The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (51 page)

⁸
This work, unusual and disconcerting in the highest degree, was by the very physiology of its elaboration far removed from the “Dadaist
collage,”
which is always a poetic and a
posteriori
arrangement. It was also the contrary of Chirico’s metaphysical painting, for here the spectator had perforce to believe in the earthy reality of the subject, which was of an elementary and frenzied biological nature. And it was furthermore the contrary of the poetic softening of certain abstract paintings which continue stupidly, like blind moths, to bump into the extinguished lamps of the neo-Platonic light.

I, then, and only I was the true surrealist painter, at least according to the definition which its chief, André Breton, gave of surrealism. Nevertheless, when Breton saw this painting he hesitated for a long time before its scatological elements—for in the picture appeared a figure seen from behind whose drawers were bespattered with excrement. The involuntary aspect of this element, so characteristic in psychopathological iconography, should have sufficed to enlighten him. But I was obliged to justify myself by saying that it was merely a simulacrum. No further questions were asked. But had I been pressed I should certainly have had to answer that it was the simulacrum of the excrement itself. This idealistic narrowness was from my point of view the fundamental “intellectual vice” of the early period of surrealism. Hierarchies were established where there was no need for any. Between the excrement and a piece of rock crystal, by the very fact that they both sprang from the common basis of the unconscious, there could and should be no difference in category. And these were the men who denied the hierarchies of tradition!

⁹
After this “hallucination” which I can completely vouch for on my own testimony, here are two further incidents of the same nature, which I have on authority which I consider as good as my own, for they were related to me by my father, who is the last person in the world to be given to this kind of thing. He explained to me that when I was barely three years old I happened to be sitting and playing on a large, completely deserted terrace. Several members of my family observed the interest and satisfaction I showed in my game, which consisted in piling together and tapping little clods of dirt. Suddenly it appears that I stopped my game and looked in front of me, where there was nothing but empty space, and drew back seized with such a violent fright that I did not stop weeping the rest of the morning. All those who witnessed this scene were convinced that I had had a terrifying apparition. The other incident occurred in our house in Cadaques. We were getting ready to go out on a boat ride one day. At the last moment my father went back into the house to get a handkerchief. He had only been inside the house a few moments when he came out again, pale and upset, and explained to us that just as he came into the dining room he heard little footsteps of someone coming down the stairs. He immediately recognized these steps by their characteristic slow, light tread. He looked toward the door and there on the threshold he did in fact see my grandmother (who had been dead for eight years), carrying a little basket with clothes to be mended. She went down the remaining three steps and disappeared from sight without vanishing into thin air.

¹⁰
I did not succeed in this. Political preoccupations almost immediately ruined the activity of the surrealists like a cancer. They adopted my slogans, for they were the only clairvoyant ones, but this did not suffice to inject vigor into the movement. I saw that henceforth I would have to conquer or die without being helped by anyone.

¹¹
My relatives still call me a child.

¹²
Gradiva
, the novel by W. Jensen, interpreted by Sigmund Freud
(Der Wahn und die Träume)
. Gradiva is the heroine of this novel, and she effects the psychological cure of the other, the male protagonist. When I began to read this novel, even before coming upon Freud’s interpretation, I exclaimed, “Gala, my wife, is essentially a Gradiva.”

¹³
A very precise study of the wax candle, written in 1929, led me to the conclusion that this object lends itself to a whole series of symbolic situations in which non-terrorizíng unconscious representations of intestinal and digestive metaphors lead to the apotheosis of human waste matter–the turd.

¹⁴
The author is here referring to the formerly very wide-spread method of weaning children by coating the nursing mother’s nipples with a substance of disagreeable
taste.–Translator’s note
.

¹⁵
Indeed, the heroine who invented the wax manikin with the sugar nose glued on it created a surprising “surrealist object functioning symbolically” (of the type of those I myself was to reinvent in i93o in Paris). This anthropomorphic object was destined to be “activated” by the blow of a sword and, by the leap of the nose into the mouth of the necrophile who was to operate it, to release phantasms and representations of life among the nostalgic sentiments of unconscious copro-necrophilism.

¹⁶
Zoe Bertrand is the real protagonist, the double of the mythological image of Gradiva, in the novel by Jensen referred to in a previous note (p. 233).

¹⁷
The manner in which the torrero dodges the bull with feints which he makes with his cape.

¹⁸
A Catalonian song.

¹⁹
I call my wife: Gala, Galuchka, Gradiva (because she has been my Gradiva), Olive (because of the oval of her face and the color of her skin), Olivette, the Catalonian diminutive of olive; and its delirious derivatives, Olihuette, Orihuette, Buribette, Burihueteta, Sulihueta, Solibubulete, Oliburibuleta, Cihueta, Lihuetta. I also call her Lionete (little lion), because she roars like the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion when she gets angry; Squirrel, Tapir, Little Negus (because she resembles a lively little forest animal); Bee (because she discovers and brings me all the essences that become converted into the honey of my thought in the busy hive of my brain). She brought me the rare book on magic that was to nourish my magic, the historic document irrefutably proving my thesis as it was in the process of elaboration, the paranoiac image that my subconscious wished for, the photograph of an unknown painting destined to reveal a new esthetic enigma, the advice that would save one of my too subjective images from romanticism. I also call Gala Noisette Poilue–Hairy Hazlenut (because of the very fine down that covers the hazlenut of her cheeks); and also “Fur Bell” (because she reads to me aloud during my long sessions of painting, making a murmur as of a fur bell by virtue of which I learn all the things that but for her I should never know).

²⁰
The taste that I like best in the world is that of the very red and full rock-urchins that are to be found during the May moon in the Mediterranean. My father too loves this food, in an even more exaggerated way than I.

PART III

CHAPTER TEN

Beginnings in Society Crutches - Aristocracy Hotel du Chateau in Carry-le-Rouet Lydia - Port Lligat Inventions - Malaga Poverty - L’age D’or

No sooner had I arrived in Paris than I was in a great hurry to leave again. I wanted to begin as soon as possible the pictorial investigations of which I had conceived the idea in Cadaques just at the time when my repudiation by my family occurred, paralyzing the course of my projects.

I wanted to paint nothing less than an “invisible man,” but to do this I wanted to go away somewhere to the country again. But also I definitely wanted to take Gala along. The idea that in my own room where I was going to work there might be a woman, a real woman who moved, with senses, body hair and gums, suddenly struck me as so seductive that it was difficult for me to believe this could be realized. However, Gala was quite ready to go with me, and we were in the midst of deciding where we should go. Meanwhile–timidly and as if by chance–I tossed a certain number of bold slogans into the bosom of the surrealist group in order to test their demoralizing effect during my absence. I upheld “Raymond Roussel as against Rimbaud; the modern-style object as against the African object; still-life deception as against plastic art; imitation as against interpretation.”

All this, I knew, would suffice for several years, and I purposely gave very few explanations. At this time I had not yet become a “talker,” and I uttered only the strictly necessary words, words intended solely to annoy everyone. The remnants of my pathological timidity edged my character with extremely uncommunicative features, features so abrupt that I was in effect conscious that people would look forward nervously to the infrequent occasions when I would open my mouth. Then, with a remark that was terribly crude and charged with Spanish fanaticism, I
would express all that my pent-up eloquence had accumulated during the painful and prolonged silences, when my polemic impatience would undergo the hundred and one martyrdoms of that French conversation, so sprinkled with
“esprit”
and good sense that it often manages to conceal its lack of bony structure and of substance.

On one occasion I had to listen to an art critic who was constantly talking about matter–the “matter” of Courbet, how he spread out his “matter,” how he felt at home in handling his “matter.”

“Have you ever tried to eat it?” I finally asked.

Becoming wittily French, I added, “When it comes to s–t, I still prefer Chardin’s.”

One evening I was having dinner at the Vicomte de Noailles’. Their house intimidated me, and I was extremely flattered to see my painting
The Lugubrious Game
hung between a Cranach and a Watteau. At this dinner there were artists and society people, and I immediately realized that I was the chief object of attraction. I believe that the Noailles were deeply touched by my timidity. Each time the wine-butler came and whispered the name and the year of the wine into my ear with an air of great secretiveness, I thought it was something very serious that he had come discreetly to tell me–Gala run over by a taxi, or a furious surrealist who was coming to beat me up–and I would turn livid, leap up and prepare to leave the table. Then, in a louder voice so as to reassure me, and looking with the utmost dignified intentness at the bottle lying prone in the little basket, the butler would repeat “Romanée 1923.” At one gulp I would drink down this wine that had just so terrified me and thanks to which I recovered my hope of overcoming my timidity and of being able to talk.

I have always admired–and I did so particularly at this time–the person who, without having anything really sensational or important to say, manages throughout a whole dinner of twenty people to steer the conversation in whatever direction he chooses, to make himself heard in the midst of a general silence at the right moments without having to stop eating–in fact, eating more than the next fellow–and still has time for an occasional slyly calculated pause during which he gracefully and self-confidently stops the flow of his conversation just long enough to brush aside the danger of anyone’s taking advantage of his absorption to kindle fresh hearths of conversation, or–in the extreme case in which this should occur–is able to extinguish them at the desired moment without seeming to make the slightest effort, and at the same time give the recalcitrant ones the impression, when he interrupts their incipient conversation against their will, that it is they who are interrupting by asking him in a voice that verges on the impolite to repeat his last remarks so that they can follow the course of his argument in which they have not the slightest interest.