With all this, the German troops were one front after another. Coco was like a white swan, her thoughtful brow slightly bowed, moving forward on the water of history which was beginning to flood everything, with the unique elegance and grace of French intelligence. All that is best in what France possesses in the way of “race” can be found in Coco. She could speak of France as no one else could; she loved it body and soul, and I knew that no matter what befell her country she would never leave it. Coco was, like myself, one of the living incarnations of Post-War Europe, and the evolution of our two spirits had been very similar. During the fortnight that Mademoiselle Chanel spent with us at Arcachon all the themes, human and divine, were again gone over in the course of our interminable conversations which the war had invested with a new rigor of exacting originality, for one would have to begin to look upon form in a wholly different way.
But her originality was the opposite of mine. I have always either shamelessly “exhibited” my ideas, or else hidden them with a refined jesuitical hypocrisy. Not she: she does not exhibit them, nor does she hide them. She dresses them. The sense of clothes had in her a biological significance of self-modesty of a mortal and fatal violence. What Ludwig II of Bavaria dresses Chanel must have designed to “dress,” for formal occasions and for street-wear, the young and hard bitterness of her unavowed sentiments! Her sense of fashion and of costume was “tragic”–as in others it is “cynical.” Above all Chanel was the being possessing the best dressed “body and soul” on earth.
After Coco, Marcel Duchamp came to see us. He was terrorized by those bombardments of Paris that had never yet taken place. Duchamp is an even more anti-historic being than I; he continued to give himself over to his marvelous and hermetic life, the contact with whose inactivity was for me a paroxysmal stimulant for my work. Never had I worked so hard, or with such a burning sense of intellectual responsibility, as during this war, at Arcachon. I delivered myself over body and soul to the struggle of technique and of matter. It became alchemy. I was seeking that unfindable thing, the medium to paint in, the exact mixture of amber oil, of gum, of varnish, of imponderable ductility and of super-sensitive materiality by virtue of which the very sensibility of my spirit could at last materialize itself. How many times I have spent a sleepless night because of two drops too many erroneously poured into my painting medium! Gala alone was a witness to my furies, my despairs, my fugitive ecstasies, and my relapses into the bitterest pessimism. She alone knows to what point painting became for me at this period a ferocious reason for living, while at the same time it became an even more ferocious and unsatisfied reason for loving her, Gala, for she and she alone was reality; and all that my eyes were capable of seeing was “she,” and it was the portrait of her that would be my work, my idea, my reality.
But in order to achieve this portrait of my Galarine, as I called her, I would perhaps have to die of fatigue like a real Catholic donkey, and half rotten–as I already was–a donkey on his last legs from carrying alone on his back covered with sores bronzed with imitative flies the whole weight of deficiencies, nothingnesses and revolutions of our sceptical, formless and traditionless epoch!
And from the problems of the physical kitchen of technique, I fell back into that “all” that was the spirit of Leonardo–all, all, all. Cosmogony, cosmogony, cosmogony! The conquest of all, the systematic interpretation of all metaphysics, of all philosophy, and of all science, according to the fund of Catholic tradition which alone the rigor of the critical-paranoiac method would be capable of reviving. Everything remained to be integrated, to be architectonized, to be morphologized. It was killing! And Gala alone enabled me to live. She collected Bordeaux wines; she took me in the company of the painter Leonor Fini, whose esthetic torments gave me a little relief, to dine at the Château Trompette of Bordeaux or to the Chapon Fin. She would put a mushroom à la Bordelaise fragrant with garlic on the tip of my tongue, and say to me, “Eat!” “It’s good!” I would exclaim, while my brain did not cease to hammer, Cosmogony, cosmogony, cosmogony! And at times a tear would well into my eye, the product of just the right mixture of cosmogony and garlic.
Beside all this the European war appeared to me like an episodic children’s fight on a street-corner. One day, nevertheless, this fight began to make too much of an uproar and became too real because of those big, happy and taciturn children of the German troops who were already very close, and who arrived in fairy-tale armored carriages covered with childish drawings and camouflaged with branches. I said to myself, this it getting too historical for me; and in a rage I stopped painting the picture I was in the midst of, and we left.
In Bordeaux we spent a sinister day, that of its first bombardment, and we entered Spain two days before the Germans occupied the international bridge of Hendaye. Gala left directly for Lisbon, where I was to meet her as soon as my documents were in order, in order to arrange our trip to America, which appeared to bristle with red tape of a superhuman refinement.
From Irúm I went to Figueras–that is to say, I crossed the whole of Spain. I found my country covered with ruins, nobly impoverished, with faith in its destiny revived, and with mourning engraved with a diamond in every heart.
“Knock, knock!”
“Who goes there? Who is knocking?”
“It is I.”
“Who?”
“I, Salvador Dali, your son.”
That is how I knocked at my father’s door in his house of Cadaques, at 2 o’clock one morning. I embraced my family–my father, my aunt, and my sister. They prepared anchovies, sausage, and tomatoes sprinkled with oil for me. I chewed my food, stupefied and terrorized: for I saw no traces of the revolution.
“Nothing had changed” in eleven years, and everything had remained the same in spite of the three years of civil war and revolution! Oh, the perennity, the force, the indestructibility of the real object! TI unfathomable violence of tangible and formal things, to the detriment of history; the terrorizing and permanent power of the “material concrete” over the vain ephemeral of ideological revolutionism!
The night that I spent in Figueras I thought I was dreaming wide awake. Before going to sleep I walked for a long time hack and forth in my room, the one I had lived in before I was banished from my house, which was the same one that I had lived in as a child. There, too, everything was exactly as it had been before. Moved to tears, I went over to a little secretary-cabinet in cherry wood that I knew by heart. I touched its heart. Its heart, let me explain, was a little system of pigeon-holes which was probably intended for writing-paper and envelopes, but as this cabinet was never used to write on, these pigeon-holes always remained empty except for a bottom compartment, where the hand could barely reach with the tips of its fingers. There one could always find the same kinds of objects–one or two indeterminate keys, buttons, a five-centimo piece that was indented, as if it had received a blow (the convexity thus created having formed a hump on the other side that was pointed and shiny like an incipient metal boil), safety pins, purplish wads of dust, and perhaps a tiny ivory rabbit or some other small carved object, preferably of ivory and always broken, with a bit of the glue used to mend it covering and going beyond the edge of the mutilated surface, which bristled with tiny very black and shiny hairs, all sticky, giving to the ivory object an appalling appearance of dirtiness and of irremediable repugnance. I knew from experience that even when my mother, who had a passion for cleanliness, managed to empty and remove even the last speck of dust from the bottom of that little grilled balcony other objects, but always of the same kind, and the same kind of purplish wads of dust, would immediately reappear in the same place. Thus it was with a beating heart that I slipped my hand into the depth of the mysterious heart of this secretary-cabinet, and with the tips of my fingers I immediately felt the exact contact of everything I expected. Everything was there: the two or three keys, one of them rusty, the other smaller, very shiny; the safety pins. With the tips of my fingers I successfully caressed the buttons, th
e little conical relief of the humped five-centimo coin, the broken ivory carving which I felt to be sticky at the point of its regulation scar, dirty as it should be with little black and shiny hairs. I pressed between my fingers several of those little wads of dust, of a deep purplish color, and taking them close to the light which continued to shine on them with the same wanness as during the convalescences of my childhood, I examined them attentively. This wad of dust was stronger than anything, because it was outside of history; it was the very dynamite of time, capable of making history itself blow up, the violet flower of tradition!
I turned round. I knew that behind me a reproduction in a round frame, above the bed, concealed a round moisture stain in this same spot. When I was small I would sometimes lift up this painting, and almost always a little spider would come running out. I tried this now. The spot had disappeared, but a little spider scurried out, exactly as when I was a small boy.
It is true that my sister had been tortured by the C.I.M.4 and driven to insanity, but she was already completely cured. It is true that a bomb had ripped a balcony from our house, but no one had ever looked precisely at that balcony before. It is true that the floor tiling in our dining room was all blackened by the fire that the anarchists had made when they would cook their meals right in the middle of the room, but this was just the spot where the large dining table stood, and to see this damage it was necessary to move the table which, though it vanished for two months, was found again twenty kilometres from Figueras, at a dentist’s. Like the film of a destructive catastrophe run in reverse, after the revolutionary explosion everything, as by enchantment, returned to its original and traditional place. The piano, which was thought to have disappeared forever, “existed.” And little by little it returned to the place of its origin. One morning it was back once more where it belonged! Everything became again as before! It was as if the process of “becoming” obeyed the physical laws of the serene traditional surfaces of the metaphysical lakes of history, which after each upheaval resumed their identity, thus contradicting the very principles of the Hegelian dialectic, while the concentric circles of the illusory waves of human progress, though appearing to grow, were in reality only consummating their own oblivion upon the far-flung shores of human destiny, making the territorial and mechanical eye forget the traceless traumatism of the stone of the invisible and already forgotten revolution which when it was thrown seemed capable of splashing heaven itself with its heterogeneous agitation. And if Heraclitus was right in claiming that one cannot bathe twice in the same stream, Dali is just as right in claiming that the stagnant water of the lakes of tradition, unlike a river, does not have the slightest need to stir or to run anywhere in order to reflect the eternal originality of heaven, or to rot with dignity and without heaven, if need be …
Before leaving Paris I met a childhood friend, who had been a revolutionary all his life. For years he had bitterly struggled as a fervent terrorist to establish the Spanish Republic. During the Civil War he fought like a lion without respite up to the last moment among the anti-fascist militias. A refugee in Paris, without money, hovering on the edge of ill-health, he was relinquishing his non-conformist canon. He had not yet lost hope for Spain. He said to me, lowering his voice confidentially as if under the painful constraint of a confession that cost him dearly and that he had paid for with blood which did not belong to him,
“What our country needs is to do away with Franco and become a constitutional monarchy again!–A king!” exclaimed this man who had been a sincere revolutionary during his whole life.
I also knew some painters who were terribly revolutionary, smashers of all the plaster moulds of academic tradition, who in the more reflective age of their graying hairs were beginning–too late–to apply themselves shamefully and secretively to drawing as academically as they were capable of doing, from the plaster molds broken during the irresponsible iconoclasm of their youth.
But Dali is not of those either. Dali is not returning to anything, he does not renounce anything, for instead of denying even that Revolutionary Post-war Period which he denounces, which he hates and fights, he wants to affirm and “sublimate” it, because it was reality and because the very lack of tradition of that period is in itself a tradition to be integrated into the period that will follow. For Cosmogony is an “exclusive whole.” Cosmogony is neither Reaction nor Revolution–Cosmogony is Renaissance, hierarchized and exclusive knowledge of everything.
The day after my return to Cadaques I embraced the heroic Lydia, “a Ben Plantada,” who had survived everything. Her old age was still “well planted.” I went with her to pay a visit to our house in Port Lligat. Ramon de Hermosa had died during the civil war in an old people’s home in Gerona. He had been confined there by the decision of the local Committee. Ramon was a “Mal Plantado,” and the tree of his laziness had not been able to resist the ordeal of transplantation. Lydia said to me,
“During the revolution everybody loved me. In those moments when one is about to die one sees clearly where spirituality is to be found.”
“But how did you manage to live, without your sons, without men to help you, at your age?” I asked her.
She smiled before my innocence.
“Never have I lived better; I had everything and more than I wanted; my spirituality, you understand?”
“But what does this spirituality consist of, for the time comes when one jolly well has to go and eat!”
“Precisely, precisely–you see, my spirituality functioned precisely at the meal hour. Those militiamen of faith would come in trucks. It was very hot, and they would camp on the beach. They were constantly arguing and quarrelling among themselves. I never said a word to anybody. I would pick out the best spot, and I would calmly go ahead and make one of those good fires that promise a lot of coals, that only ‘La Ben Plantada’ knows how to make. The meal hour would gradually come round, and after a while I would hear one of the militiamen exclaim, ‘Who is that woman over there?’ I don’t know,’ another would say, ‘she’s been preparing a fire for a long time!’ And they would continue their endless discussions–whether they ought to kill all the people of the village, because they were all sons of whores; whether they should definitely seize power before the end of the week; whether they should burn the church and the curate that very afternoon.
“Meanwhile I continued to feed my fire well with fresh vinestalks that crackled like the hairs of angels. And now one and now another of the militiamen would begin, sure as fate, to come close to my fire. One of them at last would say, ‘We’ll have to think about dinner.’ I would say nothing, and throw another handful of wood on the fire, the smell of which was like a whiff of balsam to the peeled souls of that handful of criminals. ‘Come,’ said another, ‘we’ve got to go and get something to eat.’ And one after another, a chop, a rabbit’s leg, a pigeon would appear and begin to cook, to turn a golden brown, to sizzle, and to glaze. And as they ate they all became gentle as lambs, and insisted on my sharing everything with them. By being nice to me they tried to make up for all the bad they had done. Nothing was good enough for Lydia, and they began to show me all kinds of attentions. When I discovered someone among them who was capable of understanding me, I would tell them the story of the secret of the Master, the secret of ‘La Ben Plantada.’ It was the life of Cockaigne. Always they went to fetch new chinaware in the gentlemen’s houses, because they would never wash them, and once they had finished a meal they would throw everything, dishes, cups, spoons, into the sea.
“But all this did not last very long, for those of the opposing party would get the upper hand sooner or later. While we would be eating, one of the anarchists would come running, with the face of an exhumed corpse, bringing bad news. The left republicans had repressed the anarchist movement and trucks loaded with assault guards and machine-guns were already on their way from Cadaques. Everyone would get up, tossing the half-finished chop into the air, and prepare to leave. One would leave me a pair of shoes, anot
her a wool blanket, another a stolen phonograph, another a down cushion ‘Come on! Let’s go! The good life is over! Everybody up! The time has come to run. Ay, Ay, they’re already coming! Ay, Ay, Ay! we’ve got to go and die!’
“And the beach became deserted again, without a living soul. But about the middle of the afternoon would come the assault troops of the separatists. They would shout, insult each other and blaspheme like the others, and like the others, no one yet thought of supper, or of dying. But I had already brought a little fresh wood and began to light the fire. Someone would say, ‘Who is that woman over there, dressed in black?’ I don’t know. She’s making a fire.’ ... One of them would come round, then another. They would watch me silently. And I wouldn’t say a word, and I would throw on a fresh handful of vinestalks that would crackle so pleasantly that it was good to hear. Someone would exclaim, ‘We’ve got to think of supper.’ Others would then shout, ‘Let’s go and find something.’
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Page 51