At the basis of this lies his
hedonism, which leads him to think of the Earthly Paradise as desirable.
hedonism, which leads him to think of the Earthly Paradise as desirable.
Orwell
Still, if you chose to make this a matter of national prestige and
examine our achievement in the various branches of literature, you would find that
England made a fairly good showing until you came to what may be roughly described as
political writing, or pamphleteering. I mean by this the special class of literature that has
arisen out of the European political struggle since the rise of Fascism. Under this heading
novels, autobiographies, books of “reportage”, sociological treatises and plain pamphlets
can ah be lumped together, all of them having a common origin and to a great extent the
same emotional atmosphere.
Some out of the outstanding figures in this school of writers are Silone, Malraux,
Salvemini, Borkenau, Victor Serge and Koestler himself. Some of these are imaginative
writers, some not, but they are ah alike in that they are trying to write contemporary
history, but UNOFFICIAL history, the kind that is ignored in the text-books and lied
about in the newspapers. Also they are all alike in being continental Europeans. It may be
an exaggeration, but it cannot be a very great one, to say that whenever a book dealing
with totalitarianism appears in this country, and still seems worth reading six months
after publication, it is a book translated from some foreign language. English writers,
over the past dozen years, have poured forth an enormous spate of political literature, but
they have produced almost nothing of aesthetic value, and very little of historical value
either. The Left Book Club, for instance, has been running ever since 1936. How many of
its chosen volumes can you even remember the names of? Nazi Gennany, Soviet Russia,
Spain, Abyssinia, Austria, Czechoslovakia — all that these and kindred subjects have
produced, in England, are slick books of reportage, dishonest pamphlets in which
propaganda is swallowed whole and then spewed up again, half digested, and a very few
reliable guide books and text-books. There has been nothing resembling, for instance,
FONTAMARA or DARKNESS AT NOON, because there is almost no English writer to
whom it has happened to see totalitarianism from the inside. In Europe, during the past
decade and more, things have been happening to middle-class people which in England
do not even happen to the working class. Most of the European writers I mentioned
above, and scores of others like them, have been obliged to break the law in order to
engage in politics at all; some of them have thrown bombs and fought in street battles,
many have been in prison or the concentration camp, or fled across frontiers with false
names and forged passports. One cannot imagine, say, Professor Laski indulging in
activities of that kind. England is lacking, therefore, in what one might call concentration-
camp literature. The special world created by secret-police forces, censorship of opinion,
torture and frame-up trials is, of course, known about and to some extent disapproved of,
but it has made very little emotional impact. One result of this is that there exists in
England almost no literature of disillusionment about the Soviet Union. There is the
attitude of ignorant disapproval, and there is the attitude of uncritical admiration, but very
little in between. Opinion on the Moscow sabotage trials, for instance, was divided, but
divided chiefly on the question of whether the accused were guilty. Few people were able
to see that, whether justified or not, the trials were an unspeakable horror. And English
disapproval of the Nazi outrages has also been an unreal thing, turned on and off like a
tap according to political expediency. To understand such things one has to be able to
imagine oneself as the victim, and for an Englishman to write Darkness at Noon would be
as unlikely an accident as for a slave-trader to write UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.
Koestler’s published work really centres about the Moscow trials. His main theme is the
decadence of revolutions owing to the corrupting effects of power, but the special nature
of the Stalin dictatorship has driven him back into a position not far removed from
pessimistic Conservatism. I do not know how many books he has written in all. He is a
Hungarian whose earlier books were written in Gennan, and five books have been
published in England: SPANISH TESTAMENT, THE GLADIATORS, DARKNESS AT
NOON, SCUM. OF THE EARTH, and ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE. The subject-
matter of all of them is similar, and none of them ever escapes for more than a few pages
from the atmosphere of nightmare. Of the five books, the action of three takes place
entirely or almost entirely in prison.
In the opening months of the Spanish civil war Koestler was the NEWS CHRONICLE’S
correspondent in Spain, and early in 1937 he was taken prisoner when the Fascists
captured Malaga. He was nearly shot out of hand, then spent some months imprisoned in
a fortress, listening every night to the roar of rifle fire as batch after batch of Republicans
was executed, and being most of the time in acute danger of execution himself. This was
not a chance adventure which “might have happened to anybody”, but was in accordance
with Koestler’s life-style. A politically indifferent person would not have been in Spain at
that date, a more cautious observer would have got out of Malaga before the Fascists
arrived, and a British or American newspaper man would have been treated with more
consideration. The book that Koestler wrote about this, SPANISH TESTAMENT, has
remarkable passages, but apart from the scrappiness that is usual in a book of reportage, it
is definitely false in places. In the prison scenes Koestler successfully establishes the
nightmare atmosphere which is, so to speak, his patent, but the rest of the book is too
much coloured by the Popular Front orthodoxy of the time. One or two passages even
look as though they had been doctored for the purposes of the Left Book Club. At that
time Koestler still was, or recently had been, a member of the Communist Party, and the
complex politics of the civil war made it impossible for any Communist to write honestly
about the internal struggle on the Government side. The sin of nearly all left-wingers
from 1933 onwards is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-
totalitarian. In 1937 Koestler already knew this, but did not feel free to say so. He came
much nearer to saying it — indeed, he did say it, though he put on a mask to do so — in his
next book, THE GLADIATORS, which was published about a year before the war and
for some reason attracted very little attention.
THE GLADIATORS is in some ways an unsatisfactory book. It is about Spartacus, the
Thracian gladiator who raised a slaves’ rebellion in Italy round about 65 BC, and any
book on such a subject is handicapped by challenging comparison with SALAMMBO. In
our own age it would not be possible to write a book like SALAMMBO even if one had
the talent. The great thing about Salammbo, even more important than its physical detail,
is its utter mercilessness. Flaubert could think himself into the stony cruelty of antiquity,
because in the mid-nineteenth century one still had peace of mind. One had time to travel
in the past. Nowadays the present and the future are too terrifying to be escaped from,
and if one bothers with history it is in order to find modem meanings there. Koestler
makes Spartacus into an allegorical figure, a primitive version of the proletarian dictator.
Whereas Flaubert has been able, by a prolonged effort of the imagination, to make his
mercenaries truly pre-Christian, Spartacus is a modem man dressed up. But this might
not matter if Koestler were fully aware of what his allegory means. Revolutions always
go wrong — that is the main theme. It is on the question of WHY they go wrong that he
falters, and his uncertainty enters into the story and makes the central figures enigmatic
and unreal.
For several years the rebellious slaves are uniformly successful. Their numbers swell to a
hundred thousand, they overrun great areas of Southern Italy, they defeat one punitive
expedition after another, they ally themselves with the pirates who at that time were the
masters of the Mediterranean, and finally they set to work to build a city of their own, to
be named the City of the Sun. In this city human beings are to be free and equal, and
above all, they are to be happy: no slavery, no hunger, no injustice, no floggings, no
executions. It is the dream of a just society which seems to haunt the human imagination
ineradicably and in all ages, whether it is called the Kingdom of Heaven or the classless
society, or whether it is thought of as a Golden Age which once existed in the past and
from which we have degenerated. Needless to say, the slaves fail to achieve it. No sooner
have they formed themselves into a community than their way of life turns out to be as
unjust, laborious and fear-ridden as any other. Even the cross, symbol of slavery, has to
be revived for the punishment of malefactors. The turning-point comes when Spartacus
finds himself obliged to crucify twenty of his oldest and most faithful followers. After
that the City of the Sun is doomed, the slaves split up and are defeated in detail, the last
fifteen thousand of them being captured and crucified in one batch.
The serious weakness of this story is that the motives of Spartacus himself are never
made clear. The Roman lawyer Fulvius, who joins the rebellion and acts as its chronicler,
sets forth the familiar dilemma of ends and means. You can achieve nothing unless you
are willing to use force and cunning, but in using them you pervert your original aims.
Spartacus, however, is not represented as power hungry, nor, on the other hand, as a
visionary. He is driven onwards by some obscure force which he does not understand,
and he is frequently in two minds as to whether it would not be better to throw up the
whole adventure and flee to Alexandria while the going is good. The slaves’ republic is in
any case wrecked rather by hedonism than by the struggle for power. The slaves are
discontented with their liberty because they still have to work, and the final break-up
happens because the more turbulent and less civilised slaves, chiefly Gauls and Germans,
continue to behave like bandits after the republic has been established. This may be a true
account of events — naturally we know very little about the slave rebellions of antiquity —
but by allowing the Sun City to be destroyed because Crixus the Gaul cannot be
prevented from looting and raping, Koestler has faltered between allegory and history. If
Spartacus is the prototype of the modem revolutionary — and obviously he is intended as
that — he should have gone astray because of the impossibility of combining power with
righteousness. As it is, he is an almost passive figure, acted upon rather than acting, and
at times not convincing. The story partly fails because the central problem of revolution
has been avoided or, at least, has not been solved.
It is again avoided in a subtler way in the next book, Koestler’s masterpiece,
DARKNESS AT NOON. Here, however, the story is not spoiled, because it deals with
individuals and its interest is psychological. It is an episode picked out from a
background that does not have to be questioned. DARKNESS AT NOON describes the
imprisonment and death of an Old Bolshevik, Rubashov, who first denies and ultimately
confesses to crimes which he is well aware he has not committed. The grown-upness, the
lack of surprise or denunciation, the pity and irony with which the story is told, show the
advantage, when one is handling a theme of this kind, of being a European. The book
reaches the stature of tragedy, whereas an English or American writer could at most have
made it into a polemical tract. Koestler has digested his material and can treat it on the
aesthetic level. At the same time his handling of it has a political implication, not
important in this case but likely to be damaging in later books.
Naturally the whole book centres round one question: Why did Rubashov confess? He is
not guilty — that is, not guilty of anything except the essential crime of disliking the Stalin
regime. The concrete acts of treason in which he is supposed to have engaged are all
imaginary. He has not even been tortured, or not very severely. He is worn down by
solitude, toothache, lack of tobacco, bright lights glaring in his eyes, and continuous
questioning, but these in themselves would not be enough to overcome a hardened
revolutionary. The Nazis have previously done worse to him without breaking his spirit.
The confessions obtained in the Russian state trials are capable of three explanations:
1 . That the accused were guilty.
2. That they were tortured, and perhaps blackmailed by threats to relatives and friends.
3 . That they were actuated by despair, mental bankruptcy and the habit of loyalty to the
Party.
For Koestler’s purpose in DARKNESS AT NOON 1 is ruled out, and though this is not
the place to discuss the Russian purges, I must add that what little verifiable evidence
there is suggests that the trials of the Bolsheviks were frame-ups. If one assumes that the
accused were not guilty — at any rate, not guilty of the particular things they confessed
to — then 2 is the common-sense explanation. Koestler, however, plumps for 3, which is
also accepted by the Trotskyist Boris Souvarine, in his pamphlet CAUCHEMAR EN
URSS. Rubashov ultimately confesses because he cannot find in his own mind any
reason for not doing so. Justice and objective truth have long ceased to have any meaning
for him. For decades he has been simply the creature of the Party, and what the Party now
demands is that he shall confess to non-existent crimes. In the end, though he had to be
bullied and weakened first, he is somewhat proud of his decision to confess. He feels
superior to the poor Czarist officer who inhabits the next cell and who talks to Rubashov
by tapping on the wall. The Czarist officer is shocked when he learns that Rubashov
intends to capitulate. As he sees it from his “bourgeois” angle, everyone ought to stick to
his guns, even a Bolshevik. Honour, he says, consists in doing what you think right.
“Honour is to be useful without fuss,” Rubashov taps back; and he reflects with a certain
satisfaction that he is tapping with his pince-nez while the other, the relic of the past, is
tapping with a monocle. Like Bukharin, Rubashov is “looking out upon black darkness”.
What is there, what code, what loyalty, what notion of good and evil, for the sake of
which he can defy the Party and endure further torment? He is not only alone, he is also
hollow. He has himself committed worse crimes than the one that is now being
perpetrated against him. For example, as a secret envoy of the Party in Nazi Germany, he
has got rid of disobedient followers by betraying them to the Gestapo. Curiously enough,
if he has any inner strength to draw upon, it is the memories of his boyhood when he was
the son of a landowner. The last thing he remembers, when he is shot from behind, is the
leaves of poplar trees on his father’s estate. Rubashov belongs to the older generation of
Bolsheviks that was largely wiped out in the purges. He is aware of art and literature, and
of the world outside Russia. He contrasts sharply with Gletkin, the young GPU man who
conducts his interrogation, and who is the typical “good party man”, completely without
scruples or curiosity, a thinking gramophone. Rubashov, unlike Gletkin, does not have
the Revolution as his starting-point. His mind was not a blank sheet when the Party got
hold of it. His superiority to the other is finally traceable to his bourgeois origin.
One cannot, I think, argue that DARKNESS AT NOON is simply a story dealing with the
adventures of an imaginary individual. Clearly it is a political book, founded on history
and offering an interpretation of disputed events. Rubashov might be called Trotsky,
Bukharin Rakovsky or some other relatively civilised figure among the Old Bolsheviks.
If one writes about the Moscow trials one must answer the question, “Why did the
accused confess? ” and which answer one makes is a political decision. Koestler answers,
in effect, “Because these people had been rotted by the Revolution which they served”,
and in doing so he comes near to claiming that revolutions are of their nature bad. If one
assumes that the accused in the Moscow trials were made to confess by means of some
kind of terrorism, one is only saying that one particular set of revolutionary leaders has
gone astray. Individuals, and not the situation, are to blame. The implication of Koestler’s
book, however, is that Rubashov in power would be no better than Gletkin: or rather,
only better in that his outlook is still partly pre-revolutionary. Revolution, Koestler seems
to say, is a corrupting process. Really enter into the Revolution and you must end up as
either Rubashov or Gletkin. It is not merely that “power corrupts”: so also do the ways of
attaining power. Therefore, all efforts to regenerate society BY VIOLENT MEANS lead
to the cellars of the OGPU, Lenin leads to Stalin, and would have come to resemble
Stalin if he had happened to survive.
Of course, Koestler does not say this quite explicitly, and perhaps is not altogether
conscious of it. He is writing about darkness, but it is darkness at what ought to be noon.
Part of the time he feels that things might have turned out differently. The notion that so-
and-so has “betrayed”, that things have only gone wrong because of individual
wickedness, is ever present in left-wing thought. Later, in ARRIVAL AND
DEPARTURE, Koestler swings over much further towards the anti-revolutionary
position, but in between these two books there is another, SCUM OF THE EARTH,
which is straight autobiography and has only an indirect bearing upon the problems
raised by DARKNESS AT NOON. True to his life-style, Koestler was caught in France
by the outbreak of war and, as a foreigner and a known anti-Fascist, was promptly
arrested and interned by the Daladier Government. He spent the first nine months of war
mostly in a prison camp, then, during the collapse of France, escaped and travelled by
devious routes to England, where he was once again thrown into prison as an enemy
alien. This time he was soon released, however. The book is a valuable piece of
reportage, and together with a few other scraps of honest writing that happened to be
produced at the time of the debacle, it is a reminder of the depths that bourgeois
democracy can descend to. At this moment, with France newly liberated and the witch-
hunt after collaborators in full swing, we are apt to forget that in 1940 various observers
on the spot considered that about forty per cent of the French population was either
actively pro-German or completely apathetic. Truthful war books are never acceptable to
non-combatants, and Koestler’s book did not have a very good reception. Nobody came
well out of it — neither the bourgeois politicians, whose idea of conducting an anti-Fascist
war was to jail every left-winger they could lay their hands on, nor the French
Communists, who were effectively pro-Nazi and did their best to sabotage the French war
effort, nor the common people, who were just as likely to follow mountebanks like Doriot
as responsible leaders. Koestler records some fantastic conversations with fellow victims
in the concentration camp, and adds that till then, like most middle-class Socialists and
Communists, he had never made contact with real proletarians, only with the educated
minority. He draws the pessimistic conclusion: “Without education of the masses, no
social progress; without social progress, no education of the masses”. In SCUM OF THE
EARTH Koestler ceases to idealise the common people. He has abandoned Stalinism, but
he is not a Trotskyist either. This is the book’s real link with ARRIVAL AND
DEPARTURE, in which what is normally called a revolutionary outlook is dropped,
perhaps for good.
ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE is not a satisfactory book. The pretence that it is a novel
is very thin; in effect it is a tract purporting to show that revolutionary creeds are
rationalisations of neurotic impulses. With all too neat a symmetry, the book begins and
ends with the same action — a leap into a foreign country. A young ex-Communist who
has made his escape from Hungary jumps ashore in Portugal, where he hopes to enter the
service of Britain, at that time the only power fighting against Gennany. His enthusiasm
is somewhat cooled by the fact that the British Consulate is uninterested in him and
almost ignores him for a period of several months, during which his money runs out and
other astuter refugees escape to America. He is successively tempted by the World in the
form of a Nazi propagandist, the Flesh in the form of a French girl, and — after a nervous
breakdown — the Devil in the form of a psychoanalyst. The psychoanalyst drags out of
him the fact that his revolutionary enthusiasm is not founded on any real belief in
historical necessity, but on a morbid guilt complex arising from an attempt in early
childhood to blind his baby brother. By the time that he gets an opportunity of serving the
Allies he has lost all reason for wanting to do so, and he is on the point of leaving for
America when his irrational impulses seize hold of him again. In practice he cannot
abandon the struggle. When the book ends, he is floating down in a parachute over the
dark landscape of his native country, where he will be employed as a secret agent of
Britain.
As a political statement (and the book is not much more), this is insufficient. Of course it
is true in many cases, and it may be true in all cases, that revolutionary activity is the
result of personal maladjustment. Those who struggle against society are, on the whole,
those who have reason to dislike it, and normal healthy people are no more attracted by
violence and illegality than they are by war. The young Nazi in ARRIVAL AND
DEPARTURE makes the penetrating remark that one can see what is wrong with the left-
wing movement by the ugliness of its women. But after all, this does not invalidate the
Socialist case. Actions have results, irrespective of their motives. Marx’s ultimate
motives may well have been envy and spite, but this does not prove that his conclusions
were false. In making the hero of ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE take his final decision
from a mere instinct not to shirk action and danger, Koestler is making him suffer a
sudden loss of intelligence. With such a history as he has behind him, he would be able to
see that certain things have to be done, whether our reasons for doing them are “good” or
“bad”. History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by
neurotics. In ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE Peter’s idols are overthrown one after the
other. The Russian Revolution has degenerated, Britain, symbolised by the aged consul
with gouty fingers, is no better, the international class-conscious proletariat is a myth. But
the conclusion (since, after all, Koestler and his hero “support” the war) ought to be that
getting rid of Hitler is still a worth-while objective, a necessary bit of scavenging in
which motives are almost irrelevant.
To take a rational political decision one must have a picture of the future. At present
Koestler seems to have none, or rather to have two which cancel out. As an ultimate
objective he believes in the Earthly Paradise, the Sun State which the gladiators set out to
establish, and which has haunted the imagination of Socialists, Anarchists and religious
heretics for hundreds of years. But his intelligence tells him that the Earthly Paradise is
receding into the far distance and that what is actually ahead of us is bloodshed, tyranny
and privation. Recently he described himself as a “short-term pessimist”. Every kind of
horror is blowing up over the horizon, but somehow it will all come right in the end. This
outlook is probably gaining ground among thinking people: it results from the very great
difficulty, once one has abandoned orthodox religious belief, of accepting life on earth as
inherently miserable, and on the other hand, from the realisation that to make life liveable
is a much bigger problem than it recently seemed. Since about 1930 the world has given
no reason for optimism whatever. Nothing is in sight except a welter of lies, hatred,
cruelty and ignorance, and beyond our present troubles loom vaster ones which are only
now entering into the European consciousness. It is quite possible that man’s major
problems will NEVER be solved. But it is also unthinkable! Who is there who dares to
look at the world of today and say to himself, “It will always be like this: even in a
million years it cannot get appreciably better? ” So you get the quasi-mystical belief that
for the present there is no remedy, all political action is useless, but that somewhere in
space and time human life will cease to be the miserable brutish thing it now is.
The only easy way out is that of the religious believer, who regards this life merely as a
preparation for the next. But few thinking people now believe in life after death, and the
number of those who do is probably diminishing. The Christian churches would probably
not survive on their own merits if their economic basis were destroyed.
The real problem is how to restore the religious attitude while accepting death as final.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness. It is
most unlikely, however, that Koestler would accept this. There is a well-marked
hedonistic strain in his writings, and his failure to find a political position after breaking
with Stalinism is a result of this.
The Russian Revolution, the central event in Koestler’s fife, started out with high hopes.
We forget these things now, but a quarter of a century ago it was confidently expected
that the Russian Revolution would lead to Utopia. Obviously this has not happened.
Koestler is too acute not to see this, and too sensitive not to remember the original
objective. Moreover, from his European angle he can see such things as purges and mass
deportations for what they are; he is not, like Shaw or Laski, looking at them through the
wrong end of the telescope. Therefore he draws the conclusion: This is what revolutions
lead to. There is nothing for it except to be a “short-term pessimist” i. e. to keep out of
politics, make a sort of oasis within which you and your friends can remain sane, and
hope that somehow things will be better in a hundred years.
At the basis of this lies his
hedonism, which leads him to think of the Earthly Paradise as desirable. Perhaps,
however, whether desirable or not, it isn’t possible. Perhaps some degree of suffering is
ineradicable from human life, perhaps the choice before man is always a choice of evils,
perhaps even the aim of Socialism is not to make the world perfect but to make it better.
All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure. It is his unwillingness to
admit this that has led Koestler’s mind temporarily into a blind alley and that makes
ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE seem shallow compared with the earlier books.
BENEFIT OF CLERGY: SOME NOTES ON SALVADOR DALI
( 1944 )
Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who
gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the
inside is simply a series of defeats. However, even the most flagrantly dishonest book
(Frank Harris’s autobiographical writings are an example) can without intending it give a
true picture of its author. Dali’s recently published LIFE comes under this heading. Some
of the incidents in it are flatly incredible, others have been rearranged and romanticised,
and not merely the humiliation but the persistent ORDINARINESS of everyday life has
been cut out. Dali is even by his own diagnosis narcissistic, and his autobiography is
simply a strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight. But as a record of fantasy, of the
perversion of instinct that has been made possible by the machine age, it has great value.
Here, then, are some of the episodes in Dali’s life, from his earliest years onward. Which
of them are true and which are imaginary hardly matters: the point is that this is the kind
of thing that Dali would have LIKED to do.
When he is six years old there is some excitement over the appearance of Halley’s comet:
Suddenly one of my father’s office clerks appeared in the drawing-room doorway and
announced that the comet could be seen from the terrace. . . While crossing the hall I
caught sight of my little three-year-old sister crawling unobtrusively through a doorway. I
stopped, hesitated a second, then gave her a terrible kick in the head as though it had been
a ball, and continued running, carried away with a ‘delirious joy’ induced by this savage
act. But my father, who was behind me, caught me and led me down in to his office,
where I remained as a punishment till dinner-time.
A year earlier than this Dali had ‘suddenly, as most of my ideas occur,’ flung another
little boy off a suspension bridge. Several other incidents of the same kind are recorded,
including (THIS WAS WHEN HE WAS TWENTY-NINE YEARS OLD) knocking
down and trampling on a girl ‘until they had to tear her, bleeding, out of my reach. ’
When he is about five he gets hold of a wounded bat which he puts into a tin pail. Next
morning he finds that the bat is almost dead and is covered with ants which are devouring
it. He puts it in his mouth, ants and all, and bites it almost in half.
When he is an adolescent a girl falls desperately in love with him. He kisses and caresses
her so as to excite her as much as possible, but refuses to go further. He resolves to keep
this up for five years (he calls it his ‘five-year plan’), enjoying her humiliation and the
sense of power it gives him. He frequently tells her that at the end of the five years he
will desert her, and when the time comes he does so.
Till well into adult life he keeps up the practice of masturbation, and likes to do this,
apparently, in front of a looking-glass. For ordinary purposes he is impotent, it appears,
till the age of thirty or so. When he first meets his future wife, Gala, he is greatly tempted
to push her off a precipice. He is aware that there is something that she wants him to do
to her, and after their first kiss the confession is made:
I threw back Gala’s head, pulling it by the hair, and trembling with complete hysteria, I
commanded:
‘Now tell me what you want me to do with you! But tell me slowly, looking me in the
eye, with the crudest, the most ferociously erotic words that can make both of us feel the
greatest shame! ’
Then Gala, transforming the last glimmer of her expression of pleasure into the hard light
of her own tyranny, answered:
‘I want you to kill me! ’
He is somewhat disappointed by this demand, since it is merely what he wanted to do
already. He contemplates throwing her off the bell-tower of the Cathedral of Toledo, but
refrains from doing so.
During the Spanish Civil War he astutely avoids taking sides, and makes a trip to Italy.
He feels himself more and more drawn towards the aristocracy, frequents smart
SALONS, finds himself wealthy patrons, and is photographed with the plump Vicomte
de Noailles, whom he describes as his ‘Maecenas. ’ When the European War approaches
he has one preoccupation only: how to find a place which has good cookery and from
which he can make a quick bolt if danger comes too near. He fixes on Bordeaux, and
duly flees to Spain during the Battle of France. He stays in Spain long enough to pick up
a few anti-red atrocity stories, then makes for America. The story ends in a blaze of
respectability. Dali, at thirty-seven, has become a devoted husband, is cured of his
aberrations, or some of them, and is completely reconciled to the Catholic Church. He is
also, one gathers, making a good deal of money.
However, he has by no means ceased to take pride in the pictures of his Surrealist period,
with titles like ‘The Great Masturbator’, ‘Sodomy of a Skull with a Grand Piano’, etc.
There are reproductions of these all the way through the book. Many of Dali’s drawings
are simply representational and have a characteristic to be noted later. But from his
Surrealist paintings and photographs the two things that stand our are sexual perversity
and necrophilia. Sexual objects and symbols — some of them well known, like our old
friend the high-heeled slipper, others, like the crutch and the cup of warm milk, patented
by Dali himself — recur over and over again, and there is a fairly well-marked excretory
motif as well. In his painting, Le Jeu Lugubre, he says, ‘the drawers bespattered with
excrement were painted with such minute and realistic complacency that the whole little
Surrealist group was anguished by the question: Is he coprophagic or not? ’ Dali adds
firmly that he is NOT, and that he regards this aberration as ‘repulsive’, but it seems to be
only at that point that his interest in excrement stops. Even when he recounts the
experience of watching a woman urinate standing up, he has to add the detail that she
misses her aim and dirties her shoes. It is not given to any one person to have all the
vices, and Dali also boasts that he is not homosexual, but otherwise he seems to have as
good an outfit of perversions as anyone could wish for.
However, his most notable characteristic is his necrophilia. He himself freely admits to
this, and claims to have been cured of it. Dead faces, skulls, corpses of animals occur
fairly frequently in his pictures, and the ants which devoured the dying bat make
countless reappearances. One photograph shows an exhumed corpse, far gone in
decomposition. Another shows the dead donkeys putrefying on top of grand pianos which
formed part of the Surrealist film, Le Chien Andalou. Dali still looks back on these
donkeys with great enthusiasm.
I ‘made up’ the putrefaction of the donkeys with great pots of sticky glue which I poured
over them. Also I emptied their eye-sockets and made them larger by hacking them out
with scissors. In the same way I furiously cut their mouths open to make the rows of their
teeth show to better advantage, and I added several jaws to each mouth, so that it would
appear that although the donkeys were already rotting they were vomiting up a little more
their own death, above those other rows of teeth formed by the keys of the black pianos.
And finally there is the picture — apparently some kind of faked photograph — of
‘Mannequin rotting in a taxicab. ’ Over the already somewhat bloated face and breast of
the apparently dead girl, huge snails were crawling. In the caption below the picture Dali
notes that these are Burgundy snails — that is, the edible kind.
Of course, in this long book of 400 quarto pages there is more than I have indicated, but I
do not think that I have given an unfair account of his moral atmosphere and mental
scenery. It is a book that sti nk s. If it were possible for a book to give a physical stink off
its pages, this one would — a thought that might please Dali, who before wooing his future
wife for the first time rubbed himself all over with an ointment made of goat’s dung
boiled up in fish glue. But against this has to be set the fact that Dali is a draughtsman of
very exceptional gifts. He is also, to judge by the minuteness and the sureness of his
drawings, a very hard 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 would denounce his morals
and jeer at his paintings. And these two sets of facts, taken together, raise a question
which for lack of any basis of agreement seldom gets a real discussion.
The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and
even — since some of Dali’s pictures would tend to poison the imagination like a
pornographic postcard — on life itself. What Dali has done and what he has imagined is
debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does
not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society
in which they can flourish has something wrong with it.
Now, if you showed this book, with its illustrations, to Lord Elton, to Mr. Alfred Noyes,
to THE TIMES leader writers who exult over the ‘eclipse of the highbrow’ — in fact, to
any ‘sensible’ art-hating English person — it is easy to imagine what kind of response you
would get. They would flatly refuse to see any merit in Dali whatever. Such people are
not only unable to admit that what is morally degraded can be asthetically right, but their
real demand of every artist is that he shall pat them on the back and tell them that thought
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 into their hands. For their
impulse is not only to crush every new talent as it appears, but to castrate the past as well.
Witness the renewed highbrow-baiting that is now going on in this country and America,
with its outcry not only against Joyce, Proust and Lawrence, but even against T. S. Eliot.
But if you talk to the kind of person who CAN see Dali’s merits, the response that you
get is not as a rule very much better. If you say that Dali, though a brilliant draughtsman,
is a dirty little scoundrel, you are looked upon as a savage. If you say that you don’t like
rotting corpses, and that people who do like rotting corpses are mentally diseased, it is
assumed that you lack the aesthetic sense. Since ‘Mannequin rotting in a taxicab’ is a
good composition. And between these two fallacies there is no middle position, but we
seldom hear much about it. On the one side KULTURBOLSCHEVISMUS: on the other
(though the phrase itself is out of fashion) ‘Art for Art’s sake. ’ Obscenity is a very
difficult question to discuss honestly. People are too frightened either of seeming to be
shocked or of seeming not to be shocked, to be able to define the relationship between art
and morals.
It will be seen that what the defenders of Dali are claiming is a kind of BENEFIT OF
CLERGY. The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary
people. Just pronounce the magic word ‘Art’, and everything is O. K. : kicking little girls
in the head is O. K. ; even a film like L’Age d’Or is O. K. * It is also O. K. that Dali should
batten on France for years and then scuttle off like rat as soon as France is in danger. So
long as you can paint well enough to pass the test, all shall be forgiven you.
* Dali mentions L’Age d’Or and adds that its first public showing was broken up by
hooligans, but he does not say in detail what it was about. According to Henry Miller’s
account of it, it showed among other things some fairly detailed shots of a woman
defecating. (Author’s Footnote)
One can see how false this is if one extends it to cover ordinary crime. In an age like our
own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain
amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a
pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a
claim for the artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if
it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we
should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another KING
LEAR. And, after all, the worst crimes are not always the punishable ones. By
encouraging necrophilic reveries one probably does quite as much harm as by, say,
picking pockets at the races. 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. The one
does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a
wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what
purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves
to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be
possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the
public hangman. ’ Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the
implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.
Not, of course, that Dali’s autobiography, or his pictures, ought to be suppressed. Short of
the dirty postcards that used to be sold in Mediterranean seaport towns, it is doubtful
policy to suppress anything, and Dali’s fantasies probably cast useful light on the decay
of capitalist civilisation. But what he clearly needs is diagnosis. The question is not so
much WHAT he is as WHY he is like that. It ought not to be in doubt that his is a
diseased intelligence, probably not much altered by his alleged conversion, since genuine
penitents, or people who have returned to sanity, do not flaunt their past vices in that
complacent way. He is a symptom of the world’s illness. The important thing is not to
denounce him as a cad who ought to be horsewhipped, or to defend him as a genius who
ought not to be questioned, but to find out WHY he exhibits that particular set of
aberrations.
The answer is probably discoverable in his pictures, and those I myself am not competent
to examine. But I can point to one clue which perhaps takes one part of the distance. This
is the old-fashioned, over-omate Edwardian style of drawing to which Dali tends to revert
when he is not being Surrealist. Some of Dali’s drawings are reminiscent of Diirer, one
(p. 113) seems to show the influence of Beardsley, another (p. 269) seems to borrow
something from Blake. But the most persistent strain is the Edwardian one. When I
opened the book for the first time and looked at its innumerable marginal illustrations, I
was haunted by a resemblance which I could not immediately pin down. I fetched up at
the ornamental candlestick at the beginning of Part I (p. 7). What did this remind me of?
Finally I tracked it down. It reminded me of a large vulgar, expensively got-up edition of
Anatole France (in translation) which must have been published about 1914. That had
ornamental chapter headings and tailpieces after this style. Dali’s candlestick displays at
one end a curly fish-like creature that looks curiously familiar (it seems to be based on
the conventional dolphin), and at the other is the burning candle. This candle, which
recurs in one picture after another, is a very old friend. You will find it, with the same
picturesque gouts of wax arranged on its sides, in those phoney electric lights done up as
candlesticks which are popular in sham-Tudor country hotels. This candle, and the design
beneath it, convey at once an intense feeling of sentimentality. As though to counteract
this, Dali has spattered a quill-ful of ink all over the page, but without avail. The same
impression keeps popping up on page after page. The sign at the bottom of page 62, for
instance, would nearly go into PETER PAN. The figure on page 224, in spite of having
her cranium elongated in to an immense sausage-like shape, is the witch of the fairy-tale
books. The horse on page 234 and the unicorn on page 218 might be illustrations to
James Branch Cabell. The rather pansified drawings of youths on pages 97, 100 and
elsewhere convey the same impression. Picturesqueness keeps breaking in. Take away
the skulls, ants, lobsters, telephones and other paraphernalia, and every now and again
you are back in the world of Barrie, Rackham, Dunsany and WHERE THE RAINBOW
ENDS.
Curiously, enough, some of the naughty-naughty touches in Dali’s autobiography tie up
with the same period. When I read the passage I quoted at the beginning, about the
kicking of the little sister’s head, I was aware of another phantom resemblance. What was
it? Of course! RUTHLESS RHYMES FOR HEARTLESS HOMES, by Harry Graham.
Such rhymes were very popular round about 1912, and one that ran:
Poor little Willy is crying so sore, A sad little boy is he, For he’s broken his little sister’s
neck And he’ll have no jam for tea,
might almost have been founded on Dali’s anecdote. Dali, of course, is aware of his
Edwardian leanings, and makes capital out of them, more or less in a spirit of pastiche.
He professes an especial affection for the year 1900, and claims that every ornamental
object of 1900 is full of mystery, poetry, eroticism, madness, perversity, et. Pastiche,
however, usually implies a real affection for the thing parodied. It seems to be, if not the
rule, at any rate distinctly common for an intellectual bent to be accompanied by a non-
rational, even childish urge in the same direction. A sculptor, for instance, is interested in
planes and curves, but he is also a person who enjoys the physical act of mucking about
with clay or stone. An engineer is a person who enjoys the feel of tools, the noise of
dynamos and smell of oil. A psychiatrist usually has a leaning toward some sexual
aberration himself. Darwin became a biologist partly because he was a country gentleman
and fond of animals. It may be therefore, that Dali’s seemingly perverse cult of
Edwardian things (for example, his ‘discovery’ of the 1900 subway entrances) is merely
the symptom of a much deeper, less conscious affection. The innumerable, beautifully
executed copies of textbook illustrations, solemnly labelled LE ROSSIGNOL, UNE
MONTRE and so on, which he scatters all over his margins, may be meant partly as a
joke. The little boy in knickerbockers playing with a diabolo on page 103 is a perfect
period piece. But perhaps these things are also there because Dali can’t help drawing that
kind of thing because it is to that period and that style of drawing that he really belongs.
If so, his aberrations are partly explicable. Perhaps they are a way of assuring himself that
he is not commonplace. The two qualities that Dali unquestionably possesses are a gift
for drawing and an atrocious egoism. ‘At seven’, he says in the first paragraph of his
book, ‘I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since. ’
This is worded in a deliberately startling way, but no doubt it is substantially true. Such
feelings are common enough. ‘I knew I was a genius’, somebody once said to me, Tong
before I knew what I was going to be a genius about. ’ And suppose that you have nothing
in you except your egoism and a dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow; suppose
that your real gift is for a detailed, academic, representational style of drawing, your real
METIER to be an illustrator of scientific textbooks. How then do you become Napoleon?
There is always one escape: INTO WICKEDNESS. Always do the thing that will shock
and wound people. At five, throw a little boy off a bridge, strike an old doctor across the
face with a whip and break his spectacles — or, at any rate, dream about doing such
things. Twenty years later, gouge the eyes out of dead donkeys with a pair of scissors.
Along those lines you can always feel yourself original. And after all, it pays! It is much
less dangerous than crime. Making all allowance for the probable suppressions in Dali’s
autobiography, it is clear that he had not had to suffer for his eccentricities as he would
have done in an earlier age. He grew up into the corrupt world of the nineteen-twenties,
when sophistication was immensely widespread and every European capital swarmed
with aristocrats and RENTIERS who had given up sport and politics and taken to
patronising the arts. If you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back. A
phobia for grasshoppers — which a few decades back would merely have provoked a
snigger — was now an interesting ‘complex’ which could be profitably exploited. And
when that particular world collapsed before the German Anny, America was waiting.
You could even top it all up with religious conversion, moving at one hop and without a
shadow of repentance from the fashionable SALONS of Paris to Abraham’s bosom.
That, perhaps is the essential outline of Dali’s history. But why his aberrations should be
the particular ones they were, and why it should be so easy to ‘sell’ such horrors as
rotting corpses to a sophisticated public — those are questions for the psychologist and the
sociological critic. Marxist criticism has a short way with such phenomena as Surrealism.
They are ‘bourgeois decadence’ (much play is made with the phrases ‘corpse poisons’
and ‘decaying RENTIER class’), and that is that. But though this probably states a fact, it
does not establish a connection.
examine our achievement in the various branches of literature, you would find that
England made a fairly good showing until you came to what may be roughly described as
political writing, or pamphleteering. I mean by this the special class of literature that has
arisen out of the European political struggle since the rise of Fascism. Under this heading
novels, autobiographies, books of “reportage”, sociological treatises and plain pamphlets
can ah be lumped together, all of them having a common origin and to a great extent the
same emotional atmosphere.
Some out of the outstanding figures in this school of writers are Silone, Malraux,
Salvemini, Borkenau, Victor Serge and Koestler himself. Some of these are imaginative
writers, some not, but they are ah alike in that they are trying to write contemporary
history, but UNOFFICIAL history, the kind that is ignored in the text-books and lied
about in the newspapers. Also they are all alike in being continental Europeans. It may be
an exaggeration, but it cannot be a very great one, to say that whenever a book dealing
with totalitarianism appears in this country, and still seems worth reading six months
after publication, it is a book translated from some foreign language. English writers,
over the past dozen years, have poured forth an enormous spate of political literature, but
they have produced almost nothing of aesthetic value, and very little of historical value
either. The Left Book Club, for instance, has been running ever since 1936. How many of
its chosen volumes can you even remember the names of? Nazi Gennany, Soviet Russia,
Spain, Abyssinia, Austria, Czechoslovakia — all that these and kindred subjects have
produced, in England, are slick books of reportage, dishonest pamphlets in which
propaganda is swallowed whole and then spewed up again, half digested, and a very few
reliable guide books and text-books. There has been nothing resembling, for instance,
FONTAMARA or DARKNESS AT NOON, because there is almost no English writer to
whom it has happened to see totalitarianism from the inside. In Europe, during the past
decade and more, things have been happening to middle-class people which in England
do not even happen to the working class. Most of the European writers I mentioned
above, and scores of others like them, have been obliged to break the law in order to
engage in politics at all; some of them have thrown bombs and fought in street battles,
many have been in prison or the concentration camp, or fled across frontiers with false
names and forged passports. One cannot imagine, say, Professor Laski indulging in
activities of that kind. England is lacking, therefore, in what one might call concentration-
camp literature. The special world created by secret-police forces, censorship of opinion,
torture and frame-up trials is, of course, known about and to some extent disapproved of,
but it has made very little emotional impact. One result of this is that there exists in
England almost no literature of disillusionment about the Soviet Union. There is the
attitude of ignorant disapproval, and there is the attitude of uncritical admiration, but very
little in between. Opinion on the Moscow sabotage trials, for instance, was divided, but
divided chiefly on the question of whether the accused were guilty. Few people were able
to see that, whether justified or not, the trials were an unspeakable horror. And English
disapproval of the Nazi outrages has also been an unreal thing, turned on and off like a
tap according to political expediency. To understand such things one has to be able to
imagine oneself as the victim, and for an Englishman to write Darkness at Noon would be
as unlikely an accident as for a slave-trader to write UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.
Koestler’s published work really centres about the Moscow trials. His main theme is the
decadence of revolutions owing to the corrupting effects of power, but the special nature
of the Stalin dictatorship has driven him back into a position not far removed from
pessimistic Conservatism. I do not know how many books he has written in all. He is a
Hungarian whose earlier books were written in Gennan, and five books have been
published in England: SPANISH TESTAMENT, THE GLADIATORS, DARKNESS AT
NOON, SCUM. OF THE EARTH, and ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE. The subject-
matter of all of them is similar, and none of them ever escapes for more than a few pages
from the atmosphere of nightmare. Of the five books, the action of three takes place
entirely or almost entirely in prison.
In the opening months of the Spanish civil war Koestler was the NEWS CHRONICLE’S
correspondent in Spain, and early in 1937 he was taken prisoner when the Fascists
captured Malaga. He was nearly shot out of hand, then spent some months imprisoned in
a fortress, listening every night to the roar of rifle fire as batch after batch of Republicans
was executed, and being most of the time in acute danger of execution himself. This was
not a chance adventure which “might have happened to anybody”, but was in accordance
with Koestler’s life-style. A politically indifferent person would not have been in Spain at
that date, a more cautious observer would have got out of Malaga before the Fascists
arrived, and a British or American newspaper man would have been treated with more
consideration. The book that Koestler wrote about this, SPANISH TESTAMENT, has
remarkable passages, but apart from the scrappiness that is usual in a book of reportage, it
is definitely false in places. In the prison scenes Koestler successfully establishes the
nightmare atmosphere which is, so to speak, his patent, but the rest of the book is too
much coloured by the Popular Front orthodoxy of the time. One or two passages even
look as though they had been doctored for the purposes of the Left Book Club. At that
time Koestler still was, or recently had been, a member of the Communist Party, and the
complex politics of the civil war made it impossible for any Communist to write honestly
about the internal struggle on the Government side. The sin of nearly all left-wingers
from 1933 onwards is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-
totalitarian. In 1937 Koestler already knew this, but did not feel free to say so. He came
much nearer to saying it — indeed, he did say it, though he put on a mask to do so — in his
next book, THE GLADIATORS, which was published about a year before the war and
for some reason attracted very little attention.
THE GLADIATORS is in some ways an unsatisfactory book. It is about Spartacus, the
Thracian gladiator who raised a slaves’ rebellion in Italy round about 65 BC, and any
book on such a subject is handicapped by challenging comparison with SALAMMBO. In
our own age it would not be possible to write a book like SALAMMBO even if one had
the talent. The great thing about Salammbo, even more important than its physical detail,
is its utter mercilessness. Flaubert could think himself into the stony cruelty of antiquity,
because in the mid-nineteenth century one still had peace of mind. One had time to travel
in the past. Nowadays the present and the future are too terrifying to be escaped from,
and if one bothers with history it is in order to find modem meanings there. Koestler
makes Spartacus into an allegorical figure, a primitive version of the proletarian dictator.
Whereas Flaubert has been able, by a prolonged effort of the imagination, to make his
mercenaries truly pre-Christian, Spartacus is a modem man dressed up. But this might
not matter if Koestler were fully aware of what his allegory means. Revolutions always
go wrong — that is the main theme. It is on the question of WHY they go wrong that he
falters, and his uncertainty enters into the story and makes the central figures enigmatic
and unreal.
For several years the rebellious slaves are uniformly successful. Their numbers swell to a
hundred thousand, they overrun great areas of Southern Italy, they defeat one punitive
expedition after another, they ally themselves with the pirates who at that time were the
masters of the Mediterranean, and finally they set to work to build a city of their own, to
be named the City of the Sun. In this city human beings are to be free and equal, and
above all, they are to be happy: no slavery, no hunger, no injustice, no floggings, no
executions. It is the dream of a just society which seems to haunt the human imagination
ineradicably and in all ages, whether it is called the Kingdom of Heaven or the classless
society, or whether it is thought of as a Golden Age which once existed in the past and
from which we have degenerated. Needless to say, the slaves fail to achieve it. No sooner
have they formed themselves into a community than their way of life turns out to be as
unjust, laborious and fear-ridden as any other. Even the cross, symbol of slavery, has to
be revived for the punishment of malefactors. The turning-point comes when Spartacus
finds himself obliged to crucify twenty of his oldest and most faithful followers. After
that the City of the Sun is doomed, the slaves split up and are defeated in detail, the last
fifteen thousand of them being captured and crucified in one batch.
The serious weakness of this story is that the motives of Spartacus himself are never
made clear. The Roman lawyer Fulvius, who joins the rebellion and acts as its chronicler,
sets forth the familiar dilemma of ends and means. You can achieve nothing unless you
are willing to use force and cunning, but in using them you pervert your original aims.
Spartacus, however, is not represented as power hungry, nor, on the other hand, as a
visionary. He is driven onwards by some obscure force which he does not understand,
and he is frequently in two minds as to whether it would not be better to throw up the
whole adventure and flee to Alexandria while the going is good. The slaves’ republic is in
any case wrecked rather by hedonism than by the struggle for power. The slaves are
discontented with their liberty because they still have to work, and the final break-up
happens because the more turbulent and less civilised slaves, chiefly Gauls and Germans,
continue to behave like bandits after the republic has been established. This may be a true
account of events — naturally we know very little about the slave rebellions of antiquity —
but by allowing the Sun City to be destroyed because Crixus the Gaul cannot be
prevented from looting and raping, Koestler has faltered between allegory and history. If
Spartacus is the prototype of the modem revolutionary — and obviously he is intended as
that — he should have gone astray because of the impossibility of combining power with
righteousness. As it is, he is an almost passive figure, acted upon rather than acting, and
at times not convincing. The story partly fails because the central problem of revolution
has been avoided or, at least, has not been solved.
It is again avoided in a subtler way in the next book, Koestler’s masterpiece,
DARKNESS AT NOON. Here, however, the story is not spoiled, because it deals with
individuals and its interest is psychological. It is an episode picked out from a
background that does not have to be questioned. DARKNESS AT NOON describes the
imprisonment and death of an Old Bolshevik, Rubashov, who first denies and ultimately
confesses to crimes which he is well aware he has not committed. The grown-upness, the
lack of surprise or denunciation, the pity and irony with which the story is told, show the
advantage, when one is handling a theme of this kind, of being a European. The book
reaches the stature of tragedy, whereas an English or American writer could at most have
made it into a polemical tract. Koestler has digested his material and can treat it on the
aesthetic level. At the same time his handling of it has a political implication, not
important in this case but likely to be damaging in later books.
Naturally the whole book centres round one question: Why did Rubashov confess? He is
not guilty — that is, not guilty of anything except the essential crime of disliking the Stalin
regime. The concrete acts of treason in which he is supposed to have engaged are all
imaginary. He has not even been tortured, or not very severely. He is worn down by
solitude, toothache, lack of tobacco, bright lights glaring in his eyes, and continuous
questioning, but these in themselves would not be enough to overcome a hardened
revolutionary. The Nazis have previously done worse to him without breaking his spirit.
The confessions obtained in the Russian state trials are capable of three explanations:
1 . That the accused were guilty.
2. That they were tortured, and perhaps blackmailed by threats to relatives and friends.
3 . That they were actuated by despair, mental bankruptcy and the habit of loyalty to the
Party.
For Koestler’s purpose in DARKNESS AT NOON 1 is ruled out, and though this is not
the place to discuss the Russian purges, I must add that what little verifiable evidence
there is suggests that the trials of the Bolsheviks were frame-ups. If one assumes that the
accused were not guilty — at any rate, not guilty of the particular things they confessed
to — then 2 is the common-sense explanation. Koestler, however, plumps for 3, which is
also accepted by the Trotskyist Boris Souvarine, in his pamphlet CAUCHEMAR EN
URSS. Rubashov ultimately confesses because he cannot find in his own mind any
reason for not doing so. Justice and objective truth have long ceased to have any meaning
for him. For decades he has been simply the creature of the Party, and what the Party now
demands is that he shall confess to non-existent crimes. In the end, though he had to be
bullied and weakened first, he is somewhat proud of his decision to confess. He feels
superior to the poor Czarist officer who inhabits the next cell and who talks to Rubashov
by tapping on the wall. The Czarist officer is shocked when he learns that Rubashov
intends to capitulate. As he sees it from his “bourgeois” angle, everyone ought to stick to
his guns, even a Bolshevik. Honour, he says, consists in doing what you think right.
“Honour is to be useful without fuss,” Rubashov taps back; and he reflects with a certain
satisfaction that he is tapping with his pince-nez while the other, the relic of the past, is
tapping with a monocle. Like Bukharin, Rubashov is “looking out upon black darkness”.
What is there, what code, what loyalty, what notion of good and evil, for the sake of
which he can defy the Party and endure further torment? He is not only alone, he is also
hollow. He has himself committed worse crimes than the one that is now being
perpetrated against him. For example, as a secret envoy of the Party in Nazi Germany, he
has got rid of disobedient followers by betraying them to the Gestapo. Curiously enough,
if he has any inner strength to draw upon, it is the memories of his boyhood when he was
the son of a landowner. The last thing he remembers, when he is shot from behind, is the
leaves of poplar trees on his father’s estate. Rubashov belongs to the older generation of
Bolsheviks that was largely wiped out in the purges. He is aware of art and literature, and
of the world outside Russia. He contrasts sharply with Gletkin, the young GPU man who
conducts his interrogation, and who is the typical “good party man”, completely without
scruples or curiosity, a thinking gramophone. Rubashov, unlike Gletkin, does not have
the Revolution as his starting-point. His mind was not a blank sheet when the Party got
hold of it. His superiority to the other is finally traceable to his bourgeois origin.
One cannot, I think, argue that DARKNESS AT NOON is simply a story dealing with the
adventures of an imaginary individual. Clearly it is a political book, founded on history
and offering an interpretation of disputed events. Rubashov might be called Trotsky,
Bukharin Rakovsky or some other relatively civilised figure among the Old Bolsheviks.
If one writes about the Moscow trials one must answer the question, “Why did the
accused confess? ” and which answer one makes is a political decision. Koestler answers,
in effect, “Because these people had been rotted by the Revolution which they served”,
and in doing so he comes near to claiming that revolutions are of their nature bad. If one
assumes that the accused in the Moscow trials were made to confess by means of some
kind of terrorism, one is only saying that one particular set of revolutionary leaders has
gone astray. Individuals, and not the situation, are to blame. The implication of Koestler’s
book, however, is that Rubashov in power would be no better than Gletkin: or rather,
only better in that his outlook is still partly pre-revolutionary. Revolution, Koestler seems
to say, is a corrupting process. Really enter into the Revolution and you must end up as
either Rubashov or Gletkin. It is not merely that “power corrupts”: so also do the ways of
attaining power. Therefore, all efforts to regenerate society BY VIOLENT MEANS lead
to the cellars of the OGPU, Lenin leads to Stalin, and would have come to resemble
Stalin if he had happened to survive.
Of course, Koestler does not say this quite explicitly, and perhaps is not altogether
conscious of it. He is writing about darkness, but it is darkness at what ought to be noon.
Part of the time he feels that things might have turned out differently. The notion that so-
and-so has “betrayed”, that things have only gone wrong because of individual
wickedness, is ever present in left-wing thought. Later, in ARRIVAL AND
DEPARTURE, Koestler swings over much further towards the anti-revolutionary
position, but in between these two books there is another, SCUM OF THE EARTH,
which is straight autobiography and has only an indirect bearing upon the problems
raised by DARKNESS AT NOON. True to his life-style, Koestler was caught in France
by the outbreak of war and, as a foreigner and a known anti-Fascist, was promptly
arrested and interned by the Daladier Government. He spent the first nine months of war
mostly in a prison camp, then, during the collapse of France, escaped and travelled by
devious routes to England, where he was once again thrown into prison as an enemy
alien. This time he was soon released, however. The book is a valuable piece of
reportage, and together with a few other scraps of honest writing that happened to be
produced at the time of the debacle, it is a reminder of the depths that bourgeois
democracy can descend to. At this moment, with France newly liberated and the witch-
hunt after collaborators in full swing, we are apt to forget that in 1940 various observers
on the spot considered that about forty per cent of the French population was either
actively pro-German or completely apathetic. Truthful war books are never acceptable to
non-combatants, and Koestler’s book did not have a very good reception. Nobody came
well out of it — neither the bourgeois politicians, whose idea of conducting an anti-Fascist
war was to jail every left-winger they could lay their hands on, nor the French
Communists, who were effectively pro-Nazi and did their best to sabotage the French war
effort, nor the common people, who were just as likely to follow mountebanks like Doriot
as responsible leaders. Koestler records some fantastic conversations with fellow victims
in the concentration camp, and adds that till then, like most middle-class Socialists and
Communists, he had never made contact with real proletarians, only with the educated
minority. He draws the pessimistic conclusion: “Without education of the masses, no
social progress; without social progress, no education of the masses”. In SCUM OF THE
EARTH Koestler ceases to idealise the common people. He has abandoned Stalinism, but
he is not a Trotskyist either. This is the book’s real link with ARRIVAL AND
DEPARTURE, in which what is normally called a revolutionary outlook is dropped,
perhaps for good.
ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE is not a satisfactory book. The pretence that it is a novel
is very thin; in effect it is a tract purporting to show that revolutionary creeds are
rationalisations of neurotic impulses. With all too neat a symmetry, the book begins and
ends with the same action — a leap into a foreign country. A young ex-Communist who
has made his escape from Hungary jumps ashore in Portugal, where he hopes to enter the
service of Britain, at that time the only power fighting against Gennany. His enthusiasm
is somewhat cooled by the fact that the British Consulate is uninterested in him and
almost ignores him for a period of several months, during which his money runs out and
other astuter refugees escape to America. He is successively tempted by the World in the
form of a Nazi propagandist, the Flesh in the form of a French girl, and — after a nervous
breakdown — the Devil in the form of a psychoanalyst. The psychoanalyst drags out of
him the fact that his revolutionary enthusiasm is not founded on any real belief in
historical necessity, but on a morbid guilt complex arising from an attempt in early
childhood to blind his baby brother. By the time that he gets an opportunity of serving the
Allies he has lost all reason for wanting to do so, and he is on the point of leaving for
America when his irrational impulses seize hold of him again. In practice he cannot
abandon the struggle. When the book ends, he is floating down in a parachute over the
dark landscape of his native country, where he will be employed as a secret agent of
Britain.
As a political statement (and the book is not much more), this is insufficient. Of course it
is true in many cases, and it may be true in all cases, that revolutionary activity is the
result of personal maladjustment. Those who struggle against society are, on the whole,
those who have reason to dislike it, and normal healthy people are no more attracted by
violence and illegality than they are by war. The young Nazi in ARRIVAL AND
DEPARTURE makes the penetrating remark that one can see what is wrong with the left-
wing movement by the ugliness of its women. But after all, this does not invalidate the
Socialist case. Actions have results, irrespective of their motives. Marx’s ultimate
motives may well have been envy and spite, but this does not prove that his conclusions
were false. In making the hero of ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE take his final decision
from a mere instinct not to shirk action and danger, Koestler is making him suffer a
sudden loss of intelligence. With such a history as he has behind him, he would be able to
see that certain things have to be done, whether our reasons for doing them are “good” or
“bad”. History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by
neurotics. In ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE Peter’s idols are overthrown one after the
other. The Russian Revolution has degenerated, Britain, symbolised by the aged consul
with gouty fingers, is no better, the international class-conscious proletariat is a myth. But
the conclusion (since, after all, Koestler and his hero “support” the war) ought to be that
getting rid of Hitler is still a worth-while objective, a necessary bit of scavenging in
which motives are almost irrelevant.
To take a rational political decision one must have a picture of the future. At present
Koestler seems to have none, or rather to have two which cancel out. As an ultimate
objective he believes in the Earthly Paradise, the Sun State which the gladiators set out to
establish, and which has haunted the imagination of Socialists, Anarchists and religious
heretics for hundreds of years. But his intelligence tells him that the Earthly Paradise is
receding into the far distance and that what is actually ahead of us is bloodshed, tyranny
and privation. Recently he described himself as a “short-term pessimist”. Every kind of
horror is blowing up over the horizon, but somehow it will all come right in the end. This
outlook is probably gaining ground among thinking people: it results from the very great
difficulty, once one has abandoned orthodox religious belief, of accepting life on earth as
inherently miserable, and on the other hand, from the realisation that to make life liveable
is a much bigger problem than it recently seemed. Since about 1930 the world has given
no reason for optimism whatever. Nothing is in sight except a welter of lies, hatred,
cruelty and ignorance, and beyond our present troubles loom vaster ones which are only
now entering into the European consciousness. It is quite possible that man’s major
problems will NEVER be solved. But it is also unthinkable! Who is there who dares to
look at the world of today and say to himself, “It will always be like this: even in a
million years it cannot get appreciably better? ” So you get the quasi-mystical belief that
for the present there is no remedy, all political action is useless, but that somewhere in
space and time human life will cease to be the miserable brutish thing it now is.
The only easy way out is that of the religious believer, who regards this life merely as a
preparation for the next. But few thinking people now believe in life after death, and the
number of those who do is probably diminishing. The Christian churches would probably
not survive on their own merits if their economic basis were destroyed.
The real problem is how to restore the religious attitude while accepting death as final.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness. It is
most unlikely, however, that Koestler would accept this. There is a well-marked
hedonistic strain in his writings, and his failure to find a political position after breaking
with Stalinism is a result of this.
The Russian Revolution, the central event in Koestler’s fife, started out with high hopes.
We forget these things now, but a quarter of a century ago it was confidently expected
that the Russian Revolution would lead to Utopia. Obviously this has not happened.
Koestler is too acute not to see this, and too sensitive not to remember the original
objective. Moreover, from his European angle he can see such things as purges and mass
deportations for what they are; he is not, like Shaw or Laski, looking at them through the
wrong end of the telescope. Therefore he draws the conclusion: This is what revolutions
lead to. There is nothing for it except to be a “short-term pessimist” i. e. to keep out of
politics, make a sort of oasis within which you and your friends can remain sane, and
hope that somehow things will be better in a hundred years.
At the basis of this lies his
hedonism, which leads him to think of the Earthly Paradise as desirable. Perhaps,
however, whether desirable or not, it isn’t possible. Perhaps some degree of suffering is
ineradicable from human life, perhaps the choice before man is always a choice of evils,
perhaps even the aim of Socialism is not to make the world perfect but to make it better.
All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure. It is his unwillingness to
admit this that has led Koestler’s mind temporarily into a blind alley and that makes
ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE seem shallow compared with the earlier books.
BENEFIT OF CLERGY: SOME NOTES ON SALVADOR DALI
( 1944 )
Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who
gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the
inside is simply a series of defeats. However, even the most flagrantly dishonest book
(Frank Harris’s autobiographical writings are an example) can without intending it give a
true picture of its author. Dali’s recently published LIFE comes under this heading. Some
of the incidents in it are flatly incredible, others have been rearranged and romanticised,
and not merely the humiliation but the persistent ORDINARINESS of everyday life has
been cut out. Dali is even by his own diagnosis narcissistic, and his autobiography is
simply a strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight. But as a record of fantasy, of the
perversion of instinct that has been made possible by the machine age, it has great value.
Here, then, are some of the episodes in Dali’s life, from his earliest years onward. Which
of them are true and which are imaginary hardly matters: the point is that this is the kind
of thing that Dali would have LIKED to do.
When he is six years old there is some excitement over the appearance of Halley’s comet:
Suddenly one of my father’s office clerks appeared in the drawing-room doorway and
announced that the comet could be seen from the terrace. . . While crossing the hall I
caught sight of my little three-year-old sister crawling unobtrusively through a doorway. I
stopped, hesitated a second, then gave her a terrible kick in the head as though it had been
a ball, and continued running, carried away with a ‘delirious joy’ induced by this savage
act. But my father, who was behind me, caught me and led me down in to his office,
where I remained as a punishment till dinner-time.
A year earlier than this Dali had ‘suddenly, as most of my ideas occur,’ flung another
little boy off a suspension bridge. Several other incidents of the same kind are recorded,
including (THIS WAS WHEN HE WAS TWENTY-NINE YEARS OLD) knocking
down and trampling on a girl ‘until they had to tear her, bleeding, out of my reach. ’
When he is about five he gets hold of a wounded bat which he puts into a tin pail. Next
morning he finds that the bat is almost dead and is covered with ants which are devouring
it. He puts it in his mouth, ants and all, and bites it almost in half.
When he is an adolescent a girl falls desperately in love with him. He kisses and caresses
her so as to excite her as much as possible, but refuses to go further. He resolves to keep
this up for five years (he calls it his ‘five-year plan’), enjoying her humiliation and the
sense of power it gives him. He frequently tells her that at the end of the five years he
will desert her, and when the time comes he does so.
Till well into adult life he keeps up the practice of masturbation, and likes to do this,
apparently, in front of a looking-glass. For ordinary purposes he is impotent, it appears,
till the age of thirty or so. When he first meets his future wife, Gala, he is greatly tempted
to push her off a precipice. He is aware that there is something that she wants him to do
to her, and after their first kiss the confession is made:
I threw back Gala’s head, pulling it by the hair, and trembling with complete hysteria, I
commanded:
‘Now tell me what you want me to do with you! But tell me slowly, looking me in the
eye, with the crudest, the most ferociously erotic words that can make both of us feel the
greatest shame! ’
Then Gala, transforming the last glimmer of her expression of pleasure into the hard light
of her own tyranny, answered:
‘I want you to kill me! ’
He is somewhat disappointed by this demand, since it is merely what he wanted to do
already. He contemplates throwing her off the bell-tower of the Cathedral of Toledo, but
refrains from doing so.
During the Spanish Civil War he astutely avoids taking sides, and makes a trip to Italy.
He feels himself more and more drawn towards the aristocracy, frequents smart
SALONS, finds himself wealthy patrons, and is photographed with the plump Vicomte
de Noailles, whom he describes as his ‘Maecenas. ’ When the European War approaches
he has one preoccupation only: how to find a place which has good cookery and from
which he can make a quick bolt if danger comes too near. He fixes on Bordeaux, and
duly flees to Spain during the Battle of France. He stays in Spain long enough to pick up
a few anti-red atrocity stories, then makes for America. The story ends in a blaze of
respectability. Dali, at thirty-seven, has become a devoted husband, is cured of his
aberrations, or some of them, and is completely reconciled to the Catholic Church. He is
also, one gathers, making a good deal of money.
However, he has by no means ceased to take pride in the pictures of his Surrealist period,
with titles like ‘The Great Masturbator’, ‘Sodomy of a Skull with a Grand Piano’, etc.
There are reproductions of these all the way through the book. Many of Dali’s drawings
are simply representational and have a characteristic to be noted later. But from his
Surrealist paintings and photographs the two things that stand our are sexual perversity
and necrophilia. Sexual objects and symbols — some of them well known, like our old
friend the high-heeled slipper, others, like the crutch and the cup of warm milk, patented
by Dali himself — recur over and over again, and there is a fairly well-marked excretory
motif as well. In his painting, Le Jeu Lugubre, he says, ‘the drawers bespattered with
excrement were painted with such minute and realistic complacency that the whole little
Surrealist group was anguished by the question: Is he coprophagic or not? ’ Dali adds
firmly that he is NOT, and that he regards this aberration as ‘repulsive’, but it seems to be
only at that point that his interest in excrement stops. Even when he recounts the
experience of watching a woman urinate standing up, he has to add the detail that she
misses her aim and dirties her shoes. It is not given to any one person to have all the
vices, and Dali also boasts that he is not homosexual, but otherwise he seems to have as
good an outfit of perversions as anyone could wish for.
However, his most notable characteristic is his necrophilia. He himself freely admits to
this, and claims to have been cured of it. Dead faces, skulls, corpses of animals occur
fairly frequently in his pictures, and the ants which devoured the dying bat make
countless reappearances. One photograph shows an exhumed corpse, far gone in
decomposition. Another shows the dead donkeys putrefying on top of grand pianos which
formed part of the Surrealist film, Le Chien Andalou. Dali still looks back on these
donkeys with great enthusiasm.
I ‘made up’ the putrefaction of the donkeys with great pots of sticky glue which I poured
over them. Also I emptied their eye-sockets and made them larger by hacking them out
with scissors. In the same way I furiously cut their mouths open to make the rows of their
teeth show to better advantage, and I added several jaws to each mouth, so that it would
appear that although the donkeys were already rotting they were vomiting up a little more
their own death, above those other rows of teeth formed by the keys of the black pianos.
And finally there is the picture — apparently some kind of faked photograph — of
‘Mannequin rotting in a taxicab. ’ Over the already somewhat bloated face and breast of
the apparently dead girl, huge snails were crawling. In the caption below the picture Dali
notes that these are Burgundy snails — that is, the edible kind.
Of course, in this long book of 400 quarto pages there is more than I have indicated, but I
do not think that I have given an unfair account of his moral atmosphere and mental
scenery. It is a book that sti nk s. If it were possible for a book to give a physical stink off
its pages, this one would — a thought that might please Dali, who before wooing his future
wife for the first time rubbed himself all over with an ointment made of goat’s dung
boiled up in fish glue. But against this has to be set the fact that Dali is a draughtsman of
very exceptional gifts. He is also, to judge by the minuteness and the sureness of his
drawings, a very hard 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 would denounce his morals
and jeer at his paintings. And these two sets of facts, taken together, raise a question
which for lack of any basis of agreement seldom gets a real discussion.
The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and
even — since some of Dali’s pictures would tend to poison the imagination like a
pornographic postcard — on life itself. What Dali has done and what he has imagined is
debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does
not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society
in which they can flourish has something wrong with it.
Now, if you showed this book, with its illustrations, to Lord Elton, to Mr. Alfred Noyes,
to THE TIMES leader writers who exult over the ‘eclipse of the highbrow’ — in fact, to
any ‘sensible’ art-hating English person — it is easy to imagine what kind of response you
would get. They would flatly refuse to see any merit in Dali whatever. Such people are
not only unable to admit that what is morally degraded can be asthetically right, but their
real demand of every artist is that he shall pat them on the back and tell them that thought
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 into their hands. For their
impulse is not only to crush every new talent as it appears, but to castrate the past as well.
Witness the renewed highbrow-baiting that is now going on in this country and America,
with its outcry not only against Joyce, Proust and Lawrence, but even against T. S. Eliot.
But if you talk to the kind of person who CAN see Dali’s merits, the response that you
get is not as a rule very much better. If you say that Dali, though a brilliant draughtsman,
is a dirty little scoundrel, you are looked upon as a savage. If you say that you don’t like
rotting corpses, and that people who do like rotting corpses are mentally diseased, it is
assumed that you lack the aesthetic sense. Since ‘Mannequin rotting in a taxicab’ is a
good composition. And between these two fallacies there is no middle position, but we
seldom hear much about it. On the one side KULTURBOLSCHEVISMUS: on the other
(though the phrase itself is out of fashion) ‘Art for Art’s sake. ’ Obscenity is a very
difficult question to discuss honestly. People are too frightened either of seeming to be
shocked or of seeming not to be shocked, to be able to define the relationship between art
and morals.
It will be seen that what the defenders of Dali are claiming is a kind of BENEFIT OF
CLERGY. The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary
people. Just pronounce the magic word ‘Art’, and everything is O. K. : kicking little girls
in the head is O. K. ; even a film like L’Age d’Or is O. K. * It is also O. K. that Dali should
batten on France for years and then scuttle off like rat as soon as France is in danger. So
long as you can paint well enough to pass the test, all shall be forgiven you.
* Dali mentions L’Age d’Or and adds that its first public showing was broken up by
hooligans, but he does not say in detail what it was about. According to Henry Miller’s
account of it, it showed among other things some fairly detailed shots of a woman
defecating. (Author’s Footnote)
One can see how false this is if one extends it to cover ordinary crime. In an age like our
own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain
amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a
pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a
claim for the artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if
it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we
should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another KING
LEAR. And, after all, the worst crimes are not always the punishable ones. By
encouraging necrophilic reveries one probably does quite as much harm as by, say,
picking pockets at the races. 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. The one
does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a
wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what
purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves
to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be
possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the
public hangman. ’ Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the
implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.
Not, of course, that Dali’s autobiography, or his pictures, ought to be suppressed. Short of
the dirty postcards that used to be sold in Mediterranean seaport towns, it is doubtful
policy to suppress anything, and Dali’s fantasies probably cast useful light on the decay
of capitalist civilisation. But what he clearly needs is diagnosis. The question is not so
much WHAT he is as WHY he is like that. It ought not to be in doubt that his is a
diseased intelligence, probably not much altered by his alleged conversion, since genuine
penitents, or people who have returned to sanity, do not flaunt their past vices in that
complacent way. He is a symptom of the world’s illness. The important thing is not to
denounce him as a cad who ought to be horsewhipped, or to defend him as a genius who
ought not to be questioned, but to find out WHY he exhibits that particular set of
aberrations.
The answer is probably discoverable in his pictures, and those I myself am not competent
to examine. But I can point to one clue which perhaps takes one part of the distance. This
is the old-fashioned, over-omate Edwardian style of drawing to which Dali tends to revert
when he is not being Surrealist. Some of Dali’s drawings are reminiscent of Diirer, one
(p. 113) seems to show the influence of Beardsley, another (p. 269) seems to borrow
something from Blake. But the most persistent strain is the Edwardian one. When I
opened the book for the first time and looked at its innumerable marginal illustrations, I
was haunted by a resemblance which I could not immediately pin down. I fetched up at
the ornamental candlestick at the beginning of Part I (p. 7). What did this remind me of?
Finally I tracked it down. It reminded me of a large vulgar, expensively got-up edition of
Anatole France (in translation) which must have been published about 1914. That had
ornamental chapter headings and tailpieces after this style. Dali’s candlestick displays at
one end a curly fish-like creature that looks curiously familiar (it seems to be based on
the conventional dolphin), and at the other is the burning candle. This candle, which
recurs in one picture after another, is a very old friend. You will find it, with the same
picturesque gouts of wax arranged on its sides, in those phoney electric lights done up as
candlesticks which are popular in sham-Tudor country hotels. This candle, and the design
beneath it, convey at once an intense feeling of sentimentality. As though to counteract
this, Dali has spattered a quill-ful of ink all over the page, but without avail. The same
impression keeps popping up on page after page. The sign at the bottom of page 62, for
instance, would nearly go into PETER PAN. The figure on page 224, in spite of having
her cranium elongated in to an immense sausage-like shape, is the witch of the fairy-tale
books. The horse on page 234 and the unicorn on page 218 might be illustrations to
James Branch Cabell. The rather pansified drawings of youths on pages 97, 100 and
elsewhere convey the same impression. Picturesqueness keeps breaking in. Take away
the skulls, ants, lobsters, telephones and other paraphernalia, and every now and again
you are back in the world of Barrie, Rackham, Dunsany and WHERE THE RAINBOW
ENDS.
Curiously, enough, some of the naughty-naughty touches in Dali’s autobiography tie up
with the same period. When I read the passage I quoted at the beginning, about the
kicking of the little sister’s head, I was aware of another phantom resemblance. What was
it? Of course! RUTHLESS RHYMES FOR HEARTLESS HOMES, by Harry Graham.
Such rhymes were very popular round about 1912, and one that ran:
Poor little Willy is crying so sore, A sad little boy is he, For he’s broken his little sister’s
neck And he’ll have no jam for tea,
might almost have been founded on Dali’s anecdote. Dali, of course, is aware of his
Edwardian leanings, and makes capital out of them, more or less in a spirit of pastiche.
He professes an especial affection for the year 1900, and claims that every ornamental
object of 1900 is full of mystery, poetry, eroticism, madness, perversity, et. Pastiche,
however, usually implies a real affection for the thing parodied. It seems to be, if not the
rule, at any rate distinctly common for an intellectual bent to be accompanied by a non-
rational, even childish urge in the same direction. A sculptor, for instance, is interested in
planes and curves, but he is also a person who enjoys the physical act of mucking about
with clay or stone. An engineer is a person who enjoys the feel of tools, the noise of
dynamos and smell of oil. A psychiatrist usually has a leaning toward some sexual
aberration himself. Darwin became a biologist partly because he was a country gentleman
and fond of animals. It may be therefore, that Dali’s seemingly perverse cult of
Edwardian things (for example, his ‘discovery’ of the 1900 subway entrances) is merely
the symptom of a much deeper, less conscious affection. The innumerable, beautifully
executed copies of textbook illustrations, solemnly labelled LE ROSSIGNOL, UNE
MONTRE and so on, which he scatters all over his margins, may be meant partly as a
joke. The little boy in knickerbockers playing with a diabolo on page 103 is a perfect
period piece. But perhaps these things are also there because Dali can’t help drawing that
kind of thing because it is to that period and that style of drawing that he really belongs.
If so, his aberrations are partly explicable. Perhaps they are a way of assuring himself that
he is not commonplace. The two qualities that Dali unquestionably possesses are a gift
for drawing and an atrocious egoism. ‘At seven’, he says in the first paragraph of his
book, ‘I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since. ’
This is worded in a deliberately startling way, but no doubt it is substantially true. Such
feelings are common enough. ‘I knew I was a genius’, somebody once said to me, Tong
before I knew what I was going to be a genius about. ’ And suppose that you have nothing
in you except your egoism and a dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow; suppose
that your real gift is for a detailed, academic, representational style of drawing, your real
METIER to be an illustrator of scientific textbooks. How then do you become Napoleon?
There is always one escape: INTO WICKEDNESS. Always do the thing that will shock
and wound people. At five, throw a little boy off a bridge, strike an old doctor across the
face with a whip and break his spectacles — or, at any rate, dream about doing such
things. Twenty years later, gouge the eyes out of dead donkeys with a pair of scissors.
Along those lines you can always feel yourself original. And after all, it pays! It is much
less dangerous than crime. Making all allowance for the probable suppressions in Dali’s
autobiography, it is clear that he had not had to suffer for his eccentricities as he would
have done in an earlier age. He grew up into the corrupt world of the nineteen-twenties,
when sophistication was immensely widespread and every European capital swarmed
with aristocrats and RENTIERS who had given up sport and politics and taken to
patronising the arts. If you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back. A
phobia for grasshoppers — which a few decades back would merely have provoked a
snigger — was now an interesting ‘complex’ which could be profitably exploited. And
when that particular world collapsed before the German Anny, America was waiting.
You could even top it all up with religious conversion, moving at one hop and without a
shadow of repentance from the fashionable SALONS of Paris to Abraham’s bosom.
That, perhaps is the essential outline of Dali’s history. But why his aberrations should be
the particular ones they were, and why it should be so easy to ‘sell’ such horrors as
rotting corpses to a sophisticated public — those are questions for the psychologist and the
sociological critic. Marxist criticism has a short way with such phenomena as Surrealism.
They are ‘bourgeois decadence’ (much play is made with the phrases ‘corpse poisons’
and ‘decaying RENTIER class’), and that is that. But though this probably states a fact, it
does not establish a connection.
