Issue 33 — 15 February 2020

An opportunity that I missed was the chance to conduct an interview with David A. Young. Many readers of this blog will recall that David was a Torontonian and a Gurdjieffian; in fact, to many readers, he was the city’s leading Fourth Way personality and respected by most of the readers of this blog who are members of one Toronto group or another, for there are at least three groups, and this may be laid to David’s door-step.

For the record, David was born on October 23, 1938, and he died on January 28, 2018. He is survived by his wife Sandy and son Mark and daughter Lisa, and he lives in the affections of city’s Gurdjieffians. For a short while he was a curator at the Royal Ontario Museum and then for a long time a high-school teacher. His teacher in the Work was Mrs. Louise Welch, and the lovely tribute to her, written in 2001, is titled”Essence Friend — Louise Welch” and it appears on at least two sites on the Web.

The year 2010 found me writing articles and reviews and filing them on Sophia Wellbeloved’s web-blog which was published from Cambridge, England. The blog found many readers in many parts of the world and I felt that my function was to localize the teaching to the extent that I understood it by emphasizing Fourth Way activities in two locations: Toronto and Canada. This emphasis remains consistent with my publishing and literary interests.

To this end I contributed reviews of current Canadian books and authors. I conducted email interviews with both Barbara Wright George and Simson Najovits. I would submit a list of twenty or so general questions and the interviewee was free to respond to these questions, revise them, or reject them as the case may be. They made interesting reading, especially after the passage of some years.

When I invited David Young to be interviewed, he did not say yes and he did not say no. I found this to be characteristic of the man. Instead he said, rather craftily, “Send me the questions and I will decide.” This way he could have his cake and eat it too. He wanted the best of all possible worlds, and he got it. What I wanted was an interview; in effect, as an interviewer, I got half an interview, one entirely composed of my questions, eighteen or so, with no answers from the interviewee at all. He did not reply at all! You might say that both of us benefitted.

Here is that interview. The reader is free to imagine the answers that David would have supplied had he felt inclined to do so.

11 Nov. 2019

 

“I have some reservations about being profiled, but since I can always back out later, I have decided to take the first step and ask for your questionnaire.” So replied David Young to my request for an interview to be conducted by email for Sophia Wellbeloved’s web-blog. My initial request to him was made on July 6. He replied on July 13, 2010, indicating some provisional interest. But before the interview … a few preliminary remarks.

Regular readers of this page will remember that over the years, in addition to writing reviews and commentaries on Work-related publications and events, I have interviewed two people with long histories of involvement with the work – Barbara Wright George (San Francisco and Toronto) and Simon Najovits (Montreal and Paris).

Both of them have connections with Canada – Barbara, now a Toronto resident, is married to James George, formerly Canada’s High Commissioner to India; Simson, a long-time literary friend, was born and educated in Montreal before he joined the French radio network in Paris where until retirement he was department head of one of ORTF’s foreign-language divisions. (My interviews with the two of them are archived on the JRC pages on Sophia’s blog.)

David Young is a Torontonian through and through. I have known him since the late 1950s, though over the last sixty years we have met only intermittently, perhaps a half-dozen times. The first time was at a Group meeting in a private residence about 1956. On another occasion he delivered an introductory lecture on the Work to the members of the Toronto Theosophical Society and I was in the audience asking questions. The last time we met it was over lunch and I pressed him for “leads” to Canadians who had made contributions to Fourth Way practices and appreciations.

We have nodded and smiled at each other at various semi-public events held in the city. Our sole meeting of consequence took place over lunch, when David, assessing my interest, more or less encouraged me to prepare a series of photocopied reports of my findings on the intersection of “The Work and Canada.” I did so, my main interest being to determine who was who and where and when, and in taking a geographical look at the expression of the Work, an extension of my research into the nature of cultural Canadiana.

For a picture of David Young, imagine a stolidly built man, serious, with a slight smile and a vague professional even professorial air. In the late Fifties, he served as a curator at the Royal Ontario Museum, before opting to become a secondary school teacher in Toronto, the position that saw him into retirement. He lived in North Toronto with his wife and their adult children.

In the background was what I call the Toronto Group. I plan to ask David how he refers to it. It was established in 1953, one year following the formation of the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York City. Madame de Hartmann, working with the Daly family, led by the NFB film producer Tom Daly, established the fledgling organization. It was brought under the aegis of Mrs. Louise Welch who with her husband Dr. William Welch travelled from New York City to spend innumerable weekends of each year in Toronto for about four decades. Those weekends corresponded to what is regarded as Toronto’s cultural and multicultural surgence of the 1960s. The couple, and their daughter Patty, are fondly remembered by members of the Toronto Group.

It is not widely known that there was Work-related activity in the city before the founding of the Toronto Group. Paul Bura, a Ukrainian-born, London-educated engineer, along with his wife Sheila, who conducted Movements classes in London, Toronto, and New York, were active in the city. (Paul should not to be confused with the British broadcaster and poet of the same name.)

The couple had lived at J.B. Bennett’s communities at Coombe Springs and Sherbourne House in England. They allied themselves with the newly formed Toronto Group and I recall meeting both of them in 1957. Following Sheila’s death I kept in touch with Paul until his death about three years ago.

David Young is closely identified with the Work in Toronto. I decided to ask him about nomenclature.

JRC: How do you refer to what I have been calling “the Toronto Group”?

DY:

JRC: What is your contribution to it and your title?

DY:

JRC: I have always assumed you were born and raised a Protestant, perhaps an Anglican or a Presbyterian. Is that so?

DY:

JRC: It was reading P.D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous that led me to the Toronto Group. What did it in your case?

DY:

JRC: Did you find, as I did, that an introduction to Work principles put mainstream religious principles and practices into a new and understandable perspective?

DY:

JRC: How many people, would you estimate, were involved in Group work in the late 1950s? What was the ratio of men to women? Were most of the members professional people? How many are involved today?

DY:

JRC: Even then Toronto was a multicultural city. I remember there being members from ten or so foreign countries, including England, Wales, Ukraine, Russia, France, South Africa, United States, etc. Did the Work strike you even then as a movement that had a global reach?

DY:

JRC: I have clear memories of Mrs. Welch conducting sessions and of Alfred Etiévant leading the Movements. You knew them as close friends. Would you care to give us a sentence or two to describe their appearance and approach?

DY:

JRC: A considerable undertaking for the fairly small Toronto group was the establishing of Traditional Studies Press. Among its most notable publications is the Guide and Index to G.I. Gurdjieff’s Beezlebub’s Tales to His Grandson. The first edition appeared way back in 1971, with subsequent reprintings and even an expanded edition in 2003. I understand that although Madame de Salzmann gave her permission for it to be prepared, she had to be encouraged to do so, for she felt there was no need for the publication of what would be essentially a dictionary with citations for references in All and Everything. Were you involved in its preparation?

DY:

JRC: Today the Greater Metropolitan Area of Toronto embraces 3.3 million people. Close to half of its population comes from other countries. In the city there is one Anthroposophical Society; there are two Theosophical Societies (the oldest one was authorized by H.P. Blavatsky herself); and there are at least three Gurdjieff-related organizations (four if you include work being done on the Bennett line). Could you offer a guide to the various Work organizations and their affiliations?

DY:

JRC: The last twenty or so years have seen, in Toronto and elsewhere in the world, a considerable burgeoning of interest in such subjects as New Age thought, psychical and parapsychological activities, the disjunction between religion and spirituality, the nature of traditional wisdom, occult ideas and psychical phenomena, and spiritual tutors like J.Krishnamurti, Rudolf Steiner, and G.I. Gurdjieff, to stop with those who had their impact during the Interwar Years (1919-1929).

Add to these Jon Kabat-Zinn with his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and the work of neurophysiologists and neuropsychologists in the field of consciousness studies. Given that such ideas are not limited to “schools” of thought but that information about them is often available free of charge at any time in any place on the Internet through Google, what role do the Gurdjieff organizations have to play in this time and place?

DY:

JRC: I am occasionally asked by an intelligent friend or acquaintance to recommend a book about the Work. I mention the titles of one or two books, and I have named them in past articles on this web-blog. (For the record they include Ouspensky’s The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution and Seymour B. Ginsburg’s Gurdjieff Unveiled. As it happens, the texts of both books are available free of charge on Google.) When you are asked to make a recommendation, what book or books do you recommend?

DY:

JRC: In your opinion, did Madame de Salzmann redirect, reorient, re-align, or re-intensify the Work in an unprecedented way in the 1970s and 1980s?

DY:

JRC: Do you think Mr. Gurdjieff will be remembered fifty years from now – in the year 2060? If so, how will he be remembered?

DY:

JRC: I see the Work – Ouspensky’s Special Doctrine, the System, the Fourth Way, the Gurdjieff Work, etc. – as ways to render life “more vivid.” How do you see it?

DY:

JRC: Thank you for responding to these leading questions. Before we part, is there a question that I have not asked that you think I should ask so you may answer it?

DY:

JRC: Thank you. Chimo!

13 July 2010

P.S. Thank you, readers, for your queries about this word or expression. Chimo is derived from the Indian and Eskimo languages, including the trade language known as Chinook Jargon, which from the 19th century has been spoken on the Pacific Coast of Canada. The expression means both “hail and farewell,” both “hello and goodbye,” and both “maybe and maybe not.” Hence it is ever useful!