The Book of the Dead

dagger in his belt, he held two white Russian wolfhounds on a leash with one hand and a billiard cue in the other. He looked fantastic, but it nearly killed him. Dali hadn’t taken into account the fact that he couldn’t breathe inside his helmet. He started the lecture but soon began to run out of oxygen. The audience didn’t know he was suffocating, and Gala had gone out for coffee. He collapsed and his friends tried to hammer the bolts open on the helmet, to no avail. Finally, when Dali was nearly dead, a worker was found who freed him with a wrench.

This clownish side to Dali annoyed the other Surrealists and, in the run up to war, his infantile fantasies quickly lost their charm: “I often dreamed of Hitler as a woman. His flesh, which I had imagined whiter than white, ravished me.” When he declared his support for Franco in 1939, the other Surrealists expelled him. His response was typical: “There is one difference between the surrealists and me. I am a surrealist.”

The other thing that angered his colleagues was his (or rather, Gala’s) knack for making money. Andre Breton had already christened him “Avida Dollars” (an anagram meaning “I want dollars”) and Dali himself confessed to “a pure, vertical, mystical, gothic love of cash.” The next two decades saw him transform himself into the first and biggest ever artist-celebrity, living in New York, working with Walt Disney and Hitchcock, designing the Chupa Chups lollipop wrapper, and appearing in a host of TV advertisements. He even created his own range of merchandise: artificial fingernails containing mirrors; Bakelite furniture that could be molded to fit the body; shoes fitted with springs to increase the pleasure of walking; and dresses with anatomical paddings to make women look more attractive. Outrageously, he also signed sheets of blank artists’ paper for $10 each (there may be as many as fifty thousand still in circulation). By the mid-1960s, Dali had achieved his dream of universal popularity: He was one of the most recognizable 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 Dali, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dali.

In 1958, when being interviewed by Mike Wallace for 60 Minutes, Dali had pronounced: “Dali 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 “Dali himself” is his greatest work of art, for once, he isn’t joking. The waxed mustache, the staring eyes, the cape and cane, the dramatic rolling of his r’s: Dali’s whole life had become a performance.

The messianic braggadocio didn’t last: Dali’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 to 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, Dali had never really left home at all. Despite the extravagance of his created “Dali” 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, Dali 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. Dali 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 a secret doubt.” This is perfect for Dali, the boy who never escaped the shadow cast by his older dead namesake, but it might apply equally well to Leonardo, Andersen, 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 overcompensation we might be living in a world without the Mona Lisa, psychoanalysis, space travel, or the machine on which these words were written.

CHAPTER TWO Happy-go-lucky Epicurus—Benjamin Franklin—Edward Jenner—Mary Seacole—Moll Cutpurse—Richard Feynman

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)

History 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. Far from indulging in orgies and banquets, Epicurus lived on barley bread and fruit, with cheese as a special treat on only feast days. Celibate himself, he discouraged sexual relations among his followers, and his students were allowed no more than a pint of wine a day.

But Epicurus had the misfortune to live in the highly competitive golden age of Greek philosophy, where he found himself up against the Academy, founded by Plato, and the porch (stoa) of the Stoics—both articulate and well-organized opponents. The mud they slung at him more than two millennia ago has stuck firm.

He was born into an Athenian family but grew up on the island of Samos, a mile off the coast of what is now Turkey. He was thirty-five before he arrived in Athens, taking a house with a large garden and setting up a school. He had brought his pupils with him, and unlike the Academicians and Stoics, with their very public disputations, the Epicureans kept themselves to themselves. Inscribed over the entrance arch were the alluring words: “Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure.” You can see how the rumors started.

In fact, the Epicurean definition of pleasure is quite precise. It is simply “the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul,” or ataraxia. This tranquil state is to be attained by “sober reasoning” and most specifically not by “an unbroken succession of drinking bouts and of revelry,” “sexual lust,” and “the enjoyment of fish and other delicacies.”

Epicurus’s idea of “the good life” was also not what you’d expect. “It is impossible,” he wrote, “to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly.” Decent behavior depends on a decent standard of living. Asked to name the bare necessities, most of us would list food, water, warmth, and shelter, but Epicurus insisted on a few more: freedom, thought, and friendship. “Of all the things,” he wrote, “which contribute to a blessed life, none is more important, more fruitful, than friendship.” Food and wine are pleasurable mainly because they are sociable. “Eating or drinking without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf.”

For a good meal with friends, something you can well do without (“fish and other delicacies” aside) is fear. “It is better to be free of fear while lying upon a pallet, than to have a golden couch and a rich table and be full of trouble.” The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche observed: “Wisdom hasn’t come a step further since Epicurus, but has often gone many thousands of steps backward.” One such backward step is to forget Epicurus’s core idea: