Autobiography is only to
be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A
man who gives a good account of himself is probably
lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is
simply a series of defeats. However, even the most
flagrantly dishonest book (Frank Harris’s
autobiographical writings are an example) can without
intending it give a true picture of its author.
Dali’s recently published
Life [
The Secret
Life of Salvador Dali (The Dial Press, 1942)] comes
under this heading. Some of the incidents in it are
flatly incredible, others have been rearranged and
romanticised, and not merely the humiliation but the
persistent
ordinariness of everyday life has been
cut out. Dali is even by his own diagnosis
narcissistic, and his autobiography is simply a
strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight. But as
a record of fantasy, of the perversion of instinct that
has been made possible by the machine age, it has great
value.
Here, then, are some of
the episodes in Dali’s life, from his earliest years
onward. Which of them are true and which are
imaginary hardly matters: the point is that this is
the kind of thing that Dali would have liked to
do.
When he is six years old there is some
excitement over the appearance of Halley’s comet:
- Suddenly one of my father’s
office clerks appeared in the drawing-room
doorway and announced that the comet could be
seen from the terrace.... While crossing
the hall I caught sight of my little
three-year-old sister crawling unobtrusively
through a doorway. I stopped, hesitated a
second, then gave her a terrible kick in the head
as though it had been a ball, and continued
running, carried away with a ‘delirious joy’
induced by this savage act. But my father,
who was behind me, caught me and led me down in
to his office, where I remained as a punishment
till dinner-time.”
A year earlier than this Dali had
“suddenly, as most of my ideas occur,” flung
another little boy off a suspension bridge. Several
other incidents of the same kind are recorded, including
(this was when he was twenty-nine years old) knocking
down and trampling on a girl “until they had to tear
her, bleeding, out of my reach.”
When he is about five he gets hold of a
wounded bat which he puts into a tin pail. Next
morning he finds that the bat is almost dead and is
covered with ants which are devouring it. He puts
it in his mouth, ants and all, and bites it almost in
half.
When he is an adolescent a girl falls
desperately in love with him. He kisses and
caresses her so as to excite her as much as possible, but
refuses to go further. He resolves to keep this up
for five years (he calls it his “five-year plan”),
enjoying her humiliation and the sense of power it gives
him. He frequently tells her that at the end of the
five years he will desert her, and when the time comes he
does so.
Till well into adult life he keeps up
the practice of masturbation, and likes to do this,
apparently, in front of a looking-glass. For
ordinary purposes he is impotent, it appears, till the
age of thirty or so. When he first meets his future
wife, Gala, he is greatly tempted to push her off a
precipice. He is aware that there is something that
she wants him to do to her, and after their first kiss
the confession is made:
- I threw back Gala’s head,
pulling it by the hair, and trembling with
complete hysteria, I commanded: “Now
tell me what you want me to do with you!
But tell me slowly, looking me in the eye, with
the crudest, the most ferociously erotic words
that can make both of us feel the greatest shame!”
- Then Gala, transforming the last
glimmer of her expression of pleasure into the
hard light of her own tyranny, answered:
“I want you to kill me!”
He is somewhat disappointed by this
demand, since it is merely what he wanted to do
already. He contemplates throwing her off the
bell-tower of the Cathedral of Toledo, but refrains from
doing so.
During the Spanish Civil War he
astutely avoids taking sides, and makes a trip to
Italy. He feels himself more and more drawn towards
the aristocracy, frequents smart salons, finds
himself wealthy patrons, and is photographed with the
plump Vicomte de Noailles, whom he describes as his
“Maecenas.” When the European War
approaches he has one preoccupation only: how to
find a place which has good cookery and from which he can
make a quick bolt if danger comes too near. He
fixes on Bordeaux, and duly flees to Spain during the
Battle of France. He stays in Spain long enough to
pick up a few anti-red atrocity stories, then makes for
America. The story ends in a blaze of
respectability. Dali, at thirty-seven, has become a
devoted husband, is cured of his aberrations, or some of
them, and is completely reconciled to the Catholic
Church. He is also, one gathers, making a good deal
of money.
However, he has by no means ceased to
take pride in the pictures of his Surrealist period, with
titles like “The Great Masturbator,” “Sodomy
of a Skull with a Grand Piano,” etc. There are
reproductions of these all the way through the
book. Many of Dali’s drawings are simply
representational and have a characteristic to be noted
later. But from his Surrealist paintings and
photographs the two things that stand our are sexual
perversity and necrophilia. Sexual objects and
symbols - some of them well known, like our old friend
the high-heeled slipper, others, like the crutch and the
cup of warm milk, patented by Dali himself - recur over
and over again, and there is a fairly well-marked
excretory motif as well. In his painting, Le Jeu
Lugubre, he says, “the drawers bespattered with
excrement were painted with such minute and realistic
complacency that the whole little Surrealist group was
anguished by the question: Is he coprophagic or
not?” Dali adds firmly that he is not,
and that he regards this aberration as “repulsive,”
but it seems to be only at that point that his interest
in excrement stops. Even when he recounts the
experience of watching a woman urinate standing up, he
has to add the detail that she misses her aim and dirties
her shoes. It is not given to any one person to
have all the vices, and Dali also boasts that he is not
homosexual, but otherwise he seems to have as good an
outfit of perversions as anyone could wish for.
However, his most notable
characteristic is his necrophilia. He himself
freely admits to this, and claims to have been cured of
it. Dead faces, skulls, corpses of animals occur
fairly frequently in his pictures, and the ants which
devoured the dying bat make countless
reappearances. One photograph shows an exhumed
corpse, far gone in decomposition. Another shows
the dead donkeys putrefying on top of grand pianos which
formed part of the Surrealist film, Le Chien Andalou.
Dali still looks back on these donkeys with great
enthusiasm.
- I ‘made up’ the
putrefaction of the donkeys with great pots of
sticky glue which I poured over them. Also
I emptied their eye-sockets and made them larger
by hacking them out with scissors. In the
same way I furiously cut their mouths open to
make the rows of their teeth show to better
advantage, and I added several jaws to each
mouth, so that it would appear that although the
donkeys were already rotting they were vomiting
up a little more their own death, above those
other rows of teeth formed by the keys of the
black pianos.
And finally there is the picture -
apparently some kind of faked photograph - of “Mannequin
rotting in a taxicab.” Over the already
somewhat bloated face and breast of the apparently dead
girl, huge snails were crawling. In the caption
below the picture Dali notes that these are Burgundy
snails - that is, the edible kind.
Of course, in this long book of 400
quarto pages there is more than I have indicated, but I
do not think that I have given an unfair account of his
moral atmosphere and mental scenery. It is a book
that stinks. If it were possible for a book to give
a physical stink off its pages, this one would - a
thought that might please Dali, who before wooing his
future wife for the first time rubbed himself all over
with an ointment made of goat’s dung boiled up in
fish glue. But against this has to be set the fact
that Dali is a draughtsman of very exceptional
gifts. He is also, to judge by the minuteness and
the sureness of his drawings, a very hard worker.
He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a
fraud. He has fifty times more talent than most of
the people who would denounce his morals and jeer at his
paintings. And these two sets of facts, taken
together, raise a question which for lack of any basis of
agreement seldom gets a real discussion.
The point is that you have here a
direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and
even - since some of Dali’s pictures would tend to
poison the imagination like a pornographic postcard - on
life itself. What Dali has done and what he has
imagined is debatable, but in his outlook, his character,
the bedrock decency of a human being does not
exist. He is as anti-social as a flea.
Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in
which they can flourish has something wrong with it.
Now, if you showed this book, with its
illustrations, to Lord Elton, to Mr. Alfred Noyes,
to The Times leader writers who exult over the
“eclipse of the highbrow” - in fact, to any
“sensible” art-hating English person - it is
easy to imagine what kind of response you would
get. They would flatly refuse to see any merit in
Dali whatever. Such people are not only unable to
admit that what is morally degraded can be æsthetically
right, but their real demand of every artist is that he
shall pat them on the back and tell them that thought is
unnecessary. And they can be especially dangerous
at a time like the present, when the Ministry of
Information and the British Council put power into their
hands. For their impulse is not only to crush every
new talent as it appears, but to castrate the past as
well. Witness the renewed highbrow-baiting that is
now going on in this country and America, with its outcry
not only against Joyce, Proust and Lawrence, but even
against T. S. Eliot.
But if you talk to the kind of person
who can see Dali’s merits, the response that
you get is not as a rule very much better. If you
say that Dali, though a brilliant draughtsman, is a dirty
little scoundrel, you are looked upon as a savage.
If you say that you don’t like rotting corpses, and
that people who do like rotting corpses are mentally
diseased, it is assumed that you lack the æsthetic
sense. Since “Mannequin rotting in a taxicab”
is a good composition. And between these two
fallacies there is no middle position, but we seldom hear
much about it. On the one side Kulturbolschewismus:
on the other (though the phrase itself is out of fashion)
“Art for Art’s sake.” Obscenity is a
very difficult question to discuss honestly. People
are too frightened either of seeming to be shocked or of
seeming not to be shocked, to be able to define the
relationship between art and morals.
It will be seen that what the defenders
of Dali are claiming is a kind of benefit of clergy.
The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are
binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word
“Art,” and everything is O.K.: kicking
little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L’Age
d’Or is O.K. [Dali mentions L’Age
d’Or and adds that its first public showing was
broken up by hooligans, but he does not say in detail
what it was about. According to Henry Miller’s
account of it, it showed among other things some fairly
detailed shots of a woman defecating.] It is also
O.K. that Dali should batten on France for years and then
scuttle off like rat as soon as France is in
danger. So long as you can paint well enough to
pass the test, all shall be forgiven you.
One can see how false this is if one
extends it to cover ordinary crime. In an age like
our own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional
person, he must be allowed a certain amount of
irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is.
Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be
allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a
claim for the artist, however gifted. If
Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it
were found that his favourite recreation was raping
little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him
to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write
another King Lear. And, after all, the worst
crimes are not always the punishable ones. By
encouraging necrophilic reveries one probably does quite
as much harm as by, say, picking pockets at the
races. One ought to be able to hold in one’s
head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good
draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one
does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the
other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is
that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a
good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is
separable from that. And yet even the best wall in
the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a
concentration camp. In the same way it should be
possible to say, “This is a good book or a good
picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.”
Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is
shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is
also a citizen and a human being.
Not, of course, that Dali’s
autobiography, or his pictures, ought to be
suppressed. Short of the dirty postcards that used
to be sold in Mediterranean seaport towns, it is doubtful
policy to suppress anything, and Dali’s fantasies
probably cast useful light on the decay of capitalist
civilisation. But what he clearly needs is
diagnosis. The question is not so much what
he is as why he is like that. It ought not
to be in doubt that his is a diseased intelligence,
probably not much altered by his alleged conversion,
since genuine penitents, or people who have returned to
sanity, do not flaunt their past vices in that complacent
way. He is a symptom of the world’s
illness. The important thing is not to denounce him
as a cad who ought to be horsewhipped, or to defend him
as a genius who ought not to be questioned, but to find
out why he exhibits that particular set of
aberrations.
The answer is probably discoverable in
his pictures, and those I myself am not competent to
examine. But I can point to one clue which perhaps
takes one part of the distance. This is the
old-fashioned, over-ornate Edwardian style of drawing to
which Dali tends to revert when he is not being
Surrealist. Some of Dali’s drawings are
reminiscent of Dürer, one (p. 113) seems to show the
influence of Beardsley, another (p. 269) seems to borrow
something from Blake. But the most persistent
strain is the Edwardian one. When I opened the book
for the first time and looked at its innumerable marginal
illustrations, I was haunted by a resemblance which I
could not immediately pin down. I fetched up at the
ornamental candlestick at the beginning of Part I (p.
7). What did this remind me of? Finally I
tracked it down. It reminded me of a large vulgar,
expensively got-up edition of Anatole France (in
translation) which must have been published about
1914. That had ornamental chapter headings and
tailpieces after this style. Dali’s
candlestick displays at one end a curly fish-like
creature that looks curiously familiar (it seems to be
based on the conventional dolphin), and at the other is
the burning candle. This candle, which recurs in
one picture after another, is a very old friend.
You will find it, with the same picturesque gouts of wax
arranged on its sides, in those phoney electric lights
done up as candlesticks which are popular in sham-Tudor
country hotels. This candle, and the design beneath
it, convey at once an intense feeling of
sentimentality. As though to counteract this, Dali
has spattered a quill-ful of ink all over the page, but
without avail. The same impression keeps popping up
on page after page. The sign at the bottom of page
62, for instance, would nearly go into Peter Pan.
The figure on page 224, in spite of having her cranium
elongated in to an immense sausage-like shape, is the
witch of the fairy-tale books. The horse on page
234 and the unicorn on page 218 might be illustrations to
James Branch Cabell. The rather pansified drawings
of youths on pages 97, 100 and elsewhere convey the same
impression. Picturesqueness keeps breaking
in. Take away the skulls, ants, lobsters,
telephones and other paraphernalia, and every now and
again you are back in the world of Barrie, Rackham,
Dunsany and Where the Rainbow Ends.
Curiously, enough, some of the
naughty-naughty touches in Dali’s autobiography tie
up with the same period. When I read the passage I
quoted at the beginning, about the kicking of the little
sister’s head, I was aware of another phantom
resemblance. What was it? Of course! Ruthless
Rhymes for Heartless Homes, by Harry Graham.
Such rhymes were very popular round about 1912, and one
that ran:
- Poor little Willy is crying so
sore,
A sad little boy is he,
For he’s broken his little sister’s
neck
And he’ll have no jam for tea,
might almost have been founded on Dali’s
anecdote. Dali, of course, is aware of his
Edwardian leanings, and makes capital out of them, more
or less in a spirit of pastiche. He professes an
especial affection for the year 1900, and claims that
every ornamental object of 1900 is full of mystery,
poetry, eroticism, madness, perversity, et.
Pastiche, however, usually implies a real affection for
the thing parodied. It seems to be, if not the
rule, at any rate distinctly common for an intellectual
bent to be accompanied by a non-rational, even childish
urge in the same direction. A sculptor, for
instance, is interested in planes and curves, but he is
also a person who enjoys the physical act of mucking
about with clay or stone. An engineer is a person
who enjoys the feel of tools, the noise of dynamos and
smell of oil. A psychiatrist usually has a leaning
toward some sexual aberration himself. Darwin
became a biologist partly because he was a country
gentleman and fond of animals. It may be therefore,
that Dali’s seemingly perverse cult of Edwardian
things (for example, his “discovery” of the
1900 subway entrances) is merely the symptom of a much
deeper, less conscious affection. The innumerable,
beautifully executed copies of textbook illustrations,
solemnly labelled le rossignol, une montre and so
on, which he scatters all over his margins, may be meant
partly as a joke. The little boy in knickerbockers
playing with a diabolo on page 103 is a perfect period
piece. But perhaps these things are also there
because Dali can’t help drawing that kind of thing
because it is to that period and that style of drawing
that he really belongs.
If so, his aberrations are partly
explicable. Perhaps they are a way of assuring
himself that he is not commonplace. The two
qualities that Dali unquestionably possesses are a gift
for drawing and an atrocious egoism. “At
seven,” he says in the first paragraph of his book,
“I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has
been growing steadily ever since.” This is
worded in a deliberately startling way, but no doubt it
is substantially true. Such feelings are common
enough. “I knew I was a genius,” somebody
once said to me, “long before I knew what I was
going to be a genius about.” And
suppose that you have nothing in you except your egoism
and a dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow;
suppose that your real gift is for a detailed, academic,
representational style of drawing, your real métier
to be an illustrator of scientific textbooks. How
then do you become Napoleon?
There is always one escape: into
wickedness. Always do the thing that will shock
and wound people. At five, throw a little boy off a
bridge, strike an old doctor across the face with a whip
and break his spectacles - or, at any rate, dream about
doing such things. Twenty years later, gouge the
eyes out of dead donkeys with a pair of scissors.
Along those lines you can always feel yourself
original. And after all, it pays! It is much
less dangerous than crime. Making all allowance for
the probable suppressions in Dali’s autobiography,
it is clear that he had not had to suffer for his
eccentricities as he would have done in an earlier
age. He grew up into the corrupt world of the
nineteen-twenties, when sophistication was immensely
widespread and every European capital swarmed with
aristocrats and rentiers who had given up sport
and politics and taken to patronising the arts. If
you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money
back. A phobia for grasshoppers - which a few
decades back would merely have provoked a snigger - was
now an interesting “complex” which could be
profitably exploited. And when that particular
world collapsed before the German Army, America was
waiting. You could even top it all up with religious
conversion, moving at one hop and without a shadow of
repentance from the fashionable salons of Paris to
Abraham’s bosom.
That, perhaps is the essential outline
of Dali’s history. But why his aberrations
should be the particular ones they were, and why it
should be so easy to “sell” such horrors as
rotting corpses to a sophisticated public - those are
questions for the psychologist and the sociological
critic. Marxist criticism has a short way with such
phenomena as Surrealism. They are “bourgeois
decadence” (much play is made with the phrases
“corpse poisons” and “decaying rentiers
class”), and that is that. But though this
probably states a fact, it does not establish a
connection. One would still like to know why Dali’s
leaning was towards necrophilia (and not, say,
homosexuality), and why the rentiers and
the aristocrats would buy his pictures instead of hunting
and making love like their grandfathers. Mere moral
disapproval does not get one any further. But
neither ought one to pretend, in the name of “detachment,”
that such pictures as “Mannequin rotting in a
taxicab” are morally neutral. They are
diseased and disgusting, and any investigation ought to
start out from that fact.
