The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Read online

  THE SECRET LIFE

  OF SALVADOR DALI

  THE SECRET LIFE

  OF SALVADOR BALI

  BY

  Salvador Dalí

  TRANSLATED BY HAAKON M. CHEVALIER

  DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC., NEW YORK

  This Dover edition, first published in 1993, is an unabridged and slightly altered republication of the work originally published by the Dial Press, New York, in 1942. The two color plates, which were on unnumbered pages in the original edition, have been repositioned on the inside covers.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dali, Salvador, 1904-1989

  [Vie secrete de Salvador Dali. English]

  The secret life of Salvador Dali / by Salvador Dali ; translated by Haakon M. Chevalier.

  p. cm.

  “An unabridged and slightly altered republication of the work originally published by the Dial Press, New York, in 1942”–T.p. verso.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-486-27454-6

  ISBN-10: 0-486-27454-3

  1. Dali, Salvador, 1904-1989. 2. Painters–Spain–Biography. I. Title.

  ND813.D3A2 1993

  759.6–dc20

  [B]

  92-36763

  CIP

  Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

  27454313

  www.doverpublications.com

  A Gala- Gradiva,

  celle qui avance

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  I. Anecdotic Self-Portrait

  II. Intra-Uterine Memories

  III. Birth of Salvador Dali

  IV. False Childhood Memories

  V. True Childhood Memories

  The Story of the Linden-Blossom Picking and the Crutch

  PART TWO

  VI. Adolescence; Grasshopper; Expulsion from School; End of the European War

  VII. “It”; Philosophic Studies; Unfulfilled Love; Techncial Experiments; My “Stone Period”; End of Love Affair; Mother’s Death

  VIII. Apprenticeship to Glory; Suspension from the School of Fine Arts of Madrid; Dandyism and Prison

  IX. Return to Madrid; Permanent Expulsion from the School of Fine Arts; Voyage to Paris; Meeting with Gala; Beginnings of the Difficult Idyll of my Sole and Only Love Story; I am Disowned by my Family

  Tale of the Wax Manikin with the Sugar Nose

  PART THREE

  X. Beginnings in Society; Crutches; Aristocracy; Hotel du Château in Carry-le-Rouet; Lydia; Port Lligat; Inventions; Malaga; Poverty; L’Age d’Or

  XI. My Battle; My Participation and my Position in the Surrealist Revolution; “Surrealist Object” versus “Narrated Dream”; Critical-Paranoiac Activity versus Automatism

  XII. Glory Between the Teeth, Anguish Between the Legs; Gala Discovers and Inspires the Classicism of my Soul

  XIII. Metamorphosis; Death; Resurrection

  XIV. Florence; Munich; Monte Carlo; Bonwit Teller; New European War; Battle Between Mlle. Chanel and M. Calvet; Return to Spain; Lisbon; Discovery of the Apparatus for Photographing Thought; Cosmogony; Perennial Victory of the Acanthus Leaf; Renaissance

  Epilogue

  PROLOGUE

  At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.

  Stendhal somewhere quotes the remark of an Italian princess who was eating ice cream with enormous relish one hot evening. “Isn’t it too bad this is not a sin!” she exclaimed. When I was six, it was a sin for me to eat food of any kind in the kitchen. Going into this part of the house was one of the few things categorically forbidden me by my parents. I would stand around for hours, my mouth, watering, till I saw my chance to sneak into that place of enchantment; and while the maids stood by and screamed with delight I would snatch a piece of raw meat or a broiled mushroom on which I would nearly choke but which, to me, had the marvelous flavor, the intoxicating quality, that only fear and guilt can impart.

  Aside from being forbidden the kitchen I was allowed to do anything I pleased. I wet my bed till I was eight for the sheer fun of it. I was the absolute monarch of the house. Nothing was good enough for me. My father and mother worshiped me. On the day of the Feast of Kings I received among innumerable gifts a dazzling king’s costume–a gold crown studded with great topazes and an ermine cape; from that time on I lived almost continually disguised in this costume. When I was chased out of the kitchen by the bustling maids, how often would I stand in the dark hallway glued to one spot–dressed in my kingly robes, my sceptre in one hand, and in the other a leather-thonged mattress beater–trembling with rage and possessed by an overwhelming desire to give the maids a good beating. This was during the anguishing hour before the sweltering, hallucinatory summer noon. Behind the partly open kitchen door I would hear the scurrying of those bestial women with red hands; I would catch glimpses of their heavy rumps and their hair straggling like manes; and out of the heat and confusion that rose from the conglomeration of sweaty women, scattered grapes, boiling oil, fur plucked from rabbits’ armpits, scissors spattered with mayonnaise, kidneys, and the warble of canaries–out of that whole conglomeration the imponderable and inaugural fragrance of the forthcoming meal was wafted to me, mingled with a kind of acrid horse smell. The beaten white of egg, caught by a ray of sunlight cutting through a whirl of smoke and flies, glistened exactly like froth forming at the mouths of panting horses rolling in the dust and being bloodily whipped to bring them to their feet. As I said, I was a spoiled child.

  My brother died at the age of seven from an attack of meningitis, three years before I was born. His death plunged my father and mother into the depths of despair; they found consolation only upon my arrival into the world. My brother and I resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections. Like myself he had the unmistakable facial morphology of a genius.1 He gave signs of alarming precocity, but his glance was veiled by the melancholy characterizing insurmountable intelligence. I, on the other hand, was much less intelligent, but I reflected everything. I was to become the prototype par excellence of the phenomenally retarded “polymorphous perverse,” having kept almost intact all the reminiscences of the nursling’s erogenous paradises: I clutched at pleasure with boundless, selfish eagerness, and on the slightest provocation I would become dangerous. One evening I brutally scratched my nurse in the cheek with a safety pin, though I adored her, merely because the shop to which she took me to buy some sugar onions I had begged for was already closed. In other words, I was viable. My brother was probably a first version of myself, but conceived too much in the absolute.

  We know today that form is always the product of an inquisitorial process of matter–the specific reaction of matter when subjected to the terrible coercion of space choking it on all sides, pressing and squeezing it out, producing the swellings that burst from its life to the exact limits of the rigorous contours of its own originality of reaction. How many times matter endowed with a too-absolute impulse is annihilated; whereas another bit of matter, which tries to do only what it can and is better adapted to the pleasure of molding itself by contracting in its own way before the tyrannical impact of space, is able to invent its own original form of life.

  What is lighter, more fanciful and free to all appearances than the arborescent blossoming of agates! Yet they result from the most ferocious constraint of a colloidal environment, imprisoned in the most relentless of inquisitorial structures and subjected to all the tortures of compression and moral asphyxiation, so that their most de
licate, airy, and ornamental ramifications are, it seems, but the traces of its hopeless search for escape from its death agony, the last gasps of a bit of matter that will not give up before it has reached the ultimate vegetations of the mineral dream. Hence what we have in the case of the agate is not a plant transformed into a mineral, or even a plant caught and swallowed up in a mineral. On the contrary, we actually have the spectral apparition of the plant, its arborescent and mortal hallucination: the end and form of the inquisitorial and pitiless constraint of the mineral world.

  So too the rose! Each flower grows in a prison! In the aesthetic point of view freedom is formlessness. It is now known, through recent findings in morphology (glory be to Goethe for having invented this word of incalculable moment, a word that would have appealed to Leonardo!) that most often it is precisely the heterogeneous and anarchistic tendencies offering the greatest complexity of antagonisms that lead to the triumphant reign of the most rigorous hierarchies of form.

  Even as men with unilateral, one-way minds were burned by the fire of the Holy Inquisition, so multiform, anarchistic minds–precisely because they were such–found in the light of these flames the flowering of their most individual spiritual morphology. My brother, as I have already said, had one of those insurmountable intelligences with a single direction and fixed reflections that are consumed or deprived of form. Whereas I was the backward, anarchistic polymorphous perverse. With extreme mobility I reflected all objects of consciousness as though they were sweets, and all sweets as though they were materialized objects of consciousness. Everything modified me, nothing changed me; I was soft, cowardly, and resilient; the colloidal environment of my mind was to find in the unique and inquisitorial rigor of Spanish thought the definitive form of the bloody, jesuitical, and arborescent agates of my curious genius. My parents baptized me with the same name as my brother–Salvador–and I was destined, as my name indicates, for nothing less than to rescue painting from the void of modern art, and to do so in this abominable epoch of mechanical and mediocre catastrophes in which we have the distress and the honor to live. If I look toward the past, beings like Raphael appear to me as true gods; I am perhaps the only one today to know why it will henceforth be impossible even remotely to approximate the splendors of Raphaelesque forms. And my own work appears to me a great disaster, for I should like to have lived in an epoch during which nothing needed to be saved! But if I turn my eyes toward the present, although I do not underestimate specialized intelligences much superior to my own–yes, I shall repeat it a hundred times–I would for nothing in the world change places with anyone, with anyone whomsoever among my contemporaries. But the ever-perspicacious reader will already have discovered without difficulty that modesty is not my specialty.

  One single being has reached a plane of life whose image is comparable to the serene perfections of the Renaissance, and this being happens to be precisely Gala, my wife, whom I had the miracle to choose. She is composed of those fleeting attitudes, of those Ninth-Symphony-like facial expressions, which, reflecting the architectonic contours of a perfect soul, become crystallized on the very shore line of the flesh, at the skin’s surface, in the sea foam of the hierarchies of her own life, and which, having been classified, clarified by the most delicate breezes of the sentiments, harden, are organized, and become architecture in flesh and bone. And for this reason I can say of Gala seated that she resembles perfectly, that she is posed with the same grace as, Il Tempietto di Bramante near the church of San Pietro in Montorio at Rome; for, like Stendhal in the Vatican, I too can measure exactly the slim columns of her pride, the tender and stubborn banisters of her childhood, and the divine stairways of her smile. And so, as I watch her from the corner of my eye during the long hours I spend huddled before my easel, I say to myself that she is as well painted as a Raphael or a Vermeer. The beings around us look as though they were not even finished, and so badly painted! Or rather, they look like those sordid caricatural sketches hastily drawn on cafe terraces by men with stomachs convulsed by hunger.

  Tabernacle.

  I have said that at the age of seven I already wanted to be Napoleon, and I must explain this. On the third floor of our house lived an Argentine family named Matas, one of whose daughters, Ursulita, was a renowned beauty. It was whispered in the Catalonian oral mythology of 1900 that she had been selected by Eugenio d’Ors as the archetype of Catalonian womanhood, in his book La Ben Plantada (The Well-Planted One).

  Shortly after I reached the age of seven, the all-powerful social-libidinal attraction of the third floor began to exercise its sway over me. In the sultry twilights of early summer I would sometimes abruptly interrupt the supreme pleasure of drinking from the terrace faucet (delightfully thirsty, my heart beating fast) when the almost imperceptible creaking of the third-floor balcony door made me hope it would perhaps open. On the third floor I was worshiped as I was at home. There, every day at about six, around a monumental table in a drawing room with a stuffed stork, a group of fascinating creatures with the hair and the Argentine accent of angels would sit and take maté,2 served in a silver sipper which was passed from mouth to mouth. This oral promiscuity troubled me peculiarly and engendered in me whirls of moral uneasiness in which the blue flashes of the diamonds of jealousy already shone. I would in turn sip the tepid liquid, which to me was sweeter than honey, that honey which, as is known, is sweeter than blood itself–for my mother, my blood, was always present. My social fixation was sealed by the triumphal and sure road of the erogenous zone of my own mouth. I wished to sip Napoleon’s liquid! For Napoleon too was there, in the third-floor drawing room; there was a picture of him in the centre of the circle of glorious polychromes that adorned one end of a tin keg; this little keg was painted to look like wood and contained the voluptuous substance of the maté. This object was preciously placed on a centrepiece in the exact middle of the table. Napoleon’s image, reproduced on the maté keg, meant everything to me; for years his attitude of Olympian pride, the white and edible strip of his smooth belly, the feverish pink flesh of those imperial cheeks, the indecent, melodic, and categorical black of the spectral outline of his hat, corresponded exactly to the ideal model I had chosen for myself, the king.

  At that time people were singing the stirring song:

  Napoleón en el final

  De un ramillette colosal.

  This little picture of Napoleon had forcefully taken hold of the very core of the still nonexistent contours of my spirit, like the yolk of an egg fried in a pan (without the pan, and yet already in the centre of the pan).

  Thus I frantically established hierarchies in the course of a year; from wanting to be a cook I had awakened the very person of Napoleon from my impersonal costume of an obscure king. The furtive nutritive delights had assumed the architectural form of a small tabernacle–the keg containing the maté. The swarming erotic emotions aroused by the confused visions of the creatures, half women, half horses, who inhabited the kitchen below had given way to those of the third-floor drawing room, provoked by the serene image of a true lady, Ursulita Matas, the 1900 archetype of beauty.

  Later on I shall explain and minutely describe several thinking machines of my invention. One of these is based on the idea of the wonderful “edible Napoleon,” in which I have materially realized those two essential phantoms of my early childhood–nutritive oral delirium and blinding spiritual imperialism. It will then become clear as daylight why fifty small goblets filled with lukewarm milk hung on a rocking chair are to my mind exactly the same thing as the plump thighs of Napoleon. Since this may become true for everyone, and since there are all sorts of advantages in being able to look upon things in this way, I shall explain these and many other enigmas, even stranger and no less exact, in the course of this sensational book. One thing, at least, is certain: everything, absolutely everything, that I shall say here is entirely and exclusively my own fault.

  1 Since 1929 I have had a very clear consciousness of my genius, and I confess that thi
s conviction, ever more deeply rooted in my mind, has never excited in me emotions of the kind called sublime; nevertheless, I must admit that it occasionally affords me an extremely pleasurable feeling.

  2 An Argentinian tea.

  PART I

  CHAPTER ONE

  Anecdotic Selfportrait

  I know what I eat

  I do not know what I do

  Fortunately I am not one of those beings who when they smile are apt to expose remnants, however small, of horrible and degrading spinach clinging to their teeth. This is not because I brush my teeth better than others; it is due to the much more categorical fact that I do not eat spinach. It so happens that I attach to spinach, as to everything more or less directly pertaining to food, essential values of a moral and esthetic order. And of course the sentinel of disgust is ever on hand, vigilant and full of severe solicitude, ceremoniously attentive to the exacting choice of my foods.

  I like to eat only things with well-defined shapes that the intelligence can grasp. I detest spinach because of its utterly amorphous character, so much so that I am firmly convinced, and do not hesitate for a moment to maintain, that the only good, noble and edible thing to be found in that sordid nourishment is the sand.

  The very opposite of spinach is armor. That is why I like to eat armor so much, and especially the small varieties, namely, all shell-fish. By virtue of their armor, which is what their exoskeleton actually is, these are a material realization of the highly original and intelligent idea of wearing one’s bones outside rather than inside, as is the usual practice.

  The crustacean is thus able, with the weapons of its anatomy, to protect the soft and nutritive delirium of its insides, sheltered against all profanation, enclosed as in a tight and solemn vessel which leaves it vulnerable only to the highest form of imperial conquest in the noble war of decortication: that of the palate. How wonderful to crunch a bird’s tiny skull!1 How can one eat brains any other way! Small birds are very much like small shell-fish. They wear their armor, so to speak, flush with their skin. In any case Paolo Uccello painted armor that looked like little ortolans and he did this with a grace and mystery worthy of the true bird that he was and for which he was named.