A stunning work of memoir and an unforgettable depiction of the
brilliance and madness by** one of Surrealism's most compelling
figures**
In 1937 Leonora Carrington--later to become one of the twentieth
century's great painters of the weird, the alarming, and the wild--was a
nineteen-year-old art student in London, beautiful and unapologetically
rebellious. At a dinner party, she met the artist Max Ernst. The two
fell in love and soon departed to live and paint together in a farmhouse
in Provence.
In 1940, the invading German army arrested Ernst and sent him to a
concentration camp. Carrington suffered a psychotic break. She wept for
hours. Her stomach became "the mirror of the earth"--of all worlds in
a hostile universe--and she tried to purify the evil by compulsively
vomiting. As the Germans neared the south of France, a friend persuaded
Carrington to flee to Spain. Facing the approach "of robots, of
thoughtless, fleshless beings," she packed a suitcase that bore on a
brass plate the word Revelation.
This was only the beginning of a journey into madness that was to end
with Carrington confined in a mental institution, overwhelmed not only
by her own terrible imaginings but by her doctor's sadistic course of
treatment. In Down Below she describes her ordeal--in which the
agonizing and the marvelous were equally combined--with a startling,
almost impersonal precision and without a trace of self-pity. Like
Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Down Below
brings the hallucinatory logic of madness home.
