Owning Up: The Trilogy (46 page)

8

I bad not exactly lost touch with the Surrealists during the Kestrel/ Edgebaston episode. It was just that I had seen them less often. Nor had I allowed the world of Harrods and Gunters to destroy my belief in the Surrealist dream or my increasing pleasure in the Surrealist sensibility. Even while eagerly en route to Perry, I had never forgotten, crossing the Thames, to look out of the train window at a building that never failed, or fails, to give me a distinct
frisson.
It is a pumping station, built by some romantic nineteenth-century engineer-cum-architect. It consists of a tall chimney resembling an Italian campanile, but the most extraordinary feature is the pump-house itself. It looks like an imposing French town house with a steep Mansard roof of tiles imitating fish-scales. The house is, at first sight, on two floors with high, regularly disposed windows but, on looking in, you recognise that the facade is only a shell. There are no floors. The entire structure houses elaborate nineteenth-century machinery of great, rather sinister beauty.

In Chatham, too, walking through the dockyard on summer evenings where conspiracies of rusty, geometrical, nautical objects cast their lengthening shadows across the open spaces between railway-like sheds and dry docks, I was possessed by that nostalgic sense of the enigma which permeates the early pictures of de Chirico. I’d acquired my first picture, a little
frottage
of a bird by Ernst. I’d bought it on hire purchase from Roland, Browse and Del Blanco with money I’d earned from writing art reviews for the
Liverpool Daily Post.
Typically Mesens told me I’d been overcharged, but later on was delighted when I persuaded my father to give me forty pounds to buy a
Personnage avec des insects
by the same painter. I took these back to Liverpool on one of the slow night trains, placing them opposite me on the empty seat, staring at them as the train crawled through Rugby and Crewe. Ernst, I thought, Max Ernst, ‘the most magnificently haunted brain in Europe’, made these things. They are now mine. They have travelled deviously from his studio in Paris during the Thirties to this dimly-lit railway carriage and will soon hang at home. I scrutinised them with hallucinatory intensity. How real was my emotion? I was alone, it’s true, but how theatrical were my feelings? I can no longer say. Registering those images, I felt them to be my own passport to the domain of the marvellous. The train rattled over the worn points. The dawn was breaking as I carried them up the platform at Lime Street towards the waiting taxi.

The fact that my father had been persuaded to give money to buy a picture interested ELT considerably. I must eventually learn a trade. Had I thought of becoming an art dealer? Actually I hadn’t, but he began to convince me that it was an excellent idea. Admittedly, he pointed out, if I came to him as a trainee I would at first be paid very little, but I would soon advance, and furthermore our continuing intimacy would enable me, after gallery hours, to assist him with Surrealist ‘interventions’ both literary and active. I told him I had thoughts of becoming a journalist but he and Sybil soon shamed me into relinquishing the idea. The press were hyenas, scandalmongers and, to quote Edouard, ‘idiots first-class’. I put aside the image I had of myself on the
Liverpool Daily Post,
living at home for next to nothing, proud of my beer-stained mac, nicotined fingers, and a sweat-stained trilby worn at a rakish angle. I saw myself now in a gallery, persuading the perceptive rich to collect Ernst and Magritte; my reputation as a poet supported by my guile as a dealer. So persuasive was ELT’s argument that for ten years I ‘forgot’ that I could write and had been published. Next time I was on leave I spoke to my father about joining the art world and he suggested I ask Edouard and Sybil up to Liverpool to talk it over.

They came, Mesens infuriating my mother by his inability to spend less than three ritualistic hours shaving, bathing and dressing, but my father got on well with him, and by the end of the weekend had agreed to buy me into the gallery at the price of nine hundred pounds to invest in pictures after my demob. I was quite surprised by this as, outside the pub, where he was very open-handed, he was rather cautious with money. Nor was he so convinced by modern art as to think of it as an investment. I asked him later what made him decide to do it and he explained that his father had bought him into a business he didn’t even like and at least I was enthusiastic. Later he began to appreciate certain painters, Magritte in particular, and after I had acquired
Le Viol
he was always taking me into a pub near his office to see a barmaid who he thought looked ‘just like it’. He even began, in imitation of Mesens, to make collages, some of which were both inventive and poetic. ‘Tom,’ said Edouard, ‘is a good old boy.’

I now had a job to look forward to, but as yet there was no prospect of my demob. At some point during the previous year the atom bomb had finished the Japanese war, but I have no clear recollection of when or how I spent VJ night. This is odd because it meant that there was no longer any danger of my being drafted to the Far East to face active service, but I suppose I had become so convinced that I would remain on the
Argus
for ever that I had stopped worrying. When, in a year or so, it was time for my demob, I would drift up to the barracks and remind them that I existed, but first there were all those who had been conscripted before me to release into Civvy Street. My life was pleasant enough for me to feel in no hurry – and besides, something extraordinary had happened to me, something which entirely dispelled my fast-fading regrets at my rejection by Perry Edgebaston. I had had a woman, and that woman was Sybil Mesens.

One afternoon in their flat, hung now with pictures and furnished with Regency furniture, Edouard and I were discussing sex. As a Surrealist he was naturally in favour of the poetic eroticism inherent in all sexual activity and in its non-rational aspects. The Surrealists had always insisted on the right to act out their desires without reference to traditional moral structures, and with complete contempt for the notion that the only reason for yielding to our instincts was for the procreation of children. I remember asking him, that misty autumn afternoon, why Breton had therefore condemned homosexuality; I had long confessed, rather to Sybil’s disapproval, my own propensities. After all, I argued, homosexuality actually precluded the creation of children. Edouard reiterated the undesirable freemasonry of homosexuality in the arts, but told me that in fact, among Surrealists, bisexuality was quite common. Edouard, in particular, had enjoyed frequent
partousses
with his wife and other friends. Group visits to the brothel were not unknown, but no one ever confessed to Breton. He, arch advocate of total freedom, the eloquent defender of
l‘amour fou,
was, in practice, something of a puritan. It was one thing to write a pamphlet in defence of Charlie Chaplin’s fondness for cunnilingus – one of his divorces had raised this issue and the Surrealists had come out strongly on the comedian’s side, with a manifesto called ‘Hands off Love’; but somehow, when it came down to it, Andre was over-fastidious, albeit defending his position behind the most elaborate and obscurantist smoke-screen. The rest of the Surrealists felt it easier to put his theoretical precepts into practice behind his back.

Sybil was reading a green Penguin detective novel while this conversation was in progress. Edouard resented in her only three things: her singing of Anglican hymns while doing the housework, her fondness for purist abstract art, and her refusal to read anything except what he called ‘teckies’; she seemed restless and vaguely irritated with what we were talking about. She shut the book and said quite casually: ‘For Christ’s sake stop going on about sex. If you want a fuck, George, come in the bedroom.’

I couldn’t have been more surprised and looked nervously at Edouard to see how he reacted. He shrugged and said: ‘Why not?’

I was to realise, long after, that they must have discussed it before and perhaps that part of Sybil’s reason was to wean me away from my total commitment to arse. At the time, however, I believed it to be entirely spontaneous. I followed her into the bedroom and we undressed. She was in her later thirties and had a fine body. To my twenty-two-year-old eyes, time had just begun to stake a claim on her; there was a crease under her buttocks and a few lines under her eyes, but she was very handsome, very uninhibited and, rather to my relief, I found I had an immediate erection. I knew, from conversations with my shipmates, what to do: I went down on her and vice versa, kissed and probed and entered. She moaned and moved under me. Looking up at one point I saw ELT had come into the room. He had taken off all his clothes except for his socks and was displaying signs of obvious excitement. It was evident that he too had enjoyed those sessions with the Eluards in pre-war Paris.

‘You are fucking my wife!’ he shouted with fervent satisfaction.

Even then I registered some hidden amusement: that detached sense of the absurd which had always accompanied my pleasure in sex and has made it impossible for me to understand, let alone identify with, the Longfords and Whitehouses of the world. This, however, in no way marred my pleasure and, when Sybil’s movements and breathing began to accelerate and her features to change into a mask of rigid lust, I came into her at what proved (but then after all there is not really much difference between hetero- and homosexual climaxes) the right moment. As I rolled off, Edouard took my place. I watched him with interest and soon felt some restirring of desire. I was particularly impressed by his orgasm, during which he shouted some French blasphemies and rolled his eyes like a frightened bullock cornered in a market place. Indeed for some years I consciously affected this performance until Mick Mulligan persuaded me that it looked absurd rather than convincing.

And so, high above Brook Street, we made love in various combinations and positions while the light faded, and on many other occasions too, but crossing the transsexual barrier didn’t convert me overnight. I continued for some years to prefer boys and even now, while for a long time inactive in this direction, I find myself staring wistfully at young men from time to time. I had somehow imagined it would be a very different and superior experience – more intense -but it was not. What it did though was to give me the confidence to try again when the next opportunity came; to realise that girls liked it too. To make it with a couple proved an ideal introduction. A mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar proved less traumatic, less of a jump, and I remain ever grateful to Sybil and ELT for their sexual generosity that afternoon thirty years ago.

During the months that followed, now that I’d made it clear I knew it was over, I saw something of Perry, Reggie and Robin. I went to Anarchist meetings from time to time. I went to see
Sweet and Low
and marvelled at Hermione Gingold’s ability to make everything sound so rude. I drank, whenever I was up West, in the Caribbean. I trekked to Hampstead to see French films at the Everyman. I met up again with Percy and spent a weekend at his house with his nightmare mother in Aldershot on leave. My fat homosexual friend from Liverpool took me to the opening post-war season at Stratford- upon-Avon. We stayed at The Gloriana boarding house. In order to explain why we were sharing a room, he told everyone I was his nephew. I adored the plays, and paid willingly for my pleasure. ‘Lovely boy,’ he whispered in the Warwickshire night. It was a considerable compensation to be thought this, even in the dark.

Mostly, however, I saw the Mesens and in training for my future career followed ELT around as he began to wheel and deal in an art world just beginning to wake up from its wartime hibernation. He had organised an exhibition, ‘The Surrealist Eye’, at a gallery of a sympathetic dealer who specialised largely in primitive objects. None of the pictures sold; most of them were beautiful. Surrealism was right ‘out’ in 1946.

‘Edouard,’ I wrote to my mother, ‘took me with him to buy two paintings by Paul Klee (pronounced to rhyme with “hay” not “tea”). They cost him £50 the pair. He took three-quarters of an hour beating down the price from £54 and was very pleased.’ I found it rather odd that ‘the poet’ Mesens should derive such pleasure from haggling over so small a sum and boast about it to me at such length over several gins in a pub off Bond Street.

Later we met Lucien Freud, whom Edouard told me he found to be the only interesting young painter in London, but ‘very perverse’. He said that he felt Lucien’s main object in life was acting against the theories of his grandfather, the great Sigmund. Lucien, while unshaven and shabby, nevertheless projected considerable
panache.
His guttural Rs advertised his Austrian origin, but his English was otherwise faultless if idiosyncratic. His pale eyes, moving restlessly around the Chinese restaurant where we were dining, seemed more like those of a hawk than of a man. They appeared to see through you rather than look at you. Several of his views I found suspect or dotty, but there was no doubting his sincerity as an artist. His passion was to realise, at whatever cost and with ruthless determination, his intense visionary obsessions. Edouard tried hard to solicit his support for the Surrealist canon. Lucien would not be drawn. His amorality, except when it came to his work, rejected totally the idea of any moral imperative.

Eventually ELT went home but Lucien and I sat on. I was much flattered by his interest and unaware that it might have been the product of insomnia. I told him about my perplexity at Edouard’s pleasure in bringing down the price of the Klees. He didn’t find it out of character at all. He told me he thought Edouard was very unhappy and that his businesslike behaviour was intended to deceive himself and the world. I have sometimes found Lucien’s verbal judgements (as opposed to his visual probity), wide of the mark or even totally at fault, but he was right about ELT. Inside that extraordinary man a poet fought with a shopkeeper, a drunken Anarchist struggled with a man who would check a restaurant bill four times. Mesens influenced me and has obsessed me more than anyone else in my life. The surface of my table in the hotel in Berlin where I am writing this at 2.30am is a homage to his insane sense of order and fantasy, but indeed he was not happy. He needed success like a drug, he rejected success like a monk. His tension drove him to the bottle. He was part saint, part demon, a monster I loved until the day he died of alcoholic poisoning in a Brussels hospital in 1971. In dreams he is my most frequent resurrectionary visitor.