The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (52 page)

In the course of this first dinner at the Noailles’ I discovered two things. First, that the aristocracy–what was then called “society”—was
infinitely more vulnerable to my system of ideas than the artists, and especially the intellectuals. Indeed “society people” still wore clinging to their personalities the dose of atavism, of civilization, of refinement which the generation of the middle class with advanced social ideas had just joyfully sacrificed as a holocaust to the “young” ideologies with collectivist tendencies. The second thing I discovered was the climbers, those little sharks frantically scrambling for success, who with their assiduous flattery, their intriguing and competitive gossiping anxiety crowd around all the tables covered with the best crystals and the best silverware. I decided that I would thenceforth have to make use of these two kinds of
discoveries–of society people to keep me, and of the climbers to open a way of prestige for me with the blundering calumnies of their jealousy. I have never feared gossip. I let it build up. All climbers work and sweat at it. When finally they hand it to me as complete, I look at it, I examine it, and I always end by finding a way to turn it to my advantage. The activity of the malicious creatures who surround one is a force capable by itself alone of launching the vessel of one’s glory. The important thing is never to relinquish the wheel for a moment. Climber-ism is not interesting. The interesting thing is to arrive–just as looking for a watch is not interesting–the interesting thing is to find it

That I had reached fame I felt and knew the moment I landed at the Gare d’Orsay in Paris. But I had reached it without realizing it, and so quickly that I found myself all alone, without being known to anyone and without passport or baggage. I would therefore have to go back and fetch them, and hire porters. I would have to go and have my documents visaed, and I realized that with all this bureaucratic red tape I risked wasting the rest of my life. I therefore began to look around me, and from then on I regarded most of the people I met solely and exclusively as creatures I could use as porters in my voyages of ambition. Almost all these porters sooner or later became exhausted. Unable to endure the long marches that I forced on them at top speed and under all climatic conditions they died on the way. I took others. To attach them to my service, I promised to get them to where I myself was going, to that end-station of glory which climbers desperately want to reach. But as I have already said, I did not want to arrive, “I was going there.”

How was I going to succeed in making society people come to my support? It was childishly simple. I was going to succeed by having them come and lean on me. What are society people? Society people are people who, instead of standing on the world with both feet, balance themselves on a single foot, like storks. This involves an aristocratic attitude by which they wish to show that, while having to remain standing in order to continue to see everything from above, they like to touch the common base of the world only by what is strictly necessary in order to continue to maintain their equilibrium. This exhaustingly egocentric posture often needs support, and it is because of this that society people habitually surround themselves with a crowd of “unijambists” to lean on, who, assuming the diverse forms of pederastic and drug-addicted artists, come by turns and serve as support for the untenable attitude of an aristocracy which at this time was already beginning to feel the first jostlings of the “People’s Front.”

Such being the case, I decided to join forces with the group of invalids whose snobbism propped up a decadent aristocracy which still stuck to its traditional attitude. But I had the original idea of not coming with empty hands, like all the rest. I arrived, in fact, with my arms loaded with crutches! One thing I realized immediately. It would take quantities
and quantities of crutches to give a semblance of solidity to all that. And I inaugurated the “pathetic crutch,” the prop of the first crime of my childhood, as the all-powerful and exclusivist post-war symbol–crutches to support the monstrous development of certain atmospheric-cephalic skulls, crutches immobilize the ecstasy of certain attitudes of rare elegance, crutches to make architectural and durable the fugitive pose of a choreographic leap, to pin the ephemeral butterfly of the dancer with pins that would keep her poised for eternity. Crutches, crutches, crutches, crutches.

I even invented a tiny facial crutch of gold and rubies. Its bifurcated part was flexible and was intended to hold up and fit the tip of the nose. The other end was softly rounded and was designed to lean on the central hollow above the upper lip. It was therefore a nose crutch, an absolutely useless kind of object to appeal to the snobbism of certain criminally elegant women, just as some beings wear monocles without having any other need of them than to feel the sacred tug of their exhibitionism incrusted in the flesh of their own face.

My symbol of the crutch so adequately fitted and continues to fit into the unconscious myths of our epoch that, far from tiring us, this fetish has come to please everyone more and more. And curiously enough, the more crutches I put everywhere, so that one would have thought people had at last become bored by or inured to this object, the more everyone wondered with whetted curiosity, “Why so many crutches?” When I had made my first attempt at keeping the aristocracy standing upright by propping it with a thousand crutches, I looked it in the face and said to it honestly,

“Now I am going to give you a terrible kick in the leg.”

The aristocracy drew up a little more the leg that it kept lifted, like a stork.

“Go ahead,” it answered, and gritted its teeth to endure the pain stoically, without a cry.

Then, using all my might, I gave it a terrific kick right in the shin. It did not budge. I had therefore propped it well.

“Thank you,” it said to me.

“Never fear,” I answered as I left, kissing its hand, “I’ll be back. With the pride of your one leg and the crutches of my intelligence, you are stronger than the revolution that is being prepared by the intellectuals, whom I know intimately. You are old, and dead with fatigue, and you have fallen from your high place, but the spot where your foot is soldered to the earth is tradition. If you should happen to die, I would come at once and place my own foot in that very imprint of tradition which has been yours, and immediately I would curl up my other leg like a stork. I am ready and able to grow old in this attitude, without tiring.”

The aristocratic regime has in fact been one of my passions, and already at that period I thought a great deal about the possibility of giving back to this class of the elite a historic consciousness of the role which it would inevitably be called upon to play in the ultra-individualist Europe that would emerge from the present war. For had I written down all my previsions of the events which were to overwhelm the world during the following years, people would indeed have been obliged to acknowledge my prophetic gift. At any rate, all my friends of good faith who since 1929 have followed and been able to verify the accuracy of most of my predictions are ready to testify to the almost literal fulfillment of events which, at the moment they were announced, were always considered as paradoxical, without real basis, and indicative only of a sense of humor of the most sombre kind.

In 1929 I predicted things which, to be sure, are still far from having been realized: that the period of the “masses,” of “collectivism” and of mechanism which would be unleashed by the post-war revolutionary ideologies after these had devoured the democracies with their new totalitarian life, must lead to a European war out of which, after a thousand miseries and vicissitudes, only an individualist tradition that would be Catholic, aristocratic, and probably monarchic could arise anew from the bosom of an impoverished society. These things were listened to by no one, and I must say that I myself did not pay too much attention to them, letting them drop at random, rather through love of adventure than for any other reason.

While waiting for the fulfillment of all these prophecies, while waiting for the surrealists to begin to digest the short sentences that I had tossed them, while waiting for the climbers to busy themselves about doing me injury, while waiting for society people to begin to want me, I left for the Côte d’Azur. Gala knew a solitary hotel where no one could come and ferret us out. It was the Hotel du Château at Carry-le-Rouet. We took two large rooms there, in one of which I set up my studio. We had the hallway stacked with wood, so that our fireplace would never for a moment be without a fire–and so that no one could come and disturb us on the pretext of bringing us wood. I set up an electric light which lighted just my painting, leaving the rest of the room almost in darkness, and I had given orders never to open the shutters. We often had our meals brought up to the room; at other times we would go down into the dining room; but for two months we did not once go outdoors!

IX. Dalinian Eccentricities Not to be Further Imitated

Mannequin rotting in a taxicab, where an interior rainfall had been installed. Three hundred Burgundy snails lived for a month in the “rainy taxi.”

Dali disguised as the “Angelus” of Millet.

A woman walking through London wearing a mask made of roses, as shown in one of Dali’s paintings.

Image shown by Dali in a Congress of Architects, as a prototype of the soft architecture of the future.

Mannequin with a real loaf of bread on her head. Picasso visited the exhibition, and his dog leaped at the loaf of bread and devoured it.

Beginning in 1940, Dali came to consider the eccentric period as closed, and thought it time for the world to enter upon an era of fasting and austerity
.

X. The Strangest Distortions in the Whole History of Art

“The Ghost of Vermeer”–which may be used as a table.

“The Cranial Harp.”

“Myself at the Age of Ten, when I was the Grasshopper Child.”

“The Enigma of William Tell.”

Sculpture of an “Aerodynamic Woman.”