The New Yorker | How Leonora Carrington Feminized Surrealism

 

By Merve Emre

December 21, 2020

 

When asked to describe the circumstances of her birth, the Surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington liked to tell people that she had not been born; she had been made. One melancholy day, her mother, bloated by chocolate truffles, oyster purée, and cold pheasant, feeling fat and listless and undesirable, had lain on top of a machine. The machine was a marvellous contraption, designed to extract hundreds of gallons of semen from animals-pigs, cockerels, stallions, urchins, bats, ducks-and, one can imagine, bring its user to the most spectacular orgasm, turning her whole sad, sick being inside out and upside down. From this communion of human, animal, and machine, Leonora was conceived. When she emerged, on April 6, 1917, England shook.

 

The success of a creation story hangs on how richly it seeds the life to come. Carrington's encompasses all the elements of her life and her art. There is her decadence and indelicate sense of fancy; her fascination with animals and with bodies, both otherworldly and profane. Above all, there is her high-spirited, baroque sense of humor, mating the artificial to the natural, and recalling Henri Bergson's claim that the essence of comedy is the image of "something mechanical encrusted upon the living." Her humor and its offspring-two novels, a memoir, a delightfully macabre collection of stories, along with hundreds of paintings, sculptures, and objets-have been unearthed on several occasions since her death, in 2011. Each time her work is reborn, it seems more prescient, her comedy more finely tuned to our growing consciousness of the nonhuman world and the forces that inhabit it.

 

In Carrington's creation story, the butt of the joke is her true origins, an incurably repressive Anglo-Irish upbringing, which she fled in 1937. She settled first in France, and then, when the Nazis descended, Madrid, New York, and Mexico City, where she spent the rest of her life. She never again saw her father, a Lancashire mill owner who, in her twenties, had her committed to a mental institution. "Of the two, I was far more afraid of my father than I was of Hitler," she claimed. She seldom visited her mother, an able, sympathetic woman, more mesmerized by the whirligig of the London scene than by art or literature. "The Debutante," a story Carrington wrote just after leaving home, shows the savagery she wrought from her family's money and good English manners. A girl befriends a hyena at the zoo, teaches it to speak, and persuades it to take her place at a ball. The hyena attends wearing the face of the girl's maid, killed and eaten as part of its evening toilette.

 

"Nurse! Do let's pretend that I'm a hungry hyena, and you're a bone," Lewis Carroll's Alice shouts, in "Through the Looking Glass." Alice is too young to imagine her game of make-believe literalized as gruesome social satire, but Carrington, a devoted reader of Carroll and Jonathan Swift, certainly could. The Cheshire Cat and the Houyhnhnms must have taught her that comedy and critique both work by casting the familiar aspects of life in new, doubtful guises. Which is more artificial, she asks: dressing a hyena as a human or a human as a woman? What is the difference between a hyena and a human? Shouldn't the two be allies in a planetary war against débutante balls, against kings and queens and empires, against the cannibalizing machinery of capital, which takes the domination of women and nature as its origin point?

 

Surrealist art, with its convulsive, outlandish juxtapositions, showed Carrington how to discern the folly of the humans she knew. It also invited her to cavort with nonhuman creatures, drawing on their beauty and suffering to make tame ideas about character and plot more porous, elastic, and gloriously unhinged. The distinctions between human and animal, animal and machine, flicker in and out of focus in her early stories, but the fiction she wrote in the nineteen-fifties and sixties dissolves them lavishly. Here we find several barnyards' worth of chimeras, extravagant beings who commune with all manner of "mechanical artifacts." They are bearers of utopian hopes and victims of threats from ordinary humans. Consider her story "As They Rode Along the Edge," a romance featuring Virginia Fur, not quite woman, not quite cat, with "bats and moths imprisoned" in her hair and a blind nightingale lodged in her throat. Her lover, Igname the Boar, woos her in "a wig made of squirrels' tails." Their children are seven little boars conceived under "a mountain of cats." Virginia boils and eats all but one of the children, after men hunt and kill their father.

 

In Carrington's writing, the critic Janet Lyon has observed, the appearance of an ordinary human always feels like an aberration, a harbinger of death. Ordinary humans, when confronted with Carrington's creatures, brandish their superior rationality and industry. Sometimes they press the point with guns, other times with atomic bombs, as in her novel "The Hearing Trumpet," to be reissued next month by New York Review Books. Yet they remain ignorant of how pitiable it is to be merely human in the first place. "To be one human creature is to be a legion of mannequins," a goddess in one of her stories proclaims. "When the creature steps into the mannequin he immediately believes it to be real and alive and as long as he believes this he is trapped inside the dead image, which moves in ever-increasing circles away from Great Nature." For Carrington, humanity was a seductive costume donned by dummies. To step out of the costume risked deranging the self that one unthinkingly inhabited, courting madness, the dissolution of the belief in the human world as the arbiter of reality. But it was also to draw closer to Great Nature, in the quest for a new, liberating art.

 

The story of Carrington's liberation from the human world is the subject of her memoir, "Down Below" (1944). The book opens by summoning its reader:

Exactly three years ago, I was interned in Dr. Morales's sanatorium in Santander, Spain, Dr. Pardo, of Madrid, and the British Consul having pronounced me incurably insane. Since I fortuitously met you, whom I consider the most clear-sighted of all, I began gathering a week ago the threads which might have led me across the initial border of Knowledge. I must live through that experience all over again, because, by doing so, I believe that I may be of use to you, just as I believe that you will be of help in my journey beyond that frontier by keeping me lucid and by enabling me to put on and to take off at will the mask which will be my shield against the hostility of Conformism.

Who could turn down this flattering invitation? You will serve as her accomplice, as well as her pupil-the débutante to her masked hyena. Together, you form one of her conjoined beings: the narrator who weaves the story of her life; the reader who lets herself be ensnared by it.

 

"Down Below" imagines its narrator and its readers journeying toward Knowledge as a collective entity, yet the circumstances leading up to its writing were singular and bizarre. They began with Carrington's adolescent rebellions. Her father sent her to a convent school in 1930; the nuns sent her back. In 1936, her mother sent her to study art in London, where she fell in with the Surrealists. They worshipped her as a muse, a witch-not the old and ugly kind, André Breton explained, but an enchantress with "a smooth, mocking gaze." This reputation still clings to her, unlike the bedsheets she is said to have worn to parties. Even her well-intentioned biographer Joanna Moorhead writes with bewitched reverie of the teen-age Leonora, "the beautiful, sparky young woman with her dark eyes, crimson lips, and cascade of raven curls" destined to meet the German Surrealist Max Ernst, twenty-six years older than her, and soon to anoint her his femme-enfant. Her family had wrongheadedly nicknamed her Prim. He renamed her the Bride of the Wind.

 

How far would the wind carry its young bride? Across the Channel, to a small stone farmhouse in Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche, in the Rhône Valley, which the couple bought in 1938. They painted its interior with fish and lizard-like creatures, women turning into horses, and a blood-red unicorn. They sculpted a mermaid for the terrace, bought two peacocks to roam the yard, and mounted a bas-relief on the house's façade. Its two figures still stand. A man in robes, with a bird cawing between his legs-this was Loplop, Ernst's alter ego. Next to him, a faceless woman holds a lopped-off head in her hand. Her most notable features are her stony, round, vigorously protruding breasts.

 

Here Carrington completed her first major painting, "Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse)," in which a hyena with engorged teats and a woman with ferocious hair and a pale, unalarmed face stare out at the viewer. But amid the painting, the drinking, the talk and the sex, the wind blew foul and fair. For one thing, the Nazis were drawing near. For another, Ernst was married, more established, selfish, clingy, and demanding. One wonders if she started to see their relationship the way that his patron Peggy Guggenheim did: "Like Nell and her grandfather in 'The Old Curiosity Shop.' " One also wonders if Carrington, eying the bas-relief, felt paralyzed by the way male Surrealists had treated women as artificial beings-their bodies manipulable, their spirits elusive. Salvador Dali, in his essay "The New Colors of Spectral Sex Appeal" (1934), had prophesied that the sexual attractiveness of modern woman would derive from "the disarticulation and distortion of her anatomy." "New and uncomfortable anatomical parts-artificial ones-will be used to accentuate the atmospheric feeling of a breast, buttock, or heel," he wrote, only half-joking. She would appear a luminous paradox, animate and inanimate, carnal and ghostly; perfect for being desired and for being painted but not for creating an art of her own.

 

Against this background, "Down Below" opens with Ernst's internment by the French as an undesirable foreigner, after the outbreak of war, in 1939. His imprisonment, we learn, jump-started a ritual of purgation. Carrington spent twenty-four hours drinking orange-blossom water to induce vomiting. Then she took a nap and reconciled herself to his absence. For three weeks, she ate sparingly, sunbathed, tended potatoes in the garden, and ignored the German troops thronging the village. She wondered if her attitude "betrayed an unconscious desire to get rid for the second time of my father: Max, whom I had to eliminate if I wanted to live," she wrote, planning to sell up and drive to Spain. The reader who counts the threads of the story-a purified heroine, her calling to vanquish an undesirable man, a journey through a mysterious land-knows that this is no lurid memoir of psychosis and political chaos. It is a quest narrative, designed to give brisk expression to Carrington's desire for a freer world.

 

Like all quests, this one had its obstacles. The first turned out to be her body, prized and painted by the Surrealists. Previously dismantled into its erotic components-a torso in a photograph, a breast on a wall-it began to integrate with everything around it. "Jammed!" Carrington proclaimed when the car taking her to Spain broke down. "I was the car. The car had jammed on account of me, because I, too, was jammed between Saint-Martin and Spain." In Andorra, she could only scuttle like a crab: "an attempt at climbing stairs would again bring about a 'jam.' " The modernist arthropod-Kafka's bug, or Eliot's Prufrock, longing to be "a pair of ragged claws"-is a well-worn trope of alienation and stasis, but for Carrington it sparked a breakthrough. Part car, part crab, part Carrington, she hit on the same revelation that all her fiction would offer: her body had only ever been a poorly crafted artifice, caging her spirit and barring the entry of others.

 

And so a more profound journey beckoned, not the expulsion of a single man-Ernst is forgotten by the narrator-but her reincarnation as a multiple and quixotic being: "an androgyne, the Moon, the Holy Ghost, a gypsy, an acrobat, Leonora Carrington, and a woman," she wrote. And a more terrible obstacle loomed. For her revelation, she was institutionalized, made "a prisoner in a sanatorium full of nuns," and later injected with Cardiazol, stripped, and strapped to a bed. She had a series of visions in which all the nuns and doctors, all of history, religion, and nature were contained in her, and she was the world. Freeing herself would free the cosmos, "stop the war and liberate the world, which was 'jammed' like me," she had reasoned. The place where will permeated all matter, where the boundaries between bodies and beings dissolved, was not Spain but what she called "Down Below." "I would go Down Below, as the third person of the Trinity," she announced. The title of the book named her true destination, her utopia.

 

This, at least, is what we are led to believe. The reader, like any dutiful sidekick, awaits further instructions to go Down Below. Instead, Carrington's madness lifts, and upon her release she journeys from Madrid to Lisbon to New York. The quest is aborted, utopia abandoned, the threads of the story snapped before they can be knotted together. Why, the disappointed reader wonders, has the heroine failed to complete her quest? The epilogue to "Down Below" suggests that, in life, no one was there to help convert Carrington's madness into a fully realized world. The artistic community of European Surrealism was now scattered, confined. Her surreal experience of psychiatric institutionalization was mirrored by Surrealism's institutionalization in New York's art market-a complicity with wealth depressingly symbolized by Ernst's marriage to Peggy Guggenheim, in 1942. "Surrealism is no longer considered modern today," a character in "The Hearing Trumpet" laments. "Even Buckingham Palace has a large reproduction of Magritte's famous slice of ham with an eye peering out. It hangs, I believe, in the throne room."

 

"The Hearing Trumpet," one of the great comic novels of the twentieth century, reprises the quest narrative of "Down Below," but with some key changes to insure it succeeds. Its narrator, Marian Leatherby, is ninety-two years old, gummy, rheumatic, gray-bearded, and deaf. Her lifelong dream is to tour Lapland in a sleigh drawn by woolly dogs. Barring that, she would like to collect enough cat hair for her friend Carmella to knit her a sweater. But Marian's son, Galahad, less noble than his Arthurian namesake, installs her in a retirement home for women run by the Well of Light Brotherhood and "financed by a prominent American cereal company (Bouncing Breakfast Cereals Co.)." Before Marian is taken away, Carmella gives her a hearing trumpet, pictured in Carrington's illustrations as a ridiculously oversized, scallop-edged object, "encrusted with silver and mother o'pearl motifs and grandly curved like a buffalo's horn." Marian-part human, part animal, part machine-delights in the artifice of her body's enhancement. She can hear now, and how prettily!

 

What can we hear through "The Hearing Trumpet"? First, a thoroughgoing commitment to absurdity; the plot is gleeful nonsense. Then the driest strain of humor. Finally, the echoes of a ragtag history of English literature, mined not for its contact with human reality but for its capacity to conjure a world beyond the one humans can see, smell, touch, and taste. The hearing trumpet, or otacousticon, is a seventeenth-century invention, and the scrapes it gets Marian into seem plucked from the earliest picaresques. The retirement home is headed by a lewd doctor who preaches a doctrine of "Will over Matter." The women live in cottages, each more preposterously shaped than its neighbor: a lighthouse, a circus tent, a toadstool, a cuckoo clock. The discovery of a document detailing the occult activities of an old abbess suddenly launches us on a grail quest. It summons to Marian's side not Galahad but the winged animals and white goddesses of the Celtic and Old English traditions.

 

Carrington's heroine succeeds because she is matched by a narrative form as chimerical as she is-not the short story or the memoir but the novel. "The Hearing Trumpet" reads like a spectacular reassemblage of old and new genres, the campy, illegitimate offspring of Margaret Cavendish's romances and Robert Graves's histories, with Thomas Pynchon's riotous paranoia spliced in to keep it limber and receptive to the political anxieties of its moment. The search for the grail is undertaken after the "dreadful atom bomb" has inaugurated another Ice Age, killing nearly all humans and destroying their modern infrastructure. 

The Cold War has turned the world, well, cold. Carrington's comedy of literalization asks us how a metaphor has become a terrible reality. A conversation between Marian and Carmella provides an answer:

"It is impossible to understand how millions and millions of people all obey a sickly collection of gentlemen that call themselves 'Government'! The word, I expect, frightens people. It is a form of planetary hypnosis, and very unhealthy."

"It has been going on for years," I said. "And it only occurred to relatively few to disobey and make what they call revolutions. If they won their revolutions, which they occasionally did, they made more governments, sometimes more cruel and stupid than the last."

"Men are very difficult to understand," said Carmella. "Let's hope they all freeze to death."

 

The women have no use for frozen institutions. What they seek are living communities for all creatures, forged not through domination and cruelty but through care and mutual assistance.

 

The community that the novel creates is what distinguishes "The Hearing Trumpet" as a delicious triumph of world-making. Unlike Leonora in "Down Below," Marian is not alone in her fight against Conformism. Her sidekicks are not her spectral readers but a gathering of elderly women, animals, and spirits, growing ever more crowded and boisterous as the novel shuffles them to their end. In its climax, Marian leaps into a cauldron of meat broth and, in an act of Eucharistic voodoo, drinks herself, lightly seasoned with salt and peppercorns. Dissolving like a bouillon cube, she finds her brothy spirit permeating the other women, who keep her from spilling all over the place. Together, they forage mushrooms, raise goats, conjure bees whose honey they lick from their bodies, and make spinning wheels. They hope to people the frozen earth with "cats, werewolves, bees, and goats"-an "improvement on humanity," Marian declares.

 

For all the outlandishness of the novel's action, there is something supremely practical about its tone, as if it were well within our power to step into its looking-glass world-a world where Carrington's recombinant art and utopian imagination are not extraordinary at all but simple facts of life. Perhaps what made the novel's surreal ending conceivable was the environment in which it was produced, the artistic community that formed around Carrington in Mexico City. She arrived there in 1942, and found a city full of socialists and communists in exile, its arts scene presided over by the suspicious luminaries of Mexican Muralism. (Frida Kahlo apparently called Carrington and her circle "those European bitches.") She married the Hungarian photographer Chiki Weisz, had two children, and created a new "Surreal Family," anchored by two friends, the photographer Kati Horna and the painter Remedios Varo. The family was a matriarchy, committed to dissolving the boundaries between the daily work of art and the daily work of care-a feminist project more enduring and surreal than any single romance or school of painting.

 

For the next several decades, the family experimented with traditional craftsmanship. Carrington's studio was "a combined kitchen, nursery, bedroom, kennel, and junk-store," her patron Edward James observed, impressed by the magic she could wring out of domesticity. Atop a table one might spy a cot for Horna's daughter, with a parade of long-necked animals that Carrington had painted around the base; in later years, a folding screen, a gift for Carrington's son Gabriel, with whom she would smoke the marijuana she grew on the roof. His forthcoming memoir of her, "The Invisible Painting," is a testament to a kind of Fabian workshop in exile, whose techniques seemed enchanted by care. His mother's "inner demons would dissolve" when she did embroidery and appliqué; woodworking yielded "a she-wolf inlaid with abalone shells" and a roulette wheel she painted with horses. She made dolls stuffed with cat hair for the children and cooked for everyone-a procession of outrageous meals over which they would gather to speak a hybrid of Spanish, English, and French.

 

Underneath all this shimmering play runs a deep vein of vulnerability. "I am an old lady who has lived through a lot and I have changed," Carrington wrote to a friend in 1945. She was only twenty-eight. She did not have to be elderly to feel old-isolated, estranged from her body, her consciousness dispersed. She was soon to be a new mother in a foreign country, never to live in her homeland again. She had entered early retirement, settling into her self-fashioned assisted-living facility. After her younger son, Pablo, was born, in 1947, Carrington wrote to the art dealer Pierre Matisse explaining why she would not attend her solo show at his gallery in New York: "I haven't been out of these four walls for about 2 years & have become so intimidated by the outside world that I might have grown a hare-lip, a long grey beard & three cauliflower ears, bow legs, a hump, gall stones & cross eyes."

 

Some might see this self-imposed lockdown as a constraint born from her insecurity, but it contained the conditions of her liberation. The gray beard would reappear on her heroine Marian, as would her mistrust of institutional consecration. Both are marks of wisdom, proof of Carrington's faith that the spirit of a community, where art is truly lived and made, can walk through walls.

 

Whether she was young or old, locked up or locked down, Carrington summoned unseen forces to come and make a lonely world feel bigger. "The Hearing Trumpet" prophesied the rest of her life, and she was content with it. She made her art, loved her friends and children deeply, had no interest in publicity, rarely offered explanations of her work, and never wrote another novel. And why would she? "The Hearing Trumpet" contained the utopia she imagined, and the world she knew. ♦

 

Published in the print edition of the December 28, 2020, issue, with the headline "Extravagant Creatures."

December 21, 2020