This period of imprisonment pleased me immeasurably. I was naturally among the political prisoners, all of whose friends, co-religionists and relatives showered us with gifts. Every evening we drank very bad native champagne. I had resumed writing the “Tower of Babel” and was reliving the experience of Madrid, drawing philosophic consequences from each incident and each detail. I was happy, for I had just rediscovered the landscape of the Ampurdán plain, and it was while looking at this landscape through the bars of the prison of Gerona that I came to realize that at last I had succeeded in aging a little. This was all I wished, and it was all that for several days I had wanted to tear out and squeeze from my experience in Madrid. It was fine to feel a little older, and to be within a “real prison” for the first time. And finally, as long as it lasted, it would be possible for me to let my mind relax.
1 This belongs chronologically a few years later in my biography.
2 At this period I had just begun to read Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. This book presented itself to me as one of the capital discoveries in my life, and I was seized with a real vice of self-interpretation, not only of my dreams but of everything that happened to me, however accidental it might seem at first glance.
3 Eugenio d’Ors once made the profound observation that “everything that is not tradition is plagiarism.” Everything that is not traditíon is plagiarism, Salvador Dali repeats. The most exemplary case that one can give of this to a young student of the history of art ís that of Perugino and Raphael. Raphael, while still a very young student, found himself almost without realizing it incorporating and possessing the whole tradition of his master, Perugino: drawing, chiaroscuro, matter, myth, subject, composition, architecture—all this was “given” to him. Hence he was lord and master. He was free. He could work within such narrow limits that he could give hís whole mind to doing it. If he decided to suppress a few columns or to add a few steps to the stairway; if he thought the head of the Madonna should lean forward a little more, that the shadow of the orbits of her eyes should have a more melancholy accent, with what luxury, what intensity, what liberty of invention he could do thís. The complete opposite is Picasso, as great as Raphael, but damned. Damned and condemned to eternal plagiarism; for, having fought, broken and smashed tradition, his work has the dazzle of lightning and the anger of the slave. Like a slave he is chained hand and foot by the chains of his own inventions. Having reinvented everything, he is tyrannized by everythíng. In each of his works Picasso struggles like a convict; he is tyrannized, reduced to slavery by the drawing, the color, the perspective, the composition, by each of these things. Instead of leaning upon the immediate past which is their source, upon the “blood of reality” which is tradition, he must lean upon the “memory” of all that he has seen—plagiarism of the Etruscan vases, plagiarism of Toulouse-Lautrec, plagiarism of Africa, plagiarism of Ingres. THE POVERTY OF REVOLUTION. Nothing is truer: “The more one tries to revolutionize, the more one does the same thíng.”
4 Act of faith—the name given to the ceremony of burning alleged heretics by the Holy Spanish Inquisition.—Translator’s note.
5 Form presents itself as the result of elementary physical modifications. Among these are the reactions of matter (general morphology).
6 Removing this varnish from my head was a whole drama. The only way to dissolve it was by dipping it in turpentine, which was dangerous for the eyes. After this (except on one occasion that I shall describe in its proper place) I never used picture varnish again, but I achieved almost the same effect by adding white-of-egg to the brilliantine.
7 When, nine years later, I met one of these friends again in Paris who admitted to me that he still preciously preserved his piece of this pact, I was once more stupefied by the endemic childishness of humanity. Of all animals, of all plants, of all architectures, of all rocks, it is man who finds it hardest to age.
8 An area of empty space behind my head has always created in me a sense of anxiety so painful that it makes it impossible for me to work. A screen is not enough for me, I need a real wall. If the wall is very thick I know beforehand that my work is already well on the way to success.
CHAPTER NINE
Return to Madrid Permanent Expulsion from the School of Fine Arts Voyage to Paris Meeting With Gala Beginnings of the Difficult Idyll of My Sole and Only Love Affair I am Disowned by My Family
The afternoon that I was released from the prison of Gerona I reached Figueras just at dinner time and I remember that I ate eggplant as a vegetable. Immediately after, I went to the movies. The news of my liberation had spread through the town, and when they saw me come in I received a veritable ovation.
A few days later we left for Cadaques, where I became an “ascetic” once more, and where I literally gave myself over body and soul to painting and to my philosophic research. The memory of my beginnings of debauchery in Madrid accentuated the severity of my new habits, while giving them that touch of grace appropriate to one who for a moment has held in his own hand the panting bird of a recent and exotic vital experience. I knew, moreover, that I was going to return to Madrid, once my probationary period was over. I should then have a chance to continue experiments of that kind there. But now, the earlier I got up in the morning, the more vigorously I streaked my paper with the hard point of my pencil to transmit to it the fundamental flow of my thoughts, the more capable I was of resisting all the temptations of my body, the more I could canalize the forces of my libido and let them swell the combative forces that struggle, remain and triumph in the crusade of intelligence that should lead me some day to the conquest of the kingdom of my own soul; the more capable I was of impoverishing myself and renouncing my body, the more quickly I would age.
At the end of that summer, which was extremely hot, I had grown thin as a skeleton. My body was absent from my personality, so to speak, and I felt myself turning into one of those fantastic figures of Hieronymus Bosch, of whom Philip II was so passionately fond. I was in fact a kind of monster whose sole anatomical parts were an eye, a hand and a brain.
In my family it was a long-established Sunday habit to drink coffee after the mid-day meal, and to take half a tiny glass of chartreuse. I always respected this limit. But once, on one of those very calm afternoons of Cadaques when the sky and the sea intermingle in what the natives call a “white calm,” I mechanically filled my small glass to the edge, and the chartreuse even overflowed a little onto the tablecloth. “What are you doing?” my father exclaimed with alarm. “Don’t you know that that’s a very strong drink?” Pretending that I recognized the imprudence I had just committed, I poured half my glass back into the bottle.
My father settled down to enjoy the sleep of the just. As for me—who knows what I was thinking?... But, as in the case of my “Parsifal,” it is better that there should still remain some impenetrable secrets for my readers, for such secrets will be very useful to me for future editions of this book—corrected and augmented. And if it is meritorious on my part to offer myself body and soul, torn into shreds, for the curiosity of my contemporaries by giving them a unique document for scientific investigation, it is also perfectly legitimate, it seems to me, that I should anticipate the future commercial problems inherent in this question, while incidentally taking advantage of the present occasion tactfully and prudently to begin to give it publicity.
When my disciplinary period had expired, I returned to Madrid where I was awaited with delirious impatience by my group, who confessed that without me “things had not been the same.” They were all disoriented, lost and dead of an imaginative famine which I alone was capable of placating. I was acclaimed, I was looked after, I was coddled. I became their divinity. They did everything for me, they bought me shoes, ordered special neckties, reserved seats for me at the theatre, packed my suitcases, watched over my health, my moods, submitted to all my whims, went forth like squadrons of cavalry to overcome the practical dragons that stood in the way of the realization of my most impossible
fantasies.
My father, since the experience of the first year, now gave me no more than a modest monthly sum, ludicrously inadequate to the style of living which my orgiastic recrudescence was going to require. But he continued innocently to pay all my bills as in the past. It will not be difficult for my readers, however, to understand that as far as I was concerned this amounted to the same thing. Moreover, my group at that moment helped me financially. Each one had his own way of getting hold of a considerable sum of money when the situation demanded. One would pawn a ring with a magnificent diamond which had been a family gift; another would manage, by a miracle, to mortgage a large piece of property which he had not yet inherited; a third would sell his car to defray the expenses of two or three days of our existence. We also took advantage of the halo of “rich men’s sons” which surrounded us to borrow money from the most unbelievable people. We would make up a detailed list of them, after which we would draw lots. Each of us was supposed to call upon a different person. We would take two taxis. One of us would go into the café that our victim frequented or climb up to his apartment. Sometimes we would have no success, and then we would go on and try the next one. By the end of the day we actually managed to get together a considerable sum, often beyond all our hopes. And this is saying a good deal, in view of our insatiable cupidity. From time to time we would return the money to the persons who had lent us the most substantial sums, and this made it easy for us to ask them for some again. We thus created the habit of confidence which, sooner or later, was in turn to fail. For the most part the large loans were in time reimbursed by our parents, who eventually, after our creditors’ patient waiting had been hopelessly exhausted, received on their heads a shower of demands for payment. But our real victims were our most modest and generous friends, who lent us money not because of the confidence with which we inspired them, but through sympathy, affection, and especially admiration, which we aroused in them through our feats of intelligence. For the sole sake of making them pay dearly for a moment of our conversation we would put on an act in which we were not above resorting to cheap histrionic effects. “We’ve been robbed!” I would cynically exclaim after receiving the loan of a sum of money. “That remark I made about realism and Catholicism alone is worth five times this amount!” The worst of it was that I really believed our behavior was honorable, and we had absolutely no scruples about it.
One evening I was the victim of the confidences of an artist who expressed the most complete admiration for my work. Naïvely and without the slightest reticence, he poured out his heart to me, revealing in the details of his story a case of spiritual poverty which rivalled his pecuniary poverty. He seemed to believe that after having told his story he would be able to achieve, if not a perfect communion of souls, at least a communication of ideas, an interchange of feelings which might not perhaps bring much light to his troubled spirit but which would at least console him, through my comprehension of his multiple torments, and that if my commiseration became propitious, he might even ask me for a little financial aid.
“Well,” he said, when he came at last to the end of his story, with tears in his eyes and depressed by my long and expressionless silence, “that’s how it is with me! How is it with you?”
“With me? I command a very high price,” I answered slowly, and as I did so I was looking across at one of the towers of the Palace of Communications in which I remember that a window opened at that very moment, letting fall from its height a whitish object which I watched as it fell.
Receiving no answer to my remark I turned my head to look at the man. His face was hidden in a dubiously clean handkerchief and he was weeping. I had sacrificed him! Yet another victim to the growing dandyism of my mind. I felt a burst of pity, and was about to make a move toward him and console him in a brotherly way. But the esthetics of my attitude commanded me to act in just the opposite way. To make matters worse, the wretched state of his person communicated to me a physical repugnance which would have cut short any attempt at a warm effusion.
I said to him then, after having placed a friendly hand on one of his sunken shoulders, covered with dandruff from his rat’s hair,
“Why don’t you try to hang yourself?... Or throw yourself from the top of a tower?”
And as I left him standing there I thought of that whitish bundle that had just fallen from one of the windows of the Palace of Communications. Was it Maldoror? 1 The shadow of Maldoror hovered over my life, and it was just at this period that for the duration of an eclipse precisely another shadow, that of Federico Garcia Lorca, came and darkened the virginal originality of my spirit and of my flesh.
During this time I knew several elegant women on whom my hateful cynicism desperately grazed for moral and erotic fodder. I avoided Lorca and the group, which grew to be his group more and more. This was the culminating moment of his irresistible personal influence—and the only moment in my life when I thought I glimpsed the torture that jealousy can be. Sometimes we would be walking, the whole group of us, along El Paseo de la Castellana on our way to the cafe where we held our usual literary meetings and where I knew Lorca would shine like a mad and fiery diamond. Suddenly I would set off at a run, and no one would see me for three days... No one has ever been able to tear from me the secret of these flights, and I don’t intend to unveil it now—at least not yet...
I shall only tell you that one of my favorite games at this time was to dip bank notes into my whiskey until they began to disintegrate. This involved a long ceremonial which would dumfound those who happened to witness it. I loved to practice this trick while I argued, with a refined avarice, about the price of one of those modest demi-mondaines who offer themselves to you body and soul, saying “Give me whatever you like!”
At the end of a year of libertinism I received notice of my permanent expulsion from the Academy of Fine Arts. This time the matter appeared in an official announcement in La Gaceta, as an order signed by the king, on October 20th, 1926. The story of this incident has been faithfully reported in one of the anecdotes which I have chosen for my anecdotic self-portrait.
This time my “expulsion” in no way astonished me. Any committee of professors, in any country in the world, would have done the same on feeling themselves thus insulted. The motives for my action were simple: I wanted to have done with the School of Fine Arts and with the orgiastic life of Madrid once and for all; I wanted to be forced to escape all that and come back to Figueras to work for a year, after which I would try to convince my father that my studies should be continued in Paris. Once there, with the work that I would bring, I would definitely seize power!
But before leaving Madrid I wanted to savor that last evening alone. I ambled through hundreds of streets that I had never seen. In one afternoon I squeezed out to the last drop the whole substance of that city, where the people, the aristocracy and pre-history know no transition. It shone beneath the concise and limpid October light, like an immense peeled bone faintly tinted with blood-pink. In the evening I went and sat down in my favorite corner of the Rector’s Club, and contrary to my habit I drank just two sober whiskeys. Nevertheless I was one of the last to leave, and I was assailed by a trembling little old woman in rags who persecuted me with her insistent begging. I paid no attention to her and continued on my way. When I got as far as the Bank of Spain, with the beggar-woman still trailing me, I ran into a very beautiful young woman who offered me gardenias. I gave her a hundred pesetas and took all she had. Then, turning round, I made a present of them to the old beggar-woman. She remained for a long time glued to the spot like a statue of salt. I walked on slowly for several minutes, and when I again turned round I could barely make out in the moonlight a little black mass with a white smudge in the middle which was all I could see of the basket filled with flowers which I had left in her hands—hands gnarled like vine-stalks and covered with sores.
The following day I was too lazy to pack my suitcases, and left with all my luggage empty. My arrival in Figueras cause
d a general consternation in my family: expelled, and without even a clean shirt to change into! Good heavens, what would happen to my future! To console them all, I kept telling them,
“I swear to you I was convinced I had packed all my suitcases, but I must have confused it with the last time”—I was referring to my return home two years before.
On my arrival in Figueras I found my father thunderstruck by the catastrophe of my expulsion, which had shattered all his hopes that I might succeed in an official career. With my sister, he posed for a pencil drawing which was one of my most successful of this period. In the expression of my father’s face can be seen the mark of the pathetic bitterness which my expulsion from the Academy had produced on him.
At the same time that I was doing these more and more rigorous drawings, I executed a series of mythological paintings in which I tried to draw positive conclusions from my cubist experience by linking its lesson of geometric order to the eternal principles of tradition. I took part in several collective expositions in Madrid and in Barcelona, and had a one-man exposition in the Gallery of Dalmau, who was the Barcelonian patriarch of advance-guardism and who looked as though he might have just stepped out of a painting by El Greco.
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Page 27