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. The same gift — a way of drawing the best out of strong minds without imposing a single line on them — carried into the second half of his life, when he set the literary career aside and became, in London and then New York, the chief English mouthpiece of a teaching he had not invented and could not control.

George Bernard Shaw, who helped arrange the financial backing that let Orage take over The New Age in 1907 and printed in its pages — unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Leeds: the heterodox soil

Orage came to that work from the provinces and from heterodoxy. Born on 22 January 1873 and raised in modest circumstances in the East Midlands, he trained as a teacher and from 1893 taught in Leeds elementary schools, where he became a fixture of the city’s advanced intellectual life rather than a quiet provincial master. In 1903, with the journalist and bibliophile Holbrook Jackson, he co-founded the Leeds Arts Club, an avant-garde forum whose programme ran across the unlikely span that would define him for the rest of his life: lectures on Plato, on Friedrich Nietzsche, on Fabian socialism, and on the Theosophy of Helena Blavatsky’s circle. He joined the Independent Labour Party and the Theosophical movement in the same years; he read Nietzsche as a doctrine of self-overcoming and Theosophy as a map of hidden human possibility, and he saw no contradiction in holding both at once. 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 Leeds years supplied the two convictions that would still govern him at the end — that society could be remade by reordering the way it held and distributed value, and that the individual person could be remade by a discipline of attention. Tom Steele’s study Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club, 1893–1923 (1990) treats this period not as juvenilia but as the formed seedbed of everything that followed; the editor and the esoteric teacher were both already present in the Leeds lecturer.

The New Age, 1907–1922

The editorship drew him to London. He moved south in 1906, and in 1907 — with Jackson again, and with financial backing arranged in part through George Bernard Shaw and a sympathetic Theosophist banker — he took over the small weekly The New Age. From 1909 he ran it alone, and ran it for fifteen years as one of the most consequential little papers in the English language. Its politics were Guild Socialism, an attempt to vest industry in the hands of self-governing trade guilds rather than in either the state or the shareholder; but the paper’s reach far exceeded its program. Orage opened its columns to whoever could write well and think hard, and the roster he printed on almost no money is a fair index of his eye: George Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, Katherine Mansfield (whose early stories he championed), Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, T. E. Hulme, and a long succession of younger critics, economists, and poets. He was, by the testimony of nearly everyone who passed through the office, a great editor in the strict sense — not a writer of much published work of his own, but a maker of other writers, able to commission, cut, provoke, and improve. Contributors went unpaid or barely paid; what they got instead was the attention of a reader who took their work more seriously than they did. Philip Mairet, who knew him and wrote the first biography, A. R. Orage: A Memoir (1936), recorded the paradox that the most articulate force in the paper rarely signed an article: Orage’s medium was the conversation, the leader-column, and the editing pencil.

Katherine Mansfield in 1917; Orage championed her early stories in The New Age — photograph by Lady Ottoline Morrell, National Portrait Gallery, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The turn: Gurdjieff, 1922

The turn that defines the later Orage came in 1922. He had already begun to feel the limits of the cultural-political life — Guild Socialism was fading, and the inner question that Leeds had planted, the question of whether a human being is in fact awake, had never left him. In 1922 he encountered the work of G. I. Gurdjieff, the Greek-Armenian teacher, largely through Gurdjieff’s pupil P. D. Ouspensky, whose London lectures Orage attended. Gurdjieff’s system — later called the Fourth Way — held that ordinary waking life is a kind of sleep, that what people call the “I” is in truth a shifting crowd of momentary selves, and that a sustained, exacting effort of attention and self-observation might bring a person toward a more unified, genuinely conscious state of being. For Orage this was not a new interest but the same interest given a method. He resolved to commit himself to it wholesale. He sold his interest in The New Age — handing the paper to other hands at the close of 1922 — and went to Gurdjieff’s newly founded Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at the Prieuré des Basses Loges near Fontainebleau, where for months he submitted, at nearly fifty, to the manual labor, the sacred dances, and the deliberate frustrations through which Gurdjieff broke down a pupil’s habitual self. That a celebrated London editor would go and dig the master’s garden became one of the legends of the early Work.

G. I. Gurdjieff, the Greek-Armenian teacher whose system Orage committed himself to in 1922 — unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

New York: Gurdjieff’s representative, 1924–1931

Late in 1923 Gurdjieff sent Orage ahead to the United States to prepare the ground for his own first American visit and the demonstrations of the Movements that would announce the teaching there. Orage arrived in New York in January 1924, and for roughly the next seven years he was Gurdjieff’s representative in America. He gathered and led the New York groups, conducting the talks and exercises through which much of the Work first reached an English-speaking audience; he drew in writers, editors, psychologists, and people of means — among them the editor Jane Heap, the novelist Jean Toomer, and the literary circle around The Little Review — and he carried a double burden that strained him for years: to transmit the teaching faithfully and, at the same time, to raise from his American pupils the money that kept the Institute in France alive. He also took on the labor that would prove his most lasting service to the tradition. Gurdjieff’s central book, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson — composed in Russian and Armenian and deliberately written to resist easy reading — reached its English form chiefly through Orage, who did the bulk of the translation and editing and led group readings of the manuscript in New York. When the book was finally published in 1950, sixteen years after Orage’s death, the English text that an enormous readership came to know was substantially his.

In these years Orage also married Jessie Dwight, a young American he had met in New York; the marriage tied his life to the country where he taught and sharpened the eventual conflict between his independence and his master’s authority. Many who knew the teaching in those years knew it as Orage taught it — lucid, psychological, addressed to literate Americans in their own idiom — and Paul Beekman Taylor’s study Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium (2001) argues that the American reception of the Fourth Way was, to a degree rarely acknowledged inside the later Foundation, an Orage reception: it bore the stamp of the editor’s clarity as much as the master’s strangeness.

The break and the return

The relationship was not simple. Gurdjieff was a demanding and at times deliberately disruptive master, and the historical record shows mounting strain between teacher and pupil over money, over doctrine, and over Orage’s growing independence as an interpreter. The rupture came in 1931, on Gurdjieff’s return to New York: by the account of the American psychologist Charles Daly King, a pupil present at the time, Gurdjieff abruptly and publicly repudiated Orage and the version of the teaching Orage had been giving, pressing the New York group to disown him. Why he did so has been debated ever since. Some read it as a calculated shock of the kind Gurdjieff used on principle, a final test rather than a true expulsion; others, King among them, felt it was not Orage who had changed. Whatever its intent, the break effectively ended Orage’s career as a teacher of the Work. He withdrew from active teaching, and by 1931 he had returned to England.

There he went back to what he had always done best. In April 1932 he founded a new weekly, the New English Weekly, and gave his last energies to Social Credit, the monetary-reform theory of the engineer C. H. Douglas, which held that an economy chronically issues less purchasing power than it prices its goods at, and that the remedy was to distribute credit directly to citizens. It was, in its way, a return to the Leeds conviction that society’s hidden machinery of value could be set right — the economic counterpart to the inner work he had pursued under Gurdjieff. He edited the paper with his old gift, and he was beginning to fold something of the Gurdjieff teaching back into its pages when his health failed. On the night of 5–6 November 1934, after some days of feeling unwell, Orage gave a radio broadcast on Social Credit and died within hours of leaving the studio, of a presumed stroke, at sixty-one.

Scholarship and the textual record

Orage left little finished writing of his own — a measure of a man whose genius was for other people’s work — and so he survives largely through the record others kept. The earliest and still-affectionate portrait is Philip Mairet’s A. R. Orage: A Memoir (1936; reissued 1966), written by a colleague who shared both the New English Weekly and the Gurdjieff interest. The fullest account of the American years is Louise Welch’s Orage with Gurdjieff in America (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), by a pupil who sat in the New York groups. The standard external history of the whole tradition, James Webb’s The Harmonious Circle (1980), set Orage within the wider Gurdjieff–Ouspensky story and treated that story as a constructed twentieth-century lineage rather than a recovered ancient one; the major archival reckoning with his Gurdjieff service is Paul Beekman Taylor’s Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium (Weiser, 2001) and his broader Gurdjieff’s America (2004), which together restore Orage’s centrality to the American transmission. His own talks reach print only posthumously and at several removes — A. R. Orage’s Commentaries on G. I. Gurdjieff’s “All and Everything”, edited by C. S. Nott (Two Rivers Press, 1985), and the New York lecture transcripts gathered in Gurdjieff’s Emissary in New York (2014) — texts whose status as faithful records of what he said in the room is itself a question scholars weigh.

For the Leeds and New Age side of the life the indispensable study is Tom Steele’s Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club, 1893–1923 (Scolar Press, 1990); the runs of The New Age themselves are openly digitized and fully searchable in The Modernist Journals Project, which preserves the weekly Orage made and lets a reader watch his editorial hand at work issue by issue. The bibliographical and biographical record is collected in the Online Books Page author file for A. R. Orage. What no source fully reconciles is the man himself: the cultural esotericism he carried from Leeds to Fontainebleau ran beneath both halves of his life, but it surfaced under different names — Theosophy, then guild economics, then the Fourth Way, then Social Credit — and the through-line is easier to feel than to fix.

The figures who stood nearest him form their own constellation in the record. Claude Bragdon, the American architect and Theosophist who had been Ouspensky’s first English-language publisher, moved in the same New York milieu Orage drew on; Ouspensky was the door through which Orage entered the teaching, and remained its most systematic expositor while Orage became its most persuasive transmitter. The two men divided the labor of carrying Gurdjieff into English between them — Ouspensky the careful philosopher of In Search of the Miraculous, Orage the editor who could make the strangeness legible.

His standing is contested in a precise way. To students of modernist literature he is an editor — the maker of The New Age, the man who first printed half a generation of English writing. To students of twentieth-century esotericism he is the figure who carried the Gurdjieff teaching to America and shaped how it was received, the English voice in which the Work first spoke. 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.

→ Related: Theosophy · Claude Bragdon · Gurdjieff · Fourth Way Gurdjieff Work · P D Ouspensky · Helena Blavatsky · Plato · Esotericism