Armed with Madness: The Surreal Leonora Carrington: A conversation with Bryan and Mary Talbot
Joanna Pawlik
Mary Talbot: We’re a married couple of long standing and in the past 10 years or so we started producing graphic novels together. My background is academic, and I’ve worked at a range of different universities. I taught socio-linguistics, mostly with an interest in language and gender and with feminist linguistics, which has informed the work that I’ve done when I’ve written for graphic novels. I’m Visiting Professor of Graphic Narrative at Lancaster now.
Bryan Talbot: I’ve been writing and drawing comics and graphic novels for over 45 years, including doing one of the first two, if not the first British graphic novels, which was The Legend of Luther Arkwright, which was serialized from 1978.
Joanna Pawlik: Can I ask about the genesis of Armed with Madness and the process of researching it?
Mary Talbot: I started writing this and researching in 2017, possibly earlier. I’ve not been working on it all the time, but I started working on the script in 2019.
Bryan Talbot: I basically painted it all in 2022.
Joanna Pawlik: You mentioned the research, Mary, and the book includes an extensive bibliography that discloses what you read. I wonder whether you could say a little bit about that process of research, and whether you see this as a scholarly graphic novel.
Mary Talbot: I’ve always done a lot of research, and I always made sure that people could see that I have done a lot of research. You’ll notice the end notes of Armed with Madness, for where I haven’t been able to squeeze a bit of factual detail without stymying the story. I want to make sure people know about it.
I was already interested in her [Carrington] as a potential biographical subject when Joanna Moorhead’s biography came out in 2017 [The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington]. But I was thinking about it already. I can’t remember what triggered it. I’d known about her and that field for a long time. But when it came up to the surface as a potential subject for biographical graphic novel, I can’t remember. But I was immediately trying to find as much material as I could. I was looking in bookshops, in London, in art collections, obviously doing online searches, slide research, and so on.
Joanna Pawlik: How important was historical accuracy in both the visual and the verbal parts of Armed with Madness?
Bryan Talbot: Well, with the visuals I tried to keep them as accurate as possible. I did lots of searches for the fashions. I have books on fashions through the decades to make sure that dress was appropriate, make sure the cars were right and not ahead of the time. I looked deliberately for photographs of street scenes of whichever city she was in at that time of the appropriate period. I was as accurate as I could be.
Joanna Pawlik: I love in the notes how you disclose some of the decisions that you had to make around historical accuracy. I wonder whether you could say a little bit about that decision making process.
Bryan Talbot: I looked at photographs of the artists from the time Leonora knew them. Before I put the moustache on Salvador Dalí, I said to Mary, you need to put a note at the end to say it’s just so people recognize him [the notes disclose that Dalí did not have a moustache in 1937 but this was added for the character’s legibility]. One of the hardest things was because Carrington’s work is still in copyright, I couldn’t just reproduce it. So, I had to produce images that were inspired by it and looked like Leonora Carrington’s work. If at any certain time she’s working on a picture in the book, I made sure it was a picture she did in that year.
Joanna Pawlik: Can you say a little bit more about how you navigated the copyright issue?
Bryan Talbot: I couldn’t do exact copies of the artworks but if you look at the sculptures I painted [Carrington’s sculptures on Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City, 2008] and compare them to what she actually did, they’re all a bit different. They have the figures in different positions or something like that. As I said, none of the paintings are actually reproduced and the most you see is from side on or a view of a work in progress. The one I was most worried about was Guernica so I’ve drawn it in perspective, receding away. There are people standing in front of parts of it, including Picasso and there are speech balloons over part of it, so they can’t really say I simply reproduced it.
Carrington’s portrait of Max Ernst is in extreme side view, and if you look at the panel showing a close up of the jar with the horse inside it’s a different shape and the horse is different.
Joanna Pawlik: And what about the text and the narrative, Mary? It’s so interesting to hear that you have a background as a researcher in linguistics. I was fascinated by the linguistic choices for the dialogue. How did you know the idiom? Were you striving for that sort of historical accuracy?
Mary Talbot: I was very much aware that she couldn’t sound too modern. But I must have been looking at material from that period and noticing the idiom that people would have been using in the thirties, but I’m afraid I can’t remember more. I know I read the Armed with Madness book by Mary Butts [1928]. Oh, I tried to read it. I must admit I wasn’t thrilled. That was written in the twenties, but it is that sort of thing I was looking for. I was reading around stuff from the period.
Joanna Pawlik: Now that you’ve mentioned the other Armed with Madness, can you say a little bit about the choice of title, and any crossover with this earlier work.
Mary Talbot: I think it just emerged between us. I mentioned I could put it as an epigram at the beginning, but Bryan thought it would make a great title for the book. The working title was just Leonora, which clearly wasn’t enough. It needed something with more impact.
Joanna Pawlik: The text and the images do such an incredible job of depicting Leonora Carrington’s experiences of madness in vivid, visceral detail. I love the part that criticizes the male group of Surrealists for romanticizing and poeticizing madness, and you seemed to move away from this approach. Could you say a little bit about that?
Mary Talbot: Well, I was drawing directly on her account, whilst obviously not getting into the grounds of plagiarism. I was using Down Below [1972] very closely which is a very dead-pan account of her psychotic experience, with a little afterword which she produced some years later. It fills in a lot that she didn’t include in the original. I think a lot of the idiom probably came from that. I was trying as much as possible to draw upon her writing, not just other people’s writing. It has a very distinctive quality to it—the surreal take on things.
When Bryan came to think of how to illustrate these passages, her very particular way of expressing herself came across.
Joanna Pawlik: My next question was going to be about why Leonora Carrington, and why now?
Bryan Talbot: When Mary mentioned her, I’d never heard of her but I thought she was a great subject.
Mary Talbot: I’d been looking for ages for another biographical subject.
Joanna Pawlik: I was really struck by the depiction of the way in which conflict, fascism and the geopolitical landscape registers itself on an individual’s psyche, and I was wondering whether that was something that you thought spoke to the present moment.
Mary Talbot: I think she’s just fascinating. It was such an amazing, risky life that she led. She leapt into the unknown three times. I think it has resonance in any period. But yes, maybe particularly now when we’re in an unstable situation geopolitically.
Joanna Pawlik: What is it that a graphic novel can do that other forms of biography can’t do? What can you tell and show us about Carrington’s life that departs from other forms of biography? Is there something about graphic novels’ particular combination of the visual and the verbal that better suits them to depict what we might call “the surreal”?
Bryan Talbot: Telling a story using a mixture of the words and pictures means the information is transmitted through two channels, and you can actually get a lot of complex information over very, very directly.
Mary Talbot: It’s a very accessible format. There are people who would read a graphic novel on a subject which they wouldn’t dream of touching otherwise. You could say that we’ve done the hard work for them!
Bryan Talbot: I think a graphic novel is just a medium like theatre, or like literature: it’s capable of handling any subject.
Mary Talbot: I just remembered another potential influence. We were watching a lot of 1930s cartoons.
Joanna Pawlik: Can you give an example of the kinds of cartoons that you were watching?
Bryan Talbot: I’m trying to remember the name. The people who did Popeye, they did a lot of surreal strips, strange cartoons? Max Fleischer! That definitely fed in somehow.
Mary Talbot: I was trying to get you to do little dancing flame devils at one point, which was in one cartoon. Don’t ask me which one! Never ended up in there!
Bryan Talbot: At one point in the script, you wanted lots of swastikas crawling about. And I thought, if that was in a cartoon you could actually show them doing it, but static on a page, it wasn’t really possible. So, I had them floating through the air instead. The worst sort of comics just have text in the box and have a picture showing what’s written in the box. It’s just describing what’s in the panel. The text should be there to give you something that you can’t get through the drawing.
Joanna Pawlik: Could you say a little bit about the division of labour between the speech balloons and the text boxes?
Mary Talbot: The text box is a narrative voice, whereas obviously the balloons are the dialogue. The text boxes can do very different things. They can put a different layer on it. In the first draft I didn’t use any text boxes. I kept it as spare as I could, so it was very much in the moment. With discussion with Bryan as he was starting to work on the images, I started introducing them. I wasn’t sure how that sort of text box voiceover was appropriate for something which is meant to be surreal. I’d never come across a surreal biography before. But we gradually introduce them to make some kind of sense.
Joanna Pawlik: Were you aiming for a kind of surreal biographical mode?
Bryan Talbot: In places, certainly, especially the psychotic episode. It’s definitely a very surreal part. There’s one frame where she’s recovering from having an injection. She’s lying on the bed that’s composed of a giant tongue, inside a transparent egg!
Figures 1 and 2. Figs 1 and 2, double page spread from Armed with Madness. Copyright Bryan and Mary Talbot 2023.
Joanna Pawlik: While we’re talking about the images, I was really struck by the use of color in Armed with Madness. Could you talk us through a little bit about those washes and what the colors might represent?
Bryan Talbot: Absolutely, the color gives different moods. When she falls in love with Max Ernst, it’s La Vie en Rose for several pages, and then when she starts going off the rails, it goes through blue and then green and when she really starts accelerating it turns red and gets really intense. Most of the most harrowing sequences are in red.
Mary Talbot: As they were going into Spain, she said in Down Below that she can see the blood. She can smell it, and it’s part of getting across that horror that she’s experiencing.
Joanna Pawlik: Could I ask about the decisions you had to take about how to represent her relationship with Max Ernst. I was struck by how he comes across as a bit annoying. There’s a lovely moment when they’re in New York, and somebody says, “Max Ernst had to make it all about him”, or something like that. And then Leonora at one point says “Max, you need to sort out your genital responsibilities”.
Bryan Talbot: He used to depict himself as Loplop, Father Superior of the Birds. I think he’s a bit creepy. He was a serial cradle-snatcher.
Joanna Pawlik: Breton doesn’t come off very well either! He is a bit dismissive of Carrington.
Mary Talbot: Yes, well he was a piece of work as well, wasn’t he?
Bryan Talbot: While I was drawing the scene after she’s meeting Max again, after becoming separated, and he’s with Peggy Guggenheim, I decided that when he [Max Ernst] said he still loved her, he’d put his hand on her thigh under the table to echo the attempted seduction attempt of the creepy ICI representative seen earlier.
Joanna Pawlik: I was fascinated by the representation of the 1938 International Surrealist exhibition in Paris in Armed with Madness. I mainly loved the part about people mucking about with the torches, but also the representation of Carrington’s response to the exhibition; when she’s walking down the row of mannequins, and then she says something like “oh, they’re such boys!” I wonder whether you could say a little bit more about your take on the group’s gender politics.
Figure 3. Armed with Madness Copyright Bryan and Mary Talbot 2023.
Mary Talbot: I suppose the voices that I put in were mine, when they say “such boys!”. But I was drawing on the material that I was reading. I would have to really hunt around to tell you whether that was the words anyone other than me would have used. But I was certainly trying to express what I felt their views would be.
Joanna Pawlik: I wanted to ask about the importance of female friendship to Carrington. And how did you try to represent those female friendships?
Mary Talbot: I got the sense that they supported one another. The two Leonors in particular [Carrington and Leonor Fini], even though they fell out. There was apparently a lot of letter writing going on between them after they’d fallen out. You know I was very concerned that that sort of issue came through, as much as possible without it veering away from the trajectory of Leonora’s life. But she did pick up a relationship with Remedios Varo, which she always said was enormously important to her.
Joanna Pawlik: There’s a lovely scene when they’re talking about motherhood and Varo asks “how are you doing this? How are you raising children and at the same time having a solo exhibition in New York?”, and Carrington says, “Yes, that’s me”.
Mary Talbot: I think she’s saying, “I’m feeling comfortable about it”. She said she couldn’t believe how much she loved her children. She didn’t care she could barely afford shoes.
Joanna Pawlik: Were you trying to draw a comparison between Carrington’s friendships with women and those of the male surrealists, who are often depicted squabbling or as rivals to each other in Paris?
Mary Talbot: In terms of the narrative, it was important to get something that propelled them out of Paris. In the narrative pacing sense, it is important to have this hostile environment which included Ernst’s ex-wife, Marie-Berthe. That was one of the things that drove them out, but the other was this furious argument going on over whether to support the Communist movement. It was something that troubled mostly the men, although Leonor Fini attacks a painting because she’s furious at them for inviting Tristan Tzara to visit and he was on the side she deplored.
The only time Carrington became noticeably politicized was in the sixties, in terms of actual organized or gender politics. She was involved with the women’s movement in Chicago, which I wasn’t able to include. It would have dragged it in terms of the narrative. There’s a whole section of her life that we haven’t covered when she was in North America. The only time she was involved with anything like party politics was in 1968 in Mexico. Apparently, they were making leaflets in the basement. I didn’t have a lot to go on about her involvement with the women’s movement in Chicago. There’s not much detail, otherwise I might have persevered.
Joanna Pawlik: Armed with Madness seems to imply there’s a kind of proto-ecological consciousness in Carrington’s work and thought. Could you say a little bit about that?
Mary Talbot: That was just a gut feeling I had from the artwork as much as anything. She obviously doesn’t think humans have got anything to boast about. She rather wishes she was a horse. You know these things come across very clearly. I don’t know whether she actually use the word “Anthropocene”, but she would have understood it. It comes across in The Hearing Trumpet very clearly.
Dr Joanna Pawlik is Senior Lecturer in the department of Art History at the University of Sussex (2014–). Her monograph Remade in America: Surrealist Art, Activism and Politics 1940-1978 (University of California Press, 2021) was co-winner of the 2022 MSA first book prize. She received a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2020/21 for her new project Draw the Line: Figuring (anti-)fascism in American art, 1961–1980. She has published widely on surrealism, postwar American art and visual culture, transnationalism, regionalism, and little magazines.
Professor Mary Talbot is an internationally acclaimed graphic novelist. Armed with Madness: The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington (2023, with Bryan Talbot) is her most recently published graphic biography. Her first, Dotter of her Father’s Eyes (with Bryan Talbot), won the 2012 Costa Biography Award. Mary is currently Visiting Professor of Graphic Narrative at Lancaster University. https://www.mary-talbot.co.uk/
Multiple award-winning Bryan Talbot has written and drawn comics and graphic novels for over 40 years, including Judge Dredd, Batman, Sandman, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, The Tale of One Bad Rat, Alice in Sunderland, Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes (with Mary Talbot) and his Grandville series of steampunk detective thrillers. Bryan was awarded a Doctorate in Arts and another in Letters and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. http://www.bryan-talbot.com
