Gurdjieff’s America
Reviewed by Seymour Ginsburg author of In Search of the Unitive Vision

I cannot imagine anyone better qualified than Paul Beekman Taylor to write about Gurdjieff’s America. Taylor, emeritus professor at the University of Geneva, brings to his subject, a scholar’s meticulous research. This is enhanced by details known to Taylor through his familial connections with and his personal knowledge of G. I. Gurdjieff, the Greek/Armenian mystic, and many of the people who were Gurdjieff’s pupils and intimates.

This is the third and most comprehensive book in the trilogy that Paul Taylor, an American himself, has authored about Gurdjieff and particularly about his travels to America and his relations with his American pupils. The earlier books, Shadows of Heaven: Gurdjieff and Toomer and Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium recount the history of Gurdjieff’s relationships with Jean Toomer and Alfred R. Orage respectively, who along with C. Daly King, were arguably the most important exponents of Gurdjieff’s teaching in America. Taylor honored Orage, knew King and Toomer was like a father to him. He is the son of Edith Taylor, one of the women with whom Gurdjieff was intimate, and the half-brother of Eve Taylor, Gurdjieff’s natural daughter. Taylor lived his first two years at the Prieuré, Gurdjieff’s residential school outside Paris. Much of his later childhood was spent in the household of Jean Toomer in Pennsylvania. During the war years, living again with his mother in Connecticut, Taylor recounts that “streams of ‘Gurdjieffians’ passed through our home” These included Stanley Nott and his family, Fritz Peters, Nick Putnam, Bernard Metz and many, many others. Taylor knew them all.

Paul Taylor is one of the few people still on the scene who actually knew Gurdjieff. He had contact with him off and on all during the decades of the nineteen thirties and forties. In Gurdjieff’s America he shares his recollections of the man with us. Many of the people who today study Gurdjieff’s teaching are, like me, second generation, pupils of pupils of Gurdjieff. Perhaps the majority of pupils today are already third generation. All of us are indebted to Professor Taylor for sharing with us his intimate recollections of Gurdjieff and the characters who surrounded him, especially in America. While many of us study Gurdjieff’s teaching, we know almost nothing of the man himself. Taylor’s trilogy, especially this third volume, helps to fill that void. He brings Gurdjieff to life for us, giving us a “feel” for the man, not only for his extraordinary powers and level of being, but even for what we might see today as his failings. For example, what would be regarded today as a chauvinistic attitude toward women is balanced by Gurdjieff’s work with the lesbian group known as “the rope.” Taylor details all this.

From the historical and scholarly perspective, Taylor has gone out of his way through meticulous research, to clear up numerous questions raised by earlier historical accounts of Gurdjieff and inconsistencies in the reporting of events surrounding him. As Taylor says, “there is a regrettable mass of misinformation concerning Gurdjieff’s life, some of which has been incited by Gurdjieff’s own purposeful ‘fictions’ of self, including occasional either careless or intentional misdating of events.”

One of the questions among many that Taylor has cleared up is just how many visits Gurdjieff made to America and the nature of his activities during those visits. There were nine visits in all, a number larger than I had been led to believe, and possibly a tenth visit. Even Taylor’s extensive research could not yield corroborative evidence of a supposed visit to America by Gurdjieff at the end of 1932, mentioned by earlier writers.

During Gurdjieff’s nine or ten visits to America, Taylor points out that Gurdjieff would spend a total of over three years in New York City, a length of time that I found surprising. Taylor catalogs the many luminaries of the arts and literature who were attracted to Gurdjieff in America just as they had been in Europe. Most did not become his pupils but were especially interested in the sacred dances performed by troupes of pupils that are a major part of the Gurdjieff teaching. In furtherance of spreading the teaching Gurdjieff traveled to other parts of America, among them, Boston, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

Especially notable was Gurdjieff’s relationship with the architect, Frank Lloyd Wright and his wife Oligivanna who had earlier been a Gurdjieff pupil and exponent of the dances. The Wrights established residential schools of architecture, in many ways along the lines of the Prieuré, at Scottsdale, Arizona and Spring Green, Wisconsin where Gurdjieff visited. On one visit to Spring Green in 1939, Taylor records that Wright said jokingly to Gurdjieff, “Well, Mr. Gurdjieff, this is very interesting. I think I’ll send some of my young pupils to you in Paris. Then they can come back and I’ll finish them off.’ ‘You finish! You are idiot,’ said Gurdjieff. ‘You finish! No! You begin, I finish.’ ‘You know,’ said Olgivanna, ‘Mr. Gurdjieff is right.’” But, as Taylor points out, there were no hard feelings between the two despite Gurdjieff’s outburst. Gurdjieff’s America is full of delightful accounts like this.

Gurdjieff’s America gives us a “feel” for the times during which Gurdjieff ventured to America in the effort to establish his teaching on the American continent. Those times began during the boom years of the nineteen twenties but continued into the depression era of the nineteen thirties. There is the well known story of Gurdjieff’s hopes of receiving financial aid from wealthy New Mexico senator Bronson Cutting only to see those hopes dashed when Cutting died in the crash of a private airplane in 1935. But Taylor debunks the idea stating, “it is unlikely that Cutting was prepared to advance money for Gurdjieff to repurchase the Prieure or to acquire another property,” and explaining that not only had Cutting himself suffered severe financial losses but that he was not interested in Gurdjieff’s teaching per se.

Pervading the book are Taylor’s accounts of the extraordinary financial difficulties endured by Gurdjieff and his pupils both in Europe and in America, exacerbated by the worldwide depression and second World War. For example, little known to Gurdjieff’s later pupils was the importance of the financial support of the wealthy hotel magnate Andre Dupre’, and after his death, the continuing support by his widow Anci, who Gurdjieff had cured of an inoperable tumor. It was largely through the Dupres’ connections and support that Gurdjieff was able to maintain himself in Paris during the second World War. Afterward, it was Anci who put forward the balance of funds demanded by the publishers for the publication of All and Everything (Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson). Gurdjieff’s America is chock full of little known facts like these. Taylor’s description of the remarkable curing of Anci is one of the many little known facts about Gurdjieff’s remarkable powers.

It must be mentioned that while not a book of the teaching, Taylor touches upon numerous aspects of the teaching including commentary on portions of Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, Gurdjieff’s great book of the teaching. The reader, not otherwise familiar with the Gurdjieff teaching, will begin to get some insight into it.

I loved reading Gurdjieff’s America and have learned a great deal from it as will, no doubt, all pupils of Gurdjieff’s teaching, along with scholars and students of the history of the times. This book is destined to be regarded as the definitive account of Gurdjieff’s sojourns in America.