The Mordant Observations of a Legendary Muse
Second ReadCaroline Blackwood inspired paintings by Lucian Freud and poetry by Robert Lowell. Her own work has been unjustly forgotten.By Negar AzimiDecember 12, 2024Many a man was beguiled by Caroline Blackwood’s eyes, searching for his own reflection in their depths, but she herself was a ravenous observer, staring monstrosity head on.Photograph from Evening Standard / GettyIn the room devoted to the archives of Lucian Freud in London’s National Portrait Gallery, a strikingly tender painting depicts a young woman with waifish features, blond tresses, and enormous slate-blue eyes. The portrait, “Girl in Bed,” has a delicacy that stands out amid the characteristically mottled, fleshy faces of Freud’s subjects—the slender fingers and crumpled duvet, the high blush on the cheeks. The girl in question is Caroline Blackwood, a twenty-one-year-old heiress of aristocratic extraction, who would soon become the artist’s wife. Freud made ten-odd paintings of Blackwood, charting the zigzag of their relationship, from the sensitive, alluring “Girl Reading” and “Girl in Bed” (both produced in 1952, at the height of their courtship), to the abject “Hotel Bedroom,” from 1954, in which Blackwood appears wizened and withdrawn, while Freud himself stands by the window, lost in shadow.The artist was hardly alone in his fixation. Walker Evans photographed Blackwood more than a hundred times, capturing her progression from nymphlike youth to haggard middle age. Robert Lowell, her third and final husband, immortalized her in his Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection “The Dolphin” as, variously, a dolphin, a baby killer whale, and a mermaid who dines on “her winded lovers’ bones.” Not long after the collapse of their marriage, he was found dead in the back of a taxicab clutching Freud’s “Girl in Bed.” At the hospital, they had to break his arms to pry it away.Almost twenty years after her death, Blackwood’s serial associations with distinguished men of art and letters still cling to her like flies to shit. Forever Vera, never Vladimir. Blackwood’s biographer, Nancy Schoenberger, christened her subject a “dangerous muse,” a phrase that doubles as the book’s unfortunate title, crystallizing Blackwood’s image as a woman pressed into the service of male genius. But the preoccupation with her extravagant entanglements is misleading, for Blackwood was in fact a writer of rare distinction, the author of wit-drenched books about the wages of class, women’s inhumanity to women, bitchiness, greed, abjection, family, monsters.Blackwood knew a thing or two about monsters. She seemed preternaturally primed to sniff them out, making a meal of them in macabre texts populated by indelible characters, who are alternately vain, stingy, pompous, and cruel. Her most memorable monsters, as it happens, were women of soaring privilege, which is to say women of her own class. An air of bleakness and spiritual anomie permeates the writing, occasionally tempered by the outlandishness of her subjects. “If it’s berserk behavior I like it,” Blackwood once observed. She was fond of quoting a line of Lowell’s: the only light at the end of the tunnel is “the light of the oncoming train.”Eyes are a recurring motif. “What big eyes you’ve got,” the poet John Betjeman once said to her. “Doesn’t it hurt?” Many a man was beguiled by those eyes, searching for his own reflection in their depths. But Betjeman was on to something in evoking the Big Bad Wolf. Blackwood was a ravenous observer, staring monstrosity head on—addressing child murder and repressed violence (“The Fate of Mary Rose”), the gruesome plight of burn victims (“Burns Unit”), or the tale of a spiky widow who throws tea parties for her pet monkeys (“The Interview”). In an early short story, “Please Baby Don’t Cry,” a high-strung housewife undergoes cosmetic surgery to remedy her sagging skin. The operation is, alas, fantastically botched, leaving her unable to shut her eyes at night. “There was simply no other way of giving her that really taut and youthful look she wanted,” her doctor says.It wasn’t evident that Blackwood would become a writer. She was born into the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, the product of a narcissistic mother, who was a scion of the Guinness-brewing fortune, and an Etonian father, who was killed in wartime Burma, when Blackwood was thirteen. Childhood was spent in the company of cruel nannies in a falling-apart stone mansion in Northern Ireland. (Clandeboye, as it was called, was crammed with colonial loot courtesy of her great-grandfather, a former viceroy of India.) Her mother, whom the photographer Cecil Beaton once described as “the biggest bitch in London,” loomed large. Maureen Guinness, a.k.a. the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, was known for directing her maids to warm up the toilet seat before she went to the lavatory and for neglecting to feed her children. “Caroline loathed her mother,” her friend, the writer Jonathan Raban, remembered. The distant and dipsomaniacal Mar
In the room devoted to the archives of Lucian Freud in London’s National Portrait Gallery, a strikingly tender painting depicts a young woman with waifish features, blond tresses, and enormous slate-blue eyes. The portrait, “Girl in Bed,” has a delicacy that stands out amid the characteristically mottled, fleshy faces of Freud’s subjects—the slender fingers and crumpled duvet, the high blush on the cheeks. The girl in question is Caroline Blackwood, a twenty-one-year-old heiress of aristocratic extraction, who would soon become the artist’s wife. Freud made ten-odd paintings of Blackwood, charting the zigzag of their relationship, from the sensitive, alluring “Girl Reading” and “Girl in Bed” (both produced in 1952, at the height of their courtship), to the abject “Hotel Bedroom,” from 1954, in which Blackwood appears wizened and withdrawn, while Freud himself stands by the window, lost in shadow.
The artist was hardly alone in his fixation. Walker Evans photographed Blackwood more than a hundred times, capturing her progression from nymphlike youth to haggard middle age. Robert Lowell, her third and final husband, immortalized her in his Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection “The Dolphin” as, variously, a dolphin, a baby killer whale, and a mermaid who dines on “her winded lovers’ bones.” Not long after the collapse of their marriage, he was found dead in the back of a taxicab clutching Freud’s “Girl in Bed.” At the hospital, they had to break his arms to pry it away.
Almost twenty years after her death, Blackwood’s serial associations with distinguished men of art and letters still cling to her like flies to shit. Forever Vera, never Vladimir. Blackwood’s biographer, Nancy Schoenberger, christened her subject a “dangerous muse,” a phrase that doubles as the book’s unfortunate title, crystallizing Blackwood’s image as a woman pressed into the service of male genius. But the preoccupation with her extravagant entanglements is misleading, for Blackwood was in fact a writer of rare distinction, the author of wit-drenched books about the wages of class, women’s inhumanity to women, bitchiness, greed, abjection, family, monsters.
Blackwood knew a thing or two about monsters. She seemed preternaturally primed to sniff them out, making a meal of them in macabre texts populated by indelible characters, who are alternately vain, stingy, pompous, and cruel. Her most memorable monsters, as it happens, were women of soaring privilege, which is to say women of her own class. An air of bleakness and spiritual anomie permeates the writing, occasionally tempered by the outlandishness of her subjects. “If it’s berserk behavior I like it,” Blackwood once observed. She was fond of quoting a line of Lowell’s: the only light at the end of the tunnel is “the light of the oncoming train.”
Eyes are a recurring motif. “What big eyes you’ve got,” the poet John Betjeman once said to her. “Doesn’t it hurt?” Many a man was beguiled by those eyes, searching for his own reflection in their depths. But Betjeman was on to something in evoking the Big Bad Wolf. Blackwood was a ravenous observer, staring monstrosity head on—addressing child murder and repressed violence (“The Fate of Mary Rose”), the gruesome plight of burn victims (“Burns Unit”), or the tale of a spiky widow who throws tea parties for her pet monkeys (“The Interview”). In an early short story, “Please Baby Don’t Cry,” a high-strung housewife undergoes cosmetic surgery to remedy her sagging skin. The operation is, alas, fantastically botched, leaving her unable to shut her eyes at night. “There was simply no other way of giving her that really taut and youthful look she wanted,” her doctor says.
It wasn’t evident that Blackwood would become a writer. She was born into the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, the product of a narcissistic mother, who was a scion of the Guinness-brewing fortune, and an Etonian father, who was killed in wartime Burma, when Blackwood was thirteen. Childhood was spent in the company of cruel nannies in a falling-apart stone mansion in Northern Ireland. (Clandeboye, as it was called, was crammed with colonial loot courtesy of her great-grandfather, a former viceroy of India.) Her mother, whom the photographer Cecil Beaton once described as “the biggest bitch in London,” loomed large. Maureen Guinness, a.k.a. the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, was known for directing her maids to warm up the toilet seat before she went to the lavatory and for neglecting to feed her children. “Caroline loathed her mother,” her friend, the writer Jonathan Raban, remembered. The distant and dipsomaniacal Marchioness “seemed incapable of loving her,” according to Schoenberger. A serial socializer, Guinness showed up at parties wearing a penis-nose. As her daughters grew older, the only thing she seemed to care about was their standing in London society.
Blackwood, a reluctant débutante, encountered the wolfish Freud at a ball hosted by the socialite Lady Rothermere (later known as Mrs. Ian Fleming). Freud was smitten with the eighteen-year-old, who was said to be perpetually tongue-tied, at least until she soaked herself in alcohol. The pair ran off to Paris, then to London, where they were regulars at Soho’s Colony Room, a private drinking club and refuge for the city’s demimonde. (The painter Francis Bacon often filled out their louche triumvirate, making them something of a throuple avant la lettre.) For Blackwood, marrying Freud was a deliberate provocation, a defection from her mother’s milieu. Maureen loathed that her daughter had married a commoner, and a Jew at that. If her new son-in-law was fond of quoting his famous grandfather, the Marchioness was not impressed: as Blackwood later recalled, she had “never heard of Sigmund Freud.”
The marriage was messy and by 1956 Blackwood had had enough. She escaped to Rome, then to Hollywood, where she socialized with a circle of British expats centered on the novelist and screenwriter Christopher Isherwood; she had vague intentions of becoming an actress. (At the urging of Cary Grant, she indulged in LSD therapy to cure her shyness.) Even if she looked like a cross between Grace Kelly and Lauren Bacall, she wasn’t much of an actress. Ivan Moffat, a screenwriter she was entangled with at the time, later remarked that her personality didn’t suit show business. In Schoenberger’s words, “she simply refused to gush.”
New York made more sense for the un-sunnily disposed. Blackwood moved to the city in 1957; she took acting classes 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 more than two decades her senior, she would raise three daughters. An invitation by Stephen Spender to write a piece about the Beats for Encounter magazine launched her career as a writer, in 1959. The essay—a sharply skeptical treatment of a fashionable subject whose mystique she punctured without remorse (“The Beatnik is simply a bourgeois fantasy. . . . He is merely the Bohemian in every American business-man that has got out”)—established a distinctly Blackwoodian tone. (Another Encounter essay was titled “The Mystique of Ingmar Bergman,” whom she described as “the leading director of children’s films for adults.”) More writing coincided with more drinking. Alcohol, according to Blackwood’s friend Xandra Hardie, was her own dangerous muse. “If she couldn’t drink, she couldn’t write, she couldn’t talk, she couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t fuck, and she liked to fuck.” Her marriage with Citkowitz began to unravel.
Blackwood was having an affair with Robert Silvers, an editor at The New York Review of Books, when she met Robert Lowell. Silvers had founded The Review, in 1963, with a coterie of friends, including Lowell’s longtime wife, the redoubtable critic Elizabeth Hardwick. After a whirlwind romance and much theatrical vacillation, Lowell abandoned Hardwick to join Blackwood in London in 1970, a move that would forever mark her as the other woman to Hardwick’s many passionate partisans. The union was electric, for better or worse. Lowell was often manic—prone to eating laundry detergent or declaring himself Mussolini addressing the masses—and their five-year-long marriage was marked by a succession of breakups and psychic breaks, both his and hers. “Dysfunctional does not even begin to describe my family and upbringing,” Blackwood’s daughter Ivana Lowell reflected years later. A series of photos taken by Walker Evans testify to the madhouse nature of their coupledom: Blackwood’s hair is greasy, her eyes limned with gratuitous kohl, while Lowell, hair longish, plays mad professor. “I’m manic and Caroline’s panic,” a friend remembered him quipping. “We’re like two eggs cracking.”
Blackwood was not one for placid pleasures. If their turbulent marriage fed Lowell’s art, it unambiguously nurtured the writer in her. “It was liberating for her to be with him,” Raban said. “He was entranced by the stories she told and by her way of putting things. She told wonderful, scandalous stories—feats of exaggeration!” “For All That I Found There,” her first book, a collection of pieces which included a suite of grim, eccentric short stories, appeared in 1973. “The Stepdaughter,” a slim, claustrophobic novel recently reissued by McNally Editions, followed three years later. The book is narrated by a woman left to raise Renata, the dull and doomy teen-age daughter of a philandering husband who has abandoned them. From her posh Manhattan apartment, the narrator, spiralling, rails against her human inheritance, a laconic girl addicted to baking instant cakes—“shriveled, rock-like objects.” The stepmother’s resentment is inescapable: “I find Renata very ugly,” she writes to an imaginary correspondent, describing her stepdaughter as a “teapot with a missing spout.”
Motherhood as original sin would be Blackwood’s most persistent theme. Her second novel, “Great Granny Webster,” a gothic tale based on her great-grandmother’s life, was said to have missed out on the Booker Prize in 1977 only because Philip Larkin, who sat on the jury that year, found it too autobiographical. The granny in question is unforgettable, presiding over an ancestral mansion with no heating and terrified butlers who wear boots inside because of the leaky roof that she’s too stingy to repair. The book is a sort of matricidal fantasia, Blackwood’s literary vengeance against her own mothers and, by extension, the class that she was born into. The Sunday Times likened the book to a “box of chocolates with amphetamine centres.”
Blackwood published two more novels, including “Corrigan,” the tale of a scam artist in a wheelchair. She published nonfiction, too, tending toward reportage of the New Journalism variety, including an account of a gravediggers’ strike in Liverpool, titled “Notes from Underground.” The writing across all of these works is vivid, acerbic, unflinching. But perhaps more than any other book, “The Last of the Duchess,” a strange jewel of a text she began writing in 1980 but only published in 1995, the year before her death, apotheosizes Blackwood’s enduring fascination with the monstrous.
Blackwood found her perfect subject in Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American who ensorcelled Edward VIII in the mid-nineteen-thirties, precipitating his abdication and inspiring a tornado of tabloid fodder. In 1980, long after the scandal had subsided, Blackwood’s old friend Francis Wyndham commissioned her to write the accompanying text to a planned portfolio of portraits of the elderly Simpson. The photo shoot fell through, but Blackwood pursued the story anyway, seeking Simpson out in Paris, where she and Edward had lived in pointless luxury since the nineteen-forties as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, amassing bibelots and cavorting with all manner of unseemly characters. (The Duke and Duchess even met with Hitler, in 1937; he is said to have remarked, of Simpson, “She would have made a good queen.”)
Blackwood was intrigued by the rogue royal who was neither aristocratic nor conventionally beautiful. “Mrs. Simpson was a figure who was regarded with horror,” she writes, in what would become the opening pages of her book, a woman who “symbolized sex and evil.” Among other things, the enterprising Simpson was rumored to have mastered a sex trick called the Shanghai Squeeze, which was said to “make a matchstick feel like a Havana cigar.”
Blackwood never got her sitdown with the dowager duchess; every glimpse of her subject is secondhand. And yet she paints a macabre portrait of the royal body as royal cadaver. The notorious American who spent decades in France and “failed to pick up more than a smattering of French” is, in Blackwood’s telling, a withered, enfeebled husk, confined to a mansion on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. Here is Blackwood, archly sensationalist, even Orientalist, reacting to paparazzi photographs of her subject: “The duchess looked pitiful. Her tiny shrunken body was being lifted by a nurse. Her legs were cigarette thin and they dangled uselessly. Her hair was tied tightly back in a knot. Her head lolled helplessly on her chest. There was a close-up of her face and she looked a little like a Chinese Mandarin, but more like a dead monkey. Her famous eyes were closed slits, and they had the same slant as those of her lawyer.”
The lawyer is not insignificant. If “The Last of the Duchess” is a study of at least two women—three, if one includes its author—the character who edges to the front of this group portrait is Suzanne Blum. An octogenarian who once represented Rita Hayworth in her divorce from the Aly Khan, Maître Blum seems to be Simpson’s de-facto jail warden. In Blackwood’s telling, Blum’s devotion to her charge borders on the demonic; she subjects the Duchess to successive operations to keep her alive and bans even her closest friends from visiting. (Perhaps projecting, Blackwood laments that the “malignant old spider” has swiped the Duchess’s beloved silver mug of vodka; “Why did she have to take it away from the poor little creature?”) When speaking of Simpson, Blum breaks into French and references a “relation de chaleur,” which Blackwood slyly infers has erotic undertones. In the end, she offers us a love story of an unexpected kind.
“The Last of the Duchess” was not published until after the death of the legendarily litigious Blum. “If you do not write a favorable article about the Duchess—I will not sue you. . . . I will kill you,” she had hissed at Blackwood. “I do not trust you.” She was right not to. Barred from meeting Simpson, Blackwood nevertheless managed to render an extraordinarily vivid and unflattering likeness of her elusive subject. Forced to proceed sideways toward her quarry, she implicates the reader in the psychodrama of her pursuit. We read on, hoping the secrets will come spilling out, only to be met by a wall of obfuscation. This wall provides the subject of the book. In this way, “The Last of the Duchess” figures into an illustrious subgenre of the biographical art: the glorious failure.
Some of the text’s most damning—and entertaining—passages are drawn from Blackwood’s visits with the Duke and Duchess’s surviving compatriots, taxidermied specimens like Diana Mosley and her husband, Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists, who’d been interned for much of the Second World War. Blackwood has little sympathy for the Windsors and their fellow-travellers; her encounters with people in late stages of decrepitude verge on mocking, as in her description of Sir Oswald, who “shuffled around with the face of a shrewd old smiling reptile”:
When “The Last of the Duchess” came out, critics took issue with it, accusing Blackwood of conspicuous fabulism. “A book of snobby royal tittle-tattle on which Blackwood is attempting, rather late in the day, to confer some gravitas,” Zoë Heller wrote in the London Review of Books. In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani opined that “as journalism . . . it is deeply and seriously flawed.” Of course it is! And yet this criticism feels unfair, not least because the author herself declared the book “a dark fairy tale,” acknowledging that she wandered “into realms of purest speculation” when confronted with Blum’s implacable evasions. Armed with a caricaturist’s eye for the absurd, Blackwood may not have been careful with the facts, but her work evokes a larger truth. As a woman upon whom men relentlessly projected fantasy, she knew that fiction was contiguous with real life. “You can’t really get the truth about anybody from an interview,” she once told the critic Michael Kimmelman. “It’s all fiction in a way.”
“The Last of the Duchess” was Blackwood’s final nonfiction book. She had weathered a succession of tragedies in the last quarter of her life, including the death of a daughter to a heroin overdose and the loss of her brother to AIDS. After Lowell’s death, in 1977, she split her time between the Upper East Side and Sag Harbor, still wearing superfluous eye makeup and entertaining a motley crew of younger friends with her lacerating wit. In photographs from this period, she remains beautiful, if world-worn, a Greek statue exposed to the elements. Schoenberger recounts Blackwood’s visit to a friend in Maine who stationed buckets of water around the guest quarters in case Blackwood, an inveterate smoker, started a fire.
Blackwood died of complications from cervical cancer on Valentine’s Day, 1996. She had been working on a book about trans people, a community that had long fascinated her. Her final days were spent in a suite in the Mayfair Hotel on Park and Sixty-fifth. A friend sprinkled holy water from Lourdes on her supine body, and Marianne Faithfull, sprawled on her bed in leopard-skin trousers, sang to her. The Marchioness flew over on the Concorde to say goodbye to her daughter. The two had spent years in court, battling over the family fortune, but Maureen, now eighty-nine, was frail, no longer the monster of Blackwood’s youth. The visit was said to have gone well. ♦
