The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

This feat, along with recent republications of Carrington’s two other major pieces of literary work-her memoir of detention in a Spanish mental institution during World War II, Down Below (NYRB, 2017), and her collected short stories (Dorothy, A Publishing Project, also 2017)-suggests that her authorial star is yet again on the rise, perhaps due to a renewed interest in the occult among Gen Z and millennial readers.

After glowing reviews in the New York Times and the New Yorker by Blake Butler and Merve Emre, respectively, the first printing sold out in a month. Printed in more than twenty editions and some six languages over the past forty-plus years, Carrington’s story was once again rereleased in January by New York Review Books, with an afterword by Polish novelist and Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. In 1974, it appeared simultaneously in the US and the UK, in the original English.Ĭover of The Hearing Trumpet (1974/2021) by Leonora Carrington. However, it was not published until 1969, in a French translation titled Le Cornet acoustique. It’s clear The Hearing Trumpet was strongly influenced by Graves’s revisionist mythology: the manuscript, according to Carrington scholar Susan L.

Having absorbed Graves’s fantastical investigation, the British artist went on to write her first and only novel, The Hearing Trumpet, a tale of the apocalyptic upending of an elderly woman’s life. It has since become a classic of Contemporary Paganism.Ĭarrington, who had previously written a number of short stories in a piquant Surrealist vein-many of them critical of Christianity-took notice. Yet his entirely reasonable overall conclusion-that modern monotheistic religion has effaced other, pluralist systems dedicated to matriarchy and the worship of nature-found resonance with many nonacademic readers, and the book went into multiple editions in 1948, ’52, and ’61.

A series of deductions based on a purported relationship between letters of the Celtic alphabet and certain trees enabled him, he claimed, to uncover divine names hidden in ancient writing. Riding felt her own spiritual convictions had been parodied by her ex in what amounted to a “ whorish abomination.” Graves seems also to have invented his translations of Celtic poetry, relying on a limited grasp of the language. Eliot called the book “ prodigious, monstrous, stupefying, indescribable,” and Laura Riding, Graves’s former literary collaborator and romantic partner, disliked it very much. Graves’s scholarly methods were suspect, his tone one of reverence and perhaps obsessive conviction, his sentences elaborate, his sources arcane. How Leonora Carrington's Surrealist Art Imaginatively Reclaimed Female Perspectives

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington