Dangerous Muse

June 4, 2001
Lady Caroline Blackwood (1931–1996), with her wealth, fame, brilliance, eccentricity, dysfunction and illness, is an ideal subject for an absorbingly juicy (albeit tragic) biography. Perhaps best known for marrying painter Lucian Freud, then Aaron Copland's prize student Israel Citkowitz, then patrician poet Robert Lowell, the mysterious Blackwood, with her enormous, unflinching eyes, was "one of the great beauties of her day"; she was also a writer in her own right. Schoenberger (Girl on a White Porch), former director of the Academy of American Poets, never met Blackwood (the day of their proposed meeting, Blackwood was hospitalized and died soon thereafter). The author traces this troubled, fascinating life from a childhood on a grand family estate in Northern Ireland, through her marriages to brilliant yet tortured and unstable men, and then through widowhood, when Blackwood inhabited a former funeral home in Sag Harbor, on New York's Long Island, reputedly haunted still by her dark presence. Blackwood inspired her husbands' brilliant works—such as Freud's photograph Girl in Bed
(it was clutched by Lowell when he died of a heart attack) and Lowell's The Dolphin, dedicated to Caroline. But Schoenberger calls her "both a muse and an anti-muse," for she also undermined their creativity with her alcoholism and cruel wit, provoking their worst qualities, like Freud's gambling and womanizing, Citkowitz's passivity and Lowell's bipolar illness and abusiveness. Alternately vibrant and pathetic, Blackwood alienated and insulted everyone around her. Schoenberger targets the general reader over the scholar—particularly with her exploration of Blackwood's "curse"—but those interested in literary biography, particularly in the lives of artists and the sources of their creativity, will find relevant material here. Agents, Joy Harris and Leslie Daniels.
16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW.(July 3)Forecast:Though already chosen for the
Wall Street Journal's summer reading list, with first serial rights sold to
Vogue, this myth-making bio will have to show unexpected reach to appeal to a mass of readers. The author will do some regional publicity in New York and Washington, D.C.

June 15, 2001
Lady Caroline Blackwood, who died in 1996, is best known in the United States for her turbulent marriage to poet Robert Lowell (the last of her three husbands). Born into the Anglo-Irish nobility in 1931, she was an heiress to the Guinness fortune and one of the most glamorous socialites of her day. Brilliant but moody, she first married the painter Lucian Freud, who commemorated her eerie beauty in several famous paintings. Although she had written sporadically throughout her life, it was not until after Lowell's death in 1977 that she began to concentrate on her haunting, often autobiographical fiction and nonfiction (e.g., Great Granny Webster, which was shortlisted for the Booker). Blackwood died before she and Schoenberger (creative writing, Coll. of William &Mary; Girl on a White Porch) could agree on this biography. The subsequent destruction of her papers, plus the refusal of Blackwood's children and family to contribute, has made this a rather thin study of a bewildering woman whose character is not entirely explained by hereditary eccentricity, alcoholism, and an unhappy life. For general and specialized collections. (Illustrations not seen.) Shelley Cox, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale

Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2001
Perhaps some day Caroline Blackwood will have dwindled into a mere footnote to the poetry of Robert Lowell. But with this vivid biography, Schoenberger has forestalled academic oblivion for at least another decade. It is no literary abstraction but a fiery and willful woman who lives in this searing chronicle of taboos defied, lives scarred, and great poetry achieved. From the time she agreed as a mere girl to strip for prepubescent boys attending her private prep school, Blackwood played a perilous game, recklessly risking her own ruin and that of those who loved (or lusted after) her, all for the sake of raw and intense experience. Schoenberger plumbs the turbid depths of those experiences as recorded in Blackwood's caustic satire and dark verse. But it is during her seven-year marriage to Lowell (which Blackwood acknowledged as her "main marriage") that her unruly passions coalesced into their clearest meanings. Probing beneath some of the most haunting lines of Lowell's " The Dolphin" and " Day by "Day, Schoenberger reveals Blackwood's irresistible, yet lacerating, influence. Lowell's many admirers--who typically know he died clutching a portrait of Caroline--will themselves take a firm grip on this nuanced biography of the woman who so tormented and inspired him.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)