Maniac Eyeball (31 page)

The next day, I went to my devastated house at Port Lligat. The shutters hung askew, the doors were off their hinges. Nothing remained of the furniture or dishes.

Everywhere, on the walls, graffiti which in their challenge-game recorded each passage of rival armed troops, shouting their arrogant certainty of victory. I could follow the progression of the war as on a general-staff map. Anarchists pushed out by Communists, return of the Trotskyists, the Separatists, the Republicans, and finally the Francoites with their “Arriba España!” covering a whole panel. I kicked the debris out of the way and went out.

Lidia, the well set, was waiting for me in front of the house that for so long had been hers. She laughed with her toothless mouth as she saw me. I kissed her, and she told me of her war. With her noble madness, she had always bet with the surest instinct. Each evening, at the worst moments of wartime fury, she sat on the beach at Cadaqués and built a big fire that she methodically kept going. When the tired, chilled, and hungry soldiers emerged from the night and the cold, they came over and opened their packs; Lidia was their canteen-keeper. When they had nothing left to devour, they went out foraging, and Lidia became their fence. The next day, they got killed or driven off by the others. Lidia rebuilt her fire and resumed her role as provider. They all went through that way, the fanatics eaten up with their hatred, the argumentative revolutionaries, the cruel military men, the harmless dreamers. At Lidia’s fireside, ideas, passions, disciplines melted away. They all held their hands out to get warm and paid tribute so as to eat. That is how revolutions work out.

As Lidia said, “There is always a time when they have to eat.” I like the idea that kitchen fires win out over the fires of war.

On the way back, I went through Madrid to bring news of Lidia to her master, Eugenio d’Ors, who had immortalized her in
La Bien Plantada.
We embraced as if we were never to see each other again. He introduced me to his companions, the philosopher Eugenio Montès, the poets Marquina and Dionisio Ridruejo. I spent a week at the heart of this Platonic banquet, answering the questions of my friends, curious and avid to find some bearings. All of them had been marked by the civil war but they were more than ever determined to live by the power of the spirit.

To hold on to oneself! Not to give in to the attractions, the tumults of artificial interests in the idea of collective murder that was dominating Europe and which my country had just lived through – there could be no other goal for an artist. Gala was waiting for me in Lisbon with a veritable turnout of the
International Who’s Who
. In Praça del Rossio, famous for its Inquisitional stakes, the dog-days sun was burning down on the most famous creative movers of the flight drama, the last act of which ended in a visa: Schiaparelli, René Clair, the Duke of Windsor, Paderewski were mopping their brows as they dreamt of good old American refrigerators. Meantime, they had to make do with overcrowded hotels, stopped-up toilet bowls, and the dankness of police offices in which blind and unfeeling public servants parsimoniously meted out rubber stamps that spelled heaven or hell. The streets were full of friends with so much anxiety in their eyes that one wondered whether it were better to recognize them or let them forget you. Dalí did not wait to find out, and the
Excemption
carried me off toward freedom. I was never so happy for my egotism that kept me from looking back and avoided my being turned into a statue of the salt of pity and compassion. Unhappy the poor of mind who let themselves be tied up by noble feelings!

I was abandoning the old cracked face of a senile, lazy Europe, purulent with its contradictions, gnawed by skepticism, drunk with materialism. Leaning on the rail of the
Excemption,
I watched as the outline of a continent that was soon to be nothing but a symbolic line melted away into the hot haze – and, like a powerful nostalgia, the memory of my youth surged up in my heart. I dis covered a thousand reasons for loving the continent that had given me so much.

But it was probably necessary for fate to have its way, for the great blood purge to drain the abscesses, for suffering and tears to enlighten intelligences. I would come back, I told myself, when Europe had again found faith in man. It was a blue dream, such as all exiles have. Fortunately, I had Gala at my side, with her eyes and her skin and her strength. All the rest, after all, meant less than one of her smiles.

How Dalí Lived Five Years In The United States

At Hampton Manor, Caresse Crosby was awaiting us with all the hospitality of a wealthy American woman, and with her we found a bit of the charm of the Ile-de-France and her Mill of the Sun. We had barely gotten there, when I put two big canvases on my easel and started to paint
Araignée du Soir,
Espoir
(
Spider Of Evening – Hope
) and
La Resurrection de
la Chair
(
Resurrection Of The Flesh
), that I was at for five years before finishing. On the first of these, the mouth of a cannon, supported by a crutch, vomited a spirited horse and a tongue turned into a breast-foot-victory. Mean while, a runny woman’s body is playing a living violoncello in front of an angel hiding his face. The
Resurrection of the Flesh
is a kind of Doomsday in which gold, power, thought, love, and death are all brought up for judgment before life.

The Germans were parading through Paris when I applied the first brushstroke, and leaving it when I signed the picture after having registered in it as in a seismograph all of the fever of those terrible years which with Catalan fanaticism I refused to take any part in, but of which my genius recorded all the variations. I had in the interim had the fun of painting my
Autoportrait Mou Avec Du Bacon Grillé
(
Soft Self-Portrait With Fried Bacon
), which translated my new way of life at Pebble Beach, California.

America had quickly adopted me with the luxury it reserves to its chosen. The New York Museum of Modern Art in 1940 gave a retrospective show of forty-three of my paintings and seventeen drawings, to great success. When I traveled, it was like a Roman emperor going up to the Capitol. For two years, this exhibit toured the United States, appearing in eight of the largest cities. That constituted consecration. Then the Knoedler Gallery for a time took over handling my interests, presenting twenty-nine pictures, all of which were sold.

Europe was being put to the sword from Glasgow to Stalingrad and going through convulsions of rage. This flower of civilization had engendered the miasmas of a political line now devouring it. Nothing was being left of what had been the pride of its noble, prodigal races. An iron collar around its neck was crushing it. I now felt that I had been chosen by God’s angels to keep the great tradition intact and bear witness to the genius of a continent. This certainty gave me great courage and genius-inspired intensity of concentration and creation. I felt the time would come when, on a ravaged earth, reconstruction would be needed and that I owed it to myself to be there with all the gloriousness of my genius to insure a new renascence.

Between the ballet
Labyrinth
and the illustrating of Maurice Sandoz’
Fantastic Memories, I
started to write
The
Secret Life Of Salvador Dalí,
so as to bring my truth to the world and open the doors of knowledge on the vertiginous depths of my life. I knew that through my experience I was answering the basic questions of people of today and giving current responses to the feeling of death, the great time-space crisis that was unsettling sensibilities, the sublimation of sex instincts. I revealed the sources of a method that allowed for the taming of madness, all madnesses, and offered the infinite resources of childhood joys and nobility of living. Never had a human being so revealed his intimacy and the depth of his being. And if, thirty years later, I now go back over those pages of my life, it is not to retract anything, but to add, with the benefit of greater distance in relation to people and things, the wealth of a new season of my life and the light of my ever sharper and more penetrating genius.

The bomb at Hiroshima exploded in an immaculate sky.
“Pikadon”
(Light and noise), was how the few surviving Japanese described it. I was painting Gala in a nude rear view and
Galarina
, engrossed in my love and the charm of sensual fulfillment, when I felt the seismic shock of the explosion that filled me with terror. Not for a second did I imagine the two hundred thousand dead, who, being reduced to ash, were not easy to apprehend, anyway, but I thought with horror of a chain reaction that might have ignited the whole world before I finished the perfect bosom of my
Galarina
, compromising my immortality. The fact of being thus dependent on the hazards of history disquieted me. No one was safe in whatever corner of the world. I resolved to study without delay the best way to preserve my precious existence from the inroads of death and began seriously to be concerned with formulas for immortality. The
Melancolia
Atomica
(
Melancholy, Atomic, Uranic Idyll
) that I then painted expresses the doubts and uncertainties born in me on August 6, 1945.

My success did not end, and my genius, surprised for a mo ment by the atomic explosion, was quickly called upon again. I was asked to illustrate
Don Quixote,
and dove into the lithographic plates certain that I was going to renew the whole technique, but never guessing that I had selected a road that would take nineteen years to lead me to Dulcinea.

Publishers, who are like flies attracted to honey, now filled my house; one jumped out the window with the proofs of
Macbeth
while another was coming in the service entrance to propose that I illustrate
Montaigne,
or else they were trying to whet my appetite with the fifty secrets of the art of magic or the auto biography of Benvenuto Cellini. I had one answer for all of them: “Cash in hand.”

I am a goldsmith; gold alone inspires me. The richness of the American soil was causing the golden corn of old Europe to rise for harvesting by the Catalan Dalí, in whom desire alone grew more intense – in keeping with his name. It could not be that the sordid massacre which on the other side of the Atlantic was decimating the most noble humanity did not serve some purpose. Preserved, cherished, sated, I stood witness against the generalized stupidity and dominated my period with all the glory of my genius, untamed, haughty, indestructible.

During this time, I truly felt that I did not belong to the race of masochistic insects offering themselves as a holocaust to barbarous gods when they had at their disposal all the possibilities of faith. Yet, I drew from it all a few useful conclusions on how to dominate men, subjugate women, and stupefy children. I think I have shown how my cynicism and genius have been able to make the most of these observations.

“EVERYONE IS A PACIFIST; GOING AGAINST ALL THE PRINCIPLES OF OUR ACTIONS SINCE ANTIQUITY, THE RENAISSANCE, THE MARVELOUS SPEECH BY MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE ON THE ART, THE NOBILITY, THE GRANDEUR OF THE MILITARY ARTS – EVERYONE, WHETHER SOVIET OR AMERICAN. THIS IS THE GREAT DECADENCE! JUST AS IN A MONARCHY I FEEL THAT THE ANARCHIST WHO WANTS TO KILL THE KING IS ULTRA-RESPECTABLE, SINCE BY HIS ACTION HE GUARANTEES THE MAXIMUM OF DIVERSITIES THAT A PERFECT SOCIETY – WHICH IS WHAT ABSOLUTE MONARCHY IS – MUST CONTAIN, SO, IT IS MONSTROUS FOR A HUMAN BEING TO CONTEMPLATE A HUMANITY WITHOUT WAR.”

Chapter Fourteen: How To Become A Super-Snob

When I first met Helena Rubinstein in New York, all I saw was the majesty of a Bourbon nose, as huge as a plowshare, coming toward me, carried hoppingly on short legs, while under the light of the chandeliers there shone a constellation of emeralds that gave one the im pression that her fingers were carrying torches while her neck was girt with flames. This burst of luster told me she had multi-millions. When she laughed, her eyes remained as cold as high-shoe buttons and her skin – as parchmented as the face of Tz’u-hsi, the last Dowager Empress of China, whom she resembled – was furrowed with colored wrinkles, as with the war paint of an old Sioux chief.

In 1942, Helena Rubinstein was worth a hundred million dollars. She had apartments in New York, London, Paris, and Grasse on the Riviera. She ruled over a factory and a string of stores in New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Australia, Europe, from which flowed rivers of beauty creams, ointments, cleansing creams, and clouds of powder. She plastered more than 50 percent of the feminine sex in a carapace of illusions that remade their faces as well as their souls. This noble enterprise had given Helena Rubinstein the character of an unyielding corset.

As an emigrant from Poland, the eldest of eight children, she landed in Australia at age sixteen with a dozen jars of her mother’s beauty cream in her trunk, bent on conquering the leadership of an empire. She directed men and women with an equally iron hand, yet she did not know how to use a telephone: she could not dial a number and screamed into the receiver with Dalínian fieriness. I impressed her mightily and returned the compliment with my royal hauteur.

“You know,” she told me, “that I own the building we are in.” Then, as I did not seem to react, she added: “I liked the apartment, but the landlord would not rent to Jews. So I bought the whole thing.”

She showed me through thirty-six rooms of a triplex on the fourteenth floor of the building. The entryway had been made into a jungle right out of Douanier Rousseau.

From sitting room to picture galleries, it all finally led to her own bedroom. There she nestled like the minotaur in the heart of the labyrinth and waited for her prey in an immense transparent bed, the legs and incurved half-canopy of which were fluorescent. Helena, lying there, seemed to be floating on one of my limp watches, and she strewed about her emeralds, pearls, amethysts, pell-mell, before going to bed, accumulating the rivières of diamonds night after night, until some mornings her room was a bright galaxy of the first magnitude, blinding in its splendor. Then Helena seemed less wrinkled than usual. The morning she received me in her bedroom, she wiped her nose on the satin sheets.