Gurdjieff Studies

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OUSPENSKY & GURDJIEFF: AN HISTORICAL CHOREOGRAPHY Piotr Demianovich Ouspensky, incontestably the most famous and influential pupil of the Greco-Armenian spiritual teacher George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, was born in Moscow on 5 March 1878. Hisearly impulse to search for a substrate of hidden meaning beneath life’s “obvious absurdities” was lentadult scope by his profession of journalist and author; in youth he travelled extensively, both literallyand in the realm of ideas. In 1912 Ouspensky sprang improbably to national fame through his book Kluck Kzaradkam

(Tertium Organum), which, invoking the concept of the Fourth Dimension, audaciously challengedthe constraints on human consciousness implicit in Aristotle’s Organon and Bacon’s Novum

Organum. By autumn 1913 Ouspensky had adventitiously come to Gurdjieff’s attention, whenMoscow newspapers reported his departure for Egypt, Ceylon, and India. In London, while en route

to the East, the celebrity author briefly met the editor of the critical weekly New Age ‘Alfred Richard’(James Alfred) Orage, an admirer of Ouspensky’s recently translated essay on Tarot symbolism. On 13 November 1914, a week after Ouspensky’s return to Russia from Colombo, he was intriguedby a notice in the newspaper Golos Moskvi, which referred to a ballet The Struggle of the

Magicians, ostensibly belonging to ‘a certain Hindu’. Five months later when Ouspensky waslecturing on esotericism, he was approached by the musician Vladimir Pohl and by Gurdjieff’s cousinthe sculptor Sergei Dmitrievich Mercourov. They spoke extravagantly of Gurdjieff’s ‘occult’ group;disclosed surprisingly that Gurdjieff was the ‘Hindu’ Impresario; and urged Ouspensky to contacthim. After considerable hesitation Ouspensky agreed, and his first meeting with Gurdjieff in Moscow– momentous within the Gurdjieffian canon – was effected by Pohl in April 1915 in ‘a small cafe in anoisy but not central street’. Ouspensky was thirty-seven. The encounter went well and after associating daily for one week, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky tacitlyaccepted the respective roles of teacher and pupil. Ouspensky, though elated, was professionallyobliged to return to the capital Petrograd, where he worked and lived in a small room on the corner ofNevsky Prospekt and Liteynaia Street. Not until six months later was contact resumed duringGurdjieff’s three brief visits there in the autumn of 1915; indeed Ouspensky’s formal studies underGurdjieff, commenced only in February 1916, when Gurdjieff although ill began to lecture inPetrograd fortnightly. From a circle assembled chiefly by Ouspensky, Gurdjieff gradually constitutedhis first Petrograd group, whose six members included Ouspensky and his romantic intimate AnnaIlinishna Butkovsky-Hewitt, the Finnish psychiatrist Dr Leonid Robertovich de Stjernvall, andAndrei Andreivitch Zaharoff. To this group during the five months between February and June 1916,Gurdjieff conveyed (in a systematic expository way, to which he never fully returned) virtually theentire apparatus of his cosmological and psychological ideas, which included the Law of Three, theLaw of Seven, the Ray of Creation, the Table of Hydrogens, the Food Diagram, and the Cosmoses.With such unique acuity did Ouspensky register all this complex material that Gurdjieff confided tohim the task of first outlining it to two highly significant new participants: the eminent classicalcomposer Thomas Alexandrovitch de Hartmann and his young wife Olga Arcadievna.

During midsummer 1916 Gurdjieff came to live in Petrograd in an apartment close to Ouspensky atthe corner of Nevsky Prospekt and Pushkinskaia; his groups, enlarged to thirty, met almost everyevening, often in the house of Mme E. N. Maximovitch. In August, at the Maximovitch countrydacha in Finland, Gurdjieff induced in Ouspensky an intense telepathic and mystical experience,which seems to mark the apogee of their rapport. Through the autumn and winter of 1916 Ouspensky saw little of Gurdjieff (who had returned toMoscow to work there). Late in October Ouspensky was mobilised, commissioned in the GuardsSappers, and conveniently posted to regimental H.Q. in Petrograd, two miles from his new home onTroitskaia. Into this large apartment Ouspensky received the domineering divorcee SophiaGrigorievna Maximenko aged forty-two, with whom he entered into so-to-say a ‘marriage ofinconvenience’. Possibly the unconventionality of this arrangement, as well as Ouspensky’s acutemyopia, contributed to his premature and welcome demobilisation from the Guards in January 1917. At the beginning of February 1917, Gurdjieff made his last visit to Petrograd, lectured on the‘Diagram of Everything Living’, and shortly returned to Moscow. Suddenly came civil disorder; theenforced abdication of Tsar Nicholas II on 2 March 1917; and the downfall of the Romanoff dynasty.During the ensuing confusion of the provisional government (led by Prince Georgi EvgenievitchLvov, later by Aleksander Feodorovitch Kerensky) Gurdjieff’s precise whereabouts were uncertain,and communication with him at first impossible, then inconclusive. Despite the seniority of DrStjernvall, it was Ouspensky who emerged in this vacuum as the de facto steward of the Petrogradgroup: energetic, paternalistic, and far-sightedly aware of the necessity of emigration. Early in June 1917 Ouspensky was suddenly invited by telegram to come to Gurdjieff in his home inAlexandropol, on the distant Russo-Turkish frontier. Here he met Gurdjieff’s closest relatives: hisfather Ivan, his mother Yevdokia, his younger brother Dmitri Ivanovitch (and probably Gurdjieff’swife Ulosifna Osipovna Ostrovska). After a fortnight Gurdjieff asked Ouspensky to return toMoscow and Petrograd and call the groups to new work with him in the south. Ouspensky faithfullyand quickly discharged this trust: in mid-July he rejoined Gurdjieff, at Essentuki, on the northernfoothills of the Caucasus, bringing Mme Ouspensky and her adult daughter Lenotchka Savitsky. Only thirteen pupils succeeded in congregating at Essentuki, and Gurdjieff worked intensively withthem night and day. His techniques included fasting, acceleration of tempo, relaxation, cultivation ofattention and bodily sensation, the ‘Stop Exercise’, and simple Movements. Ouspensky – replete withthe theory of the Work – was suddenly and richly exposed to its praxis, in his fortieth year. After sixweeks Gurdjieff ended this experiment and went to Tuapse, taking only Zaharoff. From this junctureOuspensky – obscurely disappointed in his expectations – began to prefer Gurdjieff’s ideas overGurdjieff himself. Early in September 1917 Ouspensky returned to Petrograd alone to retrieve some belongings, finallyleaving on 15 October (ten days before the Bolshevik revolution). He wintered with Gurdjieff in theCaucasus, successively at Uch Dere, Olghniki, and Essentuki, but received no instruction. On 12February 1918, Gurdjieff issued a circular letter over Ouspensky’s signature calling the remainder ofhis Moscow and Petrograd groups south. By March forty people had assembled and Gurdjieff begana second period of concentrated work – significant as the last episode of Ouspensky’s real pupilship.As in the first Essentuki experiment, Gurdjieff’s emphasis was on practice not theory, and a variety ofcomplex exercises were given. The sacred dances (in which Ouspensky had negligible interest orfacility) implied for him that Gurdjieff was now tending towards religion. Concluding that Gurdjieff’smethods did not suit him, Ouspensky painfully resolved to part. In May 1918 he left Gurdjieff’shouse and resumed writing A New Model of the Universe which romantically evoked his early

travels and speculations. Although Ouspensky continued to hold aloof from Gurdjieff throughout the summer of 1918 (whilethe Civil War progressively engulfed Essentuki) he loyally interested himself in Gurdjieff’s audaciousplan to extricate his people over the Caucasus Mountains. Gurdjieff, with his party, left Essentuki, atthe beginning of August 1918 and Ouspensky did not see him again for nearly two years. Politicaldevelopments quickly overtook Ouspensky in Essentuki, stranding him there ten months with MmeOuspensky, his stepdaughter Lenotchka Savitsky, and – very soon – his step-grandson Leonidas(‘Lonya’) Savitsky. Their ordeal between September and December 1918, entailing cold, hunger andtyphoid, left Ouspensky with an ineradicable detestation of Bolshevism. In this stressful period,during which he courageously found work as a house-porter, schoolmaster, and librarian, Ouspenskyfirst made long-term plans to teach Gurdjieff’s ideas. In January 1919, Essentuki was liberated by the Volunteer Army under General Anton IvanovitchDenikin: conditions eased, and (from Alexander Nikorovich Petrov in February and Olga deHartmann in May) Ouspensky had news of Gurdjieff’s circumstances. Unwilling to rejoin Gurdjieff,Ouspensky decided that, once conditions permitted, he would emigrate to London and teachGurdjieff’s System there. He chose England because he had friendships in literary and theosophicalcircles (e.g. with A. R. Orage, Carl E. Bechhofer-Roberts, and Mme A. L. Pogossky); because hisbook The Symbolism of the Tarot had been published in English; and above all because heaccurately foresaw that no other European people would give a readier hospitality to Gurdjieff’sideas. Between June 1919 and January 1920, Ouspensky spent his final precarious months in Russiaattendant on the hard-pressed White forces. He left Essentuki with his family at the beginning of Juneand went, via Rostov-on-Don, to Ekaterinodar capital of the Kuban. During the autumn Ouspenskysomehow found a way to send five articles to Orage, who published them in the New Age. Oragealso commended him to Major ‘Frank’ (Francis William Stanley) Pinder, influential in Ekaterinodaras Head of the British Economic Mission to Denikin’s Volunteer Army; Pinder then helped bygenerously employing Ouspensky out of his own pocket, to write the Mission’s press summaries. Here in Ekaterinodar in September 1919, under grimly adverse conditions, Ouspensky began to teachhis first Gurdjieffian group (a precocious initiative, which Gurdjieff had neither explicitly approvednor forbidden). Ouspensky was forty-one. He had recently declined two written invitations fromGurdjieff to rejoin him in Tiflis: instead in the autumn he accompanied Maj. Pinder and the Missionnorth to Rostov (leaving his family installed in a suburb of Ekaterinodar). In Rostov Ouspensky wasjoined by Zaharoff and resumed public lectures. In mid-December an unexpected visit fromBechhofer-Roberts, travelling as a freelance war correspondent, restimulated Ouspensky’s interest inEngland. By the close of December 1919, Bolshevik forces were at Rostov’s perimeter, and the trio –in imminent danger – dispersed: Bechhofer- Roberts found his way to Tiflis; Zaharoff died ofsmallpox in Novorossiysk; Ouspensky extricated his family from Ekaterinodar and brought themacross the Crimea to Odessa, where they embarked to begin a lifetime’s exile. In January 1920 Ouspensky arrived destitute in a Constantinople teeming with Allied forces,demobilised Turks, and Russian refugees. On completing shipboard quarantine, the family werefortunate to find accommodation in a single room in a large lodging house on Prinkipo Island in theMarmara. Ouspensky again supported them, this time by teaching mathematics to children, andEnglish (which he scarcely knew) to fellow émigrés. Once established, Ouspensky began lectures onGurdjieff’s ideas in Pera, Constantinople’s European quarter; here, in the upstairs offices of theRussky Mayak (a Y.M.C.A. for White Russians) he excited broad interest, gradually forming a

nucleus of twenty to thirty pupils. He anticipated the arrival of Gurdjieff and his company, which wasrumoured in bazaar gossip, and which materialised in June 1920. The ensuing year – the last throughout which Gurdjieff and Ouspensky had substantial contact – wascharacterised by Ouspensky’s complex vacillations. At outset, when he brought Gurdjieff to hislectures and magnanimously surrendered all his pupils to him, there seemed promise of fullreconciliation. Indeed from July to September 1920 the two men related closely: exchanging visits,making excursions, attending dervish ceremonies, and working together on the scenario of Gurdjieff’sballet The Struggle of the Magicians. However by October, when Gurdjieff opened his Institute inConstantinople at No.13 Yemenedji Sokak, the same psychological difficulties arose for Ouspenskyas at Essentuki: accordingly he dissociated himself and withdrew for two months to Prinkipo. Here inmid-November 1920, he was gratified to receive, from Nikolai Alexandrovitch Bassaraboff in NewYork, a substantial royalty cheque, with the unanticipated news that Tertium Organum had beenpublished successfully in English: this reinforced Ouspensky’s intention to settle in England orAmerica. In December, once Gurdjieff’s Institute was established, Ouspensky resumed his ownlectures at Russky Mayak, and also began group discussions at Matchka, in the flat of Mrs WinifredAlise Beaumont (then living with John Godolphin Bennett who a year later became Ouspensky’spupil). Despite their now independent trajectories, the relationship between Gurdjieff and Ouspensky wasstill fundamentally unimpaired. In spring 1921 Ouspensky accepted an invitation to give weeklylectures at Gurdjieff’s Institute. He also interested himself in Gurdjieff’s Movement classes at theGrand Rabbinate, both by volunteering young pupils and by attending Saturday night demonstrations(his interest however fell short of personal participation). On 19 May 1921 Ouspensky received the then substantial sum of £100 from Mary Lilian, LadyRothermere in Rochester New York, cabled with the encouraging message: ‘Deeply impressed byyour book Tertium Organum wish meet you in New York or London will pay all expenses’. Withhis path to London now smoothed, Ouspensky secured from Gurdjieff permission to write andpublish a book on his ideas. His last three months in Prinkipo were not without tension: he sufferedbureaucratic delay in obtaining his British entry visa; and Mme Ouspensky, disapproving his course,resolved to remain with Gurdjieff. Ouspensky finally left alone for London in mid-August 1921. Ouspensky was to live twenty years in England propagating (and financially reliant on) Gurdjieff’sideas. His reception in London in August 1921 was well prepared. Lady Rothermere installed him ina Bloomsbury hotel near Taviton Street; provided him with a meeting place in her studio in CircusRoad, St John’s Wood; liberally distributed copies of Tertium Organum; and introduced him tofigures like T. S. Eliot. Ouspensky’s old acquaintance A. R. Orage orchestrated the recruitment ofpupils: from journalistic circles he drew Rowland Kenney first editor of the Daily Herald and CliffordSharp editor of the New Statesman; from the Theosophical Society and the Quest Society manyminor figures; and from the ‘psychosynthesis group’ the Jungians Dr Henry Maurice Dunlop Nicolland Dr James Carruthers Young. Ouspensky, by extolling ‘his synthesis and the method of study andpractice he had evolved’, quickly stamped his authority on this small section of London’sintelligentsia. (His indebtedness to Gurdjieff received little emphasis.) By October 1921, Ouspensky was surprisingly well established: in Eugenie Kadloubovsky he hadfound a devoted secretary; in his cat ‘Vashka’ companionship; and in Ralph Philipson a financialbacker less intrusive than Lady Rothermere. At 55a Gwendwr Road in West Kensington he hadrented a modest maisonette (his principal residence for the next fourteen years); and throughtheosophical connections he enjoyed the use of a large meeting room at 38 Warwick Gardens, where

he held groups three or four times a week. Despite this all-round consolidation, Ouspensky’s moodvacillated, and in December he briefly considered returning to Constantinople. Commencing on 8 March 1922, Gurdjieff made a three week visit to London, and at Ouspensky'sinvitation talked with his groups (Olga de Hartmann interpreting). It was wounding to Ouspenskythat Gurdjieff completely won over the allegiance of most of his pupils and patrons, who on their owninitiative set out to found and fund Gurdjieff’s Institute in London at Hampstead. Had this eventuated,Ouspensky was resolved to maintain his independence by moving to France or America: however theHome Office refused Gurdjieff a permanent entry permit to Britain and on 14 July 1922 he settled inFrance. Much relieved, Ouspensky immediately visited Paris to confer; his English supporters thenvolunteered substantial funds, with which, on 30 September 1922, Gurdjieff bought the Prieuré atFontainebleau as a permanent centre for his work. On the same day at Gwendwr Road, Ouspenskyinterviewed the critically ill writer Katherine Mansfield and referred her to Gurdjieff. In autumn 1922,with or without Ouspensky’s acquiescence, all his most promising pupils (except J. G. Bennett)namely A. R. Orage, Dr Nicoll, Dr Young, Rowland Kenney, and the diplomat Eric Graham ForbesAdam, congregated at the Prieuré, together with Katherine Mansfield, Lady Rothermere and MmeOuspensky. Ouspensky himself joined them in November to observe rather than participate. Katherine Mansfield’s death at the Prieuré on 9 January 1923 excited in England a shallowjournalistic interest in the Work, not unhelpful to Ouspensky (who projected himself as Gurdjieff’sequal rather than his apprentice). Alluding to Gurdjieff’s ideas as ‘our discoveries’, Ouspenskyannounced to the press the imminent publication of his book Fragments of an Ancient Teaching (infact posthumously published twenty-seven years later as In Search of the Miraculous). Throughoutthe year Ouspensky worked stolidly to reconstitute his position in London, following the exodus tothe Prieuré. By October Rowland Kenney and Dr Nicoll had returned and the latter quicklyintroduced another pupil of substance, the surgeon Dr Kenneth Macfarlane Walker. AlthoughOuspensky refused Gurdjieff’s repeated invitation to come and live at the Prieuré, he paid severalshort visits in 1923, and was there in the first week of 1924, when Gurdjieff left to tour America withthirty-five pupil dancers. Returning immediately to England, Ouspensky assembled his ten senior pupils and backers in RalphPhilipson’s flat in Portland Place, and announced he had broken off all relations with Gurdjieff andwould in future operate quite independently. Those who chose to remain under his supervision (theyincluded Dr Nicoll, J. G. Bennett, Rowland Kenney and Dr Walker) must never again communicatein any way with Gurdjieff or his pupils, or even mention his name. Though rigorously imposing thisrule on his followers, Ouspensky reserved to himself, for at least seven years, a latitude to seeGurdjieff occasionally; and as early as June 1924 revisited the Prieuré to hear an account ofGurdjieff’s successful tour of the U.S.A. However, Ouspensky was in London on 8 July 1924, when Gurdjieff sustained serious injuries in acar crash on the Paris-Fontainebleau Road. He did not visit Gurdjieff during his convalescence but hewent to ponder at the site of the accident (which he concluded was a sinister retribution forGurdjieff’s hubris). Gurdjieff, himself sobered by his narrow escape from death, resolved to focus oncommitting his teaching to writing and began his magnum opus Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson.Supervision of the emergent study groups in America he deputed in October 1924 to A. R. Orage,who loyally discharged his mandate but built up quite a following of his own. 1925 (year of the first extant MS. of In Search of the Miraculous) found Ouspensky depressed: cut

off from Gurdjieff and doubtful of his capacity to evolve independently. There now entered his mindthe fixed idea that he must discover ‘Higher Source’, an entity he situated either in Asia or on asupernal plane. Eager for contact with the Mevlevi dervishes he prevailed on Forbes Adam, a formerprotégé of Lord Curzon, to insist on a posting to Constantinople: unhappily, on 7 July 1925, two daysafter his arrival there, Adam – Ouspensky’s most influential pupil – shot himself. Further cloudsloomed in August, when the dubious commercial adventurism of J. G. Bennett in Greece broughtOuspensky innocently to the attention of M.I.5. As a final rebuke Mme Ouspensky, on leaving thePrieuré, declined Gurdjieff’s advice to join her husband in England. Ouspensky next made brief and adventitious contact with Gurdjieff and Mme Ouspensky at thefuneral of Mme Ostrowska, who died from cancer at Fontainebleau on 26 June 1926. In EnglandOuspensky had drawn close to his pupils Dr and Mrs Nicoll and from 1927 on spent every otherweek-end in the tranquillity of Alley Cottage, the Doctor’s retreat at Sidlesham. By contrast, in March1928, his other senior pupil J. G. Bennett was in Athens jail. Police seizure and misinterpretation ofBennett’s private correspondence resulted in Ouspensky – an ardent anti-Bolshevik – beingsummoned to the Home Office to answer a farcical imputation of Bolshevik sympathies. Soaggrieved was Ouspensky that he forcefully instructed his pupils to sever all relations with Bennett(as earlier with Gurdjieff). In summer 1928, Gurdjieff’s calmer disengagement from his principalhelpers in France stimulated Mme Ouspensky to come to England for the first of successive summervisits. Henceforward, though the Ouspenskys’ personal relationship remained platonic even fractious,they shared their teaching role in England and America: he tirelessly retelling Gurdjieff’s ideas, sheattempting to create, in successive country houses, Prieuré-like conditions for practical work. By 1929Ouspensky was more than ever committed to his long-held personal theory of ‘Eternal Recurrence’:the strong sense that in every particular he was reliving his life – underpinned by the hypothesis thathis death, whensoever, would merely return him yet again to his birth in Moscow on 5 March 1878. Early in 1930 Ouspensky was disconcerted to receive the transactions of a small London groupindependently constituted by Bennett without prior permission; then in early summer A. R. Oragealso problematically re-appeared in England, having effectively separated from Gurdjieff. By October1930 Ouspensky had become concerned to entrench his own position, even at the cost of somepopularisation: at Warwick Gardens he began public lectures on ‘The Search for ObjectiveConsciousness’, précising Gurdjieff’s psychological ideas, without acknowledgement, as his(Ouspensky’s) ‘System’. To these lectures he invited Bennett and his small group thus effecting abrief reconciliation. In mid 1931 Ouspensky saw Gurdjieff for the last time, at the Cafe Henri IV at Fontainebleau,intimating that since Gurdjieff’s work had not succeeded in attracting the attention of ‘Higher Source’he himself was now attempting to. A final rupture resulted, which on Ouspensky’s side wasembittered. On returning to England, Ouspensky made (through Rosamund Sharp) an unsuccessfulattempt to recapture the interest of Orage. His disappointment here was offset by the publication of ANew Model of the Universe which complemented his lectures in attracting many new pupils. In thisclimate of expansion Ouspensky tasked Dr Nicoll, on 9 September 1931, to go away and teachGurdjieff’s ideas independently (the only such explicit mandate Ouspensky ever gave); a little later inthe year ‘The Dell’, at Sevenoaks, was taken for the work of Mme Ouspensky, at last permanentlysettled in England. Confused echoes of New Model and even of the Warwick Gardens lectures were beginning to beheard from literary sources, and in July 1932 Ouspensky was nettled to find himself caricatured as‘Professor August Moe’ in The Gap in the Curtain by John Buchan. Nevertheless this wideninginterest drew more members to the study groups, and ‘The Dell’ was relinquished as inadequate in the

second week of September, when the Ouspenskys were lent ‘Little Gaddesden’, a large Victorianmansion in seven acres of land near Hayes in Kent. On 26 August 1933, Gurdjieff published his first book Herald of Coming Good, its extravagant andprovocative tone suggesting to Ouspensky that its author had gone mad. Copies sent to Ouspensky’spupils, by C. S. Nott and Elizabeth Gordon, were called in and destroyed. (Here Ouspensky happilyanticipated the wishes of Gurdjieff himself, who quickly withdrew and suppressed his apprenticework.) By 1934 the contradictions between Ouspensky’s inner and outer life were more troublesome.Outwardly all seemed well: J. G. Bennett had returned to the fold while A. R. Orage, who haddeclined to, died suddenly on 5 November; a second edition of New Model swelled the stream ofnew enquirers and for these Ouspensky refined from his earlier lectures six lucid introductoryreadings, subsequently published as The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution. To deliver these,he enlisted from his pupils distinguished proxies like Dr Francis Roles (his personal physician),Robert John Grote Mayor (a member of the Cambridge ‘Apostles’), and a latecomer to his circleHenry John Sinclair, Lord Pentland (a former President of the Cambridge Union Society). In privateby contrast Ouspensky was melancholic and had begun to drink: despondent at not contacting HigherSource; tormented by the personal implications of Eternal Recurrence; and consumed by nostalgia forSt Petersburg. In spring 1935 this nostalgia was reinforced by a brief and poignant visit to LittleGaddesden from Olga and Thomas de Hartmann (whose Second Piano Sonata is dedicated toOuspensky’s idea of the Fourth Dimension). In 1935 recruitment was further stimulated by the journalist Rom Landau’s best-seller God Is My

Adventure with its substantial, explicit, and highly favourable reference to Ouspensky and ‘hisSystem’. By mid-summer even the facilities at Little Gaddesden had become quite inadequate.Therefore, with funds from well-to-do pupils, Ouspensky bought his most famous seat Lyne Place atVirginia Water twenty-three miles south-west of London – an imposing Regency house in nearly 100acres of farm land. Three months later both Ouspenskys moved in (though retaining both 55aGwendwr Road and 38 Warwick Gardens for use in London). The residential core at Lyne wasRussian – the Ouspenskys, the Savitskys, Mme Kadloubovsky, and a handful of St Petersburgpensioners: a few senior English pupils were co-opted for periods to manage the household andgrounds; and hundreds came every week-end to work. The acquisition of Lyne set the seal on Ouspensky’s sense of independence from Gurdjieff (whocontrastingly had been obliged to sell the Prieuré in 1933): for example though Ouspensky acceptedfrom C. S. Nott a typescript copy of G.’s seminal work Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson herefused to read it; then in November he rebuffed the lesbian editor Jane Heap, who had modestlyapplied to enter his groups (after herself teaching in France for eight years with Gurdjieff’s consent).While rejecting these concrete possibilities, Ouspensky consoled himself with lingering hopes ofcontacting Higher Source. Rom Landau’s essay had been that of a gifted dilettante, but in October 1936 there appeared the firstrelevant (though guarded) book by one of Ouspensky’s senior pupils: this was Kenneth Walker’sautobiography The Intruder, built around coded Work ideas, especially that of multiple selves.Among Ouspensky’s steady stream of recruits in 1936, three would later acquire significance:Rodney Collin-Smith, his sponsor Robert S. de Ropp, and the young Marie Seton who was bilingualin English and Russian. Meanwhile however, Ouspensky had begun to distance himself from J. G.Bennett, distrusting his self-will and extravagant claims.

By the autumn of 1937, Ouspensky was exciting new interest among youthful members of the Britishintelligentsia: he was read by Denis Healey a future Chancellor of the Exchequer; Gerald Heard andAldous Huxley visited him at Lyne, having attended his lectures at Warwick Gardens in companywith Christopher Isherwood. He resisted their urgings that, in view of Europe’s instability, he shouldemigrate to America. Just as Rom Landau had been repudiated after his book, J(ohn) B(oynton)Priestley now earned resentment for two generous literary salutes: first in his play I Have Been Here

Before premiered at the Royalty Theatre on 22 September (where Ouspensky is sympatheticallycharacterised as ‘Dr Görtler’) and secondly in his autobiographical Midnight on the Desert, wherePriestley describes his fascinated reading of New Model. Aldous Huxley also drew criticism forintroducing glimmerings of ‘Ouspensky’s System’ into Ends and Means. By 1938, Ouspensky had delegated much routine teaching, freeing himself to plan theinstitutionalisation of his groups. Suspecting – correctly – that he was still under Home Officesurveillance, he secured (through Kenneth Walker) the prior approval of Scotland Yard. In April1938 he formed the ‘Historico-Psychological Society’ of which he was the ‘Official Lecturer’. (TheSociety’s Committee included Ouspensky and his wife, Dr Walker, Lord Pentland, and Dr Roles; R.J. G. Mayor was librarian and treasurer.) Ouspensky next preoccupied himself with drafting, for thestrict adherence of Society members, scores of prohibitive rules, which he believed would promoteconsciousness: pupils should never mention Gurdjieff; never address each other by Christian names;never converse together before strangers; never speak to anyone who had left the groups etc. Ouspensky gave his last lecture at Warwick Gardens on 13 October 1938, the Society by then havingacquired Colet House at 46 Colet Gardens, an elegant and imposing building (close to GwendwrRoad) with a studio accommodating over 300 People. Ouspensky at 60 – magisterially established atLyne and Colet; surrounded by distinguished and loyal lieutenants; supported by the Historico-Psycho-logical Society; and having directly and indirectly under his governance 1000 pupils –seemed embarked on his great days. Yet shadows were not lacking: the Munich crisis in Septemberhad emphasised the fragility of all institutions; Mme Ouspensky, having contracted Parkinson’sdisease, was becoming bedridden; and Ouspensky himself (desolated by his continued failure tocontact Higher Source, or personally to acquire the noetic insights of a decisive mystical experience)was drinking more heavily. The final months of peace seemed to promise a vitalisation of the Society, through three independentshocks. The first was a striking demonstration of the Movements, given at Colet by a small classtaught by Gurdjieff’s pupils Rose Mary Nott and Jessmin Howarth; the second was a successfuloverture to the hereditary head of the Mevlevi dervishes, made in April by J. G. Bennett, andenthusiastically welcomed by Ouspensky; the third and overriding one was C. S. Nott’s plan to bringGurdjieff himself to London in September, to treat Mme Ouspensky’s chronic illness. All theseendeavours foundered on 3 September 1939, when Britain declared war on Germany. Conscriptionand evacuation completely disrupted the groups and Ouspensky’s work in London effectivelystopped. Lyne Place – far-sightedly stocked with every sort of provision – became a haven for severalWork families. Contraction, austerity, danger, and war psychosis marked Ouspensky’s closing period in England. On29 May 1940 the British Army evacuated from Dunkirk; Paris (where Gurdjieff remained) fell on 14June; eight days later France capitulated. With Hitler controlling the entire European seaboard fromNorway to the Spanish frontier, Ouspensky made a deeply meditated (and largely erroneous) politicalanalysis: that Germany would quickly win the war; that German hegemony would provoke a pan-European proletarian revolution, fanned by the U.S.S.R.; and that the Americas alone would surviveas a bulwark against the detested Bolshevism. In August 1940 the Battle of Britain was at crescendo,

not least in the skies above Lyne; on 23 August there commenced the ‘Blitz’ on London, in which55a Gwendwr Road was destroyed. Judging both present conditions and future prospects in England as quite impossible for his work,Ouspensky prepared to emigrate. He announced his intention abruptly at his last wartime meeting inEngland, held at Lyne on 25 January 1941: in practical terms his senior cadre were tasked to keepLyne going, and for their inner work to ‘stop thoughts’ (they might also, Ouspensky believed, derivesome benefit from reading Monks of Athos by Dawkins). Asked if he would begin groups inAmerica, Ouspensky unexpectedly responded that he could not foresee conditions in a continentwhich he had visited ‘only in previous incarnations’. Six days later, on 31 January 1941, he sailedfrom Liverpool for New York on the S.S. Georgic, leaving behind him virtually all his disconcertedpupils. Ouspensky’s six years in America were notable chiefly for the calamitous decay in his health, hopes,and integrity. He arrived in New York in March 1941 approximately on his sixty-third birthday,accompanied by a recent adherent the bravura writer Rodney Collin-Smith. Mme Ouspensky and herfamily had preceded him. Ouspensky’s welcome was assured by his many influential contacts: areception was given him at Miss Scott’s apartment; a New York studio was found for him on 79thStreet; and Marie Seton (independently in America) was engaged as his private secretary. In attracting new pupils, Ouspensky could capitalise on his stature as author of Tertium Organum

and New Model. He had nevertheless to take account of entrenched Oragean followers (including Mrand Mrs Nott, Muriel Draper, Jessmin Howarth, William Welch and Willem A. Nyland). At an earlyexploratory meeting with twenty of the Orage group in Muriel Draper’s house on Madison Avenue.Ouspensky showed more resolution than tact: he insisted Beelzebub not be discussed; that ‘Gurdjieffwas wrong’; and that he would leave for California if the group succeeded in extricating Gurdjieff toNew York. Generally the group was unimpressed, judging Ouspensky to be over-intellectual,pretentious, and lacking in real authority. Only a minority, encouraged by C. S. Nott, acceptedOuspensky provisionally and faute de mieux; from these Ouspensky scrupulously refused money,insisting it be sent to Gurdjieff in Paris. Helped by his wayward step-grandson Lonya, who gave public readings of the well-rehearsedWarwick Gardens lectures, Ouspensky gradually formed around his Oragean nucleus a new circle,whose first recorded meeting at 79th Street was on 10 June 1941. Within a month however he hadfurther alienated the old core by his assertion – evoking painful memories – that Orage had forgottenmuch and invented much. Ouspensky’s own presentation of the System, even in his early years inAmerica, proved flat and stale. Not only were his energies depleted by age, drink, and the debilitatingEast Coast climate, but he had lost all personal conviction. Of the forty-five people whom he gatheredinitially, only six remained at the end of 1941. In the autumn Schuyler B. Jackson (a former Oragean then resident in Florida) suggested a suitablecountry house, ‘Franklin Farms’ at Mendham, New Jersey, and Janet Collin-Smith (Rodney Collin-Smith’s wife) indicated willingness to pay for it. In a message read aloud at Lyne Place on 1November 1941, Ouspensky reported this development, called on experienced helpers to join him,insisted Lyne be maintained at the ‘highest possible level’, and warned against Bolshevism. (TheOrage group’s incompatible hopes that Gurdjieff himself might be brought to Franklin Farms werefinally dashed on 11 December, when the U.S.A. declared war on Germany.) The purchase of Franklin Farms and the installation of the Ouspenskys were completed in 1942, Theimposing three-storey granite house, a former residence of the Governor of New Jersey, stood on a

hilltop in 400 acres of agricultural land, with numerous out-buildings. Ouspensky had separatequarters from Mme Ouspensky and was chauffeured to his regular New York lectures by his mostintimate disciple Rodney Collin-Smith. Against the grand back-cloth of Franklin Farms, Ouspenskywas able slowly to increase his American following to approximately 150. Nevertheless his firstpriority from 1942 onwards was to defend his international reputation and self-styled ‘leadership ofthe Work’. Here the news from England was mixed: Dr Walker’s latest books Diagnosis of Man and The Circle

of Life handled their System insights discreetly and signalled no challenge; altogether more alarmingwere reports of J. G. Bennett’s unlicensed lectures and of his intention to produce an explicit book onthe ideas. In May 1942 Ouspensky wrote pressing Bennett to desist but received an evasive replywhich further disturbed his equilibrium. When in New York the publisher’s blurb on an imprint ofNew Model erroneously asserted that its author was ‘working with Gurdjieff in London’,Ouspensky’s reaction was disproportionately vehement. Ironically his assiduously promulgated image, as the only true custodian of a deeply valued teaching,was no longer mirrored in his private reflections. Pressed by Marie Seton – who had grownconcerned over his gourmet life-style and explosive temper – he shocked her by confiding hiscontempt for his pupils, his conviction that neither they nor he had gained anything from the System,and his intention, nevertheless, to maintain the role of teacher, because of the comfort and luxury itafforded. She urged him to give up the lectures until he had found his way again; when he refused,she left the Work. Though – by his own admission – Ouspensky was in a painfully false situation in America, he did notdeceive himself; nor perhaps was his unwillingness to undeceive his pupils wholly egotistical. Hisattention was attracted increasingly to England where, at least by contrast, his work had had a shiningintegrity. He had long since identified the chief threat to his legacy there as J. G. Bennett, with hisheadstrong initiatives and dubious esotericism. Now even Bennett’s mathematics were capable ofdisturbing him: as an author whose lifelong reputation turned on his interpretation of the ‘FourthDimension’, he construed Bennett’s preoccupation with a fifth dimension as a futile provocation. Hislast personal letter to Bennett, just before Christmas 1943, curtly dismissed the latter’s substantialpaper on this subject. Worse was to come: early in 1944 Ouspensky was shocked to learn thatBennett had gone to Lyne and canvassed his own ideas for developing the System, as againstOuspensky’s principle of conserving it; he immediately issued instructions further curtailing Bennett’sauthority. Ouspensky’s last three years in America invite compassion: he was trapped in a moral cul-de-sac; hisonly writing was a two-page introduction to his formal and repetitious lectures; his health finallycollapsed – his kidneys irreparably damaged by drink, and his general functioning almost suggestinghe had had a stroke. At Mendham he was troubled and bewildered by his wife’s acerbic vehemence;in New York he found the moral and material support of so-to-say the ‘Orageans’ progressivelywithdrawn, as Gurdjieff re-emerged after the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944. More and moreOuspensky began to shun human contact outside a small circle of intimates, which included LordPentland (appointed to Washington by the British authorities in 1944) and the melodramatic RodneyCollin-Smith. He continued to brood darkly on J. G. Bennett, first ordering all members of theHistorico-Psychological Society to ostracise him, and later (in spring 1945) instructing his Londonsolicitor to demand from that ‘charlatan and thief’ the return of ‘all Mr Ouspensky’s material’. From V.E. Day on 8 May 1945, Ouspensky’s English nucleus at Lyne Place – strangely ill-informedof his ruined health and oblivious of his altered disposition – awaited his return with almost Messianic

expectation. Ouspensky procrastinated. Ostensibly he was consumed with impatience for ColetGardens to be de-requisitioned from the Admiralty and prepared to receive him. More probably hewas waiting stoically for the final crisis in his health: the precise psychological moment when hecould enact with deathbed candour the long-planned dénouement of his life (which entailed nothingless than the simultaneous sacrifice of his own reputation and his pupils’ hopes). Ouspensky gave his last (and subjectively meretricious) lecture on the benefits of the System in NewYork in the summer of 1946. On 18 January 1947 at the Grand Ballroom of Steinway Hall, hesuddenly announced to his demoralised group of sixty that he was leaving for England the next day:Mme Ouspensky would remain at Franklin Farms, and those under her direction could continue; therest must shift for themselves. He sailed from New York on the S.S. Queen Elizabeth on 19 January1947 (his considerable entourage including Aubrey Wolton, Basil Tilley, and his newly acquiredsecretary Miss Quinn). Mme Ouspensky, now incapacitated with Parkinson’s disease, did not see herhusband off, and they never met again. Ouspensky arrived at Southampton on 23 January, and was driven with Miss Quinn straight to LynePlace. There senior Society members and Mme Kadloubovsky were reunited with him in anatmosphere of suppressed emotionality, only heightened by his undisguisable physical frailty. Withindays Gurdjieff sent a message inviting Ouspensky to join him in Paris, and for the last timeOuspensky refused a reconciliation. Instead, on 6 February he tasked Dr Roles to supervise thespeedy collection of an audience of 300 – selecting new and normal people ‘uncontaminated’ bySystem ideas. Such was Ouspensky’s earliest public hint of his startling re-orientation. On 26 February he painfully took the platform at Colet Gardens between Miss Quinn and AubreyWolton, for the first of six revolutionary Wednesday meetings. Though his demeanour still impressed,his replies to increasingly desperate questions were curt, dismissive, obstructive – breathing abroadthe spirit of desolate nihilism earlier confided to Marie Seton. Essentially he claimed he had given noteaching in the past and had none to give now. His audience of bemused newcomers groped for anexplanation in clinical terms; more ironically the old cadre – as Ouspensky might have foreseen –reassured themselves that his volte face was nothing more than a salutary and emancipating teachingdevice. The possibility that he was simply confessing the bald truth, as he now saw it, was notentertained in any quarter. At a second meeting, on 5 March 1947, Ouspensky’s sixty-ninth birthday, he again frustrated allquestions and reiterated his bankruptcy, and so again at a third meeting one week later: he could notcredit the possibility of evolution, and had no help to give. On 23 March, after just two months inEngland, he threw Lyne Place into further turmoil by announcing that, since ‘a start could not bemade that way’, he was returning to America. Consequently in ensuing weeks scores of disciplesmade frantic arrangements to meet this contingency – only to be told that Ouspensky would in fact bestaying. In this atmosphere of confusion, a fourth barren meeting at Colet was held on 7 May. At Lyne Ouspensky was at first substantially dependent on his secretary Miss Quinn and hisphysician Dr Roles: these were joined in mid-April by Rodney Collin-Smith, and in mid-May byLonya and an old Russian friend from pre-1914. The senior English pupils half sought and halffeared confidences from this intimate coterie. By 19 May Miss Quinn had been authorised topromulgate the somewhat obvious fact that Ouspensky had ‘abandoned the System’ but few Englishpupils would credit her. Ouspensky himself, when pressed by Dr Walker, at the fifth and penultimateColet meeting on 21 May, was at pains to convey his even starker judgement by retorting ‘There is noSystem’. Then, briefly departing from his nihilistic tenor, he advised people to ‘remember’ (alludingnot to Gurdjieffian ‘self-remembering’ but to Eternal Recurrence). At his final meeting on 18 June,

Ouspensky conveyed – with more desperation than hope – the need for everyone to begin again,starting from what he or she really wanted. Then, having denied the possibility of life after death, hewas helped from the platform and given an injection. He never spoke in public again. Ouspensky’s last days are highly problematical. What is certain is that his inevitable and imminentdeath, his stress on Eternal Recurrence, and his abjuration of the System, created in the closed circleat Lyne an electrifying atmosphere. Though the majority of his pupils met the situation with a calmself-interrogation, a few (including Dr Roles) preferred various chimerical consolations involvingtelepathy, transmutation, and angelic presences etc. Most indulgent among the latter was RodneyCollin-Smith, who conceived events as a neo-Mediaeval Mystery Play, in which his own andOuspensky’s every action bore cosmic significance After Lonya left for Mendham on 4 June, Ouspensky had for intimate company Miss Quinn, RodneyCollin-Smith and Josch the cat; he kept very much to his room, though on fine days he might spendan hour under the cedar tree, and on wet days in the Green drawing-room; he ate very little, spokevery little, slept very little, and smoked a good deal; he continued to be attended by Dr Roles. In late August Ouspensky evidently wished to replicate in Mendham and New York the shockadministered at Colet and Lyne, and announced his intention to leave for the U.S.A. on 4 September.Despite the earlier débâcle in March and despite his increasing debility, his pupils on both sides of theAtlantic were again galvanised into action. Only when his luggage was actually aboard, andSouthampton dock gates opened to admit his Daimler, did he say, “I’m not going to America thistime”. In the last months of his life, Ouspensky – urged on by Rodney Collin-Smith – undertook exhaustingcar journeys by night to revisit West Wickham, Sidlesham, Sevenoaks, and Hayes. (Mere nostalgiacan hardly account for this stoical effort, hence more plausibly construed in the context of EternalRecurrence.) Though the story that Ouspensky, on his final day, dressed painfully and gave hisdisciples at Lyne a moving valediction, is almost certainly apocryphal, there is broad consensus thathe worked on himself at the end, in a manner reflecting nobility of spirit. At dawn on 2 October 1947, Piotr Demianovich Ouspensky died at Lyne Place. He was buried in thechurchyard of Holy Trinity Church in the parish of Botley’s and Lyne, and a requiem service washeld at the Russian church in Pimlico. When the elders of the Historico-Psychological Society soughtguidance from Mme Ouspensky in Mendham she unexpectedly referred them to Gurdjieff in Paris.Several complied (Walker, Tilley, Wolton, and Pentland): others held aloof (Roles, Mayor, Collin-Smith). After two years of intense activity, focused on Gurdjieff’s apartment at 6 Rue des ColonelsRenard and more briefly on the Wellington Hotel in New York, Gurdjieff himself died at Neuilly on29th October 1949... The vexed politics of the ensuing Gurdjieffian diaspora – however fascinatinghistorically, psychologically and sociologically – are not ideally addressed within the paradigm of aGurdjieff/Ouspensky dichotomy. As the author of Tertium Organum and A New Model of the Universe, Ouspensky’s substantial andquite independent literary reputation is assured. His position within the Gurdjieffian canon is moreequivocal: inevitably so, since he quickly repudiated Gurdjieff and ultimately repudiated his ideas.From the time that he struck his independent posture in England in 1921, Ouspensky assiduouslyprojected himself as Gurdjieff’s equal (so successfully that the image prevails, even today, injournalistic borrowings and middle-brow assumptions). Yet no repudiation, no historical revisionism,can cancel out the simple fact that Gurdjieff taught Ouspensky; that in thirty years Ouspensky broughtnothing except a superb expository skill, to the ideas he received from Gurdjieff in 1916.

In his precociously assumed role of teacher Ouspensky exercised great natural authority, probity,industry, and organisational ability. During his twenty year dispensation in England, no-onepromulgated Work theory with more fidelity and intellectual virility than he; and arguably no-onetempered it less with feeling, or buttressed it less with praxis. Ouspensky drew no understanding fromGurdjieff’s Movements or Sacred Dances; in group he offered small personal counsel orencouragement; nor – despite Essentuki – did he grasp the pivotal importance of Gurdjieff’s exercisesin attention and bodily sensation. By 1925, when he first acknowledged a certain deficiency, herevealingly situated it in the domain of knowledge (‘the missing parts of the System’) rather than inthe quality of his work on himself. Ouspensky will be remembered for centuries. His enduring memorial will be his posthumous book In

Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, a masterpiece of clarity andpsychological juxtaposition. “No system of gnostic soteriological philosophy that has been publishedto the modern world,” writes the critic Philip Mairet, “is comparable to it in power and intellectualarticulation”. Yet the paradox is breathtaking, for here par excellence is the book of the abandonedSystem, comprising for three parts in four the words of Ouspensky’s repudiated master GeorgeIvanovitch Gurdjieff.

Copyright © James Moore 2007

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