The secret life of Salvador Dalí is, as any other of his activities, full of talented
notes. Dalí recounts his early life
and tells everything, without shades or shadows, going from one place to
another without asking for permission. This might be the cause for the attack
of many people, like the English
writer George Orwell. Nevertheless
the style and content of the book by Dalí
is unique and marks the beginning of this type of biographies…
En vocabulario: rumps
y para saber: Paul Gauguin
It has attracted
both editorial praise as well as criticism…
… Dalí is a good
draughtsman and a disgusting human being…
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí is an autobiography by the internationally renowned
artist Salvador
Dalí published in 1942 by Dial Press. The book was written in French and translated into English by Haakon Chevalier. It covers his family history, his early life, and
his early work up through the 1930s, concluding just after Dalí's return to Catholicism
and just before the global outbreak of the Second
World War. The book is over 400 pages long and contains numerous detailed
illustrations. It has attracted both
editorial praise as well as criticism, notably from George Orwell.
 |
| The secret life of Salvador Dalí |
Dalí
opens the book with the statement: "At the age of six I wanted to be a
cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon.
And my ambition has been growing steadily since." According to Time,
Dalí wrote with a highly detailed,
methodical style that layered words
the same way as paint. For example, he states in an early section about his
childhood 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…”
Dalí
states in the book:
As a young
child, he wore a king's ermine cape, a gold scepter, and a crown and then posed
for himself with a mirror. He tucked his genitals inside the outfit to look
more feminine.
He stood out
dramatically from the poor children in his school by carrying a flexible bamboo
cane adorned with a silver dog's head figure and a sailor suit with gold
insignia.
Due to a
"refined Jesuitical
spirit", he remained a virgin until age 25. As an adolescent, he resisted
the sexual advances by his girlfriend for five years until he left her, doing
so mostly out of his enjoyment of being in control.
He became
interested in necrophilia, but was then later cured of it.
While walking
down the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet in Paris in 1934, he became so disgusted at
the sight of a blind double-amputee that he kicked him.
Reception
Time
stated that Dalí's autobiography was
"one of the most irresistible books of the year." The magazine called
it "a wild jungle of fantasy, posturing, belly laughs, narcissist and
sadist confessions", while also commenting that "The question has
always been: Is Dalí crazy? The book
indicates that Dalí is as crazy as a fox."
George Orwell wrote a notable criticism of the book titled Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador
Dalí in 1944. Orwell categorized Dalí's book among other recent autobiographies that he considered
"flagrantly dishonest". He denounced Dalí's accounts of physical abuse against various women in Dalí's early life. He wrote "it is
not given to any one person to have all the vices, and Dalí also boasts that he is not homosexual, but otherwise he seems
to have as good an outfit of perversions as anyone could wish for" and
"if it were possible for a book to give a physical stink off its pages,
this one would". He also commented that "[o]ne ought to be able to
hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being",
defending aspects of Dalí's surrealist
style.
In July 1999, an
article by Charles Stuckey in Art in America stated that Dalí's book "arguably
revolutionized a literary genre". He argued that Dalí's book had been intended as slapstick humor and has been
generally misinterpreted by critics. He also wrote:
“Indebted to the
fanciful childhood-oriented writings by artists such as Gauguin, Ernst and de Chirico...
Manically boasting about his weaknesses and vices no less than about his
achievements and virtues, Dalí helped
to initiate today's antiheroic mode of autobiography and, by extension, the
sex-centered biographical interpretations of artists and art so prevalent since
the 1960s, whether Cézanne and his
apples or Johns and his Targets are
at issue.”
Influences
American writer and humorist James Thurber
wrote a semi-autobiographic article for The
New Yorker called The Secret Life of
James Thurber on February 27, 1943. In the article, Thurber referred to Dalí's
title and parts of his style in comparison to his own life. In particular, Thurber
noted with dismay that his own autobiographical book, My Life and Hard Times, sold for only $1.75 a copy in 1933 while Dalí's book sold for a full $6.00 in
1942.
Vocabulario
Rumps: The
buttocks.
I would catch
glimpses of their heavy rumps…
Para saber
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a French
Post-Impressionist artist. Unappreciated until after his death, Gauguin is now recognized for his
experimental use of color and Synthetist
style that were distinct from Impressionism.
Toward the end of his life, he spent ten years in French Polynesia. The
paintings from this time depict people or landscapes from that region.
 |
| Paul Gaugin, 1891 |
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Esto es parte del archivo: El genio de Dalí
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