William Patrick Patterson's Struggle Of The Magicians, slyly pinching its title from a never-performed "ballet" that Gurdjieff and his most well known student, P.D. Ouspensky, had occasionally worked on, is, at the very least, a wonderful historical document.

Patterson has plotted Gurdjieff's self-proclaimed mission, that of bringing a certain hidden Eastern knowledge to the West against the backdrop of the turbulent politics of tearly twentieth century Europe and teasingly spiced it with detailed research about  the relationships between Gurdjieff and pupils like Ouspensky, Orage and Bennett.

Others occasionally rate a mention but not greatly so and yet, beyond the excellent research and easy prose, Patterson has added a deliciously scandalous, gossipy commentary on all the students' shenanigans and implied shortcomings, which makes Struggle Of The Magicians a can't-put-down Fourth Way* page-turner.

To be fair, all the others get taken down a peg or two and one certainly begins to think about the legendary figures of the Fourth Way in very "human" terms. Not surprisingly, Patterson reserves his greatest criticism for the debonair Englishman Orage, partly, one feels, because of Orage's obvious weaknesses for women but quite possibly because he was Gurdjieff's "teachers pet" as well. Crusty old Ouspensky had no idea how to make Gurdjieff laugh and I feel I detect a lingering jealousy about Gurdjieff's favoritism. 

Given that well-known author & (now) film-maker Patterson is from the Ouspensky lineage, it's no surprise then, that Ouspensky emerges from the motley bunch of students better than anyone else.

Besides his own bias, Patterson has good reason to champion Ouspensky, whose "school" has certainly been the least flamboyant and scandal-free of the numerous Gurdjieffian offshoots. They certainly appear to live by the book (In Search Of The Miraculous, that is) but I remain unconvinced that Ouspensky actually "got" Gurdjieff and it was this shortcoming, Chief Feature**, if you like, that made it impossible to function together.

So, "The Struggle" implied by the title is misleading. "Struggle" implies equal or near-equal forces battling and for me, the problems between Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (or any of the other students for that matter) weren't equal in the slightest. Ouspensky's strength, which was to systemize Gurdjieff's ideas, was also his downfall because he was trying to make a formula of something that had none. Like humor, laughter or the mojo between two symbiotic thinkers thrown together (e,g, Lennon & McCartney), the dynamism is for a certain duration, seldom beyond.

This wasn't a stuggle in the slightest. Gurdjieff had all the aces and Ouspensky had a couple of pairs.

Struggle Of The Magicians

If you're at all interested in the history of The Fourth Way in Europe during Gurdjieff's life, this is a fantastic, beautifully written reference book. Take out the bias towards Ouspensky and it gets my strong recommendation. 

*Gurdjieff referred to his teachings as The Fourth Way.

**One of Gurdjieff's astonishing psychological insights was about Man's "Chief Feature" in which one (or possibly several) aspects will always dominate in a Man's life, irrespective of whether he accepts it as part of his personality or not.