By: George Orwell
Translated by: Granit Zela

Autobiography should be trusted only when it reveals something shameful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, for every life, when viewed from within, is simply a series of defeats. Yet even a book that is most blatantly dishonest (the autobiographical writings of Frank Harris are an example) can unintentionally give a true picture of its author. Life[1] recently published by Dali falls into this category. Some of the events in it are completely unbelievable, others have been rearranged and romanticized, and not just the humiliation but the constant normality of everyday life has been cut out. Dali, even by his own diagnosis, is a narcissist, and his autobiography is simply an act of striptease performed in the rosy spotlight. But as a record of the fantasy, of the perversion of instinct made possible by the machine age, it has great value.

Here, then, are some of the episodes in Dali's life, from his early years onwards. Which of them are real and which are imaginary hardly matters: it's the kind of thing Dali would have liked to do. That's the point.

When he is six years old, he is overcome with enthusiasm for the appearance of Halley's Comet:

Suddenly, one of my father’s office clerks appeared at the door of the drawing room and announced that the comet could be seen from the terrace… As I was passing through the corridor, I saw my little three-year-old sister creeping unnoticed through a door. I stopped, hesitated for a second, then gave her a terrible blow on the head as if she were a cannonball and kept running, carried away by a “delirious joy” caused by this wild act. But my father, who was behind me, caught me and took me to his office, where I remained as punishment until dinner.

A year earlier, this Dali had “suddenly, as most ideas come to me,” thrown another little boy from a suspension bridge. Many other incidents of this kind are described, including (this when he was twenty-nine) the fall and trampling of a girl “until they had to take her away, bleeding, from me.”

When he was about five years old, he caught an injured bat and put it in a tin bucket. The next morning, he found the bat almost dead and covered in ants that were devouring it. He put it in his mouth, along with the ants, and bit it almost in half.

When he is a teenager, a girl falls desperately in love with him. He kisses and caresses her to arouse her as much as possible, but refuses to go any further. He decides to do this for five years (he calls it his “five-year plan”), enjoying her humiliation and the feeling of power it gives him. He often tells her that at the end of the five years he will leave her, and when the time comes, he does so.

He continues to masturbate into adulthood, apparently in front of a mirror. For obvious reasons, he is impotent until he is about thirty. When he first meets his future wife, Gala, he is very tempted to push her over the edge. He is aware that there is something she wants him to do to her, and after their first kiss, the confession is made:

I pushed Gala's head, pulling her by the hair and shaking with complete hysteria, I ordered: "Now tell me what you want me to do to you! But tell me slowly, looking me in the eye, with the rudest, most wildly erotic words that can make us both feel the greatest shame!"

… Then Gala, transforming the last light of her expression of pleasure into the strong light of her tyranny, replied: “I want you to kill me!”

He is somewhat disappointed by this request, as it is simply what he wanted to do. He considers throwing it off the bell tower of Toledo Cathedral, but does not do so.

During the Spanish Civil War he cleverly avoids being on one side and takes a trip to Italy. He feels himself increasingly drawn to the aristocracy, frequents salons, finds himself a wealthy client and is photographed with the plump Vicomte de Noailles, whom he describes as his “patron”. As the European war approaches, he has only one concern: how to find a place that has good cooking and from which he can flee like lightning if danger approaches. He flees from Bordeaux to Spain during the Battle of France. He stays in Spain long enough to hear some stories of atrocities against the Reds, then takes them to America. The story ends with a blaze of respect. Dali, at the age of thirty-seven, has become a devoted husband, has recovered from his deviations or some of them and has fully reconciled with the Catholic Church. And manages to accumulate quite a lot of money.

However, he never ceases to be proud of the paintings of his surrealist period, with titles like The big masturbator, The sodomy of a skull with a grand piano etc. There are reproductions of them throughout the book. Many of Dali's drawings are representative and have a characteristic that should be emphasized later. But from the surrealist paintings and photographs the two things that stand out are sexual perversion and necrophilia. Sexual objects and symbols – some of them well-known, like high-heeled slippers, others, like the crutch and the cup of warm milk, patented by Dali himself – are repeated over and over, and there is a well-known motif related to excrement. For the painting, The Sorrowful Game, he says, “the drawers filled with excrement were painted with such a meticulous and realistic self-satisfaction that the whole little surrealist group was troubled by the question: “Is he a faeces-eater or not?” Dali adds firmly that he is not, and that he finds this aberration “disgusting,” but it seems that his interest in excrement stops there. Even when he recounts the experience of watching a woman pee on her feet, he must add the detail that she lacks purpose and gets her shoes dirty. It is not true that a man has all the vices, and Dali even boasts that he is not homosexual, but there seems to be a kind of perversity that anyone could desire.

However, his most obvious characteristic is necrophilia. He freely admits this and claims to have recovered from it. Dead faces, skulls, animal corpses occur quite often in his paintings, and ants devouring a dying bat reappear repeatedly. One photograph shows an exhumed, highly decomposed corpse. Another shows dead donkeys rotting on a grand piano that were part of the surrealist film The Andalusian Dog. Dali still looks at these donkeys with great enthusiasm. “I ‘prepared’ the rotting of the donkeys with large containers of glue which I poured over them. I also hollowed out their eye sockets and made them larger by cutting them with scissors. In the same way I cut out their mouths in a furious manner to better show the rows of teeth and added some jaws to each mouth, so that it would seem that, although the donkeys are already rotting, they are vomiting a little more of their death, on top of those other rows of teeth formed by the keys of the black piano. And finally there is the photograph – apparently some kind of forged photograph – of a Mannequin rotting in a taxi”. Over the already somewhat swollen face and chest of a seemingly dead girl, large snails crawl. In the caption below the photograph Dali notes that these are Burgundy snails – that is, the edible kind.

Of course, there is more to this long 400-page book than I have shown, but I do not think I have given an unfair account of his moral atmosphere and mental landscape. It is a book that stinks. If it were possible for the book to emit a physical odor from its pages, that would be a thought that might please Dali, who, before attempting to lay hands on his future wife for the first time, rubbed himself with a pomade made from boiled goat dung mixed with fish glue. But, despite this, it must be noted that Dali is a man of very extraordinary gifts. He is also, judging by the detail and certainty of his drawings, a very great worker. He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud. He has fifty times more talent than most of the people who denounced his morality and ridiculed his paintings. And these two sets of facts, taken together, raise a question which, for lack of any basis of agreement, rarely receives real discussion.

The point is that you have a direct and unmistakable attack on reason and decency; and even – since some of Dali’s pictures would try to poison the imagination like a pornographic postcard – on life itself. What Dali did and what he imagined is debatable, but in his worldview, in his character, the basic decency of a human being does not exist. He is as antisocial as a flea. It is clear that such people are undesirable and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it.

Now, if you were to show this book, with its illustrations, to the historian Lord Elton, the poet and playwright Alfred Noyes, the leading writers of Times who rejoice in the "eclipse of the intellectuals" - in fact, any "sensitive" Englishman who hates art - it is easy to imagine what kind of reaction you would get. They would categorically refuse to see any merit in Dali. Such people are not only unable to accept that what is morally degraded can be aesthetically okay, but their real demand from any artist is that he pat them on the back and tell them that thinking is unnecessary. And they can be especially dangerous at a time like the present, when the Ministry of Information and the British Council put power in their hands. For their impulse is not only to suppress every new talent it seems, but also to castrate the past. We witness how they turn against intellectuals here and in America, with their outcry not only against Joyce, Proust and Lawrence, but also against TS Eliot.

But if you talk to the kind of person who can see the merits of Dali, the answer you get is not a rule, at best. If you say that Dali, although a brilliant artist, is a little clown, you will be looked at as a savage. If you say that you do not like rotting corpses and that people who like rotting corpses are mentally ill, you are assumed to lack an aesthetic sense. Since “The Rotting Mannequin in a Taxi” is a good composition (as it undoubtedly is), it cannot be a disgusting, degraded picture; whereas Noyes, Elton, etc. would tell you that because it is disgusting it cannot be a good composition. And between these two ideas there is no middle ground, or rather, there is a middle ground, but we rarely hear about it. On the one hand, Bolshevik art, and on the other (although the phrase itself is out of fashion) “Art for art’s sake.” Immorality is a very difficult subject to discuss honestly. People are too afraid of either appearing shocked or appearing not to be shocked to be able to define the relationship between art and morality.

It will be seen that what Dali's defenders are claiming is a kind of clerical benefit. The artist should be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just say the magic word "art," and everything is fine. Rotting corpses with snails crawling on them are fine; kicking little girls in the head is fine; even a movie like L'Age d'Or[2] (Golden Age) It's okay. It's also okay that Dali should fatten up in France for years and then run away like a rat as soon as France is in danger. As long as you can paint well enough to pass the test, everything will be forgiven.

One can see how false this is if one uses it to cover up ordinary crime. In an age like ours, when the artist is a completely extraordinary person, he should be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, as if he were a pregnant woman. However, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, and no one would say such a thing about an artist, however talented. If Shakespeare were to return to earth tomorrow and it were discovered that his favorite pastime was to rape little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go on with the excuse that he could write another “King Lear.” And, after all, the worst crimes are not always the most punishable.

By inciting necrophilic fantasies, one can do as much harm as, say, a thieving bookie. We must bear in mind the fact that Dali is a good painter and at the same time a disgusting human being. One does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing we demand of a wall is that it stand. If it stands, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is another. And yet, even the best wall in the world deserves to fall if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way, it should be possible to say: “This is a good book or a good painting and it should be burned by the public executioner.” In so far as we say this, at least in our minds, we are admitting that the artist is both a citizen and a human being.

This does not mean, of course, that Dali's autobiography, or his paintings, should be banned. With the exception of the dirty postcards sold in Mediterranean port cities, it is doubtful whether anything should be banned, and Dali's fantasies may perhaps shed useful light on the decay of capitalist civilization. But what is clearly needed is a diagnosis. The question is not so much what he is, but why he is so. There is no doubt that he has a sick intelligence, perhaps not much altered by his alleged conversion, since true penitents, or people who have regained their sanity, do not display their past vices in such a self-satisfied manner. He is a symptom of the world's disease. The most important thing is not to denounce him as a villain who should be whipped or to defend him as a genius who should not be questioned, but to discover why he exhibits that particular set of deviations.

The answer is probably to be found in his paintings, and I am not competent to examine them. But I can point out one clue that may be significant. This is the old-fashioned, overly ornate, Edwardian style of drawing to which Dali tends to revert when he is not being surrealist. Some of Dali's drawings recall Dürer, one (page 113) seems to show the influence of Beardsley, another (page 269) seems to have borrowed something from Blake. But the most consistent emphasis is Edwardian. When I first opened the book and looked at the countless marginal illustrations, I noticed a resemblance that I could not immediately define. I came to the decorative candlestick at the beginning of Part I (page 7). What did it remind me of? I finally found it. It reminded me of a large and expensive edition of “Anatole France” (translation) which must have been published around 1914. It had chapter headings decorated with drawings and sketches at the end of the chapters in this style.

Dali's candlestick has on one side a fish-like creature that is curled up and looks, oddly, familiar (it seems to be based on the conventional dolphin), and on the other is the burning candle. This candle, which is repeated in other paintings, is a very old friend. You will find it, with the same picturesque spots of wax on its sides, under the fake electric lights made like candlesticks that are popular in Tudor-style country hotels. This candle and the design beneath it immediately convey a strong sense of sentimentality. As if to counteract this, Dali has splashed paint all over the page, but to no avail. The same impression continues to appear page after page.

The design at the bottom of page 62, for example, almost resembles Peter Pan. The figure on page 224, despite the skull being stretched into a large sausage-like shape, is the witch of the storybooks. The horse on page 234 and the unicorn on page 218 could be illustrations for James Branch Cabell. The rather distorted drawings of young people on pages 97, 100 and elsewhere create the same impression. The picturesque continues to emerge. Remove the skulls, ants, lobsters, telephones and other gadgets, and you are occasionally transported back to the world of Barrie, Rackham, Dunsany and Where the Rainbow Ends.[3]

Strangely enough, some of the most sinister passages in Dali's autobiography date back to the same period. When I read the passage I quoted at the beginning, about kicking the little sister in the head, I was aware of another similarity that I couldn't quite place. What was it? Of course! Ruthless rhymes for soulless homes by Harry Graham. Such rhymes were very popular around 1912, and one that was published was as follows:

Poor little Willie is crying so much,
A sad little boy he is,
Because he broke his little sister's neck
And he won't have jam for tea.

It may have served Dali for his own purposes. Dali, of course, is aware of his Edwardian tendencies and uses them, more or less in the spirit of pastiche. He expresses a special love for the year 1900 and claims that every decorative object of the year 1900 is full of mystery, poetry, eroticism, madness, perversity, etc. However, pastiche usually implies a genuine love for the thing parodied. It seems to be, if not always, common for an intellectual tendency to be accompanied by an irrational, even childish, impulse in the same direction. A sculptor, for example, is interested in flat surfaces and curves, but he is also a person who finds pleasure in the physical act of working with clay or stone. An engineer is a person who enjoys the feel of tools, the noise of dynamos, and the smell of oil. A psychiatrist usually has a tendency towards some sexual deviation himself.

Darwin became a biologist partly because he was a country gentleman and fond of animals. It is therefore likely that Dali's seemingly perverse cult of things Edwardian (for example, his "discovery" of the 1900 tube entrances) is simply symptomatic of a much deeper, less conscious love. Countless, beautifully executed copies of textbook illustrations, solemnly labeled the nightingale, (nightingale) a watch (an hour) and so on, which he scatters all over the place, can be partly meant as a joke. The little boy in men's underwear playing with a devil on page 103 is a perfect painting of the period. But perhaps these things are also there because Dali cannot help drawing something like this, because it belongs to that period and that style of drawing that he really belongs to.

If so, the deviations are partly explainable. Perhaps they are a way of reassuring himself that he is not ordinary. Two qualities that Dali undoubtedly possesses are a gift for drawing and a cruel egotism. “At the age of seven,” he says in the book’s opening paragraph, “I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has grown steadily ever since.” This statement is deliberately phrased in a surprising way, but it is undoubtedly essentially true. Such feelings are more than common. “I knew I was a genius,” someone once told me, “long before I knew what I would be a genius for.” And imagine that there was nothing in you but egotism and a talent that was not extraordinary; suppose your true gift is for a detailed, academic, and representative style of drawing, your true best being an illustrator of scientific texts. How then to become Napoleon?

There is always an escape: in wickedness. Always do what will shock and hurt people. At the age of five, throw a little boy off a bridge, punch an old doctor in the face and break his glasses – or, at any rate, dream of doing such things. Twenty years later, gouge out the eyes of dead donkeys with a pair of scissors. With these actions you can always feel original. And in the end, you get paid! It is much less dangerous than crime. Considering all the possible distortions in Dali's autobiography, it is clear that he did not have to suffer for his strange behavior as he would have done at an earlier age. He grew up in the corrupt world of the 1920s, when sophistication was extremely widespread and every European capital was filled with aristocrats and tenants who had given up sports and politics and taken up patronage of the arts. If you threw dead donkeys at people in paintings, they would throw money at you. A phobia of locusts – which a few decades ago would have merely provoked a joker – was now an interesting “complex” that could be exploited to advantage. And when this particular world collapsed before the German army, America was waiting. You could fill it all with religious conversion, moving in one step and without a shadow of regret from the fashionable salons of Paris to the bosom of Abraham.

This is perhaps the essential outline of the story of Dali. But why his deviations should be as peculiar as they were, and why it should be so easy to "sell" such horrors as rotting corpses to a sophisticated public - these are questions for the psychologist and the sociological critic. Marxist criticism falls short in describing phenomena like surrealism. They are “bourgeois decadence” (much play is made on the phrases “corpse poisons” and “the decaying tenant class”), and that’s it. But while this may state a fact, it does not establish a connection. We do, however, want to know why Dali’s inclination was toward necrophilia (and not, say, homosexuality) and why tenants and aristocrats should buy his paintings instead of going hunting and making love like their grandfathers. Mere moral disapproval gets you no further. But no one should claim, in the name of “disengagement,” that paintings such as “Decomposing Mannequin in a Taxi” are morally neutral. They are sick and disgusting, and any examination must begin from that fact.

June 1944

“The Benefit of the Clergy” appeared as part of the “Saturday Book” for 1944. When the publishers, Messrs. Hutchinson, decided that this essay should be removed because it was immoral, it was removed from every copy of the book, while for technical reasons it was impossible to remove its title from the table of contents. [Note by the author George Orwell]. /Taken from issue 24 of the magazine "Akademia"/

________________

[1] The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (Dial Press, New York), 1942.

[2] Dali mentions L'Age d'Or and adds that her first public performance was interrupted by hooligans, but he does not give details of what it was about. According to Henry Miller's account, she stated that she had, among other things, some very detailed images of a woman defecating.

[3] Children's play, originally written for Christmas 1911 by Clifford Mills and John Ramsey. (Translator's note).

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