You can tell a lot about a man by his moustache ...
I.
One of the things I like about Salvador Dalí is that, like Bataille, he really got under the skin of André Breton, who objected to his counter-revolutionary fascination (and flirtation) with fascism and his love of fame and fortune.
Another thing I like about Dalí, is that he also repulsed George Orwell; that talented mediocrity whom, as G. K. Chesterton rightly pointed out, is precisely the kind of person the English love best; a man of sound reason who speaks his mind in plain and simple language.
We find this mixture of common sense and candour - not to mention splenetic moralism - in Orwell's essay
Benefit of Clergy: a series of notes written on the great Spanish artist who had recently published his autobiography,
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942).
As we shall see, Orwell considered Dalí's text
flagrantly dishonest, seemingly unable to grasp that it was a surreal and fictionalised version of his life, rather than an attempt to write a truthful and accurate account. Dalí was perverting the genre of autobiography and playing with language in a darkly humorous manner, just as he played with paint on canvas.
II.
Actually, to be fair to Orwell, he does seem to understand that Dalí's text has been "rearranged and romanticised" and is more a "record of fantasy" than a genuine autobiography - it's just that he doesn't like it. He thinks it's a narcissistic book and a form of exhibitionism: "a strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight" - which is the worst kind of limelight there is in Orwell's homophobic imagination.
Its only value, says Orwell, is in revealing how far the "perversion of instinct" has gone within the modern world and he then lists several episodes from Dalí's life to illustrate this process of corruption: "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."
Well, maybe ... Or maybe it's the case that Dali writes these terrible things - like kicking his little sister in the head or throwing another young child off a bridge - not because they are what he secretly wanted to do, but so that he doesn't have to think of doing them any longer; maybe, as D. H. Lawrence suggests, we shed our sickness in books.
Interestingly, Orwell places masturbation alongside animal cruelty on his spectrum of corruption, as if choking the chicken and biting a dead bat in half are one and the same thing. Two things, he says, stand out from Dalí's paintings and photographs: sexual perversity and necrophilia - "and there is a fairly well-marked excretory motif as well".
It's true, of course, that Dalí - again like Bataille - was pornographically fixated on heterogeneous matter and that one can find plenty of unpleasant and disturbing elements in his work: shit-stained underwear, decomposing corpses, dead donkeys, and mannequins with huge snails crawling all over them. But Orwell makes no attempt to ask why this might be and to examine the role of base materialism within Surrealism.
All he wants to do is hold his nose and look away and that's not what one expects of a critic - even a left-leaning critic to whom such things are simply signs of bourgeois decadence.
III.
To his credit, however, Orwell does at this point in his essay spring something of a surprise on his readers by admitting that whilst Dalí is an antisocial flea who makes "a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and [human] decency", he is nevertheless "a draughtsman of very exceptional gifts". Orwell continues:
"Dalí 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."
That, I think, is true. But it's admirable of Orwell to concede such of someone he clearly despises and in so doing differentiate himself from those reactionary philistines who "flatly refuse to see any merit in Dalí whatever" and are incapable of admitting that "what is morally degraded can be aesthetically right".
Orwell doesn't stop here though: he also takes a pop at those devotees of Dalí who refuse to hear a word said against him or his work. If you say to such people 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."
Orwell concludes that this makes the question of obscenity almost impossible to discuss: "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's unfortunate, says Orwell: for 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."
IV.
In effect, says Orwell, Dalí's defenders are claiming a kind of benefit of clergy. In other words, the artist is thought to be "exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people [...] So long as you can paint well enough [...] all shall be forgiven you".
Personally, I rather like this idea: as someone who doesn't subscribe to the equality of all souls and universal rights - who thinks that exceptional people with exceptional tastes and talents should be allowed a certain licence - it doesn't offend me in the manner it does Orwell. I don't think individuals of genius should be allowed to get away with blue murder or ought never to be questioned. But nor do I think they should be subject to the same petty morality of the slave.
V.
In conclusion: I still dislike Orwell, but I agree with Jonathan Jones that his attempt in this essay on Dalí "to express the delicate possibility that art can be right and wrong, good and bad, a work of genius and a thing of shame", shows a certain courage and intellectual honesty on his part.
See:
Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, (Dial Press, 1942).
George Orwell, Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali (1944): click here to read online.
Jonathan Jones, 'Why George Orwell was right about Salvador Dalí', The Guardian (9 June 2009): click here to read online.
For another recent post on Dalí, click here.
