I had just decided exactly what I would do. I was going to go down, enter the display room, and upset the bathtub filled with water. With the place inundated, they would certainly be forced to lower the shade and take everything out. This appeared as the sole solution, for the idea of starting a suit against Bonwit-Teller struck me as childish.
The gentleman explained to me that they had changed my displays because they had been too successful; that there had been a constant crowd gathered around them which blocked the traffic; and that now they were just right, and that he would not for the world remove them after all the expense they had gone to.
I bowed my head with the utmost correctness and walked out, leaving each of the two gentlemen wearing a smile expressive of the most complete scepticism. I went down to the main floor and very calmly headed for the display-window where the bath-tub stood and stepped inside. I paused for a moment to savor the act I was about to commit, and looked through the window at the bizarre crowd which at this hour literally inundated the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue. There must have been something very unusual about my apparition in the window, for a large crowd gathered to watch me.
I took hold of the bath-tub with both hands, and tried to lift it so as to turn it over. I felt like the Biblical Samson between the pillars of the temple. The bath-tub was much heavier than I had calculated, and before I could raise one side it slipped right up against the window so that at the moment when with a supreme effort I finally succeeded in turning it over it crashed into the plate glass, shattering it into a thousand pieces. The crowd immediately fell back in a wide semicircle with a movement of instinctive terror, dodging the glass-splinters and the water from the bath-tub which now was spilling onto the sidewalk. Then I coolly appraised the situation and judged it much more reasonable to leave by the hole in the window bristling with the stalactites and the stalagmites of my anger than to go back through the door in the rear of the shop window. Barely had I jumped through the frame and landed on the sidewalk than a large piece of glass which must have held up by a miracle became detached and cut down across the space I had just passed through-and it was another miracle that I was not guillotined by it, for judging by its dimensions and weight it might very easily have split my head wide open.
XV. Last Days of Happiness in Europe
Gala in sailor costume at Cadaques, the day she caught 15 lobsters in a single morning.
The Homeric luncheons at Palamos. From left. lo right: Charlie Bestegui, Rouss e sett, Bettina Berger, Salvador Dhli, Countess Madina Visconti, Jose-Maria Sert, Gala ’Dali, Baroness von Thyssen, Prince Alexis Mdivani.
René Crevel, observing a snail, foreshadows the distress felt in Europe when he committed suicide.
My best friend, Mademoiselle Chanel, at Rochehrune. House of Salvador and Gala Dali at Port Lligat.
Roussie Sert and Dali at Palamos.
Gala: The Olive.
Dali, Princess Nathalie Paley, and Gala at Palamos.
XVI. My Heteroclite Life in America
I draw Harpo Marx in Hollywood.
I invent a hallucinatory mask, during breakfast in bed at the Hotel St. Regis in New York.
At Caresse Crosby’s place in Virginia, a black piano, black dogs, and black pigs are assembled on the snow, and negroes sing while I work. Caresse is at the piano. (Courtesy Eric Schaal-Pix.)
Based on my plans, “The Dream of Venus” is constructed at the Amusement Park of the World’s fair in New York. (Courtesy Eric Schaal-Pix.)
Having reached the sidewalk, I slipped on the coat that I was carrying over my arm, for the air was sharp and cool and I was afraid of catching cold. With a slow step I headed for my hotel. I had only gone some ten paces when an extremely polite plainclothesman delicately placed his hand on my shoulder, and explained apologetically that he had to arrest me.
Gala and my friends came running to the station to which I was taken, and my lawyer presented me with two alternatives: I could either be immediately released on bail, and the trial would take place much later; or if I preferred, I could remain for a short time in jail, together with the other people who were being held, and then my case would come up within a few hours. I was anxious to have this matter over with as soon as possible, and decided on the second alternative.
The promiscuity in which I was forced to live with the other prisoners terrorized me. Most of them were drunks and professional bums, who vomited and fought among themselves with an admirable optimism. I kept running from one corner to another to escape the spatterings of all that swarming ignominy, and my distress must have been noticed by a small gentleman loaded with rings and gold chains which hung ostentatiously from all his pockets, and whom in spite of his slight stature and his effeminate look all those brawny, two-fisted fellows seemed to respect.
“You’re Spanish,” he said to me, “I can see that right off. I’m from Puerto Rico. Why are you here?”
“I broke a window,” I answered.
“That’s nothing. They’ll fine you a few dollars, and that’s all. It was a saloon, wasn’t it? In what part of town did you break the window?”
“It wasn’t a saloon, it was a shop on Fifth Avenue.”
“Fifth Avenue!” exclaimed the small gentleman from Puerto Rico, in a manner indicating that I had suddenly risen in his estimation. Immediately taking me under his protection he added, “You can tell me all about it later. Right now stay close to me and don’t be afraid of anything. Nobody’ll touch you while you’re here.”
He must certainly have been an important figure in these circles.
The judge who tried my case betrayed upon his severe features the amusement that my story afforded him. He ruled that my act was “excessively violent” and that since I had broken a window I would have to pay for it, but he made a point of adding emphatically that every artist has a right to defend his “work” to the limit.
The following day the press reacted, giving me a warm and moving proof of its sympathy, and I received a shower of telegrams and letters from artists and private individuals all over the country, telling me that by my act I had not only defended my “personal case” but also that of the independence of American art, too often subjected to the incompetence of intermediaries of an industrial and commercial type. I had thus unintentionally touched one of the country’s open wounds.
Immediately after I had broken my Bonwit-Teller window, I received an offer to do “another one,” entirely to my taste–a monumental one, that would not have to be broken, in the New York World’s Fair which was to open in another month and a half, and I signed a contract with a corporation,2 a contract which appeared to me unequivocally to guarantee my “complete imaginative freedom.”
This pavilion was to be called The Dream of Venus, but in reality it was a frightful nightmare, for after some time I realized that the corporation in question intended to make The Dream of Venus with its own imagination, and that what it wanted of me was my name, which had become dazzling from the publicity point of view. I still did not speak a word of English, and the whole struggle to impose the least of my ideas had to be carried out through my secretary, who sweated blood! Each day there was a new explosion. I had designed costumes for my swimming girls executed after ideas of Leonardo da Vinci’s, and instead of this they constantly kept bringing me horrible costumes of sirens with rubber fish-tails! I realized that all this was going to end up in a fish-tail–that is, badly. I explicitly stated a thousand times that I would not hear of those sirens’ tails that the corporation wanted at all costs to impose on me, claiming that I did not know the psychology of the American public. I shouted, I lost my temper–all through my secretary. The sirens’ tails would disappear for a while and suddenly they would reappear, like the bitter after-taste of some greasy and indigestible foods.
Realizing that the explanations and the letters of protest that my secretary typed every evening to the point of exhaustion were becoming more and more ineffective, I told him to stop all these explanations, and to
buy me a large pair of scissors. I appeared the following morning in the workshop where The Dream of Venus was being set up. My contract granted me the supreme right of supervision, and I was going to use and abuse this right with the challenging force of my scissors. The first thing I did was to cut open, one after another, the dozen sirens’ tails intended for the swimming girls, thus making them totally unusable. After this I attacked the fluorescent gold and silver wigs which I had not called for either–a wholly gratuitous and anonymous fantasy of the corporation’s. I cut them into braids which I dipped in tar, to be stuck to umbrellas turned inside out which were to line the ceiling of the pavilion. Thus these umbrellas appeared as if covered with a lugubrious Spanish moss in mourning. After having transformed the wigs of the sirens into Spanish moss, I used my scissors, which were but the cutting symbol of the vengeance of my personality, to cut, snip, puncture and annihilate everything, sticking them finally right into the heart of the “anonymous” corporation, which in the end cried “Ay!” and raised its arms in sign of surrender.
Resigned, they agreed to do whatever my royal will commanded them. But my struggles were not over, for sabotage was about to begin. They did “approximately” what I ordered, but so badly and with such bad faith that the pavilion turned out to be a lamentable caricature of my ideas and of my projects. I published on this subject a manifesto: Declaration of Independence of the Imagination and of the Rights of Man to His Own, Madness (New York, 1939), to rid myself of the moral responsibility for such an adulterated work, for it was not possible to break the windows a second time (in spite of the fact that, given the dimensions of the swimming pool in which my exhibit was placed, this was tempting, and would have produced a fine effect, with the flooding of the entire pavilion).
I left for Europe, disgusted with The Dream of Venus, long before it was finished–so that I never did see my work completed. I was to learn subsequently that no sooner had I left than the corporation took advantage of my absence to fill The Nightmare of Venus with the anonymous tails of anonymous sirens, thus making what little was left of Dali perfectly anonymous.
On the Champlain that took me back to Europe I had time to revise and situate more philosophically my feelings of admiration for the elementary and biologically intact force of “American democracy,” an admiration often expressed in a fervent and lyrical form in the course of this book, and which the unfortunate circumstances of my recent voyage had in no way affected. On the contrary, for where one may dialogue with open scissors in one’s hand there is healthy flesh to cut and liberty for all sorts of famines. Unfortunately Europe, to which I was returning, was already exhausted with its masturbatory and sterile self-refinement; and the failure to synthesize the ideological contradictions of which it had become the speculative grazing-ground already predisposed it to the unique solution of war and defeat.
On my return trip to France on the Champlain I had time, besides, to reflect on that other, more hidden, America–that of certain solitary and lucid intelligences who had already given us Europeans repeated lessons of “transcendent didacticism.” The discrimination revealed by certain museums and certain private collections was in effect a decisive proof that, far from the sceptical eclecticism of Europe, there is already forming in America, as in no other country, a fore-air of thesis and synthesis. James Thrall Soby, with whom I had just tightened the intellectual bonds that had joined us on my first voyage to America, had as it happened been the first to make an ideological grouping of esthetic values according to Picasso, under the manifest sign of the pitiless exclusion of abstractionism and of non-figurative art, fusing in a desire for integration and interpretive synthesis the aspirations toward a “renaissance” latent in the ultra-figurative sector of paranoiac surrealism and neo-romanticism. It was obvious, but it had to be “classified.” The Bérard-Dali axis was infinitely more “real,” spiritually speaking, than that of the superficially surrealist affinities which linked surrealist individualities among themselves by the conventional links of the sect. And Eugene Behrman’s paintings, “romantic with classicism,”3 became authentically mysterious and had a quality of imagination infinitely superior to that of my literal followers, the “official surrealists.” Soby’s intellectual platform was very similar to that which Julien Levy, in a parallel way, with the weapons of action in his hands, had resolutely adopted, evident in the spiritual direction toward which he guided the activity of his gallery from the beginning–that of hierarchy and synthesis. Soby had also been among the first to consider “critical paranoiac activity” as destined to succeed the excitement over automatic experiments which was wearing itself out in a boring repetitiveness and in an exasperating and interminable marking of time.
I had a sad confirmation of this interminable marking of time when upon my arrival in Paris I learned that the surrealist group had found nothing better to do during my absence than to set up the weariless continuation of the more or less flying small beans of pure automatism in opposition to my new search for the esthetic hierarchization of irrational imagination. The answer to my hierarchization was a surrealist exhibition in which the entries were arranged according to the perfectly collectivist criterion of the order of the alphabet! It really was not necessary to have gone to such lengths to revolutionize everything from top to bottom in order at last to come to the point of adopting such an arrangement! I have never succeeded in learning the alphabet by heart, and when I need to look up something in the dictionary all I have to do is to open it at random, and I always find what I am looking for. The order of the alphabet is not my specialty, and I have had the gift of always being outside it. I was going, then, to put myself outside the order of the alphabet of surrealism, since, whether I wished it or not, “I was surrealism.”
As with everything else, my Mad Tristan, which was my best theatrical work, “could not be played,” and became transformed into the Venus-berg, and the Venusberg into the Bacchanale, which became its definitive version. This was a ballet that I had invented for the Monte Carlo Russian Ballet. I got along very well with Leonid Massine, who had been a hundred per cent Dalinian for a long time–it was precisely he who was predestined to do the choreography of the Dance of the Crutches. Prince Chervachidze, who with the Vicomte de Noailles is the purest representative of the authentic aristocracy of Europe, executed my stage sets with a professional conscience hardly deserved by our gimcrack modern epoch, always in a hurry and lacking in scrupulousness, in which everything is half done and badly done. I also had the good fortune to have Chanel take upon herself the designing of the costumes. Chanel worked on my show with a wholehearted enthusiasm and created the most luxurious costumes that have ever been conceived for the theatre. She used real ermine, real jewels, and the gloves of Ludwig II of Bavaria were so heavily embroidered that we felt some anxiety as to whether the dancer would be able to dance with them on.
But once more the work was to fail. The moment the war broke out the ballet company hurriedly left for America before Chanel and I had finished our work. In spite of the cables we sent to try to delay the performance the Bacchanale appeared at the Metropolitan with improvised costumes, and without my having seen even a single rehearsal! Nevertheless it was, it appears, an immense success.
The European war was approaching. The enervating adventures of our recent voyage to America had exhausted Gala and myself, and we decided to go off for a rest to the Pyrenees, close to the Spanish frontier, where we stopped at the Grand Hotel in Font-Romeu. “To rest,” for me, meant to begin immediately to paint twelve hours a day instead of resting. The apartment for which I had made a reservation, and in which I planned to set up my studio, as it was the best in the hotel, had just been occupied by the Chief of Staff of the French army, General Gamelin, who had arrived unexpectedly on an inspection tour of the frontier fortifications. We therefore had to wait impatiently for Gamelin to leave before we could occupy his room, which we did without a moment’s delay. The evening when I got into General Gamelin’s bed with
Gala, she read the cards before we went to sleep, and saw the exact date of the declaration of war. The clothes that we had left on the armchair in disorder cast upon the wall the shadow of an impressive silhouette, which was exactly the profile of General Gamelin. A bad omen!
The mobilization occurred, and the Grand Hotel was shut down.
Back in Paris I examined the map of France, I studied my winter campaign, trying to plan it in such a way as to combine the possibility of a Nazi invasion with gastronomical possibilities, for in Font-Romeu the food was rather bad, and I was possessed by a frenzy for appetizing dishes. I finally put my finger as close as possible to the Spanish frontier and at the same time on a neuralgic point of French cooking: Bordeaux. That would be one of the last places the Germans reached if, as seemed to me highly improbable, they should win. Moreover Bordeaux naturally meant Bordeaux wine, jugged hare, duck liver aux raisins, duck aux oranges, Arcachon claire-oysters . . . Arcachon! I’ve got it! That is exactly the spot, a few kilometres from Bordeaux, to spend the war-days.
Three days after our arrival in Arcachon the war was declared, and I began to set up my studio in a large colonial-style villa, overlooking the famous Arcachon ornamental lake, which we rented from Monsieur Colbet.
Monsieur Colbet had what was probably the world’s greatest capacity for talking. I had proof of this during the period when Mademoiselle Chanel came to visit us, for until then I thought it was Chanel who was the most tireless talker. One evening, before a dish of fried sardines and a glass of Medoc, I got little “Coco” (which is what her intimate friends call Mademoiselle Chanel) and Monsieur Colbet together to see which could outdo the other. The struggle lasted, and remained undecisive, for over three long hours, but toward the end of the fourth hour Monsieur Colbet began to get the upper hand, and finally triumphed. His victory was due chiefly to his respiratory technique. His way of breathing while he talked was simply astonishing, for even in the most heated moments he did not for a second abandon that even and unalterable rhythm of inhaling and exhaling characteristic of those who are determined to go a long way. Coco, on the other hand, would from time to time let herself be caught in the trap of her own eloquence and have to stop for a second or two to take a deep breath–aaahhhl It was then that Monsieur Colbet would perfidiously push home his advantage and continue imperturbably the thread of his story, somewhat frayed up to that point, and at the same time veer the conversation in the direction of themes and questions in which he felt that Mademoiselle Chanel was growing increasingly unsteady. When termites came up for discussion, for instance, Chanel lost her footing, not having sufficiently definite opinions on the subject. Then Monsieur Colbet would go boldly ahead and pour forth tons of anecdotes drawn from personal experiences during his African travels. One felt that he was capable of pursuing this theme for the whole rest of the night.
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Page 50