I have always admired–and I did so particularly at this time–the person who, without having anything really sensational or important to say, manages throughout a whole dinner of twenty people to steer the conversation in whatever direction he chooses, to make himself heard in the midst of a general silence at the right moments without having to stop eating–in fact, eating more than the next fellow–and still has time for an occasional slyly calculated pause during which he gracefully and self-confidently stops the flow of his conversation just long enough to brush aside the danger of anyone’s taking advantage of his absorption to kindle fresh hearths of conversation, or–in the extreme case in which this should occur–is able to extinguish them at the desired moment without seeming to make the slightest effort, and at the same time give the recalcitrant ones the impression, when he interrupts their incipient conversation against their will, that it is they who are interrupting by asking him in a voice that verges on the impolite to repeat his last remarks so that they can follow the course of his argument in which they have not the slightest interest.
In the course of this first dinner at the Noailles’ I discovered two things. First, that the aristocracy–what was then called “society”—was infinitely more vulnerable to my system of ideas than the artists, and especially the intellectuals. Indeed “society people” still wore clinging to their personalities the dose of atavism, of civilization, of refinement which the generation of the middle class with advanced social ideas had just joyfully sacrificed as a holocaust to the “young” ideologies with collectivist tendencies. The second thing I discovered was the climbers, those little sharks frantically scrambling for success, who with their assiduous flattery, their intriguing and competitive gossiping anxiety crowd around all the tables covered with the best crystals and the best silverware. I decided that I would thenceforth have to make use of these two kinds of discoveries–of society people to keep me, and of the climbers to open a way of prestige for me with the blundering calumnies of their jealousy. I have never feared gossip. I let it build up. All climbers work and sweat at it. When finally they hand it to me as complete, I look at it, I examine it, and I always end by finding a way to turn it to my advantage. The activity of the malicious creatures who surround one is a force capable by itself alone of launching the vessel of one’s glory. The important thing is never to relinquish the wheel for a moment. Climber-ism is not interesting. The interesting thing is to arrive–just as looking for a watch is not interesting–the interesting thing is to find it
That I had reached fame I felt and knew the moment I landed at the Gare d’Orsay in Paris. But I had reached it without realizing it, and so quickly that I found myself all alone, without being known to anyone and without passport or baggage. I would therefore have to go back and fetch them, and hire porters. I would have to go and have my documents visaed, and I realized that with all this bureaucratic red tape I risked wasting the rest of my life. I therefore began to look around me, and from then on I regarded most of the people I met solely and exclusively as creatures I could use as porters in my voyages of ambition. Almost all these porters sooner or later became exhausted. Unable to endure the long marches that I forced on them at top speed and under all climatic conditions they died on the way. I took others. To attach them to my service, I promised to get them to where I myself was going, to that end-station of glory which climbers desperately want to reach. But as I have already said, I did not want to arrive, “I was going there.”
How was I going to succeed in making society people come to my support? It was childishly simple. I was going to succeed by having them come and lean on me. What are society people? Society people are people who, instead of standing on the world with both feet, balance themselves on a single foot, like storks. This involves an aristocratic attitude by which they wish to show that, while having to remain standing in order to continue to see everything from above, they like to touch the common base of the world only by what is strictly necessary in order to continue to maintain their equilibrium. This exhaustingly egocentric posture often needs support, and it is because of this that society people habitually surround themselves with a crowd of “unijambists” to lean on, who, assuming the diverse forms of pederastic and drug-addicted artists, come by turns and serve as support for the untenable attitude of an aristocracy which at this time was already beginning to feel the first jostlings of the “People’s Front.”
Such being the case, I decided to join forces with the group of invalids whose snobbism propped up a decadent aristocracy which still stuck to its traditional attitude. But I had the original idea of not coming with empty hands, like all the rest. I arrived, in fact, with my arms loaded with crutches! One thing I realized immediately. It would take quantities and quantities of crutches to give a semblance of solidity to all that. And I inaugurated the “pathetic crutch,” the prop of the first crime of my childhood, as the all-powerful and exclusivist post-war symbol–crutches to support the monstrous development of certain atmospheric-cephalic skulls, crutches immobilize the ecstasy of certain attitudes of rare elegance, crutches to make architectural and durable the fugitive pose of a choreographic leap, to pin the ephemeral butterfly of the dancer with pins that would keep her poised for eternity. Crutches, crutches, crutches, crutches.
I even invented a tiny facial crutch of gold and rubies. Its bifurcated part was flexible and was intended to hold up and fit the tip of the nose. The other end was softly rounded and was designed to lean on the central hollow above the upper lip. It was therefore a nose crutch, an absolutely useless kind of object to appeal to the snobbism of certain criminally elegant women, just as some beings wear monocles without having any other need of them than to feel the sacred tug of their exhibitionism incrusted in the flesh of their own face.
My symbol of the crutch so adequately fitted and continues to fit into the unconscious myths of our epoch that, far from tiring us, this fetish has come to please everyone more and more. And curiously enough, the more crutches I put everywhere, so that one would have thought people had at last become bored by or inured to this object, the more everyone wondered with whetted curiosity, “Why so many crutches?” When I had made my first attempt at keeping the aristocracy standing upright by propping it with a thousand crutches, I looked it in the face and said to it honestly,
“Now I am going to give you a terrible kick in the leg.”
The aristocracy drew up a little more the leg that it kept lifted, like a stork.
“Go ahead,” it answered, and gritted its teeth to endure the pain stoically, without a cry.
Then, using all my might, I gave it a terrific kick right in the shin. It did not budge. I had therefore propped it well.
“Thank you,” it said to me.
“Never fear,” I answered as I left, kissing its hand, “I’ll be back. With the pride of your one leg and the crutches of my intelligence, you are stronger than the revolution that is being prepared by the intellectuals, whom I know intimately. You are old, and dead with fatigue, and you have fallen from your high place, but the spot where your foot is soldered to the earth is tradition. If you should happen to die, I would come at once and place my own foot in that very imprint of tradition which has been yours, and immediately I would curl up my other leg like a stork. I am ready and able to grow old in this attitude, without tiring.”
The aristocratic regime has in fact been one of my passions, and already at that period I thought a great deal about the possibility of giving back to this class of the elite a historic consciousness of the role which it would inevitably be called upon to play in the ultra-individualist Europe that would emerge from the present war. For had I written down all my previsions of the events which were to overwhelm the world during the following years, people would indeed have been obliged to acknowledge my prophetic gift. At any rate, all my friends of good faith who since 1929 have followed and been able to verify the accuracy of most of my predictions are ready to testify to the almost literal fulfillment
of events which, at the moment they were announced, were always considered as paradoxical, without real basis, and indicative only of a sense of humor of the most sombre kind.
In 1929 I predicted things which, to be sure, are still far from having been realized: that the period of the “masses,” of “collectivism” and of mechanism which would be unleashed by the post-war revolutionary ideologies after these had devoured the democracies with their new totalitarian life, must lead to a European war out of which, after a thousand miseries and vicissitudes, only an individualist tradition that would be Catholic, aristocratic, and probably monarchic could arise anew from the bosom of an impoverished society. These things were listened to by no one, and I must say that I myself did not pay too much attention to them, letting them drop at random, rather through love of adventure than for any other reason.
While waiting for the fulfillment of all these prophecies, while waiting for the surrealists to begin to digest the short sentences that I had tossed them, while waiting for the climbers to busy themselves about doing me injury, while waiting for society people to begin to want me, I left for the Côte d’Azur. Gala knew a solitary hotel where no one could come and ferret us out. It was the Hotel du Château at Carry-le-Rouet. We took two large rooms there, in one of which I set up my studio. We had the hallway stacked with wood, so that our fireplace would never for a moment be without a fire–and so that no one could come and disturb us on the pretext of bringing us wood. I set up an electric light which lighted just my painting, leaving the rest of the room almost in darkness, and I had given orders never to open the shutters. We often had our meals brought up to the room; at other times we would go down into the dining room; but for two months we did not once go outdoors!
IX. Dalinian Eccentricities Not to be Further Imitated
Mannequin rotting in a taxicab, where an interior rainfall had been installed. Three hundred Burgundy snails lived for a month in the “rainy taxi.”
Dali disguised as the “Angelus” of Millet.
A woman walking through London wearing a mask made of roses, as shown in one of Dali’s paintings.
Image shown by Dali in a Congress of Architects, as a prototype of the soft architecture of the future.
Mannequin with a real loaf of bread on her head. Picasso visited the exhibition, and his dog leaped at the loaf of bread and devoured it.
Beginning in 1940, Dali came to consider the eccentric period as closed, and thought it time for the world to enter upon an era of fasting and austerity.
X. The Strangest Distortions in the Whole History of Art
“The Ghost of Vermeer”–which may be used as a table.
“The Cranial Harp.”
“Myself at the Age of Ten, when I was the Grasshopper Child.”
“The Enigma of William Tell.”
Sculpture of an “Aerodynamic Woman.”
“Incomprehensible Object.”
African Lion. It was in hearing a lion roar at the Zoo in Barcelona that I conceived these distortions whose prolonged appendix forms represent in my aesthetic system something like the “cavernous roarings of form.” (Courtesy: American Museum of Natural History; N. Y.)
This period has remained engraved in Gala’s and my memory as one of the most active, exciting and frenzied periods of our lives. And several times, during those long reveries which come over one on train-trips, just at the moment when each of us seemed to be wandering in the most distant of his memories, it has happened that both of us would exclaim at once, “You remember the time at Carry-le-Rouet?”
After two months of voluntary confinement, during which I knew and consummated love with the same speculative fanaticism that I put into my work, The Invisible Man was only half completed. But in his smile Gala already saw the same road full of difficulties leading to success that the cards predicted each time she consulted them. I believed blindly in the cards that Gala interpreted. Every evening I asked her to read them, and after this the slightest spells of anxiety which occasionally came and gnawed at my happiness vanished instantly.
For several days the cards had announced a letter from a dark man, and money. The letter arrived, and it was from the Vicomte de Noailles. The Goemans Gallery was on the verge of bankruptcy, and he offered to help me financially to free me from the least uneasiness on this score. He suggested that I pay him a visit; his car would come and fetch me on a day that I was to set. It was just two months to the day since we had come to the Hôtel du Château, and we decided to go out for a little walk, during which we would examine the situation. I remember that we were overwhelmed by the dazzling brilliance of a sunny winter morning. Our complexions were cadaverous, and we had great difficulty in getting used to the light after our two months of almost continuous darkness. The heat of the sun seemed a delight such as we had never experienced, and we decided to eat outside. For the first time, too, we took wine with our meals. By the time we got to the coffee our decision had been made. Gala would go to Paris to try to get some money that the gallery owed us. I would go and visit the Vicomte de Noailles in his Château de Saint Bernard at Hyères. I would offer to do an important picture for him for which he would pay me twenty-nine thousand francs in advance. With this, and the money Gala had at her disposal, we would go to Cadaques and build a small house just big enough for the two of us. This would permit us to work and to escape Paris from time to time. I like only the landscape of Cadaques, and I would not even look at any other.
Gala left for Paris, and I for the Noailles’, who were enchanted by my proposal. On the same day that Gala returned from Paris, I got back from Hyères. She brought the money, and I had received the check. I spent the whole afternoon looking at the check, and for the first time I had the suspicion that money was a rather important thing. We started off again for Spain, and there began the period of my life which I consider the most romantic, the hardest, the most intense, the most breathless, and also the one that “surprised” me most, for favorable hazards have always seemed to me to be my due–and suddenly it looked as though my good luck were going to end, to spoil.
Now began the brutal battle that I was to wage against life, and which until then I had always thought I would be able to elude. I had in fact until then known no other obstacles or constraints than those of my own imagination. All the odds had been on my side. Love too had served me–it had cured me of my approaching madness, and I adored it to the point of driving it mad. But suddenly I was going to return to Cadaques where, instead of being the son of Dali the notary, I would be the disgraced son, disowned by his family, and living with a Russian woman to whom I was not married!
How were we going to organize our life in Cadaques? There was only one person on whom we could count–Lydia, “La Ben Plantada.”1 Lydia was a woman of the village, the widow of Nando, “the good sailor with the blue eyes and the serene look.” Her age was about fifty. The writer Eugenio d’Ors had spent the summer once, when he was twenty, in the house that Lydia owned at that time. Lydia had a mind predisposed to poetry, and had been struck with wonder at the unintelligible conversations of the young Catalonian intellectuals. Sometimes when d’Ors was about to start out on a boat trip, accompanied by Lydia’s husband, he would shout to Lydia to bring him a glass of water, and in thanking her d’Ors had several times exclaimed,
“Just look at Lydia, how well planted she is!”
The following winter d’Ors published his famous book, La Ben Plantada, which was steeped in neo-Platonism, and Lydia immediately said, “That’s me.” She learned the book by heart, and began to write letters to d’Ors, in which symbols presently appeared with alarming abundance. D’Ors never answered these letters. But he was at this time writing his daily column in the Veu de Catalunya, and Lydia came to believe that this column of d’Ors’s was the detailed, though figurative, answer to her letters. She explained that this was d’Ors’s only recourse, for a lady whom Lydia had nicknamed “Mother of God of August,” and certain other ladies whom she had her reasons for c
onsidering her rivals, would with their perfidy have managed to intercept the correspondence. This obliged d’Ors to speak in a veiled manner and, like herself, to express all his sentiments in a more and more figurative way. Lydia possessed the most marvelously paranoiac brain aside from my own that I have ever known. She was capable of establishing completely coherent relations between any subject whatsoever and her obsession of the moment with sublime disregard of everything else, and with a choice of detail and a play of wit so subtle and so calculatingly resourceful that it was often difficult not to agree with her on questions which one knew to be utterly absurd. She would interpret d’Ors’s articles as she went along with such felicitous discoveries of coincidence and plays on words that one could not fail to wonder at the bewildering imaginative violence with which the paranoiac spirit can project the image of our inner world upon the outer world, no matter where or in what form or on what pretext. The most unbelievable coincidences would arise in the course of this amorous correspondence, which I have several times used as a model for my own writings.
On one occasion d’Ors wrote an ultra-intellectual critical article entitled Poussin and El Greco. That evening Lydia arrived, triumphantly waving from afar the newspaper in which the article had just appeared. She adjusted the folds of her skirt and sat down with that ceremonial air by which she indicated that there was a great deal to talk about, and that it was going to take a long time. Then, putting her hand up to her mouth confidentially, she said in a low voice,
“He begins his article with the end of my letter!”
It so happened that in her last letter she had alluded to two popular characters in Cadaques. One of them was called Pusa, and the other was a Greek deep-sea diver, who was surnamed “El Greco.” Hence the analogy was quite obvious, at least phonetically: Pusa and “El Greco”–Poussin and El Greco! But this was just the beginning, for Lydia took the esthetic and philosophic parallel which d’Ors established between the two painters as being the comparison she herself had made between Pusa and the Greek diver, elucidating it word by word in an interpretive delirium so systematic, coherent and dumfounding that she often verged on genius!
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Page 35