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

THE NEW AGE 61

. Was a source of Joy to us when he came visiting at 13 Guildford Street. After discovering that empty beer bottles were as good as currency, since we exchanged them for coppers at the corner pub, he never arrived without two quart bottles of beer crammed into the pockets of his frockcoat, which, from the look of it, served as dressingown as well as calling kit. He would appear about six o’clock, saying that he had an urgent appointment at seven, but at ten or eleven o’clock we would still be sitting beside our fireplace entrancing us with his speculations—the evolution of Sex, for instance, through various grades of animals. We finished up, I remember, with Pan-Man, Sex harmonious. As for Scorpio, why was he set in the zodiac as the sign of Sex? Because he made an effort of will and turned himself Inside Out with one great convulsion, and so the vertebrates were born.

This brand of nonsense was novel to us and we enjoyed it hugely. Mitrinovic made a plummy mouthful of every word he used. He did not say: Albion, he said: “All-bion, Word of Mystery, Name of Strength.’ Feeling gay, he would imitate Serbian bagpipes with zest. The only thing that irked him was the success of Ouspensky, his rival as a seer, and behind Ouspensky, farther away but more menacing, the magnetic force of Gurdjieff. Too many clever men in London, he complained, were throwing up their jobs and migrating to Fontainebleau because Gurdjieff had promised that he could raise into full bloom the merest bud of a soul. Yet after melancholy shakings of the head Mitrinovi¢é would then gurgle with laughter and cry: ‘London is Looney-bin, no?’. He had an eye for a pretty woman, too; he told us that Ezra Pound’s wife was like a cherry tree. We found him an entertaining companion because he was such an egregious nonsensemonger, which, we suspected, he was aware of himself.4

Edwin Muir was to recall similar scenes—the arrival with the beer bottles under each arm and then the endless talk “about the universe, the creation of the animals, the destiny of man, the nature of Adam Kadmon, the influence of the stars, the objective science of criticism . . . and a host of other things which I have since forgotten.”5

There is, in both the accounts of the Muirs, especially Willa’s, more than a hint that whilst they found him stimulating and hugely entertaining, they also felt there was something crankish about him, something of the poseur. Janko Lavrin, a friend of Mitrinovié’s during this period, was later to describe his fellow Slay as a man with a “home-made messiah complex,” concerned to be a saviour rather than to save anyone. However, in those post-war years in London the intellectual kinship and friendship between the two men, strengthened no doubt by their shared status as exiles, was éxtremely close. It was Lavrin, later to be appointed Professor of Slavonic Languages at Nottingham University, who was instrumental in introducing Mitrinovi¢ to intellectual and artistic circles in the capital beyond those of The New