In Lucien Freud’s painting Hotel Bedroom, a young, waifish blonde woman lies in bed, hand touching her face, while Lucien looms above by a window. The woman is Caroline Blackwood, Lucien’s wife at the time. She later married the poet Robert Lowell and came from a multiple well known aristocratic, families including the Guinness heirs. It is these three facts she is known for, rather than the multiple brilliant books she authored and I wonder if she is considered too posh, too pretty, too surrounded by famous men for many people to give her writing a second look. I discovered her when reading the biography of Lucien Freud by William Feaver where her resistance to putting up with bullshit from Lucien piqued my interest. Here he is returning to their marital home
Later, when she insinuates that he had stopped her from writing, from the vantage point of writing and publishing books later in life, he cruelly calls her “spastically untidy and hopeless”
The first book I read by her was Great Granny Webster, (published by nyrb press- Blackwood is entirely out of print in the UK ) a girl’s memoir about various women in her family- Great Granny Webster of the title who she goes to stay with in a seaside town, and who serves her “tiny pats of margarine..laid out on a large silver engraved butter-dish, looked so diminished by their expensive settings” and “stingy and minute portions of rubbery unseasoned canned spaghetti” and wants to leave her a sinister old bed with wooden decorative pineapples on it. Her eccentric aunt Lavinia who once “gate-crashed a fashionable London party totally naked except for a sanitary towel” and her grandmother who goes mad living on a family estate in Ulster, Dunmartin Hall where the staff have to wear wellingtons because of all the leaks
This passage took my breath away.
The first story in the collection Good Night Sweet Ladies is from the perspective of a famous painter’s widow, who hoards monkeys and bitterness. It’s easy to imagine this piece as speculative auto fiction: what would have happened to Caroline and her creativity if she had stuck with Lucien? In another, she takes a jab at poets by describing a man having to copywriter for a sanitary towel company.
In the same story, catholic school in Ireland is described with creepy vividness, the other girls poking the narrator’s breasts with safety pins. In another story, a petty hair salon owner in New York gets annoyed when her new employee, a Holocaust survivor, roles up the sleeves of her dress to wash a customers hair, revealing her camp number tattoo. Caroline’s eye for the cruelty and strangeness of human nature is ingenious.
The Fate of Mary Rose I could see becoming a sensation if it were republished: a domestic thriller set in small town Kent, where the murder of a child leads to hysteria among the town’s women, it is narrated by a sinister and careless husband and is compulsive and deeply strange.
She has much in common with Barbara Comyns, Nancy Mitford and Leonora Carrington, though of a younger generation. Robert Lowell’s previous wife,Elizabeth Hardwick has recently made a comeback( with beautiful editions by Faber) and I do hope Caroline too will too.
Wow. What a find. I must search her out. I feel kinship with her being “spastically untidy and hopeless”...
Phwoar! Grateful for this introduction to Caroline Blackwood, thank you! I can see why you admire her writing - the world she evokes, of jam pots and rusty bridles and entangled fishing rods, of fairies and demented women and unpolished parquet strikes me as reminiscent of the magical and peculiar world/s you conjured in Doll's Alphabet xx