Wife Mary Louise Aswell, Partner Cady Wells
Queer Places:
Santa Fe National Cemetery, 501 N Guadalupe St, Santa Fe, NM 87501
Arthur "Fritz" Peters (March 2, 1913 - December 19, 1979),
born in Madison, Wisconsin, was shaped by many physical and
psychological "disasters" at an early age. His brother accidently blinded
Fritz's right eye with a crochet hook; his parents divorced when he was about
18 months old; his mother subsequently married a lawyer who was cold towards
Fritz. When Fritz was eight or nine, his mother experienced a nervous
breakdown and was sent to a sanatorium. Fritz and his brother were then
adopted by Margaret Anderson, his mother's sister, and
Jane Heap, editors of
The Little Review. Between 1947 and 1951,
Cady Wells wintered in St. Croix, and engaged in two long-term affairs, his last with
Fritz Peters.
In 1924 Anderson and Heap brought 11-year-old Fritz to
George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man
at the Prieuré in Avon, France. Peters was under the impression Gurdjieff was
a "prophet" or perhaps the "second coming of Christ." His initial trepidation
vanished when he found Gurdjieff to be a "simple, straightforward man."
Gurdjieff asked him how he saw life. "Life," Peters said, "is a gift."
Gurdjieff, greatly pleased, asked what he wanted to know about life. Peters
told him—"I want to know everything."
Gurdjieff made him his personal caretaker, having him clean
his personal quarters, serve as his waiter, as well as receiving private
lessons.
According to Gurdjieff, Peters had been able to remain
"open" despite his childhood traumas, and thus had been a "garbage can" in
which Gurdjieff could "dump" some of his accumulated learning.
In October 1929, Peters, now 15 years old, returned to his
mother and stepfather in Chicago, only to discover his mother had experienced
another nervous breakdown. Soon after Fritz found himself living on his own.
In 1934 Gurdjieff came to New York and Peters describes a
nightmare train ride with him to Chicago in which Gurdjieff did everything in
his power to annoy Peters and the other passengers. Upon their arrival,
Gurdjieff proceeded to publicly denounce Peters in front of the Chicago group.
Peters, reaching a breaking point, hurled some choice four-letter words at
Gurdjieff and stormed out of the gathering. Several months later, Peters
realized that Gurdjieff had intentionally forced an end to his unquestioning,
idealistic love for Gurdjieff.
Peters contacted Gurdjieff groups in Chicago and New York,
but invariably perceived them as phony and humorless. Gurdjieff told Peters:
"You not learn my work from talk and book—you learn in skin, and you cannot
escape."
Drafted during World War II, Peters was appalled by the
different types of people he met and the effects of war. Peters' horrific
experiences left him with grave doubts concerning the meaning of human
existence. Finally, shell shocked and in a state close to madness, he went to
see Gurdjieff in Paris. Gurdjieff did not immediately recognize him, but after
Peters stated his name the two embraced and Gurdjieff loudly exclaimed, "My
son!" Inside the apartment, an already weary Gurdjieff healed Peters by
transmitting "a violent, electric blue light." A month later, at a
luncheon in Gurdjieff's apartment, Gurdjieff said he could now die as he had
found someone to whom he could transmit his life's work. Raising his arm, he
made a dramatic sweeping gesture from student to student, only stopping when
his extended finger pointed directly at Fritz Peters.
After the war Peters returned to America and began to
establish himself as a successful author. His first novel, The World Next
Door, published in 1949, is based on his experience in a VA hospital after
World War II. The next year saw the publication of a children's story, The
Book of the Year, and a short story entitled Hello Emily.
Hello Emily is the only published short story by Fritz Peters. The piece was purchased by Harper's Bazaar in early 1949 and it appeared in the August 1950 issue of the magazine. Fritz married
Mary Louise Aswell, the
fiction editor for Harper's Bazaar, in June of that same year. They likely met
while Fritz was working as assistant to Louise Dahl Wolfe, a well known
fashion photographer of the time who did extensive work for Harper's Bazaar.
In 1951,
Peters' second novel, Finistére, followed, detailing the adolescence
and homosexual encounters of its main character; it has been described as
autobiographical. The Descent, published in 1952, explores
what happens to those involved in a tragic auto accident. In 1966 Peters
released Blind Flight, a novel about a mentally disturbed woman
reevaluating her relationships to her family and herself. In 1978, a year
before his death, he published his last book, Balanced Man, in which he
further discussed Gurdjieff and his legacy.
The themes in Fritz's novels are drawn directly from his
own life, which was filled with nervous breakdowns, alcoholism, a broken
marriage and homosexuality. Very little has been written about
the life of Fritz Peters or his relationship with Gurdjieff. William Patrick
Patterson's novel, Struggle of the Magicians, includes an essay
specifically exploring Peters' relationship with Gurdjieff. Peters can be seen
through the eyes of others in such works as Ladies of the Rope: Gurdjieff's
Special Left Bank Women's Group; Dear Tiny Heart: The Letters of Jane
Heap and Florence Reynolds; The Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas;
and Gertrude Stein: Her Life and Work. Reviews of Fritz Peters' major
literary works are available, and there are some journal articles and books
written about his contribution to gay literature. His daughter, Katherine,
delivered a collection of Fritz Peters' papers to Boston University a few
years after his death in 1979.
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