Chicago Surrealists Welcome Mary Low!

Chicago Surrealists Welcome Mary Low! Penelope Rosemont (bio) Mary Low and I met at O’Hare airport, an extremely busy, crowded place. Back in those days of old, in 1982, we would go and meet our friends as they disembarked. If we didn’t know them well, we would hold up a sign: “Surrealist Greetings!” or “Chicago Surrealist group!” or “Welcome Surrealists!” So, on the phone I said to Mary, “We’ll hold up a sign, “Chicago Surrealists Welcome Mary Low!” But Mary replied, “You won’t need the sign, you’ll know me!” I was puzzled. The photo we had of her was from the 1930s. We brought the sign anyway and stood in a packed crowd, perhaps one hundred people, some waving signs also. Most read “Caldwell Family Reunion!” or “Elks Convention,” or “St Michael’s Picnic,” etc. We examined closely the passengers wandering by. But Mary, we didn’t see Mary . . . Then, a tall, stately woman passed through the crowd. I said, “That has to be Mary!” She was dressed in white. White fringed sleeves on a white leather jacket, white slacks with silver studs, white fancy Western cowboy hat . . . fancy, white cowboy boots with high heels. . . . Her hair was white, this was a stunning woman at sixty-eight. I was charmed at first sight. But how did this happen? City Lights published Red Spanish Notebook in 1979—essays by Mary Low and Juan Breá on the [End Page 98] Spanish resistance against Franco fascism. Our Chicago surrealist group had found an old copy of the book and urged Nancy Joyce Peters, surrealist stalwart at City Lights and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights to reprint it. It featured an introduction by the famous West Indian writer C. L. R. James, author of the Black Jacobins and Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, and a review by George Orwell. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Penelope Rosemont, Mary Low, and Paul Garon, Chicago, 1980s. Photo by Franklin Rosemont. We made efforts to locate Low to ask her permission, but no one knew where she was or even if she was still alive. So, the book was printed. Not long after, City Lights received a phone call, “You reprinted my book! I didn’t even know about it.” The kind of call a publisher does not want to get ever. But Low was not angry, she was pleased. She was living in Miami, working as a teacher; she had remarried in 1944 and was known as Mary Machado. Nancy gave us her phone number and address and we began a correspondence and friendship that only fellow surrealists can appreciate. Low surprised me early at our first meeting when she said, “You are beautiful, my dear—and you have a great [End Page 99] nose!” She went on, “I just can’t stand those stupid little Hollywood noses popular today. You can’t take a woman with a nose like that seriously.” Low herself had a well-proportioned nose. During her first visit, we lunched outdoors at Heartland Cafe, a sprawling place where we had surrealist exhibitions. The cafe was founded by Michael James and Katie Hogan to be a community center with healthy food where people could gather, talk politics, dream dreams. Low, Franklin, and I sat, talked, and did exquisite corpse drawings and word games. Soon other surrealist friends, Robert Green, Debra Taub, and Paul and Beth Garon came over to meet Mary. Her personality warmed us all. She was comfortable with us as if we had known each other forever. She commented on how wonderful it was to be with surrealists again. And it is true: surrealists, like relatives or longtime friends, share a common past, we love the same people, and we share the same goals. Also, we enjoy getting together in groups and playing surrealist games. Games that are not competitive but are productive, each person contributing a piece of a drawing, a story, a poem . . . or aphorisms. We added a forward by Eugenio Granell to Red Spanish Notebook. Granell was a good friend and amazing surreal-ist painter. At the time, he was living in New York and editing Espania Libre. A...