The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky (13 page)

Orage himself had already decided to go and join Gurdjieff. After listening to the Master's talks, he felt as if he had received a religious Call. He was becoming tired of being an editor - since pre-war days the circulation of
The New Age
had slumped - and of the London literary scene. When he called on Ouspensky in the autumn of 1922 to ask his advice, Ouspensky, who had been watching Orage from the window of his flat, replied with typical brevity: 'I can see you have already made up your mind, so why ask me?' And so began the exodus from London which would also include Nicoll and his fellow doctor James Young. John Bennett, back from Constantinople, would also become a regular weekend visitor at the Priory.

Orage must have wondered whether he had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. In the seven years since he had met Ouspensky, Gurdjieff had ceased to rely on verbal teaching to convey his message; he was looking for some form of 'action'. Even in Petrograd he had recognized that the discipline required by dancing could help his students to unite the three centres. The deliberate hardships and privations - beyond the demands of the situation - that he had imposed upon the disciples who followed him to the Caucasus had strengthened his belief in the efficacy of 'super-effort'. His discovery of Dalcroze's method suggested an extension of the Eastern dances he had presented in Tiflis in
The Struggle of the Magicians
. So had the 'Stop!' exercise. So at last Gurdjieff had a system of physical exercises to offer, as well as a system of ideas. And the starting point was super-effort.

When Orage arrived at the Priory, he was first of all told not to smoke - which 'almost killed him' - then handed a spade and told to dig. The day began around 4 a.m. with a light breakfast of coffee and rolls. Then he was made to dig until evening. Orage did not even have the consolation that it was useful work that would improve the Priory; sometimes Gurdjieff made his followers dig a ditch one day and fill it in the next. Orage, although tall, was an overweight man, and he was soon in such a state of exhaustion that he often found himself in tears. Then one day at the end of five months, 'in the depths of despair' and feeling he could go on no longer, he decided to make one more extra effort. To his astonishment, he suddenly began enjoying the digging. And Gurdjieff, who had been observing him from a distance, suddenly said: 'Now Orage, I think you dig enough - let us go and drink coffee.' For he had other plans for Orage than growing vegetables. His experience with Ouspensky had shown him the value of 'intellectual' pupils. Orage was to be Ouspensky's replacement as his chief propagandist.

On 13 December, 1923, Gurdjieff's followers gave the first public performance in the West of the 'movements', at the Champs Elysées Theatre, and although reviews were mixed, it made a considerable impact. Orage was not present; together with Dr Stoerneval he was on his way to New York to further Gurdjieff's ambition to conquer the world.

Meanwhile, back in Warwick Gardens, Ouspensky was teaching Gurdjieff's ideas in his own way - intellectually. Inevitably, he laid enormous emphasis on the cosmology - the ray of creation, the Law of Three, the Law of Seven and the Enneagram. With his thick glasses and dry manner, he was not capable of inspiring the same fascination and devotion as the Master in Paris, yet his students gradually found that he was becoming an addiction. In
Venture with Ideas
, Kenneth Walker has recorded how, to begin with, he found Ouspensky interesting and original, but felt no compulsion to go to every meeting. Little by little, as he tested Ouspensky's ideas about lack of self-awareness, he began to feel an increasing compulsion to return; finally, he reached the stage where Ouspensky's lectures were the most important thing in his life. He was particularly impressed by his comments about 'wastage'. We all have a certain amount of energy to carry us through the day; but we waste so much in useless activities and negative emotions that we have no chance of having energy left over for personal evolution. Walker discovered:

The more I put into practice the psychological principles of the System, the more convinced I became of their value, I found, for example, that with their help I was able to overcome certain difficulties in my professional life, difficulties resulting from negative imagination. I no longer lay awake at night, as I formerly did, listening for the telephone to ring and for the night-sister to tell me that the patient on whom I had operated had suddenly collapsed. I ceased to wonder during the small hours of the morning whether it would not have been better for me to have done this rather than that, for by now I had fully realised the futility of such thoughts. And as the wastage of energy through worry and identification lessened I found myself able to do more and with steadily increasing efficiency.

After publication of
A New Model of the Universe
in 1931, the number of Ouspensky's pupils began to increase. Soon there were so many that he had to hold two meetings a week. New faces continued to appear, but many of them dropped out almost immediately. One Spiritualist who asked Ouspensky his views on life 'on the other side' was offended when Ouspensky replied that it was far more important to study life on this side. Another man was upset because Ouspensky brushed aside his attempt to translate the ideas of the System into religious terminology, and also failed to return. Ouspensky did not mind in the least. In fact, he explained that one of the major principles of the Work was 'artificially produced friction' and that this often involved irritating everybody. Gurdjieff himself constantly applied this method at the Priory, even to setting his pupils against one another.

As for Ouspensky, his students noticed that he no longer went to see Gurdjieff in Paris. There had been a total break, no one knew why. Ouspensky's old friend Mouraviev tells a story of how, when asked about this break, Ouspensky replied: 'If someone close to you, your near relative, turned out to be a criminal, what would you do?' This sounds like more than an intellectual disagreement, and the likelihood is that Ouspensky had received confirmation of the rumours about seduction that he had ordered Orage to suppress.

When Ouspensky visited New York many years later, he was asked again about the break with Gurdjieff, and replied simply that when he had discovered that 'Gurdjieff was wrong', he had to leave him. But since Ouspensky continued to teach a system that was basically Gurdjieff's, it is hard to understand what he meant by the assertion that Gurdjieff was wrong.

The obvious difference between Ouspensky's 'method' and Gurdjieff's is that Ouspensky's was much gentler: it did not consist of trying to bring people to a point of 'second wind' by driving them to near exhaustion. Yet Ouspensky himself came to feel that more actual 'work' was required. In 1933, the group decided to acquire a house, and a suitable property was found at Hayes, on the Great West Road out of London. Here the assorted group of professional men and women did physical work - gardening, woodwork, housework - but the aim was largely self-observation. Walker has a delightful story of two of them being sent out to beat carpets. His approach was simple - raise the carpet off the ground with one hand and beat it with the other. His companion wanted to suspend the carpet from a line, and spent a long time finding a suitable clothesline and stringing it between two trees. It proved to be too low and had to be raised. After a series of vicissitudes that sound like
Three Men in a Boat
, they finally started to beat the carpet, and the rope snapped. It can be seen why Ouspensky's students seem to have enjoyed the process of getting to know themselves through self-observation.

Ouspensky explained that one of the main problems with civilized human beings is their 'false personalities', the front they have built up to meet the world. 'Madame Ouspensky', who seems to have been in many ways a stronger character than her husband, had an eagle eye for weakness, and a deadly gift for mimicry. Walker describes her imitations of 'Mr N.' arriving late for lunch and hoping no one had noticed, 'Miss D.' dusting a room as if applying powder to her nose, 'Mr M.' grinding coffee beans with as much effort as he would put into raising a heavy bucket from a deep well. She also had a gift of words - most of them in Russian - and had no hesitation in making remarks like 'You are a warning to us all and quite useless' or describing someone's conversation as 'pouring emptiness into a void'. She likened the 'false personality' to a huge hot-air pie which the owner carried about on a tray in order to be admired, but which had to be treated very carefully, or its thin crust would be damaged.

All this. Walker explains, developed in them the ability to laugh at themselves and at one another, and made for a relaxed and happy atmosphere. Madame Ouspensky differed from her husband in having a strong religious bent, and so spent much time arranging readings from world scriptures - the sayings of the Buddha, the
Bhagavad Gita
, texts of Taoism and Sufism, even the Church Fathers. And Ouspensky, who had always insisted that the Fourth Way should be regarded as a scientific method, seems to have accepted all this without protest. According to his own doctrine of sleep and mechanicalness, religious readings should have been useless, a method of self-deception. The fact that he accepted them seems to indicate that he acknowledged that the world's great religions have fundamentally the same aim as the Work. On the other hand, the mystery may be explained simply by the fact that Madame Ouspensky had preferred to be at the Priory with Gurdjieff rather than in London with her husband, and that Gurdjieff's attitude to religion was quite unlike Ouspensky's. When Gurdjieff finally sent her away, she came to England with the deepest reluctance, and she and Ouspensky continued to live separately. (In
The Harmonious Circle
, James Webb records that Ouspensky had a mistress.)

Within three years, Ouspensky's community had become so successful that they decided they needed a larger place, and moved to a house at Virginia Water, near Ascot. But this had disadvantages; Lyne Place was so large that the atmosphere of intimacy was lost, and they felt they belonged to an institution. They also saw less of the Ouspenskys. But they moved a step further in the direction of the Priory by felling timber, building a sawmill, and farming on a larger scale. And after a few years, Ouspensky went still further in Gurdjieff's direction by introducing training in 'the movements'. 'Head, body, arms and legs often moved in different rhythms and when it seemed natural to turn in a certain direction the exercise often dictated that one should turn in the opposite direction,' according to Walker. He goes on:

It was difficult at the end of a hard day's work in London to drive out some twenty odd miles into the country in order to take part in these supremely difficult exercises. At such times the flimsiest excuse seemed to provide a valid reason for not going. A whole conversation would start up inside me; the fog was getting thicker. . . next day would be a heavy day. . . But the strange thing was that however fatigued I might be when I began Gurdjieff's difficult exercises I always drove back to London so full of energy that I had no desire to go to bed.

But Ouspensky now recognized that the sheer success of his enterprise had become his main problem.'He could either cut down the size of the group and carry on more intensive work with a smaller following, or else he could open the door wider and allow more people to enter.' The latter course, which might seem self-defeating, was the one they chose. Instead of the Warwick Gardens flat (which they had kept on), they would find a larger house in London. One was eventually found in Hammersmith. But with the war approaching, the Ouspenskys apparently decided that they needed some innocent 'cover'. Why this should be so is not clear, and it seems likely that it was a hangover from the old days of 'secrecy', when the notion that they were a secret society formed an additional bond. (In fact, Ouspensky
was
under Home Office surveillance in the late '30s as a potential Russian agent, but was not even aware of it.) At all events, the group decided to call themselves the Historico-Psychological Society, and claim to be studying Eastern religions. They would even present public lectures on 'appropriate subjects', and impart their real purpose only to members of the audience who seemed suitable . . .

While Ouspensky had been building up his own secure following in England, Gurdjieff's group had been through some strange vicissitudes. Throughout the inter-war years Gurdjieff's main problem was money. Ouspensky built up a following of well-off disciples who could afford to pay for their instruction; Gurdjieff had a large group of Russians who needed to be supported. He drove himself so hard during the early days of the Priory that one night, driving back from Paris, he was unable to stay awake. He pulled his car into the side of the road, and was awakened the next morning when a farm wagon tried to get past. His night in the open led to a chill whose effects were long lasting.

Then malicious gossip was caused by the death of the writer Katherine Mansfield at the Priory in January 1924. She was rumoured to have been worked to death by the demonic 'magician'. In fact, she had arrived there - in October 1923 - already dying of tuberculosis. Gurdjieff had the curious idea of placing her bed over a barn where she could smell the odour of cows, but it did no good; she died after an evening of watching the Gurdjieff dances.

By that time, Orage was in New York preparing the way for Gurdjieff's arrival. He disembarked towards the end of December, and was taken to a bookshop on 44th St, whose part-owner promptly fell in love with him. A few days later, Orage gave his first lecture, explaining to his audience that Gurdjieff had been a member of a group called the Seekers after Truth, who had spent years searching for esoteric knowledge in the East, and had brought back its secrets to the West. There was an element of truth in this, but it seems almost certain that the Seekers after Truth were a product of Gurdjieff's imagination.

In early January 1924, Gurdjieff arrived, together with the Hartmanns and other followers. A first performance of the sacred dances was given in a small hall whose stage had been reconstructed by the group. It was free, and Gurdjieff himself handed out tickets in the foyer, scrutinizing the faces of the people and ignoring some of them. In early February there was a performance at the Neighbourhood Playhouse; it lasted for four hours, and left the audience deeply impressed. In addition to the dances, Gurdjieff's pupils demonstrated certain 'magic' tricks involving telepathy. A pupil in the audience would take some object from a member of the audience, and 'transmit' it to someone on stage, who would accurately describe it. The names of operas were also 'transmitted' and Hartmann would then play extracts from them on the piano. 'Pictures' were 'transmitted' to the artist de Salzmann, who drew them on large sheets of paper. Gurdjieff explained - through Orage - that some of these demonstrations were 'tricks', some were 'half-tricks' and some were genuine psychical phenomena; but he left it to the audience to guess which was which. One young man named Stanley Nott confessed himself totally baffled. The writer Llewellyn Powys said that the pupils were like a hutchful of hypnotized rabbits, while another commentator described Gurdjieff as looking like a riding master.