Leonora (8 page)

‘I am filled with fear.'

‘Few reach the level of the “unknown”. The majority live in fear of losing their heads and going to pieces along the way. Baudelaire also said that we had to go through the fire that burns our brains, and fling ourselves down to the bottom of the abyss.'

Older than Leonora, Ursula has her discover Novalis, talks to her of Apollinaire and recites
Le Pont Mirabeau
aloud. André Breton's
Les Champs Magnétiques
inspired the literature of the Surrealists and Leonora has to read it. Up until this point, Leonora's literary universe has been that of Lewis Carroll, William Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites. Ursula opens the door to the rage of
Les Chants de Maldoror
by Lautréamont, a poet who was born with something of the jackal, the vulture and the panther about him.

‘Lautréamont made a comparison that Ernst transformed into his credo: “As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.” Who knows whether you could be his sewing machine, Leonora.'

‘Or his umbrella.'

The first International Surrealist Exhibition is held at the New Burlington Galleries, to be attended by Max Ernst. It launches Leonora towards another planet, a place she had conceived as an unrealisable dream during her adolescence. ‘So it is that what I have always sought really exists, and what attracts me matters just as much to others.'

She is impressed when Ursula lets her know that at the start of the Spanish Civil War Eluard, Breton and Ernst wanted to travel to Spain to fight alongside the Republicans. Malraux permitted himself the luxury of turning them down, saying: ‘I am looking for men who do not know how to paint.'

‘They are men who lived through the First World War, when Max was an artillery instructor. He suffered a clinical death and recorded it saying: “Max Ernst died on the 1st August 1914. He resurrected on the 11th November 1918 as a young man desirous of becoming a sage to encounter the legend of his times.” Max lived through the war as a dead man. It was one of the greatest evils our world has seen,' Ursula tells her.

‘Does Max not believe in God or patriotism?'

‘No.'

‘I am very proud of my brothers, who have enlisted in the Army, the Royal Navy and the RAF.'

‘For those involved in the fighting, these four years of war continue representing the worst tragedy there could be. Have you read
The Interpretation of Dreams
by Freud? Do you know who Hegel is?'

‘No, Ursula, no.'

‘I'll bring you their books tomorrow.'

The First World War obliged former Dadaists, now become Surrealists, to acquire the ability to put art at the service of their imagination. In the light of the criminality and the imbecility of the military, followers of Breton and Freud ruled out reason and opened themselves to the high world of the unconscious. They rescued and rehabilitated Lautréamont from oblivion, a consequence of his odes to murder, violence, sadomasochism, blasphemy and darkness. Surrealism, if it was to be permanent revolution, had to start with oneself. Poetry would be made flesh and blood as Eluard demanded. Men and women, the old and the newborn would now be impelled by their feelings to destroy the army, prisons, brothels and, first of all, churches. At long last, painters really did hold the answer, along with writers, and scientists, experimentalists and the inspired, the romantics and muses who guided the creators, those who fearlessly go naked and children who leap into the void holding tight to their umbrellas.

Ah – and the sad youths leaving on the train!

Just one more sausage dog lost between Brühl and Paris.

8

THE NIGHTINGALE'S THREAT

D
INING WITH MAX ERNST
at home with Ursula and her Hungarian husband Ernő Goldfinger becomes an obsession. Leonora selects a black dress. Her hair, as jet-black as her eyes, cascades over her shoulders. The house is filled with people when she walks through the front door, exchanging her flat shoes for high heels. She deposits the flatties in the hall along with her mackintosh and umbrella, and enters the living room with her heart pumping fit to burst.

Leonora is quite different to the rest of the young guests. She is already pawing the ground, spurring herself onwards, champing at the bit, her eyes flashing. Her lips part in a smile without her intending it. Her mouth is blood red.

‘Leonora, Leonora, I want you to meet the photographer Lee Miller, she's a golden Venus, an American model; you can see her over there, at the back, to the right of the living room.' Ursula points in her direction.

Among the groups engaged in conversation, Leonora spies a man with white hair who breaks all the rules of good manners by signalling to her, oblivious to all those pressing in around him. A stranger to convention, he eschews the art critics and possible buyers. ‘I see here a free man, a man to whom the business of art is an irrelevance,' Leonora thinks, while at the same instant a waiter offers her a flute of champagne. The bubbles are on the point of overflowing when a sign from a stranger restrains her: Max Ernst is cautioning her with a warning gesture. Ursula introduces her with: ‘This is my dear friend and colleague …' The artist isn't listening. He only has eyes for Leonora, his all is directed towards the one person he desires to draw nearer. In no time, Ursula has withdrawn and left the two of them alone.

Leonora meanders about the room, her red mouth bright below her black eyes, her red mouth accentuated by the white of her face and crowned by the wild blackness of her hair. ‘How beautiful!' Max thinks. And how very different to the women he is accustomed to seducing and above all, how different to Marie-Berthe, his wife! Ernst turns his back on the art critic and the admiring lady, and takes Leonora by the arm. She has a presentiment that she is running the biggest risk of her life. Magnetic powers seize her like they did Alice when she fell down the tunnel to the centre of the earth.

‘Is it true that in London art doesn't exist, compared to what's going on in Paris?' Clearly, he wishes to extend an invitation.

A giraffe sporting an emerald necklace passes by, talking to a rhinoceros: ‘That man is irresistible, look he's all eyes.' He surprises her by taking her by the hand. Leonora has never dreamt of anything like this. She has achieved her goal in life: he will transform her life, teach her to see the world anew. She is his coal mine and he will extract and polish the diamonds from deep within.

Max radiates light.

They isolate themselves in a corner of the room.

‘Are you a nightingale?'

‘I emerged from the egg my mother laid in her eagle's nest on the 2nd April, forty-six years ago.' He laughs. ‘And this took place in Brühl, near Cologne. It was there that eleven thousand virgins gave up their lives rather than lose their virginity. Are you a virgin?'

Leonora is unperturbed. So the genius is twenty-six years older than she? Between 1891 and 1917 lies a gulf of years almost as wide as that between herself and her father. Max tells her the dome of Cologne Cathedral retains the skulls and bones of the Three Wise Men, Gaspar, Melchior and Balthasar, and that every year they take them out in golden coffers encrusted with jewels – something that he, as a child, adored to watch.

‘Where on earth did Ursula find you? I dreamt you way back when the Virgin smacked the Infant Jesus' little bottom. You were peeping out from behind the door, and to reach you I had to escape from the house, barefoot and in a red smock, golden curls, blue eyes and a whip in my left hand. I took the road leading to the station, and elicited the admiration of some Catholic worshippers on pilgrimage to Kevelaer. “He is the Son of God,” they said, kneeling before me. I offered them my blessings and some neighbours took me home. My father punished me, despite my attempts to explain to him: “I am the Christ Child.” So he painted me standing on a little cloud and, instead of a whip, put a crucifix in my hand.'

The following days are devoted to Max. In him, Leonora discovers an artisan, a carpenter, a plasterer, an electrician, a plumber. Compass, hammer, file, any tool whatsoever, pliers, blow-torches, moulds, all matter much more to him than so-called
objets d'art
. Ernst constructs, glues, nails, makes little boxes, opens drawers and doors, builds, refines and incorporates. More than inhabiting an
atelier
, he accommodates an entire ironmongery. As a result, before simply mixing blue and green paint on his palette, he imports screws and cables. The essence of his creativity is his handiwork. His hands, as dextrous as any cabinet maker's, naturally incline towards saw and sandpaper. Screwdriver and pliers are more in evidence than paintbrushes. His spatula is heavy enough to resemble a builder's. And he prefers to talk to a plumber than to a fellow painter, who makes assumptions about his creativity.

‘You know, Leonora, my father was also a painter, a bad one, as all he painted were copies. He taught the deaf how to speak; I would accompany him, and follow the movements of his lips so closely that I learnt how to become such a technical expert that I am now the most observant of men, knowing exactly how to read not only lips, but evil intentions. I also know how raw materials are going to behave, and I read not merely the human face but the surfaces of plaster, chalk, wood, tincture of iodine, coal and oils.'

That night, on returning to her room, Leonora repeats to herself: ‘I am happy, I am me. What I've always held on to inside me at long last will be liberated and gallop forth.'

The British art collector, Roland Penrose, invites Herbert Read, author of the book on Surrealism that turned Leonora's head, Man Ray and his lover, the dancer Ady Fidelin, Paul and Nush Eluard, Eileen Agar and her husband Joseph Bard, E. L. T. Messens, Magritte's great friend and the editor of the
London Bulletin
, to Lamb Creek House, his holiday home in Cornwall.

‘Why don't you invite your little friend along?' proposes Penrose.

‘I think I shall die of love,' Leonora confides to Ursula Goldfinger.

‘If you don't die, from now onwards your life will begin to make sense.'

‘That girl of yours is brilliant. Where on earth did you find her?' Penrose persists, idolising Max still further.

Leonora is the centre of attraction, the novelty in the group, the big discovery. At night, Ady Fidelin, Penrose's wife, Lee Miller, Eluard's wife, Nush, and Eileen Agar dance naked in the light of their lovers' car headlamps that illuminate the garden. Ady Fidelin's hip movements prove superior to those of Nush. ‘Indecent, pornographic,' the newspapers accuse Max. The order for his arrest was not long in coming.

‘What about you? Are you just going to stand and stare at us?' asks Ady. In a flash, Leonora has stripped naked. What freedom! Lee Miller assures her: ‘Madness opens the doors on your inner world. Performing acts condemned by others raises you to a new level, you leap out of your own mediocrity.'

The nocturnal dance is an act of redemption. Leonora is exalted, believes in herself, in the beauty of her body, she is a mare set at liberty within her animal hide; seeing her now, the Reverend Mother would bear witness to her capacity to levitate. During the daytime, she walks everywhere at Max's side as part of an ongoing apprenticeship, while he collects leaves and bark from the trees, places them under a sheet of paper, traces them with a pencil and teaches her the technique of
frottage.

‘I discovered how to do it one day, having carefully studied a plank of wood flooring, then placed a sheet of paper on top of it, rubbing it with a pencil until the grain of wood turned into the surface of the sea. I found knots in the wood and wanted to conserve what the wood showed me, its landscapes, its dearly cherished poetry, its sexuality.'

Leonora looks at him. He is a man possessed and she longs to hurl herself into the abyss with him. Whatever nobody else notices, to Ernst is creative material. He might well be mentally ill, but he draws her to him, and she can no longer draw back. In his
frottage
she can see a forest, birds and hybrid animals never previously imagined. All now transformed into memorable objects.

‘I had no idea that matter could contain so many unrecognisable spirits.'

‘I know a great deal about trees, because when I was in Brühl my father went into the forest to paint and took me with him.'

Max hoards what nobody else notices, his field of study includes a length of rope fibre, a piece of cork, a wooden peg, a hair forgotten in the sink. ‘You have to go beyond painting.'

He introduces her to one of the works he gave to Roland Penrose:

‘It's an oil painting, can you see how thick it is, see every corpuscle it contains? I mixed the paint in with the hairs from my arm. I made up a paste, applied it to the canvas and then rubbed it for hours with sandpaper. Other colours and then other textures emerged, and look how it came out. Now we are going to rub this canvas I have just painted, until its entrails are exposed, new pigments, its deepest veins. It will reveal everything it contains within, and you'll discover how many things lie beneath what you saw at first sight. What happens to the viewer when images are superimposed is simply astounding. Look how this fragment of linen fabric unravels, can you follow the trail of each thread? Now cross it over the next one. Anything serves a purpose: you can use a spatula or even a knife,
grattage
means that the marks of time emerge like hieroglyphics, even like cries.

‘It looks to me as if you are violating the fabric.'

‘That's the convulsive beauty Breton talks about.'

Leonora is dazzled as she follows the maestro, she's swinging on high tension cables, unpicking the weft of her life.

‘Everything that lives has its way of being, and it's not true that painting is no more than the application of colour to canvas. That kind of painting is finished, what counts is what goes way beyond it. You can smear it with your excrement, scratch it – go for it! – don't sit around copying the masters as you'll never be able to supersede them. The life in your body, in the composition of its very cells, is what composes your painting, Leonora. You can brush the canvas like your hair, scratch it with your nails or your teeth, stain it with your blood or your saliva, salt it with your tears.'

Frottage
also reveals to Leonora the seven circles of hell. She descends to new strata inside the mine. Max shows her a forest constructed out of fish bones.

‘How?'

‘I removed the fish skeleton, let it fall on the canvas, and transformed it into a forest.'

Leonora murmurs admiringly: ‘You teach me to see what I have never seen before. The potential was there, that I knew, I could feel it. Thanks to you, I am now certain of it!'

Ernst gives her a sheet of paper and a stick of charcoal, then sets her to trace the rough surface of a plank. Soon she becomes excited.

‘Now, add your own colours to it, and your forest will be just like mine.'

When Leonora shows him what she has drawn on top of her tracing, he exclaims:

‘Don't be so orthodox, don't seek to obey, free yourself, unearth your past. What did you dream last night?'

‘The impossible.'

‘Then draw the impossible.'

‘I dreamt there was a whale at the far end of my bedroom, and I was also a whale, and we were going to eat me.'

‘That's a familiar image that goes all the way back to the Bible. Jonah was more creative with it. You were really going to eat yourself?'

‘Assisted by you and the depth of your mouth.'

Ernst smears a leaf with paint and places a second leaf on top of it, then lifts the top one off and from beneath emerge cypresses, poplars, mosses, birds; they transmute into hybrid creatures in which skin, fur and feathers are indistinguishable. Ernst gives it the title
Woman Turning into a Bird.

They spend two weeks living under the same spell. Among the women, the photographer Lee Miller is the person who most attracts Leonora.

‘I was Man Ray's assistant. He also caused me to fall in love with him, and I took portraits of Picasso, Eluard and Jean Cocteau. I was the statue in Jean Cocteau's
Blood of a Poet
and the theatre critics agreed that mine was the best part in the whole film!'

It's a fact that she has a model's figure. ‘Did you know that Lee Miller did the adverts for Kotex sanitary towels?' gossips Eileen Agar. Leonora is surprised to learn that her new women friends should have a life so rich in challenges.

‘I've lived nothing and know nothing,' she tells Lee Miller.