The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (61 page)

“Gala, give me your hand. I’m afraid of falling, it’s dark. I’m all worn out by this walk. You think the maid will have found some sardines at the last moment for this evening? If it’s still as warm as this tomorrow, perhaps I can take off one of my wool sweaters. We’ll take some drops to sleep well tonight. Tomorrow I have lots and lots of things to do before it gets to be this time.”

We were returning home. A faint smoke rose from the chimney of our roof. It was the fish soup that was cooking and taking its time about it. Let us hope she has put a few crabs into it. We walked and walked, locked in each other’s arms, and we felt like making love.

Suddenly I was seized with a joy that made me tremble. “My God, what a stroke of luck that we are not Rodin, you or I!”

As a special treat, to celebrate the completion of a painting, we went with the fishermen for a feast of fried sardines and chops on Cape Creus, which is exactly the epic spot where the mountains of the Pyrenees come down into the sea, in a grandiose geological delirium. There, no more olive trees or vines. Only the elementary and planetary violence of the most diverse and the most paradoxically assembled rocks. The long meditative contemplation of these rocks has contributed powerfully to the flowering of the “morphological esthetics of the soft and the hard” which is that of the Mediterranean Gothic of Gaudi—to such an extent that one is tempted to believe that Gaudi must, at a decisive moment of his youth, have seen these rocks which were so greatly to influence me.

But aside from the esthetics of this grandiose landscape, there was also materialized, in the very corporeity of the granite, that principle of paranoiac metamorphosis which I have already several times called attention to in the course of this book. Indeed if there is anything to which one must compare these rocks, from the point of view of form, it is clouds, a mass of catastrophic petrified cumuli in ruins. All the images capable of being suggested by the complexity of their innumerable irregularities appear successively and by turn as you change your position. This was so objectifiable that the fishermen of the region had since time immemorial baptized each of these imposing conglomerations—the camel, the eagle, the anvil, the monk, the dead woman, the lion’s head. But as we moved forward with the characteristic slowness of a row-boat (the sole agreeable means of navigation), all these images became transfigured, and I had no need to remark upon this, for the fishermen themselves called it to my attention.

“Look, Sefior Salvador, now instead of a camel one would say it had become a rooster.”

What had been the camel’s head now formed the comb, and the camel’s lower lip which was already prominent had lengthened to become the beak. The hump, which before had been in the middle of its back, was now all the way back and formed the rooster’s tail. As we came
nearer, the tips of the anvil had become rounded, and it was exactly like a woman’s two breasts ...

While the fishermen rowed, and one saw these rocks at each monotonous stroke of the oars continually become metamorphosed, “become uninterruptedly something else,” “change simulacra,” as though they had been phantasmal quick-change artists of stone, I discovered in this perpetual disguise the profound meaning of that modesty of nature which Heraclitus referred to in his enigmatic phrase, “Nature likes to conceal herself.” And in this modesty of nature I divined the very principle of irony. Watching the “stirring” of the forms of those motionless rocks, I meditated on my own rocks, those of my thought. I should have liked them to be like those outside—relativistic, changing at the slightest displacement in the space of the spirit, becoming constantly their own opposite, dissembling, ambivalent, hypocritical, disguised, vague and concrete, without dream, without “mist of wonder,” measurable, observable, physical, objective, material and hard as granite.

In the past there had been three philosophic antecedents of what I aspired to build in my own brain: the Greek Sophists, the Jesuitical thought of Spain, founded by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, and the dialectics of Hegel in Germany—the latter, unfortunately, lacked irony, which is the essentially esthetic element of thought; moreover it “threatened revolution”...

In the lazy way in which the fishermen of Cadaques rowed there was concealed a quality of patience and of inaction which, too, was a form of irony. And I said to myself that if I really wanted to return to Paris as a conqueror I ought to arrive there rowing a boat, I ought not even to get out of this boat, but go there directly, bringing this light of Lligat clinging to my brow, which two months of decantation of the spirit had settled and clarified—for the spirit, like wine, cannot be transported without peril; it must not be shaken too much, or it will spoil on the way. It is to the rhythmic beat of the lazy and ironic oars that one should transport the rare wines of tradition on days of great calm, in order that these should be as little aware as possible of the voyage, even though the voyage should be “as long as possible.” For nothing in fact is more cretinizing for the spirit of man than the speed of modern means of locomotion, nothing more discouraging than those “speed records” that are announced with weariless periodicity. I am willing, for that matter, to grant anything one likes in this realm, and I will even ask the reader to accept with me for a moment the hypothesis that it may be possible to go around the world in a single day. How boring that would be! Imagine this to be still further perfected until one could do it in ten minutes—in one minute. But this would be frightful! On the other hand, suppose that, by a miraculous stroke of luck emanating from heaven, one should suddenly succeed in making the trip between Paris and Madrid last three hundred years. What mystery then, what speed! What vertigo
for the imagination! Immediately, instead of the train, one would go back to horoscopes. Instead of traveling on the back of an airplane’s carcass oozing with gasoline, one would again travel on that of the stars! But this too is romanticism
à la Méliès
.
⁵
Three hundred years is too long to go from Madrid to Paris. Let us then take the ironic average, that of the stage-coach, that of Stendhal’s and Goethe’s voyages to Italy. At that time distances still “counted,” and gave time to the intelligence to be able to measure all spaces and all forms, and all the states of the soul and of the landscape and of the architecture. At that time the slowness and lack of mechanical perfection were still among the prime conditions for the easy and savory development of the intelligence. Row, Dali, row! Or rather, let the others, those worthy fishermen of Cadaques, row. You know where you want to go; they are taking you there, and one might almost say that it was by rowing, surrounded by fine paranoiac fellows, that Columbus discovered the Americas!

It became necessary to return to Paris once more. Our money was practically exhausted. Thus we were leaving “to make a few more pennies,” as I called it, in order to be able to come back to Port Lligat as soon as possible. But the soonest would be in no less than three or four months. I therefore pressed against my palate the corporeity of these last days tinted and impregnated with the light and the already somewhat elegiac savor of our imminent departure. Spring, feeble and bruised, like an autumn coming to birth again backwards, was beginning to make itself felt, and the tips of the fig-tree branches which had just been lighted with little green flames of young leaves, seemed like candelabra of tarnished silver lighted for the Easter festivals.

It was the season for lima beans. I was finishing a long meal of which the principal dish had been precisely this extraordinary vegetable which so greatly resembles a prepuce. The Catalonians have a way of flavoring beans which makes this one of my favorite dishes. For this they have to be cooked with bacon and very fat Catalonian
butifarra
⁶
, and the secret consists in putting into the mixture a little chocolate and some laurel leaves. I had eaten my fill and was looking absentmindedly, though fixedly, at a piece of bread. It was the heel of a long loaf, lying on its belly, and I could not cease looking at it. Finally I took it and kissed the very tip of it, then with my tongue I sucked it a little to soften it, after which I struck the softened part on the table, where it remained standing. I had just reinvented Columbus’s egg: the bread of Salvador Dali. I had discovered the enigma of bread: it could stand up without having to be eaten! This thing so atavistically and consubstantially welded to the idea of “primary utility,” the elementary basis of continuity, the symbol of “nutrition,” of sacred “subsistence,” this thing, I repeat, tyrannically inherent in the “necessary,” I was going to render useless
and esthetic. I was going to make surrealist objects with bread. Nothing could be simpler than to cut out two neat, regular holes on the back of the loaf and insert an inkwell in each one. What could be more degrading and esthetic than to see this bread-ink-stand become gradually stained in the course of use with the involuntary spatterings of “Pelican” ink? A little rectangle of the bread-inkstand would be just the thing to stick the pens into when one was through writing. And if one wanted always to have fresh crumbs, fine pen-wiper-crumbs, one had only to have one’s bread-inkwell-carrier changed every morning, just as one changes one’s sheets ...

Upon arriving in Paris, I said to everyone who cared to listen, “Bread, bread and more bread. Nothing but bread.” This they regarded as the new enigma which I was bringing them from Port Lligat. Has he become a Communist? they would wonder jokingly. For they had guessed that my bread, the bread I had invented, was not precisely intended for the succor and sustenance of large families. My bread was a ferociously anti-humanitarian bread, it was the bread of the revenge of imaginative luxury on the utilitarianism of the rational practical world, it was the aristocratic, esthetic, paranoiac, sophisticated, jesuitical, phenomenal, paralyzing, hyper-evident bread which the hands of my brain had kneaded during the two months in Port Lligat. During two months, in fact, I had subjected my spirit to the tortures of the most infinitesimal doubts, to the rigorous exactions of my slightest intellectual explorations. I had painted, I had loved, I had written and studied, and in the last moment, on the eve of leaving, I had summarized, in the apparently insignificant gesture of putting the end of a loaf of bread upright on a table, the whole spiritual experience of this period.

This is my originality. One day I said, “There is a crutch!” Everybody thought it was an arbitrary gesture, a stroke of humor. After five years they began to discover that “it was important.” Then I said, “There is a crust of bread!” And immediately it began in turn to assume importance. For I have always had the gift of objectifying my thought concretely, to the point of giving a magic character to the objects which, after a thousand reflections, studies and inspirations, I decided to point to with my finger.

A month after my return to Paris I signed a contract with George Keller and Pierre Colle, and I exhibited in the latter’s gallery my
Sleeping Woman-Horse-Invisible Lion
, which was the fruit of my contemplations of the rocks of Cape Creus; also a painting of Catholic essence which was called
The Profanation of the Eucharistic Host
, and
The Dream
, and
William Tell. The Profanation of the Host
was bought by Jean Cocteau,
William Tell
by Andre Breton;
The Dream
and
Sleeping Woman-Horse-Invisible Lion
by the Vicomte de Noailles. The art critics began to be more seriously interested in my art, but only the surrealists and society people seemed to be really touched to the quick. After a certain time the Prince de Faucigny-Lucinge bought
The Tower of Desire
, a painting which represented a naked man and woman at the top of a tower, beside a lion’s head, caught in a “fixed” embrace charged with crime and eroticism.

I began at about this period to appear assiduously at a few society dinners where I was welcomed, together with Gala, with mingled fear and respectful admiration. I took advantage of this reaction at the first opportunity to bring in my bread. One evening during a concert at the home of the Princesse de Polignac, I surrounded myself with a group of elegant ladies, the ones most vulnerable to my kind of lucubrations. My obsession with bread had led me to a revery which became crystallized in the plan of founding a secret society of bread, which would have as its aim the systematic cretinization of the masses. That evening, between glasses of champagne, I expounded the general plan. The weather was mild, and the sky was full of shooting stars, and I could see the souls of these charming ladies reflected in their sparkling jewels. The laughter with which they greeted the lamentable apparition of my project flashed with the same diversity. Some of the laughs came from
blasé and very beautiful mouths, which had not laughed thus for three years; others set their teeth to control their laughter, knowing that all this was dangerous, for they found me handsome; still other laughs were those of hundred per cent French scepticism, yielding nothing before a demonstration of false reasoning. These laughs, opening into a fan of nacre and pearl, wafted voluptuous gusts upon my conversation, which tactfully utilized the variegated sparkle of all those rows of teeth in order skillfully and prudently to add or subtract just the gram or the centigram of levity necessary to the equilibrium of attention, which I brilliantly succeeded in maintaining at this already brilliant initiation of my gifts as a conversationalist. Just at the moment when I believed I had managed to bring the attention of each of the women in my circle to a dead center with an erudite exposition of my idea of “secret societies” sprinkled with whimsicalities, I stopped talking. I knew perfectly well that the idea was a childish one. But I was not only thinking of this. What is all this about the bread? What can Dali have invented with this bread of his? And they laughed again, with a little touch of unwholesome frenzy.