Sunday Morning! Leonora Carrington, the Complete Stories

The Soviet Union sends America a gift of rats that can perform surgery. A hyena attends a fancy dress ball in the place of a young woman by cleverly wearing a maid’s face. A strange looking creature is caught in the brambles by her hair while followed by six horses and trying to save a corpulent bird from being hunted. The stories of Leonora Carrington read like fairy tales for mad children, and suggest that maybe that’s a fair description of surrealism overall.

Certainly, Carrington has been treated as an enfant terrible of the surrealist movement too many times. Born to a wealthy industrialist Roman Catholic family, she was precocious and troublemaking from a young age- although one has to think nearly any child would have run afoul of her domineering father and his stodgy milieu. Nevertheless, the governesses and tutors and large family estate seem to have spurred her imagination from a young age, stimulated further by seeing a Paul Éluard painting in Paris at age ten. She was soon painting as well and is today best remembered for her canvases. Her self-portrait is one of the key works of surrealism.

It’s a portrait that contains many of the elements that recur throughout her stories: the hyena that seems more like a guide than a wild animal, the horse running wild, the slightly menacing rocking horse, the underlying power of female sexuality like a magnet at the center of the image.

Certainly, the temptation for many in the middle of the last century was to interpret all of this type of art through a Freudian lens, a viewpoint that Carrington rejected for the simple reason that she wasn’t interested in Freud. Her stories, which came out in a complete edition a few years ago, are as packed with images and symbols and weirdness as her paintings. They read more like dreams where, if one strange occurrence throws you, don’t worry; there will be four more oddities along shortly.

Summarizing the stories is about the same as narrating them. In “The Happy Corpse Story,” a young man falls down crying over a lost love, so a happy corpse swinging from a nearby tree offers to give the young man a ride on its back to find the love if he’ll cut it down; along the way, the corpse tells the boy a very short story about their very boring father committing fraud and being sent to Telephone Hell for dying with a phone in his ear; mother committed suicide out of boredom by walking into a refrigerator, while the corpse committed suicide with a machine gun. Lo and behold, though, the corpse is actually the dead mother of the young man and so they reminisce about the jam sandwiches he used to eat and he’s forgotten all about his lost love! Simple, right?

These weird tales seemingly came naturally to Carrington. The English upper class is the perfect setting and breeding ground for surrealism, as absurdists from Carroll to Python can attest: it’s something about the need to maintain buttoned-down normalcy at all costs that makes one want to add a talking horse or a hundred ducks and a character named Jock McFish McFruit. On this side of the pond, the key American artwork of the century, Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, really only works in those small-town 1950s settings of complete normalcy. When everything is serene and conservative, the dreams seep through. Reality in this century is a bit too surreal already.

It’s tempting nowadays to look for signs of exploitation in Carrington’s youthful relationship with Max Ernst- though she was twenty, so not an adolescent, her art remained somewhat childlike throughout her life. Nevertheless, the short relationship established her as an artist and probably saved her from having her spirit totally crushed by her parents. When Ernst was persecuted by the Gestapo and had to flee Paris with the help of Peggy Guggenheim, Carrington was devastated and wound up committed to an asylum, a nightmarish experience she wrote about in Down Below, recently reprinted by the NYRB series.

After being released to a caretaker, her loving parents intended to have Leonora Carrington committed full-time to a sanitarium in South Africa. Thankfully, she fled to Portugal and then New York, making a marriage of convenience along the way to a Mexican ambassador. She soon landed in Mexico City, where she spent much of the rest of her long life and was recognized as a major artist of the century. Surrealism likely saved her life; she certainly returned the favor.

Which has become the dominant opinion in the years after her death. Leonora Carrington’s art and her stories dive deep into the dream world like a somewhat perverse pulp fictional Alice. She sought out and demanded freedom of all sorts throughout her life, starting with the freedom to imagine and fantasize. In the end, she was victorious over reality and all its enforcers.

And so, what are YOU reading, watching, pondering, playing, or imagining this weekend?