FROM NYTIMES
THE GREAT OOM
The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America
By Robert Love
Illustrated. 402 pages. Viking. $27.95.
Iowa Swami Who Beguiled the Jazz Age
By JANET MASLIN
Robert Love lives in Nyack, N.Y., in a cottage built in 1927 that has an Egyptian ankh carved in granite over its front door. The house next door is adorned with an ouroboros, an image of a snake eating its tail. Mr. Love wondered what chapter in local history might have produced these leftover symbols. Answering that question led him to investigate the career of Pierre Bernard, the P. T. Barnum of Hudson Valley yoga.
From “The Great Oom” by Robert Love
Paul Dukes, a follower of the swami Pierre Bernard.
THE GREAT OOM
The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America
By Robert Love
Illustrated. 402 pages. Viking. $27.95.
Mr. Love has written “The Great Oom,” a lively and idiosyncratic Bernard biography. (Mr. Bernard also figures in a more straightforward history of yoga in America, “The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America,” by Stefanie Syman, due in June.) But how much of the Bernard angle and the Nyack connection are sheer happenstance? How much of the Bernard story would have interested Mr. Love if the latter lived in Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J., and did not have an ankh anywhere in sight?
A lot. Mr. Bernard, who was born Perry Arnold Baker but became best known as the Omnipotent Oom, is a colorful, still-marginal figure who was prescient about the popularity of yoga in American life. He was also a headline-making swami-entrepreneur who defied his bland Iowa origins to become one of the most renowned eccentrics of the Jazz Age. And the legacy of his program and his acolytes is still with us. “Dr. Bernard seems to delight in being a surprising person,” Fortune magazine wrote about this protean character in 1933, and Mr. Love entertainingly explains what Fortune meant. Leon, Iowa, where Mr. Bernard was born in 1876, was never meant to hold him. “May be alright to die in, but never thought much of it as a place to live,” he would write. So by 1898 he was in San Francisco, serving as the guinea pig in public demonstrations of the power of the self-induced trance. (“Tortured While Asleep,” one San Francisco newspaper would write of how the young man could endure being bloodily pierced by steel surgical needles without seeming to notice.)
By 1904 he had created a secret society called the Tantrik Order and was very much in tune with his times. “If the T.O. seems exotic by today’s social standards,” Mr. Love writes about that group, “it was not very far from the mainstream of American life at the time. Every night in cities large and small, bewhiskered fraternal brothers and their sisters in veils scurried across the cobblestones from meeting to meeting, carrying rule books, manuals, pins, badges and feathers.”
It was a time when books on hypnotism were popular, when the controversial Theosophical Society wielded influence and when self-proclaimed mystics from G. I. Gurdjieff to Aimee Semple McPherson were figures of note.
But Mr. Bernard offered something special: physical experience as a pathway to spiritual enlightenment. His emphasis, when yoga itself was still exotic in the United States, on the then relatively unpopular hatha yoga and breathing techniques wound up having mesmerizing effects on his disciples. And those disciples, as his career progressed, increasingly tended to be bored, wealthy young women who found themselves invigorated by whatever Mr. Bernard had to offer.
Despite his 1910 New York City trial and imprisonment for having “inveigled and enticed” a young woman “for the purpose of sexual intercourse,” Mr. Bernard continued to dazzle followers of what The New York Times called his “Sanskrit sect.”
Eventually Nyack became his home base and he began buying estates there. (Mr. Love’s home had been owned by one of his acolytes.) Combining his holdings into what he would call “the Clarkstown Country Club,” or C.C.C., Mr. Bernard built an empire.
When he first moved up the Hudson with a couple of young Vanderbilts in tow, the tabloid press followed: “They had picked up the commingled scents of sex (yoga), society (the Vanderbilts) and scandal (the Great Oom himself) — a newsroom trifecta if there ever was one,” Mr. Love explains. Yet Mr. Bernard also did things like encourage Little League baseball in Nyack, win over the town’s police chief, build an airport and install enough bright lighting for nighttime sports events to woo the local citizenry.
As for the group’s official activities, Mr. Love writes: “It was a winning strategy of serious fun, and there was no end in sight for the club and its services.” There was also something especially American in Mr. Bernard’s insistence on vigorous physical workouts for all. The heiresses scrubbed floors (presaging the rehab regimens of the present day). The yoga students struck difficult poses. The value of cleaning everything, including colons, was greatly stressed. When Mr. Bernard’s love of circuses led to the club’s acquisition of elephants, not even the elephant enema was off limits.
“The Great Oom” includes some wonderful anecdotes about the place in its heyday, as when the great reporter Joseph Mitchell came to size the place up. “You are the first newspaper man to enter these rooms and I don’t want you to overlook the opium dens and the orgy rooms,” instructed Mr. Bernard, who never lacked a sense of humor.
Broadway actors, a celebrated British spy, a famous boxer in training and the very young Pete Seeger were among the many and varied visitors to this showplace. About the circus atmosphere, Mr. Bernard once said winningly, “I can make a lofty tumbler out of any hard-shelled dyspeptic old crab.”
The Nyack outpost seems to have been an extremely happy and thriving place until it wasn’t. The Depression put a damper on seemingly frivolous forms of recreation. The coterie of Mr. Bernard’s closest disciples grew older, to the point at which there were more widows than nubile young women on the premises. Elephants died. And Mr. Bernard’s wildly varied financial holdings (he invested in a chemical company that poisoned alcohol during Prohibition) began to fail, so much so that he tried selling off cows to stay solvent.
During his prodigious research, Mr. Love found a late-1940s newspaper ad offering for sale animal cages, professional-grade tap-dancing mats and enough steam-laundry equipment for a small institution. “Here was an elegy in agate type, a coded obituary for an era of dreams now dimmed,” he writes.
In 1955, not long before Mr. Bernard died, he was visited by Mr. Seeger and delivered an elegy of his own. “The captain,” Oom said, “has to go down with the ship.”
THE GREAT OOM
The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America
By Robert Love
Illustrated. 402 pages. Viking. $27.95.
Iowa Swami Who Beguiled the Jazz Age
By JANET MASLIN
Robert Love lives in Nyack, N.Y., in a cottage built in 1927 that has an Egyptian ankh carved in granite over its front door. The house next door is adorned with an ouroboros, an image of a snake eating its tail. Mr. Love wondered what chapter in local history might have produced these leftover symbols. Answering that question led him to investigate the career of Pierre Bernard, the P. T. Barnum of Hudson Valley yoga.
From “The Great Oom” by Robert Love
Paul Dukes, a follower of the swami Pierre Bernard.
THE GREAT OOM
The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America
By Robert Love
Illustrated. 402 pages. Viking. $27.95.
Mr. Love has written “The Great Oom,” a lively and idiosyncratic Bernard biography. (Mr. Bernard also figures in a more straightforward history of yoga in America, “The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America,” by Stefanie Syman, due in June.) But how much of the Bernard angle and the Nyack connection are sheer happenstance? How much of the Bernard story would have interested Mr. Love if the latter lived in Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J., and did not have an ankh anywhere in sight?
A lot. Mr. Bernard, who was born Perry Arnold Baker but became best known as the Omnipotent Oom, is a colorful, still-marginal figure who was prescient about the popularity of yoga in American life. He was also a headline-making swami-entrepreneur who defied his bland Iowa origins to become one of the most renowned eccentrics of the Jazz Age. And the legacy of his program and his acolytes is still with us. “Dr. Bernard seems to delight in being a surprising person,” Fortune magazine wrote about this protean character in 1933, and Mr. Love entertainingly explains what Fortune meant. Leon, Iowa, where Mr. Bernard was born in 1876, was never meant to hold him. “May be alright to die in, but never thought much of it as a place to live,” he would write. So by 1898 he was in San Francisco, serving as the guinea pig in public demonstrations of the power of the self-induced trance. (“Tortured While Asleep,” one San Francisco newspaper would write of how the young man could endure being bloodily pierced by steel surgical needles without seeming to notice.)
By 1904 he had created a secret society called the Tantrik Order and was very much in tune with his times. “If the T.O. seems exotic by today’s social standards,” Mr. Love writes about that group, “it was not very far from the mainstream of American life at the time. Every night in cities large and small, bewhiskered fraternal brothers and their sisters in veils scurried across the cobblestones from meeting to meeting, carrying rule books, manuals, pins, badges and feathers.”
It was a time when books on hypnotism were popular, when the controversial Theosophical Society wielded influence and when self-proclaimed mystics from G. I. Gurdjieff to Aimee Semple McPherson were figures of note.
But Mr. Bernard offered something special: physical experience as a pathway to spiritual enlightenment. His emphasis, when yoga itself was still exotic in the United States, on the then relatively unpopular hatha yoga and breathing techniques wound up having mesmerizing effects on his disciples. And those disciples, as his career progressed, increasingly tended to be bored, wealthy young women who found themselves invigorated by whatever Mr. Bernard had to offer.
Despite his 1910 New York City trial and imprisonment for having “inveigled and enticed” a young woman “for the purpose of sexual intercourse,” Mr. Bernard continued to dazzle followers of what The New York Times called his “Sanskrit sect.”
Eventually Nyack became his home base and he began buying estates there. (Mr. Love’s home had been owned by one of his acolytes.) Combining his holdings into what he would call “the Clarkstown Country Club,” or C.C.C., Mr. Bernard built an empire.
When he first moved up the Hudson with a couple of young Vanderbilts in tow, the tabloid press followed: “They had picked up the commingled scents of sex (yoga), society (the Vanderbilts) and scandal (the Great Oom himself) — a newsroom trifecta if there ever was one,” Mr. Love explains. Yet Mr. Bernard also did things like encourage Little League baseball in Nyack, win over the town’s police chief, build an airport and install enough bright lighting for nighttime sports events to woo the local citizenry.
As for the group’s official activities, Mr. Love writes: “It was a winning strategy of serious fun, and there was no end in sight for the club and its services.” There was also something especially American in Mr. Bernard’s insistence on vigorous physical workouts for all. The heiresses scrubbed floors (presaging the rehab regimens of the present day). The yoga students struck difficult poses. The value of cleaning everything, including colons, was greatly stressed. When Mr. Bernard’s love of circuses led to the club’s acquisition of elephants, not even the elephant enema was off limits.
“The Great Oom” includes some wonderful anecdotes about the place in its heyday, as when the great reporter Joseph Mitchell came to size the place up. “You are the first newspaper man to enter these rooms and I don’t want you to overlook the opium dens and the orgy rooms,” instructed Mr. Bernard, who never lacked a sense of humor.
Broadway actors, a celebrated British spy, a famous boxer in training and the very young Pete Seeger were among the many and varied visitors to this showplace. About the circus atmosphere, Mr. Bernard once said winningly, “I can make a lofty tumbler out of any hard-shelled dyspeptic old crab.”
The Nyack outpost seems to have been an extremely happy and thriving place until it wasn’t. The Depression put a damper on seemingly frivolous forms of recreation. The coterie of Mr. Bernard’s closest disciples grew older, to the point at which there were more widows than nubile young women on the premises. Elephants died. And Mr. Bernard’s wildly varied financial holdings (he invested in a chemical company that poisoned alcohol during Prohibition) began to fail, so much so that he tried selling off cows to stay solvent.
During his prodigious research, Mr. Love found a late-1940s newspaper ad offering for sale animal cages, professional-grade tap-dancing mats and enough steam-laundry equipment for a small institution. “Here was an elegy in agate type, a coded obituary for an era of dreams now dimmed,” he writes.
In 1955, not long before Mr. Bernard died, he was visited by Mr. Seeger and delivered an elegy of his own. “The captain,” Oom said, “has to go down with the ship.”
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