The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (69 page)

¹³
Rails of calves’ lungs—an idea borrowed from Raymond Roussel, the greatest French imaginative writer.

¹⁴
An armchair that “breathes” by means of a mechanical pump and cushions that can be blown up. This armchair I call artificial by contrast with the “naturalness” of common armchairs. The artificial armchair is very useful for putting to sleep old people, children and snobs of every kind.

¹⁵
I have always considered “good taste” to be one of the principal causes of the growing sterility of the French mind; I have always defended, as against French good taste, the fertile and biological bad taste of Wagner, Gaudi and Boecklin.

¹⁶
M. de Roussy de Sales.

¹⁷
I have heard a Catalonian painter say of someone very dirty, “Imagine how dirty he was—that black stuff we all have between our toes he has between his fingers!”

¹⁸
A comic actor of the French cinema, discovered by Jean Renoir, rightly considered by Salvador Dali to be the most realistic and the best. The war prevented Dali from executing the portrait of Fernandel disguised as a Velásquez
menino
(dwarf).

CHAPTER TWELVE

Glory Between the Teeth, Anguish Between the Legs— Gala Discovers and Inspires the Classicism Of My Soul

My second voyage to America had just been what one may call the official beginning of “my glory.” All my paintings were sold at the opening of the exhibit.
Time
magazine published on its cover the photograph of me done by Man Ray with this sub-title: “SURREALIST SALVADOR DALI: A blazing pine, an archbishop, a giraffe, and a cloud of feathers went out of the window.” I had learned from several sources about its having appeared, and when I received a copy of the magazine I was very disappointed, for I thought it was a “little” magazine. I subsequently learned that it was one of the best and most important put out in America.

I have never understood the rapidity with which I became popular. I was frequently recognized on the street, and asked to give autographs. Great quantities of flabbergasting letters came to me from the most varied and remote parts of the country. And I received a shower of extravagant offers, each more unexpected than the last.

By way of demonstration, I accepted an offer to dress one of the windows of Bonwit-Teller’s shop with a surrealist display. I used a manikin whose head was made of red roses and who had fingernails of ermine fur. On a table, a telephone transformed into a lobster; hanging on a chair, my famous “aphrodisiac coat” consisting of a black dinner jacket to which were attached one beside another, so as entirely to cover it, eighty-eight liqueur glasses filled to the edge with green
crême de menthe
, with a dead fly and a cocktail straw in each glass.

This same aphrodisiac coat had just been shown with great success in a surrealist exhibit in London, at which I gave a lecture from inside a diving suit. Lord Berners was in charge of renting the diving suit in question, and over the telephone they asked him to specify exactly to what depth Mr. Dali wished to descend. Lord Berners replied that I
was going to descend to the subconscious, after which I would immediately come up again. With equal seriousness the voice answered that in this case they would replace the helmet with a special one.

I got into the diving suit, and the mechanic from the diving-suit establishment bolted my helmet on tight. The diving suit had extremely heavy lead shoes which I could barely lift. I therefore had to walk very slowly, leaning on friends who helped to move me, as though I were completely paralyzed, and thus I appeared before the audience holding two luxurious white Russian wolf hounds on a leash. My apparition in a diving suit must have had a very anguishing effect, for a great silence fell over the audience. My assistants managed to get me to my seat behind the microphone. It was only at this moment that I realized that it would be impossible for me to deliver my speech through the glass window of my helmet. Moreover, I had been shut up in this thing for ten minutes and became heated from the exertions I had made in walking across the stage to reach my chair, so that I was dripping with perspiration, and felt faint and on the point of suffocating.

I made the most energetic gestures I could to have the helmet of my diving suit removed. Gala and Edward James, immediately understanding my painful situation, came running to take off my helmet. But it was solidly bolted on, and there was nothing to be done, for the worker who had put it on me had disappeared. They tried to open a slit between the helmet and the suit with a billiard cue so that I would be able to breathe. Finally they brought a hammer and began to strike the bolts energetically to make them turn. At each blow I thought I would faint. The audience for the most part was convinced that all this was part of the show, and was loudly applauding, extremely amused at the pantomime that we were playing so realistically. When I at last got out of the diving suit everyone was impressed by my really deathly pallor, which constituted the accurate gauge of that Dalinian dramatic element which never fails to attend my most trivial acts and undertakings. I believe the Dalinian mythology which was already so crystallized upon my return to New York owed a great deal to the violent eccentricity of this lecture in a diving suit, as well as to the distinction of the exhibit of my paintings which Mr. MacDonald had held in his London Gallery in conjunction with that of two illustrious predecessors, under the title
Cézanne—Corot—Dali
.

But just as everything seemed to be going better and better for me, I suddenly felt myself in the grip of a depression which I was unable to define. I wanted to return to Spain as soon as possible! A kind of insurmountable fatigue weighed on my ever-alert imaginative hysteria. I had had enough of all this! Enough diving suits, lobster-telephones, jewel-clips, soft pianos, archbishops, and blazing pines thrown from windows, enough of publicity and cocktail parties. I wanted to return to Port Lligat as soon as possible. There, now at last, in the solitude which Gala and I had won through our common effort of six years spent in
striking, without impatience but with unwearying persistence, the hammer-blows of our personality on the red-hot anvil of the sooty Vulcan of actuality—at last, I said to Gala, I would be able to begin to do “important” things.

We arrived in Port Lligat toward the end of a very bright December afternoon. Never had I understood so well how beautiful the landscape of Port Lligat was! I wanted desperately to be happy, to enjoy the minutest chink of the life that I was about to begin. But an unknown anguish held me by the solar plexus, and it obliged me continually to utter deep sighs. At night I could not sleep. And when dawn came I would walk along the seashore. The memories of the extravagant and brilliant life I had been leading these last years, in Paris, London and New York, struck me now as remote and without reality, and only my more and more pervasive and inexplicable anguish filled each present moment with its oppressive and corporeal weight.

What is the matter with me? You have what you have been wanting for six years. You are in your Port Lligat, which is the spot you love best in the world. You are with Gala, who is the being you love best in the world. You no longer suffer the degradation of money worries. With the greatest luxury of time you can begin the important works you desired most in the world to undertake. You have never enjoyed such good health as you do now. Plans for theatrical and motion-picture ventures beckon to you, and you are free to choose... Gala would be happy if she did not worry about your unexpected anxiety that screws up your eyes into that cowardly squint, which betrays your fear . . . your fear of what?

I would heave a sigh of rage against my own anguish that thus annihilated all my illusions, and the sea air that filled my lungs seemed to me bitter as gall and tears intermingled. I said to myself that this was idiotic, but in spite of all the reassuring arguments which I resorted to to overcome it, I was sure that in the past hour my anguish had grown all the more. This mere supposition released a flood of anguish which for a moment paralyzed my whole body, plunging it into a horrible sweat. If it continued at this rate I would soon break down and weep . . . I must react against my stupidity. Gala had sometimes advised me to take a shower to calm my nerves. I would plunge into the calm and icy water of the solitary beach wrapped in winter sleep.

I undressed and remained for a long time standing naked. The sun was burning as in summer, but I did not have the courage to go into the water. Then I heard anguish ascend the stairway of flesh of my naked body step by step. It reminded me of the paralyzing tale which had so frightened me when I was a little boy—the tale of the dead Marieta who, on the very night of her burial, returns to her house to frighten her husband.

“Ay, ay!” she cries lugubriously as she climbs the stairway, “I am on the first step!”

“Marieta! Marieta!” cries the husband beseechingly. “Don’t come and get me! Go back to your grave!”

“Ay, ay!” answers Marieta, “Ay, ay, I am on the second step!”

“Marieta! Marieta! . . .”

“Ay, ay! Now I am on the third step!”

“Marieta! ...”

In the end, when Marieta, the dead woman, had reached the last step, my nurse Llucia who was telling me the story would pause to create the most hair-raising suspense, after which she would scream with unexpected violence, clutching my shoulder with her hand, “I’ve got you!”

Far behind me I heard Gala call me to lunch, and I trembled hysterically, instinctively bringing one hand to my heart and the other to my penis. A bland odor rose from my body, seeming to me to be the very odor of my own death. And from that moment I felt the whole weight of my anguish bear down between my legs like the cut-off and dirty hand of my already rotting destiny. As I returned to the house I tried to explain my mood to Gala.

“There is nothing the matter with me. I know that my glory is there, within reach, ripe as an Olympian fig; I have only to clench my hand and my teeth to feel the juice of its materiality flow. There is nothing the matter with me, there is nothing to produce this anguish. And yet I feel myself the slave of a growing anguish—I don’t know where it comes from or where it is going! But it is so powerful that it frightens me! That is exactly what is the matter with me: there is nothing wrong, absolutely nothing that can frighten me, but I am afraid of being afraid, and the fear that I may be afraid frightens me!”

Already from afar we perceived the figure of Lydia “La Ben Plantada,” dressed in black and seated on the threshold of the door to our house, awaiting our return. When we got close, Lydia got up and came to meet us. She was weeping. We went inside, and she confided to us that her life with her two sons had become unbearable. Her sons no longer went fishing; they spoke only of their radium mines; they spent most of the time lying on their pallets. Sometimes they would weep; sometimes, taken with dreadful fits, they would beat her. She showed us a scar on her head, pulling aside two strands of her white hair, and let us see the blue
marks all over her body. A week later her two sons were sent to the mad-house in Gerona. In the afternoons Lydia would come to the house and weep. Port Lligat was solitary. A violent and persistent wind prevented the fishermen from going out to fish, and only the famished cats would skulk around our little house. Ramon de Hermosa was perpetually coughing, and was so completely covered with lice that I forbade him to come near us. Lydia would bring him left-overs every evening. Our maid spoke to herself endlessly in the kitchen. One morning she went up on the roof with her breasts bare and a strange hat made out of newspaper and pieces of string perched on her head. She had gone mad, and we had to get a new maid