Dali House

Somehow on September 15, 2001, The Guardian had the bad timing and/or the gall, and the space, to print a longish essay by John Sutherland on a then-upcoming show at the Tate Modern. It’s excellent, though, as was the headline, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak surrealist”. Some excerpts:

The word “surreal” is common linguistic property. You’ll find it even in the mouths of citizens who rarely go to art galleries and wouldn’t know a Tanguy from a tangerine, or Man Ray from a fish with a long spiked tail. It has become one of those all-purpose “intensifiers” for situations where other words fail. “Surreal,” one mutters, “bloody surreal”.

Useful as it may be, “surreal” is, on closer inspection, something of a misnomer. It comes from the French surréalisme, which translates into English as “super-realism”. Or, as the Spice Girls would have put it, something “reelly reelly reel”.

But surrealism – as a style – is not hyper-realistic or ultra-realistic. Just the opposite, in fact. In real life you won’t find lobsters on telephone cradles, clock-faces that flop over table-ends like soft-fried eggs, or beautiful women whose naughty bits turn out to be cellos.

Later than much of Europe, Britain began to wake up to surrealism in the summer of 1936, with the International Surrealist Exhibition at London’s New Burlington Gallery. Some 40,000 people came to see it over the three weeks it was on show. On the opening day, the crush was so great that traffic in Piccadilly was brought to a standstill.

All the big foreign names were there. The event was immortalised by Salvador Dali giving a lecture in a deep-sea diving suit. Famously, he had to be extracted, suffocating, from his metal helmet with pliers. That image was lodged in the British mind as a defining icon. The press spluttered with universal indignation at this “practical joke” on the British people. Higher Froggie nonsense. War breaks out in Spain and what do we get? A Spaniard playing silly buggers.

It was a gross misunderstanding. Surrealism in the pre-war years was not merely an art movement. It had political muscle. Walter Benjamin, the great Marxist critic, hailed its rupture of traditional connections as revolutionary. Surrealism was a necessary jolt to the bourgeois world. It disconnected things.

Dali, in his less frivolous moments, proclaimed paranoia and nightmare the truly creative and truth-telling mental conditions. These were the rich codes of the unconscious in which surrealism spoke. Breton called the artists’ language “psychic automatism”. You can track Freud and his “Interpretation of Dreams” everywhere in surrealism’s snow. And, like Freud, they were obsessed with sex and death.

Artist Roland Penrose and the anarchist critic Herbert Read (motto: “To hell with culture!”) were the organisers of the 1936 exhibition. But surrealism, like Marxism, never took root in the UK. Not English, as Mr Podsnap would say. Nor would it find a home in the countries of the fascist axis where it was firmly placed in the category of Goebbels’ entartete Kunst, degenerate art. Nicht Deutsch, either.

Britain, as in so many things, would not be ready for surrealism until it was safely passé. It seeped in via two unlikely conduits: dance halls and BBC radio comedy. At the climax of a 1956 stomp with Mick Mulligan’s Magnolia Jazz Band, George Melly did his version of “Frankie and Johnny”. Clad entirely in black, the singer stalked across the stage, carrying on his shoulder a black trombone case as the coffin, while Mick played a cod version of the death march.
Years later, when I read Melly’s autobiography, I realised that his act had been a conscious homage to Dali in his diving suit. Young Melly had appointed himself the apostle of British surrealism.

David Gascoyne’s career is a literary fable. [Pictured at right, he died two months after the Guardian published this article, age 85.] In 1932, still a schoolboy, he published his first book of poems. On his meagre royalties he absconded to Paris on his 17th birthday. He became friends with Paul Eluard and enemies with Jean Cocteau. He sat at the feet of Ernst and Aragon.
He hit it off with Dali, stayed in his studio, and wrote him a poem in the surrealist style. Before he was 20 he published the pioneering treatise “A Short Study of Surrealism” and translated Dali’s “Conquest of the Irrational” and Breton’s “What Is Surrealism?” He was a one-man propaganda campaign for surrealism in Britain.

Gascoyne returned to England for the International Exhibition in 1936, and it was he who wielded the life-saving pliers on Dali’s diving helmet. But he concluded that the British were “as scared of surrealism as they are of sex”.

He returned to Paris in 1947. Alas, avant-gardism was a war casualty. Surrealism was no longer the dernier cri. American abstract expressionism was the coming thing. More drugs, less poetry, breakdowns, ulcers. He returned, wrecked, to his parents’ home in the Isle of Wight in the 1960s and thence into the local asylum.
There, one day, a woman therapist read the patients a poem, “September Sun”. “I wrote that,” Gascoyne muttered. They married in 1975. Judy Lewis, it emerged, had kept house for Bob Dylan during his surrealist, acid-rock, Isle-of- Wight-concert phase. Paranoia could not have invented it.

The Gascoynes live, serenely, on their island. I visited them. Few do, I suspect. Surrealists, like other prophets, are without honour in their own country. I shall be angry if Gascoyne does not have place of honour at the opening of Desire Unbound. But I fear the next time he makes the headlines will be in this paper’s obituary page. Then, perhaps, we shall recognise our great surrealist’s achievement.