The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky (11 page)

The next three years were to see this learning process accelerated. As the Revolution began, Gurdjieff recognized that it would no longer be possible to work in Russia. He sent Ouspensky a postcard saying that he was going back home, to Alexandropol. Ouspensky and the Petrograd group had already decided to leave, so when Gurdjieff invited Ouspensky to join him, he took a train for the Caucasus. In Tiflis (now Tbilisi), the capital of Georgia, drunken soldiers held meetings on the platform all night, and three were shot - one for theft, the second because he was mistaken for the first, and the third because he was mistaken for the second. In Alexandropol, Ouspensky met Gurdjieff's family, and saw a photograph of Gurdjieff that revealed 'with undoubted accuracy what his profession had been at the time it was made' - he adds that, since this was his own discovery, he will keep it to himself. The photograph was the one that showed Gurdjieff as a stage hypnotist. Ouspensky seems to have tried to keep this aspect of Gurdjieff a secret, possibly because he believed Gurdjieff used it for sexual purposes. (Gurdjieff was later to reveal his former profession in his book
Herald of Coming Good
, published in 1933.)

Ouspensky was impressed by Gurdjieff's filial respect for his father and mother - the father was over 80 - Gurdjieff listened to his father's conversation for hours on end, stimulating him with questions.

After two weeks they decided to return to Petrograd. But at Tiflis they met a general who had been one of Gurdjieff's pupils and what he told Gurdjieff made the latter change his mind about returning. He left Ouspensky to go on alone. But before that happened, an interesting conversation took place. When Ouspensky asked how he could strengthen his 'I', Gurdjieff told him that he should already be feeling his 'I' differently. Ouspensky had to admit that he felt exactly the same as usual. But two years later he was to experience this sense of a 'controlling ego', the 'owner' of the horse and carriage, and to know that his years with Gurdjieff
had
borne fruit after all. 'Man number four' had come into being.

In Moscow and Petrograd, Ouspensky passed on to Gurdjieff's students the message that they should join him in the Caucasus. When he returned, Gurdjieff had moved to Essentuki - not far away - and finally a group of 12 foregathered there. It included Ouspensky's wife and step-daughter, Thomas de Hartmann and his wife Olga, and a pupil called Zaharoff.

Here, during the next six weeks, Gurdjieff introduced them to the 'Stop!' exercise, and to the idea of 'super-effort' - deliberately pushing yourself further when tired. It seems to have been at this point in his career that Gurdjieff began to introduce the strenuous physical exercises that became such a central part of his method. A typical one is described by Ouspensky: sitting on the floor with knees bent and palms close together between the feet, the pupil had to lift one leg and count up to ten, saying 'Om' instead of using numbers, then up to nine, then up to eight, and so on, down to one, then start repeating it all backwards, meanwhile 'sensing' his right eye. Then he had to separate the thumb and 'sense' his left ear. And so on. When this exercise was mastered, the pupils had to add breathing exercises to it, and after that, still more 'complications' were introduced. In addition to this, they were all made to fast. And in spite of physical weakness, they were made to run for miles in the heat, stand with extended arms, or mark time at the double. All these, Gurdjieff explained, were merely 'preliminary' exercises.

But it was during these exercises that Ouspensky had his one experience of 'higher consciousness'. In a room alone, he began to mark time at the double while performing breathing exercises. As he was pouring with sweat and his head was spinning, 'suddenly something seemed to crack or move inside me and my breathing went on evenly and properly at the rate I wanted it to.'

I shut my eyes and continued to mark time, breathing easily and freely, and feeling exactly as though strength was increasing in me and that I was getting lighter and stronger. I thought that if I could continue to run in this way for a certain time I should get still more interesting results because waves of a joyful trembling had already begun to go through my body which, as I knew from previous experiments, preceded what I called the opening of the inner consciousness. But at this moment someone came into the room and I stopped.

Ouspensky says that this taught him that an exercise can be transferred from the mind to the 'moving centre'. This clearly has much in common with William James's 'second wind' and with Bennett's experience at Fontainebleau (see p.55), when the 'breakthrough' was again achieved by strenuous and agonizing physical effort.

All at once, just as the pupils were beginning to feel that they were at last achieving something significant, Gurdjieff shocked them all by announcing that he was dropping the Work, and going to Tuapse, on the Black Sea coast. Ouspensky says that this was the moment when his faith in Gurdjieff first began to waver. It all seemed so pointless. He went to Tuapse with Gurdjieff, then decided to return Petrograd. He stayed there until after the Bolshevik takeover, then, feeling that 'something sickly and clammy was drawing near', he left for the Caucasus again. Ouspensky was to hate Communism with a total and virulent hatred all his life.

Meanwhile, Gurdjieff had decided to move a few miles down the coast, near to Sochi. Typically, he decided to make this a test for his followers. In his book
Our Life with Mr Gurdjieff
, Hartmann describes how Gurdjieff bought a cart, and told them they were going to take a short cut to Sochi over the mountains. The Hartmanns were sent on ahead, and found the climb exhausting in the heat, with their city clothing (Olga was wearing high-heeled shoes). They stopped at an inn for tea, hoping to stay the night, but when Gurdjieff arrived, he decided that the night was so fine that they might as well continue. They stumbled on exhaustedly until two in the morning, when Gurdjieff announced they would make a fire. It was raining, and they had to struggle through the undergrowth to find dry wood. Finally they made tea and most of them lay down to sleep on the hard stones. But Hartmann was told that he had to keep guard. He sat there until dawn, when Gurdjieff announced it was time to set off. Now Hartmann was told he could lie on top of the luggage. In fact this was worse than walking, for if he dozed off, he fell off the luggage.

Finally, at midday, they passed through a village, bought cooked lamb and beans, and Hartmann had a deep sleep. That night, again, they needed a fire because they could hear the howling of wolves and jackals, which might have killed the horses. They took turns on guard. The next day at noon they found a deserted posthouse, and spent two days recovering. When they resumed their journey, Hartmann observed that he was no longer tired. The 'super-effort' had caused a breakthrough to a higher energy level, James's 'vital reserves.' Eventually, when they arrived at a pleasant little villa near Sochi, Hartmann felt he was in heaven. Nevertheless, he fell ill with typhoid and almost died; he attributed his recovery to the fact that Gurdjieff sat by his bed and somehow 'infused' vitality.

Ouspensky joined them there. So did a Petrograd disciple, Leonid Stoerneval. His wife had been deeply unwilling to leave Petrograd, but shortly after they left, the Bolsheviks took over. Hartmann had had a similar escape: the day after he left Petrograd, soldiers had come to his home to arrest him.

Again, Gurdjieff revealed the unpredictable part of his nature. For some reason, he turned against Zaharoff and virtually forced him to leave. Ouspensky was upset; his faith in Gurdjieff the man - as distinguished from the System - was beginning to collapse.

In February 1918, they moved to another village. The danger now was being cut off by the Bolsheviks. Then Gurdjieff decided to go back to Essentuki. Work there became harder still. They were ordered to fast and the men were separated from the women. The 'movements' became more and more complicated and difficult. The aristocratic Hartmann was made to go to Kislovodsk to sell silk wound on to cards - until Gurdjieff relented. The women were ordered to give up their jewellery, and Olga de Hartmann cried all night, but dutifully handed it over. Gurdjieff then gave it back to her. But another woman who handed over her jewellery, confident that she would receive it back, never saw it again. Gurdjieff seemed to be teaching in harshly practical parables.

While in Essentuki, Gurdjieff's family arrived - nearly 30 of them. Turks had invaded Alexandropol, and his father had been killed. Gurdjieff was forced to look after this crowd of starving relatives. It was as if fate was subjecting him to the same 'testing' that he was inflicting on his pupils.

Meanwhile, Ouspensky was now at last certain that he had to break with Gurdjieff:

I saw clearly that I had been mistaken about many things that I had ascribed to G, and that by staying with him now I should not be going in the same direction I went at the beginning.

To try to explain his meaning, he says that if Gurdjieff had all the time been leading him into the 'way of the monk', he would have left - not because he did not respect the way of the monk, but because
it was not his way
. And neither, he felt, was the way the Work was now developing.

Ouspensky had at last recognized what, perhaps, he should have realized three years earlier. Yet he had undoubtedly received a great deal from Gurdjieff. In any case, there was now no going back. All he could do was to move to another house and continue work on
A New Model of the Universe
, as if the meeting with Gurdjieff had never happened.

Five

Gurdjieff and his followers left Essentuki at the beginning of August 1918, and made their way 100 miles southwest to the Black Sea. Gurdjieff had succeeded in escaping with his usual incredible effrontery. He had asked the Essentuki Soviet for permission to mount an archaeological expedition to the mountains where, he said, he hoped to find gold. He would need large quantities of alcohol for washing the gold. The Soviet provided the alcohol, together with the necessary tents and other equipment.

Ouspensky, who had also meant to go south, was trapped when Cossacks cut the railway line. So he was forced to spend the autumn and winter in Essentuki. He managed to get a job as a porter, then as a schoolteacher, and so was able to support a numerous 'family' - his wife, stepdaughter, and his stepdaughter's two children. He also started a school library with books that had been 'requisitioned' from their owners. When the White army re-took the town he had hurriedly to tear off the word 'Soviet' from the notice outside the Essentuki Public Library.

At the first opportunity, he finally made his way south, to Ekaterinodar (later Krasnodar), an evil-smelling and ugly city that he loathed on sight. There he began to write a series of articles about his experiences of the Revolution, which he sent off to London. They appeared in
The New Age
, the magazine edited by the charismatic Orage, whose acquaintance Ouspensky had made on his way to India in 1912, and renewed on his way back to Russia in 1914. Ouspensky's condemnation of the Bolsheviks was uncompromising; he talked of the 'dictatorship of the criminal element'.

When Ouspensky mentioned, in one of the letters, that he was 'only alive because my boots and my trousers and other articles of clothing . . . are still holding together', Orage hastened to contact F.S. Pinder, the British government representative in Ekaterinodar, who appointed Ouspensky to his staff, and seems to have paid him from his own pocket.

It was also while in Ekaterinodar that Ouspensky finally 'set up on his own'. He formed a small group and began to lecture to them on Gurdjieff's ideas. It was at this point that he suddenly became aware that now, at last, he was aware of a 'new I'. 'Man number four' was beginning to form inside him, and he experienced a curious new confidence. And in fact, in a sense - although there were still difficulties to come - his troubles were basically over.

But the Reds were winning the civil war. Denikin, the White general, was forced to withdraw to Rostov-on-Don, and the British staff - and the Ouspensky family - went with him. In Rostov Ouspensky met once again Andrei Zaharoff, the man Gurdjieff had driven away from Essentuki. Zaharoff had become totally disillusioned, not only with Gurdjieff, but also with his ideas, and Ouspensky found it impossible to convince him that, no matter what they might both think of Gurdjieff as a person, the ideas were still valid. Carl Bechhofer Roberts, a journalist connected with
The New Age
, spent two weeks with Ouspensky and Zaharoff in their lodging - a draughty barn - drinking home-made vodka. (His experiences are amusingly recorded in an appendix to Ouspensky's 1919
Letters from Russia
.) A month later, Roberts had escaped to Novorossisk, on the Black Sea, Ouspensky was back in Ekaterinodar, and Zaharoff had died of smallpox. Finally, with the aid of the British, Ouspensky and his family were evacuated to a refugee camp on Prinkipo Island, a suburb of Constantinople. There, once again, he encountered Gurdjieff.

Gurdjieff's band of disciples was now greatly reduced. From Essentuki they had travelled to Maikop, escaped from there by the skin of their teeth as the Reds closed in, and returned to Sochi. There, to everyone's astonishment, Gurdjieff announced that the group would now break up. The likeliest reason is that they had run out of money. A small number remained, including Gurdjieff's wife, the de Hartmanns and the Stoernevals. When the Turks withdrew from Georgia - which they had been occupying - in late 1918, Gurdjieff decided to return to its capital Tiflis. He arrived there in January 1919, and found it an unexpectedly pleasant place to resume his Work. It was full of artists and intellectuals who had fled from the Bolsheviks, and was virtually a second St Petersburg. Olga de Hartmann became a singer at the opera; her husband became a professor at the Conservatoire. Gurdjieff resumed his teaching, and acquired himself two new disciples, the painter Alexander de Salzmann and his wife Jeanne, a teacher of Jacques Dalcroze's system of dancing, called 'eurythmics'. Gurdjieff attended some of Jeanne de Salzmann's classes, and demonstrated some of his own 'movements'. But he was undoubtedly as much influenced by eurythmics as was that other contemporary guru Rudolf Steiner. Gurdjieff also organized a profitable carpet business. It was in Tiflis that he decided to call his future institute the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man; he even drafted a prospectus, declaring (untruthfully) that it was already in operation in Bombay, Alexandria, Kabul, New York, Chicago, Stockholm, Moscow and Essentuki. Ouspensky, who received a copy, was not impressed. And Bechhofer Roberts, who called at the new institute, reported that Gurdjieff was getting tired of his followers and was anxious to get to Europe. The newly independent Georgia was chaotic, and likely to be attacked by the Reds (as, in fact, it was in 1921). This is why, in May 1920, Gurdjieff and a group of about 30 followers started to make their way to Constantinople; they arrived in June. They were all penniless - the carpets Gurdjieff had tried to take with him as working capital had been seized en route by marauding soldiers - and were forced to start looking for ways of making money in a city that was already crowded with poverty-stricken Russians. Gurdjieff arrived to find that Ouspensky had already started his own group. When his ex-Master arrived, the ever-loyal Ouspensky handed it over to him. Although he had decided not to work with Gurdjieff again, the two remained on friendly terms. Ouspensky then set up on his own at the White Russian Club in Pera, the European quarter, and his talents as a lecturer soon brought him such large audiences that he had to apply to an English lady for the loan of her drawing-room. Her name was Winifred Beaumont, and her flat was shared by a young English Intelligence officer called John Godolphin Bennett. Bennett had been invalided out of the army after being blown up - he had had an 'out of the body experience' in the hospital - and had gone one better than Ouspensky in concluding that the answer to the riddles of the world lay in the concept of a
fifth
dimension.