Leonora (9 page)

‘It's better that way, and you'll please Max better too. He's a Pygmalion.'

Eileen Agar, the Argentine, dazzles her with her audacity. Her daring is way in excess of that of the English girls up in Lancashire. She follows the sun like a sunflower; Leonora wants to be like these women, living deliberately open to magnetic currents. They talk of their lovers and boast of their nocturnal exploits and extol their emotions. These women certainly know how to live! Lee Miller grew bored in Egypt with her millionaire Aziz Eloui Bey and sent him packing, pyramids and all. She made him a long tie of the Nile and left him with his tongue hanging out on the river bank.

‘I arrived on a camel made of sand,' she assures Leonora, who listens to her open-mouthed. Eileen Agar is capable of changing a quill into a spray of roses. The aim of life is not to prosper, but to transform oneself.

When you launch yourself into the unknown is when you are saved.

‘How do you manage to paint?' Leonora asks Eileen Agar.

‘The first thing is to be receptive, and you are. Sometimes I just sit still for a quarter of an hour or more, asking myself what I am going to do, and all of a sudden an idea comes to me. Often it is nothing more than a title, a caption, or the germ of an image. I smear the canvas, giving form to my unconscious mind. If I get stuck, I take a little nap, and when I return to my easel, the idea flows again. I try not to be too alert, since being over-conscious is inhibiting.'

Just one thing dampens the passion of their surroundings. The Spanish Civil War, which Picasso indicts with his painting of
Guernica
, now on exhibition in Paris. In the house in Cornwall, the mural evokes more comment than the war itself.

‘I loathe men when they dress up as soldiers,' says Eileen Agar, ‘I loathe weapons, I loathe war.'

‘I can't return to Paris without your promise that you'll come too, Leonora.'

‘What for?'

‘To live with me, paint with me, and die with me,' says Max, by way of a farewell.

‘Now that I have met you, how can you imagine that I would leave you?'

‘Max, you are my Holy Grail.'

‘Max, you are my misfortune.'

‘You are my spoon.'

Ursula Goldfinger warns her:

‘Think it over carefully. He is married to a woman who is a gallery director in Paris. She is extremely well known, all the painters there owe her a great deal, she protects and even maintains some of them.'

‘Then she should be giving him a kick up the backside right now this very minute.'

Leonora thinks leaving a wife seems as simple as choosing another menu. Meat or fish? For Leonora, leaving everything behind is the easiest thing in the world, given how willing she was to send her parents, her brothers, Nanny and Boozy – her fox terrier – to the devil in both England and Ireland.

‘So you are set on doing exactly whatever you want,' Nanny says, with a sad look in her eyes.

‘Of course,' Leonora answers back, capable of surrendering herself without question and without thought for the consequences.

Back in Hazelwood, Leonora confronts her parents. Not only is she not about to have the wedding they have so longed for, it couldn't even happen with the man she is madly in love with, since he is already married. And he is twenty-six years older than her, and she is on the point of being reunited with him in Paris.

‘Quite different structures underpin our sense of reality, Papa. Just like in painting: when you make a tracing a different image emerges. It's called
pentimento
.'

‘What are you talking about, Leonora?'

‘I am searching for another way to live.'

‘Your way of life is conditioned by your birth, by the education we have given you, and by your inheritance. If you behave with ingratitude, you'll pay dearly for it.'

‘No. Papa, I have learnt other ways of living in the world. I am not your creation. I want to reinvent my own self. I am leaving.'

Outdoors, her father's foxhounds are barking, but with less fury than the pack baying inside Leonora herself.

The farewell is a declaration of war. How is it possible that he, the builder of a business worth millions of pounds, is being defied by a young girl? How will he get someone so ungrateful to submit to his control?

From the heights of his rage, Carrington yells at her from the bottom of his guts: ‘You are no longer my daughter! My door will never be darkened by your shadow again!' Leaning on Maurie for support, he prophesies: ‘You shall never see me again!'

As Leonora rushes out to the station, intending to catch the train to Dover and from there the ferry to Calais, her mother catches hold of her: ‘Let me know as soon as you get to Paris. Whatever situation you find yourself in, I will always help you. What you're doing is sheer madness, and you have no idea what may await you there.'

9

LOPLOP

I
N 1937 AND AT THE AGE
of twenty, Leonora leaves her home never to go back. ‘I never left with Max. I went alone and every time I have ever left anyone, I've left alone.'

No sooner does she arrive in Paris than Mrs. Ernst, to whom Max has been married for ten years, appears, as sharply pointed and inevitable as the Eiffel Tower. She was at the exhibition in London, without Max ever mentioning her.

Impetuously, Leonora convinces herself: ‘It doesn't matter to me. Max could have a harem of wives, all immense giants, bra size 42 C, armed to the teeth and determined to kill me; and I would stay with him regardless.' She takes a taxi to his studio at 26, Rue des Plantes, in Montparnasse.

‘Whatever happens, I've come to Paris to paint,' Leonora tells herself, and asks her mother to rent a flat for her at 12, Rue Jacob.

She tells Max all about her life. She assures him her father will pursue her even unto Paris and make their live together impossible.

‘It doesn't matter if he does,' Ernst replies. Carrington took away her beloved Tartar when she still so needed him.

Max contributes a rocking horse he found in an antiques shop, which Leonora paints alongside a hyena, her other self, in a picture she has begun called
The Inn of the Dawn Horse.
She gives the final brushstrokes to her white trousers and her jet-black hair. Tartar flees through the window towards the freedom of the trees. You have to fly above everything. Life explodes inside Leonora, there's no way back, she gallops as she did on Winkie, sweeping all obstacles from her path. Dragons with long claws and monstrous serpents with boars' snouts can tear at her flesh, but she gallops onwards. Nothing stops her. She is a mare, rearing, kicking up dust-clouds. Nothing restrains her. Her strength dumbfounds the painter, who day and night won't leave her alone, following her closely and nervously; she must not escape him like the horse in her self-portrait.

Now it is her turn to make him feel secure: ‘Yes, I am here, Max, like the leaves you make rubbings with, like the bark covering the tree, like the trees of the earth. So time will pass, and my roots will become yours, entwined in one another.'

Ernst's wife, Marie-Berthe Aurenche, protects artists from themselves, praying for them daily. If they don't support her in return, if they go over to Leonora, she will forgive them. She takes refuge in the Church. At the moment of the elevation of the Host, the devout turn their heads and stare at her sobbing loudly beside the holy water stoup, raising her hands to the heavens.

Before going to sleep at night, Leonora runs over the lessons taught by her master. Madness brings the Surrealists to a higher level. Up until now Leonora's world at home in England has been a conventional one, possibly insipid but well protected; in Paris she is walking along the edge of a precipice, hand in hand with the most daring man on Earth.

Any of the Old Masters would have opened their arms to Max. Rembrandt would have had him sit by his side, yet Ernst wants to cut all that up, turn it into collage, paint horns on his [Rembrandt's] head, in order to travel on to the next dimension, break every rule. So much courage is required and Leonora follows him breathlessly, all her senses alerted. Music emanates from Max's body, his voice is pure provocation, his movements grow like ivy intricating itself around her legs.

‘The strongest Surrealist image is one that presents the most heightened degree of arbitrariness, and which requires the most work to translate into a practical language.'

‘How can I paint a sense of smell? How can I make my paintings reek?'

‘Write it down.'

Leonora writes
The Debutante
in order to make a mockery of her presentation at Court. As well as being stinking and repellent, the hyena emits the sound of sarcastic, human laughter. She paints one with the eyes of a man and its breasts swollen with milk.

‘Why on earth would they admit a hyena into Buckingham Palace, Leonora?'

‘Because she kills the servant, then covers her hyena face with the woman's skin for a mask, and carries on until her stench betrays her. Is it absolutely necessary for you to spend tonight at the Rue des Plantes with your wife?'

‘When you know her better, you will see that I am right to do so. She is too fragile, she cries the whole time, my friends all adore her, and many of them owe their careers to her. Jean Aurenche is her brother, and a virtuoso cinematographer. It is difficult to abandon her, I have to proceed very slowly with her.'

‘And how fragile do you think
I
am?'

‘Next to her, you are the Rock of Gibraltar.'

Ernst divides his days and nights between his studio on the Rue des Plantes and the Rue Jacob.

‘To Marie-Berthe, the end of love is like being disembowelled.'

‘And for you?'

‘I am Loplop, the superior bird, and I am obsessed with you, Leonora.'

‘What is Loplop all about?'

‘There's a street poet known as Ferdinand Lop. I took his name and am the Vogelobre Loplop.' Max wraps his arms around her. ‘I am a bird of prey, and I shall cover you with my feathers. Look, they are already sprouting.'

The picture that most shocks Leonora is that of the blind swimmer imprisoned behind vertical stripes made not of water but of steel. Or are they electric cables about to electrocute him? Is this the water that exerts such efforts to drown us, the harder we swim? There is no way to escape.

‘Who can save themselves? Are you going to throw yourself into the water with me?'

‘Once I saw a blind swimmer who never for a moment strayed from his lane.'

He explains that the painting is inspired by an illustration of electric currents in a science book, and that ‘automatically, we all blindly follow the current'.

Max's Surrealist friends swiftly turn her into their idol. Nush Eluard takes her by the hand. ‘Look, I am the wife of a poet and I live every minute as if it were my last.' Lee Miller assures her that, ‘In this life, everything is permitted if you know how to do it.' Young and lovely, Leonora has turned her back on a vast fortune and an enviable position in society. She is the absolute incarnation of what Breton calls
l'amour fou
, breaking every rule; her actions belie the bourgeois conventions within which she was raised. Lee Miller agrees: ‘You have come so far already, don't look back. Marie-Berthe, poor thing, is now a pillar of salt.'

Breton's followers go to the very limits of their existence, the margins of society, they are seers. They appropriate a truth beyond reality, and call it Surrealism. They demand the liberation of men and women from all that prevents them from being themselves, in order to conform with a biological impulse to do whatever attracts them. Art confined by tradition is like a caged beast. To jail a creature is to deprive it of its grandeur. There is little space for fantasy within the cage of traditional art. However firmly established, inhibitions continue to maintain their force, no matter what liberties men accord themselves.

‘Paris loathes us,' sighs Louis Aragon, still resentful of the censorship accorded to
Le Con d'Irène
in the creation of which he had to suck all of Apollinaire's
Eleven Thousand Pricks.

‘How wonderful,' replies Breton. ‘He is a great man who justifies our existence. The bourgeoisie hate us because soon they will have to admit that we have an indefinable attraction within ourselves which excites them. In the gallery, the day before yesterday, a woman told me she had returned to view Ernst's paintings a second time, because their colour and sense of movement affected her so profoundly.'

Among all the other exhibitors, it is Ernst's spiritual dimension that stands out. He does what he likes and they admire him. Leonora is now his queen, his woman, his chosen one, and Marie-Berthe has been cast aside along the way: she is now nothing more than a victim. Surrealists do not practise fidelity.

Loplop, the superior bird, dazzles André Breton: ‘We are witnesses to the birth of a new art form.' Insults justify Ernst's way of life and his disdain for whoever fails to understand it.
La Fessée
, his painting of the Virgin slapping the infant Jesus' bottom, offended his father. He paints with fury, liberating the burdens of childhood, buffeting traditions, taking it out on his family. When he was an adolescent visiting an art gallery in Cologne, he heard a young man offering an explanation of each painting in turn to an old man. Finally, the old man exclaimed indignantly: ‘What is all this about? I am now seventy-nine years old, and in my whole life dedicated to art I have never been so insulted.' The youth became equally infuriated: ‘If you are really seventy-nine years old, you should have passed on to a better life by now.'

‘He would like to be your friend,' Max intervened, speaking to the young man.

‘My name is Jean Arp,' the young man introduced himself, holding out his hand. ‘Art has to be done away with as civilisation was by the War.'

‘How?'

‘With terror, with rage.'

‘Does Dadaism not have any room for compassion?'

‘Yes, but never for the past.'

Arp was the first to affirm that chance is the great creative stimulus. After struggling for months with a picture which he ended up tearing to bits and scattering to the four winds, he observed that the scraps of paper had fallen to the ground in just the shape that he had been seeking. So he stuck them together, recalling Mallarmé: ‘
Un coup de dés n'abolira jamais le hasard
.'

He tells Max: ‘I created a woman's buttocks from an ink blot.'

Ernst despises the morality of the confessional and maintains, with Lautréamont, that his one and only task is to attack the Creator who engendered such scum on earth as man. Max discovered him thanks to Breton, who in turn knew him because Soupault obtained a copy of
Les Chants de Maldoror
(‘Songs of Maldoror') which he took to the Front with him during the First World War.

According to Ernst, the Church's confessionals were responsible for diminishing sexuality and repressing pleasure.

Max brandishes the cutting edge of his smile.

All this rebelliousness stimulates Leonora because it evokes something more within her; her energy is more ferocious than ever, and her ideas swim against the current like salmon. The more eccentric Max's propositions become, the more attractive they seem to her.

‘Do you know that once upon a time I wanted to be a doctor? My intention was to cure minds. I felt myself to be capable of teaching men not to give in to whatever a scarecrow in a cassock told me about being an emissary of Divine Will. When you're young, you're like a billiard ball, always liable to bounce one end of the table to the other. I experienced mystical crises, times of exaltation and depression, even attacks of hysteria. I dangerously blurred the distinction between birds and humans because my pink cockatoo died the same day my sister was born. I buried her in the garden – the cockatoo not my sister – and then descended into a nervous breakdown; the same experience repeated itself when I was almost hit by a car in Brühl. I laughed and the driver cursed at me. I put my family into check-mate and I think I did them a favour when I left Germany.'

What Max fails to mention is that in Brühl he also left behind his first wife, the art critic Louise Straus, and his son, Hans Ulrich Ernst, known as ‘Jimmy', aged only two. The boy came to visit in Paris and Max had no idea what to do with him. He hauled him around his friends' houses to see Dalí, Masson and Tanguy. It was with relief that Max took him back to the Gare St. Lazare and put him on a train back home.

Now Jimmy was living in Paris with his mother, looking for work with the help of Marie-Berthe Aurenche, the woman abandoned. Since the painter had left his second wife, Louise and she had become accomplices in grief.

‘Leonora, paint what you used to think about as a child. Express all your inhibitions and your childhood fears.'

‘Then I would have to paint like a child and I've no interest in doing that.'

‘It's the first step to liberating yourself; whatever you paint, whatever you draw, whatever you sculpt will be childish in content but will lead you into freedom. In addition, children arrive in the world with an impressive power of reason but then, through lack of experience, allow themselves to be repressed by adults.'

One morning Leonora snaps at him: ‘Marie-Berthe told me – or rather yelled at me – that you have a son. If you are so very interested in children's fantasies, introduce me to Jimmy.'

‘What will you say to him?'

Jimmy is now seventeen and no longer a child. He has nothing in common with the collage his father dedicated to him fifteen years earlier, when he was about to turn two:
Dadafax, minimus.
He is a young man with straight fair locks that fall into his eyes, and which he keeps pushing aside with his hand. Leonora kisses him on both cheeks and Jimmy smiles.