The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (40 page)

The following day when I returned to the school an atmosphere of panic reigned among my co-disciples, and they told me that I was going to be expelled for the incident of the previous day. I did not take the matter seriously, for I knew that it was impossible to take such a measure in retaliation for the mere act of having walked out in the middle of the President’s speech. My gesture, though clearly one of protest, had remained strictly within the limits of politeness, since I had not interrupted the President or slammed the door as I left. But in my innocence I was not at all aware that this was not what the stir was about. It appeared that after I left, the students who supported Vásquez Díaz began to interrupt the academician’s speech with insults and imprecations, and passing from words to deeds, persecuted the academicians till they were forced to make their escape and lock themselves up in the drawing-class. The students were on the point of breaking in the door
by using a bench as a battering ram when the mounted police rode into the yard and shortly succeeded in rescuing the trembling academicians.

The morally visible leader of this state of mind was myself. And in spite of the fact that I had not been present at the disturbance, I was put down on the list of the rebels as having actively cooperated with them from the moment of my exit, which was interpreted as a signal for the demonstration to begin. It was in vain that I attempted to plead my innocence. I was suspended for a year from the Academy of Fine Arts, and after the disciplinary council had confirmed my suspension I returned to Figueras.

I had been home but a short time when I was taken into custody by the Civil Guard and locked up in the prison of Figueras. At the end of a month I was transported to the prison of Gerona, and was finally set free when no adequate charges could be found on which to try me. I had arrived in Catalonia at a bad moment. A very determined revolutionary upsurge had just been energetically repressed by General Primo de Rivera, who was the father of José Antonio, the future founder of the Spanish Falange. Elections had just taken place, and an effervescent political agitation absorbed all activities. My best childhood friends of Figueras had all become revolutionaries, and my father, accomplishing his strict notarial functions, had had to testify to abuses committed by certain elements of the right during the elections. I had just arrived, and this was remarked even more than formerly. I was always talking about anarchy and monarchy, deliberately linking them together. It was from this whole amalgam of circumstances, which only my father could adequately and accurately relate, that my arbitrary imprisonment resulted, without any other consequence than to add a lively color to the already highly colored sequence of the anecdotic episodes of my life.

This period of imprisonment pleased me immeasurably. I was naturally among the political prisoners, all of whose friends, co-religionists and relatives showered us with gifts. Every evening we drank very bad native champagne. I had resumed writing the “Tower of Babel” and was reliving the experience of Madrid, drawing philosophic consequences from each incident and each detail. I was happy, for I had just rediscovered the landscape of the Ampurdán plain, and it was while looking at this landscape through the bars of the prison of Gerona that I came to realize that at last I had succeeded in aging a little. This was all I wished, and it was all that for several days I had wanted to tear out and squeeze from my experience in Madrid. It was fine to feel a little older, and to be within a “real prison” for the first time. And finally, as long as it lasted, it would be possible for me to let my mind relax.

¹
This belongs chronologically a few years later in my biography.

²
At this period I had just begun to read Sigmund Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams.
This book presented itself to me as one of the capital discoveries in my life, and I was seized with a real vice of self-interpretation, not only of my dreams but of everything that happened to me, however accidental it might seem at first glance.

³
Eugenio d’Ors once made the profound observation that “everything that is not tradition is plagiarism.” Everything that is not traditíon is plagiarism, Salvador Dali repeats. The most exemplary case that one can give of this to a young student of the history of art ís that of Perugino and Raphael. Raphael, while still a very young student, found himself almost without realizing it incorporating and possessing the whole tradition of his master, Perugino: drawing, chiaroscuro, matter, myth, subject, composition, architecture—all this was “given” to him. Hence he was lord and master. He was free. He could work within such narrow limits that he could give hís whole mind to doing it. If he decided to suppress a few columns or to add a few steps to the stairway; if he thought the head of the Madonna should lean forward a little more, that the shadow of the orbits of her eyes should have a more melancholy accent, with what luxury, what intensity, what liberty of invention he could do thís. The complete opposite is Picasso, as great as Raphael, but damned. Damned and condemned to eternal plagiarism; for, having fought, broken and smashed tradition, his work has the dazzle of lightning and the anger of the slave. Like a slave he is chained hand and foot by the chains of his own inventions. Having reinvented everything, he is tyrannized by everythíng. In each of his works Picasso struggles like a convict; he is tyrannized, reduced to slavery by the drawing, the color, the perspective, the composition, by each of these things. Instead of leaning upon the immediate past which is their source, upon the “blood of reality” which is tradition, he must lean upon the “memory” of all that he has seen—plagiarism of the Etruscan vases, plagiarism of Toulouse-Lautrec, plagiarism of Africa, plagiarism of Ingres. THE POVERTY OF REVOLUTION. Nothing is truer: “The more one tries to revolutionize, the more one does the same thíng.”

⁴
Act of faith—the name given to the ceremony of burning alleged heretics by the Holy Spanish Inquisition.—
Translator’s note.

⁵
Form presents itself as the result of elementary physical modifications. Among these are the reactions of matter (general morphology).

⁶
Removing this varnish from my head was a whole drama. The only way to dissolve it was by dipping it in turpentine, which was dangerous for the eyes. After this (except on one occasion that I shall describe in its proper place) I never used picture varnish again, but I achieved almost the same effect by adding white-of-egg to the brilliantine.

⁷
When, nine years later, I met one of these friends again in Paris who admitted to me that he still preciously preserved his piece of this pact, I was once more stupefied by the endemic childishness of humanity. Of all animals, of all plants, of all architectures, of all rocks, it is man who finds it hardest to age.

⁸
An area of empty space behind my head has always created in me a sense of anxiety so painful that it makes it impossible for me to work. A screen is not enough for me, I need a real wall. If the wall is very thick I know beforehand that my work is already well on the way to success.

CHAPTER NINE

Return to Madrid Permanent Expulsion from the School of Fine Arts Voyage to Paris Meeting With Gala Beginnings of the Difficult Idyll of My Sole and Only Love Affair I am Disowned by My Family

The afternoon that I was released from the prison of Gerona I reached Figueras just at dinner time and I remember that I ate eggplant as a vegetable. Immediately after, I went to the movies. The news of my liberation had spread through the town, and when they saw me come in I received a veritable ovation.

A few days later we left for Cadaques, where I became an “ascetic” once more, and where I literally gave myself over body and soul to painting and to my philosophic research. The memory of my beginnings of debauchery in Madrid accentuated the severity of my new habits, while giving them that touch of grace appropriate to one who for a moment has held in his own hand the panting bird of a recent and exotic vital experience. I knew, moreover, that I was going to return to Madrid, once my probationary period was over. I should then have a chance to continue experiments of that kind there. But now, the earlier I got up in the morning, the more vigorously I streaked my paper with the hard point of my pencil to transmit to it the fundamental flow of my thoughts, the more capable I was of resisting all the temptations of my body, the more I could canalize the forces of my libido and let them swell the combative forces that struggle, remain and triumph in the crusade of intelligence that should lead me some day to the conquest of the kingdom of my own soul; the more capable I was of impoverishing myself and renouncing my body, the more quickly I would age.

At the end of that summer, which was extremely hot, I had grown thin as a skeleton. My body was absent from my personality, so to speak, and I felt myself turning into one of those fantastic figures of Hieronymus Bosch, of whom Philip II was so passionately fond. I was in fact a
kind of monster whose sole anatomical parts were an eye, a hand and a brain.

In my family it was a long-established Sunday habit to drink coffee after the mid-day meal, and to take
half
a tiny glass of chartreuse. I always respected this limit. But once, on one of those very calm afternoons of Cadaques when the sky and the sea intermingle in what the natives call a “white calm,” I mechanically filled my small glass to the edge, and the chartreuse even overflowed a little onto the tablecloth. “What are you doing?” my father exclaimed with alarm. “Don’t you know that that’s a very strong drink?” Pretending that I recognized the imprudence I had just committed, I poured half my glass back into the bottle.

My father settled down to enjoy the sleep of the just. As for me—who knows what I was thinking?... But, as in the case of my “Parsifal,” it
is better that there should still remain some impenetrable secrets for my readers, for such secrets will be very useful to me for future editions of this book—corrected and augmented. And if it is meritorious on my part to offer myself body and soul, torn into shreds, for the curiosity of my contemporaries by giving them a unique document for scientific investigation, it is also perfectly legitimate, it seems to me, that I should anticipate the future commercial problems inherent in this question, while incidentally taking advantage of the present occasion tactfully and prudently to begin to give it publicity.

When my disciplinary period had expired, I returned to Madrid where I was awaited with delirious impatience by my group, who confessed that without me “things had not been the same.” They were all disoriented, lost and dead of an imaginative famine which I alone was capable of placating. I was acclaimed, I was looked after, I was coddled. I became their divinity. They did everything for me, they bought me shoes, ordered special neckties, reserved seats for me at the theatre, packed my suitcases, watched over my health, my moods, submitted to all my whims, went forth like squadrons of cavalry to overcome the practical dragons that stood in the way of the realization of my most impossible fantasies.

My father, since the experience of the first year, now gave me no more than a modest monthly sum, ludicrously inadequate to the style of living which my orgiastic recrudescence was going to require. But he continued innocently to pay all my bills as in the past. It will not be difficult for my readers, however, to understand that as far as I was concerned this amounted to the same thing. Moreover, my group at that moment helped me financially. Each one had his own way of getting hold of a considerable sum of money when the situation demanded. One would pawn a ring with a magnificent diamond which had been a family gift; another would manage, by a miracle, to mortgage a large piece of property which he had not yet inherited; a third would sell his car to defray the expenses of two or three days of our existence. We also took advantage of the halo of “rich men’s sons” which surrounded us to borrow money from the most unbelievable people. We would make up a detailed list of them, after which we would draw lots. Each of us was supposed to call upon a different person. We would take two taxis. One of us would go into the café that our victim frequented or climb up to his apartment. Sometimes we would have no success, and then we would go on and try the next one. By the end of the day we actually managed to get together a considerable sum, often beyond all our hopes. And this is saying a good deal, in view of our insatiable cupidity. From time to time we would return the money to the persons who had lent us the most substantial sums, and this made it easy for us to ask them for some again. We thus created the habit of confidence which, sooner or later, was in turn to fail. For the most part the large loans were in time reimbursed by our parents, who eventually, after our creditors’ patient waiting had been hopelessly exhausted, received
on their heads a shower of demands for payment. But our real victims were our most modest and generous friends, who lent us money not because of the confidence with which we inspired them, but through sympathy, affection, and especially admiration, which we aroused in them through our feats of intelligence. For the sole sake of making them pay dearly for a moment of our conversation we would put on an act in which we were not above resorting to cheap histrionic effects. “We’ve been robbed!” I would cynically exclaim after receiving the loan of a sum of money. “That remark I made about realism and Catholicism alone is worth five times this amount!” The worst of it was that I really believed our behavior was honorable, and we had absolutely no scruples about it.