From genius to money machine

George Melly

DALI by Meredith Etherington-Smith Sinclair-Stevenson, £20, pp. 553 Edward James, Dali's early patron and putative lover, dismissed him in the Eight- ies as 'a comedian who hasn't been able to think of a new joke for the last 30 years'. Most serious critics would agree with this Judgment. Despite a general revaluation of Surrealism, Dali's star has waned. With the exception of the 'authentic' early work, the rest has been consigned to the cellars of the imaginary museum. In the magic-realist sweepstake Magritte, originally a rank out- sider, has come up on the inside to win. At this inauspicious moment Miss Ethering- ton-Smith has written a long, scrupulously fair biography. To do so she has had to out- wit a formidable opponent — Dali himself. Almost from childhood he had set about constructing his own myth; a mélange of fact, lies, exaggeration and self-promotion. To dismantle this illusory construction must have involved a formidable amount of research; a task made no easier by the Squeaking and gibbering of her subject's unlaid ghost.

. The early years present, perhaps surpris- ingly, less of a problem in that, despite Dali's souping-up of every unusual circum- stance and his suppression of considerable happiness, there was enough genuinely traumatic material to justify much of his subsequent history. She gives credence (I believe rightly) to Dali's much-publicised Obsession with 'the other Salvador Dali'; an infant who died nine months before he was born, and whose name his parents chose to recycle. This she feels might have unsettled anyone. She cites how Dali's formidable father, a man terrified by venereal diseases, saw fit to place on the top of the piano a book illustrating their physical effect in the hope. of discouraging his children from yielding to future temptation; an 'object lesson' which might well account for the Painter's dislike of physical contact, his near-impotence, voyeurism and resort to masturbation. She lays stress on the no doubt compensatory spoiling by his mother and her comparatively early death, and she in no way discounts Dali's incestuous and reciprocated devotion to his older sister. That the background to this Freudian text- book family should be Catalonia, a harsh landscape and primitive society perversely proud of its eccentricity and fanaticism, contributed, she suggests convincingly, the final and essential ingredient needed to account for Dali's development. Neverthe- less, she is at pains to stress that as an artist he was immensely gifted and serious. As Orwell wrote in his otherwise hostile review of Dali's The Secret Life, 'he is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud'.

While studying art in Madrid, Dali became friends with two contemporaries, the future film-maker Luis Bufiuel and the poet Garcia Lorca. In the years that fol- lowed they were to quarrel over him: Lorca, a homosexual, fell in love with Dali, Bufwel wanted him as a collaborator. Dali played off one against the other, but even- tually settled for Bailie' on opportunist grounds. It paid off. It was the film they made together, The Andalusian Dog, which eased his entry into the Surrealist Group in Paris, his obvious destination.

Not Mad

(For Laura and Amy)

Embarrassed by their father My teenage daughters told me Recently they'd far rather I didn't keep them company When we go shopping in the town. I might, it seems, let them down In some way. Their friends might see.

Couldn't I please cross over?

Today, wandering separately Round the shops, we chanced to meet.

Well no, not quite. Seeing me Coming, they quickly crossed the street, Avoiding an encounter.

Watching them saunter Past, heads turned pointedly Away, I felt obsolete.

Still, that's the way of it.

Pushed to one side we watch them pass.

Lear-like, I could rail a bit, But what's the point? Life's farce Not tragedy. Best face the fact In this unfunny, final Act, Exiled, as it always is, Love watches from across the street.

George Jowett

He was home.

Andre Breton, the movement's leader, welcomed Dali with considerable relief. Surrealism was in crisis, rent by political differences and Dali, apolitical except when it paid off, and a Catherine wheel of brilliant notions and inspired imagery, helped to reanimate the whole show. Miss Etherington-Smith is, like many historians, hard on Breton. She is irritated by his dic- tatorial stance, his air of Papal infallibility. Nonetheless, without him Surrealism would never have held the course. Under his imprimatur, those poets and painters of genius produced their best work, Dali included. What all Breton's critics fail to take into account was his extraordinary charisma. As I once met him I can vouch for this.

Breton saw the potential flaw in Dali almost immediately. He wrote, as early as 1929, of the possibility of the replacement of Dali's 'admirable voice' by 'the creaking of his patent leather shoes'. His misgivings were to be fully justified. It was that same year that Gala entered Dali's life. We are only a third of the way through the book and Nemesis is on stage.

Gala was of Russian origin and married to the poet Paul Eluard. A Surrealist groupy/harpy, she had already had affairs with Ernst and de Chirico. Dali, when she met him in Spain while on holiday with her husband, was at the height of his powers but also on the edge of insanity. She remained behind with him, saved his reason, and began to devour him like a praying mantis. Miss Etherington-Smith favours a neutral tone, a refreshing contrast to her subject's hysterical outpourings, but she can do nothing to conceal or modify the monstrosity of Gala. A greedy, vain nymphomaniac, she gradually transformed a genius into a money machine. She let him run with the Surrealists while it was still advantageous, and then, with his eager con- nivance (for his egotism and taste for treachery were there from the start), encouraged him to reject everything they had stood for; to embrace Franco, to place himself at the service of the Catholic church, to court and intimidate the rich. To cap it all, once he was too old to work effectively, she abandoned him to vultures and hyenas.

Did Dali love Gala? Undoubtedly. She satisfied his masochism, fed his infantilism, made it possible for them to live like royal- ty with a court of grotesque spongers. Did she love him? As a cat loves cream.

The author of this fine book describes this decline with admirable perception. She notes, to take one example, how much Warhol learned from studying the Dalis' operation in New York. Her description of the last terrible years is the more moving for its objectivity. Only in the epilogue does she hedge her bets. She wonders if there might one day be a revaluation of the later work. There won't be.