I am unable to recommend this book. My understanding is that Lachman was invited to write this book by a Swedenborg organisation, but that at some point their relations were not sufficiently buoyant to maintain a productive connection. He mentions that someone suggested it to him, and that another gave him the transcripts of Nicoll’s diaries, but unless my sources are wrong, while quite true, this omits as much as it discloses.

The major problem I have with the book is that Nicoll’s achievement is not recognised in anything like adequate terms. I would agree with Bennett that Nicoll was one of Gurdjieff’s leading pupils. Although his personal acquaintance with Gurdjieff was quite brief, and unlike Bennett, he never returned to him, yet he made something real for himself. All one has to do is consider the numbers of serious men and women who joined his groups. Further evidence for Nicoll’s discoveries are found in his Psychological Commentaries, The New Man, The Mark, and perhaps especially in the notes of group meetings with him. These are mentioned in Lachman’s book, but I find the treatment of them is rather meagre. Further, slim but significant works such as the Simple Explanation are quite absent. Nicoll’s treatment of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky’s ideas (because he did take Ouspensky’s contributions very seriously) is mastery: clear, deep and practical. I doubt anyone reading this book, even should they do so ever so carefully, woudl realise that.

There is an over-emphasis on the contents of the unpublished diaries, augmented by reference to the sexological views of Colin Wilson, of all people. For example, on 87, he quotes CW to the effect that: “The major component of the sexual urge is the sense of sin … the sense of invading another’s privacy, of escaping one’s own separateness.” And “Without the sense of violation … sexual excitement would be weakened, or perhaps completely dissipated.” I have not read Wilson to ensure this is a fair quote, but it is hard to believe that someone could write this imagining it to be a general truth. It might be true for certain individuals. If so, it is a description of their pathology. The sexual function can only be well discharged if there is no sense of violation, no sense of sin. Whatever Nicoll may have said and done, at times, and there is quite enough speculation in these pages, my point is that GL cites CW as if it were scripture of universal application. Likewise, GL speaking in his own voice, writes “Nothing gives a man more confidence than sexual conquest.” (97) He might speak for himself. I do not wish to make this short review a critique of GL personally, so I will pass on.

While too much of this book is fruitlessly concerned with sex, one of the most significant events in Nicoll’s life is passed over: how Gurdjieff had all those at the Prieure stay up for “most of the night doing unusually difficult exercises in order to create the force which he was able to use to cure Jane … when she was very ill. He and Mrs Nicoll always felt that he in this way saved (two year old) Jane’s life.” (Informal Work Talks, 82). When I picked up this volume, I was quite looking forward to reading about this, and seeing whether GL had discovered more about it. I was disappointed to find it entirely absent. But it is quite significant. What did Gurdjieff do? Are there any known parallels? How could Nicoll have left Gurdjieff, the man who saved his daughter’s life, and not constantly sought him out?

Neither is there any treatment of the exercises which Nicoll did before going to bed, and the one of moving “through the Time-Body,” learnt apparently from Gurdjieff (Pogson, Maurice Nicoll, 91 and 252). I am not sure GL could have uncovered more material about these, but he does not even mention them, and in failing to do so, the portrait produced makes Nicoll seem more of an intellectual type, less of a balanced man, than in fact he was.

Nicoll remembered and passed on some very important statements of Gurdjieff’s which would otherwise have been lost. I have reported some of them on this page, e.g. that “Behind real ‘I’ lies God.” Here is another one:

He emphasised that if anyone made an effort in his mind towards someone it was not lost in the total Cosmos. It would be sure to get there eventually; it was like posting a letter. It was wrong to think there was no connection because the London (Nicoll group) people were not present visibly. In the psychic world people can be present or not according to what you think. We have to learn to live in the psychic world. If you murder a person in your thoughts you are ruining your psychic world.

He said of sacrifices that people, more conscious in the past, tried to put the pain into animals by killing them to avert the pain of wars, etc. for Man, knowing that a certain amount of pain was necessary for the world (to feed the moon). Gurdjieff had said the Moon did not require so much pain now, but wars went on from habit. (IWT 17)

I could go on providing such gems, valuable material which the book under review passes over. My sense is that Nicoll actually knew the first part, about the psychic world, for himself. Is this not significant? I shall refrain from commenting on Nicoll and Swedenborg, for Swedenborg did become very important to Nicoll, especially in his later years. But if GL had examined the ideas in New Man and Mark at any length, he could have shown where that influence appeared. That would have been a contribution to the literature.

We have a skewed idea of Nicoll in those last years. Living Time, a rather ordinary study in my view, was published although written long before. He had long ripened beyond it. He had developed an understanding of “the Work” as a force, an impulse, a voice. It is one of the striking features of how Nicoll wrote and spoke. But if GL refers to this at all, I missed it. Further, from the little I have seen of the unpublished diaries, Nicoll started to develop an almost unique way of conversing with a higher element of himself, perhaps the Steward. Now, as it happens, Bennett had also come to this point. That, it seems to me, is very important. It may also explain why he did not return to Gurdjieff: he now had a source of authority within himself.

Neither does GL ever explain why he sees Nicoll as a “forgotten” teacher of the Fourth Way. I could challenge this, but there is little point: the idea appears in the subtitle but is not explained.

Another major feature of Nicoll’s achievement which this book does not bring out is his linking the Gurdjieff Work to Christianity, or perhaps more precisely, showing how the Gurdjieff Work can help one to be a Christian: to do what Christ commanded. In the process, he reconfigures our picture of Christianity; we see in the Gospels meanings and above all, levels of meaning, which we had not realised. It also had the effect that the Work looks different, because it was no longer  separated from Christianity by a gulf, but was rather a land bridge, joining the valley of ordinary life to the high road, the higher level on which both the Work and the Way can be lived out. This was a major and massive achievement: it meant that many good people, otherwise suspicious of certain elements in the Work came and still come to find that the eternal values they had been taught to think illusory were real.

In a word, in all this discussion of sometimes eccentrically selected things Nicoll said and did, his being is missing. For me, the main value of this unfortunate book is that it has strengthened my resolve to ensure that the Gurdjieff Society of Newport works with those who have the requisite knowledge and being to produce a volume worthy of Nicoll and his achievement.