Maniac Eyeball (28 page)

The hardest part was getting it into a taxi – despite its invisibility, which only grew increasingly greater. I went all about in New York, bread in hand, pushing passers-by out of the way, without anyone mentioning it. I stopped on the sidewalk, leaning on my bread, and window-shopped. Pictures were taken, but since the bread bled out at either side, no one saw what it was.

Yet on the last day there was a miracle. As the aging bread began to crumble, I decided one morning to eat it. Having coffee at the counter of a drugstore on 50th Street, I started to break an end off my bread to go with my fried eggs.

The counter crowd had soon gathered around to watch me. There were a lot of questions, but being by myself and unable to speak English, invisibility now was replaced by incomprehension and the mystery of the bread remained unsolved for Americans on that November day in 1934.

As I was crossing the street, I slipped and lost hold of my bread. A policeman helped me to the sidewalk. When I looked back, my bread had disappeared – become totally invisible – even to me. I knew it had been assimilated, digested by the city, and that its yeast was even now making its way through the bellies of the immense phalluses all around us, already manufacturing the Dalínian sperm of my future success.

Dalí’s First American Success

The very next day, I had a triumph. My dealer, Julien Levy, sold almost half the show in the first three days it was open.

The papers lauded my imagination and Caresse Crosby threw a big party for me. The elite of American society came to the Coq Rouge for the event, which had as its theme “A Surrealist Dream”. The idea was to show what oneiricism could make of the challenge of European Surrealist imagination.

I had dreamed up an “exquisite corpse” costume for Gala. On her head, she had a nude doll whose guts were being eaten away by ants while a phosphorescent lobster’s claws clutched its head. And I greeted visitors standing next to a flayed bull, held up by crutches, its belly full of big-horned phonographs. My mustache, standing out like two aerials, radiated magic fluid. It was a wonder some evening.

The first lady to arrive came in entirely naked, with a bird cage over her head. Her escort was dressed in a nightshirt and had a night-table over his head for an umbrella. When the party was at its height, he opened the door of the chamberpot compartment and let out swarms of hummingbirds. There were eyes everywhere, on a pretty lady’s lower abdomen, on tits, backs, crotches, and foreheads.

Tumors bounced around like globulous bosoms. Huge safety pins hung from the most beautiful hunks of flesh in New York. From time to time, with my switch, I would tap at a filled bathtub that teetered more and more precariously at the head of the stairs, threatening to douse the whole assembly... It was a soirée that would have turned my little Surrealist pals green with envy as they sat around their marble-topped cafe tables in the Place Blanche, masturbating in the name of Lautréamont!

The next morning at ten we were aboard the
Normandie
heading back to Europe, where I found the jealousy and mediocrity of the Surrealist crises unchanged.

No sooner had I landed, than my old friends filed a ridiculous lawsuit against me. They accused Gala – on the basis of an article in the notoriously pandering
Le Petit Parisien –
of having created a scandal at our dream ball in New York by wearing as a headpiece the provocative symbol of the dead Lindbergh baby whose kidnap-murder was then the big headline story – and the whole thing was odious. The truth was that they were losing sleep because I was getting ahead. Especially the little group of Communists led astray by Aragon. This sounded to me like the last fatal crisis, and that was just fine with me.

Hitler was beginning to yell very loud. With his Sam Browne belt, his forelock, and the tight little cheeks of his arse, he impressed me as deeply as the American telephone that had inspired my
Violeites Impériales
(
Imperial Violets
),
Le Moment Sublime
(
The Sublime Moment
), and
Cheval
Aveugle Mâchant Un Téléphone
(
Blind Horse Chewing A
Telephone
). To announce my return, I published
La Conquête
de l’Irrationnel
(
Conquest Of The Irrational
), in 1935, causing a sensation in artistic circles. But I almost let my dreams destroy me, in the way that you are liable to let a sharp pickpocket who steps on your foot get away with your wallet.

The first blow came from Franco’s uprising in Spanish Morocco, leading to the siege of Madrid and the tragic news of Lorca’s being executed by mistake. The chaos in Spain undid me, and the monsters of civil war found their way on to my canvases. The double being of the “cannibalism of autumn” was eating itself up and sucking my blood. My father was to be persecuted, my sister almost lose her mind, my church steeple would be razed, and countless friends would die! Death, nothingness, and the abjectness of hate were all about me. My paranoiac-critical system was going full blast. In the depths of despair, I continued to paint, turning vertigo into virtue. I produced the
Venus de Milo Aux
Tiroirs
(
Venus With Opening Drawers
) and the
Cabinet
Anthropomorphique
(
Anthropomorphic Cabinet
; also known as
The City Of Drawers).
The richest collector in England, Edward F. W. James, gave me a dazzling commission.

London was the scene for a Cézanne-Corot-Dalí exhibit, at which I showed my
Veston Aphrodisiaque
(
Aphrodisiac
Jacket
), made of ninety-eight liqueur glasses filled with green crème de menthe, each penetrated by a cock tail straw. The success of all this would be sweet to think back on, were my memory not tainted with a horrible sensation.

I had decided to make a speech at this exhibit, but from in side a deepsea-diver’s suit, to symbolize the subconscious. I was put into the outfit, even including the leaden shoes that nailed me to the spot. I had to be carried up to the stage. Then the helmet was screwed and bolted on. I started my speech behind the glass facepiece in front of a microphone which of course picked up nothing. But my facial expressions fascinated the audience. Soon they saw me open-mouthed, apoplectic, then turning blue, my eyes revulsed. No one had thought of connecting me to an air supply and I was yelling that I was asphyxiating. The specialist who had put the suit on me was nowhere to be found. I gesticulated in such a way as to make friends under stand that the situation was becoming critical. One of them grabbed a pair of scissors and tried in vain to cut a vent in the fabric, another tried to unscrew the helmet – and, when that did not work, started banging at the bolts with a hammer. My head pounded like a ringing bell and my eyes teared with pain. I was being pulled and pushed every which way. Two men were trying to force the mask off, while a third kept striking blows that knocked me out. The stage had turned into a frenzied mêlée from which I emerged as a disjointed puppet in my copper helmet that resounded like a gong. At this, the crowd went wild with applause before the total success of the Dalínian mimo-drama which in its eyes apparently was a representation of the conscious trying to apprehend the subconscious. I almost died of this triumph. When finally they got the helmet off I was as livid as Jesus coming out of the desert after the forty-day fast.

This horrible sensation of angst was to leave traces that were long in healing and made even worse by the tragedy of the Spanish war. The pestilential odor of death was rising from the charnelhouses of old Europe in which Lorca was one of the first cadavers, the very image of the hero struck down by blind hate. Stupidity had even joined the Surrealists. They wanted to expel me as a Hitlerite provocateur, suspected of having stolen milk from the children of the unemployed because I was more concerned with my thinking-machine that I fed with warm milk.

How Dalí Chose Success Rather Than Stupidity

I turned my back on Europe to escape the hateful birdlime that it exuded like snot. I did not yet know that my back was as trans parent as my infant-nurse’s had been. When I got to New York for the third time, in 1936, glory was waiting. The penicillin of my bread had spread and done its work elegantly. America was prey to acute Dalínitis.

Time
magazine greeted me by printing Man Ray’s photograph of me on its cover. Since I had no idea of what the magazine was, I could not appreciate the importance of this fact, and my blasé air about it was not in the least affected. But I was soon to learn the breadth of that publication’s influence: I could not cross a street with out being recognized and my arm was soon sore from autographing every weird bit of paper shoved under my nose.

Glory was as intoxicating to me as a spring morning. I sold all my pictures on opening day of the show and Bonwit Teller commissioned me to do a Surrealist store window. I decapitated a mannequin and replaced the head with a bouquet of red roses, extending the length of the fingernails with ermine hairs. A lobster made into a telephone and my green crème-de-menthe
Aphrodisiac Jacket
were the other two characters of my grouping, which was a big hit. But these little games, and even the incense of glory, were not satisfying. I stayed up on my balcony watching life go by without being a part of it, ill at ease.

Gala, ever attentive, tried to keep me happy with the fine idea of going back to Spain to add a storey to our house at Port Lligat, but clinking glasses with the bricklayers and roofers did nothing to reassure me about the quality or future of men who were always ready to disembowel each other for the artifice of a cause. Listening to them, I knew civil war was inevitable and horrifying. It was catastrophe eve, time to flee from Spain. So Gala took me to Italy, there to pick up the traces of Andrea Palladio, the architect of the Foscari Palace, whom I admired, and Bramante. I wandered through Rome, and visited my friend Edward James, and then Lord Berners, and painted
Impressions d’Afrique
(
Impressions Of
Africa
). All the while, from my window opening on the Forum, with one ear I could hear Musso lini shouting his speeches to the people of Rome.

This was a strange period of my existence, comparable to the painful state of a gestating woman – but with a kind of nervous pregnancy. I felt heavy with the sufferings of my world. I was like one persecuted. Illness haunted me. All the upsets, the tragedies, murders, crises, troubles that rang out through news reports translated themselves in me into one obsessive anxiety: germs.

I had just heard that some thirty-odd friends of mine had been executed by anarchist firing squads, when Gala took me to Tre-Croci at the Austrian border, to try to find some peace of mind. She left me there alone. My obsession grew worse. I felt surrounded. I spent my time with my nose stuck into the toilet bowl inspecting my stools, peering into my handkerchief to analyze my snot. I was back with the hallucinations I had in the time before Gala cured me through her love. I understood that I was living through an unusual phenomenon of my paranoiac-critical becoming.

Gala’s return freed me. Just before she got back, I had an un usually rare Dalínian experience. For a week, every time I sat down on the throne, my eye was attracted by a kind of greenish snot that was stuck on the porcelain wall-facing between the windows and seemed to be daring me. That day, I took a sheet of tissue and sharply swooped down on the snot. Far from yielding, the point of it went through the paper and stuck me between nail and flesh, right down to the bone. I started to bleed. I gazed in terror at this unbelievable cut and my imagination quickly informed me that soon my finger would doubtless have to be cut off, as might even the whole hand that was turning purple under the pressure I was applying to keep the germs from moving in! Tetanus had surely taken hold of my body.

Would I be able to survive with a hand cut off? With a dead hand rotting underground? The very idea made me shiver. I fell to my knees. At that moment my eyes caught the base of the shining stalagmite of snot. I grasped that it was a fleck of hardened glue. In a fraction of a second, my lucidity wiped the terrors away. Snot alone could have been fatal to me! I had nothing to fear from glue! I pulled the sliver out of the bleeding wound. I was cured.

Gala was the one who showed me what had happened to me: just as the deep crisis that was convulsing Spain and Europe was the result of insurmountable contradictions into which society had boxed itself, so my American success had imprisoned me in a Surrealist image of myself which corresponded exactly to what I had dreamt. My head was banging against the ceiling and the blows I could hear resounding were being made by my forehead bumping into the “successful image of my distinction.” I absolutely had to break out of my armor and set myself a new mental model. Only my work could give me the strength and stature demanded by events and this selfsame success. That was why Gala had left me alone so I might find myself.

My metamorphosis became the keyword of my
gravida,
which once more opened the doors of deliverance to me so I could live again. Gala showed me that the essential for me was henceforth to find the path of great tradition, give my work the classical virtue of an architecture. Then everything I had believed for the past months crystallized in me with miraculous force and divine instinct. I painted
Le
Corridor de Palladio
(
Palladio’s Corridor
),
Plage Enchantée
avec Trois Graces Fluides
(
Enchanted Beach With Three
Fluid Graces
), and especially
Gala Gradiva
for the greater glory of my love.

Yes, I understood that I was “the savior of modern art”, that in this day of philosophical and artistic nearsightedness I alone was capable of sublimating all the experiments, all the contemporary values by giving them their true classical meaning – in an atomized world what was needed was synthesis, in an incoherent world the affirmation of the line of force, in a skeptical world to be a man of faith.