Edward James was an eccentric benefactor of the arts, but he will be remembered best for the surreal palace he built in the remote jungles of Mexico.”>
He was, the BBC declared, the last of the great eccentrics. A self-described wizard and a poet, he was also a model who appeared in the paintings of Ren Magritte and Salvador Dal and hands down one of 20th century Englands most flamboyant aristocrats.
His name was Edward James, and while you may well never have heard of him, just a taste of his story will leave you wishing you knew more.
His various oddities and accolades aside, the thing that James may now be most notorious forand what drew him to my attentionis the other-worldly surrealist palace he spent two decades building in the Mexican rainforest: Las Pozas.
Jamess childhood, while gilded, was far from perfect. His mother was sort of indifferent and James summed up her maternal qualities by telling a story of how one day she shouted up the main staircase of their estate called West Dean for the servants to send one of the children down to go to church with her. When the servant asked which one, she retorted, the one that goes best with my blue dress.
It was during this childhood, James would later claim, that his surrealist worldview was born. His days were full of hours trapped alone indoors, and so he would invent imaginary worlds that he furnished with household objects.
As an aspiring poet and student at Oxford in the mid-1920s he showed an incredible ability to create extraordinary, essentially surreal environments in his lodgings, explains Margaret Hooks, the author of the seminal James biography, Surreal Eden: Edward James and Las Pozas, in an interview with The Daily Beast. Combining disparate materials and objects, juxtaposing medieval tapestries with London Underground posters, wiring speakers into a neoclassical bust of a Roman emperor to blare the latest in French music and American jazz.
James reportedly also made his mark at Oxford with his fortunedriven around in a Rolls Royce, flown in a private plane, and decorating his room in a velvet trim. It was also the beginning of what would be his lifelong funding and participation in the creation of art. He co-published work with John Betjeman and Rex Whistler. Eventually, Hooks tells The Daily Beast, a poetic sensibility, attraction to beautiful objects, and his love of the fantastic brought him into contact with surrealist circles, though he had little interest in their manifestos and incessant infighting.
James would spend the 20s and 30s supporting his friends in the surrealist circle. He began by merely buying artwork from broke friends who he thought were talented. (He did not buy from the bad ones, he said, because they shouldnt be encouraged.) Magritte and Dal were the two most famous names who owed much of their early financial success to James. He was also friends with Picasso and Man Ray, and bought their work.
But James never saw himself as a collector.
He thought of himself as a friend as well as supporter of the artists he knew at the time and simply bought or commissioned the work of those he liked most, Hooks points out. Whats more, he had often collaborated with them on the pieces they produced, providing seminal ideas and financing for several of Dals works, including the Lobster Telephone, the Pluvial Taxi and the famous Mae West sofa.
The 30s would also see tragedy befall James. In 1930 he married the Austrian stage actress Tilly Losch, who reportedly wed him thinking he was gay and the marriage was just for show. James, however, was passionately in love with her and tried to keep her love by financing a play that he hired George Balanchine to direct with a score and lyrics by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (which was in fact their last score together). But even that was not enough to stave off divorce. The split devastated James, who also claimed that Losch aborted three of their pregnancies that would have given them children.
She was apparently the love of his life and the separation from her was traumatic. He never remarried and there appears to have been no other intimate partner of significance after he divorced Tilly, Hooks says.
It was also devastating because it was a very public split. James accused her of having affairs, and she accused him of being gay. In the end, one of her lovers, the Russian Prince Serge Obolensky was ordered to pay legal costs. While James won, his choice to fight the divorce in public cost him many of his friends and his family shunned him.
In 1938, James fled for New York to manage Dals exhibit at the New York Worlds Fair, but it was, as the BBC documentary notes, the beginning of a semi-permanent exile. After New York he went to Los Angeles to join his friends Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood by attempting to become a mystic under Gerald Heard (who would co-found Alcoholics Anonymous). But there James felt slighted and patronized because of his wealth.
In 1947, Jamesalong with his new friend, Plutarco Gastelum, the manager of the telegraph office in Cuernavaca he met in 1944came across Xilitla on a quest for orchids. James bought an old coffee plantation, and for nearly 20 years, primarily for the orchid collection he maintained on the plantation, he frequently returned. While there, James wished to live out a hermetic life by the waterfalls on his land. The pools, he said, were his bathroom. But one day he was shampooing his hair in the pools below the waterfalls when a noise in the brush caused him to stop and he opened his eyes to see what he thought were 12 penguins watching him. Eventually, after rubbing out the soap, James realized they were nuns who wanted him to build a health clinic for the local population.
For three days white ashes fell and burned everything, James said the villagers told him. There had been a freak snowfall, and many of the orchids had died.
In response, James embarked on what would be his signature project, a project that would only end 22 years later with his death in 1984, but one that would fill the jungle with a beauty far more permanent than his beloved orchids.
[James] once said that had if he had proposed the kind of fantastic structures he wanted to build at Las Pozas to workers back in England, they would have told him he was dreaming, it wasnt possible, that it couldnt be done, Hooks tells The Daily Beast. In Mexico, however, there was much more acceptance of Jamess eccentricities.
There was a completely different perspective on what was normal and acceptable, she continues. I think he found this very liberating, having found perhaps for the first time in his life a place and a community that were accepting of his unusual imagination and placed no limits on his creative energies.
I gave money to help humanity, he boasted.
While only a man of genius and unconventional character could have led the life he did, James clearly struggled at times with his nature.
I never wanted to be an eccentric. Ive tried to conform, he complained in the BBC documentary. One is an eccentric entirely against ones own will.
When James died in 1984, Plutarco and his family took over. But the jungle being the jungle, the property proved to be too expensive to maintain. My guide at the site told me that James always imagined the ruins slowly fading into the rainforest, the intention being that someday an archaeologist would find it and be utterly perplexed by the mish-mash of styles and buildings.
In 2007 it was sold to two of Mexicos billionaires (Banamexs Roberto Hernandez Ramirez and Cemexs Lorenzo Zambrano Trevino) as well as the state of San Luis Potos for a reported $2.2 million. It is now visited by an estimated 100,000 visitors a year, and the foundation running the gardens works to maintain and restore what was built of Jamess vision.
In a world in which the forces of globalization squeeze and pull the world inexorably closer and the great characters and eccentrics of the 20th century are fading fast, theres something inspiring about one odd mans dream palace decaying amidst the jungle in a remote part of Mexico.
This is part of our new weekly travel column The Road Less Traveled, which promises to give you weird museums, unforgettable characters, bucket-list worthy destinations, and juicy tales from around the world.
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