Alfred Richard Orage

Alfred R. OrageBorn 22 January 1873

Dacre, West Riding of

Yorkshire, England

Died 6 November 1934

(aged 61)

London, England

Nationality English

Occupation teacher, lecturer, writer,

editor, publisher

Known for Editor of The New Age

Religion Nonconformist

Spouse(s) Jean Walker (first spouse

maiden name), Jessie

Richards Dwight (second

and last spouse maiden

name)

Children Richard and Ann

Parents William Orage, Sarah Anne

McGuire (mother's maiden

name)

Relatives David, Marcus, Linnet,

Carolyn, Piers, Toby and

Peregrine (grandchildren)

Alfred Richard OrageFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alfred Richard Orage (22 January 1873– 6 November 1934) was a Britishintellectual, now best known for editingthe magazine The New Age. Whileworking as a schoolteacher in Leeds, hepursued various interests, including Plato,the Independent Labour Party, andtheosophy. In 1900 Orage met HolbrookJackson and three years later theyco-founded the Leeds Arts Club, whichbecame a centre of modernist culture inpre-World War I Britain. In 1905, Orageresigned his teaching position and movedto London. There, in 1907, he bought andedited the English weekly The New Age,at first with Holbrook Jackson, andbecame an influential figure in socialistpolitics and modernist culture, especiallyat the height of the magazine's fame

before the First World War.[1]

In 1924 Orage sold The New Age andwent to France to work with GeorgeGurdjieff, the spiritual teacher P. D.Ouspensky had recommended to him.After spending some time of preliminarytraining in the Gurdjieff System, Oragewas sent to America by Gurdjieff himselfto raise funds and lecture on the newsystem of self-development whichemphasized the harmonious work ofintellectual, emotional and moving functions. Orage also worked with Gurdjieff intranslating the first version of Gurdjieff's All and Everything as well as MeetingsWith Remarkable Men from Russian to English; however, neither book was everpublished in their lifetime.

In 1927 his first wife, Jean, granted him a divorce and in September he marriedJessie Richards Dwight (1901–1985), the co-owner of the Sunwise Turn bookshopwhere Orage first lectured on the Gurdjieff System. Orage and Jessie had twochildren, a boy and a girl: Richard and Ann. While in New York, Orage and Jessieoften catered to celebrities such as Paul Robeson fresh from his London Tour. In1930, Orage returned to England and in 1931 he published the New English

Alfred Richard Orage - Wikipedia, the free encycl... http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alfred_...

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Weekly, remaining in London until his death on 6 November 1934.[2]

Contents

1 Early life

2 Editor in London

3 Orage's politics

4 With Gurdjieff

5 Last years

6 Works

7 References

8 External links

Early life

Born James Alfred Orage in Dacre, near Harrogate, in the West Riding ofYorkshire into a nonconformist religious family, he was generally known as Dickieand he dropped the name James altogether and adopted the middle nameRichard. He became a schoolteacher in a Leeds Board elementary school at theage of twenty one and helped to found the Leeds branch of the IndependentLabour Party in 1894, writing a weekly literary column for the Labour Leader,from 1895 to 1897. He brought a philosophical outlook to the paper, including inparticular the thought of Plato and Edward Carpenter. All in all, Orage devotedseven years of study to Plato, from 1893 to 1900; he also devoted seven years ofhis life to the study of Nietzsche's philosophy, from 1900 to 1907; from 1907 to

1914 he became a student of the Mahabharata.[3]

By the late 1890s, Orage was disillusioned with conventional socialism and turnedfor a while to theosophy. In 1900, he met Holbrook Jackson in a Leeds bookshop,and lent him a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita. In return, Jackson lent him FriedrichNietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, which led him to study Nietzsche's work indepth. In 1903, Orage, Jackson and the architect Arthur J. Penty helped to foundthe lively and successful Leeds Arts Club, with the intention of promoting thework of radical thinkers including G. B. Shaw whom Orage had met in 1898,Henrik Ibsen, and Nietzsche. During this period he returned to socialist platformsbut by 1906, he was determined to combine Carpenter's socialism with Nietzscheand theosophy. Concentrating on this and in the presence of Beatrice Hastingswas too much for Jean, the wife of his first marriage, the same wife who hadshared in his own theosophic and aesthetic interests of his early activities in the


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Leeds Arts Club, who did not grant him a divorce but went to live instead withHolbrook Jackson and worked the rest of her life as a skilled craftswoman in thetradition of William Morris. In 1906, Beatrice Hastings whose real name wasEmily Alice Haigh hailing from Port Elizabeth, a green-eyed beauty of twenty-sixwith literary ambitions, could be seen with Orage and would eventually become aregular contributor to the New Age. By 1907, it became an intimate relationshipand as Beatrice Hastings herself would later confess, ″Aphrodite amused herself

at our expense.″[4]

Orage explored his new ideas in several books. He saw Nietzsche's Übermenschas a metaphor for the "higher state of consciousness" sought by mystics andattempted to define a route to this, insisting this must involve a rejection ofcivilisation and conventional morality. Instead, he moved through a celebration ofDionysus to declare he was in favour not of an ordered socialism but of an

anarchic movement.[5]

In a one-year period, from 1906 to 1907, he published three books,Consciousness: Animal, Human and Superhuman based on his experience withTheosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche: the Dionysian Spirit of the Age and Nietzsche inOutline and Aphorism. His rational critique of Theosophy evoked an editorialrebuttal from The Theosophical Review and in 1907, he terminated his associationwith the Society. The two books on Nietzsche were the first to be published in

England as a systematic introduction to Nietzschean thought.[6]

Editor in London

In 1906, he resigned his teaching post and moved to London, following ArthurPenty, another Leeds Art Club friend. Orage attempted to form a league for therestoration of a guild system, much as described by William Morris.

The failure of this project spurred him in 1907, supported by George BernardShaw, to buy the weekly magazine The New Age, in partnership with HolbrookJackson. He quite soon turned it into his conception of a forum for politics,literature and the arts. Although many contributors were Fabians, he to someextent distanced himself from their politics, and a wide range of politicalviewpoints were represented. The magazine launched an attack on parliamentarypolitics, while Orage argued the need for utopianism. He also attacked the tradeunion leadership, while offering some support to syndicalism, and tried tocombine this with the guild system. Combining these two viewpoints resulted inGuild socialism, a political philosophy he began to argue for from about 1910.

Between 1908 and 1914 The New Age was undoubtedly the premier littlemagazine in the UK. It was instrumental in pioneering the British avant-garde,from vorticism to imagism. Some of its contributors at this time included T.E.Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Herbert Read and many others. Apart from


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his undoubted genius as an editor, it might be said that Orage's real talent was asa conversationalist and a ″bringer together″ of people. The modernists of Londonwere scattered between 1905 and 1910. Between 1910 and 1914, largely thanksto Orage, a sense of a genuine ″movement″ was created. In other words, Oragesuccessfully ran a forum which at least assumed (and perhaps created) acommonality between the seemingly unfathomable philosophies and artistic

practices then being created.[7]

Orage's politics

Orage declared himself a socialist, and followed Georges Sorel in arguing thattrade unions should pursue an increasingly aggressive policy as regards issuessuch as wage deals and working conditions. He approved of the increasingmilitancy of the unions in the pre-war era, and seems to have shared Sorel's beliefin the necessity of a Trade Union-led General Strike, leading to a re-evolutionary

situation.[8] However, for Orage, economic power precedes political power and

political reform is useless without economic reform.[9]

In the early issues of The New Age, Orage supported the women's suffragemovement, but became increasingly hostile as the Women's Social and PoliticalUnion became more prominent and more militant. Pro-suffragette articles werenot published after 1910, but heated debate on this subject took place in thecorrespondence column.

During World War I, Orage defended the interests of the working class. On 6August 1914, Orage wrote in Notes of the Week of The New Age: ″We believe thatEngland is necessary to Socialism, as Socialism is necessary to the world.″ In1917, in the published work Political Ideals, Bertrand Russell mentions for the

first time Orage Guild Socialism.[10] On 14 November 1918, Orage wrote of thecoming Treaty of Versailles: "... The next world-war, if unhappily there should beanother, will in all probability be contained within the clauses and conditionsattaching to the present peace settlement." By the end of the war, Orage wasconvinced the hardships of the working class were the result of the monetarypolicies of banking and government. If Great Britain could remove the pound fromthe gold standard during the war and reestablish the gold standard after the war,then the gold standard is not as necessary as the oligarchic monetary few wouldwant the proletariat many to believe. On 15 July 1920, Orage wrote: ″We shouldbe the first to admit that the subject of Money is difficult to understand. It is'intended' to be, by the minute oligarchy that governs the world by means of

it."[11]

After the First World War, he was influenced by C. H. Douglas and became asupporter of Social credit. On 2 January 1919, Orage published the first article by

C. H. Douglas to appear in The New Age: ″A Mechanical View of Economics″.[12]


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With Gurdjieff

In 1914 Orage met with P. D. Ouspensky, whose ideas left a lasting impression.When Ouspensky moved to London in 1921, Orage began attending his lectureson "Fragments of an unknown teaching", the subject of which would later bepublished as In Search of the Miraculous. From this point on Orage became lessand less interested in literature and art, instead focusing his attention in thegreater part of the 1920s on the problems of the theory and practice of mysticismwithout having to run away from the world. His correspondence with HarryHoudini on these subjects moved him to explore ideas of the afterlife. He returnedto the idea that there were absolute truths and felt these were embodied in theMahabharata.

In February 1922, Ouspensky introduced Orage to G. I. Gurdjieff. Selling the NewAge, he moved to Paris to study at the Institute for the Harmonious Developmentof Man. In 1924 Orage was appointed by Gurdjieff to lead study groups inAmerica. He taught the Gurdjieff System in America for seven years. Gurdjieffarrived in New York from France on 13 November 1930, and after a few years ofteaching in New York, Orage was deposed by Gurdjieff and his groups wereformally disbanded because Gurdjieff believed that they had been incorrectlytaught and they were working under the misconception that self-observationcould be practiced in the absence of self-remembering or in the presence ofnegative emotions. Members were allowed to continue study with Gurdjieff aftertaking an oath not to communicate with Orage (ironically Orage himself alsosigned the oath). Upon hearing that Orage had also signed, Gurdjieff wept.Gurdjieff had once considered Orage as a friend and brother and thought of Jessieas a bad choice by Orage for a mate. Orage was a chain smoker and Jessie was a

heavy drinker.[13]

Orage, Ouspensky, and C. Daly King emphasized certain aspects of the GurdjieffSystem while ignoring others. According to Gurdjieff himself, Orage emphasizedself-observation. In Harlem, New York City, Jean Toomer, one of Orage's studentsat Greenwich Village and part and parcel of the Harlem Renaissance, was using

Gurdjieff's work to confront the problem of racism.[14]

The Orages sailed back to New York from England on the S.S. Washington on 29December 1930 and arrived at 9:30 AM on Thursday, 8 January 1931. The nextday, while staying at the Irving Hotel, Orage wrote a letter to Gurdjieff unveiling aplan for the publication of All and Everything before the end of the year and

promising a substantial amount of money.[15]

At lunch, on 21 February 1931, in New York City, Achmed Abdulla, a.k.a. NadirKahn, confided to the Orages that he had met Gurdjieff in Tibet and thereGurdjieff was a.k.a. Lama Dordjieff, a Tsarist agent and tutor to the Dalai


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Lama.[16]

After the separation with Gurdjieff, Orage returned to England with Jessie. In theprivately published Third Series of writings, Gurdjieff wrote of Orage and his wifeJessie, ″his romance had ended in his marrying the saleswoman of 'Sunwise Turn,'

a young American pampered out of all proportion to her position...″[17]

Last years

In May 1930, Orage returned to England and became seriously involved withpolitical issues and was paramount in re-sparking interest in the Social CreditMovement. He was temporarily back in New York on 8 January 1931 to meetGurdjieff's new demands. As Orage would confess to his wife, he would not beteaching the Gurdjieff System to any group past the end of the Spring. Orage wason the pier on 13 March 1931 to bid Gurdjieff farewell on his way back to France;the Orages sailed back to England on 3 July of the same year. Back in England,Orage founded a new journal, The New English Weekly, in April 1932. By thebeginning of 1933, The New English Weekly was an established success with thecritics but the economic effects of the Great Depression made it difficult as amonetary venture; they were hard put for money. On 18 May 1933, Oragepublished Dylan Thomas first poem, And Death Shall Have No Dominion. OnSeptember 1933, Jessie gave birth to a daughter, Ann. On January 1934, SenatorBronson M. Cutting presented before the United States Senate Orage's SocialCredit Plan as one of the tools of Roosevelt's economic policies; the newsappeared in the 2 February issue of The New English Weekly. At the beginning ofAugust 1934, Gurdjieff asked Orage to revise a new edition of The Herald ofComing Good. On 20 August, Orage wrote his last letter to Gurdjieff: "Dear Mr.

Gurdjieff, I've found very little to revise..."[18]

Toward the end of his life, Orage was attacked by a severe pain below the heart,an ailment that had been diagnosed a couple of years back as simply functionaland he did not again seek medical advice.

He was working on Social Credit and prepared a speech to be broadcast on"Property in Plenty". During the broadcast, he experienced an excruciating painbut continued the speech as if nothing were happening. After leaving the studio,he spent the evening with his wife and friends and made plans to see the doctornext day. On reaching home after midnight, he went to bed and died in his

sleep.[19]

On 6 November 1934, Gurdjieff was in New York City where he received the

telegram "...from London saying that Mr. Orage had died the same morning."[20]

On hearing of Orage's death, Gurdjieff issued the following invitation: "I have justnow learned of the death of Mr. Orage, who was for many years your guide and


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teacher and my inner world essence friend. I invite you to attend a meeting to payhomage to him and to speak in his memory, on Friday evening, November 9th, at9 o'clock, in Miss Bentley's studio in Carnegie Hall, at which time, likewise, willbe played some of his favorite music and some of those pieces dedicated to him

which were composed by me while he was at the Prieuré."[21] On 7 December1934, in a letter to Ezra Pound, T. E. Lawrence expresses sadness at the death of

A. R. Orage.[22] Orage's former students of the Gurdjieff System left theenneagram inscribed on his tombstone.

Works

Friedrich Nietzsche, the Dionysian spirit of the age (1906)[23]

Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism (1907)[24]

National Guilds: An inquiry into the wage system and the way out (1914)

editor, articles from The New Age

An alphabet of economics (1918)

Readers and writers (1917–1921) (1922) as RHC[25]

Psychological Exercises and Essays (1930)

The Art of Reading (1930)

On Love. Freely Adapted form the Tibetan (Unicorn Press 1932)

Selected Essays and Critical Writings (1935) edited by Herbert Read and

Denis Saurat

Political and Economic Writings. From 'The New English Weekly' 1932-34,

with a preliminary section from 'The New Age 1912' (1936) edited by

Montgomery Butchart, 'with the advice of Maurice Colbourne, T. S. Eliot,

Philip Mairet, Will Dyson and others'

Essays and Aphorisms (1954)

The Active Mind - Adventures in Awareness (1954)

Orage as Critic (1974) edited by Wallace Martin

Consciousness: Animal, Human & Superman (1978)

A. R. Orage's Commentaries on Gurdjieff's All and Everything, edited by C. S.

Nott

References

^ Mairet, Philip (1966). A. R. Orage. University Books Inc. p. 63. "No better1.


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'argumentative' English was ever written."

^ Mairet, Philip (1966). A. R. Orage. University Books. p. 121. "The man who, as

Bernard Shaw said, was the most brilliant editor..."

2.

^ The purchase of The New Age (http://orage.mjp.brown.edu/mjp/pdf/martin02.pdf)

p. 17

3.

^ Carswell, John (1978). Lives and Letters. New Directions Publishing. pp. 28–31.

ISBN 0-8112-0681-5. "...his little book introducing the philosophy of Nietzche...

appeared in 1906..."

4.

^ Luckhurst, Roger (2002). The invention of telepathy (1870-1901)

(http://books.google.com/books?id=OB4-aURw_IoC&pg=PA257&dq=orage+birth&

cd=54#v=onepage&q=orage%20birth&f=false). Oxford University Press. p. 257.

ISBN 0-19-924962-8. "...the main problem of the mystics of all ages has been the

problem of how to develop the superconsciousness, of how to become supermen."

5.

^ Orage, A. R. (1975). Wallace Martin, ed. Orage as critic (http://books.google.com

/books?id=8dU9AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA6&

dq=Orage+and+Holbrook+Jackson#v=onepage&

q=Orage%20and%20Holbrook%20Jackson&f=false). Routledge. pp. 6–7.

ISBN 0-7100-7982-6. "...Orage did not lack activities to engage his intellectual

interests."

6.

^ Rooms in the Darwin Hotel (http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/pdf/Darwin.pdf) pp. 98-1277.

^ Ferrall, Charles (2001). Modernist writing and reactionary politics

(http://books.google.com/books?id=lxG35-IBohgC&pg=PA16#v=onepage&

q&f=false). Cambridge University Press. p. 16. ISBN 0-521-79345-9. "Thus Orage

remembered that..."

8.

^ cite book |last=Redman |first=Tim |title=Ezra Pound and Italian fascism |page=49

|

9.

^ Ironside, Philip (1996). The social and political thought of Bertrand Russell

(http://books.google.com/books?id=koKlMJXmzeoC&pg=PA104#v=onepage&

q&f=false). Cambridge University Press. p. 104. ISBN 0-521-47383-7.

10.

^ Redman, Tim (1991). Ezra Pound and Italian fascism. Cambridge University Press.

pp. 24, 33, 45–47. ISBN 0-521-37305-0.

11.

^ Hutchinson, Frances; Burkitt, Brian (1997). The political economy of social credit

and guild socialism (http://books.google.com/books?id=Q-jb8YwtXdoC&pg=PA10&

dq=orage+birth&cd=57#v=onepage&q=orage%20birth&f=false). Routledge.

ISBN 0-415-14709-3. "Douglas's birth... and his meeting with Orage in 1918 remain

the subject of mystery and speculation..."

12.

^ Gurdjieff, George (1978). Life Is Real Only Then, When 'I Am' (2nd private ed.).

New York: Triangle Editions, Inc. p. 67. LCCN 75-15225. "On the first evening of my

13.


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arrival in New York..."

^ Woodson, Jon (1999). To make a new race. Univ. Press of Mississippi. pp. 38–41.

ISBN 1-57806-131-8. "Jean Toomer...was encouraged by Orage to undertake groups of

his own."

14.

^ Taylor, Paul Beekman (2001). Gurdjieff and Orage. Weiser. p. 173.

ISBN 1-57863-128-9. "Dear and kind author of The Tales of Beelzebub..."

15.

^ Taylor, Paul Beekman (2001). Gurdjieff and Orage. Weiser. p. 178.

ISBN 1-57863-128-9. "On St. Valentine's day ...bootleg whisky Gurdjieff had offered

them in honor of the Saint of Love."

16.

^ Gurdjieff, George (1978). Life is real only then when I am (2nd Private ed.). New

York: Triangle Editions Inc. p. 95. LCCN 75-15225. "...Mr. Orage ... realizing the

necessity and at the same time all the difficulties of getting means on the one hand

for sending money to me, and on the other hand for meeting the excessive

expenditures of his new family life..."

17.

^ Taylor, Paul Beekman (2001). Gurdjieff and Orage. Weiser. pp. 179–194.

ISBN 1-57863-128-9. "There has been a great fight here over the question of Orage.

Now I understand Orage has returned to the fold."

18.

^ Philip Mairet A. R. Orage, A Memoir, pp. 118-120, University Books, 1966 ASIN:

B000Q0VV8E; 1st ed. 1936

19.

^ G. I. Gurdjieff Life is real only then, when 'I am' , p. 152, E. P. Dutton, 1978 ASIN:

B000VAZW3Y; 1st ed. Paris 1976

20.

^ A. R. Orage: Introduction and Bibliography (http://www.gurdjieff.org/driscoll5.htm)

p. 2

21.

^ Marriot, Paul; Argent, Yvonne (1998). The Last Days of T. E. Lawrence: a leaf in the

wind (http://books.google.com/books?id=3CMsJBHA4PUC&pg=PA18&

dq=The+Last+Days+of+T.+E.+Larence+Orage&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false).

Sussex Academic Press. p. 18. ISBN 1-898595-22-4.

22.

^ Friedrich Nietzsche, the Dionysian spirit of the age (http://books.google.com

/books?id=bdkzAAAAMAAJ&dq=orage+birth&lr=)

23.

^ Nietzche in Outline and Aphorism (http://books.google.com

/books?id=MS1FAAAAYAAJ&dq=orage+birth)

24.

^ Readers and writers (1917-1921) (http://books.google.com

/books?id=PrsEAQAAIAAJ&dq=orage+birth)

25.

External links

A. R. Orage: A Memoir (1936) Philip Mairet

Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club (1893–1923) (Scolar Press 1990) Tom


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Steele

Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium (2001) Paul Beekman Taylor,

English 480/680: Modernism In and Beyond the "Little Magazines", Winter

2007, Professor Ann Ardis, Brown University (http://dl.lib.brown.edu:8080

/exist/mjp/teaching/Ardis/syllabus.pdf)

Orage and the history of the New Age periodical, Brown University,

Modernist Journals Project (http://orage.mjp.brown.edu/mjp/pdf

/Martin02.pdf)

Brown University, Modernist Journals Project main index

(http://orage.mjp.brown.edu:16080/mjp/)

Encyclopædia Britannica article on Orage (http://www.britannica.com

/eb/article-9057250/Alfred-Richard-Orage#143390.hook)

Complete archive of The New Age under Orage (http://www.modjourn.org

/render.php?view=mjp_object&id=1158589415603817)

Leeds University Library Brotherton Collection Manuscripts c20 Orage

(http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/spcoll/handlists/124BCOrage.pdf)

C. Daly King: "The Oragean Version" (1951) A record of Orage's transmission

of the Gurdjieff Ideas during the 1920-30s in New York City

(http://www.scribd.com/doc/12931413/C-Daly-King-The-Oragean-Version)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alfred_Richard_Orage&oldid=610190346"Categories: 1873 births 1934 deaths People from Harrogate (district)

English journalists English socialists Independent Labour Party politicians

British Social Crediters Fourth Way

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Alfred Richard Orage