Maniac Eyeball (29 page)

The conquest of the irrational assumed its fullest meaning. I was moulting. I was saved! Nothing – not America itself, not success nor money – would ever again be able to affect me.

I was not unhappy to check out this new strength of mine by meeting Sigmund Freud. When Stefan Zweig introduced me to him in London, the fanaticism of my personality deeply impressed the father of psychoanalysis.

That autumn, too, was when we had a villa in Florence which we left to be with Coco Chanel ill in Venice and then convalescing at La Pausa at Roquebrune on the Riviera, where I met Pierre Reverdy. I applied my new-found power to the Cubist poet, the glorifier of modern art. We had a fine set-to: Now I knew I was ready to launch my great challenge.

How Dalí Challenged America

By overturning a bathtub I threw down my gauntlet to an America vaingloriously parading its self-sufficiency.

The success of my first Bonwit Teller window inspired all kinds of plagiarism up and down Fifth Avenue. I could not resist the pleasure of demonstrating what Dalínian inspiration was, and accepted the Bonwit order for two more windows.

I had not the least intention of using the usual awful mannequins. In the attic of the department store, I found two wax-women with long Ophelia hair, both covered with spiders and their gossamer webs. Accumulated dust gave them a patina as superb as that of an old bottle of
fine
champagne
brandy. On the theme of Day and the Myth of Narcissus, I laid out the rugs and furniture and put one of these old dolls in a karakul-lined bathtub filled with water.

As a counterpart, there was Night in the other window huddled into a canopied bed covered by a sheet of black satin with holes burned in it through which could be seen the other old figure, her head on a pillow of burning embers – artificial, to be sure. A jewel-covered phantom hovered at the sleeping woman’s bedside.

After an exhausting night of work, that lasted until two in the morning, the whole thing looked most smart. But when the next afternoon at five Gala and I went by and saw that the second figure had been withdrawn and the canopy no doubt sent back up to the attic, my fury was just as superb.

I went to the main office and had myself announced. Disregarding the compliments the director was attempting to pay me, I demanded that my whole decor be restored as I had done it, or my name taken off. My proposal was haughtily rejected. When I understood that I was not to get anywhere, I said good-bye and walked out very calmly – with the power of a rhinoceros trotting meekly along before he attacks.

With the same quiet assurance, I marched right in to the window that had Beauty of the Day in it, and stood there motionless while a host of gawkers was attracted outside.

When the crowd was large enough, I put both my hands on the brimming bathtub and tried to lift it, intending to spill it over, but it slipped from my grasp and with great force slid forward into the windowpane, much of which went noisily flying. Water and glass showered down on the howling mob.

As for me, my light cane over my shoulder, I briskly jumped out into the street through the opening. I had hardly gotten through the jagged glass when another huge hunk of it broke off and smashed to the ground. I turned around to see a detective putting a plump hand on my shoulder and telling me to follow him.

I spent two hours in a police detention room with drunks and bums before the judge announced that I could be released if I paid for the broken pane. But the next day the papers made a hero out of me. From that day on, in American artists’ eyes I was the incarnation of the creator’s defense of his work. The broken window did more for my glory than if I had eaten up all of Fifth Avenue.

I was still not finished, however, with the tribulations of the artist coming to grips with American commerce. I was asked to do a pavilion at the New York World’s Fair,
The Dream Of Venus,
with full freedom guaranteed. But this was a trap intended merely for the exploitation of my name. I was suddenly told what materials and what styles I had to use. I resisted all pres sures reacting with such violence that my adversaries begged for a truce, but they sabotaged my work and I had to resign. It was a salutary experience.

I immediately wrote a
Declaration Of Independence
Of Imagination
and
Of Man’s Right To Madness,
which appeared in New York in that same year (1939). This was my own personal declaration of war against stupidity. I had just given the powers of the irrational their standing in America.

A Dalínian victory.

“I HAVE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO LET MORE THAN ONE NIGHT GO BY WITHOUT SOLVING A PROBLEM THAT DEEPLY PREOCCUPIES ME.”

Chapter Thirteen: How To Dominate Men, Subjugate Women, And Stupefy Children

I am not
a
Surrealist; I
am
Surrealism.

Surrealism is not a party or a label; it is a state of mind, unique, to each his own, that can be affected by no party line, taboo, or morality. It is the total freedom to be and the right to absolute dreaming. So when, on returning from the U.S., I again confronted the puerile arrested-adolescents’ attitudes of the Surrealist group, my stomach turned. Now they wanted me to take part in a Surrealist exhibition in which the participants were to be displayed alphabetically.

Allegedly to avoid any kind of hierarchy! This meant imposing the rule of mediocrities, of the greatest number, and drowning the essential on the pretext of a simple-minded purity. The Surrealist hell was paved with good boy-scout intentions.

On board the
Champlain,
I had spent the return trip in going over my ideas and positions, so as to work out a line of behavior as hard as the tip of a diamond. I was now past thirty-three, Christ’s age, and my cosmogony by now really had to have taken shape. First of all, while I conquered America, it had grabbed me with its sense of adventure, which was likely to erupt at any street corner with the most extravagant ideas – in the U.S., there is always someone ready to go along with the most amazing of suggestions; and the youthfulness of its ever curious, avid, and imaginative minds, its sense of freedom and playfulness, yes, with this America had also conquered me. Its virtues were in sharp contrast with the superannuated European style in which the spirit of tradition I so cherished was itself choked off under narrow formalism, verbiage, and artifice. I decided, once and for all, that I would shake up that dust and, without taking any other consideration into account, allow only my own caprice to rule as law. So I forced my European contemporaries to react, in violation of their moral comforts and their bad cultural habits. It would be me, Dalí – against the world!

Henceforth I knew it was possible to mobilize a whole city and the press and the finest minds around an artist’s gesture. America had proved that to me. That experience had to be turned to my advantage. Yes, enough of the fake democracy based on so-called equal ity. Hierarchy to the fore! Respect for the conquest of genius! Out with the neighborhood poetasters, the palette errand-boys, collectors of crumbs at the dining board of art! To each according to his merits. It was too easy to merge into a society, palaver, and pillage one for the benefit of the rest. I recognized Picasso alone as among my peers. The others smelled of regimentation. Moreover, the little suburb pirates who called themselves Surrealists and who set up a new play-society while dreaming of glory had been made well aware of the enormous difference between their daring, their concerns, their passion – and mine.

The International Surrealist Exhibition, which I had taken part in shortly before my departure for the U.S. in 1938, had been to me one of those secret events that indicate a breaking point. My trip to the U.S. had deepened the gap.

And now Dalí was coming back with a “Europe, I am here!” born full-blown so to speak from the thigh of the Statue of Liberty.

How Dalí Considers the Surrealist Exhibition Of 1938

Georges Wildenstein had agreed to put on an International Surrealist Exhibition at his Galerie des Beaux-Arts, 140 Rue du Fau bourg St.-Honoré, which usually was reserved only for the classics and had had the honor of presenting El Greco.

The gallery had also shown Seurat and friends, Gauguin, Fauvism, Cubism. Raymond Cogniat, its artistic director, wanted to give the Surrealists full freedom to show their power of revelation, by going after international quality and variety. Breton and Eluard took charge of the thing, but had the good sense to call in Marcel Duchamp as permanent arbitrator. It was he who got the idea of completely camouflaging the gallery: it would be entirely hung with dirty coalsacks so the exhibit would be held in the dark, each visitor carrying his own flashlight the better to make the discovery of the meaning of things for himself. It was as hard to round up the twelve hundred coalsacks needed as it was to get insurance against a firedamp explosion that might have made an apocalyptic fireworks of the 299 works by sixty-odd participants and the roster of Tout-Paris who would attend the vernissage. That might not have been such a bad way to wipe out the recollection of all the unlikely allegedly Surrealist hardware that had been gathered in the venerable locale.

Until then, it had been possible to ask: “What is Surrealism?” Now, there it was: a claptrap collection of jokes and tricks in which the gimmick too often stood in for deficient imagination, the quick hustle was supposed to be as good as a mystery, noise was to take the place of music, and Breton’s moods were dubbed “solemn wraths”. The display was on the pauperish side. It might bring gasps from the bourgeoisie, but not from a De Sade, an Edgar Allan Poe, a Baudelaire, or a Nietzsche, who after all were the very frame of Surrealist reference. They all would have remained ice-cold before these pleasantries jokingly baptized “revolutionary Surrealist works.”

Four Louis XV beds covered with jonquils, four revolving doors, sixteen costumed mannequins, a satin-upholstered wheelbar row, a tabernacle mounted on women’s legs, a table trimmed in velvet with a female bust on it, a brazier, an imitation low bathtub, a monster pair of French can-can under-drawers big as a whole room – these were the main decor along with a puddle of water and a bit of moss.

The creation of the Olympus of Surrealism desire had given rise to some scenes of a curious morality. Breton had unflinchingly accepted Duchamp’s mannequin wearing a man’s hat and vest and jacket with pocket kerchief that lit up. Across its pubis was written in crayon,
rrose sélavy.

Likewise, André Masson’s dummy with its head inside a birdcage, but when Max Ernst wanted to set up a couple in which a lion-headed man was shown embracing a woman in deepest mourning, whose uplifted skirt revealed a pair of pink silk panties with a lighted electric bulb inside, there was a scandal. “No fire in the underpants!” came Breton’s ukase.

And poor Max Ernst had to put out that flame of immoral desire. The “head” of Surrealism reached the colors of apoplexy one morning when he discovered I-forget-whose naked mannequin with a bowl containing one goldfish in its crotch. His howls filled the gallery till the bowl was shattered.

After fire, water and fishes had been consigned to the Hades of good bourgeois morality. Each of the mannequins and dummies had a street sign over it: Weak Street, Vivian Street, Lips Street, Bead Street, Blood Tranfusion Street, Cherry Street – to make a sort of idealized Paris. All that were needed now were a Bishopric Street and a Confessional Way!

It was in this climate that I was moved to suggest the creation of a “General Commissariat of Public Imagination,” which would have been immune to the thunderbolts of a bilious and touchy Breton, to my mind far too conditioned to nice quiet reasonable dreams. I had already set up a dummy with a toucan head made of black card board embellished with an egg between the tits and dressed in a multitude of assorted little spoons. My aphrodisiac telephone with the boiled-lobster receiver stood on a straw stool beside it. Naturally, I had been allowed to participate only to the extent of this stylistic exercise plus my
Great Masturbator
and the
Girafe
En Feu
(
Giraffe On Fire
).

Striking a big blow, I asked that in the entryway in front of the gallery there be erected a monument made up of a taxi with a roof full of holes that would let a continual rain seep through on a Venus lying among the lichens, and driven by a monster. I thought Breton was going to explode with repressed rage. It was the day before the unveiling, and I was upsetting his plans. But I was convincing. All those present voted in favor and I forthwith set down a description of my “rainy taxi” for snobbish Surrealist ladies, which was to have a vegetable carpet with installation of internal rain, two hundred Burgundy snails, twelve Lilliputian frogs, each wearing a very fine crown on its head. The chauffeur to wear a helmet made of the jawbone of a shark. The lady was preferably to be dressed in a sordid cretonne print, displaying Millet’s
Angelus
and his sensational
Gleaners.
This was embodied in a resolution, which I signed.