Dangerous Muse: A Life Of Caroline Blackwood - Hardcover

Schoenberger, Nancy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297841017 ISBN 13: 9780297841012

Publisher: W&N, 2001

Synopsis

Caroline Blackwood was a journalist and novelist. She was born into the Guinness family in 1931 and was on intimate terms with some of the most celebrated artists of her time. Her first husband was the painter Lucian Freud, her second the composer Israel Citkowitz, and her third the poet Robert Lowell. Caroline's marriage to Lucian Freud caused a great stir in English society; Evelyn Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford, 'You know that poor Maureen's daughter made a runaway match with a terrible Yid?' Caroline and Lucian became part of an artistic and literary group that included Francis Bacon and Cyril Connolly but eventually Freud's drinking and gambling became too much and she left him. Her most trying times, however, were during her seven-year marriage to Lowell who suffered from paranoia and acute depression. Lowell died from a heart-attack having fled from their house in Ireland, clutching a portrait of her painted by Freud. Caroline published her first novel at the age of thirty-eight: The Stepdaughter, a study of female rage. Her gifts lay in satirising human behaviour. Her most successful book, Great Granny Webster, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, was described by John Betjeman as 'powerfully malicious'. In all, she wrote ten books of fiction and non-fiction and has been compared to Edna O'Brien, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and Samuel Beckett. She died on Valentine's Day, 1996, aged 64. Nancy Schoenberger has interviewed Blackwood's former lovers, friends and enemies including Seamus Heaney, Jonathan Miller, Elizabeth Hardwick, Jonathan Raban, Geordie Grieg and her formidable mother Lady Maureen, 4th Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, with whom Caroline had a famously contentious relationship. She has drawn together the many strands of her remarkable life into an elegant and extremely poignant biography.

About this title

Review

American academic-writer Nancy Schoenberger's candid yet sympathetic biography of Caroline Blackwood, Dangerous Muse, portrays a volatile, charismatic beauty of Guinness pedigree who embraced more than a touch of the dark stuff of life. After a miserable Anglo-Irish childhood belonging to an Elizabeth Bowen novel, Blackwood met her first husband, the "wolfishly handsome", and somewhat terrifying painter Lucian Freud, when he and Francis Bacon booed Princess Margaret as she sang a medley of Cole Porter numbers at a ball in 1949. Their marriage lasted three alcohol-led Soho years, before she moved on to American composer Israel Citkowitz. Where she inspired Freud, Citkowitz was silenced by their marriage, reduced to menial household activity that led guests to think he was the janitor. Her third, and main, marriage was to seminal American poet Robert Lowell, equipped with a lineage as distinguished as hers, and the manic depression to match. He was to refer to her in the bruisingly honest "The Dolphin" as "a mermaid who dines upon the bones of her winded lovers ". He also referred to their domestic life in Kent as "like two eggs cracking", and while their creative life was co-inspirational (she was a decent, if unblinking, writer), he was the first to fall apart, dying in the back of a New York cab clutching Girl in Bed, Freud's portrait of Blackwood, and a symbolism of which the painter's grandfather would have been proud. She was herself to die of cancer in 1996, aged 64.

These were the three major partnerships of a tempestuous life, but all eventually came second to the bottle, which caused a dramatic transformation from wide-eyed debutante waif to haggardly haunted beauty, less faded than soaked, with heavily painted panda eyes. Drink loosened her wicked, inspired tongue, but also set free the demons that led her to neglect the children she loved, and to live in often abject conditions. Nancy Schoenberger does a competent job with the "black Irish gothic" of her story, and manages to convey something of Blackwood's mercurial presence, though perhaps a better sense of the Lowell years is conveyed in Ian Hamilton's Robert Lowell. It will remain a pity that Blackwood did not live long enough to pen her own memoirs, but Schoenberger has written a shrewd, if occasionally timid, account of a talented, doomed beauty, a sometime muse who proved most dangerous, ultimately, to herself. --David Vincent

Review

The novelist Caroline Blackwood had a truly extraordinary life. Born into the wealth of the Guinness family and that decaying world of Anglo-Irish gentry and great houses which she was to chronicle sharply in her work, she married the painter Lucian Freud and the poet Robert Lowell. In between these turbulent and eventually failed marriages, she also married the composer Israel Citkowitz, Schoenberger has interviewed those who knew her - frorn Seamus Heaney and Jonathan Raban to the 4th Marchioness of Dufferin and Jonathan Miller - and put together a fascinating portrait. The parts dealing with her relationships with Lowell and Freud are especially compelling. And in the case of Lowell, heartbreakingly poignant, for the end of the marriage was to coincide with his madness and death. But what's especially valuable about the book is that it recovers Blackwood as a significant author in her own right, as well as a muse to one of the best British painters and major American poets of the century.

About this edition

• Publisher: W&N
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0297841017
• ISBN 13: 9780297841012
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320