CAROLINE BLACKWOOD (1931–1996) was born into a rich Anglo-Irish aristocratic family. She rebelled against her background at an early age and led a hectic and bohemian life, which included marriages to the painter Lucian Freud, the pianist and composer Israel Citkowitz, and the poet Robert Lowell. In the 1970s Blackwood began to write. Among her books are several novels, including Great Granny Webster and Corrigan (both available as NYRB Classics); On the Perimeter, an account of the women’s anti-nuclear protest at Greenham Common; and The Last of the Duchess, about the old age of the Duchess of Windsor.
HONOR MOORE’s most recent books are Darling (poems), which was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award, and The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by her Granddaughter, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her play Mourning Pictures was produced on Broadway, and its British production was broadcast on BBC radio. She teaches in the graduate writing programs at New School University and Columbia.
GREAT GRANNY WEBSTER
CAROLINE BLACKWOOD
Introduction by
HONOR MOORE
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
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New York
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title
Introduction
GREAT GRANNY WEBSTER
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Copyright and More Information
INTRODUCTION
IN HER FIRST book, For All That I Found There, Caroline Blackwood published a short memoir that predicts the writer she will become. During the war, Blackwood had been sent for safety to a boys’ school, and the central character of her memoir is the school bully, “gingery-haired, near-albino, with a snout-like nose. ” “Piggy” is about the interplay of sex and power, something Blackwood, a great beauty, knew about. By the time she wrote the story in her forties, she was an old hand at navigating the minefields her allure for men had set, having served as muse to Lucian Freud, whom she married and who painted her, and Walker Evans, who took spectacular photographs of her. Her turn from journalism to literary prose had followed her marriage, in 1972, to the poet Robert Lowell, and the inspiration of his life studies can be felt in hers.
“Freakishly over-weight,” Piggy McDougal holds sway over prepubescent Caroline and her male classmates by violence and intimidation, and so, when he takes her out to a rhododendron grove and directs her to remove her clothes, she does it. The little girl is “mortified and humiliated,” but the adult narrator turns boy to pig as coolly as Circe:
The nervous blink of his white eyelashes became far worse than usual.
His mouth was slack and trembly. He kept fidgeting with his hands... .
“Have you had the curse yet?” McDougal’s porcine face, usually so florid, was ashen ... Instinctively I sensed that I must not tell him that I had never had it... .
When I refused to answer, my silence seemed to chill him, for I noticed that his teeth were chattering like those of a winter swimmer... .
Blackwood followed For All That I Found There, a collection of fiction and nonfiction, with a short novel in which she engages what will become one of her central themes, the turbulent, involuntary ties between women. In The Stepdaughter, an enraged, self-absorbed woman is saddled with the sullen, cake-addicted daughter of the philandering husband who has abandoned her. In Great Granny Webster, Blackwood treats a related subject, once again with the cauterizing diction that distinguished “Piggy. ” Here she takes a writer’s dive into the material with which, as a raconteur, whiskey in hand, she famously enchanted and mesmerized her friends.
