When I got to Paris, Buñuel had already chosen our leading man, Pierre Batcheff, a being who might have come out of the eye slit at the start of the film, in unstable equilibrium on the borderline between the conscious and the unconscious, who kept himself drugged with ether in order to remain present in the world, and swung between life and death until at last committing suicide on the final day of the shooting schedule, like a holocaust offered to Moloch for my greater glory.
The poet Eugenio Montès, who ten years later was to be one of the key men of the Spanish Falange, wrote after seeing the film that Un Chien Andalou refuted everything that was ... known as good taste, pretty, agreeable, epidermic, French ... Spain is a planet on which the roses are rotted asses ... Spain is the Escorial ... In Spain, the Christs on their crosses really bleed... This is a date marked in blood, as Nietzsche would have wanted it, as Spain has always done it!
These lines, which tied me in with the great tradition of Catalan creators, were a happy echo to my own ambition. A snobbery was born about my name. I had just given myself a certificate of Parisianism and made an entrance as shattering as would be my exit from the Surrealist group several years later. My Parisian début was a masterstroke.
As if to add to my aura, Federico García Lorca publishes in La Revista de Occidente the Ode To Salvador Dalí that stands as Spain’s salute at the dawn of my new career:
Forever vivid finger marks of blood on gold
Crossing the heart of eternal Catalonia.
May stars like falconless fists light your way
As your painting and life come to flower.
Eschew the waterclock with its membraned wings
And the inflexible scythe of allegories.
But color your brush and paint ever out in the open
Facing a sea alive with sailors and boats.
The U.S. with its International Painting Exhibition at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute at the same time discovers my Corbeille de Pain (Basket Of Bread), La Jeune Fille Assise (Seated Young Girl), and Ana Maria, three canvases that make a deep impression through their modern classicism.
All this, of course, is now getting about, both in Barcelona – where my friends on the magazine, L’Amic de les Arts, whom I had turned into fanatical boosters, are lauding my name to the skies – and in Paris where the fluid Surrealist group is making use of my personality to revive the movement, although the first article to appear about me in Paris, signed by Charles-Henry Ford, had prophetically brought into view my anti-Surrealist ideas. But no one here knows as yet who I am nor what I want.
What Dalí Dreamt Of Apart From Glory
First, women, for my erotic reveries. I had still never had intercourse, but my thirst for Eros was all the greater for that.
Landing at the Gare d’Austerlitz, the first thing I did was to jump into a taxi and instruct the driver to take me to Paris’ best whorehouses. I made the grand tour of Parisian bawdry, starting, of course, with Le Chabanais, the One Two Two, Le Panier Fleuri, with their ceilings, baroque furnishings, Chinese room, mirrored walls, and lubricious apparatuses, such as the King of England’s adjustable armchair, designed to allow him to satisfy his lusts despite his regally huge pot-belly. I was passionately gripped by the atmosphere and gorged on that erotic climate like a sponge storing up a stock of images for my private dreams. I did not touch the women, who were very vulgar, too fat, and devoid of any of the charms I anticipate from an erotic surprise.
It was in the streets, in buses, on sidewalks that I looked for women, but so timidly that it seemed I would never make the grade. My imagination went wild with the vision of all those bodies offered like so much prey yet inaccessible to my hands, my cock, or my mouth, that only glory would bring tumbling into my bed. I panted with desire. I sat down on a café terrace, paying for my drinks in advance so that I might get up and leave at the slightest encouragement. I tried auto-suggestion by telling myself every woman who went by was all primed to be willing, and that all I had to do was state my desires for her to accede to my whims.
I looked first at their legs, the calves, the feet, then mentally sketched the thighs that I tried to picture, which led me to visualize the vulva with its labia and the forest of pubic hairs implanted about it. When they walked slowly, I had time to recompose their fragrance, but more often they hurried by and I had to imagine the shape of their buttocks and backs. But if the face and the elegance of movements did not please my eye, I went on to the next and again began my lascivious undressing.
How many cunts, thighs, bellies, arses had I digested in that manner? Sometimes I went so far as to wink boldly and was rewarded with a dark angry look. I would have wanted to slice one of those beautiful girls with a sadistic, barbaric razorstroke to expunge the affront from my memory. I kept wondering what I might do with that harem that kept passing me like so much bait. I dreamed of shoving my upright cock into those pretty mouths and exploding inside them with volcanic voluptuousness, or else I visualized myself forcing the café waiter to sodomize them before my eyes while they greedily swallowed my genius-laden sperm. They were naked on all fours, panting with desire, offering their arses, awaiting my caresses, eyes riveted on my cock, and I passed among them like an animal-tamer among his wild beasts, awarding my favors only parsimoniously and almost cruelly. With a sharp fingernail, I made a red mark across a firm white buttock. I scratched a breast with my claws. Here I tore out a handful of pubic hair, bringing blood. I sat down on a back and nonchalantly crossed my legs, as I tapped the taut arse with my switch. It was a great erotic moment and my cock swelled wondrously.
The whorehouse décors were also very useful to me. I rolled around on beds as huge as Arab tents and covered with animal skins, surrounded by naked women, their nipples at the alert, their pussies shaven, their bellies flat, slaves to my desires and bending to my slightest wink, doing the tiniest of my biddings. We made fantastic human tableaux, making love in groups of four, five, or six, and acrobatic, delirious positions that I dreamed up, reflected on all sides in wall mirrors like a veritable fireworks of lust.
I would have liked to be able to get up, stand on the cafe table, and ejaculate publicly amid the bravos and huzzahs. But when I rose from my seat suddenly to follow a pair of buttocks that wiggled ahead of me, it was only to discover that the woman had not even noticed me. I followed her stealthily along the sidewalk, not daring to talk to her, and soon getting to hate her for the advances I dared not make. I wanted to whip her, slash her with a razor, beat her, throw her down and vent my useless passion upon her. Sometimes I caught up with her on a bus and got to sit down next to her.
Then, timidly, I would rub knees with her. I never got one to respond. I had been told that, during rush hour, some men succeeded in getting their cocks out, showing them to the object of their desire, and getting them to fondle them! With me, at the first rub, she almost always got up, leaving me with my soft useless tool, and a short time later there I was again back on the sidewalk, swallowed up by the crowd, pushed around by hostile arses, tough thighs, rough hands, and pitiless faces. I even tried to work it on the ugliest of women!
I was young, well dressed, attractive, and a genius. None of them could see it. I hated them for their indifference, stupidity, vanity, and the shame they caused me. I would have liked artfully to torture them with molten lead that I would have strewn on their bodies drop by seething drop, cutting away the tips of their tits, ravaging their cunts and their beautiful provocative arses. But I rushed back to my hotel room on Rue Vivienne and, watching myself in the wardrobe mirror, grabbed my cock in both my hands, making it tumescent, and slowly caressed it up to its orgasmic revulsion. My sperm flooded all over the mirror while tears flowed from my eyes, making a screen composed of orgiastic visions of all those females who had rejected me. I fell to my knees, praying God to burn them all in hell.
How Dalí Dominated His Despair
This despair was one of the stations of the cross in my passion. I would have to pay for my
victory, and I knew it.
But even the hardships reinforced my conviction. I bathed in hatred, resentment, and my caprices became ever more ferocious. My belief in my sovereign intelligence never wavered. I knew I had only to find the chink in other people’s armor. I knew I had but to wait and will in order to win and that my contagious delirium would be recognized by all as proof of my genius. My paranoiac-critical method had proved itself. The true conquest of glory would have been to have women at my feet, tendering their arses. Meantime, I still had Paris to discover.
Miró, with whom I had renewed relations, invited me to dinner several times, but I had no dinner jacket and I believe I disappointed him greatly by not being properly outfitted for conquest. I had to get such clothing, made to order. That was how I came to meet the Duchess of Dato, Countess Cuevas de Vera, and the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles who acted as my sponsors in high society. I very quickly appreciated the cultural refinement of these aristocrats whose race and mummification brought them so close to my own concepts. Like me, they turned their backs on the reality that the bourgeoisie and its intellectual running-dogs were trying to impose in opposition to tradition.
I avidly appreciated the secrecy of their manners, which enchanted me. The art of conversation, which consists of talking without saying anything and captivating one’s audience, with your mouth full, while the others digest your witticisms. The dignity of the winesteward lisping the detail of a vintage into your ear as if it were a state secret. The attractiveness of their walls on which you got hung among the greatest of the great as if you were a member of the family. Had I not been shy, I would have liked to restore to these aristocrats the conviction they seemed to lack of their own historical value, their great future in a decomposing world; they were the last remaining true strength. But I was as yet unknown as philosopher and prophet. I was a painter and they were beginning to buy my works. Each thing in its own good time. The Noailleses had notably acquired my Le Jeu Lugubre (The Lugubrious Game), which I consider one of my finest paintings, and hung it between a Watteau and a Cranach.
I ate, I drank, I watched lights and shadows outline the most beautiful bosoms in Paris. I took an evil pleasure in staring ardently at one of the pretty ladies present while mentally undressing her and leaving only her pearl necklace and other jewels – which, as we know, are excrements in psychoanalytical parlance – and then listened, making the most of the moment, as her pretty rouged lips pronounced social small talk while I meaningfully stroked her lower abdomen with an imaginary ardent hand.
At these soirées there were always one or two social climbers who tried to remake the world in their own image and spat venom as a skunk does his stink. I picked them out early and forthwith discouraged them from spewing their acid on me by urgently requesting that they talk about me and my genius.
I made them so certain of my success as well as my madness that they no longer knew what to think, lest they make themselves ridiculous. They became my courtiers rather than feel crushed, preferring to laud what they could not bring down to their own level. I have always created a humus for my success with the corpses of those who least favored my genius. I attract crackpots and backbiters, whom I turn into steppingstones or footmats for my success. In those periods I met many rattlers whom I reduced to common gardensnakes so I might tan their hides for my wallet.
I turned each obstacle obstinately into an opportunity to go forward. The 1928 Salon d’Automne had turned down my Big Thumb, Beach, Moon, And Decaying Bird – now in the A. Reynolds Morse Collection), the jury, it seemed, being shocked by some of its erotic allusions. So I published the Groc Manifesto, as insulting as a slap to them, and painted Les Premiers Jours du Printemps (First Days Of Spring), a canvas that truly is a veritable erotic delirium. Ever forward, ever stronger. Ever more Dalínian.
Did they think me surrounded, shocked, refuted? Well, my genius being above all handicaps, I reappeared like a mole in the middle of the garden, right at the center of the clump they were trying to protect.
Pavel Tchelitchev took me into the Métro for the first time. I was terrified by the noise and the mob, suffocated by the horrible claustrophobic feeling, the sense of being lost. And the more panicky I became, the more delighted Tchelitchev, magnifying my shame and malaise. He despicably abandoned me at the next station. I rushed for the exit like a drowning man who, in his determination to reach the air he needs, shoves everything out of his path. Reaching the surface, I stood haggard for a long time, coming back to myself. I felt I had been spewed out of some monstrous anus after having been tumultuously tossed about within an intestine. I had no idea where I was; as if spat out on alien soil, a small useless excrement. I slowly regained possession of my senses. And, O miracle! my lucidity, my pride, my strength returned instantly to me with increased power. I understood I had just been through a great initiation. The shock was a beneficent revelation. At every opportunity, one had to use the underground routes of action and mind, cover one’s traces, appear unexpectedly, conquer oneself incessantly, and never hesitate to bugger one’s own soul so it might be reborn purer, stronger than ever. So did I go from discovery to discovery, of my self and of the others, in this protean city.
The others were the Surrealist poet Robert Desnos, whom I met when I had just finished First Days of Spring. He was sitting at the bar of La Coupole. This was the holy place of Montparnasse Bohemia. Through a revolving door, you came in from the boulevard to a narrow long rectangle of a room cut in two by the bar at which bartender Bob officiated. On the other side of the swinging doors there was a huge restaurant room used mainly by the “café-crèmers”, permanently idle intellectuals who gazed into the bottoms of their cups as if their fortunes were written there. In the cellar, three hundred people danced the tango from afternoon-tea time to four in the morning in an overheated dancing. Desnos was one of the crowd of habitués I used eagerly to peer at, though trying to assume a blasé nonchalance: Derain, Kisling, Brancusi, Ehrenburg, Zadkine; writers, models, all kinds of pretty girls on the hoof, ranging from streetwalkers to petites bourgeoises out for a lark, and girls from the provinces gone astray. Nothing for me. Not at Le Sélect, the rendezvous of homos (although Prévert had a regular table there), nor Le Dôme, the quarter’s gathering-spot for addicts.
Desnos absolutely insisted on seeing my painting, and made me take him to my place. He waxed lyrically enthusiastic. “This is absolute jamais-vu,” he passionately proclaimed. If he had had money, he would have bought it from me, but his compliments were small change as beneficial as the morning dew.
The others were Paul Eluard, whom I came across at the Bal Tabarin. I was with Camille Goëmans, who had offered me a contract and, while awaiting my reply, was treating me to the sights of Paris-by-Night. My dealer-to-be whispered a few details to me about the tall, blond, slim, and handsome man. “He’s a friend of Picasso’s. Knows all the talented painters. He’s a well-informed collector and dealer. Also well off. He carries weight with the Surrealists. In 1917 he married a woman with a gorgeous body, and carries a picture of her in his wallet. He shows it to those of his friends who know how to softsoap him. She’s in Switzerland right now. Name of Gala.”
Goëmans invited us all to have champagne together. Eluard impressed me greatly by his air of distinction. I learned that he was one of the great poets of Surrealism. His voice and hands trembled a little, giving him a touch of pathos. His sensuous eyes lit up every time they followed a feminine figure, even though he had with him an exquisite creature in a sequined black gown. He said yes when I invited him to come and visit the next summer at Cadaqués.
Slowly, the pawns of fate were falling onto the proper squares of my chessboard.
The others were also André Breton who already seemed a pontiff, even when his conclave met in a café on the Place Blanche, with the apéritif as Eucharist. A newcomer was required to show assiduity, this serving as his initiation. No way of getting away from listening to Breton orating to his court of followers l
ike a big turkeycock. The main reason for these gatherings was to let him keep control over his troops; to maintain his authority by killing in the egg the slightest tendency to dis sent and making sarcastic remarks about those who were not present, and therefore automatically at fault – among the Surrealists even more than elsewhere! The bittersweet apéritifs were supposed to keep up the morale of the Surrealists while Breton read the newspaper aloud to them or pilloried some poor nameless nonentities who had had the misfortune of displeasing him, by some kind of articles, tomelets, or even just in gossip. All extracurricular liaisons were sharply condemned: it was sort of like a Tribunal of the Inquisition set up in the village’s main café.
I was bored to death, although occasionally amused by the flareups between Breton and Aragon in which one could already sense a tension that went beyond mere irony. I had quickly come full circle around these verbose revolutionaries, and for a time wondered whether I ought not to take the leadership of them, for on the rare occasions when I spoke up my ascendancy was accepted without question. I could see Breton’s blue eye looking fixedly at me and forming a question mark above my head. He mistrusted me. He need not have! I had found the stakes to be second-rate and left him the presidency of the stockless company.
I was Surrealism.
I decided to go back to Cadaqués to work and wait for the maturation of the seeds I had sown in a Paris that no longer held any fright for me. So I went back to painting, and let the rest of the world go by. A few days later, a wire from Camille Goëmans made him definitely my dealer, through the remittance of three thousand francs that gave him ownership of three of my paintings and a right of first refusal. My father rubbed his hands with a satisfaction not devoid of worry, for someone had told him it was sometimes my habit to dissolve a bank note in a glass of high-quality whiskey.
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