Alfred Richard Orage
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Alfred Richard Orage (1873 – 1934) was a British intellectual, now best known for editing the magazine The New Age.
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[edit] Early life
Born in Dacre, West Riding of Yorkshire into a nonconformist religious family, he became a schoolteacher and joined the Independent Labour Party, writing for their paper on philosophy, including in particular the thought of Plato and Edward Carpenter,
By the late 1890s, Orage was disillusioned with conventional socialism and turned for 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 Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, which led him to study Nietzsche's work in depth. Together, Orage and Jackson helped found the Leeds Arts Club, with the intention of promoting the work of radical thinkers including G. B. Shaw, Henrik Ibsen, and Nietzsche. During this period he returned to socialist platforms, but now determined to combine Carpenter's socialism with Nietzsche and theosophy. Concentrating on this led to separation from his wife.
Orage explored his new ideas in several books. He saw Nietzsche's Übermensch as a metaphor for the "higher state of consciousness" sought by mystics and sought to define a route to this, insisting this must involve a rejection of civilisation and conventional morality. Instead, he moved through a celebration of Dionysus to declare he was in favour not of an ordered socialism but of an anarchic movement.
[edit] Editor in London
He resigned his teaching post and moved to London, following Arthur Penty, another Leeds Art Club friend in 1906. Orage attempted to form a league for the restoration of a guild system, much as described by William Morris.
The failure of this project spurred him in 1907, supported by George Bernard Shaw, to buy the weekly magazine The New Age, in partnership with Holbrook Jackson. He quite soon turned it into his conception of a forum for politics, literature and the arts. Although many contributors were Fabians, he to some extent distanced himself from their politics, and a wide range of political viewpoints were represented. The magazine launched an attack on parliamentary politics, while Orage argued the need for utopianism. He also attacked the trade union leadership, while offering some support to syndicalism, and tried to combine this with the guild system. Combining these two viewpoints resulted in Guild socialism, a political philosophy he began to argue for from about 1910.
Between 1908 and 1914 The New Age was undoubtedly the premier little magazine 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 his undoubted genius as an editor, it might be said that Orage's real talent was as a conversationalist and a 'bringer together' of people. The modernists of London were scattered between 1905 and 1910. Between 1910 and 1914, largely thanks to Orage, a sense of a genuine 'movement' was created. In other words, Orage successfully ran a forum which at least assumed (and perhaps created) a commonality between the seemingly unfathomable philosophies and artistic practices then being created.
[edit] Orage's politics
Orage's declared himself to be a socialist, and followed Georges Sorel in arguing that trade unions should pursue an increasingly aggressive policy as regards issues such as wage deals and working conditions. He approved of the increasing militancy of the unions in the pre-war era, and seems to have shared Sorel's belief in the necessity of a Trade Union-led General Strike, leading to a revolutionary situation.
Orage was militantly anti-suffragette, but allowed both pro- and anti-suffragette articles to be published in The New Age, in keeping with his policy of making the journal a forum for political debate rather than a forum for his opinions.
After the First World War, he was influenced by C. H. Douglas and became a supporter of Social credit.
[edit] With Gurdjieff
In 1914 Orage met with P. D. Ouspensky, whose ideas left a prominent impression. When Ouspensky moved to London in 1921, Orage began attending his lectures on a "fragmentary" teaching. From this point on Orage became less and less interested in literature and art, instead focussing his attention in the 1910s on spirituality and the occult. His correspondence with Harry Houdini on these subjects moved him to explore ideas of the afterlife. He returned to the idea that there were absolute truths and felt these were embodied in the Mahabharata.
In February 1922, Ouspensky introduced Orage to G. I. Gurdjieff. Selling the New Age, he moved to Paris to study at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. By 1924, Orage had become one of Gurdjieff's most valued pupils, appointed by the latter to lead study groups in America.
[edit] New English Weekly
In 1930 Orage returned to England in an attempt to found a new magazine. The New English Weekly began in April 1932; it was subsequently edited by Philip Mairet, Orage's biographer. In its pages, Orage explored politics and was a primary figure in the reviving Social Credit movement.
[edit] Works
- Friedrich Nietzsche; The Dionysian Spirit of the Age (1906)
- Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism (1907)
- 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
- 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
[edit] References
- A. R. Orage: A Memoir (1936) Philip Mairet
- Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club (1893-1923) (Scolar Press 1990) Tom Steele
- Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium (2001) Paul Beekman Taylor,
