A. R. Orage

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Alfred Richard Orage (1873–1934) was an English editor and lecturer, best remembered for two things that rarely sit together: the literary weekly he ran, and the spiritual teaching he gave the last decade of his life to. From 1907 to 1922 he edited The New Age, a London paper that printed Shaw, Pound, Katherine Mansfield, and a wide spread of political and cultural argument, and that made him one of the more influential editors of his generation. He paid contributors little and read everything; the paper’s weight came from his judgment rather than its budget.

Orage came to that work from the provinces and from heterodoxy. A schoolteacher in Leeds, he helped found the Leeds Art Club, lectured on Nietzsche and on Plato, and was for a time an active Theosophist — the esoteric movement around Helena Blavatsky’s writings — before the editorship drew him to London. The mix is characteristic of him: a man equally at home with socialist economics and with the claim that the self most people take for granted is not yet awake.

The turn that defines the later Orage came in 1922, when he met G. I. Gurdjieff, the Greek-Armenian teacher whose system — later called the Fourth Way — held that ordinary waking life is a kind of sleep, and that a disciplined effort of attention and self-observation might bring a person to a fuller, more unified state of being. Orage sold his interest in The New Age, spent months at Gurdjieff’s institute at Fontainebleau, and in 1924 went to New York as Gurdjieff’s representative there. For roughly the next seven years he led the American groups, conducting the talks and exercises through which much of the Work first reached an English-speaking audience. Many who knew the teaching in those years knew it as Orage taught it.

The relationship was not simple. Gurdjieff was a demanding and at times disruptive master, and the historical record shows strain between teacher and pupil over money, over doctrine, and over Orage’s growing independence; by the early 1930s Orage had largely withdrawn from active teaching. He returned to England and to editing, founding the New English Weekly and giving his last energies to Social Credit, the monetary-reform theory of C. H. Douglas. He died in 1934, shortly after a radio broadcast on that subject.

His standing is contested in a precise way. To students of modernist literature he is an editor; to students of twentieth-century esotericism he is the figure who carried the Gurdjieff teaching to America and shaped how it was received. The two reputations rarely meet, which is itself a fair measure of a man who moved between worlds and was never quite claimed by either.

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