Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

156 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

Books on art, with great reproductions of great paintings were available to us, and sometimes given to us to keep as our own.

We were taken to art exhibitions, also to museums, and our sense of discrimination was encouraged. DM entered into (or took up) the Surrealist movement in art and as Valerie Cooper entertained many of the painters in her studio for DM we met them also. At that time we were not only meeting political figures but painters, writers, and thinkers of the time.

In general I think that all of us would agree that our general cultural education was greatly increased and widened. We were made to form our own judgments on all we saw, heard or read.!*

The main feature of the evenings spent together in Bloomsbury Street was the amount of talk that went on. Arthur Peacock witnessed a number of sessions:

... he would sit arguing hour after hour with his followers.

The technique was strange, sometimes bewildering, and I think not very effective. All day, and sometimes until the early hours of the morning, Mitrinovi¢ would sit discussing matters. Talk would go from subject to subject. Politics and economics, philosophy and the occult, psychology came into the picture, too . . .

The same topics would come up for discussion again and again. Blueprints would be drawn up and he hurried forward their completion as if the end of the world was at hand, and these blueprints alone would save it.

At times one came away feeling completely exhausted. But there was something intriguing about the man and most of us returned to participate once more."*

The New Britain movement was once characterized as “a bottomless abyss into which documents, plans and programmes disappeared for ever and ever.” A similar kind of observation might have been made about the speed with which groups were formed, constitutions drawn up, then disbanded, reformed and revised within the group life of the latter half of the 1930s. It occurred to at least one participant during this period that, as in Alice Through the Looking Glass, they were all characters in Mitrinovic’s dream albeit a ‘dream’ which at least some of his intimates understood. The dream was the creation in microcosm of an organic social order in which the perennial conflict between individuality and community could be transcended and reconciled according to the organic model, with each person fulfilling their own needs through the performance of specific functions which also met the requirements of the wider community.

No one person in real life could fulfil their potential for growth and self-expression through the performance of a single function—so it followed