Table Of ContentJANE 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.
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THE APHORISMS
