Owning Up: The Trilogy (42 page)

When they closed the Print Room I caught a tube from South Kensington reading, with mounting excitement, one of the Surrealist publications I carried everywhere, and filled in the time in a news theatre and various pubs, in many of which I was stood drinks. Then at eight o’clock precisely, for I had earlier made an expedition to be sure exactly where it was, I entered the restaurant and asked the plump Spanish proprietor where the Surrealists met. ‘Mr Mesens,’ said the man, ‘he go upstairs but no one arrive yet.’ To retreat? No, I thought, better go up and drink a glass of wine. I was sure it would be taken as a sign of enthusiasm and commitment. I walked up into a rather dingy room with a large table and sat down at one of the laid places. I was a little drunk from excitement and the beers I’d swallowed. I thought of the pre-war Surrealist ‘séances’ at the Café de la Place Blanche in Montmartre. The magisterial Breton, Paul Eluard, Aragon before his traitorous defection to Soviet Communism, Max Ernst, ‘the most marvellously haunted mind in Europe’, Peret, Miró, Souppault; all those names I had read of, learnt, and in the main mispronounced, from the Herbert Read anthology I had discovered in that Liverpool bookshop.

Mesens, too, with his insistence on the use of his three initials, ELT, friend of Magritte, editor of the
London Bulletin,
the magazine in which I had first clapped eyes on a reproduction of
Le Viol,
he would actually be here! I drank three glasses of very sour red wine in quick succession.

There were voices, foreign voices, on the stairs. I forget who came first but I remember everybody who attended that delirious evening: Simon of course, and his sister Sonia, who wore her hair in what would now be called an ‘Afro’ and had a black boyfriend, Antonio Pedro, a Portuguese painter; two young Turkish poets, Sadi Cherkeshi and Feyyuz Fergar; the writer-cinéaste Jacques Brunius, pipe-smoking, with a long, intelligent, melancholy face and a seductive French accent; and Edith Rimmington, a rather cosy-looking lady whose pictures were nevertheless disturbingly sexual in impact. There were also various girlfriends, all of whom seemed to me extraordinarily glamorous and, I speculated, probably expert in the more erotic games of love and then, finally, ELT Mesens and his wife Sybil, he apologising in a strong Belgian accent for being late due to the difficulty of finding a taxi in Hampstead. My eyes shone, my spirits soared. I muttered to myself the famous image from Lautréamont: ‘As beautiful as the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on the dissecting table.’

ELT Mesens, a name which, since Tony and I had first come across it in our pamphlets, seemed to carry an increasingly mysterious weight, was at first sight not especially impressive. Aged then about forty – ‘I was born in 1903 without God, without King, AND WITHOUT RIGHTS!’ – shortish, plump, neatly if conservatively dressed, meticulously shaved and manicured, his shoes well polished, his hair oiled and brushed back, he had the look of a somewhat petulant baby or of a successful continental music-hall star. His wife Sybil was about five years younger, a handsome, slightly gypsyish woman with an olive skin and fine aquiline features dressed, for that austerely shabby time, with fashionable reticence. Together they presented a certain urbanity far removed (with the exception of Simon, whose style was more suggestive of a country squire visiting London for the day), from the comfortable shabbi-ness of the other Surrealists. It’s true that Edith Rimmington had an expensive fur coat, but she seemed so cosy and provincial, not unlike some of my mother’s less dashing Liverpudlian friends, that its effect was negated. Sybil didn’t seem cosy at all. She had something of the tension of a beautiful bird of prey, and ELT, despite Simon’s carefully thrown away introduction, soon established himself as the most formidable figure there. He shook hands with me (this hand I’m shaking has touched that of Breton) and sat down, as if by right, at the head of the table. The boss of the restaurant came up and took our orders for which we all contributed a pound; there was a law in force which forbade a restaurateur to charge more than five shillings per head, but by adding whatever the patron thought the client would accept to pay for wine or cover charge, this was easily sabotaged. Feeling like a very minor and impoverished disciple at the Last Supper, I ate my way through a rather under-populated paella, straining my ears the while to try and catch what Mesens was saying at the other end of the table, and chatting to those on either side of me. The girl on my left was Sadi Cherkeshi’s mistress. She had short hair and a friendly gamine appeal, but it became clear to me that her principal interest in Surrealism lay behind the Turkish poet’s flies. Antonio Pedro proved more willing to listen to my questions and explain who everybody was and what they did, and I was also extremely amused by his vivid Portuguese English. I remember him, that first evening, declining trifle for pudding – ‘It is the ‘orrible custard and the bread of yesterday’ – and also answering my query as to whether the scream of cats in sexual congress on an adjacent Beak Street roof-top was caused by pleasure or pain with: ‘Pleasure for the cat, and pain for the eatress’.

Yet cats and custard apart, I cannot truthfully say I can describe exactly what was said and done that first evening, partly because I was rather drunk and a bit mad with excitement at being there at all, but chiefly because as, over the next few months, I managed to wangle almost every Monday off, I attended most of those evenings at the Barcelona Restaurant, and while certain monumental rows, solemn games, mass ejection by the proprietor, messages from abroad, discussions over future activities or publications, even expulsions took place, it now seems, almost thirty years later, as though it were one long evening instead of a series taking place in the few months between the end of the German war, and the dropping of the first atomic bomb.

When I first heard it, the expression a ‘Surrealist seance’ seemed totally confusing. It suggested table-tapping, trumpets in bird-cages, yards of regurgitated cheese-cloth, and the shrill voices of child guides. I wondered if the intention was to evoke such phantoms as Lop-Lop, Max Ernst’s bird–king, or the disturbing spheroid-headed ‘personages’ of de Chirico. I subsequently discovered that the French meaning of the word was simply ‘a meeting’, and yet there remained something mysterious about those Mondays. They did indeed reflect a certain spiritual state of mind.

After eating, drinking and general conversation, Mesens would propose a subject. Although he had come to England in 1936 and lived here ever since, he had retained his strong Belgian accent and, despite a wide and vividly-used vocabulary, constructed his sentences as if they were in French. He particularly enjoyed provoking noisy disagreements. One of the more memorable arose out of his suggestion, couched more in the nature of a command, that no member of the group should write or draw for anything except official Surrealist publications. This was all very well for him; his war-work for the Belgian section of the BBC over, he was preparing, with financial backing, to reopen in new premises the gallery he had run before the war; but many of the rest relied on journalism to a greater or lesser extent: Brunius, for example, wrote on the history of the cinema, and even I had begun to review art exhibitions for the
Liverpool Daily Post
at a guinea a time. The opposition to ELT’s near-edict was vociferous and prolonged, and included many threats of resignation and counter-threats of expulsion. In the end, however, the breach was healed.

Most meetings were calmer. I enjoyed especially playing ‘Exquisite Corpses’, the Surrealist version of ‘Heads, Bodies and Tails’ combined with Consequences. Opening one of these I discovered someone had written ‘Love is fucking’ as their contribution. I was astounded. Who could it have been? I looked around at these grown-ups, serious people, some of them the same age as my parents. In the Navy of course the use of the word as an adjective was monotonously obligatory, but here it was used precisely, with deliberation. ‘Love is fucking.’ I couldn’t get over it although I was careful not to betray my astonishment.

After I had served my apprenticeship, Mesens encouraged me to read my poems aloud. These, written aboard the
Argus
during the night watches, offered me an opportunity to dramatise which I was not slow to take up. In one poem there was a line: ‘You are advised to take with you an umbrella in case it should rain knives and forks’. One evening I collected a great deal of cutlery from a sideboard and, on reaching the image, hurled them into the air. The effect was very satisfactory, the noise formidable, but while the Surrealists’ applause was still resounding in my gratified ears, the proprietor of the Barcelona rushed up the stairs and ejected us all. Mesens was delighted as this gave him, and others, the opportunity to indulge in that other Surreal tradition, ‘the gratuitous act’, in this case insult. Later in the week the proprietor, not wishing to lose the custom of so large a party on a regular basis, made it up and we were allowed back.

Another near-disaster for which I was responsible took place in the street when we had left the restaurant. I proposed that we should go to a telephone box, choose a number at random and, if and when the subscriber picked up the phone, recite a line from a Surrealist text and then replace the receiver. This was enthusiastically received but when, as the originator of the prank, I was assuring a puzzled gentleman in Ealing that ‘The stones are full of guts. Hurrah! Hurrah!’ (Jean Arp), a policeman approached and asked to see the identity cards or passports of all present. His confusion was absolute, his desire to translate it into some punitive action apparent. What was a British sailor doing with a group of people of Turkish, Belgian, French and Portuguese origin? However, all our papers were in order and, as I’d hurriedly severed my connection with the crossly perplexed ratepayer in W5, there was nothing he could do except tell us to move on.

After some months the meetings began to be less well attended. Simon who, despite the fact that he was the most aggressive in combating ELT, was also the most active member when it came to organisation, went away to the Middle East as part of a touring company, entertaining the troops in a production of
Pink String
and Sealing Wax,
for he was at that time an actor. Mesens himself was becoming more and more involved in the renaissance of the London Gallery. A lease had been taken on a five-storeyed Georgian building in Brook Street. It was narrow, very pretty if rickety, and in considerable disrepair. The long fight for permits and the frustrating search for building materials were beginning, but the Mesens were soon able to move into the top-floor flat and as by this time I had become very much their protégé, I had another place where I was welcome, another settee where I could sleep.

The meetings became fortnightly, then monthly and eventually ceased altogether, but I didn’t really care. I was now ‘le petit marin’ and, ELT assured me, certain to make my mark on the Surrealist movement. He added that not everybody in the group held this view however. One, whom he refused to name, said that he thought I ‘would never be more than the English Cocteau’. I assumed indignation, but was actually rather pleased.

I now had several earths and, fox-like, chose to keep moving. The Mesens’ was certainly the most comfortable and not only was Sybil an excellent and imaginative cook but I was also taken quite often to dine at a restaurant of which I had heard my mother speak in awed tones, The Ivy. Here I was amazed to find that the bill could be as high as thirty shillings a head without wine, and was equally surprised at the amount of time ELT and Sybil were prepared to invest in deciding what to eat.

Back in their flat I helped hang some of ELT’s remarkable collection (the bulk of it had been stored in the cellars of the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels where it had luckily escaped the attention of the occupying and modern-art-hating Nazis), and at last was able to examine at close quarters those painters I had admired so passionately. While we worked, washing glass smeared with the dust of six years, spraying and revarnishing canvases from which the images emerged with renewed clarity, he talked to me about the old and heady days in Paris and Brussels: about Ernst’s near-murderous jealousy of Miró, of Tanguy’s drinking habits, of Mag-ritte’s meticulously bourgeois life-style. I was enthralled, yet I didn’t choose to spend all my time there. For one thing I was worried that I might overstay my welcome. Edouard, even in those days, was a heavy drinker and, in drink, of uncertain temper. For another I was eager for experience both sexual and social, and the Mesens lived, I then thought, rather too ordered and domestic a life to satisfy me. For example I was extremely impressed to discover in his collection Magritte’s
Le Viol,
that representation of a woman’s body replacing her face, which had struck me as so marvellous when I had come across it reproduced in the
London Bulletin
in the art-school library at Stowe but, when I offered to hang it, Sybil refused. At the time I thought this mere prudery. The idea that she might dislike it on the grounds that it reduced her sex to a purely physical cipher never occurred to me.

London was beginning to acquire a meaning, a pattern. I found myself fleeing to my Liverpudlian womb less often. The kindly elderly Jewish cousins, no doubt to their relief, saw me infrequently. Not so however a connection of my father’s family, a girl, some seven years older than myself, whom I imagined to be the black sheep of the family. Her name was Paulie Rawdon Smith, the daughter of a rather stuffy Liverpool doctor. Meeting her by chance on my way to the Victoria and Albert Print Room, I discovered she had a mews flat close by where I was welcome any time. It was with Paulie that I came to know the pubs and cafés of Soho, re-meeting in this context the immaculately clean Quentin Crisp: ‘Mr Melly, I’ve been led to understand that Miss Rawdon Smith is your cousin.’ Here too I came to know many a famous old Bohemian bore such as Iron Foot Jack, with his pocketful of yellowing press-cuttings. Jack, dressed in a wide hat, cloak and knotted scarf and smelling like a goat in rut, claimed that his six-inch iron foot was the result of losing part of his leg to a passing shark, an unlikely explanation as he had retained the foot itself. He had a juicy Cockney accent, boasted of occult powers, and lived with a series of old crones whom he used as an excuse for hinting at a Crowleyan sexual virility. ‘There are occult practices,’ he told me every time we met, ‘that it is best the general public know nuffink abaht. When I had my stewdyo in Museum Street...’ More interesting was a woman called the Countess Duveen, old and bent, with some indication of a former beauty. She spoke in a grand but rasping voice, kept herself going on the insides of benzedrine inhalers and cadged cups of tea, earning her living from scavenging in dustbins or on bomb sites. She sold me a carved wooden bird of East European peasant origin for sixpence. It had once had a string which, when pulled, made its head jerk up and down to suggest that it was pecking grain, but the string had long since perished and the head sagged permanently forward. ‘Isn’t it a saucy pussy!’ the Countess had cried by way of sales talk. I resisted buying what she described as ‘a hand-sewn gentleman’s kid glove’ on the grounds that I had two hands. ‘I think,’ she announced despairingly, ‘that I know where I can find the other one.’