Down Below (NYRB Classics)

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 €œthe 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 €œof 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.