Caroline Blackwood

Lady Caroline Blackwood (born Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood; 16 July 1931 – 14 February 1996) was an English writer, socialite, and muse. Her novels have been praised for their wit and intelligence. One of her works is an autobiography, which detailed her wealthy but unhappy childhood. She was born into an aristocratic British family, the eldest child of the 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and of Maureen Constance Guinness. All three of her husbands were accomplished figures in their own fields.

Early life

Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood was born on 16 July 1931 at 4 Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge, her parents' London home. Her parents were Maureen Constance Guinness and Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava.

Blackwood was, self-admittedly, "scantily educated" at Rockport School in County Down and Downham School near Essex, among other schools.

In 1949, after a finishing school in Oxford, Blackwood was presented as a debutante 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. In Paris she met Picasso (and reportedly refused to wash for three days after he drew on her hands and nails).

After marrying artist Lucian Freud in 1953, she became a figure in London's bohemian circles, the Gargoyle Club and Colony Room replacing Belgravia drawing rooms. She sat for several of Freud's portraits, including ''Girl in Bed''. She was impressed by the vision of Freud and painter 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 American 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, American poet 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". It includes a memoir of her daughter's treatment in a burns unit.

Blackwood published her first novel ''The Stepdaughter'' (1976) three years later, and it received much acclaim. It won the David Higham Prize for best first novel.

''Great Granny Webster'' followed in 1977 and was partly derived from her own childhood. It 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.

Blackwood's 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. It is narrated by a historian whose obsessions destroy his domestic life.

After this, she completed a collection of five short stories, ''Good Night Sweet Ladies'' (1983). Her final novel, ''Corrigan'' (1984), was the least successful of her works.

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.

Published works

Blackwood published 10 books during her lifetime. ''The Collected Stories'' was published posthumously.

Novels

* ''The Stepdaughter'' (1976)
* ''Great Granny Webster'' (1977)
* ''The Fate of Mary Rose'' (1981)
* ''Corrigan'' (1984)

Collections

* ''For All That I Found There'' (1973)
* ''Good Night Sweet Ladies'' (1983)
* ''Never Breathe a Word: The Collected Stories of Caroline Blackwood'' (2010)

Other

* ''Darling, You Shouldn’t Have Gone to So Much Trouble'' (1980)
* ''On the Perimeter'' (1984)
* ''In the Pink'' (1987)
* ''The Last of the Duchess'' (1995)

Personal life

Blackwood was married three times, and had four children.

* Lucian Freud, married 9 December 1953, divorced 1958.
* Israel Citkowitz, married 15 August 1959, divorced 1972, three daughters: Natalya, Eugenia, and Ivana.
* Robert Lowell, married 21 October 1972, one son. Lowell died in 1977.

In 1957, Blackwood moved to New York City and studied acting at the Stella Adler school.

Ann Fleming, the wife of Ian Fleming, introduced Blackwood to Lucian Freud. After they started seeing each other, the couple eloped in Paris on 9 December 1953.

By 1966, when Blackwood and Citkowitz's youngest, Ivana, was born, their marriage was over. Citkowitz continued to live nearby and helped raise their daughters 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''. He stayed close to the family thereafter. According to Ivana, she and Silvers both suspected that he was her biological father. But Blackwood revealed on her deathbed that Ivana's father was another lover: the screenwriter Ivan Moffat. He was a grandson of actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and his wife.

On 22 June 1978, Natalya, Blackwood's eldest daughter with Citkowitz, died at age 17 from postural asphyxia due to a drug overdose.

Blackwood and Lowell 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, fellow poet Elizabeth Bishop, strongly advised Lowell not to publish the book, advice he ignored). Lowell suffered from bipolar disorder, and Blackwood reacted to his manic episodes with 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, while in the back seat of a New York cab. He was returning to his former wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick.

In 1977, to avoid taxation, Blackwood left England and went to live in County Kildare, Ireland. She had 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, on eastern Long Island in New York. 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, Lady Caroline 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
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20th-century English memoirists
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British debutantes
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Deaths from cancer in New York (state)
English artists' models
English biographers
British expatriates in Ireland
English expatriates in the United States
English women memoirists
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