Extracted from An African Odyssey by Hugh Massey

A Meeting With FM Alexander

The day comes when I am to go up to London to meet Alexander. I am carried down the stairs - it is the first time that I have left the floor where the bedroom is since returning from the sanatorium - and am put into the ambulance.
Alexander has a suite behind Victoria Street in London. Carried up the stairs of his consulting-rooms, I am shown into a sitting-room tastefully furnished with a few antique chairs and an elegant desk. In a few moments, Alexander enters the room, walking briskly and businesslike. He is an old man, but there is something about him that belies his age. It is more than sprightliness; he has a presence and it hides behind a young, high-pitched voice. I decide to call him ‘Sir’, which clearly goes down well.
“Why you people do all these terrible things to yourselves, I really don’t know,” he says conversationally.
Meanwhile, he has sat me down in a high-backed, hard-seated chair and moves his large, rather ugly hands about my person. First, gently on the top of my head, then on the neck which he squeezes a little between thumb and fingers. Finally he moves his hand over my back in sweeping strokes, talking to me all the time about illnesses in general.
“What do you know about my technique?” he asks.
“I’m afraid I know nothing, Sir.”
“Well, I can tell you are very ill, very ill indeed.”
To myself, I think the man’s a mountebank. He has come into this study which contains not a single piece of medical equipment as far as I can see. He doesn’t check me with a stethoscope. He obviously knows little about my particular disease, from what I have said to him. He doesn’t even wear a white coat and his replies are evasive.
As if in confirmation of my impression, he simply says at the end of half an hour’s consultation: “I advise you to go home and read my books. If you think you can understand what I have written, I shall be able to take you as a pupil. Dorothy has spoken about you and you should also talk with her.”
I feel as though I have struggled to make the 14-mile journey to him to little purpose. After the return home again in the ambulance, I get so tired that I feel sure I will never again be able to stand the trip. Disappointment is in my voice as I tell my wife, but she has already got hold of two of Alexander’s books and gives them to me to read.
“Have you read them?” I ask her.
“Well, I’ve skipped through them a little, but I confess I don’t understand what he is saying. He does mention that he has successfully treated TB, however.”
“That’s not the feeling I got,” I reply. “He doesn’t seem to know the first thing about the disease.”
I decide to read all the books anyhow, of which there are four: Man’s Supreme Inheritance, published in 1910; Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, published in 1923; The Use of the Self, published in 1932; and The Universal Constant in Living, published in 1941. I find these books to be turgid and far from clear - almost as though the writer does not want to disclose the very thing he is writing about. Written in an unfamiliar style of language, they are truly obscure. They are not ‘technical’, so their obscurity does not reside in the use of scientific terminology. They are not ‘medical’, for there is hardly a familiar medical term in them. They are not ‘philosophical’. They claim nothing but, above all - and this for me proclaims their dubious value - they do not tell the reader ‘what to do’.
Nevertheless, there is a reference to a wide variety of conditions and illnesses which have shown favourable responses to the ‘technique’. It is a strange collection. How could any sensible person reconcile with normal everyday knowledge and experience the grouping of such dissimilar conditions such as stiff neck, slipped disc, appendicitis and TB and believe they could all be embraced within a single ‘technique’ - and one so simple? It emerges that it all has something to do with changing the relationship of the head to the neck.
Why can’t he say how?
Nevertheless, I apply myself to reading the books, encouraged by Dorothy, who drops in once or twice a week to talk about the goings on at Ashley Place, the centre where Alexander works.
It perhaps says something for Alexander’s work that famous men such as Aldous Huxley, Bernard Shaw and Sir Stafford Cripps have sat in the same chair as I have recently vacated and been taught by ‘the old man’. Would men of such calibre have had the wool pulled over their eyes quite so easily? John Dewey, the leading American philosopher of his times, thinks Alexander is one of the great men of the 20th century.
Dorothy mentions that Sir Stafford Cripps has been to Alexander for a lesson that very week . He is the current Chancellor of the Exchequer and a leading lawyer. An intellectual too. It seems that if he can spare time from the House of Commons and the Treasury to go to Ashley Place, I should at least also spare time to read the books. I have nowhere to go and nothing else to occupy my time.