Brian Aldiss - The Detached Retina

Your titles too took one into a new imaginative world. The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft which can be Used as a Table. Average Atmospherocephalic Bureaucrat in the Act of Milking a Cranial Harp. Paranoic Astral Image. Convincing, as only the preposterous can be.

Some of the paintings held even more direct links with a mentality which questions what is real. The Invisible Man , for instance. Various visual puns where things appear and disappear, such as Apparition of Face and Fruit-Dish on a Beach, Slave Market with Invisible Bust of Voltaire , and the hallucinatory Metamorphosis of Narcissus, another of Athena’s victims. Well, I won’t auto-sodomize you with lists of your own canvasses, but doesn’t it strike you, as you take your astral ease, that it’s the past which is rich with life? It’s the future that’s dead, stuffed with our own mortality?

Naturally, all these whims and excesses of your imagination can be put down to revolt against upbringing, revolt against Catholicism, revolt against traditional dull nationalism. There was just a little too much showbiz. All the obits followed Orwell in speaking of your egotism. After obit, orbit—and there you swing, moody among the summer stars. We who remain Earth-bound look up. You probably have for company the Japanese Emperor Hirohito, once proclaimed a god, who achieved escape velocity a mere two weeks before you.

What a patriot that man was! Your very opposite. Never showed off. Kept a low profile. Good family man. Responsible for perhaps millions of deaths.

And even your egotism was relieved, or probably I mean made more roccoco, by your sense of humour. Perhaps you recall a stuffy English BBC type—it can’t have been a young Alan Whicker, can it?—coming to interview you in your retreat in Port Lligat, near Figueras? You sat with Gala by your blue swimming pool, your pet ocelot lounging on a cane armchair beside you.

The interview went on. You spoke English of such beauty and density that the BBC found it necessary to run sub-titles at the bottom of the screen. The interviewer, as I recollect, was just slightly critical of your notoriety, for in those days—this was in Harold Wilson’s time of office—we rather used to fawn on failure; whereas, now that Mrs Thatcher holds office, we have learnt to suck up to success.

So the interviewer came to his most devastating question. He had heard, he said, that Dali was unkind to animals. Was that true?

Do you remember how your music-hall moustache curled in scorn?

‘Dali cruel to ze animal?’ you exclaimed. ‘Nevair!’ And to emphasize the point you seized up your ocelot by the scruff of its neck and hurled it into the swimming pool.

That indeed is the way to discomfit the English.

We SF writers, in our own humbler way—for we live in Penge and Paddington and Pewsey, not Figueras—the very names shout the difference—we also try to discomfit the English. It is what SF is designed for, what Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells used it for.

Of course, we never discomfited the English very much; we have no luck at all in that respect.

I suppose you know that while you were posturing on your death bed, in a leg-over position with mortality at last, Salman Rushdie was having trouble here with his latest phantasmagoria, The Satanic Verses. It’s a fantasy which now and again makes fun of the Christian God and of Mohammed. The English dutifully bought their copies at Smith’s and Waterstone’s, to display them prominently so that friends would think they had read the book, and maintained a calm almost indistinguishable from catatonia. Not so the Moslem community in Britain (or in Bradford, which is near Britain). The Moslems descended on W. H. Smith with flaming brands, in the manner of those exciting final scenes in a Frankenstein movie. It’s the Spanish temperament, I suppose. The British are full of phlegm. Sometimes it makes you spit.

Far more worthy of expectoration was the medieval behaviour of the Ayatollah Khomeini in pronouncing the death sentence on Rushdie for his novel. Even in World War II we never witnessed such behaviour. The situation is far more bizarre than even Rushdie’s mind could think up—bizarre and horrifying.

It was my misfortune to appear on the BBC TV programme ‘Kilroy’ which discussed Khomeini’s death threat. I felt very strongly that both the freedom of speech and Rushdie must be protected—the former on principle, the latter from his foolishness. The majority of those appearing in the Kilroy-Silk bear-pit were Muslim. The atmosphere was thunderous. Many, though not all, of the Muslims present agreed vociferously with the Ayatollah that Rushdie should be killed. Some of these men held high positions in the Muslim community in Britain. When asked directly if they would murder Rushdie themselves, the men fought shy, knowing the television cameras were upon them. Two women had no such qualms. Both said they would murder Rushdie themselves.

To have to listen to such madness was almost unbearable. Fact and fantasy were again confused. No one in the vociferous belt could—or would—distinguish between a novel and a theological work. These people and millions like them, had surrendered their consciences into the keeping of the mad old man in Teheran. The most recent similar case we experienced was the fever of the Cultural Revolution under the Great Helmsman (you didn’t meet him, did you, Dali?), when two million people stood in Tienanmen Square and waved their Little Red Books.

Rushdie began his writing career with Grimus , once categorized as SF. I tried to give it the award in a Sunday Times SF Competition, but it was withdrawn. Later, I tried ineffectually to bestow the Booker Prize on D. M. Thomas’s White Hotel , rather than on Midnight’s Children . No one then imagined that Rushdie’s name would become more widely known over the face of the globe than any author since Rosetta wrote his Stone.

In the matter of freedom of speech, writers must be for it. On the whole I’m also for blasphemy—it proves the god spoken out against is still living. You can’t blaspheme against Baal or the Egyptian goddess Isis.

Some of the bourgeois like being épated. As I enjoyed Henry Miller’s writings when he was forbidden, so I enjoyed your carefully executed shockers when they were disapproved of. To my mind, some of them have a long shelf life. Longer than yours.

Your old friend Luis Buñuel proceeded you into the realms of darkness. He too did his share of shocking us out of apathy, and would have recognized in the bigotry of the Ayatollah the intolerance he mocked in the Roman Catholic Church in Spain. With Buñuel, if you remember, you made that celebrated surrealist film, L’Age d’Or. It certainly opened a large door in my consciousness.

But it’s a silver age. ‘The New Dark Age’, as a headline in our beloved Guardian calls it today (1 February 1989). Singing yobs are in vogue, Dali. Pre-pubescent voices. Tribal drumming. Over-amplification. Your exit was well-timed.

And for SF too it’s a silver age. True there is some sign that a few of the younger writers are impatient with the stodginess of their elders. (During the time of President Reagan, patriotism became a way of life and patriotism is always a blanket excuse for stifling the critical faculty, as if there were no other use for blankets.) Paul di Filipo and Bruce Sterling are names that spring to mind in this connection, and the group of writers who centre round the magazine New Pathways , with their subversive artist, Ferret.

You weren’t particulary patriotic. When the Civil War hit Spain, you sensibly refused to take sides—though you had a good precautionary word for General Franco—and went to live in Italy, continuing to flirt with psychoanalysis and sunlight. When Europe sank down on its knees in the fury of World War II, you hopped over to the New World, where the Americans embraced your flamboyance and dirty mind with open purses. Orwell blamed you for those two desertions. Silly of him, really—such an English chap, he should have remembered the words of another Englishman, ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’.