In order to bring all this about I had to find a friendly painter who was already in possession of that studio. He had to have unqualified admiration for me, and be about to leave for Catalonia . . .No, Paris would be better—he would leave for Paris. Then he would say to me, “Come to the studio whenever you want, here is the key; and no one needs to know anything about what goes on here.” I knew no one in Madrid, and the course of my revery was becoming unsatisfactory, when all at once I remembered the photograph of a well-known painter in Barcelona. At this moment my revery was brusquely interrupted by the professor’s arrival. I got up. He simply said to me, “Don’t disturb yourself, I’ll come back later.” But he had already disturbed me, and how! I felt that I was in the midst of thinking about something highly desirable, the only thing I would like to be able to think about again. But I tried in vain!
There is no greater anguish and bitterness than to run madly from one idea to another without being able to find again that most magic of all spots “where you were so comfortable” before you were interrupted. Everything is insipid, everything around you is worthless. But suddenly you find it again! Then you feel that the rediscovered train of thought, though agreeable enough, is not so marvelous as you had thought before you found that “thing,” so greatly desired.
Nevertheless I have found it again, and I can continue my revery. Let’s go ahead; it will last four or five hours. And perhaps I can continue it the next day, and at the same time perfect it. Good heavens, what a prodigious worker you are, Salvador Dahl But I overcome my temptations, and right here I shall stop describing my revery, for even though it is one of the strangest my brain has produced, it would make us lose the thread of the interpretation of the dream of the “plaster inundation,” which we were discussing before we were distracted by these general considerations on the course of the river of “Revery,” always so instructive.
So let the reader try to remember (by going back a little) that I had more than sufficient reasons to detest the two abortive paintings of the young girl. These canvases which I had temporarily hidden I intended, as I have already said, to paint over. As soon as this was possible I decided one morning to prepare the two canvases together, and I put them next to each other on the floor so that I could paint them both together, covering them with a coat of white color diluted with glue. This coat dried fast, but I was very much dissatisfied with the result, for the two frightful botched pictures of the little girl-model could be seen standing out very sharply through the transparent color. Then, deciding to resort to desperate measures, I prepared a large pot of white paint and poured it over the two canvases. The paint flowed over the edges and spread on the floor, but, as usual in such circumstances, far from being discouraged or stopping because of this incident, I decided that the damage was already done, and that a little more or less no longer made the slightest difference. I would clean it all up later. But for the moment I wanted to take advantage of the “inundation” to pour still another pot of paint over the canvas, this time making the paint even thicker. It would cover the two coats that were already there and would form a new one that not only would make the two detested pictures completely disappear but also and especially would cause my two canvases to acquire very thick and smooth surfaces, as though they were “covered with plaster.” I poured out the second pot of paint with such lack of concern over spilling it that it was now spreading across the floor of the room like a flood. The sun poured in through the windows, and the dazzling white consciously reminded me of the town of Figueras covered with snow, at the period of my false memories.
Having finished the story of my canvases, let us now undertake the analysis of the dream of the plaster-flood which, as we shall see, is a dream which by its blinding symbols betrays my ambitious autocratic desires of “absolute monarchy” to which I have already alluded, and which constituted the continuous desire of my whole early childhood. What did these two paintings represent for me? First of all, the double and jealous image of myself as king and as young girl. This is even illustrated materially by the fact that the two paintings representing the same subject are considered by me as two kings. This conflict of the two kings broke out on the occasion of His Majesty’s visit to the Academy of Fine Arts. In fact I immediately noticed that he had singled me out among all the others. This distinction, in the unconscious, meant: he had recognized that I was a king. It is quite natural that the effect produced on my imagination by the real encounter with His Majesty Alfonso XIII should have awakened in my mind the violent royal feelings with which I had lived during my whole childhood. The King’s presence revived in my mind the King I bore within my skin! During the entire visit to the school I had this impression, which did not leave me a single moment, that the two of us were uniquely and continually isolated from all the rest.
But this dualism finally disappeared, for at the moment when I made my genuflection before him I felt myself agreeably but totally depersonalized: I was completely identified with him! I was he, and since he was the real thing, all my autocracy was directed against the false one. The false king was the one I had painted on the two canvases. There the rivalry was flagrant because of the desire to have the sex organs that were the contrary of my own. When I spilled the plaster and inundated the sculpture class I realized the same symbol as I had realized in pouring the paint over my two canvases. “I effaced the rival false king.” This plaster, and this paint, of an immaculate white, was the ermine mantle of the absolute monarchy which unifies all, covers, makes occult, and dominates all “majestically.” It was exactly the same ermine mantle which in my memories covered the hostile reality of the town of Figueras with a shroud of snow. It was the same purifying mantle which, as it covered and hid the Academy of Fine Arts, also covered the two paintings made in this Academy, representing for me the sum of the most painful experiences suffered in this place of spiritual degradation. The plaster flood was thus nothing other than the ermine mantle of my absolute monarchy solemnly spreading from above, from the summit of the tower of the sculpture class, over everything that was “below.”
Misunderstood king! Dali, for your twenty-one years you were assimilating your readings wonderfully well! I congratulate you! And now, continue, go right on telling us things and things about yourself; it fascinates us more and more! Go to it! Here we are, listening to you. Wait, wait, let me drink a glass of water! . . .
Four months had passed since my arrival in Madrid, and my life continued to be as methodical, sober and studious as on the first day. I am not altogether telling the truth when I say this—for in reality as my sobriety, my capacity for study, and the minute rigor to which I subjected my spirit, grew from week to week, I felt myself reaching that limit of daily discipline composed of the ritualized perfecting of each moment which leads by a direct short-cut to the very border of asceticism. I should have liked to live in a prison! I was sure that if I had lived in one I should not have regretted a single iota of my liberty. Everything in my paintings took on a more and more severe and monastic flavor, and it was on the plaster-like surface of the canvases which I had unhappily prepared with such a thick coat of paint mixed with glue that I painted these things.
I say “unhappily,” because the two cubist paintings which I executed during those first four months of my stay in Madrid were two capital works, as impressive as an auto-da-fé 4—which is what they were. The excessively thick preparation caused them to crack, they began to fall to pieces, and the two paintings were thus totally destroyed.
But before this, one day, they were discovered, and I with them. The Students’ Residence where I lived was divided into quantities of groups and sub-groups. One of these groups was that of the artisticliterary advance guard, the non-conformist group, strident and revolutionary, from which the catastrophic miasmas of the post-war period were already emanating. This group had recently inherited a narrow negativistic and paradoxical tradition deriving from a group of “ultra” litterateurs and painters—one of those indigeno
us “isms” born of the confused impulses created by European advance guard movements, and more or less related to the Dadaists. This group was composed of Pepin Bello, Luis Bunuel, Garcia Lorca, Pedro Garfias, Eugenio Montes, R. Barrades and many others. But of all the youths I was to meet at this period only two were destined to attain the dizzy heights of the upper hierarchies of the spirit—Garcia Lorca, in the biological, seething and dazzling substance of the post-Gongorist poetic rhetoric, and Eugenio Montes, in the stairways of the soul and the stone-canticles of intelligence. The former was from Granada, and the latter from Santiago de Compostela.
One day when I was out, the chamber maid had left my door open, and Pepin Bello happening to pass by saw my two cubist paintings. He could not wait to divulge this discovery to the members of the group. These knew me by sight, and I was even the butt of their caustic humor. They called me “the musician,” or “the artist,” or “the Pole.” My anti-European way of dressing had made them judge me unfavorably, as a rather commonplace, more or less hairy romantic residue. My serious, studious air, totally lacking in humor, made me appear to their sarcastic eyes a lamentable being, stigmatized with mental deficiency, and at best picturesque. Nothing indeed could contrast more violently with their British-style tailored suits and golf jackets than my velvet jackets and my flowing bow ties; nothing could be more diametrically opposed than my long tangled hair falling down to my shoulders and their smartly trimmed hair, regularly worked over by the barbers of the Ritz or the Palace. At the time I became acquainted with the group, particularly, they were all possessed by a complex of dandyism combined with cynicism, which they displayed with accomplished worldliness. This inspired me at first with such great awe that each time they came to fetch me in my room I thought I would faint.
They came all in a group to look at my paintings, and with the snobbishness which they already wore clutched to their hearts, greatly amplifying their admiration, their surprise knew no limits. That I should be a cubist painter was the last thing they would have thought of! They frankly admitted their former opinion of me, and unconditionally offered me their friendship. Much less generous, I still kept a speculative distance. I wondered what benefit I could derive from them, and whether they really had anything to offer me.
They literally drank my ideas, and in a week the hegemony of my thought began to make itself felt. Wherever members of the group were present the conversation was sprinkled with, “Dali said. . .” “Dali answered. . .” “Dali thinks . . .” “How did Dali like this?” “It looks like Dali.” “It’s Dalinian. . .” “Dali must see that. . .” “Dali ought to do that. . .” And Dali this, and Dali that, and Dali everything!
Although I realized at once that my new friends were going to take everything from me without being able to give me anything in return—for in reality of truth they possessed nothing of which I did not possess twice, three times, a hundred times as much—on the other hand, the personality of Federico Garcia Lorca produced an immense impression upon me. The poetic phenomenon in its entirety and “in the raw” presented itself before me suddenly in flesh and bone, confused, blood-red, viscous and sublime, quivering with a thousand fires of darkness and of subterranean biology, like all matter endowed with the originality of its own form.5 I reacted, and immediately I adopted a rigorous attitude against the “poetic cosmos.” I would say nothing that was indefinable, nothing of which a “contour” or a “law” could not be established, nothing that one could not “eat” (this was even then my favorite expression). And when I felt the incendiary and communicative fire of the poetry of the great Federico rise in wild, dishevelled flames I tried to beat them down with the olive branch of my premature anti-Faustian old age, while already preparing the grill of my transcendental prosaism on which, when the day came, when only glowing embers remained of Lorca’s initial fire, I would come and fry the mushrooms, the chops and the sardines of my thought (which I knew were destined to be served some day—fried to a turn, and good and hot—on the clean cloth of the table of the book which you are in the midst of reading) in order to appease for some hundred years the spiritual, imaginative, moral and ideological hunger of our epoch.
Our group was taking on a more and more anti-intellectual color; hence we began to frequent intellectuals of every sort, and to haunt the cafés of Madrid in which the whole artistic, literary and political future of Spain was beginning to cook with a strong odor of burning oil. The double vermouths with olives contributed generously to crystallize this budding “post-war” confusion, by bringing a dose of poorly dissimulated sentimentalism which was the element most propitious to the elusive transmutations of heroism, bad faith, coarse elegance and hyperchloridic digestions, all mixed up with anti-patriotism; and from this whole amalgam a hatred rooted in bourgeois mentality which was destined to make headway grew, waxed rich, opening up new branches daily, backed by unlimited credit, until the day of the famous crash of the then distant Civil War.
I said a moment ago that the group which had just taken me so generously to its bosom was incapable of teaching me anything, and even as I said this I knew that it was not altogether true, since the group nevertheless taught me one thing, and it was precisely because of this thing that I remained in the group, and that I was going to continue to remain. They taught me how to go on a bender. I spent about three days at it: two days for the barber, one morning for the tailor, one afternoon for money, fifteen minutes to get drunk, and until six o’clock the next morning to go on the “bender.” I must relate all this in detail.
One afternoon the whole group of us were having tea in one of the fashionable spots in Madrid, which naturally was called the Crystal Palace. No sooner did I enter it than everything became clear to me. I had radically to change my appearance. My friends, who took a much more decided pride in my person than I (since my immeasurable arrogance always immunized me against being affected by anything), were eager to defend my truculent appearance, and even to force its acceptance, with an energetic and resolute courage. They were ready to sacrifice everything for this, and their vehement non-conformism tended to make a veritable battle-flag of my preposterous get-up. By their offended air they seemed to want to answer the furtive, discreet, though insistent glances from the elegant throng that surrounded us by saying, “Well! Our friend looks like a gutter rat, to be sure, but he is the most important personage you have ever met, and at the slightest incivility on your part we’ll knock you down.” Bunuel especially, who was the huskiest and most daring among us, would survey the room to discover the slightest occasion to pick a fight. For that matter, he would seize on any pretext that promised to end in a free-for-all. But nothing happened. When we got outside I said to the bodyguards of my outlandishness, “You’ve been very decent with me. But I’m not at all anxious to keep this up. Tomorrow I’m going to dress like everyone else!”
This decision, made on the spur of the moment, impressed everyone deeply, for they had all become terribly “conservative” about my appearance. My decision was discussed endlessly and with the same kind of emotion that must have possessed Socrates’ disciples when he stoically announced that he was going to drink the hemlock. They tried to make me go back on my decision—as though my personality were attached to my clothes, my hair and my sideburns, and ran the risk of being destroyed and of disappearing along with the paralyzing aspect of my amazing capillary and sartorial emblems. But my decision was irrevocable. The principal and secret reason was that I was bent on something which suddenly appeared to me as of capital importance. I wanted to be attractive to elegant women. And what is an elegant woman? I had found out just now, in the tea-room, by observing one sitting at the opposite table. An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and who has no hair under her arms. On her for the first time I had discovered a depilated armpit, and its color, so finely and delicately blue-tinged, appeared to me as something extremely luxurious and perverse. I made up my mind to study “all these questions,” and to do so—as I did everything—thoroug
hly!
The next morning I began at the beginning—with my head. However, I did not dare go directly to the Ritz barbershop, as my friends had recommended. I therefore went in search of an ordinary barber. I thought I would have him do it just “roughly,” and have the rest of my hair properly cut at the Ritz in the afternoon. But each time I reached the door of a barbershop I would suddenly be seized with timidity and decide to go elsewhere. The time it would take to say “Cut my hair” was really a difficult moment to get across.
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Page 23