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A review by drjerry
Down Below by Leonora Carrington
5.0
Thankfully the live wire of mental breakdown has never brushed against me. The closest I've been is watching one of my best friends from college unravel over the course of a few months -- slowly at first, then like an avalanche toward the end. That was twenty-five years ago. Reading Carrington's memoir of her own mental breakdown and hospitalization brought goosebumps to me a couple times, thinking, 'wow, that passage reminds me of one of J's fixations at the time.'
This was the first thing I've read from Carrington. My appetite for reading more of her (fiction) writing is now piqued.
As other reviewers have noted, the text is very short. It is written in the the form of diary entries over the course of a few days in 1943 -- about three years after the episode took place. The text itself has an interesting history quite befitting of a personal memoir of the descent into madness and recovery. A first version of the text was written in 1942 while the author was living in New York but that was lost. An acquaintance persuaded her to reconstruct it, which she did in 1943 in "the abandoned Russian embassy in Mexico City, where she ... and other refugees were squatting. Lenora then talked it through in French to Jeanne Mengen, ... who established the first published version in French." The French version was translated into English by Victor Llona and published in the surrealist journal VVV in 1944. Both the French dictation and the English translation were used as the basis of the current text, which was edited by Carrington herself in 1987.
The NYRB edition contains a great introduction by Marina Warner, who was a friend of Carrington, and provides a lot of biographical context from the author's life and the artistic and historical context in which it was created. The most succinct and probably the best summary of the text is from Warner herself, which deserves to be quoted verbatim: Down Below gives an unsparing account of the experience of being insane. As an act of truth-telling memory, it derives its power from this antinomy at its heart, that it is a narrative, apparently rationally composed and accurately recalled, about hair-raisingly unhinged behavior and cruel, scientific therapies that induced states of personal annihilation.
This was the first thing I've read from Carrington. My appetite for reading more of her (fiction) writing is now piqued.
As other reviewers have noted, the text is very short. It is written in the the form of diary entries over the course of a few days in 1943 -- about three years after the episode took place. The text itself has an interesting history quite befitting of a personal memoir of the descent into madness and recovery. A first version of the text was written in 1942 while the author was living in New York but that was lost. An acquaintance persuaded her to reconstruct it, which she did in 1943 in "the abandoned Russian embassy in Mexico City, where she ... and other refugees were squatting. Lenora then talked it through in French to Jeanne Mengen, ... who established the first published version in French." The French version was translated into English by Victor Llona and published in the surrealist journal VVV in 1944. Both the French dictation and the English translation were used as the basis of the current text, which was edited by Carrington herself in 1987.
The NYRB edition contains a great introduction by Marina Warner, who was a friend of Carrington, and provides a lot of biographical context from the author's life and the artistic and historical context in which it was created. The most succinct and probably the best summary of the text is from Warner herself, which deserves to be quoted verbatim: Down Below gives an unsparing account of the experience of being insane. As an act of truth-telling memory, it derives its power from this antinomy at its heart, that it is a narrative, apparently rationally composed and accurately recalled, about hair-raisingly unhinged behavior and cruel, scientific therapies that induced states of personal annihilation.