Shadows in Heaven

209 Pages·2016·9.18 MB·English

by  Paul Beekman Taylor - Shadows in Heaven

SHADOWS
OF
HEAVEN
Paul Beekman Taylor
SAMUEL WEISER, INC.
York Beach, Maine
This book is dedicated to Jean Toomer’s daughter
Margot, who has her own story yet to tell,
and to her children Michelle and Philip,
who deserve to have this one.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments..................................................................................................... ix
Chapter 1. Memory and Design............................................................................... 1
Chapter 2. Living with Toomer.............................................................................. 15
Chapter 3. Growing with Toomer..........................................................................39
Chapter 4. The Ascent; With Gurdjieff 1924-1926............................................... 63
Photographs.......................................................................between pages 118-119
Chapter 5. The Descent; From Gurdjieff 1927-1939...........................................119
Chapter 6. Beelzebub’s Last Sojourn on Earth................................................... 165
Chapter 7. Gurdjieff’s Teaching Text................................................................... 185
Chapter 8. Returning to Toomer...........................................................................199
Chapter 9. Shadowing Gurdjieff and Toomer....................................................221
Bibliography.............................................................................................................237
Index.......................................................................................................................... 241
About the Author.....................................................................................................246
Acknowledgments
I thank the Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, Yale University, for permission to publish material
from the Toomer papers. Susan Sandberg, representing the estate of Mar­
jorie Content, has permitted me to publish excerpts from her mother’s
letters, and has offered photographs for reproduction. Anne B. Orage has
given me permission to cite the diaries of Jessie Dwight, the correspon­
dence of A. R. Orage, and to reproduce a late photo of Orage. Rudolph
Byrd, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Michael Harper have read the first three
chapters from an early draft with sympathy and encouragement. Nikolai
de Stjernvall has freely offered his recollections of the Prieure. Luba
Gurdjieff was patient with my constant questioning over the past thirty
years. I cannot remember all of those who have spoken to me of Gurdjieff
in the 1940s and 50s, but among these are Jessie, Richard and Ann Orage,
Tatiana Savitsky Nagro, Nick Putnam, Phillip Lasell, Fritz Peters, Patty
Welch, Marian Sutta, lovanna Lloyd-W-ight, Dushka [Sophie] Howarth,
Bernard Metz, Rita Romilly, Solita Solano, Margaret Anderson, Stanley
and Rosemary Nott, Daly King, Sherman Manchester, Roger Manchester,
and, most of all, my mother Edith Annesley Taylor and my sister Eve Tay­
lor Chevalier.
I am also in debt to the scholars who have carefully outlined the lives
of Toomer and Gurdjieff, particularly to Rudolph Byrd for his fine study,
Toomer’s Years with Gurdjieff, which incited the undertaking of this work by
challenging me to review my own.
❖ ^ ^
Quoted material at the chapter openings comes from the following sourc­
es: chapter 1, page 1, Jean Toomer, “The Blue Meridian,” in The Collected
Poems, Robert Jones and Margot Toomer, eds. (Chapel Hill, NC: Univer­
sity of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 65, and Jean Toomer, Essentials, Ru­
dolph Byrd, ed. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993), xxxiv;
chapter 2, page 15, Jean Toomer, Essentials, p. xxi, and Jean Toomer, “The
Blue Meridian,” in The Collected Poems, p. 66; chapter 3, page 39, Jean
Toomer, Essentials, xxiv and, “People” in The Collected Poems, p. 80; chapter
4, page 63, A. R. Orage, cited by C. Daly King, The Oragean Version (New
York: Privately published, 1951), p. 257, and Jean Toomer, “The Blue Me­
ridian,” in The Collected Poems, p. 67, and Jean Toomer, Cane (New York:
X ❖ Acknowledgments
Boni and Liveright, 1922), p. 150; chapter 5, page 119, Jean Toomer, Essen­
tials, xxii, and G. I. Gurdjiefi^ cited by Solita Solano in personal communi­
cation to Edith Taylor; chapter 6, page 165, Louis Pauwels, “Du
detachement, Les dossiers H.: Georges Ivanovitch Qurdjieff, Bruno de
Panafieu, ed. (Pans: I’Age d’homme, 1992), p. 60, and James Webb, The
Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Works of G. I. Gurdjieg P. D. Ouspensky and
Their Followers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), p. 15; chapter 7,
page 185, A. R. Orage, cited by C. Daly King, The Oragean Version, p. 266,
and Frank Lloyd Wright, cited by Anne Fremantle, “Travels with a Search­
er,” New York Times Book Review, 8 September 1963, p. 6; chapter 8, page
199, Jean Toomer, The Wayward and The Seeking, Darwin T. Turner, ed.
(Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1980), p. 438, and Jean
Toomer, “The Blue Meridian,” in The Collected Poems, p. 53; chapter 9,
page 221, Jean Toomer, “The Blue Meridian,” in The Collected Poems, p. 68,
and John Milton, Paradise Lost, Merritt Y Hughes, ed. (New York' Odyssey
Press, 1957), Book 5, 574-576.
------------- Chapter One ---------------
Memory and Design
Expand the fields, the specializations,
The limitations of occupation,
The definition of what we are
That gain fractions and lose wholes—
I am of the field of being,
We are beings.
—“The Blue Meridian”
According to what a man is called, so will people respond to him.
—Essentials
The subtitle for this book, Gurdjiejf and Toomer, suggests that I am scanning
the direct relations between two men. Yet Nathan Jean Toomer spent little
time in the physical company of Georgii Ivanovich Gurdjieff between
1924, when he saw him for the first time, and 1935, when he saw him last.
Nonetheless, during that period, Toomer spent the greater part of his en­
ergies in the service of Gurdjieff, teaching, raising funds, and organizing
study groups. In fact, he considered himself attached to Gurdjieff until
1939, when he finally turned away from his master, and in 1953, only three
years after Gurdjieff’s death, he re-engaged himself in the Gurdjieff work
in New York City. Toomer’s life with Gurdjieff is, indeed, a major topic of
this book, but my tide alludes as well to intricate connective relationships
that the association between the two men engendered. One strand is
Toomer’s relationship with my mother, Edith Taylor, and another is his re­
lationship with me, both of which grew out of his participation in the
Gurdjieff work. Other strands in the fabric of this story include those ex­
periences of my mother with Gurdjieff, which Jean Toomer influenced di­
rectly as well as indirectly, and my own brief participation in Gurdjieff’s
world, which my mother encouraged. Therefore, although I have assem­
bled the text of this book, I am more reporter than author, for the pages
that follow record many voices, among which the most telling are those of
Toomer, Gurdjieff, and Edith Taylor. Behind the scenes, the intertwining
relationships of these three people were orchestrated and mediated by the