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-ornate
Edwardian style of drawing to which Dali tends to revert when he is not
being Surrealist. Some of Dali's drawings are reminiscent of D?rer, 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
quillful 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, 'long 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
M?TIER 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
&nbs
p; 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 Army, 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. One would still like to know WHY Dali's leaning was towards
necrophilia (and not, say, homosexuality), and WHY the RENTIERS and the
aristocrats would buy his pictures instead of hunting and making love
like their grandfathers. Mere moral disapproval does not get one any
further. But neither ought one to pretend, in the name of 'detachment',
that such pictures as 'Mannequin rotting in a taxicab' are morally
neutral. They are diseased and disgusting, and any investigation ought to
start out from that fact.
RAFFLES AND MISS BLANDISH (1944)
Nearly half a century after his first appearance, Raffles, 'the amateur
cracksman', is still one of the best-known characters in English
fiction. Very few people would need telling that he played cricket for
England, had bachelor chambers in the Albany and burgled the Mayfair
houses which he also entered as a guest. Just for that reason he and his
exploits make a suitable background against which to examine a more
modern crime story such as NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH. Any such choice
is necessarily arbitrary--I might equally well have chosen ARS?NE LUPIN
for instance--but at any rate NO ORCHIDS and the Raffles books [Note,
below] have the common quality of being crime stories which play the
limelight on the criminal rather than the policeman. For sociological
purposes they can be compared. NO ORCHIDS is the 1939 version of
glamorized crime, RAFFLES the 1900 version. What I am concerned with
here is the immense difference in moral atmosphere between the two
books, and the change in the popular attitude that this probably
implies.
[Note: RAFFLES, A THIEF IN THE NIGHT and MR. JUSTICE RAFFLES, by E. W.
Hornung. The third of these is definitely a failure, and only the first
has the true Raffles atmosphere. Hornung wrote a number of crime stories,
usually with a tendency to take the side of the criminal. A successful
book in rather the same vein as RAFFLES is STIUGAREE. (Author's footnote.)]
At this date, the charm of RAFFLES is partly in the period atmosphere and
partly in the technical excellence of the stories. Hornung was a very
conscientious and on his level a very able writer. Anyone who cares for
sheer efficiency must admire his work. However, the truly dramatic thing,
about Raffles, the thing that makes him a sort of byword even to this day
(only a few weeks ago, in a burglary case, a magistrate referred to the
prisoner as 'a Raffles in real life'), is the fact that he is a
GENTLEMAN. Raffles is presented to us and this is rubbed home in
countless scraps of dialogue and casual remarks--not as an honest man
who has gone astray, but as a public-school man who has gone astray. His
remorse, when he feels any, is almost purely social; he has disgraced
'the old school', he has lost his right to enter 'decent society', he has
forfeited his amateur status and become a cad. Neither Raffles nor Bunny
appears to feel at all strongly that stealing is wrong in itself, though
Raffles does once justify himself by the casual remark that 'the
distribution of property is all wrong anyway'. They think of themselves
not as sinners but as renegades, or simply as outcasts. And the moral
code of most of us is still so close to Raffles' own that we do feel his
situation to be an especially ironical one. A West End club man who is
really a burglar! That is almost a story in itself, is it not? But how if
it were a plumber or a greengrocer who was really a burglar? Would there
be anything inherently dramatic in that? No although the theme of the
'double life', of respectability covering crime, is still there. Even
Charles Peace in his clergyman's dog-collar, seems somewhat less of a
hypocrite than Raffles in his Zingari blazer.
Raffles, of course, is good at all games, but it is peculiarly fitting
that his chosen game should be cricket. This allows not only of endless
analogies between his cunning as a slow bowler and his cunning as a
burglar, but also helps to define the exact nature of his crime. Cricket
is not in reality a very popular game in England--it is nowhere so
popular as football, for instance--but it gives expression to a
well-marked trait in the English character, the tendency to value 'form'
or 'style' more highly than success. In the eyes of any true
cricket-lover it is possible for an innings of ten runs to be 'better'
(i.e. more elegant) than an innings of a hundred runs: cricket is also
one of the very few games in which the amateur can excel the
professional. It is a game full of forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic
changes of fortune, and its rules are so defined that their
interpretation is partly an ethical business. When Larwood, for instance,
practised bodyline bowling in Australia he was not actually breaking any
rule: he was merely doing something that was 'not cricket'. Since
cricket takes up a lot of time and is rather an expensive game to play,
it is predominantly an upper-class game, but for the whole nation it is
bound up with such concepts as 'good form', 'playing the game', etc., and
it has declined in popularity just as the tradition of 'don't hit a man
when he's down' has declined. It is not a twentieth-century game, and
nearly all modern-minded people dislike it. The Nazis, for instance, were
at pains to discourage cricket, which had gained a certain footing in
Germany before and after the last war. In making Raffles a cricketer as
well as a burglar, Hornung was not merely providing him with a plausible
disguise; he was also drawing the sharpest moral contrast that he was
able to imagine.
RAFFLES, no less than GREAT EXPECTATIONS or LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR, is a
story of snobbery, and it gains a great deal from the precariousness of
Raffles's social position. A cruder writer would have made the 'gentleman
burglar' a member of the peerage, or at least a baronet. Raffles,
however, is of upper-middle-class origin and is only accepted by the
aristocracy because of his personal charm. 'We were in Society but not of
it', he says to Bunny towards the end of the book; and 'I was asked
about
for my cricket'. Both he and Bunny accept the values of 'Society'
unquestioningly, and would settle down in it for good if only they could
get away with a big enough haul. The ruin that constantly threatens them
is all the blacker because they only doubtfully 'belong'. A duke who has
served a prison sentence is still a duke, whereas a mere man about town,
if once disgraced, ceases to be 'about town' for evermore. The closing
chapters of the book, when Raffles has been exposed and is living under
an assumed name, have a twilight of the gods feeling, a mental atmosphere
rather similar to that of Kipling's poem, 'Gentleman Rankers':
Yes, a trooper of the forces--Who has run his own six horses! etc.
Raffles now belongs irrevocably to the 'cohorts of the damned'. He can
still commit successful burglaries, but there is no way back into
Paradise, which means Piccadilly and the M.C.C. According to the
public-school code there is only one means of rehabilitation: death in
battle. Raffles dies fighting against the Boers (a practised reader would
foresee this from the start), and in the eyes of both Bunny and his
creator this cancels his crimes.
Both Raffles and Bunny, of course, are devoid of religious belief, and
they have no real ethical code, merely certain rules of behaviour which
they observe semi-instinctively. But it is just here that the deep moral
difference between RAFFLES and NO ORCHIDS becomes apparent. Raffles and
Bunny, after all, are gentlemen, and such standards as they do have are
not to be violated. Certain things are 'not done', and the idea of doing
them hardly arises. Raffles will not, for example, abuse hospitality. He
will commit a burglary in a house where he is staying as a guest, but the
victim must be a fellow-guest and not the host. He will not commit
murder [Note, below], and he avoids violence wherever possible and prefers
to carry out his robberies unarmed. He regards friendship as sacred, and
is chivalrous though not moral in his relations with women. He will take
extra risks in the name of 'sportsmanship', and sometimes even for
aesthetic reasons. And above all, he is intensively patriotic. He
celebrates the Diamond Jubilee ('For sixty years, Bunny, we've been ruled
over by absolutely the finest sovereign the world has ever seen') by
dispatching to the Queen, through the post, an antique gold cup which he
has stolen from the British Museum. He steals, from partly political
motives, a pearl which the German Emperor is sending to one of the
enemies of Britain, and when the Boer War begins to go badly his one
thought is to find his way into the fighting line. At the front he
unmasks a spy at the cost of revealing his own identity, and then dies
gloriously by a Boer bullet. In this combination of crime and patriotism
he resembles his near-contemporary Ars?ne Lupin, who also scores off the
German Emperor and wipes out his very dirty past by enlisting in the
Foreign Legion.
[Note: Actually Raffles does kill one man and is more or less
consciously responsible for the death of two others. But all three of
them are foreigners and have behaved in a very reprehensible manner. He
also, on one occasion, contemplates murdering a blackmailer. It is
however, a fairly well-established convention in crime stories that
murdering a blackmailer 'doesn't count'. (Author's footnote, 1945.)]
It is important to note that by modern standards Raffles's crimes are
very petty ones. Four hundred pounds worth of jewellery seems to him an
excellent haul. And though the stories are convincing in their physical
detail, they contain very little sensationalism--very few corpses,
hardly any blood, no sex crimes, no sadism, no perversions of any kind.
It seems to be the case that the crime story, at any rate on its higher
levels, has greatly increased in blood-thirstiness during the past twenty