How far would the wind carry its young bride? Across the Channel, to a small stone farmhouse in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche, in the Rhône Valley, which the couple bought in 1938. They painted its interior with fish and lizard-like creatures, women turning into horses, and a blood-red unicorn. They sculpted a mermaid for the terrace, bought two peacocks to roam the yard, and mounted a bas-relief on the house’s façade. Its two figures still stand. A man in robes, with a bird cawing between his legs—this was Loplop, Ernst’s alter ego. Next to him, a faceless woman holds a lopped-off head in her hand. Her most notable features are her stony, round, vigorously protruding breasts.
Here Carrington completed her first major painting, “Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse),” in which a hyena with engorged teats and a woman with ferocious hair and a pale, unalarmed face stare out at the viewer. But amid the painting, the drinking, the talk and the sex, the wind blew foul and fair. For one thing, the Nazis were drawing near. For another, Ernst was married, more established, selfish, clingy, and demanding. One wonders if she started to see their relationship the way that his patron Peggy Guggenheim did: “Like Nell and her grandfather in ‘The Old Curiosity Shop.’ ” One also wonders if Carrington, eying the bas-relief, felt paralyzed by the way male Surrealists had treated women as artificial beings—their bodies manipulable, their spirits elusive. Salvador Dali, in his essay “The New Colors of Spectral Sex Appeal” (1934), had prophesied that the sexual attractiveness of modern woman would derive from “the disarticulation and distortion of her anatomy.” “New and uncomfortable anatomical parts—artificial ones—will be used to accentuate the atmospheric feeling of a breast, buttock, or heel,” he wrote, only half-joking. She would appear a luminous paradox, animate and inanimate, carnal and ghostly; perfect for being desired and for being painted but not for creating an art of her own.
Against this background, “Down Below” opens with Ernst’s internment by the French as an undesirable foreigner, after the outbreak of war, in 1939. His imprisonment, we learn, jump-started a ritual of purgation. Carrington spent twenty-four hours drinking orange-blossom water to induce vomiting. Then she took a nap and reconciled herself to his absence. For three weeks, she ate sparingly, sunbathed, tended potatoes in the garden, and ignored the German troops thronging the village. She wondered if her attitude “betrayed an unconscious desire to get rid for the second time of my father: Max, whom I had to eliminate if I wanted to live,” she wrote, planning to sell up and drive to Spain. The reader who counts the threads of the story—a purified heroine, her calling to vanquish an undesirable man, a journey through a mysterious land—knows that this is no lurid memoir of psychosis and political chaos. It is a quest narrative, designed to give brisk expression to Carrington’s desire for a freer world.
Like all quests, this one had its obstacles. The first turned out to be her body, prized and painted by the Surrealists. Previously dismantled into its erotic components—a torso in a photograph, a breast on a wall—it began to integrate with everything around it. “Jammed!” Carrington proclaimed when the car taking her to Spain broke down. “I was the car. The car had jammed on account of me, because I, too, was jammed between Saint-Martin and Spain.” In Andorra, she could only scuttle like a crab: “an attempt at climbing stairs would again bring about a ‘jam.’ ” The modernist arthropod—Kafka’s bug, or Eliot’s Prufrock, longing to be “a pair of ragged claws”—is a well-worn trope of alienation and stasis, but for Carrington it sparked a breakthrough. Part car, part crab, part Carrington, she hit on the same revelation that all her fiction would offer: her body had only ever been a poorly crafted artifice, caging her spirit and barring the entry of others.
And so a more profound journey beckoned, not the expulsion of a single man—Ernst is forgotten by the narrator—but her reincarnation as a multiple and quixotic being: “an androgyne, the Moon, the Holy Ghost, a gypsy, an acrobat, Leonora Carrington, and a woman,” she wrote. And a more terrible obstacle loomed. For her revelation, she was institutionalized, made “a prisoner in a sanatorium full of nuns,” and later injected with Cardiazol, stripped, and strapped to a bed. She had a series of visions in which all the nuns and doctors, all of history, religion, and nature were contained in her, and she was the world. Freeing herself would free the cosmos, “stop the war and liberate the world, which was ‘jammed’ like me,” she had reasoned. The place where will permeated all matter, where the boundaries between bodies and beings dissolved, was not Spain but what she called “Down Below.” “I would go Down Below, as the third person of the Trinity,” she announced. The title of the book named her true destination, her utopia.
This, at least, is what we are led to believe. The reader, like any dutiful sidekick, awaits further instructions to go Down Below. Instead, Carrington’s madness lifts, and upon her release she journeys from Madrid to Lisbon to New York. The quest is aborted, utopia abandoned, the threads of the story snapped before they can be knotted together. Why, the disappointed reader wonders, has the heroine failed to complete her quest? The epilogue to “Down Below” suggests that, in life, no one was there to help convert Carrington’s madness into a fully realized world. The artistic community of European Surrealism was now scattered, confined. Her surreal experience of psychiatric institutionalization was mirrored by Surrealism’s institutionalization in New York’s art market—a complicity with wealth depressingly symbolized by Ernst’s marriage to Peggy Guggenheim, in 1942. “Surrealism is no longer considered modern today,” a character in “The Hearing Trumpet” laments. “Even Buckingham Palace has a large reproduction of Magritte’s famous slice of ham with an eye peering out. It hangs, I believe, in the throne room.”
“The Hearing Trumpet,” one of the great comic novels of the twentieth century, reprises the quest narrative of “Down Below,” but with some key changes to insure it succeeds. Its narrator, Marian Leatherby, is ninety-two years old, gummy, rheumatic, gray-bearded, and deaf. Her lifelong dream is to tour Lapland in a sleigh drawn by woolly dogs. Barring that, she would like to collect enough cat hair for her friend Carmella to knit her a sweater. But Marian’s son, Galahad, less noble than his Arthurian namesake, installs her in a retirement home for women run by the Well of Light Brotherhood and “financed by a prominent American cereal company (Bouncing Breakfast Cereals Co.).” Before Marian is taken away, Carmella gives her a hearing trumpet, pictured in Carrington’s illustrations as a ridiculously oversized, scallop-edged object, “encrusted with silver and mother o’pearl motifs and grandly curved like a buffalo’s horn.” Marian—part human, part animal, part machine—delights in the artifice of her body’s enhancement. She can hear now, and how prettily!
What can we hear through “The Hearing Trumpet”? First, a thoroughgoing commitment to absurdity; the plot is gleeful nonsense. Then the driest strain of humor. Finally, the echoes of a ragtag history of English literature, mined not for its contact with human reality but for its capacity to conjure a world beyond the one humans can see, smell, touch, and taste. The hearing trumpet, or otacousticon, is a seventeenth-century invention, and the scrapes it gets Marian into seem plucked from the earliest picaresques. The retirement home is headed by a lewd doctor who preaches a doctrine of “Will over Matter.” The women live in cottages, each more preposterously shaped than its neighbor: a lighthouse, a circus tent, a toadstool, a cuckoo clock. The discovery of a document detailing the occult activities of an old abbess suddenly launches us on a grail quest. It summons to Marian’s side not Galahad but the winged animals and white goddesses of the Celtic and Old English traditions.
Carrington’s heroine succeeds because she is matched by a narrative form as chimerical as she is—not the short story or the memoir but the novel. “The Hearing Trumpet” reads like a spectacular reassemblage of old and new genres, the campy, illegitimate offspring of Margaret Cavendish’s romances and Robert Graves’s histories, with Thomas Pynchon’s riotous paranoia spliced in to keep it limber and receptive to the political anxieties of its moment. The search for the grail is undertaken after the “dreadful atom bomb” has inaugurated another Ice Age, killing nearly all humans and destroying their modern infrastructure. The Cold War has turned the world, well, cold. Carrington’s comedy of literalization asks us how a metaphor has become a terrible reality. A conversation between Marian and Carmella provides an answer:
The women have no use for frozen institutions. What they seek are living communities for all creatures, forged not through domination and cruelty but through care and mutual assistance.
