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Shadows of Heaven: Gurdjieff and Toomer

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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

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.

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.

Fodder for those "upset" with the man, focusing more on "G" than his teachings. Since G was not inclined to use money for selfish purposes, his means of aquisition must be tempered with this knowledge. The debate may rage forever regarding the notion of whether or not the ends justify the means. Taylor has done a good job bringing us into some of the personal aspects of a man he thought of as a great and profound teacher.

A subjective glance at a man without much focus on the teaching, this is a good book for those more interested in gossip than spiritual growth. For those of us on the sidelines and in posession of ignorance, being critical is a simple matter which Taylor proves post haste. He does, however, lend some discussion to the way in which he clearly benefitted from being in the presence of the greatest teacher of the 20th century.

Perhaps it was his great respect for Toomer that inspired Taylor to expose the side of Gurdjieff who used others to further his own endeavors. Gurdjieff used a variety of people to provide him with money, including Toomer. Toomer finally had the good sense to say "enough." Other "pupils" of Gurdjieff have alluded to this side of the man, but they tend to gloss it over because, after all, he was such a great guy. Taylor himself isn't above such glossing, and he seems to seesaw between starry-eyed devotee and realistic (if bitter) observer throughout his account.

Another example of Gurdjieff's thievery is "Beelzebub's Tales," which was the product of various people, but of course Gurdjieff took full credit. For someone who could barely grunt in English, the book came out pretty well--could it have been Orage and Toomer that we have to thank for that?

Interestingly, Taylor has a half-sister whose father was Gurdjieff. His mother was yet another unlucky participant in satisfying Gurdjieff's desires. Sounds like the old man left behind quite a string of unhappy women. Unfortunately, Taylor's mother (who was emotionally abused by Gurdjieff during her pregnancy with HIS child, not to mention his total negligence of the children he brought into the world) doesn't evoke the same level of sympathy from Taylor that Toomer does.

Personally, I'm tired of the "boys will be boys" attitude that pervades "spiritualism." Gurdjieff believed that women's role was to help men, and this is unfortunately something that many men like to hear. It has an especially wonderful ring to it when such an "enlightened fellow" gives women-hating his blessing. Taylor's book was good reading, but it would have been better if he'd given more than a perfunctory glance at the bigger issue he exposed in his book--how acceptable outright misogyny is in "spiritualism" and especially in Gurdjieffian circles.

Account of how the fearless leader hoodwinks yet another pidgeon. Too bad Toomer & the rest of them couldn't honor & respect those who truly deserved it...their wives & mothers.

Anyone interested in the psychology of religious fanaticism will find this book instructive, both through the author's nondeserved reverential attitude toward Gurdjieff, as well as the disgusting truths he reveals about this "great teacher." Taylor thus displays his own hypnosis by not even recognizing much of Gurdjieff's behavior (e.g. impregnating women & leaving them in the lurch) as atrocious.

This book actually makes excellent reading for any woman (or even the rare man) who is interested in the ways "spiritualism" abuses women. Any woman contemplating joining a Gurdjieff group, or any woman who is unfortunate enough to already find herself alone & confused in a Gurdjieff group, may find out why the Cult of Gurdjieff is the way it is--it's Head Honcho was a pig! Otherwise, save your money & buy something of value, like "Heart of Flesh" by Joan Chittister.