Dear So-and-So

The potential​ for drollery should be obvious: four females, confined in a luxury apartment on an upper floor of a Manhattan high-rise, moulder in rage and ennui when the head of household, Arnold, absconds to Paris with his new French girlfriend. The abandoned wife, J., swallows ‘fistfuls of Valium’ while staring bleakly out of the window. Monique, the young au pair, looking ‘much older and more careworn than when she first arrived’, is disliked by her charge, four-year-old Sally Ann, who is in turn ignored by her mother. Then there is Renata, the 13-year-old stepdaughter, who barely speaks and eats cake she has baked from shop-bought mixes in front of the television: ‘The matronly spread of her huge body gave her the look of someone prematurely middle-aged.’

The Stepdaughter is only fitfully sympathetic, and it’s about as comedic as an exorcism. It is written entirely from J.’s point of view, in the form of letters to non-existent confidantes (‘Dear So-and-So’), and the catharsis is all hers:

Everything about Renata I found instantly disturbing … Her face was pudgy with lost, fat-buried features, and her skin was very bad, as if she had always lived on a diet of ice cream and starch. She was wearing an orange and white T-shirt which had a really bold Californian bad taste. It emphasised the way that her bulging midriff was just as prominent as her bulging belly and breasts. I found myself staring transfixed by the brightness of Renata’s ugly orange shorts, which allowed one to see that her massive thighs were marked like an old woman’s with little pocks of bluish fat.

There’s more than a little scorn for America here, as if Renata embodies a gluttonous nation. J. suggests that Monique is also repelled: ‘Monique has a beautiful slim little figure … Sometimes I see Monique looking at Renata with real terror as if she fears that at any moment this enormous girl might give birth to some kind of colossal messiah of an instant cake.’

The cakes are a point of contention because J. herself is wasting away, subsisting on black coffee and obsessing over her husband’s shenanigans. ‘If she would only make proper homemade cakes, using proper ingredients, butter, sugar, milk and flour, I might be able to respect it,’ J. complains, without an ounce of believability. Rapidly the accusations mount. Renata leaves the kitchen in a mess and is rude to Monique; she shows no interest in playing with her half-sister. The coup de grâce arrives when we’re told that Renata uses tremendous amounts of toilet paper and doesn’t flush. Soon J. is imagining that Renata’s mother is on a cruise in the Caribbean (in reality she’s on a psychiatric ward in California) and that little things are disappearing from the apartment, pilfered by Renata. When Monique gives two weeks’ notice, J. is thrown into disarray: something has to change. The teenager has to be got rid of somehow.

The Stepdaughter (1976), Caroline Blackwood’s first novel, was published when she was 44 and married to Robert Lowell. The seven years they spent together transformed her from an occasional magazine writer to a committed littérateur, a vindication of many years in the role of aristocratic playgirl, trophy wife and muse. She hailed from ‘the insular world of the Protestant ascendancy in Northern Ireland’, her biographer, Nancy Schoenberger, writes, ‘the product of a long line of colonial administrators on her father’s side and the Guinnesses on her mother’s’. (Maureen Guinness was one of the ‘golden Guinness girls’, three sisters who reigned over London high society between the wars; arranging debutante balls for her daughters may have been her sole maternal pleasure.) Blackwood’s first husband, Lucian Freud, painted her; Walker Evans photographed her; she was the dedicatee of Lowell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Dolphin. (Sample epithet for Blackwood: ‘baby killer whale’.) He was likely writing the poems while she was writing The Stepdaughter in the same room. The couple were known to hole up on the top floor of Blackwood’s London townhouse while her most recent ex-husband, the composer Israel Citkowitz, occupied the middle floor and the nanny and children (two of them Citkowitz’s, one Lowell’s, one Ivan Moffat’s) lived on the ground floor.

‘I’m manic, and Caroline’s panic,’ Lowell quipped. As in The Stepdaughter, the living arrangements were claustrophobic. Four months into their relationship, Lowell had a mental breakdown and locked Blackwood in their flat, forbidding her to call anyone: ‘It was the longest three days of my life,’ she said. According to Schoenberger, Caroline agreed ‘to consider his breakdown their affliction, not just his’.

This set the tone for their folie à deux. From the start their partnership was embattled, both having to extricate themselves from marriages (Lowell’s seismic separation from Elizabeth Hardwick, his wife of more than twenty years, is recounted in The Dolphin Letters). But it was his illness and Blackwood’s alcoholism that were responsible for the domestic chaos that marked their time together: him in and out of psychiatric institutions, her moving the brood from London to a country house in Kent, an ancestral manse in Ireland, then to the US and back again, trailing an ever-changing retinue of nannies and housekeepers. There were serious mishaps: two car accidents in 1972 alone, and one child, six-year-old Ivana, spilling boiling water from a kettle on her lap and ending up in a burns unit for nine months. Another car accident resulted in Ivana’s almost losing an eye. When the family moved to Boston for one of Lowell’s teaching stints at Harvard, a cousin of his recalled that ‘the countess sat elegantly with an empty liquor bottle at her feet that she did not even try to kick under the couch. To me, this made her an aristocrat.’ Obviously it couldn’t last. The couple’s friend Frank Bidart told Schoenberger that he was ‘afraid of how destructive [Blackwood] could be when she drank … She once threatened to put her children in the car and smash into a wall.’

‘It’s hard not to read The Stepdaughter as a veiled account of Caroline’s sense of entrapment by her brood of children, whose constant needs she was often unable to meet,’ Schoenberger writes. (What hope is there for those of us without a Guinness fortune to fall back on?) There were family friends who maintained that The Stepdaughter was a portrayal of Blackwood’s relationship with her eldest daughter, Natalya. The family denied it, and physically Natalya was nothing like Renata. But in 1976, during one of Lowell’s hospitalisations, Blackwood, dreading his release, fled to America with her two youngest children, Ivana and Sheridan; the 15-year-old Natalya was somehow left alone in the London flat without any money. By the time she was seventeen, in 1978, she had left home and fallen into drug addiction. She died within the year, a syringe floating in the bath in which she was found. It appeared that she had been too drunk to finish injecting herself with heroin before she slipped into the water.

In The Stepdaughter Renata seems less a character based on a person than a projection of the narrator’s own self-hatred, the two representing a psychic split in which both ageing wife and ugly stepdaughter are duelling aspects of the same person. Similarly, the women in The Fate of Mary Rose (written five years later) are slippery projections of the narrator, a historian called Rowan Anderson. His dour wife, Cressida, is self-effacing and houseproud. She is infatuated with their runty six-year-old daughter, Mary Rose, stuffing her with yeast and cod liver oil and keeping her away from other children. Rowan has set them up far from his own London flat, where he works on his books and entertains his tempestuous mistress, Gloria, the perfect Magdalene to Cressida’s Madonna: sexy, liberated, dabbling in modelling and acting and writing. He seesaws between the two, comfortable in his masculine prerogative, but vaguely aware that he is making no one happy. Only Cressida’s neighbour Mrs Butterhorn (widowed, so more authentically free than anyone) has his number and scolds him for neglecting his wife and daughter. When Maureen Sutton, a child from the local council estate, is found dead in the woods, there isn’t enough sand in the world for Rowan to bury his head in. As the whole village spirals into paranoia, Cressida becomes more and more disturbed, dyeing her clothes black, stalking the bereaved parents, pacing sleeplessly through the house at night and adding multiple locks and bolts to all the doors. Does she suspect Rowan of child rape and murder, and is this what she is whispering to their daughter? Which one – mother or father – is Mary Rose’s rescuer?

Doubles prevail: wife and mistress, living girl and dead girl, or living doll and plastic doll. (The plastic doll, a rejected gift from Rowan to Mary Rose, sheds tears and passes water.) It’s like the blurred vision of a drunk. Rowan was plastered on whisky the night Maureen went missing and has no memory of what transpired. He’s Arnold from The Stepdaughter, but instead of dominating the story through his absence, he is the unreliable husband around whom the women do a ghost dance. As in The Stepdaughter, the claustrophobia of houses and families threatens to dissolve identity. Yet which is worse – to be too close or too distant?

The ways in which Blackwood was abandoned were myriad. Her father, a heavy drinker, died in the Burma campaign when she was thirteen. (What little time they spent together seems to have mostly involved Caroline retrieving his dead birds on shoots.) Her mother was a narcissistic socialite who left Caroline and her two siblings to the whims of despotic nannies before dispatching them (or ‘shovelling’ them, as her sister, Perdita, put it) to ‘another school and another school’. By the laws of primogeniture, her younger brother inherited the family pile. She was sought after by men – the American composer Ned Rorem called her ‘one of the two or three most beautiful women I have ever seen’. But her marriage to Freud, at the age of 23, set the pattern for the rest of her relationships: she left him, either because he was brazenly unfaithful or because one night he pushed away a plate of food she had prepared for him. One of her lovers, Ivan Moffat, said that ‘people who leave don’t like being left. Caroline was a great leaver.’ (Though, as Schoenberger writes, ‘that didn’t prevent her from feeling, at times, that she had been abandoned.’) I am condensing an impossibly eventful life lived in a succession of haunted houses.

The cruelty of The Stepdaughter would be funnier if it were more facetious. As unkind as J. is about Renata’s body, in other ways she is pathetic and vacillating, lacking all comprehension one minute, acutely self-aware the next. Fixated on the absent Arnold, she is as much of a bore as the dumpy, mute Renata. If Blackwood was drinking while writing this novel, it might account for the repetitions. At one point I was certain she had lost the thread. The detail about Renata stuffing the toilet with paper and not flushing is repeated twice within fourteen pages. Halfway through the book J. blames Renata for her inability to concentrate on her painting – the first time this pursuit is mentioned.

The Fate of Mary Rose, on the other hand, only rambles while walking the reader through a dark alley in a choke collar. After The Stepdaughter, Blackwood’s writing took a quantum leap. Great Granny Webster was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1977 (Philip Larkin nixed it because he said it wasn’t fiction). There, too, matriarchal relations are haunted by a phantom man – in this case a father – but the narrator is all eye and ear, the better to capture the indelible characters of Granny Webster and Aunt Lavinia. The book is full of genuine black humour. Blackwood hit her stride just as her relationship with Lowell collapsed and he flew back to Hardwick in New York. (Freud’s painting of the youthful Caroline, Girl in Bed, was in Lowell’s arms when he suffered a heart attack and died in the back of a taxi coming from the airport.) Neither The Stepdaughter nor The Fate of Mary Rose ends with anything like finality. Both daughter figures finagle their own escapes, so thoroughly that even the reader is left out of the reckoning.

One last shady detail. After Natalya’s death, Blackwood co-wrote a mock cookbook with the novelist Anna Haycraft. Darling, You Shouldn’t Have Gone to So Much Trouble: Stylish Meals in Seconds collected recipes from celebrities and glitterati – Sonia Orwell, Marianne Faithfull, Barbara Cartland and Roald Dahl among them – along with quotations from canonical writers and philosophers. ‘Caroline used to cook these appalling meals,’ her friend Xandra Hardie remarked. ‘And [she] would slop onto these plates a sole really burned on the top, maybe some grapes chucked in with it, and some sort of white sauce which was about nine-tenths white wine, one-tenth cream.’ Anita Brookner, reviewing the book for the TLS, was appalled by the recipes, finding absolutely no fun in Blackwood’s culinary short cuts – particularly her use of Smash. It smacks of Renata’s instant cake mix in The Stepdaughter, of which J. is so disapproving. Blackwood dedicated the cookbook to the memory of Natalya.