The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (31 page)

Salvador Dali y Domenech, Apprentice Painter

After twenty-one years
¹
of cares, anxieties and great efforts I am at last able to see my son almost in a position to face life’s necessities and to provide for himself. A father’s duties are not so easy as is sometimes believed. He is constantly called upon to make certain concessions, and there are moments when these concessions and compromises sweep away almost entirely the plans he has formed and the illusions he has nourished. We, his parents, did not wish our son to dedicate himself to art, a calling for which he seems to have shown great aptitude since his childhood.

I continue to believe that art should not be a means of earning a livelihood, that it should be solely a relaxation for the spirit to which one may devote oneself when the leisure moments of one’s manner of life allow one to do so. Moreover we, his parents, were convinced of the difficulty of his reaching the preeminent place in art which is achieved only by true heroes conquering all obstacles and reverses. We knew the
bitterness, the sorrows and the despair of those who fail. And it was for these reasons that we did all we could to urge our son to exercise a liberal, scientific or even literary profession. At the moment when our son finished his baccalaureate studies, we were already convinced of the futility of turning him to any other profession than that of a painter, the only one which he has genuinely and steadfastly felt to be his vocation. I do not believe that I have the right to oppose such a decided vocation, especially as it was necessary to take into consideration that my boy would have wasted his time in any other discipline or study, because of the “intellectual laziness” from which he suffered as soon as he was drawn out of the circle of his predilections.

When this point was reached, I proposed to my son a compromise: that he should attend the school of painting, sculpture and engraving in Madrid, that he should take all the courses that would be necessary for him to obtain the official title of professor of art, and that once he had completed his studies he should take the competitive examination in order to be able to use his title of professor in an official pedagogical center, thus securing an income that would provide him with all the indispensable necessities of life and at the same time permit him to devote himself to art as much as he liked during the free hours which his teaching duties left him. In this way I would have the assurance that he would never lack the means of subsistence, while at the same time the door that would enable him to exercise his artist’s gifts would not be closed to him. On the contrary, he would be able to do this without risking the economic disaster which makes the life of the unsuccessful man even more bitter.

This is the point we have now reached! I have kept my word, making assurance for my son that he shall not lack anything that might be needed for his artistic and professional education. The effort which this has implied for me is very great, if it is considered that I do not possess a personal fortune, either great or small, and that I have to meet all obligations with the sole honorable and honest gain of my profession, which is that of a notary, and that this gain, like that of all notaryships in Figueras, is a modest one. For the moment my son continues to perform his duties in school, meeting a few obstacles for which I hold the pupil less responsible than the detestable disorganization of our centers of culture. But the official progress of his work is good. My son has already finished two complete courses and won two prizes, one in the history of art and the other in “general apprenticeship in color painting.” I say his “official work,” for the boy might do better than he does as a “student of the school,” but the passion which he feels for painting distracts him from his official studies more than it should. He spends most of his hours in painting pictures on his own which he sends to expositions after careful selection. The success he has won by his paintings is much greater than I myself could ever have believed possible. But, as I have already mentioned, I should prefer such success to come later, after he had
finished his studies and found a position as a professor. For then there would no longer be any danger that my son’s promise would not be fulfilled.

In spite of all that I have said, I should not be telling the truth if I were to deny that my son’s present successes please me, for if it should happen that my son would not be able to win an appointment to a professorship, I am told that the artistic orientation he is following is not completely erroneous, and that however badly all this should turn out, whatever else he might take up would definitely be an even greater disaster, since my son has a gift for painting, and only for painting.

This notebook contains the collection of all I have seen published in the press about my son’s works during the time of his apprenticeship as a painter. It also contains other documents relating to incidents that have occurred in the school, and to his imprisonment, which might have an interest as enabling one to judge my son as a citizen, that is to say, as a man. I am collecting, and shall continue to collect, everything that mentions him, whether it be good or bad, as long as I have knowledge of it. From the reading of all the contents something may be learned of my son’s value as an artist and a citizen. Let him who has the patience to read everything judge him with impartiality.

I left for Madrid with my father and my sister. To be admitted to the School of Fine Arts it was necessary to pass an examination which consisted of making a drawing from the antique. My model was a cast of the
Bacchus
by Jacopo Sansovino, which had to be completed in six days. My work was following its normal and satisfactory course when, on the third day, the janitor (who would often chat with my father while the latter waited impatiently in the court for me to get out of school) revealed his fear that I would not pass the examination.

“I am not discussing the merits of your son’s drawing,” he said, “but he has not observed the examination rules. In these rules it is clearly stated that the drawing must have the exact measurements of an Ingres sheet of paper, and your son is the only one who has made the figure so small that the surrounding space cannot be considered as margins!”

My father was beside himself from that moment. He did not know what to advise me—whether to start the drawing over again or to finish it as best I could in its present dimensions. The problem troubled him all during our afternoon walk. At the theatre that evening, in the middle of the picture, he made everyone turn round by suddenly exclaiming, “Do you feel you have the courage to start it all over again?” and, after a long silence, “You have three days left!” I derived a certain pleasure from tormenting him on this subject; but I myself was beginning to feel the contagion of his anguish, and I saw that the question was actually becoming serious.

“Sleep well,” he advised me before I went to bed, “and don’t think about this; tomorrow you must be at your best, and you will decide at the last moment.” The next day, filled with great courage and decision, I completely rubbed out my drawing without a moment’s hesitation. But no sooner had I completed this operation than I remained paralyzed by fear at what I had just done. I looked, flabbergasted, at my paper which was all white again, while my fellow-competitors all around me, on their fourth day of work, were already beginning to touch up their shadows. The following day all of them would be almost through; and then they would have plenty of time left to check on final corrections, which always require calm and reflection. I looked at the clock with anguish. It had already taken me half an hour just to erase. I thus anxiously began my new figure, trying this time to take measurements so that it would have the dimensions which the regulations required. But so clumsily did I go about these preliminary operations, which any other student would have executed mechanically at a single stroke, that at the end of the session I had once more to rub out the whole thing. When the class was over my father instantly read in the pallor of my face that things were not going well.

“What did you do?”

“I erased it.”

“But how is the new one going?”

“I haven’t begun it. All I did was to erase and take measurements. I want to be sure this time!”

My father said, “You’re right—but two hours to take measurements! Now you have only two days left. I should have advised you not to erase your first drawing.”

Neither my father nor I could eat that evening. He kept saying to me, “Eat! Eat! If you don’t eat, you won’t be able to do anything tomorrow.” We fretted the whole time, and my sister, too, looked shaken. My father confessed to me later that he spent the whole night without being able to sleep for one second, assailed by insoluble doubts—I should have erased it, I should not have erased it!

The next day arrived. Sansovino’s
Bacchus
was marked and impregnated so deeply in my memory that I threw myself into the work like a starving wolf. But this time I made it too large. There was nothing to be done—it was impossible to cheat! His feet extended entirely beyond the paper. This was worse than anything, a much worse fault than to have left immense margins. Again I erased it completely.

When I got out of class my father was livid with impatience. With an unconvincing smile and trying to encourage me he said, “Well?”

“Too big,” I answered.

“And what do you intend to do?”

“I’ve already erased it.” I saw a tear gleam in my father’s eyes.

“Come, come, you still have tomorrow’s session. How many times before this you’ve made a drawing in a single session!”

But I knew that in two hours this was humanly impossible, for it would take at least one day to sketch it out, and another to make the shadows. Besides, my father was saying this only to encourage me. He knew as well as I that I had failed in the examination and that the day after the next we would have to return to Figueras covered with shame—I who was the best of them all back there—and this after the absolute assurances that Señor Nuñez had given him that I could not possibly fail to pass my examinations, even if by chance my drawing should be the poorest that I was capable of making.

“If you don’t pass the examinations,” he said, trying to continue to console me, “it will be my fault and the fault of that imbecilic janitor. If your drawing was good, which it seemed to be, what would it have mattered whether it was a little smaller or larger?”

Then I whetted my maliciousness and answered, “It’s as I’ve been telling you. If a thing is well drawn, it forces itself upon the professors’ esteem!”

My father meditatively rolled one of the strands of white hair that grew on each side of his venerable skull, bitten to the quick by remorse.

“But you yourself told me,” he said “that it was very, very small.”

“Never,” I answered. “I said it was small, but not very
very
small!”

“I thought you had told me it was very very small,” he insisted. “Then perhaps it would have passed, if it wasn’t small-small! Tell me exactly how it was, so that I can at least form an opinion.”

Then I began one of the most refined tortures. “Now that we have spoken so much about it, I can’t exactly remember its dimensions; it was average, rather small, but not exaggeratedly small.”

“But try to remember. Look, was it about like this?” showing me a dimension with his thumb and his fork.

“With the twisted form of the fork,” I said, “I can’t tell.”

Then patiently he resumed his questioning. “Imagine that it was this knife; it has no curve. Tell me if it was as small as that?”

“I don’t think so,” I answered, pretending to search my memory, “but perhaps it was.”

Then my father began to get impatient and exclaimed furiously, “It’s either yes or no!”

“It’s neither yes nor no,” I answered, “for I can’t remember!”

Then my father paced back and forth in the room in absolute consternation. Suddenly he took a crumb of bread, and put one knee on the floor. “Was it as small as this,” he asked, in a theatrical pleading tone, showing me the crumb with one hand, “or as big as that?” pointing to the cupboard with the other hand. My sister wept, and we went to the cinema. It was a popular type of motion picture, and in the intermission everyone turned round to look at me as though I were a very rare object. With my velvet jacket, my hair which I wore like a girl’s, my gilded cane and my sideburns reaching more than halfway down my cheeks, my appearance was in truth so outlandish and unusual that I was taken for
an actor. There were two little girls, in particular, who looked at me ecstatically, with their mouths open. My father grew impatient. “Soon we won’t be able to go out with you. We’re made a show of every time. All that hair, and those long side-burns—and anyway we’ll damn well have to go back to Figueras like beaten dogs with our tails between our legs.”

An expression of infinite bitterness had come over my father’s bluish gaze in the last two days, and the white strand of hair which he was in the habit of fingering in his moments of cruelest doubt and anxiety now stood out stiff, like a horn of white hair into which was condensed all the torment and all the yellowish and menacing bile of my problematic future.

The following day dawn broke dismally, with lurid flashes of capital punishment. I was ready for anything. I was no longer afraid, for my sense of impending catastrophe had reached its peak in the infernal atmosphere of the previous day. I set to work, and in exactly one hour I had completely finished the drawing, with all the shading. I spent the remaining hour doing nothing but admiring my drawing, which was remarkable—never had I done anything so precise. But suddenly I became terrified as I noticed one thing: the figure was still small, even smaller than the first one.

When I got out my father was reading the newspaper. He did not have the courage to ask any questions; he waited for me to speak.