Down Below
  • Published: 15 April 2017
  • ISBN: 9781681370606
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 112
  • RRP: $29.99

Down Below

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Down Below is a stunning work of memoir that gives readers a look into the mind of one of Surrealism's most compelling figures and an unforgettable depiction of brilliance and madness. Includes black and white photographs of Carrington and her family.

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 “the 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 “of 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.
  • Published: 15 April 2017
  • ISBN: 9781681370606
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 112
  • RRP: $29.99
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Praise for Down Below

"Here Carrington recounts with frightening precision the mental breakdown she suffered after Ernst...was put into a concentration camp...Down Below offers convincing proof that her sensibility remained fully intact after her ordeal." --Richard Burgin, The New York Times

"[A] mystical remembrance of her dementia and a painfully visceral glimpse into the nature of madness." --Christie's

"A spiritual descent to the underworld...that hover[s] between the ordinary, everyday world and another zone of dreams or death."­ -­-The Guardian

"Down Below, though nonfiction, is just as vivid as her more surreal prose... It's a striking glimpse into her life and into a troubled mind, the occasional forays into surreal imagery only deepening the experience."­ --Tobias Carroll, The Paris Review

"Best known, because she was Max Ernst's lover, as a Surrealist wild-child and muse. But her own work is unique, startling, completely original, a cutting-edge all on its own." --­Ali Smith, Artful

"A 'breakthrough' to another dimension, to a world of magical and visionary domains."­ --­Gloria Orenstien, Theater of the Marvelous: Surrealism and the Contemporary Stage

"It is a harrowing account, not least because the Carrington who is telling the story refuses to adopt a safely distant perspective; she tries, instead, to convey the experience of madness as it was lived, from the inside...Down Below is fascinating not only in its own right, but also when read in conjunction with Carrington's novels written in the 1950s." --Susan Ruban Suleiman, Women's Review of Books

"For Carrington, the asylum becomes an ontological investigation of a new world, with the artist occupying a position somewhere between Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver, trying to excavate a system from her experience." --Joanna Walsh, Verso blog

"A powerful account." --Jeff VanderMeer, Omnivoracious

"Among the Surrealist texts that contemplate the mind free of societal constraints, Carrington's work shows another side to madness, stripping it of any vestiges of romance." --Ann Hoff, Journal of Modern Literature

"[A] searing novel." --Tate Museum

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