Undiscovered Country
 Kathryn Hulme
 (Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
 1997 Watersign Press; 2 edition
 ISBN: 1891218034

"In the Paris of the thirties the great adventure of my life began." As a resourceful companion & guide, she visited Paris where her empty life changed under the guidance of the Russian mystic Gurdjieff. Sustained by his teachings she began to find herself, write & publish her first books.

Kathryn Hulme's life, however, was never that simple. Born of this century & old enough to remember the San Francisco earthquake. With a father who visited infrequently yet dominated their family, she & her sister & brother grew up in a time & place quite unusual, with few biases or prejudices intact.

To read of this woman's life, is to follow an old soul out into a world far too dangerous for her & yet it seems everywhere she went she brought her direct interest, companioship & a measure of safety. A being at home with herself, with her own company, with the living of life & yet, a sleeping beauty for all that - numb, vacant & drifting.

Here are the memories of the first hippies, those wandering souls who, with a pocketfull of cash & a handful of necessities, trekked all over the Old World, seeking, absorbing, fascinated & somehow very safe. Here is arguably the first suburban American who followed the crumbs to the feet of a master mystic, decades before we knew about gurus, spiritual teachers & ashrams.

Here are the stories of her awakening, her confusion & the strengthening of her courage for the decades to come. When her mystical world becomes threatened by Hitler's advances, Kathryn Hulme reluctantly returns to America to gather up the loose ends of her life. In the bowels of newly-formed Liberty Ships, this poetic, unadorned Rosie The Riveter leaves her unique mark on each metal hull she completes.

When the ordinary paths in life like marriage & motherhood, career & civil service ellude you, what else is there for women to do? Work in factories, learn languages & study about the transformation of consciousness from the teachings of a great mystic, arguably the European antecedent to the human enlightenment movement in America of the l960s & 1970s.

When first I read Undiscovered Country I hunted up what little has been printed by/about Gurdjieff. In light of the human potential movement in which I was flowing at the time, this Mystic's works seemed quite well-known &, dare I say it, obvious - except in the context of when he was teaching, some forty years previous & one huge world war, holocaust & cold war ago. On The Pilgrimage for "something more" to which we are urged by an inner hunger no outer trappings can sate, Gurdjieff's teachings & his Circle, into which Kathryn Hulme enters, like a thirsty hunter at a river at dusk, shines like the setting sun, casting strange & vivid shadows of meanings across us, to confuse us out of our arrogant complacence. Yet when you read Kathryn Hulme, the absence of self is remarkable.

To this day, Kathryn Hulme's spare description of this magical man, evokes familiar visions, especially for this erstwhile earth mother, commune-dweller & ashram dabbler: "In his at-home attire - shirt sleeves, baggy trousers and carpet slippers, with tasseled red fez tilted back on his great shaved head - he appeared the paterfamilias, a deceptive impression unless rightly interpreted as high priest of his family with unlimited powers to punish or expose its members. Often we wondered why he insisted on truths we believed we had heard before, or on ways of conduct we thought we had always followed...until we pondered his advice and realized we had done the exact opposite all our lives."

A healing, insightful & productive read. Can't recommend it high enough.

Also by Kathryn Hulme: Arab Interlude; Desert Night; We Lived As Children; The Wild Place; The Nun's Story; Annie's Captain & more.
(06/12/99)

Rebecca