“We stayed with Edward at Xilitla in Mexico, taking my daughter Marina with us. He met us at the airport in Mexico City…with a dead or dying crocodile, about a foot long, on a bath towel beside him. It seemed to revive in the hotel jacuzzi because the force of the water made its tail wag. When eventually he knew it to be dead, he wrote an Ode to a Dying Crocodile and commissioned his old friend, the French composer Henri Sauguet, to set it to music.”
—
Desmond Guiness - ‘Edward James and His Stories’
in Edward James: A Surreal Life
