Gurdjieff International Review

William & Louise Welch

Bio-Sketches
by Patty Welch Llosa William J. Welch, M.D.
Like many of his contemporaries around Gurdjieff in the l940s, William J.Welch was a very well-rounded man. Born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on September 12, 1911, he broke away from the middle west when he went to Yale University, and (in his words) never looked back. After Yale he came to New York in 1933. It was a city he loved all his life for its bustling energy and stimulating diversity of people, and his rst job was as go-fer for Chet Bowles and Bill Benton at the Benton & Bowles advertising agency, where he soon became the bright young executive that everyone knew would go far. One Saturday morning in l934 he walked by the ofce of young Louise Michel, and because she had the best looking legs at Benton & Bowles, he asked her out to lunch. Thus a sixty-odd year romance began, and thus he connected rst with the New York group that had been started by A.R.Orage, a mentor and substitute father of the orphaned Louise, and later with Orages master, G.I.Gurdjieff, when he next came to New York. This marked a turning point in his life. As he said in his autobiography, What Happened In Between: ADoctors Story (Braziller, New York, l972), a small worm continued to gnaw away at my self-esteem. It seemed increasingly shameful to know so little and pretend so much. I have long since come to the recognition that at bottom a man never really knows anything, but it seemed to me then that it would be a good thing to know something, to be in possession of a body of knowledge from which one met the world rather than always to be forced to improvise and never to have any inner discipline that was ones own. Idecided to study medicine. He had very little money but a secret benefactor stepped forward to get him a scholarship at Columbia College of Physicians & Surgeons. He went there after a year spent at Columbia boning up on science courses which the gentleman scholar at Yale had largely ignored. Welch waited to marry Louise until 1941, when he had almost nished his medical studies, though he had already become a father gure to her two children, Patty and Dick. As war broke out he became a lieutenant and then captain in the Army Medical Corps, and participated in a seminal study of treatment of malaria at Goldwater Memorial Hospital. After the war, he went on to practice medicine as an internist and cardiologist, rst at Princeton, where he shared a house with the legendary dean of Princeton University, Christian Gauss; then in New York City as physician for such distinguished people as J.Robert Oppenheimer, Ben Shahn, Benny Goodman and Mayor Robert F.Wagner. He was president of the New York Heart Association from l9671969. He also wrote syndicated newspaper columns (Dr. Welch Says) and conducted a call-in radio show (Ask Dr. Welch). In his private life he was attending lectures by P. D. Ouspensky during the war and was one of a small circle around Gurdjieff when he came to New York in fall of l948 and winter of l949. When Gurdjieff became ill in Paris in the summer of l949, Welch was in constant contact with the doctors attending him, suggesting medicines and treatment, and when the illness became ominous in October, suggested trying a new medicine which he offered to send them. But Gurdjieff responded that he should come himself to administer it, so after an incredible one-day preparation in which he managed to get the medicine, a plane ticket and a new passport, he ew to Paris, his rst trip abroad. Gurdjieff greeted him with his usual expansive: Ah, dock-tor, bravo America!, but Welch saw how serious his condition was and immediately told him in the commanding voice of a doctor accustomed to make such decisions: You should be in the hospital! To the astonishment of those gathered around him, including his closest students and several of his doctors, Gurdjieff accepted at once, and they went together in an ambulance to the American Hospital of Paris, where Welch attended him until Gurdjieff died a few days later. He also wrote about Gurdjieff in his autobiography, Gurdjieff remained as a light over my shoulder, with his questioning insight and his devilish way of throwing into focus the noise and fury of an upside-down world. Bill and Louise Welch were part of the original group of some twenty people who bought the Gurdjieff Foundation building in New York City, and took an active part in groups, special presentations of the Gurdjieff ideas, and intensive weeks of study for many years. Along with Olga and Thomas de Hartmann, they introduced the Gurdjieff teaching to Canada in the early l950s and have left ourishing groups in Toronto and Halifax. Welch continued to follow Gurdjieffs teaching until his own death and had a profound inuence on an ever-widening group of people who wished to follow the ancient dictum know thyself. He was president of the New York Gurdjieff Foundation from l984 to his death in July of l997.

Louise Michel Blinken Welch

When Mother died on Christmas day last year, a whole era died with her, not only for me as her daughter, but for everyone close to herher family; occupants of the house she lived in where she was the uncontested heart for so many years; close friends and students of the Gurdjieff teaching, whom she helped to a better understanding of themselves or encouraged to develop sides of themselves scarcely guessed at by anyone; and other lives she touched obliquely or only once or twice. Wherever she touched, she gave. Yes, she was a giver. Whether it was attention, love, soul food, a warm blanket or a delicious dinner you needed, she found what it was and then provided it or a rich alternative. She deepened our deepest questions and helped us see new aspects and dimensions in them and in ourselves. Whatever our need she focused on how to provide what was necessary or help us nd it for ourselves. She gave us so much in addition to mothering, hugging away bad dreams, rmly chiding to call out the best in us. She even tried to teach me cookingand she was an expert who could turn even wartime shortages into an innite variety of pasta or potato dishes. I have long regretted that I resisted her efforts because she was too good a cook and, feeling I could never match her talent, decided not to try. It is amazing that she had so much love to give, considering that she received so little as a child. Born in New York of Ukrainian immigrant parents in l905, she was taken in reluctantly by her grandparents when her mother died soon after. They told her they were her parents and left her largely alone, though she was visited infrequently by her father, who was introduced to her as an uncle, until he died when she was ten. Deceit and half-truths were hidden in every family relationship, and her happiest childhood memories were from outside the home; of school and Saturdays in Fairmont Park, at the public library or in the peanut gallery at concerts of the famed Philadelphia Philharmonic. Forced to leave school at twelve and work wrapping parcels in the basement of Strawbridge & Clothier, alarge department store, in order to bring home money for the family, she became seriously anemic. Luckily she was cared for by a friendly doctor who insisted she was not well enough to return to work, and sent her back to school. She told me only a few years ago that the day he told her this was the happiest day of her life. In Mothers early teens a psychologist took an interest in her exceptional intelligence, conducted experiments with her and even asked to adopt her, but by then Mother had had enough of pseudo-parents and refused outright to belong to someone else. Although this woman arranged a full scholarship for Mother at Alfred University, she turned against her in the middle of Mothers senior year, giving her no choice but to leave college with only $17 in her pocket and head for the nearest big town to nd a job. Never a complainer, Mother rose to yet another occasion that could have induced feelings of helplessness, discouragement and distrust in a lesser soul. The next day she walked into the ofces of the Rochester Democrat and explained her desperate need of a job to a kind older man who turned out to be the managing editor. He admired her courage. He gave her a shot at cub reporting in the newspapers morgue where she wrote obituaries day after day until her lucky break came. When a re broke out in a downtown building and there was no reporter immediately available to cover it, she was sent to do the job and from then on was a part of the reporting staff. Always a quick learner, she was hired a few years later by the New York American, becoming in her early twenties both fashion editor and Mother Manhattan, who provided advice to the lovelorn. (Wrote Walter Winchell in his column: Louise Michel has gone from bad to Hearst!) In those exciting years of the late 1920s she thrived among New Yorks intellectual elite and met her journalist rst husband on the upper deck of an open-top Fifth Avenue bus on the way to a lecture by A.R. Orage, the well-known English editor. Orage became a father gure to her and introduced her to the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff. Abandoned by her rst husband a few years later during the depression, she had two young children to raise and began writing advertising copy for Benton & Bowles in 1934. There she met WilliamJ. Welch, an up-and-coming adman, but held off marrying him for seven years, not wanting a family of three to burden his career shift when he decided to chuck advertising and go to medical school. In l936, Mother was appointed director of the writers project of the Work Project Administration for the state of Connecticut. When she moved to New York with her new husband in 1941, she continued to write books and articles, but her deepest interest was now focused on the Gurdjieff teaching. She attended P.D. Ouspenskys lectures in New York and later took active part in Mme Ouspenskys work at Franklin Farms, in Mendham, New Jersey. After Gurdjieffs death in l949, Mother became one of the leading gures in the newly established Gurdjieff Foundation of New York City and later assisted the founding of similar institutions in Toronto and Halifax. In l982, feeling that Orage had never received the recognition he was due as the principal disseminator of the Gurdjieff teaching in the United States, she wrote a vivid account of those years called Orage with Gurdjieff in America, (Routledge & Kegan Paul) which has been translated into French. Louise Welch died peacefully in her 95th year with her family gathered around her, as gentle and loving in dying as she was in life.

As David Young said at her funeral, Mrs. Welch had a large family each one of us felt we had a special place in her heart. Copyright 2000 Patty Welch Llosa Photo of Louise Welch 1985 Martha Henrickson This webpage 2000 Gurdjieff Electronic Publishing Featured: Spring 2000 Issue, Vol. III (2) Revision: October 1, 2000

Gurdjieff International Review

The Death of Gurdjieff

By William J. Welch, M.D.
In the lunch hour of the day of my specialty written examination, my private life impinged on my professional life. I was called to the phone. Word had come from Paris that Gurdjieff was seriously ill, and I was asked if I could arrange to send to his doctor in Paris some serum albumin that had recently become available in the United States. Gurdjieff had not been vigorously well when he was in New York in the winter of 1948, but he had not seemed seriously ill and never took to his bed. He was racked by a spasmodic cough, a deep, gurgling, tracheal rumble that reected not only a chronic inammation at the bases of his lungs, but also his love of Gaulois Bleu, the popular French cigarette, fat with harsh, black Turkish tobacco, which he selected from a bright blue package and carefully screwed into a short, hand-whittled wooden holder. His abdominal girth was heroic and his presence in the Turkish bath, while not gargantuan, was at least the match of Rodins Balzac. He held court, when in New York, in the vast hot room of the Luxor baths on West Forty-sixth Street, an iced towel ipped around his bald head, his tiny feet splayed out under his vast belly above the expanse of which he poured himself tumblers of Perrier water, belching roundly, proclaiming with gutty satisfaction to no one in particular, Bravo, Perrier! Regular visits to the bath were a ritual part of the festival of his life, and many of the men in the group around him became devotees of the hot room, the steam room, and even the Russian room, where the blinding heat, produced by splashing white hot rocks with cold water, was nearly more than could be borne, especially at the uppermost levels of the bleacher-like benches that lined the enclosure. Other patrons must have wondered at the enigmatic, caramel-colored, ercely moustached gure of Gurdjieff picking his way with feline grace from the hot room to the steam room to the Russian room, ultimately to lead his band of followers to the marble staircase going down into the neo-renaissance pool, which took up the central area of the baths. Only an eedyot would have the stupidity to plunge into the pool on emerging from the heat of the steam room or the sauna. (My son, Dick, received a dressing down for not restraining himself.) We would line up on either side of him as he took a sitting position in the middle at the top of the staircase, with only his feet touching the water, several steps below the level of his tawny rump. At measured intervals, we would follow his lead in unison, and slip down one step at a time, until we were nally sitting chin deep in the chilly pool. I was astounded to read some years later that among the bemused adepts who participated in this droll ritual, one believed himself to have been initiated into some special level of illumination in the course of his gradual, and ultimately total, immersion. I am afraid my only illumination derived from the shuddering chill to which I never became wholly acclimated, as my fundament and its anterior appendages were nally plunged into the icy water. However much the analogy to an esoteric baptism might appeal to the unduly suggestible, I was not convinced, though almost anything Gurdjieff did could be interpreted as symbolic. When I went to the bath in Gurdjieffs absence, I avoided such slow motion heroics and preferred to emulate another habitu of the bath who was not connected with our tribe. It was this gentlemans habit to emerge from the Russian room six feet and at least six inches more of massive, steaming, tomato-red bulk. He would lumber impassively down the steps in measured strides, walking tall, looking straight ahead, and never hesitating at the shock of the cold water, but continuing to walk until he was completely submerged. Still walking, and turning in a slow circle, he would start back. Gradually he rose up out of the water like Triton, his skin having returned to its apparently natural dull gray-blue. He was, I suspect, a Russian, or perhaps like Gurdjieff, a Georgian, who seemed wholly impervious to the ordeal, including the attendant illumination high or low. It was thus with memories of Gurdjieffs no longer young, but sturdy, aged vigor that I heard with disbelief in the late summer of 1949 of his dwindling strength and deteriorating health. He had talked of going away on a journey, or leaving his followers to pursue his own aims, and we had listened with mixed emotions. But in his presence, although he was not a big man, he gave a massive impression of contained energyleonine, alert, watching, and capable of springing up. We certainly did not think of his death as near. [The complete text is available in the printed copy of this issue.] ~~ This excerpt is taken from Dr. Welchs autobiography, What Happened in Between: A Doctors Story, New York: George Braziller, 1972, pp. 132142. Copies of the book are available from Olana Gallery, 2 Carillon Road, Brewster, NY 10509, 845-279-8077, email: olana@rcn.com.

Copyright 2004 Gurdjieff Electronic Publishing Featured: Fall 2004 Issue, Vol. VIII (1) Revision: November 1, 2004

Gurdjieff International Review

For Dr. William J. Welch

Eulogy
by Roger Lipsey
Eulogies are not written in tranquillity. They are an urgent response to the often abrupt departure of one loved or admired. They need not be mendacious, and this one is not. The eulogy that follows was offered on July 12, 1997, at the kind invitation of Dr. Welchs family, at St. Thomas church in New York City. This version restores some biographical paragraphs passed over on the occasion itself. Those interested in knowing more of Dr. Welch will nd no better place to look than in his own book, What Happened In Between: A Doctors Story. Bless your eyes, he would often say at parting. I never quite knew what he meant, and perhaps you didnt either. That he became partially blind in the last several years didnt change a thing: eyes could still be blessed. I know that, as a doctor, he was not referring only to spiritual eyes, or some suchhe was certainly blessing the very physical eyes of his friends and family, and the fragile bodies those eyes must guide. But as a man who almost unwillingly felt and acknowledged the sacred dimension of life, he was surely also blessing the mind and spirit that see and ensure for us something approaching a sound participation in life. I say something approaching a sound participation. He would have understood that; he was not one to speak in absolutes or believe them. Everything was, as he often said, more nearly true, more nearly understood than before. Living for him was an approach to insight and love. The only absolute was the exercise of common decency, each toward the other and toward oneself. Living for him was an unspeakable joy. Have we ever known anyone who so relished each event, large or small, each encounter with another?and this despite, or perhaps because of an underlying skepticism and seriousness of mind that remained even in his laughter. He considered it an astonishing privilege to live, to think carefully about things, to be in touch with others. He never took life or his companions for granted. This may explain in part why the journey to his apartment, for so many of us, was a pilgrimage; he was always fresh in front of us or very nearly. Many here will remember their own occasions of pilgrimage. Some came in anguish; life is not easy. We left not lured from our sorrows or concerns, but more resolute, enriched in understanding, heard. I have the ears of a lynx, he would say meaning that he heard the slightest sound. He also heard the sound of hearts, the sound of a thought barely formulated but seeking its way. I dont think he wanted to be viewed as a wise man, and I dont think he viewed himself as an especially spiritual man. However, these things he was and they came about, one might say, as symptoms of the fever of his life. His calling, really, was truth-seeking in medicine as in psychological and social experience. His calling was questioning. I remember a talk he gave years ago in which he didnt actually assert a single thing: he simply questioned. Every statement was a question. At the timeI was youngthis seemed astonishing, even suspect. Now I understand better. What he couldnt calculate, and had no need to, was the impact on himself and on those around him of his questioning. It probably remade him over the years. Simply by questioning and by attending to the answers that came of themselves or emerged in the course of unblinking inquiry, he became a wise man and a spiritual man. But there was something more: his feeling for people. It must have guided him into medicine in the rst place; it certainly grew with the years as he looked after many thousands of patients. Dr. Welch had a capacity for unfeigned, immediate compassion: one experienced it at once when speaking with him of any real difculty, be it medical or personal. He often railed at human self-preoccupation and described us, as Gurdjieff did, as lamentably unavailable to one another. This was somehow scoured out of him; perhaps his awareness of it was enough gradually to evict it. He had the rare attribute of welcoming people to be their best, didnt invisibly compete. He was there for others, so fully that he almost shone with love at times. But some factor, perhaps good taste, certainly good sense, allowed him to feel much without becoming sentimental. Gurdjieff. The great inector of Dr. Welchs life, the one who implicitly challenged him to be not just a superb doctoralready no small thingbut to explore human experience with wrenching honesty. Gurdjieff was the teacher whom he met in New York in the 1930s and loved ever after with the awe and delight of a son toward a difcult but astonishing father. It was this man, whom we can safely regard as a Western Zen master, who redened for Dr. Welchand many others of his generationthe full meaning of humanness and the possible scope of experience. Gurdjieffs example and inuence, falling on many different souls, bore fruit in many different ways. In Dr. Welch, is it saying too much, or saying falsely, to remember his enormous humanity, outsized really: more than one could hope for. Gurdjieff did not lead him to the heaven of the mysticsDr. Welch thought earth to be heaven enough for now, if properly perceived and livedbut Gurdjieff did contribute in ways that can never be fully known to the emergence of rich

humanity in his spiritual son. Gurdjieff said, if you work for your life you also work for your death. Dr. Welch worked for his life, and the lives of others. Dr. Welch was born on September 12, 1911, in Eau Claire, Wisconsina town he described in his autobiography as having one of everything. In 1929, he graduated The Blake School, near Minneapolis, Minnesota, and attended Yale College, where he graduated in 1933. A loyal Yale man, in later years he would reminisce about the monumentally wastrel existence he pursued there, but his brilliant use of language, thoughtful approach to medical and human fact, and lifelong love of the study of American and world history suggested that he had not spent his time quite so prodigally as alleged. An initial position in advertising, with Benton & Bowles, left him unsatised and he quickly reoriented his career into medicine. He graduated the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, in 1942, and completed his internship and a residency in cardiology at Bellevue Hospital in New York. From 1942 through 1946, he participated as a captain in the U.S. Army Medical Corps in a malaria research project under the direction of Dr. James Shannon, who later became director of the National Institutes of Health. In 1950 through 1955, he was in private practice in Princeton, New Jersey, where he and his wife Louise shared a home with the legendary dean of Princeton University, Christian Gauss; I understand that the two families would meet mainly in the common kitchen, where tacit but binding rules governed times for conversation and times for privacy. Returning to New York City, where he practiced privately from 1955 through 1981, he was afliated with New York University Medical Center and Doctors Hospital, and was Medical Director of the New York Cardiac Center in Yonkers. Many of us will recall our unspoken pride and involuntary feeling of personal safety during his tenure as president of what was then the New York Heart Association, in 1967 through 1969; that institution is now an afliate of the American Heart Association. Until this year, Dr. Welch retained his rank at NYU as an Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine. In the 1950s and 60s, Dr. Welch wrote a syndicated newspaper column called Dr. Welch Says, on medical issues, and conducted a call-in radio show, Ask Dr. Welch, again on medical issues. Always quick to appreciate those who know their trade well, he rened through these activities the lively style that adds to the pleasure of reading his 1972 autobiography, to which he gave the title What Happened in Between: A Doctors Story. It might as well have been titled The Education of William Welch, as its sustained clarity, verve, and awless listening to the resources of language recall one of the great American autobiographies, The Education of Henry Adams. Dr. Welchs private practice of medicine was paralleled by public practiceactivities serving the larger community. Along this avenue of endeavor, he responded to a distinguished patients invitation to provide the intellectual framework for the Emily Davie and Joseph S.Kornfeld Foundation, which focuses on medicine and human dignity, particularly in the closing phase of life. Dr. Welch was instrumental with Prof. John Fletcher, rst and current holder of the Kornfeld Chair of Bioethics at the University of Virginia, in the founding of The Center for Biomedical Ethics at that university. Dr. Welch was also an active member of the advisory board to Howmedica, a division of Pzer. In later years, Dr. Welch took pleasure in his membership in The Century Association, a New York club where he annually exhibited the honorable results of his late-found avocation, oil painting. He also felt it a considerable achievement to have been invited to do the voice over for the celebrated lm, Places in the Heart, directed by his friend Robert Benton. His membership in the Screen Actors Guild as a result of that venture struck him as a sign of successful retirement from medical practice. From 1984 until his death, Dr. Welch was President of the Gurdjieff Foundation in New York City and advisor to afliated Canadian organizations, the Society for Traditional Studies in Toronto and the Association for Experimental Studies in Halifax, both of which he co-founded with his wife Louise. From the mid-1950s, Dr. Welch and his wife had a wide circle of friends of all ages with whom they shared their understanding of the Gurdjieff teaching. Dr. Welch was a worldly man, contributing vigorously in many walks of life. But to which world, exactly, did he belong? To many, I would say. As a physician, he belonged closely and loyally to this world, the world of hearts and vessels, CAT scans and hope for the best. As a friend and advisor, he belonged also to this world, where our lives play out with their fair share of tragedy and comedy; he knew how to help. But surely in his most intimate being, which one heard at times in his words and felt in his attitude, he belonged also to another world, a spiritual world. He had not really anticipated this, I think; but he was honest enough to recognize good evidence and vulnerable enough to be moved by it. He would say on occasion to Jeanne deSalzmann, Gurdjieffs successor and a woman he both respected and lovedhe would say, Madame, your secret is safe with me, by which he meant that since he didnt really understand what she was saying, he could be trusted not to repeat it. But I suspect her secret was not so safe, after all; he understood quite well. He was sometimes taken by surprise by the depth of his own feeling and vision. He and some friends of his conducted, in the basement of the townhouse we shared, what amounted to an 18th century Academy of Art. It met weekly among the water pipes and electrical conduit, none the worse for its setting. And for the most part, his own paintings were increasingly skilled exercises in traditional realistic oil painting. But once, working with the others to meet who knows what unusual challenge in a quick-drying medium, gouache or something of the kind, he permitted himself to paint a spontaneous vision: the vision of a landscape, balmy and expansive with a sparkling blue skyand white stairs mysteriously mounting here and there, as if oating within or above the landscape. Looking at it while he cheerfully explained that he had no idea where the image came from, I realized at once that when the time came, he would know his way. Dr. Welch, bless your eyes. Copyright 2000 Roger Lipsey This webpage 2000 Gurdjieff Electronic Publishing Featured: Spring 2000 Issue, Vol. III (2) Revision: April 1, 2000

Gurdjieff International Review

Staying with Emptiness

William Welch
The following exchange with Dr. William Welch is excerpted from the transcript of a group meeting on May 5, 1995 in New York. Question: When I turn to myself and nd emptiness, I never get any further. I think something should be there because I turned to look. But how does one try? How does one knock on the door and then continue to stay there even if it doesnt open? Dr. Welch: Where is the inner perception that can awaken in me when Im not in touch with myself? Nothing awakens. And I know the difference, but Im distracted by my daily life. Instead of staying with the emptiness, I turn away because theres nothing there. I dont stay there because its difcult to bear or its boring or its many things. Theres no awakening because I dont stay there. And I cant say that I see my emptiness. Rather, I immerse myself in it. You ask, How can one try? so already you have judged it. Oh well, there I am, empty. I must be somebody very nothing. Yet it has been suggested that nothingness is an experience I could undertake to be in touch with, without chastising myself, in the same way that I can be in touch with not knowing. How to experience the freedom that can come from being free of these things I know? I may say I know my emptiness, but I dont know it at all. I have already judged it and put it away and gone about doing something else

[The complete text is available in the printed copy of this issue.] ~~ Traditional Studies Press has published a recording of Dr. Welch reading Ren Daumals Mount Analogue. Dr. Welch saw this book as a many-facetted jewel, and appreciated its poetry, its humor and its truth. He reads it with great gusto and delight. Look for it at: www.traditionalstudiespress.com.
1

French for Angel.

Copyright 2007 Gurdjieff Electronic Publishing Featured: Spring 2007 Issue, Vol. X (1) Revision: June 1, 2008

Gurdjieff International Review

Dr. Welch Reads Beelzebub

By David A. Young

Dr. William Welch likened Beelzebubs Tales to His Grandson to an elephantine allegory of the meaning of life and the purpose of mans existence, a book difcult for the uninitiated to penetrate, but described by one critic as a veritable ying cathedral of a book, and by another as a true source of knowledge unparalleled in the twentieth century.1 This book, as read by Dr. Welch, is soon to be released in compact disc format. In this recording, we hear an authentic voice, resonant, powerful, deep and rich. Whenever Dr. Welch was visiting the Foundation groups in Toronto or Halifax, he was always the one who was asked to read Beelzebubs Tales, and for many years he read frequently at the New York Foundation as well as Armonk. He reads with gusto and lan. It is clear that he loves the book and knows it well. But something else lends authority to his reading. At the time of the recording, he was one of the ever-smaller number of people still alive who had known Gurdjieff. He met Gurdjieff in the 1930s, took an active part in the New York group in the following years, and eventually became the president of the Gurdjieff Foundation in New York, a post he occupied for the last thirteen years of his life. When Gurdjieff was in New York, Dr. Welch would meet with him almost every night and participate in his movements classes and

groups. Of course Dr. Welch also knew Ouspensky, attending his lectures in New York, and he also joined in the work at Franklin Farms with Mme Ouspensky. But it was primarily his relationship with Gurdjieff that informed his reading of Beelzebubs Tales. During the time that Gurdjieff was very ill, Dr. Welch was called on by Gurdjieffs doctors to obtain a very new medicine. Gurdjieff was told the medicine would be sent immediately. Why not Doctor come? Gurdjieff asked. So within hours, Dr. Welch had his rst passportthrough a friend in the State Departmentand was ying from New York to Paris to serve as attending physician through what would prove to be the last days of Gurdjieffs life. Dr. Welch examined Gurdjieff as soon as he walked in the door of his at in the rue des Colonels Renard and told Gurdjieff that he belonged in a hospital. To the amazement of the other doctors in attendance, who for several days had been telling him the same thing, Gurdjieff agreed. Dr. Welch writes: I shall not try to describe the actual moment of his death, for although I was present, and the events that occurred were unique in my experience, I do not know their signicance and have no way of expressing them in a proper context For myself, what I must acknowledge is that the death of Gurdjieff was the death of a man not in quotation marks. And I have seen many men die.2 In the fall of 1992, a few people close to Dr. Welch, realizing how privileged they were to hear him read, wished to record his telling of Beelzebubs Tales to His Grandson for future generations. Their rst thought was to use a recording studio, but Dr. Welch, then eighty years of age, was already having trouble walking. A studio was just not practical. Instead, the recording took place in the Welch apartment, where a little group gathered to lend their attention to the reading. Thus it became a Work projectwith an eye not only on the future but also on the present moment. High-quality recording equipment was purchased, and the readings were held on Sunday nights starting at 9:00 p.m. Dr. Welch would read for about half an hour and then there would be discussion, sometimes lasting until almost midnight. This recording, although less polished than any studio recording would have been, is much more vital. At the apartment, the window was always open a little. Dr. Welch liked it that way. Sometimes we hear from outdoors the sounds of the citya siren or the cry of children. Sometimes we hear the sound of rustling paper. Sometimes Dr. Welch or Mrs. Welch comments briey. The recording project ended two years before Dr. Welchs death. His voice was still resonant and had more warmth and feeling than ever before, but the pace of his reading had become slower and slower. He was going blind. As he said more than once: Old age is not for sissies.

Finally, he was reading the last chapters from a special machine that magnied the type. This was very cumbersome because he had to move the paper continually under the machine to make each new word appear. Even so, he would sometimes get into a rhythm and it would go very well. Dr. Welch died before recording the last part of the chapter on America. This missing section, read by one of his lves, is included in this recording to make it complete. There is no doubt that Dr. Welch honoured and revered Gurdjieffbut he was no sycophant. He reads with a twinkle in his voice. He questions everything. In the last few years of his life, he often repeated the statement: We dont need answers. What we need are better questions! In everything he did, he always retained a delightful sense of irreverent humour in keeping with the tone of much of Beelzebubs Tales itself. The following selections from Dr. Welchs autobiographical book, What Happened in Between, may serve to provide a glimpse of his earthy wisdom, his humour, his mastery of the English language, and the lighter side of his relationship with Gurdjieff: His abdominal girth was heroic and his presence in the Turkish bath, while not gargantuan, was at least the match of Rodins Balzac. He held court, when in New York, in the vast hot room of the Luxor baths on West Forty-sixth Street, an iced towel ipped around his bald head, his tiny feet splayed out under his vast belly above the expanse of which he poured himself tumblers of Perrier water, belching roundly, proclaiming with gutty satisfaction to no one in particular, Bravo, Perrier! 3 Dr. Welch continues his verbal sketch of the scene in the Turkish baths: Other patrons must have wondered at the enigmatic, caramel coloured, ercely moustached gure of Gurdjieff picking his way with feline grace from the hot room to the steam room to the Russian room, ultimately to lead his band of followers to the marble staircase going down into the neo-renaissance pool We would line up on either side of him as he took a sitting position in the middle at the top of the staircase At measured intervals, we would follow his lead in unison, and slip down one step at a time, until we were nally sitting chin deep in the chilly pool. I was astounded to read some years later that among the bemused adepts who participated in this droll ritual, one believed himself to have been initiated into some special level of illumination in the course of his gradual, and ultimately total, immersion. I am afraid my only illumination derived from the shuddering chill to which I never became wholly acclimated, as my fundament and its anterior appendages were nally plunged into the icy water.4 Much of Gurdjieffs teaching was imparted while dining:

I, seven-times Doctor, Gurdjieff said to me one night as I sat next to him, nishing his soup, while the remains of a sheeps head awaited its turn. In Paris, I have two hundred lves, all doctors. He looked into my eyes and I smiled agreement to what we both knew was the baldest misstatement. Why he said such things I have no idea, but his braggadocio never seemed offensiveindeed I waited for him to make his outrageous boasts, as if he had always been my grandfather5 In this recording of Beelzebubs Tales to His Grandson, Dr. Welch reads from an early draft of the 1992 edition, and there are only minor differences between the text used by Dr. Welch and the version ultimately published. Although not all readers welcomed the 1992 revision, which closely follows the 1956 French edition, Dr. Welch felt that it had much to recommend it. Cynthia Pearce, a senior member of the New York Foundation in the 1960s and 1970s, once said that there would be many translations of Beelzebubs Tales to His Grandson in future years, and that each one would have its own particular virtues and failings. Those of us who had struggled for years with the 1950 edition came to love it regardless of the typographical errors and difcult passages. (In some ways, it was like the King James Version of the Bible: although there are other, more modern, more accurate editions, they dont have the same ring.) But whichever edition Dr. Welch read, his love and understanding of Beelzebubs Tales to His Grandson is the essential point. And the greater the understanding of the reader, the more the listener may glean from this extraordinary book. Dr. Welchs daughter, Patty Welch Llosa, says of this recording: It is so thrilling to hear his voice again and I have found that in those last slower chapters it has an extraordinary vibrancy and joy. He so loved life in all its juiciness! I feel the most telling impressions I have of him are of his enjoyment of everything. Of food: Every meal should be a esta. Of people: In his later years he loved to watch them walk by from the front stoop where he would stand in the sun and invent stories about them for us. And always of life itself: Its a cornucopia of good things. The other element was his recognition of the human-ness of human beings. Mother [Louise Welch] was always in search of understanding, I was always in search of perfection and higher things, but he loved life right where he lived it. ~~
1 2 3 4 5

William J. Welch, What Happened in Between, A Doctors Story (New York: George Braziller, 1972), p.140 Ibid., 140141 Ibid., 132 Ibid., 133 Ibid., 127

Excerpts
It is planned that this compact disc product of Dr. Welch reading Beelzebub will be made available for ordering in the coming months. Consult the Traditional Studies Press website for further details and announcements. Three selections follow. To listen, you will need a sound card, speakers, and MP3 player.

AMONG other convictions formed in my common presence during my responsible, peculiarly composed life, there is one such alsoan indubitable convictionthat always and everywhere on the earth, among people of every degree of development of understanding and of every form of manifestation of the factors which engender in their individuality all kinds of ideals, there is acquired the tendency, when beginning anything new, unfailingly to pronounce aloud or, if not aloud, at least mentally, that denite utterance understandable to every even quite illiterate person, which in different epochs has been formulated variously and in our day is formulated in the following words: In the name of the Father and of the Son and in the name of the Holy Ghost, Amen.

Having said this, Hassein drooped his head and became silent; and Beelzebub, looking at him affectionately, began to speak as follows: I advise you, my dear Hassein, not to put such questions to yourself yet. Do not be impatient. Only when that period of your existence arrives which is proper for your becoming aware of such essence-questions, and you actively mentate about them, will you understand what you must do in return.

I repeat, my boy: Try very hard to understand everything that will relate to both these fundamental cosmic sacred laws, since knowledge of these sacred laws, particularly knowledge relating to the particularities of the sacred Heptaparaparshinokh, will help you in the future to understand very easily and very well all the second-grade and thirdgrade laws of World-creation and World-existence. Copyright 2003 Gurdjieff Electronic Publishing Featured: Spring 2003 Issue, Vol. VI (1) Revision: April 1, 2003