(no subject)

[skygiants]

genarti and I both recently read Leonora Carrington's 1974 surrealist novel The Hearing Trumpet, about a selectively deaf old lady whose unappreciative relatives put her into an old age home, where she is forced to perform annoying physical therapy exercises, uncovers a poisoning attempt, is haunted by the mystery of a seventeenth-century cross-dressing occultist nun, leads a hunger strike, and weathers an icepocalypse, among other activities equally strange or stranger.

Beth found the pace and tone of plotting very Joan Aiken-ish and I have to admit I agree with her.

BETH: But I understand that The Hearing Trumpet is like this because Carrington was a surrealist. Is it possible that Joan Aiken was also a surrealist this whole time and we've simply not been looking at her work through the right lens?
ME: I don't think her life landed her in quite the right set of circumstances to be a surrealist properly ... I think she was a little too young when the movement was kicking off .... but I do think that perhaps she believed in their beliefs even if she didn't know it ....

Anyway, The Hearing Trumpet is in some ways has elements of a classically seventies feminist text -- she wrote it while deeply involved in Mexico's 1970s women's liberation movement, and the whole occultist nun -> holy grail -> icepocalypse plot has a lot of Sacred Sexy Goddess Repressed By The Evil And Prudish Christian Church running through it -- but Marian Leatherby's robust and and opinionated ninety-year-old voice is so charmingly unflappable that the experience is never in the least bit predictable or cliche. My favorite character is Marian's best friend Carmella, who kicks off the book by giving mostly-deaf Marian the hearing trumpet that allows her to [selectively] understand the things that are going on around her. Carmella plays the role often seen in children's books of Friend Who Is Constantly Gloriously Catastrophizing About How Dramatic A Situation Will Be And How They Will Heroically Rescue You From It (and then I will smuggle you a secret letter and tunnel into the old-age home in order to avoid the dozens of police dogs! etc. etc.) which is even funnier when the things that are actually happening are even weirder and more dramatic than anything Carmella predicts, just in a slightly different genre, and then funnier again when Carmella shows up towards the end of the book perfectly suited to surviving the Even Newer, Weirder, and More Dramatic Situations that have Arisen.

The end-note explains that Carrington based Carmella on her friend Remedios Varo, a detail I include as a treat for the Varo-heads but also as an illustration of how much the novel builds itself on the connections between weird women who survive a largely-incomprehensible world by being largely incomprehensible themselves. Carrington herself was in her late fifties when she wrote this book, but she too lived into her nineties; her Wikipedia article describes her in its header as "one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s." It's hard not to inscribe that back into the text in some way, which is of course an impossible reading, but one does like to imagine the ninety-year-old Carrington with just as much presence as the ninety-year-old Marian.

Comments

[portico]

having read joanna moorhead’s book about carrington, i think that reading of her character at the end of her life is exactly right. (moorhead was a cousin from the english family carrington had estranged herself from in the 40s who connected with her at the very end of her life)

[skygiants]

The Moorhead book also sounds fascinating, would you rec?

[portico]

i would! it’s a biography in places (the various homes where carrington lived), which as you might imagine really worked for me lol

[ethelmay]

I appear to be doomed forever to mix her up with Dora Carrington (and Carrington, who preferred her surname, is doomed to have "Dora" dragged in so people don't think she's Leonora.

[skygiants]

This other Carrington ALSO sounds fascinating, though!

[ethelmay]

Leonora is the one I know nothing about (not that I know a lot about D.C., but she crops up a good deal, like all the Bloomsbury-adjacent crowd).

[sovay]

It's hard not to inscribe that back into the text in some way, which is of course an impossible reading, but one does like to imagine the ninety-year-old Carrington with just as much presence as the ninety-year-old Marian.

I have no conviction that Leonora Carrington cared about the linear flow of time any more than the rest of the supposedly realistic order of things, so I'm cool with this reading.

(I have not read The Hearing Trumpet in more than a decade, but I remember loving it. I found it in a used book store, having totally managed to miss to that point that she wrote as well as painted. Its cover was one of her own artworks. She had still been alive when it was reprinted.)

[skygiants]

Great point! If the Earth can tilt on its axis and the poles completely reorient themselves I don't see why linear time should be far behind.

I loved all the sketches in the text! Do you remember what cover you had? Our library copy was this one:

[sovay]

Great point! If the Earth can tilt on its axis and the poles completely reorient themselves I don't see why linear time should be far behind.

Indeed!

I loved all the sketches in the text! Do you remember what cover you had? Our library copy was this one

It was this one! I despair of ever unpacking my library out of storage.

[skygiants]

Ohhh what a beautiful volume!!

[mific]

Wonderfully Boschian!

[kore]

I love Leonora! And Dora too, altho her story is really sad. I think I got into Leonora through Plath, who often based poems on paintings, and then found her books (they were a lot harder to get then, the NYRB editions are beautiful).

[skygiants]

I love to know that Leonora inspired Plath! It's always a delight to hear about that kind of continuity.

[osprey_archer]

Joan Aiken as surrealist! I don't know a lot about surrealism, but from the little I do know it sounds very right that Aiken was at very least a fellow traveler, whether she knew it or not. I feel like the combination of playfully batshit stuff (St. Paul's on rollers!) with actually quite dark material is pretty common in surrealism but unusual outside of it.

[skygiants]

I was squinting at the timelines like, well, Carrington was only about seven or eight years older than Aiken, but that's seven or eight CRUCIAL years to be old enough to go hang out with dashing surrealist artists in the thirties while little Joan was still a child at school. It occurs to me to wonder if anyone's written a good biography of Joan Aiken; I can't seem to turn anything up but it really seems like somebody should.

[lirazel]

Um, this sounds amazing, I am going to seek it out, thank you for bringing it to my attention!

[skygiants]

I think it would be incredibly up your alley!