This became the point of departure for a very important discovery which I decided to communicate to the Sorbonne in Paris under the evocative name of The Invisible Bread. In this paper I presented and explained the phenomenon of sudden invisibility of certain objects, a kind of negative hallucination, much more frequent than true hallucinations, but very difficult to recognize because of its amnesic character. One does not immediately see what one is looking at, and this is not a vulgar phenomenon of attention, but very frequently a clearly hallucinatory phenomenon. The power to provoke this kind of hallucination at will would pose possibilities of invisibility within the framework of real phenomena, becoming one of the most effective weapons of paranoiac magic. One recalls the “involuntary” element which is at the basis of all discoveries. Columbus discovered America while he was looking for the Antipodes. In the Middle Ages, metals like lead and antimony were discovered in the search for the philosopher’s stone. And I, while I had been looking for the most directly exhibitionistic way of showing my obsession with bread, had just discovered its invisibility. It was the very invisibility which I had not been able to solve in a satisfactory manner in my Invisible Man. What man cannot do, bread can.
My exhibit at Julien Levy’s was a great success. Most of the paintings were sold, and critical reaction, while keeping its polemic tone, was unanimous in recognizing my imaginative and pictorial gifts.
I was to leave again for Europe on the Normandie, which was sailing at ten o’clock the next morning. For the last night of our stay Caresse Crosby and a group of friends had arranged to give an “oneiric” ball in my honor, at the Coq Rouge. This party, which was got up in one afternoon, remained a kind of “historic institution” in the United States, for it was subsequently repeated and imitated in most American cities. This first “surrealist ball” exceeded in strangeness everything that its organizers had desired and imagined. Indeed the “surrealist dream” brought out the germs of mad fantasy that slumbered in the depths of everyone’s brains and desires with the maximum of violence. I myself, though I may be considered to be fairly inured to eccentricity, was surprised at the truculent aspect of the witches’ sabbath, at the frenzy of imagination in which that night at the Coq Rouge was plunged. Society women appeared with their heads in bird cages and their bodies practically naked. Others had painted on their bodies frightful wounds and mutilations, cynically slashing their beauties and transpiercing their flesh with a profusion of safety pins. An extremely slender, pale spiritual woman had a “living” mouth in the middle of her stomach gaping through the satin of her dress. Eyes grew on cheeks, backs, under-arms, like horrible tumors. A man in a bloody night shirt carried a bedside table balanced on his head, from which a flock of multi-colored humming birds flew out at a given moment. In the center of the stairway a bath-tub full of water had been hung, which threatened every moment to fall and empty its contents on the heads of the guests, and in a corner of the ballroom a whole skinned beef had been hooked up, its yawning belly supported by crutches, and its insides stuffed with a half-dozen phonographs. Gala appeared at the ball dressed as an “exquisite corpse.” On her head she had fastened a very realistic doll representing a child devoured by ants, whose skull was caught between the claws of a phosphorescent lobster.
The following day we innocently left for Europe. I say “innocently,” for on our arrival in Paris we were to learn the scandal of the “oneiric” ball. At this time the feverish excitement over the Lindbergh-baby trial was at its height. The French correspondent of the Petit Parisien, 16 along with the usual chronicle of this trial, cabled the sensational news that the wife of the famous surrealist painter, Salvador Dali, had appeared at a ball with the bloody replica of the Lindbergh baby fastened to her head, and thereby provoked “a great scandal.” The only person in New York who was aware of this scandal was the French correspondent of the Petit Parisien, who had not even been at the ball. In Paris, however, the news spread like wildfire, and our arrival was greeted with stupefaction.
I was no longer master of my legend, and henceforth surrealism was to be more and more identified with me, and with me only. Much water had passed under the bridge, and I found upon my return that the group I had known—both surrealists and society people—was in a state of complete disintegration. Preoccupations of a political nature had turned a great number of them toward the left, and a whole surrealist faction, obeying the slogans of Louis Aragon, a nervous little Robespierre, was rapidly evolving toward a complete acceptance of the communist cultural platform. This inner crisis of surrealism came to a head the day when, upon my suggesting the building of a “thinking-machine,” consisting of a rocking chair from which would hang numerous goblets of warm milk, Aragon flared up with indignation. “Enough of Dali’s fantasies!” he exclaimed. “Warm milk for the children of the unemployed!”
Breton, thinking he saw a danger of obscurantism in the communist-sympathizing faction, decided to expel Aragon and his adherents—Bunuel, Unic, Sadoul, and others—from the surrealist group. I considered René Crevel the only completely sincere communist among those I knew at the time, yet he decided not to follow Aragon along what he termed “the path of intellectual mediocrity.” Nevertheless he remained distant from our group, and shortly afterward committed suicide, despairing of the possibility of solving the dramatic contradictions of the ideological and intellectual problems confronting the Post-War generation. Crevel was the third surrealist who committed suicide, thus corroborating their affirmative answer to a questionnaire that had been circulated in one of its first issues by the magazine La Révolution Surréaliste, in which it was asked, “Is suicide a solution?” I had answered no, supporting this negation with the affirmation of my ceaseless individual activity. The remaining surrealists were in the process of committing suicide gradually, sinking into the growing obscurity of the lethargic and political tittle-tattle of the collective cafe terraces.
Personally, politics have never interested me, and at that moment less than ever, for they were becoming day by day more wretchedly anecdotic and threatened ruin. On the other hand I undertook the systematic study of the history of religions, especially the Catholic religion, which appeared to me more and more as the “perfect architecture.” I began to isolate myself from the group, and to travel constantly: Paris, Port Lligat, New York, back to Port Lligat, London, Paris, Port Lligat. I took advantage of my appearances in Paris to go out into society. Very rich people have always impressed me; very poor people, like the fishermen of Port Lligat, have likewise impressed me; average people, not at all. Around the real surrealist personalities were beginning to gather average people, a whole fauna of misfit and unwashed petty bourgeois. I ran away from them as from the cholera. I went to see André Breton three times a month, Picasso and Eluard twice a week, their disciples never; society people every day and almost every night.
Most society people were unintelligent, but their wives had jewels that were hard as my heart, wore extraordinary perfumes, and adored the music that I detested. I remained always the Catalonian peasant, naïve and cunning, with a king in my body. I was bumptious, and I could not get out of my mind the troubling image, post-card style, of a naked society woman loaded with jewels, wearing a sumptuous hat, prostrating herself at my dirty feet...17 My mania for wearing elegant clothes, harking back to the period of Madrid, took up its abode again in my brain, and I then understood that “elegance” was the materialization of the material refinement of an epoch, being for that very reason only the tangible, acute simulacrum, the clarion-call of religion.
Nothing is in fact more tragic and vain than fashion, and just as for an intelligence of the first order, like my own, the war of 1914 was fetishistically represented by Mademoiselle Chanel, the war which was soon to break out and which was going to liquidate the post-war revolutions was symbolized, not by the surrealist polemics in the café on the Place Blanche, or by the suicide of my great friend René Crevel, but by the dressmaking establishment which Elsa Schiaparelli was a
bout to open on the Place Vendôme. Here new morphological phenomena occurred; here the essence of things was to become; transubstantiated; here the tongues of fire of the Holy Ghost of Dali were going to descend. And (since unfortunately I am always right) the German troops were to swoop down on Biarritz, just a few years later, camouflaged in the Schiaparelli and Dali manner, wearing cynical and mimetic costumes, with branches of leaves freshly torn from the soil of France bursting from their sandy animal hair like the Nordic buds of a crucified Daphne. But the soul and the biology of the Schiaparelli establishment was Bettina Bergery, one of the women of Paris most highly endowed with fantasy. She exactly resembled a praying mantis, and she knew it. Bettina and Roussie Sert (née Princess Mdivani), fairy skeletons of sveltest poetry, with Chanel France de France, head the procession of those who continue in spite of separations and death to be my best friends.
London brought to Paris a gleam of Pre-Raphaelism which I was the only one to understand and to savor. Peter Watson had a sure taste for architecture and furniture, and bought the Picassos which, without his knowing it, most resembled Rossettis. And Edward James, hummingbird poet, ordered aphrodisiac lobster-telephones, bought the best Dalis, and was naturally the richest. Lord Berners was impassively present, within the diving-suit of his humor, at the concerts, always of a high quality, given by the Princess de Polignac in the large drawing-room decorated by José-Maria Sert with tempests of embryo elephants prophetic of the Europe of the League of Nations which one day was going to blow up.
At Missia Sert’s, Sert’s first wife, the most substantial gossip of Paris was concocted. At Marie-Louise Bousquets one smacked the leftovers of these in her social-literary salon where she received on Thursdays, a salon at the bottom of the serene gray stone lake of the Place Palais-Bourbon, a salon in which I saw the most spectacular short-circuits between real cherries and the luminous ones of the cherry-colored rays of the setting sun which, so to speak, crept in in order to settle on the nose of the bone of this salon, the soft and phantasmal nose, of Ambroise Vollard, and sometimes even on Paul Poiret. Across the square from Marie-Louise, Emilio Terry kept new Dalis amid the finest spiderwebs in Paris.
In the spring it was very pleasant at the Comtesse Marie Blanche de Polignac’s, where from the garden one listened to string quartets played in the interior all aflame with candles and Renoir paintings and with the malefic coprophagia of an unsurpassable pastel by Fantin-Latour—all this accompanied by petits-fours and much candy and other sweets.
At the Vicomtesse de Noailles’s it was just the opposite, the counterpoint in painting and literature. It was the tradition of Hegel, Ludwig II of Bavaria, Gustave Doré, Robespierre, de Sade and Dali and a touch of Serge Lifar.
There were also the balls and the dinners of Mrs. Reginald Fellowes. There one could count on the disappointment of not seeing her wear a dress designed by Jean Cocteau, and hear a speech by Gertrude Stein, all of which was fortunately accompanied by a snobbery and an elegance of the first quality.
The Prince and Princesse de Faucigny-Lucinge had an indisputable sense of “tone.” Their “tone” was almost as violent and sustained as the “figura” of the Spaniards. It was the slightly gamy residue of the super-elegant and exotic pictures of Aubrey Beardsley. This princess always had a touch of the “outmoded” that was capable of tyrannizing fashion. Her anachronism was always up-to-date; she was unquestionably one of the women possessing the most precise sense of “Parisian elegance.”
The Comte and the Comtesse Etienne de Beaumont constituted the theatrical key to all this. To enter their house was to enter the theatre. All that was needed to recognize this was to see a cubist Picasso of the gray period hung on the silvery tubes of an organ. Etienne de Beaumont spoke exactly like people born to the theatre, and wore fancy kid shoes. All the more or less criminal intrigues between the various companies of Ballets Russes that Diaghilev had left in his wake germinated, grew and invariably exploded in his garden, on whose trees artificial flowers were sometimes hung. At his house, too, one could with impunity meet Marie Laurencin, Cardinal Verdier, Colonel de La Roque, Leonid Massine, Serge Lifar (dead tired and cadaverous), the Maharajah of Kapurthala, the Spanish ambassador, and a sprinkling of surrealists.
The “society” of Paris was becoming unrestrainedly promiscuous, and the spectre of the defeat of 1940 was already rising in the Bordeaux clouds of the horizon of France, with that catastrophic bitter-sweet which was incarnated in the popular, realistic and gluey gums of Fernandel,18 which offered a ravishing effect of contrast to the racy and spectral pallor of the Russian princess, Natalie Paley, dressed in the finest Lelong dress, her silhouette covered with all the powder of the stage of 1900. Another touch was added by the inimitable phiz of Henry Bernstein in the midst of telling the cynical-sentimental dénouement of a prophetic bit of gossip before a plate of spaghetti—all this drowned in the penumbra of the gallant Parmesan cheese which illuminated the Casanova night club and which awaited only the propitious moment to burst into flame like a crêpe suzette. The beard of Bébé Bérard, which, after the hairs of my own moustache, was that of the most intelligent painter in Paris, would saunter about, reeking of opium and Le Nain-Roman decadence, in this Paris ripe for Rasputinism, for Bébé-dandyism and for Gala-Dalinism, with a suspicious, flattering assurance, as architectonically romantic as that of a glance of Piero della Francesca. Aside from his paintings, Bérard had three things which I thought very fine and touching—his dirtiness, his glance, and his intelligence. As for Boris Kochno, he had a beard that was always savagely shaved, that grew with the perseverance and the courage of a Cossack. He “lighted” the Russian ballets, ate rapidly and often left in a great hurry, excusing himself immediately after the dessert (he was running to another dessert). Sometimes his flesh would become red and congested: then the blue of his shaved and stubborn beard would contrast with the white of his shirt-front, and if one did not look too carefully he gave the effect of a French flag, all red, white and blue.
The painter José-María Sert, a man possessing a true Spanish jesuitical imagination—a splendid sheath that enveloped him, like a golden diving-suit—had a house three hours from Port Lligat, the Mas Juny, the poorest and most luxurious spot in Europe. With Gala I would often go and spend weeks there. To the Mas Juny the whole group that I knew in Paris found its way, and there toward the end of summer, the last happy days of post-war Europe were lived—happy, and at the same time of intelligent “quality.” All this today is but the nostalgic memory of a time that is gone.
This period of summer enchantment in the setting of the Catalonian sardanas and the provincial festivals of the Costa Brava ended with the accident of Prince Alexis Mdivani and Baroness von Thyssen, killed in a Rolls-Royce on the road from Palamos to Figueras. Roussie, Alexis Mdivani’s sister, was to die of grief over this four years later. To tell you how much I loved this being I shall tell you only that she resembled—as two “pearls of death” resemble each other—the portrait of the young girl by Vermeer of Delft in The Hague Museum.
One must not judge the protagonists of this “insoluble” and super-romantic Europe too frivolously. One may wait a century for such beings to be produced anew. Surrealists, and society ladies too, died for the sake of sentiments! Certain professional politicians were not to do as much in the coming trials. And out of this helter-skelter of luxury, moral confusion, sentimental promiscuity and ideological experiments stretched to the point of tearing all the viscera of elegance and race of each one of us, very few were destined to survive, for the Europe that we loved was sinking amid the ruins of contemporary history—ruins without memory and without glory, the enemy of all of us, who were supremely—and heroically—anti-historic!
1 Recently in thumbing through Life magazine I came upon photographs of similar objects that are now on the market and can be bought at the five-and-ten-cent stores, and that are, I believe, called “whackaroos.”
2 An extremely violent wind, the equivalent of the mistral i
n Southern France. It usually blows for three or four days in succession, lasting sometimes as long as two weeks.
3 Picasso had spent a summer in Cadaques with Derain; Ramon Pitchot had brought them here. They had interested themselves in Lydia’s case, and lent her two books by the same author, but different books. Lydia succeeded in interpreting them in such a way as to make one the continuation of the other.
4 The night fishing of sardines.
5 Georges Méliès (1861-1938), one of the pioneers in motion pictures.
6 A native blood sausage.
7 Name suggested by an idea of René Magritte’s.
8 One of the most typical surrealist objects was the cup, saucer and spoon made of fur imagined by Meret Oppenheim, which is now in the possession of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Page 45