Not So Secret Life

The dapper Spanish painter Salvador ("soft watches") Dali has published his autobiography.* It is a wild jungle of fantasy, posturing, belly laughs, narcissist and sadist confessions. It is stuffed with Dali's paranoiac paintings, sketches and constructions (see cut), is one of the most irresistible books of the year. Dali, whatever else he is, is a character. He stands, among other things, against Buddha and Spinach, for Maturity and Snails.

The question has always been: Is Dali crazy? The book indicates that Dali is as crazy as a fox. Dali is a superb draftsman, whose painting technique reveals the sheen of an old master. In both his painting and writing he is sensationally packaging fantasies of his own, plus ideas inspired by Freud. Dali's soft watches may even be considered as a sort of Dali trademark. He has mode an exceptionally good thing of art, is likely to do the same with this book.

Notes from The Secret Life of Salvador Dali:

>When Dali was very young his mother continually asked him: "Sweetheart, what do you wish? Sweetheart, what do you want?" Among the things young Salvador wanted and got were a king's ermine cape, a gold scepter and a crown. Dressed in these, young Dali would stare at himself in the mirror. Says he: "Then I pushed my sexual parts back out of sight . . . so as to look as much as possible like a girl." At school Salvador was the only child to be brought "hot milk and cocoa . . . in a magnificent thermos bottle wrapped in a cloth embroidered with my initials." Surrounded by poor children, Salvador wore "a sailor suit with insignia embroidered in thick gold," always carried a "flexible new bamboo cane adorned with a silver dog's head."

>Aged five, Dali pushed a boy smaller than himself off a railingless bridge. "He landed on some rocks 15 feet below. I ran home to announce the news." That same year Dali fell in love with a wounded bat. Says he: "I picked up the bat, crawling with ants . . . but instead of kissing it, I gave it such a vigorous bite with my jaws that I almost split it in two."

>As an adolescent Dali made plans to be "uninterruptedly in love." These plans were "organized with a total bad faith and a refined Jesuitical spirit. ... I always chose girls whom it was doubtful or impossible that I should ever see again." Dali was still a virgin at 25.

>When he was 29, a girl complimented him on the beauty of his feet. Says he: "I jumped up, my mind clouded by an odd feeling of jealousy toward myself . . . knocked [my admirer] down and trampled on her with all my might." In the same year, suffering from uncontrollable fits of laughter and bordering on insanity, he met his future wife Gala (then wife of Surrealist Poet Paul Eluard). To impress the Eluards, Dali decided to get himself up "very elaborately." He tore his best silk shirt to shreds, shaved his armpits so deep that they bled, transferred blood to other parts of his body, turning his bathing trunks inside out, placed an enormous red geranium behind one ear, a pearl necklace round his neck, and finally smeared his whole body with a mixture of goat dung and aspic. From this there emerged, says Dali, "Miracle of miracles!--the 'exact' odor of the ram . . . a stifling stench!"

>In 1934 in Paris, Dali found the sight of "a legless blind man sitting in his little cart," tapping the sidewalk "with a boundless self-assurance," so repugnant that he "went up to the blind man and . . . gave him a kick that sent him scooting all the way across the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet."

>The fetishistic crutches featured in so many Dali paintings may be traced to a crutch which he found in the attic of a tower from which he had planned to push a girl. Says Dali: "It was the first time in my life that I saw a crutch. . . . The superb crutch! Already it appeared to me as the object possessing the height of authority and solemnity. [It] communicated to me an assurance, an arrogance even, which I had never been capable of until then."

>Alfonso XIII paid a visit to Madrid's School of Fine Arts. Unknown to the King, students were rushed from room to room to give the monarch the impression that the school was packed. Dali declares that he was so infuriated by this insult to the King that he waited until the school was empty, locked himself in the sculpture classroom, turned the faucet on full force. Says Dali: "My idea was very simple: to cause a great inundation of plaster. I used all the four sacks of plaster that were in the room. . . . As the [plaster] was greatly diluted, [it] was able to flow under the doors. Soon I could hear the sound of the cascade . . . flowing from the top of the stairway all the way down to the entrance hall . . . that whole great stairway inundated by a river of plaster majestically pouring down was most startling. . . . I was forced to stop to admire this sight, which I mentally compared with something as epic as the burning of Rome. . . ." Having described this epic, Dali confesses that the "whole episode of the plaster inundation was but an illusion." Observes Dali: ". . . I had just begun to read Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams."

>In Vienna, Sigmund Freud was invariably "out of town for reasons of health" whenever Dali sought an interview. Dali "held long imaginary conversations with Freud," saw him one night "clinging to the curtains of my room in the Hotel Sacher." Several years later Dali was eating snails in a French town, suddenly saw a newspaper photograph of Freud. Dali uttered a loud cry. Says he: "I had just that instant discovered the morphological secret of Freud! Freud's cranium is a snail!" Dali eventually met Freud. But only when Dali's voice "became involuntarily sharper and more insistent . . . before [Freud's] imperturbable indifference," did the psychological giant finally blurt out: "I have never seen a more complete example of a Spaniard. What a fanatic!"

Fanatic or not, there is no doubt that Dali can turn it on with words as well as paint. Writes he of the kitchen in his boyhood home: "Behind the partly open kitchen door I would hear the scurrying of those bestial women with red hands; I would catch glimpses of their heavy rumps and their hair straggling like manes; and out of the heat and confusion that rose from the conglomeration of sweaty women, scattered grapes, boiling oil, fur plucked from rabbits' armpits, scissors spattered with mayonnaise, kidneys, and the warble of canaries--out of that whole conglomeration the imponderable and inaugural fragrance of the forthcoming meal was wafted to me, mingled with a kind of acrid horse smell."

Salvador Dali was last week living in the swank Del Monte Hotel in Del Monte, Calif. He said he had breakfast at 7:30, lunch at 12:45, dinner at 8, played chess with Mrs. Dali after dinner. Most of the time he spent in his hotel room.

* The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (Dial; $6).

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