The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington

by Leonora Carrington

  THE COMPLETE STORIES OF LEONORA CARRINGTON

  Stories and Translations Copyright © 2017 The Estate of Leonora Carrington Introduction Copyright © 2017 Kathryn Davis

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, without permission in writing from the publisher. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  First Edition

  ISBN: 978-0-9973666-4-8

  Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9973666-5-5

  Art on cover:

  Leonora Carrington, Self-Portrait, ca. 1937-38. Oil on canvas. 25 9/16 × 32 in.

  The Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection, 2002 (2002.456.1)

  © 2016 Estate of Leonora Carrington / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

  Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA

  Image source: Art Resource, NY

  The publisher wishes to thank Meghan Lamb

  Design and composition by Danielle Dutton

  Printed on permanent, durable, acid-free recycled paper in the United States of America

  Dorothy, a publishing project

  St. Louis, MO

  DOROTHYPROJECT.COM

  THE COMPLETE STORIES OF LEONORA CARRINGTON

  Introduction by Kathryn Davis

  Translations from the French by Kathrine Talbot

  Translations from the Spanish by Anthony Kerrigan

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  THE HOUSE OF FEAR

  The Debutante

  The Oval Lady

  The Royal Summons

  A Man in Love

  Uncle Sam Carrington

  The House of Fear

  THE SEVENTH HORSE

  As They Rode Along the Edge

  Pigeon, Fly!

  The Three Hunters

  Monsieur Cyril de Guindre

  The Sisters

  Cast Down by Sadness

  White Rabbits

  Waiting

  The Seventh Horse

  The Neutral Man

  A Mexican Fairy Tale

  Et in bellicus lunarum medicalis

  My Flannel Knickers

  The Happy Corpse Story

  How to Start a Pharmaceuticals Business

  My Mother Is a Cow

  PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED

  The Sand Camel

  Mr. Gregory’s Fly

  Jemima and the Wolf

  NOTE ON THE PUBLICATION

  NOTE ON THE TRANSLATIONS

  INTRODUCTION

  “Everything happened after I was born.” So declared Leonora Carrington—that most magnificent of creatures, composed of equal parts giantess and egg, hyena and horse, “beautiful, a blinding white all over, with four legs as fine as needles, and a mane which fell around her long face like water”—in refusing to answer a question about her family history. “I don’t think in terms of explanation,” she elaborated. “I was all, all was in me; I rejoiced at seeing my eyes become miraculously solar systems, kindled by their own light …”

  Her habit of refusal of the world she was born into began early and she kept at it her whole life long. Like the steadfastly defiant daughter in “Jemima and the Wolf”—who rejects the doll that is a gift from her mother, saying “Isn’t it enough that the world is full of ugly human beings without making copies of them?”—Leonora refused to behave the way a young girl is supposed to behave, getting herself expelled from two Catholic boarding schools in short order. “I had an allergy to collaboration,” she said, as meanwhile she addressed herself to the task of learning how to levitate. I like to imagine her drifting through the vast echoey passageways of Crookhey Hall, the “lavatory gothic” mansion she lived in until she was ten, her feet hovering just inches above the ground and her dark Celtic hair spreading wildly around her small white face as she passed through room after room after room, all the while not knowing what she would come upon next or what hole she might fall into, including the one that brought her at last (by way of a French farmhouse and a Spanish sanatorium) to the equally implausible “house of the Sphinx” in Mexico City where she spent the last sixty years of her life, painting and sculpting and writing and cooking up magical potions in the kitchen.

  She was born on April 6, 1917, in Lancashire, England—the same day the United States declared war on Germany, setting in motion events that would later have a profound effect on her life. “The only person present at my birth,” she once confided to a cousin, “was our dear and faithful old fox-terrier, Boozy … My mother was away at the time.” Leonora’s father was a textile magnate and principal shareholder in Imperial Chemicals; he appears in her paintings as Lord Candlestick, presiding in his sleek phallic way over “banquets, bazaars, meetings, symposiums, discussions, board meetings, race meetings, and simple meatings where meat was eaten.” From the outset Leonora gravitated toward her Irish mother and her Irish nanny, both of whom satisfied her appetite for tales driven by the marvelous. A changeling baby becomes a black dog, a glowing bar of iron, a sack of wool. A little girl walks through a looking glass. Fairies steal the souls of the dead and change them into butterflies. A man who is also a salmon ends up caught, roasted, and eaten by the Queen of Ireland.

  In Leonora’s stories things are always eating other things or being eaten, forewarned about getting “roasted in hot fat, stuffed with parsley and onions,” the cooking utensils “half full of what look[s] like green food” but is “a fluffy growth of fungi,” a hoard of carnivorous white rabbits all the while masticating chunks of meat before they are, themselves, made into stew. Nothing is what it seems to be in these stories, a philosophy Leonora applied in her own kitchen, where she was always more alchemist than chef, mixing tapioca with squid ink and serving it as caviar, snipping hair from the head of a despised sleeping guest and cooking it into the next morning’s omelet.

  Following her failure with the nuns, Leonora briefly attended Miss Penrose’s Academy of Art in Florence, was expelled from a Parisian finishing school, was presented at the court of George V, attended a coming-out ball at the Ritz, and ended up studying art in London with Amédée Ozenfant. It was he who introduced her to the classic rules of perspective she used to great effect when creating the eerie interior spaces that haunt her paintings; he also was instrumental in arranging her introduction to Max Ernst, about whose Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale she once said: “You know how when something really touches you, it feels like burning, a burning inside.”

  Leonora was nineteen, Max was forty-six and on his second marriage; he prevented her beer bottle from rolling off the table with his finger. Leonora was the femme enfant every male Surrealist dreamed of having for his very own, the woman-child whose naïve soul might provide a conduit to the unconscious. They ran off together, first to Paris and from there to the farmhouse in southern France where they lived for two idyllic years, painting and writing and tending the grape vines and having lots of sex. In 1940 the Germans crossed the Maginot Line and the idyll came to an end. Max was arrested; convicted as a “degenerate artist,” he was interned in a prison camp. Leonora lost her mind. The world “jammed,” to use the term she employs in Down Below, her novel set in the asylum where she eventually ended up and where she was subjected to a violent treatment system involving Cardiazol, a drug that mimicked the effects of shock therapy.

  It’s impossible not to read Leonora’s life story as one of her own stories, events in both instances governed by the s
ame uncanny operation of cause and effect. “A box of Tabu powder with a lid, half gray and half black, meant eclipse, complex, vanity, taboo, love,” says the narrator of Down Below, making an arrangement of the objects she’s been allowed to bring with her to Bedlam. “My nail buff, shaped like a boat, evoked for me a journey into the Unknown, and also the talisman protecting that journey: the song ‘El barco velero.’ My little mirror was to win over the Whole. As for my Tangee lipstick, I have but a vague memory of its significance …”

  In the end it was her Irish nanny who came to the rescue, whisking her away in a submarine, though the submarine may have been a warship and the nanny may have been Leonora’s cousin—accounts of this event vary. In any case, eventually Leonora slipped out the backdoor of a restaurant in Lisbon to avoid being sent to yet another asylum, this one in South Africa. Despite her deep aversion to bullfighting she married Renato Leduc, a retired bullfighter, in order to get to New York, then moved with him to Mexico City, where the two of them amicably divorced. It was in Mexico City that she met and married Chiki Weisz, a Hungarian resistance photographer, and together they had two sons. Even though Leonora described Mexico as “a familiar swimming pool with sharks in it,” she lived there for the rest of her long and remarkably productive life. I think it’s safe to say her Irish soul (as well as her British tea and her French lingerie) were brought along to keep her company.

  There are writers who describe the unfamiliar (flensing blubber, for example) and manage to make it feel familiar; there are writers who describe the ordinary (a day in Dublin) and manage to make it new. It’s a function of the marvelous to be able to do two things at once, to put together two things that seem to be in conflict to create something astonishing. In “The Debutante” Leonora tells the story of a young girl not unlike herself who is forced to endure the dread prospect of a coming-out ball until her friend, who also happens to be a hyena, agrees to go in her place. Of course the minute the hyena opens her mouth and says “I don’t know how to dance, but at least I could make small talk” you know you’re no longer in a world ruled by routine social obligation but in a fairy tale world in which a hyena is able to don a gown, wear gloves to cover her paws, and walk around on her hind legs in order to accustom herself to wearing high-heeled shoes. The catch is that in a fairy tale, you’d know it’s not a real hyena, whereas in Leonora Carrington’s stories the hyenas are always real.

  Gentle reader! Rampaging reader, heartbroken reader, ravenous reader! The world Leonora Carrington refused all those many years ago will never go away, with its pointless rules and cruelties. Unspeakable things are going to happen to you but they will happen in a world where a hyena’s rank smell at table will prove to change everything.

  Or, as Leonora herself wrote as a coda to one of her stories:

  Even though you won’t believe me

  my story is beautiful

  And the serpent that sang it

  Sang it from out of the well.

  KATHRYN DAVIS

  THE COMPLETE STORIES OF LEONORA CARRINGTON

  THE DEBUTANTE

  When I was a debutante, I often went to the zoo. I went so often that I knew the animals better than I knew the girls of my own age. Indeed it was in order to get away from people that I found myself at the zoo every day. The animal I got to know best was a young hyena. She knew me too. She was very intelligent. I taught her French, and she, in return, taught me her language. In this way we passed many pleasant hours.

  My mother was arranging a ball in my honour on the first of May. During this time I was in a state of great distress for whole nights. I’ve always detested balls, especially when they are given in my honour.

  On the morning of the first of May 1934, very early, I went to visit the hyena.

  “What a bloody nuisance,” I said to her. “I’ve got to go to my ball tonight.”

  “You’re very lucky” she said. “I’d love to go. I don’t know how to dance, but at least I could make small talk.”

  “There’ll be a great many different things to eat,” I told her. “I’ve seen truckloads of food delivered to our house.”

  “And you’re complaining,” replied the hyena, disgusted. “Just think of me, I eat once a day, and you can’t imagine what a heap of bloody rubbish I’m given.”

  I had an audacious idea, and I almost laughed. “All you have to do is go instead of me!”

  “We don’t resemble each other enough, otherwise I’d gladly go,” said the hyena rather sadly.

  “Listen,” I said. “No one sees too well in the evening light. If you disguise yourself, nobody will notice you in the crowd. Besides, we’re practically the same size. You’re my only friend, I beg you to do this for me.”

  She thought this over, and I knew that she really wanted to accept.

  “Done,” she said all of a sudden.

  There weren’t many keepers about, it was so early in the morning. I opened the cage quickly, and in a very few moments we were out in the street. I hailed a taxi; at home, everybody was still in bed. In my room I brought out the dress I was to wear that evening. It was a little long, and the hyena found it difficult to walk in my high-heeled shoes. I found some gloves to hide her hands, which were too hairy to look like mine. By the time the sun was shining into my room, she was able to make her way around the room several times, walking more or less upright. We were so busy that my mother almost opened the door to say good morning before the hyena had hidden under my bed.

  “There’s a bad smell in your room,” my mother said, opening the window. “You must have a scented bath before tonight, with my new bath salts.”

  “Certainly,” I said.

  She didn’t stay long. I think the smell was too much for her.

  “Don’t be late for breakfast,” she said and left the room.

  The greatest difficulty was to find a way of disguising the hyena’s face. We spent hours and hours looking for a way, but she always rejected my suggestions. At last she said, “I think I’ve found the answer. Have you got a maid?”

  “Yes,” I said, puzzled.

  “There you are then. Ring for your maid, and when she comes in we’ll pounce upon her and tear off her face. I’ll wear her face tonight instead of mine.”

  “It’s not practical,” I said. “She’ll probably die if she hasn’t got a face. Somebody will certainly find the corpse, and we’ll be put in prison.”

  “I’m hungry enough to eat her,” the hyena replied.

  “And the bones?”

  “As well,” she said. “So, it’s on?”

  “Only if you promise to kill her before tearing off her face. It’ll hurt too much otherwise.”

  “All right. It’s all the same to me.”

  Not without a certain amount of nervousness I rang for Mary, my maid. I certainly wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t hate having to go to a ball so much. When Mary came in I turned to the wall so as not to see. I must admit it didn’t take long. A brief cry, and it was over. While the hyena was eating, I looked out the window. A few minutes later she said, “I can’t eat any more. Her two feet are left over still, but if you have a little bag, I’ll eat them later in the day.”

  “You’ll find a bag embroidered with fleurs-de-lis in the cupboard. Empty out the handkerchiefs you’ll find inside, and take it.” She did as I suggested. Then she said, “Turn round now and look how beautiful I am.”

  In front of the mirror, the hyena was admiring herself in Mary’s face. She had nibbled very neatly all around the face so that what was left was exactly what was needed.

  “You’ve certainly done that very well,” I said.

  Towards evening, when the hyena was all dressed up, she declared, “I really feel in tip-top form. I have a feeling that I shall be a great success this evening.”

  When we had heard the music from downstairs for quite some time, I said to her, “Go on down now, and remember, don’t stand next to my mother. She’s bound to realize that it isn’t me. Apart from her I
don’t know anybody. Best of luck.” I kissed her as I left her, but she did smell very strong.

  Night fell. Tired by the day’s emotions, I took a book and sat down by the open window, giving myself up to peace and quiet. I remember that I was reading Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. About an hour later, I noticed the first signs of trouble. A bat flew in at the window, uttering little cries. I am terribly afraid of bats. I hid behind a chair, my teeth chattering. I had hardly gone down on my knees when the sound of beating wings was overcome by a great noise at my door. My mother entered, pale with rage.

  “We’d just sat down at the table,” she said, “when that thing sitting in your place got up and shouted, ‘So I smell a bit strong, what? Well, I don’t eat cakes!’ Whereupon it tore off its face and ate it. And with one great bound, it disappeared through the window.”

  (1937–38)

  THE OVAL LADY

  A very tall thin lady was standing at the window. The window was very high and very thin too. The lady’s face was pale and sad. She didn’t move, and nothing moved in the window except the pheasant feather in her hair. My eyes kept being drawn to the quivering feather: it was so restless in the window, where nothing was moving!

  This was the seventh time I had passed in front of this window. The sad lady hadn’t stirred; in spite of the cold that evening, I stopped. Perhaps the furniture in the room was as long and thin as the lady and the window. Perhaps the cat, if there were a cat, would also conform to their elegant proportions. I wanted to know, I was devoured by curiosity, an irresistible desire took hold of me to enter the house, simply to find out.