LEONORA CARRINGTON (1917–2011) was born in Lancashire, England, to an industrialist father and an Irish mother. She was raised on fantastical folk tales told to her by her Irish nanny at her family’s estate, Crookhey Hall. Carrington would be expelled from two convent schools before enrolling in art school in Florence. In 1937, a year after her mother gave her a book on surrealist art featuring Max Ernst’s work, she met the artist at a party. Not long after, Carrington and the then-married Ernst settled in the south of France, where Carrington completed her first major painting, The Inn of the Dawn Horse (Self-Portrait), in 1939. In the wake of Ernst’s imprisonment by the Nazis, Carrington fled to Spain, where she suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to a mental hospital in Madrid. She eventually escaped to the Mexican embassy in Lisbon and settled first in New York and later in Mexico, where she married the photographer Imre Weisz and had two sons. Carrington spent the rest of her life in Mexico City, moving in a circle of like-minded artists that included Remedios Varo and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Among Carrington’s published works is a novel, The Hearing Trumpet (1976), and two collections of short stories. A group of stories she wrote for her children, collected as The Milk of Dreams, is published by The New York Review Children’s Collection; her Complete Stories is published by Dorothy, a Publishing Project in the United States and by Silver Press in the United Kingdom.
MARINA WARNER’s studies of religion, mythology, and fairy tales include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, From the Beast to the Blonde, and Stranger Magic (National Book Critics Circle Award for Literary Criticism; Truman Capote Prize). A Fellow of the British Academy, Warner is also a professor of English and creative writing at Birkbeck College, London. In 2015 she was given the Holberg Prize.
DOWN BELOW
LEONORA CARRINGTON
Introduction by
MARINA WARNER
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1988 by Leonora Carrington
Introduction copyright © 2017 by Marina Warner
All rights reserved.
Cover image: Leonora Carrington, Crookhey Hall, 1987; © 2016 Estate of Leonora Carrington / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Princeton University Art Museum/Art Resource, NY
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Carrington, Leonora, 1917–2011, author.
Title: Down below / Leonora Carrington ; introduction by Marina Warner.
Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2017. | Series: NYRB Classics
Identifiers: LCCN 2016026859| ISBN 9781681370606 (softcover) | ISBN 9781681370613 (epub)
Subjects: | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Artists, Architects, Photographers. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women.
Classification: LCC PR6053.A6965 A6 2017 | DDC 823/.914—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026859
ISBN 978-1-68137-061-3
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
DOWN BELOW
Frontispiece
MONDAY, 23 AUGUST 1943
TUESDAY, 24 AUGUST 1943
WEDNESDAY, 25 AUGUST 1943
THURSDAY, 26 AUGUST 1943
FRIDAY, 27 AUGUST 1943
Postscript
Note on the Text
INTRODUCTION
THE YOUNG Leonora Carrington was determined to leap free of the dictates of her rich industrialist family: an early self-portrait shows a white horse (a perennial alter ego) leaping out of the window behind her, while a she-hyena (another familiar, another soul-sister), her udders leaking milk, comes docilely to the artist’s hand. Edward James, the connoisseur and a patron of the surrealists, described Leonora, then a student artist, as “a ruthless English intellectual in revolt against all the hypocrisies of her homeland.” In 1936, enrolled in the Ozenfant School of Fine Arts in London, she was already exploring her inner world, the “hypnagogic visions” that rose before her eyes when consciousness and the unconscious merge in the in-between of waking and sleeping, and she recognized, at the first International Surrealist Exhibition in London that year, an immediate kinship with the movement. Carrington’s mother had given her a copy of Herbert Read’s Surrealism. There she found, reproduced in the book, Max Ernst’s assemblage-painting Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale, which struck her to the heart, she said. Several decades later, she would still remember how it felt: “a burning, inside; you know how when something really touches you, it feels like burning.”
Max Ernst, born in 1891, has been somewhat eclipsed in the galaxy of artists of the period—Arshile Gorky, Méret Oppenheim, Lee Miller, Giorgio de Chirico—but at the time he was idolized: according to André Breton, the despotic arbiter of the surrealist pantheon, he was “the most magnificently haunted brain of our times.” Ernst was Loplop, Prince of Birds, the surrealist movement’s “Bird Superior,” eclipsing all others in fame and prestige with his effortless gaiety and cruelty of invention, his unstinting ability to replenish the store of fantasies and improvise new media, new methods. He had realized the doctrine Breton had proclaimed in the first manifesto: “N’importe quel merveilleux est beau, il n’y a meme que le merveilleux qui soit beau.” (Anything that is marvelous is beautiful, indeed only the marvelous is beautiful.)
When Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst met, she was nineteen years old and he was forty-six; she appeared to him as if directly summoned from the surrealist dream world, fulfilling every fantasy about the femme-enfant, the child-medium who excites the lover’s imagination and moves him to fresher, stronger visions. Belief in the penetrating faculty of youth, in the young woman-child’s closeness to mystery and sexuality, formed the crux of surrealist doctrine. In the fictional quest story L’Amour fou, published in 1937 (the same year Ernst met Carrington), Breton wrote a letter to his newborn daughter: “Let me believe that you will be ready then [on her sixteenth birthday] to embody the eternal power of woman, the only power before which I have ever bowed.” To Breton the femme-enfant was a figure of salvation, because “in her and only her there seems to me to dwell, in a state of absolute transparency, the other prism of sight, which we stubbornly refuse to take into account, because it obeys laws which are very different, and which male despotism must prevent at all costs from being divulged.” She was the “marvelously magnetic conductor,” “the only one capable of retrieving that age of wildness.” Ernst, in the autobiographical texts collected in Beyond Painting, recalled dreams teeming with such young women, and his frottages and collages conjure imaginary beings such as “the nymph Echo,” “Perturbation, my sister,” and Marceline-Marie, “the little girl who dreams of entering Carmel.” In the preface he wrote to the short story “The House of Fear,” Leonora was “la mariée du vent” incarnate, “the bride of the wind” of his desire, anticipated eleven years beforehand in the suite of prints Histoire naturelle.
Almost immediately, the couple left for Paris; she was to come back to England only once more, forty years later, for the funeral of her mother.
Soon after arriving in Paris, Leonora first exhibited her paintings in a show where the original sheets of Ernst’s collage novel of 1934, Une Semaine de bonté (A Week of Kindness, or The Seven Capital Elements)
, were also displayed, showing a sweet-faced and imperturbable young protagonist endlessly subjected to floods and mayhem, fire and assault in a wickedly adroit parody of the penny-dreadful picture romance. In this suite of images, and its earlier companions, La Femme 100 têtes (The Hundred Headless Woman) and Rêve d’une petite fille que voulut entrer au carmel (A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil), Ernst mocks the rituals and ideals of his Catholic boyhood—Passion Week, the love language of the Song of Songs, martyrdom stories. Leonora had this in common with Ernst, that she had been brought up a Catholic and reveled in mischievous blasphemy to scandalize the bien-pensants.
In Paris, the couple rented an apartment, but extremely painful conflicts with Marie-Berthe Aurenche, to whom Ernst was still very much married and who was living in the city, as well as political quarrels within the fractious surrealist movement, drove them south. In the spring of 1938, they left Paris, and there began for Leonora a brief period of settled life in the village of Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche. She was sculpting, painting and writing—short fantastic fictions in an eccentric French. An artist’s pamphlet, La Maison de la peur (The House of Fear), was the first to be published, in 1938, with its original spelling and grammar intact (Ernst in a foreword praised its “beautiful language, truthful and pure”), and signature collage illustrations by Ernst, composed from magazine engravings; a second collection, La Dame ovale (The Oval Lady), followed the year after. It included several of Carrington’s most laconic and memorable tales—“The Debutante,” “A Man in Love,” “The Royal Summons,” and “Uncle Sam Carrington”—again illustrated with fanciful, mock-solemn prints by Ernst.
These tales have Leonora’s unique tone of voice, at once naive and perverse, comic and lethal, with the deadpan innocence of the masters of the macabre. The simplicity of her syntax and the cool sequential structure of the narrative heighten the delinquent pleasure of her voice: “She sucked, sucked for long minutes. . . . She threw back her head and crowed like a cock. Afterwards she hid the corpse in the drawer of a chest.” The effect owes something to the restriction of using French, a language she had only studied with a French governess at home and in English convent schools. But unfamiliarity does not cramp her style; rather it sharpens the flavor of ingenuous knowingness that so enthralled the surrealists.
Ernst was an inspiring companion, she later acknowledged, with whom she discovered a new way of living; he could turn everything into play—cooking, keeping house, gardening. Memoirs of those days tell of excursions, general high spirits, practical jokes (there are some legendary surrealist exploits among them—Leonora cutting a guest’s hair while he slept and sprinkling it into an omelette for flavor, or dyeing sago black with squid’s ink and dishing it up with cracked ice and lemon as caviar for a collector paying a call). Although temperamentally she later resisted nostalgia and indeed reminiscing at all, she once let slip that this time just before war broke out was “an era of paradise.”
The small stone Provençal farmhouse still stands on a hill above the deep valley of the Ardèche, east of the great gorges and natural arches carved by the spate of the river. The outside wall, facing the unpaved incline to the house, was sculpted by Ernst with towering fantastic creatures: a willowy young woman with a pigeon and a fish on her head holds a curled catlike totem in her left hand; beside her, a huge hieratic beaked monster raises his arms, while a smaller winged demon issues dancing from the wall beneath him. Behind the house a fragmentary carving of a horse lies on the broken wall, another white horse’s head bares its teeth on the balustrade of the terrace. The beaked giant is easy to recognize as Ernst’s alter ego, Loplop, Prince of Birds, and his partner as the mythologized figure of the surreal muse, incarnate in Leonora; the horse is a recurrent figure of release and power in her imagery. The inner walls of the courtyard are decorated in relief and painted, though—and this was more than twenty years ago—the pigments had faded and the concrete and plaster were eroding.
But Ernst’s overweening ego (according to Peggy Guggenheim, he got cross when someone suggested Napoleon was the greater genius), combined with the coercive, cruel fantasies of surrealist sexuality, infuse many scenes that Leonora wrote and painted at the time with a degree of terror that rises above the usual range of the macabre tale. Célestin des Airlines-Drues, a character in the story “Pigeon, Fly!,” wears the striped socks and cloak of feathers in which Leonora dressed Ernst in the portrait she painted of him in 1945. Here he is a frightening vampire, not an absurd or tender one. He asks the narrator to paint a picture of his dead wife—who turns out to be herself. Art becomes a death sentence, or at least a prophecy of a fatal conclusion.
Although they collaborated on the transformation of the house in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche, Ernst did not encourage Leonora’s art as much as he did her writing. It is easy to imagine, and perhaps not unjust, that he could inhabit her stories more fruitfully, and certainly his works of the period incorporate many Carrington motifs—horse-headed figures, journeys through craggy and forested landscapes out of the fairy-tale reading of her youth, mane-headed young women, emaciated ghouls.
The older artist, who had been married most of his adult life (Marie-Berthe was his second wife), also expected his femme-enfant to be a femme de ménage, and to provide for the stream of guests who flowed in from Paris and London and other points and stayed to talk, play, dress up, quarrel, tease one another, explore, and feast and drink—the house had its own vineyard. There is a series of photographs, taken by Lee Miller when she and Roland Penrose came to visit, which show Leonora in the kitchen, wearing a lace blouse and a long skirt that Leonor Fini, one of Ernst’s “pets” —as Guggenheim later sharply put it—had bought in the Marché aux Puces in Paris. Later, on the same contact sheet, Ernst cradles his child bride, beaming to himself. What emerges from Leonora’s steady look and the vigorous tilt of her head is that she was holding her own, but that it was hard, for she was being wrapped up in so much, posed in borrowed clothes, given a new language, cast to perform the role of the marvelous erotic and farouche child-wife to her much older lover. Fini painted her on several occasions at this time as a kind of Pre-Raphaelite Joan of Arc in black armor, engaged in enigmatic rites.
The charades, the fancy dress, the interplay of roles, both adoptive and prescribed, influence the fantastic metamorphoses in the stories: in an early tale, Arabelle Pégase, with her “dress made entirely of the heads of cats,” represents another aspect of the immortal figure of Fear, whose house Leonora imagined herself to have entered. She’s often Gothic in her humor, but the horror has its face towards real, endured experience. In this, she brings to mind Mary Shelley, who also fantasized improbable things and managed to survive Romanticism.
Carrington’s own ambiguous homage to Ernst, published in New York in 1942 in the surrealist magazine View, evokes him in his persona of the Bird Superior, seizing Fear, of the many-furred hide and the hooves like white bats: “The Bird Superior ties fear to the flames of the fire by her tail and dips his feathered arms in the colour. Each feather immediately begins to paint a different image with the rapidity of a shriek . . . .” This ferocious description of the making of art can be applied to Leonora herself: beneath the oneiric lyricism of her images, Fear lies pinioned, trying to break free.
In later years, Leonora would become angry when fans—like myself—showed intense curiosity about that early phase of her life. She once wrote me a furious letter—and letters from her were rare—because something I had written about her appeared with the photograph of Ernst leaning, blissed out, eyes closed, on her shoulder. Those old days were long ago for her, and she was not pleased when the intervening decades of work were not given their due. “A lot of people want to make me into gossip,” she said, “and it’s missing the point of anybody to make them into gossip.”
When Leonora was born in 1917, the Carrington family was living in a huge Lancashire mansion called Crookhey Hall, and though they left it ten years later for a somewhat less imposing pile, i
t is Crookhey (Crackwood in her stories), with its gardeners and huntsmen and maids and “lavatory Gothic architecture,” which provided the principal raw material for the many sites of captivity, suffocation, and punishment in her work, including the asylum in Spain and its grounds, as mapped in Down Below.
Her father, Harold, was a textile tycoon who sold the family concern, Carrington Cottons, to the large industrial company Courtaulds and became a principal shareholder of Imperial Chemicals Industries (ICI). His own father, a mill hand, had shown a flair for invention when he patented a new attachment for the looms; it led to the development of Viyella, a soft, blended cotton-and-wool twill every English child knows for its salutary properties of warmth, lightness, and durability.
The Carringtons were northerners, entrepreneurial, rough-and-ready. “You know what my father was most like?” Leonora once remarked. “A mafioso.” By contrast, her maternal side, the Moorheads—Irish, Catholic—were easygoing and interested in magic and folklore. Her mother, Mairi, was the daughter of a country doctor from County Westmeath; she was “a complete mythologist,” according to Leonora, and wove tall tales about the family, discovering connections far and wide, from the novelist Maria Edgeworth to Franz Joseph I of Austria. Leonora remembers a portrait of the emperor turning into an “ancestor.” Mairi would read aloud the books of her favorite Irish writer, James Stephens, while Harold preferred the yarns of W. W. Jacobs—Gothic tales like “The Monkey’s Paw.” The tone of fey whimsy of Stephens’s The Crock of Gold sometimes sounds in Leonora’s writings; likewise, she turned to good account Jacobs’s mix of macabre black magic and English heartiness. She also absorbed the English and Scottish nursery blend of nonsense, fabulism, comedy, and mysticism (Beatrix Potter, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, George MacDonald) and was told more ghost stories by her Irish nanny, Mary Kavanagh, the daughter of a prison warder. She had joined the family as a sewing maid at the age of sixteen or seventeen. (In one version of Down Below, Leonora describes her nanny as “my wet nurse, who had been with me till my twentieth year.”) It was Nanny who was sent by her parents to fetch her back from Spain, and who arrived after a horrendous fortnight in the cabin of a warship (tradition has a submarine, but . . .) to find her darling girl in a madhouse. The plan was to go to South Africa to see out the war, but in the event, the rescue mission failed, as Leonora ran away to Portugal and then to the United States (but this is getting too far ahead of the story).
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