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

60 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

Hastings, A. E. Randall, J. M. Kennedy, Katherine Mansfield, Ezra Pound, Ramiro de Maeztu and T. E. Hulme. In later years they were replaced or supplemented by Edwin Muir, Herbert Read, Janko Lavrin and Philip Mairet. Upton Sinclair and Augustus John were also occasional visitors.

Undoubtedly, to many of his new associates, Mitrinovic appeared as a strange and eccentric “Central European,” just one more exile with strange ideas seeking refuge and a “following” in London. At the same time he succeeded in captivating many of the talented people gathered around the weekly, even if they had only the vaguest notion of what it was that motivated him. Philip Mairet has provided a detailed description of Mitrinovic as he appeared to the intellectuals and artists meeting in the cafés and coffee houses during this period.

He had the intensity of consciousness, the immediate intuition, of those few individuals whose instinctive, emotional and intellectual centres work in unison. .. . Physically, he was of the splendid type and proportions one so often sees in the Dalmatian and Bosnian peasantry of his forebears. The forehead was not remarkably high, but the cranium was highly domed and the back of the head rather flat. The fine, dark eyes set wide apart never struck me as truly “hypnotic, they had the watchful look one often sees in those born under Scorpio—Goethe, for instance. It was the mouth, of a singularly perfect form that was his organ of power; the mouth of a poet and orator. The winning beauty of his smile was in strange contrast with a fortunately rare but startingly discordant laugh; but the weight and seriousness of his inexhaustible exhortations was often relieved by a gentle, ingenuous humour. To people of all kinds and conditions he had an easy and engaging approach: cabmen and charwomen responded to his charm as readily as businessmen, artists or intellectuals. Provoked to self-defence he could be formidable... Yet it was in Mitrinovié that more than a few broken or depressed individuals felt they-had their one perfect experience of Chrisilike love and understanding. He had, in fact, that abundance of being that a number of recent writers have sought to convey in their recollections of Gurdjieff . . . Widely unlike in character and destiny as the two men were, both were distinguished from everybody one had met before by what I might call a higher magnitude of humanity.

An insight into the life and style of Mitrinovi¢ during the immediate post-war years in London can be obtained from the memoirs and autobiographies of his contemporaries. Amongst these were the Muirs, Edwin and Willa, who had moved from Scotland to London in 1919 where Edwin was working three days a week in The New Age office as Orage’s assistant. According to Willa, Mitrinovic