23 FEBRUARY 1991, Page 27

BOOKS

Little Mr Edward

Mark Amory

For a man who achieved little, Edward James is much discussed. There is another book besides these three (Swans Reflecting Elephants by James himself and George Melly, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982), there has been a television documentary and there is to be a film. He frequently pops up in biographies of other people, though not in solemn ones. James planned, no that is not the word, imagined, an autobiography based on his own letters, which run to hundreds of thousands of words, but mercifully never achieved what would have been the least appealing and most inaccurate version of all.

The most charming is Little Mr George. A short dapper figure with a large white dog covered in blue spots has 'an enormous house which stood in the midst of a vast estate'. No one loves him. 'He started to wear odd clothes and grew a little beard', and went to Paris to buy unrealistic pic- tures; but people admired the artists, not him. So he packed an Old Etonian tie and went to the Back of Beyond; no one noticed. But the people there were smaller than him and called him White Father and gave him a bamboo throne among the parrots. When he is asked to come home he ponders but decides to stay where he is, allowing his enormous house to be used for charitable purposes. The book is for young children and James is not mentioned, but the author agrees that it is modelled on him 'very, very closely'.

The story can be made to sound glamor- ous. Born in 1907 to a fashionable Edward- ian hostess and perhaps Edward VII, he did indeed live in an enormous house (West Dean in Sussex) in a vast estate (12,000 acres). His mother had little time for him or his sisters: 'Nanny', called Evie up the nursery stairs, 'I am going to church. Send down one of the children to accompany me.' Which one, madam?' It doesn't matter. Whichever one matches my blue dress.' Unhappy at school (Lock- er's Park and Eton) as is only suitable for a sensitive artist, when James reached Ox- ford he joined a dashing set of aristocrats (the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava) and intellectuals (John Betjeman, whose first poems he published). Later he helped a very different genius, Dylan Thomas. His rooms in Christ Church (four instead of the usual two) included a bedroom hung with crimson, grey and silver silk and a drawing- room with a purple ceiling. Briefly em- ployed as an Honorary Attaché in Rome, he bought two 14th-century palazzos facing each other across the Tiber, each linked by bridge to an island, so that after dinner he could stroll across and have coffee in the other one, where a string quartet would be playing. Soon he was in love with a famously beautiful dancer, Tilly Losch, for whom he created a ballet that is still performed, collaborating with the greatest talents of the age, Kurt Weill and Georges Balanchine. He bought many major works from his friends Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte, the second fulfilling a brilliant commission so that four looking-glasses turned at the touch of a switch into four large pictures. Influenced by these surreal- ists, he transformed his mother's Lutyens house, Monkton, into a thing of wonder with palm trees at the door, bamboos for drain-pipes, classical music wafting over the trees, inside a mass of eccentric brie-a- brae, outside the whole thing puce. His divorce was a sensation, with Miss Losch charging among other things that he had had an affair with Serge Lifar. A myste- rious experience led him to write his only novel, The Gardener Who Saw God, while elegant editions of his poems poured from the James Press. His feeling for mysticism drew him to Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard and Christopher Isherwood in Los Angeles. Another vision drew him to Mexico: down there on a visit with a friend, they stopped to swim in a river. Edward got out first. When the friend emerged a swarm of brilliant butterflies, attracted by his wet, naked body, clothed him from head to foot in trembling colour. This and a love of orchids led him to buy land and spend ten million dollars erecting extraordinary structures in the jungle, soaring pillars, staircases to nowhere. He also found a family who loved him, and birds and animals he could love. West Dean was given away and turned into a college for arts and crafts, unique and flourishing. Publicity caught up with him and when he died in 1982 he had become another of those living legends.

Very roughly, Philip Purser deftly de- scribes the glamour, John Lowe goes for the truth which inevitably destroys it. Edward James was certainly not the child of his godfather Edward VII, nor was his mother the king's daughter, as he himself used to suggest; mistress, perhaps. His true father was probably the amiable adventur- er his mother later married. There is no evidence that he was particularly unhappy at school. At Oxford he was more a hanger-on than a member of any gilded set, already using his money in an attempt to buy affection, as when, for instance, Basil Dufferin asked if he could borrow a car and Edward gave it to him.

His marriage was an immediate disaster, one account (his own) having Tilly Losch bar the door on their honeymoon night and shout through it that she had only married him because she thought he was homosex- ual. The divorce was squalid, though it is only fair to mention that Losch bought no evidence whatever to support her allega- tions. For instance, James heard a young Italian bus-driver singing and arranged for him to have lessons. Losch complained that when she was ill James spent time not with her but with the boy in the room below. How did she know? She had heard him singing. It turned out that he was in Milan and James had been listening to records of his voice. Many of the ideas for Monkton (which I had always seen as an assault on all his mother stood for) came from others. The colour was chosen by Dali, who exploited him ruthlessly (Mag- ritte was a much nicer man). His press printed rubbish and it is not clear that any of his own work was published without subsidy. A few whispy claims are made for his poetry but what is quoted seems to be without talent. He remained a spoiled child and spoiled children age badly. In America his life went to pieces. Huxley had no time for him, Isherwood actually disliked him. He was always in a muddle, living in various houses and hotels, often at the same time. It is difficult to be certain about sex but the women he admired often say they did not sleep with him; some of the men certainly did. Bisexual is a usefully vague term, but as someone remarked in a film recently, how often do you hear of a bisexual cheating on his steady boyfriend with a girl? James fingered the handle of the closet but never came out. He became 'a merciless raconteur', full of endless repetition and self-justification, which led to endless lies. Extraordinarily generous, he could also be extraordinarily mean and would go on and on about how people wanted his money. His gossip was pur- posefully malicious. He was described as being 'as weak as mashed potato'. Having made over West Dean, he was impossible, quarrelling with a procession of trustees. At one meeting he demanded a lake on which he could see black swans paddling. Surveyors were called, money spent. At the next, the lake forgotten, he wanted a maze. The end was not a neat Voltairian return to cultivating his jungle, where he only spent three months a year. For much more time he was messing about at Monk- ton and abandoning plans for new houses in Europe, buying plots, plotting buys.

And yet, and yet . . . . John Lowe, who worked and suffered at West Dean, is generous enough to put in arguments for the defence. Dali did not palm him off with rubbish, and anyway James saw himself as a patron, not a collector, supporting talent in need. Lowe finds the Mexican building entrancing, better than if each one or indeed any of them, was finished. As usual, much of James's paranoia was justi- fied, people were after his money. Of course he was a hopeless administrator, but West Dean was his idea, genuinely generous (L10 million, not a tax dodge) and what he described as an arrangement for 'housewives to learn basket-making' in fact teaches 6,000 students a year such crafts as bookbinding, porcelain and furni- ture restoration, tapestry weaving and metallurgy to the highest standards. Pat- rick Boyle (now Glasgow), who made the excellent television programme, is vehe- ment in his defence, while admitting the bad days. One such was with his great friend the painter Leonora Carrington. James, arguing with her, knocked off his own glasses. They broke. 'Look what you've made me do'. Tiresome enough, but then, characteristically, he went on about it for hours, apparently expecting sympathy for how badly he had been treated. To call such behaviour childish is a slur on children. But on good days he was literally the most fascinating conver- sationalist I have ever heard, completely original ideas came tumbling out. . . He told us the plot of a novel he planned, kept us spellbound for an hour. Of course he never wrote it. He had a creative talent but there was something in him that always prevented him carrying things out. He said the idea for the Dali sofa with Mae West's lips was his, for instance, and I believe him.

James would have liked the attention and might even have enjoyed the bickering he has caused. There were squabbles over Monkton, now privately owned. No one can write about him accurately. Boyle told me that a piece in the Sunday Times, in which I was involved and which relaunched his fame, was full of mistakes. Lowe says Boyle's film has 'many errors of fact' and that he wrote his book because existing versions (which included Purser, now re- vised) were inadequate. The West Dean trust found Lowe 'dull and peevish' and suggested a 'schedule of corrections' (not incorporated). It is a bit laborious some- times but that is because he is attempting to set straight a record as twisty as a boa-constrictor, and that is James's own fault (intention?). He blazed a misleading trail. One way and another he has now got all the books he deserves.