The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (65 page)

I had just received some newspaper clippings from New York about a small exhibition that Julien Levy had organized during the summer, with the picture of the soft watches and others which I had lent him. The exhibition had been a success, in spite of the fact that not much had been sold. But the articles which I got translated revealed a comprehension a hundred times more objective and better informed of my intentions, and of the case which I constituted, than most of the commentaries on my work that had appeared in Europe, where my work was judged only in relation to the “vested interests” which the writers of articles had in their platforms. In Paris, in fact, everyone judges things from the esthetic point of view of his own intellectual interests. A certain critic had fought, continues to fight, and would have sacrificed his life for cubism and non-figurative art. When I arrived upon the scene, reactualizing anecdotism in the illusion-creating and ultra-blatant manner that Meissonier had used in his epoch, these worthy defenders of pure plastics received me with the fiery barrage of their neo-Platonic batteries. Nor were those who defended the opposite extreme, pure and absolute automatism,
able to accept my hegemony composed of rigor and systematization. In Europe, in short, I was surrounded solely by partisans.

America was different. Our kind of esthetic civil war had not yet touched that country except in a purely informative way. And often what with us had tragic undertones assumed at most an aspect of entertainment in America. Cubism had never had a real influence, and in America it had been rightly considered as an indispensable experiment which should properly be filed among the official archives of history. Thus, taking no sides, far from the battle, having nothing to gain and nothing to lose or to combat, they could be lucid and see spontaneously what made the most impression upon them among all the things that were happening in Europe. And what was going to make the most impression on them was precisely myself, the most partisan, the most violent, the most imperialistic, the most delirious, the most fanatical of all. Europeans are mistaken in considering America incapable of poetic and intellectual intuition. It is obviously not by tradition that they are able to avoid mistakes, or by a perpetual sharpening of “taste.” No, America does not choose with the atavistic prudence of an experience which she has not had, or with the refined speculation of a decadent brain which it does not possess, or even with the sentimental effusion of its heart which is too young . . .

No, America chooses better and more surely than it would with all these things combined. America chooses with all the unfathomable and elementary force of her unique and intact biology. She knows, as does no one else, what she lacks, what she does not have. And all that America “did not have” on the spiritual plane I was going to bring her, materialized in the integral and delirious mixture of my paranoiac work, in order that she might thus see and touch everything with the hands of liberty. Yes, what America did not have was precisely the horror of my rotten donkeys from Spain, of the spectral aspect of the Christs of El Greco, of the whirling of the fiery sunflowers of Van Gogh, of the airy quality of Chanel’s
décolletés
, of the oddness of fur cups, of the metaphysics of the surrealist manikins of Paris, of the apotheosis of the
symphonic and Wagnerian architecture of Gaudi, of Rome, Toledo and Mediterranean Catholicism...

The idea I was beginning to form of America was corroborated by the impression produced upon me by a personal meeting with Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the director of the Museum of Modern Art of New York. I met him at a dinner at the Vicomte de Noailles’. He was young, pale, and very sickly-looking; he had stiff and rectilinear gestures like those of pecking birds—in reality he was pecking at contemporary values, and one felt that he had the knack of picking just the full grains, never the chaff. His information on the subject of modern art was enormous. By contrast with our European directors of modern museums, most of whom still had not heard of Picasso, Alfred Barr’s erudition verged on the monstrous. Mrs. Barr, who spoke French, prophesied that I would have a dazzling future in America, and encouraged me to go there.

Gala and I had already decided to take a trip to America, but we had no money . . . At about this time we became acquainted with an American lady who had bought Le Moulin du Soleil in the Forest of Ermenonville. It was the surrealist writer René Crevel who introduced us to her, taking us to lunch at her Paris apartment one summer day. At this luncheon everything was white, except the table cloth and the china, so that if one had taken a picture of it it would be the negative that appeared to be the positive. Everything that we ate was white. We drank milk. The curtains were white, the telephone white, the rug white. She was dressed in white, wore white ear-rings, shoes and bracelets. This American lady became interested in my secret society. We decided to begin to build a fifteen-metre oven in the Forest of Ermenonville in order to bake my famous loaf of bread. We would try to get the baker
of Ermenonville to become our accomplice, as she had already observed that he had rather marked tendencies toward the “bizarre.” This so white American lady who would have made such a black negative was Caresse Crosby.

Every week-end we went to the Moulin du Soleil. We ate in the horse-stable, filled with tiger skins and stuffed parrots. There was a sensational library on the second floor, and also an enormous quantity of champagne cooling, with sprigs of mint, in all the corners, and many friends, a mixture of surrealists and society people who came there because they sensed from afar that it was in this Moulin du Soleil that “things were happening.” At this period the phonograph never stopped sighing Cole Porter’s
Night and Day
, and for the first time in my life I thumbed through
The New Yorker
and
Town and Country
. Each image that came from America I would sniff, so to speak, with the voluptuousness with which one welcomes the first whiffs of the inaugural fragrances of a sensational meal of which one is about to partake.

I want to go to America, I want to go to America ...This was assuming the form of a childish caprice. Gala would console me: as soon as we could scrape together enough money we would go! But just at this time everything was going from bad to worse. My contract with Pierre Colle was ended and his financial situation did not enable him to renew it. Money worries thus loomed before us again with an endemic and aggravated aspect. By the fact that collectors likely to buy Dalis already had some, our possibilities of making sales became increasingly few and precarious. Moreover we had spent all our small savings in Port Lligat, and whenever an unexpected sale occurred, Gala took advantage of it to publish my books, which reached only the same small group of society people who bought my pictures. I thus found myself at a moment when I was simultaneously at the height of my reputation and influence and at the low point of my financial resources.

I was not of those who resign themselves to adversity, and my reaction was one of anger. I developed a restrained, barely visible but continual fury. Since Málaga, when I had decided to make money, I had not yet succeeded. We would see! I stormed and fumed. As I paced the streets I would tear the buttons from my overcoat and bite them. I would tap the ground with my feet and it seemed to me as if I were sinking into it.

One evening on my way home from a day of fruitless attempts I met at the foot of the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet a legless blind man sitting in his little cart. Rolling his rubber wheels with his hands, he was pushing himself along with an extremely perky and coquettish air. When he came to the edge of the sidewalk to cross the avenue, he stopped short, took out a small cane from under his cushion and began impertinently to tap the sidewalk, with a boundless self-assurance which struck me as utterly
repugnant. With an intolerable insistence he was calling upon the casual passerby to interrupt his walk in order to extend him a brotherly hand and help him across the avenue to protect him from the traffic.

The street was deserted. There were no other passersby besides myself—only a blonde girl in the distance, who was walking the street, and who seemed to be looking at me. I went up to the blind man and with a thrust of my foot against the back of his cart I gave him a kick that sent him scooting all the way across the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet. His cart struck the opposite sidewalk, and he would have fallen forward from the impact, except for the fact that with his blind man’s williness he had prudently and solidly clutched the arms of his cart with both hands. He remained stiff with outraged dignity and as motionless as the lamp post beside him. Now I in turn crossed the avenue, and looked as I passed at the face of the blind man. He evidently was not deaf, for on hearing my approaching footsteps, which he recognized as mine, his erect attitude became suddenly more humble and in keeping with the modesty which his state of physical degradation dictated. I saw the lemon-colored spider of cowardice cross his absent gaze. I then understood that if I had asked this blind man for money, in spite of the terrible avarice which must undoubtedly be his, he would have relinquished it to me.

It was thus that I discovered how I was going to go about crossing the Atlantic. For I was not legless; for I was not blind, degraded, and pitiful. For I did not tap impertinently with an altruistic cane in order to make that noise of pity which would bring some anonymous person gratuitously to help me across the ocean separating me from America. No, I was not plunged in abjection. On the contrary, I was radiant with glory. No help for me, therefore—just as one does not come to the aid of a tiger even if he is starving. Therefore, if I could not make use of the magic gift of the percussion of the blind man’s cane to get people to help me, I could at least wrench this cane from the blind man’s hands and strike about me. I could also, as I had just done, rid myself pitilessly of the conventional paralysis that cluttered my footsteps.

With the little money that we had left I made reservations on the next steamer to New York, the
Champlain
, which was leaving in three days. We thus had to find the rest of the sum that would enable us to complete the payment of our passage, and a little more besides, at least for the first two weeks of our stay over there. For three days I ran all over Paris, armed with the symbolic cane of the blind man, which in my hands had become the magic wand of my anger. I struck right and left, caring not where the blows fell. I beat and shook that shriveled and knotty trunk of money, which let fall a few scattered coins only at the moment when it felt the avarice of its own soul falter beneath the impetuous rage of my frenzied flagellation. Again, again, again—you will get as many blows, as many shakings, as you need to make you let go; give, give, give, now, give now, give all, give all! The myth of Danae was realized, and after three days of furiously
jerking fortune’s cock it ejaculated in a spasm of gold! After this I felt as exhausted as if I had made love six times in succession.

My fear of missing the boat made me get to the station three hours ahead of time. I kept my eyes riveted on the clock and on our porter who kept going off every moment and who I was afraid would betray us at the last minute. Gala held my hand to calm my nervousness. I said to her, “Only when I am on the boat will I feel calm.” At the moment of boarding the train the news-cameramen wanted me to get down again to pose in front of the locomotive. They had to be satisfied with taking my picture through the window of my compartment. I was actually afraid the train might get away from us while we went to take the pictures, and so I told the reporters, to give them an explanation of my refusal,

“Locomotives are not in scale with me—either I am too big or they are too small.”

My fear of missing the trip to America was not wholly dissipated by our boarding the
Champlain
. As soon as I felt myself on the high seas a great fear of the “ocean space” took hold of me. I had never yet in my life sailed out of sight of land, and the creakings of the ship appeared to me more and more suspect. I felt that the boat was too large and too complex to be able to make the crossing without a catastrophe. I attended all the life-saving drills and I was always on the spot minutes ahead of time, my life-belt attached with all the regulation straps. I made Gala take the same interest as myself in all these annoying precautions, which either disgusted her or made her laugh till the tears rolled down her cheeks. Each time she came into our cabin she found me lying on my bunk reading, with my life-belt strapped on. I expected every moment in fact to hear the decisive whistle of a real alarm. The thought that I might be the victim of a “mechanical” catastrophe made me shudder, and I looked upon the officers of the ship, who were carefree and pleasant, as my executioners.