The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (68 page)

Nothing is in fact more tragic and vain than fashion, and just as for an intelligence of the first order, like my own, the war of 1914 was
fetishistically represented by Mademoiselle Chanel, the war which was soon to break out and which was going to liquidate the post-war revolutions was symbolized, not by the surrealist polemics in the café on the Place Blanche, or by the suicide of my great friend René Crevel, but by the dressmaking establishment which Elsa Schiaparelli was about to open on the Place Vendôme. Here new morphological phenomena occurred; here the essence of things was to become; transubstantiated; here the tongues of fire of the Holy Ghost of Dali were going to descend. And (since unfortunately I am always right) the German troops were to swoop down on Biarritz, just a few years later, camouflaged in the Schiaparelli and Dali manner, wearing cynical and mimetic costumes, with branches of leaves freshly torn from the soil of France bursting from their sandy animal hair like the Nordic buds of a crucified Daphne. But the soul and the biology of the Schiaparelli establishment was Bettina Bergery, one of the women of Paris most highly endowed with fantasy. She exactly resembled a praying mantis, and she knew it. Bettina and Roussie Sert (née Princess Mdivani), fairy skeletons of sveltest poetry, with Chanel
France de France
, head the procession of those who continue in spite of separations and death to be my best friends.

London brought to Paris a gleam of Pre-Raphaelism which I was the only one to understand and to savor. Peter Watson had a sure taste for architecture and furniture, and bought the Picassos which, without his knowing it, most resembled Rossettis. And Edward James, hummingbird poet, ordered aphrodisiac lobster-telephones, bought the best Dalis, and was naturally the richest. Lord Berners was impassively present, within the diving-suit of his humor, at the concerts, always of a high quality, given by the Princess de Polignac in the large drawing-room decorated by José-Maria Sert with tempests of embryo elephants prophetic of the Europe of the League of Nations which one day was going to blow up.

At Missia Sert’s, Sert’s first wife, the most substantial gossip of Paris was concocted. At Marie-Louise Bousquets one smacked the leftovers of these in her social-literary salon where she received on Thursdays, a salon at the bottom of the serene gray stone lake of the Place Palais-Bourbon, a salon in which I saw the most spectacular short-circuits between real cherries and the luminous ones of the cherry-colored rays of the setting sun which, so to speak, crept in in order to settle on the nose of the bone of this salon, the soft and phantasmal nose, of Ambroise Vollard, and sometimes even on Paul Poiret. Across the square from Marie-Louise, Emilio Terry kept new Dalis amid the finest spiderwebs in Paris.

In the spring it was very pleasant at the Comtesse Marie Blanche de Polignac’s, where from the garden one listened to string quartets played in the interior all aflame with candles and Renoir paintings and with the malefic coprophagia of an unsurpassable pastel by Fantin-Latour—all this accompanied by
petits-fours
and much candy and other sweets.

At the Vicomtesse de Noailles’s it was just the opposite, the counterpoint in painting and literature. It was the tradition of Hegel, Ludwig II of Bavaria, Gustave Doré, Robespierre, de Sade and Dali and a touch of Serge Lifar.

There were also the balls and the dinners of Mrs. Reginald Fellowes. There one could count on the disappointment of not seeing her wear a dress designed by Jean Cocteau, and hear a speech by Gertrude Stein, all of which was fortunately accompanied by a snobbery and an elegance of the first quality.

The Prince and Princesse de Faucigny-Lucinge had an indisputable sense of “tone.” Their “tone” was almost as violent and sustained as the
“figura”
of the Spaniards. It was the slightly gamy residue of the super-elegant and exotic pictures of Aubrey Beardsley. This princess always
had a touch of the “outmoded” that was capable of tyrannizing fashion. Her anachronism was always up-to-date; she was unquestionably one of the women possessing the most precise sense of “Parisian elegance.”

The Comte and the Comtesse Etienne de Beaumont constituted the theatrical key to all this. To enter their house was to enter the theatre. All that was needed to recognize this was to see a cubist Picasso of the gray period hung on the silvery tubes of an organ. Etienne de Beaumont spoke exactly like people born to the theatre, and wore fancy kid shoes. All the more or less criminal intrigues between the various companies of Ballets Russes that Diaghilev had left in his wake germinated, grew and invariably exploded in his garden, on whose trees artificial flowers were sometimes hung. At his house, too, one could with impunity meet Marie Laurencin, Cardinal Verdier, Colonel de La Roque, Leonid Massine, Serge Lifar (dead tired and cadaverous), the Maharajah of Kapurthala, the Spanish ambassador, and a sprinkling of surrealists.

The “society” of Paris was becoming unrestrainedly promiscuous, and the spectre of the defeat of 1940 was already rising in the Bordeaux clouds of the horizon of France, with that catastrophic bitter-sweet which was incarnated in the popular, realistic and gluey gums of Fernandel,
¹⁸
which offered a ravishing effect of contrast to the racy and spectral pallor of the Russian princess, Natalie Paley, dressed in the finest Lelong dress, her silhouette covered with all the powder of the stage of 1900. Another touch was added by the inimitable phiz of Henry Bernstein in the midst of telling the cynical-sentimental
dénouement
of a prophetic bit of gossip before a plate of spaghetti—all this drowned in the penumbra of the gallant Parmesan cheese which illuminated the Casanova night club and which awaited only the propitious moment to burst into flame like a
crêpe suzette
. The beard of Bébé Bérard, which, after the hairs of my own moustache, was that of the most intelligent painter in Paris, would saunter about, reeking of opium and Le Nain-Roman decadence, in this Paris ripe for Rasputinism, for Bébé-dandyism and for Gala-Dalinism, with a suspicious, flattering assurance, as architectonically romantic as that of a glance of Piero della Francesca. Aside from his paintings, Bérard had three things which I thought very fine and touching—his dirtiness, his glance, and his intelligence. As for Boris Kochno, he had a beard that was always savagely shaved, that grew with the perseverance and the courage of a Cossack. He “lighted” the Russian ballets, ate rapidly and often left in a great hurry, excusing himself immediately after the dessert (he was running to another dessert). Sometimes his flesh would become red and congested: then the blue of his shaved and stubborn beard would contrast with the white of his shirt-front, and if one did not look too carefully he gave the effect of a French flag, all red, white and blue.

The painter José-María Sert, a man possessing a true Spanish jesuitical imagination—a splendid sheath that enveloped him, like a golden diving-suit—had a house three hours from Port Lligat, the Mas Juny, the poorest and most luxurious spot in Europe. With Gala I would often go and spend weeks there. To the Mas Juny the whole group that I knew in Paris found its way, and there toward the end of summer, the last happy days of post-war Europe were lived—happy, and at the same time of intelligent “quality.” All this today is but the nostalgic memory of a time that is gone.

This period of summer enchantment in the setting of the Catalonian
sardanas
and the provincial festivals of the Costa Brava ended with the accident of Prince Alexis Mdivani and Baroness von Thyssen, killed in a Rolls-Royce on the road from Palamos to Figueras. Roussie, Alexis Mdivani’s sister, was to die of grief over this four years later. To tell you how much I loved this being I shall tell you only that she resembled—as two “pearls of death” resemble each other—the portrait of the young girl by Vermeer of Delft in The Hague Museum.

One must not judge the protagonists of this “insoluble” and super-romantic Europe too frivolously. One may wait a century for such beings to be produced anew. Surrealists, and society ladies too, died for the sake of sentiments! Certain professional politicians were not to do as much in the coming trials. And out of this helter-skelter of luxury, moral confusion, sentimental promiscuity and ideological experiments stretched to the point of tearing all the viscera of elegance and race of each one of us, very few were destined to survive, for the Europe that we loved was sinking amid the ruins of contemporary history—ruins without memory and without glory, the enemy of all of us, who were supremely—and heroically—anti-historic!

¹
Recently in thumbing through
Life
magazine I came upon photographs of similar objects that are now on the market and can be bought at the five-and-ten-cent stores, and that are, I believe, called “whackaroos.”

²
An extremely violent wind, the equivalent of the
mistral
in Southern France. It usually blows for three or four days in succession, lasting sometimes as long as two weeks.

³
Picasso had spent a summer in Cadaques with Derain; Ramon Pitchot had brought them here. They had interested themselves in Lydia’s case, and lent her two books by the same author, but different books. Lydia succeeded in interpreting them in such a way as to make one the continuation of the other.

⁴
The night fishing of sardines.

⁵
Georges Méliès (1861-1938), one of the pioneers in motion pictures.

⁶
A native blood sausage.

⁷
Name suggested by an idea of René Magritte’s.

⁸
One of the most typical surrealist objects was the cup, saucer and spoon made of fur imagined by Meret Oppenheim, which is now in the possession of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

⁹
Freud relates a desert sacrifice of totemic character, in which the entire tribe in a few hours devoured a raw camel, of which only the bones remained at sunrise.

¹⁰
Della Porta, a Neapolitan of Catalonian origin who lived in the thirteenth century, gives in his
Natural Magic
(previously referred to, p. 9) the recipe for making an egg as large as one wishes.

¹¹
I was at this time taking a medicine which, according to the physician who prescribed it, was intended to plaster my stomach walls.

¹²
Angel Guimerá had been (without my knowing it) the very founder of the society under whose auspices I was speaking. This amplified the scandal to such a point that the president of the society in question had to hand in his resignation the following day.