Claire recommends: The Milk Bowl of Feathers: Essential Surrealist Writings, edited, with an introduction, by Mary Ann Caws
The Milk Bowl of Feathers is Mary Ann Caws’ most recent addition to the surrealist catalogue, and though it is (delightfully) slim for an anthology, this volume manages to feature an unexpected cast of surrealist writers, and a good percentage of them are women.
Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature and Emerita and Resident Professor at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, Mary Ann Caws has translated and written on many Surrealists, so it is with a comprehensive knowledge of the canon that she has curated this treasury of often-overlooked female Surrealist artists, whose captivating work really takes the spotlight, even as it is presented alongside the usual suspects of André Breton, Tristan Tzara, and the like. The stellar female Surrealists included here are: Dora Maar, Joyce Mansour, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Mina Loy, Alice Rahon, Gisèle Prassinos, Kay Sage, Meret Oppenheim, Alice Rahon, and Léona Delcourt.
As Caws expresses in her brief yet compelling introduction, Dada emerged as a globalizing artistic force post WWI. It was the Dada movement, not André Breton, that was the true forbear of Surrealism. Though many claimed sovereignty in the movement (“I am Surrealism” says Salvador Dalí on repeat), this collection is proof that Surrealism belongs to no one, despite how it is traditionally anthologized. More importantly, this collection is a reminder that Surrealism belongs to everyone.
In her introduction, Mary Ann Caws says: “Essential to Surrealist behavior is a constant state of openness, of readiness for whatever occurs, whatever marvelous object we might come across, manifesting itself against the already thought, the already lived.” Concisely, Caws conveys the importance of spontaneity to this formative movement, the unlimited potential that it holds for the creation of art. And in the work of these featured female artists, we can read a more complete spectrum of this openness to the subconscious, often expressed in enthralling pangs of obsession, wild emptiness, and desire.
Love, Caws reminds us, is the emotion that triumphs through Surrealist writings, experiencing the transcendent emotion “always for the first time” (Breton). Love in Surrealism is a kind of enchantment with consciousness, even its darker tributaries:
I love sliding I love upsetting everything
… writes Jaques-Bernard Brunius in his poem “I Love”. A stunning and complex specter of love steps through in Dora Maar’s poem, “I Rested In The Arms Of My Arms”:
An eternal shivering of thoughts
Fear love Fear love
Close the window open the window
You’ll see you’ll see
The hummingbird motionless as a star
Among the diverse cast of writers is Claude Cahun, a non-gender-conforming writer who lived and wrote well before the term non-binary came into the nomenclature. Born Lucie Renee Mathilde Schwob, Claude Cahoun was a chosen name. A French photographer, sculptor and writer, Claude’s self-portraits often depict doubles of the artist which result in a kind of visual twinning, and reveal their deep investigation of identity and social constructs. Within Claude’s short piece in The Milk Bowl of Feathers, I found one of my favorite passages of the collection:
Only with the very tip would I wish to sew, sting, kill. The rest of the body, what comes after, what a waste of time! Only ever travel in the prow of myself.
Cahoun is not widely translated into English, and their titles in translation are currently out of print, so it is a rare treat to come across this piece in Caws’ collection. (any translators out there looking for a new project?).
Léona Delacourt, a name many people may not have come across, also finds its way into this collection. Léona was the dedicatee of Andre Breton’s infamous novel, Nadja, in which she is obsessed over and exoticized beyond recognition. Though her pieces here are very short, and are themselves drafts of letters to Breton, they lend humanity and a frantic voice back to the person who had been all but lost to history within the heroine, Nadja:
—my soul is troubled—and turns in all directions to find the fire—
Joyce Mansour was a prolific Jewish-Egyptian Surrealist poet whose work hasn’t seen much translation into English, but who authored 16 books of poetry during her lifetime. Her apartment was fabled to be a favored meeting place for Surrealist rendezvous. Her poetry is wrenched by deep bodily sensations, known for her brazen use of erotic imagery, but also for diving deep into the sensations of the mind’s surf:
Shining with a thousand quivers
Consumed by ecstatic mad inertia
Discovered by André Breton at age 14, Gisèle Prassinos is yet another female Surealist whose image has traditionally been cast in the light of a femme enfant, a young muse, objectified by male artists. But it is apparent that Gisèle was something of a prodigy; her words absolutely slice through the page in her intellectual and freaky prose:
I know that by taking on generally the superiority of prophetic organization, your heart will never dare to claim mine.
…
So, by fixing upon you curtsies and spinnings, I moan these words at you, as a hoax: ‘let’s fear the senses.’
If you like what you read of Gisèle Prassinos in The Milk Bowl of Feathers, check out her full collection of stories, The Arthritic Grasshopper (Wakefield Press, 2017) on the shelves at Malvern Books.
The Milk Bowl of Feathers also includes a range of writings done by visual artists, including a story by everybody’s favorite British expat painter, Leonora Carrington. Carrington’s stories (check out this great collection put out by Dorothy Project, also on the shelves at Malvern Books) feel like stepping into one of her paintings—they’re populated by bizarre humanoid creatures whose incoherent foibles mimic free association. For example, in her story “The Sand Camel,” two young boys fashion a camel out of butter and sand, and this weird pet animates, and goes on to hold their grandmother upside-down as a kind of makeshift umbrella.
The Milk Bowl of Feathers is a fresh salute to the Surrealist spirit, which is as relevant now as ever in its openness to possibility; in reaching beyond the rational, we push against capitalism, nationalism, and against a hierarchy of meaning that can create toxic frameworks, such as the phallocracy that dominates our understanding of Surrealism. I think we could all benefit from an injection of receptivity, and a more inclusive exploration of art and life that exists in a sheer state of exuberance.