HIDDEN FACES—Salvador Dali—Dial ($3).
This week New England's latest flowering produced a veritable rum blossom. Written in "implacable" 14-hour stretches during a four-month "retirement in the mountains of New Hampshire," Surrealist Painter Salvador Dali's Hidden Faces is the year's tipsiest first novel.
For Novelist Dali Hidden Faces is a revealing study of contemporary French high society. It is also "an anagram sealed in the fire of my personality and in the blood of my wife." Some of its surrealistic characters:
¶Beautiful Veronica Stevens, who was in love with a masked aviator whose face she had never seen. She used to beat "her mother over the head with a telephone." Reason: Mrs. Stevens' "biological need for the absolute" filled her with a desire to make tailored suits to cover the "indecent" shapes of streamlined automobiles.
¶Betka, Veronica's voluptuous girl friend, whose "pure teeth savagely crunched stalks of celery that broke in her mouth like icicles of spring." One day she received a one-word telegram from her mother in Poland. It said: "Suka" (Russian for bitch).
¶Madame de Montluçon, who once showed Senator Daudier her low-necked Chanel dress, which crawled with "rather large pearl caterpillars." "Quite edible," said the Senator, "but I should have preferred to have the caterpillars served in a separate dish."
¶Suave Count Hervé de Grandsailles, who gave a brilliant dinner party where "congested epiderms . . . empurpled the candelabra," and the guests' faces were "caught in the ferocious meshes of anamorphosis." With "faint but delightful anguish" the Count detected in the "immaculate turgescence" of his cream cheese "the animal femininity of the she-goat."
Cork Trees and Seduction. Count Grandsailles was France's most brilliant statesman. "With the leftist ideas of his right-hand partner the Count would mildly bring out the rightist ideas of his left-hand partner, and with the rightist ideas of his left-hand partner, he would moderately develop the leftist ideas of his right-hand partner." His chief passion was planting cork trees. But for five years the Count had practised "mutual seduction" with beautiful Solange de Cleda. A horse-lover, he "was always tempted to tap Solange on the buttocks and give her a piece of sugar." Solange liked to fall on her knees in a crowded room and, "feebly muttering," wind her arms around the Count's legs.
After the Germans invaded France (machine-gun "rays . . . made . . . deep incisions [in] the loathsome yolks of eggs fried in boiling oil") Count Grandsailles was sent to Casablanca by the Vichy Government. Vichy thought he was loyal. But the Count was chiefly interested in planting more & more cork trees. "All I want," he told the admiring North Africans, "is an Arab revolt within 48 hours." "You shall have [it]," cried Communist Professor Brousillon, "but it may cost the lives of several Communists."