The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (35 page)

Four months had passed since my arrival in Madrid, and my life continued to be as methodical, sober and studious as on the first day. I am not altogether telling the truth when I say this—for in reality as my sobriety, my capacity for study, and the minute rigor to which I subjected my spirit, grew from week to week, I felt myself reaching that limit of daily discipline composed of the ritualized perfecting of each moment which leads by a direct short-cut to the very border of asceticism. I should have liked to live in a prison! I was sure that if I had lived in one I should not have regretted a single iota of my liberty. Everything in my paintings took on a more and more severe and monastic flavor, and it was on the plaster-like surface of the canvases which I had unhappily prepared with such a thick coat of paint mixed with glue that I painted these things.

I say “unhappily,” because the two cubist paintings which I executed during those first four months of my stay in Madrid were two capital works, as impressive as an
auto-da-fé
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—which is what they were. The excessively thick preparation caused them to crack, they began to fall to pieces, and the two paintings were thus totally destroyed.

But before this, one day, they were discovered, and I with them. The Students’ Residence where I lived was divided into quantities of groups and sub-groups. One of these groups was that of the artisticliterary advance guard, the non-conformist group, strident and revolutionary, from which the catastrophic miasmas of the post-war period were
already emanating. This group had recently inherited a narrow negativistic and paradoxical tradition deriving from a group of “ultra”
litterateurs
and painters—one of those indigenous “isms” born of the confused impulses created by European advance guard movements, and more or less related to the Dadaists. This group was composed of Pepin Bello, Luis Bunuel, Garcia Lorca, Pedro Garfias, Eugenio Montes, R. Barrades and many others. But of all the youths I was to meet at this period only two were destined to attain the dizzy heights of the upper hierarchies of the spirit—Garcia Lorca, in the biological, seething and dazzling substance of the post-Gongorist poetic rhetoric, and Eugenio Montes, in the stairways of the soul and the stone-canticles of intelligence. The former was from Granada, and the latter from Santiago de Compostela.

One day when I was out, the chamber maid had left my door open, and Pepin Bello happening to pass by saw my two cubist paintings. He could not wait to divulge this discovery to the members of the group. These knew me by sight, and I was even the butt of their caustic humor. They called me “the musician,” or “the artist,” or “the Pole.” My anti-European way of dressing had made them judge me unfavorably, as a rather commonplace, more or less hairy romantic residue. My serious, studious air, totally lacking in humor, made me appear to their sarcastic eyes a lamentable being, stigmatized with mental deficiency, and at best picturesque. Nothing indeed could contrast more violently with their British-style tailored suits and golf jackets than my velvet jackets and my flowing bow ties; nothing could be more diametrically opposed than my long tangled hair falling down to my shoulders and their smartly trimmed hair, regularly worked over by the barbers of the Ritz or the Palace. At the time I became acquainted with the group, particularly, they were all possessed by a complex of dandyism combined with cynicism, which they displayed with accomplished worldliness. This inspired
me at first with such great awe that each time they came to fetch me in my room I thought I would faint.

They came all in a group to look at my paintings, and with the snobbishness which they already wore clutched to their hearts, greatly amplifying their admiration, their surprise knew no limits. That I should be a cubist painter was the last thing they would have thought of! They frankly admitted their former opinion of me, and unconditionally offered me their friendship. Much less generous, I still kept a speculative distance. I wondered what benefit I could derive from them, and whether they really had anything to offer me.

They literally drank my ideas, and in a week the hegemony of my thought began to make itself felt. Wherever members of the group were present the conversation was sprinkled with, “Dali said. . .” “Dali answered. . .” “Dali thinks . . .” “How did Dali like this?” “It looks like Dali.” “It’s Dalinian. . .” “Dali must see that. . .” “Dali ought to do that. . .” And Dali this, and Dali that, and Dali everything!

Although I realized at once that my new friends were going to take everything from me without being able to give me anything in return—for in reality of truth they possessed nothing of which I did not possess twice, three times, a hundred times as much—on the other hand, the personality of Federico Garcia Lorca produced an immense impression upon me. The poetic phenomenon in its entirety and “in the raw” presented itself before me suddenly in flesh and bone, confused, blood-red, viscous and sublime, quivering with a thousand fires of darkness and of subterranean biology, like all matter endowed with the originality of its own form.
⁵
I reacted, and immediately I adopted a rigorous attitude
against
the “poetic cosmos.” I would say nothing that was indefinable, nothing of which a “contour” or a “law” could not be established, nothing that one could not “eat” (this was even then my favorite expression). And when I felt the incendiary and communicative fire of the poetry of the great Federico rise in wild, dishevelled flames I tried to beat them down with the olive branch of my premature anti-Faustian old age, while already preparing the grill of my transcendental prosaism on which, when the day came, when only glowing embers remained of Lorca’s initial fire, I would come and fry the mushrooms, the chops and the sardines of my thought (which I knew were destined to be served some day—fried to a turn, and good and hot—on the clean cloth of the table of the book which you are in the midst of reading) in order to appease for some hundred years the spiritual, imaginative, moral and ideological hunger of our epoch.

Our group was taking on a more and more anti-intellectual color; hence we began to frequent intellectuals of every sort, and to haunt the cafés of Madrid in which the whole artistic, literary and political future of Spain was beginning to cook with a strong odor of burning oil. The
double vermouths with olives contributed generously to crystallize this budding “post-war” confusion, by bringing a dose of poorly dissimulated sentimentalism which was the element most propitious to the elusive transmutations of heroism, bad faith, coarse elegance and hyperchloridic digestions, all mixed up with anti-patriotism; and from this whole amalgam a hatred rooted in bourgeois mentality which was destined to make headway grew, waxed rich, opening up new branches daily, backed by unlimited credit, until the day of the famous crash of the then distant Civil War.

I said a moment ago that the group which had just taken me so generously to its bosom was incapable of teaching me anything, and even as I said this I knew that it was not altogether true, since the group nevertheless taught me one thing, and it was precisely because of this thing that I remained in the group, and that I was going to continue to remain. They taught me how to go on a bender. I spent about three days at it: two days for the barber, one morning for the tailor, one afternoon for money, fifteen minutes to get drunk, and until six o’clock the next morning to go on the “bender.” I must relate all this in detail.

One afternoon the whole group of us were having tea in one of the fashionable spots in Madrid, which naturally was called the Crystal Palace. No sooner did I enter it than everything became clear to me. I had radically to change my appearance. My friends, who took a much more decided pride in my person than I (since my immeasurable arrogance always immunized me against being affected by anything), were eager to defend my truculent appearance, and even to force its acceptance, with an energetic and resolute courage. They were ready to sacrifice everything for this, and their vehement non-conformism tended to make a veritable battle-flag of my preposterous get-up. By their offended air they seemed to want to answer the furtive, discreet, though insistent glances from the elegant throng that surrounded us by saying, “Well! Our friend looks like a gutter rat, to be sure, but he is the most important personage you have ever met, and at the slightest incivility on your
part we’ll knock you down.” Bunuel especially, who was the huskiest and most daring among us, would survey the room to discover the slightest occasion to pick a fight. For that matter, he would seize on any pretext that promised to end in a free-for-all. But nothing happened. When we got outside I said to the bodyguards of my outlandishness, “You’ve been very decent with me. But I’m not at all anxious to keep this up. Tomorrow I’m going to dress like everyone else!”

This decision, made on the spur of the moment, impressed everyone deeply, for they had all become terribly “conservative” about my appearance. My decision was discussed endlessly and with the same kind of emotion that must have possessed Socrates’ disciples when he stoically announced that he was going to drink the hemlock. They tried to make me go back on my decision—as though my personality were attached to my clothes, my hair and my sideburns, and ran the risk of being destroyed and of disappearing along with the paralyzing aspect of my amazing capillary and sartorial emblems. But my decision was irrevocable. The principal and secret reason was that I was bent on something which suddenly appeared to me as of capital importance. I wanted to be attractive to elegant women. And what is an elegant woman? I had found out just now, in the tea-room, by observing one sitting at the opposite table. An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and who has no hair under her arms. On her for the first time I had discovered a depilated armpit, and its color, so finely and delicately blue-tinged, appeared to me as something extremely luxurious and perverse. I made up my mind to study “all these questions,” and to do so—as I did everything—thoroughly!

The next morning I began at the beginning—with my head. However, I did not dare go directly to the Ritz barbershop, as my friends had recommended. I therefore went in search of an ordinary barber. I thought I would have him do it just “roughly,” and have the rest of my hair properly cut at the Ritz in the afternoon. But each time I reached the door of a barbershop I would suddenly be seized with timidity and decide to go elsewhere. The time it would take to say “Cut my hair” was really a difficult moment to get across.

Toward the end of that afternoon, after a thousand hesitations, I finally made up my mind to it. But as soon as I saw the white towel in which the barber had enveloped me become covered with my ebony-black strands I was seized for a moment with a Samson complex. What if the story about Samson were true? I looked at myself in the mirror in front of me, and I thought I saw a king on his throne. But this produced in me a great uneasiness. Nothing, in fact, more resembles the grotesque parody of a royal ermine cape than the large and solemn white towel sprinkled with the black tails of our own hair that are being snipped off our heads. It is curious, but that is how it is. It was the first and the last time in my life that for several minutes I lost faith in myself. My image of a king-child appeared to me suddenly as a painful case of biological
deficiency, the product of a catastrophic disequilibrium between my sickly, feeble, backward constitution and a precocious but sterile intelligence incapable of functioning in the realm of action, with nothing to look forward to but the degeneration of the terribly incomplete and spiritually aged freak that I was.

I was thinking all these things while the hair fell in shreds on my knees and on the tiled floor—which I remember very well having been of yellow, white and blue porcelain representing a kind of dragon-fish biting its tail. Was I perhaps an imbecile like all the others? I paid, gave the tip and headed toward the Ritz where the barber would put the finishing touches on the work.

As soon as I was in the street, with the barber’s door shut behind me, I felt myself a different man, and all my recent scruples and fears melted in an instant like a soap bubble. I knew that the slamming of that door had separated me forever from the swampy blackness of my hair which they must now be sweeping up. I no longer regretted anything, anything, and with the allegorical, age-avid mouth of the Medusa of my anti-sentimentalism, of my anti-Faust, I spat the last unprepossessing hair of my adolescence upon the pavement of time. Instead of going to the barber’s when I reached the Ritz, I headed for the bar and asked for “a cocktail.”