For Russian intellectuals not partial to the Bolshevik revolution, 1919 wasn’t exactly a good year. The earthquakes of anarchy brought on by a world war and then a civil war, and the prospect of an unknown and uncertain future, sent artists and thinkers suspicious of Lenin and the Bolsheviks running to Europe. Berlin, Paris, and London swelled with the influx of émigrés. And for esoteric philosophers, obsessed with questions of time, consciousness, and the “psychology of man’s possible evolution,” it may have seemed a particularly inauspicious year.
Such might have been the feeling of P. D. Ouspensky, philosopher of the eternal recurrence, author of a work on translogical metaphysics, and, at the time, a somewhat beleaguered student of the enigmatic Greco-Armenian teacher, G. I. Gurdjieff.
In chapter eighteen of his masterpiece, In Search of the Miraculous (1949), the story of his time with Gurdjieff, Ouspensky tells of his escape from the revolution and of his journey across Russia, from St. Petersburg through the Caucasus, to Turkey, Constantinople, and the outskirts of Europe. The record reads like an adventure story. Russia at that time had become a vast minefield of war, famine, sickness, and crime, and Ouspensky’s report rivals the less than verifiable accounts of Gurdjieff’s own spiritual journeys in Meetings with Remarkable Men (1963). As a journalist, Ouspensky covered the revolution in a series of letters for the New Age, the London magazine of ideas edited by the man who would soon take Ouspensky’s place as Gurdjieff’s chief lieutenant, A. R. Orage.
Ouspensky’s account of everyday life during the revolution, his analysis of political events, and his profound antipathy for the Bolsheviks come through in his Letters from Russia: 1919. They flesh out the cool, distant, philosophical voice characteristic of In Search of the Miraculous. Times were difficult. In one letter he writes: “I personally am still alive only because my boots and trousers and other articles of clothing—all ‘old campaigners’—are still holding together. When they end their existence, I shall evidently end mine.”
While the workers of the world united, the author of books on the Tarot, the fourth dimension, and the superman, whose talks about India and his travels in the East filled lecture halls in St. Petersburg and Moscow, carried luggage as a house porter to support his family.
But in 1919 Ouspensky experienced more than a physical journey and revolution. As the charismatic “arch-disturber of sleep” Gurdjieff led his band of students across an exploding Russia, Ouspensky faced his growing doubts about his teacher and decided to act. Since 1915, when they first met in a cheap Moscow café, Ouspensky had sat at Gurdjieff’s feet and absorbed his teaching. The irony of meeting the “magician” Gurdjieff in precisely the drab, gray, everyday world that Ouspensky had journeyed to the East in order to escape was not lost on his commentators—nor, I think, on Ouspensky himself.
At the start of his inner and outer adventures with Gurdjieff, which would eventually lead him to London and independent work, Ouspensky said that he “had come to the conclusion a long time ago that there was no escape from the labyrinth of contradictions in which we live except by an entirely new road, unlike anything hitherto known or used by us.” He knew then as “an undoubted fact that beyond the thin film of false reality there existed another reality from which, for some reason, something separated us.”
The “miraculous” that he searched for was a penetration into this new reality. That he should find it in an unfashionable back-street café, frequented by small dealers and commission agents, and not in the ashrams of India or the bamboo jungles of Ceylon, must have piqued his sense of the absurd. Subsequent events could only have added to it, not the least of them his uncertainty about Gurdjieff as a transmitter of what Ouspensky later came to call the “system.”
As any practitioner of Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way soon discovers, a mystery theater atmosphere surrounds the lives of its early advocates. Some see the split between guru and chela as a vast historical symbol, a living hieroglyph of esoteric wisdom, acted out by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky for some reason unknown to their followers and perhaps unknowable except for some future students. Others see Ouspensky as a weak intellectual, unable to grasp the true import of Gurdjieff’s teachings; see, for example, James Moore’s less than unbiased account in Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth (1991) and William Patrick Patterson’s Struggle of the Magicians (1997). Still others, like me, simply recognize that however remarkable a man Gurdjieff was, Ouspensky himself was no pushover. The mind capable of writing A New Model of the Universe (1931) would sooner or later leave Gurdjieff’s nest and set up on his own.
And such, at the beginning of his perilous escape from the revolution, were Ouspensky’s own thoughts. During a six-week stay in Essentuki, in the Caucasus, Gurdjieff, according to Ouspensky, began to change. Suddenly, for no reason, he abandoned the “work on themselves” he had put his followers through for the previous three years and said he was leaving for the Black Sea. Why had he stopped, especially after the great difficulties his group had faced in getting the “work” started there? Ouspensky “had to confess that my confidence in G. began to waver from this moment.” Thus began a separation that cost the philosopher many a painful decision and a trial by fire that at times had the potential of costing him his life.
It is clear from his letters that Ouspensky loathed his time in Ekaterinodar, a city of squalor, bribery, and sickness. He came there by way of Essentuki, where he had arrived at his momentous decision to leave Gurdjieff. It was not a sudden revelation, but the product of a slow, cumulative process. “For a whole year,” he writes, “something had been accumulating and I gradually began to see that there were many things I could not understand and that I had to go.”
And so he tried. When conditions got worse—with Cossack raids on the Bolshevik-occupied city—Ouspensky decided to leave. He would try to reach London, where he knew Orage and others from the New Age and where he could make a living with his pen. But he wouldn’t leave before Gurdjieff. Reluctant to abandon his teacher, Ouspensky stayed until the last moment, waiting until Gurdjieff left before making his own departure.
But by then it was too late. Madness erupted, and Ouspensky was trapped. All ways out of Essentuki were cut off. For a man who had been taught that human beings are in prison, caged by the walls of “sleep,” the less metaphorical restraints of a bandit Bolshevik regime, complete with robberies, executions, requisitions, and famine were, one suspects, a gold mine of opportunities to remember himself. And indeed it was during this period that Ouspensky discovered a strange new self-confidence. Not ordinary self-confidence, but rather a “confidence in the unimportance and the insignificance of the self, that self which we usually know.” If something big faced him, something that would strain his every nerve, this new “I,” he believed, would be equal to it. And this, Ouspensky wrote, was the result of his work with Gurdjieff.
By early January 1920, Ouspenky found himself in Constantinople, washed to the edge of Europe by the great wave of the revolution. Friends had died; he and his family had suffered hardship, although they were, he tells us, more fortunate than others. But in a city already brimming over with refugees, expositors of esoteric psychologies were not in the best position to earn a living. Once again challenged by necessity, Ouspensky supported his family by teaching English—which he spoke poorly—to his fellow Russian émigrés.
He managed to get other work as well. He set up lectures and started groups, discussing psychology and philosophy in relation to esotericism. Gurdjieff soon arrived, and the two worked together in what now seems like a last honeymoon of fruitful activity before the categorical split. Although Ouspensky still had his doubts, he agreed to help Gurdjieff translate material for his ballet, The Struggle of the Magicians, perhaps a more apt swan song for their collaboration than either suspected at the time. They visited the Mevlevi dervishes in Pera, the European quarter of the city, where Gurdjieff had begun one of his many Institutes for the Harmonious Development of Man. They also walked through the maze of bazaars, where, more than likely, Gurdjieff wangled a deal or two on the side.
And then the miracle happened. If Ouspensky had hoped to find the miraculous through Gurdjieff, what happened to him in June 1921 was an event almost specifically designed to make him believe in the possibility of fairy godmothers. Unknown to Ouspensky, Claude Bragdon, an artist and publisher, had put out a translation of Ouspensky’s first major work, Tertium Organum (1912), in America. To his amazement, Bragdon discovered he had a bestseller on his hands. A young Russia émigré, Nicholas Bessaraboff, had arrived at Bragdon’s door with a copy of Ouspenky’s metaphysical prose poem on time, eternity, and the fourth dimension, demanding Bragdon publish it. Bragdon, who spoke Russian, read it and did publish it. Now, through the offices of the New Age, he had managed to track its mysterious author down and sent him a substantial royalty check. Ouspensky must have had a peak experience when it arrived. He had made contact with the outside world at last. It had come to him.
Ouspensky asked Bragdon for help getting himself and his family to London. Difficulties arose. Then the second miracle occurred. Bragdon received a telegram from Viscountess Rothermere, wife of a powerful English newspaper baron. Tertium Organum had stimulated her immensely, and she absolutely had to meet its publisher. An afternoon visit to Bragdon’s office led to another telegram, this one to Ouspenky: “DEEPLY IMPRESSED BY YOUR BOOK TERTIUM ORGANUM WISH TO MEET YOU NEW YORK OR LONDON WILL PAY ALL EXPENSES.”
And if that wasn’t miracle enough, a cable for one hundred pounds was included, a sizeable sum at the time. Visas were all that remained, difficult things to come by for refugees. But again luck was on Ouspensky’s side. J. G. Bennett, who would later become the third major interpreter of Gurdjieff’s work (after Ouspensky and Orage), was at that time an agent in the British Foreign Service, stationed in Constantinople. He had met Ouspensky and had helped him secure a place for his meetings. Bennett arranged the paperwork, and Ouspensky was soon on his way to London.
Previously a hungry philosopher, lifting suitcases for his daily crust, the forty-three-year-old Ouspensky arrived in London as the feted author of a bestselling work on metaphysics, a romantic survivor of the collapse of Russia, the teacher of a system that was a revolution in its own right, and the darling, at least for a time, of a wealthy and beautiful woman eager to introduce him to London’s literary circles and wine and dine him at her expense. Surely Ouspensky had found the miraculous.
His arrival in London was greeted with the kind of reception every author fantasizes about at least once in his lifetime. Colin Wilson, no stranger to a sudden eruption into fame, gives an idea of what Ouspensky found when he got off the boat in August 1921. It was, he writes, a “fairy-tale reception” by the “beautiful Lady Rothermere”:
Then a magnificent party…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…. Ouspensky’s buildup had been impressive: a mysterious foreign philosopher who had been forced to flee from the Bolsheviks, had endured immense hardships and…against all the odds, had made his way to London…his lectures turned out to be…startlingly new and strange. The conquest was complete. Ouspensky had become the intellectual flavor of the month.
Ouspensky’s first stop was a hotel in Bloomsbury, that part of London associated with the British Museum, Virginia Woolf, and Lytton Strachey. Later he moved to a small studio flat in Gwendwr Road, near Baron’s Court, paid for by Lady Rothermere. The building, now demolished, was described by Kenneth Walker as one of Victorian style, “uniformly dismal in pattern.” During a meeting with Ouspensky, Walker inspected the atmosphere of the philosopher’s “cell,” Ouspensky’s home for more than a decade. He found a small bed, two armchairs, a gas fire, a low bookcase, and a low mahogany table. Books, papers, letters, pens, a typewriter, a camera, a galvanometer, and an “unknown scientific instrument” wrestled for space. Reproductions of the old masters hung on the walls. A hunk of bread and a half-eaten tin of sardines atop the mantelpiece suggested “a nice disregard for the inconvenience of which life is chiefly composed.”
Soon Ouspensky began to hold meetings to expound Gurdjieff’s system, first in Lady Rothermere’s studio, later in Warwick Gardens in Kensington. Eventually, as attendance at his lectures grew in the 1930s, Ouspensky acquired first a large house in Gadsden, Kent, then Lyne Place in Virginia Water, a suburb of London. In Lyne Place he set up an institute comparable in size, character, and ambition to Gurdjieff’s own Prieuré in Fontainebleau, outside Paris.
Although Ouspensky had doubts about his teacher and was resolved to scale the uncongenial heights of higher consciousness on his own, he nevertheless continued to have faith in the system. Gurdjieff himself may have gone off the rails—readers can consult the evidence and conclude for themselves—but the “work” was Ouspensky’s bedrock. At least until his bizarre last meetings in 1947, shortly before his death. In the end, after teaching the system for more than twenty-five years, a sick, tired, and searingly honest Ouspensky shocked his audience in Colet Gardens by announcing that there was no system and that they had to start again from the beginning and think for themselves.
Before Gurdjieff, Ouspensky was an enthusiastic artist-philosopher, in love with nature, beauty, art, and the fairer sex and confident of our ability to push the mind into the farther reaches of reality. And after Gurdjieff? What is evident is that the years of fruitless search, his demanding work with Gurdjieff, and the challenges of living in a war-torn and revolutionary Russia took their toll. J. G. Bennett tells the story that males in the Ouspensky clan alternated between life-loving Peters and world-denying Demians. Ouspenksy was dealt an uncomfortably equal share of both characters. Few in London knew the Ouspensky who had caroused with Russian Symbolist poets at the Stray Dog Café, headquarters of prerevolutionary St. Petersburg’s avant-garde. But if any had, they would have noticed a change. The Ouspensky who arrived in a London eager for spiritual renewal and soon to give forth a Waste Land offered a teaching that would shock many, disgust a few, and exhilarate others. He was a very serious man. Peter hadn’t disappeared entirely; Ouspensky was fond of good food and frequented a Chinese restaurant on Oxford Street. But Demian had gained the upper hand.
And the teaching? Man is “asleep.” We are robots driven by outside forces. We think we have will and consciousness and that we are free, but this belief is precisely the prison that cages us and the soporific that keeps us asleep. The first move in our “war against sleep” is to realize our absolute mechanicalness and inability to do.
Many were not taken with the message, or with the messenger. The occultist A. E. Waite, author of books on mysticism and Kabbalah, is said to have walked out of one of Ouspensky’s lectures, saying, “Mr. Ouspensky, there is no love in your system.” Dry, professorial, and brief, Ouspensky was unlike the effervescently charming Orage, who believed that in Ouspensky he had found “someone who knows”—until, that is, he met Gurdjieff himself. Unflatteringly compared in appearance to Woodrow Wilson, the stout, solid, close-cropped, white-haired, pincenezed Ouspensky lacked Gurdjieff’s incomparable panache.
The writer Rom Landau, author of the bestselling God Is My Adventure (1939) and later a student of Ouspensky, tells of Ouspensky’s reserve, born of a “self-discipline not to indulge in superfluous little activities…. Whatever Ouspensky had to say was said in the shortest possible way, and was followed by silence.” Some described him as a man of “dominant, if not domineering type of character.” Others said he looked like “a dejected bird, huddled up in a rain storm.”
In many ways, Ouspensky was not really cut out for the role he began to play in England and later in the United States: that of the esoteric teacher. He was, first and foremost, a romantic philosopher and writer. The admirably hard-edged logic and unswerving precision he brought to the “work” was in many ways paid for by the slow desiccation of his more gentle artistic side. This side became known to people who got close to him, like C. S. Nott, whose Journey through This World (1969) gives an account of meeting Ouspensky at Lyne Place in 1936. By then the recourse to drink that would eventually kill him had begun, as had the nostalgic evocations of older times in Russia.
But before these sad developments, Ouspensky enjoyed an opportunity to influence a select audience of London’s literary lights that any thinker, esoteric or otherwise, would envy. One can imagine the exchange, verbal or perhaps more subtle, between him and T. S. Eliot as they eyed each other at Lady Rothermere’s soirée. Much of Eliot’s poetry deals with the themes of time, eternity, and our inveterate tendency to avoid seeing the world as it really is, all themes central to Ouspensky’s message. In Four Quartets Eliot wrote, “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past,” an Ouspenskian proposition if there ever was one.
Ouspensky made some significant immediate conquests among the intelligent men and women who attended his lectures, dissatisfied with the spiritual lassitude of England between the wars. Along with acquiring Kenneth Walker, a Harley Street physician and author of a spiritual autobiography, Ouspensky also stole one of C. G. Jung’s early followers in England, in whom Jung had high hopes. Maurice Nicoll, later to be the author of Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, returned from his first encounter with Ouspensky so excited that he shook his pregnant wife awake to tell her of the experience. Before meeting Ouspensky, during a dark night of the soul, Nicoll had prayed to the god Hermes for a message, a way out of confusion. Ouspensky, he believed, was his answer, and he later went on to teach the system in his own heavily Christianized variant.
This descent is familiar to students of the Fourth Way. What is less known is Ouspensky’s influence on literary history. Like Tertium Organum’s effect on the Russian avant-garde, the presence of Ouspenskian ideas in English literature between the wars is a topic rarely discussed in the academy. But along with Eliot, ideas from the system appeared in the work of other major writers. The character of Mr. Proptor in Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer (1939) is said to be modeled on Ouspensky. “All personality is a prison,” Huxley’s character says. “Potential good is anything that helps you get out of prison”—an aphorism that wouldn’t be out of place in one of Ouspensky’s lectures. In The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers (1980), James Webb suggests that Huxley researched the perennial philosophy by attending Ouspensky’s meetings and points out that Huxley refers to “negative emotions,” a central “work” term, in his description of a bad trip in The Doors of Perception (1954). Charles Williams, the Dante scholar and member of the latter-day Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, wrote a novel dealing with aspects of time and space familiar to Ouspensky. Many Dimensions (1931) posits a universe very much like Ouspensky’s new model. But not all were well-disposed to Ouspensky’s theories. The vitriolic artist and writer Wyndham Lewis, who characterized Gurdjieff as a “Levantine psychic shark,” lumped Ouspensky together with other “fancy time theorists” like Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust, and Charlie Chaplin in his critique of modern culture, Time and Western Man (1927).
Yet it was as a philosopher of time, and not as an exponent of Gurdjieff’s system, that Ouspensky would have his most direct influence on English letters. September 22, 1937, was the first night of the famous playwright and novelist J. B. Priestley’s new play, I Have Been Here Before. Visitors to the Royal Theatre that evening read in their programs that the strange theories of time and recurrence of the character of Dr. Gortler were based on an “astonishing book,” A New Model of the Universe, by one P. D. Ouspensky. As Kenneth Walker’s account tells us, Ouspensky, suffering a hangover from his uncertain days in Russia, conducted his teaching in an atmosphere of secrecy, shunning public attention. To have his name read each night by the audience of a West End theater while watching a hit play must have seemed quite a cosmic joke, although it certainly didn’t hurt the sales of the book. Priestley, having been exposed to Ouspensky’s ideas about eternal recurrence and six-dimensional time, dove deeply into them, but never managed to meet the man himself. His very celebrity made Ouspensky see him as a potential “threat to security.” This didn’t stop Priestley, a “time-haunted man,” from spending the rest of his career in some ways pursuing the questions raised by Ouspensky and later by Maurice Nicoll.
The symbiosis between art and reality is rife with irony. The very atmosphere of mystery that surrounded Ouspensky, made public through Priestley’s play, lent him the dramatic air of the character of Dr. Gortler and, for a time, attracted more attention to him. Foreign, enigmatic, preoccupied, impatient of the civilities that make up our usual social conduct, Ouspensky appeared in the consciousness of cultured London in the late 1930s much like Priestley’s character. A man from elsewhere and elsewhen, refugee or exile, who in some strange way saw deeper into the ambiguous face of the world than the rest of us. A man for whom time, indeed, was of the essence. If Ouspensky’s later years were filled with sadness and disappointment, his journey out of the chaos of his homeland into a literary London eager to hear his message has the aura of myth. It is a timeless symbol of the eternal search that the Ouspensky of Tertium Organum believed was the meaning of life.