“This can’t last forever. You know that I must live alone!”
Gala left me at Figueras and continued her voyage to Paris.
In my father’s dining-room the storm broke–a storm created wholly by myself over the slightest of my father’s complaints. He was brokenhearted at the more and more lofty and inconsiderate way I had of treating my family. The question of money was brought up. I had in fact signed a two-year contract with the Goemans Gallery, but I could not manage to remember what the terms were, and in thinking it over more carefully, I could not even say whether the contract was for two or three years, or perhaps for one! My father begged me to try to find it. I said that I did not know where I had put it, and that I wanted to put off looking for it for three days, when I would be going to Cadaques, and that there I would have plenty of time to do it. I said also that I had spent all the money Geomans had advanced me. This bowled my family over completely. I then began to rummage in my pockets, and pulled out a bank note here and another there, half torn and so crumpled and bedraggled that they were certainly not usable. Everything in the way of small change I had thrown into the garden of a square before the station, not to be burdened by it. In a few moments of ransacking my pockets 1 had managed to gather together three thousand francs, which were left over from my trip.
The following day Luis Bunuel arrived in Figueras, having just received an order from the Vicomte de Noailles to make a film exactly according to our two fancies. I learned also that the same Vicomte de Noailles had bought Le Jeu Lugubre, and that almost all the rest of the paintings of my exhibit had been sold at prices that ranged between six and twelve thousand francs.
I left for Cadaques dizzy with my success, and began the film L’Age d’Or (The Golden Age). My mind was already set on doing something that would translate all the violence of love, impregnated with the splendor of the creations of Catholic myths. Even at this period I was wonderstruck and dazzled and obsessed by the grandeur and the sumptuousness of Catholicism. I said to Bunuel,
“For this film I want a lot of archbishops, bones and monstrances. I want especially archbishops with their embroidered tiaras bathing amid the rocky cataclysms of Cape Creus.”
Bunuel, with his naïveté and his Aragonese stubbornness, deflected all this toward an elementary anti-clericalism. I had always to stop him and say,
“No, no! No comedy. I like all this business of the archbishops; in fact, I like it enormously. Let’s have a few blasphematory scenes, if you will, but it must be done with the utmost fanaticism to achieve the grandeur of a true and authentic sacrilege!”
Bunuel left, taking with him the notes on which we had collaborated. He was going to begin to get L’Age d’Or into production so that it could start simmering, and I would come later.
I thus remained all alone in the house in Cadaques. In the winter sun I would eat at one sitting three dozen sea-urchins with wine, or five or six chops fried on a fire of vinestalks. In the evening a fish soup and cod with tomato, or else a good big fried sea-perch with fennel. One noonday while I was opening an urchin I saw before me a white cat. He had something coming out of one eye which flashed like quicksilver in the sun at each of its movements. I stopped eating my urchin and approached the cat. The cat did not move; on the contrary it continued to look at me all the more intently. Then I saw what it was: the cat’s eye was completely pierced through with a large fishhook, the point of which emerged from one side of its dilated and blood-shot pupil. It was frightful to see, and especially to imagine the impossibility of extracting this fish-hook without emptying the eye itself. I threw rocks at it to rid myself of the sight that filled me with an unspeakable horror. But the following days just at the moments of my greatest enjoyment20 and when it was most intolerable–as with a piece of well-toasted bread I was getting ready to empty an urchin shell of its palpitating coral–the apparition of the white cat with its eye pierced through with the silvery hook stopped my gluttonous gesture in an attitude of anguished paralysis. I finally became convinced that this cat was an omen.
A few days later I received a letter from my father notifying me of my irrevocable banishment from the bosom of my family. I do not wish to unveil here the secret which was at the root of such a decision, for this secret concerns only my father and myself, and I have no intention of reopening a wound which kept us apart for six long years and made both of us suffer so greatly. When I received this letter, my first reaction was to cut off all my hair. But I did more than this–I had my head completely shaved. I went and buried the pile of my black hair in a hole I had dug on the beach for this purpose, and in which I interred at the same time the pile of empty shells of the urchins I had eaten at noon. Having done this I climbed up on a small hill from which one overlooks the whole village of Cadaques, and there, sitting under the olive trees, I spent two long hours contemplating that panorama of my childhood, of my adolescence, and of my present.
The same evening I ordered a taxi which would fetch me the next day and take me to the frontier where I would board a train straight for Paris. I had a breakfast composed of sea-urchins, toast and a little very bitter red wine. While waiting for the taxi, which was late in coming, I observed the shadow of my profile that fell on a white-washed wall. I took a sea-urchin, placed it on my head, and stood at attention before my shadow–William Tell.
The road that goes from Cadaques and leads toward the mountain pass of Peni makes a series of twists and turns, from each of which the village of Cadaques can be seen, receding farther into the distance. One of these turns is the last from which one can still see Cadaques, which has become a tiny speck. The traveler who loves this village then in-voluntarily looks back, to cast upon it a last friendly glance of leave-taking filled with a sober and effusive promise of return. Never had I neglected to turn around for this last glance at Cadaques. But on this day, when the taxi came to the bend in the road, instead of turning my head I continued to look straight before me.
1 See footnote to page 209.
2 Just recently, in writing the preface to the catalogue of my last New York exhibit, which I signed with my pseudonym Jacinto Felipe, I felt that I needed, among other things, to have someone write a pamphlet on me bearing a title something like “Anti-Surrealist Dali.” For various reasons I needed this type of “passport,” for I am myself too much of a diplomat to be the first to pronounce such a judgment. The article was not long in appearing (the title was approximately the one I had chosen), and it appeared in a modest but attractive review edited by the young poet Charles Henri Ford.
3 Miro, I remember, told me the marseillais story of the owl. Someone had promised to bring his friend a parrot on his return from America. Back in Marseilles he suddenly realized that he had forgotten his promise. He caught an owl, painted it green and presented it to his friend. After some time the two friends met. The returned traveler slyly asked, “How is the parrot I gave you? Does he talk yet?” And the other answered, “Talk, no. But he thinks a great deal.”
4 The Comte de Lautréamont, whose real name was Isidore Ducasse (1846-1870). His Chants de Maldoror, a fantastic, poetic, and highly neurotic novel, has had an enormous influence on surrealism.—Translator’s Note.
5 A word in artists’ slang to refer to painters under contract with a dealer.
6 Popular song of Aragon of exemplary racial violence.
7 When a war breaks out, especially a civil war, it would be possible to foresee almost immediately which side will win and which side lose. Those who will win have an iron health from the beginning, and the others become more and more sick. The ones can eat anything, and they always have magnificent digestions. The others, on the other hand, become deaf or covered with boils, get elephantiasis, and in short are unable to benefit by anything they eat. A rigorously controlled statistical study along this line could not fail to be of the highest scientific interest.
8 This work, unusual and disconcerting in the highest degree, was by the very physiology of its elaboration far r
emoved from the “Dadaist collage,” which is always a poetic and a posteriori arrangement. It was also the contrary of Chirico’s metaphysical painting, for here the spectator had perforce to believe in the earthy reality of the subject, which was of an elementary and frenzied biological nature. And it was furthermore the contrary of the poetic softening of certain abstract paintings which continue stupidly, like blind moths, to bump into the extinguished lamps of the neo-Platonic light.
I, then, and only I was the true surrealist painter, at least according to the definition which its chief, André Breton, gave of surrealism. Nevertheless, when Breton saw this painting he hesitated for a long time before its scatological elements—for in the picture appeared a figure seen from behind whose drawers were bespattered with excrement. The involuntary aspect of this element, so characteristic in psychopathological iconography, should have sufficed to enlighten him. But I was obliged to justify myself by saying that it was merely a simulacrum. No further questions were asked. But had I been pressed I should certainly have had to answer that it was the simulacrum of the excrement itself. This idealistic narrowness was from my point of view the fundamental “intellectual vice” of the early period of surrealism. Hierarchies were established where there was no need for any. Between the excrement and a piece of rock crystal, by the very fact that they both sprang from the common basis of the unconscious, there could and should be no difference in category. And these were the men who denied the hierarchies of tradition!
9 After this “hallucination” which I can completely vouch for on my own testimony, here are two further incidents of the same nature, which I have on authority which I consider as good as my own, for they were related to me by my father, who is the last person in the world to be given to this kind of thing. He explained to me that when I was barely three years old I happened to be sitting and playing on a large, completely deserted terrace. Several members of my family observed the interest and satisfaction I showed in my game, which consisted in piling together and tapping little clods of dirt. Suddenly it appears that I stopped my game and looked in front of me, where there was nothing but empty space, and drew back seized with such a violent fright that I did not stop weeping the rest of the morning. All those who witnessed this scene were convinced that I had had a terrifying apparition. The other incident occurred in our house in Cadaques. We were getting ready to go out on a boat ride one day. At the last moment my father went back into the house to get a handkerchief. He had only been inside the house a few moments when he came out again, pale and upset, and explained to us that just as he came into the dining room he heard little footsteps of someone coming down the stairs. He immediately recognized these steps by their characteristic slow, light tread. He looked toward the door and there on the threshold he did in fact see my grandmother (who had been dead for eight years), carrying a little basket with clothes to be mended. She went down the remaining three steps and disappeared from sight without vanishing into thin air.
10 I did not succeed in this. Political preoccupations almost immediately ruined the activity of the surrealists like a cancer. They adopted my slogans, for they were the only clairvoyant ones, but this did not suffice to inject vigor into the movement. I saw that henceforth I would have to conquer or die without being helped by anyone.
11 My relatives still call me a child.
12 Gradiva, the novel by W. Jensen, interpreted by Sigmund Freud (Der Wahn und die Träume). Gradiva is the heroine of this novel, and she effects the psychological cure of the other, the male protagonist. When I began to read this novel, even before coming upon Freud’s interpretation, I exclaimed, “Gala, my wife, is essentially a Gradiva.”
13 A very precise study of the wax candle, written in 1929, led me to the conclusion that this object lends itself to a whole series of symbolic situations in which non-terrorizíng unconscious representations of intestinal and digestive metaphors lead to the apotheosis of human waste matter–the turd.
14 The author is here referring to the formerly very wide-spread method of weaning children by coating the nursing mother’s nipples with a substance of disagreeable taste.–Translator’s note.
15 Indeed, the heroine who invented the wax manikin with the sugar nose glued on it created a surprising “surrealist object functioning symbolically” (of the type of those I myself was to reinvent in i93o in Paris). This anthropomorphic object was destined to be “activated” by the blow of a sword and, by the leap of the nose into the mouth of the necrophile who was to operate it, to release phantasms and representations of life among the nostalgic sentiments of unconscious copro-necrophilism.
16 Zoe Bertrand is the real protagonist, the double of the mythological image of Gradiva, in the novel by Jensen referred to in a previous note (p. 233).
17 The manner in which the torrero dodges the bull with feints which he makes with his cape.
18 A Catalonian song.
19 I call my wife: Gala, Galuchka, Gradiva (because she has been my Gradiva), Olive (because of the oval of her face and the color of her skin), Olivette, the Catalonian diminutive of olive; and its delirious derivatives, Olihuette, Orihuette, Buribette, Burihueteta, Sulihueta, Solibubulete, Oliburibuleta, Cihueta, Lihuetta. I also call her Lionete (little lion), because she roars like the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion when she gets angry; Squirrel, Tapir, Little Negus (because she resembles a lively little forest animal); Bee (because she discovers and brings me all the essences that become converted into the honey of my thought in the busy hive of my brain). She brought me the rare book on magic that was to nourish my magic, the historic document irrefutably proving my thesis as it was in the process of elaboration, the paranoiac image that my subconscious wished for, the photograph of an unknown painting destined to reveal a new esthetic enigma, the advice that would save one of my too subjective images from romanticism. I also call Gala Noisette Poilue–Hairy Hazlenut (because of the very fine down that covers the hazlenut of her cheeks); and also “Fur Bell” (because she reads to me aloud during my long sessions of painting, making a murmur as of a fur bell by virtue of which I learn all the things that but for her I should never know).
20 The taste that I like best in the world is that of the very red and full rock-urchins that are to be found during the May moon in the Mediterranean. My father too loves this food, in an even more exaggerated way than I.
PART III
CHAPTER TEN
Beginnings in Society Crutches - Aristocracy Hotel du Chateau in Carry-le-Rouet Lydia - Port Lligat Inventions - Malaga Poverty - L’age D’or
No sooner had I arrived in Paris than I was in a great hurry to leave again. I wanted to begin as soon as possible the pictorial investigations of which I had conceived the idea in Cadaques just at the time when my repudiation by my family occurred, paralyzing the course of my projects.
I wanted to paint nothing less than an “invisible man,” but to do this I wanted to go away somewhere to the country again. But also I definitely wanted to take Gala along. The idea that in my own room where I was going to work there might be a woman, a real woman who moved, with senses, body hair and gums, suddenly struck me as so seductive that it was difficult for me to believe this could be realized. However, Gala was quite ready to go with me, and we were in the midst of deciding where we should go. Meanwhile–timidly and as if by chance–I tossed a certain number of bold slogans into the bosom of the surrealist group in order to test their demoralizing effect during my absence. I upheld “Raymond Roussel as against Rimbaud; the modern-style object as against the African object; still-life deception as against plastic art; imitation as against interpretation.”
All this, I knew, would suffice for several years, and I purposely gave very few explanations. At this time I had not yet become a “talker,” and I uttered only the strictly necessary words, words intended solely to annoy everyone. The remnants of my pathological timidity edged my character with extremely uncommunicative features, features so abrupt that I was in effect conscious that people wou
ld look forward nervously to the infrequent occasions when I would open my mouth. Then, with a remark that was terribly crude and charged with Spanish fanaticism, I would express all that my pent-up eloquence had accumulated during the painful and prolonged silences, when my polemic impatience would undergo the hundred and one martyrdoms of that French conversation, so sprinkled with “esprit” and good sense that it often manages to conceal its lack of bony structure and of substance.
On one occasion I had to listen to an art critic who was constantly talking about matter–the “matter” of Courbet, how he spread out his “matter,” how he felt at home in handling his “matter.”
“Have you ever tried to eat it?” I finally asked.
Becoming wittily French, I added, “When it comes to s–t, I still prefer Chardin’s.”
One evening I was having dinner at the Vicomte de Noailles’. Their house intimidated me, and I was extremely flattered to see my painting The Lugubrious Game hung between a Cranach and a Watteau. At this dinner there were artists and society people, and I immediately realized that I was the chief object of attraction. I believe that the Noailles were deeply touched by my timidity. Each time the wine-butler came and whispered the name and the year of the wine into my ear with an air of great secretiveness, I thought it was something very serious that he had come discreetly to tell me–Gala run over by a taxi, or a furious surrealist who was coming to beat me up–and I would turn livid, leap up and prepare to leave the table. Then, in a louder voice so as to reassure me, and looking with the utmost dignified intentness at the bottle lying prone in the little basket, the butler would repeat “Romanée 1923.” At one gulp I would drink down this wine that had just so terrified me and thanks to which I recovered my hope of overcoming my timidity and of being able to talk.
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Page 34