Caroline Blackwood

Lady Caroline Blackwood (16 July 1931 – 14 February 1996) was an English writer, and the eldest child of the 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and the brewery heiress Maureen Guinness.

Active in the literary world through her journalism and her novels, Lady Caroline Blackwood made three 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 praised for their wit and intelligence, and one in particular is scathingly autobiographical in describing her unhappy childhood.

Early life and background

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; the couple 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 figure in London's bohemian circles, the Gargoyle Club and Colony Room replaced Belgravia drawing rooms. She sat for several of Freud's portraits, including ''Girl in Bed''. She was impressed by the vision of Freud and Francis Bacon and her later fiction was influenced by 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. According to Christopher Isherwood, "she is only capable of thinking negatively. Confronted by a phenomenon, she asks herself: what is wrong with it?" During the mid-1960s, she had an affair with Robert Silvers, the founder and co-editor of ''The New York Review of Books''.Brubach, Holly
"Their Better Half"
''The New York Times'', 17 August 2010.Gaines, Steven
"Ivana Lowell, Sober Guinness Heiress Raised by Poet, Says What Happened"
''New York'' magazine, 19 September 2010.

Her third husband, Robert Lowell, was an 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 memoir of her daughter's treatment in a burns unit. Blackwood's first novel ''The Stepdaughter'' (1976) appeared three years later and received much acclaim. It won the David Higham Prize for best first novel. ''Great Granny Webster'' followed in 1977 and was partly derived on her own childhood, and depicted an old woman's destructive impact on her daughter and granddaughter. It was short-listed for the 1977 Booker Prize.

''The Last of the Duchess'' was completed in 1980. A study of the relations between the Duchess of Windsor and her lawyer, 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 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.

Blackwood's later books were based on interviews and vignettes, including ''On The Perimeter'' (1984), which focused her attentions on the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire, and ''In The Pink'' (1987), which was a book looking at the hunting and the hunt saboteur fraternities.

Works

* ''For All That I Found There'' (1973)
* ''The Fate of Mary Rose'' (1974)
* ''The Stepdaughter'' (1976)
* ''Great Granny Webster'' (1977)
* ''Darling, You Shouldn't Have Gone to So Much Trouble'' (1980) (with Anna Haycraft)
* ''Good Night Sweet Ladies'' (1983)
* ''Corrigan'' (1984)
* ''On the Perimeter'' (1984)
* ''In the Pink'' (1987)
* ''The Last of the Duchess'' (1995)
* ''Never Breathe a Word'' (2010)

Personal life

Blackwood's marriage to Lucian Freud (1922-2011) disintegrated soon after they married in 1953; it was dissolved in 1958, in Mexico. In 1957, Blackwood moved to New York City and studied acting at the Stella Adler school.

On 15 August 1959, she married the pianist Israel Citkowitz (1909–1974), 22 years her senior; they had three daughters. By 1966, when their youngest, Ivana, was born, their marriage was over, although Citkowitz continued to live nearby and helped raise their children 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 (1917-1977), 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. 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 former 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 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 memoirs, of Princess Margaret and of Francis Bacon, published in ''The New York Review of Books'' in 1992.

Death

On 14 February 1996, Blackwood died from cancer, at the Mayfair Hotel on Park Avenue in New York City, aged 64.

References

Further reading

*Davenport-Hines, Richard. "Caroline Blackwood" in the ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press.

External links

Official Profile
on National Portrait Gallery, London

Lady Caroline Blackwood, Wry Novelist, Is Dead at 64
on New York Times

{{DEFAULTSORT:Blackwood, Caroline
1931 births
1996 deaths
20th-century British novelists
20th-century British writers
Caroline
British biographers
British debutantes
British expatriates in Ireland
British expatriates in the United States
British memoirists
Daughters of British marquesses
Deaths from cancer in New York (state)
English artists' models
Guinness family
Freud family
People educated at Rockport School
People from Knightsbridge
People of Anglo-Irish descent