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By Gary Lachman
 Sometime in the year 1924 a precocious French poet named René Daumal had
a mystical experience that became the determining event of his life.
Soaking a handkerchief in carbon tetrachloride— a powerful anesthetic he used
for his beetle collection— the sixteen-year-old Daumal held it to his nostrils
and inhaled. Instantly he felt himself “thrown brutally into another world,” a
strange other dimension of geometric forms and incomprehensible sounds, in which
his mind “traveled too fast to drag words along with it” (Daumal, Powers of the
Word 164).
It was his first encounter with what he would later call “absurd
evidence”— “proof” that another existence lies beyond the conscious mind.
Obsessed with the mystery of death, René was determined to peek at “the great
beyond.” When the anesthetizing effects of the fumes proved too great, René’s
hand would drop from his face. He would then regain consciousness, his mind
reeling— and his head aching— from its recent plunge into somewhere else.
René repeated his experiment many times, sometimes alone, sometimes with
friends, always with the same result: the conviction that he had briefly entered
“another world,” one infinitely more real than our everyday reality. He may have
taken his trip hundreds of times, and it is almost certain that his repeated use
of carbon tetrachloride started the weakening of his lungs that led to his death
from tuberculosis in 1944 at the age of 36.
If all René Daumal did in his short life was to experiment with drugs and
write poetry, he probably would not be remembered today, except by students of
obscure French literature. But unlike so many other youthful travelers into “the
beyond,” before his death Daumal managed to capture some of the insights gleamed
from his dangerous interior journeys. Nowhere did Daumal come closer to
communicating most clearly something of the strange “other” reality that he
observed in his harmful adolescent experiments and dedicated his life to
penetrating than in his last, unfinished novel, Mount Analogue (1952).
Symbolizing a “way to truth” that “cannot not exist,” Mount Analogue towers
above the everyday world like a spiritual Everest. An ardent climber, by the
time he tried to make this metaphysical ascent, Daumal had added a few items to
his alpinist’s gear. Jettisoning the uncertain “heights” of drugs by 1939, when
he first contemplated the novel, Daumal had been for many years a student of the
teachings of the enigmatic Armenian G. I. Gurdjieff, communicated through
Gurdjieff’s long time disciples Alexandre and Jeanne de Salzmann.
Early Life
René Daumal was born in 1908 in the forests of the Ardennes, not far from the
Belgian border. Like his hero, the equally precocious boy-poet Arthur
Rimbaud— with whom he shared an early death, a fascination with drugs, and an
interest in the occult— Daumal was educated at Charleville. Early on he displayed
two lifelong characteristics: a brilliant intellect and a fascination with the
“beyond.” The first revealed itself fully when he completed his baccalauréat at
17; the second, even earlier, by an obsession with death starting at 6. When
most boys were dreaming of cowboys and Indians— or in Daumal’s case, the French
equivalent— René kept himself awake, caught in a stranglehold of “nothingness.”
This early confrontation with the void led to exhausting experiments with
entering dreams while still awake and strenuous attempts at “lucid dreaming,”
which his fellow Gurdjieffean P. D. Ouspensky (“On the Study of Dreams”) had
also made a generation earlier. It would also lead to his teenage attempts at
suicide, as well as the basic themes of his first collection of poetry, Counter
Heaven, for which he won an esteemed literary prize in 1935.
In his early years René found scant opportunity to discuss these deep
matters. Although his paternal grandfather, Antoine Daumal, was a Mason who
began his own esoteric lodge, most adults gave René’s existential concerns
little thought. But during his precocious teens, René was not alone. When his
family moved to Reims and entered the boy in the lycée, René met three other
young mental voyagers who shared his taste for metaphysical speculation. In
1922, with Roger Vailland, Robert Meyrat, and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, René
started a kind of secret society.
The Simplists, as they called themselves, became inseparable and were
dedicated to retaining the spontaneity and intuition of childhood— a curious aim,
given that Daumal at the time was only 14. Along with reading “decadent” poets
like Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and books on occultism and theosophy, the Simplists
conducted various experiments in parapsychology and magic, what the group called
“experimental metaphysics,” some of which included the use of hashish and opium.
In one potentially dangerous experiment, Daumal walked alone for hours with his
eyes closed, strangely avoiding the obstacles in his path. Other experiments
included astral traveling, shared dreams, precognition, attempts to open the
third eye, and a form of second sight the group called “paroptic vision.”
The last type of experiment was often conducted under the supervision of
their lycée professor, René Maublanc. Maublanc had himself conducted experiments
with the author Jules Romain, who in 1920 published a book entitled La Vision
extrarétinienne et le sens paroptique. In it he argued that, if the eyes were
closed or blinded, a kind of sight could develop in the epidermal cells of the
fingers, an idea that the Italian scientist Cesare Lombroso had put forth some
years earlier.
In these experiments, René revealed an uncanny ability to determine the
identity of objects with his eyes closed in a darkened room while wearing
tight-fitting, thick, blackened glasses, rather like underwater goggles. During
these sessions Maublanc would hypnotize René, who would then hold his hands near
the objects, or place them on a specially covered box containing some item.
Daumal could also “see” the images on book covers and even sense colors by the
temperature they gave off.
Le Grand Jeu
In 1925 René entered the prestigious Lycée Henri-IV in Paris, to prepare for
examinations to enter the École Normale Supérieure. One of his professors was
the philosopher Émile Chartier, better known under the penname “Alain.” Along
with his work in mathematics, philosophy, science, and medicine, Daumal also
studied Sanskrit, mastering the language in three years, composing a grammar and
beginning several translations. Daumal also read the works of the Traditionalist
René Guénon and wrote a series of essays on Indian esthetics, posthumously
published as Rasa (1982).
At the time of Daumal’s studies in ancient traditions, however, Paris was a
hotbed of modernism, and no group was more vociferous than the Surrealists, who
shared with him and the other Simplists a fascination with the occult and
paranormal. As a consequence of a fall in 1927, Daumal had a period of amnesia,
which prevented him from taking his entrance examinations, so he began a course
of “free studies” in philosophy at the Sorbonne. There he met the Czech painter
Joseph Sima and the Siberian-born, naturalized American Vera Milanova, who would
later become his wife. With the poet André Rolland de Reneville and the other
Simplists, the nineteen-year-old Daumal embarked on the short-lived literary
review for which he is most remembered in France today, Le Grand Jeu (The Big
Game).
The wild blend of Guénon, Alfred Jarry’s Pataphysics, occultism, and arcane
scholarship in Le Grand Jeu posed a threat to Surrealism. When the first issue
appeared in 1928, Surrealism had been around for a decade, but had lost momentum
in endless squabbles over politics and egos. The young poets, scarcely out of
their teens, calling for a “Revolution of Reality returning to its source” and
claiming to speak the same word as “uttered by the Vedic Rishis, the Cabbalist
Rabbis, the prophets, the mystics, the great heretics of all time and the true
Poets” (Daumal, Powers of the Word 6) were bound to attract the older group’s
attention. Overtures were made to bring them into the fold, but Daumal firmly
declined. The Surrealist André Breton, deep into Marxism, retaliated by openly
criticizing Le Grand Jeu for its ideological failings. Daumal, unfazed, answered
that Breton should beware of “eventually figuring in study guides to literary
history.”
Daumal emerged from this skirmish intact, but he and Le Grand Jeu were
not in good shape. By 1929, his childhood friend Roger Gilbert-Lecomte had
succumbed to the drug addiction that would eventually kill him. Daumal himself
was barely scratching out an existence, living in poverty, losing his teeth, and
feeling the ravages of his various experiments. The third issue of the review
would be its last. If Daumal rejected the solicitations of the pope of
Surrealism, it was not from lack of need for a father figure. He was merely
waiting to meet a more remarkable man.
Alexandre de Salzmann and Gurdjieff
Daumal’s meeting with a remarkable man occurred in November 1930 at the
Café Figon on the Boulevard St. Germain. Sitting at a table drinking calvados
and beer, and drawing odd Arabic and Oriental designs, was a man that Joseph
Sima recognized from a previous collaboration. Sima approached and introduced
the famous artist Alexandre de Salzmann to his young friend. But a different
story seems more in line with the kind of legends one associates with the
Gurdjieff “work.” In the latter account, de Salzmann, a world-renowned authority
on theater lighting and set design, approached the young bohemians and engaged
them in conversation. After a few minutes, he proposed a test: he asked the
group to hold their arms straight out at the side for as long as they could.
Several minutes later only Daumal’s remained in the air. De Salzmann smiled and
said, “You interest me.” However the event happened,
Daumal had met his remarkable man.
Alexandre de Salzmann was born into an aristocratic family in Tiflis,
Georgia, in 1874. Like Gurdjieff, he had a colorful past, part of which included
being kidnapped by brigands as a teenager. He claimed to have lost his teeth
when falling from a mountain while in the service of a Russian Grand Duke. Also
like Gurdjieff, de Salzmann was a trickster who enjoyed frequent leg-pulling, so
we should be wary of believing all his claims. But de Salzmann certainly shared
another character trait with his master. He was a remarkably versatile man,
enthusiastic about everything. When Daumal first encountered him, he described
de Salzmann as a “former dervish, former Benedictine, former professor of
jiu-jitsu, healer, stage designer” (quoted by Roger Shattuck in the introduction
to Mount Analogue 13).
After studies in Moscow, de Salzmann headed for Munich, where he got
involved in the Art Nouveau movement, becoming friends with the poet Rilke and
the painter Wassily Kandinsky and contributing illustrations to important
journals like Jugend and Simplicissimus. In 1911 he went to Hellerau, where he
developed a new system of stage lighting. Among others, the poet and playwright
Paul Claudel was captivated by his work. It was also there that he met his wife,
Jeanne Allemand, a teacher of Dalcroze Eurythmics, who, after Gurdjieff’s death
in 1949, became the central living exponent of “the work.” After a brief return
to Moscow, the couple settled in Alexandre’s home town of Tiflis, and it was
there, in 1919, that they met Gurdjieff.
Escaping from a Russia thrown into madness by war and revolution, Gurdjieff
had brought his band of followers to the Georgian capital. Two of his students,
Thomas and Olga de Hartmann, a celebrated composer and singer, became involved
with the Tiflis Opera, and it was there they met de Salzmann, whom Thomas knew
from Munich. De Hartmann introduced de Salzmann to Gurdjieff, and the remarkable
man was impressed. “He is a very fine man,” Gurdjieff is reported to have said.
“And she [Jeanne] is intelligent.” Thus began a lifetime relationship for all
three.
De Salzmann’s relationship with Gurdjieff was ambiguous. At the time of the
former’s death from tuberculosis in 1933, Gurdjieff had apparently cut off his
student of fifteen years, refusing to visit him as he lay dying in a hotel room.
When the weak, sickly man finally summoned the strength to confront Gurdjieff,
his master all but ignored him. On his deathbed, de Salzmann is reported to have
said, “I’ll know on the other side whether he’s a Master or a demon.” As James
Webb remarks in The Harmonious Circle (435 -6), whatever “esoteric” meaning may
have been behind Gurdjieff’s behavior, this incident must remain one of the
darkest in the complicated legends surrounding “the work.”
When the twenty-one-year-old Daumal met de Salzmann, he had no doubt that his
moment of destiny had arrived. Gurdjieff had been in France since 1922,
directing the activities at his famous prieuré in Fontainebleau, where,
ironically, another young writer, Katherine Mansfield, also died of
tuberculosis. But by 1924, Gurdjieff had seemingly lost interest in his
Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man and was laboring at the
monumental Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (1950), gaining inspiration from
copious amounts of black coffee and armagnac.
When Daumal met de Salzmann, the artist was making a living as an interior
decorator and antique dealer. Still thirsting for the absolute, Daumal now drank
greedily at one of its living wells. René and Vera spent endless nights talking
with de Salzmann about Gurdjieff and “the work,” and eventually de Salzmann
appeared in fictional form in two of Daumal’s allegorical novels, A Night of
Serious Drinking (1938)— started during his brief stay in New York while working
as a press agent for the Indian dancer Uday Shankar— and Mount Analogue. After
Alexandre’s death, the two threw themselves into “the work” with a dedication
that troubled their former friends, and it was during his time with Jeanne de
Salzmann that Daumal’s first sightings of Mount Analogue began.
In a house in Sevres, a suburb of Paris, Jeanne de Salzmann set up a kind of
mini-prieuré, a communal home dedicated to “the work.” There, with the
orientalist Philippe Lavastine and a few others, René and Vera pursued the
difficult task of “awakening.” They struggled through Gurdjieff’s “movements,”
incredibly complicated physical exercises designed to tap unused energies and
overcome “sleep,” and investigated the effects of music on the human organism.
René and Vera were also involved in a similar “work house” set up in Geneva. All
during this time Daumal’s health deteriorated— his rotting teeth were pulled and
he became deaf in his left ear. He kept his failing body and growing soul
tenuously together by contributing to L’Encyclopédie Française and through
freelance translation. Among other works, he translated D. T. Suzuki’s
three-volume Essays on Zen Buddhism into French.
In 1938 Daumal began working with Gurdjieff directly, attending the famous
dinners in Gurdjieff’s tiny flat on the Rue de Colonel Renards, a turning point
in his life sadly paralleled by another: in the same year he was diagnosed with
tuberculosis. Typically, Daumal rejected treatment and flatly refused to enter a
sanitarium. Throughout his life, Daumal showed a consistent disdain for the
flesh, as manifested in his dangerous drug adventures, his psychic experiments,
and now his total commitment to “the work.” The essence of that “work” is
“struggle,” and at this point Daumal certainly found himself in the right place
for it.
In 1940 Germany invaded France. Vera was Jewish, and for his remaining years,
Daumal eked out an increasingly precarious existence, constantly on the run from
the Gestapo and the Vichy government. At one point he and Vera were reduced to
drinking hot water to stave off hunger pangs. In 1941 tubercular arthritis
developed in his left foot. Two years later a synovial tumor erupted and the
resulting infection caused excruciating pain. Like his hero Rimbaud, for the
last six months of his life Daumal was unable to walk. In the end malnourishment
and a punishing habit of chain-smoking Gauloise cigarettes killed him. In April
1944 Daumal died. An uncompleted sentence in the manuscript of Mount
Analogue marks the point at which his quest for the absolute ended.
Mount Analogue
Subtitled A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in
Mountain Climbing, like all good parables, Mount Analogue resists final
interpretation. A riveting adventure story, it is also a modern day Pilgrim’s
Progress. The plot is simple. Led by the Professor of Mountaineering, Pierre
Sogol (de Salzmann), eight adventurers board the yacht Impossible to discover
the invisible but “absolutely real” Mount Analogue. Though it is hidden from
ordinary eyes, Sogol pinpoints its location through a series of supra-logical
deductions involving the curvature of space.
Convinced of the necessity of Mount Analogue’s existence, the crew eventually
arrive, set up camp, and begin the ascent, along the way discovering the
strange, nearly invisible crystals called “peradams.” These symbolize the rare
and difficult truths discovered on the spiritual path, and reflect Daumal’s own
lucid, limpid prose. There are insightful studies of the different
voyagers— embodying Gurdjieff’s classification of types— a fascinating portrait of
de Salzmann, and penetrating analyses of Western civilization.
Although the book’s fragmentary character is in keeping with Gurdjieff’s
“work”— Ouspenksy’s own masterpiece In Search of the Miraculous was originally
titled Fragments of an Unknown Teaching— the fact that Daumal did not live to
complete it is a tragedy. And yet, when we look at Daumal’s brief but eventful
life, it somehow seems fitting that this spiritual voyage of discovery would be
cut short. There is no question of Daumal’s dedication to his goals or the
integrity of his pursuit. But his approach to the higher regions took more
perilous routes than were necessary.
Of his youthful drug experiences, Daumal (Powers of the Word 169)
wrote that, if “in return for the acceptance of serious illness or disabilities,
or of a very perceptible abbreviation of the physical life-span, we could
acquire one certainty, it would not be too high a price to pay.” In scaling
Mount Analogue, Daumal was as courageous as any terrestrial climber, yet there
is a strain of spiritual and physical masochism in his credo. Others who
followed Gurdjieff’s Spartan path were similarly neglectful of the flesh.
For Daumal, the idea that the absolute was some inaccessible region started
early. That a teenage Daumal would make “crazy” attempts to reach “the beyond”
is understandable, but that he should persist in later years suggests immaturity
and an irresponsible attitude to his health. The fact that the heights of Mount
Analogue are invisible, and the yacht his adventurers board is named
Impossible, argues that even after Daumal had moved beyond his dubious
experiments with drugs, he continued in the same mind. In choosing a mountain as
the locale of his last, great effort, Daumal certainly had the rigors of
Gurdjieff’s “work” in view. Sadly, it may have been precisely this punishing
attitude to attaining the spiritual heights that helped bring about his tragic,
untimely death.
Yet such considerations should not prevent us from appreciating his work.
Since its rediscovery in the 1960s, Mount Analogue has remained one of the
classics of “metaphysical adventure,” a spur to thousands of spiritual
travelers, prodded out of their armchairs by its surprisingly restrained account
of Daumal’s last conscious excursion into the unknown. Perhaps aware that he
would soon be taking an even more mysterious voyage, Daumal made sure that he
left as clear a trail as possible for those who followed.
Before his death, he left an outline of the novel’s remaining chapters. “At
the end,” he said, “ I want to speak at length of one of the basic laws of Mount
Analogue. To reach the summit, one must proceed from encampment to encampment.
But before setting out for the next refuge, one must prepare those coming after
to occupy the place one is leaving. Only after having prepared them, can one go
on up” (Mount Analogue 104). The title of this last chapter was to be “And You,
What Do You Seek?” For all his detours and wrong turnings, with Mount
Analogue Daumal undoubtedly left a valuable way station for all who would come
after him.
References
| Daumal, | René. The Powers of the Word. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. San
Francisco: City Lights, 1991.
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| ------. | “Draft of an Introduction to the Grand
Jeu.” In The Powers of the Word, trans. Mark Polizzotti, 6. San
Francisco: City Lights, 1991.
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| ------. | Mount Analogue. Harmondsworth, England:
Penguin Books, 1986.
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| ------. | A Night of Serious Drinking (Le Grand Beuverie).
Paris: Gallimard, 1938.
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| ------. | Rasa. San Francisco: City Lights, 1982.
| | Ouspensky, | P. D. “On the Study of Dreams and on Hypnosis.” In A New Model of the
Universe, 242 -73. New York: Knopf, 1969. Written in 1905 and revised in 1929. |
| Webb, | James. The Harmonious Circle. New York: Putnam’s, 1980.
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Gary Lachman, an American resident in England, is a frequent contributor
to the Quest. His new book, Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark
Side of the Age of Aquarius, published in England last May, is available from
www.amazon.co.uk.
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