New English Weekly

Last month there came back in London, after a ten-year literary absence without leave, Editor Alfred Richard Orage with a new magazine, The New English Weekly. As editor of The New Age from 1907 to 1922 he was considered England's best by not a few for not a few reasons. Such prestige did his magazine have, so much literary loyalty did its editor inspire, that literati contributed mostly without pay, among them Shaw, Chesterton, Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Havelock Ellis, Wyndham Lewis. Editor Orage's special genius lay in discovering new writers, helping them develop themselves. Over 40 famed writers--including Katherine Mansfield, Michael Arlen, Richard Aldington, the Brothers Powys, Rebecca West, Storm Jameson--got their start in his paper.

But even more than literature, economics was Orage's editorial line. Together with S. G. Hobson, he formulated Guild Socialism in 1912. After the WaR he campaigned, in his magazine and in the flesh, for the Social Credit system of Major C. H. Douglas. Meanwhile he was attending the lectures of Russian Philosopher Peter D. Ouspensky, who bated his breath about a Wise Man, Georges Gurdjieff, who made learned philosophers look like chicken-soup. In the midst of his activities Editor Orage dropped everything, betook himself to the Wise Man's ''Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man" at Fontainebleau.

Here England's prize editor was allotted the task of serving, unassisted, as kitchen-boy in a kitchen feeding 50 or 60 people. In 1923 he accompanied Gurdjieff, with some 40 other pupils, on a tour of the U. S. In 1924 he was assigned the task of spreading the Gurdjieff ideas in America. Known by his editorial reputation to a few people in New York, Gurdjieffite Orage soon proselytized scores of the intelligentsia. Americans began to flock to Fontainebleau. But in 1924 an automobile accident almost killed Gurdjieff; he was forced to discontinue the activities of his Institute, took to writing. His book, of biblical proportions, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, or an Objective Criticism of the Life of Man, recently completed, was translated from the Russian by Russian pupils, retranslated into English by Editor Orage. This completed, Orage returned to England and lay life again.

The New English Weekly, resembling in general format other English weeklies, is the old New Age in not impenetrable disguise.* The editorial introduction urges the substitution of a financial-economic system cut to fit the present age of plenty in place of one that is tailored by the banking system expressly for a machine-murdered age of want. Contributors include Hilaire Belloc and Grand Duchess Marie of Russia. Will Dyson, onetime cartoonist of the Labor Party's Daily Herald, prints a scathing etching; Paul Banks reviews the drama, Storm Jameson, novels. From a "Western Newspaper Man" Editor Orage has received and amazingly printed a scurrilous parody of the 23rd Psalm which has for many months circulated in the U. S. from hand to hand like a dirty joke: "Hoover is my Shepherd. I am in want."

Contributors, particularly new writers, are invited by The New English Weekly. Terms are the same as in the old New Age --''payment only by arrangement," or never. The magazine's (unpaid) U. S. representative is Critic Gorham Munson; distributors, Coward-McCann. As a supplement to the first issue are printed 55 impressive letters of congratulation from such diverse notables as AE, Michael Arlen, Jacob Epstein, Thomas Burke, the late Sir Patrick Geddes, Major C. H. Douglas, Havelock Ellis, William McFee, Richard Aldington, Thomas Sturge Moore. British consensus is that Editor Orage has started a snowball rolling up Civilization's hill.

* The New Age, under the editorship of Arthur Brenton, still continues to be published, still propagandizes Major C. H. Douglas' Social Credit principles, the gist of which is that society's purchasing power has been outrun by its productive power (TIME, April 21, 1930).

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