George Melly

Inspired by the bourgeois ‘bad taste’ of Magritte’s house in the Rue des Mimosas in suburban Brussels, Jonathan Miller took off into one of his self-intoxicating fantasies. We were there together in the mid-Sixties to make a film for the BBC, and although I had forewarned him, Jonathan couldn’t believe that this overstuffed furniture, this aviary of china birds, these chiming clocks, garish oriental rugs and draped curtains could form the chosen, or at any rate tolerated, habitat of the austere master of unease. He therefore conceived the notion that, at the back of the wardrobe in the bedroom (a chamber so immaculate one could hardly imagine anyone sleeping in it), there was a secret door leading into Magritte’s ‘real bedroom’, whose squalid vice-stained sheets were full of sausage-roll crumbs, where the po was unemptied, and a stale bottle of Tizer had got stuck to the top of a bedside table defaced by cigarette burns.

On 9 September 1983, Beverley Nichols spent the morning of his 85th birthday working on a poem about his birth. He called it ‘Lamplight’ because his mother had told him he was born at dusk. In the first verse he describes the scene: ‘shadows flit across the lawn,’ ‘roses fade,’ ‘stars, like silver sentinels, take up their watch.’ The second verse imagines the octogenarian Nichols hovering over the cradle with the power to spare or choke his infant self. The third would presumably have given us his decision, but he never finished it. Rising to his feet to look at something in his last garden, he collapsed, rallied temporarily in hospital, but died six days later.

‘Am I eccentric?’ Edward James once asked me in the days before I was added to his long list of enemies both real and imaginary. ‘I suppose I am, but I don’t mean to be. I’ve always tried to behave like everyone else.’ We were sitting on the platform of one of the inevitably incomplete concrete follies he was building at enormous expense on a hillside he owned by proxy in a Mexican jungle. He was wearing a poncho, while a macaw, perched on his shoulder, was pulling hairs out of his beard, and I thought: is this how he thinks ordinary people behave? Is he mad? He probably was a bit mad – not dangerously so but mad nevertheless. But he was also rich: rich enough to fail, although he tried hard enough, to ruin himself; rich enough to buy himself out of trouble. It is very often money which transforms ‘mad’ into the less pejorative ‘eccentric’.’