Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was an artist and writer with a distinctive vision within the world of Surrealism. Her paintings, sculptures and stories are filled with eccentric beings that shapeshift between plant, animal, human and object, between this world and other worlds.
Leonora despised regimentation and conformity from an early age. Her
radical, rebellious behavior led to her being expelled from more than
one school. Then, at the age of ten, she beheld her first Surrealist
painting in a Left Bank gallery in Paris. We can imagine the psychic
explosion - as if Leonora could see for the first time she was not
alone, she did have kindred spirits that could express themselves by
their art.
At age nineteen Leonora met the Surrealist artist Max Ernst, age forty-six and married, but Leonora's Surrealist mind was simply too powerful to prevent the two artists from running off together and eventually marrying. But then history intervenes and....you can read all about it in Kathryn Davis' fine introduction to this collection of stories published by Dorothy Project.
Since my prime interest is literature rather than history or biography, I'll focus on a batch of Leonora stories themselves that scream out to her literary uniqueness and, as Kathryn Davis puts it, "Her habit of refusal of the world she was born into."
All of the below stories are written in the first person by an unnamed narrator I'll take the liberty of calling Leonora, since, after all, the author told her biographer Joanna Moorhead that "every piece of writing she ever did was autobiographical."
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."
So begins this tale where the narrator (a good bit of autobiography here) relates her mother was arranging a ball in her honor causing poor Leonora great distress since she always detested balls, especially when given in her honor.
But then Leonora comes up with a plan while speaking with a hyena, one of the zoo animals she's particularly fond of - the hyena can go to the ball this evening in her place.
Events move apace and the hyena, now in Leonora's bedroom, proposes a way to go to the ball as human rather than hyena: "Ring for the 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."
Surrealism, anyone? In her New York Times review, here's what Parul Sehgal had to say about what it's like to read a Leonora Carrington story: "In the middle of the fluffy fairy tale, something bristles, something unpleasantly familiar, something human and frightening."
THE OVAL LADY
"A very tall thin lady was standing at the window. The window was very high and very thin too."
Leonora Carrington had a lifelong obsession with levitation and people that can look down at the world from a great height. For example, the oval lady of the story is at least ten feet tall.
At one point, the oval lady, Lucretia by name, asks narrator Leonora, "Did you come to play with us? I'm glad, because I get very bored here. Let's make believe that we're all horses. I'll turn myself into a horse; with some snow, it'll be more convincing."
However, any rambunctiousness is quickly snuffed out by two bastions of decency and order: an old woman of the house who is probably Lucretia's nanny and Lucretia's loathsome father. Poor Lucretia! And to think, she looks to be no older than sixteen.
UNCLE SAM CARRINGTON
An odd tale where Leonora's friend, the horse, suggests they go watch ladies at work in their garden. And what a sight they see, as in -
"The ladies were in their kitchen garden. It was behind their house and was surrounded by a high brick wall. I climbed on the horse's back, and a pretty astonishing sight met my eyes: the Misses Cunningham-Jones, each armed with a huge whip, were whipping the vegetables on all sides, shouting, "One's got to suffer to go to Heaven. Those who do not wear corsets will never get there."
The vegetables, for their part, were fighting amongst themselves, and the larger ones threw the smaller ones at the ladies with cries of hate.
"It's always like this," said the horse in a low voice. "The vegetables have to suffer for the sake of society. You'll see that they'll soon catch one for you, and that it'll die for the cause."
Reading this Leonora yarn, I wondered how elements from her background, things like all those nuns and Catholic teachings, influenced the ladies' violence against the vegetables - and by extension, violence against nature itself.
WHITE RABBITS
For me, this was the most shocking and disturbing of the tales in this collection.
One afternoon, having washed her hair, Leonora sits out on the small stone balcony of her apartment in New York City to let her hair dry. Suddenly, she sees a large raven alight on the balcony of the house opposite. The raven sits on the balustrade and seems to peer into the empty window. A few minutes later, a woman comes out on the balcony carrying a large dish full of bones, which she empties on the floor. With an appreciative squeak, the raven hops down and pokes around appreciatively.
The woman looks straight at Leonora and smiles in a friendly fashion. Leonora smiles back and waves the towel in her hand. This neighborly gesture encourages the woman to toss her head coquettishly and give Leonora an elegant, royal salute and then ask, "Do you happen to have any bad meat over there that you don't need? "Not at the moment," replies Leonora. To which the woman says if she happens to have any stinking, decomposed meat toward the end of the week, she'd be grateful if Leonora brought it over.
Leonora takes steps to get hold of bad meat and does bring it to the lady. What happens when she enters the woman's house is the stuff of nightmares. That closing sentence counts as one of the most powerful, surreal endings I've ever encountered in all of literature. Gives me the shivers just thinking about it.
I'll conclude with a quote from the Kathryn Davis Introduction:
"Nothing is what it seems to be in these stories, a philosophy Leonora applied to 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."
Surrealist author and artist Leonora Carrington, (1917-2011)
At age nineteen Leonora met the Surrealist artist Max Ernst, age forty-six and married, but Leonora's Surrealist mind was simply too powerful to prevent the two artists from running off together and eventually marrying. But then history intervenes and....you can read all about it in Kathryn Davis' fine introduction to this collection of stories published by Dorothy Project.
Since my prime interest is literature rather than history or biography, I'll focus on a batch of Leonora stories themselves that scream out to her literary uniqueness and, as Kathryn Davis puts it, "Her habit of refusal of the world she was born into."
All of the below stories are written in the first person by an unnamed narrator I'll take the liberty of calling Leonora, since, after all, the author told her biographer Joanna Moorhead that "every piece of writing she ever did was autobiographical."
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."
So begins this tale where the narrator (a good bit of autobiography here) relates her mother was arranging a ball in her honor causing poor Leonora great distress since she always detested balls, especially when given in her honor.
But then Leonora comes up with a plan while speaking with a hyena, one of the zoo animals she's particularly fond of - the hyena can go to the ball this evening in her place.
Events move apace and the hyena, now in Leonora's bedroom, proposes a way to go to the ball as human rather than hyena: "Ring for the 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."
Surrealism, anyone? In her New York Times review, here's what Parul Sehgal had to say about what it's like to read a Leonora Carrington story: "In the middle of the fluffy fairy tale, something bristles, something unpleasantly familiar, something human and frightening."
THE OVAL LADY
"A very tall thin lady was standing at the window. The window was very high and very thin too."
Leonora Carrington had a lifelong obsession with levitation and people that can look down at the world from a great height. For example, the oval lady of the story is at least ten feet tall.
At one point, the oval lady, Lucretia by name, asks narrator Leonora, "Did you come to play with us? I'm glad, because I get very bored here. Let's make believe that we're all horses. I'll turn myself into a horse; with some snow, it'll be more convincing."
However, any rambunctiousness is quickly snuffed out by two bastions of decency and order: an old woman of the house who is probably Lucretia's nanny and Lucretia's loathsome father. Poor Lucretia! And to think, she looks to be no older than sixteen.
UNCLE SAM CARRINGTON
An odd tale where Leonora's friend, the horse, suggests they go watch ladies at work in their garden. And what a sight they see, as in -
"The ladies were in their kitchen garden. It was behind their house and was surrounded by a high brick wall. I climbed on the horse's back, and a pretty astonishing sight met my eyes: the Misses Cunningham-Jones, each armed with a huge whip, were whipping the vegetables on all sides, shouting, "One's got to suffer to go to Heaven. Those who do not wear corsets will never get there."
The vegetables, for their part, were fighting amongst themselves, and the larger ones threw the smaller ones at the ladies with cries of hate.
"It's always like this," said the horse in a low voice. "The vegetables have to suffer for the sake of society. You'll see that they'll soon catch one for you, and that it'll die for the cause."
Reading this Leonora yarn, I wondered how elements from her background, things like all those nuns and Catholic teachings, influenced the ladies' violence against the vegetables - and by extension, violence against nature itself.
WHITE RABBITS
For me, this was the most shocking and disturbing of the tales in this collection.
One afternoon, having washed her hair, Leonora sits out on the small stone balcony of her apartment in New York City to let her hair dry. Suddenly, she sees a large raven alight on the balcony of the house opposite. The raven sits on the balustrade and seems to peer into the empty window. A few minutes later, a woman comes out on the balcony carrying a large dish full of bones, which she empties on the floor. With an appreciative squeak, the raven hops down and pokes around appreciatively.
The woman looks straight at Leonora and smiles in a friendly fashion. Leonora smiles back and waves the towel in her hand. This neighborly gesture encourages the woman to toss her head coquettishly and give Leonora an elegant, royal salute and then ask, "Do you happen to have any bad meat over there that you don't need? "Not at the moment," replies Leonora. To which the woman says if she happens to have any stinking, decomposed meat toward the end of the week, she'd be grateful if Leonora brought it over.
Leonora takes steps to get hold of bad meat and does bring it to the lady. What happens when she enters the woman's house is the stuff of nightmares. That closing sentence counts as one of the most powerful, surreal endings I've ever encountered in all of literature. Gives me the shivers just thinking about it.
I'll conclude with a quote from the Kathryn Davis Introduction:
"Nothing is what it seems to be in these stories, a philosophy Leonora applied to 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."
Surrealist author and artist Leonora Carrington, (1917-2011)
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