Simon Watson Taylor; surrealist (AMAZING)
Hyfler/Rosner
during a conference of his colleagues. The film was shown by
a police inspector who "borrowed them" from a pal in
Scotland Yard's "Black Museum". A sergeant projected the
movies and a uniformed copper rewound the films in the
kitchen. It all delighted Watson Taylor's anarchist belief
in the corruption of the Establishment."
By George Melly, The Independent
16 November 2005
Simon Watson Taylor, actor, translator and air steward: born
Wallingford, Oxfordshire 15 May 1923; died London 4 November
2005.
One morning, between the defeat of Hitler and the explosion
of the atom bomb, I moved permanently from Liverpool to
London, where Simon Watson Taylor was the first adult friend
I made by myself. We remained friends until his death.
In a navy training camp at the end of the Second World War,
I had met Tony Harris Reed, already a Surrealist convert,
and he had discovered an advertisement in the New Statesman
for various publications of the Surrealist Group in England;
with our order we sent off his Ernstian collage and my
derivative poems. There was soon a letter which, while
acknowledging our work without over-praising it, suggested
that if we ever came to London we get in touch. It was
signed "Simon Watson Taylor, Secretary to the Surrealist
Group".
Eventually I rang and made a date requesting a visit to
Watson Taylor's flat in Markham Square. He answered crisply
and I hitch-hiked into London on the day agreed and found my
way to his rather smart address. I nervously rang the bell.
My first impression when he answered was of a small but
neatly made man, full of aggressive energy fuelled by
alcohol, controlled by discipline. He was well dressed, in a
conservative tweed suit and with an expensive shirt and tie.
His hair was short, cut en brosse by an excellent barber.
His humour was icy.
Wishing to impress, I declared my adherence to Surrealism in
the solemn style based on what I had read in translation of
André Breton, but it was only when I hypocritically attacked
homosexuality that he assured me that few of the other great
Surrealists shared Breton's curious homophobia. The only
trouble with the human body, he said, was that there were
not enough holes in it for exploring human pleasure. I must
have been maddening, but it was clear he had taken a liking
to me and a friendship was born.
He opened a walk-in cupboard of rare vintage jazz records,
many with the original label. I was somehow not surprised,
as jazz and Surrealism were my own twin passions. Before we
parted, he suggested I attend the next Surrealist meeting in
the upstairs room of a Spanish restaurant off Regent Street.
I arrived rather early but others gradually showed up,
mostly Portuguese and Turkish foreigners, and soon the
Belgian E.L.T. Mesens and his wife Sybil swept in. Mesens
was the organiser of the London group, but Watson Taylor
would frequently disagree with his pronouncements and most
enjoyable shouting matches took place as we ate the
under-populated paella and drank the cheap red wine.
Watson Taylor continued to visit E.L.T. from time to time,
although Sybil, like most wives, detested him. Once, when
not being offered a whisky, he insisted on it and E.L.T.
eventually poured him one out. Watson Taylor spat it out,
saying that it had been watered, to deceive Sybil as to the
amount he had been knocking back. She looked furious.
He was a great friend too of Andy Garnett, one-time leader
of the Chelsea Set, and much later on went to stay with the
Garnetts at their country house. There Watson Taylor
practised yoga on the lawn, but showed no sign of leaving,
and Andy's wife Polly eventually kicked him out. But they
remained friends and later Watson Taylor became the
godfather (no religious connection of course) of their first
daughter.
Then, in our case, he visited our house in Wales with a
girl. They both took LSD and, when the girl developed a bad
trip, Watson Taylor simply left and my second wife, Diana,
far from pleased, had to talk her down. These instances were
disgraceful, no doubt, but Andy and I accepted them as part
of our friend's intransigence.
Simon Watson Taylor was born in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, in
1923. His father Felix's family had made a fortune in the
West Indies. I met his father once and he seemed amiable
enough, but Simon rejected him like Oedipus on speed. His
mother was a Tennant, something he quite often mentioned.
During the Second World War, he once told me, he had worked
at a factory and was converted to Communism but, falling in
love with a beautiful girl of Italian birth and discovering
she was an anarchist, he became one overnight. He thus
fulfilled the most important belief of the Surrealists, the
complete suppression of all other considerations in favour
of l'amour fou.
He remained an anarchist and sometimes a violent one - in
the thick of the protest against Suez, for example, he threw
ball-bearings under the police horses' hooves. On the other
hand, he was secretary of the Freedom Defence Committee,
whose chairman was Herbert Read and which included A.E.
Housman, George Orwell and J.B. Priestley, protesting
against the imprisonment of the editors of a magazine, War
Commentary, for attempting to cause the disaffection of
English troops.
Watson Taylor next became an actor, touring weekly to
entertain the same troops the anarchists were trying to
disaffect. Apart from contributing to many Surrealist
publications, his main livelihood became translating from
the French. I can see him still in the flat at his work
table, surrounded by reference books and dictionaries, and
the results were impeccably researched and elegantly worded.
Among his many translations were André Breton's Surrealism
and Painting (1972) and, still in print, his collaboration
with Cyril Connolly on Alfred Jarry's work, The Ubu Plays
(1968), and his much-reprinted Paris Peasant by Louis Aragon
(1971), one of a few masterpieces of early Surrealist
literature.
Simultaneously, he joined an airline as cabin steward, and
this enabled him to travel the world free and pursue his
interests abroad. In New York, for instance, he became a
great friend of Marcel Duchamp and the Beat poets. To begin
with, these flights were very slow and often in flying
boats. He was sometimes very amusing about the affairs
between both staff and passengers.
When my first marriage broke up temporarily in the
early/middle Fifties, I moved at his invitation into his
basement flat in Tregunter Road and stayed there for several
years without much friction. We were both, and it helped,
fanatically tidy. At that time he still liked jazz and he
was pleased with my collection of then unfashionable Surreal
masterpieces. We both drank Merrydown dry cider, mostly
ordered by the crate, and we split the price.
He was pleased, too, that I knew several of his jazz heroes,
Mr Five-by-Five blues shouter Jimmy Rushing for one, who was
given to an astounding appetite, although meat was still
rare, if not rationed. Simon managed to find him a steak
that overlapped a large serving plate, and Jimmy despatched
it as if it were a cocktail sausage. There were other
memorable jazz parties too, and many visits from girls.
There was also a porn show organised by a timber merchant
during a conference of his colleagues. The film was shown by
a police inspector who "borrowed them" from a pal in
Scotland Yard's "Black Museum". A sergeant projected the
movies and a uniformed copper rewound the films in the
kitchen. It all delighted Watson Taylor's anarchist belief
in the corruption of the Establishment.
I grew to love Simon when we shared his flat. We were like
an old married couple, but he was never dull. Once, when he
was away, two young poets he had met in New York came with
his permission to sleep in his bed. Coming back from a late
gig, I found the flat as if a hurricane had blown through
it. The pair were in bed together both with flu, throwing
their used Kleenex on the floor. I exploded and made them
get up and tidy the whole place, while they complained of me
being so bourgeois. Their names were Allen Ginsberg and
Gregory Corso.
In 1954 Watson Taylor, who had quit Surrealism together with
many other long-established members following a row with the
increasingly dictatorial and mystical Breton, had joined the
Pataphysicians, whose great hero was Jarry. The basis of
Pataphysics was based on a character in Jarry's 1923 novel
Docteur Faustroll who proposed "the science of imaginary
solutions".
When Watson Taylor eventually got bored with their solemn
black humour, he went the whole hog. He dismissed jazz,
selling all his valuable 78s for a mere £50, discarded his
suits for hippie clothing, if in his case a rather smarter
version than most, and set off for Goa and the beach, with
its wild teenagers, drugs and very loud rock and roll. It
was party, party time. He returned to Britain occasionally,
typically to visit his dentist, and here too surrounded
himself with the young. Once he told me he led these
fledglings to a fashionable disco. The enormous bouncer was
astonished. "Who are you?" he asked Watson Taylor. "The Pied
Piper?"
After Goa he moved to an island off the Philippines for more
of the same. He came home finally because of a series of
mild heart attacks and as a precaution against ending in a
foreign hospital with its enormous bill. He got back to
England with no money and possessing only what he had on. He
rang up a woman whom he had met in Goa, Janet Menzel. She
took him under her wing, found him a very nice bedsit off
the Fulham Road - "always my favourite area", he told me -
and looked after him until the day he died.
Once I was invited to dinner. It was during the only violent
snowstorm in recent years and the taxi inched through it. He
had promised me "a beautiful Pataphysical girl" but,
sensibly, she decided not to brave the weather. Watson
Taylor let me in and took me up in the lift. The rest of the
"inmates", he told me, were "respectable old biddies". In
our shared youth, he had always been a brilliant chef,
especially of elaborate Japanese cuisine. Tonight the
chicken was as rare as a young grouse. I ate it despite his
protests, but it was my last visit. I phoned him from then
on.
A curious thing was that I had written about him in various
books and he never commented. Now he was suddenly proud of
them, leaving the books out on a coffee table, and showing
them to everyone. Did they remind him of his remarkable
life, now that it was almost visibly drawing to its close?
(That took some time. Like Dalí in old age, he enjoyed being
surrounded by the young and pretty Pataphysical girls.)
What was it about Simon Watson Taylor, a man who never
hesitated to be true to himself and say what came into his
head without ever considering the consequences? Hard to
tell. I had the feeling he was living as he did on our
behalf. Here we all were, married or single, childless or
smothered in kiddies, ruined or with our mortgages paid, and
there was he - a truly free man.