Brian Aldiss - The Detached Retina

We doubt: therefore we are.

B.W.A.

Boars Hill

Oxford

November 1994

England, 1989

Dear Salvador Dali,

It’s a real sorrow that you died in January of this year, and I expect you were upset as well. I wanted to say thanks to you; let’s trust I’m not too late. I hope this letter will reach you as you rest in Abraham’s Bosom. Rough luck on Abraham, though.

But that can’t be right. You must be in some surreal place—perhaps in the heaven the ancient Egyptians dreamed about, by the summer stars. Or simply in orbit. Somewhere unorthodox. You liked breaking taboos.

Remember you once tried to prove that ‘the whole universe comes to a focus’ (as you put it) in the centre of the railway station in Perpignan? That was a good stunt. Perhaps you’re there in Perpignan, awaiting a celestial diesel to somewhere.

You were crazy. Or you acted the part. The remark about Perpignan railway station came in an article you wrote in 1965, extolling the virtues of the great Salvador Dali. Like Caesar, you referred to yourself in the third person—though in your case you were the first and the second person too: there were scarcely any others.

Your article involves the miraculous flies of Gerona, the cleanliness of Delft, the visceral eye of Vermeer, van Leeuwenhoek’s invention of the microscope, several revolutions, the atomic bomb, and a swarm of priests dressed in black. It’s incoherent. You never wanted to make sense of the world; that had no part in your ‘critical paranoia’ method. Yet there was a tawdry magic. Take one sentence from that article:

Thus the blood of the dragoons and the hussars who hibernated at Beresina mixing directly with the blood of the new technologists of the always Very Holy Russia caused a historic mutation, producing the true and new mutant beings—the astronauts who, propelled by the templates of their genetic code, could not have a more positive way to direct themselves toward heaven than to jet straight toward the moon, which we will see happen from one moment to the other.

Even van Vogt couldn’t manage prose like that. So let’s just think of you in orbit somewhere in the summer stars. Greetings to Hieronymus Bosch.

You may not remember this, but we met on one occasion; an event was held in the London Planetarium, when you and I helped to launch a book of Fleur Cowles’s poems and paintings. You were working hard on giving an impression of great eccentricity. Without wishing to complain, I was slightly disappointed—only, I hasten to add, in the way that one is generally disappointed by meeting one’s heroes in the flesh. It’s the Napoleon-was-a-bit-short syndrome. When I met Jeffrey Archer, another of the greats, the same thought flashed across my mind. There was a kind of rotting Edwardian stylishness about you. Whereas Archer’s unmitigatedly eighties; the Hush Puppy school.

But you were a hero. At my school, in Form IVA, it was taken for granted you were the great artist of the age. We liked rotting carcasses, elongated skulls, soggy watches, crutches, and the rest of your props. One of our number, now a Labour backbencher, could act out your canvas, Spectre of Sex Appeal , naked, with the aid of a couple of hockey sticks. We chortled over your Life , so full of disgusting facts or fantasies that it would have meant expulsion had we been caught with the book in our lockers.

It was the confusion of fact with fantasy which caught the imagination. I have cooled down a bit since those days in IVA, when the class debated whether you had an exceedingly large whatnot, a laughably small one, or possibly none at all. Since then, you have sunk down the list of favourite artists in my estimation, whereas Kandinsky, Gauguin, Tanguy, Max Ernst and de Chirico in his early period, remain firm. Odd how all the century’s most exciting art was achieved before World War II was spent.

We’ll return to the confusion of fact with fantasy later, because that is where your connection with science fiction comes in, but first, at the risk of disturbing that great calm into which you have flown, I want to remind you of what George Orwell said. Orwell wrote that your two unquestionable qualities were an atrocious egotism and a gift for drawing. Many of us have aspired towards either, or both. As a kind of corollary to that remark, Orwell said ‘one ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being.’ It is an oft-quoted remark. You must be proud of it.

Although he belonged to the NUJ, Orwell was a little, well, prudish. He objected in print to the way in which you consummated your love of Paul Eluard’s wife. That certainly must have been a Gala event: you covered yourself with a mixture of goat’s dung boiled in fish glue. Chacun à son goat , I say. It must have made something stick, since Gala remained your idolized companion for fifty years. Orwell has no comment on that aspect of your life.

To be honest—Orwell was another hero of mine—the author of 1984 is wearing no better than you. A new world has come up over the skyline since your heyday in the thirties and forties. Your paranoid harp-players and flaming giraffes have acquired period charm. You got too rich. You became religious, in a florid, Murillo-like, Madonna-worshipping way which sickens us more than the necrophilia sickened Orwell. It’s a common tragedy, outliving your epoch.

Still, you did paint Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonitions of Civil War , and several other canvasses which will remain icons of their time.

You must always have worked very hard. Kept working, even when—towards the end—you turned to the kitschy religious subjects. Is Dali perhaps Catalan for Doré? Like Doré, you illustrated numerous books. But it was the early paintings which fed a young imagination, the images seen through a dry, pure atmosphere—some of them, like Sleep , where an immense sagging face is propped precariously above the desert, are now fodder for Athena posters, alongside Beardsley and Escher, other masters of illusion.