How Doth the Little Crocodile sculpture

by Philip Gambone

On a recent visit to Mexico City, as I walked down the Paseo de la Reforma, I came across a delightfully whimsical sculpture. The 28-foot-long bronze depicted five baby crocodiles sailing in a large crocodile boat that was paddled by another crocodile. The piece, "How Doth the Little Crocodile," is by the British-born Mexican artist and writer Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). Carrington's name was vaguely familiar to me—she pops up in most discussions of modern Mexican art—but it wasn't until I read Joanna Moorhead's biography, The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington and subsequently went to an exhibition of Carrington's paintings that I understood just how significant Carrington was in the Mexican and international art scene.

The daughter of "new-money" parents, Carrington grew up in a large country estate in Lancashire, England. A rebellious child, she was ousted from two schools, one run by nuns. When she was eighteen, she reluctantly consented to be presented at a debutante ceremony at Court. By the next year, her parents saw that their recalcitrant daughter was not going to toe the line anymore. Recognizing that Leonora's first love was painting and drawing, they agreed to let her study art.

While at art school, Carrington was introduced to the surrealist movement. "Surrealism," writes Moorhead, "was all about separating people from their expectations." Its spirit was "all about sex … about life and death and desire, and it perfectly displayed the central ambition of the movement, which was to be both playful and disturbing at the same time." This was a language that spoke to the offbeat Carrington. She fell in love with Surrealism and with its standard bearer, Max Ernst, with whom she began an affair.

Max Ernst
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Ernst, who called her a "dark, glowing beauty," taught Leonora "a lot," she said. "Especially about writers and artists … about people I wouldn't have known about otherwise. A proper education, not a convent education." In fact, what she learned from Ernst was, she declared, "more or less everything."

By 1940, their affair had turned into a warm friendship. She thought that if she stayed with Ernst, she would be "dwarfed" by him. It was Ernst, Carrington later wrote, "whom I had to eliminate if I wanted to live." By then, her painting career had taken off. "She did not simply study or debate or mull over the premises of Surrealism," writes Moorhead, "she lived them."

Portrait of Max Ernst by Leonora Carrington
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In 1942, Carrington moved to Mexico. It was "a leap into the dark," Moorhead says, a chance to "see what the future there might hold." It held a lot. She began associating with a group of artists, including Pablo O'Higgins, Remedios Varo, Kati Horna, Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo. "For the first time in her life," Moorhead writes, "she was somewhere she felt she fitted in." Not long after she arrived, Carrington met and married a Hungarian photographer, Chiki Weisz. They had two children.

Early in 1943, Peggy Guggenheim included Carrington's work in her newly opened Manhattan gallery, The Art of This Century. The show, titled Thirty Women, included work by some of the most important female painters of the day. Five years later, Carrington had her first important one-person show, also in New York.

Her artistic success did not insure financial wellbeing. Cut out of her inheritance by her brothers, Carrington and Chiki lived in poverty in a house in Colonia Roma, which she described as "absolutely perfect." There they frequently hosted meetings of her surrealist-artist friends. Along with her fellow female artists, Remedios and Kati, Carrington "took Surrealism to a new place," writes Moorhead, "a place where it was woman-centered and instinctive."

Leonora Carrington
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Throughout the 40s and 50s, Carrington's painting became more complex. Her subject matter depicted imaginary worlds and dreamscapes inhabited by supernatural creatures. "There is much that is macabre and ghoulish," wrote a reviewer in 1960 in The Times of London, "and yet, in spite of Miss Carrington's apparent desire to shock she gives the impression that in her heart of hearts it is sheer beauty that matters most."

Carrington, who once described herself as a "female human animal," always declined to explain her imagery, saying, "My art is wiser than I am." The same might be said for her surrealist novel, The Hearing Trumpet, in which, as the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk notes, "The borders between reality and fantasy, the solemn and the absurd, the sublime and the ridiculous dissolve into the surrealist tissue of the novel."

Carrington wrote The Hearing Trumpet in her middle years, but it was not published until much later, first in a French translation and then, in 1977, in English with illustrations by her son, Pablo Weisz-Carrington. By the beginning of this century, the novel was recognized as a small masterpiece. The Guardian included The Hearing Trumpet on its list of "1000 novels everyone should read."

The Institution
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The plot centers on 92-year-old Marian Leatherby, an eccentric woman who lives in an unnamed Latin American country (but recognizable as Mexico) with her son Galahad and his family. Because she is hard of hearing, Marian's friend Carmella gives her a hearing trumpet, which magnifies sound so that ordinary conversation becomes quite audible. "You will also have the privilege of being able to spy on what your whole family are saying about you," Carmella tells her. Carmella's idea proves to be horribly accurate: Marian overhears her family planning to pack her off to an old-folks' institution. "You are going away on a nice holiday, mother," Galahad tells her.

Dr. Gambit Examines Marian
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Living at the Institution, whose main building looks like a medieval castle, are nine other ladies, all "over seventy and under a hundred." One lives in a boot-shaped hut; another in a cuckoo clock. A third in a red toadstool with yellow spots. The place is run by creepy Dr. Gambit, who diagnoses his new patient with a "Deficient Personality." Drifting in and out of a twilight state of mind, Marian gives herself over to daydreaming.

The Nun's Portrait in the Refectory
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In the refectory, Marian becomes entranced by an "enchantingly sinister" painting of a winking nun. "The bawdy old bag is probably peeking at the monastery through a hole in the wall, watching the monks prancing around in their knickers," one of Marian's fellow residents opines. Marian begins to weave a fanciful story about the nun, to whom she gives the name Doña Rosalinda Alvarez della Cueva, which, curiously, turns out to have been the nun's actual name. Another of the residents slips her a small book, a biography of the nun, whose life was full of peculiar adventures including a journey to the west of Ireland disguised as a bearded cavalier in search of the Holy Grail.

The Beast in the Tower
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Adventures ensue for Marian as well: a murder in the Institution ("poisoned fudge"), the discovery that one of the resident ladies is actually a man in disguise, a mysterious set of riddles, a prisoner in the Institution's tower, and an earthquake that splits open the tower and releases a creature with the body of a human and covered with glittering feathers. Marian explores the tower, descending into a large round chamber where she discovers a woman stirring a great iron cauldron. The woman turns out to be herself. "Which of us is really me?" she asks. "Jump into the broth," the woman replies.

Jump into the Broth
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I won't reveal how this zany, madcap novel ends. Suffice it to say, Carrington pulls out all the surrealist stops. Along the way, she has great fun poking fun at lots of institutions and commonly accepted behaviors. "It is impossible," Marian's friend Carmella says, "to understand how millions and millions of people all obey a sickly collection of gentlemen that call themselves 'Government'! The word, I expect, frightens people. It is a form of planetary hypnosis, and very unhealthy." To which Marian responds, "It has been going on for years."

All her life, Carrington rebelled: against conventionality and privilege, against the macho culture of Mexico, against the notion that motherhood meant she should forget about a creative career. She chose—"with her eyes wide open," Moorhead says—a difficult life. "I suspect she would entirely concur with her fellow artist Georgia O'Keeffe, who said she had been absolutely terrified every moment along the way, but that fear had never stopped her doing a single thing she wanted to do." But let's leave the last word to Carrington's alter-ego, Marian: "Nobody," she declares, "could ever be bored with me I have too much soul."

The Hearing Trumpet was reissued in 2021 in The New York Review of Books Classics series. While not really about Mexico, it's the kind of novel that only someone living in Mexico—whom the French writer André Breton called the most surrealist country on earth—could have conceived.

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of six books, including As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. His new collection of short stories, Zigzag, has just been published by Rattling Good Yarns Press and is available on Amazon, at the Aurora Bookstore, and at the Biblioteca bookshop.

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