Backlisted - The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

Leonora Carrington's charming and surreal novel The Hearing Trumpet (1976, probably) is the subject of this episode. Joining Una, Andy and Nicky is author and lecturer Dr Paul March-Russell, who offers insights into all aspects of Carrington's career. Leonora Carrington lived a long and extraordinary life; we discuss the ways in which her biography intersects not just with her books, but her remarkable paintings and sculptures, which at auction now fetch tens of millions of dollars. How did the daughter of a Lancashire industrialist become first a muse to the Surrealists, and then an artist in her own right, whose visionary work will probably outlast theirs? How did the many challenges she faced - institutional, sexist, financial and health - shape her writing? And why, as Paul suggets, is Leonora Carrington so relevant to young artists today? Point your hearing trumpets at wherever you get your podcasts. On Mon 27th Oct 2025, Backlisted is recording a show at 92NY in New York, on William Maxwell at the New Yorker. Tickets are available now from https://www.92ny.org. On Wed 29th Oct 2025, we are recording a second show at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, NYC, a special episode on books by Bob Dylan, including Tarantula and Chronicles Vol. 1. Tickets are available now from https://bitterend.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to back to backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. The book featured on today's show is The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington, first published, Sort of, in 1976 in both the UK and the US. I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously and Inventory, an unreliable guide to my record collection. I'm Dr. Una McCormack, Target Books author and Associate Fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge. And I'm Nicky Birch, the producer and editor of Backlisted. and I'm excited to say, to celebrate 10 years of us podcasting about old books,

Backlist is going to New York. Yes, for the first time ever, we're touring the States because two dates is definitely a tour. We will be celebrating Maxwell's work via his own novels and short stories, plus those of writers he championed, including John Cheever and J.D. Salinger, who we haven't discussed on Backlister before, and Elizabeth Taylor and Sylvia Townsend Warner, who we discussed repeat. And we'll be discussing those authors with the help of two perfect guests, Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker,

and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan, an old friend of Backlisted. And, for what it's worth, in addition to 2025 marking the 10th anniversary of Backlisted, it's also the 100th anniversary of The New Yorker. But wait, but wait. this is a tour. I mean, not quite a never-ending tour because it's only two dates, but nevertheless, on Friday the 29th of October, and I can hardly believe I'm saying this, backlisted will be live at the bitter end in Greenwich Village, where we will be recording a special episode on books by Bob Dylan. Yes, it's finally happening. We are going to be covering. Tarantula, writings and drawings, Chronicles Volume 1, the weird little parable on the back cover of John Wesley Harding, and possibly even if rumours are to be believed in it's published in time,

Chronicles Volume 2. And not for nothing, but October the 29th, 2025 is the 9th anniversary of Bob Dylan being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. So, whatever your plans may be for marking that special occasion, scrap them and come and see us at the bottom line instead. Okay, Oona, over to you. Well, joining us on today's show to discuss the hearing trumpet and the life and career of its author, Leonora Carrington.

We're delighted to welcome Dr. Paul March Russell. Paul, hello. How are you? Hello, I'm glad to be here. Glad to be here eventually. We're very glad. You're speaking to us from the stormy wilds of Kent, aren't you? I think you're currently enacting a right that's going to summon up a load of bees or something like that. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, it does feel slightly apocalyptic.

Good. So that's appropriate. Very good for Canterbury. Well, Paul March Russell Edits Foundation, the International Review of Science Fiction and is co-founder with me of Gold S.F. The feminist imprint published by Goldsmith's Press. His publications include the short story and introduction, modernism and science fiction, and most recently, J.G. Ballard's Crash. He's also co-ed edited books on John Ruskin, Romantic Legacies, the post-colonial short story, and Arthur C. Clarke. And Paul doesn't like anyone getting too close to his eyes since watching Enchernandoloo as a seven-year-old. Paul, what the Dickens happened? Well, what the counting happened.

It's the great days of open university programmes, Saturday, Sunday mornings, and which my brother and I used to watch avidly. And, you know, they get bad press, but they're really, really good, actually. And they had an art history documentary about serialism. And it started without any... There were no trigger warnings in 1977, okay? And so it just started with a man slashing open a woman's eye.

And that kind of memory stays with you, oddly enough. So I have a bit of a phobia about close eye. contact. Well, this is a parable for unscrutinised screen time, isn't it, I think. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We had totally unscrucised screen time as children, which is why I watched many things I should never have watched as a youngster. Paul, I can relate to your story because around the same time, I estimate I was about the age of seven. I was off school sick. And my mum was in the kitchen and I was just been allowed to watch the telly. So it was like open university or something.

And that's how I learned where babies come from, which was in an unedited program that went through the whole labour process of a woman's labour with the head crowning and everything. Oh my God. And that's why I do this for a living now. Well, my brother defends his choice of viewing habits. But I say, well, you know, this is what made you, Paul.

yeah it's true isn't it now paul i must ask you you have written about crash and i am on the record on the backlisted record in fact as being a j g ballard skeptic okay right okay now we are going to be talking about surrealists and surrealism today so if i were to adapt my thinking tweak my way of thinking about ballard and think of him as a surrealist would i then be able to read him and he's not and his horrible prose would it kind of come into focus for me if i thought of him as a surrealist actually and if you're linking up to horrible prose actually yes um there's there's a lot of debates about crash in terms of like it's unreadability um and a lot of actually comes down to the fact that what ballard does in crash is to adapt a surrealist technique which is

specific to, oddly enough, to British surrealism rather than French, which is the use of the litany as a way of kind of linked together seemingly incongruous elements. So the most famous example of that in literature is actually Deva Gascoigne's and the Seventh Dream was the Dream of ISIS, poem from 1933. And it's that technique that Ballard uses. It does mean that on the one hand, you can think of Ballard as the most saintly figure. You know, he's a profound, you know, sacred figure. On the other hand, you could regard him as being utterly boring and tedious, which is the other meaning of a litanylid. So you can have it both ways. Paul, can I welcome you to Batlisted and say that you are amazing because I have just tried

there to do that facetious student thing of going, oh, I didn't like him. You've absolutely put me in my place. Congratulations. Well done. But also, though, in my defence, in my defence, I was right, wasn't I, Paul? You are right, yeah. I don't mind people not liking Ballard. I can absolutely see why they don't like him. On the other hand, I do think Crash is an extraordinary work. Although, having said that, extremely traumatic to write about if you spend your time closely reading it.

I've read Crash, and actually I preferred Crash to the book we featured on the podcast. We did cocaine nights, which I did not vibe with. So, oh, there we are. Well, that's laid that ghost to rest eight years later. You can now read Ballard in good conscience. Oh, great. Well, the hearing trumpets, which is, in fact, what we're here to talk about today, recounts the story of 92-year-old Marion Leatherby,

who lives in Mexico with her son Galahad and his wife Muriel and the motorcycle riding son Robert. After being given a hearing trumpet by her friend Carmela, Marion accidentally discovers that her family is conspiring to pack her off to an institution. She ends up in, yes, a surreal retirement home run by a doctor and Mrs. Gambit, not from the New Avengers, where bizarre rituals are enacted

and the occult forms part of the healthcare plan. We should sell that to the NHS. In the words of one commentator, murder and mystery, cross-dressing, hunger strikes, rebellion, midnight dancing and revelries, poetic riddles and the specter of a looming frozen apocalypse are only a few of the smorgasbord of ingredients that spice up everyday life at this old people's home. So, relatable. The novel explores themes of aging, institutionalisation, female power and method. and the transformative nature of the imagination. Plus, the ending is so surreal that it is spoiler-proof. So it might come up and you won't be able to tell. Yeah, that's indeed.

Right. Well, not unlike Leonora Carrington herself, the history of the hearing trumpet spans continents, decades, and a chronology that confirms that time is not, in fact, a straight line. There is some confusion over when the novel was written and in which language. Art historian Susan Abarth believes Carrington completed the hearing trumpet in 1950, but there is evidence to suggest the author began writing the novel more than a decade earlier in the late 1930s.

It was first published in a French translation in 1974 as Le Connette Acoustique, before appearing in an English edition two years later. Fascinatingly, for a novel she may have written in her 20, Leonora Carrington lived long enough to become synonymous with its non-aginarian heroine, which may in turn have become part of the book's latter-day appeal. It was re-published by Penguin Modern Classics in 2005, when Carrington was still alive, and by the way, on the jacket copy of the Penguin edition here, they claim it was written in the 1960s, so God only knows which one is right.

and in the US as part of the NYRB Classics Range in 2021. NYRB have also made her remarkable memoir down below available again, and just now in July 2025, Carrington's first novel, The Stone Door. Well, should you require further endorsements, Luis Bunweil, Director von Schen-Onde-Loo and Traumatizer of the Young, Paul Mark Russell, said, reading the hearing trumpets liberate. us from the miserable reality of our days, while Ali Smith has described it as one of the most original, joyful, satisfying and quietly visionary novels of the 20th century. How then should we

consider Leonora Carrington as a writer, a painter, a feminist, an artist, an artist's muse, a magician, a survivor, a surrealist or all of the above? Why in the early 21st century has this novel seemingly taken on a life of its own? And what precisely are we hearing when we listen to the world through the hearing trumpet? When we come back, we'll hear from Leonora herself and her biographer and cousin, Joanna Moorhead. But first, our sponsors would like a word with you. Okay, I think it's working. Will you say something into this and see if I can...

The time has come, the war has said to talk of many things, of shoes and ships and ceiling wax and cabbages and kings. Lancashire born, Lancashire bred, strong in the arm and weak in the head. I had three brothers, all bigger than me and stronger than me, and they used to throw stones at me. I remember that. We were given champagne, and Max put his fingers to take the bubbles out, so I copied him. He was very easy, Max, and I liked him because it was a wonderful new world for me.

She went to see her father in Lancashire, and she told him that she was going to move to Paris, to live with Max Ernst, and most importantly, to be an artist herself. And her father was incandescent. I mean, he was furious that she was going off with Max Ernst, and he also was extremely unhappy that she was going off to try and make a life for herself as an artist, and he told her that she would die penniless and in a garret, because that was what happened to all artists.

She suddenly found herself in the cafes in Paris with people like Andre Breton and Picasso. I met Picasso. What he liked to him was reading other people's letters that he found of my place. He did it openly. laughing. Salvador Dali, Joan Miro.

He asked me how old I was. I was very young. He wanted me to buy him cigarettes. And what did you do? Nothing. Wanted to send me and I refused. It was a terribly exciting moment to be in Paris. Paris was at the center of the art world at the time.

The surrealists in Paris clearly didn't see women as their equals. They ignored me, I think. Women can't paint. according to my early time, earlier time. What can you say? Bullshit. Bullshit. That's a favourite thing that we say in Lancashire to Surrealist painters.

Paul, where and when did you first encounter the hearing trumpet? Well, the hearing trumpets, I probably came to say later, actually, probably more in the 2010s, actually. But I first read Leona Carrington in the early 1990s, so when I was a MA student. And it was initially two anthologies, one which is quite famous, Wicked Girls and Wairwood Women by Angela Carter, which featured her short story, The Debutante. And the other one, which actually is a less well-known anthology, but actually an incredibly important anthology for the early 90s. that kind of woman, edited by Bonte Adams and Trudy Tate, which is a really essential anthology of women's modernist short fiction.

And they included the short story Pigeon Fly, which is a very important story because it's a story where, in a sense, Carrington is critiquing her relationship with Ernst. So that was my starting point. We mentioned Ballard a moment ago, though, but the name Leonora Chanel turns upon of Ballard's short stories in Vermilion Sands, which I read, like, as a 13-year-old. And I suspect that might be actually my first inkling

of Leonora Carrington's kind of ghostly presence. But yeah, but the image trumpet, I definitely came to more than 2010s, I think, actually. How about you, Andy? Was it the writing or the art? Oh, it's the art. I find Leonora Carrington really interesting figure. Just after I moved to London in late 1991, I went to, is probably the very first art exhibition I went to when I was living in London

and it was at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park and it was a retrospective of the work of Leonora Carrington and it was then the first retrospective in Britain that had ever taken place and also I believe one of the only retrospectives in Europe and I didn't even know that she had books out or was a published writer I think I may have learnt that as a result of going to the exhibition. And from what I remember, the exhibition was very striking, and it got quite a lot of publicity at the time.

And since then, it seems a weird thing to say, doesn't it? But obviously, she still had 20 years of her life to run then. She was 70, or mid-70s. She didn't die until 2011. And so I followed her, it seems a funny thing to say, I followed her career with interest since 1991. in as much as I'm old enough and I've lived long enough to see, first of all, her literary reputation grow from almost nothing to the point where the hearing trumpet is probably one of

the most popular penguin modern classics of the last 10 years. But also the art, Paul, right? There was a painting of Leonora Carrington's that recently, last year I believe, sold in New York for $28.5 million, the last time that painting sold, which was 30 years ago, it sold for $450,000. So it has increased in value, or at least partly because the gentleman who paid $28.5 million for it was the underbidder 30 years ago. But nevertheless, I feel I've lived long enough, as in the case with the British pop art painter and collageist Pauline Boett to see their reputations go from almost nothing to outstrip their male counterparts in whatever movement they were part of.

And so Joanna Moorhead, who we heard from in that clip, says she doesn't think necessarily that Leonardo Carrington's moment has arrived yet. And I think that's a really interesting comment because my experience would be, well, very few people knew who she was. And now she's almost a household name. Yeah. I mean, I think she has become, I think, enormously well known. I mean, I don't know if she's a household name. I think it might be going a bit too far.

But I think she's now of. She will. She will be. I think she will be. Yeah. I agree, yeah. But I think she is now such a relevant. to younger female artists working now,

and especially artists who are thinking through things like the impact of climate change and thinking about alternate ways of being in the world and therefore embracing things like the occult, like the mystical, the supernatural, the pagan. In that sense, Karenton is absolutely chiming with where a lot of artists are working right now. Of course, we should bear in mind we're having this conversation, and we've got the Ithul Calhoun exhibition at Tate Britain open at this moment, which is an extraordinary exhibition, and I recommend everybody to go to this as well.

Leonhard Carrington, I thought Calhoun, I don't think they actually knew one another, and yet so much of that artwork, you know, converges. So I think we're living in a very, very particular moment where a writer and artist like Carrington is actually our contemporary. We're not talking about somebody from 1930s, 1940s, 1940s. as if they're dead and buried, they're actually very, very alive and very, very vibrant to where we are right now.

I encountered the art and the text simultaneously. I saw a painting, it was the giantess, and it was on the cover of the Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women. And I thought, oh, it's this stunning portrait of a giantess, kind of clutching this tiny egg. And I think the painting interested me more than many of the stories, actually.

though I read the story there and then she was someone that I would periodically you would sort of click a link and go oh that's opened up the Leonora Carrington area of my brain and I would I delved more into the art than the writing I think I knew her more

as an artist than a writer and that's maybe something we should talk about to the extent that I based some monsters in one of my Doctor Who novels on some of her sculptures so yeah yeah I kind of got that you see it lovely dark sculptures with sort of curved heads and horns.

What was that novel called? It's called All Flesh is Grass. That's grass because I am... Not Dr. Who and All Flesh is Grass. Dr. Who are the Leonora Carrington sculptures. And this question, I think, where her reputation sits, whether she would be better known as artist or writer, and how we might sort of tease that apart.

I was in Waterstones the other day, and there's the novella shelf and there was the hearing trumpet. So Paul, I'd be interested to hear what you think where that reputation lies and how we might connect the art to the writing. Yeah, I mean, I would say first and foremost, she is an artist.

I mean, I feel, but that's not to suggest that the writing is somehow a sideline, you know, some kind of miscellaneous thing on the borderlines for artwork. I think it's absolutely integral to artwork. I'm thinking about her short stories for a moment, before we look at the hearing trumpet in more detail, but the short stories were originally published in French

with illustrations by Max Ernst. You know, what that suggests is not only, A, the closeness of their relationship, so in around about 1938, 39, but it also emphasises the closeness between text and image in Karenton's work. So I don't see her short stories or her longer pieces as being,

supplementary miscellaneous. I think they're integral, but they are all feeding into the art. And, you know, I mean, we may say this later, but I mean, Carrington used to get very angry about people who just would obsess about a relationship with Ernst. She would say, hold a minute, I've been living another, you know, 50, 60 years after Ernst. You know, I produce all this work. The greatest significance of Carrington comes post-1945. There seems to be a consensus that the art gets this great kind of expansion of flowering after the war, isn't it, when she, actually, when she becomes a mother, that there's a sort of, you know, explosion of her art.

I want to dig a little into the, we alluded to it at the start, this sort of hazy genesis of the novel and when it was written and how it was written. And does it go back as early as the 30s, Paul? Do we know it's that? Well, I think as Andy rightly says, said, I mean, there was an awfully kind of vague origin story about this. It may well be the late 1930s, early 40s. Certainly, we tend to think now it's more the early 1950s, but reading the text, there is an allusion to the invasion of Hungary, which is obviously 56, and we had to mention that it was a novel of the 1960s. I suspect that this is a book that Carrington was coming back to and rewriting and revising over a very, very lengthy time. I think it may not have taken its final form until the early 1960s, I feel. In which case, and this is totally speculative on my part, I'm not making any direct connection,

she would be completing this in or around the same time that Rachel Carson would be writing Silent Spring. I think if you think on those lines, this is a book which actually is kind of crossing the boardlines from 30s, 40s through to the early 60s, and seeing these kind of connections in terms of development about women's autonomy, about motherhood, about eco-feminism, and its beginnings in Carson, and of course the whole spectrum of the nuclear arms race. I wasn't being entirely whimsical when I was saying the whole story around this book proves that time isn't a straight line. I don't believe, as a writer myself, reading this book,

that some elements of that book are not based on one of the defining events of her life, her incarceration in the mental institution, which we'll come on and talk about. And that suggests that even if she did start it in the 1930s, she may have revised it to turn it. I read it as almost like a fable version of those events. The other thing that strikes me as totally fascinating about how this book is, in a sense, of this moment, Paul, as you suggest, but untethered from it simultaneously, is the way that the first time I read the hearing trumpet, I assumed incorrectly that the author was an elderly woman expressing an informed perspective, albeit a fantastical one, of what it was like to be an elderly

woman. Whereas in fact, she may have been in her 20s when she started writing it and probably finished it way before she then went on to become as old as the character is in the book. So I feel like its success now, part of its moment now, is partly around that misapprehension. What do we know about Leonora Carrington, if we know anything? She was an elderly woman who lived in Mexico who lived a fabulous, difficult life. And here's a novel about an elderly woman who's lived a fantastic and difficult life. And the roots of it are in that incarceration in the early 30s. And also the sense that she is, as an artist,

is in the true sense, whatever she turns her hand to, she does so artistically, right? So I agree with you, Paul. The writing is not her dominant mode, but is still very important to her work as a whole. Yeah, the other thing I'd add to that is that, yes, obviously, Marianne has a family and so on, so she's not exactly a spinster figure. But I suddenly read this novel alongside something, like, I mentioned, Syria Townsendor Warner, Once before, that's, hey, Lolly Willows. Yes, I've got it on my notes here.

Mine too. Yeah, it's a, it's a clean sweep for Lollie Willows. But if she did start writing it in the 30s, then the best-selling Lollie Willows in the States could be read as this novel, The Hearing Trump, it is a subversion of that, right? Fascinating. When is ICE published?

Is that Anna Kavan? Yeah, Anna Kavan, 1967. Yeah. But I mean, right, I mean, Anna Kavan, of course, obviously her early works are first short story collection, 1940, remember rightly. So she's absolutely of this same generation as Carrington. But again, somebody, as you rightly say, you know, is then picked up much later, you know, sort of at the same time as people like, you know, Anne Quinn and Christine Brooke Rose. You know, you've got this, you've got these very interesting sort of pick up atymporality of this book.

You've got these very interesting sort of time lags, as it were, of people like Harrington, like Anna Kavan, maybe Siveterns, what are being picked up later. Again, you know, it's no surprise to me that something like Angela Carter, and the way that Carter is obviously kind of revising our ideas of canonical literary history, is then picking up something like Carrington. You know, she picks up new women writers in that anthology. You know, people like George Edgerton and Vernon Lee. And so I think, I mean, but these are all part of an alternate history. It's that kind of odd way that feminist traditions have to be mosaic constructed, isn't it? Andy? We're going to hear a little bit from the hearing trumpet in just a second.

We've invited, no, we can. I've just taken it from the audiobook. But it's Sean Phillips reading the hearing trumpet. Before I do that, however, we're going to do this a couple of times. times during this show. Back in 2017, which was the centenary of Leonora Carrington's birth, Chloe Aradius, who co-curated a retrospective in 2015 of Carrington's paintings and art at Tate Liverpool, published a thing in the LRB blog. She published an A to Z of Leonora Carrington. And I thought it would be fun to ask you to pick a letter, Paul, between A to and a to

Z, pick a letter. I'll go with R. Okay, we're just scrolling down now. R. Roma. R is for Roma. Colonia Roma was the neighbourhood of Mexico City. Leonora Carrinson lived in from the 1940s over the decades. It underwent an enormous transformation. Across the street lay the debris of a collapsed building, a victim of the 1985 earthquake, which housed a growing community of cats and homeless people. Leonora called it a garden of scorpions. Excellent. Brilliant. Okay, that's pretty good. Una, please, a letter between A and Z. Oh, I think I would like the letter F. The letter F, yes, certainly. F is for filters, as in cigarette filters. Until her final days, Leonora smoked. Her choice of cigarette varied, but she

always attached them to short plastic filters, which she would clean and reuse. There we go. This is gold. Can I pick one? Yeah, all right, then. I'm going to pick you. Yeah. You is for University of Contraception.

Leonora would often complain there were too many people in the world and wish they would establish such a university. I don't think Leonora put up with much shit, does she really? I think I, I think I tried. invoicing that university, and they've never got back to me. Okay, can you provide? Yeah. Why don't we hear the opening now of the hearing trumpet, read by Sean Phillips. So at least everybody listening to this episode has now started reading the book in question. When Carmella gave me the present of a hearing trumpet,

she may have foreseen some of the consequences. The trumpet was certainly a fine specimen of its kind, without being really modern. It was, however, exceptionally pretty, being encrusted with silver and mother-of-pearl motifs, and grandly curved like a buffalo's horn. The aesthetic presence of this object was not its only quality. The hearing trumpet magnified sound to such a degree that ordinary conversation became quite audible even to my ears. Here, I must say, that all my senses are by no means impaired by age. My sight is still excellent, although I use spectacles for reading, when I read, which I practically never do.

True, rheumatics have bent my skeleton somewhat. This does not prevent me taking a walk in clement weather, and sweeping my room once a week on Thursday, a form of exercise which is both useful and edifying. Here I may add that I consider that I am still a useful member of society, and I believe still capable of being pleasant and amusing when the occasion seems fit. The fact that I have no teeth and never could wear dentures does not in any way discomfort me. I don't have to bite anybody, and there are all sorts of soft, edible foods, easy to procure and digestible to the stomach.

Mashed vegetables, chocolate and bread dipped in warm water make the base of my simple diet. I never eat meat, as I think it is wrong to deprive animals of their life when they are so difficult to chew anyway. Oh, that's so good, isn't it? Right, Paul, can we talk a little bit about the hearing trumpet itself?

I think in the light of everything we've just been talking about. People might be slightly surprised to hear quite how charming that is. I'd like to ask you, but two basic things then. Describe for us the narrative voice and what is the symbolic purpose of the hearing trumpet? She's given a hearing trumpet, okay, we're going to take that at face value for the time being. So, tone and hardware, please. Tone and hardware. I mean, in terms of tone, it's definitely charming. That's the word you used. And there's a lovely kind of quizzical quality about it.

I think quizzical is the word I'm going to go for for the tone. Almost a kind of sort of literalism you find in fairy tales. Fairy tales played a huge part in Carrington's imagination. You know, I mean, the most absurdest fairy tales actually you can find the ones by

Alexander Avaniassev, the Russian folk collector. And then you have, you know, dragons riding on horses because obviously it's how dragons, you know, get about. They don't bother with their wings. And it's that kind of strange kind of deadpan literalism. And the way in which this narrative voice is constantly open to the world and the world of experiences, the world of the sensations, and it doesn't prejudge any of those experiences or sensations.

So I think those are the kinds of words I want to use that narrative voice. And I think also in terms of the hardware, I mean, it then leads into the idea of the hearing trumpet. And I'm probably going to get Euna's point on this view as well, actually. But I think that, you know, the hearing trumpet obviously plot device, you know, it allows Marion to overhear her family's machinations of, you know, pushing away off into this horrible kind of care home. But then there's other weird things happen. Like she manages she can hear Dr. Gambit's voice without using the hearing trumpet. So actually, from a kind of purely plot device, it doesn't really work as such. She shows a healthy disregard for narrows' conventions, I believe, is what we're.

I mean, I think ultimately, I mean, ultimately, I think of a hearing trumpet is really kind of, you know, that it's the last Trump, actually, is apocalyptic, you know, sort of inauguration of the end of the world. Oh, I see what you mean. And so we could see the trumpet as not merely something we listen through, but something we blow into or somebody blows into in order to sound the apocalypse. Oh, I like that. Yes, I think also it's that sense of, she doesn't hear, I just hear other people's voices. I think also in the sense that Marian is actually, it's almost like a sort of internalised trumpet.

She's actually beginning to actually listen to herself and actually come to an appreciation of actually who she is in the world. And hearing the truth underneath the lies that people are telling her, you know, oh, we're not packing you off to an institution. We found this wonderful place where you're going to be very happy and with people your own age. It's that she's, I mean, my mind always straight to Tolkien, but the ring of invisibility confers kind of the ability to just sneak up on people and hear what they're saying about you, doesn't it? Yes.

So there's an aspect of that. I talk, thinking about her tone of voice and what you're saying there, the word that came to mind was almost ingenue. There's something, and it goes back to what I think we were saying about it simultaneously being a young woman and an old woman happening at once. Andy, you had a really interesting phrase that someone reading the novel for the first time said to you. Yes. Yes, a friend of mine said, oh yeah, the hearing trumpet. It's a coming of age novel for women who are dying.

which I thought was brilliant. You know, that idea of Marion Weatherby kind of being simultaneously a girl like Leonora Carrington could remember being relatively recently but also this kind of Dante-esque figure. Dante is a 92-year-old woman with a hearing age. You know, it's a headings. into the underworld.

I think that what we were talking about earlier, that atemporality, that's all part of the same thing, isn't it? It's this sense of artists are self-defining creatures. And that, I think, is one of the attributes of Leonora Carrington's career and life and this novel. Marion Weatherby is whoever she says she is. The other comparison I'd make, as she, in terms of the voice,

is Alice in Wonderland. There's very much a kind of Alice-like voice there in terms of, you know, yeah, okay, now I'm bigger, now I'm smaller, I'll go along with it. You know, whatever happens, you know. And again, I think that idea of the ingenue that Una mentions, I think, is part of that. But I do love the idea, a coming of age novel

for those on the point of dying. I think it is a wonderful word expressing attention. Absolutely brilliant, yeah. I've got the jacket copy here, Una. Shall I... Go for it. Imagine you're sitting in the Rutledge, Keegan and Paul marketing department in 1976, and this manuscript of the French novel

plops onto your desk and they say, OK, knock up a quick blur that's going to sell this to W.H. Smith stations. This is what they came up with. The hearing trumpet is narrated by 92-year-old Marion Leatherby, inmate of an old lady's home, haunted by occult doctrines and poisonings and administered by the pedantic Dr. Gambit. Here, Marion discovers the secret of the leering abbess and the Holy Grail, and one of the old ladies is accidentally killed. It's like, it's a very literal relating of what happens in the novel, isn't it? When the women rise up in a feminist cabal to save themselves from their protectors,

they unwittingly set off an upheaval of cosmic proportions. Now that is gone the table next to Leslie Thomas, so that's pretty good going. Already, before its first official publication in Britain, the hearing trumpet enjoys the reputation of an underground classic. First written by the author and painter Leonora Carrington in the early 1960s, its existence seemed destined to remain unknown to all but a small group of friends and admirers when the original manuscript was lost shortly after completion. Luckily, a rough draft was uncovered in 1973

and the author was prevailed upon to rework it for publication in French translation. When Le Cornette Acoustique appeared in France in 1974, it was universally acclaimed as a classic of fantastic literature. Marion and her hearing trumpet have been likened to, get ready, Alice and her looking glass, and Louis Bunewell has said, I really hope some kid in England is traumatised. ever by seeing right, cut up.

Oh no, he says reading the hearing trumpet liberates us from the miserable reality of our days. First of all, then, panel, what do we think of that as a piece of jacket copy? Paul. Well, I definitely snap it up, I have to say. Okay. It's great, you know.

You can probably see they're kind of struggling to encapsulate this text, this book. But, and I think that's the thing. I mean, I think we're talking earlier about how is it, why is it that Carrington is being taken up now as opposed to, you know, well, for 15 or 60 years ago. And I think actually he's just trying to categorise this thing. Where the hell do you position is on the bookshelf?

It's no surprise it's published in France. I think that the trigger phrase for me is feminist cabal. I mean, I'm in on that one, yeah. So, Andy, go on. Una, I think I'll ask you first. we were talking earlier about let's pretend we don't know all the biography about Leonora Carrington

let's pretend we don't know that she's a painter that we don't know that she has a history of surrealism let's apply some good old at university in the 1980s death of the author theory to this novel what on earth would we make of this novel if we didn't understand it

as the product of a very specific vision from a very specific artist? My first encounter, this was earlier this year, is baffling, bewildering, yeah, beguiling, that I can't believe how funny it is. And then as it gradually, it folds in and in and nests in and in, and there are stories and letters. And then at the end, you realise that little throwaways are getting connected up. It's not just free association. It's dipping into her subconscious and dipping, as I think we've discussed into her own personal myths, but something crafted and worked is coming out the other end. Paul, what do you think?

Well, if you are taking the 80s death of the author approach, you would think, oh yes, it's the polysemious text with all of it shifting into texts and so on. So actually, you probably rather like this as a piece of avant-garde literature, even if you don't know nothing about this author. I'm glad that we're able to acknowledge it as baffling. Not because it is purely baffling, but as a reader, you've got to be open to the idea that bafflement can be intriguing rather than frustrating, right?

Also, Paul, I wonder the extent to which the torrid history of how this book finally appeared in English. I mean, that that detail on the jacket, it copy there that suggests it was sort of something she may have written earlier, lost, forgotten, remembered that somebody else's prompting, then dictated to somebody and then worked it over again. I mean, it's, it's, even the authorial process of it is not an Ian McEwen-like sit at the desk for two years and produce a well-formed novel. It's a, it's a totally chaotic seemingly process and that chaos is encoded in the story itself.

The other thing you go by our mind in the 70s. This is the era just after, you know, B.S. Johnson's, Christy Mallory's own double entry. You know, you have that kind of absurdist narrative, which is pushing away at the literary establishment, at what passed for fiction at the end of decade because we're going to have rushed to midnight's children. So in a sense, the hearing trumpet,

can be placed upon a bookshelf alongside those kinds of texts as they emerged in the mid-70s. But absolutely, that chaos is encoded in the narrative. Again, it can be frustrating to read. Frustration, as Bart would say, is also the trigger towards, you know, exhilaration and intrigue and, you know, the pleasure of the text and so on,

and, you know, the surprising kind of weaves and turns in it. And it depends very much, always a reader, what you actually want to read for, what you actually get out of reading. Well, listen, we're going to take a quick break now. And when we come back, we're going to be listening to an excerpt from the Antiques Road Show. So don't be going anywhere. See you in a minute.

Hey, we know you probably hit play to escape your business banking, not think about it. But what if we told you there was a way to skip over the pressures of banking? By matching with a TD Small Business Account Manager, you can get the proactive business banking advice and support your business needs. Ready to press play? Get up to $2,700 when you open select small business banking products. Yep, that's $2,700 to turn up your business. Visit TD.com slash small business match to learn more. Conditions apply. I know there's an artist by the name of Lenora Carrington, and that she lived in Mexico.

Originally she came from Europe, but that she came to Mexico after the Second World War. Much more than that, I don't know, except I know that she was a surrealist. Right. Well, it's a fabulous example of her work, and it really relates to that personal angst that she had. Now, she painted a variety of different mediums. This is a piece on canvas, and so it looks like it's primarily oil. Recently, her value has come up a bit because she has passed away. She died in 2011.

She lived to be 94, I believe. Her works are sold mainly in Latin American sales. There's a lot of interest in those. you had it appraised or? I have not. I do know what my parents paid for it. I believe they said they bought it somewhere around $7 to $10,000, which was a big price to pay for a painting. I'm sure my father had to think twice about it when he did it. Right now, I would expect an auction estimate of $200 to $300,000 these days. They bought well. So listen, that was a clip from the US version of Antiques Road Show and I've been to a recording of the Antiques Road Show and I can tell you the

so-called expert there had been on the internet like we all have learning facts about Leonora Carrington before taking to the camera. But that was broadcast in 2014. And in the light of what we were talking about earlier, there's no question but that painting would be worth a lot more now. You know, his father bought it for $10,000. He asked, It was worth $200,000 11 years ago. It's got to be over a million now, hasn't it? I think there's a story in the biography where Joanna Moorhead tells Leonora that one of her paintings that she'd sold for a few thousand had just sold for over a million.

And it's like, well, I'm not, she's not seeing any of that, you know, it's gone. but, you know, a pleasure that the artist is getting, you know, is reaching that height, it's getting that recognition. Paul, do you have a little bit of the hearing trumpet you could read us that maybe overlaps with the conversation we've been having? There's a story inside a story, actually, here. So we have a story about the leering nun that was mentioned earlier. And so I'm going to give a little bit of the painting itself.

And I cannot read as well as Sean Phillips. So bear with me. While the doctor held forth, I had plenty of time to examine the winking nun. My interest increased as time went on. Georgina was cultured and often mentioned famous artists that'd been madly in love with her. So pretending my interest was purely artistic, I questioned her about the painting. It might be the Zabaran school, she said, looking uncommonly thoughtful, probably painted in the late 18th century. Spanish, of course.

An Italian could never have done anything so enchantingly sinister. A nun with a lear, unknown master? Do you suppose she's really winking, or is she blind in one eye? I asked, anxious for Georgina's opinion on a more personal aspect of the lady. She is definitely winking. The bald, the old bag is probably peeking at the monastery for a hole in the wall, watching the monks prancing around in their knickers. Georgina had one-track mind.

It is beautiful, she added. I wonder, the gams let it hang amongst their hideous possessions. Everything in the house ought to have been burnt long ago. apart from the leering abbess. Certainly, the painting had a force all of its own, and I was pleased that Georgina was also impressed. She was such a cultured person, almost an aristocrat. Really, it was strange or often that leering abbess occupied my thoughts.

I even gave her a name, keeping it strictly to myself. I called her Donna Rosalinda Alvarez della Creva, a nice long name, Spanish style. She was abbess, I imagined, of a huge Baroque convent on the lonely and barren mountain in Castile. The conventus El Convento de Santa Barbara to Tartarus. The bearded patroness of Limbo

said to play with unbaptised children in this nether region. How all these fancies occurred to me, I do not know, but they can be amused, especially during sleepless nights. Old people would not sleep much. Thank you, Paul. It's that thing we were talking about

where I'm so interested that Carrington as a relatively young writer, let's just give it that vague phrase. is looking to create a persona which allows her the freedom that a relatively young woman would not enjoy, Una. Do you think there's a strange thing to say, there's almost wishful fulfillment there? I wish I could be left to my own devices, literally, if they're hearing trumpets, as Marion Weatherby is in her 90s. There's one small gag in the book, which is that Marion's mother is still alive, yeah? so even

yeah she's a hundred and ten she's a hundred and ten so even at this sort of you know incredibly advanced age marion is still locked in a it's not hugely central to the text but it is present there's still the presence of an older generation that you know has an influence or control that there's a there's a lock in with that generation which of course in leonora's own life is an extremely complicated

relationship. The non-figure again being subverted as there's something there's something freeing about taking the veil. It's all very unusual. There's a kind of mix up as well of the limbo story which is quite sinister in Catholic theology where the unbaptised babies sort of go and haunt this terrifying, you know, shadowy world but here it becomes playful and they're guarded and friends of the old who are close to you know about to go into the bardo aren't they so we're going to hear a clip in a moment from um of uh leonora carrington's cousins and then leonora herself one of the things i love about one of the many fabled legendary stories about leonora

carrington it's not actually true that when she was incarcerated in a mental asylum her family dispatched her nanny to bring her back on a submarine. It was actually a perfectly normal ship, but they did send the nanny out. It's only the submarine that's not true. Yeah, the rest of that's totally true, right? But also, she was thrown out from whichever school she was thrown out from for being hard to teach, but also she was caught trying to levitate. That's the detail.

I like the and there is a kind of repeating occult theme you know that the inspiration for many of the paintings and you can see in the hearing trumpet as well and it's a catholic school she's thrown out of so if she was if she was yeah you know I think even I would have got kicked out of common school for trying to levitate if you if you would like if you would like to have let's just listen to this clip if you would like immediately to understand why leonora Harrington did not fit into the family that she grew up with. Well, I remember there has been an absolute striking beauty. I didn't understand her paintings.

They're not really what, I suppose, there are things to be admired, but I don't think really I would have ever gone out of the way to buy one. They all seem to have funny animals in them and that sort of thing, and they didn't really appeal to me. But that was the nanny, and I think she was the one who had the immense influence on them. She came, I think, from the west of Ireland, and, you know, what the Irish are. They're a bit, what's the word, fay, I think. She was a bit odd, I must say.

She had a funny way of talking with you. Yes. I do remember that. We were both at Mary's Convent, Ascot, and Leonor, it was rather a rebel. I mean, she was very anti-any discipline or rules or anything, and she was rather inclined to go her own way. And she was rather musical as well as artistic. And the great craze, or her craze, was to have a saw, and she could play on.

on this sword, just bang on him, play on it. And of course, we were caught and there was trouble. She just didn't fit into school. I think I was mainly expelled. I think I was mainly expelled for not collaborating. a kind of allegor to collaboration. And I remember I was told that apparently you don't collaborate with either games or work. That's what they put on my report.

They wanted me to conform to the life of horses and hunt balls and being well considered by the local gentry, I suppose. That sort of thing. And were you supposed to go out into society? Yes, well, you know, don't you have debutiles in England still? What a marvellous thing. I didn't know. They scrapped it, did they? Oh, that's one of my favourite things we've ever, my favourite clips we've ever had on that list. First of all, for her cousins, that was her cousins there, John Cardwell and Patricia Patterson. and saying without irony, talking without irony about people speaking with funny voices.

I enjoyed that very much. And then that was followed by Leonora herself, discovering that they no longer have debutants in the UK and how marvellous it was they no longer had. And also the delight that maybe if they had kept a couple of her paintings, they might have, I don't know, they probably could have saved the family home or something. Yeah. Well, I found a clip from the Times newspaper in 1935, which I'm going to read you a tiny bit of. Leonora Carrington and her mother, her mother and Luna, were presented to the king and queen at the coming out ball.

Una, why was that significant apart from seeing the queen and the king? Why was that a significant thing? It was the cattle market, wasn't it? You were presenting your young daughters basically for the, for the, for the, for the, for the nobility to see whether you could marry them to their sons. And in the case of Leonora's family, her family were new money. They weren't aristocracy. Yeah, they were Nouveau, weren't they?

Her father is incredibly rich. I mean, we're talking a multimillionaire, but the generation before him had not been. So, Leonora was specifically their passport to nobility. You know, if they married that daughter in the right place, this was the way that they would kind of, you know, level up achievement unlocked. So this is Leonora being presented. So a huge honour, actually, for a, you know, a Lancashire mercantile family. And we know what Leonora thinks of it. So I've got here the actual clipping from 90 years ago from the Times of the list, the description of what every Deb wore.

at that occasion and I am going to read you what Miss Leonora Carrington wore followed by immediately by what Mrs. Paul Lindo wore okay so Miss Leonora Carrington wore quote

a gown of citron satin embroidered with the reversed side of the material a train to match a petit point don't tell fan Victor Steeble 22 Bruton Street I mean, absolute visions of phantom thread there, as far as I'm concerned.

Meanwhile, that was relatively restrained compared with what the next young girl on the list was wearing. Mrs Paul Lindo, a gown of jade green satin with a pattern on the dull side of the material applique on to form a panel continued from the front round to the back and down the skirt, a train of the same material embroidered to match the gown, an ostrich feather fan. You know, this was not, this was, the reason for going into all this pool is to give everyone a setting of what Leonora Carrington was rebelling against and running away from. And we should say that her rebellion takes,

is conducted at that coming out ball, because she spends most of the time sitting on a chair, reading Aldous Huxley's Isles in Gaza. And people are scandalised, aren't they? Exactly. It's a scandalous book at the time, of course, at Huxley. And she has absolutely no interest of being treated to the cattle market, as Zuna puts it. That takes the hutspar, you know, the confidence to do that, is extraordinary. Could you tell us a bit about the events that lead to her incarceration?

and because I feel we must talk about that. I see it in the hearing trumpet and of course she wrote her memoir down below which is extraordinary. I might read a bit from that in a minute. But could you talk us through that? As I mentioned earlier, Ernst, you know, married man,

but whisked Carrington off to Paris and then to Saint-Mattain-Dadesh in France. In 1940, Ernst has actually already been previously arrested once. But in 1940, he's arrested by the Gestapo, and Carrington suffers a mental breakdown. A friend of hers, Catherine Yarrow, helps her to travel to Spain, but Carrington's mental illness deteriorates further, and she's eventually incarcerated in an asylum in Madrid run by Dr. Morales and his son. And there, she is given very powerful drugs, cardiol, which effectively inducese, sort of epileptic.

like fits in her. So she's horribly, badly treated. As I say, she's rescued by her nanny with the intention of basically, you know, getting it to South Africa to a sanatorium. Again, marvellously, she ditches the nanny in Portugal and runs off with a Mexican ambassador to Mexico, which I need on the next part of her story. There's a conflation in her mind as well, isn't there? of the, she, she starts to believe that she's been brought to Spain to kind of persuade people to free themselves from Franco.

And there's a conflation in her mind and a very perceptive conflation that fascism is part of that patriarchal web that suppressing her. And again, it's sort of, she's seeing a truth, but the truth is so, kind of seeing that truth is so painful and destructive that it does drive her into madness.

and then of course the treatment as well. Down below is a remarkable piece of writing, whether you see it as the work of an artist or the work of somebody bringing back information from the absolute abyss. It's structured perhaps truthfully as being written over the course of several days. And so she's constantly saying to the reader,

I'm not sure I've got the strength to go on with this, but I must do because I think getting it down will help me get rid of it. Anyway, I'll just read a page. Wednesday the 25th of August, 1943. I had been writing for three days, though I had expected to deliver myself in a few hours. This is painful because I am living this period all over again

and sleeping badly, troubled and anxious as I am about the usefulness of what I am doing. However, I must go on with my story in order to come out of my anguish. My ancestors, malevolent and smug, are trying to frighten me. That's a wonderful phrase, malevolent and smug. During the whole time, I was tightly tied to my bed. I had an opportunity to get acquainted with my strange neighbours, a knowledge which did not help me solve my problem to wit, where was I, and why was I there? They came and watched me through the glass panel in my door. Sometimes they would come in and talk to me, the Prince of Monaco and Pan-America.

Don Antonio, with his matchbox containing a small piece of excrement. Don Gonzalo, pursued and tortured by the Archbishop of Santander, the Marquis de Silva with his giant spiders. He was drying out from a heroin addiction. He was also suffering from the same injection that had been given me, though the nurses claimed the swelling came from a spider-bite, who had been the intimate friend of Alfonso the 13th, and was also Franco's friend. The Marquist was powerful in the Requette, the Carlist Party. He was very nice, and Gar-Gar. Observing in those gentlemen a certain extravagance, I inferred that they were all under the hypnotic influence of Van Ghent's gang, and that this place was consequently some sort of prison.

for those who had threatened the power of that group, also that I, the most dangerous of all, was fated to undergo a still more terrible torture in order to be reduced better still and become like my companions in distress. I thought that the Moraleses were masters of the universe, powerful magicians who made use of their power to spread horror and terror.

I knew by dint of divination that the way, world was congealed, that it was up to me to vanquish them and the Vangents in order to set it in motion again. After several days of enforced immobility, I noticed that my brain was still functioning and that I was not defeated. I believed that my cerebral power was superior to my enemies. What a fascinating mixture of trauma, humour and defiance there. Paul, she required these things often in her life, didn't she, at least until she got to Mexico, but even in Mexico. Those are absolutely defining characteristics of Carrington as a person and as an artist. And actually, even in Mexico, I mean, we've got to remember that, you know, her early years,

she was in deep, deep hardship. I mean, there's a story that, you know, there's a story that, you know, You know, the only thing she had to eat at one point was ice cream. You know, she is an extraordinary figure in that sense. Coming back to the asylum and the way that all then leads into the hearing trumpet, we have the obviously Dr. Gambit and Mrs. Gambit in the novel certainly owes a lot to the moralises. There's also a way in which that she's also criticising not just Franco's, you know, ultra-right regime,

but also Freud. She had no interest in Freud that he said earlier that she didn't read the solicit manifesto. She was very suspicious of kind of Papa Freud. And then it's in terms of the rewriting of this text. There's also ways in which the gambits are based upon the work of the mystic Gerjeff. Gergev had various acolytes in Mexico

whose workshops Karenton attended, some of which she liked, some which was extremely mistrustful of. She's always very mistrustful of patriarchal men, who seem to think that they have the key to all mythologies, that they have the truth, they have the absolute wisdom on all things. And she's extraordinary, I mean, that is going to get her back up no end. And I think you can see the gambits as being a kind of amalgam of all those figures.

Equally, the asylum is also, there's echoes of, yeah, the manor house which had grew up, the convents from which she was chucked out. Yes. Institutions. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. We have to wrap up in a minute, but, you know, I know. you have a lovely thing that you found that we would give a different side perhaps of Leonora Carrington via one of her sons.

One of her sons, through her husband, Cheeky Weiss, Gabrielle Vise Carrington has written an absolutely beautiful memoir of his mother and she was, by all accounts, just, I mean, just an amazing, an amazing mother, extremely devoted to the boys, particularly with Gabriel became really a kind of artistic collaborator in many way. They do set designs together. She is interested in his work as a kind of critic and a poet. And he has an absolutely wonderful piece at the start of the book, which I think just humanises her and gives a very different side of her.

And it's to do with a painting that Max Ernst made of her when she's extremely young called Leonora in the morning light, exceptionally beautiful painting. and Gabrielle writes about it. When their relationship was at its peak, Max painted Leonora looking animated and joyful, the life pouring out of her. In the painting, she's emerging from lush, seemingly impenetrable vegetation,

and she appears to move with ease. It's a scene that's always led me to ponder the enigma of both the painter and his subjects. For decades, we admired the piece of art, me and Patty, his wife, and our children, Pablo, Agatha and Daniel. In it, Leonora inhabits a landscape that seems to belong in her. She's clad in moss, surrounded by a jungle of Leanas. Years later, when Leonora was no longer with us, I was unexpectedly deprived of this painting. This situation belongs

to a private part of my life. However, I not only want to record here the injury I suffered on losing a gift from my mother, but also to bid farewell to all the phantoms in that exceptional canvas, phantoms that nourished our lives, communicating their mystery to the room in which the painting hung. Before it was taken away, I used to scrutinise it, losing myself among the vines and exotic fruit deficted in its colourful threads and jewels. Clad in moss, her loose hair flying in the wind. Leonora emerges from a glittering chaos, the green vegetation mutating into animals and fruit. She's seeking something, her pale, fearless face captured by Max's brush as she sets out on some unknown quest. Leonora was not always capable of finding this

intangible something, and she would sometimes full prey to anguish, discouragement and restlessness, feeling the impossibility of inhabiting her own body. At other times, her reward for this thirst for discovery was the paintings, sculptures and other artistic narratives that emerge after a period of intense work, during which a lit cigarette was held perpetually between her fingers while pondering what to do next. That's beautiful. That's really beautiful. I think that's the same. I saw, I watched one of the documentaries about her. And Gabrielle, her son there, says of her, well, she didn't fit in England. And she didn't fit in New York. And she didn't really even fit in Mexico. Art was her country.

And that's where we must leave it for this week. Please disconnect your hearing aids. Many thanks to Paul for filling our heads with old women, mysterious books and unicorns. And thank you to our own sonic alchemist, Nicky Birch, for turning bass metal into audio gold. If you would like show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the previous 245 episodes, please visit our website at backlisted.fm. To buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows, please visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose Backlisted as your bookshop.

But before we go, Paul, is there anything you'd like to add about Leonora Carrington or the hearing trumpet that we haven't got to? The one thing I'd mention, we've talked about a memoir which is definitely important to read, I'd also mention Mary and Bryant-Hawberts' graphic novel Armed with Madness. Yes.

The real life of Leonehack Carrington, which is a superb artistic rendering of her lifestyle. It is absolutely brilliant. Had you read this before, Paul, before we got ready for this thing. Only when you mentioned it, and then I got it, and it's truly fantastic. Yeah, I'm going to thank, on the record, Dr. Una McCormack for her fact-finding work here, because armed with madness by Mary M. Taubler and Brian Tall, but I agree with you, Paul.

I thought it was fantastic. And as a kind of distillation of all the other sources we've drawn on, really skilled and ingenious. And once you've read that one, read the one they do about Lucia Joyce, James Joyce's daughter. Yeah, another fantastic. Oh, that'll cheer me, right. Yeah. So thank you, Paul. Thank you, Una.

Thank you, Nikki. And thank you listeners. We hope you've enjoyed this show. We really, really have. We are about to take a month's long break, but don't worry, we'll be back in a fortnight. Because we've been hard at work to make sure we are. So, Una, any last message for our friends out on? Oh, just look at her amazing paintings and sink into them, I think.

And, yeah, we'll catch you on the flip side. See you soon. Bye-bye. Bye-bye, everyone. Thank you. I. Thank you. Thank you.