“Locomotives are not in scale with me—either I am too big or they are too small.”
My fear of missing the trip to America was not wholly dissipated by our boarding the Champlain. As soon as I felt myself on the high seas a great fear of the “ocean space” took hold of me. I had never yet in my life sailed out of sight of land, and the creakings of the ship appeared to me more and more suspect. I felt that the boat was too large and too complex to be able to make the crossing without a catastrophe. I attended all the life-saving drills and I was always on the spot minutes ahead of time, my life-belt attached with all the regulation straps. I made Gala take the same interest as myself in all these annoying precautions, which either disgusted her or made her laugh till the tears rolled down her cheeks. Each time she came into our cabin she found me lying on my bunk reading, with my life-belt strapped on. I expected every moment in fact to hear the decisive whistle of a real alarm. The thought that I might be the victim of a “mechanical” catastrophe made me shudder, and I looked upon the officers of the ship, who were carefree and pleasant, as my executioners.
I continually drank champagne, to give myself courage and in anticipation of seasickness, which, however, did not occur. Caresse Crosby was traveling on the same boat. Disappointed by the failure of the project of baking a fifteen-metre loaf of bread, which had never got beyond the preliminary stage, she spoke to the captain about getting the longest possible loaf of French bread that could be baked in the ship’s ovens. We were put in touch with the baker on board, who promised to make us one that would be two and a half metres long, but he would have to put a wood armature inside it so that it would not break in two the moment it began to dry. The baker kept his word, and I received this bread in my cabin luxuriously enveloped in cellophane.
I thought that it would be an intriguing object for the reporters who would probably come on board to interview me when we landed. Everyone spoke of these reporters with horror and contempt. “Those awful uneducated people,“ they said, “who never stop chewing their gum while they ask you endless indiscreet questions.“ Everyone had invented private tricks for evading them, but beneath this puerile hypocrisy, it was very easy to see that everyone desired and thought of only one thing—the opportunity to be interviewed. Only they defended themselves in advance against possible disappointment by the well-known reaction of “not wanting it”—because the “grapes were too sour.“ I, however, affected the opposite position, and often said, “I love getting publicity, and if I am lucky enough to have the reporters know who I am, I will give them some of my own bread to eat, just as Saint Francis did with his birds.” My shamelessness in this regard struck everyone as in such bad taste that they could not help twisting their mouths into a suggestion of a sneer.
“What do you think I can do to have my bread make the greatest impression on the reporters?” I would unsparingly ask all my acquaintances on the ship. I decided in the end to change its cellophane envelope for another made of simple newspaper tied with strings in the middle and leaving both ends sticking out: I wanted the fact that it was really a loaf of bread to be unmistakable, and I would be able to unwrap it myself before everyone’s eyes.
We reached New York, and while we were going through the formalities of having our visas checked for the landing I got word that the reporters wanted to talk to me. I ran to my cabin to fetch my loaf of bread, and appeared in another cabin where a group of reporters were waiting for me.
Then there happened to me an utterly disconcerting thing, and I felt as Diogenes, that king of the cynics, would have felt if on the day when he went forth naked with a tub around his middle and a lighted candle in his hand he had met no one in his way who would ask him, “What are you looking for?” It may appear astonishing, but it is a fact that not one of the reporters asked me a single question about the loaf of bread which I held conspicuously during the whole interview either in my arm or resting on the ground as though it had been a large cane.
On the other hand, all these reporters were amazingly well informed as to who I was. Not only this. They knew stupefying details about my life. They immediately asked me if it was true that I had just painted a portrait of my wife with a pair of fried chops balanced on her shoulder. I answered yes, except that they were not fried, but raw. Why raw? they immediately asked me. I told them that it was because my wife was raw too. But why the chops together with your wife? I answered that I liked my wife, and that I liked chops, and that I saw no reason why I should not paint them together.
These reporters were unquestionably far superior to European reporters. They had an acute sense of “non-sense,” and one felt, moreover, that they knew their job dreadfully well. They knew in advance exactly the kind of things that would give them a “story.” They had a merciless flair for the sensational which made them pounce immediately upon the kernel of every question and which enabled them, in the midst of the swarming and indistinguishable confusion, to choose unerringly just the daily events possessing the vitamin content necessary for the journalistic diet that was to nourish the casual curiosity of millions of psychologies in a state of inanition. In Europe reporters start out on their interviews with their finished article already in their pockets, composed in advance on the basis of circumstances and coincidences of all sorts, and addressed to a reader who will read it only in order to judge whether what he is told is exactly what he already knew. Europe has the sense of history, but not that of journalism. The American journalist, on the other hand, starts from, a criterion based on instantaneity, in which his all-powerful instinct of biological competition comes first and foremost, enabling him to shoot on the fly those rare and fleeting birds of actuality which he will bring back still warm and bleeding and toss on the desk of his editor-in-chief-a desk covered by the pallor of expectation of the white sheets of paper awaiting news, and by the blackness of the black hope of the news locked up within his black telephone.
The day I arrived in America the reporters returned from their morning hunt and triumphantly tossed into the air a pair of raw chops. Already that evening all New York was eating these chops, and even today in the remote corners of the continent I know that people are still gnawing at the last substance of their bones . . .
I went out on the deck of the Champlain, and suddenly I beheld New York. It rose before me, verdigris, pink and creamy-white. It looked like an immense Gothic Roquefort cheese. I love Roquefort, and I exclaimed, “New York salutes me!” But immediately the pride of the Catalonian blood of Christopher Columbus which flows in my veins cried to me, “Present!” and I in turn saluted the cosmic grandeur and the virgin originality of the American flag.
New York, you are an Egypt! But an Egypt turned inside out. For she erected pyramids of slavery to death, and you erect pyramids of democracy with the vertical organ-pipes of your skyscrapers all meeting at the point of infinity of liberty! New York, granite sentinel facing Asia, resurrection of the Atlantic dream, Atlantis of the subconscious. New York, the stark folly of whose historic wardrobes gnaws away at the earth around the foundations and swells the inverted cupolas of your thousand new religions. What Piranesi invented the ornamental rites of your Roxy Theatre? And what Gustave Moreau apoplectic with Prometheus lighted the venomous colors that flutter at the summit of the Chrysler Building?
New York, your cathedrals sit knitting stockings in the shadow of gigantic banks, stockings and mittens for the Negro quintuplets who will be born in Virginia, stockings and mittens for the swallows, drunk and drenched with Coca-Cola, who have strayed into the dirty kitchens of the Italian quarter and hang over the edge of tables like black Jewish neckties soaked in the rain and waiting for the snappy, sizzling stroke of the iron of the coming elections to make them edible, crisp as a charred slice of bacon.
New York, your beheaded manikins are already asleep, spilling all their “perpetual blood” which flows like the “surgical fountains of publicity” within the display-windows dazzling with electricity, contaminated with “lethargi
c surrealism.” And on Fifth Avenue Harpo Marx has just lighted the fuse that projects from the behinds of a flock of explosive giraffes stuffed with dynamite. They run in all directions, sowing panic and obliging everyone to seek refuge pell-mell within the shops. All the fire-alarms of the city have just been turned on, but it is already too late. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! I salute you, explosive giraffes of New York, and all you forerunners of the irrational—Mack Sennett, Harry Langdon, and you too, unforgettable Buster Keaton, tragic and delirious like my rotten and mystic donkeys, desert roses of Spain!
I awoke in New York at six in the morning on the seventh story of the Hotel St. Moritz, after a long dream involving eroticism and lions. After I was fully awake I was surprised by the persistence of the lions’ roars that I had just heard in my sleep. These roars were mingled with the cries of ducks and other animals more difficult to differentiate. This was followed by almost complete silence. This silence, broken only by roars and savage cries, was so unlike the din I had expected—that of an immense “modern and mechanical” city—that I felt completely lost, and for some time I thought my waking imagination continued to be under the influence of my dream. Nevertheless I had actually heard lions’ roars, for the waiter who brought me breakfast, a Canadian who spoke French perfectly, informed me that there was a zoo just across the avenue in Central Park. And when I looked out of my window I could make out the cages, and even the seals splashing in the tank.
But all my experiences during the rest of the day only continued systematically to give the lie to the stereotype of the “modern and mechanical city” which the estheticians of the European advance guard, the apologists of the aseptic beauty of functionalism, had tried to impose upon us as an example of anti-artistic virginity. No, New York was not a modern city. For, having been so at the beginning, before any other city, it now on the contrary already had a horror of this. I began my succession of afternoon cocktail parties at a house on Park Avenue in which fierce anti-modernism manifested itself in the most spectacular fashion, beginning with the very façade. A crew of workers armed with implements projecting black smoke that whistled like apocalyptic dragons were in the act of patining the outer walls of the building in order to “age” this excessively new skyscraper by means of that blackish smoke characteristic of the old houses of Paris. In Paris, on the other hand, the modern architects à la Corbusier were racking their brains to find new and flashy, utterly anti-Parisian materials which would not turn black, so as to imitate the supposed “modern sparkle” of New York. As soon as I entered the elevator I was surprised by the fact that instead of electricity it was lighted by a large candle. On the wall of the elevator there was a copy of a painting by El Greco hung from heavily ornamented Spanish red velvet strips—the velvet was authentic and probably of the fifteenth century. After the smoked façade and the Toledo-chapel elevator I do not think it is necessary to continue with the description of the apartment, of which I shall only tell you in passing that it contained Gothic, Persian, Spanish Renaissance, Dalis and two organs.
The whole rest of the afternoon I visited an unbroken succession of other apartments and hotel rooms. We went from one cocktail party to another; sometimes several occurred in the same building; this gave rise to a complete confusion which my absolute ignorance of the English language made all the more vague and agreeable. But of all the fleeting visions the sole clear impression that remained in my mind was that of New York as a city without electricity. The elevator lighted by a candle was not an isolated case; it was typical. Everywhere the electric light was choked by Louis XVI skirts, by Gothic polychrome parchment manuscripts, by manuscript partitions of Beethoven serving as lampshades. One had the impression that artificial ivy grew in all the corners of the woodwork, and that bats, equally artificial, and invisible, were constantly flitting through the propitious darkness of the halls. In the evening I visited an astonishing motion-picture temple. It was decorated with the most diverse artistic bronzes, from the Victory of Samothrace to Carpeaux; with ultra-anecdotic pictures really painted in oil, framed with an oppressive fantasy of gold molding; and in the midst of all this one suddenly perceived the plumes of a playing fountain illuminated with the whole iridescent rainbow of bad taste. And again, organs—organs everywhere, organs and organs, more and more monumental.
That evening before going to bed I took a last Scotch and soda at the bar of the Hotel St. Moritz in the company of a very ceremonious Quaker in a top hat whom I had met discreetly dissipating in a sordid Harlem night club and who, since we had been introduced, seemed not to want to leave us. He spoke enough French to enable me to guess that he wanted to tell or confess something to us. Gala must have had the same impression, for finally she said in the most provocative way, “I am sure you live in a state of mind quite close to that of the surrealists.” This was all that was needed to make him reveal his secret to us. He was a Quaker, and in addition he belonged to an altogether original spiritualist sect. None of his friends, even the most intimate, knew this. But I, a surrealist, who painted grand pianos hanging from the tops of cypress trees, inspired him with confidence. He knew I would understand. The members of this sect, by virtue of a recent secret invention, were able to hold conversations with the dead, though only for the four months following their decease, during which period the spirit does not yet leave for good the familiar haunts of the defunct. Gala discreetly asked for more detailed information. This was all the spiritualist Quaker was waiting for, and all in one breath he said, “It’s a kind of little brass trumpet that you attach to the wall by means of a rubber suction-grip. Every night before going to bed I talk to my father, who died two months ago.” At which point I suggested that this was probably the propitious hour for his conversation, and that it would be a good idea for all of us to go to bed. And we almost immediately took leave of one another.
Before going to sleep on this my second night in New York I went over in my mind, as it became steeped in a haze of drowsiness, the incongruous contours of the images seen in the course of my first day. No, a thousand times no—the poetry of New York was not what they had tried in Europe to tell us it was. The poetry of New York does not lie in the pseudo-esthetics of the rectilinear and sterilized rigidity of Rockefeller Center. The poetry of New York is not that of a lamentable frigidaire in which the abominable European esthetes would have liked to shut up the inedible remains of their young and modern plastics! No!
The poetry of New York is old and violent as the world; it is the poetry that has always been. Its strength, like that of all other existing poetry, lies in the most gelatinous and paradoxical aspects of the delirious flesh of its own reality. Each evening the skyscrapers of New York assume the anthropomorphic shapes of multiple gigantic Millet’s Angeluses of the tertiary period, motionless and ready to perform the sexual act and to devour one another, like swarms of praying mantes before copulation. It is the unspent sanguinary desire that illuminates them and makes all the central heating and the central poetry circulate within their ferruginous bone-structure of vegetable diplococcus.
The poetry of New York is not serene esthetics; it is seething biology. The poetry of New York is not nickel; it is calves’ lungs. And the subways of New York do not run on iron rails; they run on rails of calves’ lungs!13 The poetry of New York is not pseudo-poetry; it is true poetry. The poetry of New York is not mechanical rhythm; the poetry of New York is the lions’ roar that awakened me the first morning. The poetry of New York is an organ, Gothic neurosis, nostalgia of the Orient and the Occident, parchment lampshade in the form of a musical partition, smoked façade, artificial vampire, artificial armchair.14 The poetry of New York is Persian digestion, sneezing golden bronze, organ, suction-grip trumpet for death, gums of thighs of glamor girls with hard cowrie-shell vulvas. The poetry of New York is organ, organ, organ, organ of calves’ lungs, organ of nationalities, organ of Babel, organ of bad taste,15 of actuality; organ of virginal and history-less abyss. The poetry of New York is not that of a practical
concrete building that scrapes the sky; the poetry of New York is that of a giant many-piped organ of red ivory—it does not scrape the sky, it resounds in it, and it resounds in it with the compass of the systole and the diastole of the visceral canticles of elementary biology. New York is not prismatic; New York it not white. New York is all round; New York is vivid red. New York is a round pyramid. New York is a ball of flesh a little pointed toward the top, a ball of millennial and crystallized entrails; a monumental ruby in the rough—with the organ-point of its flashes directed toward heaven, somewhat like the form of an inverted heart—before being polished!
On certain very bright mornings filled with the dazzling sun of early November, I would go walking all alone in the heart of New York with my bread under my arm. Once I went into a drug store on 57th Street and asked for a fried egg which I ate with a small piece of my large loaf of bread which I cut off to the stupefaction of everyone who gathered round me to watch me and ask me questions. I answered all these questioners with shrugs of my shoulders and with timid smiles.
One day when I was walking thus, my bread, which had become entirely dry and had for some time betrayed marked tendencies to crumble, broke into two pieces, and I decided then that the moment had come to get rid of it. I happened to be on the sidewalk just in front of the Hotel Waldorf Astoria. It was exactly twelve o’clock, the hour of the noon-day phantoms, and I decided to go and eat in the Sert Room. But just at the moment of crossing the street I slipped and fell. In my fall the two pieces of bread were tossed violently against the pavement and scooted off some considerable distance. A policeman came and helped me up. I thanked him and began to limp away. But after taking a dozen steps I turned round, curious to observe what had finally happened to the two parts of my bread. They had simply disappeared without leaving the slightest trace, and the manner in which they were spirited away is still an enigma to me. Neither the policeman nor any of the other people on the street had the two large pieces of bread about them. I definitely had the bewildering and disquieting impression that this was a delirious and subjective phenomenon, and that the bread was there somewhere before my eyes, but that I did not see it for affective reasons that I would subsequently discover and that were connected with a whole long history involving the bread.
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Page 44