She married, firstly, Lucien Michael Freud, son of Ernst Freud and Lucie Brasch, on 9 December 1953. She and Lucien Michael Freud were divorced in 1957 at Mexico. She married, secondly, Israel Citkowitz on 15 August 1959. She and Israel Citkowitz were divorced before 1972. She married, thirdly, Robert Traill Spence Lowell in 1972. She died on 15 February 1996 at age 64.
From 9 December 1953, her married name became Freud. Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood used the pen-name of Caroline Blackwood. From 15 August 1959, her married name became Citkowitz. She wrote the book For All That I Found There. From 1972, her married name became Lowell. She wrote the book The Stepdaughter, published 1976. She wrote the book Great Granny Webster, published 1977. She was decorated with the award of Booker Prize (runner-up) in 1977. She wrote the book Good Night Sweet Ladies. She wrote the book The Fate of Mary Rose. She wrote the book On the Perimeter: Caroline Blackwood at Greenham Common, published 1984. She wrote the book In the Pink. She wrote the book Darling. She wrote the book Corrigan. She wrote the book You Shouldn't Have Gone to so Much Trouble.
Children of Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood and Israel Citkowitz
•Natalya Citkowitz b. 17 Aug 1960, d. 22 Jun 1978
•Evgenia Citkowitz b. 1964
•Ivana Citkowitz b. 1966
Child of Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood and Robert Traill Spence Lowell
•Robert Sheriden Lowell b. Aug 1971
According to her daughter Ivana's memoir, "Why Not Say What Happened?", Caroline's ashes were buried under a pine tree at her home in Sag Harbor, NY. This house was once known as "the Summer White House" as it was occupied by Chester A. Arthur on vacations during his presidency.
Caroline Blackwood was a writer with a small number of books to her name. These have an intensity, a black and humorous concentration on the pitilessness of experience, which should ensure their survival. They are also very funny.
Ireland was in her blood and upbringing. Ireland suffers Blackwood's forensic surgery in her first book, For All That I Found There (1973), a collection of short stories and meditative pieces. With courage and a certain breathtaking cruelty she followed it with two autobiographical novels. The Stepdaughter (1976) is a miniature Greek tragedy, done as farce, about an unhappy relationship with your child. The title is the only figleaf permitted; the book is based on her eldest child, Natalia Citkowitz, who died through addiction before the book was published. There is something of Evelyn Waugh in Blackwood's ability to make you laugh reluctantly at her ruthlessness: Waugh done over by the painter Francis Bacon. Great Granny Webster is lighter and funnier. Here the Anglo- Irish world of Elizabeth Bowen is allowed no smidgen of decadent charm; water drips relentlessly through the roof, room after oppressive room of the statutory mansion. Yeats, you feel, would have had a nervous breakdown had he lived to read it. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1977 and was greatly admired by Philip Larkin.
Subsequent novels such as The Fate of Mary Rose (1981) and Corrigan (1984) were less successful, though they well repay re-reading. A further collection of short stories, Good Night Sweet Ladies (1983) and a sympathetic yet merciless account of the predominantly female protest at Greenham Common, On the Perimeter (1984), confirmed her talent. If her last book, an account of the last days of the Duchess of Windsor, The Last Duchess (1995), betrays some signs of Caroline Blackwood's cancer and alcoholism, it does contain one of the greatest pieces of comic writing I know: her own attempts at interviewing Maitre Suzanne Blum, the terrifying French lawyer who took charge of the Duchess's fortune and bedridden body before dying herself in her nineties.
Caroline Blackwood's dark temperament, perfectly realised in her writing, is in some ways a puzzle, given the facts of her life. It was a rich life literally and metaphorically She was one of the most beautiful women of her generation (a more intense and fascinating version of the film star, Michelle Pfeiffer, I found). Even in the last years, when life and illness ravaged her, you could not look at anyone else when she was in the room. She was loved by some of the most talented men of the age and married two of them, the painter Lucian Freud and the poet Robert Lowell. She was well-off (her mother was Maureen Guinness, now Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava) and aristocratic in a period when that added rather than subtracted glamour. Her father, who died when she was 13 was Basil Dufferin, eulogised in a Betjeman poem; her brother Sheridan Dufferin, whom with her sister Perdita she loved, was the kind of man whose charm, generosity and modesty give aristocrats a good name.
As well as passion, Caroline Blackwood experienced love both giving and receiving. In some ways a difficult mother, she was always close to her daughters Eugenia and Ivana Citkowitz and her son Sheridan Lowell. She made great and enduring friendships with men and women: I was lucky enough to enjoy her friendship for nearly 35 years. She was very funny because polite and well-mannered on the surface, in no sense a person who shocked in order to make an effect, she mercilessly cut straight through to the core of things. Like Lucian Freud, and her friend Francis Bacon, she hated padding. You could not pretend in her company. Even on her deathbed, black Blackwood gold was mined. One of the women she loved most, a Catholic and fellow novelist, had brought water from Lourdes. Some of it spilt on the sheets. "I might have caught my death," she muttered.
Lucian Freud's portraits of her are in my view his greatest paintings. She was pleased to get a recent long telephone call from him. "I had forgotten how funny Lucian can be," she said. Some time after leaving him, she married Israel Citkowitz, a talented composer and delightful man who sadly suffered most of his career from a debilitating writer's block.
Without turning into a figure of tragic suffering, Citkowitz followed her to England after her marriage to Robert Lowell and continued as a father to his children, and as a kind of nanny-duenna to Blackwood for the rest of his life. She was his great achivement. He always registered a quiet pride in it.
Robert Lowell's life with Blackwood and his traumatic parting and final reunion with his previous wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwicke, is relived in three books of poems. A long sequence of love poems, The Dolphin, praises and anatomises Caroline as the Muse who put an end to his philanderings.
Any clear thing that blinds us with
surprise,
your wandering silences and bright
trouvailles,
dolphin let loose to catch the
flashing fish . . .
They lived in London, in a manor she bought in Kent and later in her cousin Desmond Guinness's great house Castletown in Co. Kildare. The marriage ran aground on the shoals of Blackwood's drinking, Lowell's sense that he had little time he had to live and terror of his bouts of manic depression - ironically less persistent after their meeting. Their love affair never floundered. Lowell lived with Elizabeth the last year of his life, but visited Blackwood.
Three days before he died I delivered to him in Ireland a picture I had procured, a Freud of Caroline. He died clutching it in a cab on his way to Elizabeth in New York. At his graveside the two women clung to each other.
Grey Gowrie
Caroline Maureen Blackwood, writer: born 1931; married 1953 Lucian Freud (marriage dissolved), 1959 Israel Citkovitz (marriage dissolved; three daughters, one deceased), 1972 Robert Lowell (died 1977; one son); died New York 14 February 1996.
WHEN LADY Caroline Blackwood, the Irish writer and Guinness heiress, was living in Paris in the early 1950's, she and her first husband, the painter Lucian Freud, were invited to visit Picasso.
"Picasso got one of his followers to ask Lucian if he would like to see Picasso's paintings," Blackwood says. "Of course, Lucian said yes. Meanwhile Picasso asked me if I wanted to see his doves: he had this spiral iron staircase leading to the roof, and off we go, winding round and round to the top, until we reached these doves in cages and all around us was the best view of Paris, the best. Whereupon immediately, standing on this tiny, tiny space, way above the city, Picasso does a complete plunge at me. All I felt was fear. I kept saying, 'Go down the stairs, go down.' He said, 'No, no, we are together above the roofs of Paris.' It was so absurd, and to me Picasso was just as old as the hills, an old letch, genius or no.
"I wonder," Blackwood pauses to ask, "what we were supposed to have done if I accepted? There was no space to make love, with all those doves. And think how many other people he had up there. Did they go through with it? And technically, how did they go through with it? And with the husband downstairs?"
She then adds a coda: "Lucian got a call out of nowhere from a mistress of Picasso's who asked him if he could come round and paint her. She wanted to make Picasso jealous. Lucian very politely said maybe he could paint her portrait later, but not now because he happened to be in the midst of doing his wife's portrait."
That picture, Blackwood says, turned out to be Freud's "Girl in Bed." Years later, in 1977, it played a curious part in the death of the poet Robert Lowell, another of Lady Caroline's husbands. Their marriage was in tatters when, as the story goes, he left her in Ireland and returned to the United States. After Lowell's taxi arrived at his apartment on West 67th Street, the driver found him slumped over. A doorman summoned Elizabeth Hardwick, the writer and editor whom Lowell had left to marry Blackwood; she happened to live in the same building. Hardwick opened the taxi door -- only to be confronted with her ex-husband's corpse. He was holding "Girl in Bed."
With its macabre humor, the Lowell story is one Blackwood might have written if she hadn't lived through it. "I think it's partly Irish," Blackwood says over lunch at Coco Pazzo, an elegant restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan. "Irish people are very funny but have this tragic sense.
"As Cal wrote," she continues, referring to Lowell, "if there's light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train. He was a humorous poet, you know, though people don't ever say that about him. He also wrote that in the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet, which is very funny, don't you think?"
BLACKWOOD IS A DELICATE WOMAN OF 63, SLIGHTLY stooped yet graceful, with a husky, smoker's voice. She is dressed in a loose-fitting black pants suit, the sort of unbourgeois outfit that pegs her immediately as an upper-class bohemian. Her extraordinary eyes -- big opalescent pools, which Freud made into giant spheres in his hypnotic portraits -- are the principal signs of the beauty she was in her youth. Her looks are striking but weatherbeaten.
It's not just that Blackwood likes to drink. She has also endured a series of Job-like catastrophes over the years: the death of her second husband, the American composer and pianist Israel Citkowitz; Lowell's crippling manic depression and early death; the death from AIDS of her brother, Sheridan, to whom she was very close; the death of her eldest daughter, Natalya, after a drug overdose, and her own bout with cervical cancer, for which she had an operation that left her in constant pain.
Though on one level she thrives on tragedy -- is even defined by it -- Blackwood can't abide maudlin sentiments; bringing up these episodes with her elicits an awkward silence. At first during lunch she gives only clipped responses to questions or just nods in agreement. She orders one vodka after another, tonic on the side. She is more comfortable discussing her new book, "The Last of the Duchess." But still she's cautious.
She also greets with silence a question about her flamboyant socialite mother, Maureen, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. When Maureen was young she reportedly once gave Sir Oswald Mosley, the English fascist, a black eye after he made a pass at her in Antibes. In recent years, though vastly rich, she has complained that her children haven't helped support her and the several houses she lives in. The Picasso biographer John Richardson recalls that Maureen's son, Sheridan, used to bemoan having to help pay for her villa in Sardinia, which he nicknamed the Villa Costalota. Lately, Blackwood, her sister and sister-in-law have wrangled with Maureen over the disposition of $24 million in Guinness inheritance money. The dispute, ultimately settled in Maureen's favor, underscores the nearly nonexistent relationship between Caroline and her mother, a topic Caroline prefers not to discuss.
Gradually, though, as she relaxes, Blackwood emerges as a strangely dramatic woman: intense and vulnerable, with quirky affectations like abbreviating words (Champagne becoming "champ"), a dark, razor-sharp sense of humor and an offbeat sensibility.
Geordie Greig, the New York correspondent for The Sunday Times of London and a family friend, gives an apt description of her: "When she calls on the phone she'll say 'Hiiii, it's Carrr-oline,' and there's always that enigmatic, Eartha Kitt-like purr. But in conversation she's unpredictable. Caroline's physical demeanor is so unforceful that the force of her words, which can be lethally accurate, is made doubly strong. She has an artist's sensibility to sift through any social niceties and get straight to the point. Even with her house on Long Island nothing follows the rules. Lunch might be a huge feast of lobsters and Champagne, or her fridge may be completely out of food."
Over the years, Blackwood has moved easily among several worlds: from the insular, horsy Anglo-Irish upper classes to the hard-drinking smart set of postwar England, to the liberal intelligentsia of New York City in the 1960's and 70's. She has lived in the United States for much of the last 35 years. Nowadays, she's often with her children, who also live here. Her son, Sheridan Lowell, 23, works for a small publishing firm in Manhattan. Her youngest daughter, Ivana Lowell (she has taken her stepfather's name) is 28; she works for the publishing arm of the media company Miramax and has become a lively presence in New York society since moving from London a few years ago. Another daughter, Evgenia Citkowitz, 30, is a screenwriter in Los Angeles married to the English actor Julian Sands.
Blackwood spends many mornings in her kitchen writing longhand. A broken back she suffered when she was young has made it impossible for her to type. She has published nine books that have been richly admired in Britain, where she is best known. They include collections of short stories and essays of stringent, sly, entirely anticonformist social criticism. Her novels are stylish, remorseless, frightening and wickedly funny. They can sometimes remind you a little of Beckett, except that Blackwood's nihilistic sensibility is more gothic than his: it's Beckett crossed with Bram Stoker.
"The Last of the Duchess" is her mesmeric account of a vain attempt to visit the ailing Duchess of Windsor in 1980 and of Blackwood's encounters with the Duchess's ruthless and highly powerful octogenarian lawyer, Maitre Suzanne Blum, a woman obsessed with her client to the point of erotic fantasy. Blum was the Cerberus at the Duchess's door, blocking even old friends from contacting her, according to Blackwood. Was the sick Duchess tortured by being kept alive, Blackwood wondered, or might she even be dead? Was Blum only saying she was alive so that she could sell the royal jewels and claim the money as her legal fee?
HOW MUCH OF THE book is Irish blarney? After all, the story of Blum, like so many of the stories Blackwood tells, is so bizarre it sounds like fiction. In a sense, though, that's Blackwood's point. She writes as she speaks, with a dramatic flair that can seduce you even as you wonder how precise she is. (Freud, for instance, recalls the Picasso incident very differently.) "You can't really get the truth about anybody from an interview," Blackwood says. "It's all fiction in a way."
She portrays herself in her books as a wide-eyed innocent, astonished by the horrors around her. In person, though, she has a disconcerting habit of staring at you, coolly sizing you up while she picks demurely at her meal. You can see how she could drive Maitre Blum mad.
"If it's berserk behavior I like it as a subject," Blackwood says. "If you write about bland people there's no story, is there? I hated Blum and was really scared of her," Blackwood recalls, "but she thought I was a complete idiot because I acted the dumb journalist with her a bit. She wouldn't even have seen me if I didn't have a title. On the other hand she wouldn't have been so rude if I were a crowned head."
Her full name is Lady Caroline Hamilton Temple Blackwood: she's a descendant on her father's side of the great 18th-century dramatist and wit Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She is a Guinness on her mother's side. (She says she finds stout undrinkable.)
"Brewers or bankers, aristocrats or plutocrats, the Guinnesses are apt to be a law unto themselves," John Richardson says. "This Anglo-Irish dynasty is famously cultivated, brilliant, profligate, witty and beguiling. Caution and abstemiousness are not their forte. Caroline upholds her family's reputation for courage, eccentricity and subversive humor. She most certainly does not hold with the ultraconservative views of some of her cousins."
She grew up in the ancestral stone mansion called Clandeboye, in County Down in Northern Ireland. "My great-grandfather built a wing every time he had another child," Blackwood says. "You didn't build a room then, you built a wing. It was terribly rundown when I was a child, the typical joke Irish house with all the pails to catch dripping water all over the place."
Her great-grandfather, Lord Dufferin, was an eminent Victorian, rumored to have been Disraeli's illegitimate son. "I think he was," says Blackwood, mischievously. "Why would a Scottish landowner have a son who looked like Disraeli? He once got up in the House of Lords and denied that he was Disraeli's son, because it was terrible for his mother's honor, but that sort of implies that he was, doesn't it?"
Queen Victoria made him Viceroy of India, where he used to sit on his throne, fanned by peacock feathers, while processions of rajahs paid him homage. At Clandeboye he built a stone shrine to his mother, an immense architectural folly called Helen's Tower that inspired poems by Browning, Kipling and Tennyson. "Kipling loved my great-grandfather and wrote lots of very bad poems to him," Blackwood says. "He had a fatal effect on poets. I mean, the Tennyson poem is a jingle that goes on and on." She discovered not long ago that Helen's Tower inspired a World War I memorial in France to Irish soldiers. "I mean, Helen's Tower is really odd, isn't it? Victorians thought it was fine someone building a tower to his mother while she was alive, but can you imagine doing it now, in post-Freudian times?"
Blackwood's father, Basil, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was a close friend of Evelyn Waugh and part of the glittering circle he recalled in "Brideshead Revisited." When the Marquess was killed in 1943 by the Japanese in the jungle in Burma, he was 35. Blackwood was 12 at the time and has only dim memories of her father.
Like other women of her class she skipped college; instead she went to work for Claud Cockburn, an influential left-wing journalist who wrote for, among others, The Times Literary Supplement. "Claud was a reviewer for TLS and I read books for him, because in those days the reviews were unsigned," Blackwood says. "It was really corrupt but I was extremely diligent."
She recalls meeting Freud around then, at a party memorable for the fact that the painter Francis Bacon caused a row when he hooted down Princess Margaret, who had just started singing "Let's Do It." Blackwood becomes testy when asked if a reference to her in a recent book as Margaret's lady-in-waiting is true. "That's a lie and I'll sue you if you say it," she says, only half kidding and appalled that anyone could imagine her in such a role.
She changes the subject. "Lucian was fantastic, very brilliant, incredibly beautiful, though not in a movie-star way," she says. "I remember he was very mannered, he wore these long side whiskers, which nobody else had then. And he wore funny trousers, deliberately. He wanted to stand out in a crowd, and he did."
When Freud and Blackwood returned to London from Paris, they settled into the circle that included Bacon, Cyril Connolly and the other artists and writers who gathered nightly at the fabled Gargoyle and Colony Clubs. "As a concept the Gargoyle was brilliant," Blackwood states. "O.K., everyone there would be a bit drunk. But you could wander in any night and find the cleverest people in England. After the war it was completely normal for intellectuals to knock each other down if someone had written a bad review or taken someone's girl. Then they always sent flowers the next day."
GRADUALLY HER marriage to Freud crumbled. When she left him, he was devastated. Blackwood says only that "Lucian and I couldn't be married, not endlessly. We were both too restless."
She fled to Los Angeles, installed herself at the Chateau Marmont and got a tiny part in the television series "Have Gun Will Travel." But she hated the city. The best thing to come out of it was that Stephen Spender asked her to do an article for Encounter magazine about California beatniks. It turned out to be a sendup that launched her writing career. Beatnik culture, she wrote, "has all the trappings of the subversive, the meeting in the darkened cellar, the conspiratorial whisper behind the candle in the Chianti bottle, the nihilistic mutter, without the mildest element of subversion."
Not long after Blackwood moved from Los Angeles to New York she met Israel Citkowitz, a former student of Aaron Copland, some 20 years her senior. They married. Today Blackwood speaks warmly but vaguely about Citkowitz. She describes him as "gorgeous and brilliant, which wasn't a bad combination." But they separated after a few years and she became involved with Robert Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books. Through Silvers she met Lowell.
Citkowitz and she remained friendly until he died, and he sometimes lived in the London house she shared with Lowell in the 1970's, helping her to care for the children during Lowell's bouts of madness. Lowell would write a poem to Citkowitz, lines of which Blackwood used as an epitaph on Citkowitz's grave. Her three daughters were born while she was still married to him. She had a son, Sheridan, by Lowell in 1971.
In 1972 she and Lowell flew to Santo Domingo for a joint divorce-marriage. "Nobody could understand the service because it was all in Spanish," she remembers. "It was in a hut, with chickens coming in and out. You'd move to one hut and they'd say you're divorced. Then to another hut where they'd say you're married. All the time there was lots of loud typing. So romantic."
It pains Blackwood that her marriage with Lowell is often described solely in terms of his breakup with Hardwick and illness. She recalls periods at Milgate, their house in Kent, as idyllic. But she acknowledges that Lowell's episodes of manic depression became increasingly unmanageable.
"I wanted Israel to be in the house because I couldn't deal with it alone," she explains. "Not that Cal would have hurt the children, he wasn't murderous. But I had to watch him all day and all night because a manic never sleeps." One day she found him hacking holes in the wall with a carving knife. He told her he was looking for Etruscan treasures. "It was a horrible affliction to not know when your mind was suddenly going to go -- particularly when you had got this huge mind."
Then Lowell died; then Natalya. Through it all, Blackwood managed to turn out a remarkable string of books. One of them, "On the Perimeter," was a report about the women who had camped for years in the mud at Greenham Common in England to protest the American nuclear missile base there. "The Stepdaughter" was a short epistolary novel about an abusive woman abandoned by her husband and left with his hideous daughter. Another novel, "The Fate of Mary Rose," is a chilling tale about an increasingly deranged mother's fatal obsession with her daughter's safety.
Blackwood even wrote a lighthearted cookbook with her friend the English novelist Anna Haycraft (who wrote under the name of Alice Thomas Ellis) that featured celebrity recipes. Blackwood asked Francis Bacon for a recipe. "I doubt anybody had ever asked him for one before. But he was a fantastic cook, and he had this very smart recipe for mayonnaise. Then it turned out that he was such a perfectionist that he kept holding up the publication to make revisions. Eventually Anna called in a panic, saying she'd forgotten to put in Francis's very last revision before the book went to press. 'It had less to do with salt and more to do with vinegar,' she said. Francis brought 100 copies of the book anyway."
In 1980, Blackwood began work on "The Last of the Duchess." "It was pathetic Blum being so old and in love with the Duchess," Blackwood muses. "What a stupid thing to do. But of course the Duchess was ridiculous, too. A more noble figure than she wouldn't have let this lawyer take over her life." The paradox, as Blackwood implies in the book, is that the socialite Duchess spent her last days in solitary confinement, and -- considering the Windsors' connection to Hitler -- that her jailer was a Jew.
Writing kept Blackwood going through one calamity after another -- until the cancer a few years ago. "I really don't like talking about it," she says, after a long pause. "I just kept on trying to do what I do, no matter what life did to me. But after the cancer I became so used to the idea that I would be dead that I had reconciled myself to the idea of not writing anymore. Once you've accepted you're dead, why write?
Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (16 July 1931 – 14 February 1996) was a writer, and the eldest child of The 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and the brewery heiress Maureen Guinness.
A well-known figure in the literary world through her journalism and her novels, Lady Caroline Blackwood was equally well known for her high-profile marriages, first to the artist Lucian Freud, then to the composer Israel Citkowitz and finally to the poet Robert Lowell, who described her as "a mermaid who dines upon the bones of her winded lovers". Her novels are known for their wit and intelligence, and one in particular is scathingly autobiographical in describing her unhappy childhood.
She was born into an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family from Ulster at 4 Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge, her parents' London home. She was, she admitted, "scantily educated" at, among other schools, Rockport School (County Down) and Downham (Essex). After a finishing school in Oxford she was presented as a debutante in 1949 at a ball held at Londonderry House.
Career
Blackwood's first job was with Hulton Press as a secretary, but she was soon given small reporting jobs by Claud Cockburn. Ann Fleming, the wife of "James Bond" author Ian Fleming, introduced Lady Caroline to Lucian Freud, and the two eloped to Paris in 1952. In Paris she met Picasso (and reportedly refused to wash for three days after he drew on her hands and nails). She married Freud on 9 December 1953 and became a striking figure in London's bohemian circles; the Gargoyle Club and Colony Room replaced Belgraviadrawing rooms as her haunts. She sat for several of Freud's finest portraits, including Girl in Bed, which testifies to her alluring beauty. She was impressed by the ruthless vision of Freud and Francis Bacon and her later fiction was a literary version of their view of humanity.
In the early 1960s, Blackwood began contributing to Encounter, London Magazine, and other periodicals on subjects such as beatniks, Ulster sectarianism, feminist theatre and New York free schools. Although these articles were elegant, minutely observed and sometimes wickedly funny, they had, according to Christopher Isherwood, a persistent flaw: "she is only capable of thinking negatively. Confronted by a phenomenon, she asks herself: what is wrong with it?"[1] During the mid-1960s, she had an affair with Robert Silvers, the founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books.[2][3]
Her third husband, Robert Lowell, was a crucial influence on her talents as a novelist. He encouraged her to write her first book, For All That I Found There (1973), the title of which is a line from the Percy French song "The Mountains of Mourne", and which includes a mordant memoir of her daughter's treatment in a burns unit. Blackwood's first novel The Stepdaughter (1976) appeared three years later to much acclaim, and is a concise and gripping monologue by a rich, self-pitying woman deserted by her husband in a plush New York apartment and tormented by her fat stepdaughter. It won the David Higham Prize for best first novel. Great Granny Webster followed in 1977 and was partly derived on her own miserable childhood, and depicted an austere and loveless old woman's destructive impact on her daughter and granddaughter. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize.
In 1980 came The Last of the Duchess, a study of the relations between the Duchess of Windsor and her cunning lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum; it could not be published until after Blum's death in 1995. Her third novel The Fate of Mary Rose (1981) describes the effect on a Kent village of the rape and torture of a ten-year-old girl named Maureen and is narrated by a selfish historian whose obsessions destroy his domestic life. After this came a collection of five short stories, Good Night Sweet Ladies (1983), followed by her final novel, Corrigan (1984), which was the least successful and depicts the effects on a depressed widow of a charming, energetic but sinister cripple who erupts into her life.
Blackwood's later books were based on interviews and vignettes, including On The Perimeter (1984), which focused her attentions on the women's peace encampment at the Greenham Common air base in Berkshire, and In The Pink (1987), which was a reflective, ghoulish book looking at the hunting and the hunt saboteur fraternities and exposed the many obsessive personalities of both fox-hunters and animal rights activists.
Personal life
Blackwood's marriage to Lucian Freud disintegrated soon after they married in 1953; it was dissolved in 1958, in Mexico.[citation needed] In 1957, Blackwood moved to New York City and studied acting at the Stella Adler school. She also went to Hollywood and appeared in several films.[citation needed]
On 15 August 1959, she married the pianist Israel Citkowitz (1909–1974), 22 years her senior and born in the same year as her late father; they had three daughters. By 1966, when their youngest, Ivana, was born, their marriage was over, although Citkowitz continued to live nearby and served as a nanny-duenna[citation needed] until his death. During the mid-1960s, Blackwood had an affair with Robert Silvers, a founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books, who stayed close to the family thereafter.[2][3]
According to Ivana, both she and Silvers suspected that he was her biological father.[4] However, a deathbed admission by Blackwood revealed that Ivana's biological father was another boyfriend: the screenwriter Ivan Moffat, a grandson of actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree.[2][3]
In 1970, Blackwood returned to London and, in April, began a relationship with the poet Robert Lowell, then a visiting professor at All Souls College, Oxford. Their son, Sheridan, was born on 28 September 1971; after being divorced from their respective spouses, Blackwood and Lowell were married, on 21 October 1972. They lived in London and at Milgate House in Kent. The sequence of poems in Lowell's The Dolphin (1973) provides a disrupted narrative of his involvement with Blackwood and the birth of their son (Lowell's friend Elizabeth Bishop strongly advised Lowell not to publish the book, advice he ignored).
Lowell suffered from bipolar disorder, and his manic episodes prompted in Blackwood distress, confusion, feelings of uselessness, and fear about the effects on their children. Her anxieties, alcohol-related illnesses, and late-night tirades exacerbated his condition.[citation needed] In 1977, Lowell died, reportedly clutching one of Freud's portraits of Blackwood, in the back seat of a New York cab, on his way back to his second wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick.[5] This loss was followed a year later by the death of her daughter Natalya, from a drug overdose at the age of 18.
In 1977, to avoid taxation, Blackwood left England and went to live in County Kildare, Ireland, in an apartment at the great Georgian mansion of Castletown House, which was owned by her cousin Desmond Guinness. Ten years later, in 1987, she returned to the United States, settling in a large, comfortable house in Sag Harbor, Long Island, where, although her abilities were reduced by alcoholism, she continued to write; her work of that era includes two vivid memoirs, of Princess Margaret and of Francis Bacon, published in The New York Review of Books in 1992.[citation needed]
According to those close to her, she never lost her macabre sense of humour, even during her final illness. British writer and essayist Anna Haycraft, a staunch Roman Catholic, brought holy water from Lourdes, which accidentally spilled on Blackwood's deathbed sheets; "I might have caught my death", she muttered.[citation needed]
Death
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On 14 February 1996, Blackwood died from cancer, at the Mayfair Hotel on Park Avenue in New York City, aged 64. She was survived by her two younger daughters: Evgenia Citkowitz Sands (b. 1963), wife of actor Julian Sands, and Ivana (b. 1966); by her son, Sheridan Lowell; by her sister, Lady Perdita Blackwood; and by her mother, the former Maureen Guinness, who died two years later, aged 91. She was predeceased by her father, Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (1909–1945); by her eldest daughter, Natalya (1960–1978); and by her brother, Sheridan Dufferin, 5th Marquess (1938–1988).
Titled Bohemian; Caroline Blackwood
Posted 08 Jun 2023 by MARKFLANDERS38
By MICHAEL KIMMELMANAPRIL 2, 1995
NYT
WHEN LADY Caroline Blackwood, the Irish writer and Guinness heiress, was living in Paris in the early 1950's, she and her first husband, the painter Lucian Freud, were invited to visit Picasso.
"Picasso got one of his followers to ask Lucian if he would like to see Picasso's paintings," Blackwood says. "Of course, Lucian said yes. Meanwhile Picasso asked me if I wanted to see his doves: he had this spiral iron staircase leading to the roof, and off we go, winding round and round to the top, until we reached these doves in cages and all around us was the best view of Paris, the best. Whereupon immediately, standing on this tiny, tiny space, way above the city, Picasso does a complete plunge at me. All I felt was fear. I kept saying, 'Go down the stairs, go down.' He said, 'No, no, we are together above the roofs of Paris.' It was so absurd, and to me Picasso was just as old as the hills, an old letch, genius or no.
"I wonder," Blackwood pauses to ask, "what we were supposed to have done if I accepted? There was no space to make love, with all those doves. And think how many other people he had up there. Did they go through with it? And technically, how did they go through with it? And with the husband downstairs?"
She then adds a coda: "Lucian got a call out of nowhere from a mistress of Picasso's who asked him if he could come round and paint her. She wanted to make Picasso jealous. Lucian very politely said maybe he could paint her portrait later, but not now because he happened to be in the midst of doing his wife's portrait."
That picture, Blackwood says, turned out to be Freud's "Girl in Bed." Years later, in 1977, it played a curious part in the death of the poet Robert Lowell, another of Lady Caroline's husbands. Their marriage was in tatters when, as the story goes, he left her in Ireland and returned to the United States. After Lowell's taxi arrived at his apartment on West 67th Street, the driver found him slumped over. A doorman summoned Elizabeth Hardwick, the writer and editor whom Lowell had left to marry Blackwood; she happened to live in the same building. Hardwick opened the taxi door -- only to be confronted with her ex-husband's corpse. He was holding "Girl in Bed."
With its macabre humor, the Lowell story is one Blackwood might have written if she hadn't lived through it. "I think it's partly Irish," Blackwood says over lunch at Coco Pazzo, an elegant restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan. "Irish people are very funny but have this tragic sense.
"As Cal wrote," she continues, referring to Lowell, "if there's light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train. He was a humorous poet, you know, though people don't ever say that about him. He also wrote that in the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet, which is very funny, don't you think?"
BLACKWOOD IS A DELICATE WOMAN OF 63, SLIGHTLY stooped yet graceful, with a husky, smoker's voice. She is dressed in a loose-fitting black pants suit, the sort of unbourgeois outfit that pegs her immediately as an upper-class bohemian. Her extraordinary eyes -- big opalescent pools, which Freud made into giant spheres in his hypnotic portraits -- are the principal signs of the beauty she was in her youth. Her looks are striking but weatherbeaten.
It's not just that Blackwood likes to drink. She has also endured a series of Job-like catastrophes over the years: the death of her second husband, the American composer and pianist Israel Citkowitz; Lowell's crippling manic depression and early death; the death from AIDS of her brother, Sheridan, to whom she was very close; the death of her eldest daughter, Natalya, after a drug overdose, and her own bout with cervical cancer, for which she had an operation that left her in constant pain.
Though on one level she thrives on tragedy -- is even defined by it -- Blackwood can't abide maudlin sentiments; bringing up these episodes with her elicits an awkward silence. At first during lunch she gives only clipped responses to questions or just nods in agreement. She orders one vodka after another, tonic on the side. She is more comfortable discussing her new book, "The Last of the Duchess." But still she's cautious.
She also greets with silence a question about her flamboyant socialite mother, Maureen, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. When Maureen was young she reportedly once gave Sir Oswald Mosley, the English fascist, a black eye after he made a pass at her in Antibes. In recent years, though vastly rich, she has complained that her children haven't helped support her and the several houses she lives in. The Picasso biographer John Richardson recalls that Maureen's son, Sheridan, used to bemoan having to help pay for her villa in Sardinia, which he nicknamed the Villa Costalota. Lately, Blackwood, her sister and sister-in-law have wrangled with Maureen over the disposition of $24 million in Guinness inheritance money. The dispute, ultimately settled in Maureen's favor, underscores the nearly nonexistent relationship between Caroline and her mother, a topic Caroline prefers not to discuss.
Gradually, though, as she relaxes, Blackwood emerges as a strangely dramatic woman: intense and vulnerable, with quirky affectations like abbreviating words (Champagne becoming "champ"), a dark, razor-sharp sense of humor and an offbeat sensibility.
Geordie Greig, the New York correspondent for The Sunday Times of London and a family friend, gives an apt description of her: "When she calls on the phone she'll say 'Hiiii, it's Carrr-oline,' and there's always that enigmatic, Eartha Kitt-like purr. But in conversation she's unpredictable. Caroline's physical demeanor is so unforceful that the force of her words, which can be lethally accurate, is made doubly strong. She has an artist's sensibility to sift through any social niceties and get straight to the point. Even with her house on Long Island nothing follows the rules. Lunch might be a huge feast of lobsters and Champagne, or her fridge may be completely out of food."
Over the years, Blackwood has moved easily among several worlds: from the insular, horsy Anglo-Irish upper classes to the hard-drinking smart set of postwar England, to the liberal intelligentsia of New York City in the 1960's and 70's. She has lived in the United States for much of the last 35 years. Nowadays, she's often with her children, who also live here. Her son, Sheridan Lowell, 23, works for a small publishing firm in Manhattan. Her youngest daughter, Ivana Lowell (she has taken her stepfather's name) is 28; she works for the publishing arm of the media company Miramax and has become a lively presence in New York society since moving from London a few years ago. Another daughter, Evgenia Citkowitz, 30, is a screenwriter in Los Angeles married to the English actor Julian Sands.
Blackwood spends many mornings in her kitchen writing longhand. A broken back she suffered when she was young has made it impossible for her to type. She has published nine books that have been richly admired in Britain, where she is best known. They include collections of short stories and essays of stringent, sly, entirely anticonformist social criticism. Her novels are stylish, remorseless, frightening and wickedly funny. They can sometimes remind you a little of Beckett, except that Blackwood's nihilistic sensibility is more gothic than his: it's Beckett crossed with Bram Stoker.
"The Last of the Duchess" is her mesmeric account of a vain attempt to visit the ailing Duchess of Windsor in 1980 and of Blackwood's encounters with the Duchess's ruthless and highly powerful octogenarian lawyer, Maitre Suzanne Blum, a woman obsessed with her client to the point of erotic fantasy. Blum was the Cerberus at the Duchess's door, blocking even old friends from contacting her, according to Blackwood. Was the sick Duchess tortured by being kept alive, Blackwood wondered, or might she even be dead? Was Blum only saying she was alive so that she could sell the royal jewels and claim the money as her legal fee?
HOW MUCH OF THE book is Irish blarney? After all, the story of Blum, like so many of the stories Blackwood tells, is so bizarre it sounds like fiction. In a sense, though, that's Blackwood's point. She writes as she speaks, with a dramatic flair that can seduce you even as you wonder how precise she is. (Freud, for instance, recalls the Picasso incident very differently.) "You can't really get the truth about anybody from an interview," Blackwood says. "It's all fiction in a way."
She portrays herself in her books as a wide-eyed innocent, astonished by the horrors around her. In person, though, she has a disconcerting habit of staring at you, coolly sizing you up while she picks demurely at her meal. You can see how she could drive Maitre Blum mad.
"If it's berserk behavior I like it as a subject," Blackwood says. "If you write about bland people there's no story, is there? I hated Blum and was really scared of her," Blackwood recalls, "but she thought I was a complete idiot because I acted the dumb journalist with her a bit. She wouldn't even have seen me if I didn't have a title. On the other hand she wouldn't have been so rude if I were a crowned head."
Her full name is Lady Caroline Hamilton Temple Blackwood: she's a descendant on her father's side of the great 18th-century dramatist and wit Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She is a Guinness on her mother's side. (She says she finds stout undrinkable.)
"Brewers or bankers, aristocrats or plutocrats, the Guinnesses are apt to be a law unto themselves," John Richardson says. "This Anglo-Irish dynasty is famously cultivated, brilliant, profligate, witty and beguiling. Caution and abstemiousness are not their forte. Caroline upholds her family's reputation for courage, eccentricity and subversive humor. She most certainly does not hold with the ultraconservative views of some of her cousins."
She grew up in the ancestral stone mansion called Clandeboye, in County Down in Northern Ireland. "My great-grandfather built a wing every time he had another child," Blackwood says. "You didn't build a room then, you built a wing. It was terribly rundown when I was a child, the typical joke Irish house with all the pails to catch dripping water all over the place."
Her great-grandfather, Lord Dufferin, was an eminent Victorian, rumored to have been Disraeli's illegitimate son. "I think he was," says Blackwood, mischievously. "Why would a Scottish landowner have a son who looked like Disraeli? He once got up in the House of Lords and denied that he was Disraeli's son, because it was terrible for his mother's honor, but that sort of implies that he was, doesn't it?"
Queen Victoria made him Viceroy of India, where he used to sit on his throne, fanned by peacock feathers, while processions of rajahs paid him homage. At Clandeboye he built a stone shrine to his mother, an immense architectural folly called Helen's Tower that inspired poems by Browning, Kipling and Tennyson. "Kipling loved my great-grandfather and wrote lots of very bad poems to him," Blackwood says. "He had a fatal effect on poets. I mean, the Tennyson poem is a jingle that goes on and on." She discovered not long ago that Helen's Tower inspired a World War I memorial in France to Irish soldiers. "I mean, Helen's Tower is really odd, isn't it? Victorians thought it was fine someone building a tower to his mother while she was alive, but can you imagine doing it now, in post-Freudian times?"
Blackwood's father, Basil, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was a close friend of Evelyn Waugh and part of the glittering circle he recalled in "Brideshead Revisited." When the Marquess was killed in 1943 by the Japanese in the jungle in Burma, he was 35. Blackwood was 12 at the time and has only dim memories of her father.
Like other women of her class she skipped college; instead she went to work for Claud Cockburn, an influential left-wing journalist who wrote for, among others, The Times Literary Supplement. "Claud was a reviewer for TLS and I read books for him, because in those days the reviews were unsigned," Blackwood says. "It was really corrupt but I was extremely diligent."
She recalls meeting Freud around then, at a party memorable for the fact that the painter Francis Bacon caused a row when he hooted down Princess Margaret, who had just started singing "Let's Do It." Blackwood becomes testy when asked if a reference to her in a recent book as Margaret's lady-in-waiting is true. "That's a lie and I'll sue you if you say it," she says, only half kidding and appalled that anyone could imagine her in such a role.
She changes the subject. "Lucian was fantastic, very brilliant, incredibly beautiful, though not in a movie-star way," she says. "I remember he was very mannered, he wore these long side whiskers, which nobody else had then. And he wore funny trousers, deliberately. He wanted to stand out in a crowd, and he did."
When Freud and Blackwood returned to London from Paris, they settled into the circle that included Bacon, Cyril Connolly and the other artists and writers who gathered nightly at the fabled Gargoyle and Colony Clubs. "As a concept the Gargoyle was brilliant," Blackwood states. "O.K., everyone there would be a bit drunk. But you could wander in any night and find the cleverest people in England. After the war it was completely normal for intellectuals to knock each other down if someone had written a bad review or taken someone's girl. Then they always sent flowers the next day."
GRADUALLY HER marriage to Freud crumbled. When she left him, he was devastated. Blackwood says only that "Lucian and I couldn't be married, not endlessly. We were both too restless."
She fled to Los Angeles, installed herself at the Chateau Marmont and got a tiny part in the television series "Have Gun Will Travel." But she hated the city. The best thing to come out of it was that Stephen Spender asked her to do an article for Encounter magazine about California beatniks. It turned out to be a sendup that launched her writing career. Beatnik culture, she wrote, "has all the trappings of the subversive, the meeting in the darkened cellar, the conspiratorial whisper behind the candle in the Chianti bottle, the nihilistic mutter, without the mildest element of subversion."
Not long after Blackwood moved from Los Angeles to New York she met Israel Citkowitz, a former student of Aaron Copland, some 20 years her senior. They married. Today Blackwood speaks warmly but vaguely about Citkowitz. She describes him as "gorgeous and brilliant, which wasn't a bad combination." But they separated after a few years and she became involved with Robert Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books. Through Silvers she met Lowell.
Citkowitz and she remained friendly until he died, and he sometimes lived in the London house she shared with Lowell in the 1970's, helping her to care for the children during Lowell's bouts of madness. Lowell would write a poem to Citkowitz, lines of which Blackwood used as an epitaph on Citkowitz's grave. Her three daughters were born while she was still married to him. She had a son, Sheridan, by Lowell in 1971.
In 1972 she and Lowell flew to Santo Domingo for a joint divorce-marriage. "Nobody could understand the service because it was all in Spanish," she remembers. "It was in a hut, with chickens coming in and out. You'd move to one hut and they'd say you're divorced. Then to another hut where they'd say you're married. All the time there was lots of loud typing. So romantic."
It pains Blackwood that her marriage with Lowell is often described solely in terms of his breakup with Hardwick and illness. She recalls periods at Milgate, their house in Kent, as idyllic. But she acknowledges that Lowell's episodes of manic depression became increasingly unmanageable.
"I wanted Israel to be in the house because I couldn't deal with it alone," she explains. "Not that Cal would have hurt the children, he wasn't murderous. But I had to watch him all day and all night because a manic never sleeps." One day she found him hacking holes in the wall with a carving knife. He told her he was looking for Etruscan treasures. "It was a horrible affliction to not know when your mind was suddenly going to go -- particularly when you had got this huge mind."
Then Lowell died; then Natalya. Through it all, Blackwood managed to turn out a remarkable string of books. One of them, "On the Perimeter," was a report about the women who had camped for years in the mud at Greenham Common in England to protest the American nuclear missile base there. "The Stepdaughter" was a short epistolary novel about an abusive woman abandoned by her husband and left with his hideous daughter. Another novel, "The Fate of Mary Rose," is a chilling tale about an increasingly deranged mother's fatal obsession with her daughter's safety.
Blackwood even wrote a lighthearted cookbook with her friend the English novelist Anna Haycraft (who wrote under the name of Alice Thomas Ellis) that featured celebrity recipes. Blackwood asked Francis Bacon for a recipe. "I doubt anybody had ever asked him for one before. But he was a fantastic cook, and he had this very smart recipe for mayonnaise. Then it turned out that he was such a perfectionist that he kept holding up the publication to make revisions. Eventually Anna called in a panic, saying she'd forgotten to put in Francis's very last revision before the book went to press. 'It had less to do with salt and more to do with vinegar,' she said. Francis brought 100 copies of the book anyway."
In 1980, Blackwood began work on "The Last of the Duchess." "It was pathetic Blum being so old and in love with the Duchess," Blackwood muses. "What a stupid thing to do. But of course the Duchess was ridiculous, too. A more noble figure than she wouldn't have let this lawyer take over her life." The paradox, as Blackwood implies in the book, is that the socialite Duchess spent her last days in solitary confinement, and -- considering the Windsors' connection to Hitler -- that her jailer was a Jew.
Writing kept Blackwood going through one calamity after another -- until the cancer a few years ago. "I really don't like talking about it," she says, after a long pause. "I just kept on trying to do what I do, no matter what life did to me. But after the cancer I became so used to the idea that I would be dead that I had reconciled myself to the idea of not writing anymore. Once you've accepted you're dead, why write?
"It took me a long time to get back to writing. For a while I didn't have any ideas, none." She smiles. "But now I try and write all morning. It may be so awful that I put my pencil through the whole thing and start over the next day. But at least I've got plenty of ideas."
ding the main story
With its macabre humor, the Lowell story is one Blackwood might have written if she hadn't lived through it. "I think it's partly Irish," Blackwood says over lunch at Coco Pazzo, an elegant restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan. "Irish people are very funny but have this tragic sense.
"As Cal wrote," she continues, referring to Lowell, "if there's light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train. He was a humorous poet, you know, though people don't ever say that about him. He also wrote that in the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet, which is very funny, don't you think?"
BLACKWOOD IS A DELICATE WOMAN OF 63, SLIGHTLY stooped yet graceful, with a husky, smoker's voice. She is dressed in a loose-fitting black pants suit, the sort of unbourgeois outfit that pegs her immediately as an upper-class bohemian. Her extraordinary eyes -- big opalescent pools, which Freud made into giant spheres in his hypnotic portraits -- are the principal signs of the beauty she was in her youth. Her looks are striking but weatherbeaten.
It's not just that Blackwood likes to drink. She has also endured a series of Job-like catastrophes over the years: the death of her second husband, the American composer and pianist Israel Citkowitz; Lowell's crippling manic depression and early death; the death from AIDS of her brother, Sheridan, to whom she was very close; the death of her eldest daughter, Natalya, after a drug overdose, and her own bout with cervical cancer, for which she had an operation that left her in constant pain.
Though on one level she thrives on tragedy -- is even defined by it -- Blackwood can't abide maudlin sentiments; bringing up these episodes with her elicits an awkward silence. At first during lunch she gives only clipped responses to questions or just nods in agreement. She orders one vodka after another, tonic on the side. She is more comfortable discussing her new book, "The Last of the Duchess." But still she's cautious.
She also greets with silence a question about her flamboyant socialite mother, Maureen, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. When Maureen was young she reportedly once gave Sir Oswald Mosley, the English fascist, a black eye after he made a pass at her in Antibes. In recent years, though vastly rich, she has complained that her children haven't helped support her and the several houses she lives in. The Picasso biographer John Richardson recalls that Maureen's son, Sheridan, used to bemoan having to help pay for her villa in Sardinia, which he nicknamed the Villa Costalota. Lately, Blackwood, her sister and sister-in-law have wrangled with Maureen over the disposition of $24 million in Guinness inheritance money. The dispute, ultimately settled in Maureen's favor, underscores the nearly nonexistent relationship between Caroline and her mother, a topic Caroline prefers not to discuss.
Gradually, though, as she relaxes, Blackwood emerges as a strangely dramatic woman: intense and vulnerable, with quirky affectations like abbreviating words (Champagne becoming "champ"), a dark, razor-sharp sense of humor and an offbeat sensibility.
Geordie Greig, the New York correspondent for The Sunday Times of London and a family friend, gives an apt description of her: "When she calls on the phone she'll say 'Hiiii, it's Carrr-oline,' and there's always that enigmatic, Eartha Kitt-like purr. But in conversation she's unpredictable. Caroline's physical demeanor is so unforceful that the force of her words, which can be lethally accurate, is made doubly strong. She has an artist's sensibility to sift through any social niceties and get straight to the point. Even with her house on Long Island nothing follows the rules. Lunch might be a huge feast of lobsters and Champagne, or her fridge may be completely out of food."
Over the years, Blackwood has moved easily among several worlds: from the insular, horsy Anglo-Irish upper classes to the hard-drinking smart set of postwar England, to the liberal intelligentsia of New York City in the 1960's and 70's. She has lived in the United States for much of the last 35 years. Nowadays, she's often with her children, who also live here. Her son, Sheridan Lowell, 23, works for a small publishing firm in Manhattan. Her youngest daughter, Ivana Lowell (she has taken her stepfather's name) is 28; she works for the publishing arm of the media company Miramax and has become a lively presence in New York society since moving from London a few years ago. Another daughter, Evgenia Citkowitz, 30, is a screenwriter in Los Angeles married to the English actor Julian Sands.
Blackwood spends many mornings in her kitchen writing longhand. A broken back she suffered when she was young has made it impossible for her to type. She has published nine books that have been richly admired in Britain, where she is best known. They include collections of short stories and essays of stringent, sly, entirely anticonformist social criticism. Her novels are stylish, remorseless, frightening and wickedly funny. They can sometimes remind you a little of Beckett, except that Blackwood's nihilistic sensibility is more gothic than his: it's Beckett crossed with Bram Stoker.
"The Last of the Duchess" is her mesmeric account of a vain attempt to visit the ailing Duchess of Windsor in 1980 and of Blackwood's encounters with the Duchess's ruthless and highly powerful octogenarian lawyer, Maitre Suzanne Blum, a woman obsessed with her client to the point of erotic fantasy. Blum was the Cerberus at the Duchess's door, blocking even old friends from contacting her, according to Blackwood. Was the sick Duchess tortured by being kept alive, Blackwood wondered, or might she even be dead? Was Blum only saying she was alive so that she could sell the royal jewels and claim the money as her legal fee?
HOW MUCH OF THE book is Irish blarney? After all, the story of Blum, like so many of the stories Blackwood tells, is so bizarre it sounds like fiction. In a sense, though, that's Blackwood's point. She writes as she speaks, with a dramatic flair that can seduce you even as you wonder how precise she is. (Freud, for instance, recalls the Picasso incident very differently.) "You can't really get the truth about anybody from an interview," Blackwood says. "It's all fiction in a way."
She portrays herself in her books as a wide-eyed innocent, astonished by the horrors around her. In person, though, she has a disconcerting habit of staring at you, coolly sizing you up while she picks demurely at her meal. You can see how she could drive Maitre Blum mad.
"If it's berserk behavior I like it as a subject," Blackwood says. "If you write about bland people there's no story, is there? I hated Blum and was really scared of her," Blackwood recalls, "but she thought I was a complete idiot because I acted the dumb journalist with her a bit. She wouldn't even have seen me if I didn't have a title. On the other hand she wouldn't have been so rude if I were a crowned head."
Her full name is Lady Caroline Hamilton Temple Blackwood: she's a descendant on her father's side of the great 18th-century dramatist and wit Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She is a Guinness on her mother's side. (She says she finds stout undrinkable.)
"Brewers or bankers, aristocrats or plutocrats, the Guinnesses are apt to be a law unto themselves," John Richardson says. "This Anglo-Irish dynasty is famously cultivated, brilliant, profligate, witty and beguiling. Caution and abstemiousness are not their forte. Caroline upholds her family's reputation for courage, eccentricity and subversive humor. She most certainly does not hold with the ultraconservative views of some of her cousins."
She grew up in the ancestral stone mansion called Clandeboye, in County Down in Northern Ireland. "My great-grandfather built a wing every time he had another child," Blackwood says. "You didn't build a room then, you built a wing. It was terribly rundown when I was a child, the typical joke Irish house with all the pails to catch dripping water all over the place."
Her great-grandfather, Lord Dufferin, was an eminent Victorian, rumored to have been Disraeli's illegitimate son. "I think he was," says Blackwood, mischievously. "Why would a Scottish landowner have a son who looked like Disraeli? He once got up in the House of Lords and denied that he was Disraeli's son, because it was terrible for his mother's honor, but that sort of implies that he was, doesn't it?"
Queen Victoria made him Viceroy of India, where he used to sit on his throne, fanned by peacock feathers, while processions of rajahs paid him homage. At Clandeboye he built a stone shrine to his mother, an immense architectural folly called Helen's Tower that inspired poems by Browning, Kipling and Tennyson. "Kipling loved my great-grandfather and wrote lots of very bad poems to him," Blackwood says. "He had a fatal effect on poets. I mean, the Tennyson poem is a jingle that goes on and on." She discovered not long ago that Helen's Tower inspired a World War I memorial in France to Irish soldiers. "I mean, Helen's Tower is really odd, isn't it? Victorians thought it was fine someone building a tower to his mother while she was alive, but can you imagine doing it now, in post-Freudian times?"
Blackwood's father, Basil, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was a close friend of Evelyn Waugh and part of the glittering circle he recalled in "Brideshead Revisited." When the Marquess was killed in 1943 by the Japanese in the jungle in Burma, he was 35. Blackwood was 12 at the time and has only dim memories of her father.
Like other women of her class she skipped college; instead she went to work for Claud Cockburn, an influential left-wing journalist who wrote for, among others, The Times Literary Supplement. "Claud was a reviewer for TLS and I read books for him, because in those days the reviews were unsigned," Blackwood says. "It was really corrupt but I was extremely diligent."
She recalls meeting Freud around then, at a party memorable for the fact that the painter Francis Bacon caused a row when he hooted down Princess Margaret, who had just started singing "Let's Do It." Blackwood becomes testy when asked if a reference to her in a recent book as Margaret's lady-in-waiting is true. "That's a lie and I'll sue you if you say it," she says, only half kidding and appalled that anyone could imagine her in such a role.
She changes the subject. "Lucian was fantastic, very brilliant, incredibly beautiful, though not in a movie-star way," she says. "I remember he was very mannered, he wore these long side whiskers, which nobody else had then. And he wore funny trousers, deliberately. He wanted to stand out in a crowd, and he did."
When Freud and Blackwood returned to London from Paris, they settled into the circle that included Bacon, Cyril Connolly and the other artists and writers who gathered nightly at the fabled Gargoyle and Colony Clubs. "As a concept the Gargoyle was brilliant," Blackwood states. "O.K., everyone there would be a bit drunk. But you could wander in any night and find the cleverest people in England. After the war it was completely normal for intellectuals to knock each other down if someone had written a bad review or taken someone's girl. Then they always sent flowers the next day."
GRADUALLY HER marriage to Freud crumbled. When she left him, he was devastated. Blackwood says only that "Lucian and I couldn't be married, not endlessly. We were both too restless."
She fled to Los Angeles, installed herself at the Chateau Marmont and got a tiny part in the television series "Have Gun Will Travel." But she hated the city. The best thing to come out of it was that Stephen Spender asked her to do an article for Encounter magazine about California beatniks. It turned out to be a sendup that launched her writing career. Beatnik culture, she wrote, "has all the trappings of the subversive, the meeting in the darkened cellar, the conspiratorial whisper behind the candle in the Chianti bottle, the nihilistic mutter, without the mildest element of subversion."
Not long after Blackwood moved from Los Angeles to New York she met Israel Citkowitz, a former student of Aaron Copland, some 20 years her senior. They married. Today Blackwood speaks warmly but vaguely about Citkowitz. She describes him as "gorgeous and brilliant, which wasn't a bad combination." But they separated after a few years and she became involved with Robert Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books. Through Silvers she met Lowell.
Citkowitz and she remained friendly until he died, and he sometimes lived in the London house she shared with Lowell in the 1970's, helping her to care for the children during Lowell's bouts of madness. Lowell would write a poem to Citkowitz, lines of which Blackwood used as an epitaph on Citkowitz's grave. Her three daughters were born while she was still married to him. She had a son, Sheridan, by Lowell in 1971.
In 1972 she and Lowell flew to Santo Domingo for a joint divorce-marriage. "Nobody could understand the service because it was all in Spanish," she remembers. "It was in a hut, with chickens coming in and out. You'd move to one hut and they'd say you're divorced. Then to another hut where they'd say you're married. All the time there was lots of loud typing. So romantic."
It pains Blackwood that her marriage with Lowell is often described solely in terms of his breakup with Hardwick and illness. She recalls periods at Milgate, their house in Kent, as idyllic. But she acknowledges that Lowell's episodes of manic depression became increasingly unmanageable.
"I wanted Israel to be in the house because I couldn't deal with it alone," she explains. "Not that Cal would have hurt the children, he wasn't murderous. But I had to watch him all day and all night because a manic never sleeps." One day she found him hacking holes in the wall with a carving knife. He told her he was looking for Etruscan treasures. "It was a horrible affliction to not know when your mind was suddenly going to go -- particularly when you had got this huge mind."
Then Lowell died; then Natalya. Through it all, Blackwood managed to turn out a remarkable string of books. One of them, "On the Perimeter," was a report about the women who had camped for years in the mud at Greenham Common in England to protest the American nuclear missile base there. "The Stepdaughter" was a short epistolary novel about an abusive woman abandoned by her husband and left with his hideous daughter. Another novel, "The Fate of Mary Rose," is a chilling tale about an increasingly deranged mother's fatal obsession with her daughter's safety.
Blackwood even wrote a lighthearted cookbook with her friend the English novelist Anna Haycraft (who wrote under the name of Alice Thomas Ellis) that featured celebrity recipes. Blackwood asked Francis Bacon for a recipe. "I doubt anybody had ever asked him for one before. But he was a fantastic cook, and he had this very smart recipe for mayonnaise. Then it turned out that he was such a perfectionist that he kept holding up the publication to make revisions. Eventually Anna called in a panic, saying she'd forgotten to put in Francis's very last revision before the book went to press. 'It had less to do with salt and more to do with vinegar,' she said. Francis brought 100 copies of the book anyway."
In 1980, Blackwood began work on "The Last of the Duchess." "It was pathetic Blum being so old and in love with the Duchess," Blackwood muses. "What a stupid thing to do. But of course the Duchess was ridiculous, too. A more noble figure than she wouldn't have let this lawyer take over her life." The paradox, as Blackwood implies in the book, is that the socialite Duchess spent her last days in solitary confinement, and -- considering the Windsors' connection to Hitler -- that her jailer was a Jew.
Writing kept Blackwood going through one calamity after another -- until the cancer a few years ago. "I really don't like talking about it," she says, after a long pause. "I just kept on trying to do what I do, no matter what life did to me. But after the cancer I became so used to the idea that I would be dead that I had reconciled myself to the idea of not writing anymore. Once you've accepted you're dead, why write?
"It took me a long time to get back to writing. For a while I didn't have any ideas, none." She smiles. "But now I try and write all morning. It may be so awful that I put my pencil through the whole thing and start over the next day. But at least I've got plenty of ideas."
BIO WIKIPEDIA
Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (16 July 1931 – 14 February 1996) was a writer, and the eldest child of The 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and the brewery heiress Maureen Guinness.
A well-known figure in the literary world through her journalism and her novels, Lady Caroline Blackwood was equally well known for her high-profile marriages, first to the artist Lucian Freud, then to the composer Israel Citkowitz and finally to the poet Robert Lowell, who described her as "a mermaid who dines upon the bones of her winded lovers". Her novels are known for their wit and intelligence, and one in particular is scathingly autobiographical in describing her unhappy childhood.
She was born into an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family from Ulster at 4 Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge, her parents' London home. She was, she admitted, "scantily educated" at, among other schools, Rockport School (County Down) and Downham (Essex). After a finishing school in Oxford she was presented as a debutante in 1949 at a ball held at Londonderry House.
Career
Blackwood's first job was with Hulton Press as a secretary, but she was soon given small reporting jobs by Claud Cockburn. Ann Fleming, the wife of "James Bond" author Ian Fleming, introduced Lady Caroline to Lucian Freud, and the two eloped to Paris in 1952. In Paris she met Picasso (and reportedly refused to wash for three days after he drew on her hands and nails). She married Freud on 9 December 1953 and became a striking figure in London's bohemian circles; the Gargoyle Club and Colony Room replaced Belgraviadrawing rooms as her haunts. She sat for several of Freud's finest portraits, including Girl in Bed, which testifies to her alluring beauty. She was impressed by the ruthless vision of Freud and Francis Bacon and her later fiction was a literary version of their view of humanity.
In the early 1960s, Blackwood began contributing to Encounter, London Magazine, and other periodicals on subjects such as beatniks, Ulster sectarianism, feminist theatre and New York free schools. Although these articles were elegant, minutely observed and sometimes wickedly funny, they had, according to Christopher Isherwood, a persistent flaw: "she is only capable of thinking negatively. Confronted by a phenomenon, she asks herself: what is wrong with it?"[1] During the mid-1960s, she had an affair with Robert Silvers, the founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books.
Her third husband, Robert Lowell, was a crucial influence on her talents as a novelist. He encouraged her to write her first book, For All That I Found There (1973), the title of which is a line from the Percy French song "The Mountains of Mourne", and which includes a mordant memoir of her daughter's treatment in a burns unit. Blackwood's first novel The Stepdaughter (1976) appeared three years later to much acclaim, and is a concise and gripping monologue by a rich, self-pitying woman deserted by her husband in a plush New York apartment and tormented by her fat stepdaughter. It won the David Higham Prize for best first novel. Great Granny Webster followed in 1977 and was partly derived on her own miserable childhood, and depicted an austere and loveless old woman's destructive impact on her daughter and granddaughter. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize.
In 1980 came The Last of the Duchess, a study of the relations between the Duchess of Windsor and her cunning lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum; it could not be published until after Blum's death in 1995. Her third novel The Fate of Mary Rose (1981) describes the effect on a Kent village of the rape and torture of a ten-year-old girl named Maureen and is narrated by a selfish historian whose obsessions destroy his domestic life. After this came a collection of five short stories, Good Night Sweet Ladies (1983), followed by her final novel, Corrigan (1984), which was the least successful and depicts the effects on a depressed widow of a charming, energetic but sinister cripple who erupts into her life.
Blackwood's later books were based on interviews and vignettes, including On The Perimeter (1984), which focused her attentions on the women's peace encampment at the Greenham Common air base in Berkshire, and In The Pink (1987), which was a reflective, ghoulish book looking at the hunting and the hunt saboteur fraternities and exposed the many obsessive personalities of both fox-hunters and animal rights activists.
Personal life
Blackwood's marriage to Lucian Freud disintegrated soon after they married in 1953; it was dissolved in 1958, in Mexico.[citation needed] In 1957, Blackwood moved to New York City and studied acting at the Stella Adler school. She also went to Hollywood and appeared in several films.
On 15 August 1959, she married the pianist Israel Citkowitz (1909–1974), 22 years her senior and born in the same year as her late father; they had three daughters. By 1966, when their youngest, Ivana, was born, their marriage was over, although Citkowitz continued to live nearby and served as a nanny-duenna[citation needed] until his death. During the mid-1960s, Blackwood had an affair with Robert Silvers, a founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books, who stayed close to the family thereafter.
According to Ivana, both she and Silvers suspected that he was her biological father. However, a deathbed admission by Blackwood revealed that Ivana's biological father was another boyfriend: the screenwriter Ivan Moffat, a grandson of actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree.
In 1970, Blackwood returned to London and, in April, began a relationship with the poet Robert Lowell, then a visiting professor at All Souls College, Oxford. Their son, Sheridan, was born on 28 September 1971; after being divorced from their respective spouses, Blackwood and Lowell were married, on 21 October 1972. They lived in London and at Milgate House in Kent. The sequence of poems in Lowell's The Dolphin (1973) provides a disrupted narrative of his involvement with Blackwood and the birth of their son (Lowell's friend Elizabeth Bishop strongly advised Lowell not to publish the book, advice he ignored).
Lowell suffered from bipolar disorder, and his manic episodes prompted in Blackwood distress, confusion, feelings of uselessness, and fear about the effects on their children. Her anxieties, alcohol-related illnesses, and late-night tirades exacerbated his condition.[citation needed] In 1977, Lowell died, reportedly clutching one of Freud's portraits of Blackwood, in the back seat of a New York cab, on his way back to his second wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. This loss was followed a year later by the death of her daughter Natalya, from a drug overdose at the age of 18.
In 1977, to avoid taxation, Blackwood left England and went to live in County Kildare, Ireland, in an apartment at the great Georgian mansion of Castletown House, which was owned by her cousin Desmond Guinness. Ten years later, in 1987, she returned to the United States, settling in a large, comfortable house in Sag Harbor, Long Island, where, although her abilities were reduced by alcoholism, she continued to write; her work of that era includes two vivid memoirs, of Princess Margaret and of Francis Bacon, published in The New York Review of Books in 1992.
According to those close to her, she never lost her macabre sense of humour, even during her final illness. British writer and essayist Anna Haycraft, a staunch Roman Catholic, brought holy water from Lourdes, which accidentally spilled on Blackwood's deathbed sheets; "I might have caught my death", she muttered.
Death
On 14 February 1996, Blackwood died from cancer, at the Mayfair Hotel on Park Avenue in New York City, aged 64. She was survived by her two younger daughters: Evgenia Citkowitz Sands (b. 1963), wife of actor Julian Sands, and Ivana (b. 1966); by her son, Sheridan Lowell; by her sister, Lady Perdita Blackwood; and by her mother, the former Maureen Guinness, who died two years later, aged 91. She was predeceased by her father, Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (1909–1945); by her eldest daughter, Natalya (1960–1978); and by her brother, Sheridan Dufferin, 5th Marquess (1938–1988).
New York Times -
WHEN LADY Caroline Blackwood, the Irish writer and Guinness heiress, was living in Paris in the early 1950's, she and her first husband, the painter Lucian Freud, were invited to visit Picasso.
"Picasso got one of his followers to ask Lucian if he would like to see Picasso's paintings," Blackwood says. "Of course, Lucian said yes. Meanwhile Picasso asked me if I wanted to see his doves: he had this spiral iron staircase leading to the roof, and off we go, winding round and round to the top, until we reached these doves in cages and all around us was the best view of Paris, the best. Whereupon immediately, standing on this tiny, tiny space, way above the city, Picasso does a complete plunge at me. All I felt was fear. I kept saying, 'Go down the stairs, go down.' He said, 'No, no, we are together above the roofs of Paris.' It was so absurd, and to me Picasso was just as old as the hills, an old letch, genius or no.
"I wonder," Blackwood pauses to ask, "what we were supposed to have done if I accepted? There was no space to make love, with all those doves. And think how many other people he had up there. Did they go through with it? And technically, how did they go through with it? And with the husband downstairs?"
She then adds a coda: "Lucian got a call out of nowhere from a mistress of Picasso's who asked him if he could come round and paint her. She wanted to make Picasso jealous. Lucian very politely said maybe he could paint her portrait later, but not now because he happened to be in the midst of doing his wife's portrait."
That picture, Blackwood says, turned out to be Freud's "Girl in Bed." Years later, in 1977, it played a curious part in the death of the poet Robert Lowell, another of Lady Caroline's husbands. Their marriage was in tatters when, as the story goes, he left her in Ireland and returned to the United States. After Lowell's taxi arrived at his apartment on West 67th Street, the driver found him slumped over. A doorman summoned Elizabeth Hardwick, the writer and editor whom Lowell had left to marry Blackwood; she happened to live in the same building. Hardwick opened the taxi door -- only to be confronted with her ex-husband's corpse. He was holding "Girl in Bed."
With its macabre humor, the Lowell story is one Blackwood might have written if she hadn't lived through it. "I think it's partly Irish," Blackwood says over lunch at Coco Pazzo, an elegant restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan. "Irish people are very funny but have this tragic sense.
"As Cal wrote," she continues, referring to Lowell, "if there's light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train. He was a humorous poet, you know, though people don't ever say that about him. He also wrote that in the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet, which is very funny, don't you think?"
BLACKWOOD IS A DELICATE WOMAN OF 63, SLIGHTLY stooped yet graceful, with a husky, smoker's voice. She is dressed in a loose-fitting black pants suit, the sort of unbourgeois outfit that pegs her immediately as an upper-class bohemian. Her extraordinary eyes -- big opalescent pools, which Freud made into giant spheres in his hypnotic portraits -- are the principal signs of the beauty she was in her youth. Her looks are striking but weatherbeaten.
It's not just that Blackwood likes to drink. She has also endured a series of Job-like catastrophes over the years: the death of her second husband, the American composer and pianist Israel Citkowitz; Lowell's crippling manic depression and early death; the death from AIDS of her brother, Sheridan, to whom she was very close; the death of her eldest daughter, Natalya, after a drug overdose, and her own bout with cervical cancer, for which she had an operation that left her in constant pain.
Though on one level she thrives on tragedy -- is even defined by it -- Blackwood can't abide maudlin sentiments; bringing up these episodes with her elicits an awkward silence. At first during lunch she gives only clipped responses to questions or just nods in agreement. She orders one vodka after another, tonic on the side. She is more comfortable discussing her new book, "The Last of the Duchess." But still she's cautious.
She also greets with silence a question about her flamboyant socialite mother, Maureen, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. When Maureen was young she reportedly once gave Sir Oswald Mosley, the English fascist, a black eye after he made a pass at her in Antibes. In recent years, though vastly rich, she has complained that her children haven't helped support her and the several houses she lives in. The Picasso biographer John Richardson recalls that Maureen's son, Sheridan, used to bemoan having to help pay for her villa in Sardinia, which he nicknamed the Villa Costalota. Lately, Blackwood, her sister and sister-in-law have wrangled with Maureen over the disposition of $24 million in Guinness inheritance money. The dispute, ultimately settled in Maureen's favor, underscores the nearly nonexistent relationship between Caroline and her mother, a topic Caroline prefers not to discuss.
Gradually, though, as she relaxes, Blackwood emerges as a strangely dramatic woman: intense and vulnerable, with quirky affectations like abbreviating words (Champagne becoming "champ"), a dark, razor-sharp sense of humor and an offbeat sensibility.
Geordie Greig, the New York correspondent for The Sunday Times of London and a family friend, gives an apt description of her: "When she calls on the phone she'll say 'Hiiii, it's Carrr-oline,' and there's always that enigmatic, Eartha Kitt-like purr. But in conversation she's unpredictable. Caroline's physical demeanor is so unforceful that the force of her words, which can be lethally accurate, is made doubly strong. She has an artist's sensibility to sift through any social niceties and get straight to the point. Even with her house on Long Island nothing follows the rules. Lunch might be a huge feast of lobsters and Champagne, or her fridge may be completely out of food."
Over the years, Blackwood has moved easily among several worlds: from the insular, horsy Anglo-Irish upper classes to the hard-drinking smart set of postwar England, to the liberal intelligentsia of New York City in the 1960's and 70's. She has lived in the United States for much of the last 35 years. Nowadays, she's often with her children, who also live here. Her son, Sheridan Lowell, 23, works for a small publishing firm in Manhattan. Her youngest daughter, Ivana Lowell (she has taken her stepfather's name) is 28; she works for the publishing arm of the media company Miramax and has become a lively presence in New York society since moving from London a few years ago. Another daughter, Evgenia Citkowitz, 30, is a screenwriter in Los Angeles married to the English actor Julian Sands.
Blackwood spends many mornings in her kitchen writing longhand. A broken back she suffered when she was young has made it impossible for her to type. She has published nine books that have been richly admired in Britain, where she is best known. They include collections of short stories and essays of stringent, sly, entirely anticonformist social criticism. Her novels are stylish, remorseless, frightening and wickedly funny. They can sometimes remind you a little of Beckett, except that Blackwood's nihilistic sensibility is more gothic than his: it's Beckett crossed with Bram Stoker.
"The Last of the Duchess" is her mesmeric account of a vain attempt to visit the ailing Duchess of Windsor in 1980 and of Blackwood's encounters with the Duchess's ruthless and highly powerful octogenarian lawyer, Maitre Suzanne Blum, a woman obsessed with her client to the point of erotic fantasy. Blum was the Cerberus at the Duchess's door, blocking even old friends from contacting her, according to Blackwood. Was the sick Duchess tortured by being kept alive, Blackwood wondered, or might she even be dead? Was Blum only saying she was alive so that she could sell the royal jewels and claim the money as her legal fee?
HOW MUCH OF THE book is Irish blarney? After all, the story of Blum, like so many of the stories Blackwood tells, is so bizarre it sounds like fiction. In a sense, though, that's Blackwood's point. She writes as she speaks, with a dramatic flair that can seduce you even as you wonder how precise she is. (Freud, for instance, recalls the Picasso incident very differently.) "You can't really get the truth about anybody from an interview," Blackwood says. "It's all fiction in a way."
She portrays herself in her books as a wide-eyed innocent, astonished by the horrors around her. In person, though, she has a disconcerting habit of staring at you, coolly sizing you up while she picks demurely at her meal. You can see how she could drive Maitre Blum mad.
"If it's berserk behavior I like it as a subject," Blackwood says. "If you write about bland people there's no story, is there? I hated Blum and was really scared of her," Blackwood recalls, "but she thought I was a complete idiot because I acted the dumb journalist with her a bit. She wouldn't even have seen me if I didn't have a title. On the other hand she wouldn't have been so rude if I were a crowned head."
Her full name is Lady Caroline Hamilton Temple Blackwood: she's a descendant on her father's side of the great 18th-century dramatist and wit Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She is a Guinness on her mother's side. (She says she finds stout undrinkable.)
"Brewers or bankers, aristocrats or plutocrats, the Guinnesses are apt to be a law unto themselves," John Richardson says. "This Anglo-Irish dynasty is famously cultivated, brilliant, profligate, witty and beguiling. Caution and abstemiousness are not their forte. Caroline upholds her family's reputation for courage, eccentricity and subversive humor. She most certainly does not hold with the ultraconservative views of some of her cousins."
She grew up in the ancestral stone mansion called Clandeboye, in County Down in Northern Ireland. "My great-grandfather built a wing every time he had another child," Blackwood says. "You didn't build a room then, you built a wing. It was terribly rundown when I was a child, the typical joke Irish house with all the pails to catch dripping water all over the place."
Her great-grandfather, Lord Dufferin, was an eminent Victorian, rumored to have been Disraeli's illegitimate son. "I think he was," says Blackwood, mischievously. "Why would a Scottish landowner have a son who looked like Disraeli? He once got up in the House of Lords and denied that he was Disraeli's son, because it was terrible for his mother's honor, but that sort of implies that he was, doesn't it?"
Queen Victoria made him Viceroy of India, where he used to sit on his throne, fanned by peacock feathers, while processions of rajahs paid him homage. At Clandeboye he built a stone shrine to his mother, an immense architectural folly called Helen's Tower that inspired poems by Browning, Kipling and Tennyson. "Kipling loved my great-grandfather and wrote lots of very bad poems to him," Blackwood says. "He had a fatal effect on poets. I mean, the Tennyson poem is a jingle that goes on and on." She discovered not long ago that Helen's Tower inspired a World War I memorial in France to Irish soldiers. "I mean, Helen's Tower is really odd, isn't it? Victorians thought it was fine someone building a tower to his mother while she was alive, but can you imagine doing it now, in post-Freudian times?"
Blackwood's father, Basil, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was a close friend of Evelyn Waugh and part of the glittering circle he recalled in "Brideshead Revisited." When the Marquess was killed in 1943 by the Japanese in the jungle in Burma, he was 35. Blackwood was 12 at the time and has only dim memories of her father.
Like other women of her class she skipped college; instead she went to work for Claud Cockburn, an influential left-wing journalist who wrote for, among others, The Times Literary Supplement. "Claud was a reviewer for TLS and I read books for him, because in those days the reviews were unsigned," Blackwood says. "It was really corrupt but I was extremely diligent."
She recalls meeting Freud around then, at a party memorable for the fact that the painter Francis Bacon caused a row when he hooted down Princess Margaret, who had just started singing "Let's Do It." Blackwood becomes testy when asked if a reference to her in a recent book as Margaret's lady-in-waiting is true. "That's a lie and I'll sue you if you say it," she says, only half kidding and appalled that anyone could imagine her in such a role.
She changes the subject. "Lucian was fantastic, very brilliant, incredibly beautiful, though not in a movie-star way," she says. "I remember he was very mannered, he wore these long side whiskers, which nobody else had then. And he wore funny trousers, deliberately. He wanted to stand out in a crowd, and he did."
When Freud and Blackwood returned to London from Paris, they settled into the circle that included Bacon, Cyril Connolly and the other artists and writers who gathered nightly at the fabled Gargoyle and Colony Clubs. "As a concept the Gargoyle was brilliant," Blackwood states. "O.K., everyone there would be a bit drunk. But you could wander in any night and find the cleverest people in England. After the war it was completely normal for intellectuals to knock each other down if someone had written a bad review or taken someone's girl. Then they always sent flowers the next day."
GRADUALLY HER marriage to Freud crumbled. When she left him, he was devastated. Blackwood says only that "Lucian and I couldn't be married, not endlessly. We were both too restless."
She fled to Los Angeles, installed herself at the Chateau Marmont and got a tiny part in the television series "Have Gun Will Travel." But she hated the city. The best thing to come out of it was that Stephen Spender asked her to do an article for Encounter magazine about California beatniks. It turned out to be a sendup that launched her writing career. Beatnik culture, she wrote, "has all the trappings of the subversive, the meeting in the darkened cellar, the conspiratorial whisper behind the candle in the Chianti bottle, the nihilistic mutter, without the mildest element of subversion."
Not long after Blackwood moved from Los Angeles to New York she met Israel Citkowitz, a former student of Aaron Copland, some 20 years her senior. They married. Today Blackwood speaks warmly but vaguely about Citkowitz. She describes him as "gorgeous and brilliant, which wasn't a bad combination." But they separated after a few years and she became involved with Robert Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books. Through Silvers she met Lowell.
Citkowitz and she remained friendly until he died, and he sometimes lived in the London house she shared with Lowell in the 1970's, helping her to care for the children during Lowell's bouts of madness. Lowell would write a poem to Citkowitz, lines of which Blackwood used as an epitaph on Citkowitz's grave. Her three daughters were born while she was still married to him. She had a son, Sheridan, by Lowell in 1971.
In 1972 she and Lowell flew to Santo Domingo for a joint divorce-marriage. "Nobody could understand the service because it was all in Spanish," she remembers. "It was in a hut, with chickens coming in and out. You'd move to one hut and they'd say you're divorced. Then to another hut where they'd say you're married. All the time there was lots of loud typing. So romantic."
It pains Blackwood that her marriage with Lowell is often described solely in terms of his breakup with Hardwick and illness. She recalls periods at Milgate, their house in Kent, as idyllic. But she acknowledges that Lowell's episodes of manic depression became increasingly unmanageable.
"I wanted Israel to be in the house because I couldn't deal with it alone," she explains. "Not that Cal would have hurt the children, he wasn't murderous. But I had to watch him all day and all night because a manic never sleeps." One day she found him hacking holes in the wall with a carving knife. He told her he was looking for Etruscan treasures. "It was a horrible affliction to not know when your mind was suddenly going to go -- particularly when you had got this huge mind."
Then Lowell died; then Natalya. Through it all, Blackwood managed to turn out a remarkable string of books. One of them, "On the Perimeter," was a report about the women who had camped for years in the mud at Greenham Common in England to protest the American nuclear missile base there. "The Stepdaughter" was a short epistolary novel about an abusive woman abandoned by her husband and left with his hideous daughter. Another novel, "The Fate of Mary Rose," is a chilling tale about an increasingly deranged mother's fatal obsession with her daughter's safety.
Blackwood even wrote a lighthearted cookbook with her friend the English novelist Anna Haycraft (who wrote under the name of Alice Thomas Ellis) that featured celebrity recipes. Blackwood asked Francis Bacon for a recipe. "I doubt anybody had ever asked him for one before. But he was a fantastic cook, and he had this very smart recipe for mayonnaise. Then it turned out that he was such a perfectionist that he kept holding up the publication to make revisions. Eventually Anna called in a panic, saying she'd forgotten to put in Francis's very last revision before the book went to press. 'It had less to do with salt and more to do with vinegar,' she said. Francis brought 100 copies of the book anyway."
In 1980, Blackwood began work on "The Last of the Duchess." "It was pathetic Blum being so old and in love with the Duchess," Blackwood muses. "What a stupid thing to do. But of course the Duchess was ridiculous, too. A more noble figure than she wouldn't have let this lawyer take over her life." The paradox, as Blackwood implies in the book, is that the socialite Duchess spent her last days in solitary confinement, and -- considering the Windsors' connection to Hitler -- that her jailer was a Jew.
Writing kept Blackwood going through one calamity after another -- until the cancer a few years ago. "I really don't like talking about it," she says, after a long pause. "I just kept on trying to do what I do, no matter what life did to me. But after the cancer I became so used to the idea that I would be dead that I had reconciled myself to the idea of not writing anymore. Once you've accepted you're dead, why write?
"It took me a long time to get back to writing. For a while I didn't have any ideas, none." She smiles. "But now I try and write all morning. It may be so awful that I put my pencil through the whole thing and start over the next day. But at least I've got plenty of ideas."
From 9 December 1953, her married name became Freud. Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood used the pen-name of Caroline Blackwood. From 15 August 1959, her married name became Citkowitz. She wrote the book For All That I Found There. From 1972, her married name became Lowell. She wrote the book The Stepdaughter, published 1976. She wrote the book Great Granny Webster, published 1977. She was decorated with the award of Booker Prize (runner-up) in 1977. She wrote the book Good Night Sweet Ladies. She wrote the book The Fate of Mary Rose. She wrote the book On the Perimeter: Caroline Blackwood at Greenham Common, published 1984. She wrote the book In the Pink. She wrote the book Darling. She wrote the book Corrigan. She wrote the book You Shouldn't Have Gone to so Much Trouble.
Children of Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood and Israel Citkowitz
•Natalya Citkowitz b. 17 Aug 1960, d. 22 Jun 1978
•Evgenia Citkowitz b. 1964
•Ivana Citkowitz b. 1966
Child of Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood and Robert Traill Spence Lowell
•Robert Sheriden Lowell b. Aug 1971
According to her daughter Ivana's memoir, "Why Not Say What Happened?", Caroline's ashes were buried under a pine tree at her home in Sag Harbor, NY. This house was once known as "the Summer White House" as it was occupied by Chester A. Arthur on vacations during his presidency.
Caroline Blackwood was a writer with a small number of books to her name. These have an intensity, a black and humorous concentration on the pitilessness of experience, which should ensure their survival. They are also very funny.
Ireland was in her blood and upbringing. Ireland suffers Blackwood's forensic surgery in her first book, For All That I Found There (1973), a collection of short stories and meditative pieces. With courage and a certain breathtaking cruelty she followed it with two autobiographical novels. The Stepdaughter (1976) is a miniature Greek tragedy, done as farce, about an unhappy relationship with your child. The title is the only figleaf permitted; the book is based on her eldest child, Natalia Citkowitz, who died through addiction before the book was published. There is something of Evelyn Waugh in Blackwood's ability to make you laugh reluctantly at her ruthlessness: Waugh done over by the painter Francis Bacon. Great Granny Webster is lighter and funnier. Here the Anglo- Irish world of Elizabeth Bowen is allowed no smidgen of decadent charm; water drips relentlessly through the roof, room after oppressive room of the statutory mansion. Yeats, you feel, would have had a nervous breakdown had he lived to read it. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1977 and was greatly admired by Philip Larkin.
Subsequent novels such as The Fate of Mary Rose (1981) and Corrigan (1984) were less successful, though they well repay re-reading. A further collection of short stories, Good Night Sweet Ladies (1983) and a sympathetic yet merciless account of the predominantly female protest at Greenham Common, On the Perimeter (1984), confirmed her talent. If her last book, an account of the last days of the Duchess of Windsor, The Last Duchess (1995), betrays some signs of Caroline Blackwood's cancer and alcoholism, it does contain one of the greatest pieces of comic writing I know: her own attempts at interviewing Maitre Suzanne Blum, the terrifying French lawyer who took charge of the Duchess's fortune and bedridden body before dying herself in her nineties.
Caroline Blackwood's dark temperament, perfectly realised in her writing, is in some ways a puzzle, given the facts of her life. It was a rich life literally and metaphorically She was one of the most beautiful women of her generation (a more intense and fascinating version of the film star, Michelle Pfeiffer, I found). Even in the last years, when life and illness ravaged her, you could not look at anyone else when she was in the room. She was loved by some of the most talented men of the age and married two of them, the painter Lucian Freud and the poet Robert Lowell. She was well-off (her mother was Maureen Guinness, now Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava) and aristocratic in a period when that added rather than subtracted glamour. Her father, who died when she was 13 was Basil Dufferin, eulogised in a Betjeman poem; her brother Sheridan Dufferin, whom with her sister Perdita she loved, was the kind of man whose charm, generosity and modesty give aristocrats a good name.
As well as passion, Caroline Blackwood experienced love both giving and receiving. In some ways a difficult mother, she was always close to her daughters Eugenia and Ivana Citkowitz and her son Sheridan Lowell. She made great and enduring friendships with men and women: I was lucky enough to enjoy her friendship for nearly 35 years. She was very funny because polite and well-mannered on the surface, in no sense a person who shocked in order to make an effect, she mercilessly cut straight through to the core of things. Like Lucian Freud, and her friend Francis Bacon, she hated padding. You could not pretend in her company. Even on her deathbed, black Blackwood gold was mined. One of the women she loved most, a Catholic and fellow novelist, had brought water from Lourdes. Some of it spilt on the sheets. "I might have caught my death," she muttered.
Lucian Freud's portraits of her are in my view his greatest paintings. She was pleased to get a recent long telephone call from him. "I had forgotten how funny Lucian can be," she said. Some time after leaving him, she married Israel Citkowitz, a talented composer and delightful man who sadly suffered most of his career from a debilitating writer's block.
Without turning into a figure of tragic suffering, Citkowitz followed her to England after her marriage to Robert Lowell and continued as a father to his children, and as a kind of nanny-duenna to Blackwood for the rest of his life. She was his great achivement. He always registered a quiet pride in it.
Robert Lowell's life with Blackwood and his traumatic parting and final reunion with his previous wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwicke, is relived in three books of poems. A long sequence of love poems, The Dolphin, praises and anatomises Caroline as the Muse who put an end to his philanderings.
Any clear thing that blinds us with
surprise,
your wandering silences and bright
trouvailles,
dolphin let loose to catch the
flashing fish . . .
They lived in London, in a manor she bought in Kent and later in her cousin Desmond Guinness's great house Castletown in Co. Kildare. The marriage ran aground on the shoals of Blackwood's drinking, Lowell's sense that he had little time he had to live and terror of his bouts of manic depression - ironically less persistent after their meeting. Their love affair never floundered. Lowell lived with Elizabeth the last year of his life, but visited Blackwood.
Three days before he died I delivered to him in Ireland a picture I had procured, a Freud of Caroline. He died clutching it in a cab on his way to Elizabeth in New York. At his graveside the two women clung to each other.
Grey Gowrie
Caroline Maureen Blackwood, writer: born 1931; married 1953 Lucian Freud (marriage dissolved), 1959 Israel Citkovitz (marriage dissolved; three daughters, one deceased), 1972 Robert Lowell (died 1977; one son); died New York 14 February 1996.
WHEN LADY Caroline Blackwood, the Irish writer and Guinness heiress, was living in Paris in the early 1950's, she and her first husband, the painter Lucian Freud, were invited to visit Picasso.
"Picasso got one of his followers to ask Lucian if he would like to see Picasso's paintings," Blackwood says. "Of course, Lucian said yes. Meanwhile Picasso asked me if I wanted to see his doves: he had this spiral iron staircase leading to the roof, and off we go, winding round and round to the top, until we reached these doves in cages and all around us was the best view of Paris, the best. Whereupon immediately, standing on this tiny, tiny space, way above the city, Picasso does a complete plunge at me. All I felt was fear. I kept saying, 'Go down the stairs, go down.' He said, 'No, no, we are together above the roofs of Paris.' It was so absurd, and to me Picasso was just as old as the hills, an old letch, genius or no.
"I wonder," Blackwood pauses to ask, "what we were supposed to have done if I accepted? There was no space to make love, with all those doves. And think how many other people he had up there. Did they go through with it? And technically, how did they go through with it? And with the husband downstairs?"
She then adds a coda: "Lucian got a call out of nowhere from a mistress of Picasso's who asked him if he could come round and paint her. She wanted to make Picasso jealous. Lucian very politely said maybe he could paint her portrait later, but not now because he happened to be in the midst of doing his wife's portrait."
That picture, Blackwood says, turned out to be Freud's "Girl in Bed." Years later, in 1977, it played a curious part in the death of the poet Robert Lowell, another of Lady Caroline's husbands. Their marriage was in tatters when, as the story goes, he left her in Ireland and returned to the United States. After Lowell's taxi arrived at his apartment on West 67th Street, the driver found him slumped over. A doorman summoned Elizabeth Hardwick, the writer and editor whom Lowell had left to marry Blackwood; she happened to live in the same building. Hardwick opened the taxi door -- only to be confronted with her ex-husband's corpse. He was holding "Girl in Bed."
With its macabre humor, the Lowell story is one Blackwood might have written if she hadn't lived through it. "I think it's partly Irish," Blackwood says over lunch at Coco Pazzo, an elegant restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan. "Irish people are very funny but have this tragic sense.
"As Cal wrote," she continues, referring to Lowell, "if there's light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train. He was a humorous poet, you know, though people don't ever say that about him. He also wrote that in the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet, which is very funny, don't you think?"
BLACKWOOD IS A DELICATE WOMAN OF 63, SLIGHTLY stooped yet graceful, with a husky, smoker's voice. She is dressed in a loose-fitting black pants suit, the sort of unbourgeois outfit that pegs her immediately as an upper-class bohemian. Her extraordinary eyes -- big opalescent pools, which Freud made into giant spheres in his hypnotic portraits -- are the principal signs of the beauty she was in her youth. Her looks are striking but weatherbeaten.
It's not just that Blackwood likes to drink. She has also endured a series of Job-like catastrophes over the years: the death of her second husband, the American composer and pianist Israel Citkowitz; Lowell's crippling manic depression and early death; the death from AIDS of her brother, Sheridan, to whom she was very close; the death of her eldest daughter, Natalya, after a drug overdose, and her own bout with cervical cancer, for which she had an operation that left her in constant pain.
Though on one level she thrives on tragedy -- is even defined by it -- Blackwood can't abide maudlin sentiments; bringing up these episodes with her elicits an awkward silence. At first during lunch she gives only clipped responses to questions or just nods in agreement. She orders one vodka after another, tonic on the side. She is more comfortable discussing her new book, "The Last of the Duchess." But still she's cautious.
She also greets with silence a question about her flamboyant socialite mother, Maureen, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. When Maureen was young she reportedly once gave Sir Oswald Mosley, the English fascist, a black eye after he made a pass at her in Antibes. In recent years, though vastly rich, she has complained that her children haven't helped support her and the several houses she lives in. The Picasso biographer John Richardson recalls that Maureen's son, Sheridan, used to bemoan having to help pay for her villa in Sardinia, which he nicknamed the Villa Costalota. Lately, Blackwood, her sister and sister-in-law have wrangled with Maureen over the disposition of $24 million in Guinness inheritance money. The dispute, ultimately settled in Maureen's favor, underscores the nearly nonexistent relationship between Caroline and her mother, a topic Caroline prefers not to discuss.
Gradually, though, as she relaxes, Blackwood emerges as a strangely dramatic woman: intense and vulnerable, with quirky affectations like abbreviating words (Champagne becoming "champ"), a dark, razor-sharp sense of humor and an offbeat sensibility.
Geordie Greig, the New York correspondent for The Sunday Times of London and a family friend, gives an apt description of her: "When she calls on the phone she'll say 'Hiiii, it's Carrr-oline,' and there's always that enigmatic, Eartha Kitt-like purr. But in conversation she's unpredictable. Caroline's physical demeanor is so unforceful that the force of her words, which can be lethally accurate, is made doubly strong. She has an artist's sensibility to sift through any social niceties and get straight to the point. Even with her house on Long Island nothing follows the rules. Lunch might be a huge feast of lobsters and Champagne, or her fridge may be completely out of food."
Over the years, Blackwood has moved easily among several worlds: from the insular, horsy Anglo-Irish upper classes to the hard-drinking smart set of postwar England, to the liberal intelligentsia of New York City in the 1960's and 70's. She has lived in the United States for much of the last 35 years. Nowadays, she's often with her children, who also live here. Her son, Sheridan Lowell, 23, works for a small publishing firm in Manhattan. Her youngest daughter, Ivana Lowell (she has taken her stepfather's name) is 28; she works for the publishing arm of the media company Miramax and has become a lively presence in New York society since moving from London a few years ago. Another daughter, Evgenia Citkowitz, 30, is a screenwriter in Los Angeles married to the English actor Julian Sands.
Blackwood spends many mornings in her kitchen writing longhand. A broken back she suffered when she was young has made it impossible for her to type. She has published nine books that have been richly admired in Britain, where she is best known. They include collections of short stories and essays of stringent, sly, entirely anticonformist social criticism. Her novels are stylish, remorseless, frightening and wickedly funny. They can sometimes remind you a little of Beckett, except that Blackwood's nihilistic sensibility is more gothic than his: it's Beckett crossed with Bram Stoker.
"The Last of the Duchess" is her mesmeric account of a vain attempt to visit the ailing Duchess of Windsor in 1980 and of Blackwood's encounters with the Duchess's ruthless and highly powerful octogenarian lawyer, Maitre Suzanne Blum, a woman obsessed with her client to the point of erotic fantasy. Blum was the Cerberus at the Duchess's door, blocking even old friends from contacting her, according to Blackwood. Was the sick Duchess tortured by being kept alive, Blackwood wondered, or might she even be dead? Was Blum only saying she was alive so that she could sell the royal jewels and claim the money as her legal fee?
HOW MUCH OF THE book is Irish blarney? After all, the story of Blum, like so many of the stories Blackwood tells, is so bizarre it sounds like fiction. In a sense, though, that's Blackwood's point. She writes as she speaks, with a dramatic flair that can seduce you even as you wonder how precise she is. (Freud, for instance, recalls the Picasso incident very differently.) "You can't really get the truth about anybody from an interview," Blackwood says. "It's all fiction in a way."
She portrays herself in her books as a wide-eyed innocent, astonished by the horrors around her. In person, though, she has a disconcerting habit of staring at you, coolly sizing you up while she picks demurely at her meal. You can see how she could drive Maitre Blum mad.
"If it's berserk behavior I like it as a subject," Blackwood says. "If you write about bland people there's no story, is there? I hated Blum and was really scared of her," Blackwood recalls, "but she thought I was a complete idiot because I acted the dumb journalist with her a bit. She wouldn't even have seen me if I didn't have a title. On the other hand she wouldn't have been so rude if I were a crowned head."
Her full name is Lady Caroline Hamilton Temple Blackwood: she's a descendant on her father's side of the great 18th-century dramatist and wit Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She is a Guinness on her mother's side. (She says she finds stout undrinkable.)
"Brewers or bankers, aristocrats or plutocrats, the Guinnesses are apt to be a law unto themselves," John Richardson says. "This Anglo-Irish dynasty is famously cultivated, brilliant, profligate, witty and beguiling. Caution and abstemiousness are not their forte. Caroline upholds her family's reputation for courage, eccentricity and subversive humor. She most certainly does not hold with the ultraconservative views of some of her cousins."
She grew up in the ancestral stone mansion called Clandeboye, in County Down in Northern Ireland. "My great-grandfather built a wing every time he had another child," Blackwood says. "You didn't build a room then, you built a wing. It was terribly rundown when I was a child, the typical joke Irish house with all the pails to catch dripping water all over the place."
Her great-grandfather, Lord Dufferin, was an eminent Victorian, rumored to have been Disraeli's illegitimate son. "I think he was," says Blackwood, mischievously. "Why would a Scottish landowner have a son who looked like Disraeli? He once got up in the House of Lords and denied that he was Disraeli's son, because it was terrible for his mother's honor, but that sort of implies that he was, doesn't it?"
Queen Victoria made him Viceroy of India, where he used to sit on his throne, fanned by peacock feathers, while processions of rajahs paid him homage. At Clandeboye he built a stone shrine to his mother, an immense architectural folly called Helen's Tower that inspired poems by Browning, Kipling and Tennyson. "Kipling loved my great-grandfather and wrote lots of very bad poems to him," Blackwood says. "He had a fatal effect on poets. I mean, the Tennyson poem is a jingle that goes on and on." She discovered not long ago that Helen's Tower inspired a World War I memorial in France to Irish soldiers. "I mean, Helen's Tower is really odd, isn't it? Victorians thought it was fine someone building a tower to his mother while she was alive, but can you imagine doing it now, in post-Freudian times?"
Blackwood's father, Basil, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was a close friend of Evelyn Waugh and part of the glittering circle he recalled in "Brideshead Revisited." When the Marquess was killed in 1943 by the Japanese in the jungle in Burma, he was 35. Blackwood was 12 at the time and has only dim memories of her father.
Like other women of her class she skipped college; instead she went to work for Claud Cockburn, an influential left-wing journalist who wrote for, among others, The Times Literary Supplement. "Claud was a reviewer for TLS and I read books for him, because in those days the reviews were unsigned," Blackwood says. "It was really corrupt but I was extremely diligent."
She recalls meeting Freud around then, at a party memorable for the fact that the painter Francis Bacon caused a row when he hooted down Princess Margaret, who had just started singing "Let's Do It." Blackwood becomes testy when asked if a reference to her in a recent book as Margaret's lady-in-waiting is true. "That's a lie and I'll sue you if you say it," she says, only half kidding and appalled that anyone could imagine her in such a role.
She changes the subject. "Lucian was fantastic, very brilliant, incredibly beautiful, though not in a movie-star way," she says. "I remember he was very mannered, he wore these long side whiskers, which nobody else had then. And he wore funny trousers, deliberately. He wanted to stand out in a crowd, and he did."
When Freud and Blackwood returned to London from Paris, they settled into the circle that included Bacon, Cyril Connolly and the other artists and writers who gathered nightly at the fabled Gargoyle and Colony Clubs. "As a concept the Gargoyle was brilliant," Blackwood states. "O.K., everyone there would be a bit drunk. But you could wander in any night and find the cleverest people in England. After the war it was completely normal for intellectuals to knock each other down if someone had written a bad review or taken someone's girl. Then they always sent flowers the next day."
GRADUALLY HER marriage to Freud crumbled. When she left him, he was devastated. Blackwood says only that "Lucian and I couldn't be married, not endlessly. We were both too restless."
She fled to Los Angeles, installed herself at the Chateau Marmont and got a tiny part in the television series "Have Gun Will Travel." But she hated the city. The best thing to come out of it was that Stephen Spender asked her to do an article for Encounter magazine about California beatniks. It turned out to be a sendup that launched her writing career. Beatnik culture, she wrote, "has all the trappings of the subversive, the meeting in the darkened cellar, the conspiratorial whisper behind the candle in the Chianti bottle, the nihilistic mutter, without the mildest element of subversion."
Not long after Blackwood moved from Los Angeles to New York she met Israel Citkowitz, a former student of Aaron Copland, some 20 years her senior. They married. Today Blackwood speaks warmly but vaguely about Citkowitz. She describes him as "gorgeous and brilliant, which wasn't a bad combination." But they separated after a few years and she became involved with Robert Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books. Through Silvers she met Lowell.
Citkowitz and she remained friendly until he died, and he sometimes lived in the London house she shared with Lowell in the 1970's, helping her to care for the children during Lowell's bouts of madness. Lowell would write a poem to Citkowitz, lines of which Blackwood used as an epitaph on Citkowitz's grave. Her three daughters were born while she was still married to him. She had a son, Sheridan, by Lowell in 1971.
In 1972 she and Lowell flew to Santo Domingo for a joint divorce-marriage. "Nobody could understand the service because it was all in Spanish," she remembers. "It was in a hut, with chickens coming in and out. You'd move to one hut and they'd say you're divorced. Then to another hut where they'd say you're married. All the time there was lots of loud typing. So romantic."
It pains Blackwood that her marriage with Lowell is often described solely in terms of his breakup with Hardwick and illness. She recalls periods at Milgate, their house in Kent, as idyllic. But she acknowledges that Lowell's episodes of manic depression became increasingly unmanageable.
"I wanted Israel to be in the house because I couldn't deal with it alone," she explains. "Not that Cal would have hurt the children, he wasn't murderous. But I had to watch him all day and all night because a manic never sleeps." One day she found him hacking holes in the wall with a carving knife. He told her he was looking for Etruscan treasures. "It was a horrible affliction to not know when your mind was suddenly going to go -- particularly when you had got this huge mind."
Then Lowell died; then Natalya. Through it all, Blackwood managed to turn out a remarkable string of books. One of them, "On the Perimeter," was a report about the women who had camped for years in the mud at Greenham Common in England to protest the American nuclear missile base there. "The Stepdaughter" was a short epistolary novel about an abusive woman abandoned by her husband and left with his hideous daughter. Another novel, "The Fate of Mary Rose," is a chilling tale about an increasingly deranged mother's fatal obsession with her daughter's safety.
Blackwood even wrote a lighthearted cookbook with her friend the English novelist Anna Haycraft (who wrote under the name of Alice Thomas Ellis) that featured celebrity recipes. Blackwood asked Francis Bacon for a recipe. "I doubt anybody had ever asked him for one before. But he was a fantastic cook, and he had this very smart recipe for mayonnaise. Then it turned out that he was such a perfectionist that he kept holding up the publication to make revisions. Eventually Anna called in a panic, saying she'd forgotten to put in Francis's very last revision before the book went to press. 'It had less to do with salt and more to do with vinegar,' she said. Francis brought 100 copies of the book anyway."
In 1980, Blackwood began work on "The Last of the Duchess." "It was pathetic Blum being so old and in love with the Duchess," Blackwood muses. "What a stupid thing to do. But of course the Duchess was ridiculous, too. A more noble figure than she wouldn't have let this lawyer take over her life." The paradox, as Blackwood implies in the book, is that the socialite Duchess spent her last days in solitary confinement, and -- considering the Windsors' connection to Hitler -- that her jailer was a Jew.
Writing kept Blackwood going through one calamity after another -- until the cancer a few years ago. "I really don't like talking about it," she says, after a long pause. "I just kept on trying to do what I do, no matter what life did to me. But after the cancer I became so used to the idea that I would be dead that I had reconciled myself to the idea of not writing anymore. Once you've accepted you're dead, why write?
Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (16 July 1931 – 14 February 1996) was a writer, and the eldest child of The 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and the brewery heiress Maureen Guinness.
A well-known figure in the literary world through her journalism and her novels, Lady Caroline Blackwood was equally well known for her high-profile marriages, first to the artist Lucian Freud, then to the composer Israel Citkowitz and finally to the poet Robert Lowell, who described her as "a mermaid who dines upon the bones of her winded lovers". Her novels are known for their wit and intelligence, and one in particular is scathingly autobiographical in describing her unhappy childhood.
She was born into an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family from Ulster at 4 Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge, her parents' London home. She was, she admitted, "scantily educated" at, among other schools, Rockport School (County Down) and Downham (Essex). After a finishing school in Oxford she was presented as a debutante in 1949 at a ball held at Londonderry House.
Career
Blackwood's first job was with Hulton Press as a secretary, but she was soon given small reporting jobs by Claud Cockburn. Ann Fleming, the wife of "James Bond" author Ian Fleming, introduced Lady Caroline to Lucian Freud, and the two eloped to Paris in 1952. In Paris she met Picasso (and reportedly refused to wash for three days after he drew on her hands and nails). She married Freud on 9 December 1953 and became a striking figure in London's bohemian circles; the Gargoyle Club and Colony Room replaced Belgraviadrawing rooms as her haunts. She sat for several of Freud's finest portraits, including Girl in Bed, which testifies to her alluring beauty. She was impressed by the ruthless vision of Freud and Francis Bacon and her later fiction was a literary version of their view of humanity.
In the early 1960s, Blackwood began contributing to Encounter, London Magazine, and other periodicals on subjects such as beatniks, Ulster sectarianism, feminist theatre and New York free schools. Although these articles were elegant, minutely observed and sometimes wickedly funny, they had, according to Christopher Isherwood, a persistent flaw: "she is only capable of thinking negatively. Confronted by a phenomenon, she asks herself: what is wrong with it?"[1] During the mid-1960s, she had an affair with Robert Silvers, the founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books.[2][3]
Her third husband, Robert Lowell, was a crucial influence on her talents as a novelist. He encouraged her to write her first book, For All That I Found There (1973), the title of which is a line from the Percy French song "The Mountains of Mourne", and which includes a mordant memoir of her daughter's treatment in a burns unit. Blackwood's first novel The Stepdaughter (1976) appeared three years later to much acclaim, and is a concise and gripping monologue by a rich, self-pitying woman deserted by her husband in a plush New York apartment and tormented by her fat stepdaughter. It won the David Higham Prize for best first novel. Great Granny Webster followed in 1977 and was partly derived on her own miserable childhood, and depicted an austere and loveless old woman's destructive impact on her daughter and granddaughter. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize.
In 1980 came The Last of the Duchess, a study of the relations between the Duchess of Windsor and her cunning lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum; it could not be published until after Blum's death in 1995. Her third novel The Fate of Mary Rose (1981) describes the effect on a Kent village of the rape and torture of a ten-year-old girl named Maureen and is narrated by a selfish historian whose obsessions destroy his domestic life. After this came a collection of five short stories, Good Night Sweet Ladies (1983), followed by her final novel, Corrigan (1984), which was the least successful and depicts the effects on a depressed widow of a charming, energetic but sinister cripple who erupts into her life.
Blackwood's later books were based on interviews and vignettes, including On The Perimeter (1984), which focused her attentions on the women's peace encampment at the Greenham Common air base in Berkshire, and In The Pink (1987), which was a reflective, ghoulish book looking at the hunting and the hunt saboteur fraternities and exposed the many obsessive personalities of both fox-hunters and animal rights activists.
Personal life
Blackwood's marriage to Lucian Freud disintegrated soon after they married in 1953; it was dissolved in 1958, in Mexico.[citation needed] In 1957, Blackwood moved to New York City and studied acting at the Stella Adler school. She also went to Hollywood and appeared in several films.[citation needed]
On 15 August 1959, she married the pianist Israel Citkowitz (1909–1974), 22 years her senior and born in the same year as her late father; they had three daughters. By 1966, when their youngest, Ivana, was born, their marriage was over, although Citkowitz continued to live nearby and served as a nanny-duenna[citation needed] until his death. During the mid-1960s, Blackwood had an affair with Robert Silvers, a founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books, who stayed close to the family thereafter.[2][3]
According to Ivana, both she and Silvers suspected that he was her biological father.[4] However, a deathbed admission by Blackwood revealed that Ivana's biological father was another boyfriend: the screenwriter Ivan Moffat, a grandson of actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree.[2][3]
In 1970, Blackwood returned to London and, in April, began a relationship with the poet Robert Lowell, then a visiting professor at All Souls College, Oxford. Their son, Sheridan, was born on 28 September 1971; after being divorced from their respective spouses, Blackwood and Lowell were married, on 21 October 1972. They lived in London and at Milgate House in Kent. The sequence of poems in Lowell's The Dolphin (1973) provides a disrupted narrative of his involvement with Blackwood and the birth of their son (Lowell's friend Elizabeth Bishop strongly advised Lowell not to publish the book, advice he ignored).
Lowell suffered from bipolar disorder, and his manic episodes prompted in Blackwood distress, confusion, feelings of uselessness, and fear about the effects on their children. Her anxieties, alcohol-related illnesses, and late-night tirades exacerbated his condition.[citation needed] In 1977, Lowell died, reportedly clutching one of Freud's portraits of Blackwood, in the back seat of a New York cab, on his way back to his second wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick.[5] This loss was followed a year later by the death of her daughter Natalya, from a drug overdose at the age of 18.
In 1977, to avoid taxation, Blackwood left England and went to live in County Kildare, Ireland, in an apartment at the great Georgian mansion of Castletown House, which was owned by her cousin Desmond Guinness. Ten years later, in 1987, she returned to the United States, settling in a large, comfortable house in Sag Harbor, Long Island, where, although her abilities were reduced by alcoholism, she continued to write; her work of that era includes two vivid memoirs, of Princess Margaret and of Francis Bacon, published in The New York Review of Books in 1992.[citation needed]
According to those close to her, she never lost her macabre sense of humour, even during her final illness. British writer and essayist Anna Haycraft, a staunch Roman Catholic, brought holy water from Lourdes, which accidentally spilled on Blackwood's deathbed sheets; "I might have caught my death", she muttered.[citation needed]
Death
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On 14 February 1996, Blackwood died from cancer, at the Mayfair Hotel on Park Avenue in New York City, aged 64. She was survived by her two younger daughters: Evgenia Citkowitz Sands (b. 1963), wife of actor Julian Sands, and Ivana (b. 1966); by her son, Sheridan Lowell; by her sister, Lady Perdita Blackwood; and by her mother, the former Maureen Guinness, who died two years later, aged 91. She was predeceased by her father, Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (1909–1945); by her eldest daughter, Natalya (1960–1978); and by her brother, Sheridan Dufferin, 5th Marquess (1938–1988).
Titled Bohemian; Caroline Blackwood
Posted 08 Jun 2023 by MARKFLANDERS38
By MICHAEL KIMMELMANAPRIL 2, 1995
NYT
WHEN LADY Caroline Blackwood, the Irish writer and Guinness heiress, was living in Paris in the early 1950's, she and her first husband, the painter Lucian Freud, were invited to visit Picasso.
"Picasso got one of his followers to ask Lucian if he would like to see Picasso's paintings," Blackwood says. "Of course, Lucian said yes. Meanwhile Picasso asked me if I wanted to see his doves: he had this spiral iron staircase leading to the roof, and off we go, winding round and round to the top, until we reached these doves in cages and all around us was the best view of Paris, the best. Whereupon immediately, standing on this tiny, tiny space, way above the city, Picasso does a complete plunge at me. All I felt was fear. I kept saying, 'Go down the stairs, go down.' He said, 'No, no, we are together above the roofs of Paris.' It was so absurd, and to me Picasso was just as old as the hills, an old letch, genius or no.
"I wonder," Blackwood pauses to ask, "what we were supposed to have done if I accepted? There was no space to make love, with all those doves. And think how many other people he had up there. Did they go through with it? And technically, how did they go through with it? And with the husband downstairs?"
She then adds a coda: "Lucian got a call out of nowhere from a mistress of Picasso's who asked him if he could come round and paint her. She wanted to make Picasso jealous. Lucian very politely said maybe he could paint her portrait later, but not now because he happened to be in the midst of doing his wife's portrait."
That picture, Blackwood says, turned out to be Freud's "Girl in Bed." Years later, in 1977, it played a curious part in the death of the poet Robert Lowell, another of Lady Caroline's husbands. Their marriage was in tatters when, as the story goes, he left her in Ireland and returned to the United States. After Lowell's taxi arrived at his apartment on West 67th Street, the driver found him slumped over. A doorman summoned Elizabeth Hardwick, the writer and editor whom Lowell had left to marry Blackwood; she happened to live in the same building. Hardwick opened the taxi door -- only to be confronted with her ex-husband's corpse. He was holding "Girl in Bed."
With its macabre humor, the Lowell story is one Blackwood might have written if she hadn't lived through it. "I think it's partly Irish," Blackwood says over lunch at Coco Pazzo, an elegant restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan. "Irish people are very funny but have this tragic sense.
"As Cal wrote," she continues, referring to Lowell, "if there's light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train. He was a humorous poet, you know, though people don't ever say that about him. He also wrote that in the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet, which is very funny, don't you think?"
BLACKWOOD IS A DELICATE WOMAN OF 63, SLIGHTLY stooped yet graceful, with a husky, smoker's voice. She is dressed in a loose-fitting black pants suit, the sort of unbourgeois outfit that pegs her immediately as an upper-class bohemian. Her extraordinary eyes -- big opalescent pools, which Freud made into giant spheres in his hypnotic portraits -- are the principal signs of the beauty she was in her youth. Her looks are striking but weatherbeaten.
It's not just that Blackwood likes to drink. She has also endured a series of Job-like catastrophes over the years: the death of her second husband, the American composer and pianist Israel Citkowitz; Lowell's crippling manic depression and early death; the death from AIDS of her brother, Sheridan, to whom she was very close; the death of her eldest daughter, Natalya, after a drug overdose, and her own bout with cervical cancer, for which she had an operation that left her in constant pain.
Though on one level she thrives on tragedy -- is even defined by it -- Blackwood can't abide maudlin sentiments; bringing up these episodes with her elicits an awkward silence. At first during lunch she gives only clipped responses to questions or just nods in agreement. She orders one vodka after another, tonic on the side. She is more comfortable discussing her new book, "The Last of the Duchess." But still she's cautious.
She also greets with silence a question about her flamboyant socialite mother, Maureen, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. When Maureen was young she reportedly once gave Sir Oswald Mosley, the English fascist, a black eye after he made a pass at her in Antibes. In recent years, though vastly rich, she has complained that her children haven't helped support her and the several houses she lives in. The Picasso biographer John Richardson recalls that Maureen's son, Sheridan, used to bemoan having to help pay for her villa in Sardinia, which he nicknamed the Villa Costalota. Lately, Blackwood, her sister and sister-in-law have wrangled with Maureen over the disposition of $24 million in Guinness inheritance money. The dispute, ultimately settled in Maureen's favor, underscores the nearly nonexistent relationship between Caroline and her mother, a topic Caroline prefers not to discuss.
Gradually, though, as she relaxes, Blackwood emerges as a strangely dramatic woman: intense and vulnerable, with quirky affectations like abbreviating words (Champagne becoming "champ"), a dark, razor-sharp sense of humor and an offbeat sensibility.
Geordie Greig, the New York correspondent for The Sunday Times of London and a family friend, gives an apt description of her: "When she calls on the phone she'll say 'Hiiii, it's Carrr-oline,' and there's always that enigmatic, Eartha Kitt-like purr. But in conversation she's unpredictable. Caroline's physical demeanor is so unforceful that the force of her words, which can be lethally accurate, is made doubly strong. She has an artist's sensibility to sift through any social niceties and get straight to the point. Even with her house on Long Island nothing follows the rules. Lunch might be a huge feast of lobsters and Champagne, or her fridge may be completely out of food."
Over the years, Blackwood has moved easily among several worlds: from the insular, horsy Anglo-Irish upper classes to the hard-drinking smart set of postwar England, to the liberal intelligentsia of New York City in the 1960's and 70's. She has lived in the United States for much of the last 35 years. Nowadays, she's often with her children, who also live here. Her son, Sheridan Lowell, 23, works for a small publishing firm in Manhattan. Her youngest daughter, Ivana Lowell (she has taken her stepfather's name) is 28; she works for the publishing arm of the media company Miramax and has become a lively presence in New York society since moving from London a few years ago. Another daughter, Evgenia Citkowitz, 30, is a screenwriter in Los Angeles married to the English actor Julian Sands.
Blackwood spends many mornings in her kitchen writing longhand. A broken back she suffered when she was young has made it impossible for her to type. She has published nine books that have been richly admired in Britain, where she is best known. They include collections of short stories and essays of stringent, sly, entirely anticonformist social criticism. Her novels are stylish, remorseless, frightening and wickedly funny. They can sometimes remind you a little of Beckett, except that Blackwood's nihilistic sensibility is more gothic than his: it's Beckett crossed with Bram Stoker.
"The Last of the Duchess" is her mesmeric account of a vain attempt to visit the ailing Duchess of Windsor in 1980 and of Blackwood's encounters with the Duchess's ruthless and highly powerful octogenarian lawyer, Maitre Suzanne Blum, a woman obsessed with her client to the point of erotic fantasy. Blum was the Cerberus at the Duchess's door, blocking even old friends from contacting her, according to Blackwood. Was the sick Duchess tortured by being kept alive, Blackwood wondered, or might she even be dead? Was Blum only saying she was alive so that she could sell the royal jewels and claim the money as her legal fee?
HOW MUCH OF THE book is Irish blarney? After all, the story of Blum, like so many of the stories Blackwood tells, is so bizarre it sounds like fiction. In a sense, though, that's Blackwood's point. She writes as she speaks, with a dramatic flair that can seduce you even as you wonder how precise she is. (Freud, for instance, recalls the Picasso incident very differently.) "You can't really get the truth about anybody from an interview," Blackwood says. "It's all fiction in a way."
She portrays herself in her books as a wide-eyed innocent, astonished by the horrors around her. In person, though, she has a disconcerting habit of staring at you, coolly sizing you up while she picks demurely at her meal. You can see how she could drive Maitre Blum mad.
"If it's berserk behavior I like it as a subject," Blackwood says. "If you write about bland people there's no story, is there? I hated Blum and was really scared of her," Blackwood recalls, "but she thought I was a complete idiot because I acted the dumb journalist with her a bit. She wouldn't even have seen me if I didn't have a title. On the other hand she wouldn't have been so rude if I were a crowned head."
Her full name is Lady Caroline Hamilton Temple Blackwood: she's a descendant on her father's side of the great 18th-century dramatist and wit Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She is a Guinness on her mother's side. (She says she finds stout undrinkable.)
"Brewers or bankers, aristocrats or plutocrats, the Guinnesses are apt to be a law unto themselves," John Richardson says. "This Anglo-Irish dynasty is famously cultivated, brilliant, profligate, witty and beguiling. Caution and abstemiousness are not their forte. Caroline upholds her family's reputation for courage, eccentricity and subversive humor. She most certainly does not hold with the ultraconservative views of some of her cousins."
She grew up in the ancestral stone mansion called Clandeboye, in County Down in Northern Ireland. "My great-grandfather built a wing every time he had another child," Blackwood says. "You didn't build a room then, you built a wing. It was terribly rundown when I was a child, the typical joke Irish house with all the pails to catch dripping water all over the place."
Her great-grandfather, Lord Dufferin, was an eminent Victorian, rumored to have been Disraeli's illegitimate son. "I think he was," says Blackwood, mischievously. "Why would a Scottish landowner have a son who looked like Disraeli? He once got up in the House of Lords and denied that he was Disraeli's son, because it was terrible for his mother's honor, but that sort of implies that he was, doesn't it?"
Queen Victoria made him Viceroy of India, where he used to sit on his throne, fanned by peacock feathers, while processions of rajahs paid him homage. At Clandeboye he built a stone shrine to his mother, an immense architectural folly called Helen's Tower that inspired poems by Browning, Kipling and Tennyson. "Kipling loved my great-grandfather and wrote lots of very bad poems to him," Blackwood says. "He had a fatal effect on poets. I mean, the Tennyson poem is a jingle that goes on and on." She discovered not long ago that Helen's Tower inspired a World War I memorial in France to Irish soldiers. "I mean, Helen's Tower is really odd, isn't it? Victorians thought it was fine someone building a tower to his mother while she was alive, but can you imagine doing it now, in post-Freudian times?"
Blackwood's father, Basil, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was a close friend of Evelyn Waugh and part of the glittering circle he recalled in "Brideshead Revisited." When the Marquess was killed in 1943 by the Japanese in the jungle in Burma, he was 35. Blackwood was 12 at the time and has only dim memories of her father.
Like other women of her class she skipped college; instead she went to work for Claud Cockburn, an influential left-wing journalist who wrote for, among others, The Times Literary Supplement. "Claud was a reviewer for TLS and I read books for him, because in those days the reviews were unsigned," Blackwood says. "It was really corrupt but I was extremely diligent."
She recalls meeting Freud around then, at a party memorable for the fact that the painter Francis Bacon caused a row when he hooted down Princess Margaret, who had just started singing "Let's Do It." Blackwood becomes testy when asked if a reference to her in a recent book as Margaret's lady-in-waiting is true. "That's a lie and I'll sue you if you say it," she says, only half kidding and appalled that anyone could imagine her in such a role.
She changes the subject. "Lucian was fantastic, very brilliant, incredibly beautiful, though not in a movie-star way," she says. "I remember he was very mannered, he wore these long side whiskers, which nobody else had then. And he wore funny trousers, deliberately. He wanted to stand out in a crowd, and he did."
When Freud and Blackwood returned to London from Paris, they settled into the circle that included Bacon, Cyril Connolly and the other artists and writers who gathered nightly at the fabled Gargoyle and Colony Clubs. "As a concept the Gargoyle was brilliant," Blackwood states. "O.K., everyone there would be a bit drunk. But you could wander in any night and find the cleverest people in England. After the war it was completely normal for intellectuals to knock each other down if someone had written a bad review or taken someone's girl. Then they always sent flowers the next day."
GRADUALLY HER marriage to Freud crumbled. When she left him, he was devastated. Blackwood says only that "Lucian and I couldn't be married, not endlessly. We were both too restless."
She fled to Los Angeles, installed herself at the Chateau Marmont and got a tiny part in the television series "Have Gun Will Travel." But she hated the city. The best thing to come out of it was that Stephen Spender asked her to do an article for Encounter magazine about California beatniks. It turned out to be a sendup that launched her writing career. Beatnik culture, she wrote, "has all the trappings of the subversive, the meeting in the darkened cellar, the conspiratorial whisper behind the candle in the Chianti bottle, the nihilistic mutter, without the mildest element of subversion."
Not long after Blackwood moved from Los Angeles to New York she met Israel Citkowitz, a former student of Aaron Copland, some 20 years her senior. They married. Today Blackwood speaks warmly but vaguely about Citkowitz. She describes him as "gorgeous and brilliant, which wasn't a bad combination." But they separated after a few years and she became involved with Robert Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books. Through Silvers she met Lowell.
Citkowitz and she remained friendly until he died, and he sometimes lived in the London house she shared with Lowell in the 1970's, helping her to care for the children during Lowell's bouts of madness. Lowell would write a poem to Citkowitz, lines of which Blackwood used as an epitaph on Citkowitz's grave. Her three daughters were born while she was still married to him. She had a son, Sheridan, by Lowell in 1971.
In 1972 she and Lowell flew to Santo Domingo for a joint divorce-marriage. "Nobody could understand the service because it was all in Spanish," she remembers. "It was in a hut, with chickens coming in and out. You'd move to one hut and they'd say you're divorced. Then to another hut where they'd say you're married. All the time there was lots of loud typing. So romantic."
It pains Blackwood that her marriage with Lowell is often described solely in terms of his breakup with Hardwick and illness. She recalls periods at Milgate, their house in Kent, as idyllic. But she acknowledges that Lowell's episodes of manic depression became increasingly unmanageable.
"I wanted Israel to be in the house because I couldn't deal with it alone," she explains. "Not that Cal would have hurt the children, he wasn't murderous. But I had to watch him all day and all night because a manic never sleeps." One day she found him hacking holes in the wall with a carving knife. He told her he was looking for Etruscan treasures. "It was a horrible affliction to not know when your mind was suddenly going to go -- particularly when you had got this huge mind."
Then Lowell died; then Natalya. Through it all, Blackwood managed to turn out a remarkable string of books. One of them, "On the Perimeter," was a report about the women who had camped for years in the mud at Greenham Common in England to protest the American nuclear missile base there. "The Stepdaughter" was a short epistolary novel about an abusive woman abandoned by her husband and left with his hideous daughter. Another novel, "The Fate of Mary Rose," is a chilling tale about an increasingly deranged mother's fatal obsession with her daughter's safety.
Blackwood even wrote a lighthearted cookbook with her friend the English novelist Anna Haycraft (who wrote under the name of Alice Thomas Ellis) that featured celebrity recipes. Blackwood asked Francis Bacon for a recipe. "I doubt anybody had ever asked him for one before. But he was a fantastic cook, and he had this very smart recipe for mayonnaise. Then it turned out that he was such a perfectionist that he kept holding up the publication to make revisions. Eventually Anna called in a panic, saying she'd forgotten to put in Francis's very last revision before the book went to press. 'It had less to do with salt and more to do with vinegar,' she said. Francis brought 100 copies of the book anyway."
In 1980, Blackwood began work on "The Last of the Duchess." "It was pathetic Blum being so old and in love with the Duchess," Blackwood muses. "What a stupid thing to do. But of course the Duchess was ridiculous, too. A more noble figure than she wouldn't have let this lawyer take over her life." The paradox, as Blackwood implies in the book, is that the socialite Duchess spent her last days in solitary confinement, and -- considering the Windsors' connection to Hitler -- that her jailer was a Jew.
Writing kept Blackwood going through one calamity after another -- until the cancer a few years ago. "I really don't like talking about it," she says, after a long pause. "I just kept on trying to do what I do, no matter what life did to me. But after the cancer I became so used to the idea that I would be dead that I had reconciled myself to the idea of not writing anymore. Once you've accepted you're dead, why write?
"It took me a long time to get back to writing. For a while I didn't have any ideas, none." She smiles. "But now I try and write all morning. It may be so awful that I put my pencil through the whole thing and start over the next day. But at least I've got plenty of ideas."
ding the main story
With its macabre humor, the Lowell story is one Blackwood might have written if she hadn't lived through it. "I think it's partly Irish," Blackwood says over lunch at Coco Pazzo, an elegant restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan. "Irish people are very funny but have this tragic sense.
"As Cal wrote," she continues, referring to Lowell, "if there's light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train. He was a humorous poet, you know, though people don't ever say that about him. He also wrote that in the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet, which is very funny, don't you think?"
BLACKWOOD IS A DELICATE WOMAN OF 63, SLIGHTLY stooped yet graceful, with a husky, smoker's voice. She is dressed in a loose-fitting black pants suit, the sort of unbourgeois outfit that pegs her immediately as an upper-class bohemian. Her extraordinary eyes -- big opalescent pools, which Freud made into giant spheres in his hypnotic portraits -- are the principal signs of the beauty she was in her youth. Her looks are striking but weatherbeaten.
It's not just that Blackwood likes to drink. She has also endured a series of Job-like catastrophes over the years: the death of her second husband, the American composer and pianist Israel Citkowitz; Lowell's crippling manic depression and early death; the death from AIDS of her brother, Sheridan, to whom she was very close; the death of her eldest daughter, Natalya, after a drug overdose, and her own bout with cervical cancer, for which she had an operation that left her in constant pain.
Though on one level she thrives on tragedy -- is even defined by it -- Blackwood can't abide maudlin sentiments; bringing up these episodes with her elicits an awkward silence. At first during lunch she gives only clipped responses to questions or just nods in agreement. She orders one vodka after another, tonic on the side. She is more comfortable discussing her new book, "The Last of the Duchess." But still she's cautious.
She also greets with silence a question about her flamboyant socialite mother, Maureen, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. When Maureen was young she reportedly once gave Sir Oswald Mosley, the English fascist, a black eye after he made a pass at her in Antibes. In recent years, though vastly rich, she has complained that her children haven't helped support her and the several houses she lives in. The Picasso biographer John Richardson recalls that Maureen's son, Sheridan, used to bemoan having to help pay for her villa in Sardinia, which he nicknamed the Villa Costalota. Lately, Blackwood, her sister and sister-in-law have wrangled with Maureen over the disposition of $24 million in Guinness inheritance money. The dispute, ultimately settled in Maureen's favor, underscores the nearly nonexistent relationship between Caroline and her mother, a topic Caroline prefers not to discuss.
Gradually, though, as she relaxes, Blackwood emerges as a strangely dramatic woman: intense and vulnerable, with quirky affectations like abbreviating words (Champagne becoming "champ"), a dark, razor-sharp sense of humor and an offbeat sensibility.
Geordie Greig, the New York correspondent for The Sunday Times of London and a family friend, gives an apt description of her: "When she calls on the phone she'll say 'Hiiii, it's Carrr-oline,' and there's always that enigmatic, Eartha Kitt-like purr. But in conversation she's unpredictable. Caroline's physical demeanor is so unforceful that the force of her words, which can be lethally accurate, is made doubly strong. She has an artist's sensibility to sift through any social niceties and get straight to the point. Even with her house on Long Island nothing follows the rules. Lunch might be a huge feast of lobsters and Champagne, or her fridge may be completely out of food."
Over the years, Blackwood has moved easily among several worlds: from the insular, horsy Anglo-Irish upper classes to the hard-drinking smart set of postwar England, to the liberal intelligentsia of New York City in the 1960's and 70's. She has lived in the United States for much of the last 35 years. Nowadays, she's often with her children, who also live here. Her son, Sheridan Lowell, 23, works for a small publishing firm in Manhattan. Her youngest daughter, Ivana Lowell (she has taken her stepfather's name) is 28; she works for the publishing arm of the media company Miramax and has become a lively presence in New York society since moving from London a few years ago. Another daughter, Evgenia Citkowitz, 30, is a screenwriter in Los Angeles married to the English actor Julian Sands.
Blackwood spends many mornings in her kitchen writing longhand. A broken back she suffered when she was young has made it impossible for her to type. She has published nine books that have been richly admired in Britain, where she is best known. They include collections of short stories and essays of stringent, sly, entirely anticonformist social criticism. Her novels are stylish, remorseless, frightening and wickedly funny. They can sometimes remind you a little of Beckett, except that Blackwood's nihilistic sensibility is more gothic than his: it's Beckett crossed with Bram Stoker.
"The Last of the Duchess" is her mesmeric account of a vain attempt to visit the ailing Duchess of Windsor in 1980 and of Blackwood's encounters with the Duchess's ruthless and highly powerful octogenarian lawyer, Maitre Suzanne Blum, a woman obsessed with her client to the point of erotic fantasy. Blum was the Cerberus at the Duchess's door, blocking even old friends from contacting her, according to Blackwood. Was the sick Duchess tortured by being kept alive, Blackwood wondered, or might she even be dead? Was Blum only saying she was alive so that she could sell the royal jewels and claim the money as her legal fee?
HOW MUCH OF THE book is Irish blarney? After all, the story of Blum, like so many of the stories Blackwood tells, is so bizarre it sounds like fiction. In a sense, though, that's Blackwood's point. She writes as she speaks, with a dramatic flair that can seduce you even as you wonder how precise she is. (Freud, for instance, recalls the Picasso incident very differently.) "You can't really get the truth about anybody from an interview," Blackwood says. "It's all fiction in a way."
She portrays herself in her books as a wide-eyed innocent, astonished by the horrors around her. In person, though, she has a disconcerting habit of staring at you, coolly sizing you up while she picks demurely at her meal. You can see how she could drive Maitre Blum mad.
"If it's berserk behavior I like it as a subject," Blackwood says. "If you write about bland people there's no story, is there? I hated Blum and was really scared of her," Blackwood recalls, "but she thought I was a complete idiot because I acted the dumb journalist with her a bit. She wouldn't even have seen me if I didn't have a title. On the other hand she wouldn't have been so rude if I were a crowned head."
Her full name is Lady Caroline Hamilton Temple Blackwood: she's a descendant on her father's side of the great 18th-century dramatist and wit Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She is a Guinness on her mother's side. (She says she finds stout undrinkable.)
"Brewers or bankers, aristocrats or plutocrats, the Guinnesses are apt to be a law unto themselves," John Richardson says. "This Anglo-Irish dynasty is famously cultivated, brilliant, profligate, witty and beguiling. Caution and abstemiousness are not their forte. Caroline upholds her family's reputation for courage, eccentricity and subversive humor. She most certainly does not hold with the ultraconservative views of some of her cousins."
She grew up in the ancestral stone mansion called Clandeboye, in County Down in Northern Ireland. "My great-grandfather built a wing every time he had another child," Blackwood says. "You didn't build a room then, you built a wing. It was terribly rundown when I was a child, the typical joke Irish house with all the pails to catch dripping water all over the place."
Her great-grandfather, Lord Dufferin, was an eminent Victorian, rumored to have been Disraeli's illegitimate son. "I think he was," says Blackwood, mischievously. "Why would a Scottish landowner have a son who looked like Disraeli? He once got up in the House of Lords and denied that he was Disraeli's son, because it was terrible for his mother's honor, but that sort of implies that he was, doesn't it?"
Queen Victoria made him Viceroy of India, where he used to sit on his throne, fanned by peacock feathers, while processions of rajahs paid him homage. At Clandeboye he built a stone shrine to his mother, an immense architectural folly called Helen's Tower that inspired poems by Browning, Kipling and Tennyson. "Kipling loved my great-grandfather and wrote lots of very bad poems to him," Blackwood says. "He had a fatal effect on poets. I mean, the Tennyson poem is a jingle that goes on and on." She discovered not long ago that Helen's Tower inspired a World War I memorial in France to Irish soldiers. "I mean, Helen's Tower is really odd, isn't it? Victorians thought it was fine someone building a tower to his mother while she was alive, but can you imagine doing it now, in post-Freudian times?"
Blackwood's father, Basil, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was a close friend of Evelyn Waugh and part of the glittering circle he recalled in "Brideshead Revisited." When the Marquess was killed in 1943 by the Japanese in the jungle in Burma, he was 35. Blackwood was 12 at the time and has only dim memories of her father.
Like other women of her class she skipped college; instead she went to work for Claud Cockburn, an influential left-wing journalist who wrote for, among others, The Times Literary Supplement. "Claud was a reviewer for TLS and I read books for him, because in those days the reviews were unsigned," Blackwood says. "It was really corrupt but I was extremely diligent."
She recalls meeting Freud around then, at a party memorable for the fact that the painter Francis Bacon caused a row when he hooted down Princess Margaret, who had just started singing "Let's Do It." Blackwood becomes testy when asked if a reference to her in a recent book as Margaret's lady-in-waiting is true. "That's a lie and I'll sue you if you say it," she says, only half kidding and appalled that anyone could imagine her in such a role.
She changes the subject. "Lucian was fantastic, very brilliant, incredibly beautiful, though not in a movie-star way," she says. "I remember he was very mannered, he wore these long side whiskers, which nobody else had then. And he wore funny trousers, deliberately. He wanted to stand out in a crowd, and he did."
When Freud and Blackwood returned to London from Paris, they settled into the circle that included Bacon, Cyril Connolly and the other artists and writers who gathered nightly at the fabled Gargoyle and Colony Clubs. "As a concept the Gargoyle was brilliant," Blackwood states. "O.K., everyone there would be a bit drunk. But you could wander in any night and find the cleverest people in England. After the war it was completely normal for intellectuals to knock each other down if someone had written a bad review or taken someone's girl. Then they always sent flowers the next day."
GRADUALLY HER marriage to Freud crumbled. When she left him, he was devastated. Blackwood says only that "Lucian and I couldn't be married, not endlessly. We were both too restless."
She fled to Los Angeles, installed herself at the Chateau Marmont and got a tiny part in the television series "Have Gun Will Travel." But she hated the city. The best thing to come out of it was that Stephen Spender asked her to do an article for Encounter magazine about California beatniks. It turned out to be a sendup that launched her writing career. Beatnik culture, she wrote, "has all the trappings of the subversive, the meeting in the darkened cellar, the conspiratorial whisper behind the candle in the Chianti bottle, the nihilistic mutter, without the mildest element of subversion."
Not long after Blackwood moved from Los Angeles to New York she met Israel Citkowitz, a former student of Aaron Copland, some 20 years her senior. They married. Today Blackwood speaks warmly but vaguely about Citkowitz. She describes him as "gorgeous and brilliant, which wasn't a bad combination." But they separated after a few years and she became involved with Robert Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books. Through Silvers she met Lowell.
Citkowitz and she remained friendly until he died, and he sometimes lived in the London house she shared with Lowell in the 1970's, helping her to care for the children during Lowell's bouts of madness. Lowell would write a poem to Citkowitz, lines of which Blackwood used as an epitaph on Citkowitz's grave. Her three daughters were born while she was still married to him. She had a son, Sheridan, by Lowell in 1971.
In 1972 she and Lowell flew to Santo Domingo for a joint divorce-marriage. "Nobody could understand the service because it was all in Spanish," she remembers. "It was in a hut, with chickens coming in and out. You'd move to one hut and they'd say you're divorced. Then to another hut where they'd say you're married. All the time there was lots of loud typing. So romantic."
It pains Blackwood that her marriage with Lowell is often described solely in terms of his breakup with Hardwick and illness. She recalls periods at Milgate, their house in Kent, as idyllic. But she acknowledges that Lowell's episodes of manic depression became increasingly unmanageable.
"I wanted Israel to be in the house because I couldn't deal with it alone," she explains. "Not that Cal would have hurt the children, he wasn't murderous. But I had to watch him all day and all night because a manic never sleeps." One day she found him hacking holes in the wall with a carving knife. He told her he was looking for Etruscan treasures. "It was a horrible affliction to not know when your mind was suddenly going to go -- particularly when you had got this huge mind."
Then Lowell died; then Natalya. Through it all, Blackwood managed to turn out a remarkable string of books. One of them, "On the Perimeter," was a report about the women who had camped for years in the mud at Greenham Common in England to protest the American nuclear missile base there. "The Stepdaughter" was a short epistolary novel about an abusive woman abandoned by her husband and left with his hideous daughter. Another novel, "The Fate of Mary Rose," is a chilling tale about an increasingly deranged mother's fatal obsession with her daughter's safety.
Blackwood even wrote a lighthearted cookbook with her friend the English novelist Anna Haycraft (who wrote under the name of Alice Thomas Ellis) that featured celebrity recipes. Blackwood asked Francis Bacon for a recipe. "I doubt anybody had ever asked him for one before. But he was a fantastic cook, and he had this very smart recipe for mayonnaise. Then it turned out that he was such a perfectionist that he kept holding up the publication to make revisions. Eventually Anna called in a panic, saying she'd forgotten to put in Francis's very last revision before the book went to press. 'It had less to do with salt and more to do with vinegar,' she said. Francis brought 100 copies of the book anyway."
In 1980, Blackwood began work on "The Last of the Duchess." "It was pathetic Blum being so old and in love with the Duchess," Blackwood muses. "What a stupid thing to do. But of course the Duchess was ridiculous, too. A more noble figure than she wouldn't have let this lawyer take over her life." The paradox, as Blackwood implies in the book, is that the socialite Duchess spent her last days in solitary confinement, and -- considering the Windsors' connection to Hitler -- that her jailer was a Jew.
Writing kept Blackwood going through one calamity after another -- until the cancer a few years ago. "I really don't like talking about it," she says, after a long pause. "I just kept on trying to do what I do, no matter what life did to me. But after the cancer I became so used to the idea that I would be dead that I had reconciled myself to the idea of not writing anymore. Once you've accepted you're dead, why write?
"It took me a long time to get back to writing. For a while I didn't have any ideas, none." She smiles. "But now I try and write all morning. It may be so awful that I put my pencil through the whole thing and start over the next day. But at least I've got plenty of ideas."
BIO WIKIPEDIA
Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (16 July 1931 – 14 February 1996) was a writer, and the eldest child of The 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and the brewery heiress Maureen Guinness.
A well-known figure in the literary world through her journalism and her novels, Lady Caroline Blackwood was equally well known for her high-profile marriages, first to the artist Lucian Freud, then to the composer Israel Citkowitz and finally to the poet Robert Lowell, who described her as "a mermaid who dines upon the bones of her winded lovers". Her novels are known for their wit and intelligence, and one in particular is scathingly autobiographical in describing her unhappy childhood.
She was born into an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family from Ulster at 4 Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge, her parents' London home. She was, she admitted, "scantily educated" at, among other schools, Rockport School (County Down) and Downham (Essex). After a finishing school in Oxford she was presented as a debutante in 1949 at a ball held at Londonderry House.
Career
Blackwood's first job was with Hulton Press as a secretary, but she was soon given small reporting jobs by Claud Cockburn. Ann Fleming, the wife of "James Bond" author Ian Fleming, introduced Lady Caroline to Lucian Freud, and the two eloped to Paris in 1952. In Paris she met Picasso (and reportedly refused to wash for three days after he drew on her hands and nails). She married Freud on 9 December 1953 and became a striking figure in London's bohemian circles; the Gargoyle Club and Colony Room replaced Belgraviadrawing rooms as her haunts. She sat for several of Freud's finest portraits, including Girl in Bed, which testifies to her alluring beauty. She was impressed by the ruthless vision of Freud and Francis Bacon and her later fiction was a literary version of their view of humanity.
In the early 1960s, Blackwood began contributing to Encounter, London Magazine, and other periodicals on subjects such as beatniks, Ulster sectarianism, feminist theatre and New York free schools. Although these articles were elegant, minutely observed and sometimes wickedly funny, they had, according to Christopher Isherwood, a persistent flaw: "she is only capable of thinking negatively. Confronted by a phenomenon, she asks herself: what is wrong with it?"[1] During the mid-1960s, she had an affair with Robert Silvers, the founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books.
Her third husband, Robert Lowell, was a crucial influence on her talents as a novelist. He encouraged her to write her first book, For All That I Found There (1973), the title of which is a line from the Percy French song "The Mountains of Mourne", and which includes a mordant memoir of her daughter's treatment in a burns unit. Blackwood's first novel The Stepdaughter (1976) appeared three years later to much acclaim, and is a concise and gripping monologue by a rich, self-pitying woman deserted by her husband in a plush New York apartment and tormented by her fat stepdaughter. It won the David Higham Prize for best first novel. Great Granny Webster followed in 1977 and was partly derived on her own miserable childhood, and depicted an austere and loveless old woman's destructive impact on her daughter and granddaughter. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize.
In 1980 came The Last of the Duchess, a study of the relations between the Duchess of Windsor and her cunning lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum; it could not be published until after Blum's death in 1995. Her third novel The Fate of Mary Rose (1981) describes the effect on a Kent village of the rape and torture of a ten-year-old girl named Maureen and is narrated by a selfish historian whose obsessions destroy his domestic life. After this came a collection of five short stories, Good Night Sweet Ladies (1983), followed by her final novel, Corrigan (1984), which was the least successful and depicts the effects on a depressed widow of a charming, energetic but sinister cripple who erupts into her life.
Blackwood's later books were based on interviews and vignettes, including On The Perimeter (1984), which focused her attentions on the women's peace encampment at the Greenham Common air base in Berkshire, and In The Pink (1987), which was a reflective, ghoulish book looking at the hunting and the hunt saboteur fraternities and exposed the many obsessive personalities of both fox-hunters and animal rights activists.
Personal life
Blackwood's marriage to Lucian Freud disintegrated soon after they married in 1953; it was dissolved in 1958, in Mexico.[citation needed] In 1957, Blackwood moved to New York City and studied acting at the Stella Adler school. She also went to Hollywood and appeared in several films.
On 15 August 1959, she married the pianist Israel Citkowitz (1909–1974), 22 years her senior and born in the same year as her late father; they had three daughters. By 1966, when their youngest, Ivana, was born, their marriage was over, although Citkowitz continued to live nearby and served as a nanny-duenna[citation needed] until his death. During the mid-1960s, Blackwood had an affair with Robert Silvers, a founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books, who stayed close to the family thereafter.
According to Ivana, both she and Silvers suspected that he was her biological father. However, a deathbed admission by Blackwood revealed that Ivana's biological father was another boyfriend: the screenwriter Ivan Moffat, a grandson of actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree.
In 1970, Blackwood returned to London and, in April, began a relationship with the poet Robert Lowell, then a visiting professor at All Souls College, Oxford. Their son, Sheridan, was born on 28 September 1971; after being divorced from their respective spouses, Blackwood and Lowell were married, on 21 October 1972. They lived in London and at Milgate House in Kent. The sequence of poems in Lowell's The Dolphin (1973) provides a disrupted narrative of his involvement with Blackwood and the birth of their son (Lowell's friend Elizabeth Bishop strongly advised Lowell not to publish the book, advice he ignored).
Lowell suffered from bipolar disorder, and his manic episodes prompted in Blackwood distress, confusion, feelings of uselessness, and fear about the effects on their children. Her anxieties, alcohol-related illnesses, and late-night tirades exacerbated his condition.[citation needed] In 1977, Lowell died, reportedly clutching one of Freud's portraits of Blackwood, in the back seat of a New York cab, on his way back to his second wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. This loss was followed a year later by the death of her daughter Natalya, from a drug overdose at the age of 18.
In 1977, to avoid taxation, Blackwood left England and went to live in County Kildare, Ireland, in an apartment at the great Georgian mansion of Castletown House, which was owned by her cousin Desmond Guinness. Ten years later, in 1987, she returned to the United States, settling in a large, comfortable house in Sag Harbor, Long Island, where, although her abilities were reduced by alcoholism, she continued to write; her work of that era includes two vivid memoirs, of Princess Margaret and of Francis Bacon, published in The New York Review of Books in 1992.
According to those close to her, she never lost her macabre sense of humour, even during her final illness. British writer and essayist Anna Haycraft, a staunch Roman Catholic, brought holy water from Lourdes, which accidentally spilled on Blackwood's deathbed sheets; "I might have caught my death", she muttered.
Death
On 14 February 1996, Blackwood died from cancer, at the Mayfair Hotel on Park Avenue in New York City, aged 64. She was survived by her two younger daughters: Evgenia Citkowitz Sands (b. 1963), wife of actor Julian Sands, and Ivana (b. 1966); by her son, Sheridan Lowell; by her sister, Lady Perdita Blackwood; and by her mother, the former Maureen Guinness, who died two years later, aged 91. She was predeceased by her father, Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (1909–1945); by her eldest daughter, Natalya (1960–1978); and by her brother, Sheridan Dufferin, 5th Marquess (1938–1988).
New York Times -
WHEN LADY Caroline Blackwood, the Irish writer and Guinness heiress, was living in Paris in the early 1950's, she and her first husband, the painter Lucian Freud, were invited to visit Picasso.
"Picasso got one of his followers to ask Lucian if he would like to see Picasso's paintings," Blackwood says. "Of course, Lucian said yes. Meanwhile Picasso asked me if I wanted to see his doves: he had this spiral iron staircase leading to the roof, and off we go, winding round and round to the top, until we reached these doves in cages and all around us was the best view of Paris, the best. Whereupon immediately, standing on this tiny, tiny space, way above the city, Picasso does a complete plunge at me. All I felt was fear. I kept saying, 'Go down the stairs, go down.' He said, 'No, no, we are together above the roofs of Paris.' It was so absurd, and to me Picasso was just as old as the hills, an old letch, genius or no.
"I wonder," Blackwood pauses to ask, "what we were supposed to have done if I accepted? There was no space to make love, with all those doves. And think how many other people he had up there. Did they go through with it? And technically, how did they go through with it? And with the husband downstairs?"
She then adds a coda: "Lucian got a call out of nowhere from a mistress of Picasso's who asked him if he could come round and paint her. She wanted to make Picasso jealous. Lucian very politely said maybe he could paint her portrait later, but not now because he happened to be in the midst of doing his wife's portrait."
That picture, Blackwood says, turned out to be Freud's "Girl in Bed." Years later, in 1977, it played a curious part in the death of the poet Robert Lowell, another of Lady Caroline's husbands. Their marriage was in tatters when, as the story goes, he left her in Ireland and returned to the United States. After Lowell's taxi arrived at his apartment on West 67th Street, the driver found him slumped over. A doorman summoned Elizabeth Hardwick, the writer and editor whom Lowell had left to marry Blackwood; she happened to live in the same building. Hardwick opened the taxi door -- only to be confronted with her ex-husband's corpse. He was holding "Girl in Bed."
With its macabre humor, the Lowell story is one Blackwood might have written if she hadn't lived through it. "I think it's partly Irish," Blackwood says over lunch at Coco Pazzo, an elegant restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan. "Irish people are very funny but have this tragic sense.
"As Cal wrote," she continues, referring to Lowell, "if there's light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train. He was a humorous poet, you know, though people don't ever say that about him. He also wrote that in the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet, which is very funny, don't you think?"
BLACKWOOD IS A DELICATE WOMAN OF 63, SLIGHTLY stooped yet graceful, with a husky, smoker's voice. She is dressed in a loose-fitting black pants suit, the sort of unbourgeois outfit that pegs her immediately as an upper-class bohemian. Her extraordinary eyes -- big opalescent pools, which Freud made into giant spheres in his hypnotic portraits -- are the principal signs of the beauty she was in her youth. Her looks are striking but weatherbeaten.
It's not just that Blackwood likes to drink. She has also endured a series of Job-like catastrophes over the years: the death of her second husband, the American composer and pianist Israel Citkowitz; Lowell's crippling manic depression and early death; the death from AIDS of her brother, Sheridan, to whom she was very close; the death of her eldest daughter, Natalya, after a drug overdose, and her own bout with cervical cancer, for which she had an operation that left her in constant pain.
Though on one level she thrives on tragedy -- is even defined by it -- Blackwood can't abide maudlin sentiments; bringing up these episodes with her elicits an awkward silence. At first during lunch she gives only clipped responses to questions or just nods in agreement. She orders one vodka after another, tonic on the side. She is more comfortable discussing her new book, "The Last of the Duchess." But still she's cautious.
She also greets with silence a question about her flamboyant socialite mother, Maureen, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. When Maureen was young she reportedly once gave Sir Oswald Mosley, the English fascist, a black eye after he made a pass at her in Antibes. In recent years, though vastly rich, she has complained that her children haven't helped support her and the several houses she lives in. The Picasso biographer John Richardson recalls that Maureen's son, Sheridan, used to bemoan having to help pay for her villa in Sardinia, which he nicknamed the Villa Costalota. Lately, Blackwood, her sister and sister-in-law have wrangled with Maureen over the disposition of $24 million in Guinness inheritance money. The dispute, ultimately settled in Maureen's favor, underscores the nearly nonexistent relationship between Caroline and her mother, a topic Caroline prefers not to discuss.
Gradually, though, as she relaxes, Blackwood emerges as a strangely dramatic woman: intense and vulnerable, with quirky affectations like abbreviating words (Champagne becoming "champ"), a dark, razor-sharp sense of humor and an offbeat sensibility.
Geordie Greig, the New York correspondent for The Sunday Times of London and a family friend, gives an apt description of her: "When she calls on the phone she'll say 'Hiiii, it's Carrr-oline,' and there's always that enigmatic, Eartha Kitt-like purr. But in conversation she's unpredictable. Caroline's physical demeanor is so unforceful that the force of her words, which can be lethally accurate, is made doubly strong. She has an artist's sensibility to sift through any social niceties and get straight to the point. Even with her house on Long Island nothing follows the rules. Lunch might be a huge feast of lobsters and Champagne, or her fridge may be completely out of food."
Over the years, Blackwood has moved easily among several worlds: from the insular, horsy Anglo-Irish upper classes to the hard-drinking smart set of postwar England, to the liberal intelligentsia of New York City in the 1960's and 70's. She has lived in the United States for much of the last 35 years. Nowadays, she's often with her children, who also live here. Her son, Sheridan Lowell, 23, works for a small publishing firm in Manhattan. Her youngest daughter, Ivana Lowell (she has taken her stepfather's name) is 28; she works for the publishing arm of the media company Miramax and has become a lively presence in New York society since moving from London a few years ago. Another daughter, Evgenia Citkowitz, 30, is a screenwriter in Los Angeles married to the English actor Julian Sands.
Blackwood spends many mornings in her kitchen writing longhand. A broken back she suffered when she was young has made it impossible for her to type. She has published nine books that have been richly admired in Britain, where she is best known. They include collections of short stories and essays of stringent, sly, entirely anticonformist social criticism. Her novels are stylish, remorseless, frightening and wickedly funny. They can sometimes remind you a little of Beckett, except that Blackwood's nihilistic sensibility is more gothic than his: it's Beckett crossed with Bram Stoker.
"The Last of the Duchess" is her mesmeric account of a vain attempt to visit the ailing Duchess of Windsor in 1980 and of Blackwood's encounters with the Duchess's ruthless and highly powerful octogenarian lawyer, Maitre Suzanne Blum, a woman obsessed with her client to the point of erotic fantasy. Blum was the Cerberus at the Duchess's door, blocking even old friends from contacting her, according to Blackwood. Was the sick Duchess tortured by being kept alive, Blackwood wondered, or might she even be dead? Was Blum only saying she was alive so that she could sell the royal jewels and claim the money as her legal fee?
HOW MUCH OF THE book is Irish blarney? After all, the story of Blum, like so many of the stories Blackwood tells, is so bizarre it sounds like fiction. In a sense, though, that's Blackwood's point. She writes as she speaks, with a dramatic flair that can seduce you even as you wonder how precise she is. (Freud, for instance, recalls the Picasso incident very differently.) "You can't really get the truth about anybody from an interview," Blackwood says. "It's all fiction in a way."
She portrays herself in her books as a wide-eyed innocent, astonished by the horrors around her. In person, though, she has a disconcerting habit of staring at you, coolly sizing you up while she picks demurely at her meal. You can see how she could drive Maitre Blum mad.
"If it's berserk behavior I like it as a subject," Blackwood says. "If you write about bland people there's no story, is there? I hated Blum and was really scared of her," Blackwood recalls, "but she thought I was a complete idiot because I acted the dumb journalist with her a bit. She wouldn't even have seen me if I didn't have a title. On the other hand she wouldn't have been so rude if I were a crowned head."
Her full name is Lady Caroline Hamilton Temple Blackwood: she's a descendant on her father's side of the great 18th-century dramatist and wit Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She is a Guinness on her mother's side. (She says she finds stout undrinkable.)
"Brewers or bankers, aristocrats or plutocrats, the Guinnesses are apt to be a law unto themselves," John Richardson says. "This Anglo-Irish dynasty is famously cultivated, brilliant, profligate, witty and beguiling. Caution and abstemiousness are not their forte. Caroline upholds her family's reputation for courage, eccentricity and subversive humor. She most certainly does not hold with the ultraconservative views of some of her cousins."
She grew up in the ancestral stone mansion called Clandeboye, in County Down in Northern Ireland. "My great-grandfather built a wing every time he had another child," Blackwood says. "You didn't build a room then, you built a wing. It was terribly rundown when I was a child, the typical joke Irish house with all the pails to catch dripping water all over the place."
Her great-grandfather, Lord Dufferin, was an eminent Victorian, rumored to have been Disraeli's illegitimate son. "I think he was," says Blackwood, mischievously. "Why would a Scottish landowner have a son who looked like Disraeli? He once got up in the House of Lords and denied that he was Disraeli's son, because it was terrible for his mother's honor, but that sort of implies that he was, doesn't it?"
Queen Victoria made him Viceroy of India, where he used to sit on his throne, fanned by peacock feathers, while processions of rajahs paid him homage. At Clandeboye he built a stone shrine to his mother, an immense architectural folly called Helen's Tower that inspired poems by Browning, Kipling and Tennyson. "Kipling loved my great-grandfather and wrote lots of very bad poems to him," Blackwood says. "He had a fatal effect on poets. I mean, the Tennyson poem is a jingle that goes on and on." She discovered not long ago that Helen's Tower inspired a World War I memorial in France to Irish soldiers. "I mean, Helen's Tower is really odd, isn't it? Victorians thought it was fine someone building a tower to his mother while she was alive, but can you imagine doing it now, in post-Freudian times?"
Blackwood's father, Basil, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was a close friend of Evelyn Waugh and part of the glittering circle he recalled in "Brideshead Revisited." When the Marquess was killed in 1943 by the Japanese in the jungle in Burma, he was 35. Blackwood was 12 at the time and has only dim memories of her father.
Like other women of her class she skipped college; instead she went to work for Claud Cockburn, an influential left-wing journalist who wrote for, among others, The Times Literary Supplement. "Claud was a reviewer for TLS and I read books for him, because in those days the reviews were unsigned," Blackwood says. "It was really corrupt but I was extremely diligent."
She recalls meeting Freud around then, at a party memorable for the fact that the painter Francis Bacon caused a row when he hooted down Princess Margaret, who had just started singing "Let's Do It." Blackwood becomes testy when asked if a reference to her in a recent book as Margaret's lady-in-waiting is true. "That's a lie and I'll sue you if you say it," she says, only half kidding and appalled that anyone could imagine her in such a role.
She changes the subject. "Lucian was fantastic, very brilliant, incredibly beautiful, though not in a movie-star way," she says. "I remember he was very mannered, he wore these long side whiskers, which nobody else had then. And he wore funny trousers, deliberately. He wanted to stand out in a crowd, and he did."
When Freud and Blackwood returned to London from Paris, they settled into the circle that included Bacon, Cyril Connolly and the other artists and writers who gathered nightly at the fabled Gargoyle and Colony Clubs. "As a concept the Gargoyle was brilliant," Blackwood states. "O.K., everyone there would be a bit drunk. But you could wander in any night and find the cleverest people in England. After the war it was completely normal for intellectuals to knock each other down if someone had written a bad review or taken someone's girl. Then they always sent flowers the next day."
GRADUALLY HER marriage to Freud crumbled. When she left him, he was devastated. Blackwood says only that "Lucian and I couldn't be married, not endlessly. We were both too restless."
She fled to Los Angeles, installed herself at the Chateau Marmont and got a tiny part in the television series "Have Gun Will Travel." But she hated the city. The best thing to come out of it was that Stephen Spender asked her to do an article for Encounter magazine about California beatniks. It turned out to be a sendup that launched her writing career. Beatnik culture, she wrote, "has all the trappings of the subversive, the meeting in the darkened cellar, the conspiratorial whisper behind the candle in the Chianti bottle, the nihilistic mutter, without the mildest element of subversion."
Not long after Blackwood moved from Los Angeles to New York she met Israel Citkowitz, a former student of Aaron Copland, some 20 years her senior. They married. Today Blackwood speaks warmly but vaguely about Citkowitz. She describes him as "gorgeous and brilliant, which wasn't a bad combination." But they separated after a few years and she became involved with Robert Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books. Through Silvers she met Lowell.
Citkowitz and she remained friendly until he died, and he sometimes lived in the London house she shared with Lowell in the 1970's, helping her to care for the children during Lowell's bouts of madness. Lowell would write a poem to Citkowitz, lines of which Blackwood used as an epitaph on Citkowitz's grave. Her three daughters were born while she was still married to him. She had a son, Sheridan, by Lowell in 1971.
In 1972 she and Lowell flew to Santo Domingo for a joint divorce-marriage. "Nobody could understand the service because it was all in Spanish," she remembers. "It was in a hut, with chickens coming in and out. You'd move to one hut and they'd say you're divorced. Then to another hut where they'd say you're married. All the time there was lots of loud typing. So romantic."
It pains Blackwood that her marriage with Lowell is often described solely in terms of his breakup with Hardwick and illness. She recalls periods at Milgate, their house in Kent, as idyllic. But she acknowledges that Lowell's episodes of manic depression became increasingly unmanageable.
"I wanted Israel to be in the house because I couldn't deal with it alone," she explains. "Not that Cal would have hurt the children, he wasn't murderous. But I had to watch him all day and all night because a manic never sleeps." One day she found him hacking holes in the wall with a carving knife. He told her he was looking for Etruscan treasures. "It was a horrible affliction to not know when your mind was suddenly going to go -- particularly when you had got this huge mind."
Then Lowell died; then Natalya. Through it all, Blackwood managed to turn out a remarkable string of books. One of them, "On the Perimeter," was a report about the women who had camped for years in the mud at Greenham Common in England to protest the American nuclear missile base there. "The Stepdaughter" was a short epistolary novel about an abusive woman abandoned by her husband and left with his hideous daughter. Another novel, "The Fate of Mary Rose," is a chilling tale about an increasingly deranged mother's fatal obsession with her daughter's safety.
Blackwood even wrote a lighthearted cookbook with her friend the English novelist Anna Haycraft (who wrote under the name of Alice Thomas Ellis) that featured celebrity recipes. Blackwood asked Francis Bacon for a recipe. "I doubt anybody had ever asked him for one before. But he was a fantastic cook, and he had this very smart recipe for mayonnaise. Then it turned out that he was such a perfectionist that he kept holding up the publication to make revisions. Eventually Anna called in a panic, saying she'd forgotten to put in Francis's very last revision before the book went to press. 'It had less to do with salt and more to do with vinegar,' she said. Francis brought 100 copies of the book anyway."
In 1980, Blackwood began work on "The Last of the Duchess." "It was pathetic Blum being so old and in love with the Duchess," Blackwood muses. "What a stupid thing to do. But of course the Duchess was ridiculous, too. A more noble figure than she wouldn't have let this lawyer take over her life." The paradox, as Blackwood implies in the book, is that the socialite Duchess spent her last days in solitary confinement, and -- considering the Windsors' connection to Hitler -- that her jailer was a Jew.
Writing kept Blackwood going through one calamity after another -- until the cancer a few years ago. "I really don't like talking about it," she says, after a long pause. "I just kept on trying to do what I do, no matter what life did to me. But after the cancer I became so used to the idea that I would be dead that I had reconciled myself to the idea of not writing anymore. Once you've accepted you're dead, why write?
"It took me a long time to get back to writing. For a while I didn't have any ideas, none." She smiles. "But now I try and write all morning. It may be so awful that I put my pencil through the whole thing and start over the next day. But at least I've got plenty of ideas."
She married, firstly, Lucien Michael Freud, son of Ernst Freud and Lucie Brasch, on 9 December 1953. She and Lucien Michael Freud were divorced in 1957 at Mexico. She married, secondly, Israel Citkowitz on 15 August 1959. She and Israel Citkowitz were divorced before 1972. She married, thirdly, Robert Traill Spence Lowell in 1972. She died on 15 February 1996 at age 64.
From 9 December 1953, her married name became Freud. Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood used the pen-name of Caroline Blackwood. From 15 August 1959, her married name became Citkowitz. She wrote the book For All That I Found There. From 1972, her married name became Lowell. She wrote the book The Stepdaughter, published 1976. She wrote the book Great Granny Webster, published 1977. She was decorated with the award of Booker Prize (runner-up) in 1977. She wrote the book Good Night Sweet Ladies. She wrote the book The Fate of Mary Rose. She wrote the book On the Perimeter: Caroline Blackwood at Greenham Common, published 1984. She wrote the book In the Pink. She wrote the book Darling. She wrote the book Corrigan. She wrote the book You Shouldn't Have Gone to so Much Trouble.
Children of Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood and Israel Citkowitz
•Natalya Citkowitz b. 17 Aug 1960, d. 22 Jun 1978
•Evgenia Citkowitz b. 1964
•Ivana Citkowitz b. 1966
Child of Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood and Robert Traill Spence Lowell
•Robert Sheriden Lowell b. Aug 1971
According to her daughter Ivana's memoir, "Why Not Say What Happened?", Caroline's ashes were buried under a pine tree at her home in Sag Harbor, NY. This house was once known as "the Summer White House" as it was occupied by Chester A. Arthur on vacations during his presidency.
Caroline Blackwood was a writer with a small number of books to her name. These have an intensity, a black and humorous concentration on the pitilessness of experience, which should ensure their survival. They are also very funny.
Ireland was in her blood and upbringing. Ireland suffers Blackwood's forensic surgery in her first book, For All That I Found There (1973), a collection of short stories and meditative pieces. With courage and a certain breathtaking cruelty she followed it with two autobiographical novels. The Stepdaughter (1976) is a miniature Greek tragedy, done as farce, about an unhappy relationship with your child. The title is the only figleaf permitted; the book is based on her eldest child, Natalia Citkowitz, who died through addiction before the book was published. There is something of Evelyn Waugh in Blackwood's ability to make you laugh reluctantly at her ruthlessness: Waugh done over by the painter Francis Bacon. Great Granny Webster is lighter and funnier. Here the Anglo- Irish world of Elizabeth Bowen is allowed no smidgen of decadent charm; water drips relentlessly through the roof, room after oppressive room of the statutory mansion. Yeats, you feel, would have had a nervous breakdown had he lived to read it. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1977 and was greatly admired by Philip Larkin.
Subsequent novels such as The Fate of Mary Rose (1981) and Corrigan (1984) were less successful, though they well repay re-reading. A further collection of short stories, Good Night Sweet Ladies (1983) and a sympathetic yet merciless account of the predominantly female protest at Greenham Common, On the Perimeter (1984), confirmed her talent. If her last book, an account of the last days of the Duchess of Windsor, The Last Duchess (1995), betrays some signs of Caroline Blackwood's cancer and alcoholism, it does contain one of the greatest pieces of comic writing I know: her own attempts at interviewing Maitre Suzanne Blum, the terrifying French lawyer who took charge of the Duchess's fortune and bedridden body before dying herself in her nineties.
Caroline Blackwood's dark temperament, perfectly realised in her writing, is in some ways a puzzle, given the facts of her life. It was a rich life literally and metaphorically She was one of the most beautiful women of her generation (a more intense and fascinating version of the film star, Michelle Pfeiffer, I found). Even in the last years, when life and illness ravaged her, you could not look at anyone else when she was in the room. She was loved by some of the most talented men of the age and married two of them, the painter Lucian Freud and the poet Robert Lowell. She was well-off (her mother was Maureen Guinness, now Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava) and aristocratic in a period when that added rather than subtracted glamour. Her father, who died when she was 13 was Basil Dufferin, eulogised in a Betjeman poem; her brother Sheridan Dufferin, whom with her sister Perdita she loved, was the kind of man whose charm, generosity and modesty give aristocrats a good name.
As well as passion, Caroline Blackwood experienced love both giving and receiving. In some ways a difficult mother, she was always close to her daughters Eugenia and Ivana Citkowitz and her son Sheridan Lowell. She made great and enduring friendships with men and women: I was lucky enough to enjoy her friendship for nearly 35 years. She was very funny because polite and well-mannered on the surface, in no sense a person who shocked in order to make an effect, she mercilessly cut straight through to the core of things. Like Lucian Freud, and her friend Francis Bacon, she hated padding. You could not pretend in her company. Even on her deathbed, black Blackwood gold was mined. One of the women she loved most, a Catholic and fellow novelist, had brought water from Lourdes. Some of it spilt on the sheets. "I might have caught my death," she muttered.
Lucian Freud's portraits of her are in my view his greatest paintings. She was pleased to get a recent long telephone call from him. "I had forgotten how funny Lucian can be," she said. Some time after leaving him, she married Israel Citkowitz, a talented composer and delightful man who sadly suffered most of his career from a debilitating writer's block.
Without turning into a figure of tragic suffering, Citkowitz followed her to England after her marriage to Robert Lowell and continued as a father to his children, and as a kind of nanny-duenna to Blackwood for the rest of his life. She was his great achivement. He always registered a quiet pride in it.
Robert Lowell's life with Blackwood and his traumatic parting and final reunion with his previous wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwicke, is relived in three books of poems. A long sequence of love poems, The Dolphin, praises and anatomises Caroline as the Muse who put an end to his philanderings.
Any clear thing that blinds us with
surprise,
your wandering silences and bright
trouvailles,
dolphin let loose to catch the
flashing fish . . .
They lived in London, in a manor she bought in Kent and later in her cousin Desmond Guinness's great house Castletown in Co. Kildare. The marriage ran aground on the shoals of Blackwood's drinking, Lowell's sense that he had little time he had to live and terror of his bouts of manic depression - ironically less persistent after their meeting. Their love affair never floundered. Lowell lived with Elizabeth the last year of his life, but visited Blackwood.
Three days before he died I delivered to him in Ireland a picture I had procured, a Freud of Caroline. He died clutching it in a cab on his way to Elizabeth in New York. At his graveside the two women clung to each other.
Grey Gowrie
Caroline Maureen Blackwood, writer: born 1931; married 1953 Lucian Freud (marriage dissolved), 1959 Israel Citkovitz (marriage dissolved; three daughters, one deceased), 1972 Robert Lowell (died 1977; one son); died New York 14 February 1996.
WHEN LADY Caroline Blackwood, the Irish writer and Guinness heiress, was living in Paris in the early 1950's, she and her first husband, the painter Lucian Freud, were invited to visit Picasso.
"Picasso got one of his followers to ask Lucian if he would like to see Picasso's paintings," Blackwood says. "Of course, Lucian said yes. Meanwhile Picasso asked me if I wanted to see his doves: he had this spiral iron staircase leading to the roof, and off we go, winding round and round to the top, until we reached these doves in cages and all around us was the best view of Paris, the best. Whereupon immediately, standing on this tiny, tiny space, way above the city, Picasso does a complete plunge at me. All I felt was fear. I kept saying, 'Go down the stairs, go down.' He said, 'No, no, we are together above the roofs of Paris.' It was so absurd, and to me Picasso was just as old as the hills, an old letch, genius or no.
"I wonder," Blackwood pauses to ask, "what we were supposed to have done if I accepted? There was no space to make love, with all those doves. And think how many other people he had up there. Did they go through with it? And technically, how did they go through with it? And with the husband downstairs?"
She then adds a coda: "Lucian got a call out of nowhere from a mistress of Picasso's who asked him if he could come round and paint her. She wanted to make Picasso jealous. Lucian very politely said maybe he could paint her portrait later, but not now because he happened to be in the midst of doing his wife's portrait."
That picture, Blackwood says, turned out to be Freud's "Girl in Bed." Years later, in 1977, it played a curious part in the death of the poet Robert Lowell, another of Lady Caroline's husbands. Their marriage was in tatters when, as the story goes, he left her in Ireland and returned to the United States. After Lowell's taxi arrived at his apartment on West 67th Street, the driver found him slumped over. A doorman summoned Elizabeth Hardwick, the writer and editor whom Lowell had left to marry Blackwood; she happened to live in the same building. Hardwick opened the taxi door -- only to be confronted with her ex-husband's corpse. He was holding "Girl in Bed."
With its macabre humor, the Lowell story is one Blackwood might have written if she hadn't lived through it. "I think it's partly Irish," Blackwood says over lunch at Coco Pazzo, an elegant restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan. "Irish people are very funny but have this tragic sense.
"As Cal wrote," she continues, referring to Lowell, "if there's light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train. He was a humorous poet, you know, though people don't ever say that about him. He also wrote that in the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet, which is very funny, don't you think?"
BLACKWOOD IS A DELICATE WOMAN OF 63, SLIGHTLY stooped yet graceful, with a husky, smoker's voice. She is dressed in a loose-fitting black pants suit, the sort of unbourgeois outfit that pegs her immediately as an upper-class bohemian. Her extraordinary eyes -- big opalescent pools, which Freud made into giant spheres in his hypnotic portraits -- are the principal signs of the beauty she was in her youth. Her looks are striking but weatherbeaten.
It's not just that Blackwood likes to drink. She has also endured a series of Job-like catastrophes over the years: the death of her second husband, the American composer and pianist Israel Citkowitz; Lowell's crippling manic depression and early death; the death from AIDS of her brother, Sheridan, to whom she was very close; the death of her eldest daughter, Natalya, after a drug overdose, and her own bout with cervical cancer, for which she had an operation that left her in constant pain.
Though on one level she thrives on tragedy -- is even defined by it -- Blackwood can't abide maudlin sentiments; bringing up these episodes with her elicits an awkward silence. At first during lunch she gives only clipped responses to questions or just nods in agreement. She orders one vodka after another, tonic on the side. She is more comfortable discussing her new book, "The Last of the Duchess." But still she's cautious.
She also greets with silence a question about her flamboyant socialite mother, Maureen, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. When Maureen was young she reportedly once gave Sir Oswald Mosley, the English fascist, a black eye after he made a pass at her in Antibes. In recent years, though vastly rich, she has complained that her children haven't helped support her and the several houses she lives in. The Picasso biographer John Richardson recalls that Maureen's son, Sheridan, used to bemoan having to help pay for her villa in Sardinia, which he nicknamed the Villa Costalota. Lately, Blackwood, her sister and sister-in-law have wrangled with Maureen over the disposition of $24 million in Guinness inheritance money. The dispute, ultimately settled in Maureen's favor, underscores the nearly nonexistent relationship between Caroline and her mother, a topic Caroline prefers not to discuss.
Gradually, though, as she relaxes, Blackwood emerges as a strangely dramatic woman: intense and vulnerable, with quirky affectations like abbreviating words (Champagne becoming "champ"), a dark, razor-sharp sense of humor and an offbeat sensibility.
Geordie Greig, the New York correspondent for The Sunday Times of London and a family friend, gives an apt description of her: "When she calls on the phone she'll say 'Hiiii, it's Carrr-oline,' and there's always that enigmatic, Eartha Kitt-like purr. But in conversation she's unpredictable. Caroline's physical demeanor is so unforceful that the force of her words, which can be lethally accurate, is made doubly strong. She has an artist's sensibility to sift through any social niceties and get straight to the point. Even with her house on Long Island nothing follows the rules. Lunch might be a huge feast of lobsters and Champagne, or her fridge may be completely out of food."
Over the years, Blackwood has moved easily among several worlds: from the insular, horsy Anglo-Irish upper classes to the hard-drinking smart set of postwar England, to the liberal intelligentsia of New York City in the 1960's and 70's. She has lived in the United States for much of the last 35 years. Nowadays, she's often with her children, who also live here. Her son, Sheridan Lowell, 23, works for a small publishing firm in Manhattan. Her youngest daughter, Ivana Lowell (she has taken her stepfather's name) is 28; she works for the publishing arm of the media company Miramax and has become a lively presence in New York society since moving from London a few years ago. Another daughter, Evgenia Citkowitz, 30, is a screenwriter in Los Angeles married to the English actor Julian Sands.
Blackwood spends many mornings in her kitchen writing longhand. A broken back she suffered when she was young has made it impossible for her to type. She has published nine books that have been richly admired in Britain, where she is best known. They include collections of short stories and essays of stringent, sly, entirely anticonformist social criticism. Her novels are stylish, remorseless, frightening and wickedly funny. They can sometimes remind you a little of Beckett, except that Blackwood's nihilistic sensibility is more gothic than his: it's Beckett crossed with Bram Stoker.
"The Last of the Duchess" is her mesmeric account of a vain attempt to visit the ailing Duchess of Windsor in 1980 and of Blackwood's encounters with the Duchess's ruthless and highly powerful octogenarian lawyer, Maitre Suzanne Blum, a woman obsessed with her client to the point of erotic fantasy. Blum was the Cerberus at the Duchess's door, blocking even old friends from contacting her, according to Blackwood. Was the sick Duchess tortured by being kept alive, Blackwood wondered, or might she even be dead? Was Blum only saying she was alive so that she could sell the royal jewels and claim the money as her legal fee?
HOW MUCH OF THE book is Irish blarney? After all, the story of Blum, like so many of the stories Blackwood tells, is so bizarre it sounds like fiction. In a sense, though, that's Blackwood's point. She writes as she speaks, with a dramatic flair that can seduce you even as you wonder how precise she is. (Freud, for instance, recalls the Picasso incident very differently.) "You can't really get the truth about anybody from an interview," Blackwood says. "It's all fiction in a way."
She portrays herself in her books as a wide-eyed innocent, astonished by the horrors around her. In person, though, she has a disconcerting habit of staring at you, coolly sizing you up while she picks demurely at her meal. You can see how she could drive Maitre Blum mad.
"If it's berserk behavior I like it as a subject," Blackwood says. "If you write about bland people there's no story, is there? I hated Blum and was really scared of her," Blackwood recalls, "but she thought I was a complete idiot because I acted the dumb journalist with her a bit. She wouldn't even have seen me if I didn't have a title. On the other hand she wouldn't have been so rude if I were a crowned head."
Her full name is Lady Caroline Hamilton Temple Blackwood: she's a descendant on her father's side of the great 18th-century dramatist and wit Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She is a Guinness on her mother's side. (She says she finds stout undrinkable.)
"Brewers or bankers, aristocrats or plutocrats, the Guinnesses are apt to be a law unto themselves," John Richardson says. "This Anglo-Irish dynasty is famously cultivated, brilliant, profligate, witty and beguiling. Caution and abstemiousness are not their forte. Caroline upholds her family's reputation for courage, eccentricity and subversive humor. She most certainly does not hold with the ultraconservative views of some of her cousins."
She grew up in the ancestral stone mansion called Clandeboye, in County Down in Northern Ireland. "My great-grandfather built a wing every time he had another child," Blackwood says. "You didn't build a room then, you built a wing. It was terribly rundown when I was a child, the typical joke Irish house with all the pails to catch dripping water all over the place."
Her great-grandfather, Lord Dufferin, was an eminent Victorian, rumored to have been Disraeli's illegitimate son. "I think he was," says Blackwood, mischievously. "Why would a Scottish landowner have a son who looked like Disraeli? He once got up in the House of Lords and denied that he was Disraeli's son, because it was terrible for his mother's honor, but that sort of implies that he was, doesn't it?"
Queen Victoria made him Viceroy of India, where he used to sit on his throne, fanned by peacock feathers, while processions of rajahs paid him homage. At Clandeboye he built a stone shrine to his mother, an immense architectural folly called Helen's Tower that inspired poems by Browning, Kipling and Tennyson. "Kipling loved my great-grandfather and wrote lots of very bad poems to him," Blackwood says. "He had a fatal effect on poets. I mean, the Tennyson poem is a jingle that goes on and on." She discovered not long ago that Helen's Tower inspired a World War I memorial in France to Irish soldiers. "I mean, Helen's Tower is really odd, isn't it? Victorians thought it was fine someone building a tower to his mother while she was alive, but can you imagine doing it now, in post-Freudian times?"
Blackwood's father, Basil, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was a close friend of Evelyn Waugh and part of the glittering circle he recalled in "Brideshead Revisited." When the Marquess was killed in 1943 by the Japanese in the jungle in Burma, he was 35. Blackwood was 12 at the time and has only dim memories of her father.
Like other women of her class she skipped college; instead she went to work for Claud Cockburn, an influential left-wing journalist who wrote for, among others, The Times Literary Supplement. "Claud was a reviewer for TLS and I read books for him, because in those days the reviews were unsigned," Blackwood says. "It was really corrupt but I was extremely diligent."
She recalls meeting Freud around then, at a party memorable for the fact that the painter Francis Bacon caused a row when he hooted down Princess Margaret, who had just started singing "Let's Do It." Blackwood becomes testy when asked if a reference to her in a recent book as Margaret's lady-in-waiting is true. "That's a lie and I'll sue you if you say it," she says, only half kidding and appalled that anyone could imagine her in such a role.
She changes the subject. "Lucian was fantastic, very brilliant, incredibly beautiful, though not in a movie-star way," she says. "I remember he was very mannered, he wore these long side whiskers, which nobody else had then. And he wore funny trousers, deliberately. He wanted to stand out in a crowd, and he did."
When Freud and Blackwood returned to London from Paris, they settled into the circle that included Bacon, Cyril Connolly and the other artists and writers who gathered nightly at the fabled Gargoyle and Colony Clubs. "As a concept the Gargoyle was brilliant," Blackwood states. "O.K., everyone there would be a bit drunk. But you could wander in any night and find the cleverest people in England. After the war it was completely normal for intellectuals to knock each other down if someone had written a bad review or taken someone's girl. Then they always sent flowers the next day."
GRADUALLY HER marriage to Freud crumbled. When she left him, he was devastated. Blackwood says only that "Lucian and I couldn't be married, not endlessly. We were both too restless."
She fled to Los Angeles, installed herself at the Chateau Marmont and got a tiny part in the television series "Have Gun Will Travel." But she hated the city. The best thing to come out of it was that Stephen Spender asked her to do an article for Encounter magazine about California beatniks. It turned out to be a sendup that launched her writing career. Beatnik culture, she wrote, "has all the trappings of the subversive, the meeting in the darkened cellar, the conspiratorial whisper behind the candle in the Chianti bottle, the nihilistic mutter, without the mildest element of subversion."
Not long after Blackwood moved from Los Angeles to New York she met Israel Citkowitz, a former student of Aaron Copland, some 20 years her senior. They married. Today Blackwood speaks warmly but vaguely about Citkowitz. She describes him as "gorgeous and brilliant, which wasn't a bad combination." But they separated after a few years and she became involved with Robert Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books. Through Silvers she met Lowell.
Citkowitz and she remained friendly until he died, and he sometimes lived in the London house she shared with Lowell in the 1970's, helping her to care for the children during Lowell's bouts of madness. Lowell would write a poem to Citkowitz, lines of which Blackwood used as an epitaph on Citkowitz's grave. Her three daughters were born while she was still married to him. She had a son, Sheridan, by Lowell in 1971.
In 1972 she and Lowell flew to Santo Domingo for a joint divorce-marriage. "Nobody could understand the service because it was all in Spanish," she remembers. "It was in a hut, with chickens coming in and out. You'd move to one hut and they'd say you're divorced. Then to another hut where they'd say you're married. All the time there was lots of loud typing. So romantic."
It pains Blackwood that her marriage with Lowell is often described solely in terms of his breakup with Hardwick and illness. She recalls periods at Milgate, their house in Kent, as idyllic. But she acknowledges that Lowell's episodes of manic depression became increasingly unmanageable.
"I wanted Israel to be in the house because I couldn't deal with it alone," she explains. "Not that Cal would have hurt the children, he wasn't murderous. But I had to watch him all day and all night because a manic never sleeps." One day she found him hacking holes in the wall with a carving knife. He told her he was looking for Etruscan treasures. "It was a horrible affliction to not know when your mind was suddenly going to go -- particularly when you had got this huge mind."
Then Lowell died; then Natalya. Through it all, Blackwood managed to turn out a remarkable string of books. One of them, "On the Perimeter," was a report about the women who had camped for years in the mud at Greenham Common in England to protest the American nuclear missile base there. "The Stepdaughter" was a short epistolary novel about an abusive woman abandoned by her husband and left with his hideous daughter. Another novel, "The Fate of Mary Rose," is a chilling tale about an increasingly deranged mother's fatal obsession with her daughter's safety.
Blackwood even wrote a lighthearted cookbook with her friend the English novelist Anna Haycraft (who wrote under the name of Alice Thomas Ellis) that featured celebrity recipes. Blackwood asked Francis Bacon for a recipe. "I doubt anybody had ever asked him for one before. But he was a fantastic cook, and he had this very smart recipe for mayonnaise. Then it turned out that he was such a perfectionist that he kept holding up the publication to make revisions. Eventually Anna called in a panic, saying she'd forgotten to put in Francis's very last revision before the book went to press. 'It had less to do with salt and more to do with vinegar,' she said. Francis brought 100 copies of the book anyway."
In 1980, Blackwood began work on "The Last of the Duchess." "It was pathetic Blum being so old and in love with the Duchess," Blackwood muses. "What a stupid thing to do. But of course the Duchess was ridiculous, too. A more noble figure than she wouldn't have let this lawyer take over her life." The paradox, as Blackwood implies in the book, is that the socialite Duchess spent her last days in solitary confinement, and -- considering the Windsors' connection to Hitler -- that her jailer was a Jew.
Writing kept Blackwood going through one calamity after another -- until the cancer a few years ago. "I really don't like talking about it," she says, after a long pause. "I just kept on trying to do what I do, no matter what life did to me. But after the cancer I became so used to the idea that I would be dead that I had reconciled myself to the idea of not writing anymore. Once you've accepted you're dead, why write?
Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (16 July 1931 – 14 February 1996) was a writer, and the eldest child of The 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and the brewery heiress Maureen Guinness.
A well-known figure in the literary world through her journalism and her novels, Lady Caroline Blackwood was equally well known for her high-profile marriages, first to the artist Lucian Freud, then to the composer Israel Citkowitz and finally to the poet Robert Lowell, who described her as "a mermaid who dines upon the bones of her winded lovers". Her novels are known for their wit and intelligence, and one in particular is scathingly autobiographical in describing her unhappy childhood.
She was born into an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family from Ulster at 4 Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge, her parents' London home. She was, she admitted, "scantily educated" at, among other schools, Rockport School (County Down) and Downham (Essex). After a finishing school in Oxford she was presented as a debutante in 1949 at a ball held at Londonderry House.
Career
Blackwood's first job was with Hulton Press as a secretary, but she was soon given small reporting jobs by Claud Cockburn. Ann Fleming, the wife of "James Bond" author Ian Fleming, introduced Lady Caroline to Lucian Freud, and the two eloped to Paris in 1952. In Paris she met Picasso (and reportedly refused to wash for three days after he drew on her hands and nails). She married Freud on 9 December 1953 and became a striking figure in London's bohemian circles; the Gargoyle Club and Colony Room replaced Belgraviadrawing rooms as her haunts. She sat for several of Freud's finest portraits, including Girl in Bed, which testifies to her alluring beauty. She was impressed by the ruthless vision of Freud and Francis Bacon and her later fiction was a literary version of their view of humanity.
In the early 1960s, Blackwood began contributing to Encounter, London Magazine, and other periodicals on subjects such as beatniks, Ulster sectarianism, feminist theatre and New York free schools. Although these articles were elegant, minutely observed and sometimes wickedly funny, they had, according to Christopher Isherwood, a persistent flaw: "she is only capable of thinking negatively. Confronted by a phenomenon, she asks herself: what is wrong with it?"[1] During the mid-1960s, she had an affair with Robert Silvers, the founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books.[2][3]
Her third husband, Robert Lowell, was a crucial influence on her talents as a novelist. He encouraged her to write her first book, For All That I Found There (1973), the title of which is a line from the Percy French song "The Mountains of Mourne", and which includes a mordant memoir of her daughter's treatment in a burns unit. Blackwood's first novel The Stepdaughter (1976) appeared three years later to much acclaim, and is a concise and gripping monologue by a rich, self-pitying woman deserted by her husband in a plush New York apartment and tormented by her fat stepdaughter. It won the David Higham Prize for best first novel. Great Granny Webster followed in 1977 and was partly derived on her own miserable childhood, and depicted an austere and loveless old woman's destructive impact on her daughter and granddaughter. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize.
In 1980 came The Last of the Duchess, a study of the relations between the Duchess of Windsor and her cunning lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum; it could not be published until after Blum's death in 1995. Her third novel The Fate of Mary Rose (1981) describes the effect on a Kent village of the rape and torture of a ten-year-old girl named Maureen and is narrated by a selfish historian whose obsessions destroy his domestic life. After this came a collection of five short stories, Good Night Sweet Ladies (1983), followed by her final novel, Corrigan (1984), which was the least successful and depicts the effects on a depressed widow of a charming, energetic but sinister cripple who erupts into her life.
Blackwood's later books were based on interviews and vignettes, including On The Perimeter (1984), which focused her attentions on the women's peace encampment at the Greenham Common air base in Berkshire, and In The Pink (1987), which was a reflective, ghoulish book looking at the hunting and the hunt saboteur fraternities and exposed the many obsessive personalities of both fox-hunters and animal rights activists.
Personal life
Blackwood's marriage to Lucian Freud disintegrated soon after they married in 1953; it was dissolved in 1958, in Mexico.[citation needed] In 1957, Blackwood moved to New York City and studied acting at the Stella Adler school. She also went to Hollywood and appeared in several films.[citation needed]
On 15 August 1959, she married the pianist Israel Citkowitz (1909–1974), 22 years her senior and born in the same year as her late father; they had three daughters. By 1966, when their youngest, Ivana, was born, their marriage was over, although Citkowitz continued to live nearby and served as a nanny-duenna[citation needed] until his death. During the mid-1960s, Blackwood had an affair with Robert Silvers, a founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books, who stayed close to the family thereafter.[2][3]
According to Ivana, both she and Silvers suspected that he was her biological father.[4] However, a deathbed admission by Blackwood revealed that Ivana's biological father was another boyfriend: the screenwriter Ivan Moffat, a grandson of actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree.[2][3]
In 1970, Blackwood returned to London and, in April, began a relationship with the poet Robert Lowell, then a visiting professor at All Souls College, Oxford. Their son, Sheridan, was born on 28 September 1971; after being divorced from their respective spouses, Blackwood and Lowell were married, on 21 October 1972. They lived in London and at Milgate House in Kent. The sequence of poems in Lowell's The Dolphin (1973) provides a disrupted narrative of his involvement with Blackwood and the birth of their son (Lowell's friend Elizabeth Bishop strongly advised Lowell not to publish the book, advice he ignored).
Lowell suffered from bipolar disorder, and his manic episodes prompted in Blackwood distress, confusion, feelings of uselessness, and fear about the effects on their children. Her anxieties, alcohol-related illnesses, and late-night tirades exacerbated his condition.[citation needed] In 1977, Lowell died, reportedly clutching one of Freud's portraits of Blackwood, in the back seat of a New York cab, on his way back to his second wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick.[5] This loss was followed a year later by the death of her daughter Natalya, from a drug overdose at the age of 18.
In 1977, to avoid taxation, Blackwood left England and went to live in County Kildare, Ireland, in an apartment at the great Georgian mansion of Castletown House, which was owned by her cousin Desmond Guinness. Ten years later, in 1987, she returned to the United States, settling in a large, comfortable house in Sag Harbor, Long Island, where, although her abilities were reduced by alcoholism, she continued to write; her work of that era includes two vivid memoirs, of Princess Margaret and of Francis Bacon, published in The New York Review of Books in 1992.[citation needed]
According to those close to her, she never lost her macabre sense of humour, even during her final illness. British writer and essayist Anna Haycraft, a staunch Roman Catholic, brought holy water from Lourdes, which accidentally spilled on Blackwood's deathbed sheets; "I might have caught my death", she muttered.[citation needed]
Death
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On 14 February 1996, Blackwood died from cancer, at the Mayfair Hotel on Park Avenue in New York City, aged 64. She was survived by her two younger daughters: Evgenia Citkowitz Sands (b. 1963), wife of actor Julian Sands, and Ivana (b. 1966); by her son, Sheridan Lowell; by her sister, Lady Perdita Blackwood; and by her mother, the former Maureen Guinness, who died two years later, aged 91. She was predeceased by her father, Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (1909–1945); by her eldest daughter, Natalya (1960–1978); and by her brother, Sheridan Dufferin, 5th Marquess (1938–1988).
Titled Bohemian; Caroline Blackwood
Posted 08 Jun 2023 by MARKFLANDERS38
By MICHAEL KIMMELMANAPRIL 2, 1995
NYT
WHEN LADY Caroline Blackwood, the Irish writer and Guinness heiress, was living in Paris in the early 1950's, she and her first husband, the painter Lucian Freud, were invited to visit Picasso.
"Picasso got one of his followers to ask Lucian if he would like to see Picasso's paintings," Blackwood says. "Of course, Lucian said yes. Meanwhile Picasso asked me if I wanted to see his doves: he had this spiral iron staircase leading to the roof, and off we go, winding round and round to the top, until we reached these doves in cages and all around us was the best view of Paris, the best. Whereupon immediately, standing on this tiny, tiny space, way above the city, Picasso does a complete plunge at me. All I felt was fear. I kept saying, 'Go down the stairs, go down.' He said, 'No, no, we are together above the roofs of Paris.' It was so absurd, and to me Picasso was just as old as the hills, an old letch, genius or no.
"I wonder," Blackwood pauses to ask, "what we were supposed to have done if I accepted? There was no space to make love, with all those doves. And think how many other people he had up there. Did they go through with it? And technically, how did they go through with it? And with the husband downstairs?"
She then adds a coda: "Lucian got a call out of nowhere from a mistress of Picasso's who asked him if he could come round and paint her. She wanted to make Picasso jealous. Lucian very politely said maybe he could paint her portrait later, but not now because he happened to be in the midst of doing his wife's portrait."
That picture, Blackwood says, turned out to be Freud's "Girl in Bed." Years later, in 1977, it played a curious part in the death of the poet Robert Lowell, another of Lady Caroline's husbands. Their marriage was in tatters when, as the story goes, he left her in Ireland and returned to the United States. After Lowell's taxi arrived at his apartment on West 67th Street, the driver found him slumped over. A doorman summoned Elizabeth Hardwick, the writer and editor whom Lowell had left to marry Blackwood; she happened to live in the same building. Hardwick opened the taxi door -- only to be confronted with her ex-husband's corpse. He was holding "Girl in Bed."
With its macabre humor, the Lowell story is one Blackwood might have written if she hadn't lived through it. "I think it's partly Irish," Blackwood says over lunch at Coco Pazzo, an elegant restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan. "Irish people are very funny but have this tragic sense.
"As Cal wrote," she continues, referring to Lowell, "if there's light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train. He was a humorous poet, you know, though people don't ever say that about him. He also wrote that in the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet, which is very funny, don't you think?"
BLACKWOOD IS A DELICATE WOMAN OF 63, SLIGHTLY stooped yet graceful, with a husky, smoker's voice. She is dressed in a loose-fitting black pants suit, the sort of unbourgeois outfit that pegs her immediately as an upper-class bohemian. Her extraordinary eyes -- big opalescent pools, which Freud made into giant spheres in his hypnotic portraits -- are the principal signs of the beauty she was in her youth. Her looks are striking but weatherbeaten.
It's not just that Blackwood likes to drink. She has also endured a series of Job-like catastrophes over the years: the death of her second husband, the American composer and pianist Israel Citkowitz; Lowell's crippling manic depression and early death; the death from AIDS of her brother, Sheridan, to whom she was very close; the death of her eldest daughter, Natalya, after a drug overdose, and her own bout with cervical cancer, for which she had an operation that left her in constant pain.
Though on one level she thrives on tragedy -- is even defined by it -- Blackwood can't abide maudlin sentiments; bringing up these episodes with her elicits an awkward silence. At first during lunch she gives only clipped responses to questions or just nods in agreement. She orders one vodka after another, tonic on the side. She is more comfortable discussing her new book, "The Last of the Duchess." But still she's cautious.
She also greets with silence a question about her flamboyant socialite mother, Maureen, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. When Maureen was young she reportedly once gave Sir Oswald Mosley, the English fascist, a black eye after he made a pass at her in Antibes. In recent years, though vastly rich, she has complained that her children haven't helped support her and the several houses she lives in. The Picasso biographer John Richardson recalls that Maureen's son, Sheridan, used to bemoan having to help pay for her villa in Sardinia, which he nicknamed the Villa Costalota. Lately, Blackwood, her sister and sister-in-law have wrangled with Maureen over the disposition of $24 million in Guinness inheritance money. The dispute, ultimately settled in Maureen's favor, underscores the nearly nonexistent relationship between Caroline and her mother, a topic Caroline prefers not to discuss.
Gradually, though, as she relaxes, Blackwood emerges as a strangely dramatic woman: intense and vulnerable, with quirky affectations like abbreviating words (Champagne becoming "champ"), a dark, razor-sharp sense of humor and an offbeat sensibility.
Geordie Greig, the New York correspondent for The Sunday Times of London and a family friend, gives an apt description of her: "When she calls on the phone she'll say 'Hiiii, it's Carrr-oline,' and there's always that enigmatic, Eartha Kitt-like purr. But in conversation she's unpredictable. Caroline's physical demeanor is so unforceful that the force of her words, which can be lethally accurate, is made doubly strong. She has an artist's sensibility to sift through any social niceties and get straight to the point. Even with her house on Long Island nothing follows the rules. Lunch might be a huge feast of lobsters and Champagne, or her fridge may be completely out of food."
Over the years, Blackwood has moved easily among several worlds: from the insular, horsy Anglo-Irish upper classes to the hard-drinking smart set of postwar England, to the liberal intelligentsia of New York City in the 1960's and 70's. She has lived in the United States for much of the last 35 years. Nowadays, she's often with her children, who also live here. Her son, Sheridan Lowell, 23, works for a small publishing firm in Manhattan. Her youngest daughter, Ivana Lowell (she has taken her stepfather's name) is 28; she works for the publishing arm of the media company Miramax and has become a lively presence in New York society since moving from London a few years ago. Another daughter, Evgenia Citkowitz, 30, is a screenwriter in Los Angeles married to the English actor Julian Sands.
Blackwood spends many mornings in her kitchen writing longhand. A broken back she suffered when she was young has made it impossible for her to type. She has published nine books that have been richly admired in Britain, where she is best known. They include collections of short stories and essays of stringent, sly, entirely anticonformist social criticism. Her novels are stylish, remorseless, frightening and wickedly funny. They can sometimes remind you a little of Beckett, except that Blackwood's nihilistic sensibility is more gothic than his: it's Beckett crossed with Bram Stoker.
"The Last of the Duchess" is her mesmeric account of a vain attempt to visit the ailing Duchess of Windsor in 1980 and of Blackwood's encounters with the Duchess's ruthless and highly powerful octogenarian lawyer, Maitre Suzanne Blum, a woman obsessed with her client to the point of erotic fantasy. Blum was the Cerberus at the Duchess's door, blocking even old friends from contacting her, according to Blackwood. Was the sick Duchess tortured by being kept alive, Blackwood wondered, or might she even be dead? Was Blum only saying she was alive so that she could sell the royal jewels and claim the money as her legal fee?
HOW MUCH OF THE book is Irish blarney? After all, the story of Blum, like so many of the stories Blackwood tells, is so bizarre it sounds like fiction. In a sense, though, that's Blackwood's point. She writes as she speaks, with a dramatic flair that can seduce you even as you wonder how precise she is. (Freud, for instance, recalls the Picasso incident very differently.) "You can't really get the truth about anybody from an interview," Blackwood says. "It's all fiction in a way."
She portrays herself in her books as a wide-eyed innocent, astonished by the horrors around her. In person, though, she has a disconcerting habit of staring at you, coolly sizing you up while she picks demurely at her meal. You can see how she could drive Maitre Blum mad.
"If it's berserk behavior I like it as a subject," Blackwood says. "If you write about bland people there's no story, is there? I hated Blum and was really scared of her," Blackwood recalls, "but she thought I was a complete idiot because I acted the dumb journalist with her a bit. She wouldn't even have seen me if I didn't have a title. On the other hand she wouldn't have been so rude if I were a crowned head."
Her full name is Lady Caroline Hamilton Temple Blackwood: she's a descendant on her father's side of the great 18th-century dramatist and wit Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She is a Guinness on her mother's side. (She says she finds stout undrinkable.)
"Brewers or bankers, aristocrats or plutocrats, the Guinnesses are apt to be a law unto themselves," John Richardson says. "This Anglo-Irish dynasty is famously cultivated, brilliant, profligate, witty and beguiling. Caution and abstemiousness are not their forte. Caroline upholds her family's reputation for courage, eccentricity and subversive humor. She most certainly does not hold with the ultraconservative views of some of her cousins."
She grew up in the ancestral stone mansion called Clandeboye, in County Down in Northern Ireland. "My great-grandfather built a wing every time he had another child," Blackwood says. "You didn't build a room then, you built a wing. It was terribly rundown when I was a child, the typical joke Irish house with all the pails to catch dripping water all over the place."
Her great-grandfather, Lord Dufferin, was an eminent Victorian, rumored to have been Disraeli's illegitimate son. "I think he was," says Blackwood, mischievously. "Why would a Scottish landowner have a son who looked like Disraeli? He once got up in the House of Lords and denied that he was Disraeli's son, because it was terrible for his mother's honor, but that sort of implies that he was, doesn't it?"
Queen Victoria made him Viceroy of India, where he used to sit on his throne, fanned by peacock feathers, while processions of rajahs paid him homage. At Clandeboye he built a stone shrine to his mother, an immense architectural folly called Helen's Tower that inspired poems by Browning, Kipling and Tennyson. "Kipling loved my great-grandfather and wrote lots of very bad poems to him," Blackwood says. "He had a fatal effect on poets. I mean, the Tennyson poem is a jingle that goes on and on." She discovered not long ago that Helen's Tower inspired a World War I memorial in France to Irish soldiers. "I mean, Helen's Tower is really odd, isn't it? Victorians thought it was fine someone building a tower to his mother while she was alive, but can you imagine doing it now, in post-Freudian times?"
Blackwood's father, Basil, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was a close friend of Evelyn Waugh and part of the glittering circle he recalled in "Brideshead Revisited." When the Marquess was killed in 1943 by the Japanese in the jungle in Burma, he was 35. Blackwood was 12 at the time and has only dim memories of her father.
Like other women of her class she skipped college; instead she went to work for Claud Cockburn, an influential left-wing journalist who wrote for, among others, The Times Literary Supplement. "Claud was a reviewer for TLS and I read books for him, because in those days the reviews were unsigned," Blackwood says. "It was really corrupt but I was extremely diligent."
She recalls meeting Freud around then, at a party memorable for the fact that the painter Francis Bacon caused a row when he hooted down Princess Margaret, who had just started singing "Let's Do It." Blackwood becomes testy when asked if a reference to her in a recent book as Margaret's lady-in-waiting is true. "That's a lie and I'll sue you if you say it," she says, only half kidding and appalled that anyone could imagine her in such a role.
She changes the subject. "Lucian was fantastic, very brilliant, incredibly beautiful, though not in a movie-star way," she says. "I remember he was very mannered, he wore these long side whiskers, which nobody else had then. And he wore funny trousers, deliberately. He wanted to stand out in a crowd, and he did."
When Freud and Blackwood returned to London from Paris, they settled into the circle that included Bacon, Cyril Connolly and the other artists and writers who gathered nightly at the fabled Gargoyle and Colony Clubs. "As a concept the Gargoyle was brilliant," Blackwood states. "O.K., everyone there would be a bit drunk. But you could wander in any night and find the cleverest people in England. After the war it was completely normal for intellectuals to knock each other down if someone had written a bad review or taken someone's girl. Then they always sent flowers the next day."
GRADUALLY HER marriage to Freud crumbled. When she left him, he was devastated. Blackwood says only that "Lucian and I couldn't be married, not endlessly. We were both too restless."
She fled to Los Angeles, installed herself at the Chateau Marmont and got a tiny part in the television series "Have Gun Will Travel." But she hated the city. The best thing to come out of it was that Stephen Spender asked her to do an article for Encounter magazine about California beatniks. It turned out to be a sendup that launched her writing career. Beatnik culture, she wrote, "has all the trappings of the subversive, the meeting in the darkened cellar, the conspiratorial whisper behind the candle in the Chianti bottle, the nihilistic mutter, without the mildest element of subversion."
Not long after Blackwood moved from Los Angeles to New York she met Israel Citkowitz, a former student of Aaron Copland, some 20 years her senior. They married. Today Blackwood speaks warmly but vaguely about Citkowitz. She describes him as "gorgeous and brilliant, which wasn't a bad combination." But they separated after a few years and she became involved with Robert Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books. Through Silvers she met Lowell.
Citkowitz and she remained friendly until he died, and he sometimes lived in the London house she shared with Lowell in the 1970's, helping her to care for the children during Lowell's bouts of madness. Lowell would write a poem to Citkowitz, lines of which Blackwood used as an epitaph on Citkowitz's grave. Her three daughters were born while she was still married to him. She had a son, Sheridan, by Lowell in 1971.
In 1972 she and Lowell flew to Santo Domingo for a joint divorce-marriage. "Nobody could understand the service because it was all in Spanish," she remembers. "It was in a hut, with chickens coming in and out. You'd move to one hut and they'd say you're divorced. Then to another hut where they'd say you're married. All the time there was lots of loud typing. So romantic."
It pains Blackwood that her marriage with Lowell is often described solely in terms of his breakup with Hardwick and illness. She recalls periods at Milgate, their house in Kent, as idyllic. But she acknowledges that Lowell's episodes of manic depression became increasingly unmanageable.
"I wanted Israel to be in the house because I couldn't deal with it alone," she explains. "Not that Cal would have hurt the children, he wasn't murderous. But I had to watch him all day and all night because a manic never sleeps." One day she found him hacking holes in the wall with a carving knife. He told her he was looking for Etruscan treasures. "It was a horrible affliction to not know when your mind was suddenly going to go -- particularly when you had got this huge mind."
Then Lowell died; then Natalya. Through it all, Blackwood managed to turn out a remarkable string of books. One of them, "On the Perimeter," was a report about the women who had camped for years in the mud at Greenham Common in England to protest the American nuclear missile base there. "The Stepdaughter" was a short epistolary novel about an abusive woman abandoned by her husband and left with his hideous daughter. Another novel, "The Fate of Mary Rose," is a chilling tale about an increasingly deranged mother's fatal obsession with her daughter's safety.
Blackwood even wrote a lighthearted cookbook with her friend the English novelist Anna Haycraft (who wrote under the name of Alice Thomas Ellis) that featured celebrity recipes. Blackwood asked Francis Bacon for a recipe. "I doubt anybody had ever asked him for one before. But he was a fantastic cook, and he had this very smart recipe for mayonnaise. Then it turned out that he was such a perfectionist that he kept holding up the publication to make revisions. Eventually Anna called in a panic, saying she'd forgotten to put in Francis's very last revision before the book went to press. 'It had less to do with salt and more to do with vinegar,' she said. Francis brought 100 copies of the book anyway."
In 1980, Blackwood began work on "The Last of the Duchess." "It was pathetic Blum being so old and in love with the Duchess," Blackwood muses. "What a stupid thing to do. But of course the Duchess was ridiculous, too. A more noble figure than she wouldn't have let this lawyer take over her life." The paradox, as Blackwood implies in the book, is that the socialite Duchess spent her last days in solitary confinement, and -- considering the Windsors' connection to Hitler -- that her jailer was a Jew.
Writing kept Blackwood going through one calamity after another -- until the cancer a few years ago. "I really don't like talking about it," she says, after a long pause. "I just kept on trying to do what I do, no matter what life did to me. But after the cancer I became so used to the idea that I would be dead that I had reconciled myself to the idea of not writing anymore. Once you've accepted you're dead, why write?
"It took me a long time to get back to writing. For a while I didn't have any ideas, none." She smiles. "But now I try and write all morning. It may be so awful that I put my pencil through the whole thing and start over the next day. But at least I've got plenty of ideas."
ding the main story
With its macabre humor, the Lowell story is one Blackwood might have written if she hadn't lived through it. "I think it's partly Irish," Blackwood says over lunch at Coco Pazzo, an elegant restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan. "Irish people are very funny but have this tragic sense.
"As Cal wrote," she continues, referring to Lowell, "if there's light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train. He was a humorous poet, you know, though people don't ever say that about him. He also wrote that in the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet, which is very funny, don't you think?"
BLACKWOOD IS A DELICATE WOMAN OF 63, SLIGHTLY stooped yet graceful, with a husky, smoker's voice. She is dressed in a loose-fitting black pants suit, the sort of unbourgeois outfit that pegs her immediately as an upper-class bohemian. Her extraordinary eyes -- big opalescent pools, which Freud made into giant spheres in his hypnotic portraits -- are the principal signs of the beauty she was in her youth. Her looks are striking but weatherbeaten.
It's not just that Blackwood likes to drink. She has also endured a series of Job-like catastrophes over the years: the death of her second husband, the American composer and pianist Israel Citkowitz; Lowell's crippling manic depression and early death; the death from AIDS of her brother, Sheridan, to whom she was very close; the death of her eldest daughter, Natalya, after a drug overdose, and her own bout with cervical cancer, for which she had an operation that left her in constant pain.
Though on one level she thrives on tragedy -- is even defined by it -- Blackwood can't abide maudlin sentiments; bringing up these episodes with her elicits an awkward silence. At first during lunch she gives only clipped responses to questions or just nods in agreement. She orders one vodka after another, tonic on the side. She is more comfortable discussing her new book, "The Last of the Duchess." But still she's cautious.
She also greets with silence a question about her flamboyant socialite mother, Maureen, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. When Maureen was young she reportedly once gave Sir Oswald Mosley, the English fascist, a black eye after he made a pass at her in Antibes. In recent years, though vastly rich, she has complained that her children haven't helped support her and the several houses she lives in. The Picasso biographer John Richardson recalls that Maureen's son, Sheridan, used to bemoan having to help pay for her villa in Sardinia, which he nicknamed the Villa Costalota. Lately, Blackwood, her sister and sister-in-law have wrangled with Maureen over the disposition of $24 million in Guinness inheritance money. The dispute, ultimately settled in Maureen's favor, underscores the nearly nonexistent relationship between Caroline and her mother, a topic Caroline prefers not to discuss.
Gradually, though, as she relaxes, Blackwood emerges as a strangely dramatic woman: intense and vulnerable, with quirky affectations like abbreviating words (Champagne becoming "champ"), a dark, razor-sharp sense of humor and an offbeat sensibility.
Geordie Greig, the New York correspondent for The Sunday Times of London and a family friend, gives an apt description of her: "When she calls on the phone she'll say 'Hiiii, it's Carrr-oline,' and there's always that enigmatic, Eartha Kitt-like purr. But in conversation she's unpredictable. Caroline's physical demeanor is so unforceful that the force of her words, which can be lethally accurate, is made doubly strong. She has an artist's sensibility to sift through any social niceties and get straight to the point. Even with her house on Long Island nothing follows the rules. Lunch might be a huge feast of lobsters and Champagne, or her fridge may be completely out of food."
Over the years, Blackwood has moved easily among several worlds: from the insular, horsy Anglo-Irish upper classes to the hard-drinking smart set of postwar England, to the liberal intelligentsia of New York City in the 1960's and 70's. She has lived in the United States for much of the last 35 years. Nowadays, she's often with her children, who also live here. Her son, Sheridan Lowell, 23, works for a small publishing firm in Manhattan. Her youngest daughter, Ivana Lowell (she has taken her stepfather's name) is 28; she works for the publishing arm of the media company Miramax and has become a lively presence in New York society since moving from London a few years ago. Another daughter, Evgenia Citkowitz, 30, is a screenwriter in Los Angeles married to the English actor Julian Sands.
Blackwood spends many mornings in her kitchen writing longhand. A broken back she suffered when she was young has made it impossible for her to type. She has published nine books that have been richly admired in Britain, where she is best known. They include collections of short stories and essays of stringent, sly, entirely anticonformist social criticism. Her novels are stylish, remorseless, frightening and wickedly funny. They can sometimes remind you a little of Beckett, except that Blackwood's nihilistic sensibility is more gothic than his: it's Beckett crossed with Bram Stoker.
"The Last of the Duchess" is her mesmeric account of a vain attempt to visit the ailing Duchess of Windsor in 1980 and of Blackwood's encounters with the Duchess's ruthless and highly powerful octogenarian lawyer, Maitre Suzanne Blum, a woman obsessed with her client to the point of erotic fantasy. Blum was the Cerberus at the Duchess's door, blocking even old friends from contacting her, according to Blackwood. Was the sick Duchess tortured by being kept alive, Blackwood wondered, or might she even be dead? Was Blum only saying she was alive so that she could sell the royal jewels and claim the money as her legal fee?
HOW MUCH OF THE book is Irish blarney? After all, the story of Blum, like so many of the stories Blackwood tells, is so bizarre it sounds like fiction. In a sense, though, that's Blackwood's point. She writes as she speaks, with a dramatic flair that can seduce you even as you wonder how precise she is. (Freud, for instance, recalls the Picasso incident very differently.) "You can't really get the truth about anybody from an interview," Blackwood says. "It's all fiction in a way."
She portrays herself in her books as a wide-eyed innocent, astonished by the horrors around her. In person, though, she has a disconcerting habit of staring at you, coolly sizing you up while she picks demurely at her meal. You can see how she could drive Maitre Blum mad.
"If it's berserk behavior I like it as a subject," Blackwood says. "If you write about bland people there's no story, is there? I hated Blum and was really scared of her," Blackwood recalls, "but she thought I was a complete idiot because I acted the dumb journalist with her a bit. She wouldn't even have seen me if I didn't have a title. On the other hand she wouldn't have been so rude if I were a crowned head."
Her full name is Lady Caroline Hamilton Temple Blackwood: she's a descendant on her father's side of the great 18th-century dramatist and wit Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She is a Guinness on her mother's side. (She says she finds stout undrinkable.)
"Brewers or bankers, aristocrats or plutocrats, the Guinnesses are apt to be a law unto themselves," John Richardson says. "This Anglo-Irish dynasty is famously cultivated, brilliant, profligate, witty and beguiling. Caution and abstemiousness are not their forte. Caroline upholds her family's reputation for courage, eccentricity and subversive humor. She most certainly does not hold with the ultraconservative views of some of her cousins."
She grew up in the ancestral stone mansion called Clandeboye, in County Down in Northern Ireland. "My great-grandfather built a wing every time he had another child," Blackwood says. "You didn't build a room then, you built a wing. It was terribly rundown when I was a child, the typical joke Irish house with all the pails to catch dripping water all over the place."
Her great-grandfather, Lord Dufferin, was an eminent Victorian, rumored to have been Disraeli's illegitimate son. "I think he was," says Blackwood, mischievously. "Why would a Scottish landowner have a son who looked like Disraeli? He once got up in the House of Lords and denied that he was Disraeli's son, because it was terrible for his mother's honor, but that sort of implies that he was, doesn't it?"
Queen Victoria made him Viceroy of India, where he used to sit on his throne, fanned by peacock feathers, while processions of rajahs paid him homage. At Clandeboye he built a stone shrine to his mother, an immense architectural folly called Helen's Tower that inspired poems by Browning, Kipling and Tennyson. "Kipling loved my great-grandfather and wrote lots of very bad poems to him," Blackwood says. "He had a fatal effect on poets. I mean, the Tennyson poem is a jingle that goes on and on." She discovered not long ago that Helen's Tower inspired a World War I memorial in France to Irish soldiers. "I mean, Helen's Tower is really odd, isn't it? Victorians thought it was fine someone building a tower to his mother while she was alive, but can you imagine doing it now, in post-Freudian times?"
Blackwood's father, Basil, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was a close friend of Evelyn Waugh and part of the glittering circle he recalled in "Brideshead Revisited." When the Marquess was killed in 1943 by the Japanese in the jungle in Burma, he was 35. Blackwood was 12 at the time and has only dim memories of her father.
Like other women of her class she skipped college; instead she went to work for Claud Cockburn, an influential left-wing journalist who wrote for, among others, The Times Literary Supplement. "Claud was a reviewer for TLS and I read books for him, because in those days the reviews were unsigned," Blackwood says. "It was really corrupt but I was extremely diligent."
She recalls meeting Freud around then, at a party memorable for the fact that the painter Francis Bacon caused a row when he hooted down Princess Margaret, who had just started singing "Let's Do It." Blackwood becomes testy when asked if a reference to her in a recent book as Margaret's lady-in-waiting is true. "That's a lie and I'll sue you if you say it," she says, only half kidding and appalled that anyone could imagine her in such a role.
She changes the subject. "Lucian was fantastic, very brilliant, incredibly beautiful, though not in a movie-star way," she says. "I remember he was very mannered, he wore these long side whiskers, which nobody else had then. And he wore funny trousers, deliberately. He wanted to stand out in a crowd, and he did."
When Freud and Blackwood returned to London from Paris, they settled into the circle that included Bacon, Cyril Connolly and the other artists and writers who gathered nightly at the fabled Gargoyle and Colony Clubs. "As a concept the Gargoyle was brilliant," Blackwood states. "O.K., everyone there would be a bit drunk. But you could wander in any night and find the cleverest people in England. After the war it was completely normal for intellectuals to knock each other down if someone had written a bad review or taken someone's girl. Then they always sent flowers the next day."
GRADUALLY HER marriage to Freud crumbled. When she left him, he was devastated. Blackwood says only that "Lucian and I couldn't be married, not endlessly. We were both too restless."
She fled to Los Angeles, installed herself at the Chateau Marmont and got a tiny part in the television series "Have Gun Will Travel." But she hated the city. The best thing to come out of it was that Stephen Spender asked her to do an article for Encounter magazine about California beatniks. It turned out to be a sendup that launched her writing career. Beatnik culture, she wrote, "has all the trappings of the subversive, the meeting in the darkened cellar, the conspiratorial whisper behind the candle in the Chianti bottle, the nihilistic mutter, without the mildest element of subversion."
Not long after Blackwood moved from Los Angeles to New York she met Israel Citkowitz, a former student of Aaron Copland, some 20 years her senior. They married. Today Blackwood speaks warmly but vaguely about Citkowitz. She describes him as "gorgeous and brilliant, which wasn't a bad combination." But they separated after a few years and she became involved with Robert Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books. Through Silvers she met Lowell.
Citkowitz and she remained friendly until he died, and he sometimes lived in the London house she shared with Lowell in the 1970's, helping her to care for the children during Lowell's bouts of madness. Lowell would write a poem to Citkowitz, lines of which Blackwood used as an epitaph on Citkowitz's grave. Her three daughters were born while she was still married to him. She had a son, Sheridan, by Lowell in 1971.
In 1972 she and Lowell flew to Santo Domingo for a joint divorce-marriage. "Nobody could understand the service because it was all in Spanish," she remembers. "It was in a hut, with chickens coming in and out. You'd move to one hut and they'd say you're divorced. Then to another hut where they'd say you're married. All the time there was lots of loud typing. So romantic."
It pains Blackwood that her marriage with Lowell is often described solely in terms of his breakup with Hardwick and illness. She recalls periods at Milgate, their house in Kent, as idyllic. But she acknowledges that Lowell's episodes of manic depression became increasingly unmanageable.
"I wanted Israel to be in the house because I couldn't deal with it alone," she explains. "Not that Cal would have hurt the children, he wasn't murderous. But I had to watch him all day and all night because a manic never sleeps." One day she found him hacking holes in the wall with a carving knife. He told her he was looking for Etruscan treasures. "It was a horrible affliction to not know when your mind was suddenly going to go -- particularly when you had got this huge mind."
Then Lowell died; then Natalya. Through it all, Blackwood managed to turn out a remarkable string of books. One of them, "On the Perimeter," was a report about the women who had camped for years in the mud at Greenham Common in England to protest the American nuclear missile base there. "The Stepdaughter" was a short epistolary novel about an abusive woman abandoned by her husband and left with his hideous daughter. Another novel, "The Fate of Mary Rose," is a chilling tale about an increasingly deranged mother's fatal obsession with her daughter's safety.
Blackwood even wrote a lighthearted cookbook with her friend the English novelist Anna Haycraft (who wrote under the name of Alice Thomas Ellis) that featured celebrity recipes. Blackwood asked Francis Bacon for a recipe. "I doubt anybody had ever asked him for one before. But he was a fantastic cook, and he had this very smart recipe for mayonnaise. Then it turned out that he was such a perfectionist that he kept holding up the publication to make revisions. Eventually Anna called in a panic, saying she'd forgotten to put in Francis's very last revision before the book went to press. 'It had less to do with salt and more to do with vinegar,' she said. Francis brought 100 copies of the book anyway."
In 1980, Blackwood began work on "The Last of the Duchess." "It was pathetic Blum being so old and in love with the Duchess," Blackwood muses. "What a stupid thing to do. But of course the Duchess was ridiculous, too. A more noble figure than she wouldn't have let this lawyer take over her life." The paradox, as Blackwood implies in the book, is that the socialite Duchess spent her last days in solitary confinement, and -- considering the Windsors' connection to Hitler -- that her jailer was a Jew.
Writing kept Blackwood going through one calamity after another -- until the cancer a few years ago. "I really don't like talking about it," she says, after a long pause. "I just kept on trying to do what I do, no matter what life did to me. But after the cancer I became so used to the idea that I would be dead that I had reconciled myself to the idea of not writing anymore. Once you've accepted you're dead, why write?
"It took me a long time to get back to writing. For a while I didn't have any ideas, none." She smiles. "But now I try and write all morning. It may be so awful that I put my pencil through the whole thing and start over the next day. But at least I've got plenty of ideas."
BIO WIKIPEDIA
Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (16 July 1931 – 14 February 1996) was a writer, and the eldest child of The 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and the brewery heiress Maureen Guinness.
A well-known figure in the literary world through her journalism and her novels, Lady Caroline Blackwood was equally well known for her high-profile marriages, first to the artist Lucian Freud, then to the composer Israel Citkowitz and finally to the poet Robert Lowell, who described her as "a mermaid who dines upon the bones of her winded lovers". Her novels are known for their wit and intelligence, and one in particular is scathingly autobiographical in describing her unhappy childhood.
She was born into an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family from Ulster at 4 Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge, her parents' London home. She was, she admitted, "scantily educated" at, among other schools, Rockport School (County Down) and Downham (Essex). After a finishing school in Oxford she was presented as a debutante in 1949 at a ball held at Londonderry House.
Career
Blackwood's first job was with Hulton Press as a secretary, but she was soon given small reporting jobs by Claud Cockburn. Ann Fleming, the wife of "James Bond" author Ian Fleming, introduced Lady Caroline to Lucian Freud, and the two eloped to Paris in 1952. In Paris she met Picasso (and reportedly refused to wash for three days after he drew on her hands and nails). She married Freud on 9 December 1953 and became a striking figure in London's bohemian circles; the Gargoyle Club and Colony Room replaced Belgraviadrawing rooms as her haunts. She sat for several of Freud's finest portraits, including Girl in Bed, which testifies to her alluring beauty. She was impressed by the ruthless vision of Freud and Francis Bacon and her later fiction was a literary version of their view of humanity.
In the early 1960s, Blackwood began contributing to Encounter, London Magazine, and other periodicals on subjects such as beatniks, Ulster sectarianism, feminist theatre and New York free schools. Although these articles were elegant, minutely observed and sometimes wickedly funny, they had, according to Christopher Isherwood, a persistent flaw: "she is only capable of thinking negatively. Confronted by a phenomenon, she asks herself: what is wrong with it?"[1] During the mid-1960s, she had an affair with Robert Silvers, the founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books.
Her third husband, Robert Lowell, was a crucial influence on her talents as a novelist. He encouraged her to write her first book, For All That I Found There (1973), the title of which is a line from the Percy French song "The Mountains of Mourne", and which includes a mordant memoir of her daughter's treatment in a burns unit. Blackwood's first novel The Stepdaughter (1976) appeared three years later to much acclaim, and is a concise and gripping monologue by a rich, self-pitying woman deserted by her husband in a plush New York apartment and tormented by her fat stepdaughter. It won the David Higham Prize for best first novel. Great Granny Webster followed in 1977 and was partly derived on her own miserable childhood, and depicted an austere and loveless old woman's destructive impact on her daughter and granddaughter. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize.
In 1980 came The Last of the Duchess, a study of the relations between the Duchess of Windsor and her cunning lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum; it could not be published until after Blum's death in 1995. Her third novel The Fate of Mary Rose (1981) describes the effect on a Kent village of the rape and torture of a ten-year-old girl named Maureen and is narrated by a selfish historian whose obsessions destroy his domestic life. After this came a collection of five short stories, Good Night Sweet Ladies (1983), followed by her final novel, Corrigan (1984), which was the least successful and depicts the effects on a depressed widow of a charming, energetic but sinister cripple who erupts into her life.
Blackwood's later books were based on interviews and vignettes, including On The Perimeter (1984), which focused her attentions on the women's peace encampment at the Greenham Common air base in Berkshire, and In The Pink (1987), which was a reflective, ghoulish book looking at the hunting and the hunt saboteur fraternities and exposed the many obsessive personalities of both fox-hunters and animal rights activists.
Personal life
Blackwood's marriage to Lucian Freud disintegrated soon after they married in 1953; it was dissolved in 1958, in Mexico.[citation needed] In 1957, Blackwood moved to New York City and studied acting at the Stella Adler school. She also went to Hollywood and appeared in several films.
On 15 August 1959, she married the pianist Israel Citkowitz (1909–1974), 22 years her senior and born in the same year as her late father; they had three daughters. By 1966, when their youngest, Ivana, was born, their marriage was over, although Citkowitz continued to live nearby and served as a nanny-duenna[citation needed] until his death. During the mid-1960s, Blackwood had an affair with Robert Silvers, a founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books, who stayed close to the family thereafter.
According to Ivana, both she and Silvers suspected that he was her biological father. However, a deathbed admission by Blackwood revealed that Ivana's biological father was another boyfriend: the screenwriter Ivan Moffat, a grandson of actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree.
In 1970, Blackwood returned to London and, in April, began a relationship with the poet Robert Lowell, then a visiting professor at All Souls College, Oxford. Their son, Sheridan, was born on 28 September 1971; after being divorced from their respective spouses, Blackwood and Lowell were married, on 21 October 1972. They lived in London and at Milgate House in Kent. The sequence of poems in Lowell's The Dolphin (1973) provides a disrupted narrative of his involvement with Blackwood and the birth of their son (Lowell's friend Elizabeth Bishop strongly advised Lowell not to publish the book, advice he ignored).
Lowell suffered from bipolar disorder, and his manic episodes prompted in Blackwood distress, confusion, feelings of uselessness, and fear about the effects on their children. Her anxieties, alcohol-related illnesses, and late-night tirades exacerbated his condition.[citation needed] In 1977, Lowell died, reportedly clutching one of Freud's portraits of Blackwood, in the back seat of a New York cab, on his way back to his second wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. This loss was followed a year later by the death of her daughter Natalya, from a drug overdose at the age of 18.
In 1977, to avoid taxation, Blackwood left England and went to live in County Kildare, Ireland, in an apartment at the great Georgian mansion of Castletown House, which was owned by her cousin Desmond Guinness. Ten years later, in 1987, she returned to the United States, settling in a large, comfortable house in Sag Harbor, Long Island, where, although her abilities were reduced by alcoholism, she continued to write; her work of that era includes two vivid memoirs, of Princess Margaret and of Francis Bacon, published in The New York Review of Books in 1992.
According to those close to her, she never lost her macabre sense of humour, even during her final illness. British writer and essayist Anna Haycraft, a staunch Roman Catholic, brought holy water from Lourdes, which accidentally spilled on Blackwood's deathbed sheets; "I might have caught my death", she muttered.
Death
On 14 February 1996, Blackwood died from cancer, at the Mayfair Hotel on Park Avenue in New York City, aged 64. She was survived by her two younger daughters: Evgenia Citkowitz Sands (b. 1963), wife of actor Julian Sands, and Ivana (b. 1966); by her son, Sheridan Lowell; by her sister, Lady Perdita Blackwood; and by her mother, the former Maureen Guinness, who died two years later, aged 91. She was predeceased by her father, Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (1909–1945); by her eldest daughter, Natalya (1960–1978); and by her brother, Sheridan Dufferin, 5th Marquess (1938–1988).
New York Times -
WHEN LADY Caroline Blackwood, the Irish writer and Guinness heiress, was living in Paris in the early 1950's, she and her first husband, the painter Lucian Freud, were invited to visit Picasso.
"Picasso got one of his followers to ask Lucian if he would like to see Picasso's paintings," Blackwood says. "Of course, Lucian said yes. Meanwhile Picasso asked me if I wanted to see his doves: he had this spiral iron staircase leading to the roof, and off we go, winding round and round to the top, until we reached these doves in cages and all around us was the best view of Paris, the best. Whereupon immediately, standing on this tiny, tiny space, way above the city, Picasso does a complete plunge at me. All I felt was fear. I kept saying, 'Go down the stairs, go down.' He said, 'No, no, we are together above the roofs of Paris.' It was so absurd, and to me Picasso was just as old as the hills, an old letch, genius or no.
"I wonder," Blackwood pauses to ask, "what we were supposed to have done if I accepted? There was no space to make love, with all those doves. And think how many other people he had up there. Did they go through with it? And technically, how did they go through with it? And with the husband downstairs?"
She then adds a coda: "Lucian got a call out of nowhere from a mistress of Picasso's who asked him if he could come round and paint her. She wanted to make Picasso jealous. Lucian very politely said maybe he could paint her portrait later, but not now because he happened to be in the midst of doing his wife's portrait."
That picture, Blackwood says, turned out to be Freud's "Girl in Bed." Years later, in 1977, it played a curious part in the death of the poet Robert Lowell, another of Lady Caroline's husbands. Their marriage was in tatters when, as the story goes, he left her in Ireland and returned to the United States. After Lowell's taxi arrived at his apartment on West 67th Street, the driver found him slumped over. A doorman summoned Elizabeth Hardwick, the writer and editor whom Lowell had left to marry Blackwood; she happened to live in the same building. Hardwick opened the taxi door -- only to be confronted with her ex-husband's corpse. He was holding "Girl in Bed."
With its macabre humor, the Lowell story is one Blackwood might have written if she hadn't lived through it. "I think it's partly Irish," Blackwood says over lunch at Coco Pazzo, an elegant restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan. "Irish people are very funny but have this tragic sense.
"As Cal wrote," she continues, referring to Lowell, "if there's light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train. He was a humorous poet, you know, though people don't ever say that about him. He also wrote that in the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet, which is very funny, don't you think?"
BLACKWOOD IS A DELICATE WOMAN OF 63, SLIGHTLY stooped yet graceful, with a husky, smoker's voice. She is dressed in a loose-fitting black pants suit, the sort of unbourgeois outfit that pegs her immediately as an upper-class bohemian. Her extraordinary eyes -- big opalescent pools, which Freud made into giant spheres in his hypnotic portraits -- are the principal signs of the beauty she was in her youth. Her looks are striking but weatherbeaten.
It's not just that Blackwood likes to drink. She has also endured a series of Job-like catastrophes over the years: the death of her second husband, the American composer and pianist Israel Citkowitz; Lowell's crippling manic depression and early death; the death from AIDS of her brother, Sheridan, to whom she was very close; the death of her eldest daughter, Natalya, after a drug overdose, and her own bout with cervical cancer, for which she had an operation that left her in constant pain.
Though on one level she thrives on tragedy -- is even defined by it -- Blackwood can't abide maudlin sentiments; bringing up these episodes with her elicits an awkward silence. At first during lunch she gives only clipped responses to questions or just nods in agreement. She orders one vodka after another, tonic on the side. She is more comfortable discussing her new book, "The Last of the Duchess." But still she's cautious.
She also greets with silence a question about her flamboyant socialite mother, Maureen, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. When Maureen was young she reportedly once gave Sir Oswald Mosley, the English fascist, a black eye after he made a pass at her in Antibes. In recent years, though vastly rich, she has complained that her children haven't helped support her and the several houses she lives in. The Picasso biographer John Richardson recalls that Maureen's son, Sheridan, used to bemoan having to help pay for her villa in Sardinia, which he nicknamed the Villa Costalota. Lately, Blackwood, her sister and sister-in-law have wrangled with Maureen over the disposition of $24 million in Guinness inheritance money. The dispute, ultimately settled in Maureen's favor, underscores the nearly nonexistent relationship between Caroline and her mother, a topic Caroline prefers not to discuss.
Gradually, though, as she relaxes, Blackwood emerges as a strangely dramatic woman: intense and vulnerable, with quirky affectations like abbreviating words (Champagne becoming "champ"), a dark, razor-sharp sense of humor and an offbeat sensibility.
Geordie Greig, the New York correspondent for The Sunday Times of London and a family friend, gives an apt description of her: "When she calls on the phone she'll say 'Hiiii, it's Carrr-oline,' and there's always that enigmatic, Eartha Kitt-like purr. But in conversation she's unpredictable. Caroline's physical demeanor is so unforceful that the force of her words, which can be lethally accurate, is made doubly strong. She has an artist's sensibility to sift through any social niceties and get straight to the point. Even with her house on Long Island nothing follows the rules. Lunch might be a huge feast of lobsters and Champagne, or her fridge may be completely out of food."
Over the years, Blackwood has moved easily among several worlds: from the insular, horsy Anglo-Irish upper classes to the hard-drinking smart set of postwar England, to the liberal intelligentsia of New York City in the 1960's and 70's. She has lived in the United States for much of the last 35 years. Nowadays, she's often with her children, who also live here. Her son, Sheridan Lowell, 23, works for a small publishing firm in Manhattan. Her youngest daughter, Ivana Lowell (she has taken her stepfather's name) is 28; she works for the publishing arm of the media company Miramax and has become a lively presence in New York society since moving from London a few years ago. Another daughter, Evgenia Citkowitz, 30, is a screenwriter in Los Angeles married to the English actor Julian Sands.
Blackwood spends many mornings in her kitchen writing longhand. A broken back she suffered when she was young has made it impossible for her to type. She has published nine books that have been richly admired in Britain, where she is best known. They include collections of short stories and essays of stringent, sly, entirely anticonformist social criticism. Her novels are stylish, remorseless, frightening and wickedly funny. They can sometimes remind you a little of Beckett, except that Blackwood's nihilistic sensibility is more gothic than his: it's Beckett crossed with Bram Stoker.
"The Last of the Duchess" is her mesmeric account of a vain attempt to visit the ailing Duchess of Windsor in 1980 and of Blackwood's encounters with the Duchess's ruthless and highly powerful octogenarian lawyer, Maitre Suzanne Blum, a woman obsessed with her client to the point of erotic fantasy. Blum was the Cerberus at the Duchess's door, blocking even old friends from contacting her, according to Blackwood. Was the sick Duchess tortured by being kept alive, Blackwood wondered, or might she even be dead? Was Blum only saying she was alive so that she could sell the royal jewels and claim the money as her legal fee?
HOW MUCH OF THE book is Irish blarney? After all, the story of Blum, like so many of the stories Blackwood tells, is so bizarre it sounds like fiction. In a sense, though, that's Blackwood's point. She writes as she speaks, with a dramatic flair that can seduce you even as you wonder how precise she is. (Freud, for instance, recalls the Picasso incident very differently.) "You can't really get the truth about anybody from an interview," Blackwood says. "It's all fiction in a way."
She portrays herself in her books as a wide-eyed innocent, astonished by the horrors around her. In person, though, she has a disconcerting habit of staring at you, coolly sizing you up while she picks demurely at her meal. You can see how she could drive Maitre Blum mad.
"If it's berserk behavior I like it as a subject," Blackwood says. "If you write about bland people there's no story, is there? I hated Blum and was really scared of her," Blackwood recalls, "but she thought I was a complete idiot because I acted the dumb journalist with her a bit. She wouldn't even have seen me if I didn't have a title. On the other hand she wouldn't have been so rude if I were a crowned head."
Her full name is Lady Caroline Hamilton Temple Blackwood: she's a descendant on her father's side of the great 18th-century dramatist and wit Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She is a Guinness on her mother's side. (She says she finds stout undrinkable.)
"Brewers or bankers, aristocrats or plutocrats, the Guinnesses are apt to be a law unto themselves," John Richardson says. "This Anglo-Irish dynasty is famously cultivated, brilliant, profligate, witty and beguiling. Caution and abstemiousness are not their forte. Caroline upholds her family's reputation for courage, eccentricity and subversive humor. She most certainly does not hold with the ultraconservative views of some of her cousins."
She grew up in the ancestral stone mansion called Clandeboye, in County Down in Northern Ireland. "My great-grandfather built a wing every time he had another child," Blackwood says. "You didn't build a room then, you built a wing. It was terribly rundown when I was a child, the typical joke Irish house with all the pails to catch dripping water all over the place."
Her great-grandfather, Lord Dufferin, was an eminent Victorian, rumored to have been Disraeli's illegitimate son. "I think he was," says Blackwood, mischievously. "Why would a Scottish landowner have a son who looked like Disraeli? He once got up in the House of Lords and denied that he was Disraeli's son, because it was terrible for his mother's honor, but that sort of implies that he was, doesn't it?"
Queen Victoria made him Viceroy of India, where he used to sit on his throne, fanned by peacock feathers, while processions of rajahs paid him homage. At Clandeboye he built a stone shrine to his mother, an immense architectural folly called Helen's Tower that inspired poems by Browning, Kipling and Tennyson. "Kipling loved my great-grandfather and wrote lots of very bad poems to him," Blackwood says. "He had a fatal effect on poets. I mean, the Tennyson poem is a jingle that goes on and on." She discovered not long ago that Helen's Tower inspired a World War I memorial in France to Irish soldiers. "I mean, Helen's Tower is really odd, isn't it? Victorians thought it was fine someone building a tower to his mother while she was alive, but can you imagine doing it now, in post-Freudian times?"
Blackwood's father, Basil, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was a close friend of Evelyn Waugh and part of the glittering circle he recalled in "Brideshead Revisited." When the Marquess was killed in 1943 by the Japanese in the jungle in Burma, he was 35. Blackwood was 12 at the time and has only dim memories of her father.
Like other women of her class she skipped college; instead she went to work for Claud Cockburn, an influential left-wing journalist who wrote for, among others, The Times Literary Supplement. "Claud was a reviewer for TLS and I read books for him, because in those days the reviews were unsigned," Blackwood says. "It was really corrupt but I was extremely diligent."
She recalls meeting Freud around then, at a party memorable for the fact that the painter Francis Bacon caused a row when he hooted down Princess Margaret, who had just started singing "Let's Do It." Blackwood becomes testy when asked if a reference to her in a recent book as Margaret's lady-in-waiting is true. "That's a lie and I'll sue you if you say it," she says, only half kidding and appalled that anyone could imagine her in such a role.
She changes the subject. "Lucian was fantastic, very brilliant, incredibly beautiful, though not in a movie-star way," she says. "I remember he was very mannered, he wore these long side whiskers, which nobody else had then. And he wore funny trousers, deliberately. He wanted to stand out in a crowd, and he did."
When Freud and Blackwood returned to London from Paris, they settled into the circle that included Bacon, Cyril Connolly and the other artists and writers who gathered nightly at the fabled Gargoyle and Colony Clubs. "As a concept the Gargoyle was brilliant," Blackwood states. "O.K., everyone there would be a bit drunk. But you could wander in any night and find the cleverest people in England. After the war it was completely normal for intellectuals to knock each other down if someone had written a bad review or taken someone's girl. Then they always sent flowers the next day."
GRADUALLY HER marriage to Freud crumbled. When she left him, he was devastated. Blackwood says only that "Lucian and I couldn't be married, not endlessly. We were both too restless."
She fled to Los Angeles, installed herself at the Chateau Marmont and got a tiny part in the television series "Have Gun Will Travel." But she hated the city. The best thing to come out of it was that Stephen Spender asked her to do an article for Encounter magazine about California beatniks. It turned out to be a sendup that launched her writing career. Beatnik culture, she wrote, "has all the trappings of the subversive, the meeting in the darkened cellar, the conspiratorial whisper behind the candle in the Chianti bottle, the nihilistic mutter, without the mildest element of subversion."
Not long after Blackwood moved from Los Angeles to New York she met Israel Citkowitz, a former student of Aaron Copland, some 20 years her senior. They married. Today Blackwood speaks warmly but vaguely about Citkowitz. She describes him as "gorgeous and brilliant, which wasn't a bad combination." But they separated after a few years and she became involved with Robert Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books. Through Silvers she met Lowell.
Citkowitz and she remained friendly until he died, and he sometimes lived in the London house she shared with Lowell in the 1970's, helping her to care for the children during Lowell's bouts of madness. Lowell would write a poem to Citkowitz, lines of which Blackwood used as an epitaph on Citkowitz's grave. Her three daughters were born while she was still married to him. She had a son, Sheridan, by Lowell in 1971.
In 1972 she and Lowell flew to Santo Domingo for a joint divorce-marriage. "Nobody could understand the service because it was all in Spanish," she remembers. "It was in a hut, with chickens coming in and out. You'd move to one hut and they'd say you're divorced. Then to another hut where they'd say you're married. All the time there was lots of loud typing. So romantic."
It pains Blackwood that her marriage with Lowell is often described solely in terms of his breakup with Hardwick and illness. She recalls periods at Milgate, their house in Kent, as idyllic. But she acknowledges that Lowell's episodes of manic depression became increasingly unmanageable.
"I wanted Israel to be in the house because I couldn't deal with it alone," she explains. "Not that Cal would have hurt the children, he wasn't murderous. But I had to watch him all day and all night because a manic never sleeps." One day she found him hacking holes in the wall with a carving knife. He told her he was looking for Etruscan treasures. "It was a horrible affliction to not know when your mind was suddenly going to go -- particularly when you had got this huge mind."
Then Lowell died; then Natalya. Through it all, Blackwood managed to turn out a remarkable string of books. One of them, "On the Perimeter," was a report about the women who had camped for years in the mud at Greenham Common in England to protest the American nuclear missile base there. "The Stepdaughter" was a short epistolary novel about an abusive woman abandoned by her husband and left with his hideous daughter. Another novel, "The Fate of Mary Rose," is a chilling tale about an increasingly deranged mother's fatal obsession with her daughter's safety.
Blackwood even wrote a lighthearted cookbook with her friend the English novelist Anna Haycraft (who wrote under the name of Alice Thomas Ellis) that featured celebrity recipes. Blackwood asked Francis Bacon for a recipe. "I doubt anybody had ever asked him for one before. But he was a fantastic cook, and he had this very smart recipe for mayonnaise. Then it turned out that he was such a perfectionist that he kept holding up the publication to make revisions. Eventually Anna called in a panic, saying she'd forgotten to put in Francis's very last revision before the book went to press. 'It had less to do with salt and more to do with vinegar,' she said. Francis brought 100 copies of the book anyway."
In 1980, Blackwood began work on "The Last of the Duchess." "It was pathetic Blum being so old and in love with the Duchess," Blackwood muses. "What a stupid thing to do. But of course the Duchess was ridiculous, too. A more noble figure than she wouldn't have let this lawyer take over her life." The paradox, as Blackwood implies in the book, is that the socialite Duchess spent her last days in solitary confinement, and -- considering the Windsors' connection to Hitler -- that her jailer was a Jew.
Writing kept Blackwood going through one calamity after another -- until the cancer a few years ago. "I really don't like talking about it," she says, after a long pause. "I just kept on trying to do what I do, no matter what life did to me. But after the cancer I became so used to the idea that I would be dead that I had reconciled myself to the idea of not writing anymore. Once you've accepted you're dead, why write?
"It took me a long time to get back to writing. For a while I didn't have any ideas, none." She smiles. "But now I try and write all morning. It may be so awful that I put my pencil through the whole thing and start over the next day. But at least I've got plenty of ideas."
From 9 December 1953, her married name became Freud. Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood used the pen-name of Caroline Blackwood. From 15 August 1959, her married name became Citkowitz. She wrote the book For All That I Found There. From 1972, her married name became Lowell. She wrote the book The Stepdaughter, published 1976. She wrote the book Great Granny Webster, published 1977. She was decorated with the award of Booker Prize (runner-up) in 1977. She wrote the book Good Night Sweet Ladies. She wrote the book The Fate of Mary Rose. She wrote the book On the Perimeter: Caroline Blackwood at Greenham Common, published 1984. She wrote the book In the Pink. She wrote the book Darling. She wrote the book Corrigan. She wrote the book You Shouldn't Have Gone to so Much Trouble.
Children of Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood and Israel Citkowitz
•Natalya Citkowitz b. 17 Aug 1960, d. 22 Jun 1978
•Evgenia Citkowitz b. 1964
•Ivana Citkowitz b. 1966
Child of Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood and Robert Traill Spence Lowell
•Robert Sheriden Lowell b. Aug 1971
According to her daughter Ivana's memoir, "Why Not Say What Happened?", Caroline's ashes were buried under a pine tree at her home in Sag Harbor, NY. This house was once known as "the Summer White House" as it was occupied by Chester A. Arthur on vacations during his presidency.
Caroline Blackwood was a writer with a small number of books to her name. These have an intensity, a black and humorous concentration on the pitilessness of experience, which should ensure their survival. They are also very funny.
Ireland was in her blood and upbringing. Ireland suffers Blackwood's forensic surgery in her first book, For All That I Found There (1973), a collection of short stories and meditative pieces. With courage and a certain breathtaking cruelty she followed it with two autobiographical novels. The Stepdaughter (1976) is a miniature Greek tragedy, done as farce, about an unhappy relationship with your child. The title is the only figleaf permitted; the book is based on her eldest child, Natalia Citkowitz, who died through addiction before the book was published. There is something of Evelyn Waugh in Blackwood's ability to make you laugh reluctantly at her ruthlessness: Waugh done over by the painter Francis Bacon. Great Granny Webster is lighter and funnier. Here the Anglo- Irish world of Elizabeth Bowen is allowed no smidgen of decadent charm; water drips relentlessly through the roof, room after oppressive room of the statutory mansion. Yeats, you feel, would have had a nervous breakdown had he lived to read it. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1977 and was greatly admired by Philip Larkin.
Subsequent novels such as The Fate of Mary Rose (1981) and Corrigan (1984) were less successful, though they well repay re-reading. A further collection of short stories, Good Night Sweet Ladies (1983) and a sympathetic yet merciless account of the predominantly female protest at Greenham Common, On the Perimeter (1984), confirmed her talent. If her last book, an account of the last days of the Duchess of Windsor, The Last Duchess (1995), betrays some signs of Caroline Blackwood's cancer and alcoholism, it does contain one of the greatest pieces of comic writing I know: her own attempts at interviewing Maitre Suzanne Blum, the terrifying French lawyer who took charge of the Duchess's fortune and bedridden body before dying herself in her nineties.
Caroline Blackwood's dark temperament, perfectly realised in her writing, is in some ways a puzzle, given the facts of her life. It was a rich life literally and metaphorically She was one of the most beautiful women of her generation (a more intense and fascinating version of the film star, Michelle Pfeiffer, I found). Even in the last years, when life and illness ravaged her, you could not look at anyone else when she was in the room. She was loved by some of the most talented men of the age and married two of them, the painter Lucian Freud and the poet Robert Lowell. She was well-off (her mother was Maureen Guinness, now Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava) and aristocratic in a period when that added rather than subtracted glamour. Her father, who died when she was 13 was Basil Dufferin, eulogised in a Betjeman poem; her brother Sheridan Dufferin, whom with her sister Perdita she loved, was the kind of man whose charm, generosity and modesty give aristocrats a good name.
As well as passion, Caroline Blackwood experienced love both giving and receiving. In some ways a difficult mother, she was always close to her daughters Eugenia and Ivana Citkowitz and her son Sheridan Lowell. She made great and enduring friendships with men and women: I was lucky enough to enjoy her friendship for nearly 35 years. She was very funny because polite and well-mannered on the surface, in no sense a person who shocked in order to make an effect, she mercilessly cut straight through to the core of things. Like Lucian Freud, and her friend Francis Bacon, she hated padding. You could not pretend in her company. Even on her deathbed, black Blackwood gold was mined. One of the women she loved most, a Catholic and fellow novelist, had brought water from Lourdes. Some of it spilt on the sheets. "I might have caught my death," she muttered.
Lucian Freud's portraits of her are in my view his greatest paintings. She was pleased to get a recent long telephone call from him. "I had forgotten how funny Lucian can be," she said. Some time after leaving him, she married Israel Citkowitz, a talented composer and delightful man who sadly suffered most of his career from a debilitating writer's block.
Without turning into a figure of tragic suffering, Citkowitz followed her to England after her marriage to Robert Lowell and continued as a father to his children, and as a kind of nanny-duenna to Blackwood for the rest of his life. She was his great achivement. He always registered a quiet pride in it.
Robert Lowell's life with Blackwood and his traumatic parting and final reunion with his previous wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwicke, is relived in three books of poems. A long sequence of love poems, The Dolphin, praises and anatomises Caroline as the Muse who put an end to his philanderings.
Any clear thing that blinds us with
surprise,
your wandering silences and bright
trouvailles,
dolphin let loose to catch the
flashing fish . . .
They lived in London, in a manor she bought in Kent and later in her cousin Desmond Guinness's great house Castletown in Co. Kildare. The marriage ran aground on the shoals of Blackwood's drinking, Lowell's sense that he had little time he had to live and terror of his bouts of manic depression - ironically less persistent after their meeting. Their love affair never floundered. Lowell lived with Elizabeth the last year of his life, but visited Blackwood.
Three days before he died I delivered to him in Ireland a picture I had procured, a Freud of Caroline. He died clutching it in a cab on his way to Elizabeth in New York. At his graveside the two women clung to each other.
Grey Gowrie
Caroline Maureen Blackwood, writer: born 1931; married 1953 Lucian Freud (marriage dissolved), 1959 Israel Citkovitz (marriage dissolved; three daughters, one deceased), 1972 Robert Lowell (died 1977; one son); died New York 14 February 1996.
WHEN LADY Caroline Blackwood, the Irish writer and Guinness heiress, was living in Paris in the early 1950's, she and her first husband, the painter Lucian Freud, were invited to visit Picasso.
"Picasso got one of his followers to ask Lucian if he would like to see Picasso's paintings," Blackwood says. "Of course, Lucian said yes. Meanwhile Picasso asked me if I wanted to see his doves: he had this spiral iron staircase leading to the roof, and off we go, winding round and round to the top, until we reached these doves in cages and all around us was the best view of Paris, the best. Whereupon immediately, standing on this tiny, tiny space, way above the city, Picasso does a complete plunge at me. All I felt was fear. I kept saying, 'Go down the stairs, go down.' He said, 'No, no, we are together above the roofs of Paris.' It was so absurd, and to me Picasso was just as old as the hills, an old letch, genius or no.
"I wonder," Blackwood pauses to ask, "what we were supposed to have done if I accepted? There was no space to make love, with all those doves. And think how many other people he had up there. Did they go through with it? And technically, how did they go through with it? And with the husband downstairs?"
She then adds a coda: "Lucian got a call out of nowhere from a mistress of Picasso's who asked him if he could come round and paint her. She wanted to make Picasso jealous. Lucian very politely said maybe he could paint her portrait later, but not now because he happened to be in the midst of doing his wife's portrait."
That picture, Blackwood says, turned out to be Freud's "Girl in Bed." Years later, in 1977, it played a curious part in the death of the poet Robert Lowell, another of Lady Caroline's husbands. Their marriage was in tatters when, as the story goes, he left her in Ireland and returned to the United States. After Lowell's taxi arrived at his apartment on West 67th Street, the driver found him slumped over. A doorman summoned Elizabeth Hardwick, the writer and editor whom Lowell had left to marry Blackwood; she happened to live in the same building. Hardwick opened the taxi door -- only to be confronted with her ex-husband's corpse. He was holding "Girl in Bed."
With its macabre humor, the Lowell story is one Blackwood might have written if she hadn't lived through it. "I think it's partly Irish," Blackwood says over lunch at Coco Pazzo, an elegant restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan. "Irish people are very funny but have this tragic sense.
"As Cal wrote," she continues, referring to Lowell, "if there's light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train. He was a humorous poet, you know, though people don't ever say that about him. He also wrote that in the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet, which is very funny, don't you think?"
BLACKWOOD IS A DELICATE WOMAN OF 63, SLIGHTLY stooped yet graceful, with a husky, smoker's voice. She is dressed in a loose-fitting black pants suit, the sort of unbourgeois outfit that pegs her immediately as an upper-class bohemian. Her extraordinary eyes -- big opalescent pools, which Freud made into giant spheres in his hypnotic portraits -- are the principal signs of the beauty she was in her youth. Her looks are striking but weatherbeaten.
It's not just that Blackwood likes to drink. She has also endured a series of Job-like catastrophes over the years: the death of her second husband, the American composer and pianist Israel Citkowitz; Lowell's crippling manic depression and early death; the death from AIDS of her brother, Sheridan, to whom she was very close; the death of her eldest daughter, Natalya, after a drug overdose, and her own bout with cervical cancer, for which she had an operation that left her in constant pain.
Though on one level she thrives on tragedy -- is even defined by it -- Blackwood can't abide maudlin sentiments; bringing up these episodes with her elicits an awkward silence. At first during lunch she gives only clipped responses to questions or just nods in agreement. She orders one vodka after another, tonic on the side. She is more comfortable discussing her new book, "The Last of the Duchess." But still she's cautious.
She also greets with silence a question about her flamboyant socialite mother, Maureen, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. When Maureen was young she reportedly once gave Sir Oswald Mosley, the English fascist, a black eye after he made a pass at her in Antibes. In recent years, though vastly rich, she has complained that her children haven't helped support her and the several houses she lives in. The Picasso biographer John Richardson recalls that Maureen's son, Sheridan, used to bemoan having to help pay for her villa in Sardinia, which he nicknamed the Villa Costalota. Lately, Blackwood, her sister and sister-in-law have wrangled with Maureen over the disposition of $24 million in Guinness inheritance money. The dispute, ultimately settled in Maureen's favor, underscores the nearly nonexistent relationship between Caroline and her mother, a topic Caroline prefers not to discuss.
Gradually, though, as she relaxes, Blackwood emerges as a strangely dramatic woman: intense and vulnerable, with quirky affectations like abbreviating words (Champagne becoming "champ"), a dark, razor-sharp sense of humor and an offbeat sensibility.
Geordie Greig, the New York correspondent for The Sunday Times of London and a family friend, gives an apt description of her: "When she calls on the phone she'll say 'Hiiii, it's Carrr-oline,' and there's always that enigmatic, Eartha Kitt-like purr. But in conversation she's unpredictable. Caroline's physical demeanor is so unforceful that the force of her words, which can be lethally accurate, is made doubly strong. She has an artist's sensibility to sift through any social niceties and get straight to the point. Even with her house on Long Island nothing follows the rules. Lunch might be a huge feast of lobsters and Champagne, or her fridge may be completely out of food."
Over the years, Blackwood has moved easily among several worlds: from the insular, horsy Anglo-Irish upper classes to the hard-drinking smart set of postwar England, to the liberal intelligentsia of New York City in the 1960's and 70's. She has lived in the United States for much of the last 35 years. Nowadays, she's often with her children, who also live here. Her son, Sheridan Lowell, 23, works for a small publishing firm in Manhattan. Her youngest daughter, Ivana Lowell (she has taken her stepfather's name) is 28; she works for the publishing arm of the media company Miramax and has become a lively presence in New York society since moving from London a few years ago. Another daughter, Evgenia Citkowitz, 30, is a screenwriter in Los Angeles married to the English actor Julian Sands.
Blackwood spends many mornings in her kitchen writing longhand. A broken back she suffered when she was young has made it impossible for her to type. She has published nine books that have been richly admired in Britain, where she is best known. They include collections of short stories and essays of stringent, sly, entirely anticonformist social criticism. Her novels are stylish, remorseless, frightening and wickedly funny. They can sometimes remind you a little of Beckett, except that Blackwood's nihilistic sensibility is more gothic than his: it's Beckett crossed with Bram Stoker.
"The Last of the Duchess" is her mesmeric account of a vain attempt to visit the ailing Duchess of Windsor in 1980 and of Blackwood's encounters with the Duchess's ruthless and highly powerful octogenarian lawyer, Maitre Suzanne Blum, a woman obsessed with her client to the point of erotic fantasy. Blum was the Cerberus at the Duchess's door, blocking even old friends from contacting her, according to Blackwood. Was the sick Duchess tortured by being kept alive, Blackwood wondered, or might she even be dead? Was Blum only saying she was alive so that she could sell the royal jewels and claim the money as her legal fee?
HOW MUCH OF THE book is Irish blarney? After all, the story of Blum, like so many of the stories Blackwood tells, is so bizarre it sounds like fiction. In a sense, though, that's Blackwood's point. She writes as she speaks, with a dramatic flair that can seduce you even as you wonder how precise she is. (Freud, for instance, recalls the Picasso incident very differently.) "You can't really get the truth about anybody from an interview," Blackwood says. "It's all fiction in a way."
She portrays herself in her books as a wide-eyed innocent, astonished by the horrors around her. In person, though, she has a disconcerting habit of staring at you, coolly sizing you up while she picks demurely at her meal. You can see how she could drive Maitre Blum mad.
"If it's berserk behavior I like it as a subject," Blackwood says. "If you write about bland people there's no story, is there? I hated Blum and was really scared of her," Blackwood recalls, "but she thought I was a complete idiot because I acted the dumb journalist with her a bit. She wouldn't even have seen me if I didn't have a title. On the other hand she wouldn't have been so rude if I were a crowned head."
Her full name is Lady Caroline Hamilton Temple Blackwood: she's a descendant on her father's side of the great 18th-century dramatist and wit Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She is a Guinness on her mother's side. (She says she finds stout undrinkable.)
"Brewers or bankers, aristocrats or plutocrats, the Guinnesses are apt to be a law unto themselves," John Richardson says. "This Anglo-Irish dynasty is famously cultivated, brilliant, profligate, witty and beguiling. Caution and abstemiousness are not their forte. Caroline upholds her family's reputation for courage, eccentricity and subversive humor. She most certainly does not hold with the ultraconservative views of some of her cousins."
She grew up in the ancestral stone mansion called Clandeboye, in County Down in Northern Ireland. "My great-grandfather built a wing every time he had another child," Blackwood says. "You didn't build a room then, you built a wing. It was terribly rundown when I was a child, the typical joke Irish house with all the pails to catch dripping water all over the place."
Her great-grandfather, Lord Dufferin, was an eminent Victorian, rumored to have been Disraeli's illegitimate son. "I think he was," says Blackwood, mischievously. "Why would a Scottish landowner have a son who looked like Disraeli? He once got up in the House of Lords and denied that he was Disraeli's son, because it was terrible for his mother's honor, but that sort of implies that he was, doesn't it?"
Queen Victoria made him Viceroy of India, where he used to sit on his throne, fanned by peacock feathers, while processions of rajahs paid him homage. At Clandeboye he built a stone shrine to his mother, an immense architectural folly called Helen's Tower that inspired poems by Browning, Kipling and Tennyson. "Kipling loved my great-grandfather and wrote lots of very bad poems to him," Blackwood says. "He had a fatal effect on poets. I mean, the Tennyson poem is a jingle that goes on and on." She discovered not long ago that Helen's Tower inspired a World War I memorial in France to Irish soldiers. "I mean, Helen's Tower is really odd, isn't it? Victorians thought it was fine someone building a tower to his mother while she was alive, but can you imagine doing it now, in post-Freudian times?"
Blackwood's father, Basil, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was a close friend of Evelyn Waugh and part of the glittering circle he recalled in "Brideshead Revisited." When the Marquess was killed in 1943 by the Japanese in the jungle in Burma, he was 35. Blackwood was 12 at the time and has only dim memories of her father.
Like other women of her class she skipped college; instead she went to work for Claud Cockburn, an influential left-wing journalist who wrote for, among others, The Times Literary Supplement. "Claud was a reviewer for TLS and I read books for him, because in those days the reviews were unsigned," Blackwood says. "It was really corrupt but I was extremely diligent."
She recalls meeting Freud around then, at a party memorable for the fact that the painter Francis Bacon caused a row when he hooted down Princess Margaret, who had just started singing "Let's Do It." Blackwood becomes testy when asked if a reference to her in a recent book as Margaret's lady-in-waiting is true. "That's a lie and I'll sue you if you say it," she says, only half kidding and appalled that anyone could imagine her in such a role.
She changes the subject. "Lucian was fantastic, very brilliant, incredibly beautiful, though not in a movie-star way," she says. "I remember he was very mannered, he wore these long side whiskers, which nobody else had then. And he wore funny trousers, deliberately. He wanted to stand out in a crowd, and he did."
When Freud and Blackwood returned to London from Paris, they settled into the circle that included Bacon, Cyril Connolly and the other artists and writers who gathered nightly at the fabled Gargoyle and Colony Clubs. "As a concept the Gargoyle was brilliant," Blackwood states. "O.K., everyone there would be a bit drunk. But you could wander in any night and find the cleverest people in England. After the war it was completely normal for intellectuals to knock each other down if someone had written a bad review or taken someone's girl. Then they always sent flowers the next day."
GRADUALLY HER marriage to Freud crumbled. When she left him, he was devastated. Blackwood says only that "Lucian and I couldn't be married, not endlessly. We were both too restless."
She fled to Los Angeles, installed herself at the Chateau Marmont and got a tiny part in the television series "Have Gun Will Travel." But she hated the city. The best thing to come out of it was that Stephen Spender asked her to do an article for Encounter magazine about California beatniks. It turned out to be a sendup that launched her writing career. Beatnik culture, she wrote, "has all the trappings of the subversive, the meeting in the darkened cellar, the conspiratorial whisper behind the candle in the Chianti bottle, the nihilistic mutter, without the mildest element of subversion."
Not long after Blackwood moved from Los Angeles to New York she met Israel Citkowitz, a former student of Aaron Copland, some 20 years her senior. They married. Today Blackwood speaks warmly but vaguely about Citkowitz. She describes him as "gorgeous and brilliant, which wasn't a bad combination." But they separated after a few years and she became involved with Robert Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books. Through Silvers she met Lowell.
Citkowitz and she remained friendly until he died, and he sometimes lived in the London house she shared with Lowell in the 1970's, helping her to care for the children during Lowell's bouts of madness. Lowell would write a poem to Citkowitz, lines of which Blackwood used as an epitaph on Citkowitz's grave. Her three daughters were born while she was still married to him. She had a son, Sheridan, by Lowell in 1971.
In 1972 she and Lowell flew to Santo Domingo for a joint divorce-marriage. "Nobody could understand the service because it was all in Spanish," she remembers. "It was in a hut, with chickens coming in and out. You'd move to one hut and they'd say you're divorced. Then to another hut where they'd say you're married. All the time there was lots of loud typing. So romantic."
It pains Blackwood that her marriage with Lowell is often described solely in terms of his breakup with Hardwick and illness. She recalls periods at Milgate, their house in Kent, as idyllic. But she acknowledges that Lowell's episodes of manic depression became increasingly unmanageable.
"I wanted Israel to be in the house because I couldn't deal with it alone," she explains. "Not that Cal would have hurt the children, he wasn't murderous. But I had to watch him all day and all night because a manic never sleeps." One day she found him hacking holes in the wall with a carving knife. He told her he was looking for Etruscan treasures. "It was a horrible affliction to not know when your mind was suddenly going to go -- particularly when you had got this huge mind."
Then Lowell died; then Natalya. Through it all, Blackwood managed to turn out a remarkable string of books. One of them, "On the Perimeter," was a report about the women who had camped for years in the mud at Greenham Common in England to protest the American nuclear missile base there. "The Stepdaughter" was a short epistolary novel about an abusive woman abandoned by her husband and left with his hideous daughter. Another novel, "The Fate of Mary Rose," is a chilling tale about an increasingly deranged mother's fatal obsession with her daughter's safety.
Blackwood even wrote a lighthearted cookbook with her friend the English novelist Anna Haycraft (who wrote under the name of Alice Thomas Ellis) that featured celebrity recipes. Blackwood asked Francis Bacon for a recipe. "I doubt anybody had ever asked him for one before. But he was a fantastic cook, and he had this very smart recipe for mayonnaise. Then it turned out that he was such a perfectionist that he kept holding up the publication to make revisions. Eventually Anna called in a panic, saying she'd forgotten to put in Francis's very last revision before the book went to press. 'It had less to do with salt and more to do with vinegar,' she said. Francis brought 100 copies of the book anyway."
In 1980, Blackwood began work on "The Last of the Duchess." "It was pathetic Blum being so old and in love with the Duchess," Blackwood muses. "What a stupid thing to do. But of course the Duchess was ridiculous, too. A more noble figure than she wouldn't have let this lawyer take over her life." The paradox, as Blackwood implies in the book, is that the socialite Duchess spent her last days in solitary confinement, and -- considering the Windsors' connection to Hitler -- that her jailer was a Jew.
Writing kept Blackwood going through one calamity after another -- until the cancer a few years ago. "I really don't like talking about it," she says, after a long pause. "I just kept on trying to do what I do, no matter what life did to me. But after the cancer I became so used to the idea that I would be dead that I had reconciled myself to the idea of not writing anymore. Once you've accepted you're dead, why write?
Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (16 July 1931 – 14 February 1996) was a writer, and the eldest child of The 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and the brewery heiress Maureen Guinness.
A well-known figure in the literary world through her journalism and her novels, Lady Caroline Blackwood was equally well known for her high-profile marriages, first to the artist Lucian Freud, then to the composer Israel Citkowitz and finally to the poet Robert Lowell, who described her as "a mermaid who dines upon the bones of her winded lovers". Her novels are known for their wit and intelligence, and one in particular is scathingly autobiographical in describing her unhappy childhood.
She was born into an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family from Ulster at 4 Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge, her parents' London home. She was, she admitted, "scantily educated" at, among other schools, Rockport School (County Down) and Downham (Essex). After a finishing school in Oxford she was presented as a debutante in 1949 at a ball held at Londonderry House.
Career
Blackwood's first job was with Hulton Press as a secretary, but she was soon given small reporting jobs by Claud Cockburn. Ann Fleming, the wife of "James Bond" author Ian Fleming, introduced Lady Caroline to Lucian Freud, and the two eloped to Paris in 1952. In Paris she met Picasso (and reportedly refused to wash for three days after he drew on her hands and nails). She married Freud on 9 December 1953 and became a striking figure in London's bohemian circles; the Gargoyle Club and Colony Room replaced Belgraviadrawing rooms as her haunts. She sat for several of Freud's finest portraits, including Girl in Bed, which testifies to her alluring beauty. She was impressed by the ruthless vision of Freud and Francis Bacon and her later fiction was a literary version of their view of humanity.
In the early 1960s, Blackwood began contributing to Encounter, London Magazine, and other periodicals on subjects such as beatniks, Ulster sectarianism, feminist theatre and New York free schools. Although these articles were elegant, minutely observed and sometimes wickedly funny, they had, according to Christopher Isherwood, a persistent flaw: "she is only capable of thinking negatively. Confronted by a phenomenon, she asks herself: what is wrong with it?"[1] During the mid-1960s, she had an affair with Robert Silvers, the founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books.[2][3]
Her third husband, Robert Lowell, was a crucial influence on her talents as a novelist. He encouraged her to write her first book, For All That I Found There (1973), the title of which is a line from the Percy French song "The Mountains of Mourne", and which includes a mordant memoir of her daughter's treatment in a burns unit. Blackwood's first novel The Stepdaughter (1976) appeared three years later to much acclaim, and is a concise and gripping monologue by a rich, self-pitying woman deserted by her husband in a plush New York apartment and tormented by her fat stepdaughter. It won the David Higham Prize for best first novel. Great Granny Webster followed in 1977 and was partly derived on her own miserable childhood, and depicted an austere and loveless old woman's destructive impact on her daughter and granddaughter. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize.
In 1980 came The Last of the Duchess, a study of the relations between the Duchess of Windsor and her cunning lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum; it could not be published until after Blum's death in 1995. Her third novel The Fate of Mary Rose (1981) describes the effect on a Kent village of the rape and torture of a ten-year-old girl named Maureen and is narrated by a selfish historian whose obsessions destroy his domestic life. After this came a collection of five short stories, Good Night Sweet Ladies (1983), followed by her final novel, Corrigan (1984), which was the least successful and depicts the effects on a depressed widow of a charming, energetic but sinister cripple who erupts into her life.
Blackwood's later books were based on interviews and vignettes, including On The Perimeter (1984), which focused her attentions on the women's peace encampment at the Greenham Common air base in Berkshire, and In The Pink (1987), which was a reflective, ghoulish book looking at the hunting and the hunt saboteur fraternities and exposed the many obsessive personalities of both fox-hunters and animal rights activists.
Personal life
Blackwood's marriage to Lucian Freud disintegrated soon after they married in 1953; it was dissolved in 1958, in Mexico.[citation needed] In 1957, Blackwood moved to New York City and studied acting at the Stella Adler school. She also went to Hollywood and appeared in several films.[citation needed]
On 15 August 1959, she married the pianist Israel Citkowitz (1909–1974), 22 years her senior and born in the same year as her late father; they had three daughters. By 1966, when their youngest, Ivana, was born, their marriage was over, although Citkowitz continued to live nearby and served as a nanny-duenna[citation needed] until his death. During the mid-1960s, Blackwood had an affair with Robert Silvers, a founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books, who stayed close to the family thereafter.[2][3]
According to Ivana, both she and Silvers suspected that he was her biological father.[4] However, a deathbed admission by Blackwood revealed that Ivana's biological father was another boyfriend: the screenwriter Ivan Moffat, a grandson of actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree.[2][3]
In 1970, Blackwood returned to London and, in April, began a relationship with the poet Robert Lowell, then a visiting professor at All Souls College, Oxford. Their son, Sheridan, was born on 28 September 1971; after being divorced from their respective spouses, Blackwood and Lowell were married, on 21 October 1972. They lived in London and at Milgate House in Kent. The sequence of poems in Lowell's The Dolphin (1973) provides a disrupted narrative of his involvement with Blackwood and the birth of their son (Lowell's friend Elizabeth Bishop strongly advised Lowell not to publish the book, advice he ignored).
Lowell suffered from bipolar disorder, and his manic episodes prompted in Blackwood distress, confusion, feelings of uselessness, and fear about the effects on their children. Her anxieties, alcohol-related illnesses, and late-night tirades exacerbated his condition.[citation needed] In 1977, Lowell died, reportedly clutching one of Freud's portraits of Blackwood, in the back seat of a New York cab, on his way back to his second wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick.[5] This loss was followed a year later by the death of her daughter Natalya, from a drug overdose at the age of 18.
In 1977, to avoid taxation, Blackwood left England and went to live in County Kildare, Ireland, in an apartment at the great Georgian mansion of Castletown House, which was owned by her cousin Desmond Guinness. Ten years later, in 1987, she returned to the United States, settling in a large, comfortable house in Sag Harbor, Long Island, where, although her abilities were reduced by alcoholism, she continued to write; her work of that era includes two vivid memoirs, of Princess Margaret and of Francis Bacon, published in The New York Review of Books in 1992.[citation needed]
According to those close to her, she never lost her macabre sense of humour, even during her final illness. British writer and essayist Anna Haycraft, a staunch Roman Catholic, brought holy water from Lourdes, which accidentally spilled on Blackwood's deathbed sheets; "I might have caught my death", she muttered.[citation needed]
Death
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On 14 February 1996, Blackwood died from cancer, at the Mayfair Hotel on Park Avenue in New York City, aged 64. She was survived by her two younger daughters: Evgenia Citkowitz Sands (b. 1963), wife of actor Julian Sands, and Ivana (b. 1966); by her son, Sheridan Lowell; by her sister, Lady Perdita Blackwood; and by her mother, the former Maureen Guinness, who died two years later, aged 91. She was predeceased by her father, Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (1909–1945); by her eldest daughter, Natalya (1960–1978); and by her brother, Sheridan Dufferin, 5th Marquess (1938–1988).
Titled Bohemian; Caroline Blackwood
Posted 08 Jun 2023 by MARKFLANDERS38
By MICHAEL KIMMELMANAPRIL 2, 1995
NYT
WHEN LADY Caroline Blackwood, the Irish writer and Guinness heiress, was living in Paris in the early 1950's, she and her first husband, the painter Lucian Freud, were invited to visit Picasso.
"Picasso got one of his followers to ask Lucian if he would like to see Picasso's paintings," Blackwood says. "Of course, Lucian said yes. Meanwhile Picasso asked me if I wanted to see his doves: he had this spiral iron staircase leading to the roof, and off we go, winding round and round to the top, until we reached these doves in cages and all around us was the best view of Paris, the best. Whereupon immediately, standing on this tiny, tiny space, way above the city, Picasso does a complete plunge at me. All I felt was fear. I kept saying, 'Go down the stairs, go down.' He said, 'No, no, we are together above the roofs of Paris.' It was so absurd, and to me Picasso was just as old as the hills, an old letch, genius or no.
"I wonder," Blackwood pauses to ask, "what we were supposed to have done if I accepted? There was no space to make love, with all those doves. And think how many other people he had up there. Did they go through with it? And technically, how did they go through with it? And with the husband downstairs?"
She then adds a coda: "Lucian got a call out of nowhere from a mistress of Picasso's who asked him if he could come round and paint her. She wanted to make Picasso jealous. Lucian very politely said maybe he could paint her portrait later, but not now because he happened to be in the midst of doing his wife's portrait."
That picture, Blackwood says, turned out to be Freud's "Girl in Bed." Years later, in 1977, it played a curious part in the death of the poet Robert Lowell, another of Lady Caroline's husbands. Their marriage was in tatters when, as the story goes, he left her in Ireland and returned to the United States. After Lowell's taxi arrived at his apartment on West 67th Street, the driver found him slumped over. A doorman summoned Elizabeth Hardwick, the writer and editor whom Lowell had left to marry Blackwood; she happened to live in the same building. Hardwick opened the taxi door -- only to be confronted with her ex-husband's corpse. He was holding "Girl in Bed."
With its macabre humor, the Lowell story is one Blackwood might have written if she hadn't lived through it. "I think it's partly Irish," Blackwood says over lunch at Coco Pazzo, an elegant restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan. "Irish people are very funny but have this tragic sense.
"As Cal wrote," she continues, referring to Lowell, "if there's light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train. He was a humorous poet, you know, though people don't ever say that about him. He also wrote that in the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet, which is very funny, don't you think?"
BLACKWOOD IS A DELICATE WOMAN OF 63, SLIGHTLY stooped yet graceful, with a husky, smoker's voice. She is dressed in a loose-fitting black pants suit, the sort of unbourgeois outfit that pegs her immediately as an upper-class bohemian. Her extraordinary eyes -- big opalescent pools, which Freud made into giant spheres in his hypnotic portraits -- are the principal signs of the beauty she was in her youth. Her looks are striking but weatherbeaten.
It's not just that Blackwood likes to drink. She has also endured a series of Job-like catastrophes over the years: the death of her second husband, the American composer and pianist Israel Citkowitz; Lowell's crippling manic depression and early death; the death from AIDS of her brother, Sheridan, to whom she was very close; the death of her eldest daughter, Natalya, after a drug overdose, and her own bout with cervical cancer, for which she had an operation that left her in constant pain.
Though on one level she thrives on tragedy -- is even defined by it -- Blackwood can't abide maudlin sentiments; bringing up these episodes with her elicits an awkward silence. At first during lunch she gives only clipped responses to questions or just nods in agreement. She orders one vodka after another, tonic on the side. She is more comfortable discussing her new book, "The Last of the Duchess." But still she's cautious.
She also greets with silence a question about her flamboyant socialite mother, Maureen, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. When Maureen was young she reportedly once gave Sir Oswald Mosley, the English fascist, a black eye after he made a pass at her in Antibes. In recent years, though vastly rich, she has complained that her children haven't helped support her and the several houses she lives in. The Picasso biographer John Richardson recalls that Maureen's son, Sheridan, used to bemoan having to help pay for her villa in Sardinia, which he nicknamed the Villa Costalota. Lately, Blackwood, her sister and sister-in-law have wrangled with Maureen over the disposition of $24 million in Guinness inheritance money. The dispute, ultimately settled in Maureen's favor, underscores the nearly nonexistent relationship between Caroline and her mother, a topic Caroline prefers not to discuss.
Gradually, though, as she relaxes, Blackwood emerges as a strangely dramatic woman: intense and vulnerable, with quirky affectations like abbreviating words (Champagne becoming "champ"), a dark, razor-sharp sense of humor and an offbeat sensibility.
Geordie Greig, the New York correspondent for The Sunday Times of London and a family friend, gives an apt description of her: "When she calls on the phone she'll say 'Hiiii, it's Carrr-oline,' and there's always that enigmatic, Eartha Kitt-like purr. But in conversation she's unpredictable. Caroline's physical demeanor is so unforceful that the force of her words, which can be lethally accurate, is made doubly strong. She has an artist's sensibility to sift through any social niceties and get straight to the point. Even with her house on Long Island nothing follows the rules. Lunch might be a huge feast of lobsters and Champagne, or her fridge may be completely out of food."
Over the years, Blackwood has moved easily among several worlds: from the insular, horsy Anglo-Irish upper classes to the hard-drinking smart set of postwar England, to the liberal intelligentsia of New York City in the 1960's and 70's. She has lived in the United States for much of the last 35 years. Nowadays, she's often with her children, who also live here. Her son, Sheridan Lowell, 23, works for a small publishing firm in Manhattan. Her youngest daughter, Ivana Lowell (she has taken her stepfather's name) is 28; she works for the publishing arm of the media company Miramax and has become a lively presence in New York society since moving from London a few years ago. Another daughter, Evgenia Citkowitz, 30, is a screenwriter in Los Angeles married to the English actor Julian Sands.
Blackwood spends many mornings in her kitchen writing longhand. A broken back she suffered when she was young has made it impossible for her to type. She has published nine books that have been richly admired in Britain, where she is best known. They include collections of short stories and essays of stringent, sly, entirely anticonformist social criticism. Her novels are stylish, remorseless, frightening and wickedly funny. They can sometimes remind you a little of Beckett, except that Blackwood's nihilistic sensibility is more gothic than his: it's Beckett crossed with Bram Stoker.
"The Last of the Duchess" is her mesmeric account of a vain attempt to visit the ailing Duchess of Windsor in 1980 and of Blackwood's encounters with the Duchess's ruthless and highly powerful octogenarian lawyer, Maitre Suzanne Blum, a woman obsessed with her client to the point of erotic fantasy. Blum was the Cerberus at the Duchess's door, blocking even old friends from contacting her, according to Blackwood. Was the sick Duchess tortured by being kept alive, Blackwood wondered, or might she even be dead? Was Blum only saying she was alive so that she could sell the royal jewels and claim the money as her legal fee?
HOW MUCH OF THE book is Irish blarney? After all, the story of Blum, like so many of the stories Blackwood tells, is so bizarre it sounds like fiction. In a sense, though, that's Blackwood's point. She writes as she speaks, with a dramatic flair that can seduce you even as you wonder how precise she is. (Freud, for instance, recalls the Picasso incident very differently.) "You can't really get the truth about anybody from an interview," Blackwood says. "It's all fiction in a way."
She portrays herself in her books as a wide-eyed innocent, astonished by the horrors around her. In person, though, she has a disconcerting habit of staring at you, coolly sizing you up while she picks demurely at her meal. You can see how she could drive Maitre Blum mad.
"If it's berserk behavior I like it as a subject," Blackwood says. "If you write about bland people there's no story, is there? I hated Blum and was really scared of her," Blackwood recalls, "but she thought I was a complete idiot because I acted the dumb journalist with her a bit. She wouldn't even have seen me if I didn't have a title. On the other hand she wouldn't have been so rude if I were a crowned head."
Her full name is Lady Caroline Hamilton Temple Blackwood: she's a descendant on her father's side of the great 18th-century dramatist and wit Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She is a Guinness on her mother's side. (She says she finds stout undrinkable.)
"Brewers or bankers, aristocrats or plutocrats, the Guinnesses are apt to be a law unto themselves," John Richardson says. "This Anglo-Irish dynasty is famously cultivated, brilliant, profligate, witty and beguiling. Caution and abstemiousness are not their forte. Caroline upholds her family's reputation for courage, eccentricity and subversive humor. She most certainly does not hold with the ultraconservative views of some of her cousins."
She grew up in the ancestral stone mansion called Clandeboye, in County Down in Northern Ireland. "My great-grandfather built a wing every time he had another child," Blackwood says. "You didn't build a room then, you built a wing. It was terribly rundown when I was a child, the typical joke Irish house with all the pails to catch dripping water all over the place."
Her great-grandfather, Lord Dufferin, was an eminent Victorian, rumored to have been Disraeli's illegitimate son. "I think he was," says Blackwood, mischievously. "Why would a Scottish landowner have a son who looked like Disraeli? He once got up in the House of Lords and denied that he was Disraeli's son, because it was terrible for his mother's honor, but that sort of implies that he was, doesn't it?"
Queen Victoria made him Viceroy of India, where he used to sit on his throne, fanned by peacock feathers, while processions of rajahs paid him homage. At Clandeboye he built a stone shrine to his mother, an immense architectural folly called Helen's Tower that inspired poems by Browning, Kipling and Tennyson. "Kipling loved my great-grandfather and wrote lots of very bad poems to him," Blackwood says. "He had a fatal effect on poets. I mean, the Tennyson poem is a jingle that goes on and on." She discovered not long ago that Helen's Tower inspired a World War I memorial in France to Irish soldiers. "I mean, Helen's Tower is really odd, isn't it? Victorians thought it was fine someone building a tower to his mother while she was alive, but can you imagine doing it now, in post-Freudian times?"
Blackwood's father, Basil, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was a close friend of Evelyn Waugh and part of the glittering circle he recalled in "Brideshead Revisited." When the Marquess was killed in 1943 by the Japanese in the jungle in Burma, he was 35. Blackwood was 12 at the time and has only dim memories of her father.
Like other women of her class she skipped college; instead she went to work for Claud Cockburn, an influential left-wing journalist who wrote for, among others, The Times Literary Supplement. "Claud was a reviewer for TLS and I read books for him, because in those days the reviews were unsigned," Blackwood says. "It was really corrupt but I was extremely diligent."
She recalls meeting Freud around then, at a party memorable for the fact that the painter Francis Bacon caused a row when he hooted down Princess Margaret, who had just started singing "Let's Do It." Blackwood becomes testy when asked if a reference to her in a recent book as Margaret's lady-in-waiting is true. "That's a lie and I'll sue you if you say it," she says, only half kidding and appalled that anyone could imagine her in such a role.
She changes the subject. "Lucian was fantastic, very brilliant, incredibly beautiful, though not in a movie-star way," she says. "I remember he was very mannered, he wore these long side whiskers, which nobody else had then. And he wore funny trousers, deliberately. He wanted to stand out in a crowd, and he did."
When Freud and Blackwood returned to London from Paris, they settled into the circle that included Bacon, Cyril Connolly and the other artists and writers who gathered nightly at the fabled Gargoyle and Colony Clubs. "As a concept the Gargoyle was brilliant," Blackwood states. "O.K., everyone there would be a bit drunk. But you could wander in any night and find the cleverest people in England. After the war it was completely normal for intellectuals to knock each other down if someone had written a bad review or taken someone's girl. Then they always sent flowers the next day."
GRADUALLY HER marriage to Freud crumbled. When she left him, he was devastated. Blackwood says only that "Lucian and I couldn't be married, not endlessly. We were both too restless."
She fled to Los Angeles, installed herself at the Chateau Marmont and got a tiny part in the television series "Have Gun Will Travel." But she hated the city. The best thing to come out of it was that Stephen Spender asked her to do an article for Encounter magazine about California beatniks. It turned out to be a sendup that launched her writing career. Beatnik culture, she wrote, "has all the trappings of the subversive, the meeting in the darkened cellar, the conspiratorial whisper behind the candle in the Chianti bottle, the nihilistic mutter, without the mildest element of subversion."
Not long after Blackwood moved from Los Angeles to New York she met Israel Citkowitz, a former student of Aaron Copland, some 20 years her senior. They married. Today Blackwood speaks warmly but vaguely about Citkowitz. She describes him as "gorgeous and brilliant, which wasn't a bad combination." But they separated after a few years and she became involved with Robert Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books. Through Silvers she met Lowell.
Citkowitz and she remained friendly until he died, and he sometimes lived in the London house she shared with Lowell in the 1970's, helping her to care for the children during Lowell's bouts of madness. Lowell would write a poem to Citkowitz, lines of which Blackwood used as an epitaph on Citkowitz's grave. Her three daughters were born while she was still married to him. She had a son, Sheridan, by Lowell in 1971.
In 1972 she and Lowell flew to Santo Domingo for a joint divorce-marriage. "Nobody could understand the service because it was all in Spanish," she remembers. "It was in a hut, with chickens coming in and out. You'd move to one hut and they'd say you're divorced. Then to another hut where they'd say you're married. All the time there was lots of loud typing. So romantic."
It pains Blackwood that her marriage with Lowell is often described solely in terms of his breakup with Hardwick and illness. She recalls periods at Milgate, their house in Kent, as idyllic. But she acknowledges that Lowell's episodes of manic depression became increasingly unmanageable.
"I wanted Israel to be in the house because I couldn't deal with it alone," she explains. "Not that Cal would have hurt the children, he wasn't murderous. But I had to watch him all day and all night because a manic never sleeps." One day she found him hacking holes in the wall with a carving knife. He told her he was looking for Etruscan treasures. "It was a horrible affliction to not know when your mind was suddenly going to go -- particularly when you had got this huge mind."
Then Lowell died; then Natalya. Through it all, Blackwood managed to turn out a remarkable string of books. One of them, "On the Perimeter," was a report about the women who had camped for years in the mud at Greenham Common in England to protest the American nuclear missile base there. "The Stepdaughter" was a short epistolary novel about an abusive woman abandoned by her husband and left with his hideous daughter. Another novel, "The Fate of Mary Rose," is a chilling tale about an increasingly deranged mother's fatal obsession with her daughter's safety.
Blackwood even wrote a lighthearted cookbook with her friend the English novelist Anna Haycraft (who wrote under the name of Alice Thomas Ellis) that featured celebrity recipes. Blackwood asked Francis Bacon for a recipe. "I doubt anybody had ever asked him for one before. But he was a fantastic cook, and he had this very smart recipe for mayonnaise. Then it turned out that he was such a perfectionist that he kept holding up the publication to make revisions. Eventually Anna called in a panic, saying she'd forgotten to put in Francis's very last revision before the book went to press. 'It had less to do with salt and more to do with vinegar,' she said. Francis brought 100 copies of the book anyway."
In 1980, Blackwood began work on "The Last of the Duchess." "It was pathetic Blum being so old and in love with the Duchess," Blackwood muses. "What a stupid thing to do. But of course the Duchess was ridiculous, too. A more noble figure than she wouldn't have let this lawyer take over her life." The paradox, as Blackwood implies in the book, is that the socialite Duchess spent her last days in solitary confinement, and -- considering the Windsors' connection to Hitler -- that her jailer was a Jew.
Writing kept Blackwood going through one calamity after another -- until the cancer a few years ago. "I really don't like talking about it," she says, after a long pause. "I just kept on trying to do what I do, no matter what life did to me. But after the cancer I became so used to the idea that I would be dead that I had reconciled myself to the idea of not writing anymore. Once you've accepted you're dead, why write?
"It took me a long time to get back to writing. For a while I didn't have any ideas, none." She smiles. "But now I try and write all morning. It may be so awful that I put my pencil through the whole thing and start over the next day. But at least I've got plenty of ideas."
ding the main story
With its macabre humor, the Lowell story is one Blackwood might have written if she hadn't lived through it. "I think it's partly Irish," Blackwood says over lunch at Coco Pazzo, an elegant restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan. "Irish people are very funny but have this tragic sense.
"As Cal wrote," she continues, referring to Lowell, "if there's light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train. He was a humorous poet, you know, though people don't ever say that about him. He also wrote that in the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet, which is very funny, don't you think?"
BLACKWOOD IS A DELICATE WOMAN OF 63, SLIGHTLY stooped yet graceful, with a husky, smoker's voice. She is dressed in a loose-fitting black pants suit, the sort of unbourgeois outfit that pegs her immediately as an upper-class bohemian. Her extraordinary eyes -- big opalescent pools, which Freud made into giant spheres in his hypnotic portraits -- are the principal signs of the beauty she was in her youth. Her looks are striking but weatherbeaten.
It's not just that Blackwood likes to drink. She has also endured a series of Job-like catastrophes over the years: the death of her second husband, the American composer and pianist Israel Citkowitz; Lowell's crippling manic depression and early death; the death from AIDS of her brother, Sheridan, to whom she was very close; the death of her eldest daughter, Natalya, after a drug overdose, and her own bout with cervical cancer, for which she had an operation that left her in constant pain.
Though on one level she thrives on tragedy -- is even defined by it -- Blackwood can't abide maudlin sentiments; bringing up these episodes with her elicits an awkward silence. At first during lunch she gives only clipped responses to questions or just nods in agreement. She orders one vodka after another, tonic on the side. She is more comfortable discussing her new book, "The Last of the Duchess." But still she's cautious.
She also greets with silence a question about her flamboyant socialite mother, Maureen, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. When Maureen was young she reportedly once gave Sir Oswald Mosley, the English fascist, a black eye after he made a pass at her in Antibes. In recent years, though vastly rich, she has complained that her children haven't helped support her and the several houses she lives in. The Picasso biographer John Richardson recalls that Maureen's son, Sheridan, used to bemoan having to help pay for her villa in Sardinia, which he nicknamed the Villa Costalota. Lately, Blackwood, her sister and sister-in-law have wrangled with Maureen over the disposition of $24 million in Guinness inheritance money. The dispute, ultimately settled in Maureen's favor, underscores the nearly nonexistent relationship between Caroline and her mother, a topic Caroline prefers not to discuss.
Gradually, though, as she relaxes, Blackwood emerges as a strangely dramatic woman: intense and vulnerable, with quirky affectations like abbreviating words (Champagne becoming "champ"), a dark, razor-sharp sense of humor and an offbeat sensibility.
Geordie Greig, the New York correspondent for The Sunday Times of London and a family friend, gives an apt description of her: "When she calls on the phone she'll say 'Hiiii, it's Carrr-oline,' and there's always that enigmatic, Eartha Kitt-like purr. But in conversation she's unpredictable. Caroline's physical demeanor is so unforceful that the force of her words, which can be lethally accurate, is made doubly strong. She has an artist's sensibility to sift through any social niceties and get straight to the point. Even with her house on Long Island nothing follows the rules. Lunch might be a huge feast of lobsters and Champagne, or her fridge may be completely out of food."
Over the years, Blackwood has moved easily among several worlds: from the insular, horsy Anglo-Irish upper classes to the hard-drinking smart set of postwar England, to the liberal intelligentsia of New York City in the 1960's and 70's. She has lived in the United States for much of the last 35 years. Nowadays, she's often with her children, who also live here. Her son, Sheridan Lowell, 23, works for a small publishing firm in Manhattan. Her youngest daughter, Ivana Lowell (she has taken her stepfather's name) is 28; she works for the publishing arm of the media company Miramax and has become a lively presence in New York society since moving from London a few years ago. Another daughter, Evgenia Citkowitz, 30, is a screenwriter in Los Angeles married to the English actor Julian Sands.
Blackwood spends many mornings in her kitchen writing longhand. A broken back she suffered when she was young has made it impossible for her to type. She has published nine books that have been richly admired in Britain, where she is best known. They include collections of short stories and essays of stringent, sly, entirely anticonformist social criticism. Her novels are stylish, remorseless, frightening and wickedly funny. They can sometimes remind you a little of Beckett, except that Blackwood's nihilistic sensibility is more gothic than his: it's Beckett crossed with Bram Stoker.
"The Last of the Duchess" is her mesmeric account of a vain attempt to visit the ailing Duchess of Windsor in 1980 and of Blackwood's encounters with the Duchess's ruthless and highly powerful octogenarian lawyer, Maitre Suzanne Blum, a woman obsessed with her client to the point of erotic fantasy. Blum was the Cerberus at the Duchess's door, blocking even old friends from contacting her, according to Blackwood. Was the sick Duchess tortured by being kept alive, Blackwood wondered, or might she even be dead? Was Blum only saying she was alive so that she could sell the royal jewels and claim the money as her legal fee?
HOW MUCH OF THE book is Irish blarney? After all, the story of Blum, like so many of the stories Blackwood tells, is so bizarre it sounds like fiction. In a sense, though, that's Blackwood's point. She writes as she speaks, with a dramatic flair that can seduce you even as you wonder how precise she is. (Freud, for instance, recalls the Picasso incident very differently.) "You can't really get the truth about anybody from an interview," Blackwood says. "It's all fiction in a way."
She portrays herself in her books as a wide-eyed innocent, astonished by the horrors around her. In person, though, she has a disconcerting habit of staring at you, coolly sizing you up while she picks demurely at her meal. You can see how she could drive Maitre Blum mad.
"If it's berserk behavior I like it as a subject," Blackwood says. "If you write about bland people there's no story, is there? I hated Blum and was really scared of her," Blackwood recalls, "but she thought I was a complete idiot because I acted the dumb journalist with her a bit. She wouldn't even have seen me if I didn't have a title. On the other hand she wouldn't have been so rude if I were a crowned head."
Her full name is Lady Caroline Hamilton Temple Blackwood: she's a descendant on her father's side of the great 18th-century dramatist and wit Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She is a Guinness on her mother's side. (She says she finds stout undrinkable.)
"Brewers or bankers, aristocrats or plutocrats, the Guinnesses are apt to be a law unto themselves," John Richardson says. "This Anglo-Irish dynasty is famously cultivated, brilliant, profligate, witty and beguiling. Caution and abstemiousness are not their forte. Caroline upholds her family's reputation for courage, eccentricity and subversive humor. She most certainly does not hold with the ultraconservative views of some of her cousins."
She grew up in the ancestral stone mansion called Clandeboye, in County Down in Northern Ireland. "My great-grandfather built a wing every time he had another child," Blackwood says. "You didn't build a room then, you built a wing. It was terribly rundown when I was a child, the typical joke Irish house with all the pails to catch dripping water all over the place."
Her great-grandfather, Lord Dufferin, was an eminent Victorian, rumored to have been Disraeli's illegitimate son. "I think he was," says Blackwood, mischievously. "Why would a Scottish landowner have a son who looked like Disraeli? He once got up in the House of Lords and denied that he was Disraeli's son, because it was terrible for his mother's honor, but that sort of implies that he was, doesn't it?"
Queen Victoria made him Viceroy of India, where he used to sit on his throne, fanned by peacock feathers, while processions of rajahs paid him homage. At Clandeboye he built a stone shrine to his mother, an immense architectural folly called Helen's Tower that inspired poems by Browning, Kipling and Tennyson. "Kipling loved my great-grandfather and wrote lots of very bad poems to him," Blackwood says. "He had a fatal effect on poets. I mean, the Tennyson poem is a jingle that goes on and on." She discovered not long ago that Helen's Tower inspired a World War I memorial in France to Irish soldiers. "I mean, Helen's Tower is really odd, isn't it? Victorians thought it was fine someone building a tower to his mother while she was alive, but can you imagine doing it now, in post-Freudian times?"
Blackwood's father, Basil, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was a close friend of Evelyn Waugh and part of the glittering circle he recalled in "Brideshead Revisited." When the Marquess was killed in 1943 by the Japanese in the jungle in Burma, he was 35. Blackwood was 12 at the time and has only dim memories of her father.
Like other women of her class she skipped college; instead she went to work for Claud Cockburn, an influential left-wing journalist who wrote for, among others, The Times Literary Supplement. "Claud was a reviewer for TLS and I read books for him, because in those days the reviews were unsigned," Blackwood says. "It was really corrupt but I was extremely diligent."
She recalls meeting Freud around then, at a party memorable for the fact that the painter Francis Bacon caused a row when he hooted down Princess Margaret, who had just started singing "Let's Do It." Blackwood becomes testy when asked if a reference to her in a recent book as Margaret's lady-in-waiting is true. "That's a lie and I'll sue you if you say it," she says, only half kidding and appalled that anyone could imagine her in such a role.
She changes the subject. "Lucian was fantastic, very brilliant, incredibly beautiful, though not in a movie-star way," she says. "I remember he was very mannered, he wore these long side whiskers, which nobody else had then. And he wore funny trousers, deliberately. He wanted to stand out in a crowd, and he did."
When Freud and Blackwood returned to London from Paris, they settled into the circle that included Bacon, Cyril Connolly and the other artists and writers who gathered nightly at the fabled Gargoyle and Colony Clubs. "As a concept the Gargoyle was brilliant," Blackwood states. "O.K., everyone there would be a bit drunk. But you could wander in any night and find the cleverest people in England. After the war it was completely normal for intellectuals to knock each other down if someone had written a bad review or taken someone's girl. Then they always sent flowers the next day."
GRADUALLY HER marriage to Freud crumbled. When she left him, he was devastated. Blackwood says only that "Lucian and I couldn't be married, not endlessly. We were both too restless."
She fled to Los Angeles, installed herself at the Chateau Marmont and got a tiny part in the television series "Have Gun Will Travel." But she hated the city. The best thing to come out of it was that Stephen Spender asked her to do an article for Encounter magazine about California beatniks. It turned out to be a sendup that launched her writing career. Beatnik culture, she wrote, "has all the trappings of the subversive, the meeting in the darkened cellar, the conspiratorial whisper behind the candle in the Chianti bottle, the nihilistic mutter, without the mildest element of subversion."
Not long after Blackwood moved from Los Angeles to New York she met Israel Citkowitz, a former student of Aaron Copland, some 20 years her senior. They married. Today Blackwood speaks warmly but vaguely about Citkowitz. She describes him as "gorgeous and brilliant, which wasn't a bad combination." But they separated after a few years and she became involved with Robert Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books. Through Silvers she met Lowell.
Citkowitz and she remained friendly until he died, and he sometimes lived in the London house she shared with Lowell in the 1970's, helping her to care for the children during Lowell's bouts of madness. Lowell would write a poem to Citkowitz, lines of which Blackwood used as an epitaph on Citkowitz's grave. Her three daughters were born while she was still married to him. She had a son, Sheridan, by Lowell in 1971.
In 1972 she and Lowell flew to Santo Domingo for a joint divorce-marriage. "Nobody could understand the service because it was all in Spanish," she remembers. "It was in a hut, with chickens coming in and out. You'd move to one hut and they'd say you're divorced. Then to another hut where they'd say you're married. All the time there was lots of loud typing. So romantic."
It pains Blackwood that her marriage with Lowell is often described solely in terms of his breakup with Hardwick and illness. She recalls periods at Milgate, their house in Kent, as idyllic. But she acknowledges that Lowell's episodes of manic depression became increasingly unmanageable.
"I wanted Israel to be in the house because I couldn't deal with it alone," she explains. "Not that Cal would have hurt the children, he wasn't murderous. But I had to watch him all day and all night because a manic never sleeps." One day she found him hacking holes in the wall with a carving knife. He told her he was looking for Etruscan treasures. "It was a horrible affliction to not know when your mind was suddenly going to go -- particularly when you had got this huge mind."
Then Lowell died; then Natalya. Through it all, Blackwood managed to turn out a remarkable string of books. One of them, "On the Perimeter," was a report about the women who had camped for years in the mud at Greenham Common in England to protest the American nuclear missile base there. "The Stepdaughter" was a short epistolary novel about an abusive woman abandoned by her husband and left with his hideous daughter. Another novel, "The Fate of Mary Rose," is a chilling tale about an increasingly deranged mother's fatal obsession with her daughter's safety.
Blackwood even wrote a lighthearted cookbook with her friend the English novelist Anna Haycraft (who wrote under the name of Alice Thomas Ellis) that featured celebrity recipes. Blackwood asked Francis Bacon for a recipe. "I doubt anybody had ever asked him for one before. But he was a fantastic cook, and he had this very smart recipe for mayonnaise. Then it turned out that he was such a perfectionist that he kept holding up the publication to make revisions. Eventually Anna called in a panic, saying she'd forgotten to put in Francis's very last revision before the book went to press. 'It had less to do with salt and more to do with vinegar,' she said. Francis brought 100 copies of the book anyway."
In 1980, Blackwood began work on "The Last of the Duchess." "It was pathetic Blum being so old and in love with the Duchess," Blackwood muses. "What a stupid thing to do. But of course the Duchess was ridiculous, too. A more noble figure than she wouldn't have let this lawyer take over her life." The paradox, as Blackwood implies in the book, is that the socialite Duchess spent her last days in solitary confinement, and -- considering the Windsors' connection to Hitler -- that her jailer was a Jew.
Writing kept Blackwood going through one calamity after another -- until the cancer a few years ago. "I really don't like talking about it," she says, after a long pause. "I just kept on trying to do what I do, no matter what life did to me. But after the cancer I became so used to the idea that I would be dead that I had reconciled myself to the idea of not writing anymore. Once you've accepted you're dead, why write?
"It took me a long time to get back to writing. For a while I didn't have any ideas, none." She smiles. "But now I try and write all morning. It may be so awful that I put my pencil through the whole thing and start over the next day. But at least I've got plenty of ideas."
BIO WIKIPEDIA
Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (16 July 1931 – 14 February 1996) was a writer, and the eldest child of The 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and the brewery heiress Maureen Guinness.
A well-known figure in the literary world through her journalism and her novels, Lady Caroline Blackwood was equally well known for her high-profile marriages, first to the artist Lucian Freud, then to the composer Israel Citkowitz and finally to the poet Robert Lowell, who described her as "a mermaid who dines upon the bones of her winded lovers". Her novels are known for their wit and intelligence, and one in particular is scathingly autobiographical in describing her unhappy childhood.
She was born into an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family from Ulster at 4 Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge, her parents' London home. She was, she admitted, "scantily educated" at, among other schools, Rockport School (County Down) and Downham (Essex). After a finishing school in Oxford she was presented as a debutante in 1949 at a ball held at Londonderry House.
Career
Blackwood's first job was with Hulton Press as a secretary, but she was soon given small reporting jobs by Claud Cockburn. Ann Fleming, the wife of "James Bond" author Ian Fleming, introduced Lady Caroline to Lucian Freud, and the two eloped to Paris in 1952. In Paris she met Picasso (and reportedly refused to wash for three days after he drew on her hands and nails). She married Freud on 9 December 1953 and became a striking figure in London's bohemian circles; the Gargoyle Club and Colony Room replaced Belgraviadrawing rooms as her haunts. She sat for several of Freud's finest portraits, including Girl in Bed, which testifies to her alluring beauty. She was impressed by the ruthless vision of Freud and Francis Bacon and her later fiction was a literary version of their view of humanity.
In the early 1960s, Blackwood began contributing to Encounter, London Magazine, and other periodicals on subjects such as beatniks, Ulster sectarianism, feminist theatre and New York free schools. Although these articles were elegant, minutely observed and sometimes wickedly funny, they had, according to Christopher Isherwood, a persistent flaw: "she is only capable of thinking negatively. Confronted by a phenomenon, she asks herself: what is wrong with it?"[1] During the mid-1960s, she had an affair with Robert Silvers, the founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books.
Her third husband, Robert Lowell, was a crucial influence on her talents as a novelist. He encouraged her to write her first book, For All That I Found There (1973), the title of which is a line from the Percy French song "The Mountains of Mourne", and which includes a mordant memoir of her daughter's treatment in a burns unit. Blackwood's first novel The Stepdaughter (1976) appeared three years later to much acclaim, and is a concise and gripping monologue by a rich, self-pitying woman deserted by her husband in a plush New York apartment and tormented by her fat stepdaughter. It won the David Higham Prize for best first novel. Great Granny Webster followed in 1977 and was partly derived on her own miserable childhood, and depicted an austere and loveless old woman's destructive impact on her daughter and granddaughter. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize.
In 1980 came The Last of the Duchess, a study of the relations between the Duchess of Windsor and her cunning lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum; it could not be published until after Blum's death in 1995. Her third novel The Fate of Mary Rose (1981) describes the effect on a Kent village of the rape and torture of a ten-year-old girl named Maureen and is narrated by a selfish historian whose obsessions destroy his domestic life. After this came a collection of five short stories, Good Night Sweet Ladies (1983), followed by her final novel, Corrigan (1984), which was the least successful and depicts the effects on a depressed widow of a charming, energetic but sinister cripple who erupts into her life.
Blackwood's later books were based on interviews and vignettes, including On The Perimeter (1984), which focused her attentions on the women's peace encampment at the Greenham Common air base in Berkshire, and In The Pink (1987), which was a reflective, ghoulish book looking at the hunting and the hunt saboteur fraternities and exposed the many obsessive personalities of both fox-hunters and animal rights activists.
Personal life
Blackwood's marriage to Lucian Freud disintegrated soon after they married in 1953; it was dissolved in 1958, in Mexico.[citation needed] In 1957, Blackwood moved to New York City and studied acting at the Stella Adler school. She also went to Hollywood and appeared in several films.
On 15 August 1959, she married the pianist Israel Citkowitz (1909–1974), 22 years her senior and born in the same year as her late father; they had three daughters. By 1966, when their youngest, Ivana, was born, their marriage was over, although Citkowitz continued to live nearby and served as a nanny-duenna[citation needed] until his death. During the mid-1960s, Blackwood had an affair with Robert Silvers, a founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books, who stayed close to the family thereafter.
According to Ivana, both she and Silvers suspected that he was her biological father. However, a deathbed admission by Blackwood revealed that Ivana's biological father was another boyfriend: the screenwriter Ivan Moffat, a grandson of actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree.
In 1970, Blackwood returned to London and, in April, began a relationship with the poet Robert Lowell, then a visiting professor at All Souls College, Oxford. Their son, Sheridan, was born on 28 September 1971; after being divorced from their respective spouses, Blackwood and Lowell were married, on 21 October 1972. They lived in London and at Milgate House in Kent. The sequence of poems in Lowell's The Dolphin (1973) provides a disrupted narrative of his involvement with Blackwood and the birth of their son (Lowell's friend Elizabeth Bishop strongly advised Lowell not to publish the book, advice he ignored).
Lowell suffered from bipolar disorder, and his manic episodes prompted in Blackwood distress, confusion, feelings of uselessness, and fear about the effects on their children. Her anxieties, alcohol-related illnesses, and late-night tirades exacerbated his condition.[citation needed] In 1977, Lowell died, reportedly clutching one of Freud's portraits of Blackwood, in the back seat of a New York cab, on his way back to his second wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. This loss was followed a year later by the death of her daughter Natalya, from a drug overdose at the age of 18.
In 1977, to avoid taxation, Blackwood left England and went to live in County Kildare, Ireland, in an apartment at the great Georgian mansion of Castletown House, which was owned by her cousin Desmond Guinness. Ten years later, in 1987, she returned to the United States, settling in a large, comfortable house in Sag Harbor, Long Island, where, although her abilities were reduced by alcoholism, she continued to write; her work of that era includes two vivid memoirs, of Princess Margaret and of Francis Bacon, published in The New York Review of Books in 1992.
According to those close to her, she never lost her macabre sense of humour, even during her final illness. British writer and essayist Anna Haycraft, a staunch Roman Catholic, brought holy water from Lourdes, which accidentally spilled on Blackwood's deathbed sheets; "I might have caught my death", she muttered.
Death
On 14 February 1996, Blackwood died from cancer, at the Mayfair Hotel on Park Avenue in New York City, aged 64. She was survived by her two younger daughters: Evgenia Citkowitz Sands (b. 1963), wife of actor Julian Sands, and Ivana (b. 1966); by her son, Sheridan Lowell; by her sister, Lady Perdita Blackwood; and by her mother, the former Maureen Guinness, who died two years later, aged 91. She was predeceased by her father, Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (1909–1945); by her eldest daughter, Natalya (1960–1978); and by her brother, Sheridan Dufferin, 5th Marquess (1938–1988).
New York Times -
WHEN LADY Caroline Blackwood, the Irish writer and Guinness heiress, was living in Paris in the early 1950's, she and her first husband, the painter Lucian Freud, were invited to visit Picasso.
"Picasso got one of his followers to ask Lucian if he would like to see Picasso's paintings," Blackwood says. "Of course, Lucian said yes. Meanwhile Picasso asked me if I wanted to see his doves: he had this spiral iron staircase leading to the roof, and off we go, winding round and round to the top, until we reached these doves in cages and all around us was the best view of Paris, the best. Whereupon immediately, standing on this tiny, tiny space, way above the city, Picasso does a complete plunge at me. All I felt was fear. I kept saying, 'Go down the stairs, go down.' He said, 'No, no, we are together above the roofs of Paris.' It was so absurd, and to me Picasso was just as old as the hills, an old letch, genius or no.
"I wonder," Blackwood pauses to ask, "what we were supposed to have done if I accepted? There was no space to make love, with all those doves. And think how many other people he had up there. Did they go through with it? And technically, how did they go through with it? And with the husband downstairs?"
She then adds a coda: "Lucian got a call out of nowhere from a mistress of Picasso's who asked him if he could come round and paint her. She wanted to make Picasso jealous. Lucian very politely said maybe he could paint her portrait later, but not now because he happened to be in the midst of doing his wife's portrait."
That picture, Blackwood says, turned out to be Freud's "Girl in Bed." Years later, in 1977, it played a curious part in the death of the poet Robert Lowell, another of Lady Caroline's husbands. Their marriage was in tatters when, as the story goes, he left her in Ireland and returned to the United States. After Lowell's taxi arrived at his apartment on West 67th Street, the driver found him slumped over. A doorman summoned Elizabeth Hardwick, the writer and editor whom Lowell had left to marry Blackwood; she happened to live in the same building. Hardwick opened the taxi door -- only to be confronted with her ex-husband's corpse. He was holding "Girl in Bed."
With its macabre humor, the Lowell story is one Blackwood might have written if she hadn't lived through it. "I think it's partly Irish," Blackwood says over lunch at Coco Pazzo, an elegant restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan. "Irish people are very funny but have this tragic sense.
"As Cal wrote," she continues, referring to Lowell, "if there's light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train. He was a humorous poet, you know, though people don't ever say that about him. He also wrote that in the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet, which is very funny, don't you think?"
BLACKWOOD IS A DELICATE WOMAN OF 63, SLIGHTLY stooped yet graceful, with a husky, smoker's voice. She is dressed in a loose-fitting black pants suit, the sort of unbourgeois outfit that pegs her immediately as an upper-class bohemian. Her extraordinary eyes -- big opalescent pools, which Freud made into giant spheres in his hypnotic portraits -- are the principal signs of the beauty she was in her youth. Her looks are striking but weatherbeaten.
It's not just that Blackwood likes to drink. She has also endured a series of Job-like catastrophes over the years: the death of her second husband, the American composer and pianist Israel Citkowitz; Lowell's crippling manic depression and early death; the death from AIDS of her brother, Sheridan, to whom she was very close; the death of her eldest daughter, Natalya, after a drug overdose, and her own bout with cervical cancer, for which she had an operation that left her in constant pain.
Though on one level she thrives on tragedy -- is even defined by it -- Blackwood can't abide maudlin sentiments; bringing up these episodes with her elicits an awkward silence. At first during lunch she gives only clipped responses to questions or just nods in agreement. She orders one vodka after another, tonic on the side. She is more comfortable discussing her new book, "The Last of the Duchess." But still she's cautious.
She also greets with silence a question about her flamboyant socialite mother, Maureen, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. When Maureen was young she reportedly once gave Sir Oswald Mosley, the English fascist, a black eye after he made a pass at her in Antibes. In recent years, though vastly rich, she has complained that her children haven't helped support her and the several houses she lives in. The Picasso biographer John Richardson recalls that Maureen's son, Sheridan, used to bemoan having to help pay for her villa in Sardinia, which he nicknamed the Villa Costalota. Lately, Blackwood, her sister and sister-in-law have wrangled with Maureen over the disposition of $24 million in Guinness inheritance money. The dispute, ultimately settled in Maureen's favor, underscores the nearly nonexistent relationship between Caroline and her mother, a topic Caroline prefers not to discuss.
Gradually, though, as she relaxes, Blackwood emerges as a strangely dramatic woman: intense and vulnerable, with quirky affectations like abbreviating words (Champagne becoming "champ"), a dark, razor-sharp sense of humor and an offbeat sensibility.
Geordie Greig, the New York correspondent for The Sunday Times of London and a family friend, gives an apt description of her: "When she calls on the phone she'll say 'Hiiii, it's Carrr-oline,' and there's always that enigmatic, Eartha Kitt-like purr. But in conversation she's unpredictable. Caroline's physical demeanor is so unforceful that the force of her words, which can be lethally accurate, is made doubly strong. She has an artist's sensibility to sift through any social niceties and get straight to the point. Even with her house on Long Island nothing follows the rules. Lunch might be a huge feast of lobsters and Champagne, or her fridge may be completely out of food."
Over the years, Blackwood has moved easily among several worlds: from the insular, horsy Anglo-Irish upper classes to the hard-drinking smart set of postwar England, to the liberal intelligentsia of New York City in the 1960's and 70's. She has lived in the United States for much of the last 35 years. Nowadays, she's often with her children, who also live here. Her son, Sheridan Lowell, 23, works for a small publishing firm in Manhattan. Her youngest daughter, Ivana Lowell (she has taken her stepfather's name) is 28; she works for the publishing arm of the media company Miramax and has become a lively presence in New York society since moving from London a few years ago. Another daughter, Evgenia Citkowitz, 30, is a screenwriter in Los Angeles married to the English actor Julian Sands.
Blackwood spends many mornings in her kitchen writing longhand. A broken back she suffered when she was young has made it impossible for her to type. She has published nine books that have been richly admired in Britain, where she is best known. They include collections of short stories and essays of stringent, sly, entirely anticonformist social criticism. Her novels are stylish, remorseless, frightening and wickedly funny. They can sometimes remind you a little of Beckett, except that Blackwood's nihilistic sensibility is more gothic than his: it's Beckett crossed with Bram Stoker.
"The Last of the Duchess" is her mesmeric account of a vain attempt to visit the ailing Duchess of Windsor in 1980 and of Blackwood's encounters with the Duchess's ruthless and highly powerful octogenarian lawyer, Maitre Suzanne Blum, a woman obsessed with her client to the point of erotic fantasy. Blum was the Cerberus at the Duchess's door, blocking even old friends from contacting her, according to Blackwood. Was the sick Duchess tortured by being kept alive, Blackwood wondered, or might she even be dead? Was Blum only saying she was alive so that she could sell the royal jewels and claim the money as her legal fee?
HOW MUCH OF THE book is Irish blarney? After all, the story of Blum, like so many of the stories Blackwood tells, is so bizarre it sounds like fiction. In a sense, though, that's Blackwood's point. She writes as she speaks, with a dramatic flair that can seduce you even as you wonder how precise she is. (Freud, for instance, recalls the Picasso incident very differently.) "You can't really get the truth about anybody from an interview," Blackwood says. "It's all fiction in a way."
She portrays herself in her books as a wide-eyed innocent, astonished by the horrors around her. In person, though, she has a disconcerting habit of staring at you, coolly sizing you up while she picks demurely at her meal. You can see how she could drive Maitre Blum mad.
"If it's berserk behavior I like it as a subject," Blackwood says. "If you write about bland people there's no story, is there? I hated Blum and was really scared of her," Blackwood recalls, "but she thought I was a complete idiot because I acted the dumb journalist with her a bit. She wouldn't even have seen me if I didn't have a title. On the other hand she wouldn't have been so rude if I were a crowned head."
Her full name is Lady Caroline Hamilton Temple Blackwood: she's a descendant on her father's side of the great 18th-century dramatist and wit Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She is a Guinness on her mother's side. (She says she finds stout undrinkable.)
"Brewers or bankers, aristocrats or plutocrats, the Guinnesses are apt to be a law unto themselves," John Richardson says. "This Anglo-Irish dynasty is famously cultivated, brilliant, profligate, witty and beguiling. Caution and abstemiousness are not their forte. Caroline upholds her family's reputation for courage, eccentricity and subversive humor. She most certainly does not hold with the ultraconservative views of some of her cousins."
She grew up in the ancestral stone mansion called Clandeboye, in County Down in Northern Ireland. "My great-grandfather built a wing every time he had another child," Blackwood says. "You didn't build a room then, you built a wing. It was terribly rundown when I was a child, the typical joke Irish house with all the pails to catch dripping water all over the place."
Her great-grandfather, Lord Dufferin, was an eminent Victorian, rumored to have been Disraeli's illegitimate son. "I think he was," says Blackwood, mischievously. "Why would a Scottish landowner have a son who looked like Disraeli? He once got up in the House of Lords and denied that he was Disraeli's son, because it was terrible for his mother's honor, but that sort of implies that he was, doesn't it?"
Queen Victoria made him Viceroy of India, where he used to sit on his throne, fanned by peacock feathers, while processions of rajahs paid him homage. At Clandeboye he built a stone shrine to his mother, an immense architectural folly called Helen's Tower that inspired poems by Browning, Kipling and Tennyson. "Kipling loved my great-grandfather and wrote lots of very bad poems to him," Blackwood says. "He had a fatal effect on poets. I mean, the Tennyson poem is a jingle that goes on and on." She discovered not long ago that Helen's Tower inspired a World War I memorial in France to Irish soldiers. "I mean, Helen's Tower is really odd, isn't it? Victorians thought it was fine someone building a tower to his mother while she was alive, but can you imagine doing it now, in post-Freudian times?"
Blackwood's father, Basil, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was a close friend of Evelyn Waugh and part of the glittering circle he recalled in "Brideshead Revisited." When the Marquess was killed in 1943 by the Japanese in the jungle in Burma, he was 35. Blackwood was 12 at the time and has only dim memories of her father.
Like other women of her class she skipped college; instead she went to work for Claud Cockburn, an influential left-wing journalist who wrote for, among others, The Times Literary Supplement. "Claud was a reviewer for TLS and I read books for him, because in those days the reviews were unsigned," Blackwood says. "It was really corrupt but I was extremely diligent."
She recalls meeting Freud around then, at a party memorable for the fact that the painter Francis Bacon caused a row when he hooted down Princess Margaret, who had just started singing "Let's Do It." Blackwood becomes testy when asked if a reference to her in a recent book as Margaret's lady-in-waiting is true. "That's a lie and I'll sue you if you say it," she says, only half kidding and appalled that anyone could imagine her in such a role.
She changes the subject. "Lucian was fantastic, very brilliant, incredibly beautiful, though not in a movie-star way," she says. "I remember he was very mannered, he wore these long side whiskers, which nobody else had then. And he wore funny trousers, deliberately. He wanted to stand out in a crowd, and he did."
When Freud and Blackwood returned to London from Paris, they settled into the circle that included Bacon, Cyril Connolly and the other artists and writers who gathered nightly at the fabled Gargoyle and Colony Clubs. "As a concept the Gargoyle was brilliant," Blackwood states. "O.K., everyone there would be a bit drunk. But you could wander in any night and find the cleverest people in England. After the war it was completely normal for intellectuals to knock each other down if someone had written a bad review or taken someone's girl. Then they always sent flowers the next day."
GRADUALLY HER marriage to Freud crumbled. When she left him, he was devastated. Blackwood says only that "Lucian and I couldn't be married, not endlessly. We were both too restless."
She fled to Los Angeles, installed herself at the Chateau Marmont and got a tiny part in the television series "Have Gun Will Travel." But she hated the city. The best thing to come out of it was that Stephen Spender asked her to do an article for Encounter magazine about California beatniks. It turned out to be a sendup that launched her writing career. Beatnik culture, she wrote, "has all the trappings of the subversive, the meeting in the darkened cellar, the conspiratorial whisper behind the candle in the Chianti bottle, the nihilistic mutter, without the mildest element of subversion."
Not long after Blackwood moved from Los Angeles to New York she met Israel Citkowitz, a former student of Aaron Copland, some 20 years her senior. They married. Today Blackwood speaks warmly but vaguely about Citkowitz. She describes him as "gorgeous and brilliant, which wasn't a bad combination." But they separated after a few years and she became involved with Robert Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books. Through Silvers she met Lowell.
Citkowitz and she remained friendly until he died, and he sometimes lived in the London house she shared with Lowell in the 1970's, helping her to care for the children during Lowell's bouts of madness. Lowell would write a poem to Citkowitz, lines of which Blackwood used as an epitaph on Citkowitz's grave. Her three daughters were born while she was still married to him. She had a son, Sheridan, by Lowell in 1971.
In 1972 she and Lowell flew to Santo Domingo for a joint divorce-marriage. "Nobody could understand the service because it was all in Spanish," she remembers. "It was in a hut, with chickens coming in and out. You'd move to one hut and they'd say you're divorced. Then to another hut where they'd say you're married. All the time there was lots of loud typing. So romantic."
It pains Blackwood that her marriage with Lowell is often described solely in terms of his breakup with Hardwick and illness. She recalls periods at Milgate, their house in Kent, as idyllic. But she acknowledges that Lowell's episodes of manic depression became increasingly unmanageable.
"I wanted Israel to be in the house because I couldn't deal with it alone," she explains. "Not that Cal would have hurt the children, he wasn't murderous. But I had to watch him all day and all night because a manic never sleeps." One day she found him hacking holes in the wall with a carving knife. He told her he was looking for Etruscan treasures. "It was a horrible affliction to not know when your mind was suddenly going to go -- particularly when you had got this huge mind."
Then Lowell died; then Natalya. Through it all, Blackwood managed to turn out a remarkable string of books. One of them, "On the Perimeter," was a report about the women who had camped for years in the mud at Greenham Common in England to protest the American nuclear missile base there. "The Stepdaughter" was a short epistolary novel about an abusive woman abandoned by her husband and left with his hideous daughter. Another novel, "The Fate of Mary Rose," is a chilling tale about an increasingly deranged mother's fatal obsession with her daughter's safety.
Blackwood even wrote a lighthearted cookbook with her friend the English novelist Anna Haycraft (who wrote under the name of Alice Thomas Ellis) that featured celebrity recipes. Blackwood asked Francis Bacon for a recipe. "I doubt anybody had ever asked him for one before. But he was a fantastic cook, and he had this very smart recipe for mayonnaise. Then it turned out that he was such a perfectionist that he kept holding up the publication to make revisions. Eventually Anna called in a panic, saying she'd forgotten to put in Francis's very last revision before the book went to press. 'It had less to do with salt and more to do with vinegar,' she said. Francis brought 100 copies of the book anyway."
In 1980, Blackwood began work on "The Last of the Duchess." "It was pathetic Blum being so old and in love with the Duchess," Blackwood muses. "What a stupid thing to do. But of course the Duchess was ridiculous, too. A more noble figure than she wouldn't have let this lawyer take over her life." The paradox, as Blackwood implies in the book, is that the socialite Duchess spent her last days in solitary confinement, and -- considering the Windsors' connection to Hitler -- that her jailer was a Jew.
Writing kept Blackwood going through one calamity after another -- until the cancer a few years ago. "I really don't like talking about it," she says, after a long pause. "I just kept on trying to do what I do, no matter what life did to me. But after the cancer I became so used to the idea that I would be dead that I had reconciled myself to the idea of not writing anymore. Once you've accepted you're dead, why write?
"It took me a long time to get back to writing. For a while I didn't have any ideas, none." She smiles. "But now I try and write all morning. It may be so awful that I put my pencil through the whole thing and start over the next day. But at least I've got plenty of ideas."
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