me. I sought him out and sat before him, silent.... He was then living in the Grand Htel, over the Caf de la Paixhis office, while waiting for a flat to be found. The Prieur group had dispersed, there were no followers or pupils near him except Elizabeth Gordon who sometimes came to the Caf. Three friends of mine, who had previously met Mr. Gurdjieff, also began to go to the Caf to see him. Within a few days he gave us chapters of Beelzebub to read aloud to him. And thus, by such an accident, we four formed the nucleus of a new group which was to grow larger year by year until the end of his life.

1927 Kathryn meets Alice Rohrer (also known as Madame X, Wendy, and Nickie) in New York.

Jane establishes a study group for Gurdjieffs teaching in Montparnasse.

1929 The final issue of The Little Review is published.

1930 My Thirty Years War is published.

1931 April: Kathryn and Alice sail to France. A chance encounter aboard the ship with an American artist leads to a meeting with Solita, Janet, and Djuna Barnes in Paris. Solita leads Kathryn and Alice to the place where the only important thing in Paris is going onJanes study group. The group expands to include Kathryn Hulme, Alice Rohrer, Margaret Anderson, Georgette Leblanc, Solita Solano, and Louise Davidson.

1932 February: Kathryn collects Alice from the docks of Le Havre on her return from a trip to California and they go directly to Caf de la Paix (knowing in advance that it is Gurdjieffs Paris office). By chance, Gurdjieff is there; they introduce themselves as members of Jane Heaps study group, and he invites them to visit Fontainebleau.

May: Gurdjieff leaves the Prieur and moves into the Grand Htel above Caf de la Paix.

1933 The Herald of Coming Good is published.

1935 October 18: Jane moves to London leaving a small group of students high and dry.

Jane Heap left for London on October eighteenth ... Her train pulled out, and our group dispersed in different directions. I stood alone for a moment, then a self I had never seen or heard, the self that Gurdjieff was to name Crocodile that same evening, propelled me to the Caf de la Paix, through its heavy revolving door and directly to Gurdjieffs table.

He gazed up at me without a trace of recognition. My heart pounded as I recited my sketchy credentials for the intrusion, reminding him that I had once driven behind him to Fontainebleau, later met him in a Childs Fifth Avenue and now had come from Gare St. Lazare after seeing Miss Heap off for London. His boring eyes seemed to be sampling my inner state as I chattered; then, when I had come to the end of my rope, he mercifully invited me to sit for a coffee.

After a period of easy-feeling silence he looked at me and remarked that I had changed; I was thin in the cheeks, he said. Now I think you smell my idea, you smell so-o ... he inhaled deeply....

Then he asked me if I had ever heard of his crayfish club where he took people and sheared them. Shearing, I knew, was his colorful term for getting contributions toward his Work. Would I like to be a candidate for shearing that night? he asked, and I was nodding in advance of his statement of what it would cost me....

The coffee finished, he gathered up his notebooks and told me to come with him to his hotel.... Right after lunch, he indicated I was free to leave and escorted me to the door. He reminded me of the crayfish dinner that night to which, he said, I could invite one friend and he would invite one. We would meet in the caf at seven.

I sorted out my excited thoughts walking home to the Left Bank faster than a bus could have taken me. Was this possibly the end of our long siege of caf sitting? I heard every word he had spoken to me, exactly as spoken, rumbling, meditative or jocose, heavily accented. How quickly one got used to his extraordinary simplified English when one listened to it with head and heart! I rehearsed his words for Solita and Louise as I flew through narrow streets lined with picture galleries and antique shops where formerly I loitered for hours. Though he had said one friend, I intended that both of them accompany me to that crayfish dinner.