The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (63 page)

With the surrealist object I thus killed elementary surrealist painting, and modern painting in general. Miro had said, “I want to assassinate painting!” And he assassinated it—skilfully and slyly abetted by me, who was the one to give it its death-blow, fastening my matador’ sword between its shoulder-blades. But I do not think Miro quite realized that the painting that we were going to assassinate together was “modern painting.” For I have just recently met the older painting at the opening of the Mellon collection, and I assure you it does not yet seem at all aware that anything untoward has happened to it.

At the height of the frenzy over surrealist objects I painted a few apparently very normal paintings, inspired by the congealed and minute enigma of certain snapshots, to which I added a Dalinian touch of Meissonier. I felt the public, which was beginning to grow weary of the continuous cult of strangeness, instantly nibble at the bait. Within myself I said, addressing the public, “I’ll give it to you, I’ll give you reality and classicism. Wait, wait a little, don’t be afraid.”

This new period in Paris was coming to a close. We had the wherewithal to spend two and a half months in Cadaques, and we were getting ready to leave very shortly. My reputation in Paris had become considerably more solid. Surrealism was already being considered as before Dali and after Dali. People saw and judged only in terms of Dali; all the forms offering characteristic of the 1900 period—the soft, deliquescent
ornamentation, the ecstatic sculpture of Bernini, the gluey, the biological, putrefaction—was Dalinian. The strange medieval object, of unknown use, was Dalinian. A bizarre anguishing glance discovered in a painting by Le Nain was Dalinian. An “impossible” film with harpists and adulterers and orchestra conductors—this ought to please Dali.

A group of friends were having dinner out in the open in front of a corner
bistrot
at the Place des Victoires. No one was thinking about anything in particular. Suddenly the waiter skillfully placed a loaf of bread in the center of the table, and everyone exclaimed in astonishment, “It’s like Dali!” The bread of Paris was no longer the bread of Paris. It was my bread, Dali’s bread, Salvador’s bread. The bakers were already beginning to imitate me!

If the secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret, the secret of Gala’s influence has been to remain in turn doubly secret. I had the secret of remaining secret. Gala had the secret of remaining secret within my secret. Often people thought they had discovered my secret, but this was impossible, because it was not my secret but Gala’s. Gala’s secret and my secret formed the two evenly balanced scales of our justice, but the indicator of these scales was formed by Gala, standing erect, sculptured in gold; she held a sword, and it was with this that she pointed. People in Paris were afraid of being pointed to with this sword. Often the injustice of the absence of money-weight made one of the scales tip inordinately, threatening to spill the sperm of Dalinian philosophy which filled the other scale to the edge. Then the gold sword indicator of the Galadian scales would point without equivocation to a person who had betrayed us through avarice. This person needed to wait for no sign of our hostility—he felt himself sufficiently dishonored.

Our lack of money was another of Gala’s and my secrets. We still had almost nothing. We were living constantly among the richest people, and were constantly anguished over money. But we knew that our strength was never to show it. For the pity of the neighbor kills. Strength, said Gala, lay in inspiring, not pity but shame. We could have died of hunger, and no one would ever have known it. We made it a
pundonor
never to let our material difficulties be known.

This Spanish
pundonor
is well illustrated by the anecdote of the Spanish knight who has nothing to eat. When the noonday bell sounds he goes home. He sits down before his empty table, without bread and without wine. He waits—he waits until the others have finished eating. The square, on which all the houses look out, is deserted and slumbering beneath an implacable sun. When he thinks the opportune moment has come, the knight who has not eaten gets up, puts a tooth-pick in his mouth, and proudly crosses the square picking his teeth so that everyone can see him. They had to think he had eaten so they would still be afraid of his bite!

As soon as the money began to diminish the first precautionary
measure we took was to give bigger tips wherever we went—we never yielded an inch to mediocrity. We got along without things, but we did not resign ourselves, we did not adapt ourselves to things. We could go without eating, if need be, but we were not willing to eat poorly.

Since Málaga I had become Gala’s pupil. She had revealed to me the principle of pleasure. She taught me also the meaning of the principle of reality in all things. She taught me how to dress, how to go down a stairway without falling thirty-six times, how not to be continually losing the money we had, how to eat without tossing the chicken bone at the ceiling, how to recognize our enemies. She also taught me the “principle of proportion” which slumbered in my intelligence. She was the Angel
of Equilibrium, the precursor of my classicism. Far from becoming depersonalized, I got rid of the cumbersome, sterile and dusty tyranny of symptoms and of tics, tics, tics. I felt myself becoming master of the new and more and more conscious violence of my acts. And if the chicken bones of my eccentricity were going to continue to fly to the ceilings of my Amphitryonic hostesses, they would not be flying up there of their own accord and without knowing why. On the contrary it would be I, with the sling-shot of my own hand, who would toss them there. Instead of hardening me, as life had planned, Gala, with the petrifying saliva of her fanatical devotion, succeeded in building for me a shell to protect the tender nakedness of the Bernard the Hermit that I was, so that while in relation to the outside world I assumed more and more the appearance of a fortress, within myself I could continue to grow old in the soft, and in the supersoft. And the day I decided to paint watches, I painted them soft.

It was on an evening when I felt tired, and had a slight head-ache, which is extremely rare with me. We were to go to a moving picture with some friends, and at the last moment I decided not to go. Gala would go with them, and I would stay home and go to bed early. We had topped off our meal with a very strong Camembert, and after everyone had gone I remained for a long time seated at the table meditating on the philosophic problems of the “super-soft” which the cheese presented to my mind. I got up and went into my studio, where I lit the light in order to cast a final glance, as is my habit, at the picture I was in the midst of painting. This picture represented a landscape near Port Lligat, whose rocks were lighted by a transparent and melancholy twilight; in the foreground an olive tree with its branches cut, and without leaves. I knew that the atmosphere which I had succeeded in creating with this landscape was to serve as a setting for some idea, for some surprising image, but I did not in the least know what it was going to be. I was about to turn out the light, when instantaneously I “saw” the solution. I saw two soft watches, one of them hanging lamentably on the branch of the olive tree. In spite of the fact that my head-ache had increased to the point of becoming very painful, I avidly prepared my palette and set to work. When Gala returned from the theatre two hours later the picture, which was to be one of my most famous, was completed. I made her sit down in front of it with her eyes shut: “One, two, three, open your eyes!” I looked intently at Gala’s face, and I saw upon it the unmistakable contraction of wonder and astonishment. This convinced me of the effectiveness of my new image, for Gala never errs in judging the authenticity of an enigma. I asked her, “Do you think that in three years you will have forgotten this image?”

“No one can forget it once he has seen it.”

“Then let’s go and sleep. I have a severe head-ache. I’m going to take a little aspirin. What film did you see? Was it good?”

“I don’t know . . . I can’t remember it any morel”

That same morning I had received from a moving-picture studio a rejection of a short scenario for a film that I had laboriously prepared, and that was the profoundest possible summary of all my ideas. Having seen at a glance the negative contents of the letter I had not had the courage to read in detail the reasons for the refusal, but the bad humor into which my head-ache had put me and the satisfaction at having completed my picture in such an unhoped-for way had worked me into a state of anxiety which led me to reread it carefully after I was in bed. Having granted that the ideas in my scenario were very interesting—too interesting—the author of the letter declared categorically that the film I had in mind was not of “general” interest, that it was impossible to commercialize, that the public did not like to have its habits so violently jolted, that my images were so strange that no one would be able to remember afterwards what he had seen!

A few days later a bird flown from America bought my picture of “soft watches” which I had baptized
The Persistence of Memory
. This bird had large black wings like those of El Greco’s angels, and which one did not see, and was dressed in a white duck suit and a Panama hat which were quite visible. It was Julien Levy, who was subsequently to be the one to make my art known to the United States. He confessed to me that he considered my work very extraordinary, but that he was buying it to use as propaganda, and to show it in his own house, for he considered it non-public and “unsalable.” It was nevertheless sold and resold until finally it was hung on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art, and was without a doubt the picture which had the most complete “public success.” I saw it recopied several times in the provinces by amateur painters from photographs in black and white—hence with the most fanciful colors. It was also used to attract attention in the windows of vegetable and furniture shops!

Some time later I was present by chance at the shooting of a lamentable comic film in which, without advising me, they were utilizing most of my rejected ideas. It was idiotic, badly done, and completely pointless—a disaster. “Ideas,” I thought, “are made to be squandered, but it is always the profiteers who croak on them! For they often explode in their own hands even before their ‘first appearance.’ And the day they finally come and ask me to light the fuse of my integral spectacle myself, I can count on the prestige of the heroes who have died for me, and who in reality only wanted to starve me.” Like the Modern-Style woman on the cover of the
Petit Larousse
dictionary, I could say as I blew on the dandelion-seeds of my dangerous ideas, “I sow with every wind,” but my generosity was that of virulent germs. No one imitates Savador Dali with impunity, for he who tries to be Dali dies!

Robbed, cheated, plagiarized though I was, my reputation was steadily rising and my influence spreading, while the state of my pocket-book
remained precarious. After so many efforts, Gala and I were going to return to our Port Lligat with just enough money to spend two and a half months and then to return to Paris with enough to last us for the two weeks that we might be kept waiting. Since I had been banished from my home I had received nothing but persecution from my family. My father would have liked to make it impossible for me to live in Port Lligat, for he considered my nearness a disgrace. Since then I had balanced on my head William Tell’s apple, which is the symbol of the passionate cannibalistic ambivalence which sooner or later ends with the drawing of the atavistic and ritualistic fury of the bow of paternal vengeance that shoots the final arrow of the expiatory sacrifice—the eternal theme of the father sacrificing his son: Saturn devouring his sons with his own jaws; God the Father sacrificing Jesus Christ; Abraham immolating Isaac; Guzmán el Bueno lending his son his own dagger; and William Tell aiming his arrow at the apple on the head of his own son.