QI The Book of the Dead

Dalí had achieved his dream of universal popularity: he was one of the most recognisable people in the world and about as far away from his father’s modest ambition of turning him into an agricultural scientist as it was possible to imagine:
    Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dalí .
     
    In 1958, when being interviewed by Mike Wallace for 60 Minutes , Dalí had pronounced: ‘Dalí is immortal and will not die.’ It is a fascinating interview, despite the succession of preposterous statements (of which this is but one). What is revealing is not so much what he says but the fact that he refers to himself throughout in the third person. When he claims that ‘Dalí himself ’ is his greatest work of art, for once, he isn’t joking. Thewaxed moustache, the staring eyes, the cape and cane, the dramatic rolling of his ‘r’s: Dalí’s whole life had become a performance.
    The messianic braggadocio didn’t last: Dalí’s last years were tragic. He ended up in a stupor of clinical depression, ravaged by Parkinson’s disease and cold-shouldered by Gala. To visit her in the castle he had restored and furnished for her, she insisted he apply in writing. When she died, he took to his bed, which in 1984 he managed set on fire by short-circuiting the button he used to call for his nurse. Eventually, he stopped eating, talking and drawing completely and finally died of heart failure, aged eighty-four. He is buried in the crypt of his own Teatre-Museu (Theatre-Museum) in Figueres, very close to where he was born.
    In many ways, though, Dalí had never really left home at all. Despite the extravagance of his created ‘Dalí’ persona, he remained stuck in the pattern of his childhood: desperate to assert his identity, desperate to impress his father. For all the Freudian window-dressing of his art, Dalí didn’t really develop as an artist or a human being. He is not an artist to turn to if you want insight. Interestingly, he once met Freud (whom he often referred to as his real ‘father’) in London in 1938. The eighty-two-year-old psychologist watched him draw. ‘That boy looks like a fanatic,’ he remarked to a colleague. Dalí was, of course, delighted: he didn’t care what people said about him, only that they talked about him.

     
    We can be certain Freud didn’t intend it as a compliment. The best definition of fanatic as a psychological category comes from Aldous Huxley: ‘a man who consciously over-compensates asecret doubt’. This is perfect for Dalí, the boy who never escaped the shadow cast by his older dead namesake, but it might apply equally well to Leonardo, Andersen, Ada Lovelace or even Freud himself. The relentless drive to succeed, the need to become famous, the emotional withdrawal, the sexual hang-ups, all are present and correct. What was their shared secret doubt? Obviously, it adapts itself to the particular circumstances, but all doubted they were good enough to please the angry, absent or inadequate father who had dominated their formative years. It is one of the great paradoxes, but without those individual acts of over-compensation we might be living in a world without the Mona Lisa , psychoanalysis, space travel, or the machine on which these words are written.
    * Lime-burners heated chalk in a kiln to 1,100°C, to make quicklime, the main ingredient of mortar (the forerunner of cement) used in building.
    It was an important but badly paid and dangerous job. The dust could cause blindness or spontaneously combust, producing hideous burns. On top of that, carbon monoxide released by the process made the lime-burners dizzy. It was an easy matter to fall into the kiln and be incinerated.

CHAPTER TWO
     

Happy-go-lucky
     
     
    I have tried too, in my time, to be a philosopher;
but I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.
OLIVER EDWARDS in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)
     
    H istory records surprisingly few cheerful people. Philosophers, in particular, have the reputation for being about as miserable as comedians, but Epicurus (341–270 BC ) isn’t one of them. His poor reputation is of a very different kind, as the high priest of high living and sensual pleasure, the philosopher of the debauchee and the gourmand.
    Except that he wasn’t. So far from indulging in orgies and banquets, Epicurus lived on