Review: Leonora - Elena Poniatowska

'I am my thoughts, which means I could be anything: a bowl of chicken soup, a pair of scissors, a crocodile, a body or a leopard, even a mug of beer. If I am what I feel, then I am love and hatred, irritation, boredom and happiness, pride and humiliation, pain and madness.'

Leonora is the Mexican author Elena Poniatowska’s fictionalised biography of the artist Leonora Carrington. Sticking closely to the facts of Carrington’s life, but told in a lyrical, imagistic style, the novel is a vivid account of a turbulent existence.

Carrington was born into a wealthy family: her father was the major shareholder in ICI, and as a teen she was presented as a debutante at the court of King George V (she later wrote a fictionalised account of this experience, in which she was replaced by a hyena). After being expelled from various finishing schools, she moved to Paris to study art, against the wishes of her mother. Here, she became attracted to the Surrealist movement, particularly the artist Max Ernst, with whom she began an affair.

At the outset of World War II, she and Ernst were forcibly separated, and Carrington suffered a mental collapse. Following a controversial and traumatic course of treatment, she was able to flee to Mexico, where she began a new life, and established herself as one of the country’s leading artists.

Carrington and Poniatowska were acquainted, with the author visiting her subject regularly from the 1950s to her death in 2011. While the novel is told in a relatively straightforward biographical format, there are clearly advantages to her decision to fictionalise her account. Freed from the constraints of biography, Poniatowska’s novel can freely explore the relationship between fantasy and reality in the mind of the artist.

Leonora’s creativity comes from her ‘ability to enter that mysterious space shared by children and animals’, a form of perception closed to most adults. When she was a young girl, her nanny told her stories about mischievous spirits which lived in her garden: by the time she was sent to a convent school, her teachers believed that she was already 'far down the road to eccentricity'. There is no border between imagination and experience for her - she believes entirely in the images created in her mind. Describing her art, she declares 'I don't consider myself a surrealist. I have had fantastical visions and I paint and write them'.

Animalistic and religious imagery are major themes of Carrington’s art, which is reflected in the novel. Leonora describes Ernst as 'tall and aquiline, with a halo of sanctity encircling his white hair', whilst Lautreamont 'was born with something of the jackal, the vulture and the panther about him'. Leonora herself identifies with horses and hyenas.

In the early stages of her life, Leonora’s boundless imagination gives her life a freewheeling quality. She and Ernst descend on rural villages in France, bringing with them an irresistible sense of the carnivalesque. However, this blurring of boundaries has serious implications for the most traumatic experience of her life. Following the invasion of France in 1940, Ernst is arrested twice: first by the French, because of his nationality, and later by the Germans, who consider his art to be degenerate. Leonora is at first paralysed by shock and grief, before her friends rescue her, and drive her to the relative safety of Spain. Seriously weakened by her refusal to eat, the journey was a nightmarish ordeal. Along the way, she saw visions of dead bodies piled up by the roadside.

It has never been properly established whether these visions were accurate or not: it is possible, since the route passed through a military graveyard, but Leonora herself wondered if she might have been delirious. She certainly suffered a breakdown on reaching Madrid. This might be easily explicable, for a young woman caught in the middle of a devastating conflict, whose partner had been abducted by the secret police. War is a shattering experience, and Leonora internalised the shockwaves that pulsed through Europe: her home, relationships and her reason were all blasted to atoms. She was sent to a mental hospital in Santander, where she was treated with the controversial drug Cardiazol, a powerful convulsive with similar effects to ECT.

According to Jennie Gillions’ excellent blog The Inspired Madman, there has been much debate over the details of Carrington’s time in the hospital. Her own account of her treatment is seen as suspect, but recent research suggests that it may well have been accurate. Poniatowska's account has a hallucinatory quality, blurring once more the boundary between fantasy and reality.

Following her family’s decision to remove her from the hospital in Santander, Leonora flees to Mexico, where she gradually disassociates herself from the clique surrounding Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim, and begins to establish herself as an artist in her own right. Her time in Mexico takes up much of the second half of the book, moving away from the traditional focus on Carrington’s relationship with Ernst and portraying her as an important artist in her own right.

The relationship between Poniatowska and Carrington helps her to recreate Leonora’s family life with vivid intensity. Particularly interesting is a section in which Leonora’s children become involved in the political demonstrations of 1968: rather than viewing the events of that year from the view of  idealistic Western teenagers, we see it from the perspective of a woman who remembers the repression she saw during World War II, and is frightened for her family.

At times, the novel threatens to become a blur of sensations and conversations, perhaps reflecting Leonora's own lack of filter, but the lyricism of Poniatowska’s prose captures the free-ranging imagination, extra-sensory existence of Leonora in a way that traditional biography never could: 'crowds levitate in the streets, their arms becoming wings which raise them even higher… my whole body is like a radio, it receives and emits messages'.

There are moments too when the need to fill in biographical details does weigh heavily on the text, particularly during the early stages. The whirlwind of names during the Paris sections means that some of the dialogue is overly expository ('in 1920, Jean Arp joined the conspiracy of those revolted by the war and mounted the first International Dadaist Exhibition in a Cologne urinal'). Ultimately, though, the linear style Poniatowska adopts is successful – without it, you suspect the novel would descend into chaos.

Many art books pass over Leonora Carrington’s legacy, relegating her to a footnote in the Surrealist movement. There has been a recent revival of interest in her work, leading to a major retrospective at the Tate Liverpool. We often wonder why women are so poorly represented in movements such as Surrealism and Beat writing. One possible explanation is that while the pursuit of madness is acceptable for men like Max Ernst and Jack Kerouac, women who follow a similar path may be locked away in mental hospitals by their families. This issue is addressed in Leonora, who observes that ‘'what in men is regarded as creativity, in women is regarded as madness'. While the Surrealists professed to idealise women, Leonora sees a darker subtext, noting that Picasso's women 'inflate and deflate at his side, and if they don't manage to escape, they thunder like popped balloons'.

Leonora Carrington is a definitive example of the artist as outsider. She suffers at the hands of religion in England, politics in Occupied France, and medicine in Spain, all before the age of 25. Much of her life could be seen as an attempt to escape her class, and she produced her greatest artworks whilst living in exile. Capturing this complex existence is a challenge which Elena Poniatowska rises to brilliantly, creating a lyrical novel filled with memorable images, whilst packing a serious emotional punch.