Maniac Eyeball (12 page)

How Dalí Dominated His Despair

This despair was one of the stations of the cross in my passion. I would have to pay for my victory, and I knew it.

But even the hardships reinforced my conviction. I bathed in hatred, resentment, and my caprices became ever more ferocious. My belief in my sovereign intelligence never wavered. I knew I had only to find the chink in other people’s armor. I knew I had but to wait and will in order to win and that my contagious delirium would be recognized by all as proof of my genius. My paranoiac-critical method had proved itself. The true conquest of glory would have been to have women at my feet, tendering their arses. Meantime, I still had Paris to discover.

Miró, with whom I had renewed relations, invited me to dinner several times, but I had no dinner jacket and I believe I disappointed him greatly by not being properly outfitted for conquest. I had to get such clothing, made to order. That was how I came to meet the Duchess of Dato, Countess Cuevas de Vera, and the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles who acted as my sponsors in high society. I very quickly appreciated the cultural refinement of these aristocrats whose race and mummification brought them so close to my own concepts. Like me, they turned their backs on the reality that the bourgeoisie and its intellectual running-dogs were trying to impose in opposition to tradition.

I avidly appreciated the secrecy of their manners, which enchanted me. The art of conversation, which consists of talking without saying anything and captivating one’s audience, with your mouth full, while the others digest your witticisms. The dignity of the winesteward lisping the detail of a vintage into your ear as if it were a state secret. The attractiveness of their walls on which you got hung among the greatest of the great as if you were a member of the family. Had I not been shy, I would have liked to restore to these aristocrats the conviction they seemed to lack of their own historical value, their great future in a decomposing world; they were the last remaining true strength. But I was as yet unknown as philosopher and prophet. I was a painter and they were beginning to buy my works. Each thing in its own good time. The Noailleses had notably acquired my
Le
Jeu Lugubre
(
The Lugubrious Game
), which I consider one of my finest paintings, and hung it between a Watteau and a Cranach.

I ate, I drank, I watched lights and shadows outline the most beautiful bosoms in Paris. I took an evil pleasure in staring ardently at one of the pretty ladies present while mentally undressing her and leaving only her pearl necklace and other jewels – which, as we know, are excrements in psychoanalytical parlance – and then listened, making the most of the moment, as her pretty rouged lips pronounced social small talk while I meaningfully stroked her lower abdomen with an imaginary ardent hand.

At these soirées there were always one or two social climbers who tried to remake the world in their own image and spat venom as a skunk does his stink. I picked them out early and forthwith discouraged them from spewing their acid on me by urgently requesting that they talk about me and my genius.

I made them so certain of my success as well as my madness that they no longer knew what to think, lest they make themselves ridiculous. They became my courtiers rather than feel crushed, preferring to laud what they could not bring down to their own level. I have always created a humus for my success with the corpses of those who least favored my genius. I attract crackpots and backbiters, whom I turn into steppingstones or footmats for my success. In those periods I met many rattlers whom I reduced to common gardensnakes so I might tan their hides for my wallet.

I turned each obstacle obstinately into an opportunity to go forward. The 1928 Salon d’Automne had turned down my
Big Thumb, Beach, Moon, And Decaying Bird
– now in the A. Reynolds Morse Collection), the jury, it seemed, being shocked by some of its erotic allusions. So I published the
Groc Manifesto,
as insulting as a slap to them, and painted
Les Premiers Jours du Printemps
(
First Days Of Spring
), a canvas that truly is a veritable erotic delirium. Ever forward, ever stronger. Ever more Dalínian.

Did they think me surrounded, shocked, refuted? Well, my genius being above all handicaps, I reappeared like a mole in the middle of the garden, right at the center of the clump they were trying to protect.

Pavel Tchelitchev took me into the Métro for the first time. I was terrified by the noise and the mob, suffocated by the horrible claustrophobic feeling, the sense of being lost. And the more panicky I became, the more delighted Tchelitchev, magnifying my shame and malaise. He despicably abandoned me at the next station. I rushed for the exit like a drowning man who, in his determination to reach the air he needs, shoves everything out of his path. Reaching the surface, I stood haggard for a long time, coming back to myself. I felt I had been spewed out of some monstrous anus after having been tumultuously tossed about within an intestine. I had no idea where I was; as if spat out on alien soil, a small useless excrement. I slowly regained possession of my senses. And, O miracle! my lucidity, my pride, my strength returned instantly to me with increased power. I understood I had just been through a great initiation. The shock was a beneficent revelation. At every opportunity, one had to use the underground routes of action and mind, cover one’s traces, appear unexpectedly, conquer oneself incessantly, and never hesitate to bugger one’s own soul so it might be reborn purer, stronger than ever. So did I go from discovery to discovery, of my self and of the others, in this protean city.

The others were the Surrealist poet Robert Desnos, whom I met when I had just finished
First Days of Spring.
He was sitting at the bar of La Coupole. This was the holy place of Montparnasse Bohemia. Through a revolving door, you came in from the boulevard to a narrow long rectangle of a room cut in two by the bar at which bartender Bob officiated. On the other side of the swinging doors there was a huge restaurant room used mainly by the
“café-crèmers”,
permanently idle intellectuals who gazed into the bottoms of their cups as if their fortunes were written there. In the cellar, three hundred people danced the tango from afternoon-tea time to four in the morning in an overheated
dancing.
Desnos was one of the crowd of habitués I used eagerly to peer at, though trying to assume a blasé nonchalance: Derain, Kisling, Brancusi, Ehrenburg, Zadkine; writers, models, all kinds of pretty girls on the hoof, ranging from streetwalkers to petites bourgeoises out for a lark, and girls from the provinces gone astray. Nothing for me. Not at Le Sélect, the rendezvous of homos (although Prévert had a regular table there), nor Le Dôme, the quarter’s gathering-spot for addicts.

Desnos absolutely insisted on seeing my painting, and made me take him to my place. He waxed lyrically enthusiastic. “This is absolute
jamais-vu,”
he passionately proclaimed. If he had had money, he would have bought it from me, but his compliments were small change as beneficial as the morning dew.

The others were Paul Eluard, whom I came across at the Bal Tabarin. I was with Camille Goëmans, who had offered me a contract and, while awaiting my reply, was treating me to the sights of Paris-by-Night. My dealer-to-be whispered a few details to me about the tall, blond, slim, and handsome man. “He’s a friend of Picasso’s. Knows all the talented painters. He’s a well-informed collector and dealer. Also well off. He carries weight with the Surrealists. In 1917 he married a woman with a gorgeous body, and carries a picture of her in his wallet. He shows it to those of his friends who know how to softsoap him. She’s in Switzerland right now. Name of Gala.”

Goëmans invited us all to have champagne together. Eluard impressed me greatly by his air of distinction. I learned that he was one of the great poets of Surrealism. His voice and hands trembled a little, giving him a touch of pathos. His sensuous eyes lit up every time they followed a feminine figure, even though he had with him an exquisite creature in a sequined black gown. He said yes when I invited him to come and visit the next summer at Cadaqués.

Slowly, the pawns of fate were falling onto the proper squares of my chessboard.

The others were also André Breton who already seemed a pontiff, even when his conclave met in a café on the Place Blanche, with the apéritif as Eucharist. A newcomer was required to show assiduity, this serving as his initiation. No way of getting away from listening to Breton orating to his court of followers like a big turkeycock. The main reason for these gatherings was to let him keep control over his troops; to maintain his authority by killing in the egg the slightest tendency to dis sent and making sarcastic remarks about those who were not present, and therefore automatically at fault – among the Surrealists even more than elsewhere! The bittersweet apéritifs were supposed to keep up the morale of the Surrealists while Breton read the newspaper aloud to them or pilloried some poor nameless nonentities who had had the misfortune of displeasing him, by some kind of articles, tomelets, or even just in gossip. All extracurricular liaisons were sharply condemned: it was sort of like a Tribunal of the Inquisition set up in the village’s main café.

I was bored to death, although occasionally amused by the flareups between Breton and Aragon in which one could already sense a tension that went beyond mere irony. I had quickly come full circle around these verbose revolutionaries, and for a time wondered whether I ought not to take the leadership of them, for on the rare occasions when I spoke up my ascendancy was accepted without question. I could see Breton’s blue eye looking fixedly at me and forming a question mark above my head. He mistrusted me. He need not have! I had found the stakes to be second-rate and left him the presidency of the stockless company.

I
was
Surrealism.

I decided to go back to Cadaqués to work and wait for the maturation of the seeds I had sown in a Paris that no longer held any fright for me. So I went back to painting, and let the rest of the world go by. A few days later, a wire from Camille Goëmans made him definitely my dealer, through the remittance of three thousand francs that gave him ownership of three of my paintings and a right of first refusal. My father rubbed his hands with a satisfaction not devoid of worry, for someone had told him it was sometimes my habit to dissolve a bank note in a glass of high-quality whiskey.

“THE PAINTER IS NOT THE ONE WITH INSPIRATION,
BUT THE ONE CAPABLE OF INSPIRING OTHERS.”

Chapter Seven: How To Make Love To Gala

I felt the spasm come on like an unextinguishable force starting in the deepest part of my being. A cry sprang from me that might have broken the terrible tension that was racking me, but it died in my throat and came out as a revulsion of my whole face. My mouth opened to scream, my tongue retracted, and a frightening fit of laugh ter shook me, like a bout of the D.T.’s. Tears spurted from my eyes like peas. I tried to hold my chest in with both hands, so it would not burst from the blows of the diaphragm that were smashing against my rib cage. I was choking. My whole body was being shaken up. I seemed literally to be exploding with laughter. Each limb, every muscle had its own separate existence under the effect of this demo niacal frenzy. I was being atomized in laughter.

Bent in two, I fell to my knees and rolled on the ground exhausted, trying to catch my breath, haggard, convulsively shaking, trembling. Face smeared with dust, legs broken, chest aching, I tried to get up again, but only to collapse in another fit of mortal joy that floored me.

These excesses might last as long as fifteen or twenty minutes, until all of my strength was gone. And I came to, like a drowned man on a beach, washed up by the waves, emptied of all substance, as after an uninterrupted torturesome masturbation. My whole life was swallowed by that maw of laughter, at the bottom of which I could see yawning the abyss of madness.

Awakening, dressing, speaking to relatives or friends, in bed or on the street, nowhere was I safe from the terrifying explosion. And each day the fits became more numerous and lasted longer and longer. It took very little to set me off: a face, a word, a situation could trigger my verve. Sometimes in the middle of a sentence I was saying, my laugh would break out in place of the expected word, and the person I was conversing with would be amazed to see my face and body before his eyes turn into a wild St. Vitus’s dance. Not knowing which way to turn, he would stare at the young man with the fine, delicate face, the mustachioed dandy rolling, hiccupping, in the dust. Unable to be of help, he would circle around me, speechless, useless and mortified, and that incoherent attitude only added further to my wild glee.

But most often I would bring on my laughing fits myself by building up some scatological image in my imagination. My method was the invention of the shit-bedecked owl. I pictured the person before me balancing on his/her head a sculptured owl about the size of a hand. And on the owl’s head, an excrement – one of my most sumptuous turds, beautifully shaped into a roll, and making a strange crown above the bird’s cruel head. The combination of owl, well-placed Dalínian shit, and a serene, smug bourgeois head brought on a violent rupture of rational balance and caused me to laugh the more because none could understand why. The amazement of my vis-à-vis only increased my glee. But some heads would not lend themselves to the game.