“You are the only student who can do this,” he said, “but be sure to make it powerful, stirring–something in your own line.” He shook my hand vigorously.
I agreed, and immediately set myself to preparing my speech, which began something like this: “The great sacrifice of blood which has just been made on the field of battle has awakened the political conscience of all oppressed peoples! etc. etc.” I was extremely flattered at having been chosen to make the speech, which I rehearsed melodramatically before the mirror. But as time passed an encroaching and destructive timidity took hold of me, becoming so extreme that I was beginning to think it might get out of control. This was my first public speech, however, and with the legend that had already grown up around me it would be a shame to disappoint my audience at the last moment by a stupid childish timidity! If my “funk” continued I might be able to plead illness, but I could not resign myself to giving up my speech, which swelled in rhetorical splendor and profundity of ideas as my timidity grew more paralyzing. Already it prevented me from delivering my memorized speech, even without witnesses, confusing my memory, mixing up all the words, and blurring the letters of my own handwriting as with a beating heart and flushed cheeks I tried to decipher what I had written, my eyes gaping as though the letters had suddenly become an inexplicable hieroglyph! No! I could not! I could not! There was nothing to be done! And I stamped my foot with rage, burying my face devoured by shame and rancor at myself in the rumpled papers on which I had traced the brilliant path of my first speech with so much eloquence and assurance! No, no, no! I would not be capable of delivering my speech! And I went out to roam through the outskirts of town, to try to recover courage in the contemplation of the communicative serenity of the landscape.
The speech was scheduled for the following day. Before returning home in the late afternoon I mingled with a group of students who were all making fun of the speech I was going to give, and the slight amount of courage which I had recovered in the course of my solitary walk fell back to below zero.
The following day I awoke with my heart constricted by a mortal anguish. I could not swallow my café-au-lait. I took my speech, which I rolled up and secured with an elastic, combed my hair as best I could, and left for the Republican Centre, where the meeting was to take place.
I walked down the street as though I were going to my execution. I arrived on purpose an hour ahead of time, for I thought that by familiarizing myself with the place and the audience as it gradually foregathered, I would perhaps succeed in lessening the brutal shock of finding myself suddenly facing a crowded hall, in which as you appear silence suddenly falls with the sole aim of sucking in, as through a syphon, the speech which you bear within you. But as I reached the Republican Centre my discouragement reached its peak. The grown-up people were terribly intimidating, and there were even girls! As I entered I blushed so violently that everything became blurred before my eyes, and I had to sit down. Someone immediately brought me a glass of water. The people were pouring in in great numbers, and the sound of voices was deafening. A platform had been erected and dressed with the republican flags, and I had to take my place on it. On this platform there were three chairs. The one in the middle was reserved for me; to my right was the chairman, to my left the secretary. We sat down and were received with scattered applause and a few mocking laughs (which remained seared in my flesh like brands). I put my head between my hands as though I were studying my speech, which I had just unfolded with a firmness which I would not have thought myself capable of a moment before. The secretary got up and began a long explanation of the reasons for the meeting. He was being constantly interrupted by the more and more numerous members of the audience who took our meeting as a joke.
My eyes, unable to see a thing, were glued to my speech, and my ears could register only a confused hum amid which the only distinct notes were the clear, cruel and brutal stridences of the sarcasms directed at us. The secretary hurriedly concluded his introduction because of the audience’s lack of interest, and gave me the floor, not without alluding to my heroism on the occasion of the burning of the flag. An impressive silence fell over the hall, and I had for the first time the consciousness that the people in the audience were there only to hear me. Then I experienced that pleasure which I have since prized so highly: feeling myself the object of an “integral expectation.” Slowly I rose to my feet, without having the slightest idea what I was going to do. I tried to remember the beginning of my speech. But unable to do so, I did not open my mouth. The silence around me became even thicker, until it became an asphyxiating embrace: something was going to happen—I knew it! But what? I felt my blood rise to my head and, lifting my arms in a gesture of defiance, I shouted at the top of my lungs, “Long live Germany! Long live Russia!” After which, with a violent kick, I flung the table at the audience. Within a few seconds the hall became a scene of wild confusion, but to my surprise nobody paid any further attention to me. The members of the audience were all arguing and fighting among themselves. With sudden self-possession I slipped out and ran home.
“What about your speech?” my father asked.
“It was fine!” I answered.
And it was true. Without my realizing it, my act had led to a result of great political originality and immediacy. Martin Villanova,6 one of the agitators of the region, undertook to explain my attitude in his own way.
“There are no longer allies or vanquished,” he said. “Germany is in revolution, and must be considered on the same basis as the victors. This is especially true of Russia, whose social revolution is the only fruit of this war that offers a real hope.”
The kick that had overturned the table was just what was needed to awaken a public too slow to become alive to historic facts.
The next day I took part in the parade, carrying a German flag, which was greeted with applause, and Martin Villanova carried another, bearing the name of the Soviets, the U.S.S.R. These were certainly the first of their kind to be borne in a Spanish street.
Some time later, Martin Villanova and his group decided to baptize one of the streets of Figueras President Wilson. Villanova came to my house bringing a long canvas like a ship’s sail, and asked me to paint on it in large “artistic” letters the words, “The City of Figueras Honors Woodrow Wilson, Protector of the Liberties of Small Nations.” We climbed up on the roof of the house and hung the canvas by its four corners to rings which usually served to hang the laundry. I promised him I would go and buy pots of paint and begin the work that very afternoon so that all would be ready the next day for the unveiling of the marble plaque which would give the new illustrious name to the street.
The following morning I awoke very early, gnawed by a feeling of guilt, for I had not yet begun my work. It was probably already too late for my letters to dry in time, even if I should begin work right away. Then I had an idea. Instead of painting the letters with paint, I would cut them out, so that the motto would be made by the blue of the sky that would show through. With the lack of practical sense which characterize me at this time, I did not realize how difficult this would be and I went down to fetch some scissors. The canvas was so tough that I was not even able to puncture it. I then went and fetched a large kitchen knife. But after many efforts I succeeded only in cutting out a formless hole, which completely discouraged me from pursuing this method further. After all sorts of reflections, I decided on a new technique, even madder and more impracticable—I would burn holes in the canvas following roughly the forms of the letters, after which I would even them out with the scissors, and I would have several pails of water handy in case the canvas should start to burn beyond the edges of the letters. But this was an even more categorical failure than the last effort: the canvas caught fire, and though I managed to put it out there remained of all my labors of two hours only a blackish hole and another smaller hole which I had previously pierced with the knife.
I now felt that it was definitely too late to make any further attempt. Discouraged
, dead tired, I lay down on the canvas that hung like a hammock. Its swinging seemed very pleasant, and I immediately felt like going to sleep. I was about to doze off, but I suddenly remembered my father’s telling me that one could get a sunstroke from going to sleep in the sun. I felt my head benumbed both by the sun and sleepiness, and in order to arouse myself from this state I decided to undress completely, after which I placed one of the buckets just below the burned hole. I had just invented a new fantasy by which, in the most unexpected and innocent manner in the world, I was going to risk an almost certain death! Lying flat on my belly on the great suspended cloth which served as a hammock, I passed my head through the burned hole 7 in such a way as to be able to plunge it into the cool water. But to get my head in and out of the water it was not enough merely to contract my shoulders, for the hole had widened and one of my shoulders was already halfway through. Then my foot found the solution, making my plan extremely easy to execute. For the second hole, the one I had made with the kitchen knife, happened to be just at the level of my foot; I introduced my foot into this hole, and all I had to do to bring my head up was slightly to contract my leg.
I immersed my head several times satisfactorily, deriving an immense voluptuous pleasure from the performance. But during one of these operations there occurred an accident which might well have been fatal. After having held my breath for a long time and wishing to pull my head out of the pail of water I exerted the necessary pressure with my leg. Just then the hole in which my foot was caught tore, and instead of coming out of the water my head sank all the way to the bottom. I found myself suddenly in a critical situation, unable to make any movement, or even to upset the pail in which my head was now thoroughly caught and which immobilized me by its weight. The twisting and squirming of my body only made me swing on the hammock in a futile way, and it is thus that I found myself with no alternative but to wait for death.
It was Martin Villanova who came to my rescue; seeing that I did not appear with my poster, he came to my house, all out of breath, to find out what had happened to me. And what was happening was simply this, that Salvador Dali was in the act of dying of asphyxiation on the heights, on those same dangerous heights on the roof of the house where as a child-king he had experienced for the first time the sensation of vertigo. It took me some time to recover after I had been delivered from the pail. Martin Villanova looked at me, stupefied.
“What in the world were you doing here, stark naked, with your head inside the bucket—you might have drowned! And the mayor has already arrived, and the whole crowd is there, we’ve been waiting for more than half an hour for you to arrive! Tell me what you were doing here.”
I have always had an answer for everything, and this time I also had one. “I was inventing the counter-submarine 8,” I said.
Martin Villanova was never able to forget this scene, and he told it that very evening on the rambla. 9 “What do you think of Dali, isn’t he great! While we were waiting with all the notabilities and the band was there, and everything, there he was stark naked on the roof inventing the ‘counter-submarine,’ with his head plunged into a bucket of water. If by some misfortune I had not arrived in time, he would be good and dead right now! Isn’t he great! Isn’t Dali great!”
The following evening they were playing sardanas 10 on President Wilson Street, and the poster, which I had finally succeeded in painting in his honor, floated across the street, fastened to two balconies. Two sinister, torn holes could be seen in the canvas, and it was only Martin Villanova and I who knew that one of them corresponded to Salvador Dali’s neck and the other to his foot. But Salvador Dali was there, alive, quite alive! And we shall still hear many strange things of him. But patience! We must proceed methodically.
Thus, let us summarize Dali’s situation at the outset of this decisive post-war period: Dali, thrown out of school, is to continue his baccalaureate studies at the institute; martyrized by the anguishing grasshoppers, running away from girls, always imbued with the chimerical love of Galuchka, he has not yet experienced “it”; he has grown pubic hair; he is an anarchist, a monarchist, and an anti-Catalonian; he has been under criminal indictment for a supposed antipatriotic sacrilege; at a pro-Ally meeting he has shouted, “Long live Germany! Long live Russia!,” kicking over the table at the audience; finally he has been within a hair’s breadth of meeting death in the invention of the counter-submarine! How great he is! Look how great Salvador Dali is!
1 I have never read this book, but Kropotkin’s portrait on the cover, and the title, The Conquest of Bread, appeared to me of great subversive value, and were intended to make me appear interesting in the eyes of the people who saw me pass through the streets of the town.
2 All my life I have been preoccupied with shoes, which I have utilized in several surrealist objects and pictures, to the point of making a kind of divinity of them. In 1936 I went so far as to put shoes on heads; and Elsa Schiaparelli created a hat after my idea. Daisy Fellowes appeared in Venice with this shoe-hat on her head. The shoe, in fact, appears to me to be the object most charged with realistic virtues as opposed to musical objects which I have always tried to represent as demolished, crushed, soft–cellos of rotten meat, etc. One of my latest pictures represents a pair of shoes. I spent two long months copying them from a model, and I worked over them with the same love and the same objectivity as Raphael painting a Madonna.
It is therefore extremely instructive to observe how in an improvised lie, produced in ultra-anecdotic circumstances, I anticipated the formulation of a durable and integrated philosophic platform, which was only to become consolidated with time.
3 In 1922, in Madrid, I developed this idea of an anarchic monarchy, mingling the most caustic humor with a whole series of anti-social and a-political paradoxes which at least had the virtue of being a convincing polemic weapon by which I could amuse myself, scattering seeds of doubt and ruining my friends’ political convictions.
4 In this game with my olive I frequently ended by repeatedly inserting or pressing it into other parts of my body, under my arms, etc., after first wetting it with my saliva.
5Catalonian popular dance.
6 Martin Villanova is one of the few revolutionaries of “good faith” whom I have known in the course of my life. He was immeasurably naïve, but also immeasurably generous and prepared to make any sacrifice.
7 In my intra-uterine memories I have already told about the games which consisted in making my blood go to my head by hanging and swinging it, which eventually provoked certain retinal illusions similar to phosphenes. This new fantasy which occurred just at the end of the war must be related to the same kind of intra-uterine fantasy. Not only the fact that I had my head down, but also that I passed it through a hole, as well as everything that follows, are exemplary in this regard. The “frustrated acts,” the “unsuccessful holes,” made with great expenditure of effort and means, clearly revealed the principle of displeasure provoked by real mechanical obstacles. Also the fear of the external world incarnated in the people participating in the celebration who were looking forward to seeing my poster, which I knew could not be finished in time, provoked in me the need to seek refuge in the prenatal world of sleep. But the fear of death assailed me, unconsciously evoking for me the traumatism of birth by the agreeable symbolism of the hanging parachute simulacrum of my counter-submarine!
8 Narciso Monturiol is the inventor of the first submarine that ever navigated under water. An illustrious son of Figueras, he has his monument in the town and for as long as I can remember I have felt a strong jealousy toward him, for my ambition was to make a great invention of this kind, too.
9 A walk.
10 A Catalonian popular dance.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“It” Philosophic Studies Unassuaged Love Technical Experiments My “Stone Period” End of Love Affair Mother’s Death
I was growing. On Señor Pitchot’s property, at Cadaques, there was a cypress planted in the middle of the courtyard; it
too was growing. I now wore sideburns that reached below the middle of my cheek. I liked dark suits, preferably of very soft black velvet, and on my walks I would smoke a meerschaum pipe of my father’s on which was carved the head of a grinning Arab showing all his teeth. On my father’s excursion to the Greek ruins of Ampurias the curator of the museum made him a present of a silver coin with the profile of a Greek woman. I liked to imagine that she was Helen of Troy. I had it mounted into a tie-pin which I always wore, just as I always carried a cane. I have had several famous canes, but the most beautiful one had a gold handle in the shape of a two-headed eagle—an imperial symbol whose morphology adapted itself in a happy way to the possessive grip of my ever-dissatisfied hand.
I was growing, and so was my hand. “It” finally happened to me one evening in the outhouse of the institute; I was disappointed, and a violent guilt-feeling immediately followed. I had thought “it” was something else! But in spite of my disappointment, overshadowed by the delights of remorse, I always went back to doing “it,” saying to myself, this is the last, last, last time! After three days the temptation to do “it” once more took hold of me again, and I could never struggle more than one day and one night against my desire to do it again, and I did “it,” “it,” “it,” “it” again all the time.
“It” was not everything. . . I was learning to draw, and I put into this other activity the maximum of my effort, of my attention and of my fervor. Guilt at having done “it” augmented the unflagging rigor of my work on my drawings. Every evening I went to the official drawing school. Selior Nuriez was a very good draftsman and a particularly good engraver. He had received the Prix de Rome for engraving; he was truly devoured by an authentic passion for the Fine Arts. From the beginning he singled me out among the hundred students in the class, and invited me to his house, where he would explain to me the mysteries of chiaroscuro and of the “savage strokes” (this was his expression) of an original engraving by Rembrandt which he owned; he had a very special manner of holding this engraving, almost without touching it, which showed the profound veneration with which it inspired him. I would always come away from Señor Nuñez’ home stimulated to the highest degree, my cheeks flushed with the greatest artistic ambitions. Imbued with a growing and almost religious respect for Art, I would come home with my head full of Rembrandt, go and shut myself up in the toilet and do “it.” “It” became better and better, and I was beginning to find a psychic technique of retardation which enabled me to do “it” at less frequent intervals. For now I no longer said, “This is the last time.” I knew by experience that it was no longer possible for me to stop. What I would do was to promise myself to do “it” on Sunday, and then “occasionally on Sunday.” The idea that this pleasure was in store for me calmed my erotic yearnings and anxieties, and I reached the point of finding a real voluptuous pleasure in the fact of waiting before doing it. Now that I no longer denied it to myself in the same categorical way, and knew that the longer I waited the better “it” would be when it came, I could look forward to this moment with more and more agreeable and welcome vertigoes and agonies.
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Page 18