The Observer Magazine cover story of 29 March 1981 was an interview by George Melly with the English poet Edward James in his role as a patron of surrealist painters (‘Dreams to sell’) – one eccentric interviewing another. The piece coincided with a Christie’s auction of 28 of James’s paintings that he needed to sell in order to build a cluster of architectural follies in a Mexican jungle, Las Pozas, as one does.
James was already very wealthy when, at 21, ‘he inherited a great deal of money from an uncle killed by an elephant’. ‘He adopted a stance with one foot in conventional society and the other in high Bohemia,’ writes Melly, ‘but then came his disastrous marriage to the beautiful if treacherous Austrian dancer, Tilly Losch.’ She suspected he was gay and wanted to use her as a ‘front’, but Melly says that this was wrong: ‘He was deeply in love with her.’
She opened divorce proceedings, but he was seen as a cad for counter-suing her and left England more or less forever after that. For the next 25 years, he lived in California, but became ‘disillusioned by the hangers-on, the bitching, the materialism’.
Most of the artists whose work was to be sold had been his friends. He even got to see Picasso at work on Guernica. ‘Picasso liked Edward to bring barrels of beer to his studio,’ writes Melly, ‘and they would drink together after he had finished work.’
But James was closest of all to Dalí. ‘They shared in common a threatened childhood, a refusal to accept the barrier between dream and reality,’ writes Melly, ‘and anguish about the infinity of space and a desire to shock’. James had become fascinated with Dalí when the surrealist told him that the Germans supported Hitler because his brown shirt reminded them subconsciously of gingerbread. Now that is shocking – and even the surrealists eventually disowned Dalí.
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