An intersection of interests: Gurdjieff's Rope Group as a site of literary production - George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff - Critical Essay

As Shari Benstock and others have pointed out, Paris between the two world wars was home to a number of prominent American women writers, including Gertrude Stein, Janet Flanner, and Djuna Barnes. But within this context, one subgroup of American women writers has largely escaped critical attention. Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, Solita Solano, and Kathryn Hulme were all students of expatriate Armenian and self-proclaimed spiritual teacher George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. Anderson's French lover, Georgette LeBlanc, and her subsequent partner, American Dorothy Caruso, also published books and studied with Gurdjieff. These women (together with Louise Davidson, a New Englander, and Elizabeth Gordon, a British follower) constituted the Gurdjieff study group known as the Rope. Likening his program to a high mountain climb, Gurdjieff told participants they would need to be roped together for safety--hence the group's name (Hulme, Undiscovered 92). Among them, the group's writers published 17 books after beginning to grapple seriously with Gurdjieff's teachings. While a number of these works deserve the obscurity that has claimed them, several others received substantial contemporaneous praise and continue to merit critical attention.

To my knowledge, no one has yet examined this body of work as a discrete literary phenomenon, much less tried to determine the conditions of its emergence from the larger expatriate literary community. (1) Holly A. Baggett notes that "In addition to an artistic avant-garde in Paris during the interwar period, there was a spiritual one as well, and unfortunately the connection between the two has not been adequately scrutinized" (15). After a partial roll call of those "mesmerized" by Gurdjieff, including Heap, Anderson, Katherine Mansfield, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Jean Toomer, Waldo Frank, Gorham Munson, Herbert Croly, Muriel Draper, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Baggett writes: "With few exceptions ... the biographers and critics of those listed above fail to deal with this aspect of their subject's experience." (2) Rob Baker, a former editor of Parabola magazine, did begin a book that might have partially addressed this scholarly void. Tentatively titling the project "Gurdjieff and the Women of the Rope," Baker wrote that he hoped to "bridge the gap that has always existed between literary chroniclers of the Stein circle and historians of the Gurdjieff movement" (42). Unfortunately, Baker was unable to complete the book before his death in 1996. Gurdjieff follower William Patrick Patterson recently adopted a similar project, but his Ladies of the Rope focuses on the group as a spiritual phenomenon, emphasizing Gurdjieff's decision to work with lesbian women. To date, those who consider Gurdjieff's community have either addressed it as a spiritual phenomenon or addressed the works of its writers as if their association with Gurdjieff were not a factor. Neither approach alone can begin to present a complete picture of the writers involved.

This, then, is a preliminary survey of the Rope group as a site of literary production. Very much a product of its specific time and place, the group distinctly marked the works of its members. The behavioral model Gurdjieff provided, the literary aesthetic he articulated, the various practices he encouraged, and the attitudes he espoused all helped to shape the texts produced by his students. While Gurdjieff's impact on the work of two of his male pupils, Jean Toomer and Rene Daumal, was in several respects less than positive, his influence on the women in the Rope group appears to have been largely beneficial. These writers were able to use what they learned from Gurdjieff to increase their productivity, release themselves from dependency on the male-dominated avant-garde, and create their own text-producing "apparatus" with features very different from the traditional model.

The Rope group and Gurdjieff

Before I consider the Rope group as a site of literary production, let me sketch a brief history of the people who belonged to it. See also the chronology of major events in the lives of the group's core members at the end of this essay.

Born in Russian Armenia early in 1866, (3) Gurdjieff enjoyed the benefit of supportive parents. During his teenage years he was privately tutored by Father Dean Borsh, a prominent figure in the Russian Orthodox Church, since his father wished to prepare him for the priesthood (Moore 15). Instead of following that career path, however, he chose a more colorful route. Openly sympathetic biographer James Moore acknowledges that Gurdjieff was a con man from his youth on. Moore likens him and his early companions to sharks. An example: Gurdjieff, having inside information that a railway would be built to particular towns, persuaded local dignitaries to "pay him a small fortune to 'arrange' it" (19). James Webb, who attempts to provide an "independent" (11) account of Gurdjieff, gives a more positive account of his character, noting that while Gurdjieff could "on one level" be described as a fraud, liar, and cheat, he also exhibited compassion, charity, and adherence to his own eccentric code of honor (13). (4) But Webb also illuminates the underside of Gurdjieff's activities. Among other things, he devotes several chapters to an elaborate theory that the young Gurdjieff may have been the spy Ushe Narzunoff, a player in the "Great Game"--the clandestine struggle between Imperial Russia and Britain for control of India. (5)