Nancy Schoenberger - Dangerous Muse

NONFICTION

A Talent for Genius: The Life and Times of Oscar Levant
(with Sam Kashner)
Hollywood Kryptonite: The Bulldog, the Lady,
and the Death of Superman
(with Sam Kashner)

POETRY

The Taxidermists Daughter
Girl on a White Porch
Long Like a River

FRONTISPIECE : Caroline Blackwood by Walker Evans. Copyright 1999 Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

PUBLISHED BY NAN A. TALESE an imprint of Doubleday a division of Random House, Inc. 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

OUBLEDAY is a trademark of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schoenberger, Nancy.
Dangerous muse: the life of Lady Caroline Blackwood / Nancy Schoenberger.
p. cm.
1. Blackwood, Caroline. 2. Novelists, English20th centuryBiography. 3. Composers spousesUnited StatesBiography. 4. Painters spousesGreat BritainBiography. 5. Authors spousesUnited StatesBiography. 6. Citkowitz, Israel, 19091974Marriage. 7. Lowell, Robert, 19171977Marriage. 8. Freud, LucianMarriage. 9. Guinness family. I. Title.
PR6052.L3423 Z87 2001
828.91409dc21
[B]
00-053508

eISBN: 978-0-307-82235-2
Copyright 2001 by Nancy Schoenberger

All Rights Reserved

v3.1_r1

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to quote from copyrighted or unpublished material:

Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC: Excerpts from Day by Day by Robert Lowell. Copyright 1977 by Robert Lowell. Excerpts from The Dolphin by Robert Lowell. Copyright 1973 by Robert Lowell. Excerpt from History by Robert Lowell. Copyright 1973 by Robert Lowell. Excerpts from Selected Poems by Robert Lowell. Copyright 1976 by Robert Lowell.

Excerpt from To Robert Lowell from One Art: Letters by Elizabeth Bishop, selected and edited by Robert Giroux. Copyright 1994 by Alice Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, on behalf of the Estate of Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright 2001 by Alice Helen Methfessel.

From Robert Lowell: A Biography by Ian Hamilton. Copyright 1982 by Ian Hamilton. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

Excerpts from No Diamonds, No Hat, No Honey by Andrew Harvey. Copyright 1985 by Andrew Harvey. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

Excerpts from Growing Up at Clandeboye by Lord Dufferin, by kind permission of the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava.

Excerpts from letters by Basil Ava, fourth Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, and from Maureen, fourth Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, published by permission of Lady Perdita Blackwood.

Robert Boyerss The Visit was published in vol. 24, no. 1 of Parnassus: Poetry in Review. Reprinted courtesy of the author and the Poetry in Review Foundation.

Excerpts from Sarah Payne Stuarts My First Cousin, Once Removed. Copyright 1998 by Sarah Payne Stuart. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

Excerpt from In Memory of Basil, Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, by John Betjeman, by permission of John Murray (Publishers) Ltd.

Shes Got a Problem, words and music by Caroline Blackwood and Ben Brierley. Copyright 1983 Universal-Polygram International Publishing, Inc. ASCAP. Warner Bros. Music Corp. ASCAP. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

Letter from Peter Taylor to Robert Lowell, courtesy Eleanor Ross Taylor. Excerpts from letters from Michael Wishart to Caroline Blackwood and excerpts from Wisharts High Diver, courtesy John Byrne and the Estate of the Late Michael Wishart.

Excerpts from Walker Evanss letter to James and Tania Stern, reprinted by permission of the Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Excerpts from Israel Citkowitzs letters to Aaron Copland, courtesy Elena Citkowitz and the Aaron Copland Archive, Library of Congress.

For Sam, as always

Beauty is only the promise of happiness.
STENDHAL

A mong the many I want to thank for their cooperation and inspiration, Steven M. L. Aronson looms large. His remarkable interview with Caroline Blackwood, published in Town & Country in 1993, first planted the seed for this book, and further conversations with Steven illuminated Caroline Blackwoods sometimes maddening complexities. I already knew something about Blackwood from having worked on A Mania for Phrases, the Voices and Visions documentary film for PBS about Blackwoods third husband, the poet Robert Lowell, and from Ian Hamiltons impressive Robert Lowell: A Biography. So when the writer Shana Alexander called me one afternoon in 1995 and mentioned that Blackwood, who lived near her on the east end of Long Island, was looking around for a biographer and asked whether I would consider it, I was immediately intrigued. The idea had already taken rootI had long meditated on the sometimes treacherous task women undertake in making themselves into writersbut here was a possible chance to work with the writer herself. I had envisioned a kind of life with comments, and the one conversation I had with Blackwood over the phone seemed to promise just such a venture. Come see me in Sag Harbor, she said in her smoky, deep-throated voice. She also asked me to send her a copy of A Mania for Phrases; she had resisted watching it for a long time, as the film contained archival footage of Lowell reading his poems, still painful for her to watch.

But the day I arrived on Long Island to meet with Caroline, she went into the hospitaland died two weeks later. We never met face to face.

And yet I decided to continue. I met with her middle daughter, Evgenia Citkowitz, and Evgenias husband, the actor Julian Sands, in their home just above Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles (in a restored villa that had once belonged to Busby Berkeley). Evgenia showed me her fathers piano, while Julian, who loves the culinary arts, offered to scramble some eggs. We ended up feasting on oil-cured olives culled from an ancient olive tree Sands had replanted in their walled garden. Heartened by this early meeting, I hoped to have the cooperation of the Blackwood family, but with the exception of Carolines sister, Lady Perdita Blackwoodwho was a biographers dream and a woman of exceptional honesty and generositythe subjects grown children eventually shied from the venture. I had begun the book, I felt, with cooperation, but soon found myself writing an opposed biography. Ivana Lowell, Carolines youngest daughter, who had assumed the name of her stepfather Robert Lowell, once said about her family, There were a lot of unspoken things and a lot of closed doors.

First, there was the issue of Blackwoods alcoholism, which her family, like most, did not want to make publicor relivein any form. But even more than that, Carolines personality was so overpowering that she seemed to have left, after her death, a residue of spirit. I began to feel haunted by her. An aura of danger surrounded Caroline, a fact that struck home when I was involved in a car accident after returning to Virginia from my meeting with Evgenia and Julian Sands. Ill bet you were thinking about my mother when you hit that car, Evgenia said afterward. And of course I was. I was becoming obsessed with her, as all biographers become obsessed with their subjects. Mummy would have loved that, Evgenia told me. Later, in London, I met with a close friend of Carolines, who warned me that Caroline had considered her mother a witch, and that Caroline herself had certain witchlike qualities. The following day I made a surprise call on Lady Maureen Dufferin, Carolines mother (its amazing what biographers will do), at her home in Knightsbridge. A scrap of paper had blown onto her front steps at 4 Hans Crescent. I bent over and picked it up. It was a page from a notepad upon which someone had scrawled, Just remember I am a witch.