Maniac Eyeball (27 page)

A few days later, a fifteen-meter bread would also be found in the courtyard of the Versailles chateau, then in the Place de la Concorde, at the foot of the Obelisk, in London’s Hyde Park, Brussels’ Place Ste. Catherine, Rome’s Capitol – always without any message or provocation.

The entire world press would now be on the alert for new appearances, and knock itself out in speculation. Who was financing the campaign? What high connections could such an organization have? What were its aims?

The bakers’ union would of course feel that it was under direct attack; political parties, especially the Socialist and Communist, would be humiliated by the provocation of this gigantic bread left out in the open when thousands of undernourished people needed it, and would send delegations to government heads demanding an investigation. There would be questions in the Chamber of Deputies. The religious authorities would make lengthy commentaries on the senseless act and try to reinvest bread with its sacred quality and high dignity. But in vain!

The provocative poetic import of the giant abandoned bread would create total confusion leading to mass hysteria. The more so since the Secret Order of Bread would repeat its placements. The breads would get bigger, reaching as much as forty meters. By a kind of natural sense of emulation, the process would be picked up little by little by all sorts of nameless groups, students out for pranks, visionaries, logicians, revolutionaries, protesters. Abandoned breads would be found on every sidewalk, before monuments, on the laps of statues of great men. Bread crusts would be thrown at passing politicians, and on parades. People would pelt one another with bread on the flimsiest of pretexts. Dull-wittedness would invade the whole world like a kind of delirium...

I spoke in a very loud and peremptory tone, very convincing, prophetic and magnetic. The shining eyes of the women reflected my assurance and my hold on them. It was a radiant evening. A few of those beautiful creatures, falling for my genius, naturally went about repeating my story and even sending written accounts of it to their friends scattered all over the world in the international snob mafia. The yeast was thus already introduced into the American bread that I was about to gobble.

René Crevel introduced us to Caresse Crosby, an American woman whose wealth suited my purposes perfectly. She lived at the Mill of the Sun in Ermenonville forest. She might have chosen a place less consumed with greenery, for to her the world was all white. Dressed all in white, she drank milk, walked on white rugs, and everything possible from telephone to curtains was spotlessly white. But, when the table was set, the cloth and plates were black. I talked Caresse into building an oven for the fifteen-meter bread. Pending the secret society coming into being, Gala and I spent our weekends at Ermenonville preparing for our American campaign by listening to Cole Porter’s “Night and Day,” our hostess’ favorite song, and rifling through
The New
Yorker
with fingertips dipped in champagne.

Dalí’s Means For Conquering America

I grew daily more impatient because of my lack of the salt of the earth, that is, money. I kept kicking out in all directions to calm my fury. That was how one night the deformed buttocks of a legless man found themselves to be my target.

I would never have paid any attention to this miscarriage of nature on his little wheeled platform at the corner of Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, had he not tapped on the ground with his stick to ask someone to help him across. The street was empty. Only a whore stood guard at the other end of the block. The man could be calling to no one but me. Such presumption made me furious. I rushed over to him and with one huge kick sent him flying across to the other side, where his undercarriage hit against the curb. With fantastic skill, the legless wonder held on to both sides and was in no way thrown by the shock. He just stayed motionless and speechless, completely taken aback on his shaken-up transportation. I crossed over quickly to look my victim in the eye. Then I realized he was also blind and could not see me, which cut down somewhat on my enjoyment. But he had a sharp ear and, hearing me approach, took on an attitude full of humility and sub mission that pacified me. I went off whistling happily. A short time later, I felt terrible at not having relieved him in turn of the contents of his pocketbook; such a blind legless man had to be one of those beggars who shamelessly exploit public charity. With the profit of his collections I would probably have had enough for a good down payment on my ticket to America.

Meeting Alfred Barr, director of the New York Museum of Modern Art, at the Noailleses’ was what moved me to action. He was a nervous young man of cadaverous paleness, but fantastic plastic culture, a veritable radar of modern art, interested in every type of innovation and disposing of a budget larger than that of all the museums of France combined. “Come to the States,” he urged me. “You’ll be a lightning success.” In which, he merely echoed my own sentiments.

My father, on the other hand, was making things more and more difficult, so that living in Cadaqués was becoming impossible. He was trying to shame me. All I wanted was to get away. For a while I took refuge in painting, doing a self-portrait with a chop on my head, which psychoanalytically meant I was telling the old man to eat the chop instead of eating away at me.

In Barcelona I made a scandal, the reports of which must have appalled him. I had been invited by that city’s
Ateneo Enciclo pédico Popular
to extol the virtues of the Catalan soul, and used the occasion to speak in praise of the Marquis de Sade and denounce the baseness and intellectual inertia of the city’s idol, Angel Guimera, whom I referred to as a “faggot” and “crumbum”. Every chair in the place got smashed, several people were hurt, and the organization’s president was forced to resign. The next day, at a meeting of anarchists enthused by my daring the day before, I made a first public experiment with bread, even though this loaf was only two meters long.

I opened the session by voicing in a level tone, like any smooth lecturer, the worst insults, obscenities, and blasphemies of the Catalan tongue. I was dealing with experts, and, first interested by my words, then whipped into protest, the audience, which included many women, was soon thrilling and rumbling like a wild animal stroked by its tamer.

That was the point at which the bread was placed on my head, held on by straps, as I continued to roar my obscenities. I suddenly felt the whole hall rise as the level of a river does when it meets the ocean. The bread was the catalyst. All the insults solidified and became palpable. The male and female anarchists were turning into hysterical beings, some even falling down in fits of D.T.’s; the shouts and blows became deafening. I slipped away, the bread now under my arm, leaving them in total confusion.

Reading the next day’s papers that filled me with jubilation must have sent my father to his bed, but I was forever cured of my pathological shyness.

In New York, a showing of my
Limp Watches
had been encouragingly received by the critics. Much was written excitedly about my original vision of the world. I seemed to be the most modern novelty out of the old world. In Paris, there was little left for me to look forward to. I had made my hole. Like Alexander slicing the Gordian knot, I had left an ineradicable mark on Surrealism as I went through it. I had transformed its structures by injecting them with goo, rot, the bizarre, the disturbing, and the impossible. But now everything was turning into Byzantine sniping and scholasticism. My name was a kind of scarecrow. French common sense was somewhat narrow for my dimension. I was hungry and thirsty for a continent-wide area of edible glory and potable success to sate me. Only America was wealthy enough, had enough fresh intelligence and available energy to fulfill my hypertrophic self and put up with my whims.

How Dalí Decided To “Make the Leap”

Truth to tell, Gala and I were quietly drying up for lack of funds. Gala sewed her own frocks and made our meals – when we were not being fed by Paris’ supersnobs – and I worked incessantly: even a deep-mine miner would not have put up with my strenuous schedules and back-breaking work.

I was being robbed, my ideas were being turned to profit by others, and I was getting nothing out of it! To top off my troubles, my dealer Pierre Colle dropped his option on me. It was time to head in a new direction.

The kick in the arse I had given the legless blind man showed me how completely free of taboos I had become. Nothing stood in my way any longer. Gala scraped our savings together and reserved two berths for us on the
Champlain
to New York. We had three days left in which, with Nietzschean audacity, to scrounge some of the wherewithal for living from my best-heeled friends. But I must have looked like a mad tiger, for many doors were closed with relief after I left, without the people behind them having given me even the price of a taxi fare. The only one who welcomed me at that time, with the sovereign demeanor of a lion, was Picasso, who broke Daddy’s legendary piggy bank open for the benefit of the prodigal son. That was how I was able to leave for America.

I was feverish. I had spent three terrible days wondering where I would find the five hundred dollars we needed to leave. On the way from Paris to Le Havre, I was terrified that the train might be delayed and we might miss the boat, and had even refused to let my picture be taken at the Gare St. Lazare, in front of the locomotive, before we pulled out, for fear the train would start without me. I could not get aboard fast enough and kept nagging at Gala. We were on deck three hours before the first whistle blew.

During the whole crossing, I was still continually worried. My fears turned into terrors. The
Champlain
was creaking all over, its immensity struck me as making it vulnerable, fragile, and hard to handle in case of a catastrophe, especially since the officers I bumped into in the corridors seemed unconcerned to me, with their caps pulled over on to one ear, making small talk, while our safety depended on their reliability. I absorbed phenomenal quantities of champagne trying to calm myself, and never took off my life belt. Even in bed, I remained surrounded by cork, ready to float away on an ocean of despair, and when emergency drills took place I was always right up front, in rapt attention, cane in hand and ready to beat off women and children so as to be first into the lifeboat.

On deck, the endless expanse of ocean only increased my malaise. I did not dare look out to the horizon. The victory bulletins posted aboard to show the exact distance between us and each of the coasts only led me to somber calculations about how many strokes of the oars it would take to reach land in case of shipwreck. Anxiety and terror were my constant companions. Had it not been for my bread, this ordeal would have been a nightmare, but its yeast happily occupied my mind and gave rise to new ambitions.

We had chosen to cross on the
Champlain
with Caresse Crosby who was returning to the U.S. and was to act as our mentor. I reminded her that she still owed me a fifteen-meter bread she had promised to bake at Ermenonville. She tried to get the captain to have it made, but there was no oven aboard that could handle it, and I had to settle for one that was two and a half meters long, which at that could only be held together by a wooden backbone. But to me it was a magic wand that restored my joy. Before, I had felt emasculated, impotent, bereft of my umbilical cord. When the chef, with pomp and circumstance, came and presented me with my bread wrapped in cellophane, I was a changed man. I took it in hand, as one does a cock he is about to masturbate, and stroked it with the purest pleasure. It was slim and hard, slightly flexible and cartilaginous like a real prick, with a well-formed crust. I felt the saliva of desire moistening my throat. I took it solemnly in both hands and waved it overhead. I had just gotten back my phallus.

The first thing I did was to put a pair of pants on it, meaning that I wrapped it in newspaper to hide it from eager eyes and in crease their desire. I then laid it out in the middle of my cabin to await the great day: my marriage to America! I would land, a young bridegroom carrying his conjugal tool outstretched and in viting the whole world to attend our union.

I was on the upper deck when New York hove into view. I suddenly saw a dark mass emerge from the haze and understood that our Lilliputian shell had made it and was about to land us on the back of a sleeping monster whose variformed hard-ons we could see. Like body crabs, we would latch on to those hollow pricks looking for a niche.

When the sun broke on the thousands of glinting windowpanes, a shiver seemed to go up along the skyscrapers, as if some libidinous massage were sustaining the erection of the enormous hulks plunging into the vaginal sky.

The
Champlain
was moving ahead very slowly, borne by the swells, and I had the feeling we were participating in the slow penetra tion of earth and clouds. The siren whistled to proclaim coitus. I felt my cock shrivel between my legs and rushed down to the cabin to get my well-baked, edible bread-prick.

A mob of newspapermen had already taken over there with out invitation, showing that I was already well known. They stood, sat on the couches, the bed, chairs, or the floor, chewing gum, hats on their heads and copy paper in hand.

Amazingly, my bread, set up on four chairs, had withstood their onrush and none seemed to be aware of its presence. I grabbed it without further ado and stood it up like a bishop’s crozier or Moses’ staff. Questions popped at me: my age, my father, my mother, the
Limp Watches
, paranoiac-criticism, why I had ever thought of painting Gala with lambchops on her shoulders... but not one mentioned the bread! It could have been the invisible baguette, a magic wand. I raised it toward the ceiling, took it under my arm, ran through the corridors, went up on deck, passed the customs people, still trailed by the reporters. Not a word!

They wanted to know all about me, and I gave them stories that would make good copy and even better headlines, but not one of them could see what I was displaying in front of their eyes. So, I understood that I had just “cuckolded” them and that these suitors, who wanted to cut me to bits so as to feed me to the swine, had not been able to see through Ulysses’ cunning. My bread was the image of my untouched strength, my virile phallus. Throwing crumbs and confetti into their eyes, I had hidden my Truth from them. To them, I was the King of Non-Sequitur, the clown, as they might say, the
tummeler;
not one of them had divined the terrific pressure, the Nietzschean will pent up behind the appearances. I set my erectile bread down on American soil as one plants a tree, slowly unwrapped the newspapers covering it and discarded what was by now yesterday’s news. The golden crust shone in the sun. I lifted my bread like a flagstaff, and phallus to the fore I was off to the city...