The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (67 page)

Before going to sleep on this my second night in New York I went over in my mind, as it became steeped in a haze of drowsiness, the incongruous contours of the images seen in the course of my first day. No, a thousand times no—the poetry of New York was not what they had tried in Europe to tell us it was. The poetry of New York does not lie in the pseudo-esthetics of the rectilinear and sterilized rigidity of Rockefeller Center. The poetry of New York is not that of a lamentable frigidaire in which the abominable European esthetes would have liked to shut up the inedible remains of their young and modern plastics! No!

The poetry of New York is old and violent as the world; it is the poetry that has always been. Its strength, like that of all other existing poetry, lies in the most gelatinous and paradoxical aspects of the delirious flesh of its own reality. Each evening the skyscrapers of New York assume the anthropomorphic shapes of multiple gigantic Millet’s
Angeluses
of the tertiary period, motionless and ready to perform the sexual act and to devour one another, like swarms of praying mantes before copulation. It is the unspent sanguinary desire that illuminates them and makes all the central heating and the central poetry circulate within their ferruginous bone-structure of vegetable diplococcus.

The poetry of New York is not serene esthetics; it is seething biology. The poetry of New York is not nickel; it is calves’ lungs. And the subways of New York do not run on iron rails; they run on rails of calves’ lungs!
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The poetry of New York is not pseudo-poetry; it is true poetry. The poetry of New York is not mechanical rhythm; the poetry of New York is the lions’ roar that awakened me the first morning. The poetry of New York is an organ, Gothic neurosis, nostalgia of the Orient and the Occident, parchment lampshade in the form of a musical partition, smoked façade, artificial vampire, artificial armchair.
¹⁴
The poetry of New York is Persian digestion, sneezing golden bronze, organ, suction-grip trumpet for death, gums of thighs of glamor girls with hard cowrie-shell vulvas. The poetry of New York is organ, organ, organ, organ of calves’ lungs, organ of nationalities, organ of Babel, organ of bad taste,
¹⁵
of actuality; organ of virginal and history-less abyss. The poetry of New York is not that of a practical concrete building that scrapes the sky; the poetry of
New York is that of a giant many-piped organ of red ivory—it does not scrape the sky, it resounds in it, and it resounds in it with the compass of the systole and the diastole of the visceral canticles of elementary biology. New York is not prismatic; New York it not white. New York is all round; New York is vivid red. New York is a round pyramid. New York is a ball of flesh a little pointed toward the top, a ball of millennial and crystallized entrails; a monumental ruby in the rough—with the organ-point of its flashes directed toward heaven, somewhat like the form of an inverted heart—before being polished!

On certain very bright mornings filled with the dazzling sun of early November, I would go walking all alone in the heart of New York with my bread under my arm. Once I went into a drug store on 57th Street and asked for a fried egg which I ate with a small piece of my large loaf of bread which I cut off to the stupefaction of everyone who gathered round me to watch me and ask me questions. I answered all these questioners with shrugs of my shoulders and with timid smiles.

One day when I was walking thus, my bread, which had become entirely dry and had for some time betrayed marked tendencies to crumble, broke into two pieces, and I decided then that the moment had come to get rid of it. I happened to be on the sidewalk just in front of the Hotel Waldorf Astoria. It was exactly twelve o’clock, the hour of the noon-day phantoms, and I decided to go and eat in the Sert Room. But just at the moment of crossing the street I slipped and fell. In my fall the two pieces of bread were tossed violently against the pavement and scooted off some considerable distance. A policeman came and helped me up. I thanked him and began to limp away. But after taking a dozen steps I turned round, curious to observe what had finally happened to the two parts of my bread. They had simply disappeared without leaving the slightest trace, and the manner in which they were spirited away is still an enigma to me. Neither the policeman nor any of the other people on the street had the two large pieces of bread about them. I definitely had the bewildering and disquieting impression that this was a delirious and subjective phenomenon, and that the bread was there somewhere before my eyes, but that I did not see it for affective reasons that I would subsequently discover and that were connected with a whole long history involving the bread.

This became the point of departure for a very important discovery which I decided to communicate to the Sorbonne in Paris under the evocative name of
The Invisible Bread
. In this paper I presented and explained the phenomenon of sudden invisibility of certain objects, a kind of negative hallucination, much more frequent than true hallucinations, but very difficult to recognize because of its amnesic character. One does not immediately see what one is looking at, and this is not a vulgar phenomenon of attention, but very frequently a clearly hallucinatory phenomenon. The power to provoke this kind of hallucination at will
would pose possibilities of invisibility within the framework of real phenomena, becoming one of the most effective weapons of paranoiac magic. One recalls the “involuntary” element which is at the basis of all discoveries. Columbus discovered America while he was looking for the Antipodes. In the Middle Ages, metals like lead and antimony were discovered in the search for the philosopher’s stone. And I, while I had been looking for the most directly exhibitionistic way of showing my obsession with bread, had just discovered its invisibility. It was the very invisibility which I had not been able to solve in a satisfactory manner in my
Invisible Man
. What man cannot do, bread can.

My exhibit at Julien Levy’s was a great success. Most of the paintings were sold, and critical reaction, while keeping its polemic tone, was unanimous in recognizing my imaginative and pictorial gifts.

I was to leave again for Europe on the
Normandie
, which was sailing at ten o’clock the next morning. For the last night of our stay Caresse Crosby and a group of friends had arranged to give an “oneiric” ball in my honor, at the Coq Rouge. This party, which was got up in one afternoon, remained a kind of “historic institution” in the United States, for it was subsequently repeated and imitated in most American cities. This first “surrealist ball” exceeded in strangeness everything that its organizers had desired and imagined. Indeed the “surrealist dream” brought out the germs of mad fantasy that slumbered in the depths of everyone’s brains and desires with the maximum of violence. I myself, though I may be considered to be fairly inured to eccentricity, was surprised at the truculent aspect of the witches’ sabbath, at the frenzy of imagination in which that night at the Coq Rouge was plunged. Society
women appeared with their heads in bird cages and their bodies practically naked. Others had painted on their bodies frightful wounds and mutilations, cynically slashing their beauties and transpiercing their flesh with a profusion of safety pins. An extremely slender, pale spiritual woman had a “living” mouth in the middle of her stomach gaping through the satin of her dress. Eyes grew on cheeks, backs, under-arms, like horrible tumors. A man in a bloody night shirt carried a bedside table balanced on his head, from which a flock of multi-colored humming birds flew out at a given moment. In the center of the stairway a bath-tub full of water had been hung, which threatened every moment to fall and empty its contents on the heads of the guests, and in a corner of the ballroom a whole skinned beef had been hooked up, its yawning belly supported by crutches, and its insides stuffed with a half-dozen phonographs. Gala appeared at the ball dressed as an “exquisite corpse.” On her head she had fastened a very realistic doll representing a child devoured by ants, whose skull was caught between the claws of a phosphorescent lobster.

The following day we innocently left for Europe. I say “innocently,” for on our arrival in Paris we were to learn the scandal of the “oneiric” ball. At this time the feverish excitement over the Lindbergh-baby trial was at its height. The French correspondent of the
Petit Parisien
,
¹⁶
along with the usual chronicle of this trial, cabled the sensational news that the wife of the famous surrealist painter, Salvador Dali, had appeared at a ball with the bloody replica of the Lindbergh baby fastened to her head, and thereby provoked “a great scandal.” The only person in New York who was aware of this scandal was the French correspondent of the
Petit Parisien
, who had not even been at the ball. In Paris, however, the news spread like wildfire, and our arrival was greeted with stupefaction.

I was no longer master of my legend, and henceforth surrealism was to be more and more identified with me, and with me only. Much water had passed under the bridge, and I found upon my return that the group I had known—both surrealists and society people—was in a state of complete disintegration. Preoccupations of a political nature had turned a great number of them toward the left, and a whole surrealist faction, obeying the slogans of Louis Aragon, a nervous little Robespierre, was rapidly evolving toward a complete acceptance of the communist cultural platform. This inner crisis of surrealism came to a head the day when, upon my suggesting the building of a “thinking-machine,” consisting of a rocking chair from which would hang numerous goblets of warm milk, Aragon flared up with indignation. “Enough of Dali’s fantasies!” he exclaimed. “Warm milk for the children of the unemployed!”

Breton, thinking he saw a danger of obscurantism in the communist-sympathizing faction, decided to expel Aragon and his adherents—Bunuel,
Unic, Sadoul, and others—from the surrealist group. I considered René Crevel the only completely sincere communist among those I knew at the time, yet he decided not to follow Aragon along what he termed “the path of intellectual mediocrity.” Nevertheless he remained distant from our group, and shortly afterward committed suicide, despairing of the possibility of solving the dramatic contradictions of the ideological and intellectual problems confronting the Post-War generation. Crevel was the third surrealist who committed suicide, thus corroborating their affirmative answer to a questionnaire that had been circulated in one of its first issues by the magazine
La Révolution Surréaliste
, in which it was asked, “Is suicide a solution?” I had answered no, supporting this negation with the affirmation of my ceaseless individual activity. The remaining surrealists were in the process of committing suicide gradually, sinking into the growing obscurity of the lethargic and political tittle-tattle of the collective cafe terraces.

Personally, politics have never interested me, and at that moment less than ever, for they were becoming day by day more wretchedly anecdotic and threatened ruin. On the other hand I undertook the systematic study of the history of religions, especially the Catholic religion, which appeared to me more and more as the “perfect architecture.” I began to isolate myself from the group, and to travel constantly: Paris, Port Lligat, New York, back to Port Lligat, London, Paris, Port Lligat. I took advantage of my appearances in Paris to go out into society. Very rich people have always impressed me; very poor people, like the fishermen of Port Lligat, have likewise impressed me; average people, not at all. Around the real surrealist personalities were beginning to gather average people, a whole fauna of misfit and unwashed petty bourgeois. I ran away from them as from the cholera. I went to see André Breton three times a month, Picasso and Eluard twice a week, their disciples never; society people every day and almost every night.

Most society people were unintelligent, but their wives had jewels that were hard as my heart, wore extraordinary perfumes, and adored the music that I detested. I remained always the Catalonian peasant, naïve and cunning, with a king in my body. I was bumptious, and I could not get out of my mind the troubling image, post-card style, of a naked society woman loaded with jewels, wearing a sumptuous hat, prostrating herself at my dirty feet...
¹⁷
My mania for wearing elegant clothes, harking back to the period of Madrid, took up its abode again in my brain, and I then understood that “elegance” was the materialization of the material refinement of an epoch, being for that very reason only the tangible, acute simulacrum, the clarion-call of religion.