Katherine Mansfield and Gurdjieff's Sacred Dance
Katherine Mansfield and Gurdjieff’s Sacred Dance
James Moore
First published in Katherine Mansfield: In From the Margin edited by Roger Robinson
Louisiana State University Press, 1994
The facts are singular enough: Katherine Mansfield, a young woman who could scarcely walk or breathe, absorbed in sacred dances that lie on the very cusp of human possibility. Some ideal of inner conciliation—neighbourly to the dancers’ purpose there— seems to have visited Katherine almost precociously. At twenty, she had written, “To weave the intricate tapestry of one’s own life, it is well to take a thread from many harmonious skeins—and to realise that there must be harmony.” i The tapestry she had achieved in the ensuing years had been a brave one: on a warp of suffering she had imposed a woof of literary success. Slowly, implacably, her body but not her spirit of search had failed her, and in her final extremity she arrived at a resolution: “Risk! Risk anything!” 2 So determined, she entered the gates of the Château du Preiuré, at Fontainbleau-Avon, on Tuesday, October 17, 1922, and there, at George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, she lived out her last, intense three months. There, on January 9, 1923, she died.
Katherine Mansfield and Gurdjieff’s Sacred Dance. Copyright © James Moore 1994, 2006. www.Gurdjieff-Biblography.com 1
No one imagines that Mansfield’s fundamental significance lies outside her oeuvre, her individuality, and her life’s full spectrum of personal relationships; no one would claim some mystical apotheosis at Fontainebleau that overrode all that. But it is equally disproportionate and ignoble to strike the entire Gurdjieff entry from the Mansfield balance sheet, or to situate it within a beauty-and-the-beast fable, now so patently debilitated. To dismiss the consistently positive tone of all her letters from the institute, and not least her admission that, “I’ve learned more in a week than in
James Moore
First published in Katherine Mansfield: In From the Margin edited by Roger Robinson
Louisiana State University Press, 1994
The facts are singular enough: Katherine Mansfield, a young woman who could scarcely walk or breathe, absorbed in sacred dances that lie on the very cusp of human possibility. Some ideal of inner conciliation—neighbourly to the dancers’ purpose there— seems to have visited Katherine almost precociously. At twenty, she had written, “To weave the intricate tapestry of one’s own life, it is well to take a thread from many harmonious skeins—and to realise that there must be harmony.” i The tapestry she had achieved in the ensuing years had been a brave one: on a warp of suffering she had imposed a woof of literary success. Slowly, implacably, her body but not her spirit of search had failed her, and in her final extremity she arrived at a resolution: “Risk! Risk anything!” 2 So determined, she entered the gates of the Château du Preiuré, at Fontainbleau-Avon, on Tuesday, October 17, 1922, and there, at George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, she lived out her last, intense three months. There, on January 9, 1923, she died.
Katherine Mansfield and Gurdjieff’s Sacred Dance. Copyright © James Moore 1994, 2006. www.Gurdjieff-Biblography.com 1
No one imagines that Mansfield’s fundamental significance lies outside her oeuvre, her individuality, and her life’s full spectrum of personal relationships; no one would claim some mystical apotheosis at Fontainebleau that overrode all that. But it is equally disproportionate and ignoble to strike the entire Gurdjieff entry from the Mansfield balance sheet, or to situate it within a beauty-and-the-beast fable, now so patently debilitated. To dismiss the consistently positive tone of all her letters from the institute, and not least her admission that, “I’ve learned more in a week than in
Bibliography: New York, 1985. Interview of Peter Brook by James Moore. Guardian (U. K.), July 20, 1976. [Ida Baker], Katherine Mansfield: the Memories of L. M. London, 1971, p. 226. The film Gurdjieff’s Sacred Dances was shown to an audience of several hundred at the Katherine Mansfield Centennial Conference, at Victoria University of Wellington, in October, 1988. Jeanne Salzmann continued to supervise classes in sacred dance up to a few months before her death. Almost certainly Mansfield’s last surviving friend, she died in Paris on May 25, 1990, at the age of 101. Katherine Mansfield and Gurdjieff’s Sacred Dance. Copyright © James Moore 1994, 2006. www.Gurdjieff-Biblography.com 10