I knew nothing of Caroline Blackwood before I picked up her new collection, Never Breathe a Word. And wow! What a fantastic writer of short fiction. “Fantastic” as in brutally bleak, an emotional wasteland. My review ran in last Sunday’s LA Times.
Blackwood died more than a decade ago, after being married to two of the 20th century’s great artists: painter Lucien Freud, first, and poet Robert Lowell third (second was a composer, who never achieved the same kind of greatness). She was an heir to the Guinness fortune and was quite beautiful. If our current crop of heiress-beauty-celebrities had a fraction of her depth, our pop culture world would be a more interesting place.
I’ve been meaning to try Blackwood since reading about her stories in Gary Indiana’s essay collection, Utopia’s Debris last summer. He made her sound like a more vicious and brutal Ivy Compton-Burnett (which is really hard to imagine!). I’ll have to pick up the new collection.
I’ll have to pick it up, too!