Gala was again unpacking our baggage, with the evident intention of staying, since we had received the money. But I said,
“We’re leaving for Paris!”
“Why? We can have the benefit of another two weeks here.”
“No! The other evening when I left slamming the door, I saw a slanting ray of sunlight pierce through a shred of cloud. Just at that moment I was in the act of ‘spending’ my vital fluid. It was after this that I broke my small tooth. You understand? I had just discovered in my own flesh the ‘grandiose myth’ of Danaë. I want to go to Paris, and I want to make thunder and rain. But this time it’s going to be gold! We must go to Paris and get our hands on the money we need to finish the work on our Port Lligat house!”
We went back to Paris, stopping only as long as we had to in Madrid and Barcelona, and two hours in Cadaques to go and look at the effect of our house for a moment. This effect was even poorer and more cramped than we had expected—it was practically nothing. But already in this almost nothing there was the mark of the fanaticism of the two of us, and for the first time I was able to observe a structural reality in which Gala’s clear, concrete and trenchant personality pierced through the defective delirium of my own. There were only the proportions of a door, a window and the four walls, and already it was heroic.
But true heroism awaited us in Paris, where Gala and I were to endure the hardest, tensest and proudest effort in the day-to-day defense of our personality. Everyone around us betrayed without greatness, the anecdote devoured the category, and as my name progressively affirmed itself with the indestructible grip of a cancer in the bosom of a society that did not want to hear about it, our practical life grew increasingly difficult. It was as if people were reacting to the horrible disease of my intellectual prestige, which was demolishing and destroying them, by communicating to me that disease of which they alone possessed the germs—the continual gnawing of “financial worries.” I preferred this disease to theirs. I knew it was curable.
Bunuel had just finished L’Age d’Or. I was terribly disappointed, for it was but a caricature of my ideas. The “Catholic” side of it had become crudely anticlerical, and without the biological poetry that I had desired. Nevertheless the film produced a considerable impression, especially the scene of unfulfilled love in which one saw the hero, in a state of collapse from unsatisfied desire, erotically sucking the marble big toe of an Apollo. Bunuel left post-haste for Hollywood with dreams of conquest, and the première of the film was performed without his presence.
The audience was almost wholly sympathetic to surrealism and the performance passed without notable incident. Only a few noisy laughs and a few protests, quickly drowned out by the frenzied applause of the majority of the hall, marked the passionate tension with which our work was received. But two days later there was a different story. At one point in the film there was a scene showing a luxurious car coming to a stop, a liveried servant opening the door and taking out a monstrance, which one saw, in a close-up, deposited on the edge of the sidewalk. A pair of very beautiful woman’s legs then appeared coming out of the car. At this moment, at a pre-arranged signal, an organized group of the “King’s Henchmen”6 proceeded to toss bottles full of black ink that went crashing into the screen. Simultaneously, to the cries of “Down with the Boches!” they fired their revolvers in the air, at the same time throwing stench and tear-gas bombs. The film had shortly to be stopped, while the audience was beaten with blackjacks by the Action Française demonstrators. The glass panes of all the doors of the theatre were smashed, the surrealist books and paintings exhibited in the lobby of the theatre (Studio 28) were completely wrecked. One of my canvases was miraculously saved by an usher, who when the fracas began, had seized it and thrown it into the lavatory. But the rest were mercilessly torn to shreds after the glass protecting them had been crushed by heels. When the police appeared the wreckage was complete.
The following day the scandal burst in all the papers, and it became one of the most sensational events of the Paris season. Fiery polemics broke out everywhere, leading to the complete banning of the film by special order of the police commissariat. For some time I had occasion to fear that I would be banished from France, but almost immediately there was a reaction of public opinion in favor of L’Age d’Or. Nevertheless everyone preserved a holy fear of undertaking anything with me. “With Dali you never know. Might as well not start an Age d’Or all over again.”
The scandal of L’Age d’Or thus remained suspended over my head like a sword of Damocles, and also, like this sword, prevented me later from stammering, “I’ll never collaborate with anyone again!” I accepted the responsibility for the sacrilegious scandal, though I had had no such ambition. I should have been willing to cause a scandal a hundred times greater, but for “important reasons”—subversive rather through excess of Catholic fanaticism than through naïve anticlericalism. Nevertheless I realized that in spite of everything the film possessed an undeniable evocative strength, and that my disavowal of the film would have been understood by no one. I therefore resolved to accept all the consequences of this incident,7 while I planned to deflect its subversive side in the direction of my budding reactionary theories.
I had just made L’Age d’Or. I was going to be allowed to make The Apology of Meissonier in Painting. With me no one could ever tell where humor ended and my congenital fanaticism began, so that people soon got used to letting me do whatever I wanted, without discussion: “That’s just Dali!” they would say, shrugging their shoulders. But meanwhile Dali had said what he wanted to say, and this thing that he had just said would quickly devour all the things that were not said or that even though they were said remained as though they had not been said, for most of them were already dead letters before they were even formulated. I was considered the maddest, the most subversive, the most violent, the most surrealistic, the most revolutionary of them all. What a power of darkness behind me, therefore, for the radiance of the day when I would build the whirling sky of the Catholic and luminous geometry of all the hierarchic flesh of the angels and the archangels of classicism!
Besides, my own heaven would always remain more violent and real than the ideal hell of L’Age d’Or, just as my classicism would one day be more surrealist than their romanticism! And my reactionary traditionalism more subversive than their abortive revolution.
The whole modern effort that had been accomplished during the Post-War period was false, and would have to be destroyed. Inescapably there must be a return to tradition in painting and in everything. Otherwise spiritual activity would quickly become nothingness. No one knew how to draw any more, or how to paint, or how to write. Everything was on the same level, everything was becoming uniform as it became internationalized. The formless and the ugly became the supreme goddesses of laziness. The empty and pseudo-philosophic gossip of café tables was increasingly encroaching upon honest work in studio and workshop. And the goddesses of inspiration, instead of continuing to occupy their Parnassus imagined and painted by Raphael and Poussin, were expected to come down into the street and ply the sidewalk trade and give themselves over to the libertinism of all the more or less popular assemblages. Artists fraternized with bureaucrats, spoke the language of the most vulgarly opportunistic demagogues, and impudently joined in the ambitions and frenzies of bourgeoisification of the masses who, bursting with scepticism and mechanical progress, waxed fat in the nauseating well-being of a life without rigor, without form, without tragedy and without soul! All this was hostile to me, and did not cease to work like a dog!
1 This was the second time in my life that I encountered the incarnated myth of “La Ben Plantada,” in the person of Lydia, who resuscitated in my childhood memories that of Ursulita Matas.
2 Dentos, a fish so succulent that fishermen consider it the pork of the sea.
3 Torts, a variety of small bird, and rubellons a la llauna, a kind of mushroom fried on a thin sheet of metal: two of my favorite Catalonian dishes.<
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4 The correspondence–a symbolic one, at any rate–between the teeth and the sexual organs has been well established. In dreams the losing of teeth, which is popularly interpreted as a death omen, is supposedly a very clear allusion to onanism. Also among certain African tribes the ceremony of circumcision is replaced by that of pulling out a tooth.
5 Málaga is Picasso’s native town, and Picasso’s morphological type is very common there, with the same bull-like expression of intelligence and vivacity.
6 Les Camelots du Roi, an organization of nationalistic, Catholic and royalist youths belonging to the Action Française.
7 Later on, when Bunue! abandoned surrealism, he expurgated L’Age d’Or of its frenzied passages and made a number of other alterations without asking me my opinion. This altered version I have never seen.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
My Battle My Participation and My Position in the Surrealist Revolution “Surrealist Object” versus “Narrated Dream” Critical-Paranoiac Activity Versus Automatism
MY BATTLE
Against Simplicity
For Complexity
Against Uniformity
For Diversification
Against Equalitarianism
For Hierarchization
Against the Collective
For the Individual
Against Politics
For Metaphysics
Against Music
For Architecture
Against Nature
For Esthetics
Against Progress
For Perenniality
Against Mechanism
For the Dream
Against Abstraction
For the Concrete
Against Youth
For Maturity
Against Opportunism
For Machiavellian Fanaticism
Against Spinach
For Snails
Against the Cinema
For the Theatre
Against Buddha
For the Marquis de Sade
Against the Orient
For the Occident
Against the Sun
For the Moon
Against Revolution
For Tradition
Against Michelangelo
For Raphael
Against Rembrandt
For Vermeer
Against Savage Objects
For Ultra-Civilized 1900 Objects
Against African-Modern Art
For the Art of the Renaissance
Against Philosophy
For Religion
Against Medicine
For Magic
Against Mountains
For the Coast Line
Against Phantoms
For Spectres
Against Women
For Gala
Against Men
For Myself
Against Time
For Soft Watches
Against Scepticism
For Faith
Already upon my arrival in Paris I realized that the conspicuous success of my exhibition at Goeman’s had had as its chief result the provoking of a regular mobilization of hostilities around myself and my incipient appearance upon the scene. It was as though the unexpected downpour of my imagination, aggravated by the hail-storm of L’Age d’Or, had caused the innumerable mushrooms of my enemies to sprout on all sides, while at the same time destroying their crop of fruit.
Who were my enemies? Everyone, or almost everyone, except Gala. What could be called Modern Art, even in surrealist circles, had risen to arms, alarmed by the demoralizing and destructive power which I came to represent. In the first place, my work was violent and audacious, incomprehensible, disconcerting, subversive. In the second, it was not “young” modern art. This much was understood and taken for granted: I had a horror of my epoch! Indeed my anti-Faustian spirit was exactly the contrary of that of the snotty apologists of youth, of dynamism, of the instincts of spontaneity and of laziness, incarnated in the degrading residues of poetic cubism and of the more or less pure plastic art that ravaged the nauseating and sterile terraces of Montparnasse. That gay and modern enterprise, Cahiers d’Art, was to remain serenely ignorant of me till the last minute, while old gentlemen with gaiters woven by the mites and the dust of tradition, with white moustaches stained with snuff, with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor in their buttonholes, would pull out their lorgnettes to look closely at a painting of mine and be tempted to walk off with it under their arm, to hang it in their dining-room next to a Meissonier! The oldsters who after fifty years have not become tired of looking, have always liked and understood me. They felt that I was there to defend them. They did not need it; strength was already on their side; and I took my position beside them, knowing that victory would be on the side of tradition. My crusade was for the defense of Greco-Roman civilization.
At the moment when I arrived in Paris, the intellectual elements were rotten with the nefarious and already declining influence of Bergsonism which, with its apology of instinct and of l’élan vital (the life urge), had led to the crudest esthetic revaluations. Indeed an influence blown over from Africa swept over the Parisian mind with a savage-intellectual frenzy that was enough to make one weep. People adored the lamentable instinctive products of real savages! Negro art had just been enthroned, and this was accomplished with the aid of Picasso and the surrealists! When I reflected that the heirs of the intelligence of a Raphael Sanzio had fallen into such an aberration, I blushed with shame and rage. I had to find the antidote, the banner with which to challenge these blind and immediate products of fear, of absence of intelligence and of spiritual enslavement; and against the African “savage objects” I upheld the ultra-decadent, civilized and European “Modern Style” objects. I have always considered the 1900 period as the psycho-pathological end-product of the Greco-Roman decadence. I said to myself: since these people will not hear of esthetics and are capable of becoming excited only over “vital agitations,” I shall show them how in the tiniest ornamental detail of an object of igoo there is more mystery, more poetry, more eroticism, more madness, perversity, torment, pathos, grandeur and biological depth than in their innumerable stock of truculently ugly fetishes possessing bodies and souls of a stupidity that is simply and uniquely savage!
And one day, in the very heart of Paris, I made the discovery of the 1900 subway entrances, which unfortunately were already in the course of being demolished and replaced by horrible modern and “functional” constructions. The photographer Brassai made a series of pictures of the ornamental elements of these entrances, and people simply could not believe their eyes, so “surrealistic” was the Modern Style becoming at the dictate of my imagination. People began to look for 1900 objects at the flea market, and one would occasionally see, timidly rising beside a grimacing mask from New Guinea, the face of one of those beautiful ecstatic women in terra cotta tinted in verdigris and moon-green. The fact is that the influence of the 1900 period was beginning to make itself felt in the form of a steadily growing encroachment. The modernizing of Chez Maxim’s, which was becoming increasingly popular again, was interrupted; reviews of the 1900 epoch were revived, and the songs of this same epoch returned to favor. People speculated on the gamey and anachronistic side of 1900 in serving us literature and films in which sentimentalism and humor were combined with naïve malice. This was to culminate a few years later in the collections of the couturière, Elsa Schiaparelli, who succeeded in partially imposing the terribly inconvenient fashion of wearing the hair up in back—completely in accord with the 1900 type of morphology, which I had been the first to preach.
I thus saw Paris become transformed before my eyes, in obedience to the order I had given at the moment of my arrival. But my own influence has always outdistanced me to such a point that it has been impossible for me to convince anyone that this influence came from me. It was a phenomenon similar to the one I experienced on my second arrival in New York, upon observing that the window-displays
of the great majority of shops in the town were visibly under the surrealist influence, and yet at the same time definitely under my personal influence. But the constant drama of my influence lies in the fact that once launched it escapes from my hands, and I can no longer canalize it, or even profit by it.
I found myself in a Paris which I felt was beginning to be dominated by my invisible influence. When someone, who until then had been very modern, spoke disdainfully of functional architecture, I knew that this came from me. If someone said in any connection, “I’m afraid it will look modern,” this came from me. People could not make up their minds to follow me, but I had ruined their convictions! And the modern artists had plenty of reason to hate me. I myself, however, was never able to profit by my discoveries, and in this connection no one has been more constantly robbed than I. Here is a typical example of the drama of my influence. The moment I arrived in Paris, I launched the “Modern Style” in the midst of the most hilarious hostility. Nevertheless the prestige of my intelligence was gradually imposing itself. After a certain time it began to take, and I was able to perceive my imprint here and there merely in walking about the streets: laces, night clubs, shoes, films—hundreds of people were working and earning an honest living as a result of my influence, while I myself continued to pace the streets of Paris without being able to “do anything.” Everyone managed to carry out my ideas, though in a mediocre way. I was unable to carry them out in any way at all! I should not even have known how or where to turn to find the last and most modest place in one of those 1900 films that were about to be produced with a prodigality of means and stars, and that but for me would never have been made.
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Page 38