Dangerous Muse: A Life Of Caroline Blackwood Book

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 VincentRead More