Owning Up: The Trilogy by George Melly

Author:George Melly [Melly, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General, Music, Genres & Styles, Jazz
ISBN: 9780141025544
Google: xLqSEqR-eC4C
Publisher: Penguin Adult
Published: 2006-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

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

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