Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood.(Review)

Nancy Schoenberger Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood. Doubleday, 377 pages, $27.50

Lady Caroline Blackwood (1931-96) was a descendant of the playwright Sheridan; great-granddaughter of the Viceroy of India who annexed Burma to the British Empire; daughter of the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, a promising, but hard-drinking Irish politician, who died fighting the Japanese in Burma, and of a vain, selfish, empty-headed heiress to the Guinness millions. Cared for by a series of irresponsible and often cruel nannies, she grew up in a crumbling Georgian mansion on a 5,000-acre estate outside Belfast. She was rich, beautiful, bright, witty, and talented, but, traumatized by childhood neglect, by the loss of her father and rejection by her mother, she became depressed, alcoholic, and ill. One of her husbands was insane, one of her daughters (a heroin addict) committed suicide, and her beloved brother died early AIDS.

She was married to three exceptional artists and lasted about five years with each of them. The painter Lucian Freud kept weird nocturnal hours, drank heavily, gambled recklessly, and was consistently unfaithful. His early paintings of Blackwood are as sensuously appealing as the Venus of Botticelli. The tragic Hotel Bedroom (1954), in which the handsome Freud gazes down at his suddenly aged and wretched wife, suggests that something has gone terribly wrong with their marriage.

The stunningly attractive Israel Citkowitz, a protege of Aaron Copland, had stopped composing by the time he married Blackwood. He mainly looked after their three daughters, one of whom was actually fathered by the dashing English screenwriter Ivan Moffat. Blackwood often appeared grimy and lived in squalor, with "bloody sanitary napkins on the floor; cigarette butts, bottles of liquor, and empty pill boxes ... scattered around the room." She neglected her children, who in turn were brought up by incompetent nannies and felt rejected by their mother. "She would give them everything," a friend recalled, "except what they wanted"--attention and love. Schoenberger, obscuring a crucial point with the passive voice, writes that Moffat's six-year-old daughter Ivana "was seriously scalded when a kettle of boiling water turned over on her lap." Blackwood naturally felt guilty, but it's not clear who was responsible for the accident.

When Blackwood, always meager of utterance, sat next to Robert Lowell at a dinner party in New York, she shyly tried to break the ice by admiring the soup. "I think it's perfectly disgusting," Lowell replied, and they lapsed into silence. When they were married she was terrified and exhausted by Lowell's manic attacks and kept Citkowitz in their household to protect the children. While living through the emotional chaos of his painful disengagement from Elizabeth Hardwick and of Blackwood's acute nervous depression, Lowell wrote the sonnets in The Dolphin. Blackwood's disastrous marriages to three artists matched Lowell's to Jean Stafford, Hardwick, and herself. She married Freud in a Registry Office, Citkowitz in an Orthodox Jewish ceremony in Yonkers, Lowell in a shoddy shed in Santo Domingo.

Blackwood, both inspiring and destructive, broke men's hearts and was like a "radiant disease." Like Lowell, she fed on others, but was sufficiently disciplined to write books when she was falling apart. Lowell finally left her but was dead on arrival, clutching a Freud portrait of Blackwood, when his cab reached Hardwick's flat. Like Leonard Woolf and John Bayley, Blackwood was liberated and inspired to do her best writing--novellas, stories, memoirs, essays, and a book on the women's peace movement--after the death of her brilliant spouse. Her work was characterized by an obsession with the ugly side of human behavior, a revelation of her own base instincts, a cool narration of outrageous events, and an uneasy mixture of the comic and grotesque. Her dark, grim, bitter vision resembled that of ...