“We Must Do Eccentric Things”: Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet

A few weeks back, I found myself in Norman, Oklahoma, home of the Oklahoma University “Sooners.” What are ‘sooners,’ you ask? Why, what do you think? They’re settler colonists.

But this is not an essay about Oklahoma. This is an essay about surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington.

First let me just explain that I was in Norman to attend a very important gymnastics meet, between two stacked, powerhouse college gymnastics teams (one of whom was, indeed, the “Sooners”; their slogan is a call-and-response: Boomer! Sooner! I couldn’t invent this if I tried). The problem was that once the gymnastics festivities were over, my friend and I still seemed to be…in Oklahoma. And there really aren’t many affordable flights in and out of there. Trust me, I checked.

Luckily, OU has an art museum. Turns out, an incredible art museum: the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art.

Enter Leonora Carrington. 

More specifically, her 1978 oil painting: Friday.

The little jpeg on the museum website is a pathetic rendering. Fortunately, I snagged this photo, up close and personal. See, it pays to fly to Oklahoma!

Leonora Carrington, Friday, 1978, oil paint on canvas. Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art.

Looking at this painting makes itself mandatory. It’s a world. It’s hard to sum up. It appears to depict some old ladies having tea and a smoke at a table. But then there’s the fish. And the strange monk, lurking in the doorway. Is he a monk, or just another one of their stoned crew?

Look again, and you’ll notice the miniaturized woman on the right. Why is she so small? What’s that yellow stuff?

Look again: the fish! What!

Are they inside some kind of bubble? Are they underwater? Are those smoke rings, or bubbles?

And the woman in black, blowing the bubble-rings: what’s up with her eyes? Is this painting her hallucination?

Snapped a photo of this wall text hoping it would make more sense upon a second read; alas.

According to this museum’s wall text, we’re dealing with symbols of spirituality, the pagan, the occult. Perhaps these ladies are in an “alchemical kitchen,” per this curator’s insistence. But I think the more you try to pin down this mystifying scene, the more it slips through your fingers. Knowledge of Scandinavian symbols cannot still the tooth that nibbles at the soul, to paraphrase Dickinson.

But don’t worry, I’m not going to go on about this wacky painting for the entire post. This is a book blog!

Leonora Carrington — who passed away just over a decade ago in Mexico, where she lived most of her life, more on that later, drum roll folks, this part is exciting — was also a writer.

And so it was that the Libby app proffered its bounty, and its bounty was the novel, The Hearing Trumpet. 

Outside the art museum.

If a person finds herself in the Dallas Fort Worth airport, she should procure some skittles. And once she gets some skittles, she should sit down in a sunny spot by a big window and read Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, published by Routledge in 1976 and reprinted by Penguin in 2005. 

A hearing trumpet is really just what it sounds like: a trumpet-shaped contraption meant to help with hearing. It’s given to our narrator, Marian, by her best friend Carmella. 

“Now Carmella has given me presents several times and they are sometimes knitted and sometimes comestible, but I never saw her so excited. When she unwrapped the hearing trumpet I was at a loss to know whether it could be used for eating or drinking or merely for ornament. After many complicated gestures she finally put it to my ear and what I had always heard as a thin shriek went through my head like the bellow of an angry bull. ‘Can you hear me Marian?’ Indeed I could, it was terrifying.”

Marian is a hoot. She’s more than a hoot: she’s a queen. Marian, who is ninety-two, and who hasn’t been back to London to visit her mother in too long –– her mother is 110 –– doesn’t hear much of anything, and hasn’t for a while now it seems. She lives with her son and his family, who just like to sit around the TV. But now, Carmella suggests, Marian can use her hearing trumpet: “‘to spy on what your whole family are saying about you.’” She adds a warning: “‘You must of course be very secretive about the trumpet because they might take it away from you if they don’t want you to hear what they are saying.’

“‘Why should they want to hide anything from me?’” Marian asks, noting Carmella’s “passion for drama.”

“‘You never know,’ said Carmella. ‘People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats. You can’t be too careful.’”

It’s a flawless setup, with an irresistible narrator. Of course, she’s the unreliable one; we know this as soon as she reveals how little of the world around her she’s been hearing. But her reduced sense does not reduce the density or texture of her world. On the contrary, Carrington’s Marian narrates as vivid, as cogent, a world as anyone’s. Right after Carmella delivers her line about people under seventy and over seven, she then insists that Marian test-drive her new hearing trumpet (“‘It must be buffalo’s horn, buffalos are very large animals,’” Marian comments) by having Marian listen to some letters Carmella has written to random French people whose names she found in a stolen Paris telephone directory. We begin to suspect that Carmella’s company is easier kept when you’re hard of hearing.

Instead of giving away where this is going, which does involve Marian using her hearing trumpet as planned, I will remind you that Leonora Carrington was a surrealist. She made that wild painting (two years after the publication of this novella, apparently). That’s the energy of this book: a fish under the table. Smoke rings that could be bubbles. A creepy monk lurking. 

Marian is our guide through all the strangeness, and her lucidity and humor somehow normalize, even domesticate, the bizarre people and situations she encounters. It’s all just a day in the life for Marian. Things happen to her, but none of it really upsets or disturbs her. She’s having so much fun in her own head that she’s unfazed.

If you visit the Leonora Carrington Foundation’s website, you’ll find a Carrington quotation in all caps on the landing page: “I WARN YOU, I REFUSE TO BE AN OBJECT.” There’s a whole tab on that site filled with her quotes; she’s Kahlo meets Vonnegut. “Reason must know the heart’s reasons and every other reason,” reads a more earnest one. “In my opinion, it is not good to completely admire anyone, including God,” another cheekier one. Elsewhere I found this line attributed to her: “I am as mysterious to myself as I am to others.” Some of her best quips come from The Hearing Trumpet. 

“Leo” Carrington, an eco-feminist, spent the majority of her adult life as an expat in Mexico City. As a young woman, she’d met and fallen in love with the surrealist artist Max Ernst. Together they influenced each other’s style and built a hermitage in the south of France. But in 1939 Ernst was arrested by the Nazis in France as part of their mass censorship and persecution of artists they deemed ‘degenerate.’ Carrington fled to Spain, where some sources say her parents had her forcibly committed to an asylum after a mental breakdown. Then her former nanny rescued her (I swear!). Then Picasso (yeah, him) helped arrange a marriage to a Mexican ambassador. She spent some time in New York with that guy, then settled in Mexico, where she married a different guy and had children.

According to the gorgeous and edifying afterword to The Hearing Trumpet written by Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, Carrington became active in women’s liberation spaces in Mexico during the 1960s and 70s, creating influential artworks for the movement like a famous painting of Adam and Eve offering each other apples. Tokarczuk’s afterword performs a thorough analysis of the novel — only sometimes veering toward the over-pinning-down that I saw in that Oklahoma museum wall text. But the essay’s central assertion is hard to refute: The Hearing Trumpet, like so much of Carrington’s art, advances what Tokarczuk calls a “philosophy of eccentricity.” “It can be treated as a special message from the old to the young, going against the current of time. We must do eccentric things,”  writes Tokarczuk.

Knowing all this, I feel it’s safe to call The Hearing Trumpet a kind of satire, whose subject is those people between seven and seventy and how they treat their old folks. I loved that aspect of the novel. But Marian is a memorable heroine not just for the cruel indifference toward her kind that her story lays bare. Rather, it’s her quixotic embrace of each and every day, and her inner monologue so alive to the details of her saturated world, that now count her among my lifelong imaginary literary friends. 

At the beating heart of this book is, for me, a dream: that old age might be as vibrant as this. That our grandmothers might cohere with as much fluency and panache, and that they might forgive and forget as readily, so that, like Marian, they can relish the unexpected strangeness of another day.

References

• Gallery Wendi Norris: https://www.gallerywendinorris.com/artists-collection/leonora-carrington

• Leonora Carrington Foundation: https://www.fundacionleonoracarrington.org/

• Olga Tokarczuk, “Eccentricity as Feminism,” in The Paris Review, January 2021.

• Emily Dickinson, “This World is not Conclusion (373),” Poetry Foundation.