How Dalí Remembers The Surrealist Soirée
In point of fact, it was Eluard who gave the opening signal Breton having gotten peeved at who-knows-whom over who-remembers-what and forfeited the honor – and then, illuminated by the pocket flashlights carried at arm’s length by Everybody Who Was. Anybody in the Paris of the Day, the show was opened.
The big event of the evening was Hélène Vanel’s spectral appearance dancing dressed as a doll or a witch out of Macbeth. I had personally arranged her entrance and the Surrealist choreography. As Breton understood nothing about music or the dance, it had taken some doing to get him to agree to the scene that the ballerina Hélène Vanel was so masterfully to bring to life with her Dionysiac fervor.
At midnight, she burst from the wings like a whirlwind, in a fantastic movement that carried the whole audience into demential delirium. She stirred them up violently with her abrupt entrance, leaping onto a bed, holding at arm’s length a live rooster that started to cackle with fright. She herself then began howling in a hysterical mimodrama, rolling and disporting herself on the bed. She rose to a climax by throwing herself into the pool we had set up in the middle of the room, surrounded by reeds, and her coming-and going ended with the splashing of water over the motionless, haggard spectators, as with their flashlights they tried to make out the zigzagging peripeteias of the inspired ballerina, who was responsible for the collapse of a good part of the terrified audience, returned to its prudent dull-wittedness. The only virtue this exhibition had in my eyes was its insolence. And on that score I knew it was second to none. Nor was I willing to be limited in my acts and tastes by the fiats of a Breton or by any arbitrary conformism.
When, on my return from the U.S., I was asked by the Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo to lay out the scenario for a ballet, I accepted. The Surrealists, on the other hand, mired in their political pathos, had their minds mainly on writing manifestos and accused me of flightiness, whereas I was thinking only of the essential – the main chance with myself.
I would have liked to put on my Mad Tristan, which I had conceived several years before, but the laws of ballet forced me into one transformation after another, to create a Venusberg that finally turned into a Bacchanale. Leonid Massine did the choreography, Prince Chervachidze the settings, Coco Chanel the costumes – all marvels. We were in the full flush of Dalínian creative delirium when events caught up with us.
The Monte Carlo Ballets were afraid of war and flew the coop to the United States. The Metropolitan Opera put on my Bacchanale and, despite improvised costumes, the ballet was a big hit. The New York applause for a while drowned out the sound of the first jackboots trampling the frontiers. Hitler had just invaded Poland.
How Dalí Reacted To War
History does not concern me. It scares me as much as grasshoppers. Wars to me are the quarrels of nasty children to be avoided by making a detour. My work, my worries, my problems consist of knowing how many drops of oil are required in a color mixture, how long it should be allowed to stand, and what technique Velázquez used for his grounds – not the size and armament of a fighter plane nor the tempo of a machine gun. Military strategy, for all the holy seriousness with which it is surrounded, seems to me of a stripe with the argumentation in smoke-filled back rooms and generals’ leather trousers that forever smell of the blood and sweat of those they send to die in vain. I find it highly symbolical that circumstances at the start of the war found me sleeping in the very bed of the generalissimo of the French Army, Gamelin.
We had been planning a few days of relaxation at Font Romeu, in the Eastern Pyrenees. But when we got there, our suite at the Grand Hotel had been requisitioned by His Generalissimoship who was making an inspection tour. The next day, however, I made love to Gala in that strategist’s bed. I felt like Napoleon and conquered accordingly.
The following day, Gala read the cards for me and told me the exact date on which war would be declared. So I was not surprised when it happened. As the hotel was closing, I stuck my finger on the gastronomical map of France to find the place where I might best expect to keep body and soul together, eating high on the hog, in anticipation of the later perpetually identical days to come. Duck’s liver with raisins, oysters, and wine suggested the Bordeaux area. I chose Arcachon.
It was a happy period. Europe, allegedly civilized, was chop ping itself to bits and burning its ships in the kind of bellicose orgy that periodically in the name of the most threadbare ideals immolated the surplus of its ideas and the noblest of its men and brought the masses back to their congenital stupidity. And I, Dalí, in this atmosphere of bloody rot, set up in my studio, facing the admirable vision of the Arcachon basin, took delight in myself, and was jubilant at the idea that in a world racked by paranoiac madness I was the only critic, master of the situation, inoculated against all propaganda undertakings and petty passions. I walked along the deserted beach dreaming of the end of the world and declaiming Lorca to the waves:
El rio Guadalquivir tiene las barbas granates. Los dos rios de Granada, uno llanto y otro sangre. (The River Guadalquivir with garnet-colored beard appears. The two rivers of Granada, the one of blood, the other teats.)
I felt the blind forces of fury, destruction, and death rising to convulse all of Europe. When, three days later, the war was officially on, Gala, wise as ever, immediately set to organizing our departure, but I wanted to carry on with the wonderful feeling of being the wisest of men in a world gone mad. And I noted, with the same jubilation, that the big difference between madmen and me was that I decidedly was not.
Coco Chanel had come to join us. Her presence always added to my pleasure. When one morning Marcel Duchamp in his turn arrived at Arcachon, it was a real time for celebration. After Coco, who was totally opposite from me, for her manner of dressing people kills all exhibitionism, Marcel Duchamp I felt was the most anti Dalínian of beings, through his refusal to live in the present, his deep hermeticism, his determination to stay in the shadows and contact reality only through humor. Their presence triggered the most phe nomenal psychic provocation and I threw myself headlong into work intended to allow me to get back to my most life-giving sources. With the world going off to war, I was retiring to a cram session.
Had I listened only to Duchamp, I should have burnt my brushes. He had already sent art and anti-art to blazes. He had solved his problems like the chess teacher that he was. The only solutions that interested him were imaginary. His irony was enough for any thing. He felt he had already experienced every pleasure once and for all and repetition would inhibit orgasm. His career from the start had been that of one blasé. He had toyed with Impressionism in painting a Courant d’Air sur le Pommier du Japon (Draft On The Japanese Apple Tree), flirted with Cubism, assimilating it and going beyond in eight months with bewildering skill. His Jeune Homme Triste Dans Un Train (Sad Young Man On A Train) is somewhat himself, saddened by being on top of everything, so fast and so well. He and I were alike in our relations with matter and anti-matter. After exhibiting the Nude Descending A Staircase in Europe in 1912, which made him famous, it is well known that he canceled all his contracts and started giving French lessons in the U.S. to all comers at two dollars an hour – just enough to keep him in bread and beer, so, as he said, that he might “live in freedom.” He had chosen to be nothing when he might very well have been all. A mentality of penniless nobility. We shared pride and genius. That’s nothing to sneeze at. But he belongs to another planet, as does his Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, in which the priest, the soldier, the policeman, the trooper, the errand boy, the deliveryman, the undertaker, the lackey, and the station master dance a ballet of inhuman mechanical love on a scenario conceived from the vantage point of Sirius. His very presence created a gap, the best part of him being his secrecy. He was so detached that sometimes I felt I was talking to his shadow. He had the cold eye of his “ready-mades” and my Catalan passion had little tolerance for his sovereign indifference.
I was passionate
ly involved in the art of painting. I had always been possessed of a drive to draw and paint like the masters of old because that was the only way to translate the visions the brain imagines. The point was to equal the craftsmanship of a Vermeer or a Leonardo da Vinci. A painter in the first instance is someone who fights his laziness by studying anatomy, drawing, perspective, color. Genius comes later – when it can. Honesty means not painting dis honestly.
The climate of decomposition that was all about me led me to crystallize my art with so exclusive a passion that I forgot the rest of the world. Which was one of the aims. The other was to discover the secret of Gala’s face. First, the marvelous hazel color of her eyes, like the waters of the depths of the sea, and then the ecstasy of the trans parency of her cheeks. I tried to capture an equivalency by painting lickety-split in a sort of possessed frenzy. Like an alchemist, I was trying to find the exact chemistry of the combinations of colors, meticulously counting the number of drops of oil and mixing my colors grain by grain as the masters of yore had done. I am often ridden with despair when I realize that I, the greatest painter in the world, have no idea how one goes about painting. Gala helps me and consoles me. Always her love is there, even at the bottom of the cups in which I crush my pigments. I use amber, and others of the wildest bases for fixing my colors, even potatoes; each mistake is a step forward. I spend entire days in painting and move on into sleep totally exhausted, as into death.
Gala’s solicitude never falters. She bought the best Bordeaux wines and made me go along with her to Le Chapon Fin or Le Château Trompette: I left my El Greco and Velázquez studies to go after jugged hare, orange duck, duck liver with raisins, garlic mushrooms. I came back to earth through gastronomical sensuality, leaving my paint brushes in the cloakroom to pick them up again after coffee, for I was not going to let distraction take me away from the essential.
The imbecility of my contemporaries seemed contagious to me and I ruled out reading the papers or listening to any radio. History disgusted me more and more. Yet, one morning, it bumped me as it went by. With a great hubbub of tired motors, trucks camouflaged under branches hiding poor dirty devils with unseeing eyes came by announcing defeat, rout, exodus, and rapine. This was too much. Our luggage was shipped Lisbonward. The Germans closed the Hendaye bridge two days later. Fortunately, Gala had put a border between them and us.
At two in the morning, I knocked at my father’s door. I had crossed ten ruined villages the ghostly walls of which stood out in the moonlight like drawings out of “Goya’s horrors”, and my heart tightened at going through this maze of the miseries of war. My knocks must have hung out like a nightmare gong, for it took a long time before a troubled voice called out, “Who’s there?” Not so long ago such a brutal awakening in the middle of the night would have meant arrest and death. In the aching memories, my intrusion awoke a fear. “Me, Salvador, your son.”
However firm my voice, my figure still seemed to be out of Dante. And my kin, motionless, eyes big and staring, stayed grouped together in the dark, confronted with the intruder in the night, fanged mustache and all, appearing like a ghost. They were all looking for a footing in the shifting ground of what attitude to take. Our love over came it.
They welcomed me with kisses and hugs. Quickly, a table was set, on which my sister and aunts laid out anchovies, tomatoes, and oil. My father sat opposite me, still formidably large. Drinking me in. We exchanged few words. The anxiety of the war had gripped me.
I crossed the house to get to my room. I was shown where the balcony was missing, knocked off by a bomb. Under the dining room table they had shown me the spot on the floor blackened by the fire over which anarchists had prepared their meals. There was a chink in the wall. But in my room nothing had changed. The spot on the drapery was still the same and my ivory rabbit sat on the dresser. A key was getting rusty. At the bottom of a drawer, I found my old buttons. The window – from which on a certain morning I had glimpsed a sublime vision of woman – opened on to the night.
There was I, Dalí, as living as if time had never existed. All the things around me, as real and indestructible as my soul, were in their places. All the executions had been for nothing. The tortures for nothing. My sister had almost lost her mind, but she too had come back to sanity. And nothing, not even death, could change this reality forever engraved in me with the strength of tradition. My father was asleep on the other side of the partition, or perhaps he lay awake, thinking of the prodigal son who came home as if nothing had ever separated them. The fury of men had come breaking through like angry waves against the stone piers of time, leaving a few useless, nauseating deposits.
The next day, I went to my devastated house at Port Lligat. The shutters hung askew, the doors were off their hinges. Nothing remained of the furniture or dishes.
Everywhere, on the walls, graffiti which in their challenge-game recorded each passage of rival armed troops, shouting their arrogant certainty of victory. I could follow the progression of the war as on a general-staff map. Anarchists pushed out by Communists, return of the Trotskyists, the Separatists, the Republicans, and finally the Francoites with their “Arriba España!” covering a whole panel. I kicked the debris out of the way and went out.
Lidia, the well set, was waiting for me in front of the house that for so long had been hers. She laughed with her toothless mouth as she saw me. I kissed her, and she told me of her war. With her noble madness, she had always bet with the surest instinct. Each evening, at the worst moments of wartime fury, she sat on the beach at Cadaqués and built a big fire that she methodically kept going. When the tired, chilled, and hungry soldiers emerged from the night and the cold, they came over and opened their packs; Lidia was their canteen-keeper. When they had nothing left to devour, they went out foraging, and Lidia became their fence. The next day, they got killed or driven off by the others. Lidia rebuilt her fire and resumed her role as provider. They all went through that way, the fanatics eaten up with their hatred, the argumentative revolutionaries, the cruel military men, the harmless dreamers. At Lidia’s fireside, ideas, passions, disciplines melted away. They all held their hands out to get warm and paid tribute so as to eat. That is how revolutions work out.
As Lidia said, “There is always a time when they have to eat.” I like the idea that kitchen fires win out over the fires of war.
On the way back, I went through Madrid to bring news of Lidia to her master, Eugenio d’Ors, who had immortalized her in La Bien Plantada. We embraced as if we were never to see each other again. He introduced me to his companions, the philosopher Eugenio Montès, the poets Marquina and Dionisio Ridruejo. I spent a week at the heart of this Platonic banquet, answering the questions of my friends, curious and avid to find some bearings. All of them had been marked by the civil war but they were more than ever determined to live by the power of the spirit.
To hold on to oneself! Not to give in to the attractions, the tumults of artificial interests in the idea of collective murder that was dominating Europe and which my country had just lived through – there could be no other goal for an artist. Gala was waiting for me in Lisbon with a veritable turnout of the International Who’s Who. In Praça del Rossio, famous for its Inquisitional stakes, the dog-days sun was burning down on the most famous creative movers of the flight drama, the last act of which ended in a visa: Schiaparelli, René Clair, the Duke of Windsor, Paderewski were mopping their brows as they dreamt of good old American refrigerators. Meantime, they had to make do with overcrowded hotels, stopped-up toilet bowls, and the dankness of police offices in which blind and unfeeling public servants parsimoniously meted out rubber stamps that spelled heaven or hell. The streets were full of friends with so much anxiety in their eyes that one wondered whether it were better to recognize them or let them forget you. Dalí did not wait to find out, and the Excemption carried me off toward freedom. I was never so happy for my egotism that kept me from looking back and avoided my being turned into a statue of the salt of pity and compassio
n. Unhappy the poor of mind who let themselves be tied up by noble feelings!
I was abandoning the old cracked face of a senile, lazy Europe, purulent with its contradictions, gnawed by skepticism, drunk with materialism. Leaning on the rail of the Excemption, I watched as the outline of a continent that was soon to be nothing but a symbolic line melted away into the hot haze – and, like a powerful nostalgia, the memory of my youth surged up in my heart. I dis covered a thousand reasons for loving the continent that had given me so much.
But it was probably necessary for fate to have its way, for the great blood purge to drain the abscesses, for suffering and tears to enlighten intelligences. I would come back, I told myself, when Europe had again found faith in man. It was a blue dream, such as all exiles have. Fortunately, I had Gala at my side, with her eyes and her skin and her strength. All the rest, after all, meant less than one of her smiles.
How Dalí Lived Five Years In The United States
At Hampton Manor, Caresse Crosby was awaiting us with all the hospitality of a wealthy American woman, and with her we found a bit of the charm of the Ile-de-France and her Mill of the Sun. We had barely gotten there, when I put two big canvases on my easel and started to paint Araignée du Soir, Espoir (Spider Of Evening – Hope) and La Resurrection de la Chair (Resurrection Of The Flesh), that I was at for five years before finishing. On the first of these, the mouth of a cannon, supported by a crutch, vomited a spirited horse and a tongue turned into a breast-foot-victory. Mean while, a runny woman’s body is playing a living violoncello in front of an angel hiding his face. The Resurrection of the Flesh is a kind of Doomsday in which gold, power, thought, love, and death are all brought up for judgment before life.
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