Down Below

February 6, 2017
First published in 1943, surrealist painter and novelist Carrington’s brief and unflinchingly honest first-person account traces the author’s descent into (and recovery from) clinical insanity. The narrative is set in motion in 1940 when Carrington’s lover, artist Max Ernst (a married man, 26 years her senior), is sent to a concentration camp at Les Milles, France. Carrington experiences a period of hysteria and intense self-punishment, including frequent voluntary vomiting, and then, accompanied by two friends, she travels from France across the Spanish boarder, fleeing the Germans. All the while, Carrington’s grip on reality slips away. Once in Madrid, she is clearly insane, convinced that Germany is winning the war because of secret Nazi agents who wield supernatural hypnotic powers. Placed in a sanitarium, her delusions continue; she acts like various animals, devises conspiracies, and believes herself to be the third person of the Holy Trinity. It’s difficult to read such a candid, painful, and personal account of someone’s darkest hours, and Carrington’s detached, matter-of-fact recounting of her most undignified, wrenching moments is unnerving. In a very helpful introduction to the book, novelist Marina Warner (The Lost Father) writes that Carrington was persuaded to write the memoir by surrealism’s literary founder, André Breton, who viewed her genuine, unaffected descent into true madness as surrealism at its most pure. As such, it seems a case can be made that this little book is indeed the gold standard of surrealist literature.