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Independent spirit

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 22nd October 2008

Andrew Lambirth on how a chance meeting propelled him into working with Eileen Agar

It’s possible that my life would have been quite different if I hadn’t met the literary agent Jacintha Alexander at a party in 1985. At the time I was an impoverished researcher and aspirant writer, with a specialism in 20th-century British art. As we chatted of this and that, it emerged that Jacintha had a project that might interest me — working on the memoirs of an artist who’d already written quite a substantial text but needed help to prepare her book for publication. The artist in question was the distinguished surrealist Eileen Agar, and I jumped at the suggestion that I might work with her.

I remember our first meeting, at a group exhibition of English surrealists. Eileen was tiny but immensely chic, wearing black and white and red, with a beret and dark glasses. She was imperious and carried a stick. Desmond Morris, himself a surrealist painter as well as as a popular behaviourist, came and stood over her in his white raincoat in a wonderful display of body language that (on another occasion) I’d have loved to have heard him analyse. Nothing daunted, Eileen held her ground and soon escaped. She showed me examples of her work on the gallery walls and we agreed to meet at her flat and discuss further the idea of working together on her book.

I duly presented myself at her eyrie in Melbury Road, Kensington. Eileen had already written a lengthy tribute to her late husband, the Hungarian man of letters Joseph Bard, but the various publishers who’d been shown the typescript all made the same response. They wanted to know more about Eileen and less about Joseph. One famous editor asked specifically for details of her sex life. It became clear that she wasn’t averse to writing about herself (indeed was rather gratified that people should want to know); it was simply that unaided the task seemed rather daunting.

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