Maniac Eyeball (19 page)

How Dalí Remembers René Crevel

I always felt that the first name of “René” (meaning “reborn”) was in direct opposition to “Crevel,” which is related to the French
crever
(to croak or die). His life was set between those two poles. Gravely ill, tubercular – he had been through a pneumo-thorax – he often disappeared from Paris for sojourns in sanatoria from which he came back renascent with a babyish happy mien, hair waved, well dressed, optimistic, and ready to plunge immediately into the most refined kind of self-destructive existence: nights out, insomnia, opium, and especially the pathetic dichotomy of poetic and political commitment. He had been fervently Marxist since 1925, and his Communism, incompatible with his Surrealist ideas, created insurmountable contradictions that tore him apart. His destiny was a perfect incarna tion of the relationship between the Communist Party and the Surrealist group, and its final outcome is symbolic.

When René Crevel, looking like a
crevé
(goner), collapsed at friends’ homes and said he’d rather
crever
(croak), they would forthwith send him off to another sanatorium cure, after which he was reborn full of euphoria – and it all started again.

He visited Gala and me several times at Port Lligat, where he had periods of real joy in living. He walked about stark naked in the olive grove, like an anchorite, and while there wrote
Les Pieds dans le Plat
(
The Foot Stuck In It
),
Dalí
et l’Anti-Obscurantisme
(
Dalí And Anti-Obscurantism
), and
Le Clavecin de Diderot
(
Diderot’s Harpsichord
). He adored Gala, whom he called “The Olive,” and dreamed of finding and loving a woman like her. Unfortunately, all he found was Breton, the Communist Party – and death.

Within the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, Crevel tried to play a useful role in bringing together Surrealists and Communists. When its big international congress took place in 1934, he hoped that Breton would speak up for such unity. But the pope of the movement slapped Ilya Ehrenburg just before he was sup posed to speak.[1] That consummated the break. Crevel was deeply affected by this. He tried every desperate measure for reconciliation. A falling-out with Breton was the only tangible result of his mis carried diplomacy. The pain of this failure felled him.

One morning I phoned him to let him know I in no way endorsed Breton’s stand. A voice answered that René Crevel had just attempted suicide and was at death’s door. I got to his house at the same time as the firemen. Crevel was trying to fill his lungs with air from the tube of a bottle of oxygen. His baby face was bloodless.

He had put a cardboard label around his left wrist with his name printed on it in all caps like an epitaph. In my memory, he still lives today like some magnificent dream phoenix ever arising anew in the name of friendship, honor, and the appellation of free man. A most terrible evidence of the fundamental incompatibility between politics and poetry.

But for the moment politics wrought its havoc and darkened the eyes of Breton and his group. It even blinded them to Surrealist truth. For the fiftieth anniversary of the Salon des Indepéndants at Paris’ Grand Palais, I had exhibited a canvas entitled
L’Enigme de Guillaume Tell
(
The Enigma Of William
Tell
) and a drawing,
Le Cannibalisme des Objets
(
Cannibalism Of Objects
). Lenin, down on one knee, in open shirt, wearing a cap of melting spoon and garters, had a buttock shaped like a breakfast roll with its end held up by a forked crutch. That buttock, of course, was the symbol of the Revolution of October 1917.

I had no “Surrealist reason” for not treating Lenin as a delirious dream subject. On the contrary. Lenin and Hitler turned me on in the highest. In fact, Hitler even more than Lenin. His fat back, especially when I saw him appear in the uniform with Sam Browne belt and shoulder straps that tightly held in his flesh, aroused in me a delicious gustatory thrill originating in the mouth and affording me a Wagnerian ecstasy. I often dreamed of Hitler as a woman. His flesh, which I had imagined whiter than white, ravished me. I painted a Hitlerian wet nurse knitting sitting in a puddle of water. I was forced to take the swastika off her armband.

There was no reason for me to stop telling one and all that to me Hitler embodied the perfect image of the great masochist who would unleash a world war solely for the pleasure of losing and burying himself beneath the rubble of an empire: the gratuitous action
par excellence
that should indeed have warranted the admiration of the Surrealists, now that for once we had a truly modern hero!

I painted
L’Enigme d’Hitler
(
The Enigma Of Hitler
) which, apart from any political intent whatever, brought together all the elements of my ecstasy. Breton was outraged. He was unwilling to admit that the master of Nazism was nothing more to me than an object of unconscious delirium, a prodigious self-destructive and cataclysmic force.

On the eve of the inquisitorial meeting, Breton, carrying a cane and accompanied by Benjamin Péret, Yves Tanguy, Gui Rosey, Marcel Jean, and Georges Hugnet, had tried to poke holes in my Lenin at the Salon, but their short arms had not been able to reach the painting hung high. Which made them furious. That very morning, the “pope” had gotten a letter signed by Crevel, Tristan Tzara, and Eluard, saying that they would not vote for my expulsion, in spite of the specification of the order of the day that they had received:

Order of the Day: Dalí having been guilty on several occasions of counter-revolutionary actions involving the glorification of Hitlerian fascism, the undersigned propose – despite his statement of January 25, 1934 – that he be excluded from Surrealism as a fascist element and combated by all available means.

So Breton was ready to strike hard. To ready myself for it, I removed my sixth sweater. My thermometer firmly in my mouth, I now went over to the attack, determined to catch Breton in his own logic. I highmindedly stated that to me the dream remained the great vocabulary of Surrealism and delirium the most magnificent means of poetic expression. I had painted both Lenin and Hitler on the basis of dreams. Lenin’s anamorphic buttock was not insulting, but the very proof of my fidelity to Surrealism. I was a total Surrealist that no censorship or logic would ever stop. No morality, no fear, no cataclysm dictated their law to me. When you are a Surrealist, you have to be consistent about it. All taboos are forbidden, or else a list has to be made of those to be observed, and let Breton formally state that the kingdom of Surrealist poetry is nothing but a little domain used for the house arrest of those convicted felons placed under surveillance by the vice squad or the Communist Party.

“So, André Breton,” I concluded, “if tonight I dream I am screwing you, tomorrow morning I will paint all of our best fucking positions with the greatest wealth of detail.” Breton tensed, his pipe tightly held between his teeth, and grumbled furiously, “I would not advise you to, my friend.” He was check-mated.

As I was removing my seventh sweater, and now baring my naked breast, he called on me to foreswear my ideas about Hitler, on pain of expulsion. I had won. Kneeling on the thick carpet now formed by my sweaters on the floor, I solemnly swore I was no enemy of the proletariat – about which in fact I didn’t give a fig, for I knew no one of that name and merely granted my friendship to the most disinherited men on earth, namely the Port Lligat fishermen who were so contented with their lot that I sometimes wondered whether the Marxists knew what they were doing in pulling for the revolution.

I had transformed the grotesque occasion into a true Surrealist happening. Breton would never forgive me for it, but he learned from it that it would probably be better to avoid repeating such an experiment that could so easily turn against him and trap him in his intellectual braggadocio.

“BRETON WAS THE FIRST IMPORTANT PERSON WHO MADE ME THINK AND WHOSE CONTACT GREATLY INTERESTED ME. I WAS CONTRIBUTING ROTTING MULES AND TURDS BALANCED ON HEADS – IN A WORD, A DELIRIOUS, SUPER, FIRST-RATE INCREMENT THAT GREATLY ATTRACTED HIM. THEY HAD CLEARLY EXPLAINED TO ME THAT OUT OF PURE AUTOMATISM I WAS CALLED UPON TO TRANSCRIBE EVERYTHING THAT WENT THROUGH MY HEAD WITHOUT BENEFIT OF ANY CHECK IMPOSED BY REASON, AESTHETICS, OR MORALITY. I HAD IDEAL MEANS AND POSSIBILITIES OF COMMUNICATION. BUT BRETON WAS VERY QUICKLY SHOCKED BY THE PRESENCE OF SCATOLOGICAL ELEMENTS. HE WANTED NO TURDS AND NO MADONNA: BUT THERE IS A CONTRADICTION TO THE VERY FUNDAMENTAL OF PURE AUTOMATISM IN SETTING UP IMMEDIATE TABOOS, FOR THESE EXCREMENTS CAME TO ME DIRECTLY, BIOLOGICALLY. THERE WAS A CENSORSHIP DETERMINED BY REASON, AESTHETICS, MORALITY, TO BRETON’S TASTE, OR BY WHIM. THEY HAD CREATED IN FACT A SORT OF HIGHLY LITERARY NEO-ROMANTICISM... IN WHICH I WAS FOREVER OUT OF FAVOR, AND INDEED BEING JUDGED, INVESTIGATED, SUBJECTED IN A WORD TO INQUISITORIAL PROCEDURE.”

[1] André Breton, a few days before this Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture, met  Ehrenburg, who had written in his
Vu par un Ecrivain de I’U.R.S.S
. (
As Seen By A Soviet Writer
): “The Surrealists are perfectly willing to accept Hegel and Marx as well as the revolution, but what they will not do is work. They have their own concerns. They study pederasty, for instance, and dreams. One of them does his best to eat up an inheritance, another a wife’s dowry...” Breton slapped him. Ehrenburg was a member of the Soviet delegation to the Congress. Breton was denied the floor as a result of this incident.

Chapter Nine: How Not To Be A Catalan

When we were very small, my father used to take us on outings to Cape Creus. I need only to close my eyes in order to recapture landscapes and scenes intact, but at the time I established the strangest kind of dialogue with myself. Every rock, every promontory of Cape Creus is in permanent metamorphosis. Each is a suggestion that prompts spontaneous visualization of an eagle, a camel, a rooster, a lion, a woman – but if you approach from the sea, the nearer you get, the more the symbolism develops and changes. It is a continual simulacrum. The bird becomes a wild animal and then a barnyard fowl. Like living in a constant mirage... and yet, when we land, the granite beneath our feet is hard, compact, clear, implacable after having double-dealt us so constantly.

Likewise my thought, my mind: so wildly concentrated upon itself, a block of diamond whose multiple facets are so brilliantly shimmering that the reality surrounding it is disconcerted, deceived, snared, decoyed. Thus my strength and my strategy, patterned on a single landscape from which my roots draw their sap.

The universe is a whole. How can that be denied? Just as man breathes eighteen times a minute, or 25,920 times a day, the equinoctial point of the sun runs through the zodiac once in every 25,920 years. Our hearts beat only one-fourth as fast as our lungs breathe, just as the speed of the propagation of air is four times greater than that of water. Our life is a mimesis of the world. Our minds are like a film that records the variety of the phenomena of the universe. I am convinced that I am Cape Creus itself, that I embody the living nucleus of that landscape. My existential obsession is constantly to mimetize myself into Cape Creus. Like it, I am a cathedral of strength with a nimbus of dream-like delirium. My granite structure is equipped with ductilities, haze, glint, quicksands, that hide its needles, its craters, its promontories, the better to let me keep my secrets.

The north wind coming over the mountains, on this cape that the ancients dedicated to Aphrodite, sculpted the dream figures just as I model my own characters on my stage of life. To hear my secret voice, one must first have listened long to the song of the wind at the point of these Pyrenean rocks exchanging their memories and intertwining their millennial legends. The cape is the utmost point of Catalonia and one of those high places in which there blows the sacred spirit, the tidal wave that comes from the depths of the sea to conjoin with the breath descending from the sky to fertilize our earth. This is where my paranoia was born, in this cell of mystery.

One day I found a piece of wood formed by the waves and the rocks, awaiting me like a talisman vouchsafed by the gods, on a beach at Cape Creus. It was during an outing with Gala. Love guided our steps and illumined our days. All of our actions had unusual style; miracles sprang up beneath our eyes. I knew, when I saw that wood with its magical cachet, that Aphrodite herself had sent it to me. I picked it up religiously, and have never been without it since. This message from the gods is a good-luck charm. I often feel an over powering need to touch it so as to undergo its magnetism and inhale its spiritual effluvia. The obsession is a sort of crankiness: Gala knows as well as I that our two lives are knotted through that magical wand. At times I have mislaid it; and we became desperate. I remember once in New York making the housekeeping staff at the Hotel St. Moritz go through all the day’s dirty bedclothes to find the fetish I had negligently left between the sheets. For before I go to sleep it acts on me like a tranquilizer. It assures me of a harmonious passage from reality to dream. Before I had it, I was obsessed with the disorder I was leaving behind. I had to make sure all the drawers in the bedroom were closed. I made Gala leave all the doors ajar. Within the bedroom, I laid out a whole series of objects arranged in a harmonious but esoteric order.