The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky (14 page)

But in the novelty-hungry America of the jazz age, this search for salvation through self-knowledge made only a temporary impact, and audiences declined. A trip to Chicago - at the invitation of the Diaghilev choreographer Adolf Bolm - was a success, as was a final performance at Carnegie Hall. But financially, the trip was not as successful as Gurdjieff had hoped.

Then, in July 1924, it suddenly looked as if Gurdjieff's interesting career had been prematurely terminated. He was driving back from Paris to the Priory when his car crashed into a tree; he was found lying on his back beside it. Doctors diagnosed serious concussion. (Ouspensky, who visited the Priory during this period, believed that Gurdjieff was being punished by higher powers for his transgressions.) When Gurdjieff finally recovered, he announced that he had decided to close down the Priory, and most of the Russians left. Gurdjieff himself, apparently determined to transmit his ideas to posterity, began to write the first series of
All and Everything, Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson
, a work that became famed for its impenetrability and for the weirdness of its neologisms.

In
The Harmonious Circle
, James Webb makes the interesting suggestion that Gurdjieff arranged his own accident. He points out that Gurdjieff showed no outward sign of having been in a car crash. He was found lying beside the car with his head on a cushion. When brought back from the hospital, he was unconscious for five days, yet his fist clenched violently when Madame de Hartmann took his pulse. He is also reported to have told his attendants where to massage him.

The accident itself is a mystery. That day, Gurdjieff's car had been in the garage for its steering column to be checked. It seems odd that the steering column should then have failed - although perhaps credible enough for anyone with experience of garages. However, also that day, Gurdjieff's secretary Olga de Hartmann had been given power of attorney, and told to return to the Priory by train, instead of - as usual - in Gurdjieff's car. She was irritated, since it was a hot day, and she would have preferred to travel in the open car. She was also puzzled when Gurdjieff cancelled an appointment at the last moment; he was normally thoughtful when dealing with people outside the Work. At the time of the crash, at about 4.30 in the afternoon, she was awakened from a doze by Gurdjieff's voice calling her name. Since we know Gurdjieff possessed telepathic powers, could this not also have been part of the plan?

If Webb is correct, what could have been the purpose of such a deception? The answer may be that Gurdjieff was sick of being the 'circus master' and guru. His power to fascinate and arouse devotion made him the slave of his own disciples. He had already behaved in a similar manner in Russia when he had abruptly announced the dissolution of the group. Before the accident, he spent two days a week in Paris, and he may often have wished it could have been more. After all, in London, Ouspensky lived quietly in his flat, and gave lectures once a week. In France, Gurdjieff spent most of his time in the midst of his disciples, or trying to make money to support them.

The accident certainly changed all that. Large numbers of followers left the Priory - particularly the Russians, who were the biggest drain on Gurdjieff's resources. Olga de Hartmann took over the running of the place. Gurdjieff had told them: 'All my life I have lived for others. Now I will live for myself a while.'

How does Webb's theory explain the fact that Gurdjieff's hands
were
lacerated, and that many of his followers were shocked by the change in him? The obvious possibility is that, in faking his accident, Gurdjieff failed to jump out of the car quickly enough.

What shocked the disciples was not so much that Gurdjieff had had an accident as that, according to his own teaching, he should have been 'beyond' the law of accident. He possessed 'essence', and essence is subject to the laws of destiny, not accident.

But whether Gurdjieff's car crash was accident, destiny or play-acting, it undoubtedly freed him from the trap that had closed around him. After 1924, the Priory was suddenly a quieter place.

Six

One of our main sources for Ouspensky's final years is Stanley Nott, the young Englishman who had been introduced to Gurdjieff's teaching through Orage. In
Journey through this World: The Second Journal of a Pupil
, Nott described a visit to Ouspensky in London in the spring of 1935. He had seen Ouspensky only once before and, on that occasion had, like most people, found him rather cold and detached; now he was surprised to find him a warm and friendly man. But Madame Ouspensky proved to be a dragon, and at one point Nott had to remonstrate: 'I didn't come here to be put through a catechism, but to have a friendly conversation.' Nott lent Ouspensky a copy of the typescript of
Beelzebub's Tales
, about which he was obviously intensely curious. Nott regarded it as a kind of Bible. Ouspensky agreed to allow Nott to attend one of his groups - he told him that he now had more than 1,000 pupils - on condition that he did not talk about
Beelzebub
. But after a few glasses of wine he began to relax and unburden himself on the subject of Gurdjieff:

You know, when Gurdjieff started his Institute in Paris I did everything I could for him. I raised money for him and sent him pupils, many of them influential people. When he bought the Prieuré I went there myself and Madame stayed for some time. But I found that he had changed from when I knew him in Russia. He was difficult in Essentuki and Constantinople but more so in Fontainebleau. His behaviour had changed. He did many things that I did not like, but it wasn't what he did that upset me, it was the stupid way he did them. He came to London to my group and made things very unpleasant for me. After this I saw that I must break with him . . .

He went on to say that he was convinced that Gurdjieff had 'lost contact with the source' after Essentuki, and that he had never recovered from his car accident. Nott denied this, but could see that nothing he could say would alter Ouspensky's opinion. 'I began to see traces of the inflexible mental attitude that besets Russians . . . once they have adopted a mental attitude to a given situation they will stick to it, whatever the cost.'

According to Nott, the break had come after a visit from Gurdjieff to Ouspensky's London group in 1922 (when Gurdjieff was accompanied by Pinder). Gurdjieff had told Ouspensky that he was too intellectual, and was working on the wrong lines. If he wished to
understand
he must stop and start to work with Gurdjieff again . . . Understandably, Ouspensky rejected this - after being in the Work for seven years he must have felt that he understood it as well as he ever would. In a sense he was right; and the point is underlined by the fact that he handed Nott the typescript of
The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin
, which he had been revising. Ouspensky had already surrendered enough of his individuality to Gurdjieff.

Nott, of course, had no doubt whatever that Gurdjieff's outbursts of rudeness and eccentricity were carefully calculated to bring enlightenment to his pupils, and the memoirs of some of these pupils - like Fritz Peters - make it clear he was fundamentally correct. Yet, as we have seen, it is also clear that he failed to recognize that Ouspensky possessed his own kind of genius, and that he was right to wish to go his own way. An Ouspensky who returned to Gurdjieff as a disciple would have been emasculated.

At the first meeting Nott attended, Ouspensky arrived half an hour or so late, after an advanced pupil had already asked the audience for questions. Then Ouspensky answered the questions one by one. 'As the evening went on,' says Nott, 'Ibecame more and more impressed with the breadth and clarity of his massive and powerful mind - so far as
knowledge
was concerned.' Nott continued to feel, however, that Ouspensky was missing Gurdjieff's basic point.

Nevertheless, as they shared glasses of red wine, Nott began to feel 'a real affection' for Ouspensky. The problem, he saw, was that Ouspensky wanted to 'come to an understanding' with Guidjieff - and that was impossible. You either accepted Gurdjieff as a teacher or you didn't. The two attitudes - Ouspensky's and Nott's - were incompatible. Ouspensky felt that knowledge was an objective fact, like a mathematical table; a teacher might be useful as a catalyst, but in the ultimate sense, no teacher is 'necessary'. He obviously felt that Nott's tendency to accept Gurdjieff as an infallible guru was a sign of a feeble intellect.

Yet in spite of his success as a teacher, Ouspensky's dissatisfaction with his own progress was plain. He told Nott one day that it was now necessary to get in touch with 'an esoteric school'. 'There must be schools, either in Europe or the Near East.' In effect, he was back at square one.

Gurdjieff's comment, when Nott told him that he liked Ouspensky, was: 'Ouspensky very nice man to talk to and drink vodka with, but he is weak man.'

Reflecting on this later, Nott concluded that Ouspensky's weakness lay in his emotional centre. Intellectuals - like Shaw and Bertrand Russell - are particularly prone to this: '. . . one expects them to be adult emotionally, and they are not.'

The point is underlined by Nott's story of Ouspensky's comment when Nott asked him if he had read the typescript of
Beelzebub
: 'No, it sticks in my throat.'
Beelzebub
is, admittedly, an infuriatingly obscure book. Yet Ouspensky's failure to try to get to grips with it reveals that his remarkable intellect was hobbled by pride and touchiness.

In spite of their disagreements, Gurdjieff continued to feel kindly towards the Ouspensky's, and sent them parcels of delicacies every time Nott returned to London from the Prieuré. One day, Madame Ouspensky asked Nott what he got from Gurdjieff. His answer is significant:

Mr Gurdjieff says things to me about myself which hit me right in my feelings, in my essence, so that I can never forget them; and little by little the effect is to change something in me and give me more understanding of myself and other people; at the same time it is accompanied by a realisation of how little I actually do understand. Mr Ouspensky appeals to my mind and I'm never tired of listening to him. But this doesn't change things in myself. I think I can say that I get more for inner work from one lunch with Mr Gurdjieff than from a year of Mr Ouspensky's groups.

Oddly enough, Madame Ouspensky replied: 'Yes, I think I know what you mean.'

Another story of Nott's makes the point even more powerfully. In the second half of the 1930s he was depressed by the rise of the Nazis, and by setbacks in his personal life - including an accident in which his son lost a leg. He went to see Gurdjieff in Paris, and after lunch, Gurdjieff asked him into his sitting-room. Then Gurdjieff sat at the harmonium and began to play, 'keeping his eyes fixed on me with a look of deep compassion and power'.

Little by little I became aware that he was conveying something to me both through the music - the combination of the notes - and by the telepathic means which he understood so well. A change began to take place in me; I began to understand something, and a feeling of conscious hope and conscious faith began to displace the dark hopeless depression.

When he left, 'a healing of the psychic wounds had begun'.

Back in London, Ouspensky was lecturing to crowded audiences in Hammersmith. But Madame Ouspensky had become seriously ill. To Nott's astonishment, Ouspensky decided that Gurdjieff was the only one who could do anything for her. And in spite of Ouspensky's comment that he felt Gurdjieff had now lost touch with the 'source', Nott agreed to try to persuade Gurdjieff to come to England - Madame Ouspensky being too ill to go to Paris.

With typical generosity, Gurdjieff instantly agreed to come to London. But two days before he was due to arrive, war broke out. Fortunately, Madame Ouspensky seems to have made some kind of recovery without his help.

As soon as the air raids began, it became difficult to carry on with meetings in London, and petrol rationing and the black-out made Virginia Water inaccessible. On 4 January, 1941, Madame Ouspensky sailed for America with a small group of 'the faithful', and two weeks later, Ouspensky followed her. It had been almost 21 years since he had received the letter from Claude Bragdon with the royalty cheque for
Tertium Organum
, and the two decades since then had been a period of peace and prosperity. Now, just as it began to look as if his work was entering a new phase of success, he was once again being condemned to exile.

The voyage took more than six weeks - the
Georgic
had to go far out of its way to dodge U-boats - and they arrived in early March. Madame Ouspensky had taken a house at Rumson, on the coast of New Jersey. Stanley Nott, who had been in America a year, was glad to see that she now looked much better, and was also friendlier and less forbidding. Nott soon went to have lunch with Ouspensky in a New York hotel, and suggested that he should come and address the 'Orage group', of which he had become a member.

Orage himself had been dead since November 1934. Unlike Ouspensky, he never renounced Gurdjieff: Gurdjieff renounced him. While Orage was on a trip to England in 1930, Gurdjieff had taken over his New York group and made the members sign a letter in which they renounced Orage. Typically, Orage lost no time in signing it too. Exactly why Gurdjieff turned against Orage is unclear. He may have felt that, like Ouspensky, Orage was carrying the Work in the wrong direction. Or he may simply have decided that everybody needed a 'shock'. The shock seems to have done Orage no harm; he returned to England and devoted himself to the curious ideas of Major Clifford Douglas on 'Social Credit' - a system designed to replace money with a kind of barter. And in spite of Gurdjieff's prohibition, Orage's group continued to regard him with reverence.

Ouspensky attended a meeting of the group at a house in Madison Avenue, and was oddly unimpressive. 'No authority,' said one of Orage's pupils. They knew Gurdjieff and felt that Ouspensky had neither Gurdjieff's fire nor Orage's warmth and brilliance. The Ouspensky group that subsequently formed had only about 50 members, and by the end of two years, only half a dozen remained. On the other hand, many of Ouspensky's former pupils from England decided to join him in America, and for this group, Ouspensky, not Gurdjieff, was the Master.