Simon Watson Taylor (anarchist)

For the Wiltshire landowner, see Simon Watson Taylor (landowner).

Simon Watson Taylor (15 May 1923 – 4 November 2005) was born, after his two sisters^[1], in Wallingford, in the historic county of Berkshire, England. His father was a member of an extremely wealthy family which had made its fortune in the sugar trade in the West Indies.^[2] Watson Taylor was a life-long anarchist.^[3] He was briefly a surrealist and a pataphysicist. He worked as a translator of French literary works and as an editor. His papers are archived in the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the United States.^[4]

Early life

Watson Taylor recounted that he received his education in the 1930s.^[5] He described the college that he attended as having 'attendant horrors' but three redeeming characteristics. The characteristics were its drama society (in which he claimed as having shone), its art class and the arts section of its library, which included a copy of the 1936 anthology Surrealism^[6], which was edited by Herbert Read and which Watson Taylor described as having found exhilarating.

Watson Taylor's father led a chequered life.^[7] By the late 1930s, his family had moved to Sussex in South East England.^[5] In 1940, his family had moved to Highgate Hill in London, into a house which had a panoramanic view over the city. In the following year he left home and moved to the fashionable Borough of Chelsea, where he roomed in various bohemianian lodgings. Subsequently he became an actor, albeit briefly, which he solely attributed to his lack of talent. After settling down, he acquired a flat in Markham Square^[8], off the King's Road in the borough.

Surrealism

While Watson Taylor was living in Chelsea, he discovered Anton Zwemmer’s bookshop in Charing Cross Road, which stocked the London Bulletin, an art magazine which was edited by E.L.T. Mesens the London-based Belgian art dealer and surrealist poet. in 1943 Watson Taylor joined the London Surrealist Group.^[9] The group met in the private dining room of the Barcelona Restaurant in 17 Beak Street, Soho and included young political exiles from France and Belgium, one of whom was French anarchist Marie Louise Berneri, who Watson Taylor came to know very well. At some stage during his affinity with the group, he was asked to become the secretary of the Surrealist Group in England, see British Surrealist Group.^[10]

Anarchism

By January 1941, Watson Taylor had become a member of his local branch of the YCL (the Young Communist League).^[11] Consequently, he attended the rally in Trafalgar Square that had been called by the People’s Convention, which he castigated as a ‘Stalinist Front’. While he was attending the rally, he encountered Marie Louise Berneri who was selling copies of War Commentary, of which she was one of the founders and one of its editors.^[12] Berneri made a very striking impression on him. Consequently, he resolved to meetup with her the next day. Through Berneri, Watson Taylor met Vernon Richards and Philip Sansom, her fellow anarchist editors of War Commentary and John Olday, its cartoonist, with all of whom he became close friends.^{[citation needed]}

Anarchist Stuart Christie recounted his personal experience of Watson Taylor while he was serving his eighteen-months imprisonment in Brixton Prison. Christie was one of the eight defendents, the Stoke Newington 8, in the criminal trial of The Angry Brigade which lasted from May to December 1972, in which he was eventually acquitted.^[13] He recalled that Watson Taylor regularly visited him in prison with expensive food parcels, at least one of which was a Fortnum hamper. He described Watson Taylor as 'having the elegance and bearing of a Regency dandy' and observed that he 'carried a silver-topped walking cane on which his name was engraved.' Christie concluded his recollection of Watson Taylor with an account of his benevolence. While Watson Taylor was traveling in India, he gave his friend George Melly, the blues and jazz singer, who had been looking after his collection of surrealist paintings, permission to sell one of them to raise money for the Stoke Newington 8 Defence Committee. The sale of the painting raised about £10,000 for the committee.^{[citation needed]}

Free Unions/Union Libres

In 1944, Watson Taylor inherited £2,000 from an uncle, which prompted him to consider the possibility of producing a surrealist review.^[11] Its planned title was Free Unions/Union Libres, in homage to the love poem libre Union libre by André Breton, the French surrealist. Watson Taylor hoped that he would be able to obtain help from Express Printers of 84a Whitechapel High Street, in the East End of London, which the War Commentary collective had bought. Express Printers eventually proved to be invaluable to Watson Taylor in two ways. First, it procured on the black market the high-quality paper that he wanted, and which otherwise would have been extremely difficult for him to procure. Second, it printed the review.^{[citation needed]}

By the end of 1994, Watson Taylor had collated all the contents: prose text, poems and illustrations, that he needed for the review. All that remained was to receive the design for the cover that Birmingham-based surrealist painter Conroy Maddox had promised.^[14] However, then two unexpected related events occurred. First, early one Sunday morning, policemen from the Special Branch of Scotland Yard raided Watson Taylor's flat.^[11] Watson Taylor recounted that they were not interested in him but in Olday.^[15] The policemen didn't find Olday in the flat. So they contented themselves with removing the mass of typescripts, photographs and artwork that Watson Taylor had been assembling for Free Unions/Union Libres that was on his desk and which were declared to be 'coded messages and as such not to be released.'^[16] Second, at the end of the year, the editors of War Commentary: Richards, Berneri, Sansom and John Hewetson, were arrested by police officers, also from the Special Branch, on a charge of ‘incitement to disaffection’, ostensibly for distributing ant-war leaflets to soldiers at Waterloo Station who were about to entrain for embarkation to the Middle East. Watson Taylor stood bail for Sansom.^[17]

In July 1946, after a policeman had returned to Watson Taylor his typescripts, photographs and artwork, and Richards and Sansom had been released and Watson Taylor had edited Free Unions/Unions Libres, it was finally published with the technical assistance of Sansom and Berneri.^[18][19] Remy (2019) observed: 'the review can be seen as a manifesto, produced in a communal spirit, and gathering anarchists (most of Taylor's friends, such as F.J. Brown and Philip Sansom) together with Trotskyists (Benjamin Péret, for example), so that it should constitute a conduit for surrealist tenets.^[20][21] However, the review turned out to be its sole issue. Remy commented that it 'strikes a strangely unachieved, unfinished note.'^[22]

Watson Taylor sent a copy of Free Unions/Unions Libres to André Breton, in Paris. Breton was delighted with it. Consequently, Watson Taylor went to Paris to meet him, his friends and the members of the French surrealist group. However, a power struggle arose in Paris between two factions of the surrealism movement there, from which Watson Taylor disassociated himself. Shortly afterwards, in 1947 The International Surrealist Exhibition was held in Paris, which was the last occasion for an appearance of the English group of surrealists.^[23] The appearance comprised its contribution to a published work on surrealism which was entitled Déclaration du groupe surrréaliste en Angleterre and which was signed by, among others, Sansom and Watson Taylor.^[24] Ray (1971) observed that the declaration was 'a tacit admission of the failure of the English surrealists to maintain any kind of productive cohesiveness.'^[25] He also observed that it concludes 'with a re-affirmation of devotion to surrealist principles as stated by Breton in his interview in View, his prolegomena to a third manifesto, his "Position of Surrealism between the Wars", and in Benjamin Péret's Le Déshonneur des poètes.^[25].^[26]

A conspicuous issue with the English surrealists was what Levy 2005 called the del Renzio Affair about surrealist Toni del Renzio, who had moved to England from Paris, and to whom Watson Taylor took public exception in the August 1944 issue of Tribune, the British socialist magazine. Levy (2003) observed that, by 1947, the London-based surrealist group had declined, dispersed and disintegrated.^[27]

Pataphysics

After Watson Taylor severed his ties with surrealism, he subscribed to the tongue-in-cheek science of Pataphysics, and joined the recently created Collège de Pataphysique, in which he achieved the hypothetical status of Provéditeur-Délégataire, Régent de Brittanicité Faustrolliene et de Travaux Pratiques de Alcoölisme.^[28] However, he became disillusioned with the Collège. And in 1968 he publicly signed off from it with an article entitled 'Alfred Jarry: the magnificent pataphysical posture' in the The Times Literary Supplement, which in turn prompted the Collège to pronounce him 'dead by resignation'. However, in contrast he remained on excellent terms with the London Institute of Pataphysics, and declared himself 'delighted by its occasional investigations of what passes for "reality".'^[28]

Translating and editing work

Taylor's extensive work as a translator of modern and avant-garde French literature and books about art included Surrealism and Painting by André Breton and plays by Boris Vian including The Empire Builders, The Generals' Tea Party and The Knackers' ABC. Others were The Cenci by Antonin Artaud, Paris Peasant by Louis Aragon and numerous works by Alfred Jarry. His collection of Jarry's The Ubu Plays (Methuen, London, 1968) included translations by himself and Cyril Connolly and remains in print.

In 1968, Taylor edited French Writing Today, which was published in the United Kingdom by Penguin and in 1969 by Grove Press in the United States. He was an editorial advisor and frequent contributor to the London-based magazine Art and Artists and was the guest co-editor (with Roger Shattuck) of a special issue (May–June 1960) of the American literary magazine Evergreen Review; titled What is Pataphysics? And, with Shattuck Taylor, he edited The Selected Works of Alfred Jarry (Methuen & Co, London, 1965).