Leonora preferred to ignore the rich side of her background and recall instead that Moorhead is a Gypsy name. Nevertheless, according to the custom of the English upper classes, she was sent to boarding school, where she did not settle. With the help of the bishop of Lancaster, she was then moved to a second Catholic convent, St. Mary’s, Ascot, in Berkshire, but the nuns were disturbed by her way of writing backwards with her left hand while writing forwards with her right (later in life, she also painted with both hands at the same time). When this school also gave up on her, Leonora went to Italy to be “finished” at Miss Penrose’s Academy in the Piazza Donatello, Florence. There she began looking at the artists who were to shape her vision, inspiring her intimacy with the supernatural, her sequential storytelling, her use of tempera, and her love of cinnabar, vermilion, umber, earth colors, and gold: the Tuscan masters of the trecento and quattrocento (Sassetta, Francesco di Giorgio, Giovanni di Paolo, Fra Angelico).
She came back to England determined to be an artist, but her father considered painting “horrible and idiotic”: “You didn’t do art,” she recalled him saying. “If you did, you were either poor or homosexual, which were more or less the same sort of crime.” She was obliged to “come out,” that is, “do the season,” which was another custom of her class; her parents gave her a showy dance at the Ritz—there is a splendid official photograph of her in white satin and lilies, being presented at court in the last year of George V’s reign. She was destined for a life of prosperous tedium.
These experiences return, nightmarishly, in her stories, especially the one called “The Debutante.” But in the teeth of her father’s opposition, she insisted on returning to art school, and enrolled at Ozenfant’s.
The spell in the “paradise” of Provence was to be cut short: what Leonora called “Max’s genital responsibilities” took him to Paris; soon afterwards, war broke out, the Germans invaded, and France collapsed. She captures these times of loneliness and struggle in the stories she was writing at the time, which include the novella Little Francis, and they give strong warning signs of the danger she was in and the role of her irrepressible creativity in withstanding the worst. She had been curious to enter the house of fear, but she had not expected that its doors would shut on her so ineluctably.
During the winter when Ernst left her in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche while he sorted out his marriage, Leonora was taken in by Alphonsine, the local café’s proprietress: “I didn’t think he’d ever come back, I didn’t know where I was going. I was like a monster. At least I felt like some sort of performing animal, a bear with a ring in its nose. I was l’Anglaise, and the café, which never had anyone in it, became crowded.” She first transforms this experience in Little Francis, adding the story about a woman who, seduced by a bullfighter who’s a nose fetishist, embellishes her nose with tattoos and a ring. She said of such an experience, “I think it’s death practice.”
In 1939, after the French declared war on Germany, Ernst was arrested as an enemy alien and sent to a camp at Largentière. Leonora followed him there, supplying him with paints and other materials, and lobbying influential friends in Paris for his release. She—and other contacts—succeeded, and Ernst returned to Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche. Early the following year, after the Germans crossed the Maginot Line, he was arrested again—he was a known undesirable to the invaders; his painting La Belle Jardinière had toured the country in the Nazis’ show of “degenerate art.” This time, he was imprisoned farther away, at Les Milles near Aix, with hundreds of other “aliens” (including Hans Bellmer, who painted his portrait there). Leonora again traveled to Paris to sue for his freedom, but she now found closed doors everywhere. She returned to Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche and, unable to do more to rescue him and aware of the advancing German army, her friends scattering in panic, she suffered an attack of deep despair, leading to the symptoms she describes so harrowingly in Down Below.
Eventually she was helped to leave France by an English friend, who took her across the Pyrenees; she handed over the house and all its contents into the safekeeping of one of the villagers before leaving (when Ernst, before his final escape from France, found his way back to Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche, he was denied access to the property). In Madrid, after erratic and highly disturbed episodes, Leonora was hospitalized, then transferred to the asylum of Dr. Morales in Santander and given a course of drug therapy with Cardiazol, which induced epileptic fits of appalling severity.
Her descent into madness consecrated her as a surrealist heroine, regardless of the cost of her sufferings. The “dérèglement de tous les sens” (the derangement of all the senses) sought by Rimbaud did not bring about the “breakthrough” to enlightenment the surrealist merveilleux promised, and Down Below reflects this ambivalence. “After the experience of Down Below, I changed,” Leonora remembered. “Dramatically. It was very much like having been dead. It was very clear, I was possessed. I’d suffered so much when Max was taken away to the camp, I entered a catatonic state, and I was no longer suffering in an ordinary human dimension. I was in another place, it was something quite different. Quite different.”
Magouche Fielding, who in the forties was married to Arshile Gorky in New York, once commented drily, “Surrealism wasn’t good for your health. I don’t think anyone would take it as a cure. It was like filleting fish, taking out the backbone of quite ordinary people. Max Ernst, now, was as strong as an ox.” Leonora often referred to the “terror” she felt and continued to feel, and although she fortunately never had to contend again with anything like the prolonged bout of insanity described in Down Below, she feared a recurrence.
In the postscript appended here to the 1943 version of Down Below, she tells the story of her escape from Spain, as she remembered it in 1987. She had married Renato Leduc, a Mexican diplomat whom she had first met with Picasso in Paris—Leduc was a bull-fighting crony of the artist’s. Meanwhile, Guggenheim was coming to the rescue of many of the surrealists, including Ernst, with whom she fell painfully in love and whom she took to Lisbon, along with her former husband Laurence Vail, his wife the writer Kay Boyle, and half a dozen children from various marriages, in order to take the Clipper, the first of the transatlantic passenger planes. Lou Straus, Ernst’s first wife and the mother of his only child, Jimmy, did not escape; she was deported from a Paris detention camp to Auschwitz on one of the last trains, on June 30, 1944.
In Lisbon, Max and Leonora met again; she recalled that after all her recent ordeals, she found herself free at last from the spell Loplop had once exercised over her. Guggenheim observes, in her memoirs: “God knows how she ever got out of the place [the asylum] but after she did, she met the Mexican in Lisbon and he looked after her. He was like a father to her. Max was always like a baby and couldn’t be anyone’s father. I think she felt she needed a father more than anything else, so as to give her some stability and prevent her from going mad again.”
Leonora always spoke warmly of Guggenheim, saying that she was remarkably generous; although Ernst’s clear attachment to Leonora caused her much pain, Guggenheim offered to pay for Leonora’s passage to New York on the plane with them. Leonora refused, and when the Guggenheim household left, on July 13, 1941, “we passed over the American boat that was carrying Leonora and her husband to New York.”
In New York, their interwoven lives continued: the surrealists in exile produced papers, journals (VVV and View), and, with Guggenheim’s help, exhibitions. Leonora’s art was changing. She had seen Bosch’s paintings in the Prado in Madrid and in Lisbon and their influence was profound, as anyone who has encountered her work knows. Bosch paints “the imaginal space we all live in,” which she felt begins to take over more strongly as one grows older. During the war she developed the intricately visionary style of her mature art, peopling her panels with dreamscapes, imaginary beings, smoking volcanoes, ice floes. The portrait of Ernst she made at this time seems to offer a reply to Ernst’s grandiloquent 1940 work The Robing of the Bride; the red fea
thers of his mermaid’s-tail cloak echo the scarlet feathered robe of the bride herself. In the Carrington image, the white unicorn, her animal familiar, appears twice—frozen in the icy landscape and again trapped in the glass lantern Ernst holds in his hand. He gave her a portrait in turn, Leonora in the Morning Light, showing her rising out of a jungle, parting its tentacular growth; during this period he also painted Spanish Physician, showing a Leonora-like young woman screaming as she runs from a monstrous minotaur-like beast.
In the eighties, when she was living in New York, Leonora resisted inquiry into the interactions between the two artists, their imagery and symbols; it was eerie, when I visited the Metropolitan Museum with her in 1987, to pass by, without any comment from her, the painting entitled Napoleon in the Desert (1940), in which Ernst portrays himself with a horse’s head on a rocky outcrop, while beside him, a beautiful bride figure holds herself at a distance, unmoved by his presence.
Down Below gives an unsparing account of the experience of being insane. As an act of truth-telling memory, it derives its power from this antinomy at its heart, that it is a narrative, apparently rationally composed and accurately recalled, about hair-raisingly unhinged behavior and cruel, scientific therapies that induced states of personal annihilation. Breton encouraged Leonora to write it; from his point of view, the English artist, wild muse, femme-enfant, had realized one of the most desirable ambitions of surrealism, the katabasis of the modern age, the voyage to the other side of reason. In the preface to Ernst’s Hundred Headless Woman, Breton had spoken of “our will to absolute disorientation.” She was Nadja retrouvée, the heroine of Breton’s text returned from the lower depths, an instrument of l’amour fou and its victim. She had truly experienced the derangement Breton and Paul Éluard had only been able to simulate in L’Immaculée Conception in 1930, though their impersonation of insanity later won Jacques Lacan’s applause.
Down Below was composed with hindsight, and so it differs from the many pieces of fiction Leonora was writing earlier, as events unfolded. Down Below is factual in approach and style, written in the form of a diary, and offers a unique act of remembrance, almost incredibly circumstantial; it combines lucid retrieval and hallucinatory madness in a record that is the persevering work of an artist and a writer at the same time as the haphazard record of a patient. The title echoes mythological and literary descents into hell (Dostoyevsky and Rimbaud, as well as classic precursors familiar to her after her religious upbringing), but at the same time the depths—“down below”—are represented as an actual safe place, a sanctuary within the grounds of the asylum, where the writer dreams of going because there the horrific treatments (the agonizing injections with Cardiazol) will stop. As a testament to madness, it is split between visionary illumination and profound psychological distress. It is a classic of the genre, ranking among the most lacerating messages from the other side—Carl Jung’s The Red Book: Liber Novus, Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, and Henri Michaux’s Miserable Miracle.
Like several of Leonora Carrington’s writings, Down Below has had a complicated history of migrations and variants: she first wrote a short version in English in 1942 in New York and showed it to Janet Flanner, who was then working as a publisher but, surprisingly, wasn’t interested. This draft was lost when Leonora left for Mexico (she was always marvelously unworldly about her property, intellectual and other); however, Pierre Mabille, a friend of hers in the fugitive community there, a surgeon and an intimate of the surrealist circle in France, urged her to reconstruct it. The “you” in the opening paragraph is Mabille, and in August 1943, she began to relate this version in the abandoned Russian embassy in Mexico City, where she, Mabille, and other refugees were squatting, on the third anniversary of the events she recalls. Leonora then talked it through in French to Jeanne Megnen, Mabille’s wife, who established the first published version in French. This was then translated back into English by Victor Llona for the surrealist journal VVV, edited in New York by David Hare and, for a period, Marcel Duchamp. Down Below came out in the February 1944 issue, soon after the short story “The Seventh Horse”; nearly two years later, Henri Parisot, the publisher-editor who had brought out Leonora’s stories before the war, was able to publish it in France, where it appeared in the series L’Age d’Or immediately after the war ended.
This journey to and fro, between oral and written versions, and French and English translations, accounts in part for the major difference in tone between Down Below and Leonora’s other writings. As a testament to the horrors of psychosis, as evidence of medical treatment and convulsive drug therapy, Down Below ranks beside autobiographical fiction of such desperate conditions, as captured in Antonia White’s The Sugar House, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water. It often strikes occult resemblances with Leonora’s novella The Stone Door, but it has only moments of her distinctive drollness. On a literary level, however, Down Below belongs more closely to the genre of autobiographical record advocated by Breton and practiced by him in both Nadja and L’Amour fou; tracing off daily experience, the writer-seeker uncovers marvelous patternings brought about by le hasard objectif (objective chance) and reaches illumination. In its pitilessness, too (though it can provoke pity, Down Below shows very little to herself or towards others), the work reflects surrealism’s cult of madness, especially female madness, as another conductor to the invisible world.
Like Gisèle Prassinos, the child poet whom the surrealists idolized, or Violette Nozière and Lizzie Borden, who as delinquents—as murderers—likewise inspired their admiration, or the convulsionary women of St. Médard in the eighteenth century and the hysterics whom Jean-Martin Charcot had photographed in attitudes of despair and desire, Leonora in her crazed state met surrealist ideals of escape from bourgeois convention. Her torments confirmed her status as a kind of hierodule, a holy and erotic nymph who uniquely knew by instinct certain delinquent mysteries that the older men of surrealism felt they could not reach without her help.
“The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope,” she declares in Down Below. Her experiences of relations between herself and the world—animals, rocks, other people—share distortions of perspective along these lines, microcosms magnified, details projected into far horizons, occult meanings encrypted in random patterns. Breton elevated the idea of random chance into a principle of art, and the narrator here remembers the coherence she found in scattered circumstances, the conspiracies she detected, and the bewildering number of people she met, who make appearances like so many phantoms of a nightmare from which you cannot wake. As in case studies such as Victor Tausk’s “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia,” Leonora felt that the doctors and others around her—the sinister Van Ghent, Mr. Gilliland (the agent of her father’s company ICI), the Moraleses (father and son—she draws a fine portrait of one of them), the nurses Piadosa and Frau Asegurado, José, Alberto—were exercising dark powers over the world as well as punishing her for her unique grasp of their nefarious plans. Down Below catches very powerfully her own utter disempowerment and at the same time her conviction—insane, crazy—that only she could see what was truly happening. After arriving in Madrid, she describes how she went to the hotel room of her friend Catherine, who had helped her cross the Pyrenees: “I begged her to look at my face; I said to her: ‘Don’t you see that it is the exact representation of the world?’”
As a narrator, the author/memoirist swerves between viewpoints: she deploys huge narratives from afar—her figures can be tiny—and then works in embroiderer’s detail, close-up, introducing smaller creatures into the fabric of the larger ones. The map of the asylum at Santander, where the longed-for haven of “Down Below” appears in a flaming halo, includes a minute drawing near the “apple trees” of a horse buckled and upturned, as if felled by a cannon shot: a self-portrait of herself undergoing the violent treatments she describes?
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nbsp; It is significant that Carrington often painted faces with unmatched eyes, like The Ancestor (1968), or the piebald dogs with a patch round one eye who appear in Bird Seizes Jewel (1969), as well as several more paintings of the late eighties. Her disoriented consciousness in Down Below never returned destructively again (though, as I say, she lived in fear that it might), but she continued to inhabit, for oneiric and expressive purposes, a shifting angle of view and doubled vision both inside and outside the narrating self. Or perhaps I should say, selves? For she was convinced of the plurality of the self and believed in the Buddhist doctrine of metempsychosis (the migration of the soul into other bodies after death), and felt sympathy with all matter, without hierarchy. In Down Below, she describes how she sought “through gentleness an understanding between the mountain, my body, and my mind,” how she talked to animals “through the skin, by means of a sort of ‘touch’ language. . . . I could draw near animals where other human beings put them to precipitate flight.”
Since her childhood, Leonora Carrington had been a quester, looking for a scripture to match her belief in the metaphysical dimensions of existence. She continued to be fascinated by divination, magic, horoscopes, and sorcery of all kinds. Although her endless metaphysical search was undertaken in earnest, it was never carried out with solemnity. At one time she was deeply involved in alchemy, but she brought to its tabulations the light fantastic touch of a fairy-tale wizard rather than the bombast of a guru. Although she believed that there is something to find—the philosopher’s stone—she did not believe that she had special powers to reach it or that she ever would. True to character, she could see the comic side of her lifelong search, secular and religious, while keenly continuing to pursue it. Her encounter with the spiritual leader and teacher G. I. Gurdjieff inspired her sparkling satire of Lightsome Hall and its guru, Dr. Gambit, in The Hearing Trumpet, a comic tour de force, which was written in the fifties and published in English in 1976. For many years she was a disciple of Tibetan Buddhism, making several retreats, both in the Tibetan monastery in Scotland, where she first went with Anne Fremantle in the early seventies (the last time she visited Britain), and in upstate New York during the eighties. Drawing on a range of mystical symbols with eclectic high spirits, she offers images and enigmas that resemble koans, the Zen puzzles that, having no solution in the realm of reason, produce the release of laughter.
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