a gallimaufry

English Climate: Wartime Stories, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

This is a very nice and cohesive collection of short stories, written by Sylvia Townsend Warner between 1940 and 1946 for the New Yorker, and put together by Persephone Books. The stories centre on the Domestic Front: an ideal location for STW since domestic realism is one of her fortes and with most of the men out of the way she can concentrate on the women and the elderly, characters who always attract her attention.

The stories are stuffed with the detail of everyday life in wartime: the salvage drives (including Bone Salvage?!), the rations, the rabbit-breeding, the mouldy jam (not enough sugar). Mrs Campion, in ‘From Above’, is evacuated – liberated? – when a time bomb is discovered in Albion Terrace. A tobacconist hides the last packet of cigarettes from a customer, to keep for his own wife. In ‘England, Home and Beauty’, Mr Sillery and Major Puncheon are training the local women in how to use a machine gun:

‘Well,’ said Mrs Johnson, the last to rise. ‘Well, thank you very much, I’m sure. I daresay we could all manage that, at a pinch.’ Which was one of the comforts, Mrs Goose was murmuring to Miss Cutler, about being a woman. One had to turn one’s hand to anything, almost. One thing more or less didn’t make much difference. Miss Cutler replied that, speaking for herself, she’d always had quite a liking for machinery. Once you got the hang of it, you must admit it was very reasonable. ‘Though I’d be scared stiff if I had to drive a car,’ she said. ‘Think how you’d feel if you hurt someone accidentally.’

This training is not without controversy among the local men, and the women, having had their turn with the gun, are directed to fill ammunition belts – dull but useful work, more appropriate to them, as the men fondly imagine, until they overhear them discussing the merits of Sten guns with savage relish.

Many of the stories are very funny social comedies. In ‘It’s What We’re Here For’, two nice middle-class ladies at the Women’s Voluntary Services, eager to help the deserving poor, struggle with Mrs Leopard, who is not quite as deserving as she might be. At first it seems that Mrs Larpent and Mrs Bogle are just obtuse and patronising, but this is not it. Is it that they take their job of helping very, very seriously (as implied in the title)? Is it that Mrs Leopard is too much for them? That they wish to protect her?

(Stanley Spencer, Village Gossip, 1939; Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum; found here)

This social comedy tips easily into pathos, however. In ‘Bow to the Rising Sun’, how quickly Colonel Prowse switches his allegiance in the Fuel Control Office! He brings in flowers for pretty young Button which he then bestows upon the older Mrs Stanley, who will replace Button as the Fuel Controller’s assistant. Button tries to save face:

‘Don’t you think he’s rather sweet? So touching, the way he brings his flowers along and then gets all shy about them and dumps them down anywhere. Well, thank God it’s lunchtime! We’ll go to the Old World, shall we? Want to wash your hands? You go first.’
In the cloakroom Mrs Stanley found herself crying, weeping unavailing tears for the desperate idiot valour of the young.

There is sadness too for Gunner Brock in the title story, whose happy expectations of homecoming on leave are dashed by discoveries in the town’s salvage drive which cause him to reassess his relationship with his family. The argument about differences in risk perception in ‘Daphnis and Chloe’ will be familiar to many of us after the last year of pandemic. More darkly, ‘The Mothers’ seethes with frustration and dislike. In ‘Arsace, Il Faut Partir’, actual combat comes frighteningly close to Odette de Boulay in her night-time orchard, apples pattering down about her like the parachuting soldiers just a few miles away.

Etiquette can come under strain in a wartime situation, as in ‘The Trumpet Shall Sound’. Attending a funeral, the mourners are forced to jump into the open grave as a landmine is dropped on the cemetery. Fortunately, Mr Kedge the funeral director rises to the occasion:

Reg seized Alan, and dropped him into the grave. The he grabbed Cathie, and dropped her in beside the child.
‘Jump in, jump in! It’s a landmine coming down.’
One after another the mourners got into the grave. The mutes came to the edge, hesitated, seemed inclined to follow. Mr Kedge, with a recalling gesture, pointed them to some bushes. Remembering their position they retired there, and lay down. The clergyman still remained standing. Mr Kedge touched his elbow, pointed to the grave. The clergyman, on such an occasion, would rank as one of the family.

In other stories, we see shifts in social relations. ‘Poor Mary’ is about a serving officer on home leave – but the officer is Mary, who is in the ATS, and the spouse at home is Nicholas, a conscientious objector. The war has highlighted their differences, which in peacetime had seemed so refreshing. One of my favourite stories is ‘Sweethearts and Wives’, in which three women set up house together with their children. One of the husbands, William, coming home on leave, is appalled at their slovenly housekeeping, opportunistic behaviour and failure to feed him well. Bearing no useful gifts for them and lacking any practical skills, he seems – surplus to requirements.

(Leonora Carrington, The Kitchen Garden on the Eyot, 1946; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; found here)

In STW’s fiction, the elderly are frequent causes for concern – you never quite know whether they’re going to behave themselves – they haven’t much to lose any more and care little for convention. There is Miss Gauntlett, daughter of the famous writer, who is kindly invited into her childhood home by its present resident, Mrs Hawley. Mrs Hawley feels that Miss Gauntlett is ‘not quite worthy’ of her father and her reactions as she’s shown around are not quite what they should be. Then there are the elderly Ryders in ‘The Cold’, who have taken to their beds because they are unwell. Their daughter-in-law ruminates:

It is very nice to be cultivated, of course, but somehow in wartime it does jar to labour upstairs with a heavy supper tray and hear, beyond the door, two animated voices discussing Savanorola; and then to hear the voices silenced, like mice when one throws a shoe in their direction, as one knocked on the door and called out brightly, ‘Supper, darlings!’ and to know, as clearly as if one had seen it, that old Mrs Ryder was stubbing out one of her cigarettes. That jarred too, especially as she smoked such very heavy ones.

And in another of my favourite stories, ‘Scorched Earth’, the ‘septuagenarian fogies’ Colonel Pomeroy and his wife have enthusiastically devoted themselves to self-sufficiency: digging up the lawn for potatoes, raising mushrooms in the air raid shelter, turning everything into jam and saving ‘heeltaps from soap, and tobacco pried from cigarette stubs’. But there is one thing that gives them even greater pleasure than all of this – fantasising how to destroy it all.

I could drone on for ever about the stories in English Climate: it would be better if you just read them. All of STW’s formidable talents are on display here and it’s a pleasure to read, full of subtleties, humour and sadness. If you haven’t yet read any of STW’s work, this is an excellent place to start.

Down Below, by Leonora Carrington

(Leonora Carrington, Down Below, 1941, oil on canvas; found here)

Three days perhaps after my second Cardiazol injection, I was given back the objects which had been confiscated on my entering the sanatorium, and a few others besides. I realised that with the aid of these objects I had to set to work, combining solar systems to regulate the conduct of the World. I had a few French coins, which represented the downfall of men through their passion for money; those coins were supposed to enter into the planetary system as units and not as particular elements; should they join with other objects, wealth would no longer beget misfortune. My red-and-black refill pencil (leadless) was Intelligence. I had two bottles of eau de cologne: the flat one was the José, the other, cylindrical one, the non-José. A box of Tabu powder with a lid, half grey and half black, meant eclipse, complex, vanity, taboo, love. Two jars of face cream: the one with a black lid was night, the left side, the moon, woman, destruction; the other, with a green lid, was man, the brother, green eyes, the Sun, construction. 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; it probably was the meeting with colour and speech, painting and literature: Art.

Happy with my discovery, I would group these objects around each other; they wandered together on the celestial path, helping each other along and forming a complete rhythm. I gave an alchemical life t the objects according to their position and their contents. (My face cream Night, in the black-lidded jar, contained the lemon, which was an antidote to the seizure induced by Cardiazol.)

Lucid and gay, I waited impatiently for Don Luis. I said to myself: ‘I have solved the problems he set before me. I shall certainly be led Down Below.’ So I was horrified when, far from appreciating my labour, he gave me a second injection of Cardiazol.

So Leonora Carrington, incarcerated against her will in an asylum in Santandar, tries to reassert some control over her life and fate through ritual. She had been abducted from Madrid, drugged and anaesthetised, by doctors acting it seems on the instruction of her father. In the asylum she was subjected to Cardiazol, a convulsive drug therapy which induced terrifying fits; after she recovered, an escort was sent by her family to collect her and take her to a sanatorium in South Africa. When the party reached Lisbon, Carrington escaped them and took refuge in the Mexican consulate before ultimately travelling on to New York.

This dramatic episode in Carrington’s life began in May 1940. She was living in the south of France with Max Ernst, her much older lover, and he was arrested by the invading German army and sent to a concentration camp. Her loss and grief precipitated a psychotic break. She was taken by her friends over the border to Spain:

I was quite overwhelmed by my entry into Spain: I thought it was my kingdom; that the red earth was the dried blood of the Civil War. I was choked by the dead, by their thick presence in that lacerated countryside. I was in a great state of exaltation when we arrived in Barcelona that evening, convinced that we had to reach Madrid as speedily as possible. [...]

Once in Madrid, convinced that the city was the ‘world’s stomach and that I had been chosen for the task of restoring this digestive organ to health’, Leonora’s state of mind deteriorated further until she was forcibly sent to the institution in Santander.

Down Under was written and told (see below) shortly after the events recounted in it had taken place. Carrington retells her experiences in a way that makes no difference between what ‘really’ happened and what she ‘thought’ happened, and with no attempts to explain what might be going on or rationalise things. We are plunged into her disordered consciousness, we see only what she saw and understand only what she understood. People, like the sinister Van Ghent or Don Mariano, behave like figures in a dream; they do things but we don’t know why. We have no sense of them as human beings, only of what they represent to Carrington at that time. There is no external world, only the world of her mind.

And that world is full of fear: rightly so, for most of the male figures and administrations in Down Under seek to control or harm her. Even at her most confused or vulnerable, Carrington is acutely aware of power and who may have it (although she is not always entirely correct about this, ascribing more influence to Moro the dog than he does in fact possess). Those in power only abuse their privilege and show little compassion for Carrington. There is a sense that her recovery and certainly her subsequent escape are despite rather than thanks to those who should be caring for her.

Many of Carrington’s experiences and hallucinations heighten her sense of connexion to the natural world. She dreams she is a white colt; she is convinced that animals find her sympathetic; at one point she acts like various animals. Furthermore, she grows or the world shrinks so that her body becomes not just a symbol but literally everything. It’s as if she’s skinless. Her dysentery is a symptom of her struggle to restore the city of Madrid to health and Van Ghent’s power over her a power that extends to the whole of Spain. Weeping, she begs her friend Catherine to look at her face: ‘Don’t you see that it is the exact representation of the world?’ In the asylum, her interest in objects symbolising a greater whole continues, and her sense of the universe expands to include the entire institution. She becomes obsessed by the largest pavilion, which is called Down Below. Convinced that this is paradise, Carrington believes she can only gain entry through meditation and realisation of the Whole Truth.

(Leonora Carrington, AB EO QUOD, 1956, oil on canvas; found here)

In an interview quoted here, Carrington said:

My love for the soil, nature, the gods given to me by my mother’s mother who was Irish from Westmeath, where there is a myth about men who lived underground inside the mountains, called the ‘little people’ who belong to the race of the ‘Sidhe.’ My grandmother used to tell me we were descendents of that ancient race that magically started to live underground when their land was taken by invaders with different political religious ideas. They preferred to retire underground where they are dedicated to magic and alchemy, knowing how to change gold. (in Susan L. Aberth, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy & Art, Lund Humphries 2010)

These stories seem to feed in both to the fantasy of Down Below as a protective haven and to Carrington’s association of a personal alchemy as a means to counter hostile forces.

The book has a convoluted history. It was first written in English in New York, 1942, and subsequently lost. Carrington then dictated it in French and it was translated into English and published in 1943 in the journal VVV. The French dictation was published in Paris in 1946. The version in the NYRB series, which is the one I read, took both the French and the English texts as its basis and was reviewed and revised by Carrington herself in 1987. This history may be responsible for the particular style of the book. As Marina Warner points out in her excellent introduction, the oral/written, bilingual (and Carrington was apparently not terribly fluent in French) ancestry contributes to the very direct, almost clinical tone of the book, so very different from her other writings. Yet the ‘memories’ she describes are fresh and vivid, shocking. Perhaps Carrington was able to effectively maintain the contrast of tone and content because while she first recorded and wrote about the experiences, she was still very close to them and could recall them with great clarity; yet the repeated re-tellings and then the final editorial input forty years later gave her useful distance. The lack of bitterness, self-justification or self-pity, even when relating a gang rape, is extraordinary.

(Leonora Carrington, Crookhey Hall, 1947, casein on masonite; Crookhey Hall was Carrington’s childhood home and its gloomy neo-Gothic architecture had a profound influence on her; found here)

The Hearing Trumpet, by Leonora Carrington

(Leonora Carrington, Untitled, c. 1949–50, oil on canvas, private collection; found here)

This year is the centenary year of Leonora Carrington’s birth. She is best known as an outstanding artist, and for many years most of her writings have been out of print. Being a fan of her novel, The Hearing Trumpet, I have long wanted to read her short stories but second-hand copies of the Virago collection, The Seventh Horse and Other Stories, always seemed remarkably expensive. Now, to mark the anniversary, her collected stories are being re-issued in the US by Dorothy, a publishing project; I eagerly tried to order a copy but for some reason was unable to obtain them, so instead I have contented myself with the seemingly less complete The Debutante and Other Stories, published in the UK by Silver Press (UK), along with children’s book called The Milk of Dreams and her account of being institutionalised, Down Under (both published by NYRB). I’ve decided to try and write about all of them here. Meanwhile, to prepare myself I am re-reading The Hearing Trumpet and looking again at the lovely pictures in Susan L. Aberth’s Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (Lund Humphries).

Carrington led an exciting life, as you can read in Marina Warner’s recent piece in the Guardian or Karen’s nice review of a new biography of her in Shiny New Books by Joanna Moorehead. Carrington wrote The Hearing Trumpet in 1950, in a noisy café in Mexico City according to Aberth, but it wasn’t actually published until 1974, and then in French. Fantastical and many-tentacled, it is one of the weirdest novels I’ve ever read, and funny too, consistently overturning the reader’s expectations and appearing to have been thrown together quite casually. Our heroine is also unusual: Marian Leatherby is ninety-two years old:

Here I may add that I consider that I am still a useful member of society and I believe still capable of being pleasant and amusing when the occasion seems fit. The fact that I have no teeth and never could wear dentures dos not in anyway discomfort me. I don’t have to bite anybody and there are all sorts of soft edible foods easy to procure and digestible to the stomach. Mashed vegetables, chocolate and bread dipped in warm water make the base of my simple diet. I never eat meat as I think it is wrong to deprive animals of their life when they are so difficult to chew anyway. [...]

Indeed I do have a short grey beard which conventional people would find repulsive. Personally I found it rather gallant.

Marian is a widow who lives in her son Galahad’s house, in a room overlooking ‘a fine back yard which I share with my two cats, a hen, the maid and her two children, some flies and a cactus plant called maguey.’ The gift of a splendid hearing trumpet, from her bald and excitable friend Carmella, allows Marian to overhear Galahad and his wife plotting to send her away to an old people’s home.

‘Remember Galahad,’ added Muriel, ‘those old people do not have feelings like you or I. She would be much happier in an institution where there’s proper help to take care of her. They are very well run today. This place I told you about in Santa Brigida is run by the Well of Light Brotherhood [...] It is all very efficiently organised and reasonably inexpensive.’

However, advance knowledge doesn’t help Marian very much and she is shipped off to the institution:

First impression are never very clear, I can only say there seemed to be several court yards, cloisters, stagnant fountains, trees, shrubs, lawns. The main building was in fact a castle, surrounded by pavilions with incongruous shapes. Pixielike dwellings shaped like toadstools, swiss chalets, railway carriages, one or two ordinary bungalows, something shaped like a boat, another like what I took to be an Egyptian mummy.

These odd buildings are the sleeping places of the old ladies (the toadstool is particularly inconvenient). The institution is run by Dr Gambit and his horrible wife along the lines of a Christian cult. But just as you are imagining that this is going to be a comic novel, tensions among the institutions’ inmates lead to murder; and just as you think it’s going to be a comic novel with a murder, an ancient book containing the gothic tale of the abbess Doña Rosalinda Alvarez Cruz della Cueva takes the plot in another direction; in fact, whenever you feel you have any idea as to what’s going on, the novel swerves into completely unexpected territory involving, among others, alchemy, orgies, cookery, werewolves and apocalypse. It gallops on, pell mell, faster and faster until abruptly ending.

(Leonora Carrington, Nine Nine Nine, 1948, oil on canvas, private collection; found here)

Marian, from the beginning a devotee of the planet Venus, is repeatedly guided by golden bees and bee society – led by a queen, dominated by the sisterhood, altruistic, fruitful and renewing the fertility of the plants around them – is in direct contrast to the dessicated Christianity practised by the Gambits and the mean-minded hypocrisy of Marian’s family. It is reflected in Abbess Rosalinda’s convent, blasphemously given over to indulgence, sensualism and levitating. In the Womb of the World, Marian has an encounter which is both fairytale and eucharist, Baba Yaga and Last Supper. The total destruction of the existing world order and orientation, far from being a catastrophe, in fact signals the rebirth of the Goddess and a better future:

Ice ages pass, and although the world is frozen over we suppose someday grass and flowers will grow again. In the meantime I keep a daily record on three wax tablets.

After I die Anubeth’s werecubs will continue the document, till the planet is peopled with cats, werewolves, bees and goats. We all fervently hope this will be an improvement on humanity, which deliberately renounced the Pneuma of the Goddess.

(Leonora Carrington, unattributed photograph from here)

Leonora Carrington (1917–2011)

(And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur, 1953, oil on canvas, from here)

I must have been living under a stone for the past few months because I’ve only just discovered that Leonora Carrington died on the 25th May at the ripe old age of ninety-four. There are good obituaries of her at the Guardian and in the Independent, and a nice piece in the Telegraph by Joanna Moorhead, a relative (and author of the Guardian obituary).

 

(The Crow Catcher, 1990, oil on canvas, found here)

Carrington’s early years were eventful, to say the least: expelled from convent school and a rebel debutante, she eloped to Paris with Max Ernst where she met Picasso, Buñuel, Dalí (who praised her as ‘a most important woman artist’), Man Ray, Miró, Breton and many other artists. There are stories of her painting her feet with mustard in a restaurant and cutting guests’ hair while they slept, which she then served to them in an omelette for breakfast. They moved to Provence where Carrington started writing and was the only woman whose work was included in André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humour. At the outbreak of war Ernst was interned and Carrington suffered a breakdown; she was incarcerated in a Spanish asylum after she crossed the border to try and obtain a visa for him. Her father arranged for her to be sent to a sanatorium in South Africa, but she gave her minders the slip in Lisbon, while they awaited the ship, jumped into a taxi and demanded to be taken to the Mexican embassy. A friend of hers was a Mexican diplomat, and he married her to help her out and took her to New York. They soon divorced and Carrington moved to Mexico where she married Csizi Wiesz, with whom she had two sons. Her friends included Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo; Varo became a particularly good friend and they experimented with alchemy and the Kabbala together. Carrington was also fascinated by Mayan and Aztec culture and the Day of the Dead.

(Kron Flower, 1987, tempera on panel, from here)

Carrington is best known as a Surrealist artist and her paintings are wonderfully playful, dark and magical. They often depict transformations, strange creatures, gifts, nuns and food; they are ethereal, feminine and clearly influenced by Hieronymous Bosch. But Carrington also wrote a memoir of her spell of madness (Down Under) and fiction, including The Hearing Trumpet, which I read a few years ago.

(Syssigy, 1957, oil on board, from here)

The Hearing Trumpet is chattily narrated by ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby (‘Indeed I do have a short grey beard which conventional people would find repulsive. Personally I find it rather gallant’). Her horrible son and his family fail to discern her charms (‘Grandmother,’ said Robert, ‘can hardly be classified as a human being. She’s a drooling sack of decomposing flesh’) so they pack her off to an old ladies’ home run by the Well of Light Brotherhood. The Brotherhood do not merely care for the ladies’ physical needs, they strive to Improve them, dissolve their ‘interior impurities’ such as greed and vanity and impart Inner Radiance. There are shady goings-on and an old lady is poisoned:

‘Suffering cobras!’ said Georgina who had gone pale. ‘The fudge must have been meant for me ... They must call in the police. If we were in the United States they would both go the lethal chamber and be frizzled to lard in the electric chair. I wouldn’t mind paying anything up to ten dollars to watch.’

‘There is no capital punishment here,’ I told Georgina. ‘But they might make them work on a chain gang, cracking rocks with pick axes and whipped by colossal Nubians wearing red loin cloths.’

The plot continues, increasingly wayward, with a winking Abbess, a wolf-headed woman, the Grail and a monster bursting out of a tower.  Character is less important than exuberant event; it is a Surrealist painting in prose. Odd, slyly funny and bizarre, it’s not a book for everyone, but if you like Carrington’s art and the work of Angela Carter, chances are you will enjoy this and I’d urge you to try it.

Carrington’s paintings sell for large amounts of money, but of her books, only The Hearing Trumpet remains in print in English. Second-hand copies of The Seventh Horse are expensive: come on Virago, couldn’t you republish it – and perhaps some of her other work?

(Photograph of Leonora Carrington from here; the photographer is uncredited)