Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

Older than Leonora, Ursula has her discover Novalis, talks to her of Apollinaire and recites Le Pont Mirabeau aloud. André Breton’s Les Champs Magnétiques inspired the literature of the Surrealists and Leonora has to read it. Up until this point, Leonora’s literary universe has been that of Lewis Carroll, William Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites. Ursula opens the door to the rage of Les Chants de Maldoror by Lautréamont, a poet who was born with something of the jackal, the vulture and the panther about him.

‘Lautréamont made a comparison that Ernst transformed into his credo: “As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.” Who knows whether you could be his sewing machine, Leonora.’

‘Or his umbrella.’

The first International Surrealist Exhibition is held at the New Burlington Galleries, to be attended by Max Ernst. It launches Leonora towards another planet, a place she had conceived as an unrealisable dream during her adolescence. ‘So it is that what I have always sought really exists, and what attracts me matters just as much to others.’

She is impressed when Ursula lets her know that at the start of the Spanish Civil War Eluard, Breton and Ernst wanted to travel to Spain to fight alongside the Republicans. Malraux permitted himself the luxury of turning them down, saying: ‘I am looking for men who do not know how to paint.’

‘They are men who lived through the First World War, when Max was an artillery instructor. He suffered a clinical death and recorded it saying: “Max Ernst died on the 1st August 1914. He resurrected on the 11th November 1918 as a young man desirous of becoming a sage to encounter the legend of his times.” Max lived through the war as a dead man. It was one of the greatest evils our world has seen,’ Ursula tells her.

‘Does Max not believe in God or patriotism?’

‘No.’

‘I am very proud of my brothers, who have enlisted in the Army, the Royal Navy and the RAF.’

‘For those involved in the fighting, these four years of war continue representing the worst tragedy there could be. Have you read The Interpretation of Dreams by Freud? Do you know who Hegel is?’

‘No, Ursula, no.’

‘I’ll bring you their books tomorrow.’

The First World War obliged former Dadaists, now become Surrealists, to acquire the ability to put art at the service of their imagination. In the light of the criminality and the imbecility of the military, followers of Breton and Freud ruled out reason and opened themselves to the high world of the unconscious. They rescued and rehabilitated Lautréamont from oblivion, a consequence of his odes to murder, violence, sadomasochism, blasphemy and darkness. Surrealism, if it was to be permanent revolution, had to start with oneself. Poetry would be made flesh and blood as Eluard demanded. Men and women, the old and the newborn would now be impelled by their feelings to destroy the army, prisons, brothels and, first of all, churches. At long last, painters really did hold the answer, along with writers, and scientists, experimentalists and the inspired, the romantics and muses who guided the creators, those who fearlessly go naked and children who leap into the void holding tight to their umbrellas.

Ah — and the sad youths leaving on the train!

Just one more sausage dog lost between Brühl and Paris.

DINING WITH MAX ERNST at home with Ursula and her Hungarian husband Ernő Goldfinger becomes an obsession. Leonora selects a black dress. Her hair, as jet-black as her eyes, cascades over her shoulders. The house is filled with people when she walks through the front door, exchanging her flat shoes for high heels. She deposits the flatties in the hall along with her mackintosh and umbrella, and enters the living room with her heart pumping fit to burst.

Leonora is quite different to the rest of the young guests. She is already pawing the ground, spurring herself onwards, champing at the bit, her eyes flashing. Her lips part in a smile without her intending it. Her mouth is blood red.

‘Leonora, Leonora, I want you to meet the photographer Lee Miller, she’s a golden Venus, an American model; you can see her over there, at the back, to the right of the living room.’ Ursula points in her direction.

Among the groups engaged in conversation, Leonora spies a man with white hair who breaks all the rules of good manners by signalling to her, oblivious to all those pressing in around him. A stranger to convention, he eschews the art critics and possible buyers. ‘I see here a free man, a man to whom the business of art is an irrelevance,’ Leonora thinks, while at the same instant a waiter offers her a flute of champagne. The bubbles are on the point of overflowing when a sign from a stranger restrains her: Max Ernst is cautioning her with a warning gesture. Ursula introduces her with: ‘This is my dear friend and colleague …’ The artist isn’t listening. He only has eyes for Leonora, his all is directed towards the one person he desires to draw nearer. In no time, Ursula has withdrawn and left the two of them alone.

Leonora meanders about the room, her red mouth bright below her black eyes, her red mouth accentuated by the white of her face and crowned by the wild blackness of her hair. ‘How beautiful!’ Max thinks. And how very different to the women he is accustomed to seducing and above all, how different to Marie-Berthe, his wife! Ernst turns his back on the art critic and the admiring lady, and takes Leonora by the arm. She has a presentiment that she is running the biggest risk of her life. Magnetic powers seize her like they did Alice when she fell down the tunnel to the centre of the earth.

‘Is it true that in London art doesn’t exist, compared to what’s going on in Paris?’ Clearly, he wishes to extend an invitation.

A giraffe sporting an emerald necklace passes by, talking to a rhinoceros: ‘That man is irresistible, look he’s all eyes.’ He surprises her by taking her by the hand. Leonora has never dreamt of anything like this. She has achieved her goal in life: he will transform her life, teach her to see the world anew. She is his coal mine and he will extract and polish the diamonds from deep within.

Max radiates light.

They isolate themselves in a corner of the room.

‘Are you a nightingale?’

‘I emerged from the egg my mother laid in her eagle’s nest on the 2nd April, forty-six years ago.’ He laughs. ‘And this took place in Brühl, near Cologne. It was there that eleven thousand virgins gave up their lives rather than lose their virginity. Are you a virgin?’

Leonora is unperturbed. So the genius is twenty-six years older than she? Between 1891 and 1917 lies a gulf of years almost as wide as that between herself and her father. Max tells her the dome of Cologne Cathedral retains the skulls and bones of the Three Wise Men, Gaspar, Melchior and Balthasar, and that every year they take them out in golden coffers encrusted with jewels — something that he, as a child, adored to watch.

‘Where on earth did Ursula find you? I dreamt you way back when the Virgin smacked the Infant Jesus’ little bottom. You were peeping out from behind the door, and to reach you I had to escape from the house, barefoot and in a red smock, golden curls, blue eyes and a whip in my left hand. I took the road leading to the station, and elicited the admiration of some Catholic worshippers on pilgrimage to Kevelaer. “He is the Son of God,” they said, kneeling before me. I offered them my blessings and some neighbours took me home. My father punished me, despite my attempts to explain to him: “I am the Christ Child.” So he painted me standing on a little cloud and, instead of a whip, put a crucifix in my hand.’