I’m not sure she was a friend. All he says is she was in our group. Frankly, she could be anything from a teen to middle-aged.
Yes, and? It still doesn’t tell us her age.
Anyway, here’s how I read that passage. Some admiring acquaintance of his of unknown age was irking him by violating his physical space and instead of telling her to back off like an adult, he bottled it up until she caressed his foot and he spazzed out. That’s in keeping with his personality.
And that’s not consistent with what Jones’ description makes the unaware reader think, no?
Especially with the remark “And many more such violent and disturbing descriptions” when uh, no, Orwell does not describe anything else like that. Those are the three incidents of violence.
I mean unless you consider that anecdote of Dali throwing an omelette on the floor, or Orwell criticising Dali for “Till well into adult life he keeps up the practice of masturbation, and likes to do this, apparently, in front of a looking-glass”
I’m going to say ‘yes.’
They may or may not be a good painter. But putting pigment on a canvass with the intention of displaying it for an aesthetic effect qualifies, in my book.
I like Dali’s paintings, and it is interesting to find myself not disagreeing with a lot of what Orwell said.
Of course it’s also interesting to read Orwell’s comments and see the direct and dated homophobia in Orwell’s words.
As much as we can separate people from their statements and lives outside of their art, that’s useful. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t be able to enjoy much that was made before 1975, and a lot fewer things after.
But from his Surrealist paintings and photographs the two things that stand our are sexual perversity and necrophilia. Sexual objects and symbols — some of them well known, like our old friend the high-heeled slipper, others, like the crutch and the cup of warm milk, patented by Dali himself — recur over and over again, and there is a fairly well-marked excretory motif as well. In his painting, Le Jeu Lugubre, he says, ‘the drawers bespattered with excrement were painted with such minute and realistic complacency that the whole little Surrealist group was anguished by the question: Is he coprophagic or not?’ Dali adds firmly that he is not, and that he regards this aberration as ‘repulsive’, but it seems to be only at that point that his interest in excrement stops. Even when he recounts the experience of watching a woman urinate standing up, he has to add the detail that she misses her aim and dirties her shoes. It is not given to any one person to have all the vices, and Dali also boasts that he is not homosexual, but otherwise he seems to have as good an outfit of perversions as anyone could wish for.
Fuck off, Orwell
Only the daftest of fools believe everything they read on the internet. But by all means, correct the record. But you amended it by misrepresenting the very passage to which you linked, and that was what I was calling you on. Nothing more. Most notably, he’s says nothing about being drunk during the incident. I get you have a dog in this fight and it’s the one opposite Jones’. I do not.
Fine. I merely related what my interpretation of what that anecdote really represented, what I think it most likely means anyway. Sure the anecdote does not directly rule out all of that, or prove my interpretation, but there is I think no justification to draw a direct straight line between it and what happened aged 5 and claim that Dali shows a pattern of violence towards children throughout his entire life.
Gotta love anyone who gave Harpo Marx the gifts of a barbed wire strung harp, and a 22 page script for a new film.
I suspect this Josh Jones has not read Secret Life or any of the more reliable biographies of Dalí. He almost exclusively references Orwell’s essay for the incidents in question.
Let’s just say that I really really do not like people who participate in these games of chinese whispers.
That’s 99% of the internet, the great democratizer of publishing. As for Orwell, he and Dalí’s problems are long since over. Taking a side in their petty feud seems…anachronistic. But to each their own.
Based on a snap judgement of the headline and with no real facts (it works for the president) to back up my assumption, here I was all set to crank up a good righteous indignation, and now you tell me the guy was actually a creep? Bait and switch, Mark, bait and switch! 
also @Robert_Cook, @noahdjango
Which Orwell was perfectly aware of and points out in his essay. He also argues that it doesn’t matter - that this is what Dali would like to have done.
(as the linked article makes clear also).
I would (more pedantically) say it is what Dali wanted to tell us he had done.
Either way, the essay makes the proposition that regardless of whether Dali did this stuff or not, the fact that he chose to publish an auto-biography saying he did tells us something about Dali and maybe we should spend some time trying to find out what that is.
Orwell states his opinion that Dali is a despicable human being and a great artist. He argues that the fact that he is a great artist should not preclude criticism of him as a human being which would seem to be a fairly apropos sort of remark given recent disclosures.
He also says that the nature of Dali’s deficiencies as a human being (as Orwell sees them) is worth exploring because we might find out something useful about society as a whole:
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 rentiers 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.
Hardly surprising that he only references Orwell’s essay since it is that essay he is writing about. It’s not a review of Dali autobiographies.
As for why bring it up now (and it’s really not about picking sides in a ‘feud’), it’s reasonable to bring it up because it is a previous attempt at solving the conundrum of how to deal with the work produced by flawed human beings which a number of people are apparently currently struggling with.
Whether Dali actually was as terrible a person as Orwell considers him or whether he did what Dali claims he did or not is irrelevant to that discussion.
Nitpicking over details of summaries of incidents in an article which links to the actual texts in question and accurately summarises the gist of both is what strikes me as petty. 
Dalí considered himself a “surrealist work of art”, a sort of living performance piece. Whether it was publishing fake stories about himself designed to repulse people, making up invented languages or accents to use during interviews, or playing a flaming piano, he knew the value of self-promotion. He lived to shock the public, and it worked!
Exactly, and Orwell’s essay shows he is well aware of that and suggests it would be worth finding out:
a) why Dali chose the methods he did; and
b) why rich people liked to buy his paintings given the methods Dali chose to ‘shock’.
Orwell’s own subsequent examination of Dalí has not aged well to say the least, but he is approximately correct that the flaws of the artist, or anyone who has notable impact on culture and history, merit examination.
I was stating an observation, not venturing any opinion on it. And I think you’re correct, but Jones’ own article could afford to be clearer that it’s exclusively preoccupied with Orwell’s view of Dalí and not Dalí’s own life, as the ample confusion in this thread demonstrates.
I was directly addressing @Fang who did seem to be weighing in on the feud itself. I wasn’t addressing Josh Jones.
This seems loaded. Others can speak for themselves, but I never called Dalí a terrible person. I did call him a severely troubled man, which I freely admit is my opinion based on what I’ve read of his singular life, and I further suggested a source in support of the opinion so others could come to their own conclusions about what sort of man he was.
That the discussion was not the topic of the original post does not change the fact that it arose in the course of this thread. I see nothing wrong with participating in that digression. Josh Jones does not dictate the topics of discussion on the BBS, even in a thread about an article he posted.
Perhaps. But I saw someone linking to a passage in the autobiography and inaccurately summarizing it, and my inner pedant rebelled. Best possible use of time? Probably not.
Yes, Orwell must not have known the depths of Dali’s fascism.
Orwell does make the point in his essay that whether or not Dali actually did the things he mentioned, what’s of interest is that Dali is saying them and thus is comfortable even pretending he did these things. Orwell’s take, which in my opinion has merit, is that this says something about Dali’s character whether or not the events actually happened.
It’s become apparent to me that the two discussions in the thread are being inadvertently conflated. 
I don’t know why everyone’s wasting their time on this when the real scandal is Mencken’s take on Klee.
