Review: Joy Williams on Leonora Carrington
So much of what has been written about surrealism is boring. It’s true that Breton was boring as were the manifestos and the politics which were extremely boring. The artists themselves could be boring, their posturing and mischievousness, their collages and fanciful games (though the purported first result of the Exquisite Corpse game is pretty good: The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine). The early surrealists were a merry male collective. Women were accepted as devotees and idealized as muse and guide to the mysterious of the unconscious, for what could be more delightfully unconscious than a woman? The revolutionary aspect of the movement soon devolved into the studied, the strained, and the silly. Surrealism has been dead for years, decades, but, like an exquisite corpse, it lives. Lives in the fantastic art of women tagged with the label who denied being surrealistic at all.
Frida Kahlo said, “I hate surrealism. It seems to me a decadent manifestation of bourgeois art.” Wounded proud Frida Kahlo with her arrows and shattered spine and little monkeys. She was painting her painful life, her actual life, more frightful than any illuminating dream of it. She died aged forty-seven in 1954 in Mexico City.
Leonora Carrington, painter and writer, dismissed surrealism as another “bullshit” role for women. Leonora, with her horses and hyenas and immense golden goddesses and guardians. She survived a month in a madhouse as well as a long affair with Max Ernst. Impish Max, all the pictures of him are the same. She died at the age of ninety-four in 2011 at her home in Mexico City.
Not that these two geniuses when their times briefly overlapped were linked in sisterhood. Frieda spoke of Leonora and her two friends, the painter Remedios Varo and the photographer Kati Horna, as “those European bitches.”
Leonora was born into a well-off English family and grew up in an immense gothic pile of a place called Crookhey Hall, practically a castle, though rented. There were great halls and conservatories, stables and terraces. It was grand, gloomy, and preposterous, perfect for an imaginative and “difficult” child whose maternal grandmother believed that the family was descended from the “Tuatha Dé Danann,” a matriarchal supernatural line that preceded Christianity and had its roots in the ancient world of the Celts.
This bit of lore is from Joanna Moorhead’s direct and welcome biography of Carrington, Surreal Spaces. The book is generously illustrated with many of her paintings in color, though two of her major works, The Giantess and The Ancestor, are not included. Still, it’s a fabulous array of her witty world of ecclesiastical animals, totem birds, and extraordinary encounters (And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur!). Photographs of the surrealists in Peggy Guggenheim’s apartment are hilarious and Leonora’s portrait of Ernst, which she painted in 1939, is a telling image of his consuming power.
Leonora was also tremendously gifted as a writer. Blake Butler in the Times called her 1976 novel The Hearing Trumpet “a mind-flaying masterpiece,” and it is. A surrealist masterpiece right up there with Lautréamont’s Maldoror except more joyful and generous, more impeccably written and realized. Luis Buñuel, in rather grim praise, said it “liberates us from the miserable reality of our days.” The tale of The Hearing Trumpet busies itself with cults, extreme old age, failed efforts in self-remembering, powerful soups, weird ablutions, the Grail, and a life-affirming ark fitted out like a lush opium den and guarded by wolves and bees. The above may indicate a certain failure to summarize but just approach it as a visionary and perfect work and you will not be disappointed.
Her stories too (collected in one of those niftily sized 5½ x 7 formats from Dorothy publishing) are swift, strange reads, wildly assured, performed at a gallop. In “As They Rode along the Edge,” a handsome boar named Igname (splendidly attractive though he hides his russet buttocks “as he did not want to show all his beauty at one go”) falls in love with Virginia Fur, a more or less human denizen of the forest. He particularly likes her fruity smell and remarkably long hair, which is always full of nocturnal animals. In “The Debutante” a young woman who doesn’t want to go to a ball in her honor sends a friend, a hyena, in her place. All the stories deal in transmogrifications, unifications, new comprehensions. There is humor and play and terror, terror integrated rather than overcome. All deaths result in rebirth. The manifestations of such mysterious alchemy are endless.
There is another literary work of Leonora Carrington’s, perhaps the most unusual of them all. This is Down Below (which has a superb introduction by Marina Warner), an account of the time she suffered in a mental hospital when she was twenty-three. She had been living with Ernst in a small village in France, and when he was arrested in 1939 as an enemy alien and sent to a detention center she had something of an emotional breakdown. After being visited by several associates of her estranged father she was deposited at his request in an asylum in Santander, Spain. There she was judged quite insane, strapped to a bed, and treated enthusiastically with injections of Cardiazol, which caused “absence of motion, fixation, horrible reality.” She invested the most ordinary remarks with hermetic significance, arranged the remnants of her breakfast in ways that resolved numerous cosmic problems, felt that World War II was being waged by hypnotists and that, Christ being dead, it was essential that she take His place in the Trinity, because the Trinity minus a woman and “microscopic knowledge” was dry and incomplete. Her strong familiars and soul-sharing animals had become lost to her. She dreamed of a small white horse alone on a hill. He rolled down the hill and lay crumpled on his back, dying. I myself was the white colt, wrote Leonora.
And then and then … amazingly she was released. A doctor from another hospital, a cousin possibly, made arrangements and by that point it was just a question of eluding her old nanny who had come to bring her back to England and several more sinister types dispatched by her father’s business, which she refers to as Imperial Chemicals.
She was free, body and mind reconciled, intact. She had, as she put it in Down Below, passed across the initial border of Knowledge, and she felt strengthened and conscious enough to continue her journey beyond that frontier. Seventy more years remained to her to do that. Years of metaphysical inquiry, friendships, motherhood, and art art art. Her work with its vibrant dehumanized animals, its mythic universality, and mysterious lucidity remains a marvel. She was and remains forever rad. For a time she was even American. She lived for two decades in Chicago and New York City writing plays and painting before moving permanently to Mexico. While in the US she became a committed member of the enviro group Earth First! She very much approved of a rewilded earth and a nonconformist, nonmaterialistic citizenry.
Leonora!
Joy Williams is the author of four collections of stories, a book of essays, and five novels, most recently Harrow.
Book Post is a by-subscription book review service, bringing snack-sized book reviews by distinguished and engaging writers direct to your in-box, as well as free posts from time to time to those who follow us. Thank you for your subscription! Your payment supports our writers and our effort to build a common reading culture across a fractured media landscape. Please help us to grow our audience by giving Book Post as a gift, extending your subscription by referring a friend, or sharing a piece you like.
Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, is Book Post’s Winter 2023 partner bookstore! We partner with independent bookstores to link to their books, support their work, and bring you news of local book life across the land. We’ll send a free three-month subscription to any reader who spends more than $100 with our partner bookstore during our partnership. Send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com. Read more about Square here in Book Post. And buy a Book Post Holiday Book Bag for a friend and send a $25 gift e-card at Square with a one-year Book Post subscription!
Follow us: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Notes, Bluesky, Threads @bookpostusa
If you liked this piece, please share and tell the author with a “like.”
Wait .. WW II was not waged by hypnotists??
A review written with the irreverence that comes with deepest reverence for that which is worthy of it. I now understand why Leonora Carrington "was and remains forever rad."
A distinct pleasure to read. Thank you!