The Bird Men of Burnley (1970) by Leonora Carrington

We finally made it to the end, my friends, and we have a lot to cover. As mentioned in Part 1, in addition to the republishing of Leonora Carrington’s short stories, a novella Down Below and a children’s book, Milk of Dreams, was also released by New York Review of Books Classics, and Virago published The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington by Joanna Moorhead. All are very important books that we are lucky to have available to us. Because we’re covering three books here rather than sections of one, the following reactions are going to be pretty cursory and will hardly do justice to each piece’s depth. Please forgive me.

The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington

The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington is a personal and authorized biography written by relative and Guardian journalist Joanna Moorhead. How Moorhead came to write the story itself is really cool—a curiosity pilgrimage to visit a long-distant, eccentric cousin lead to a decade of visits, conversations, and other explorations within Carrington’s world and surrealist perspective. These conversations are the basis of how Moorhead structures the biography, and as such, it is stripped of heavy academic interpretations that we’ve only had access to before. That doesn’t mean Moorhead doesn’t reference Carrington’s work, but she does so strictly as it pertains to life, including wonderful contextualization of her writing which was immensely enlightening during this read-along. It is pivotal to any and all study of Carrington, and is a must read for those interested in the lives of women artists.

Another aspect I appreciate is the treatment of Carrington’s romance with Ernst. Since the anecdotes were straight from the white horse’s mouth, it is devoid of the usual TMZ-gossip-style it’s often recounted in (or the academic, feminist outrage, however you want to look at it). It’s shown as a simple but seminal affair that Carrington remembers as the beginning of her realized life. While the essence of Carrington’s imagination was already swirling in her 20-year-old mind, Ernst was able to share and expose her to the knowledge she needed to give it shape. It’s not that Carrington wouldn’t have become Carrington without him, but like with any mentor, her relationship with Ernst probably rushed things up a bit. And it also pushed her further along the path towards independence. As integral and inspiring as Ernst was to Carrington, she also knew that any sort of sustained, long-term relationship would usurp her talents and she was smart enough to avoid any renewed vows of love.

While the strength of this biography is its focus solely on Carrington’s life, it also falters somewhat under that mission. Things like Carrington’s notion of free love are glossed over. I also at times wished for deeper readings into her symbology and its duality with her reality and that of the collective conscious. But, I recognize that this can be found in other academic tomes, so perhaps I am being greedy.

Even so, I have a lot of questions about the actual nature of Carrington’s madness as described in Down Below that weren’t exactly answered. Part of that (and of my minor complaints above) might be that Carrington herself refused to talk about it:  “What Leonora endured in the asylum was to be the pivotal experience of her life, with ramifications that continued even in to the long afternoons we shared together….Even in her nineties, Leonora was never comfortable with talking about what happened in Santander in 1940:  a shadow would cross her face if it was mentioned, and she would quickly light another Marlboro, inhale deeply, and suggest a change of subject.” (126). She does explain Carrington’s perception of her madness in Santander as a “fluid boundary,” which she would explore for the rest of her life, and gave me much to ponder while reading her ultimate travelogue of this fluid journey in Down Below.

Down Below

Down Below is an account of Carrington’s internment at the Covadonga insane asylum in Santander, Spain during 1940. She was committed after a slow onslaught of symptoms resulting from Max Ernst’s arrests and her fleeing of France that finally expressed itself as a schizophrenic break.

Algorithmically, Down Below belongs in the same categories that house The Bell Jar, Girl Interrupted, and Prozac Nation, but there are a few things that make it hard to actually classify. Unlike, say The Bell Jar, which is promoted as solely fiction, and Girl Interrupted and Prozac Nation, as nonfiction, Down Below straddles these two genres and rides it straight into a metaphysical horizon. You witness how her imagination overpowers her mind, and how the same surrealistic narrative she crafted to make sense of her life and art crossed over into the terrible, rational reality of  her existence. Because Carrington tells the story through the voice of her madness with very little backtracking to justify its logic, many people have dismissed it as fiction, and within academia great efforts have been made to defend it as fact.

I can see why some people might dismiss it as fiction because Carrington retells the entire account through the filter she experienced it in. From basically start to finish, she relays her visions and hallucinations, not to mention rape and violence, with very little editorial explanation and emotions to what was happening on the other side of reality. Not only does this show she has kept it as part of a personal, psychological belief system, but also that it holds a truth that anyone approaching this book with a rationalist or realistic approach will not be able to understand. She never lets up; the only way to make sense of it is to break with her.

The events in Down Below are recollected several years later, so naturally some things may have been distorted by time and memory, but all in all I believe the entire journey because it is the manifesto of Carrington’s entire artistic vision. I don’t believe she was permanently cured of her mental illness, but I do believe she knew how to harness the power of her imagination enough to stay grounded through episodes that guided her to deeper explorations of her art and life. She even states that writing this account of Covadonga was a way to keep her from relapsing into the madness, even though she worries revisiting it could trigger more hallucinations and disillusionments. I don’t see this as the fulfillment of a surrealist fate (the Surrealists considered madness the highest and most artistic state of mind), or the romanticization of hysteria, but the secret to how Carrington was able to stronghold her life, preserve her personal identity, and steer her own destiny.

Throughout her long life, she was always learning and never turning away from the “fluid boundaries” of fact or fiction. They both co-existed within her world, and as such, she was able to make sense of her life “un-jammed.” As horrible as all of her experiences were in the asylum, this surrender to her imagination ultimately saved her. It shows the power of finding one’s own myth, as Jung would have it, and it’s a lesson we all could use today to stay stable in an ever increasingly disordered world that sometimes feels like 1940 rather than 2017.

Milk of Dreams

If Down Below represents the darkest moment of Carrington’s long-life, Milk of Dreams shows us the light. She loved motherhood and poured her life into raising her two sons as much as developing her canvases or constructing her stories. Naturally, those worlds overlapped and her sons recollect being surrounded by murals she painted to illustrate the stories she’d tell them. This book, published by The New York Review of Books Children’s Collections, is what’s left of that time: facsimile doodles and images lifted from the notebook she kept to formulate these amusements.

As expected, it isn’t your typical children’s book. These tales follow, perhaps even more quintessentially, Carrington’s style of astonishing imagery with terse expressions that is very effective for children’s storytelling. Each sentence is almost an association to the next and thus follows its own logic to its conclusion. Typically, the stories involve the misadventure of wayward children, many of whom lose their heads either because their ears were too big or a mean old lady who hated children separated their bodies from them. Some examples:  a golden child is rewarded with crocodiles, and another named “Little Angel” entertains himself while recovering from the flu by peeing on people who pass under his window. The stories are pretty short and sweet, and for every yarn there are several vignettes that include a sketch and caption-like explanations for what the subject is doing. The rest is left up to the imagination. Milk of Dreams shows another dimension of Carrington’s inner world, one that was open only to her sons, and is now open to all of the weird children of the world.

Well, weirdies. That’s it. Thank you so much for joining me on reading through the Leonora Carrington read-along. I’ve learned a great deal as a reader and a writer with this project, especially how to excavate, evaluate, and evolve my own personal symbology. I hope you have found it as equally inspiring.

The post Hyenas, Horses, and Rabbits, Oh My! Part IV appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

After spending ten years running away from her childhood home and being shuffled from a few more by love and war, Carrington finally found her place in the world in 1942. Joanna Moorhead describes Carrington’s wonder the best in The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington:  “Everything, for Leonora, was new:  from the appearance and demeanor of the people, she said later, to the variety of foods, plants and animals, to the landscape and the contact with the dead….” (173). Even so, it wasn’t exactly a smooth transition. Her marriage to Leduc was nosediving pretty fast as he picked up his old social circle and left Carrington alone most of the time. While this dynamic was typical in New York City, she was able to distract herself with the French Surrealists living there in exile, including Max Ernst. Mexico held nothing but strangers.

Carrington wasn’t one to be thwarted, though, and soon located her own circle to revive. Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret had been in Mexico City since the end of 1941, and when Carrington reunited with him, she met his lover, Remedios Varo. Animal lover, mystic painter, and fiercely intellectual while intuitive, Varo and Carrington would become soul sisters, and Carrington found much strength in their burgeoning friendship, including leaving Leduc to go crash with Péret and Varo. There, Carrington met the other European expatriates, and also forged a lifelong important friendship with the Hungarian photographer Kati Horna.

The friendships with Varo and Horna were seminal to Carrington’s development during this period. For the first time, she had friends who supported her endeavors on equal grounding and without the competition and condescension of the Surrealist male gaze. As a result, the trio (both in their friendships and individualities) created a feminine artistic space built upon deconstructing religion and reconstructing alchemy, which has gone on to shape Feminism and the notions of the collective art sisterhood and mythos. These three women  would collaborate and synthesize their worlds together, and was the focus of Surreal Friends, exhibited in England during 2010, and also at the center of In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States during 2012.

Carrington would also meet her second husband and life-partner, Chiki Schwartz. Unlike Ernst and Leduc, this marriage would be one of understanding and support, and enhanced for Carrington by motherhood. The Schwartzes had two sons, and Carrington was as devoted to them as she was to her canvases. Family and friends finally found, Carrington lived out the rest of her days in Mexico, painting her best and most complex work, and outliving almost all the Surrealists until she died in 2011 at the age of 94. (Dorothea Tanning followed in 2012 at 102. There’s a really crass joke about the resource of longevity of Ernst’s lovers, but I like to think in their study of the mystic and arcane maybe, just maybe, the source of the Elixir Vitae that kept them alive for so long came from their devotion to their work.)

This is a pretty terse summation for the longest and most enriching part of Carrington’s life, but these key points all culminate in the reoccurring themes in the last ten stories. In this final batch, Carrington’s preoccupation with storytelling during this period seems to fall into a few categories: fables and farces in and around Mexico, dark and mystical conversations with aging and mortality, and some good ole time absurdities that read more like children’s stories akin to Roald Dahl, such as “The Sand Camel?” and “Mr. Gregory’s Fly,” written somewhere around the 1970s.

Bird Bath (Baño de pájaros) by Leonora Carrington, 1974

Only two of the ten stories here are blatantly set in Mexico: “A Mexican Fairy Tale” and “How to Start a Pharmaceuticals Business.” The latter is a satire about a far-future Mexico deprived of worldwide communication and the resulting society’s enjoyment of this new wave of silence. It is a typical Carrington story in that it features a female narrator (in this one, Carrington identifies herself by name in the dialogue) given a task from a higher-up, and just sort of waltzes into a bizarre chain of events while trying to complete her mission that includes grave-fitting and lottery winnings. However, the prize was not a cash pot, but a tiny coffin containing the shrunken and stinking embalmed corpse of Joseph Stalin, or possibly Rasputin. In either case, a rando pharmacist feeds her a strand of hair from the homunculus’s mustache, which acts as a powerful and instantaneous pain reliever. She distills its secrets and opens the largest pharmaceutical business in Mexico.

“How to Start a Pharmaceuticals Business” is misanthropic, grotesque, and introduces a new theme that characterizes almost all of the stories from her later life: death, aging, and rejuvenation. These tropes weave in and out of the majority of stories like “The Neutral Man,” “Et in Bellicus Lunarum Medicalis,” “My Flannel Knickers” “The Happy Corpse,” and “My Mother Is a Cow.” “My Flannel Knickers,” and “My Mother is a Cow” stand out to me the most because of their ambiguous but axiomatic preoccupations with immortality such as: “Anybody over forty and toothless should be sensible enough to be quietly knitting an original new body, instead of wasting the cosmic wool.”

The most interesting and quintessential tale from this period is “A Mexican Fairy Tale.” She riffs on Quetzalcoatl, the MesoAmerican primordial feathered serpent God, and mythpunks it with the Western notion of the chemical marriage in 1940s Mexico. Quetzalcoatl is a hard god to pin down, but I believe the version that spoke most to Carrington has to be his form as a vegetation god. Her love of food expresses itself through this version, and the pages are scattered with mangos, melons, maguey, tortillas, chilies, and corn. In between the fruits and vegetables is a new bestiary filled with North American animals like pigs, jaguars, lizards, black moles, and tropical birds whose wings spin so fast you “could see through them.”

It’s one of the longer stories in the entire collection and diverges from her usual formula to depict the tale from two perspectives: pig-herder Juan, and Maria, the daughter of a surly man (Don Pedro), who loans Juan a ladder. Juan needs the ladder to investigate the mysterious crying he hears from the nearby ruins, but to gain Don Pedro’s trust, lies that it’ll be used to pick mangos. When Juan doesn’t return on time, Maria runs away from her father’s home to find Juan.

Two young people are lured by various circumstances to an ancient ruin, and there they find all sorts of anthropomorphic gods that ultimately capture them, bind them, and throw them into a flame together to transmogrify the couple into a conjunctio and unifies the narrative into one voice. Carrington calls these united souls Quetzalcoatl, and then transforms the entire, strange ritual into that of a chemical marriage in which to be truly in love two must become one. It’s a sagacious romance, and I think it is one of Carrington’s best tales.

Now that we’ve reached the end of this reading experiment, I have to admit that I wasn’t pulled in by each and every tale. At times, certain tropes like being invited into a house, or being summoned by a superior, or always just sort of stumbling into a bit of weirdness became redundant to me. Obviously, this method of manifestation must have been very important to Carrington, perhaps symbolizing how life is dealt by chance and favor. But it almost took on the same tedium as when a story begins with someone waking up from a dream. Sometimes the stories’ conclusions were unsatisfactory to me, and at other times I was indifferent to the zig-zag logic of the surrealistic visions, perhaps because the language was so clipped and dry. But maybe it’s just you aren’t meant to read Carrington’s work one after another in a marathon fashion, as I have done. In any case, what is charming, and made me ignore these personal pet peeves, is that these weaknesses are also her strengths.  When they are utilized to their full potential, as in “White Rabbits,” “A Mexican Fairy Tale,” “The Sisters,” and “As They Rode Along the Edge” to name a few, they are unforgettable and haunting masterpieces of the auto-imagination, and show just how far art can go towards reinventing and empowering the individual throughout her life.

So with the collected stories concluded, we have one more round in this read-along. Next up will be the novella Down Below and her children’s book Milk of Dreams, both published by NYRB classics, as well as a look at Joanna Moorhead’s seminal biography The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington, which has been a valuable resource throughout these past three readings.  We will even have an additional giveaway, so stay tuned for further surrealistic explorations.

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^[1] Just to be extra nerdy, I did consult Silver Press and have placed “The Sand Camel” and “Mr. Gregory’s Fly” as having been written somewhere around the 1970s. In contrast, “Jemima and the Wolf” was written around 1941, which explains why it seems to embody all of the characteristics and motifs of her earlier fiction.

The post Hyenas, Horses, and Rabbits, Oh My! Part III appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Green Tea (1942) by Leonora Carrington

We are back and shaking things up a little in this read-along. As I began reading further and further into the collection, I found I wasn’t reacting to the individual story, so much, as reacting to patterns and themes that were building upon each tale. So, since we are two thirds through, I thought I’d start grouping stories, and in the case of these ten, mark Carrington’s literary growth from the nascent and playful surrealist tales of 1937 and 1938 to the maturing, visionary, damaged fairy tales that characterize her work from 1939 to 1941. During ’37 and ’38, these last six stories read in Part I were all written during the brief but fecund period when Carrington was living with Ernst in France and expanding her artistic horizons and creating her own auto-mythology. Off the page, she was evading her family, protecting her lover from their threats, as well as fleeing Ernst’s past in the South of France. She also was making a splash among the Surrealists as a fiercely, independent femme enfant, and developing and honing her craft both within painting and writing. All at the age of 20 and 21!

But by 1939 everything changed. With the outbreak of WWII, Carrington found her idyllic new life in France torn asunder. Nazi Germany categorized the Surrealists as Degenerate artists #1, and many Surrealists were persecuted, arrested, or exiled. Ernst was arrested several times, and the abandonment and helplessness would send Carrington over the edge.

She sold their house and fled to Spain and grew even more erratic. Her parents had her committed and she underwent horrific treatments with cardiazol, which was suppose to be the pill form of electric-shock therapy. She documented this dark time in the novella Down Below, which I will be reviewing here by Part IV.  When she was finally released, she was chaperoned by her childhood nurse, who was tasked with making sure Carrington was brought back to England. This was unacceptable to Carrington, and at the last minute, found an old friend, Mexican Ambassador, Renato Leduc, and married him for safe passage to New York City and eventually Mexico.

Portrait of Max Ernst (1939) by Leonora Carrington

In Lisbon and New York City, she is reunited with Max, and participates in something of a love rectangle between Renato, him, and Peggy. However, she’s not in love with Max anymore, and finds his legend might overshadow her own career, which she very much wants to develop. It was a period of strife and hard decisions, and so naturally the next ten stories from this period are darker, cursed, and blooming with a poignant emotional range.

Expanded Bestiary

While horses, bats, birds, and hyenas are still present, her bestiary has expanded to include boars, peacocks, rabbits and cats to both poetic and terrifying effects. Peacocks aren’t so much sentient in these stories as ornamental. In “The Sisters,” a dead peacock is draped over a King’s head as an ironic totem of the triumph and immortality of the vampiric Juniper.

They also mark a pregnant pause in “Cast Down By Sadness,” which is very subtle and clever because the peacock has had long associations with the eternal, and “Sadness” treats a bizarre family dynamic that makes the Bates look like the Clevers. Likewise, the draping of the dead peacock over King Jumart’s head could be an ironic totemic triumph of the immortality of the vampiric Juniper.

Perhaps the most memorable animal in this set is Igname the Boar in “As They Rode Along the Edge.” Virginia Fur is a feral woman who rides through the forest on a wheel followed by fifty black and orange cats. She has wild, untamed, and be-twigged hair and a repugnant smell that recalls descriptions of the “The Debutante” hyena. Even in this uncivilized state, she’s still very beautiful and catches the attention of the proverbial king of the forest, Igname the Boar as well as a Saint Alexander, who wants to save her soul and civilize her.

The boar is described as transcendently beautiful, perhaps more of a God than what the local convent worships which makes sense because the boar is regaled in Celtic myth as a fertility and strength symbol. Rejected, the Saint is jealous of Fur’s choice in the Boar’s love over God’s, and scoops some hunters onto Igname’s whereabouts. Once murdered, his flesh is offered up to the Saint’s convent as tithe from a woman trying to save her marriage through divine intervention. As the rich and pious sit down to feast on Igname, Virginia and all of the other animals bust in and presumably kill everyone in sight to avenge the boar.

Was Ernst the boar, and Fur Carrington busting in on the Gestapo to avenge her broken love? The disillusionment and positioning of nature over divinity and notions of divine right at least nod to Carrington’s developing perspective of people who try to heal and meddle in other’s lives. It transcends simple father-daughter relationship. This is government, and as personified by Saint Alexander, God that Carrington is now taking on.

Banquets and Bones

There is a large emphasis in almost every story of decadent feasts and dishes. And some of it is actually food. In Joanna Moorehead’s biography, it is mentioned that Carrington became interested in historical cooking, and many of the dishes she lists off definitely seem like decadent repasts of old. In “Monsieur Cyril de Guindre”:  “…a plump fat chicken with stuffing made of brains and the livers of thrushes, truffles, crushed sweet almonds, rose conserve with a few drops of some divine liquor. This chicken…had…been suffocated in vapors of boiling patchouli:  its flesh was as creamy and tender as a fresh mushroom.” (p. 84). Emm, delicious?

I have a hard time determining from these culinary descriptions whether Carrington was vegetarian or not. The death of animals are not portrayed lightly, and while the feasts are described in lavish and meticulous detail, they don’t come off as appetizing. Of course, the diet of the author isn’t important, but it just would be interesting because were she vegetarian, her oeuvre could be considered a great effort toward animal rights advocation. Their importance and anthropomorphism almost deifies them. They are certainly equals to, if not more important, than the humans who populate Carrington’s cosmos.

And it certainly makes reading “The Sisters” and “White Rabbits,” which deals with vampirism and cannibalism more interesting. “White Rabbits” is about otherworldly neighbors who raise rabbits on rancid meet and turn them into stew every weekend. The lady of the house even expresses some affection for the creatures, but it seems fake and forced, as does the sudden interest in having the protagonist stay for a perpetual dinner.

“The Sisters” takes on a much added dimension in regards to caregiving. A healthy woman’s love life is basically ruined by the undying thirst of her chimerical, confined sister who demands “red” in lieu of her daily ration of honey. I can’t help but see this vampire, Juniper, as inspired by Carrington’s real life Psi vampire during the period of this writing—a family-assigned nurse that followed her everywhere she went in Spain once discharged.

Pigeon Fly: Love Games

Perhaps because the events of WWII and Carrington’s escape from Europe separated her from the Surrealists for a while, games and group dynamics play less of a role in this period. “Pigeon, Fly” is the one exception, and the eponymous word-association game is background noise to the protagonist as she paints. The real game in this story is, as is in many of the others, love. And more often than not, after the protagonist has found it, she looses it or finds it stolen, like in “Waiting” and “As They Rode Along.”

Love is also forbidden by disapproving wives (“The Seventh Horse”), and can takes over one’s identity (“Pigeon, Fly”). Of course, all of these variations on the theme harken back to autobiography. There is Ernst’s wife, Carrington’s love for him, and then her finding Ernst coupled with Peggy Guggenheim the whole time while she was interned in a Spanish asylum.

Relevant to this category:  Silver Press features one story missing from the Dorothy, a publishing project edition. “The Skeleton’s Holiday” is an excerpt from “a collaborative novel with Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Georges Hugnet, and Gisèle Prassinos, et. al. called The Man Who Lost His Skeleton.” It is a hilarious reprieve from the darker and more melancholy shades the other stories cast. It also features a Dadaist emphasis on shit which leads me to perhaps the biggest surprise I found during this reading…

Did…did she just make a fart joke?

“Still, don’t be sentimental. It all began the day of my grandfather’s first communion. He was only a lad, he didn’t realize the solemnity of the occasion. The evening before this Holy Day, the eve before he was to receive his Lord, he ate a plate of beans. And next morning at church…” Mcbologan hesitated. “It happened that a certain noise escaped him…”  (76)

This is from “The Three Hunters,” which features a band of brothers presenting a bizarre spectrum of disability and eccentricities brought on from a family curse. It is a wonderful piece of grotesquery, and the fact that the wrath of God was brought upon the family by a flatulent insult makes it maybe one of the best fart jokes, or at least gassy fairy tales, ever tooted—erm, told.

Literary Painting

But back to seriousness and craft! My personal favorite aspect of Carrington’s work is becoming presented in these stories. A new sensuousness is imbued throughout making the atmosphere more dimensional and visual.

If there is one thing I love about Carrington, it is how she uses color and texture to create verbal paintings. In “As They Rode Along,” Igname’s fur is made a contradiction in textures with the fruits, leaves, and plants with which he ornates himself. In “Pigeon, Fly” horses are “the color of ripe plums:  the color called roan in England.” And scenes like this one from “Monsieur Cyril de Guindre” read like an illuminated manuscript: “He didn’t notice Thibault, who had come silently into the room carrying a bouquet of moss roses. Thibaut, who was a great deal younger than Cyril de Guindre, had golden skin like the corpse of a child preserved in an old and excellent liqueur. He wore an elegant dressing gown the color of  trout flesh, and his face, behind the roses, was livid with anger.” (78) Later on, de Guindre’s daughter’s lips are “black and gleaming like the back of the beetle.” (83)

Those are just a few of examples of her prismatic poetry at work. She also perfumes her stories, and if one ever wondered what the world of Leonora Carrington might smell like, it’s patchouli. This is the predominant scent her protagonists use to scent paper, linens, and themselves.

While Carrington underwent a great deal of tragedy and torment from 1939 to 1941, the resulting maturity and disillusionment transmuted into these ten stories shows her mastering her craft and empowering her voice. By 1942, she moved to Mexico, where she would spend most  of her long life. I can’t wait to see how the stories morph alongside the young Surrealist muse who went over the edge and came back as a respected painter. and writer. Will they be informed like the earlier stories by her life, one that will inevitably be transform by the other roles she takes on—wife, mother, and soror mystic? I guess we’ll find out next week!

The post Hyenas, Horses, and Rabbits, Oh My! Part II appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

In the U.K., Carrington’s collected short works are available from the new feminist publishers, Silver Press. The Debutante and Other Stories is the first title in their catalog, and features an introduction by Sheila Heti and an afterword by Marina Warner, Carrington’s premier editor, translator, and champion.^[1] The big presses are in on the action as well with Little Brown/Virago’s launch of a brand new biography The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington by Joanna Moorhead.

While these centennial efforts are a much needed push towards a proper Carrington revival, it is still a bit messy and with important works still languishing in the stacks. Both Dorothy, A Publishing Project and Silver Press claim their new collections to be first complete editions of Carrington’s work, but they both have excluded longer short works, like the novellas Little Francis and The Stone Door, which originally appeared alongside the other tales in The House of Fear and The Seventh Horse. The content is also mostly the same with the exception of “The Skeleton’s Holiday,” which appears in The Debutante and Other Stories, and is excluded from The Complete Stories. The previously unpublished stories “The Sand Camel,” “Mr. Gregory’s Fly,” and “Jemima and the Wolf” also appear in both volumes.

The differences between the U.S. and U.K. editions are more nuanced. Silver Press has provided more historical and literary context (as well as better publishing history) with their front and back matter, as well as some nice artistic flourishes with a few photos and illustrations. The Dorothy version is a no-frills arrangement featuring the stories as they appeared in The House of Fear and The Seventh Horse collections. Silver Press ordered the tales chronologically. None of this makes one book more preferable. In fact, it makes their subtle differences compliment each other while demonstrating, perhaps, what each national market is interested in finding within Carrington. (This is an idea I will explore further after I’ve completed reading all of the stories).

Which brings me to the point of this introduction. This centennial revival has been a dream to surrealist readers. Now any reader can find most of Carrington’s work outside of academic anthologies and out-of-print collections, and can form their own library without a rare books budget. As a result, not only will this broaden the discussion on the role of women within Surrealism and Modernist work (as well as women’s literature, in general), but also restore the history of women authors working within the Weird and other Fantasist traditions.

That’s a huge reevaluation, and I am thrilled to be able to commemorate it and participate in it here with a special read-along of these releases. My plan is this: with both the Dorothy and Silver Press collections, I will review each Carrington story individually, then evaluate the collections as a whole. After that, we will move on to look at the NYRB’s releases,  Down Below, The Milk of Dreams, and last, but not least, we will discuss the life of Carrington herself as guided by Moorhead’s new biography.

So, without further a do, let’s party like hyenas:

NOTE ON SOURCE:  Because WFR.com is U. S. based, and the two collections share an almost exact TOC, I have decided to use the Dorothy, A Publishing Project collection for the majority of this read-along. However, a thorough evaluation of The Debutante and Other Stories, will follow after all of The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington have been presented.

The Debutante

“The Debutante” is perhaps Carrington’s most read and anthologized story. It first appeared in Andre Breton’s Anthology of Black Humor in 1940, highly significant as Carrington was one of two women writers included among the 45 contributors. (Child prodigy, Gisèle Prassinos, was the second). An anti-fairy tale full of desire and empty of consequence, the unnamed narrator is a wayward rich girl who prefers reading Swift and going to the zoo over dressing up and flirting with suitors. All of this makes the ball her mother is throwing her very vexing, and she persuades her best friend, a hyena, to attend the ball in her place.

After breaking the hyena out from the zoo and sneaking her home, the friends scheme to pass the beast off as the Debutante with her gown and a sinister mask made out of the maid’s face. The only dead give away that cannot be cloaked is the hyena’s smell, but the girl sends her down anyway. With the hyena successfully launched into society, the girl relaxes with Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels until a bat flies into her window and disturbs her. A harbinger of bad luck, the mother comes up and informs the girl her little trick didn’t work. Fed up with the guests’ snobbishness about her smell, the hyena tells them off, while devouring the maid’s face. She “bounds” through the window to return to her natural animal state leaving the Debutante to remain in hers.

Like most of Carrington’s work, this story is highly autobiographical and it’s easy to assume that Carrington is only expressed within this story as the eponymous debutante. However, Joanna Moorhead has a really interesting theory in The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington that Carrington broke herself apart into different aspects of her being, and her bestiary therefore represents individual aspects of her self. In this story, she is both the debutante and the hyena, a past and present evaluation (and catharsis) of her new life at the time of the story’s composition in 1937.

Before this year, Carrington was the daughter of one of the most affluent families in England. She was presented at court, and expected to marry rich in both money and title. Like the debutante, she longed for solitude among her books and paintbrushes and yearned for something more. All of that changed when she met Surrealist artist, Max Ernst. They fell in love, and she fled her abhorred debutante life to live with him in France where she found both sexual and artistic awakenings. From an autobiographical perspective, “The Debutante” is a transmutation. While Carrington begins as the debutante, she ends (in 1937, anyway) as the hyena.

While the hyena will go on to embody a much more mystical and deeper meaning in Carrington’s work, in this story, the hyena’s symbolism is simple. She embodies our deepest animal natures that we attempt to formalize and escape with civilizing notions. As a result, individuality can get lost within the regulations and expectations of society. Perhaps that is the significance of the girl reading Gulliver’s Travels, a satire that pits the eponymous protagonist against a series of conforming societies that Gulliver never quite fits into and ends up being exiled from in some shape or form.

Which makes the conversations between the hyena and the girl an interesting exchange of class and hierarchy. While the girl can’t even be bothered, the hyena—who is incarcerated and at the whim of her zookeepers—would love the chance at attending a ball because it conveys a life beyond the cage. It is somewhat resonant of “The Prince and the Pauper,” where each person holds a preconceived notion of the other person’s life. The Hyena thinks human society would be easy to infiltrate with a little small talk. The Debutante presumes civilizing rituals would tame the Hyena long enough for at least an evening. If you took these two presumptions and plugged them into a Venn Diagram, in the overlapping middle are both characters’ judgements on the upper class system and the notion of civilized society. With its emphasis on superficial ritual and protocol, everyone in the Debutante’s circle is so disconnected from the natural world that that they are oblivious. They don’t sense what is under their nose—literally—because all that is expected is for something to be there.

The girl is not impervious to this, either. Although she dismisses tradition, she’s still above it all and doesn’t hesitate to take what she wants. The person who gets the brunt of the horror is, of course, the help. When the hyena proposes killing the maid for the use of her face, the girl merely shrugs once the hyena promises the maid a swift death: “I certainly wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t hate having to go to a ball so much.” As long as it doesn’t inconvenience her, all bets are off. It is a sly depiction of aristocratic indifference—everyone and everything is disposable for their convenience.

Which is why I really like this story—it is sort of an antithesis to depictions of wealth at the time. The narrator could be seen as an anti-Flapper. She has no interest in glitz or status and finds society stifling rather than riveting. She would not fit in at Downton Abbey or Blandings Castle, or any other British homestead where the Bright Young Things were celebrated. No, “The Debutante” is one big eye roll to all of that, something most people within the middle classes would gawp at over their Gatsby party martinis. It’s a rebellion that seems dated, but due to the high tide of nostalgia washing over our recent entertainments, it is still able to bring into check how antiquated and stultifying the concept of aristocracy, and its attainments, still are.

The Oval Lady

“The Oval Lady” is a companion piece to “The Debutante.” It is about Lucretia, a sixteen year old aristocrat trapped in the proverbial tower that is her family manor. Given to standing and looking outside of the window, her strange loveliness and stillness attracts the unnamed narrator. Intrigued, the narrator enters the house to befriend Lucretia and is drawn into a magical playroom where the resident hobbyhorse wizard, Tartar, is able to manifest an imaginary game of horses into reality. The playmates are interrupted by the maid, who chides Lucretia for her arrested development, and drags her kicking and screaming to her father.

Before him, Lucretia is reprimanded. “This is the seventh time that I have had to punish you, and you are no doubt aware that in our family, seven is the last number. I am afraid, my dear Lucretia, that this time I shall have to punish you pretty severely.” He does this by burning the hobbyhorse. The narrator has gone unseen during this whole exchange, and is left in the dining room alone with the terrible sounds of a tortured horse coming from the playroom.

“The Inn of the Dawn Horse” by Leonora Carrington

Carrington’s bestiary is further developed here and recalls The Inn of the Dawn Horse, her self-portrait painted in 1937. We see Carrington and her hyena in a playroom with a white hobbyhorse hung overhead and a white horse running wild outside. Her untamed hair mimics the manes of both animals, connoting a new found connection with freedom, imagination, and inner natures. A liberty that isn’t necessarily won in either tale. However, if you look at some of the numerical patterns laid out in the story, their divination points towards escape and self-actualization.

The story begins and ends with sevens, and her age is even an indicator of this number that represents will, desire, and perfection. Perhaps seven is the last number in Lucretia’s family because it is at the summoning point of realization and determination. Threes and Fours occur less, but with maximum significance. The playroom is on the third floor, and with the magpie’s arrival, the group of three becomes four, thus opening up the imaginary realm for their game. In fact, right before Lucretia is transformed by the snow into a white horse, the magpie chants “Horse” three times. If threes are all about potential, growth, friendship, and creativity, then four is the manifestation of all of that. It seems that once the playroom has reached this magical capacity its transformation is dissolved when the Maid, a fifth wheel as it were, interrupts the reveries.

Perhaps the most poignant mystical queue Carrington uses is within the title itself. We know the oval is a special distinction: “For these aristocrats, even plates were oval, not round like ordinary people’s.” Nonetheless, the plates are the only objects that receive physical attribution. Lucretia is described in straight-angles and her father is simply geometric. Puzzling, as I presumed Lucretia was the title’s subject. Then I looked to the negative space of the story and realized that she was not necessarily the ovoid lady in question.

The Oval Lady is a cosmic egg. While the cosmic egg is usually meant for a larger creation of the world, here it is more personal and deals with not the creation, but the individual awakening, of Lucretia (and Carrington). Keeping Moorhead’s assessment in mind, perhaps the Oval Lady is the unnamed narrator who—with the exception of participating in Tartar’s game—is a terse observer who goes unnoticed by everyone but Lucretia. Perhaps she is Lucretia, an older conscious form, and is a fulfillment of Lucretia’s needed incubation in the unconscious.

Why not? The only detail we have about the narrator is that she is shorter and older than the girl. Could it be, then, that the Oval Lady is the narrator—a matured Lucretia— looking back on this pivotal scene, not through a window, but a memory portal? Through it, she is witnessing where Lucretia has reached a point of no return, a point where some cosmic eggs are about to be broken. It is the future looking to the past to meditate on the present. It’s kind of pure tarot.

The Royal Summons

A Queen goes mad, and a woman is summoned to a sovereign council to deal with it. The solution is to assassinate and replace her. All but the woman is eager to do the deed, and the council opts to select an assassin by playing a game of draughts (checkers). The woman, who is friends with the Queen, and actually there as her proxy, sees nothing good coming from this scene, but goes along with the crowd because figures her inadequacies at the game will disqualify her from the responsibility.

The Royal estate is magical, perhaps an old magic, but more Celtic than Gothic. Again, I am reminded of Alice in Wonderland, but rather than just Alice going against the Queen of Hearts, it’s her and the Queen verses the majority. But also the fantastical elements are more whimsical than sinister. There are bath sponges swimming in goat’s milk, flowers growing from woven tapestries, and talking trees, who seem to be the guardians of the regency. The woman and the council play checkers through Dawn, and to her dismay, the trees announce that she is the winner simply because she was the only one that didn’t cheat. She tries to run away from her fate, but the trees uproot and chase her down and force her to accept. So shaken is she by the Cypress that she chokes down her conscience and fulfills the mission.

I have to admit this story didn’t speak to me as readily as the last two. I don’t necessarily see Carrington within the female characters, and was thrown off by the female characters’ compliance when previously they were fierce rebels. A bone was thrown to me, though, when I learned that the French term for Draughts is Le Jeu du Dames, the game of Ladies. And while in the states we call the reigning monarch in our checkers Kings, in Europe they are Queens.

The role of Muse is every bit as constricting as debutante, and while Carrington found a place to explore and discover herself within Surrealism, she still had a patriarchy to contend with. Up until Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Leonor Fini came on the scene, women’s participation in Surrealism was considered inspirational and recreational—they were les femmes enfants that ignited l’amour fou. They also came with an expiration date, something Carrington witnessed in her relationship with Max Ernst.

Not only was he cheating on his second wife, the once femme enfant Marie-Berthe, with Carrington, but she found herself spending orgiastic, idyllic holidays among his former lovers. I don’t necessarily see Carrington as the jealous type, but I can see the emphasis on youth, beauty, and ingénue staples promoted amongst the much-older male leaders of the movement, as well as the laundry list of discarded women by 1937, as something of which the intuitive and skeptical painter stayed leery. So, perhaps one reading of this story could be its confrontation with the age-old feminist conundrum of in-fighting and competition championed by a misogynistic society that finds women disposable. As soon as someone is crowned Queen and she no longer fits the male ideal, they find another piece to depose her and take the crown.

A Man in Love

A caught thief is punished for stealing a melon by having to bare witness to her victim’s strange tale. Like “The Oval Lady,” it is a story where the narrator is brought inside a stranger’s house, only to find weird shenanigans afoot. In this instance, it’s a dead woman, named Agnes, lying on a bed of grass. Or, at least, the narrator thinks she’s dead. The fruit merchant claims otherwise, saying she has felt warm even though she’s been still for forty years.

How this bizarre situation occurred is what the merchant relays. On the night of their honeymoon, they sought lodging at a “sinister looking café” outside of Paris. It was being protected by a fox and two wolves, and the only person that answered their knocking was an old crone who barred them access. They refused to leave, and he eventually found a window to break into. They found themselves in a magical kitchen, ate of the animated vegetables, and slept on the floor among sentient rats and other unnamed horrors. But what really did the bride in was the drafts. Straight out of Poe, almost, it was a “strange draught” in the kitchen that chilled and killed—or comatosed—Agnes.

There are hints to what the classical tradition of the story’s magic is:  there are transformative creatures like the wolf and fox, the domestic alchemy found in the Crone’s kitchen, and the Crone herself. The mythpunking of the Crone is brilliant. Not only does it go beyond Celtic myth, but also addresses Western poetic notions of the death of a beautiful woman (Poe’s conceit remixed within Surrealism as Convulsive Beauty) and the worship of body over the female temple of the mind. Carrington illustrates this by showing the Crone (who embodies female wisdom within Celtic legend) only as a head and Agnes only as a body. The Crone protects her hearth through the wolf and fox manifestations, but when it is ultimately breached by the fruit merchant, poetic justice is served ironically via the poetic principle. The Crones female magic gives the Merchant, and what society wants from all its brides, a beautiful and eternal body that silently submits.

It’s a heavy scene the narrator is hearing, and she cuts it short by escaping when the merchant is overcome with tears. Man, was I relieved when she fled. A sense of dread haunts the vignette. Especially when the innocuous punishment was made ominous when the merchant tells the thief that he’d been waiting forty years to catch someone red-handed to punish them thus. Why? To alleviate loneliness? To unburden his soul? Or to lure the wicked into some kind of fairy tale switch-a-roo with the farm-to-table sleeping beauty? In any case, the dread she rightfully flees is the story’s real crux, and is made more mysterious from its old magic and revamped myths.

Uncle Sam Carrington

Carrington’s family was one of the wealthiest in Lancashire, but not the oldest. They were the nouveau riche. This major status flaw was of much worry and contention to Leonora’s mother, whose art was social climbing. She was obviously very brilliant at it, as the Carringtons were invited to all of the balls and Leonora herself was presented at George V’s court. Even so, Leonora would often hear her mother lament that someone wouldn’t acknowledge her in the street for her lack of pedigree.

This desired elitism, then, is what drives this story. An eight year old is burdened by her mother’s shame of her uncivilized relatives. She hates seeing her mother upset, and sets out on a journey to find solutions. As little girls often do in these circumstances, she finds herself lost and wandering into an enchanted forest. The first indicator is a vicious scene of two cabbages fighting like beta fish: “They were tearing each other’s leaves off with such ferocity that soon there was nothing but torn leaves everywhere and no cabbages.” Further on, she befriends a horse who takes her to see two ladies that deal in remedying “family shame.”

The Misses Cunningham-Joneses are refined and elegant witches living among ancient fauna and dignified knickers. This is glorious because the witch in the wood is usually anything but civilized. But when you meet the Misses Cunningham-Joneses, they aren’t sweating over a cauldron in their backyard, but playing draughts while dressed for tea.

They ask the child into their parlor and quiz her on her heritage. When the girl evades the questions, the elegant Crones warn her that they can only help if there is some kind of line connecting her family with “the affairs of the oldest and most noble families in England.” The girl thinks of some dead duchess’s lorgnette left in her mansion. The loose connection is tight  enough for the witches, and they disappear to work their magic.

The horse encourages the girl to spy on them. They find the ladies shouting Charm school axioms as spells while whipping their vegetables. When they finish, they return with two carrots and a zucchini. The girl exchanges a pot of jam and a fishing hook for the magical food. The vignette ends.

I am a bit dissatisfied with “Uncle Sam Carrington.”  While the previous stories are all vignettes, they all have circular and clever conclusion: the thief continues her interrupted action of stealing the melon; the councilwoman continues her deception to its final conclusion; the Debutante is caught in her deception; and the magic in “The Oval Portrait” ends with Tartar’s destruction. In “Uncle Sam” however, I don’t see any return or point to the story. While I love the imagery of the cabbages and the Charm School Crones, the adventure does not seem fully concluded where it ends. Like the duchess’s lorgnette, the ending is sufficient, but still very loose. However, sometimes fantastic stories are made better by their loose associations than anything else, so I’ll just shrug on to the next one.

The House of Fear

The same equine premise drives this tale as the last when the narrator befriends a horse who wants to show her something. She follows him to an establishment where “There were a number of creatures in ecclesiastical dress.” There is going to be a party in this bizarre cult menagerie and she is invited.  When she returns that night, she is enveloped within the team of these mystic horses and follows their charge to the Castle of Fear.

Fear, the castle’s mistress, is a one-eyed woman who may either be a really homely human or some kind of chimera: “She looked slightly like a horse, but was much uglier. Her dressing gown was made of live bats sewn together by their wings:  the way they fluttered, one would have thought they didn’t much like it.”

This is an annual get-together the women’s horse friend informs her, but the girl can’t help notice that no one seems excited about the events. She learns why:  First, the ancient castle is freezing; Second, Fear is an erratic and didactic hostess who has devised a series of impossible games for the evenings entertainment. The horses do as they are instructed, and enact the games to a horrifying effect: “…the horses began to beat the floor with their hooves as if they wanted to descend to the depths of the earth.” Despite the narrator’s trepidations, she stays still among the mayhem hoping Fear won’t see she isn’t (and can’t physically) participate. It ends on a note that is perhaps the most cryptic of the stories read so far: “It went on like this for twenty-five minutes, but…”

Those ellipses say more about the story than the story itself. The string of horses, as well as Fear, poke somewhat at the group-think dynamics that oiled and ran Surrealism. Fond of experimental games, the group always held organized parties where either a visual or verbal game was devised to explore further territory of the untapped conscious.     While that lead to a lot of the core group’s great work, perhaps Carrington found it a bit tiresome. Perhaps, like she did in England, she was feeling expected to always perform during these automatic parlor games. There is a great passage in this story about the narrator’s inner nature to stay home and just talk to herself, and I can’t help but see the “but…” as the conclusion of that musing. She doesn’t really want to participate in the group antics, but she’s in it now, and no matter how much she tries to remain invisible, they all are seeing her and watching how she performs.

“The House of Fear” was Carrington’s publishing debut. Introduced and illustrated by Max Ernst, it appeared as a limited edition chapbook in 1938. According to Joanna Moorhead, the pamphlet was more of a public validation of the couple’s blooming relationship than anything else. Ernst riffs on the horses and birds motif for their personal symbology they held for each other. He teases her about her inadequacies in a way only lovers do, not necessarily professional colleagues. Asking why, in any sort of professional seriousness, whether the writer you are introducing can “even read” seems like less than a good endorsement, I’m sure Ernst knew the intended audience would eat it up. With a print run of 120 copies, “The House of Fear” had no ambitions of being read beyond the Surrealist coterie. Therefore, Ernst knew that the audience he was declaring and exhibiting this love to would understand this contextualizing much more than the satirizing of the group itself.

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^[1] Alongside Katherine Talbot and Anthony Kerrigan, Warner worked with Carrington directly in the 1980s to translate her French and Spanish stories into English for two major collections The House of Fear:  Notes From Down Below and The Seventh Horse and Other Tales that were published by E. P. Dutton/Virago in 1988. Dutton also published Down Below at this time. These two works make up the majority of both Dorothy, A Publishing Project’s and Silver Press’s collection.

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