The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (74 page)

Paul Eluard had formulated the heraldic device, “To Live by Errors and Perfumes.” After my “error” with the false actress, and the error with my false mucus, I experienced the imponderable perfume of clairvoyance It was as though by a curious law of psychic compensation the more I was mistaken in the world of immediate things that surrounded my daily and practical life, the more I “saw” at a distance and even into the future.

We had just rented a villa surrounded by cypresses, near Florence, where I had recovered a relative calm. Mademoiselle Chanel, who was my best friend, was at this time travelling in Sicily. One evening I had the sudden and gratuitous idea that Chanel had been stricken with fever. I immediately wrote her saying, “I have a terrible fear that you are suffering from typhus.” The following day I received a telegram from Missia Sert informing me that Chanel was seriously ill in Venice. I rushed to see her! It was indeed a paratyphoid V, with high steady fevers which stubbornly resisted treatment. In these circumstances the memory of Diaghilev’s death in Venice terrified us all.

On her night-table was a large painted shell which had been given her in Capri as a present. I had always associated the island of Capri with a “great fever.” Often I had said, “In Capri the landscape always suffers from ‘horse fever.’ Capri should be cured of its grottoes.” I ordered the Capri shell to be immediately removed from the room, and then made the experiment of taking Chanel’s temperature. It had gone down to almost normal. Since then I have always been obsessed by this question: was there a Capri shell on the night-table when Diaghilev died?

I believe in magic, and am convinced that all new efforts at cosmogony and even metaphysics should be based on magic, and should recapture the state of mind that had guided brains like those of Paracelsus and Raymond Lully. The critical-paranoiac interpretation of the images that involuntarily strike my perception, of the fortuitous events that occur in the course of my days, of the so frequent and so violent phenomena of “objective hazard” that cast enigmatic rays of light over the most insignificant of my acts—the interpretation of all this, I repeat, is nothing other than the interpretative reading, which is capable of giving an objective coherence to the signs, omens, avatars, divinations, presentiments and superstitions which are the very sustenance of all “personal magic.”

But if I myself am able during short periods to read quite clearly the exact outcome of certain nearby events, Gala on the other hand is a true medium in the scientific sense of the word. Gala is never, never, never wrong. She reads cards with a paralyzing sureness. She predicted to my father the exact course of my life up to the present moment. She foretold the illness and suicide of René Crevel, and the very day of the declaration of war on Germany.

She believes in my wood—a piece of wood that I found at the beginning of our acquaintance among the rocks of Cape Creus, under extraordinary circumstances. Since then we have never been without this “pure Dalinian fetish,” though we have lost it on several occasions. Once we lost it in Covent Garden in London, and found in again the next day. Another time it had been taken out with the bed sheets. It was necessary to go minutely over the whole laundry of the Hotel St. Moritz, yet we finally found it. This piece of wood has assumed in my mind the form of a compulsive maniacal neurosis. When I get the idea that I ought to go and touch it, I cannot resist doing it. At this very moment I am forced to get up to go and touch it . . .

There! I have just touched it, and with this my anxiety, which otherwise would only have grown agonizingly, has been calmed. Before the compulsive maniacal psychosis that now is exercised exclusively in connection with my piece of wood, I was full of manias, tics, and neurotic rituals that were extremely cumbersome. My ritual for going to bed, for instance, was very long and minute. Everything in my room had to be placed in a certain pre-determined way—the door opened at just a certain angle, my socks symmetrically arranged on a certain exact part of the armchair, always the same. The slightest infraction of these rituals would make it necessary for me to get up out of bed to rectify it, even if this was extremely disagreeable to me, and if I had to get up several times. Since I found my piece of wood in 1931 I have been freed of all my manias and rituals. I have been able to do everything as I have wished, provided only that each time I think of it my wood-fetish
¹
is there with me. In any case my piece of wood is there, there, and there! It is my prayer . . .

The September equinox was going to bring us the Munich crisis. In spite of the fact that Gala’s cards had predicted that war would not “yet” come this time, we prudently left Italy and spent the Munich crisis in La Posa, on the hills of Monte Carlo, with Mademoiselle Chanel, constantly glued to the radio. This “equinox” was to last four months, during which I remained at Chanel’s in the company of the great French poet, Pierre Reverdy, whose terribly elemental and biological Catholicism made a deep impression on me. Reverdy is the integral poet of the generation of cubists. He is the soul possessing the most violent and finest set of teeth I have ever known, and has that gift, which is so rare, of spiritual anger and rage. He was “massive,” anti-intellectual, and the opposite of myself in everything, and provided me a magnificent occasion to strengthen my ideas. We fought dialetically like two Catholic cocks, and we called this “examining the question.”

During this period I was preparing my forthcoming exhibit in New York, writing the general plan of my “secret life” and painting
The Enigma of Hitler
, a very difficult painting to interpret, whose meaning still eludes me. It constituted a condensed reportage of a series of dreams obviously occasioned by the events of Munich. This picture appeared to me to be charged with a prophetic value, as announcing the medieval period which was going to spread its shadow over Europe. Chamberlain’s umbrella appeared in this painting in a sinister aspect, identified with the bat, and affected me as extremely anguishing at the very time I was painting it . . .

On my arrival in New York I was astonished by the window displays on Fifth Avenue, which all were trying more or less to ape Dali. I
immediately received another proposal from Bonwit-Teller’s shop asking me to dress two of their windows. I accepted, for I thought it would be interesting to make a public demonstration of the difference between the true and the false Dali manner. I laid down only one condition: that I be allowed to do exactly what came into my head. This condition was accepted, and I was put in touch with the man who was in charge of their window displays, a Mr. Lee, who was at all times extremely obliging.

I detested modern manikins, those horrible creatures, so hard, so inedible, with their idiotically turned-up noses. This time I wanted flesh, artificial flesh, as anachronistic as possible. We went and unearthed in the attic of an old shop some frightful wax manikins of the 1900 period with long natural dead women’s hair. These manikins were marvelously covered with several years’ dust and cobwebs. I said to Lee, “Be sure not to let anyone touch that dust, it’s their chief beauty. I’m going to serve these manikins to the Fifth Avenue public as one serves an old bottle of Armagnac that has just been brought up from the cellar with infinite precautions.” With great care we succeeded in transporting them almost in the state in which we had found them. I knew that their state was going to make a startling contrast with the frame of padded satin and mirrors that I had thought up.

The theme of the display was intentionally banal. One of the displays symbolized Day, and the other, Night. In the “Day” display one of these manikins was stepping into a “hairy bathtub” lined with astrakhan. It was filled with water up to the edge, and a pair of beautiful wax arms holding up a mirror evoked the Narcissus myth; natural narcissi grew directly out of the floor of the bedroom and out of the furniture. “Night” was symbolized by a bed whose canopy was composed of the black and sleepy head of a buffalo carrying a bloody pidgeon in its mouth; the feet of the bed were made of the four feet of the buffalo. The bedsheets of black satin were visibly burnt, and through the holes could be seen artificial live coals. The pillow on which the manikin rested her dreamy head was composed entirely of live coals. Beside the bed was seated the phantom of sleep, conceived in the metaphysical style of Chirico. It was bedecked in all the sparkling jewels of desire of which the sleeping wax woman was dreaming. This manifesto of elementary surrealist poetry right out in the street would inevitably arrest the anguished attention of passers-by with stupor when the morrow, amid so much surrealist decorativism, lifted the curtain on an authentic Dalinian vision.

On leaving the Metropolitan Opera, where we had attended a performance of
Lohengrin
, Gala and I went to Bonwit-Teller’s, where my two displays were being set up. I thought up on the spot a whole series of new lyric inventions, and we stayed to put the finishing touches to the two displays till six o’clock in the morning. Gala had completely torn her dress in the ardor of nailing and hanging false jewels everywhere. Dead tired, we went to bed.

The following day we had a large luncheon affair to attend, and it was only around five o’clock that we decided to go and see the effect of my displays. Imagine my anger when we discovered that everything, absolutely everything, had been changed, without my even having been accorded the courtesy of being informed of it! The wax manikins had been replaced by the shop’s conventional manikins; the bed and its sleeping occupant had been removed! Of my idea there remained only the satin-padded walls—in other words, what I had put in as a joke! Gala understood by my pallor and by the sobriety of my reaction that I had suddenly become dangerous.

“Go and talk to them,” she begged me, “but be reasonable; let them remove all that rubbish, and let’s forget about it!”

She went back to the hotel, for she felt that any kind of advice at this moment would only exasperate me. I went up to the management of Bonwit-Teller’s where, after having been made to wait in a corridor a good fifteen minutes, I was received by a gentleman who expressed his happiness at knowing such a great artist as myself. I then told him, through an interpreter, and with the greatest politeness, that I had just observed on passing by in the street that my work had been changed without my being advised, that I therefore wished my name to be removed from the display and this display completely changed, for the adulteration of my work could only harm my reputation. The gentleman answered that they had the right to keep “what they had liked” of my ideas, and that it would be awkward for the store to lower the shades in broad daylight to make the changes that I requested. These changes actually would not have required more than ten minutes, and I was about to give a practical demonstration of the fact that the whole thing could be done in one second. The rude manner in which my reasonable and legitimate request was answered instantly led me to deliver an ultimatum, and I announced to the gentleman that I
demanded
the removal of my name and of the parts of my display that still remained in the windows. “If this is not done within ten minutes,” I said, “I shall take drastic action.”