Bronwen Astor: Her Life and Times. Peter Stanford
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need for each individual to develop psychological insights in order to grow into a new state of higher consciousness. Such insights, she came to believe, could bridge the gap between her everyday world and the spiritual world she had glimpsed.
About Gurdjieff himself opinions were divided, even in his lifetime. His supporters – who included the New Zealand-born short-story writer, Katherine Mansfield – regarded him as a prophet and philosopher without equal. Kenneth Walker, a writer who was one of many who were drawn to the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainbleau, described its leader as ‘the arch disturber of self-complacency’, but the press at the time and historians subsequently have judged Gurdjieff less kindly. R. B. Woodings, the distinguished chronicler of twentieth-century thought, sums him up thus: ‘His ideas are not original, his sources can be readily traced and the movement he stimulated was obviously part of reawakening of interest in the occult in the earlier part of this century.’ However, Woodings is in no doubt about the impact of Gurdjieff. ‘Whether charlatan, mystic, scoundrel or “master”, he exercised remarkable authority charismatically over his disciples and by reputation over much wider American and European circles.’
Ouspensky – for nine years until 1924 Gurdjieff’s self-appointed ‘aposde’ – was no less popular and now enjoys a little more academic credibility. Again he inspired a cult-like following, based on his estate at Virginia Water in Surrey, but he had a sounder grasp of philosophy than Gurdjieff and had studied both mathematics and Nietzsche before dabbling in the occult and theosophy, the belief system promoted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by his fellow Russian Helena Blavatsky and her American associate, Henry Steele Olcott, which embraced Hindu ideas of karma and reincarnation.
And it was Ouspensky who made the greater impact on Bronwen. His The Fourth Way, published soon after his death in 1947, brought together many of the ideas he had relentlessly explored in his lifetime. It introduced Bronwen to eastern thought, which she found considerably more attractive than Christianity, and it described in detail his ‘system’ for greater self-knowledge and enlightenment. ‘The chief idea of this system,’ he wrote, ‘was that we do not use even a small part of our powers and forces. We have in us, a very big and very fine organisation, only we do not know how to use it.’ The idea, then, was to study oneself, following Ouspensky’s guidance.
This ranged from the mundane to the enlightening to the foolish. ‘We are divided,’ he claimed, ‘into hundreds and thousands of different “I”s. At one moment when I say “I”, one part of me is speaking, at another moment when I say “I” it is quite another “I” speaking. We do not know that we have not one “I”, but many different “I”s connected with our feelings and desires and have no controlling “I”. These “I”s change all the time; one suppresses another, one replaces another, and all this struggle makes up our inner life.’
To a young, impressionable woman who felt herself torn between the material and spiritual parts of her life, such ideas appeared attractive. She had already realised that she had two apparently contradictory impulses pushing her forward. One was the outgoing, fun-loving, meet-any-challenge, sporty side that was now drawing her to modelling. The other – a legacy, she was sure, from her Welsh ancestors – was driven by a solitary, contemplative, inward-looking instinct that made her want to run away from the world, curl up in a ball and search through books and thought for an answer to why Erica had died in such a tragic way. Ouspensky helped her at least to recognise these two faces within herself and gave her clues as to their origins.
When later he talked about the ‘negative emotions’ bequeathed by childhood and parents and the need to confront these in order to move to a higher level of consciousness, Ouspensky was speaking directly to Bronwen’s own experience, but it would be a mistake to imagine that she became any sort of convert to his cult. She was enthusiastic about her introduction to psychology and to discussions of levels of consciousness – Ouspensky declared there were four – and she was heartened to know that others too were struggling with the sort of questions she had hitherto tackled in secret and largely alone, but Ouspensky was simply a starting point.
In the light of her subsequent determination to combine psychological insights with organised religion – though of course at this time she was a lapsed Anglican – Ouspensky’s antipathy to belief should be noted. Despite borrowing from eastern and western religious creeds, Ouspensky boasted that his system ‘teaches people to believe in absolutely nothing. You must verify everything that you see, hear or feel.’ And some of the conclusions to which he took initially attractive ideas appeared ridiculous, even to one as inexperienced and naive as Bronwen at that stage. His theories about the effect of earthly vibrations on the mind and his peculiar mathematical tangle, ‘the ray of Creation’, ascribing numerically quantified ‘forces’ to a series of worlds (which themselves were listed from one to ninety-six) must have been difficult for even the most avid follower to swallow.
Yet Ouspensky and Gurdjieff initiated a search for a complementary psychological and spiritual framework that has since dominated Bronwen’s life. In her student days and as she took her first faltering steps into the adult world of work, the two principal elements within her and hence in her story began to unravel – the spiritual and the material. At the same time as she was setting her sights on the flimsy, fun and throwaway world of model girls, with their jetset lifestyles, headline-grabbing antics and aristocratic suitors, she embarked on a lonely and often painful journey to understand her own psyche and soul.
* In a recent similar case in Egypt, reported in British medical journals, a sixteen-year-old builder went to see his doctor with severe stomach pains. An X-ray revealed a swollen sac pressing against his kidneys and containing his unborn twin, a seven-inch long foetus, weighing more than four pounds. It had a head, an arm, a tongue and teeth. Like an incubus it had been surviving inside the sixteen-year-old, feeding off him.
One of the many reasons why it is difficult to make a start as a model is that, although the photographers and fashion houses are crying out for new faces, when it comes to the point none of them want to take the risk of trying out a new girl while she is still green.
Jean Dawnay, Model Girl (1956)
The fashion world recovered more quickly than most industries from the dislocation of the war. In Paris in February 1947 Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’ thrilled critics, buyers and public alike. ‘It’s quite a revolution, dear Christian,’ remarked Carmel Snow, reporting for Harper’s Bazaar, at the unveiling of Dior’s dramatic, narrow-waisted, low-cut, very feminine and distinctly nostalgic collection, harking back, some experts said, to the hour-glass silhouette of the 1890s. ‘Your dresses have such a new look. They’re quite wonderful.’
Snow had coined a phrase to emphasise Dior’s break with the drab, austere and utilitarian style of the war years, symbolised by his abundant use of material after a period in which it had been severely rationed. Dior, Snow claimed with some truth, had done more, however, than simply create a style. ‘He has saved Paris as Paris was saved in the Battle of the Marne.’
For there had been doubts expressed about the French capital’s ability to regain its pre-war dominance of the fashion industry, notably with American buyers. Certainly during the war years Paris had lost its crown when Hollywood brought together fashion and film to make New York’s Seventh Avenue the place to be, but the transatlantic clamour that followed the launch of the New Look – Olivia de Havilland and Rita Hayworth were amongst the Hollywood stars who rushed to place orders – ensured that Paris was back at the top of the tree. Pierre Balmain, Jacques Fath and Cristobal Balenciaga all contributed to this pre-eminence; by 1950 they had been joined by Pierre Cardin, two years later by Hubert de Givenchy. But it was Dior who reigned supreme.
In so far as Paris entertained any European rivals, they were Rome and Florence, where designers like Capucci, Pucci, Simonetta, Fabiani and Galitzine were admired, if not held in quite such global high esteem as Dior