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 of 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 protégé 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 Jean Rhys and the equally underrated Elizabeth Smart.

When exploring the drug-ridden and dangerous transsexual bars in New York, she once locked herself in a toilet stall with a complete stranger—who then did her hair. Describing how her sister gave riding lessons to disabled children, Blackwood weirdly explained that Perdita “had to find exceptionally tame ponies for ‘the thalidomides’—ponies that were ‘almost dead, like a kind of sofa,’” because some of the children had no arms or legs and had to guide the ponies with their teeth. Blackwood died of cervical cancer at the age of sixty-four, leaving investments worth $2 million, a house in Sag Harbor worth $1 million, and several precious paintings by Freud and Francis Bacon.

Schoenberger’s biography is a fair notion, fatally flawed. She was not well served by the various editors she effusively thanks in the acknowledgments. The book is badly written (“She liked the glitz of the occasion, but Hollywood’s patina quickly wore off”), and has many typos, spelling mistakes, and factual errors (even the alphabetical list of names is out of order). The Protestants still rule Northern Ireland, Noel Coward did not buy Ian Fleming’s house in Jamaica, the hotel in Denver is called the Brown Palace, the town in Los Angeles is Venice, the gentlemanly Lionel Trilling was not a “backbiter,” the London Times is published daily, and David Sylvester began publishing his interviews with Bacon in 1963 (not 1993).

Schoenberger, who often takes speculation for fact, quotes John Huston’s absurd statement about Irish witches as if it were true. She has a maddening habit of repeating herself (at least eighty times) rather than developing her points: a quite serious case of Stein-stutter. Her structure is also lopsided, with only one paragraph on Blackwood and Lowell’s year at Harvard in 1973–74, but ten padded pages on her disastrous weeklong visit to Maine in the mid-1990s. She treats Blackwood’s fiction as thinly veiled autobiography and has very little to say about her art. After writing one descriptive paragraph on Blackwood’s “greatest book,” Great Granny Webster, she quotes other critics for the next three pages.

This biography—still discussing Blackwood’s genealogy on page forty—is superficial and secondhand. The hastily worked-up material is heavily dependent on printed sources. Schoenberger’s descriptions of the playwright Sheridan, the Viceroy of India, and the Burma campaign are especially shallow. Worst of all, she has no clear understanding of the British class system. She claims that Francis Bacon, whose father was an Irish horse-trainer, had an “upper-class” childhood; that the well-named Muriel Belcher, a vulgar model who ran a shabby bohemian bar, was “grandeur personified.”

Schoenberger lists a series of names instead of explaining who the people actually are, and is especially weak on the background and character of men like Blackwood’s handsome lover, the late Alan Ross. He was a naval officer on the Murmansk run, cricketer and racehorse owner, poet, autobiographer and travel writer, married to the Fry Cocoa heiress. The porcine Cyril Connolly, who vainly pursued Blackwood, was no match for the elegant Alan Ross. This book is a mess, and the puff on the dust jacket manifestly absurd. When Blackwood’s letters and papers finally become available, we’ll need another biography to do justice to this fascinating subject.

In Italy, between marriages and addicted to vodka, Blackwood impulsively went to bed with a stranger whom she thought had keen insight into her character. He caressed her and whispered “morbida.” Knowing no Italian, she did not discover till much later that he was referring to her soft skin. Though confused and misguided, Blackwood was always recklessly bold, sexually adventurous, and deeply vulnerable.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 20 Number 1, on page 120
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