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Jane Heap - A Monograph - The Aphorisms PDF

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JANE HEAP 1887-1964 A Monograph also TH E APHORISMS Sayings used in Jane Heap’s Teaching as remembered by some of those she taught. Printed and Published by Richard Edmonds at the Phene Press, Haslemere, Surrey, England. 1987 ‘I bring you the teaching exactly as Gurdjieff gave it to me’ Jane Heap often told her people in St.John’s Wood, where she spent the last active years of her active life. She died in London in the summer of 1964, having devoted forty years to presenting the work to groups, first in New York, then in Paris, and finally in London, where she was sent by Gurdjieff, leaving behind a memory that, to those who knew her, is crystal clear to this day. After the funeral service in the Armenian Church in St. John’s Wood, Jane Heap was buried in a green plot in the cemetery at East Finchley, where later a rough-hewn block of Cumberland stone was set up, bearing just her signature. On the day of the funeral, before her people stood in turn beside the grave, one of her group recited the lines which are quoted in Meetings With Remarkable Men. I AM THOU THOU ART I, HE IS OURS, WE BOTH ARE HIS. SO MAY ALL BE FOR OUR NEIGHBOUR. Jane Heap’s constant aim was to plant in the minds of those who worked with her some understanding of the true essence of the teaching; like Gurdjieff himself she illuminated the scale of possibility for man; she offered the key to his inner world which is the birthright of all. 1 Fuller commentary on Jane’s life could only be attempted by those who lived and worked with her over many years, but some account of her early days, in which she travelled so far from unstimulating surroundings, can be an aid to appreciation of this remarkable human being who influenced so many people of her time to their lasting gratitude. Her legacy lies in the response she evoked. Jane Heap was born on November 1,1887, in Shawnee County between Kansas City and Topeka, Kansas, in the very heart of the United States. Her father came from Cheshire and her mother from Norway. Her grandmother was a Lapp, whose family had lived a three days journey beyond the Arctic Circle. Jane Heap’s upbringing in Kansas was lonely and spiritually isolated. Her father was warden of a State Asylum for the Insane. ‘There were no books to read in this place except the great volumes in the patients’ library’, Jane wrote in an article touching on her early life in The Little Review. ‘I had read them all. There was no one to ask about anything. There was no way to make a connection with life. Out there in the world they were working and thinking; here we were still. Very early I had given up everyone except the insane’. There was little challenge for Jane’s fertile brain. How­ ever, she made something out of everything, and even used to listen to the walk and tread of mental patients to try and relate them to their illnesses. ? In this strange and unreal environment one particular thought sustained her; ‘who had made the pictures, the books, the music in the world? . . . And how could you tell the makers from just people? Did they have a light around their heads? It was when Sarah Bernhardt came to St. Louis that Jane saw her performance from the balcony of the theatre, the price of that seat in the gods taxing her slender resources. ‘Even when they spoke the great actress’s name’, said Jane, ‘it had a light around it’. It was then that she resolved ‘some day I would go to Paris. Other people had got that far. I would go on living for that’. Jane did get to Europe, but first she was to carve out for herself in America a career as writer and editor that was to bring her wide recognition, a certain notoriety, and eventually a sense of direction in what she saw was a chaotic world of false values. This brief account passes over Jane’s early years of edu­ cation, little or nothing being known about them. There is a big gap in our knowledge over a long period, but it is known that she graduated from the Chicago Institute of Art in 1905, when she was eighteen, and studied costume jewelry design at Chicago’s Lewis Institute. It was in 1916 Jane met Margaret Anderson in Chicago, and there was at once a meeting of minds. Margaret was 3 the editor of The Little Review, an avant-garde publication exalting the role of the artist, initially based on Chicago and then on New York. Jane became a contributor, later co-editor and finally sole editor. The Little Review under their joint guidance went from strength to strength in esteem, despite its fluctuations in financial well-being. It attracted some of the great writers of the day, among them W .B. Yeats and James Joyce. It was the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses that brought notor­ iety and the threat of imprisonment to the editors. Because of Jane’s awareness of the art movements of the period The Little Review acquired an international stature, and its striking layout, style and typography, which Jane introduced as co-editor, helped to consolidate its position, although it was noticeable that she deliberately and contin­ uously took second place to Margaret Anderson as far as the magazine was concerned. What was significant at this period was the change of emphasis that took place in The Little Review, which had become more European in outlook, partly because of the influence of Yeats, and was tending to look more deeply into esoteric themes influenced by Georgette Leblanc, the singer and lifelong friend of Maeterlinck. This new direction led the editors in due course to the work of Ouspensky, the brilliant author of Tertium 4 Orgdtium, and then to Gurdjieff— a natural progression. It was at that point that Alfred Orage, Gurdjieff’s rep­ resentative, came to New York. Orage, described by Margaret Anderson as ‘the most persuasive man I have ever known’, made an immediate impact upon the writing fraternity of New York, but most of all on the editors of The Little Review. When Gurdjieff himself arrived in New York in 1924 the impact was no less remarkable, and, although it did not last from a public point of view, it led to the formation of groups for the study of his ideas. One such group began to meet in Jane Heap’s home on East 9th. Street, and from that time on to the end of her life she was engaged in the teaching, although she did not immediately follow Gurdjieff to Fontainebleau, as some did, and maintained her interest in writing and the world of art. Fritz and Tom Peters, whom Jane had adopted after the break-up of their parents’ marriage, did go to the Prieure, however1. Jane visited Fontainebleau in 1925 in company with Orage, but she continued her work with The Little Review until 1929, for the most part without Margaret Anderson, who had become disenchanted with the themes of art. In that year this celebrated journal was published for the last time. Margaret Anderson returned to write a final editorial, and Jane, in her own last contribution, declared that ‘art today is not a very important or adult concern. Art 5 is not the highest aim of man; it is interesting only as a pro­ nounced symptom of an ailing and aimless society.’ So Jane Heap broke with her past. ‘We have gone on running The Little Review’ she wrote, ‘or I thought I had until I found it was running me’. She was no longer prepared to be a victim. From then on her life centred on Gurdjieff’s teaching, and the road was to take her to France and even­ tually to England to promote those ideas among those who had a wish to know. It would be wrong to say the effort was self-eftacing, but she was no longer in the limelight of the world of literature and art. Jane’s years in Paris extended from 1927, when she first established a group, for the most part of expatriates, until she went to London in 1936. Her influence was extraord­ inary. She was able to introduce and make known the teaching in a unique way. In a sense she was Gurdjieff’s intermediary, certainly his interpreter. With her personal magnetism and powerful energies she became the focus of her group which had a significant impact on the Paris of her day. The group met in Jane’s flat in Montparnasse, and included Gertrude Stein, Georgette Leblanc, Soli*a Solano, Kathryn Hulme, and, whenever she was in Paris, Margaret Anderson. In London, where Jane was sent at the express wishes of Gurdjieff, on purpose to follow Orage in extending the field of activity, the group met in Hamilton Terrace, and 6 the craft shop, The Rocking Horse, was in nearby St.John’s Wood High Street. The Rocking Horse evoked skills that reflected Jane’s ability with her hands - the hands have a life of their own, she used to say — and the days were enriched by her example and her penetrating wit. During the 1939-45 war Jane prepared her people to take them to Paris to meet Gurdjicff, and this she brought about when peace came, and right up to the time of Gurdjieff’s death in . 1949 It is typical of Jane’s approach to life that she immed­ iately and totally accepted Jeanne dc Salzmann as the leader and inheritor of Gurdjieffs teaching. The tradition was carried on in St. John’s Wood for another fifteen years until Jane died on June 17, 1964. Throughout the period of her life devoted to furthering the ideas of Gurdjicff Jane was supported by the devotion of Florence Reynolds and Elspcth Champcommunal, who was latterly chief designer at Worth’s in London. From about 1926 Jane was a sufferer from diabetes, living daily with serious inconveniences, because she was partially insulin immune. So this support by her friends helped her to carry on when others would have abandoned the struggle. When Jane Heap died in 1964 the remarkable set of notebooks, which she left behind in her home at Hamilton Terrace2, bore testimony to her approach to the teaching at 7 differing levels of awareness, and the aphorisms and sayings she used in her work reveal likewise her illumination of thought. A London evening newspaper, which recorded her death, recalled the celebrated New York case over the publication of Ulysses, and then concluded with a graceful paragraph saying that Miss Heap had passed her last years ‘in quiet retirement in St. John’s Wood’, conjuring up a picture of gracious living and elegant conversation over the teacups! The circle, which had gathered round Jane in London, continued in the ‘work’ at Addison Crescent and at Bray. She had left them an inner strength and a sense of the grandeur of an incomparable tradition with all its possibil­ ities for mankind. N O T E S . I. Margaret Anderson adopted her sister Lois’s two children, Fritz and Toni; and Jane was a partner in the adoption, assuming responsibility for their care and education. 2 2. The Notes of Jane Heap: This limited edition, consisting of a short selection of the notes made by her pupils, was published in 1983 for private distribution. 8 THE APHORISMS

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