Category: Gurdjieff

An Attempt at Time Travel: The Author of Mary Poppins, Gurdjieff, and a Paris Apartment

Dear Reader,

Have you ever wished you could time travel? I have, many times, since I first began my journey into the world of P. L. Travers and her Mary Poppins. At first, I dreamed of having tea with P. L. Travers in her townhouse in Chelsea, London, and talking about all things Mary Poppins. But as time went on and I delved deeper into her universe, I began to dream of a particular kind of time travel; time travel under a cloak of invisibility.

I would love to witness the events of her life firsthand instead of relying on the filtered perceptions of those who knew (or thought they knew) her. Just think how enlightening it would be, for example, to observe her interactions with her spiritual teacher, G. I. Gurdjieff, who, by the way, was a fascinating figure in his own right. Imagine what it would be like if I could see his apartment in Paris, hear the voices, see who sat where, notice what nobody back then thought important enough to record, and then come back to tell the tale.

Since I have no supernatural powers, all I could do to come somewhat closer to realising my impossible wish was to travel, in real time, to Paris and visit number 6, rue des Colonels-Renard, where Gurdjieff dispensed his wisdom while entertaining his pupils with exotic dishes he cooked himself, Armagnac toasts, readings from his manuscripts, and music played on his harmonium.

(Gurdjieff’s harmonium. Image reproduced from Jessmin and Dushka Howarth, It’s Up to Ourselves: A Mother, a Daughter, and Gurdjieff, via The Gurdjieff International Review.)

Rue des Colonels-Renard is a quiet street in Paris’s 17th arrondissement, close to the Arc de Triomphe and just a short walk from the bustle of the Champs-Élysées. Number 6 is an elegant five-story limestone building with an ornamented stone facade, tall windows, and wrought-iron balconies adorned with flower boxes.

The building was constructed in 1911, and the name of its architect, Henri Preslier, is immortalised on its facade.

My daughter and I arrived there a little after lunch on a hot and sunny day in early June. The absence of other pedestrians on the street made it easy for me to pretend that we were stepping back in time. All I had to do was ignore the cars parked along the sidewalk and focus on the building.

I knew that I would not be able to see the actual apartment, but I was hoping to get inside the building, feel the atmosphere of the vestibule, and climb the staircase. Alas, to my great disappointment, it was not meant to be. The wrought-iron entrance gate was locked.

There was, however, a small consolation. The entrance gate was not a conventional solid door, but a combination of glass and elaborate black wrought iron, which allowed me to catch a glimpse of the vestibule beyond. After first pressing my nose between the ornamental ironwork and peering through the glass portion of the door, I pulled out my cell phone and pressed the camera lens against the glass.

I don’t know whether the entrance gate is the original one from 1911. The building must have undergone some changes over the years, but the vestibule, with its patterned mosaic floor and tall, glazed wooden inner door, certainly retains the appearance of an early-twentieth-century Parisian apartment building. It is possible, then, that the space looks much as it did when Gurdjieff lived here, and P. L. Travers came to visit.

Still hoping to somehow get inside the building, we sat on the sidewalk across the street and waited to see if someone would come in or out. No one did. As we sat there, I wondered whether the entrance gate had been locked back then too, or whether that was a consequence of modern-day security concerns. Somehow, I had a feeling that things had been a little different in Gurdjieff’s time.

I imagined P. L. Travers walking along the sidewalk with her adopted son Camillus, who was around ten years old when he first met Gurdjieff. They came to visit him in September 1949, just a few weeks before his death the following month. I wondered, did P. L. Travers scold Camillus in the manner of Mary Poppins and instruct him to be on his best behaviour? And did Camillus display the same sense of excitement and anticipation as Jane and Michael Banks when Mary Poppins took them to visit her relatives?

My reverie was suddenly interrupted by the chiming of a church bell. You can hear it in the video below.

The solemnity of the moment did not last long. My daughter, who, quite understandably, was beginning to lose patience with my facade-gazing decided to ask me a perfectly ordinary question and catapulted me back right into ordinary reality. You can hear her talking in the background and me insistently shushing her.

Then, as if to confirm my sense of reverence, a pigeon flew overhead and circled the balconies on the top floor of the building before continuing its way. Somehow, the sight of it, combined with the chiming of the bell, made me feel at peace with the fact that I could not get inside the building.

And as I am writing this and looking again at the picture of the vestibule, I notice something that I had not noticed before. If you look closely, you can see my reflection in one of the glass panes of the inner wooden door. In a way, I was inside the building, albeit not in the manner I had expected. Maybe, even though I could not physically cross that threshold, I was allowed to see enough.

Descriptions of the interior of Gurdjieff’s apartment can be found in the written accounts of his pupils. I have not read them all, of course, but last year I discovered Margaret Anderson’s The Unknowable Gurdjieff and was thrilled to find brief descriptions of what his home looked and felt like.

Margaret Anderson was an American writer and editor of the influential avant-garde literary magazine The Little Review and one of Gurdjieff’s pupils. She later became a member of the Rope, a small group of lesbian women whom Gurdjieff brought together for special work. Her account in The Unknowable Gurdjieff includes recollections from the period after the Second World War, when Gurdjieff’s American pupils began returning to Paris, along with others, like P. L. Travers, who had spent the war years in the United States.

It was in May 1948 that Anderson returned to Gurdjieff’s apartment in Paris.

“It was May in Paris, but for us there was no spring. There was no time to notice the horse-chestnut trees blossoming in the Bois, or the illuminated fountains sparkling in the Place de la Concorde in the soft sweet light. There was time only to drive as fast as possible by the shortest route to Gurdjieff’s flat in the rue Colonel Renard – a street with as little French distinction as a page in a dictionary; a flat without sunlight or a single flower, where the motionless air reeked of Asiatic cooking and the heat was almost unbearable.”

“Gurdjieff’s small dingy familiar apartement in the rue Colonels Renard had not changed – details of destruction only emphasized its changelessness: the colours had faded, the furniture was shabbier, the dining-room carpet had worn through and now had big patches on it. (…) The pictures on the walls were new, but they had the same quality as the old ones – ‘everything but art’ as Jane had said long ago.”

Jane was Jane Heap, Anderson’s co-editor of The Little Review and her partner for many years. Heap became particularly devoted to Gurdjieff’s teaching and eventually taught his work herself, leading Gurdjieff groups in London. P. L. Travers belonged to one of these groups.

I found this observation about the pictures on his walls particularly interesting because Gurdjieff had strong opinions about art. He taught that true art must be objective, transmit spiritual truths, and cosmological laws. He disliked what he called subjective art which arose largely from the artist’s personality, emotions, associations, and unconscious impulses. And, yet he covered his walls with art that his pupils, many of whom were artistically sophisticated, considered dreadful.

The kitchen was a central room in Gurdjieff’s apartment, as food played an important role in his teaching. He used different teaching methods at different periods of his life, but during his final years, meals became an essential ritual for the transmission of his ideas.

Gurdjieff concocted exotic dishes and turned his table into a dramatic stage where he acted as a master tamer of egos, administering the external shocks he believed were necessary to awaken his pupils from their identification with their thoughts and emotions. His provocative remarks, the famous ritual of the Armagnac Toasts to the Idiots, readings from his manuscripts, and the music he played on his harmonium after meals all served to open his pupils to new “impressions.”

Beyond the kitchen, there was also a storeroom in the apartment where Gurdjieff kept his victuals and the spices he used in his cooking. On occasion, he also took pupils there for private conversations. Here is a description from Margaret Anderson’s book:

“There, in the midst of fruits and sweets and wines, with slender sausages of camel’s meat, bunches of scarlet peppers and sprays of rosemary and mint suspended like canopy above, as I watched him pouring coffee out of the old battered old thermos (…)”

I found this photograph of his storeroom in It’s Up to Ourselves: A Mother, a Daughter, and Gurdjieff, by Jessmin and Dushka Howarth. The photograph, however, is black and white, and the resolution is poor, so I find it a little difficult to mentally project myself into the room.

I used AI to reconstruct the photograph. The result is not entirely accurate. There are labels, objects, decorative items, and other details that cannot be established from the original photograph, while the sausages and herbs suspended from above are missing. Overall, however, the picture remains reasonably close to the original and, for me at least, the colours add liveliness and make it easier to get a sense of the place.

And with that, my attempt to step inside Gurdjieff’s apartment comes to an end.

This is all for now. Next time, I will take you to Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Paris, where we will attempt to go back in time to 1949 and witness the day of Gurdjieff’s funeral, at which, of course, P. L. Travers was present.

Until then, be well.

Lina

Mary Poppins in Paris: Where P. L. Travers Met G. I. Gurdjieff

Dear Reader,

When I first began reading and studying the life and writings of P. L. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, I didn’t expect the journey to last as long as it has, or to carry me beyond the page. And yet it has led me all the way from Canada across London and Paris, where traces of her life still linger, and the list of places connected to her and Mary Poppins that I dream of visiting continues to grow.

In the first biography of P. L. Travers, Mary Poppins, She Wrote, Valerie Lawson reveals that Travers was one of G. I. Gurdjieff’s pupils and a lifelong follower of his spiritual teachings. At the time, I had never heard of Gurdjieff. In fact, I have no spiritual or religious background.

I spent my early childhood in Bulgaria in the 1980s, and the communist regime rejected any religious practice. The doors of the church next to my grandparents’ apartment were always locked, and I remember being told by my parents to stay away from it, lest someone see me and something bad happens. What exactly that would have been, nobody told me.

I had read Mary Poppins as a child in Bulgaria (the first two books in the series), and when I read in P. L. Travers’s biography that these stories contained elements and references to Gurdjieff’s teachings, the fires of curiosity were lit and I became compelled to find them. I can confidently say that I did find some of these references, along with other interesting connections. I am now writing a book about them, because posts cannot do justice to the subject. A deep dive is what is needed to truly appreciate the creative genius of P. L. Travers and the depth of her writing, and I sincerely hope that one day my book will be out in the world and that it will revive readers’ interest in the original Mary Poppins stories, and in the larger body of work of P. L. Travers.

Today’s post is the first in a series of three articles in which I want to share with you my experience of Paris in the footsteps of P. L. Travers. It was in Paris that she first met Gurdjieff in the late 1930s, and it was also there that she returned to visit him after the end of World War II.

Paris today is, of course, not the Paris of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet the buildings where their meetings took place still stand, quietly bearing witness to those encounters. The first meeting happened at Café de la Paix, and this is what P. L. Travers later wrote about it:

“It was a day I shall always remember for not merely did I learn things that only later I came to understand, but it pointed me in the direction my life was to take. On leaving my vital and benevolent host, he declined to say goodbye, “You will be back,” he said, and I agreed, not knowing that it would be several years before the prediction came true. War intervened, also the Atlantic Ocean, and it was not until peace broke out and I returned to London that the Golden Arrow, and I in it, could speed from its bow to Paris. ”

Café de la Paix, first inaugurated in 1862, is located near the Palais Garnier (the Paris Opera House) and is still open and bustling with life.

(I wish that big advertisement hadn’t been there when I took the picture…)

Walking in, I tried to imagine what it must have felt like for Travers to step through those same doors for the first time, and the trepidation of meeting someone who had acquired a mythical stature in her imagination, someone she had only heard about, yet whose teachings she had already begun to study.

Gurdjieff had a halo of mystery; he seemed almost like a character from a fairy tale. He spoke with a heavy accent and in parables, and his teachings can be described as a strange mixture of esoteric Christianity and Gnosticism, with echoes of Theosophy. He spoke of the inner friction of opposites, and of the need to suffer consciously, if one wanted to transcend them and awaken. His ideas were original and unique, and yet they also echoed ideas P. L. Travers had been introduced to by her literary mentor and Theosophist, George W. Russell (AE).

On the website of Café de la Paix, you can read that past regulars included Guy de Maupassant, Victor Hugo, Ernest Hemingway, and Émile Zola. I am tempted to suggest they add Gurdjieff to the list, even if he was, and still remains, a controversial figure.

Café de la Paix was one of Gurdjieff’s favorite cafes, where he liked to spend time drinking coffee, writing his books, and meeting with his pupils. Louise Goepfert, a devoted pupil and translator of the German edition of Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, remembers him telling her that he always worked in cafes and dance halls because they were places where he could see people as they are, and where he could see those who were most drunk and most abnormal (Note to the reader: he was not politically correct in his formulations, but you must put this in the context of the times). Seeing them, he said, could produce an impulse of love in him, and from that, he said, he wrote his books.

I was eager to see Café de la Paix, but at the same time I felt a little sad, because I knew the visit would not satisfy my desire to meet P. L. Travers. The only connection is through books, through accounts, and through the experience of places she once visited. That is all I can use to travel back in time. Imperfect as this connection may be, my visit to Café de la Paix will remain a favourite memory of my first trip to Paris.

The interior of the Café de la Paix has a hushed richness. Carpets, drapery, and upholstered seating absorb the sounds and create a sense of luxurious intimacy. Gilded moldings catch the light from crystal chandeliers, and mirrors stretching along the walls give the space an impression of expansiveness and movement. Above, a blue sky with white clouds is painted on the ornamented ceilings, adding an airy elegance and an overall feeling of sophistication. But above all, what stands out is the atmosphere of a place that has absorbed decades of conversations. If only its walls could talk.

As I took my seat, I tried to imagine P. L. Travers seated at a table in conversation with Gurdjieff, and then an amusing thought crossed my mind. What if I were sitting in that exact same place? What would such a temporal overlay look like? Our faces and gestures would pass through one another without resistance, our conversations mingling without interruption. A density of lived moments, layered one upon the other like an overexposed film, would leave a faint, ghost-like trace, as if the past had never fully withdrawn.

Then the waiter came to our table and I was pulled back into the present. And yet something of that brief reverie stayed with me. Whatever has changed in Paris, the rooms remain, and they still invite us to listen for the faintest echo of a life passing through.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this article, I invite you to subscribe to The Mary Poppins Effect, where I explore the work of P.L. Travers, the world of Mary Poppins, its connections to other literary worlds, and the symbolic imagination at the heart of classic children’s literature.

Until next time, be well.

Lina