‘The only truth I really care about.’ Katherine Mansfield at the Gurdjieff Institute: A Biographical Reflection

Summary

Katherine Mansfield entered the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in mid-October 1922. Occupying the Prieuré des Basse Loges, a rambling chateau near the woods of Fontainebleau that had once been the residence of Mme de Maintenon, the Institute was directed by the enigmatic G. I. Gurdjieff, an esoteric master of Greek and Armenian parentage whose eclectic teaching combined Christian spirituality with Sufipractice. Mansfield was on the verge of literary celebrity, but she was deeply unhappy in her marriage to the critic and editor John Middleton Murry – and she was dying of tuberculosis. Putting herself under the direction of Gurdjieff (to whose methods she had been introduced by A. R. Orage), Mansfield had to set aside the reservations of her husband and literary friends and take a ‘Leap into the Dark’.

During the last months of her life – she died at the Institute on 9 January 1923 – Mansfield underwent what might be termed an examination, or perhaps an experience, of conscience that led her to an unflinching acknowledgement of her own shortcomings and an attempt to mend relations with family and friends. She imagined a different kind of writing – stories she would ‘dare show to God’ – that she hoped would be an expression of a new spiritual health; unhappily, these stories would never be written. But she also perceived the possibility of attaining the inner freedom that had eluded her all her life. From the perspective of her life's final episode, her abbreviated work constitutes a passionate attempt to depict her inner journey: a going-forth from a place of innocence and certainty, a solitary passage through an inhospitable landscape, and – as the cloud of her illness increasingly darkened the horizon – a destination that seemed to offer little comfort. And yet, like the finely crafted end of a meandering story, her sojourn at Gurdjieff's Prieuré gave form and meaning to all that had gone before.

Mansfield did not take her decision to go to Fontainebleau lightly, and in a notebook she meticulously records the process by which she arrived at it. She began with the perception that her relations with others left something to be desired. ‘Let me take the case of K.M.,’ she writes: ‘She has led, ever since she can remember, a typically false life.