The Second World War. Leonora Carrington, English artist residing in France, is horrified when the Nazis invade. Her husband, Max Ernst, is arrested, and taken to a camp. In shock, and reeling from the advance of an army “of robots, of thoughtless, fleshless beings,” Carrington fled France for the (relative) safety of Spain, aided by a few friends and a rickety car. In Spain, her mental health began to deteriorate, and she ends up in an asylum…where power, privilege, and contempt all serve to create a microcosm of the madness overtaking the rest of Europe.
Carrington was a fascinating artist; a surrealist who was on familiar terms with Duchamp, Dali and all the rest, she endured longer into the 20th century, creating a body of work she called her “beastiary”. While primarily a visual artist, she also wrote frequently, and this is one of her most personal pieces: a memoir of perhaps the darkest, most endangered part of her life.
It is a tale told in chill, almost clinical verbiage. Carrington is probably not entirely unsympathetic to her own past plight, but she describes incidents of unspeakable cruelty in a language she might have learned from the doctors inflicting said cruelties upon her. Carrington places the reader squarely in her own mind, creating an at times confusing vision of heightened senses, deadly symbols and awful obsessions. Most intriguing are the occasional breaks in the facade, when Carrington the author professes difficulty in describing what is to follow.
While perhaps more of interest to fans of Carrington rather than the casual reader, DOWN BELOW is an often fascinating, if frightful book of a woman seeing, perhaps, too much of a world. Me like books.
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