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P.L. TRAVERS

WATCHES OVER

GEORGE IVANOVICH GURDJIEFF

The American Hospital of Paris, Neuilly-sur-Seine

October 30th 1949

Any meeting between the living and the dead is inevitably one-sided. Do they know something we don’t know?

On October 30th 1949, P.L. Travers sits all night in a private room on the first floor of the American Hospital of Paris, gazing lovingly at the corpse of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.

Pamela first encountered Gurdjieff thirteen years ago, in 1936, at his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, near Fontainebleau. After spending much of her life pursuing poets and mystics, she found in Gurdjieff what she had long been looking for, and was particularly drawn to his unusual emphasis on finding truth through dance. Back in London, she was to teach these Gurdjieffian dances before progressing to teaching the teachers; she spread his beliefs for the rest of her life.

Gurdjieff was a guru with an opaque past. Half Armenian, half Greek, he cultivated obscurity about many things, not least his age.^* He tried his hand at many trades, dealing, in different places and at different times, in a range of products including carpets, antiques, oil, fish, caviar, false eyelashes, sparrows and corsets.

But around 1912, he found his calling as a guru, his core belief being that ‘modern man lives in sleep, in sleep he is born and in sleep he dies’. Only by subscribing to Gurdjieff’s special training could modern man snap out of it, rise to a higher level of consciousness, and find God, or, as Gurdjieff preferred to call Him, ‘Our Almighty Omni-Loving Common Father Uni-Being Creator Endless’.

Among his many other beliefs was that the moon lives off the energy of dead human beings, known as Askokin, and controls all man’s actions. To guard against rebellion, the higher powers have implanted an organ at the base of man’s spine called the Kundabuffer, which stops him becoming too intelligent.^* Only those who follow Gurdjieff’s path can break away from their fate as food for the moon, and thus attain immortality.

P.L. Travers’ most famous creation, the flying nanny Mary Poppins, might be seen as Gurdjieff in a long dress, shorn of his handlebar moustache and propelled by an umbrella: in some of the stories, Poppins guides her charges to the secrets of the universe, with the planets all indulging in a great cosmic dance. In the chapter ‘The New One’ in Mary Poppins Comes Back, Mr and Mrs Banks give birth to a new baby, Annabel, who, it emerges, is formed from the sea, sky, stars and sun. Mary Poppins is, to all intents and purposes, one of the enlightened, aware of worlds beyond.

As Pamela Travers sits beside the corpse of Gurdjieff, she believes that the real Gurdjieff is somewhere else, somewhere on another plain, reunited with the being he used to call the Most Most [sic] Holy Sun Absolute. Alive, he was the most earthy of men, enjoying huge three-course meals, washed down with Armagnac, while his followers made do with bowls of thin soup. Some non-believers found his personal habits unseemly. In his palatial flat at his institute in Paris, he often didn’t bother to visit the lavatory, preferring to defecate willy-nilly. ‘There were times when I would have to use a ladder to clean the walls,’ recalls one of the residents. He demanded unquestioning obedience from his wealthy followers, and enjoyed humiliating them; it was almost as though he relished the sight of grown men in tears. He was a stranger to celibacy, and loved to boast of all the babies he had fathered, peppering his pidgin English with the word ‘fuck’. But for his devotees this only added to his air of other-worldliness: surely a guru so un-gurulike could not possibly be a fraud?

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’.