The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky (12 page)

Bennett and Mrs Beaumont were intrigued to hear the noisy shouts that came from her drawing-room - they might have suspected a political meeting, but Ouspensky had given his word that politics would not be discussed, and they both felt he could be trusted. When Bennett asked Ouspensky what they were talking about, and Ouspensky replied, 'The transformation of man' Bennett was even more intrigued. In due course, and under separate auspices, he met Gurdjieff - whose name he already knew, since he had received notification from Indian Intelligence that Gurdjieff was a Russian agent.

Inevitably, he was entranced. When he and Mrs Beaumont were invited to watch the 'dances', they were deeply impressed by the 'Stop!' exercise - the more so as the dancers were all rushing towards them at top speed when Gurdjieff shouted the order. But for some reason, Bennett made no attempt to become part of the group.

Meanwhile, fate was arranging a pleasant surprise for Ouspensky. A young Russian named Nicholas Bessarabov had escaped from Russia after the Revolution, taking with him a copy of
Tertium Organum
, which had deeply impressed him. In America, he approached the well-known architect Claude Bragdon, who was the author of a book on the fourth dimension, and who spoke Russian. Bragdon was equally excited by
Tertium Organum
, and he and Bessarabov embarked on a translation. In 1920, Bragdon published the book himself (under the imprint Manas Press), and to his delight and astonishment, it sold 7,000 copies in its first year. He obtained Ouspensky's address from
The New Age
, and sent him some copies of the book, together with a cheque. It was probably the happiest day of Ouspensky's life. He lost no time in writing to Bragdon to ask him if he could help him to get to London or New York. Again, fate was working overtime on Ouspensky's behalf. As Bragdon was about to reply in the negative, he received a telegram from Lady Rothermere, the wife of the British newspaper magnate, saying that she was deeply impressed by
Tertium Organum
and would like to meet its publisher. The result of the meeting was a cable for £100 to Ouspensky, and an invitation to come to London with all expenses paid.

Fortune was smiling on Ouspensky. Probably only one person in Constantinople would have been able to obtain him a visa, and that person happened to be head of British Intelligence there - John Bennett. It took three months, but by August, the Ouspenskys were ready to sail.

They arrived to a fairy-tale reception. The beautiful Lady Rothermere, a blue-eyed blonde, threw a magnificent party for them, at which they ate with gold knives and forks from what looked like gold plates. The fairy-tale continued; when Ouspensky gave his first lectures in Lady Rothermere's studio in St John's Wood, they were attended by the cream of London's intelligentsia, including Orage, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and a long list of doctors, psychologists, editors and other professional men. The British are notoriously impervious to ideas, but Ouspensky's build-up had been impressive: a mysterious foreign philosopher who had been forced to flee from the Bolsheviks, had endured immense hardships, and then, against all the odds, had made his way to London to present his new message. It all made him an irresistible attraction. And when the lectures turned out to be, in fact, startlingly new and strange, the conquest was complete. Ouspensky became the intellectual flavour of the month.

In retrospect, it is easy to understand why. The First World War had left behind a general feeling of nausea and disillusionment. Ezra Pound had written in
Mauberley
:

There died a myriad,
And of the best among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilisation.

It was the poem that, more than any other, inspired Eliot's
Waste Land
. This was the age of
The Waste Land
, of
Ulysses
, of Gertrude Stein's lost generation, of Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises
and Scott Fitzgerald's tales of the jazz age. Orage himself had been virtually discovered by Shaw, who had financed
The New Age
. But Shaw was now regarded as outdated. Orage considered himself rather as a disciple of Nietzsche - a 'revaluer of values'. Even before the war, he had announced himself an 'immoralist', one who rejected all the old values. In this he was probably inspired more by the immensely successful novel
Sanine
by Artsybashev, in which the hero is the totally 'natural man', who believes that all the old sexual and religious values are illusions, like the emperor's clothes. Pre-war London had been obsessed by everything Russian, from the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to the Diaghilev ballet, and novels like Andreyev's
Red Laugh
and Artsybashev's
Breaking Point
(in which virtually everyone commits suicide) had brought the notion of total moral negation to London long before
The Waste Land
.

A young man named C.S. Nott, who was to become one of Gurdjieff's most faithful followers, expressed the general malaise when he wrote:

Although I had had a religious upbringing and . . . been a Sunday-school teacher and lay preacher . . . , organised religion now had no content for me, nor could it give me a satisfying answer to the questions that arose in me as a consequence of the disillusionment resulting from the war.

Disillusionment had become the watchword:

Unreal city

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn . . .

In this atmosphere of emptiness and boredom, everything seemed to be disintegrating. In music, tonality was dissolving into the discords of Schönberg and Stravinsky. In art, surrealism and Dadaism seemed to make a mockery of the tradition of centuries. In philosophy, the logical positivists announced that all talk of metaphysics and values was meaningless. In psychology, Freud's sexual theory reduced the unconscious mind to a basement full of decaying rubbish and religion to a communal lie.

And now, into this scene of desolation, came a prophet from Holy Russia, announcing devastating truths that also seemed startlingly original. Here was a complex system of ideas that satisfied the sceptical intellectuals, but which also asserted that salvation could be achieved by effort. None of his audience had ever heard anything remotely like it before. The most up-to-date of them were interested in Freud, Jung and Adler, but this new doctrine seemed to sweep everything before it like an autumn gale. After that first meeting, the stunned Orage told Claude Bragdon that 'Mr Ouspensky is the first teacher I have ever met who has impressed me with the ever-increasing certainty that he knows and can do.'

Yet the first impression Ouspensky made on his audiences was far from impressive. One hostile commentator, John Carswell, has written: 'Ouspensky, though strikingly large and blond almost to the point of albinism, was in some ways unimpressive' The writer David Garnett thought he looked rather like Woodrow Wilson: 'The same lavish display of false teeth, the same baffled, unseeing eye, the same aura of high thinking and patent medicines.' Another member of his audience, Paul Selver, found Ouspensky 'quite monumentally boorish. He was one of those exasperating Russians who doggedly refuse to credit any other Slav nation with artistic ability. He sneered when I expressed the view that there were several Czech or Serbian poets of outstanding greatness. I had read them and he had not, but he contemptuously dismissed my remark with a sweeping gesture, as though consigning these unspeakable rhymesters to a garbage heap.'

Roland Kenney, a socialist who became editor of the
Daily Herald
, wrote, 'When sitting in reflection or repose, he hunched himself together and looked like a dejected bird huddling up in a rainstorm.' But he put his finger on the essential when he added: 'He was obviously a man of a dominant if not domineering type of character, with determination - or obstinacy - written over his every feature.' And another writer, Rom Landau, who also became an Ouspensky disciple, speaks of his 'strongly dictatorial manner'.

Ouspensky probably did not have the slightest interest in contradicting Selver's opinion of Czech and Serbian poets, and certainly no interest in exalting Russians at their expense; he was simply not interested in what he considered to be literary small-talk, or in questions he regarded as a waste of time. When one lady in his audience asked if the Buddha had reached the seventh level of consciousness, he replied, 'I don't know' without even looking up. He was there to teach them something he had discovered, and he did not believe in wasting time.

What he had to say was, as we know, somewhat depressing: he informed his audiences that they had virtually no free will, that they were made up of hundreds of little 'I's' and that they were actually asleep. Yet this sweeping and oversimplified doctrine - rather like a non-political Marxism - created an effect of revelation. One member of his audience was a Jungian psychologist named Maurice Nicoll. He rushed home from his first Ouspensky lecture to tell his wife, still recovering from having their first baby: 'You must come and hear Ouspensky. He is the only man who has ever answered my questions.' Nicoll appeared to be 'irradiated by an inner light', and did not even ask to see the baby. As a result of his contact with Ouspensky, he broke with Jung, who had hoped that Nicoll would be his chief exponent in London.

It was Nicoll who talked to his friend Kenneth Walker, Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons, who had just written a children's book about Noah's Ark. Gurdjieff's ideas, he said, represented a kind of Noah's Ark in the modern flood of violence and unbelief. Walker, as we have seen, felt that the atmosphere at Ouspensky's lecture was a little like the Presbyterian churches of his childhood. But he was also impressed by the scientific precision of Ouspensky's mind, and the lack of the usual idealistic waffle about Spirit, Love and so on. (One 'occultist', A.E. Waite, walked out, indignantly saying, 'Mr Ouspensky, there is no love in your system.') By now, Ouspensky's lectures had moved to 38 Warwick Gardens, Lady Rothermere having - inevitably - grown bored with the Work.

Gurdjieff, in the meantime, had failed to find the security he was looking for. He had left Constantinople for Germany, first for Berlin, then for Hellerau, near Dresden, where he hoped to take over the buildings left empty by the original Jacques Dalcroze Institute. They were owned by a man called Harold Dohrn, and parts were already let out to a smaller version of the Dalcroze Institute, to the Progressive schoolmaster A.S. Neill, and to another German headmaster named Karl Baer. But Gurdjieff wanted the whole place, and seems to have persuaded Dohrn to lease it to him. Neill and Baer naturally objected, and since they had signed leases, they had a strong case. Dohrn changed his mind, and when, according to Neill, Gurdjieff took him to court, protested that Gurdjieff had hypnotized him into agreeing to let him lease the whole building. Gurdjieff apparently lost the case. His biographer James Webb thinks it highly probable that he did use his hypnotic powers, in spite of the fact that, according to
Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am'
, he had renounced them some time before 1910 because they retarded his spiritual progress. This is not to suggest that Gurdjieff stared into Dohrn's eyes like Svengali and ordered him to go to sleep. The 'telepathic' episode in Finland described by Ouspensky makes it dear that he knew how to build up a level of heightened vitality and to use it to establish some kind of direct influence over others.

Gurdjieff acquired some of Dalcroze's best pupils, but he still had no institute. So, in 1922, he went to London and gave a talk to Ouspensky's students. Ouspensky had never made any secret of the fact that the ideas were not his own, but had originated with Gurdjieff. So there was considerable excitement when it was learned that the Master himself was coming to see them. His first talk was on 13 February, 1922. Gurdjieff had now shaven his head, so that he looked stranger and more Asiatic than ever. Ouspensky's English was heavily accented, but more or less accurate; Gurdjieff's was purely functional, and he spoke in a kind of shorthand. When one lady asked what it would be like to be conscious in essence, he replied expressively: 'Everything more vivid.' At this first talk he emphasized the way we all become more 'mechanical' as we get older, and how, consequently, tremendous effort is needed to generate new energy.

At a later lecture he spoke briefly about man's many 'I's' and inability to govern the emotions. Then, after speaking for barely five minutes, he began to take questions. This was, in fact, one of his favourite methods, for he believed that mere talk may simply fail to penetrate, while individual questions revealed what his listeners really wanted to know. (Ouspensky came to adopt the same method.) On this occasion, he made the important comment that the chief cause of our weakness is 'our inability to apply our will to all three of our centres simultaneously'. He gave an example of how the total will might be applied to the moving centre - that a prisoner whose only chance of escape depended upon throwing a note written on a ball of paper through a high and inaccessible window would concentrate his whole being to make sure he succeeded. But the real problem was to apply the same will to all three centres - physical, intellectual and emotional - at the same time.

Orage, who was present, was even more deeply impressed with Gurdjieff than with Ouspensky. In fact, he now saw that Ouspensky had intellectualized Gurdjieff's teaching, and therefore, in a sense, 'falsified' it.

It was now Gurdjieff's ambition to open his institute in London. But he had reckoned without his reputation as a Russian spy. He was interviewed by the security services, and their verdict on him seems to have been unfavourable. (There is, in fact, some evidence that he had worked for the Russian Secret Service in Tibet.) In spite of the testimony of a committee of doctors - including Nicoll and Walker - before the Home Secretary, Gurdjieff's application to move to London was refused. Even Lady Rothermere's influence failed to do him any good. So he packed his bags - undoubtedly to Ouspensky's relief - and left for Paris. There he quickly found an ideal site for the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man near Fontainebleau; it was a château called the Prieuré des Basses Loges, some 40 miles from Paris. It had formerly been the home of Madame de Maintenon, second wife of Louis XIV. Gurdjieff had no money, but Ouspensky raised it for him, with a large contribution from Lady Rothermere, so that he was able to lease the Priory for a year, with an option to buy. He sent for his pupils - who were still waiting in Berlin - and flung himself into violent activity to make money. Selling carpets would probably be less profitable than in Russia, so Gurdjieff leased two restaurants, went into the oil business, and set up as a psychiatrist specializing in drug addiction and alcoholism. (He seems to have had considerable success in this field although, regrettably, we lack details.) Ouspensky came to Paris to offer help. While he was away, rumours began to circulate among his London pupils about Gurdjieff's tendency to seduce his female students. With typical loyalty, Ouspensky wrote to Orage to ask him to squash these rumours.