An intersection of interests: Gurdjieff's Rope Group as a site of literary production - George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff - Critical Essay - 3
Rebecca Rauve
Despite their openness about Gurdjieff's influence on their lives, Leblanc, Anderson, Caruso, and Hulme received a fair number of positive reviews. In Strange Necessity, Anderson records the French critical response to Leblanc's Souvenirs: "A book so tragic, so moving, constitutes an extremely rare event. Nothing so beautiful, School Essays so strong, has appeared in many years" (109). Further: "A book Stendhal would have loved, for all that it contains of the rare and the true" And further still: "Genius overflows in this book--literary and psychological genius." (34) Hugh Ford reports that the contemporary response to My Thirty Years' War was favorable (272), and Anderson's work continued to interest critics throughout her long life. In a 1970 review (Anderson died School Essays in 1973), Alfred Kazin describes her three-volume autobiography as a "highly charged, fascinatingly feral nine monologue, rocking with the most intensely personal vibrations ..." (1). While he denies that Anderson possessed genius, Kazin compares her account of her love for Leblanc in Fiery Fountains, with its "furious idealism concentrated wholly on personal relationships," to the great "romantic tragedies in Fitzgerald and Hemingway" (29). Reviewer Ann F. Wolfe claims that Caruso's School Essays Dorothy Caruso: A Personal History, published seven years after her book about her husband, is "an even better--a far better--book than Enrico Caruso" (55). Wolfe acknowledges Dorothy Caruso's "discipleship" with Gurdjieff, but even so does not hesitate to credit the memoir with historical significance: "As a candle illuminates its sconce, so the story of [Caruso's] inner evolution throws light on the history of her era." Hulme's The Nun's Story, which School Essays transposes the Gurdjieffian values of self-observation and self-reliance onto a Catholic protagonist, was a best seller--popular enough to be made into an Audrey Hepburn movie (Baker 40).
Leaving aside Hulme's travel books and Solano's poetry, what remains of the Rope group's output is a cluster of narratives marked not only by similar forms but by similar styles. In Strange Necessity, Anderson describes the group's shared aesthetic, one that stresses the primacy School Essays of emotion over intellect, the particular over the general, and the personal over the public. "To express the emotions of life is to live. To express the life of emotions is to make art," Anderson writes (19). Solano also privileged the emotions, praising Leblanc's Souvenirs as "a record of her unique valor and tragedy." She added, "It is special for people who react to a great, illumined nature of inner School Essays struggles, all of which are individual (personal) to her" (qtd. in Anderson, Strange 109). (35) Discounting intellectuals as "sentimental" Anderson lists the reasons why she began to view her more cerebral friends with distrust: "Their judgments (so wavering), the inexactitudes of their weights and measures, the irresponsibility and unreality of their opinions and their positions" (105).
Rope writers countered what Gurdjieff had taught them to see as the relentless mechanical activity School Essays of the mind with the use of imagery. Praising the work of her friends, Anderson says, "They seem not to think, but to see; and their thoughts are pictures" (Strange 116). Leblanc: "It depends on a vision. I see a grief like an image traced by my nerves. It becomes more clear, more precise, it takes on a form, and then falls from me. The story of a fruit tree." School Essays Heap: "With my hands I take my brain and slowly uncrumple it ... surprising how big it is smoothed out like melted silk. I will crumple it up again firmly and put it back after I have left it this way for a long time shining and clean" (117). In addition to vivid imagery, another shared stylistic trait is that of pastiche. Rope narratives often incorporate old journal entries, aphorisms, School Essays or significant scraps of remembered dialog. Caruso's memoir of Enrico Caruso includes cartoon sketches by the famous singer. The same inclusive tendency that prompted Rope writers to choose others as the subject of so many of their books also seems to have inspired them to open their texts to admit the words and work of others.
Although she frequently asserted that she was not a writer, Anderson was in fact the School Essays most accomplished and inventive of the group. Her work, which became increasingly experimental as she aged, remained grounded in lived experience. In her last book she wrote, "I must write no single sentence that doesn't present an experienced fact--real or that really took place in my imagination" (Strange 174). These books invite the exploration of a variety of open questions, among them the relationship of the memoir to issues of School Essays self-representation, self-creation, and performance; the role of writing in the constitution of the everyday; and the function of narrative in relation to affect.
Conclusion: The Rope group as a literary community
Gurdjieff encouraged communal feeling among the Rope members to a much greater extent than among his male students. The November before her death, Katherine Mansfield wrote in a letter to her husband John Middleton Murry: "I remember I used to think--if School Essays there was one thing I could not bear in a community, it would be the women. But now the women are nearer and far dearer than the men" (qtd. in Webb 248). Hulme recalls being told to regard the Rope group's "inner-world journey" as a sort of team effort (Undiscovered 92). "Each must think of the others on the rope, all for one and one for all. "They were instructed School Essays to help each other "'as hand washes hand" each contributing to the company according to her lights, according to her means."
The group's literary members took seriously the direction to help each other not just with respect to their spiritual quest but also to their other shared vocation--writing. Heap prescribed writing exercises. Leblanc and Caruso wrote their books as a direct result of Anderson's prodding. The published version of Anderson's My School Essays Thirty Years' War, like the two autobiographical volumes that would follow, was the product of Solano's "expert editing" (Anderson, Forbidden 12). Baker notes that Solano probably saved Hulme's Undiscovered Country, which might otherwise have collapsed under the weight of its "purple prose" (44). (36) She was not just a skilled editor but a supportive one as well. To help Anderson in the last stages of writing My Thirty Years' War, School Essays she actually arranged for a room in a quiet hotel for her, and had tulips sent up every three days (Ford 269-70).
The more successful women in the group did their best to see that the newcomers to the literary scene were published. (37) Anderson in particular grew frustrated by her friends' difficulty in placing their work:
I often wonder why some publisher doesn't announce to the
world, "I shall publish School Essays only books which are ART. Help!!" This is
what the Little Review did, and a valiant new publisher would be
as surprised as we were at the response--aesthetic and financial--he
would receive. (Strange 111)
When publishers did not materialize quickly (and sometimes even when they did), Anderson spliced her friends' words into her own projects. The Unknowable Gurdjieff is a veritable patchwork of her own writing, sections from books by Leblanc School Essays and Caruso, and letters from Heap. The Strange Necessity includes poems by Solano and Leblanc as well as a number of other writing samples by her friends. The result is very different from the self-conscious use of pastiche for its formal qualities. Instead, the effect is more like that of a dinner conversation where everyone is energized and wants to talk at once.
Within the Rope group, letters played an important School Essays role. An indication of how their correspondence functioned can be seen in a 1941 letter to Heap from her longtime correspondent Florence Reynolds, who, like Caruso, became an honorary member of the Rope circle:
I wrote you that Solita sent me the manuscript [Anderson's Fiery
Fountains].... Some of it is so exquisite with the fragile quality
Marty has herself had these last years.... [But] to take out all the
G School Essays stuff--my dear--do you realize how little would be left, I
mean how few actual pages? His name is mentioned fifty-five
times by actual count and whole sections are nothing but a
discussion of ideas and their impact upon her. You suggest in your
letter that "Solita select the stories or pieces that might get
published." She didn't comment on this suggestion in her letter, so
I'll write her and see School Essays if she is amenable.... (Heap 141)
This passage suggests how all the group's members, even members of the extended community like Reynolds, assumed ownership of the texts the group produced. They worked together to convey those texts safely through the publishing process and into the hands of discriminating readers. The reference to Anderson's fragility also hints at what is present more overtly in other letters: the group members' concern for one School Essays another's physical safety and well-being. The letter is Reynolds's text about Anderson's text about Gurdjieff's text, and is written in response to a text by Heap. The web of language constituted an important part of their mutual safety net.
As time went on and their friendships deepened, Rope members appear to have become less interested in catering to a wide audience. At a significant point in Anderson's Forbidden Fires, the novel's School Essays heroine accuses her love interest of worrying too much about the public. "The public is an 'unconscious monster'.... Why consider it?" she asks (81), with a disdain that echoes sentiments expressed by fellow American expatriates Pound and Stein. Nevertheless, much of the group's writing did find its way to appreciative readers. The acceptance that members enjoyed during their lifetimes is probably linked in no small measure to the personal freedom School Essays and artistic inspiration that Paris offered. The liberal Parisian environment also afforded them the chance to work with Gurdjieff, whose unorthodox mentorship clearly seems to have contributed to their success. Formed at an intersection of interests--literary, sexual, spiritual--the Rope study group functioned as a fertile site for self-invention, self-revision, and self-empowerment. It privileged the private and personal over the public and impersonal, the collaboration over the individual "work of genius." School Essays Whether or not its meetings produced higher consciousness, they did engender a feminist literary community whose members gave birth to a sincere and searching body of work. In keeping with the values expressed by Gurdjieff's "parable of the road apples," the Rope group seems to have remained relatively unaffected by the "noise, rattling, and nauseous smell" of the industry their work modestly fueled. Their attention focused instead on self-reflection, self-responsibility, School Essays and a desire to provide nourishment for fellow "sparrows."
Chronology
1866? Gurdjieff born in Alexandropol in Russian Armenia to a Greek father and Armenian mother.
1887-1907 Gurdjieff's "missing years" possibly the inspiration for the wanderings detailed in Meetings with Remarkable Men.
1911 Arriving in St. Petersburg, Gurdjieff takes his first pupils.
1914 Margaret Anderson founds the Little Review.
1916 Anderson meets Jane Heap. They become lovers and copublishers. In 1917 they move to New York.
1918 Gurdjieff School Essays and a group of about 40 followers are displaced by political upheaval.
1922 Journalist Solita Solano settles in Paris with New Yorker correspondent Janet Flanner.
Gurdjieff, now with a band of about 25, enters Paris. In August he founds the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man near Fontainebleau.
1924 Anderson and Heap are among those impressed by Gurdjieff during his visit to New York. Anderson and her new lover Georgette Leblanc move School Essays to Paris and begin to frequent the Fontainebleau institute. Heap follows soon after.
1927 Heap and Anderson take Solano to visit the institute. Solano is not impressed.
1929 The final issue of the Little Review appears.
1930 Hulme, traveling in Europe as a paid companion, meets Solano.
1932 Due to unpaid bills, the institute's mortgagees foreclose. Gurdjieff spends much of the next few years in the US.
A study group led by Heap begins to School Essays hold regular meetings. Hulme attends, and her interest in Gurdjieff's teachings prompts her to remain in Paris.
1935 Gurdjieff returns to Paris. Heap goes to London to found a new study group.
1936 The Rope group is officially constituted. In addition to Anderson, Leblanc, Solano, and Hulme, attendees include New Englander Louise Davidson and British follower Elizabeth Gordon.
1938 The group disbands under threat of war.
1941 Leblanc dies of breast cancer, nursed by School Essays Anderson. On her way back to the US (where Solano has already returned), Anderson meets Dorothy Caruso.
1943 Hulme serves the war effort as a welder in a San Francisco shipyard. Beginning in 1945, she works as a supervisor in the international relief effort.
1948 Anderson travels to Paris with Caruso, who meets Gurdjieff for the first time. Solano, Hulme, Heap, and a number of other students return to spend time with School Essays the aging teacher.
1949 Gurdjieff dies in Paris.
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