Volume 27, Number 16 · October 23, 1980
The Great Mystifier
By Rosemary Dinnage
The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G.I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers
by James Webb
G.P. Putnam's, 608 pp., $19.95
Gurdjieff and Mansfield
by James Moore
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 261 pp., $25.00
Who Are You, Monsieur Gurdjieff?
by René Zuber
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 80 pp., $7.50 (paper)
James Webb has an exotic story to tell in The Harmonious Circle, and copes briskly with it through 600 pages. The Gurdjieff story is an extraordinary one not only because of the involvement of so many literary people in it, or because it is an odd byway in the history of ideas, but more simply as a rattling good yarn—concocted, perhaps, by a syndicate composed of Kipling, M.R. James, and Iris Murdoch. It covers Paris, Petersburg, Tibet, New York, Armenia, South America; Russian spymasters, occult rites, literary feuds, great swindles and great jokes; and a network of ideas that is linked to many of the important threads in late nineteenth-century thought.
Review, 5525 words
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