Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

There’s no doubt about it, he is an arrogant man.

The shame that Max once reserved for his wife is being directed into his work. The working day lasts for ten uninterrupted hours. Leonora paints too, and writes. On the 17th January 1938, she joins him in working on two paintings — What Shall We Do Tomorrow, Amelie? and The Silent Lover — for the International Exhibition of Surrealist Art, now on show in Paris and due to travel to Amsterdam.

On entering the gallery, a young man hands each visitor in turn a lantern to illuminate the dark tunnel ahead.

‘Is this an exhibition or a circus act?’ asks the patron, Marie Laure de Noailles.

Sixteen mannequins lining both sides of the dark passage represent the Eternal Feminine. The lighting focuses on the erogenous zones of the women. Brilliantly highlighted, they magnetise and dazzle the spectators.

Each Surrealist has been issued with a mannequin and, since Ernst was used to causing a sensation, he has dressed his in black and raised her skirt above her suspender belt, to display her rose pink underwear. He has also inserted a brightly lit spotlight between her thighs. A vagrant with the face of the Lion of Belfort lies on the floor, pinning the newly made widow down by her feet and staring lasciviously upwards. He wears a glove on his right hand and rummages inside the mannequin’s knickers. Even Breton exclaims:

‘You have gone too far this time. At the very least, turn out the spotlight.’

Ernst’s mannequin is a scandal. The photographers are fighting to get the best picture of it.

‘I live with the Lion of Belfort,’ says Leonora, showing off.

Max encourages her to write more. ‘You write splendidly. Your writing saves the two of us.’

Max illustrates The House of Fear , which she types out in French: a horse invites her to a party at the house of a woman who appears dressed in a cape of living bats, sewn together by their wings. The lady who owns the House of Fear proposes a competition to her guests, all of whom are horses:

‘You have to count backwards from one hundred to five as fast as you can. At the same time, you have to use your left front hoof to tap out the rhythm of the Volga Boatmen’s Song, then the Marseillaise with the right front hoof, and finally beat out Where Are You, My Last Rose of Summer? with your rear hooves. The contest lasts for twenty-five minutes, but …’

Leonora pauses.

‘Is that how it ends? Why do you interrupt the story just at that point?’

‘Because my dream ended the moment I saw the Lady of Fear.’

‘And who is the Lady of Fear?’

‘She is one of my apparitions.’

The Surrealists live in a whirlwind that breaks all the barriers. Is this really freedom? For years, Picasso’s private life has caused a scandal. Every time he appears on the street, in a café, at a gallery or the theatre he creates a spectacle. The same women he paints inflate and deflate at his side, and if they don’t manage to escape, they thunder like popped balloons, suddenly letting off air. Those who once gave themselves queenly airs and graces suddenly shrivel away. When Baudelaire called them adored tigers and indolent monsters, he cursed and condemned them to martyrdom. Rimbaud is another idol, dead by the time he was thirty-seven years old, a traitor to the cause and Verlaine’s lover, an arms trafficker addicted to absinthe and hashish.

Breton composes his manifestos and obliges others to sign them. Others go back on their word, and he throws them out on to the street. To him, Surrealism is a way of life. No Surrealist poet is permitted to sully himself by writing journalism. If he lacks the basic necessities of his subsistence, that is his own private drama which he must experience to the ultimate degree. Philippe Soupault was expelled for both his essays and his poetry, and so was the sociologist Pierre Naville, for being considered doctrinaire. Breton was not bothered by his decision to expel either Marcel Duchamp or the philosopher Georges Bataille, whom he branded an ‘excrementalist’; or André Masson, a follower of Sade, for alleging that all an artist needed to do was to dangle a pen over the page allowing it to make lines from which the best image can be formed; or Francis Picabia for aligning himself with Cubism; or Raymond Queneau, for being overly neo-French. Georges Sadoul and Louis Aragon were kicked out for the crime of choosing to become Communists. Once outside the group the poet Aragon, with his bird-like profile, became the most miserable wretch among men.

Benjamin Péret arrived at the Rue Jacob in order to exhort Max to break with Paul Eluard: the order went out to sabotage his poetry.

‘Breton believes himself to be the great incorruptible, and exercises a reign of terror in the name of Surrealist ethics,’ Max announces, clearly angry. ‘Eluard is my brother, I came to France because of him, he bought my first works and I owe him everything. In addition to all that he is a great poet, in sharp contrast to André.’

‘Are you then not going to condemn him?’

‘Most certainly I am not!’

Together with Paul Eluard and Man Ray, Max Ernst writes The Man who Lost his Skeleton, a diatribe against the Surrealist leader and his edicts.

Back in his room, Max is spinning the bicycle wheel he has attached to a circular bench. To him, no artist has anything in particular to boast of. At the end of the day, the source of art lies in the unconscious, and who has ever defined that with any degree of certainty? Reserved and ironic, he observes his colleagues furiously debating their ambitions, their nightmares, and their scandals.

The circle of admirers, detractors and collectors gathered around Breton and his followers is magnetic, and the painters are dependent on protectors and sponsors. In the art world, a patron is more important than a lover.

‘I can’t stand Paris any more,’ Max says in despair, fed up with Breton, with in-fighting, with squabbles and all the surrealists’ pettiness.

‘Then we could leave,’ Leonora encourages him.

When they arrive at St. Martin, the first thing they do is to hire some bikes. A bicycle is freedom. Pedalling along behind Max matches having an orgasm, for the way the wind fills her face and makes her hair wild. Sometimes Max dumps the bike, pushes Leonora into the trees and there, away from the road, takes her with all his strength. His body burns and sets fire to hers.

Once more they rent the room over Alphonsine’s café: ‘This morning I found another spider in your bedroom.’

LEONORA AND MAX find an eighteenth-century farmhouse and set about making their imprint on the stone floor and the stone bed, against stone walls, the heat of the sun inflaming their ardour. Max, who once upon a time used to say: ‘I have only ever experienced joy by rising to a challenge,’ is now humbled by such happiness. His sense of intimacy is feline, he adores Leonora like a cat and he explores every millimetre of her body like a spider, licking her, distinguishing her every odour moving from the scent of her hair and her skin, tasting her mouth, tongue and tears.

‘I am so absurdly happy, I am convinced that something horrible is going to happen,’ Leonora tells him.

‘So … what if we were to remain here for good?’ Max suggests.

Leonora takes in a dog and a pregnant cat who gives birth to six kittens. She looks after them as if they were her own offspring. Max decides to sculpt them in stone, alongside a woman bearing a fish in her arms.

‘My one desire is to live with Leonora for as long as the world permits,’ Max writes to his son Jimmy.

The world is that of Marie-Berthe Aurenche, the Surrealists, and the ominous rumour of war.