OPEN ANY BOOK BY CAROLINE BLACKWOOD and you will encounter the same woman. Articulate, adrift, callous, cosmically self-absorbed. She’s in the middle of her life, a retired actress or model, once striking and sought-after. Her misery has a predatory quality. Decisions made idly and capriciously she now clings to as essential facets of her “character.” She rebels continually against the restraints and privations she inflicts upon herself. She behaves as though she were onstage, thundering dramatic monologues of deceit and self-justification. What’s clearest is her anger: pure, whole, just beneath the surface, like a calcium deposit under the skin.
Blackwood’s women are loaded with rage. And why not? Their marriages are loveless, their husbands shirks, their children ingrates, their mothers domineering, their friends useless, their careers faded. But her anger transcends circumstance; it is existential, the kind breakdown can’t allay and catharsis can’t purge. In Blackwood’s vision, kindness is futile, thinly veiled “sentimental and empathizing inaction.” She loathed the self-deceiving sentiments that obscured the real nature of human relations. To disclose that real nature was always her business.
Blackwood called her late book, the pseudo-biography The Last of the Duchess, a “dark fairy-tale,” which is an apt description of all her work. She saw herself as a doomed child in a haunted house, which is the story she told again and again. It’s the curse she never allowed her heroines to overcome.
She was born in 1931 into Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Clandeboye, the ancestral estate in Ulster where she grew up, was a fabled place “doomed by the height of its own ancient colonial aspirations.” In the “big house” tradition, the Georgian mansion was a symbol of its own destitution. The roof was a sieve, with pots and jam jars arranged to catch drips, emptied every day before they started to overflow––“like bailing out a ship.” Weeds took over the tennis court; the swimming pool rotted. The butler and footmen “sloshed around the mansion in Wellingtons, disdainfully drinking their way through their employer’s wine cellar.”
The family was an ensemble cast of spiritual orphans. Blackwood’s paternal grandmother supposed herself in the confidence of fairies and claimed that Caroline’s father, Basil, the fourth Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was a changeling who’d been swapped at birth. He died when Caroline was thirteen, leaving her alone with her mother. Maureen, one of the three “Golden Guinness Girls,” called a “lovely witch” by John Huston, was a spoiled, capricious woman who spent most of her time in London, throwing lavish parties. The Blackwood siblings (Caroline, Perdita, and Sheridan) were half starved and beaten by a string of sadistic nannies. They snatched moments of freedom—they had the run of the estate, rode their bikes to the nearby town. But a gloomy entropy prevailed. Ulster was a place where “nothing would or could ever happen.” After a perfunctory education abroad, Caroline was launched in the postwar deb world where she was expected to be pretty and marry a man with a title.
Instead, in 1949 she met Lucian Freud at a party. Three years later they ran off to Paris together; they married the next. She was a blond gamine with a trust fund; he was a rakish genius on the make. Caroline read while Lucian painted her: Dostoevsky’s The Idiot during Girl in Bed, Henry James’s The Tragic Muse during Girl Reading. Her mother detested him, “poor and spivvy, and Jewish, a painter too and married.” The posh crowd echoed her disapproval. Evelyn Waugh particularly disliked Freud. “You know that poor Maureen’s daughter made a runaway match with a terrible Yid?” he wrote to Nancy Mitford. Freud’s looks and talent made no headway with them, nor did his famous grandfather. (Years later Blackwood would claim that her mother “had never heard of Sigmund Freud.”)
They lived a high-low life: dukes and duchesses, artists and bookies. (Freud liked to gamble with a “Dostoevskian passion.”) It was “a whole kind of Soho life. . . . Going out to Wheeler’s, and then the Colony and the Gargoyle.” Marriage proved a letdown. Things ended abruptly in 1956. She welcomed him home from a trip with a “perfect dinner.” He looked at it, lit a cigarette, and pushed the plate away. She went to the bedroom, packed her bags, and left.
“I went to Italy, alone—do you know that kind of mood?” In Rome she took up with the producer Ivan Moffat and followed him to Hollywood. There she tried to get into films and, at Cary Grant’s suggestion, underwent LSD psychotherapy, which seemed to unlock some creative purpose. Los Angeles didn’t suit her: “I felt like a goldfish going nowhere down very, very ugly roads.” She fled to New York, where she caroused with Walker Evans, modeled for Vogue, studied under Stella Adler, met, and eventually married, the composer Israel Citkowitz, and had three daughters, Natalya, Evgenia, and Ivana. Citkowitz didn’t live up to his talent (“I’m afraid he just had early promise,” said Caroline), but he made a good house husband. Blackwood, by then drinking heavily and involved with Robert Silvers, cofounder of the New York Review of Books, drifted out of the marriage. In 1970, at thirty-eight years old, she moved back to London with daughters in tow. She attended a party being held for Robert Lowell, then visiting fellow at All Souls, Oxford. He stayed the night and the next seven years. “After the Faber party, he moved into Redcliffe Square—I mean instantly, that night.”
Lowell was known for his autobiographical poems, his manic episodes, and his storied marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick. His infidelities were legendary (they often precipitated his breakdowns), but Hardwick had taken these in stride, and he had always returned to her. The latest, however, wasn’t, he wrote to Hardwick, “one of my manic crushes,” but rather “this and everything more.” After years of being guided by Hardwick’s steady hand, he might have wanted a playmate with whom to behave badly. Caroline, unkempt, prone to black moods, who threw out the cap when opening a bottle of vodka, fit the bill. For a summer he vacillated between the two, but eventually left Hardwick, and married Blackwood in 1972. The volatile couple retreated to Milgate Park, a crumbling Georgian pile in Kent. The children would roller-skate around the house cluttered with liquor bottles; two rabbits, two kittens, and a guinea pig named Gertrude Buckman joined the three girls, and the couple’s newly born son, Sheridan.
The two worked back-to-back, writing, rewriting, asking each other’s opinion on lines. She was, said her friend Jonathan Raban, “surrounded by Lowell’s belief in her ability.” Her early short stories and first two novels were written with him in the room. He was finishing The Dolphin (1973), the collection that won him the Pulitzer and the ire of the New York intelligentsia. The poems, which dramatized the breakdown of his marriage and the beginning of his relationship with Blackwood, incorporate quotations from Hardwick’s private letters and phone calls. Friends begged him not to publish. “Aren’t you violating a trust? IF you were given permission—IF you hadn’t changed them . . . etc. But art just isn’t worth that much,” Elizabeth Bishop remonstrated. Caroline showed more aplomb. “Once it’s turned into a poem, I don’t think it has anything to do with me. When he called me a ‘baby killer whale’ or wrote that I was ‘warm-hearted with an undercoat of ice’ or a mermaid who ‘serves her winded lover’s bones in brine,’ I didn’t mind.”
Her first book was a collection of stories and essays called For All That I Found There (1973). Her style emerged fully formed: terse prose, mordant humor, and theatrically overdrawn characters. The pieces were grouped into sections—Fact, Fiction, and Ulster—but these distinctions are almost irrelevant. Fact and fiction bleed into each other; the violence and provincialism of her childhood was what she saw in the world. A recognizable personality pervades the texts. Take these: A Protestant thug smashes the face of a Catholic girl with a stone. A salon owner fires her Saturday helper when the woman’s concentration camp tattoo sours the giddy atmosphere. A woman sits in a burn unit waiting for her daughter’s prognosis. These three stories are slotted in different sections, but they share much: hampered lives, ambient menace, an aversion to sentimentality. This homogenous, recognizable personality pervades the texts. These dark, gleaming tales take the shape of parables and allegories. In “Please Baby Don’t Cry,” she describes a woman who has had an operation to take up the sagging skin around her eyes. The operation has gone well, but there is, as the doctor says, “just one problem”: “She will never, of course, quite be able to close her eyes at night.”
Her follow-up, the 1976 novel The Stepdaughter, is the story of J., whose solipsism saves her from self-knowledge. A “tense New Yorker in her middle thirties,” she is writing “demented” letters to unnamed people in her head. The stepdaughter is Renata, a monosyllabic lump of a girl who leaves piles of unflushed paper in the toilet and exclusively eats rock-like cakes she bakes from packaged mixes. “She had the pathos of those hopelessly flawed objects which one often sees being put up for sale in junk shops.”
J. has been abandoned by her husband, Arnold, who blackmails her into continuing to care for Renata and their young daughter, Sally Ann, in the deluxe apartment he maintains for them. The enviable Upper West Side address becomes a kind of prison. “All day I have sat around in a state of shivering tension in my apartment, as if I was imprisoned in some besieged and beleaguered out-post garrison, just praying for the relief forces I hoped might arrive with the dusk.” J. is consumed by anxieties and self-hatred and convinced that her “career” (she’s a Sunday painter), her tired relationship—indeed, her whole life—is being ruined by Renata. “Her very breathing was giving me insomnia.”
Her invocations of the “dazzling” view from the apartment (it’s mentioned over a dozen times) serve a canny purpose. It remindsus that we’re not allowed to leave. The apartment is a metonym for her mind: the claustrophobia of her thoughts, the suffocating sameness of her psyche. One longs to be let out—for a walk in Central Park! We forget her prison is a luxury apartment she lives in with no financial worries, and that only the leisure of privilege allows her to endlessly fixate on Renata. J.’s fanatical commitment to demonizing the child is effected so convincingly that we’re drawn in as co-conspirators.
Style is always a form of manipulation, but particularly so in Blackwood, who treats fiction like a game she intends to win. On and off the page, she liked duping people and playing the innocent while doing so. Gary Indiana distills her technique, noting that she “practices a bullfighter’s feint. The author waves a red cape at us, knowing we will charge at the wrong target.” She lures us into relating to morally impoverished figures by virtue of only providing access to their limited viewpoint. In a kind of meta-play, we’re often as misled as her characters; she drops in red herrings and withholds critical information. The simplicity of her style carries off this duplicitousness. In both her fiction and nonfiction, she affects a child’s view of the world—a kind of wonder at the things people say, which she seemingly takes at face value and asks what they could possibly mean. In other words, she gives people the rope with which to hang themselves.
The cruelty played out in The Stepdaughter is familiar territory. The stepmother, always heartless, self-interested, is a reliable stock figure. Sarah Nicole Prickett, writing in these pages, notes that “anything can be projected upon the stepmother, who has no biography, only motive.” Being all motive tinges her actions with suspicion; she is guilty before any crime. Free from needing to be “good enough,” she is condemned to being never enough. Outsider, interloper, in but not of the family unit, the stepmother is the universal scapegoat.
This makes her the ideal subject for Blackwood, who made deriding mothers her métier. In her work (as in life, cf. Jacqueline Rose), all mothers are failed mothers. Either they exert a maniacal hold on their children, or they are absent and aloof, treating the children like entertainment for hire, trotting them out to sing for company and otherwise ruthlessly musing on their ordinariness. (Children being too dull to bear was such a preoccupation that it appears in all her fictional work.) Her hatred toward the figure of the mother raises the question: Against what is all this a defense? Blackwood’s fear of and contempt for her mother, her thwarted desire to be recognized and loved by her, is the organizing principle of her works.
The rejection of a child is broached in one of her first short stories, “The Baby Nurse.” Arabella, a former actress, falls into depression after giving birth and all but surrenders care of the child to the tyrannical nurse Miss Renny, who torments and belittles her. (Blackwood likes pairs. A harridan figure often plays sidekick to the weak mother.) Maternal ambivalence is the subject of another early story, “How You Love Our Lady,” loosely based on Caroline’s aunt Oonagh and the parties at her Irish family estate Luggala. Here the romantic and self-destructive mother lives in an enchanted world full of poets and painters. Her morbidly shy daughter Theresa (a stand-in for young Caroline) is made to feel that her “drab ordinariness” exiles her from that world, and from her mother’s affection. The Stepdaughter is more slippery: the story of an unwanted person looking to make an unwanted person feel more unwanted. It’s a novel of bequests and legacy, of what to do with our own discarded lives and those we must take on.
“Few authors in recent fiction have addressed themselves to the universal family romance with Caroline Blackwood’s bleakness,” wrote Michael Neve in 1981. The family, that seedbed of pathologies, engaged her deepest interests. Her disdain is most antic in the biographical novel Great Granny Webster (1977),a compressed family portrait that satirizes Clandeboye and its inhabitants. Her follow-up, The Fate of Mary Rose (1981), uses the cheapjack machinery of the Gothic novel to spin a thriller-qua-fable about the insanity of maternal protectiveness. Between these came the sly 1980 cookbook Darling, You Shouldn’t Have Gone to So Much Trouble, cowritten with Anna Haycraft and dedicated “to our daughters” (both women suffered the loss of a teenage child). A Who’s Who of the London scene, the recipes included Sonia Orwell’s Tagliatelli with Truffles and Francis Bacon’s Thick, Fat, Genuine Mayonnaise.
She stopped writing fiction after Corrigan, published in 1984—a comedy of manners revolving around a charismatic con man. Wheelchair-bound Corrigan arrives out of nowhere and persuades listless widow Mrs. Blunt to hand over large sums of money to support a home for the handicapped called St. Crispin’s. Corrigan is not in fact an invalid and St. Crispin’s turns out to be a pancake house behind Paddington Street, but the work of providing for it, and of caring for Corrigan, gives Mrs. Blunt a sense of purpose lost to her since the death of her husband. Ingeniously crafted (we realize late in the novel that Mrs. Blunt is in on the ruse and happy to go along with it), Corrigan convincingly argues for the necessity of deception in mutual understanding. Her later nonfiction work is a suite of subjective reportage that shares the same acerbic pulse, the oddly angled observation. Blackwood’s feeling for “states of aggression and what goes on in the minds of the combatants,” as observed by Mary-Kay Wilmers, increasingly played out in public life. Her report on the state of play between foxhunting and its enemies in In the Pink (1987) and her account of the nuclear protest encampments at Greenham Common in On the Perimeter (1984) exemplify her faculty for satire.
In The Last of the Duchess (written in 1980 but published in 1995 for legal reasons), on the last years of the Duchess of Windsor, Blackwood does to the aristocracy what Evelyn Waugh does to journalism in Scoop (something akin to character assassination). Denied access to the Duchess, Blackwood fixates on Maître Suzanne Blum, the forbidding French lawyer tasked with caring for the Duchess, filling the black hole with speculation and projection. She returns here to the setup of The Stepdaughter, with a vulnerable figure at the mercy of a despot—her take on the mother-daughter relationship.
Renata already knows Arnold has left. “He said that he had found someone who loved him much more than you ever had. He said that he loved his new girl much more than he had ever been able to love you.” In the same impassive voice, she reveals she isn’t Arnold’s daughter. She’s known since before her arrival at the apartment, and with his absence, feels impelled to leave as soon as she tells J. the truth. Far from being disappointed, Renata admires Arnold’s revelation. “I think he wanted to stop me from ever feeling hurt and disappointed about him.” And she does forgive him, in that moment. Similarly, as soon as J. is relieved of the idea of Renata as family, she feels a sense of care and responsibility for the child. Only the release of the contract of motherhood enables her to gain empathy for Renata:
Would that plump and lonely girl, who had been made to feel that her whole life was nothing more than an undesirable accident, have in the end always felt she was forced to vanish into the dark as if in some forlorn way she was really searching for herself when she looked in the cold savage streets of New York for the undesirable accident?
Blackwood’s people expect little from the world and are granted as much. Spiritual anemia is a hallmark of contemporary novels, but these mostly lack Blackwood’s élan, her breathless glee at human absurdities. Despite the bleakness of her vision, I find a kind of mangled hope in her obdurate, quixotic characters, in their commitment to the peculiar arrangements that allow them to live with the madness around them, in the baleful laughter behind it all. Life is tricky, trying, often unbearable. Also very funny.
In the end, Renata disappears into the streets of New York, vanished or dead.
J. remains in the apartment. The wayward child can never leave home.
Janique Vigier is a writer based in London.