My summers were wholly taken up with my body, myself and the landscape, and it was the landscape that I liked best. I, who know you so well, Salvador, know that you could not love that landscape of Cadaques so much if in reality it was not the most beautiful landscape in the world—for it is the most beautiful landscape in the world, isn’t it?
I can already see the sceptical though kindly smile of most of my readers. Nothing can put me into such a rage as that smile! The reader thinks: the world is so big, there are so many beautiful and varied landscapes everywhere, on every continent, in every latitude. Why does Dali try to convince us by a mere gratuitous statement that he cannot prove (except on the subjective ground of his own taste)? For this would require an experiment, which is humanly impossible, especially for Dali who, not having travelled very extensively, is and will continue to be ignorant of considerable areas of the terrestrial globe, and cannot judge and deliver an opinion of such unqualified finality.
I am sorry for anyone who reasons in this way, giving flagrant proof of his esthetic and philosophic shortsightedness. Take a potato in your hands, examine it carefully. It may have a spot that has rotted, and if you bring your nose close to it it has a different smell. Imagine for a moment that this spot of decomposition is the landscape—then on this potato that I have just respectfully offered you to hold between your fingers there would be one landscape, a single one and not thirty-six. Now on the other hand imagine that there are no moldy spots at all on the potato in question—then, if we continue to assume that the above-mentioned spot is the equivalent of the landscape, there will result the fact that the potato now has no landscape at all. This may very well happen! And this has happened to planets like the moon, where I assure you there is not a single landscape worth seeing—and I can affirm this, even though I have never been there, and even though the moon is not exactly a potato.
Just as on a human head, which is more or less round, there is only one nose, and not hundreds of noses growing in all directions and on all its surfaces, so on the terrestrial globe that phenomenal thing which a few of the most cultivated and discriminating minds in this world have agreed to call a “landscape,” knowing exactly what they mean by this word, is so rare that innumerable miraculous and imponderable circumstances—a combination of geological mold and of the mold of civilization—must conspire to produce it. That thing, then—and I repeat it once again—that thing which is called and which I call a “landscape,” exists uniquely on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea and not elsewhere. But the most curious of all is that where this landscape becomes best, most beautiful, most excellent and most intelligent is precisely in the vicinity of Cadaques, which by my great good fortune (I am the first to recognize it) is the exact spot where Salvador Dali since his earliest childhood was periodically and successively to pass the “esthetic courses” of all his summers
And what are the primordial beauty and excellence of that miraculously beautiful landscape of Cadaques? The “structure,” and that alone! Each hill, each rocky contour might have been drawn by Leonardo himself! Aside from the structure there is practically nothing. The vegetation is almost nonexistent. Only the olive-trees, very tiny, whose yellow-tinged silver, like graying and venerable hair, crowns the philosophic brows of the hills, wrinkled with dried-up hollows and rudimentary trails half effaced by thistles. Before the discovery of America this was a land of vines. Then the American insect, the phyloxera, came and devastated them, contributing by its ravages to make the structure of the soil emerge again even more clearly, with the lines formed by the retaining walls that terraced the vines accentuating and shading it, having esthetically the function of geodetic lines marking, giving emphasis and architectonic compass to the splendor of that shore, which seems to descend in multiple and irregular stairways adapted to the soil; serpentine or rectilinear tiers, hard and structural reflections of the splendor of the soul of the earth itself; tiers of civilization encrusted on the back of the landscape; tiers now smiling, now taciturn, now excited by Dionysian sentiments on the bruised summits of divine nostalgias; Raphaelesque or chivalric tiers which, descending from the warm and silvery Olympuses of slate, burst into bloom on the water’s fringe in the svelte and classic song of stone, of every kind of stone down to the granite of the last retaining walls of that unfertilized and solitary earth (its teeming vines having long since disappeared) and on whose dry and elegiac roughness, even today, rest the two bare colossal feet of that grandiose phantom, silent, serene, vertical and pungent, which incarnates and personifies all the different bloods and all the absent wines of antiquity.
When you are thinking of it least, the grasshopper springs! Horror of horrors! And it was always thus. At the heightened moment of my most ecstatic contemplations and visualizations, the grasshopper would spring! Heavy, unconscious, anguishing, its frightfully paralyzing leap reflected in a start of terror that shook my whole being to its depths. Grasshopper—loathsome insect! Horror, nightmare, martyrizer and hallucinating folly of Salvador Dali’s life.
I am thirty-seven years old, and the fright which grasshoppers cause me has not diminished since my adolescence. On the contrary. If possible I should say it has perhaps become still greater. Even today, if I were on the edge of a precipice and a large grasshopper sprang upon me and fastened itself to my face, I should prefer to fling myself over the edge rather than endure this frightful “thing.”
The story of this terror remains for me one of the great enigmas of my life. When I was very small I actually adored grasshoppers. With my aunt and my sister I would chase them with eager delight. I would unfold their wings, which seemed to me to have graduated colors like the pink, mauve and blue-tinted twilight skies that crowned the end of the hot days in Cadaques.
One morning I had caught a very slimy little fish, called a “slobberer” because of this. I pressed it very hard in my hand so as to be able to hold it without its slipping away, and only its small head emerged from my hand. I brought it close to my face to get a good look at it, but immediately I uttered a shrill cry of terror, and threw the fish far away, while tears welled into my eyes. My father, who was sitting on a rock nearby, came and consoled me, trying to understand what had upset me so. “I have just looked at the face of the ‘slobberer,’ ” I told him, in a voice broken by sobs, “and it was exactly the same as a grasshopper’s!” Since I found this association between the two faces, the fish’s and the grasshopper’s, the latter became a thing of horror to me, and the sudden and unexpected sight of one was likely to throw me into such a spectacular nervous fit that my parents absolutely forbade the other children to throw grasshoppers at me, as they were constantly trying to do in order to enjoy my terror. My parents, however, often said, “What a strange thing! He loved them so much before!”
On one occasion my girl cousin purposely crushed a large grasshopper on my neck. I felt the same unnamable and slobbery sliminess that I had noticed in the fish; and though it was eviscerated and abundantly sticky with a loathsome fluid, it still stirred, half destroyed, between my shirt-collar and my flesh, and its jagged legs clutched my neck with such force that I felt they would be torn off sooner than relax their death-grip. I remained for a moment in a half faint, after which my parents succeeded in detaching that “horrible half-living nightmare” from me. I spent the afternoon frantically rubbing my neck and washing it with sea-water. Still tonight, as I write these lines, shudders of horror shoot through my back, while in spite of myself my mouth keeps contracting into a grimace of repugnance mingled with the bitterest moral malaise, which (to the eyes of an imaginary observer) must make my facial expression as sickly and horrible to behold as that of the half-crushed grasshopper which I have just described and which I am probably imitating, identifying myself with its martyrdom by the irresistible reflexes and mimicry of my facial muscles.
But my own martyrdom awaited me on my return to Figueras. For there, once my terror was discovered, and my parents not being constantly present to protect me, I wa
s the victim of the most refined cruelty on the part of my schoolmates, who would think of nothing but catching grasshoppers to make me run—and how I rani—like a real madman, possessed by all the demons. But I rarely escaped the sacrifice—the grasshopper would land on me, half-dead, cadaverous, hideous! At times it was on opening my book that I would find it, crushed, bathed in a yellow juice, its heavy horse-head separated from its body, its legs still stirring, hi hi hi hi! !
Even in this state it was still capable of jumping on me! Once after such a discovery I flung my book away, breaking a pane of glass in the door, right in the midst of class while everyone was listening to the teacher expounding a geometry problem. That day the teacher made me leave class, and for two days I was afraid that my parents would receive a communication on the subject.
In Figueras the grasshoppers attain much greater dimensions than those of Cadaques, and this species terrified me much more. Those horrible grasshoppers of Figueras, half-crushed on the edges of the sidewalks, dragging a long foul string tied to their legs and subjected to the slow and fierce martyrdom of the games which the children inflict on them—I can see them now! There they are, there they are, those grasshoppers—motionless, convulsed with pain and terror, covered with dust like loathsome croquettes of pure fear. There they are, clutching at the edge of the sidewalk, their heads lowered, their heavy horse-heads, their inexpressive, impassive, unintelligent, frightful heads, with their blind, concentrated look, swollen with pain; there they are, motionless, motionless ...And suddenly—hi hi hi hi hi!—they jump, released with all the explosive unconsciousness of their long contained waiting, as if all of a sudden the spring of their capacity for suffering had reached the breaking-point, and they had to fling themselves, no matter where—on me!
In school my fear of grasshoppers finally took up all the space of my imagination. I saw them everywhere, even where there were none: a grayish paper, suddenly seen, and looking to me like a grasshopper, would make me utter a shrill cry which delighted everyone; a simple pellet of bread or gum thrown from behind that struck me in the head would make me jump up on my desk with both feet, trembling, looking around me, mortally anguished by the fear of discovering the horrible insect, ever ready to spring.
My nervous state became so alarming that I decided on a stratagem in order to liberate myself, not of this fear, which I knew to be all-powerful, but at least of my schoolmates’ plaguing. I accordingly invented the “counter-grasshopper.” This consisted of a simple cocotte made by folding a sheet of white paper into the shape of a rooster, and I pretended one day that this paper rooster frightened me much more than grasshoppers, and begged everyone never to show me such a thing. When I saw a grasshopper I did my utmost to repress the display of my fear. But when they showed me a cocotte I would utter screams and simulate such a wild fit that one might have thought I was being murdered. This false phobia had an immense success, not only by its novelty and its doubly scandalous effect but also and especially because it was infinitely easier to make a little cocotte of white paper than to go and hunt a grasshopper; moreover the fear produced by the white cocotte appeared more spectacular. Thanks to this stratagem I was almost freed of the grasshoppers, to which I was less and less exposed as they were replaced by the white cocottes. For a real terror I had thus succeeded in substituting its simulation, which amused and tyrannized me at the same time, for I had constantly to play my role to perfection, otherwise I risked being assailed again by a new period of real grasshoppers, and consequently of authentic terrors.
Cocottes.
But the disorder into which my hysterical reactions to each apparition of the white cocottes plunged the class became so spectacular and constant that the teachers began to be seriously concerned about my case; they decided to punish the pupils severely each time they showed me one of those white cocottes, explaining to them that my reaction was the result of a nervous state which was peculiar to me and which it was criminal to exasperate.
Not all the teachers, however, interpreted my simulation so generously. One day we were in a class with our Superior, who did not know very much about my case, when I found a large white paper cocotte inside my cap. I knew that all the pupils were just waiting for my reaction, and I therefore had to utter a cry that would measure up to my supposed irremediable repugnance Outraged by my scream, the teacher asked me to bring him the cocotte that had created the disturbance, but I answered, “Not for all the world!” His patience getting out of bounds, he began to insist and peremptorily called upon me to obey him. Then, going up to a stand on which stood an immense bottle of ink from which all the inkwells in the class were periodically filled, I took the bottle with both hands and let it drop on the paper cocotte. The bottle shattered into a thousand pieces and the flood of ink dyed the cocotte a deep blue. Delicately picking up the soaked cocotte still dripping with ink between my thumb and forefinger, I threw it on the teacher’s desk, and said, “Now I can obey you. Since it isn’t white it doesn’t frighten me any more!”
The consequence of this new Dalinian performance was that I was expelled from school the following day.
My memories of the war were all agreeable memories, for Spain’s neutrality led my country into a period of euphoria and rapid economic prosperity. Catalonia produced a truculent and succulent flora and fauna of nouveaux-riches who, when they grew in Figueras, “an agricultural region of Ampurdán where madness blends most gracefully with reality,” produced a whole harvest of picturesque types whose exploits blossomed forth in a living and burning folklore and constituted a kind of piping-hot spiritual nourishment for the elite of our fellow-citizens which supplemented, and was served together with, the everyday terrestrial nourishment—which, it must be said, was very good. I remember well that during this war of 1914 everyone in Figueras was deeply concerned over the question of cooking. There was a French family that was very intimate with my parents and whose members were confirmed gourmets; hence a woodcock, served “high” with brandy burned over it, had no secrets for me, and I knew by heart the whole ritual for drinking a good Pernod out in the sun with a sugar-lump dipped into it, while listening to the thousand and one comic anecdotes about our nouveaux-riches. These anecdotes became as famous as those of Marseille. But in crossing the frontier they lose their fine effervescent flavor. They have to be consumed on the spot.
Every evening there was a large gathering of grown-ups in the back of the French family’s shop. People came there ostensibly to talk about the war and the European situation, but mostly they told endless anecdotes. Looking out on the street through the shop-window they could watch their fellow-citizens passing by, the sight of whom was a lively stimulant that kept the conversation welded to the immediacy of happenings in the town. Hilarity hovered over this predominantly masculine gathering like a whirlwind of hysteria. At times the strident roar of their paroxysms of laughter could even be heard out in the street, mingled with the choking coughs and the plaintive screams of those who exceeded all bounds and went into such convulsions that one might have thought they would die of laughing, and, with tears rolling down their cheeks, shrieked, Ay, Ay, Ay! ...
The song “Ay, Ay, Ay” was being sung at that time, and one heard everywhere the sighs of Argentine tangos which had come from Barcelona by way of traveling salesmen who told tales of the Thousand and One Nights of roulette and baccarat, that had just been legalized in the Catalonian capital. A German painter, Siegfried Burman, who painted exclusively with knives, using enormous daubs of color, spent the whole period of the war in Cadaques teaching ladies the steps of the Argentine tango and singing German songs to the accompaniment of the guitar. A rich gentleman giving a flower party had the idea of harnessing to his flower-decked chariot two horses completely covered with confetti. For this he first had the horses coated with hot glue, several men simultaneously pouring pails of it on the animals. Then the horses were made to roll on an immense pile of confetti in which they were completely submerged. In less than an hour the two hors
es were dead. Ay, ay, ay–Ay, ay, ay! ...
Peace burst like a bomb. The armistice had just been signed, and preparations were made for a great celebration. The repercussions of the armistice were almost as joyous in this countryside of Catalonia as in France, for the country was unanimously Francophile. It had a pleasant, splendid and golden memory of the war, and here was victory, besides, right next door, with all its seductiveness: it was going to make the most of it, right down to the bone. A public demonstration was planned in the streets of Figueras, in which there would be popular and political representatives of all the small towns and villages of the region—flags, posters, meetings, sardanas5 and balls. The students formed an organization of a “progressive” type, which it was decided to name “Grupo Estudiantil,” and which was to adopt a platform and elect a committee charged with organizing the students’ participation in the “victory parades” that were being prepared.
The president of the “Grupo Estudiantil” came to me to ask me to make the opening speech. I had one day in which to prepare it.
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Page 17