Little Dali Daydream
The Case of Salvador Doll. By Fleur Cowles. (Heinemann, 42s.) The Case of Salvador Doll. By Fleur Cowles. (Heinemann, 42s.) THE truth is there is no more a book of 360 pages to •be written about Salvador Dali than there is a de Mille epic to be made of a street-accident. But here comes Miss Cowles, hostess and journalist, doing her plucky best to persuade us otherwise in a flurry of eccentric prose. As she confesses, in a foreword so full of disclaimers that further criticism seems almost ungentle- manly, what she has to offer us is the outcome of some massive scavenging, a binful of quotes and anecdotes about one of the more sordid clowns of our day. Miss Cowles is at home in what she pleases to call 'the International Set,' which old Avida Dollars (Breton's anagram) has been milking for as long as one can remember. This much Miss Cowles admits : in fact, she admits everything; not for a second does she allow herself to be pinned down to anything so unsophisticated as a point of view. Dali is I mystic, a pervert, a wit, a genius, a fraud, a window-dresser, 'the Lord Leighton of Sunset Boulevard' (Osbert Lancaster's magnificent phrase)—anything you like. The same splendid abandon informs her larger intellectual strivings, With a fine show of scholarship she cites Esquire, Coronet, Time and Freud; she will drop the name of Dante (though without the remotest relevance) as readily as that of the Windsors; she is at pains to footnote the tragedy of Coleridge's person from PorlOck while getting the story wrong. She does, alas, get a few of her stories wrong, as well as her French. But how well . she 'places' her characters. Bernard Berenson is 'that titan of art history.' But who, one wonders, is Beaudelaire? Where may one see Seurat's painting of La Grande Jette? Dietrich is in the index by virtue of this richly humorous aside: 'When Deli speaks of Divine Proportion he has neither Diana Dors nor Marlene Dietrich in mind': Miss Cowles gives us a host of examples of her subject'; whimsicalities, 'the monstrous "cheekiness" which has now become legion,' as she has it. But, by and large, she has failed us. There is still a place for a short sociological inquiry along the lines suggested by Orwell in his sensible essay. It would plot the point at which his genuine quali- ties as a painter have been chased out by other preoccupations and go on, via case-histories of certain of Dali's 'International Set' clientele, to examine the interplay of snobbery and ignorance that lies behind so much art-buying, and, more specifically, the reasons why mankind delights in returning to dung-handling babyhood. This would be useful. For such an inquiry Miss Cowles shows herself as no more equipped than a soft watch. 'The subject,' to purloin one of her happier confusions, 'remains ' an unsolved mystique.'
JOHN COLEMAN
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