Mary Poppins, She Wrote

by Valerie Lawson

  She went to cuddle one of the babies, then scooped it onto her knee and fed it, but “somebody rushed in, snatched the child from my arms and dumped it down in the chair” and instructed her “look at the banner,” which read “play is not just fun, it is a preparation for toil.”40 She did not reveal this instinctive need to nurture the baby in Moscow Excursion, only much later, when she was speaking at an American university, long after her childbearing days were over.

  • • •

  On her return to England, Pamela settled back into domesticity with Madge at Pound Cottage. They baked Christmas cakes, packed one for AE, and drank too many sherries by the hearth of the big old fireplace. The winter dragged on, Pamela more and more concerned with the state of her lungs. In March 1933 she decided to try a spring holiday with Madge in the south of France. This time, she told AE, she had hopes for a complete cure.

  The next month she saw him in Dublin, asking for his help yet again. She wanted names and phone numbers of contacts for a series of articles on Irish politics which she planned to sell to Australian magazines. Pamela was unhappy with the result; AE comforted her: “Politics, as you will discover more and more as you live, are very complicated.” But her journeys to and from AE in Ireland were about to end forever. As he told her in May 1933, “Ireland is dead to me, not the earth of course but the nation.” He visited Kingsley Porter at Glenveagh Castle early in the summer. They yarned about his need to leave Ireland for a while. His biographer, Henry Summerfield, believed AE was preparing to act out the third phase of the classic four-stage Hindu life, following the stages of student and householder: that is, shedding his possessions in preparation for the final stage of life as a religious hermit. In the first week of July, he sold almost everything, including his house at Rathgar Avenue, keeping only some books and paintings. On July 8, he took the train to Donegal. That evening, the Porters’ chauffeur picked him up from the station and took him to a spot on the coast where he was to meet Kingsley and Lucy, who had been visiting the little island of Inish Bofin, the nearest island to the coast in the Tory archipelago, where they had built a cottage. As the oarsman tied the boat up, AE saw there was only one passenger. Lucy told him her husband had drowned earlier that day. Summerfield makes no mention of any visit to the police, a request for help from a coastal patrol or anyone else, but merely states that AE and Lucy drove back to Glenveagh Castle where he spent a few days “comforting the widow.” Lucy lay on the sofa while AE read to her from an advance copy of his new book, The Avatars. He dealt with the paperwork for the funeral and, after some days, left for London. There is no hint of an inquest or any further inquiry and the episode has the air of an allegory. This really was the end of Ireland for AE.

  Early in August 1933, he moved to lodgings at 41 Sussex Gardens in London. It was a sweltering summer. Pamela asked again if he would please come to see her at Pound Cottage. He agreed on an overnight visit one Saturday late in September. AE boarded the train at Charing Cross in a three-piece suit, shirt and tie. At Mayfield, still in his Bloomsbury garb, he posed in the garden with Pamela. He placed one arm around her delicate shoulder and stared solemnly at the camera lens as Madge snapped the shutter. Pamela and Madge insisted he squeeze into their sports car to show him the Sussex countryside in its September colors.

  That evening, Pamela told him she was worried about who she really was, that she had tried various guises but always felt like an impostor. AE reassured her, “Why worry?” Back in London, he told her by his next letter that he had seen “the imp in her coming out from under the masks.” But, what did it matter? We all had “creatures within us, archangels, angels, devas, fairy, imps and devils and why worry if one of the imps in you [shows] through the mask?”41

  Pamela now had another favor to ask of AE. She would love to meet his important friend, Alfred Richard Orage, the editor of the New English Weekly. AE had admired Orage for some time, enthusiastically backing his theories on economics and social credit. But now the two met regularly, as good friends, at the Kardomah Café in Chancery Lane. Over the teacups, they discussed Indian philosophy, Hindu scriptures and yogi practices. Or rather, Orage listened while AE launched into his monologues. Orage once asked AE what happened after death. That had him stumped. He thought for a minute and said, “I don’t know.”42

  AE told Pamela, “If you wish to see Orage, I could bring you to tea any Wednesday afternoon…we go out to a little underground tea shop and talk for an hour or two, then go our ways…if you time your London visit so as to have a Wednesday 4 to 5:30, I will bring you to his office and out to the tea shop.”43 She made the pilgrimage to London to meet Orage—her next Mr. Banks—on the third Wednesday in October 1933.

  • • •

  Orage and Pamela were to know one another only a year—he died in November 1934—but in that year, Orage profoundly influenced her life. More than just an editor and another useful contact, he brought her into the orbit of the most peculiar and most powerful of all her gurus, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. If AE was her “literary father”—as Pamela once said—Gurdjieff was her spiritual father.

  She did not meet Gurdjieff until 1938. By then, her appetite was whetted by what she had heard of the master from Orage and another of Gurdjieff’s disciples, Piotr Damien Ouspensky. These two men, the Englishman, Orage, and the Russian, Ouspensky, were to carry Gurdjieff’s message to the world, acting as his interpreters for a gullible and willing audience of men and women who, like Pamela, had looked in vain for answers to their anxieties in religion and philosophy.

  Gurdjieff, Orage and Ouspensky were all the spiritual offspring of Madame Helena Blavatsky, whose Theosophical Society had so influenced Yeats and AE. Ever since she had heard AE talk of theosophy, Pamela had had a weakness for its blend of orientalism, Hindu philosophy and the occult. But from Orage onward, she was a total convert. Each of her Mr. Banks from now on would take her farther and farther down the path, one passing her to another, from AE to Orage, from Ouspensky to Gurdjieff, and finally to the New Age mystic, Krishnamurti. Orage was the critical link between her Irish theosophists of the nineteenth century and her Asian and Russian gurus of the twentieth century.

  Just as Pamela had needed a mentor and found AE, Orage himself needed a guru. When they met he was sixty, a survivor of a turbulent life spent dabbling with the ideas of Nietzsche, Plato, Blavatsky, Fabianism, Hinduism, G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells.44 Orage had been a schoolteacher in Yorkshire, and studied the Bhagavad Gita and Mahabharata before moving to London in 1906. There, partly with the financial help of Shaw, he edited the New Age magazine from a tiny, chaotic office two flights up from a little courtyard off Chancery Lane. The New Age, promoted as “a weekly review of politics, literature and art,” veered more toward culture than politics. It became a critical success, publishing Shaw, Galsworthy, Havelock Ellis and Anatole France, along with news of the theatre in Europe and of the Russian playwright, Chekhov. There was little money for contributors and virtually none for Orage himself. He nicknamed the New Age “No Wage.”

  In 1921, Orage had fallen under the influence of Gurdjieff when he attended Ouspensky’s lectures in London given at the Theosophical Hall in Warwick Gardens, off Kensington High Street. Ouspensky, also a journalist, had met Gurdjieff in Moscow in 1915. With his reporter’s eye, he noticed “a man of oriental type, no longer young, with a black mustache and piercing eyes, who astonished me because he seemed to be completely disguised…with the face of an Indian raja or an Arab sheik.”45

  Although he caught a whiff of the fraud in Gurdjieff, Ouspensky believed in the truth of his philosophies. He became Gurdjieff’s disciple, spreading his word to new audiences when he moved to London in 1921. Ouspensky’s financial backing came from Lady Rothermere, the fey, estranged wife of the press baron, Lord Rothermere.

  At Warwick Gardens, he lectured on his pet theory of eternal recurrence, telling his audience they had all lived their lives before, and would live them again and again, suffering endlessly, until t
hey found a way out of the circle. O, as they called him, had written a novel based on the idea that a life could only have meaning when a person knew he was going nowhere. Ouspensky believed in déjà vu, hoping to understand the phenomenon by studying the fourth dimension. Along with Gurdjieff, he espoused the “fourth way,” the first, second and third being the way of the fakir, the monk and the yogi. These paths involved giving something up at the start of a spiritual journey, but the fourth way involved inner work on oneself while remaining part of everyday society.

  Early in 1922, Gurdjieff himself visited London, addressing newspaper editors, including Orage. Gurdjieff might have settled in London along with Ouspensky had it not been for the British Home Office, which looked with suspicion on this caviar and carpet trader with a Nansen passport and refused him permanent entry, despite the intervention of Lady Rothermere.

  At the Theosophical Hall at Warwick Gardens, both Gurdjieff and Ouspensky told their adoring followers that men and women were mentally asleep, with no real knowledge of themselves. These poor, unknowing fools lived in a mechanical state, as if in a dream, unable to reach their potential. They could wake only through a superhuman effort to “self remember.” Part of the discipline of the Gurdjieffian way was for each person to unite and balance their three centers, intellectual, emotional and physical. Until they did so, they were simply machines or in Gurdjieff’s word “idiots.” How could they wake up? By following what he called The Work, which was in fact hard physical work done in groups. Gurdjieff also promoted various formulae, including “the law of Three” (in which “the higher blends with the lower to actualize the middle”) and “the law of Seven,” based on the musical scale. The theory was that every process had seven phases, including two semitonal intervals.

  Like Madame Blavatsky, who claimed she had studied with secret Himalayan masters, Gurdjieff maintained his laws, special insights and sacred dances came from his travels to remote monasteries in the wilderness of Central Asia. Naturally there was no proof he had ever been to such monasteries or that they did, in fact, exist. Gurdjieff was above all a brilliant actor, playing the role of an Oriental mystic with a devastating blend of charm and rudeness.

  Born in Russian Armenia about 1866, Gurdjieff had virtually trained for the life of a con man. He was a spy and a hypnotist as well as a dealer in caviar and carpets before settling in Moscow, where he began to attract a following as a guru in 1912. The following year Gurdjieff resurfaced in St. Petersburg under the persona of Prince Ozay, and began to choreograph dances including The Struggle of the Magicians. Gurdjieff was the contemporary of the wily Russian ballet entrepreneur Serge Diaghilev, and in many ways his life ran in a complementary path. Both were manipulators who won the patronage of the rich in Paris and London. Not only was Gurdjieff a messianic figure to his loyal troupe of dancers and disciples, but again like Diaghilev, he cultivated an eccentric manner and distinctive appearance. But while Diaghilev commissioned brilliant artists to collaborate on classical ballets, Gurdjieff worked mainly alone, devising his own dance vocabulary, which he taught only to his adherents. Unlike Diaghilev, he seldom presented his work to the general public. His ritualistic set pieces danced in white robes resembled a mixture of Grecian dance, exemplified by the free and barefoot style of Isadora Duncan, and the movements of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, the Swiss music teacher who had set up an Institute for Applied Rhythm.

  Gurdjieff exuded a powerful sexual magnetism that he used to maximum advantage. He liked to shock his audiences by revealing their erotic fantasies and by graphically describing their sexual organs. He never bothered with euphemisms for lovemaking when he could say fuck instead. He seduced many women and fathered many illegitimate children while at the same time scoffing at his followers’ obsession with sex. But his greatest talent was the extraction of money. Whenever Gurdjieff fell on hard times, he used his hypnotic powers to convince newcomers, intelligent men and women, mostly American, to hand over their dollars and follow him. This process he called “shearing sheep.”

  By 1921, Gurdjieff had settled in Berlin. Later the next year, with the backing of one of his “sheep,” Lady Rothermere, he established his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at the Prieure des Basses Loges in a big park at Avon, near Fontainebleau, about forty miles from Paris. Here, while Lady Rothermere flitted through the garden and brought Gurdjieff black coffee, professional men who had given up their previous lives for Gurdjieff worked for him to near exhaustion. They had been lured to the Prieure by the promise of restorative therapies of all kind, from hydro to magneto, electro to psycho.

  Far from the glories described in the seductive brochures, life at the Prieure was the equivalent of a lowly soldier’s under a sergeant major who demanded absolute submission. Through pain, fasting and other deprivations, Gurdjieff promised his slaves self-discovery. The inmates, all voluntary, had to fulfill arduous tasks, involving hard physical work—The Work—as well as learning Gurdjieff’s rhythmic movements and ritual dances. Like a child’s game of Statues, the dances included his direction to “Stop!” When he did, the dancers had to remain stock still, as if statues, for up to ten minutes until he gave them the direction “Continue.”

  Gurdjieff, though, did not offer an unrelenting diet of privation. He reserved part of the Prieure for the really rich (these quarters were called the Ritz) while he indulged himself with good food and Armagnac, which he drank to excess. Personal hygiene was not his strong point. From veiled references to his habits in contemporary reports, it seems he did not care whether or not he quite made the distance to the toilet. Conditions at the Prieure were so bad that the kitchen was infested with flies.

  Late in 1922, Orage decided to try the cure for himself. There at the Prieure, Gurdjieff allotted him a cell in the so-called Monk’s Corridor, where he cried in the evening with fatigue. Orage was forced to stop smoking—another deprivation device of Gurdjieff’s, who liked to take from his followers their most loved habit or possession. (Some were allowed to eat only soup while they watched others eating a three-course meal.)46

  One of Orage’s magazine contributors was Katherine Mansfield, herself in need of a guru. (Mansfield once wrote to Orage “you taught me to write, you taught me to think.”) Despite his own treatment at the Prieure, Orage recommended to Mansfield that she move there herself, as a permanent resident. She willingly agreed, believing, as Orage said, “that it is not writing, as writing, that needs criticism, correction and perfection, so much as the mind, character and personality of the writer.” Gurdjieff would be the master teacher. By the time she reached the Institute, Mansfield was fatally ill. Suffering from TB, her body had been tortured with mad medical experiments, strychnine tinctures, iodine injections and X-rays. Orage saw her almost every day at the Prieure and, as he wrote, “we had many long talks together.”47 She bled to death from a hemorrhage at the Prieure in January 1923. The night of her funeral, Gurdjieff hosted a huge feast at which he sat in his silken, shrouded, personal alcove.

  Later that year, Orage was dispatched by Gurdjieff to America, mainly to scout for more money but also to spread the word of The Work. In New York, he held meetings at a bookshop called the Sunwise Turn, run by two women including Jessie Richards Dwight, half his age, whom he was to marry. Jessie was not impressed by Gurdjieff; the two men had a serious falling out. By late 1930, Gurdjieff demanded that Orage’s American pupils forsake Orage. He forced them to sign a declaration stating they would have nothing further to do with Orage. Even Orage signed the document. In the words of one of Gurdjieff’s biographers, “Orage without hesitation vowed to ostracize Orage.”48

  • • •

  In 1932, Orage returned to London to his old life of journalism. His new magazine, the New English Weekly, was to publish the best writers of the day, as well as promising newcomers such as nineteen-year-old Dylan Thomas and AE’s new friend, the writer Ruth Pitter. Orage, constantly on the alert for young talent, but with a tight budget, was impressed with the energy and
output of AE’s other friend, Pamela. Soon after the meeting arranged by AE he published her poetry, and before long she became the New English Weekly’s drama critic as well. In December 1933, Pamela sent Orage one of her letters from Moscow that pleased him, according to AE, and in the same month he published the first of the poems she wrote for the magazine. (Orage published four more of her poems early in 1934, but by then her poetry was becoming an occasional thing. Gradually she must have realized that she was not going to become a great poet.)

  AE continued to respond to the vagaries of Pamela’s health and work. In January 1934 he was sorry “your lung has been troubling you.” By February he knew from Orage that she had been laid up and in April he was very sorry she had been laid up again, but he congratulated her on her first book, Moscow Excursion. “The preface is admirable. You add a delicious literary flavor to your journalism and I like your sly humor,” he wrote.

  All along, he kept soothing Pamela: “What a witch you are to get yourself laid up.” But he looked forward to “your book of lyrics. Never forget you are a poetess.”49 The book of lyrics never came. Holding her first book in her hands, Pamela knew the addiction of every first-time author. If one collection of magazine stories on Russia could be made into a book so simply, then why not another.

  She returned to the scrapbooks in the studio. The London letters were hopeless, she knew, so dated and striving for effect. But in among them were the short stories, about the under nurse, the match man and the dancing cow. AE had told her to think of a witch’s adventures. Perhaps the witch could be the nurse?