Memoirs by Robert Lowell
In April 1970, Robert Lowell went down from Oxford, where he was a visiting fellow at All Souls, to London. At a cocktail party thrown by Faber & Faber, his English publisher, the 53-year-old poet encountered an old acquaintance, Lady Caroline Blackwood, the writer and Guinness-brewing heiress. Soon after, he moved into her house in Redcliffe Square—“I mean instantly, that night,” Lady Caroline, 38 at the time, remembered.
Opinion is divided as to whether Lady Caroline was a succubus who preyed on men of genius or a tragic muse who sacrificed herself to their art. Her first husband, the painter Lucian Freud, was moving toward the succubus theory when, in 1954, he painted himself standing pensively behind her in Hotel Bedroom.
