The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (76 page)

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.

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.