Salvador Dalí

"Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí" is a review of the Spanish painter's autobiography, published in New York in 1942 and referred to by George Orwell simply as Dalí's Life. It is four hundred quarto pages long and illustrated throughout with reproductions of the Surrealist paintings, and Orwell begins by warning the reader what kind of document it is. Some of the incidents in it are flatly incredible, others rearranged and romanticised, and the ordinariness of daily life has been cut out of it entirely. Dalí is narcissistic by his own diagnosis, and the book, Orwell writes, is a strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight. He then says that this does not matter much for his purpose. Which episodes are true and which imagined hardly signifies; the point is that these are the things Salvador Dalí would have liked to do.

What follows is a list, and it is the part of the essay people remember. At six, in the excitement over the appearance of Halley's comet, Dalí describes catching sight of his three-year-old sister crawling through a doorway, stopping, and kicking her in the head as though it had been a ball, then running on carried away with what he calls a delirious joy. A year earlier he had thrown another small boy off a suspension bridge. At twenty-nine, by his own account, he knocked a girl down and trampled her until she had to be pulled bleeding out of his reach. At about five he kept a dying bat in a tin pail, found it the next morning covered in ants, and bit it almost in half with the ants still on it. As an adolescent he kept a girl who had fallen in love with him in a state of humiliation for five years, told her repeatedly that he would leave her at the end of them, and did. These are Orwell's summaries of Dalí's own tellings, and Orwell keeps the attribution visible throughout.

The pictures get the same treatment. Orwell picks out the necrophilia: the dead donkeys putrefying on grand pianos in the film Un Chien Andalou, whose eye sockets Dalí describes enlarging with scissors, and the faked photograph captioned "Mannequin rotting in a taxicab", over which Dalí notes that the snails crawling on the body are the edible Burgundy kind. He adds a footnote about L'Âge d'Or, which Dalí mentions without describing, quoting Henry Miller's account of what was in it. He also tracks the war years: no side taken in the Spanish Civil War, a turn towards the aristocracy and wealthy patrons including the Vicomte de Noailles, whom Dalí calls his Maecenas, a flight from France to Spain and then to America, and an ending in respectability, marriage and reconciliation with the Catholic Church.

Then the essay turns. Against all of it, Orwell writes, has to be set the fact that Dalí is a draughtsman of very exceptional gifts and, judging by the minuteness and sureness of the drawings, a very hard worker. He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud, and he has fifty times more talent than most of the people who would denounce his morals and jeer at his paintings. Both sets of facts are true at once, and Orwell says a reader ought to be able to hold them in one head. The rest of the essay is about why almost nobody does. On one side stands the art-hating Englishman who will grant Dalí nothing at all. On the other stands the admirer who treats any moral objection as proof that you lack an aesthetic sense.

His own proposal is diagnosis rather than denunciation, and he offers one clue he thinks he can follow. Underneath the Surrealism, Dalí keeps reverting to an over-ornate Edwardian style of drawing. Orwell chases the resemblance through the marginal illustrations until he places it: an expensively produced English edition of Anatole France from about 1914, with the same ornamental chapter headings, the same candle with picturesque gouts of wax. Take away the skulls, ants, lobsters and telephones, he writes, and you are back in the world of Barrie and Rackham. He notices the same thing in the anecdotes, which reminded him of Harry Graham's Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes, popular around 1912. The conclusion he draws is that a man whose real gift is for detailed academic drawing, and who intends to be Napoleon, has one escape available: into wickedness.