Craig Brown - One on One

The Second World War separated the guru from his protégée. Stuck in Paris, Gurdjieff refused to let the Nazi occupation hinder his lifestyle, feasting on delicacies from local suppliers attained with promises – bogus, as it turned out – of massive wealth owed to him from a Texan oilfield.

The moment the war was over, Pamela travelled to Paris on one of the first trains. She sat with Gurdjieff’s other disciples and imbibed his latest thoughts and aphorisms such as ‘Mathematic is useless. You cannot learn laws of world creation and world existence by mathematic,’ and ‘Useless study Freud or Jung. This only masturbation.’ He advised Pamela and his other followers to have an enema every day, then donned a tasselled magenta fez to play his accordion in a minor key. ‘This is temple music,’ he assured them. ‘Very ancient.’

Pamela saw Gurdjieff in Paris for one last time a little under a month before he died. She brought her adopted son, Camillus, who told Gurdjieff that he had no father. ‘I will be your father,’ said Gurdjieff. On October 25th 1949, Gurdjieff was taken to the American Hospital, carried into the ambulance in his bright pyjamas, smoking a Gauloise Bleue and exclaiming merrily, ‘Au revoir, tout le monde!’

He died four days later. The next day, Pamela travels from Victoria Station to Paris with a group of his followers. She pays homage to his corpse first in his bedroom, and for the remainder of the week in the chapel. On November 2nd she sets eyes on him for the very last time. While she is there, the undertakers come to collect him, but the coffin is too small, and a fresh one has to be ordered.

She attends his funeral at the Alexandre Nevski Cathedral. Afterwards, she files up and kisses the coffin. He is buried at Avon near Fontainebleau; with the other mourners, she throws a handful of earth on his grave.

Travers dies aged ninety-five, in 1996, leaving £2,044,078 in her will, including a generous bequest to the Gurdjieff Society. At her funeral in Chelsea, her lawyers and accountants sit on one side of the aisle, her fellow Gurdjieffians on the other. As her coffin is carried away from Christ Church, these two sides of the congregation join together in a rendition of ‘Lord of the Dance’.

COOKS SAUERKRAUT FOR

Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin

June 1934

Gurdjieff is no easy traveller. He arrives at Grand Central Station with seven suitcases, furious at the train driver for refusing to delay the departure of the midnight express until he is in a mood to board.

Cursing loudly, he bangs his way through thirteen Pullman cars, disturbing the sleeping passengers. Throughout the night, he moans and groans at theatrical volume. At breakfast, he refuses everything on the menu, informing the steward, at exhaustive length, about his complicated digestive processes and special dietary needs. For the rest of the journey he infuriates his fellow passengers with his chain smoking, drinks furiously and produces all sorts of smelly food, including an over-ripe Camembert. From Chicago, he travels to the Wrights’ 1,000-acre architectural fellowship, Taliesin. ‘Now must change, we are going to special place,’ he informs his long-suffering assistant.

Gurdjieff and Frank Lloyd Wright have never met before. Both men are, by nature, leaders, not disciples: a clash of egos seems on the cards. Furthermore, there is a question of jealousy: Wright’s wife Olgivanna was, for many years, one of Gurdjieff’s sacred dancers. ‘I wish for immortality,’ she tells him on their first meeting, and Gurdjieff had agreed to organise it for her. Added to this, the Wrights’ six-year marriage – his third, her second – is going through a stormy patch. Wright has taken to blaming Olgivanna for all his worst moods. One moment he will take an outlandish view, bulldozing her into agreeing with him, then he will change his mind and chastise her for letting him think like that. A few days ago, he dreamed that Olgivanna was in bed with a black man. When he woke up, he placed the blame on her. ‘There must be something in you that led me to the conclusion of such a dream!’ he said. Before the arrival of Gurdjieff, Olgivanna has been thinking of leaving Wright. ‘I cannot bear this abuse any longer,’ she tells her daughter.

Gurdjieff is no shrinking violet. The moment he sets foot in Taliesin he takes charge of the cooking, producing many little bags of hot spices and peppers from his various pockets. He takes control of the entertainment, too. After dinner, he supervises the playing of twenty-five or thirty of his own compositions on the piano: he is the self-proclaimed pioneer of a revolutionary new school of ‘objective’ music, the first ever to produce exactly the same reaction in all its listeners.

Without fuss, Wright becomes a willing disciple. Just twenty-four hours in the company of Gurdjieff have served to convince him of his genius. He compares him to ‘some oriental buddha’ who has ‘come alive in our midst’; like Gandhi, though ‘more robust, aggressive and venturesome … Notwithstanding a superabundance of personal idiosyncrasy, George Gurdjieff seems to have the stuff in him of which genuine prophets have been made.’ Wright sees him as ageless, like God. He is, he says, ‘a man of perhaps eighty-five looking fifty-five’. In fact, though nobody knows for sure, most people reckon his year of birth to be 1866, which would in fact make him more like sixty-eight.

Gurdjieff loves to be in command, and is never happier than when a lot of people are doing exactly what he says. Before his stay is over, he has made everyone cook great quantities of sauerkraut from his own recipe, involving whole apples, including their skins, their stems and their cores. Even his most devoted disciples find it hard to swallow. On his departure from Taliesin, he leaves behind two fifty-gallon barrels of the stuff. In the first flush of discipleship, Frank Lloyd Wright will not hear a word against the sauerkraut. He insists the barrels must be transported to his Fellowship’s desert camp in Arizona, watching attentively as they are loaded onto a truck.

The sauerkraut truck gets as far as Iowa before the crew decides to call it a day. ‘We loosened the tailgate ropes,’ one of them confesses years later, ‘and dumped the barrels into a ditch.’

Even after such a brief meeting, Wright never loses his faith in Gurdjieff. Mysteriously, his rows with Olgivanna come to an end. ‘I am sure Gurdjieff told Olgivanna to be devious, because it all changed,’ notes a friend. Or was it something in the sauerkraut?

As time goes by, Taliesin comes increasingly to resemble Gurdjieff’s Institute of Harmonious Development, particularly in its strictly pyramidical approach to harmony. ‘Never have so many people spent so much time making a very few people comfortable,’ remarks one disaffected disciple. By the late 1940s, the Wrights have taken to sitting on a dais, eating different meals to their followers, who are given fried eggs. *

The two men meet again from time to time. Whenever they clash, it is Wright who gives way: there is never any question as to which is the guru and which the disciple. When Gurdjieff returns to Taliesin in 1939, Wright suggests he sends some of his own pupils to Gurdjieff in Paris, ‘Then they can come back to me and I’ll finish them off.’

‘YOU finish! You are IDIOT!’ snaps Gurdjieff. ‘YOU finish? No. YOU begin. I finish!’

In November 1948, Wright visits Gurdjieff in the Wellington Hotel, New York, where he is staying with his varied entourage. Gurdjieff places Wright beneath an enneagram constructed of large leaves, and listens attentively as Wright talks him through his problems with his gall bladder. ‘I seven times doctor,’ announces Gurdjieff, prescribing him a meal of mutton, avocado and peppered Armagnac. Oddly enough, it seems to do the trick. Gurdjieff then brings out his harmonium. ‘The music I play you now came from monastery where Jesus Christ spent from eighteenth to thirtieth year,’ he explains.