Mary Poppins, She Wrote

by Valerie Lawson

  In Pamela’s copy of Two Flamboyant Fathers, a book of memoirs about Macnamara written by his daughter Nicolette Devas, she slashed the margins with a bold pencil line on two pages. The first marked the place where Devas wrote “not long before he died, Macnamara said ‘I have just found out that affection and tenderness are important.’ ” Devas went on to write: “These words, this confession, seem to me to sum up the failure of all his intimate relationships.” Pamela’s second mark highlighted the words “the papers beside his bed were never sorted, they were all burnt one day on his orders. And burnt too, a cupboard full of old letters and other papers.”

  Decades later, when she thought she was going to die herself, Pamela began to dream vividly of Francis Macnamara. One night, she imagined that she was alone with him. She told him how much she loved him. They could never speak of their love when he was alive. In her dream, she was free to do so. Macnamara listened, nodded, and murmured that he understood completely.2

  In April 1946 Joseph Hone wrote to Pamela to ask whether she had heard of Macnamara’s death. He didn’t miss him, Hone wrote, but felt as if the world was different since he had gone.3 Hone was now in Enniskerry in the Wicklow Mountains, while his son, Nat, lived in a seedy mansion flat in Battersea, having worked his way through his inheritance. Pamela had moved into a house not far from Nat, in the more salubrious suburb of Chelsea, where she bought a three-story Georgian terrace at 50 Smith Street, on the corner of the Kings Road.

  This was reasonably close to Camillus’s first school, the French school in South Kensington. When he was nine, Pamela decided it was time to start his serious education, at Dane Court in West Byford, Surrey. Early in September 1948, after a summer holiday in Switzerland, she drove him down to the prep school. He confided in her: “Oh, you are going to miss me!” never realizing how much he was going to miss her.4 The house was “so empty without C,” she wrote in her diary. That month, she decided to sell Pound Cottage. She drove to Mayfield, cleaned the cottage and told Nightingales, the local real estate agent, to list it.

  Now, as before, Pamela was dogged by illnesses, not of a desperate kind but the same array of colds, flu and stomach upsets that had nagged at her from the late 1920s, when her letters to AE disclosed a similar trail of problems. Late in September she felt unwell, overtired, missing Camillus and very upset in the stomach. She dragged herself to an evening meeting of New English Weekly contributors on September 28. The magazine was in its death throes but the directors resolved to start afresh, hoping they could pay the creditors.5

  The magazine was to close within a year, but Pamela hoped she might earn enough from her Mary Poppins royalties for the upkeep of her new house and to pay the wages of the first of a long line of housekeepers. The books had been moderately successful and were always in print. The first daily was Mrs. Ritchie, with whom relations were stormy, at least much more difficult than the tensions between Mrs. Banks and Mary Poppins. By year’s end, Mrs. Ritchie said she was ill and threatened to leave. (She didn’t.) Pamela was uncertain about Camillus, partly guilty that she had sent him away, partly worried that he was not growing up quite the way she planned. In autumn, he wrote that he was “in-joying” school thoroughly. Still, she felt low and lonely.

  When she drove down to see him at Dane Court, Pamela found Camillus tense and homesick. He had some grounds for complaint. At first he found Dane Court ramshackle, with everything rather worn. For tea, the boys were offered only bread and butter. Camillus was very cold in bed, his mattress was frightful and far too small. The boys all slept in dressing gowns and socks. When it was time to go, he hugged her tightly, but wouldn’t cry. Pamela felt proud at this show of a stiff upper lip.

  At Christmas 1948 she found comfort in Dane Court’s end-of-year concert. Camillus stood in the front row as the boys all sang “Away in a manger, no crib for a bed.” Pamela felt her own hot, prickly tears at the innocent words. He looked so sweet in his gray suit.

  Camillus came home to Smith Street for Christmas on December 21. Pamela recorded in her diary that this was one of the happiest days, if not the happiest, of her life. They shopped, they drove with Mrs. Ritchie to see the Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square. She read him two chapters of Dr. Dolittle at bedtime and, as she left his room, thought to herself: “Oh, God bless him always.”

  But in January, when she took him back to Dane Court, he did not adjust to the new term and promptly got the flu. The principal decided it would be better if she did not see him so often. Mrs. Ritchie quit in February, which was even harder on what she called her “digestive upset.” With the help of a new daily maid she just managed, though she did not feel well.

  In the spring Camillus came back to Smith Street to cry “Home at last!” They played Ping Pong, bought treats for lunch—mushrooms and frozen strawberries—and went to Harrods to have his hair cut and to Selfridges to buy a bow and arrow. At night she read, again, Squirrel Nutkin. All along she felt waves of anxiety, the same sense of uneasiness that had dogged her for years.

  • • •

  Pamela’s one comfort came from being part of the Gurdjieff family, dysfunctional though it was in the late 1940s, when each group of his followers maintained a haughty distance from the others. After the war, Gurdjieff tried to reconcile all the warring factions that had formed around him in France, England and the United States. It was tough work as, often, the leader of one group didn’t talk to another, except perhaps through their lawyers. The most influential group was in France, led by Jeanne de Salzmann, one of the founders of Gurdjieff’s Institute at the Prieure, which had collapsed when the Wall Street crash led to a shortfall of American funds. But now, needing funds to pay his wartime bills, Gurdjieff called in his flock, telling them “you are sheep without shepherd, come to me.”

  Pamela had retained her connection to Jane Heap’s group, but had links to another group outside London led by one of Ouspensky’s protégés, John Gondolphin Bennett. An obsessive who had recited the Lord’s Prayer a thousand times a day for nine years, Bennett fasted, put himself through ordeals and vigils, and offered Gurdjieff the gift of many influential people, among them Dr. Bernard Courtenay Mayers, a French Canadian who played an heroic part in the French resistance movement. Courtenay Mayers was to become Pamela’s lifelong adviser and doctor.

  Pamela was one of the many postwar visitors to Gurdjieff’s apartment, which, from 1948, was packed with the spiritually needy—including Bennett’s sixty disciples from England.6 Pamela’s need for her guru was so urgent she was on one of the first trains to Paris after the war. It wasn’t far from the heart of London, on the Golden Arrow boat train, to Gurdjieff’s first-floor apartment at 6 Rue des Colonels Rénard.

  Gurdjieff had survived the war in an Aladdin’s cave of begged and borrowed goods. A magpie by nature, his mirrored apartment was stashed with knickknacks and figurines, from mountain hussars to ballerinas, galloping Arab sheiks to Nubians on camels. He had stacked his floor-to-ceiling pantry shelves with sugar, salt, flour, dried fruit, lentils and spices. From Hediard, the emporium behind the Madeleine, he bought Beluga caviar, halvah and dried figs, chocolate, peppermint balls, sugared almonds, crystallized fruit, cartons of Gauloises (Bleu), bottles of vodka, calvados, and Larresingle Armagnac. Gurdjieff bought on credit, promising to settle after the war when his profits would roll in from a Texas oil well. The “oil well” turned out to be his American friends, who eventually paid his bills. From the country he brought hams, bacon and sacks of goat cheese. Apartment 6 smelled like a rakish Middle Eastern bazaar. Across the ceiling, festooned in loops and garlands, hung sprays of mint and rosemary, onions, scarlet peppers, dried eels, smoked sturgeon, and sausages that might have been made from camel’s meat. Gurdjieff was addicted to thick black coffee, constantly ready in an old thermos flask. On his shelves and in his pockets was a neverending booty of candies and lumps of sugar. Children called him Monsieur Bon Bon.

  Behind the artifice lay the tackiness. The apartment was dingy, the fur
niture shabby, the dining room carpet holey and patched. After the war, Gurdjieff himself looked older, tireder. His belly stuck out—he called it his “valise”—yet his eyes remained as hypnotic as ever, tending to stare in different directions. His silences were as eloquent, too, and his rages as effective. He spoke with a muffled Asian accent, in pidgin English, affecting odd habits of speech. The letter h in the middle of a word came out as g, so that he pronounced “behind” as “begind.”

  Yet in 1946 Pamela saw only a hero, a patriarchal host, massive of presence, radiating a kind of power that was both formidable and reassuring, like a multibranched old oak tree. But he was always unpredictable as he often spoke in parables. Gurdjieff had an alarming tendency to strip off his pupils’ masks. Underneath his gaze, everyone was naked.

  During that visit, he engaged Pamela in one of his typical plays for attention and domination. “You English,” he accused her, “even when there is butter, you prefer margarine.” No, she said, yes, he said, no, yes, no, yes, like a child’s game, until she felt close to tears. Next day, at dinner again, she tried to hide but he singled her out, demanding: “If I should say Yes would you still say No?” She nodded her head. “Good,” he said, with a beam. This was a classic Gurdjieff exchange. First the student was reduced to a childlike state, then when they least expected it, he relaxed his apparent rage, smiled “bravo” and offered the victim a sweet.7

  Pamela and all the pilgrims in Paris took their medicine with joy. “Now,” they thought, “is the harvest of our lives.” Gurdjieff saw the need in each. He read Pamela in a way that AE, too wrapped up in himself, could not. Gurdjieff perceived her loneliness, her hunger for esoteric wisdom, and the potential for funds from her powerful American friends. She went to see him in his own private rooms at his apartment. He never sent her away, answering all her questions.8

  At number 6, all his followers waited for his words of praise and wisdom. First they watched him eat, one foot folded under him as he sat on his divan. Gurdjieff fingered his food as he fingered women. He liked to assemble his own salad, fiddling with sauces, pouring out a whole bottle of chutney, slicing up cucumber with his bent fingers, adding a spoonful of cream, picking up cubes of lamb, chunks of goat’s cheese and fresh tarragon leaves. Only then would he sit back, replete, and grunt “Who fresh come from England?”9

  Before dinner his students often read from the manuscript of his book Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. After, he gave them the benefit of his insights. “Mathematic is useless,” he might say one evening, “you cannot learn laws of world creation and world existence by mathematic.” Or, another night, “Useless study Freud or Jung. This only masturbation.” He recommended that his students read Mesmer on hypnotism and told them they must have an enema every day.10

  In the late afternoon, he liked to adjourn to a café in the Avenue des Acacias. There he exchanged his fez for a Panama hat. At dinner he changed to a bright but pale turquoise pajama jacket or, more formally, into a loose gray cashmere suit, open-necked white shirt and soft kid slippers. Halfway through dinner he liked to slip on his tasseled magenta fez in the style of the Ottoman Turks. After dinner, he laid his accordion piano on his knee and played music in a sad, minor key. “This is temple music,” he said, “very ancient.” Pamela told him how she loved the music. He sat back, smoked, told the assembled company, “See now how my life is roses, roses, and I only a poor old dancing teacher!”

  At this late hour, most of the guests were relaxed if not almost comatose after numerous toasts to “the Idiots.” (Pamela’s interpretation was that he used the word “idiot” in its original Greek meaning of private person.) Gurdjieff had invented a ladder of twenty-one Idiots, up to God who was “the Unique Idiot,” but toasts were usually drunk only to the first layer of twelve idiots, who were ordinary, super, arch, hopeless, compassionate, squirming, square, round, zigzag, enlightened, doubting, or swaggering. Only Jeanne de Salzmann was considered bright enough to be “going out of idiocy.” Sometimes dinner didn’t finish until 3 A.M. The guests would keep talking at a café, reconstructing what the master had said.

  In October 1948, having emptied many English bank accounts, Gurdjieff embarked on one last shearing visit to the United States. He returned to Paris in spring 1949, bringing a brace of young women known as “the calves,” not rich followers but girls who would be the next generation of his dancers, including Jessmin Howarth’s daughter, Dushka. He then dispatched Jeanne de Salzmann to England to check on the students of one of the London groups. There she ran movement classes which Pamela attended, afterward feeling both tired and strengthened.11

  Pamela saw Gurdjieff for the last time in September 1949. With Camillus, she took the Golden Arrow to Paris, then drove straight to the Rue des Colonels Rénard. Monsieur Bon Bon was charming, of course. He offered Camillus sweeties. The boy was unself-conscious, just as disarming as the guru. Camillus told Gurdjieff he didn’t have a father. Mummy had told him Daddy had had some kind of an accident and died in the tropics. Gurdjieff assured Camillus he would be his father. Camillus told Pamela he loved him. Gurdjieff took them both in his arms and kissed them.

  Within a week they were home, Camillus back at school, Pamela agitated and again unwell. It was the old problem again: churned up bowels, constant diarrhea. A specialist found nothing but recommended an X ray. She thought of the last weeks of AE and the dreaded Dr. Munro.12

  In October, Jeanne de Salzmann made another flying visit to London to give movement lessons to almost two hundred students in a west London studio. There, wrapped in the peace a dancer feels as her body and the music become one, Pamela was intensely happy and convinced she should return to Paris to see Gurdjieff. She wanted him to give her a “task,” a special exercise for her soul. It was her body that needed help. But she was too ill to leave her bed.

  By October 24 Jeanne de Salzmann knew Gurdjieff was so ill himself that he might die. She hoped the Gurdjieff disciple Bill Welch could administer a radical liver treatment and asked the doctor to come at once from New York. It took Welch nineteen hours to fly to Paris. Exhausted, he went straight to the Rue des Colonels Rénard to find what he saw as the mark of death on Gurdjieff’s face. The doctor sent Gurdjieff to the American Hospital at Neuilly. Dressed in bright pajamas, smoking a Gauloise Bleu, he was carried into the ambulance announcing “au revoir, tout le monde!” In his private hospital room on the first floor, he kept up his insouciant patter as Welch administered the treatment, puncturing the old man’s abdomen. Gurdjieff no longer ate, but he continued to drink black coffee and to smoke through a black cigarette holder.

  On the afternoon of October 29, Rosemary Nott rang Pamela to tell her the worst had happened. Gurdjieff had died at ten thirty that morning. Pamela went to Victoria Station to book a seat, then rang Camillus to say she couldn’t visit him the next day as planned. Many Gurdjieff followers, among them Jane Heap, traveled with her on the Golden Arrow the next day.

  Gurdjieff’s embalmed body was to remain in the chapel at the American Hospital for a week, but Pamela saw him that first day in his room, trembling before entering, then, to her surprise, not shocked. She sat for a long time, gazing at him. Other friends came too, watching and praying.13

  In the chapel Pamela felt a sense of intense calm and containment. For a week it became her refuge. Chairs were arrayed around the bier. People sat quite still for a long stretch at a time. When one left another filled his place. Each afternoon, a black-bearded Russian priest said prayers while a lay singer intoned responses in a large bass voice slightly hampered by a heavy cold.14 After the service, Pamela knelt at Gurdjieff’s feet and made her promises. Each day he seemed a little farther away. She thought of AE again.15

  On November 2, she went alone to the hospital to see him for the last time. He seemed very far away now. The undertakers arrived to collect his body, and in a macabre twist which suited his macabre life, they found Gurdjieff’s body too big for the coffin. A fresh one was ordered. At the Alexandre Nevski
Cathedral in Rue Daru the congregation was puzzled by the delay. The mourners stood waiting, each holding an unlit candle, from 4 until 6 P.M. Gurdjieff was finally borne in.

  At that moment, Pamela heard the massed voices of a hidden choir in what sounded like a musical cry of both anguish and welcome. The noise was so sudden, tears rushed up to her eyes then subsided. She told herself the funeral was too great for that. The service was sung, flowers piled up, and suddenly every light in the cathedral switched off. The mourners were left in the darkness lit by their candles. Somebody asked a sacristan if they could stay and watch through the night but he said no, the priests would watch now.

  Many of the mourners went on to Jeanne de Salzmann’s, where they read from Gurdjieff’s books. She offered tea, soothed them, advised them to go on with the exercises he had given them and to work at the movements. Pamela lingered.

  The day of the funeral was cold and bright. Pamela returned to the cathedral for High Mass. This time, the priests wore grand ceremonial dress, gold and white and pale blue, with towering headdresses, which Pamela noted with the eye of a drama critic. At the end, when the priests had gone, one after another they filed up to the coffin, knelt down and kissed the shaft of a little cross that was there. Pamela felt that everybody was making the best promise they could.16

  Four huge buses followed the hearse to the burial place. They edged past the flat at the Rue des Colonels Rénard, bowled past L’Etoile with the sun frostily shining through it, through the brown leaves of the avenues. Pamela thought the flowery hearse bounded almost gaily in front. Through the window she saw a fairground with a merry-go-round in full swing. Coconut men collected centimes for the shy. The mourners sped past slums, shops, people carrying on their everyday trade. It must have seemed like a Brueghel canvas, these old black-shawled women hobnobbing in the sun, a mother holding out her baby.