The Exceptional Life and Odd Tales of Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington was, in every sense of the term, an artist. Born in 1917 England to a wealthy family, she was a rebel from a young age, pushing against the grain and culture that came with a privileged childhood. She studied art in Florence, was expelled from numerous schools, and broke out of the psychiatric hospital where she had been hospitalized after a mental breakdown. She eloped with the surrealist painter Max Ernst, eventually residing in New York and then Mexico. She played a starring role in her eccentric and fascinating life, the details of which remain largely unknown due to her being highly secretive. What we do know for sure is that Carrington created some of the most fantastical art—the stories she wrote were flush with a very unique brand of madness that remains singular and brilliantly imaginative to this day.

Yes! I also want to get the Early Bird Books newsletter featuring great deals on ebooks.

One of her more well-known stories, “The Debutante,” is perhaps the perfect example of her incredible imagination. In the story, a high-society debutante seeks out a hyena to stand in for her at an upcoming social engagement. The hyena agrees, wearing a mask as a disguise. How odd then, that no one notices the obvious thin disguise, and that it’s the hyena’s body odor that causes the deception to fail. Carrington plays with the odd in such a matter-of-fact manner, like the odd behavior and surrealistic events described contain their own brand of blasé.

In “The Royal Summons,” a surrealistic satire of the sort of word Carrington was quite familiar, our protagonist is summoned by the monarch to visit her palace. Upon getting her chauffeur to set up the trip, he informs her that he had effectively buried her car to aid in the growth of mushrooms. The absurdity of his buffoonery aside, what waits for her at the palace is even worse. Apparently the queen has gone mad, found bathing in goat’s milk with real live sponges. The ministers gather together to figure out how to take care of the queen. It’s decided that she must be killed—put out of her misery, so to speak. They hold a table tennis tournament where the winner gets to do the honors. Everything about this story, with its surprising plot turns, could be read as a reaction to the absurdity of the elite, the upper class social drama that Carrington so blatantly rebelled against. The social life was one that she had little desire to live.

Ratcheting up the oddity even more, the short but highly memorable “Uncle Sam Carrington”—which might have readers wondering if Leonora had an uncle Sam—depicts two cabbages destroying each other, literally pulling each other apart until nothing is left but the sullen aftermath of leaves. The narrator finds the event unnerving, and yet, without a better explanation, wants it to have been a dream. The problem is she was most definitely awake. It’s a story that might act as a metaphor for Carrington’s sensibility with her art. The unknown trades place with the common, the odd becomes baseline accepted and understandable, while what’s considered normal is made evermore bizarre.

“A Mexican Fairy Tale” takes a similar violence and peppers it with potency. Two children named Juan and Maria experience destruction, the cutting up of one body and the piecing together of another. The reader glimpses a transformation of the children, who face one of the most important lessons in life: growing up, becoming someone else, leaving behind your innocence. Of course, Carrington reveals this by way of a transformation into Quetzalcoatl, the God of Wind and Wisdom. In doing so, they become children no longer, and instead take on the responsibilities of being the other.

The story “The House of Fear” delightfully mends the fantastical with a brutal truth to life itself—boredom. Here we witness someone that meets a horse while out on a walk. The horse demands that the protagonist join him as he visits a strange house. In a normal situation, one would say no, or run in the opposite direction of a talking horse. But not here. The illusion hides the boredom of the horse with his day job, our protagonist being bored and potentially lonely, finds it nice and refreshing to have the horse as a friend.

The horse invites the protagonist to a party at the Castle of Fear, hosted by Lady Fear herself. The other guests are horses too, and Fear has them play a game involving counting backwards from one hundred and ten while thinking of their fate and the fate of those that have gone before them. It’s a particularly haunting image—one that offers another metric to Carrington’s deft attention to the pitfalls and often pathetic aspects of the partygoer, the socialite, the individual that must find meaning in the drama of others in order to be whole.

Carrington penned a novel during her lifetime, the long out of print The Hearing Trumpet. It has been given the New York Review of Books treatment, reissued so that a new generation can discover the majesty of the novel so many years after its initial publishing in 1974. 92-year-old Marian Leatherby has lost her hearing, has no teeth, and is essentially inching towards death’s door. Her son moves her to a retirement home, much to her dismay. The home becomes the setting for the novel as Marian enlists the goddess Venus and the hearing trumpet to discover the many secrets of the institution. We’re talking everything from marijuana-stuffed pincushions to vampires. It’s one of my favorite novels of all time, and, like her stories, there’s nothing quite like it.

Carrington died at the age of 94 in Mexico City, after living a life full and fascinating. Reading Carrington’s stories and viewing her art, we are able to see the brimming imagination of someone that has lived life on her terms. The prolific traveler and rebel, she perhaps kept the best story of all to herself—the story of her life. Perhaps the strangeness of her fiction catches us as so weird only because we haven’t really opened our eyes to view the innate absurdity of our lives as social creatures with a decadent and desperate need for validation.

Yes! I also want to get the Early Bird Books newsletter featuring great deals on ebooks.

The Hearing Trumpet

By Leonora Carrington

An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic admired by Björk and Luis Buñuel.

Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby, who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword, is “hard of hearing” but “full of life.”