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Idiots in Paris: Diaries of J.G. Bennett and Elizabeth Bennett, 1949

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Wonderful book, with information rarely available elsewhere.

I see it as an honour, be be able to write this review today, on J.G. Bennett's birthday, June 8.th.

This book is a collection of accounts written by J. G. Bennett and his wife Elizabeth during the three months preceeding Gurdjieff's death in 1949. It is detailed report of what was really happening during that time, a very good recollection of journeys vividly structured and reported.

In Elizabeth notes you find, that the memories of the dinners and lunches rituals, at Rue des Colonels Renard in Paris, with the 'toast of the idiots', are meticulously recorded and clarifying.

One very impressive description made by Elizabeth is her personal experience of Mr. Gurdjieff's death:

"We arrive at the chapel a little before six. I had not meant or wished to see his body;...
I was overwhelmed by the force that came from him. One could not be near his body without feeling unmistakably his power. He looked magnificent; composed, content, intentional, for want of a better word. Not simply a body placed by someone else. He was undisguised, nothing was concealed from us. Everything belonging to him, his inner and outer life and all the circumstances and results of it, were there to be seen, if one could see. What force there was in him then! I have never seen anything in any way like it." Idiots in Paris / pag.104- about Mr. Gurdjieffs death.

In 1949, JG Bennett was engaged, with Gurdjieff's help and guidance, in a titanic struggle with his own nature, which he describes in these diaries and, with more perspective, in his autobiography, Witness: The Story of a Search.

Elizabeth's Diary, which makes up the bulk of this book, has a different value. It is simply as a witness to conditions in Gurdjieff's circle at the end of his life. Elizabeth's diary shares with the account of Rina Hands - "The Diary of Madam Egout Pour Sweet" - the virtue of being a straightforward description with very little "self" in it.

In the 21st century, when there are few people left alive who "knew" the Armenian mystic philosopher Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (d. 1949), it is all the more important to have such honest and impartial eyewitness accounts as the one Elizabeth Bennett presents here.

Elizabeth's original introduction, included in this new edition, and the diaries themselves outline far better than any later commentator can the conditions in which Gurdjieff's pupils lived, satellites revolving round a brilliant sun.

In her introduction, Elizabeth Bennett explains that the book is "designed to help those readers who are not familiar with the activities and environment of Gurdjieff and his followers." Twice daily the group would go through a series of rituals. Of these rituals, perhaps the most significant was the one known as the "toast of the idiots." The "science of idiotism" that Gurdjieff taught portrayed the whole human situation and the hazards of attaining liberation. Elizabeth Bennett writes, "The exact repetition of the external framework left one free to attend to the shifting responsibilities of the inner world. Every moment in Gurdjieff's presence was a chance to learn, if one was sufficiently awake to take the chance."

This edition contains new material.

Unpublished entries from Elizabeth Bennett's Paris diary.

A foreword essay by George Bennett.

About the "science of idiotism" check Bruno Martin's new book The Realized Idiot

This one tells us much about Gurdjieff, and by the way, much about the kind of student he attracted, people like Bennett--who might be one of the most gullible men who ever lived (he was later duped out of his estate by some other even more phony guru, as documented in Madam Blavatsky's Baboon). For all his brilliance, even in old age G. was very crafty, manipulative and superstitious, as revealed here (he thought the caves at Lascaux were painted by Atlanteans!). Also, the quality of the Bennetts' writing really sets this apart from some other books in the genre; it is compulsively readable.