The Mordant Observations of a Legendary Muse

Within the room dedicated to the archives of Lucian Freud in London’s Nationwide Portrait Gallery, a strikingly tender portray depicts a younger lady with waifish options, blond tresses, and massive slate-blue eyes. The portrait, “Lady in Mattress,” has a delicacy that stands out amid the characteristically mottled, fleshy faces of Freud’s topics—the slender fingers and crumpled cover, the excessive blush on the cheeks. The woman in query is Caroline Blackwood, a twenty-one-year-old heiress of aristocratic extraction, who would quickly change into the artist’s spouse. Freud made ten-odd work of Blackwood, charting the zigzag of their relationship, from the delicate, alluring “Lady Studying” and “Lady in Mattress” (each produced in 1952, on the peak of their courtship), to the abject “Lodge Bed room,” from 1954, wherein Blackwood seems wizened and withdrawn, whereas Freud himself stands by the window, misplaced in shadow.

The artist was hardly alone in his fixation. Walker Evans photographed Blackwood greater than 100 instances, capturing her development from nymphlike youth to haggard center age. Robert Lowell, her third and closing husband, immortalized her in his Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry assortment “The Dolphin” as, variously, a dolphin, a child killer whale, and a mermaid who dines on “her winded lovers’ bones.” Not lengthy after the collapse of their marriage, he was discovered useless behind a taxicab clutching Freud’s “Lady in Mattress.” On the hospital, they needed to break his arms to pry it away.

Virtually twenty years after her dying, Blackwood’s serial associations with distinguished males of artwork and letters nonetheless cling to her like flies to shit. Endlessly Vera, by no means Vladimir. Blackwood’s biographer, Nancy Schoenberger, christened her topic a “harmful muse,” a phrase that doubles as the guide’s unlucky title, crystallizing Blackwood’s picture as a girl pressed into the service of male genius. However the preoccupation along with her extravagant entanglements is deceptive, for Blackwood was in truth a author of uncommon distinction, the creator of wit-drenched books concerning the wages of sophistication, girls’s inhumanity to girls, bitchiness, greed, abjection, household, monsters.

Blackwood knew a factor or two about monsters. She appeared preternaturally primed to smell them out, making a meal of them in macabre texts populated by indelible characters, who’re alternately useless, stingy, pompous, and merciless. Her most memorable monsters, because it occurs, have been girls of hovering privilege, which is to say girls of her personal class. An air of bleakness and non secular anomie permeates the writing, often tempered by the outlandishness of her topics. “If it’s berserk conduct I prefer it,” Blackwood as soon as noticed. She was keen on quoting a line of Lowell’s: the one gentle on the finish of the tunnel is “the sunshine of the oncoming practice.”

Eyes are a recurring motif. “What massive eyes you’ve received,” the poet John Betjeman as soon as mentioned to her. “Doesn’t it harm?” Many a person was beguiled by these eyes, trying to find his personal reflection of their depths. However Betjeman was on to one thing in evoking the Huge Unhealthy Wolf. Blackwood was a ravenous observer, staring monstrosity head on—addressing youngster homicide and repressed violence (“The Destiny of Mary Rose”), the ugly plight of burn victims (“Burns Unit”), or the story of a spiky widow who throws tea events for her pet monkeys (“The Interview”). In an early quick story, “Please Child Don’t Cry,” a high-strung housewife undergoes beauty surgical procedure to treatment her sagging pores and skin. The operation is, alas, fantastically botched, leaving her unable to close her eyes at night time. “There was merely no different method of giving her that actually taut and youthful look she needed,” her physician says.

It wasn’t evident that Blackwood would change into a author. She was born into the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, the product of a narcissistic mom, who was a scion of the Guinness-brewing fortune, and an Etonian father, who was killed in wartime Burma, when Blackwood was 13. Childhood was spent within the firm of merciless nannies in a falling-apart stone mansion in Northern Eire. (Clandeboye, because it was known as, was filled with colonial loot courtesy of her great-grandfather, a former viceroy of India.) Her mom, whom the photographer Cecil Beaton as soon as described as “the most important bitch in London,” loomed massive. Maureen Guinness, a.ok.a. the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, was recognized for steering her maids to heat up the bathroom seat earlier than she went to the bathroom and for neglecting to feed her youngsters. “Caroline loathed her mom,” her good friend, the author Jonathan Raban, remembered. The distant and dipsomaniacal Marchioness “appeared incapable of loving her,” based on Schoenberger. A serial socializer, Guinness confirmed up at events carrying a penis-nose. As her daughters grew older, the one factor she appeared to care about was their standing in London society.

Blackwood, a reluctant débutante, encountered the wolfish Freud at a ball hosted by the socialite Woman Rothermere (later referred to as Mrs. Ian Fleming). Freud was smitten with the eighteen-year-old, who was mentioned to be perpetually tongue-tied, at the very least till she soaked herself in alcohol. The pair ran off to Paris, then to London, the place they have been regulars at Soho’s Colony Room, a personal ingesting membership and refuge for town’s demimonde. (The painter Francis Bacon usually crammed out their louche triumvirate, making them one thing of a throuple avant la lettre.) For Blackwood, marrying Freud was a deliberate provocation, a defection from her mom’s milieu. Maureen loathed that her daughter had married a commoner, and a Jew at that. If her new son-in-law was keen on quoting his well-known grandfather, the Marchioness was not impressed: as Blackwood later recalled, she had “by no means heard of Sigmund Freud.”

The wedding was messy and by 1956 Blackwood had had sufficient. She escaped to Rome, then to Hollywood, the place she socialized with a circle of British expats centered on the novelist and screenwriter Christopher Isherwood; she had obscure intentions of changing into an actress. (On the urging of Cary Grant, she indulged in LSD remedy to treatment her shyness.) Even when she seemed like a cross between Grace Kelly and Lauren Bacall, she wasn’t a lot of an actress. Ivan Moffat, a screenwriter she was entangled with on the time, later remarked that her persona didn’t swimsuit present enterprise. In Schoenberger’s phrases, “she merely refused to gush.”

New York made extra sense for the un-sunnily disposed. Blackwood moved to town in 1957; she took performing lessons with Stella Adler, modelled for Vogue, and met her second husband, the composer Israel Citkowitz. With Citkowitz, a broody former protégé of Aaron Copland’s greater than 20 years her senior, she would elevate three daughters. An invite by Stephen Spender to jot down a bit concerning the Beats for Encounter journal launched her profession as a author, in 1959. The essay—a sharply skeptical remedy of a modern topic whose mystique she punctured with out regret (“The Beatnik is solely a bourgeois fantasy. . . . He’s merely the Bohemian in each American business-man that has received out”)—established a distinctly Blackwoodian tone. (One other Encounter essay was titled “The Mystique of Ingmar Bergman,” whom she described as “the main director of kids’s movies for adults.”) Extra writing coincided with extra ingesting. Alcohol, based on Blackwood’s good friend Xandra Hardie, was her personal harmful muse. “If she couldn’t drink, she couldn’t write, she couldn’t discuss, she couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t fuck, and he or she favored to fuck.” Her marriage with Citkowitz started to unravel.

Blackwood was having an affair with Robert Silvers, an editor at The New York Overview of Books, when she met Robert Lowell. Silvers had based The Overview, in 1963, with a coterie of associates, together with Lowell’s longtime spouse, the redoubtable critic Elizabeth Hardwick. After a whirlwind romance and far theatrical vacillation, Lowell deserted Hardwick to affix Blackwood in London in 1970, a transfer that will ceaselessly mark her as the opposite lady to Hardwick’s many passionate partisans. The union was electrical, for higher or worse. Lowell was usually manic—liable to consuming laundry detergent or declaring himself Mussolini addressing the lots—and their five-year-long marriage was marked by a succession of breakups and psychic breaks, each his and hers. “Dysfunctional doesn’t even start to explain my household and upbringing,” Blackwood’s daughter Ivana Lowell mirrored years later. A sequence of pictures taken by Walker Evans testify to the madhouse nature of their coupledom: Blackwood’s hair is greasy, her eyes limned with gratuitous kohl, whereas Lowell, hair longish, performs mad professor. “I’m manic and Caroline’s panic,” a good friend remembered him quipping. “We’re like two eggs cracking.”

Blackwood was not one for placid pleasures. If their turbulent marriage fed Lowell’s artwork, it unambiguously nurtured the author in her. “It was liberating for her to be with him,” Raban mentioned. “He was entranced by the tales she advised and by her method of placing issues. She advised great, scandalous tales—feats of exaggeration!” “For All That I Discovered There,” her first guide, a set of items which included a collection of grim, eccentric quick tales, appeared in 1973. “The Stepdaughter,” a slim, claustrophobic novel just lately reissued by McNally Editions, adopted three years later. The guide is narrated by a girl left to lift Renata, the uninteresting and doomy teen-age daughter of a philandering husband who has deserted them. From her posh Manhattan residence, the narrator, spiralling, rails towards her human inheritance, a laconic woman hooked on baking prompt truffles—“shriveled, rock-like objects.” The stepmother’s resentment is inescapable: “I discover Renata very ugly,” she writes to an imaginary correspondent, describing her stepdaughter as a “teapot with a lacking spout.”

Motherhood as unique sin can be Blackwood’s most persistent theme. Her second novel, “Nice Granny Webster,” a gothic story based mostly on her great-grandmother’s life, was mentioned to have missed out on the Booker Prize in 1977 solely as a result of Philip Larkin, who sat on the jury that 12 months, discovered it too autobiographical. The granny in query is unforgettable, presiding over an ancestral mansion with no heating and terrified butlers who put on boots inside due to the leaky roof that she’s too stingy to restore. The guide is a type of matricidal fantasia, Blackwood’s literary vengeance towards her personal moms and, by extension, the category that she was born into. The Sunday Occasions likened the guide to a “field of candies with amphetamine centres.”

Blackwood revealed two extra novels, together with “Corrigan,” the story of a rip-off artist in a wheelchair. She revealed nonfiction, too, tending towards reportage of the New Journalism selection, together with an account of a gravediggers’ strike in Liverpool, titled “Notes from Underground.” The writing throughout all of those works is vivid, acerbic, unflinching. However maybe greater than another guide, “The Final of the Duchess,” a wierd jewel of a textual content she started writing in 1980 however solely revealed in 1995, the 12 months earlier than her dying, apotheosizes Blackwood’s enduring fascination with the monstrous.

Blackwood discovered her excellent topic in Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American who ensorcelled Edward VIII within the mid-nineteen-thirties, precipitating his abdication and galvanizing a twister of tabloid fodder. In 1980, lengthy after the scandal had subsided, Blackwood’s previous good friend Francis Wyndham commissioned her to jot down the accompanying textual content to a deliberate portfolio of portraits of the aged Simpson. The picture shoot fell by way of, however Blackwood pursued the story anyway, searching for Simpson out in Paris, the place she and Edward had lived in pointless luxurious because the nineteen-forties because the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, amassing bibelots and cavorting with all method of unseemly characters. (The Duke and Duchess even met with Hitler, in 1937; he’s mentioned to have remarked, of Simpson, “She would have made queen.”)

Blackwood was intrigued by the rogue royal who was neither aristocratic nor conventionally lovely. “Mrs. Simpson was a determine who was regarded with horror,” she writes, in what would change into the opening pages of her guide, a girl who “symbolized intercourse and evil.” Amongst different issues, the enterprising Simpson was rumored to have mastered a intercourse trick known as the Shanghai Squeeze, which was mentioned to “make a matchstick really feel like a Havana cigar.”

Blackwood by no means received her sitdown with the dowager duchess; each glimpse of her topic is secondhand. And but she paints a macabre portrait of the royal physique as royal cadaver. The infamous American who spent a long time in France and “failed to select up greater than a smattering of French” is, in Blackwood’s telling, a withered, enfeebled husk, confined to a mansion on the sting of the Bois de Boulogne. Right here is Blackwood, archly sensationalist, even Orientalist, reacting to paparazzi images of her topic: “The duchess seemed pitiful. Her tiny shrunken physique was being lifted by a nurse. Her legs have been cigarette skinny they usually dangled uselessly. Her hair was tied tightly again in a knot. Her head lolled helplessly on her chest. There was a close-up of her face and he or she seemed slightly like a Chinese language Mandarin, however extra like a useless monkey. Her well-known eyes have been closed slits, they usually had the identical slant as these of her lawyer.”

The lawyer is just not insignificant. If “The Final of the Duchess” is a research of at the very least two girls—three, if one consists of its creator—the character who edges to the entrance of this group portrait is Suzanne Blum. An octogenarian who as soon as represented Rita Hayworth in her divorce from the Aly Khan, Maître Blum appears to be Simpson’s de-facto jail warden. In Blackwood’s telling, Blum’s devotion to her cost borders on the demonic; she topics the Duchess to successive operations to maintain her alive and bans even her closest associates from visiting. (Maybe projecting, Blackwood laments that the “malignant previous spider” has swiped the Duchess’s beloved silver mug of vodka; “Why did she need to take it away from the poor little creature?”) When talking of Simpson, Blum breaks into French and references a “relation de chaleur,” which Blackwood slyly infers has erotic undertones. In the long run, she gives us a love story of an surprising sort.