Shadows of Heaven: Gurdjieff and Toomer [Paperback]

Paul Beekman Taylor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1998

A great deal of mystery surrounds G.I. Gurdjieff and "The Work." Today, many on the path of self-exploration find themselves drawn to the symbolism of the enneagram, and to Gurdjieff's other teachings. Gurdjieff was undeniably charismatic many famous and influential people lived in his "shadow," accepting his guidance while changing and transforming their lives. Shadows of Heaven focuses on the relationship between Gurdjieff and the poet-novelist Nathan Jean Toomer, from 1924 until Gurdjieff's death in 1949, as well as each man's relationship with Edith Annesley Taylor and her son Paul, the author of this book. Caught in the middle of this tense triad of interests was the English critic-publisher A.R. Orage, who was close to all three parties, and whose wife, Jessie, was Edith's best friend. Paul Taylor's unique life experience has made it possible for him to combine his mother's memoir's conversations between Toomer and Gurdjieff, and entries from Jessie Orage's diary into this fascinating book. It is probably the first to reveal something of Gurdjieff's "love life" with the mothers of his children. Several new descriptions of Gurdjieff's voyages with his pupils reveal aspects of Gurdjieff's character not documented elsewhere. Excerpts from Jessie Orage's diaries testify to the magnetic attraction Gurdjieff exercised over those he felt were viral to the dissemination of his ideas. With 16 pages of never-before published photographs, this book presents a fresh new picture of Gurdjieff and his teaching, adding to his legend a tangible humanity to which we can all relate.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Red Wheel / Weiser (May 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1578630347
• ISBN-13: 978-1578630349
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,660,455 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Taylor's book an interesting account from two perspectives, May 26, 1999

By 

Bob Swain "Seattle" (Seattle) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shadows of Heaven: Gurdjieff and Toomer (Paperback)

Paul Taylor's book has two perspectives. One is that of an insider who grew up within the Gurdjieff movement. His mother was Gurdjieff and Jean Toomer's lover. His own father remains an unsolved mystery. He tells many stories of the rather Bohemian love affairs the various members of the entourage "enjoyed" -- although they mostly sound miserable and crazy.

Taylor, an English professor at the University of Geneva, also manages to put Jean Toomer and Gurdjieff into a larger academic perspective -- commenting on Toomer's race, and Gurdjieff's proximity to other philosophers and writers of his period.

The book is well-written -- maintaining at one time a personal perspective, and a wider, more objective, academic perspective. For Gurdjieffians and Toomer fans alike -- the book is highly readable and informative.

-- Kirby Olson

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars To Each His Own Gurdjieff, June 27, 2006

By 

James Moore (LONDON) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shadows of Heaven: Gurdjieff and Toomer (Paperback)

History, according to Sir George Clark, is a "hard core of fact" with a "surrounding pulp of disputable interpretation." So is biography. And this restless dialectic of fact and exegesis, obstinately irresoluble in a satisfying final chord, is full of interest for the curious student of human nature. Only look for example at the burgeoning literature touching the holistic philosopher, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff.

In Peter Brook's memoir Threads of Time and Paul Taylor's study Shadows of Heaven Gurdjieff is the highest common factor. True enough, Brook, at 73, is reprising his entire artistic life, shared with his wife Natasha Parry; true enough, Taylor is concerned to celebrate the American writer Jean Toomer, who adopted him in childhood - yet it is Gurdjieff who bids to hijack both books.

Taylor - no cultural nonentity himself (he collaborated with W. H. Auden in Norse translations) - enjoyed from infancy up a privileged entrée to the innermost Gurdjieffian set. Indeed, his flightily attractive mother Edith Annesley Taylor was one of Gurdjieff's many conquests ("He was not a nice man," she mused in the afterglow) and in November 1928 bore him a daughter named Eve. Brook, by contrast, never met Gurdjieff but in early 1950, aged 25, came enthusiastically under his influence as refracted through two powerful individualities - Jane Heap, who with Margaret Anderson had serialised Joyce's Ulysses, and subsequently Jeanne de Salzmann one of Gurdjieff's senior and intimate pupils.

Each author is here an insérend - narrator, witness, and participant in his tale. Each, incidentally, is let down by his copy editor: thus Brook has Gurdjieff born in Kars (Alexandropol actually), while Taylor, more damagingly, has Gurdjieff vowing to remove from his sight all those retainers who make his life "uncomfortable" (comfortable actually.) Beyond these parallels, the stylistic and methodological contrast between the two books practically makes one's eyes start out of one's head. Here is Professor Taylor, the very model of a neo-Rankeian - up to his armpits in facts; sinking fast (cf. Natasha Parry in Oh Les Beaux Jours); and grappling to drag the reader down with him. And here is Brook, so intent on going the Full Monty in exposing his artistic and spiritual conscience that he flings away the decent loincloth of historicity. If, to the over-cynical eye, Brook's memoir suggests the Evening Standard's social diary raised an octave - happy unpunctual hours with Beckett, Brecht, Dali, Genet et al - then Taylor's reads like a report of a grouchy Tax Inspector: every solitary cheque from Toomer to Gurdjieff accusatorially totted up.

Taylor recklessly asserts that no-one of the post-war groups possessed the "authoritative knowledge, influence, and gift to carry things further." Brook would have none of this. He hymns - and far more persuasively - the "luminous presence" of his teacher Jeanne de Salzmann, whose death at 101 plunges him into "a long and ashen period of grief." Considering that the Virgin Mary, a minimalist figure in the Gospels and early patristic writings, now finds takers as the Mediatrix of All Graces and even Co-Redemptress, it is perhaps forgiveable that Madame de Salzmann's ascendancy in the Gurdjieffian pantheon has begun to intrigue university departments which address the morphology of so-called New Religious Movements.

To contemporary Gurdjieffians bloodied by the hard pounding of his recent neo-Enlightenment attackers (Peter Washington, Anthony Storr etc.) Brook's timely reinforcement could be as welcome as Blücher's arrival on the field of Waterloo. Unfortunately, Taylor's book drives a factual salient deep into the heartland of the Gurdjieffian Mythos. After Taylor, things can never be quite the same again. Goodbye soap-opera: hello deconstructionist scholarship. Goodbye romanticism: hello wie es eigentlich gewesen. It is nevertheless the disqualifying flaw of Taylor's study that the noumenal is so conspicuously lacking. Thrust by sheer accident of birth into a magic circle, he recognises no magic and canalises no magic. His Gurdjieff is a Prospero whose wand is phallic and whose books turn out to be private ledgers ignobly maintained on triple-entry accountancy principles. Surely there was much more to it than this.

Where Brook (a pulp of meaning man if ever there was one) arguably meshes too snugly with his text, Taylor (the fact man) betrays an almost endearing alienation from his chosen subject matter. He finds Gurdjieff and his magnum opus Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson equally "unreadable"; he conveniently disavows competence to address Gurdjieff's teaching; and he manages only a lame and misleading description of his Sacred Dances i.e. that they "resemble the dances of the Whirling Dervishes." So much for the uniqueness and complexity of Gurdjieff's extraordinary oeuvre; for Madame de Salzmann's lifelong effort to serve and nourish it; and for Brook's high risk strategy in placing a fraction of it before the public.

One fine day, I propose introducing these two authors to each other. I have in mind a short collaborative postscript called Threads of Heaven or Shadows of Time. Meanwhile, does Brook conceive what he owes to Taylor's mother? After all, it was Edith who in July 1926 thwarted Jessie Orage (wife of A. R. Orage, former editor of the New Age) from actually shooting Gurdjieff with a pearl-handled revolver. Brook should be very grateful. I know I am.

James Moore, Gurdjieff's biographer,
undertook the Gurdjieff module in the
Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Merciless Destruction of Gurdjieff's Not-Too-Good-Image, May 13, 2003

By 

Reijo Oksanen "Reijo Oksanen" (Switzerland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shadows of Heaven: Gurdjieff and Toomer (Paperback)

I suppose the motivation for writing this book in the words of Gurdjieff in Beelzebub's Tales would be: 'to destroy, mercilessly, without any compromises whatsoever, in the mentation and feelings of the reader, the beliefs and views, rooted in him, about Gurdjieff himself".

I always thought that Gurdjieff took care that his own image was not without tarnish; this has been explained as his way of getting his followers not to identify the man with the teaching. Paul Beekman Taylor completes this work and achieves a clear separation, without leaving us any shadow of doubt.

Gurdjieff according to Mr. Taylor was a womanizer, father of his sister Eve and about half a dozen (if not more) of other children, who Gurdjieff left to their mothers to raise shunning all resposibility like plague (at least he did so with Eve). His Gurdjieff wrote appallingly childish letters in bad taste to Mr. Taylor's mother, Edith Annesly Taylor, who said of Gurdjieff: "He is not a nice man", and kept coming back to him like a jojo for about 25 years.

Jean Toomer, one of the many lovers of Edith Taylor, comes out much cleaner. As Gurdjieff would say: "very handy, no children, just handkerchief".

Nobody is a prophet in his own country; only very few of Gurdjieff's relatives, official or unofficial, seem to have learned from him about the things he taught. Mr. Taylor is almost family, but he learned at least one thing. His book has a one page record of the conversation he had with Gurdjieff in 1949, in which he said: "Come see me in New York, you pay me for summer here with story there, at Child's. Story is breath, life. Without story man have no self." Gurdjieff died before Paul Beekman Taylor told his story to him.

Now 50 years later he achieves with his story a good increase of the distance between Gurdjieff the man and his teaching.