Gurdjieff: a Master in Life

With this problematical chaplet of forty-nine personal souvenirs and homilies Tcheslaw Konstantinovitch Tchekhovitch is introduced to an English-speaking readership as a full-blown apologist of the iconic Greco-Armenian spiritual teacher and choreographer George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. Manifestly Tchekhovitch dotes on Gurdjieff: "However hard I tried, I could never find anything with which to reproach him." This inability is arguably the compilation's strength and simultaneously its critical weakness. In October 1949 when, with a gallant "Au revoir toute le monde", Gurdjieff died in Paris, his cultural survival seemed doubtful. With adolescents focussed on the elision of bebop into Cool Jazz, and Left Bank berets still grappling with Sartre's L'être et le néant, Gurdjieff had no leverage, no boulevard credibility. Nor had he distinguished champions to hand: Piotr Ouspensky author of Tertium Organum, Alexandre de Salzmann an associate of Rilke and Kandinsky, and Alfred Richard Orage editor of New Age – arguably the master's star troika of pupils - were all dead. Among the rich cast of surviving disciples the burly, surly, bald-headed Tchekhovitch (or 'Tchekho' as Gurdjieff called him) cut a curious figure. A sometime body-builder, circus wrestler, juggler's assistant, and pastrycook, he had lived through interesting times. Reduced, in his mid-fifties, to working as a door-to-door salesman, he was liked but not well liked, by the Parisian hierarchy. Conceivably some envy crept in here. Tchekhovitch (though a deserter from the White Russian Army) had abundantly earned his long-service medal as a foot-soldier of Gurdjieff. Virtually no-one other than Jeanne de Salzmann could match his dogged adhesion – from Constantinople in 1920 to Rue des Colonels Rénard in 1949. Tchekhovitch was hardworking. His grim expression (note the book's frontispiece) revealed an intense earnestness. Standing by Gurdjieff's grave at Fontainebleau-Avon, his obligation to posterity was revealed to him. Henceforward, week after week, month after month, he dictated his recollections to enthusiastic pupils in Paris and Lille, employing a Russo-French so strangely accented and syntactically challenged as to be barely intelligible. Not unsurprisingly, the anti-Gurdjieff world of bon ton got in its retaliation first. In 1954, when the ambitious young littérateur Louis Pauwels launched his prejudicial best-seller Monsieur Gurdjieff, Tchekho surely itched to get him in a half-Nelson or a Boston Crab. Instead he redoubled his team's efforts. Stories multiplied. Typewriters superseded la plume de ma tante. Each 'chapter' was typed, edited, reworked phrase by phrase, retyped, ascribed to nominated amanuenses. In high summer – accompanied by his cat Grishka and a train of star-struck scribes – Tchekhovitch would retreat to Formentera (an idyllic Balearic island now famed for its nudist beaches). In the cool of caves he dictated relentlessly, yet never quite sensed the pangs of authorship coming on. In 1958, unpublished and unfulfilled, Tcheslaw Konstantinovitch Tchekhovitch died. Given Gurdjieff's fierce condemnation of procrastination (the fatal 'disease of tomorrow') and his sardonic invention of Haida Yoga or hurry-up Yoga, Tchekhovitch's publication in Toronto nearly fifty years post mortem seems so transgressive that conventional review must play second fiddle to historical detective work…what explanation offers? Tchekhovitch had surprisingly entrusted all his manuscripts to a young Formentera protegė named Anselmo, who calmly stuck them in his attic. When, decades later, the architect Michel Kalt rediscovered them here, he promptly confided copies to the Institut Gurdjieff in Paris, where the rising eminence Dr Michel de Salzmann picked up the scent. Michel was intelligent: he did not remotely imagine that, from such raw material, he could edit up, or even ghost-write, a third synoptic Gospel which might rank with the grand testaments of Ouspensky and Thomas de Hartmann. Besides, he was in general hoity-toity vis-a-vis "the increasing spate of books about Gurdjieff"... And yet, and yet. Tchekhovitch plainly viewed Gurdjieff as a father-figure; and so (more advisedly) did Michel. For some time Dr de Salzmann hesitated deliciously but at length noblesse oblige prevailed; in the late 1980s - co-opting help from Serge Gautier d'Orier - he undertook to transmute the Tchekhovitch mish-mash into a "genuine narrative". Tedious years ensued. Octopus-like, the ambitious project entangled practically the whole of 'Paris Group 1'. In May 1990 Jeanne de Salzmann died, aged 101; and in August 2001 - with the editorial melee still grinding on - Michel himself died. The "genuine narrative" remained a mirage. It was in October 2003 that Tchekho's consumatory hour finally struck. But L'Originel's unanticipated publication of Tu l'aimeras : souvenirs sur Georgii Ivanovitch Gurdjieff provoked disbelief and dismay among the Paris cognoscenti. Damaging grammatical, idiomatic, and nomenclatural blunders abounded; the chapter sequence was chaotic; there was annoying extraneous guff about dreams; and even the name Tchekhovitch was misspelled 'Tchechovitch'. The presumptuous 'Tu l'aimeras' only added insult to injury: never would the stylistically fastidious Michel have granted this clod-hopping book his nihil obstat, still less have claimed editorial credit. Today's Dolmen Meadow English-language version is selling to the faithful like hot cakes at a village fête. But serious scholars, beware! Chronology alone insists this is not a translation achieved under Michel's supervision, more likely a free adaptation of the French precursor – itself a mangled derivative of Tchekho's Franco-Russian musings. The vaunted permissions of Triangle Editions (New York) and the Institut Gurdjieff (Paris) signally fail to guarantee authenticity: Gurdjieff was not born in 1877 but 1866; his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man was not founded in Paris in 1921 but in Tbilisi in 1919 (indeed he did not reach France until 1922); his birthplace Alexandropol is not near Persia but Turkey…And Tchekhovitch, incidentally, was not born in 1900 but in 1895, probably at Ekaterinoslav. The text itself, like poor old Tchekhovitch himself, is a rough diamond. He manages one or two moments of real poignancy ("In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen" murmurs a desperately injured and comatose Gurdjieff). But mostly he delivers his motley material in flatfooted style with minimal narrative thrust. Sometimes the content is bathetic (Gurdjieff rescues Alexis Combe by stopping him from regularly breakfasting in bed on 20 fried eggs); sometimes it strains credulity ("Gyorgi Ivanovitch always maintained a marvellous simplicity even when frequenting the court of the Tsar"); at one point, with worrying scholastic hubris, it trespasses on the jealously patrolled Katherine Mansfield canon...Gurdjieff's calumniators have doubtless earmarked this text for future cannibalisation. Only the apt title, Gurdjieff: a master in life, bears lingering testimony to Michel's original purpose: by judicious deployment of Tchekho's anecdotes, to advertise an altruistic sympatico Gurdjieff, astutely turning to inner and outer advantage the madcap contingencies of diurnal life. But will it do? The world has changed. A Tchekhovitch awakening in a Toronto book store would rub his eyes like Rip Van Winkle, while a Tchekhovitch logged onto Amazon.com is inconceivable. Today's mainstream Gurdjieffians don't 'do' mysterious cures, or feed the hungry: they do communal illuminism and institutional careerism. Then is this Tchekhovitch tribute to Gurdjieff heartfelt? Certainly. Is his dedication to Jeanne de Salzmann kosher? Just maybe, but it's not in the French edition. And will this unindexed paperback show literary staying power? I doubt it. Is it historically or photographically revelatory? No. Will it have consequences? Yes, probably unintended ones. Will it augment Gurdjieff's mythic capital? Perhaps the answer here is suggested by the master's demurral when Tchekho offered him money: "Calmly drinking his coffee, he stated with a smile that if I sold my business, my wife, my child and myself, and threw in my Sunday trousers, it would not have the slightest effect on the health of his finances."