While in the Kitchen

The strange and marvelous things women come up with.

I got really stuck writing this week’s piece about a book I love—The Hearing Trumpet by the artist and writer Leonora Carrington. I started with my theory that life would spin a whole lot more delightful if more people got to know the book’s unstoppable 92 year-old heroine, Marian Letherby. Much of the story takes place in the strangest old-age home in literary history. By the novel’s last page, Marian journeys to Hell and back and may, or may not, have landed in Lapland where she dedicates the rest of her long life to raising a shewolf with her best friend, Carmella. The friends’ adventures have been known to cause readers (including the present author) to pee a tiny bit from laughing at the women’s exploits. Here is a fairly good synopsis of Marian’s story that appeared in The New York Time several years ago.

Marian Leatherby at dinner listening with her trumpet to the dubious director, Dr. Gambit, hoping he will explain who the winking nun is in the painting behind him.

I got so caught up in describing the book that I mangled my real subject—Marian’s and Carmella’s friendship. The women were disparaged by relatives and caretakers as nothing more than two senile broken-down crones who it would be best to shuttled off out of sight. There was only one problem: the women inspired each other to blow through one convention after another.

Carrington modeled Marian’s and Carmella’s relationship upon her own with the painter Remedios Varo. Outwardly, they seemed conventional. On most days, Remendios walked over to Leonora’s house and spent the morning sitting around her kitchen while rambunctious children cavorted about, friends and husbands popped in, and multiple cats snoozed on the floor. In the afternoon they went out to the market to pick up ingredients for dinner. All the while, they talked about the influences of ancient myths and legends in their art and shared recipes for magical potions and elixirs they were given by local soothsayers. They advised each other about color palettes and their portraitures of invented spirits and animals captured in luminous dreamscapes. There they were in the kitchen, the most important Surrealist artists of the 20th century, creating phantasmal realities alongside the evening’s meal.

Remedios Varo in a Mask by Leonora Carrington. Photo credit: Katie Horna, 1957. Museum of Fine Art, Houston.

How domestic these women appeared among pots and pans beside the sink, whiling away a typical day. How splendid and powerful the worlds they invented together.

Leonora and Remendios at a party.

Leonora’s kitchen

Their art. First row, left, The House Opposite, Leonora Carrington 1945. Right An Unexpected Visitor, Remedias Varo, 1958. Second row, left, Grandmother Moorhead's Aromatic Kitchen, Leonora Carrington, 1975; left, Still Life Reslicitando, Remedias Varo, 1963.

Leonora Carrington’s and Remedias Varo’s Recipe for Erotic Dreams

Ingredients:

A kilo of strong roots
three white hens
a head of garlic
four kilos of honey
a mirror
two calf livers
a brick
two clothespins
a corset with stays
two false moustaches
hats to taste

Directions:

Put on the corset and make it quite tight. Sit down in front of the mirror, relax your nervous tension, smile and try on the mustaches and hats according to taste (three-cornered, Napoleonic, Basque, Beret, etc.)… Run and pour the broth (which should be very reduced) quickly into a cup.  Quickly come back with it to in front of the mirror, smile, take a sip of broth, try on one of the mustaches, take another sip, try on a hat, drink, try on everything, taking sips in between and do it all as quickly as you can.

Comments are always welcome, too.