Everybody's Autobiography, Page 3

  However here is Dali waiting to come and his Russian wife with him.

  Dali has the most beautiful mustache of any European but and that mustache is Saracen there is no doubt about that and it is a most beautiful mustache there is no doubt about that.

  Dali was a notary’s son, in Europe the role in the arts played by sons of notaries is a very interesting one. They take the place of ministers’ sons in America. Notaries are what in England are called solicitors and with us in America I do not believe there is anything that quite does it all. A notary is something that always makes one think of the novels of Balzac because notaries are just like that.

  They do everything they in the smaller towns run the auctions they make out all legal papers they act in all sales and in all disputes about inheritances that do not actually come to law, they administer estates they keep everybody’s papers they give endless advice and they can only charge for legal papers. I know a lot about them because they have been awfully good to me when we were having trouble with the tenant who was subletting Bilignin to us, and I spent all my time rushing down and telling him my troubles while the Captain who was the tenant sat in the other room waiting to tell him his troubles and finally he straightened us all out.

  It is really a nice story of French life.

  I told in Alice B. Toklas how we found the house where we spend the summers across a valley and they said we could have it when the present tenant left it. The present tenant was a lieutenant in the army and as he was stationed at the garrison in Belley, they have a battalion of Moroccan troops there, it is always strange to see in a mountain French village these native troops. It is queer the use of that word, native always means people who belong somewhere else, because they had once belonged somewhere. That shows that the white race does not really think they belong anywhere because they think of everybody else as native. Anyway the lieutenant who was in the house that we had seen across the valley and that we had had to have was stationed in the garrison at Belley. We had never seen the house inside because they were still going on being there. Why said everybody do you not get him made captain, then he would have to leave as there is no room for another captain there in the garrison. We thought that an excellent idea.

  It is remarkable how much influence one has to accomplish anything in France that is if you never expect anybody who is important to do anything for you. We found that out during the war. A general is no good he can only listen to you and make speeches to you he has no power to do anything for you because if he did every one would know about it and then everything would be all over, so the person to do it for you is a pleasant female clerk or an amiable sergeant. They can get anything done for you from extra essence to a decoration if you want it. As I explained when we wanted the red ribbon for Mildred Aldrich all the important people said they would but nothing happened but it was a woman secretary in an office who did get it for her.

  Well we know a man he is a nice man his name is George, it is not for nothing that anybody calls anybody whom they want to do anything for them George. There is something in a name. I said I was no longer sure that there is but there is something in the name of George. In any case we told our troubles to this one. When he was doing his military service he was clerk in the war office. He used to tell how every one even a general would come in and ask him if he could not get something done a little quicker for him. Well sometimes he did and sometimes he did not, it all means slipping the cards to bring one before another one, the way librarians do with renewal cards, the way anybody does with anything.

  George said let me see you want him to become a captain tell me more about him. George by this time was a business man and had nothing further to do with the war office or anything military, however he said tell me what you want me to do. That is what George always says and sometimes he does do something. He tells us when we should take enough money out of the bank to take us to the country for a month if there is going to be a revolution, so far there has not been any but if there was to be he would know. The only curious thing about him is that he believes in the Napoleonic dynasty. That is one of the queer things about France, you never know what anybody has as their loyalty, they just go on being republican but even so a very considerable number of them go on contributing to the king coming again or the emperor or something. George believes in the Bonapartists, I do not know why it does seem very foolish as the Bonapartists never did anything except bring disaster upon France and George loves France and does not love disaster. However we did tell him that we wanted the lieutenant to become a captain.

  George went off and after some months of waiting in which you look anxious but ask no questions and he mysteriously said wait he came and said I have had news for you, they say at the war office that he is not much good as a lieutenant, he is a war lieutenant, and cannot pass any further examinations but as a captain he would not do at all and then besides when he retired he would have to be paid a pension as a captain and now in two or three years he retires and they only have to pay his pension as a lieutenant, but said George perhaps he could go to Morocco that would be good for him he would get more money for active service and he would leave the house free. No no said we as good Americans and George went off and said nothing. A month after the proprietor wrote and said the lieutenant was going to Morocco and was ready to sublet the house to us with his furniture for the two years he would be away, would we take it would we, we did and it was then we first saw the notary, who too has a son and in this way we came to discover that a notary’s son in France is like a minister’s son in America and whether the lieutenant’s going to Morocco was George’s doing or a coincidence we never knew, he never would tell and so we never knew.

  So the notary drew up the lease and we had the house and about six months after war broke out in Morocco and the news came to Belley that the lieutenant was a prisoner. Alice Toklas’ conscience troubled her, mine did not trouble me but hers troubled her and then later came the news that he was not a prisoner and nothing happened to him and Alice B. Toklas was very relieved about him but later considerably later she would not have been sorry if he had been taken forever, and this when we came to know all about what a notary does.

  We had been very peaceful in Bilignin for two years and then the lieutenant came back, and he wanted to sell us the next piece of his lease that he had not got because we had taken the end of his and yet he said he wanted to take as much furniture out as he wanted to furnish the house he was to take elsewhere because he was no longer to be stationed in Belley, and he wanted the piano and I like to improvise on a piano I like to play sonatinas followed by another always on the white keys I do not like black keys and never two notes struck by the same hand at the same time because I do not like chords, but most of the time I have no piano and I do very nicely without it and I was not there when the lieutenant and his wife demanded the piano which was part of the furnishing for which we were paying, and Alice Toklas refused the piano to them and everything else to them for which we were paying and then they said that in that case they would take the house back. When I came back I had been out walking with the dogs everything was in confusion and I said I will rush to the notary, his office was closed but I made him see me any way and after I told him everything he said the lieutenant was waiting to see him too and tell him everything. Monsieur Saint Pierre the notary is a large fair man whose family like many of the notary families in France and particularly near Lyon have papers to show that they have been notaries or something like that since the eleventh century so they know all about what a notary should do. He calmed me and he calmed him although there was a wall between and he the lieutenant was in the wrong because as an officer in the army he could not rent two houses in France, he could own two but he could not rent two so if he was going to rent another one he could not continue to rent Bilignin so there we were, and if we would give him his furniture sooner our landlord would give us other furniture and make out a lease for us and everything and slowly everything
calmed down and we had the furniture out of the home of Brillat-Savarin because our landlord had inherited that house from the heirs of Brillat-Savarin and after a great deal of excitement everything was calm, the notary loaned us his clerk so that the lieutenant and his wife would be peaceful about the inventory and finally they left behind them a cavalry saber, and that is there yet and there is another piano that was left over not from Brillat-Savarin but from very nearly Brillat-Savarin and does very nicely to play sonatinas followed by another on.

  So that is what a notary is and his sons there is always one as there are ministers’ sons remember Cummings is one, but anyway there is always a notary’s son they have a violence in freedom but they are never free, that is what it is to be a notary’s son. Jean Cocteau is one, Foch was one, Bernard Faÿ is one and the other day a lot of people were here and Marcel Duchamp and somebody said or he did that Marcel Duchamp was a notary’s son oh said I that explains everything. Everything said Marcel and everybody burst out laughing but it is true it does, and Dali is a notary’s son and this is a history of him.

  Dali well he is not the most important surrealist and yes yes in a way he is.

  He came to Paris quite young from the north of Spain. As I say, since the twentieth century painting has been Spanish, as Picasso says he likes Dali because Dali, like himself, and that is Spanish bases everything on his own ignorance, they receive a wonderful inspiration and it is based oh yes it is based on ignorance, on their own ignorance because of course a Spanish notary does not know anything and has had no means of learning.

  Now alas it is changing they could go and learn just like any one but until then a Spaniard was naturally ignorant. There was one exception and that was Juan Gris he had no natural ignorance, he complained bitterly when his son came up from Spain where he had been raised and had the ignorance that was natural to any one who was a Spaniard, but Juan had none, and yet he was an exception, but I suppose naturally among all the millions of Spaniards there must be once in a while an exception. The South Americans have something of the same thing only with them ignorance tends to soften and so make as Guevara says of all Chileans a soft center inside them, but the Spanish ignorance may dry up as the center but it never goes soft or rotten.

  Anyway Dali as a young one came from Spain and very soon everybody was excited about him, and the surrealists had known about him before he came and before him had come Miró. However Miró was nice and excited every one by his painting but he had nothing to follow up his painting more than just the natural center of ignorance that any Spaniard has inside him but Dali had a special one and so he kept on being more exciting.

  They knew about him in Paris before he came, surrealists had heard of him. He was the son of a notary and he had the feeling in him of painting like Picasso and like surrealism and he did and some of these early pictures enormous and with big shapes are full of energy, and then he came to Paris and soon everybody heard of him. He painted a picture and on it he wrote I spit upon the face of my mother, he was very fond of his mother who had been a long time dead and so of course this was a symbolism. He knew about Freud and he had the revolt of having a notary for his father and having his mother dead since he was a child. And so painting this picture with this motto was a natural thing and it made of him the most important of the painters who were surrealists. Masson’s wandering line had stopped wandering and he was lost just then, Miró had found out what he was to paint and he was continuing painting the same thing, and so Dali came and everybody knew about him. It is awfully hard to go on painting. I often think about this thing. It is awfully hard for any one to go on doing anything because everybody is troubled by everything. Having done anything you naturally want to do it again and if you do it again then you know you are doing it again and it is not interesting. That is what worries everybody, anybody having done anything naturally does it again, whether it is a crime or a work of art or a daily occupation or anything like eating and sleeping and dancing and war. Well there you are having done it you do it again and knowing you are doing it again spoils its having been existing even as much as it spoils its going to be existing. A painter has more trouble about it than any one. Most people at least do not see what they have just done a writer does not see what he has just written, a musician does not hear what he has just played, but a painter has constantly in front of him what he has just painted, his walls are covered with it, when he comes back to his picture to go on there just under his eyes is what he has just done. An actor a cook nobody else has so continually before him what he has just done. And so a painter has more and less trouble going on than any one. I am often sorry for them. I know that I am the most important writer writing today but I never have any of my books before me naturally not, but they have all the time naturally everything they have just done right in front of them. And like it or not that is the way they are and have to be. Now in the old days when they were so they said copying nature after all there was something there anyway even if their pictures did not resemble what they were copying, but since Picasso no painter uses a model at least no painter whose painting interests anybody and so they paint with what is inside them as it is in them and the only thing that is outside them is the painting they have just been painting and all the others which of course are always around them. Even if they sell a good many there are still a good many there and they see them. A writer as I say never looks at his writing, once it is a finished thing, but a painter well he sees it because his room is full of it, and there is nothing really nothing else to do about it except to have it there and to see it.

  It is funny I was just thinking about it the other day. I remember so well showing in the old days the Picasso drawings and the great thing to say about them was that they were all drawn without a model. And then always there was complete astonishment. Matisse always had a model Picasso never had one, that was where French painting ended and Spanish painting began.

  My brother once was bothered because Picasso never had and never had had a model to look at and it worried finally worried my brother. He liked it but it finally did worry him, this was some years later after Picasso had done my portrait there he had had me to be a model why this was an exception I do not know and as there was never any question there was never any answer. Anyway my brother was worried, he had commenced to paint himself and he had a model so he wanted Picasso to have one. He bothered him so much about it that finally one afternoon Picasso went with him to the model class and drew two drawings while he was looking at the model, and he said what do I want to look at them for, I know what they look like so much that looking is not necessary, and if I do not then looking does not tell anything. I guess that is true, when you are going to hire a servant you look at them very hard but they are never at all what you think they are going to be so why look. The best we ever had we never saw at all until she was everything we could want. Well anyway.

  It is strange when you remember that models were everything until the beginning of the twentieth century and now hardly any painter who interests anybody really has any realization that everybody used to have a model. It is an interesting thing this, it began with Picasso and now everybody is doing it. But this has a great deal to do with everything and later when I tell about the Seurat exhibition and how I found out everything I will tell all about this thing but now to go on with Dali and how everybody knew about him.

  So Dali was beginning to be well known, at that time I did not meet him I was not interested in him, surrealism never did interest me, because after all it all came from Chirico and he was not a surrealist he is very fanciful and his eye is caught by it and he has no distinction between the real and the unreal because everything is alike to him, he says so, but the rest of them nothing is alike to them and so they do not say so, and that is the trouble with them and so they are dead before they go again. However, I did see Dali when he painted his big picture about William Tell. He said it showed the power of the father and child complex but said some one William Tell
did not shoot the apple off his child’s head because he wanted to he did not practice it every day in the garden as a form of sadism, Dali did not hear anything of this he was listening to himself tell about Freud and the feeling a father had about his children. And it was true enough that Dali’s father had a feeling about his son and would not see him. But Dali is very earnest and does not go on hearing anything. Well anyway he came with his wife and Picasso did not come. We talked a great deal together but we neither of us listened very much to one another. We talked about the writing of painters, Dali had just brought me a poem he had written about Picasso, and I said I was bored with the hopelessness of painters and poetry. That in a way was the trouble with the painters they did not know what poetry was. Dali said that if it were not for the titles of Chirico’s pictures and his own nobody would understand him, he himself would not understand the paintings of Chirico if he did not know their titles and as for Picasso’s poems, they had finally made possible for him to understand Picasso’s paintings. Oh dear I said.

  Well we went on and I said I would go and see him which I since have done, by the way some of his early painting is very large and full of emotion, there has just been recently an exhibition of Spanish painting here and a good deal of Spanish painting done in Spain, they do do more than can be done, which carries them so far that they are not there, but certainly twentieth century painting is Spanish, they do it but it is never begun. That is what makes the painting today Spanish.

  Well anyway the Dalis left and I did not see Picasso for some time and then one day I happened to go in to Rosenberg’s Gallery and they were hanging a show of Braque and Rosenberg said did I want to come in and there were Picasso and Braque and we said how do you do you.