The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky (2 page)

Ouspensky's own expulsion - at the age of 16 - seems to have done him no harm. He enrolled as a 'free listener' at Moscow University, and completed his education by reading. He was an excellent linguist, who had already learned English (although he never learned to speak it without a strong Russian accent), and in the 18 months after leaving school learned Italian well enough to read Dante. But a deep distaste for Latin and Greek prevented him from going on to take a degree. In the year he left school he discovered Nietzsche, and was deeply struck by his concept of Eternal Recurrence. This, Ouspensky concluded,was what he had experienced in childhood - the moods of 'I have been here before.'

A year later, his mother died. Perhaps to recover from the shock, Ouspensky began to travel - to Paris and to remote parts of Russia. In
Osokin
, he describes a visit to an uncle who lives on his country estate, and a love affair with his uncle's ward Tanechka (a diminutive of Tania). The girl is two years Osokin's senior. They flirt, kiss and go for long walks in the woods. He is covered with embarrassment when she calls him and he finds her standing naked in a stream. After that she spends the night in his room - it seems clear that she is the one who does the seducing. Osokin's uncle finds out and sends him back to Moscow to become a student at the military academy. As far as we know, Ouspensky was never at a military academy - but information about his early years is so sparse that he may well have been. What we
do
know is that he attended parties, drank too much vodka and was known to every policeman in Moscow because, far from being quarrelsome when drunk, he tried to act as peacemaker. 'One night', he told Carl Bechhofer Roberts, 'I remember I got home with the left sleeve of my overcoat missing. How I lost it, and where, I have never discovered.' Apart from such glimpses, we have virtually no idea of what Ouspensky did during the 10 years between his expulsion from school and 1905, when his affair with Zinaida came to an end and he tried to exorcise his misery by writing
Ivan Osokin
(originally entitled 'The Wheel of Fortune') as a kind of film outline.

This was also the year of the abortive revolution, when troops fired upon peaceable crowds who had marched to the Winter Palace to present a petition to the Tsar. In the past 20 years, Russia had become increasingly ungovernable, and the new Tsar, Nicholas II, was a vacillator who changed his mind every day or so. He could not decide whether to establish a military dictatorship or to give the liberals the constitution they wanted. Finally, he gave a constitution with one hand and took it back with the other: that is, he allowed the people to elect a parliament (called the Duma), but still kept his own government, which held all the real power. He was determined to remain an absolute ruler, but lacked all the necessary qualities. He was a weakling and a dreamer, who preferred to spend his days in his summer palace with his family rather than getting on with the business of running the country and trying to avert the revolution prophesied by the anarchists and Marxists.

Ouspensky's beloved younger sister (we do not even have a record of her name) was also a dreamer and, like so many idealistic students, she joined the revolutionary movement. She was among those arrested in 1905 and thrown into prison. Her arrest must have been a tragedy for Ouspensky, who would have recalled clearly the fate of another idealistic student, Marie Vietroff, who had been confined in the Peter and Paul fortress in 1896 because a forbidden book had been found in her room, and who had committed suicide by burning herself to death after months of ill treatment, including rape. When, in 1908, Ouspensky's sister died in prison, it must have confirmed his feeling that life is basically futile and tragic.

The truth is that Ouspensky, like the Tsar, was basically an ineffectual dreamer and a weakling. This is something that his later disciples would have found hard to imagine, for they knew him as a hard, stern man who was impatient of all talk of mysticism, and whose squarely-built figure seemed to reflect his pragmatic disposition. But we only have to consider the facts to see that this is not a true picture. After being expelled from school - which he hated with the ardour of a romantic who regards boredom as an affront to his dignity - he failed to keep his promise to take a degree and spent his legacy wandering ineffectually from place to place, vaguely seeking for something he could not define. He later claimed that he was 'never such a fool' as Osokin, but this is hard to believe. In fact, what
Osokin
reveals is a dangerously romantic young man who is immensely susceptible to women - Tanechka, Anna, Loulou, Valerie, Zinaida - and who seems to believe that if only he could find the right one all his problems would disappear . . .

Most young Russians in Ouspensky's position would have found a job in the civil service - which required very little effort - and devoted themselves to the struggle for achievement in other spheres. Ouspensky merely seems to have wasted his legacy (Osokin gambles it away), so that by 1905, when he was 27, he had to start making a living by journalism. In
A New Model of the Universe
, he offers us a glimpse of himself in 1906 or 1907, sitting in the editorial office of the Moscow newspaper
The Morning
, trying to read foreign newspapers in French, German, English and Italian in order to write an article on the forthcoming Hague Conference:

Phrases, phrases, sympathetic, critical, ironical, blatant, pompous, lying, and, worst of all, utterly automatic phrases . . . But what can I say? It is all so tedious. Diplomats and all kinds of statesmen will gather together and talk, papers will approve or disapprove, sympathise or not sympathise. Then everything will be as it was, or even worse.

And so he pushes aside the newspapers and opens a drawer of his desk 'crammed with books with titles like
The Occult World
,
Life after Death
,
Atlantis and Lemuria
,
Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie
,
Le Temple de Satan
and the like . . . I open one of the books, feeling that my article will not be written today . . .'

This is fundamentally the nostalgic romanticism of the 1890s, of Dowson and Verlaine drinking themselves to death on absinthe, of W.B. Yeats daydreaming of fairyland because he detests the real world. It is also the attitude of Goncharov's Oblomov, unable to arouse himself to get out of bed, and of Gogol's landowner Manilov, whose fantasies of fame and fortune 'grew so lively that eventually he could not even follow them himself'. Amusingly enough, Ouspensky compares the Hague peacemakers to Gogol's Manilov - a classic example of the pot calling the kettle black.

Ouspensky goes on to meditate that he would like to print his true thoughts about the Hague Conference, but knows that they would only land him in jail. And even if they got into print, nobody would read them. 'What is the use of attempting to expose lies when people like them and live by them? It is their own affair; but I am tired of lying . . .' And so he turns back to his books on magic and Atlantis . . . All of which makes it very clear that even in his late twenties, Ouspensky was still a rather ineffectual romantic who blamed the world for his own shortcomings.

We know little of these years except that Ouspensky attended meetings of the Theosophical Society and travelled widely as a journalist. In his introduction to a translation of Ouspensky's
Talks with a Devil
, J.G. Bennett writes:

Little is known of this period of his life, and I can report only the episodes I heard from him in the course of conversations. He was a successful journalist working on the leading Russian papers, but more often as a free lance. He travelled in Europe and the United States writing articles for St Petersburg papers between 1908 and 1912.

(St Petersburg may here be a slip for Moscow.)

It was in 1912 that Ouspensky achieved his ambition to go to India with an open commission to write articles for three Russian newspapers. He proceeded via London, and there made an acquaintance who later proved to be extremely valuable - A.R. Orage, a charismatic socialist who was the editor of one of the most widely read magazines of the period,
The New Age
. Promising Orage to send him some contributions, Ouspensky then travelled on to Egypt, where he was deeply fascinated by the Sphinx, then to India, where he met some of the outstanding yogis of his time, including Aurobindo. He was not impressed by any of them. He explained afterwards that he was looking for 'real knowledge' and had found only holy men who may have achieved liberation for themselves but could not transmit their methods to others. He also spent some time at Adhyar inMadras, the headquarters of the Theosophical Society, of which he had been a member since 1906. In later years he liked to tell the story of the 'caste system' at Adhyar. On the ground floor were all the hangers-on and undistinguished visitors. The second floor was reserved for well-wishers who gave their money and support to the society. The top floor, with a large open roof, was the home of the esoteric group, the real initiates of Theosophy. Ouspensky recalled with relish that he was at once admitted to the esoteric group in spite of his no longer being a member of the Theosophical Society and his open criticism of their founder, Helena Blavatsky. He asserted that he found nothing at Adhyar that made him wish to stay. According to J.G. Bennett:

He went on to Ceylon, which he found more congenial, and he met several of the more famous
bhikkus
, and satisfied himself that the old techniques of Buddhism were still being used in Ceylon. But once again he felt no urge to cut himself off from the West and become a monk. He wrote later that he was not interested in a way that would isolate him from the Western world, which held the key to the future of mankind. This did not mean that he doubted the existence of 'schools', as he called them, in India and Ceylon, but that these schools no longer had the significance that they used to have in the past. He also added that he found that most of these schools relied upon religious and devotional techniques that he was convinced were insufficient for penetrating into the essential reality for which he was seeking.

No doubt full records of this period of Ouspensky's life exist in the various newspapers he wrote for and will one day be published by some diligent researcher. Yet, while they would provide us with facts, they could hardly help us to a deeper understanding than Ouspensky himself provides in
Osokin
and the slightly later
Talks with a Devil
. The latter consists of two stories, the first of which, 'The Inventor', utilizes Ouspensky's American experience. The inventor is an American called Hugh B., who finds himself working in a factory, at a job that bores him. One day, as he is copying a design for a new machine, he realizes that it could be improved by a simple change. The designer becomes indignant at the suggestion and shouts at him. But the manager begins to see that Hugh is correct, and makes him senior draughtsman. Hugh is still dissatisfied because he is still underpaid for his inventions. He marries, but he and his wife are soon at loggerheads. All his attempts to achieve recognition as an inventor come to nothing. One day, like Ivan Osokin, he decides to commit suicide . . .

But at this point, fate intervenes to change his life. As he is buying a revolver with which to end his life, he has an idea for an automatic revolver that will fire like a machine gun. By the time he gets back home, his wife has left him, but he is so obsessed by his new invention that he takes it in his stride. (At this point, the devil who is recounting the story to Ouspensky has to admit that he cannot even begin to understand how a man can become enthusiastic about a mere invention . . . )

The prototype revolver is made, but no one seems to be interested. When one day Hugh encounters another inventor whose life has been a total failure, he almost loses courage. But eventually he meets a friend who is about to sell his factory, and the two go into partnership. At last, the new revolver is manufactured - but it sells so badly that Hugh is tempted to dispose of his patent for 1,000 dollars . . .

At this point, though, fate again takes a hand. In Paris, a famous singer is murdered by her lesbian lover with one of Hugh's revolvers. A book about the case becomes a bestseller and Hugh's factory is suddenly inundated with orders. Every time there is a murder or political catastrophe involving the new repeating pistol, they receive still more orders. Soon Hugh is a millionaire and is reunited with his wife . . .

So far, the story seems to be as deeply pessimistic as
Osokin
: despair leads to the decision to commit suicide; fate intervenes and brings success, but the success involves death and misery, and the death and misery bring still more success until the inventor feels that life has become meaningless. But at this point, we become aware that Ouspensky is no longer a pessimist trapped in the idea of Eternal Recurrence. As Hugh stands on the bridge of his yacht on the Amazon, gazing at the stars, he is suddenly imbued with a passion for astronomy. He spends the rest of the cruise reading books about the stars and, when he returns home, builds an observatory. 'Now he worked for the sake of knowledge alone, creative work, winning over and extorting from nature her closest secrets . . .' Hugh has slipped out of the grip of the devil, whose aim is to confine human beings to the narrowness of the material world. And when his wife decides to devote herself to healing the blind, the devil takes his leave, protesting that he is revolted by her sentimentality.

In a footnote in
Talks with a Devil
, Ouspensky acknowledges that he has unconsciously plagiarized an idea from Dostoevsky's scene with the Devil in
The Brothers Karamazov
. In fact,
Talks with a Devil
is altogether closer to the third act of Shaw's
Man and Superman
, the dream episode called 'Don Juan in Hell'. Shaw's Devil is also a materialist, who has designed Hell as a place where human beings can relax and enjoy themselves. He believes that the aim of life is happiness, good fellowship and artistic enjoyment. Understandably, religious people strike him as cranks; so do philosophers and scientists and all human beings driven by an obscure craving to evolve. Shaw argues that the purpose of the 'Life Force' is to create Intelligence, a brain through which Life can become conscious of its own purposes, so that it can pursue these purposes in the full light of consciousness. Nothing can satisfy the highest type of human being except to help life in its struggle to evolve.