Much has been written of Gurdjieff's relationship with his chief pupils, but his relationship with Fritz Peters is rarely, if ever, mentioned. And yet, it is unique. Only 11 years old when he first met Gurdjieff in 1924, just a month before Gurdjieff's car crash, Fritz Peters was quickly drawn into the life of the Prieure. In the months following the accident, the young boy acted as Peter Grubisic "chair-carrier," following him everywhere, watching out for his safety. Later, "Freets," as Gurdjieff called him, was enlisted as Gurdjieff's personal servant, delivering messages, doing errands, cleaning his room. And soon, every Tuesday morning the young Fritz--who, when Gurdjieff first asked what he wanted most to know, had answered: "I want to know everything"--was receiving private lessons from Gurdjieff.
At such a young and impressionable age to be taken under the wing of a master like Gurdjieff is a blessing as great as it is unique. But it can be a kind of 'curse,' as well, if not taken rightly. One learns only by consciously living one's errors and Peters' later life shows how harrowing a journey that can be. Leaving the Prieure in October 1929, Fritz Peters, then 15 years old, was immediately thrown into a turbulent adult world where he found himself totally alone, blamed and victimized, fighting for his very survival. Developed and shaped by his Prieure training, Fritz Peters walked his life's path, always the outsider, the rebel, the malcontent. He would become a member of the Chicago and New York groups, but, though the teaching and Gurdjieff were in his blood, he never found his place in the Work. His days with Gurdjieff at the Prieure were over. Neither the Chicago nor New York groups were serious enough for him. Too much reverence for Gurdjieff. Too many members he saw as "phony." His experience at the Prieure was undeniably special, but as Gurdjieff warned--"Every stick has two ends." But Peters never saw the other end of the Prieure stick. Though keenly observant and detesting any sign of falseness, he didn't see that he had allowed his early experience to make him too special, too separate. He became, as it was expressed one day in 1945 at 6 rue des Colonels Renard--"a colossal egotist."
Gurdjieff's "Successor"
That 32-year-old Fritz Peters, standing amidst a group of wartime French pupils in Gurdjieff's apartment that autumn day, could for even a moment have believed it when 73-year-old Gurdjieff pointed to him as his successor....Well, to the assembled pupils, who regularly had to pass Nazi checkpoints to get to meetings at Gurdjieff's apartment, it was yet another vivid proof of Peters' overweening self-love.
That Gurdjieff's act had evoked, as well, a trace of will-to-power and envy in those who had not grown up at the Prieure, or enjoyed as intimate a relationship with Gurdjieff, was perhaps neither recognized nor appreciated. And certainly the later life of Fritz Peters, filled as it was with seizures of anger, jealousy, rejection, vengeance, nervous breakdowns and alcoholism, would do nothing to mitigate the sweeping indictment of him on that day in postwar Paris. It would forever brand Peters as a nullity, a fool, no one to take seriously. The one group of people, then, that might have understood Fritz Peters all but disowned him. Though he was to later write Boyhood with Peter Grubisic and Gurdjieff Remembered, two books that are without rival in portraying the heart and soul of Gurdjieff in the last period of his life, Fritz Peters remains maligned and marginalized, his relationship with Gurdjieff never seriously considered.
Meeting such a monumental father-figure so early in life took nearly a lifetime for Peters to digest. For years Peters struggled with Gurdjieff's identity and his own relationship to Gurdjieff and to the teaching. In his last book, Balanced Man, Peters recounts how as late as 1960, 46 years after he first met Gurdjieff, "I was still laboring under the impression that I was special--the real son of a Messiah. In an emotional sense, I was Gurdjieff's son. I loved him more than anyone I had ever known. But times change...I no longer feel like anyone's 'son.'" As Gurdjieff foresaw, Peters would not lead a happy life. He had a broken marriage, alcoholism, homosexuality, and relationships that inevitably turned contentious.