Son of Gurdjieff: In Search of Fritz Peters
by Edward Field
Boyhood with Gurdjieff, a memoir featuring the famous teacher and mystic, has remained in print ever since it was first published in 1964, and Finistère, published in 1951 and one of the first gay novels I ever read, has continued to be available in various editions until about a decade ago, but I had never come across anyone who knew their elusive author. As far as I could tell, Fritz Peters had lived his life apart from the literary world, or at lease the parts of the literary world I’ve been involved with.
I was naturally curious about someone who had written so brilliantly about both his spirituality and his sexuality. His two famous books simply do not fit comfortably together in the mind. They appeal to two different constituencies, which nevertheless are not incompatible, for in history notable figures shared Peters’ spiritual development and same sex attraction. I should think that this would make him a subject of particular interest, but Peters himself has remained invisible, both before and since his death in 1979. This is partly due to the continuing hostility of the Gurdjieffian world over his homosexuality. But at the same time it is difficult to understand the indifference of the gay community toward the author of a gay literary classic like Finistère.
My involvement with this elusive author came about largely through an extraordinary pair of women who were involved in spiritual studies. I met them in Greenwich Village, to which I gravitated as a student after World War II. The Village had always been receptive not only to political radicalism, but to what might seem as an alien opposite – seances and Ouija board-playing, cult figures like Madame Blavatsky and Edgar Cayce, and mystical poetry of the Kahlil Gibran sort. Even if religious terminology – words like “God” or “spiritual” or (God forbid) “my soul” – were frowned on in the world of Modern Poetry I was part of, many poets followed T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden into one church or another after the war. But none of this was for me. Raised a dogmatic atheist, I never saw the “spiritual” dimensions or origins of my Marxist and Freudian beliefs, both of which pretended to supersede religion. But I read about the flamboyant Gurdjieff and his thin-lipped disciple Ouspensky, for they were very much part of European intellectual life in the period entre deux guerres that otherwise seemed so romantic to me.
It was difficult not to be dazzled by a colorful rogue like Gurdjieff with his ideas that challenged conventional thought. And much like Gurdjieff, who had groups of lesbian disciples, I have always had an affinity for lesbians, so perhaps it was inevitable that my rigidity on spiritual matters was eventually loosened in the sixties, not only by taking the Native American religious drug peyote, but by meeting, at poet May Swenson’s apartment in the Village, the couple Betty Deran and Alma Routsong, comfortably large-bottomed and bosomy ladies who would become very much part of my search for Fritz Peters. They were involved in the typical occult pursuits of Ouija board sessions, astrology, and even attempts at magic, following alchemical formulae. This was all very dubious, if not laughable, to an atheist like me, but once I let myself relax and participate, I found these two highly intelligent women quite astute in their contrapuntal reading of astrological charts.
Betty was a true medium, and we had a number of entertaining sessions at the Ouija board, once contacting my supposed literary “helper,” Jack London, who seemed too impatient with me in his peppery, Irish way to offer much help with my writing problems. A more electrifying session followed the assassination of John F. Kennedy, who announced to us from “beyond” that he was not at peace because KILLER ROAMS FREE. Betty, in her job as an economist at a Rockefeller Center think tank, successfully presented unorthodox solutions to economics problems, given to her by the ghost of Maynard Keynes via the Ouija board. The two women even used the Ouija board to work out plot details in a novel that Alma was writing. They communicated with the real-life subject, an early American primitive painter named Mary Ann Wilson, who told them her story, resulting in the by-now-classic lesbian novel, A Place for Us, later retitled Patience and Sarah, written under Alma’s pseudonym, Alma Routsong.
Both women had uncanny powers, though it was Betty who was the pioneer in their occult researches. She was the shorter of the two, with snapping black eyes, dark hair, and a toothy grin on her round face. She had started out as a Christian Science nurse, and followed the usual path of popular metaphysics – theosophy, astrology, palmistry, and alchemy – but eventually came upon the teachings of the Greek-Armenian Gurdjieff, for whom as an Armenian-American she felt a particular affinity and who, as we soon learned, had been so influential on Fritz Peters’ early life.
After Gurdjieff’s death in 1949, the movement that continued, purporting to teach his “system,” developed a decidedly anti-homosexual bias, like most spiritual groups. Paradoxically, books about Gurdjieff have been written by a number of the controversial teacher’s often-prominent lesbian disciples, demonstrating that there was no conflict in Gurdjieff, at least, over their sexual orientation. One can only infer that homosexuality, though not to be proclaimed, was no bar to participation in “The Work,” at least for women. Gurdjieff, himself from a Middle-Eastern culture that was not hypocritical about or bothered by such things, gave top marks to young Fritz Peters’ boyishly rosy behind in the community bathhouse (as Peters related in his book), where the Master of Eastern Mysticism liked to line up all his naked male disciples in order to compare, with ribald comments, their bodies and particularly their genitals. On this last point at least Gurdjieff had no reason to be shy, since he was said to have the biggest schwantz of all.
After locating a study group led by the main Gurdjieff teacher in New York – a forbidding personage named Lord Pentland – Betty was soon accepted, and quickly gained notice for her aptitude and ingenuity in “The Work.” I followed her course of self-development with growing respect. Under her influence, after years of Freudian therapy – with its limited, if theoretically correct, blaming for our messed-up lives on parents and childhood traumas – it was a relief to consider other ways of looking at things, such as the Buddhist idea that one must take responsibility for one’s own life, and most shocking to me as a Freudian, of seeing one’s parents as chosen, in order to further one’s development. The game of astrology was even fun, and the character readings according to astrological signs seemed no more arbitrary than any other theory in which I had believed. And ignoring the Christian part of it (which as a Jew was repugnant to me), the Christian Science idea of invoking the self-healing powers of the body began to make sense. Most useful of all in the long run, I began doing yoga exercises.
The Gurdjieffian idea that we are all asleep – though not too different from the Christian “Sleepers, awake!” – now struck me as an important principle, and a formulation much akin to Marx’s “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.” But unlike Betty, though I read Gurdjieff’s books as well as the ones about him I could find (including Peters’), I was not much tempted to join a Gurdjieff group nor any other organized study. Poetry remained my “way,” and along with daily yoga exercises, I would have to take care of myself, whatever the perils of life.
It was after Betty Deran broke up with Alma Routsong that I first heard about Annie Lou Stavely, a teacher of Gurdjieff who was living in Portland, Oregon. Williams had been a student of the openly lesbian Jane Heap in London, and after returning to the US had attracted a circle of disciples of her own in Portland, where she held an administrative job at the state university. On a visit to Lord Pentland at the Gurdjieff center in New York, she was introduced to Betty who, on the rebound from Alma, immediately fell in love with her.
In spite of the refusal of the Gurdjieffian teacher to entertain the possibility of a love affair with a woman, Betty precipitously gave up her well-paying job in New York to follow Mrs. Stavely back to Oregon, where Betty hoped, over time, to persuade her that she needed a woman in her life. Meanwhile, the canny Mrs. Stavely seemed quite willing to have a born problem-solver like Betty in her midst.
It was in Oregon that Betty received my letter announcing that I had finally met Fritz Peters, the author of Boyhood With Gurdjieff and Finistère. Astoundingly, I learned in her reply that her Mrs. Stavely had once had an affair with him.
When I met him in New York in the early seventies, Fritz Peters was a tall, buoyant man of about sixty, possessed of the kind of aging-boy looks of a Christopher Isherwood, or perhaps it was the similar barbershop haircut – closely clipped on the sides with a lock over the forehead – and the drinker’s nose. In an age of longish hair and relaxed dress, Fritz persisted in wearing the kind of conventional, slightly seedy suits I associate with alcoholics trying to maintain a look of respectability: he even wore a bowtie, a dapper holdover from the fifties. And I could tell that he drank. He had what I can only call a boozy manner, though I never saw him drunk.
Not knowing much about him then, there was nothing surprising that I found the author of Finistère – one of the early landmarks in gay fiction – to be completely homosexual in orientation, even if, during our dinners out, he indicated that he had once been married. I learned later, though, that he had two marital strikes out, and possibly three! But it was not unusual in that era for homosexuals to try to go straight and get married. I myself spent years with a psychoanalyst, who immediately decided that my homosexuality was at the root of all my miseries, and set out to change me. But even if Fritz had once been in conflict over his sexuality, like I was, perhaps the new open atmosphere of gay liberation had also had its effect on him, though he expressed scorn for gay groups and, as I was to learn, for the Gurdjieff study groups as well. Looking back, I continue to be puzzled at myself for not asking him, on our occasional dinners out in the Village, anything at all about Finistère’s genesis, much less the story of his life. But I sensed something wounded in him, and I respected the depths of pain and the scars of humiliation that his buoyant manner seemed to deny. I would never have brought up the past unless he brought it up first. I myself in those years was struggling with my own lifelong feelings of worthlessness, so he probably sensed a fellow sufferer in me. But I will never stop kicking myself that when I had the chance to quiz him about his life, I let it pass.
Fritz was living at the Arlington, one of those small hotels in midtown New York City left over from a grander era, on West 25th Street off Fifth Avenue. Once elegant, it had fallen into seediness. The ornate façade was marred by greying curtains and yellowed window shades, and on the sills outside the rooms stood milk cartons and food containers. Called SROs, for Single Room Occupancy, these old hotels were mostly used as permanent dwellings by the elderly, often on pensions or welfare. I later saw snapshots of Fritz’s room, which looked quite respectable if minimal, but at that time I imagined a sagging bedstead and stained sheets, threadbare carpets, the various smells in the hallways, and an old bellhop in uniform who ran errands for the aging tenants, perhaps fetching pints of booze for desperate old souls. It had that stale atmosphere about it.
Fritz had a job as a legal secretary, and he seemed satisfied with it, especially by the irregular hours demanded by the exigencies of the firm’s court cases. His employers must have been delighted with such a crackerjack worker, for whatever Fritz did, he believed in doing well.
I suspected that mental troubles and possibly breakdowns, exacerbated by drink, were recurrent over the years, and by the time I met him he had accepted the shabby level of life he could maintain. But to me he was a famous author, and I asked him why he wasn’t writing any more books. His answer was that he wasn’t interested in being a professional writer, committed to turning out one book after another. He preferred to write only when he felt he had a book in him to write.
Nor did he seem at all interested in exploiting his reputation in the Gurdjieff world. In my respect for Betty and her absorption in the training, it was astonishing to me now to learn that this man – who, from the evidence of his Boyhood With Gurdjieff, was as much an authority on the master as anyone alive – had contempt for anyone claiming to teach the so-called “Work.” He sneered at what this teaching had become, and denied it had anything to do with what Gurdjieff had taught. So if Fritz Peters considered all the various Gurdjieff groups in existence as inauthentic, they should have been paying attention to him, if they were interested in studying the real Gurdjieff system. But this did not seem to be the case.
Though Fritz’s two famous works were available at the time, I knew nothing of his other books, which by then were all out of print. It was not until much later that I found a copy of his first novel The World Next Door, published in 1949, dealing with a character’s breakdown and subsequent stay in a mental hospital, in which Fritz reveals his earlier thinking about his homosexuality, for the protagonist talks about it in an open way that must have been startling at the time. Perhaps Fritz got away with this because his character was in an institution. Ditto descriptions of patients masturbating in the wards, and sadistic guards forcing them to give blowjobs. This was raw stuff for 1949. The “hero” admits to a doctor having had a homosexual experience, even that he was in love with the man, but denies that he is a homosexual because the sex “just wasn’t any good.” Besides, “it didn’t last.... It wasn’t right, somehow.” But then it turns out that on his military record is still another homosexual experience involving a general that the army tried to hush up. He even admits that “in the beginning, I was willing to be a fairy ... but it didn’t turn out that way.” The implication is that he had decided not to be, one that was his thinking then, at any rate.
Finistère, published two years later, is for me the quintessential homosexual novel of the postwar decade, even though it ends, as the period demanded, with the suicide of the young protagonist. In Fritz Peters’ obituary in the New York Times in 1979, the subject of the novel was described as “a destructive homosexual relationship,” although the book was clearly about the destruction of a youth by his family after they discover his in-no-way-destructive, even healthy, love affair with his tutor, a very different cup of tea indeed, but in keeping with the Times’ editorial policy of that era. All the major media had the same bias. I remember, when Finistère appeared, discussing it with a friend who, in hopes of becoming a reviewer for Time magazine, was assigned by the book editor to write a sample review of the novel. A professional reporter, my friend asked the editor whether he should take a viewpoint that would conform to Time’s homophobic policy of the period, or to review it honestly. The editor demanded honesty, but then of course failed to hire my friend when he treated the book with the seriousness it deserved.
A third novel, The Descent, came out in 1952, this one set in Santa Fe, where Fritz was living during his second marriage. It seems much less revealing than the previous novels, though its nine characters do represent different aspects of Fritz’s nature, perhaps carrying out the Gurdjieffian principle of the “enneagram,” one of the basic diagrams of existence. This clumsy esoteric structure does not add much to the novel, and it disappeared with barely a ripple. Depressing as that must have been for him, along with the conflict between married life and his homosexual needs, his writing seems to have lost its momentum, and he was not to have another success until the mid-sixties, when the circumstances of his life were very different.
Boyhood with Gurdjieff, published in 1964, tells of Peters’ teenage years spent at the Château du Prieuré, Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man outside Paris. His residence there, during the mid- to late twenties, came about at the insistence of Little Review editors Margaret Anderson, who was his aunt, and Jane Heap, lesbian lovers who had moved their magazine to France and become followers of Gurdjieff. Apparently, Fritz’s mother Lois, the sister of Margaret Anderson, was making a mess of her life by falling into a series of destructive relationships with men, even doing time in a mental institution herself. Margaret and Jane, believing that living with her was unhealthy for Fritz and his brother Tom, persuaded the unhappy mother to relinquish her sons and allow the two women to raise them. As a passionate disciple and, later, teacher of Gurdjieff’s ideas, Jane thought that the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man would be an ideal place for the boys to grow up, offering them a unique opportunity to sit at the feet of the master and develop into “harmonious” men themselves. The more sensible Gertrude Stein, who was a friend of the two women but no worshipper of Gurdjieff, did not approve of the rarefied atmosphere of the Prieuré, and considered it unsuitable for American boys. At their only meeting, the powerful doyenne of the American avant garde and the mystic Gurdjieff were reported to have circled around each other warily. Jane must have agreed to some extent with Stein’s opinion, for she asked Gertrude and her friend Alice Toklas to look in on the boys, to give them books, and see to their darning and mending, the latter being Toklas’s province, of course. Stein and Toklas also took the boys out on motoring excursions and celebrated American holidays with them, such as traditional Thanksgiving dinners.
Those motherless, albeit instructive, years with Gurdjieff were indeed important to Fritz Peters’ development, and perhaps living in the undeniably magnetic presence of the great man may have succeeded in rescuing him, to some extent, from the crippling effects of his mother’s behavior. He reports in Boyhood with Gurdjieff that he fell in love with Gurdjieff from the start, and for a while at least, was something of a fanatical disciple. Once, when Gurdjieff was convalescing from an automobile accident, he was asked to stop mowing the extensive lawns at the center to give the injured man the quiet he needed. But Fritz had been told by the mystic just before the accident to continue mowing “no matter what happened.” So Fritz thought his mowing might be necessary for the Master’s recovery, and refused to stop. Oddly, he told my friend Betty later that the incident had involved not him but his brother Tom. But he did not feel there was any requirement for an author to tell the truth. This also conformed to Gurdjieffian teaching.
I have only been able to construct a spotty chronology of Peters’ life. Much is shrouded in the reluctance of survivors, especially the Gurdjieffians, to speak with me, as well as by Fritz’s own reserve in writing about himself directly, though the first two novels have clear autobiographical elements. The New York Times, in its obituary, reveals that he was born Arthur Anderson Peters in 1913 in Madison, Wisconsin. And from the published memoirs of his aunt Margaret Anderson, I gleaned some facts about his mother’s family background and his early years. Fritz was a nickname he got from his forbidding resemblance as an infant to the German General Von Hindenburg. His childhood coincided with the height of Chicago bohemia, when Margaret Anderson founded her celebrated journal The Little Review. Fritz’s mother soon dumped her unacceptably conventional husband to join sister Margaret’s artsy entourage in a makeshift encampment on the shores of Lake Michigan with her two sons. But she did not stay there long before she took another fling at romance, a pattern she would often repeat, with or without the boys in tow. It was after a decade of their flapper mother’s shifting household that in 1924 the eleven-year-old Fritz and his older brother Tom were enrolled at the Prieuré, the years so vividly recounted in Boyhood with Gurdjieff.
Responding to a questionnaire about his future in the final issue of The Little Review, dated May 1929, Fritz reports that he hoped to stay at the Prieuré until the age of twenty and always wanted to “work with Mr. G’s method.” But before the magazine appeared he had already left, willingly, in 1928, when his mother asked him to return to Chicago to live with her and her current husband. To get away from the Prieuré, he had to stand up to the formidable Jane Heap, with whom he always had a difficult relationship, and to the more formidable, but more reasonable, Gurdjieff.
The traumatic events recounted in Finistère are most likely to have occurred shortly after Fritz’s four years at Le Prieuré, during a summer abroad with his mother and stepfather. Although there must be fictional elements in the novel, I do not for a minute believe that the basic plot was a mere fantasy. An adolescent American boy joins his mother, who is spending a period in the French provinces with her new husband. She hires a French tutor for her son, and the master/pupil relationship blossoms into a love affair. But when this is discovered and broken up, his stepfather compounds the boy’s shock and grief by attempting to seduce him. In the context of the era’s negative attitudes toward homosexual behavior, and the humiliation the boy suffers, it is quite believable that he becomes suicidal, though his walking into the sea follows the requisite literary formula of that time: i.e., if you are homosexual, the only thing you can do is to kill yourself. But the novel, beautifully written, has an authenticity and intelligence that gives it a stubborn life.
Whatever the truth in this story, about this same period in his adolescence, there is also evidence of a sex episode with his brother Tom, which he dealt with in a later unpublished novel. Clearly, homosexuality was already problematical for Fritz.
With the spotty education he had received at the Prieuré, he says that he found it impossible to graduate from high school or qualify for college. This is unconvincing, for surely someone as intelligent as him could have managed to get the educational requirements if he wanted to. But perhaps he saw a college education as unnecessary for a “creative” writer, though there is no evidence that he did any writing during his twenties. In fact, whatever he was doing with his life, he was not exhibiting any direction or purpose.
By the age of twenty, in 1933, Fritz was working at the World’s Fair in Chicago. A year later, he was in New York, studying typing and shorthand at a business school. But he returned to Chicago from time to time, probably because his family was centered there. It was in Chicago, in the late thirties, that he commented on the problems that the black novelist Jean Toomer, author of Cane, was having in setting up a Gurdjieff study group, especially with the newspapers hounding Toomer for marrying a white woman.
Fritz never lost touch with Gurdjieff throughout these years, and met up with him or accompanied him on his frequent fundraising visits to America “to shear the sheep,” as Gurdjieff outrageously put it. (Elsewhere, in the same comic if heartless style, Gurdjieff referred to his disciples as rats he experimented on, when he wasn’t assigning them animal correlatives to illustrate their faults.) Though many of his most prominent disciples were banished or became disillusioned over the master’s at-times incomprehensible behavior, often calculated to shake disciples from their rigid outlook, Fritz Peters and Gurdjieff seem never to have wavered in their mutual affection. It was this deep bond and intimate familiarity with Gurdjieff’s teaching that led Fritz into his lifelong contempt for the presumptuous claims by the followers to teach “The Work.”
By 1942, with the war on, Fritz became an enlisted man, serving in the 29th Infantry Division. It was while he was stationed near London that he had the affair with Betty Deran’s beloved Annie Lou Stavely, who was in one of Jane Heap’s study groups there. After the Prieuré closed down for good and was sold in 1933, Heap had conducted her own Gurdjieff groups in Paris, but had shifted them to London in 1936, after which Williams became her student. Williams was curiously not a lesbian, though reportedly was married to a gay man. In a letter to Fritz, she reveals her feelings about the marriage, calling the period of her affair with Fritz “an oasis in the desert” for her. The poetry that Fritz wrote for her, though of little literary interest, reveals already his charming, sophisticated, if cynical self. Their heterosexual affair continued during Fritz’s various leaves and furloughs from the American army during combat duty in the later stages of the war.
During the army’s march across Europe, Fritz received a battlefield commission, and after the Battle of the Bulge – a bloody, desperate, and hopeless attempt by the Germans to reverse the course of the war and a horrifying experience for the infantryman – Fritz managed to secure leave from the front and visit Gurdjieff in Paris. He was clearly in a state of battle fatigue, but Gurdjieff, using his esoteric healing powers, had a temporary restorative effect on the young soldier’s nerves. But nothing could repair the underlying instability from childhood dislocation, and Fritz suffered the postwar collapse and hospitalization described in his first novel, The World Next Door. It seems to have been a brief postwar marriage to Mary Louise Aswell, the distinguished literary editor of Harper’s Bazaar, who had welcomed to its pages the likes of Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, that got Fritz writing at last.
Committed by his family to a Veterans Administration mental ward, the hero of The World Next Door is subjected to brutal procedures, including shock treatment. The portrait of the protagonist is clearly that of Fritz, with the characteristic arrogance and feisty, almost quarrelsome nature I remember so well. The novel confirms, not surprisingly, that his mother too had spent considerable time in mental institutions, though by the time of the novel, she had settled down in a fairly stable marriage.
Unlike the Freudian novels that were coming into vogue, The World Next Door never reveals the deeper causes of the protagonist’s breakdown beyond vague mentions of his serving in the recent war and conflict with his mother. Fritz, like most Gurdjieffians, was anti-Freudian. But the book brilliantly analyzes the politics of hospitalization, and is unsparing in describing the outer manifestations of insanity, as well as the strategies the hero uses to gain his release. For this, it was warmly received, encouraging Fritz to take the next step and write Finistère, a further confrontation of his homosexual feelings. Whatever the situation of his marriage, Mary Louise Aswell was celebrated for introducing a number of homosexual writers into the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, and she would certainly not have exhibited the typical homophobia of the era.
In this postwar period, up to Gurdjieff’s death in 1949, Fritz managed to attend some of the master’s famous dinner parties in Paris, which Gurdjieff used as an opportunity for various teaching exercises, often involving humiliating his stuffier guests, supposedly for their own good. But Gurdjieff’s technique of getting his disciples drunk, again for their own good, could not have had a positive influence on the young veteran, for whom drinking would remain a life-long problem. Moreover, Gurdjieff’s axiom, “Whatever you do, do a lot of it,” though good advice for his cautious followers, would have been dangerous justification for an incipient alcoholic, especially one who would spend most of his life trying to drown his homosexual guilt and live straight.
While I doubt that Gurdjieff himself would have cared about Fritz’s homosexuality, the movement somehow became dominated by Ouspensky, Gurdjieff’s famous rock-jawed puritanical disciple, who was adamantly opposed to homosexuality, considering it to be a wrong use of energy. The attitude of the “higher ups” in the movement, as one follower described it to me, was that Fritz was just another “homosexual living in Greenwich Village, as if his place was `under the rug’.” Even without other reasons to, was it any wonder then that Fritz drank? And it was these same “higher ups” who derided him for taking seriously what they considered a comic turn on the part of the master, in which Gurdjieff anointed Fritz as his heir.
This happened at one of those dinner parties in Paris after the war, when someone asked the great teacher who would carry on after his death. With his luminous eyes, Gurdjieff looked around the table at the disciples who had come from far and wide, their hearts were probably beating like Cinderella’s sisters in hopes of being the chosen one, and suddenly announced, “Fritz!” pointing to the astonished young man. “Fritz is my heir!”
For the rest of his life, Fritz Peters could never escape his identification with Gurdjieff, as if he had inherited part of the mantle, along with the awe, and considerable resentment, of the followers, and he was uncomfortable with it, especially with the cult that emerged after Gurdjieff’s death. Writing Boyhood with Gurdjieff must have been an attempt to deal with this burden, but since the book instantly became a classic in the enormous and growing Gurdjieffian library, it put the unfortunate Peters back in the center of the maelstrom. Still, even while shying away from it, he had to be struggling on a deeper level to lay claim to his Gurdjieffian inheritance, for by writing the book, he established himself as one of the unimpeachable authorities on the subject.
Ever since Fritz’s death, I have persisted in trying to find out more about him, sending out letters on the slimmest chance of acquaintance. Close-mouthed like all the surviving Gurdjieffians, Annie Lou Stavely answered my queries by first saying that he was better forgotten. Later relenting, she sent me a mess of photos and manuscripts he had left in her care, family snapshots with his children in Albuquerque, and others which he appears to have taken to show his children his room at the Arlington Hotel, the law office where he worked, and one of his lawyer bosses, a good-looking young family man named MacCarthy, whom he obviously had special feelings for, and with whom he socialized during his irregular hours on the job. Also among them were pages from an older family album featuring pictures of the infant Fritz and his brother Tom; a girlish-looking Fritz at age nineteen; Fritz the guide at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933; and Fritz the war-time GI, some of which appear here (more can be found on the Fritz Peters website www.fritzpeters.info).
With my attempts to contact Fritz Peters’ family proving fruitless, and Annie Lou Stavely and even his publishers stonewalling me, it was in the gay community where I struck gold. My complaints to a correspondent, the writer Samuel Steward, about my frustrations produced a remarkable account of a meeting with Fritz, while the renowned painter Paul Cadmus, going through his diary, found notations of dinner parties with Fritz in the sixties. So for a brief time, at least, there was evidence Fritz had mixed in gay and artistic circles. It was through Samuel and Paul that I located Fritz’s papers at Boston University, where his daughter had deposited them, and which revealed more details of his life and work.
Samuel Steward, best known under his pseudonym Phil Andros as a writer of gay porn, and an adviser to the famous Dr. Kinsey on homosexual matters, wrote me before his death in 1994 that he had kept notes on all his sexual partners – his Stud File, as he called it – and could give me details of an escapade with Fritz, whom he had pursued in Chicago in 1952 because of his admiration for the novel Finistère. Fritz was living in Rogers Park then: “I remember him as being blond and really drunk....” Even so, “Fritz was reluctant when I finally did get him in bed because his underwear wasn’t the cleanest.... [Later] he burst into tears and began to drink even more ... ranting about how he really wasn’t gay....”
Which not only explains Fritz’s marriage, as well as its breakup, but makes the writing and publication of Finistère – so sympathetic to homosexuality, so daring for its time – a mystery. One can only wonder at the complexities of the human heart, and Fritz’s was one of the more complex. Steward’s letter concludes, “I’m sorry, but he seemed so difficult to know, so withdrawn and afraid of being near or around someone gay or being afraid of being thought gay himself that I just couldn’t spend the time with him that I should have....”
Paul Cadmus informed me that in 1963 Fritz was living in New York with Lloyd Lozes Goff, one of Cadmus’ models from the thirties and by then a painter in his own right, that Cadmus had gone to their Manhattan apartment for dinner parties, as noted in his diary. “Yes, indeed, Lloyd and Fritz were ‘lovers,’” Cadmus wrote. “I seem to remember it was to be ‘forever’ but ... I gather Fritz was quite ‘unstable.’”
Goff was a decade older than the fifty-year-old Fritz, and must have offered security to a man who had fled his feelings for so long. If so, it is to Goff that we owe that marvelous book Boyhood with Gurdjieff, written during their affair. Significantly, the photo on the book jacket was taken by Goff and he is among the four dedicatees. In a burst of energy, Fritz turned out two more novels, Night Flight, published in England though mysteriously not in the US, and another as-yet-unpublished novel, the manuscript also dedicated to Goff, attesting to the seriousness of the relationship and his gratitude to the man who helped him accept himself at last. They were still together four years later, by the evidence of Cadmus’ social calendar of 1967.
This latter unpublished novel, found among his papers, has several chapters about Fritz’s relationship with his brother, focusing on their sexual experience during adolescence, which turned out to be significant for Fritz though not for Tom, who turned out to be conventionally straight.
But the literary creative streak eventually ended along with the love affair, and Fritz, probably following his Gurdjieffian-inspired unruly temperament, was soon on the loose. Working irregular hours as a legal secretary and living at the Arlington, he again retreated from a literary life with the excuse that he would only write when he had a book to write. He did manage to complete a second memoir, Gurdjieff Remembered, published in 1971 by Samuel Weiser, founder of the leading bookstore for spiritual literature in New York City, and years later in Albuquerque, he began another novel and completed a somewhat-fragmentary third book on Gurdjieff, A Balanced Man, that circulated in manuscript surreptitiously among Gurdjieffians.
I was in Portland, Oregon, giving poetry readings in the Northwest and staying in the house of the woman who arranged such events for the same university that Annie Lou Stavely worked for when I spoke to my hostess about the Gurdjieffian guru in Portland. My hostess recognized the name at once, exclaiming, “You don’t mean little old Berta Williams, secretary of the Theater Arts department? She can hardly answer the phone properly!” This, in a tone that dismissed Mrs. Stavely as anyone ever to be taken seriously. I trusted my friend’s opinion, but Gurdjieffians are supposed to blend in with the population, I thought to myself, and reserved judgment.
On a later tour in the Northwest, I visited my friend Betty in the old-fashioned wooden house where she was then living with Mrs. Stavely, still not as the lover she would have wished to be, but as assistant/companion. Betty had quickly become invaluable, taking over many of the tasks of everyday life, and especially, helping with Mrs. Stavely’s ever-growing number of followers.
Mrs. Stavely, who was probably used to lesbians coming on to her from her Jane Heap days, was unfortunately still adamant against trying it out for herself. But if Betty never succeeded in winning her over, Mrs. Stavely managed to make Betty try heterosexuality, which she acceded to, briefly, in hopes of getting Mrs. Stavely to loosen up by example. Cunning Mrs. Stavely, though, did not have a yielding nature and never gave in.
Though the affair with Fritz during and possibly after the war had probably broken up Mrs. Stavely’s marriage, it must have been this affair that had given the sexually uncertain Fritz the confidence to get married. Turning gay men straight is a curious ambition of some heterosexual women. In the case of Fritz it temporarily succeeded, much as her attempt to convert Betty was briefly successful.
When Mrs. Stavely retired from her job at the university, she bought a farm nearby, where Betty and her other disciples followed her. As Gurdjieff had done, she kept them all busy building new wings and porches onto the house, and launching into various erratic projects. Visiting there, and seeing her living in a torn-up house in mid-construction, I asked her when the work would be finished. “Never, if I can help it,” she replied firmly. On consideration, I said to myself that this was one smart old lady to have set herself up so well for old age. I could see that she would be taken care of devotedly until her death by her “students.”
In 1975, Fritz told me that he and Mrs. Stavely had made contact with each other again, almost certainly through the sly intervention of Betty, who was not above such things, which led to Fritz’s old lover inviting him to visit her center. Curiously, Fritz came back from this initial foray highly elated, announcing to me over dinner at the Gran Ticino, one of his habitual restaurants in Greenwich Village, that she had invited him to live on the farm and teach the Gurdjieff system. He described for me his bouts of drinking with male disciples who were wowed by meeting someone who had been so close to the legendary master, and under the influence of alcohol, the steamy embraces they had shared in the rural darkness. And he clearly reveled in being treated as an important personage, the heir of Gurdjieff. Perhaps too he saw the Oregon colony as a good place to slip into a peaceful old age, surrounded and looked after by adoring young people, as Mrs. Stavely had done, something which a third-rate New York hotel room did not offer.
Scandals and defections were nothing unusual among Gurdjieffian groups, which from the beginning were rife with betrayals, suspicions, accusations, and frequent disillusionment and departures, even expulsions. Mrs. Stavely might have initially seen Fritz Peters as a useful agent in “awakening” her followers in Oregon, radiating the Gurdjieffian spirit he had imbibed directly from the master, or even – with his outspoken, abrasive manner – as an irritant. Though she could not have foreseen the extent of his drinking and openly homosexual behavior, all the more shocking against the conservative backdrop of rural Oregon, Fritz’s great prestige as the author of Boyhood with Gurdjieff could not be denied. And he was, presumably, a dear old friend, whatever the stormy events of the past had been. Perhaps he was ready to settle down and be a suitable male companion for her, someone in her own age group who shared her past associations.
In The World Next Door, Fritz talked about his Christ complex. Now, his emotional instability was only increased by the adulation he received from Mrs. Stavely’s followers, and Fritz was clearly in a manic phase when he returned from the initial visit and regaled me over pasta at the Gran Ticino with his adventures. After he closed up his affairs in New York and was ready to fly back to Oregon to settle on the farm, he announced grandly to me, “You may accompany me to the airport,” as if he were God’s Anointed. This meant that I was being honored by being chosen to drive him there in my battered VW bus. It was not quite the vehicle he merited, but he was oblivious. At last, he was being enthroned as Gurdjieff’s heir. I got the distinct impression that he was going to be the farm’s resident guru, with Mrs. Stavely his handmaiden.
But it turned out that Annie Lou Stavely was not about to accept second billing. It was no time at all, perhaps a week or two after Fritz left, before I got a telephone call from him, not in Oregon but, astonishingly, New Mexico, informing me that the whole thing had blown up. I learned later from Betty that from the minute Fritz arrived, he started turning the place upside down, trying to run it as Gurdjieff would have, while drinking everything in sight. Betty had enjoyed having a gay man on the premises with whom she could speak frankly. But his behavior had been so impossible, so disruptive to the orderly routine of classes and “teaching” projects, Berta Williams had him shipped out on a plane for Albuquerque where, he told me, he had moved in with an old friend of eighty-three who lived in a big adobe house and needed someone to cook and deal with household matters that were getting to be too much for her.
(It was after Fritz’s death, when I informed Mrs. Stavely that I wished to write a book about him, that she relented and sent me the sheaf of photographs that he must have inadvertently left behind when she reasserted her authority and hustled him off to the airport, and order on the farm was restored.)
Soon after this, Betty herself caused a ruckus at the farm, where by now, with her problem-solving nature, she had made herself indispensable, one would think, as Mrs. Stavely’s “right-hand man.” Gurdjieffian philosophy was not anti-sexuality, and Gurdjieff himself had had a well-known, even scandalous, neo-pagan love life with his numerous female disciples, spreading his biological progeny far and wide. But under the aegis of Mrs. Stavely, “The Work” took on the more puritan cast of the London-based Ouspensky school, and when Betty and the wife of one of the young disciples fell in love, it was not looked on kindly by the straight-laced Mrs. Stavely, resulting in their expulsion.
But Betty was unabashed, and without a backward look, she and her friend went off to India to join the entourage of Baghwan Shri Rajneesh, the latest guru on the scene and one who was, unlike Mrs. Stavely, a great promoter of free sexuality in all forms. This new devotion to Baghwan may even have been encouraged by Mrs. Stavely as a way of getting rid of the disobedient, troublesome couple. As a Gurdjieffian, such manipulative behavior would be entirely acceptable.
I heard from Fritz in Albuquerque from time to time – long rambling phone calls that often interrupted me at my typewriter, and only ended when I told him I had to go back to work, which he always respected. Fritz also sent letters occasionally. He was eighty pages into a new novel, he told me, played the piano for recreation, and I learned for the first time about his children. His son, also called Fritz but nicknamed Peto, was at the University of Arizona, and his daughter Katherine was a teacher at a school for the deaf in Santa Fe, though it didn’t sound like he saw them much. It would be perfectly understandable if they were leery of this unconventional parent, who had caused so much disruption in their lives.
For his part, Fritz was avoiding what I suspect were many old acquaintances in the area. There had been a drift of Gurdjieffians to the Southwest over the years, attracted by the spiritual centers of Taos and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, which may have been what drew Fritz to the place after the war. But in his letters to me during the seventies, Fritz expressed contempt for these people who were so eager to worship him.
There were to be no more manic phases; his brief fling at wearing the crown that he had inherited from Gurdjieff was over, and he was back to cynical normalcy. But if Fritz had landed on his feet again after his expulsion from Oregon – becoming The Balanced Man of the title of his final book – it was not to last. His elderly housemate Julia was rapidly going senile. Soon, Julia no longer recognized Fritz, asked him what he was doing there, and ordered him to get the hell out. Her family took over her affairs, and seeing Fritz as an outsider trying to get his hands on the estate, got a court order and evicted him. His lawyer told him he had no choice but to comply, so he found an apartment in downtown Albuquerque that he shared with an immigrant from India, not a lover but someone whom he said he found tolerable. He was thinking of returning to New York, perhaps for the publication of the new Gurdjieff book. Another publisher was interested in reprinting Finistère and his other books as well.
There was a brief, hurried letter dated April 16, 1979, describing various ailments – blood pressure, heart, dentures – medical treatments. Then I got a call from him in the hospital. He promised to write fully.
He died, according to the brief New York Times obituary, on December 1979, in Los Cruces, New Mexico.
Perhaps his was an author’s ideal fate: the man forgotten, but the works remembered. Nevertheless, I believe that his was a life that deserves to be rescued from oblivion. I see his two classic books as representing two sides of a nature that could never quite be reconciled, resulting in a strangely unfocused and – despite the considerable achievement of these books – unachieved life. I hope this new edition of Finistère arouses enough to bring The World Next Door back into print, and perhaps the unpublished novel as well.
Out west on one of my reading tours in the seventies, the period when so many different spiritual disciplines were in the air, I was sitting around with a group of students and mentioned Gurdjieff. A young woman in a granny dress broke in with, “Oh, he’s peaked,” implying that she and her friends had absorbed Gurdjieff’s teachings and moved on to the next big thing, perhaps Carlos Castaneda, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and beyond. The young grasp things more by instinct, and don’t have the time or patience for lengthy studies. But perhaps she was also saying that the excitement of discovery was over. These days, I, too have lost the thrill of discovering new possibilities that once lurked in the books of Gurdjieff and other teachers, and the hope that my life would somehow be suddenly transformed. Yet it was changed by those years of my friendship with Betty Deran and Alma Routsong and then Fritz Peters, and I live differently today because of them.
NOTE: With such large gaps, this must remain a first, provisional study of Fritz Peters. But until survivors who knew him are willing to testify, or documents turn up, much of his life necessarily remains shrouded in mystery. I would like to thank Matthew Weseley for his invaluable help in my research.