Never Breathe a Word: The Collected Stories of Caroline Blackwood - Hardcover

Blackwood, Caroline

4.22

69 ratings by Goodreads

9781582435695: Never Breathe a Word: The Collected Stories of Caroline Blackwood

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582435693 ISBN 13: 9781582435695

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2010

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The biography of Lady Caroline Blackwood includes tumultuous, highly public marriages to artist Lucian Freud and poet Robert Lowell, a reputation for eccentricity, and frequent flares of panic. At the same time, she left a body of work marked by intelligent, commanding writing that displays a singular wit and keen appreciation for the absurd. Never Breathe a Word calls attention to Blackwood's mastery, presenting a series of acclaimed short stories, both fictional and autobiographical. Selections span the entirety of her career, from her first book, For All That I Found There, to Good Night Sweet Ladies, one of her last before her death at age 64. The pieces of fiction alternate between tragic and artfully mundane, yet always share Blackwood's characteristic frankness and black humor. Three previously unpublished stories are included, featuring some of her most sympathetic heroines. Her nonfiction comprises eight evocative vignettes taken directly from her own life and set in narrative form. Beautiful, brazen, and living in "grand squalor" among ashtrays and empty liquor bottles, Blackood died in 1996 in Manhattan's Mayfair Hotel. She left behind a rare literary legacy—one that testifies to our shared struggles, and to the threadbare connection between art and life.

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From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. A selection of grimly compelling fiction and journalistic pieces by Blackwood (1931–1996), the Irish-born author and wife to Lucian Freud and Robert Lowell, spotlights her sharp-edged observations. Blackwood frequently excoriates her characters, starting with the painter's widow of The Interview, who holds forth with a young journalist and reveals nasty details of her marriage. Many of the characters are outsized meanies: the greedy, tyrannical nanny in The Baby Nurse takes over a family's London flat when the new baby arrives and the new mother sinks into a severe postpartum depression; while in Taft's Wife, a social worker endures an excruciating, drunken lunch with a prosperous, depraved mother and the 14-year-old son she once put up for adoption. Shocking, too, is the owner of a beauty parlor in Who Needs It? who sacks a new hire because the concentration camp numbers tattooed on her arm dampen the lighthearted mood of her salon. A handful of nonfiction pieces explore the author's childhood and the bourgeois fantasy of the Beatniks to round out this accomplished oeuvre by an author who should be better known in the States. (Feb.)
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From Booklist:

The veiled widow of a famous artist in “The Interview,” the tour de force that launches this galvanizing collection, is at once magnificent and monstrous during a disastrous interview with a humorless, priggish young journalist. The escalation of their verbal fencing match, the accretion of alarming details, the rising bizarreness, and the deepening anguish are Poe-like, while the caustic wit recalls that of Dorothy Parker. And throughout, one can’t help but appreciate Blackwood’s wry twisting of autobiographical details. As portrayed by Nancy Schoenberger in Dangerous Muse (2001), Blackwood (1931–96), a beautiful Irish aristocrat and Guinness heir, counted among her husbands poet Robert Lowell and painter Lucian Freud, and was infamous for her wildness. And what fuming, self-destructing women she portrays in her acid stories: a doggedly cheerful beauty-shop owner undone by a dignified Holocaust survivor; a scorned wife on a demonic shopping spree. Blackwood’s devastating fiction is followed by a selection of quirky, deft, and diabolical personal essays that suggest the impetus for her unflinching scrutiny of the dark side. Let this collection spark a Blackwood revival. --Donna Seaman

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