Dali : Celebrated Artist or Artful Celebrity? : THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY: A Biography of Dali, By Meredith Etherington-Smith <i> (Random House: $35; 496 pp.)</i>

Salvador Dali was to art what T. Barnum was to the circus, a headline grabber with an impeccable sense of timing. On Sept. 2, 1941, a scant three months before Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into World War II, Salvador and Gala Dali hosted the Night in a Surrealist Forest Ball at the Del Monte Lodge, in Pebble Beach, Calif. According to Dali, who first proposed the idea to Herb Caen, the hotel’s director of public relations, the ultimate purpose of the affair was to raise money for the many artists who, because of the war, had been unable to leave France and were in desperate financial straits. After Caen accepted the proposal, Dali gave him a list of the things he would need to stage the event: 2,000 pine trees, 4,000 gunnysacks, 2 tons of old newspapers, 24 animal heads, 24 store-window mannequins, the largest bed in Hollywood, 2 truckloads of vegetables and fruit, including squash and melons, 12,000 shoes, a wrecked automobile and some wild animals. One of the animals, Dali explained, had to be a baby tiger. Among those attending the Ball, and thus presumably contributing to a war-relief effort, were the Hitchcocks, Sanfords and Vanderbilts, all of whom flew in from New York, and Hollywood figures such as Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Ginger Rogers, and Clark Gable. For Salvador Dali, the Night in a Surrealist Forest Ball was a smashing success not only because it added to his fame, but also because it enabled him to meet hundreds of potential patrons. Needless to say, not one penny went to help a European artist.

Meredith Etherington-Smith’s “The Persistence of Memory: A Biography of Dali,” is a rich and fairly thorough accounting of dramatic events such as these. She is at her best when she confines herself to the surface of Dali’s life. And what an extravagant and strangely dramatic surface it was. In order to impress Gala, who later became his wife, Dali shaved his armpits until they bled, tore holes in his shirt so the nipples were exposed and scented himself with a concoction of fish glue and cow dung (a scatological current runs throughout his life and art). While Etherington-Smith offers a rather bland retelling of this well-known story, she does in other parts of the book offer new information about Dali’s life; he may have slept with his mother as well as his sister, Ana Maria. But impresarios, not to mention one so eccentric and cunning as Dali, have a way of eluding the biographer, and leaving the reader hungry for more. Dali is no exception; and this biography, the first since his death in 1989, tells us enough to whet our appetite, but it doesn’t quite satisfy our thirst.

The problem with “The Persistence of Memory” is that Etherington-Smith approaches Dali’s life from the middle distance. While she is very good in conveying something of his life as a student at the Residencia de Estudiantes, in Madrid, where his fellow classmates were Luis Bunuel and Federico Garcia Lorca, she begins losing her way when Dali gets to Paris, and is welcomed by the Surrealist poets and painters. Here, Etherington-Smith shows her limitations as a biographer. She is good when she is dealing with small groups of people who are not related. The intricacies of family and history presently exceed her grasp. However, because she doesn’t effectively deal with the changing and often volatile relationships Dali had with other major figures, such as Pablo Picasso, a fellow Catalan, and Andre Breton, the founder of the Surrealist movement, as well as an early supporter and eventual enemy of Dali, she is unable to locate her subject in a larger, historical context. In doing so, she fails to answer a major question: Why is Dali important? Or is he simply someone we are curious about?

In front of the large canvas of history, Etherington-Smith shows little understanding of Surrealism or Dali’s relationship to the Surrealists, both as a group and as individual artists, how much he owes to the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico and Yves Tanguy, for example. She characterizes Andre Breton as a “curious man.” Since Breton made an anagram, “Avida Dollar,” out of Dali’s name, one suspects that Etherington-Smith doesn’t want to take Breton too seriously, because his dismissal might further taint her already tainted subject. And when it comes to looking closely at Dali, the complex relationship between his life and art, Etherington-Smith tends to make only the most simple and ultimately reductive connections. Like one of his melting watches, Dali seems to have slipped right through the author’s fingers.

Salvador Dali was born twice. The first Salvador Dali was born on Oct. 21, 1901, and died on Aug. 1, 1903, at the age of 21 months. The second Salvador Dali, who became a flamboyant artist with an immense handlebar mustache, was born in the town of Figueres (Spain) on May 11, 1904--nine months and 10 days after his brother’s death--and died in a clinic there on Jan. 23, 1989.

According to Dali, his brother’s death haunted him throughout his life, particularly since mother referred to her dead firstborn as a “genius” and often took him to see his brother’s grave and the headstone that bore his name. Clearly, eccentric behavior was common among a number of people in Dali’s family, and he was by no means the only one who was coldly out of touch when it came to the feelings of others. As he told the writer, Andre Parinaud, in his biography: “The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali”: “All the eccentricities which I commit, all the incoherent displays are the tragic fixity of my life. I wish to prove to myself that I am not the dead brother, but the living one. As in the myth of Castor and Pollux, in killing my brother, I have gained immortality for myself.”

Dali’s unequivocal statement about his “immortality” reveals a lot about the size of his ego. However, Dali was no run-of-the-mill deluded egotist. By claiming that he is immortal because he killed his brother, the “genius” who was already dead when he was born, Dali suggests something chilling about how he saw other human beings; their only purpose was to serve him.

While Etherington-Smith quotes Dali’s outrageous claim in her biography, she fails to see anything of deeper significance in what he says. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that one of the origins of Dali’s interest in trompe l’oeil or double images, which are like Chinese boxes, one inside another, may be rooted in a compensatory response; he knew that he was inhabiting a space also inhabited by the ghost of his dead brother. In this sense, Dali didn’t kill his brother, as he would lead us to believe. Rather, in making the double images a signature aspect of his art, he repeatedly unearths his brother and props him before us.

Images of dissolution and decay (the melting watches, the bodies buttressed up by crutches, the empty eye sockets) are constant features of Dali’s emotionally brittle work. The author also doesn’t recognize that Dali’s reliance on tricks of perspective finally undermined his art. He became increasingly content to demonstrate his technical virtuosity, rather than attempting to explore perceptual states that link seeing and thinking. Dali’s paintings are full of theatrics, but they convey very little feeling. Instead of developing into an artist who goes beyond all our expectations, as Picasso or, closer to home, Jackson Pollock surely did, Dali became obsessive and repetitive. In the last decades of his life, he painted corny religious paintings that had more to do with what visual drama he could concoct than with any expression of faith.

At the same time, Etherington-Smith is too often satisfied with underscoring what she believes are cause-and-effect relationships. One of Dali’s only childhood friends, Joan Butxaques, (Buxtaques literally means “pockets”), wore a suit with many pockets sewn onto it. Dali, was by his own admission, deeply attracted to this boy. The author concludes that Dali’s memory of Joan in his suit is the basis of his “obsession with pockets and drawers in furniture.” This reading of the relationship between Dali’s life and art is too reductive to be taken seriously; it makes the artist into a sensitive robot.

Near the beginning of her book, Etherington-Smith states that throughout his life Dali had an aversion to being touched, particularly when it was in the form of sexual intimacy (something Dali has in common with Latoya Jackson and Andy Warhol). A few chapters later, and without further explanation, she blithely states that his wife, Gala, learned how to sexually satisfy Dali without touching him.

After we learn that the untouchable Dali seems to have found the perfect sexual partner in Gala, Etherington-Smith documents his long and substantial affair with one of his patrons, Edward James. This was years after Dali had already repeatedly rejected the advances of the poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, who was both a schoolmate and friend. Finally, she dutifully reports that Henry Miller and Anais Nin, who were guests at the house of Caresse Crosby, where Dali and Gali were also staying, were annoyed by the sight of them always cuddling on the couch. If the reader finds this a trifle confusing, it is because Etherington-Smith doesn’t even hazard a guess as to what in Dali allowed him to embrace these disparate forms of behavior. The goal of Surrealist art and poetry may be the juxtaposition of incommensurables, but Etherington-Smith seems at times to be trying to outdo even the Surrealists. Meanwhile, the reader is left wondering what thread or threads hold together all these disparate people, which Dali seemed to effortlessly embody.

Etherington-Smith’s lack of perspective makes this book seem in places like fiction, hilarious fiction at that. Of course, Dali would have liked this. He was a complex character who deliberately encouraged contradictory views. From a very early age he was stubborn and willful, his behavior outrageous and demanding. He believed he was a real artist, but he wasn’t. He was, as anyone who has read his books on himself and art knows, entertaining, obnoxious, and self-serving.

Dali’s estimation of Picasso falls under the category of self-serving: “The only thing he never pulled off was a real painting.” As a type, Dali isn’t all that unique. One only has to think of contemporary artist-impresarios, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons to name the most obvious, and their insatiable quest for attention. Like Warhol, who is known as the Prince of Pop, Dali became synonymous with Surrealism. And yet, Dali was a late arriver on the scene, and, if anything, he drew attention to a movement that was showing signs of exhaustion by trivializing, as well as theatricalizing, its most obvious features: outrageous juxtapositions, displays of irrationality, and well-planned out, provocative events. But Dali betrayed the original tenets of Surrealism by replacing Breton’s passion, which was shared by many others, to shake society out of its complacency with something quite the opposite; he tried to fulfill complacent society’s need to be titillated and entertained. Whereas Surrealism and Dadaism, which preceded it, began because of a number of individuals’ moral outrage and utter disgust over the immense toll of World War I--the destruction, madness, and death that swept through much of Europe, though not Spain, which was neutral--Dali was an amoral opportunist who used Surrealism to advance his career.

Dali made work which is important for being memorable. Rather than being a great artist, Dali was a talented and, at times, inventive draftsman who mistook his talent for genius. He became arrogant to the point where he lost sight of what he was and wasn’t doing. Being famous and rich were more important to him than anything else, a sure sign that an artist is headed for, at best, minor status.

Etherington-Smith is unable to zero in or step back far enough from Dali for us to see him more fully and clearly. She tends to glide over the many repulsive aspects of his character, while in other instances she seems to be taken in by his disingenuousness. Picasso painted “Guernica,” while Dali began to vigorously defend Franco and his forces when he realized who would win the Spanish Civil War. Famous for his handlebar mustache, he once claimed that he didn’t know why people recognized him on the street.

The sad fact is that Dali is a tragic figure whose tragedy doesn’t inspire a great deal of empathy. Like Andy Warhol, Dali was far too successful and popular for us to think that maybe he wasn’t such a happy or reasonably contented man after all. Etherington-Smith is too much of a fan to probe too far beyond the glittering surface. She doesn’t deal too deeply with just those sides of Dali we want to know about; the sides he kept hidden. Until someone puts a fuller, more complex and revealing picture of Dali together, this biography will have to do. It is full of both entertaining and disquieting glimpses into one of this Century’s truly eccentric characters.