Dr Welch was Gurdjieff’s final physician. This autobiography was published in 1972, some years before he died. Its 208 pages are chiefly devoted to his life and especially his medical career. Gurdjieff enters at p.45, as “the source of the wisdom and the special vitality of … A.R. Orage” (45). He did not meet Orage himself, but joined in 1934, when groups were taken by Daly King (48). Welch offers the generous assessment of Daly’s group: “By the light of his patient exposition of Gurdjieff’s diagnosis of man and the challenge to verify or disprove it, the notion of the examined life took on a new meaning for me …” (49) He describes some of the things they did, in particular, how they would deliberately put themselves into embarrassing situations.

After several chapters on his medical career, he abruptly states: “On several occasions I talked with P.D. Ouspensky about this” (101). All he says about P.D.O. is:

Ouspensky had come to America from England, where he had settled shortly after the Russian revolution, in the early winter of 1941. In February of that year, we first met him at a gathering in the peeled gold-leaf and thread-bare needle-point salon of Muriel Draper, the author of Music at Midnight, sometime political activist and long a devotee of Gurdjieff. Thereafter we had gone regularly to his lectures until he returned to England shortly before his death in 1947. I had first heard of his book Tertium Organum, from a friend at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who had read it in the early ‘twenties at the behest of Professor Norbert Wiener, the pioneer in cybernetics.

Ouspensky was a formidable man who concealed a warm and poetic nature behind a granitelike exterior, was inhospitable to small talk and capable of massive silence. Indeed when questions were forthcoming from those around him that seemed to him inappropriate to the Socraticlike dialogue in which he chose to conduct his lectures, he was known to sit in contained immobility for an entire lecture period, at the end of which he would rise with easy, elephantine dignity, bow slightly to those he could discern through his thick pince-nez, and walk slowly from the room.

But when a question touched him, he could expound with brilliance and penetrating sensitivity on his diagnosis of the human dilemma and the means open to man to wake up from his sleep to another level of awareness, and a life of initiative rather than one of passive reaction.

He was then at work on an account of his experience with Gurdjieff, which was published after his death under the title In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching. When the book was read to Gurdjieff in 1948 before its publication, I heard him remark simply: “I love that man. In his book, I hear myself speak as I spoke then.” (101-102)

Dr Welch then goes on to speak about Ouspensky’s view of madness as “the end-point of involuntary involution in man under stress to a simplified, unvaried, repetitive playing of a single record …” (102) Ouspensky referred to this as in idee fixe, being the phrase probably invented in 1812 to describe “unhealthy fixation on a single object.” Welch adds that Ouspensky said that: “However painful and constricting this involution may be, it makes no demand on the initiative of a man and puts an end to his struggle to understand by solving the dilemma of life in a single protective circle rigidly excluding all conflict” (102). This alone would be pregnant with significance, but it is what follows which delivers, so to speak, the punch-line, the positive side of this insight:

At the opposite pole, real unity in a man would be the result of a conscious effort toward inclusion, an impartial acceptance of all sides of himself, including the painful ones, and could be achieved only by inner discipline, the struggle to awaken and be present to one’s life. In this act of seeing, a man can awaken the capacity in himself to respond appropriately to reality instead of to his dreams” (102)

It is easy to see how Gurdjieff could love Ouspensky. And also how Welch could love Gurdjieff. When he comes to Gurdjieff’s appearance in New York, there are a series of stories, some of more and some of less ongoing value. Some are intriguing: e.g. how Gurdjieff stressed a particular parable for the benefit of certain woman who, it seems, did not realise he was speaking to her until many years later, and then she was “overcome” (120). This shows Gurdjieff’s patience, and also that he saw people in their potential.

There is a story which gives me pause. A young Greek Orthodox priest, whom the Welches had known since the mid-30s came to Gurdjieff’s table, dressed in clerical clothing. Gurdjieff had him choose his idiot so they could toast him. Gurdjieff drew him into a friendly conversation, and “spoke to him of his mission, and of the necessity of being sensitive to the real needs of his flock.” But then Gurdjieff suddnely changed tone and said: “You know, for me that collar you wear is like a red carnation prostitute wears when she menstruates” (126). I am really not sure what to make of it – but it leaves an impression. When it was over, the priest was asked about how he liked Gurdjieff, and he replied: “He is a great teacher, that man, a true Zen master” (126). That I can make sense of: and it also leaves quite a trace.

It is also interesting that Gurdjieff said that in people over the age of 55, people’s “egotism (is) less active” (128). Of course, this is not necessarily true of everyone of that age. But it reminds me that Mrs Staveley had a special Movements class organised for the elderly, and she told others that she had done so because at that age, people had fewer impediments – I think she specified egotism, but I am not sure.

Dr Welch tended Gurdjieff over his last days. When he was draining him of some of the fluid which was pushing against his diaphragm, Gurdjieff said: “”Only if you not tired, Doctor” … his sad eyes looking down on me warmly. “You carry on”.”