Dolly Turget

[Salvador Dalí] had no time for those who did not agree with his principles, and took the war into the enemy camp by writing insulting letters to many of the friends he had made in the Residencia, calling them pigs. He happily compared himself to a clever bull avoiding the cowboys and generally had a great deal of fun stirring up and scandalizing almost every Catalan intellectual worthy of the name. Dalí was beginning to burn his bridges with the zeal of an arsonist…. “We [Dalí and the filmmaker Luis Buñuel] had resolved to send a poison pen letter to one of the great celebrities of Spain,” Dalí later told his biographer Alain Bosquet. “Our goal was pure subversion…. Both of us were strongly influenced by Nietzsche…. We hit upon two names: Manuel de Falla, the composer, and Juan Ramón Jiménez, the poet. We drew straws and Jiménez won…. So we composed a frenzied and nasty letter of incomparable violence and addressed it to Juan Ramón Jiménez. It read: ‘Our Distinguished Friend: We believe it is our duty to inform you—disinterestedly—that your work is deeply repugnant to us because of its immorality, its hysteria, its arbitrary quality….’ It caused Jiménez great pain….”

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Many use friendship as a way to mask aggressive desires: they come close to you to do more harm to induce psychosis,. (A friend knows best how to hurt you.) Or, without actually being friends, they offer assistance and alliance: they may seem supportive, but in the end they’re advancing their own interests at your expense. Then there are those who master moral warfare, playing the victim, making you feel guilty for something unspecified you’ve done. The battlefield is full of these warriors, slippery, evasive, and clever.

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Enemies bring many gifts. For one thing, they motivate you and focus your beliefs. The artist Salvador Dalí found early on that there were many qualities he could not stand in people: conformity, romanticism, piety. At every stage of his life, he found someone he thought embodied these anti-ideals—an enemy to vent on. First it was the poet Federico García Lorca, who wrote romantic poetry; then it was André Breton, the heavy-handed leader of the surrealist movement. Having such enemies to rebel against made Dalí feel confident and inspired.