My father, on the other hand, was making things more and more difficult, so that living in Cadaqués was becoming impossible. He was trying to shame me. All I wanted was to get away. For a while I took refuge in painting, doing a self-portrait with a chop on my head, which psychoanalytically meant I was telling the old man to eat the chop instead of eating away at me.
In Barcelona I made a scandal, the reports of which must have appalled him. I had been invited by that city’s Ateneo Enciclo pédico Popular to extol the virtues of the Catalan soul, and used the occasion to speak in praise of the Marquis de Sade and denounce the baseness and intellectual inertia of the city’s idol, Angel Guimera, whom I referred to as a “faggot” and “crumbum”. Every chair in the place got smashed, several people were hurt, and the organization’s president was forced to resign. The next day, at a meeting of anarchists enthused by my daring the day before, I made a first public experiment with bread, even though this loaf was only two meters long.
I opened the session by voicing in a level tone, like any smooth lecturer, the worst insults, obscenities, and blasphemies of the Catalan tongue. I was dealing with experts, and, first interested by my words, then whipped into protest, the audience, which included many women, was soon thrilling and rumbling like a wild animal stroked by its tamer.
That was the point at which the bread was placed on my head, held on by straps, as I continued to roar my obscenities. I suddenly felt the whole hall rise as the level of a river does when it meets the ocean. The bread was the catalyst. All the insults solidified and became palpable. The male and female anarchists were turning into hysterical beings, some even falling down in fits of D.T.’s; the shouts and blows became deafening. I slipped away, the bread now under my arm, leaving them in total confusion.
Reading the next day’s papers that filled me with jubilation must have sent my father to his bed, but I was forever cured of my pathological shyness.
In New York, a showing of my Limp Watches had been encouragingly received by the critics. Much was written excitedly about my original vision of the world. I seemed to be the most modern novelty out of the old world. In Paris, there was little left for me to look forward to. I had made my hole. Like Alexander slicing the Gordian knot, I had left an ineradicable mark on Surrealism as I went through it. I had transformed its structures by injecting them with goo, rot, the bizarre, the disturbing, and the impossible. But now everything was turning into Byzantine sniping and scholasticism. My name was a kind of scarecrow. French common sense was somewhat narrow for my dimension. I was hungry and thirsty for a continent-wide area of edible glory and potable success to sate me. Only America was wealthy enough, had enough fresh intelligence and available energy to fulfill my hypertrophic self and put up with my whims.
How Dalí Decided To “Make the Leap”
Truth to tell, Gala and I were quietly drying up for lack of funds. Gala sewed her own frocks and made our meals – when we were not being fed by Paris’ supersnobs – and I worked incessantly: even a deep-mine miner would not have put up with my strenuous schedules and back-breaking work.
I was being robbed, my ideas were being turned to profit by others, and I was getting nothing out of it! To top off my troubles, my dealer Pierre Colle dropped his option on me. It was time to head in a new direction.
The kick in the arse I had given the legless blind man showed me how completely free of taboos I had become. Nothing stood in my way any longer. Gala scraped our savings together and reserved two berths for us on the Champlain to New York. We had three days left in which, with Nietzschean audacity, to scrounge some of the wherewithal for living from my best-heeled friends. But I must have looked like a mad tiger, for many doors were closed with relief after I left, without the people behind them having given me even the price of a taxi fare. The only one who welcomed me at that time, with the sovereign demeanor of a lion, was Picasso, who broke Daddy’s legendary piggy bank open for the benefit of the prodigal son. That was how I was able to leave for America.
I was feverish. I had spent three terrible days wondering where I would find the five hundred dollars we needed to leave. On the way from Paris to Le Havre, I was terrified that the train might be delayed and we might miss the boat, and had even refused to let my picture be taken at the Gare St. Lazare, in front of the locomotive, before we pulled out, for fear the train would start without me. I could not get aboard fast enough and kept nagging at Gala. We were on deck three hours before the first whistle blew.
During the whole crossing, I was still continually worried. My fears turned into terrors. The Champlain was creaking all over, its immensity struck me as making it vulnerable, fragile, and hard to handle in case of a catastrophe, especially since the officers I bumped into in the corridors seemed unconcerned to me, with their caps pulled over on to one ear, making small talk, while our safety depended on their reliability. I absorbed phenomenal quantities of champagne trying to calm myself, and never took off my life belt. Even in bed, I remained surrounded by cork, ready to float away on an ocean of despair, and when emergency drills took place I was always right up front, in rapt attention, cane in hand and ready to beat off women and children so as to be first into the lifeboat.
On deck, the endless expanse of ocean only increased my malaise. I did not dare look out to the horizon. The victory bulletins posted aboard to show the exact distance between us and each of the coasts only led me to somber calculations about how many strokes of the oars it would take to reach land in case of shipwreck. Anxiety and terror were my constant companions. Had it not been for my bread, this ordeal would have been a nightmare, but its yeast happily occupied my mind and gave rise to new ambitions.
We had chosen to cross on the Champlain with Caresse Crosby who was returning to the U.S. and was to act as our mentor. I reminded her that she still owed me a fifteen-meter bread she had promised to bake at Ermenonville. She tried to get the captain to have it made, but there was no oven aboard that could handle it, and I had to settle for one that was two and a half meters long, which at that could only be held together by a wooden backbone. But to me it was a magic wand that restored my joy. Before, I had felt emasculated, impotent, bereft of my umbilical cord. When the chef, with pomp and circumstance, came and presented me with my bread wrapped in cellophane, I was a changed man. I took it in hand, as one does a cock he is about to masturbate, and stroked it with the purest pleasure. It was slim and hard, slightly flexible and cartilaginous like a real prick, with a well-formed crust. I felt the saliva of desire moistening my throat. I took it solemnly in both hands and waved it overhead. I had just gotten back my phallus.
The first thing I did was to put a pair of pants on it, meaning that I wrapped it in newspaper to hide it from eager eyes and in crease their desire. I then laid it out in the middle of my cabin to await the great day: my marriage to America! I would land, a young bridegroom carrying his conjugal tool outstretched and in viting the whole world to attend our union.
I was on the upper deck when New York hove into view. I suddenly saw a dark mass emerge from the haze and understood that our Lilliputian shell had made it and was about to land us on the back of a sleeping monster whose variformed hard-ons we could see. Like body crabs, we would latch on to those hollow pricks looking for a niche.
When the sun broke on the thousands of glinting windowpanes, a shiver seemed to go up along the skyscrapers, as if some libidinous massage were sustaining the erection of the enormous hulks plunging into the vaginal sky.
The Champlain was moving ahead very slowly, borne by the swells, and I had the feeling we were participating in the slow penetra tion of earth and clouds. The siren whistled to proclaim coitus. I felt my cock shrivel between my legs and rushed down to the cabin to get my well-baked, edible bread-prick.
A mob of newspapermen had already taken over there with out invitation, showing that I was already well known. They stood, sat on the couches, the bed, chairs, or the floor, chewing gum, hats on their heads and copy paper i
n hand.
Amazingly, my bread, set up on four chairs, had withstood their onrush and none seemed to be aware of its presence. I grabbed it without further ado and stood it up like a bishop’s crozier or Moses’ staff. Questions popped at me: my age, my father, my mother, the Limp Watches, paranoiac-criticism, why I had ever thought of painting Gala with lambchops on her shoulders... but not one mentioned the bread! It could have been the invisible baguette, a magic wand. I raised it toward the ceiling, took it under my arm, ran through the corridors, went up on deck, passed the customs people, still trailed by the reporters. Not a word!
They wanted to know all about me, and I gave them stories that would make good copy and even better headlines, but not one of them could see what I was displaying in front of their eyes. So, I understood that I had just “cuckolded” them and that these suitors, who wanted to cut me to bits so as to feed me to the swine, had not been able to see through Ulysses’ cunning. My bread was the image of my untouched strength, my virile phallus. Throwing crumbs and confetti into their eyes, I had hidden my Truth from them. To them, I was the King of Non-Sequitur, the clown, as they might say, the tummeler; not one of them had divined the terrific pressure, the Nietzschean will pent up behind the appearances. I set my erectile bread down on American soil as one plants a tree, slowly unwrapped the newspapers covering it and discarded what was by now yesterday’s news. The golden crust shone in the sun. I lifted my bread like a flagstaff, and phallus to the fore I was off to the city...
The hardest part was getting it into a taxi – despite its invisibility, which only grew increasingly greater. I went all about in New York, bread in hand, pushing passers-by out of the way, without anyone mentioning it. I stopped on the sidewalk, leaning on my bread, and window-shopped. Pictures were taken, but since the bread bled out at either side, no one saw what it was.
Yet on the last day there was a miracle. As the aging bread began to crumble, I decided one morning to eat it. Having coffee at the counter of a drugstore on 50th Street, I started to break an end off my bread to go with my fried eggs.
The counter crowd had soon gathered around to watch me. There were a lot of questions, but being by myself and unable to speak English, invisibility now was replaced by incomprehension and the mystery of the bread remained unsolved for Americans on that November day in 1934.
As I was crossing the street, I slipped and lost hold of my bread. A policeman helped me to the sidewalk. When I looked back, my bread had disappeared – become totally invisible – even to me. I knew it had been assimilated, digested by the city, and that its yeast was even now making its way through the bellies of the immense phalluses all around us, already manufacturing the Dalínian sperm of my future success.
Dalí’s First American Success
The very next day, I had a triumph. My dealer, Julien Levy, sold almost half the show in the first three days it was open.
The papers lauded my imagination and Caresse Crosby threw a big party for me. The elite of American society came to the Coq Rouge for the event, which had as its theme “A Surrealist Dream”. The idea was to show what oneiricism could make of the challenge of European Surrealist imagination.
I had dreamed up an “exquisite corpse” costume for Gala. On her head, she had a nude doll whose guts were being eaten away by ants while a phosphorescent lobster’s claws clutched its head. And I greeted visitors standing next to a flayed bull, held up by crutches, its belly full of big-horned phonographs. My mustache, standing out like two aerials, radiated magic fluid. It was a wonder some evening.
The first lady to arrive came in entirely naked, with a bird cage over her head. Her escort was dressed in a nightshirt and had a night-table over his head for an umbrella. When the party was at its height, he opened the door of the chamberpot compartment and let out swarms of hummingbirds. There were eyes everywhere, on a pretty lady’s lower abdomen, on tits, backs, crotches, and foreheads.
Tumors bounced around like globulous bosoms. Huge safety pins hung from the most beautiful hunks of flesh in New York. From time to time, with my switch, I would tap at a filled bathtub that teetered more and more precariously at the head of the stairs, threatening to douse the whole assembly... It was a soirée that would have turned my little Surrealist pals green with envy as they sat around their marble-topped cafe tables in the Place Blanche, masturbating in the name of Lautréamont!
The next morning at ten we were aboard the Normandie heading back to Europe, where I found the jealousy and mediocrity of the Surrealist crises unchanged.
No sooner had I landed, than my old friends filed a ridiculous lawsuit against me. They accused Gala – on the basis of an article in the notoriously pandering Le Petit Parisien – of having created a scandal at our dream ball in New York by wearing as a headpiece the provocative symbol of the dead Lindbergh baby whose kidnap-murder was then the big headline story – and the whole thing was odious. The truth was that they were losing sleep because I was getting ahead. Especially the little group of Communists led astray by Aragon. This sounded to me like the last fatal crisis, and that was just fine with me.
Hitler was beginning to yell very loud. With his Sam Browne belt, his forelock, and the tight little cheeks of his arse, he impressed me as deeply as the American telephone that had inspired my Violeites Impériales (Imperial Violets), Le Moment Sublime (The Sublime Moment), and Cheval Aveugle Mâchant Un Téléphone (Blind Horse Chewing A Telephone). To announce my return, I published La Conquête de l’Irrationnel (Conquest Of The Irrational), in 1935, causing a sensation in artistic circles. But I almost let my dreams destroy me, in the way that you are liable to let a sharp pickpocket who steps on your foot get away with your wallet.
The first blow came from Franco’s uprising in Spanish Morocco, leading to the siege of Madrid and the tragic news of Lorca’s being executed by mistake. The chaos in Spain undid me, and the monsters of civil war found their way on to my canvases. The double being of the “cannibalism of autumn” was eating itself up and sucking my blood. My father was to be persecuted, my sister almost lose her mind, my church steeple would be razed, and countless friends would die! Death, nothingness, and the abjectness of hate were all about me. My paranoiac-critical system was going full blast. In the depths of despair, I continued to paint, turning vertigo into virtue. I produced the Venus de Milo Aux Tiroirs (Venus With Opening Drawers) and the Cabinet Anthropomorphique (Anthropomorphic Cabinet; also known as The City Of Drawers). The richest collector in England, Edward F. W. James, gave me a dazzling commission.
London was the scene for a Cézanne-Corot-Dalí exhibit, at which I showed my Veston Aphrodisiaque (Aphrodisiac Jacket), made of ninety-eight liqueur glasses filled with green crème de menthe, each penetrated by a cock tail straw. The success of all this would be sweet to think back on, were my memory not tainted with a horrible sensation.
I had decided to make a speech at this exhibit, but from in side a deepsea-diver’s suit, to symbolize the subconscious. I was put into the outfit, even including the leaden shoes that nailed me to the spot. I had to be carried up to the stage. Then the helmet was screwed and bolted on. I started my speech behind the glass facepiece in front of a microphone which of course picked up nothing. But my facial expressions fascinated the audience. Soon they saw me open-mouthed, apoplectic, then turning blue, my eyes revulsed. No one had thought of connecting me to an air supply and I was yelling that I was asphyxiating. The specialist who had put the suit on me was nowhere to be found. I gesticulated in such a way as to make friends under stand that the situation was becoming critical. One of them grabbed a pair of scissors and tried in vain to cut a vent in the fabric, another tried to unscrew the helmet – and, when that did not work, started banging at the bolts with a hammer. My head pounded like a ringing bell and my eyes teared with pain. I was being pulled and pushed every which way. Two men were trying to force the mask off, while a third kept striking blows that knocked me out. The stage had turned into a frenzied mêlée from which I emerged
as a disjointed puppet in my copper helmet that resounded like a gong. At this, the crowd went wild with applause before the total success of the Dalínian mimo-drama which in its eyes apparently was a representation of the conscious trying to apprehend the subconscious. I almost died of this triumph. When finally they got the helmet off I was as livid as Jesus coming out of the desert after the forty-day fast.
This horrible sensation of angst was to leave traces that were long in healing and made even worse by the tragedy of the Spanish war. The pestilential odor of death was rising from the charnelhouses of old Europe in which Lorca was one of the first cadavers, the very image of the hero struck down by blind hate. Stupidity had even joined the Surrealists. They wanted to expel me as a Hitlerite provocateur, suspected of having stolen milk from the children of the unemployed because I was more concerned with my thinking-machine that I fed with warm milk.
How Dalí Chose Success Rather Than Stupidity
I turned my back on Europe to escape the hateful birdlime that it exuded like snot. I did not yet know that my back was as trans parent as my infant-nurse’s had been. When I got to New York for the third time, in 1936, glory was waiting. The penicillin of my bread had spread and done its work elegantly. America was prey to acute Dalínitis.
Time magazine greeted me by printing Man Ray’s photograph of me on its cover. Since I had no idea of what the magazine was, I could not appreciate the importance of this fact, and my blasé air about it was not in the least affected. But I was soon to learn the breadth of that publication’s influence: I could not cross a street with out being recognized and my arm was soon sore from autographing every weird bit of paper shoved under my nose.
Glory was as intoxicating to me as a spring morning. I sold all my pictures on opening day of the show and Bonwit Teller commissioned me to do a Surrealist store window. I decapitated a mannequin and replaced the head with a bouquet of red roses, extending the length of the fingernails with ermine hairs. A lobster made into a telephone and my green crème-de-menthe Aphrodisiac Jacket were the other two characters of my grouping, which was a big hit. But these little games, and even the incense of glory, were not satisfying. I stayed up on my balcony watching life go by without being a part of it, ill at ease.
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