The Evil Stepmother as Insult Comic

Gideon Leek reviews the reissue of Caroline Blackwood’s 1976 novel “The Stepdaughter.”

By Gideon LeekAugust 6, 2024

• Fiction

“IS NOT SOMETHING utterly abominable about a tense New Yorker in her middle thirties who lolls around all day in her dressing-gown, refusing to speak to either her daughter or her stepdaughter, while she stares out at her beautiful view and writes demented letters in her head?” This self-characterization by J, the narrator of Caroline Blackwood’s 1976 debut novel The Stepdaughter, is apt, if ungenerous. Yes, the sole letter writer of this one-way epistolary novel fills up most of her unwritten correspondence detailing petty grievances with the much younger co-occupant of her luxury apartment, her stepdaughter Renata, whom she hates and insults frequently, creatively, and at some length—albeit only in the letters, never aloud. But beneath the barbs, you wonder: why is she paying so much attention?

Antipathy between stepmother and stepdaughter can often be rooted in an unpleasant—likely unwanted—sympathy and identification. These natural rivals are sometimes uncomfortably close in age, and competing for attention from the same man. If J seems overly concerned with Renata’s slowness, it’s because they are racing on the same track. Yet in this case, they have both lost. Arnold, J’s husband and Renata’s father, has left them both behind, together, in his apartment. J fantasizes about being the evil stepmother: “I make cruel decisions, in which I buy Renata an air ticket and quite simply despatch her, like a suitcase, to Arnold’s Paris address.” But deep down, she is sympathetic. “I keep trying to imagine how Renata will make out in a foreign, strange community—this uncouth girl who finds it so difficult to communicate even in her own language.” Hanging like a crescent moon over some inner steppe of resentment is the knowledge that another stepmother might hate the girl even more. “I find it so easy to start seething with indignation when I think of the heartless way that Arnold’s new fiancée is bound to treat Renata.” These aren’t feelings of love, but they contain some sympathetic understanding.

Blackwood brings us into the world of this unraveling narrator, perched high above the traffic of the Upper West Side. She’s a nightmare in a nightgown, a mean spirit in a mink coat, an insult comic trapped in a high-rise. McNally Editions, publisher of the 2024 reissue, is betting that readers will find her great, guilty fun. Gritty, nasty, and rooted in the delirious gossip of Blackwood’s own salacious life, The Stepdaughter is the perfect book for people who find Joan Didion too even-keeled, Renata Adler too fair-minded. This is a novel for the meanest, most cutting person you know—the cute pink and white McNally Edition is a perfect graduation present for someone who wouldn’t thank you in a thousand years.

Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, born in London in 1931, had married three men and had four children before she published The Stepdaughter at the age of 45. It was her second book and first novel. Attractive, sharp, and funny, Blackwood, an heiress to the Guinness beer fortune, was quite a catch, and if she took a while getting her literary career going, it was because her husbands were hard men to pass up. Her first, the painter Lucian Freud (grandson of the psychiatrist), introduced her to Picasso (who made a pass) and Francis Bacon (who contributed a recipe for mayonnaise to Blackwood’s 1980 cookbook). Freud painted Blackwood again and again; her striking, almost alien beauty fit right into his visceral figure painting. (He loved her mainly for her eyes, which were oversized and beautiful. Their sexual relationship was less of a fit: of Freud’s 14 acknowledged children, she bore zero.) Around the time things went awry with Freud, Blackwood began to write, remarried (this time to the composer Israel Citkowitz), and had three children. The marriage didn’t last—there were affairs (on her part) and deathbed paternity revelations (also Blackwood’s)—but the writing did.

In Blackwood’s early pieces, on hot topics such as beatniks (“a luxury product, the revolutionary who offers no threat, the nonconformist whose nonconformity is commercial”) and feminists (“only a hissing and rather hysterical hatred of men had ever really unified this disgruntled audience,” and many, she teased, “looked a little bovine”), she revealed her dim view of humanity. She isn’t dismissive; instead, she seems almost to see right through people to their carnal cores. Similar to the brutal translucence of Freud’s and Bacon’s paintings, she paints everyday society as Grand Guignol. Everything is red and raw, oozing and overripe. Take, for example, the description of a classmate in “Piggy,” her memoir of Catholic school (from her 1973 collection For All That I Found There): “[H]is thyroid-condition thighs always looked inappropriate, they were so much too massive for his shorts.” Or consider her description of the eponymous hospital ward in “Burns Unit,” a piece Blackwood wrote about her daughter’s time recouping after an awful incident with a boiling kettle: “There they all lay like Francis Bacon figures framed in their dehumanised postures with black charred legs strapped apart and their genitals pierced by their catheters.”

On the surface, The Stepdaughter is not much of a departure. “It is difficult to describe how she manages to be so disturbing, this Humpty Dumpty of a girl,” J says of Renata. “She gives one the feeling that somewhere in the past she took such a great fall that everything healthy in her personality was badly smashed.” The bleeding, red-nail brutality of her early stories recurs here, but this is a novel, not a dogpile. Even if most of The Stepdaughter’s 100-odd pages are filled with such zingers, they also contain complication, climax, and resolution. Why, after all, is the narrator caring for this stepdaughter? The answer isn’t so simple. Arnold, J’s husband, has run off to France with a younger woman, and Renata’s mother has recused herself to an asylum. The luxurious apartment with the view, the “Afghan rugs,” and “all the reproductions of Rouault, Matisse, and Klee,” is part of an unspoken deal Arnold has offered her: he’ll keep her in the high life if she watches his daughter.

These golden handcuffs inspire denial, self-loathing, and anger, which Blackwood’s prose style perfectly captures. She uses short declarative sentences as a way of locating a mind trapped in a small space: “I am extremely upset today”; “I am avoiding all my friends”; “I find Renata very ugly.” Everything in the apartment has been reduced to simplicity because J is in denial about the enormity of the situation. When, finally, an outsider—a policeman—ventures into the fray, the fullness and depth of his description stands in stark contrast to J’s curt observations of her stepdaughter “He had a scarlet neck which looked as if it had absorbed more experience than his face,” J recounts, “and it came bulging over the collar of his uniform with every inch of its weatherbeaten surface decorated by the most unpleasantly elaborate lithography of deep cracks and creases, which were all overlaid by a feathery tissue of spider-web lines.” Even this ugly little man seems so much larger than J’s tiny world. With its letter-never-sent scheme and its claustrophobic style, The Stepdaughter is an innovative text that works. In its own way, it’s a perfect novel, if a small and mean one, a savvy artistic choice and a match for Blackwood’s talents.

It’s also a novel on which the author got some very good advice, from husband number three, celebrated American poet Robert Lowell. Before Blackwood, Lowell had been married to the novelist Jean Stafford and the critic Elizabeth Hardwick. But he also championed women writers extramaritally, involving himself in the careers (and, in some cases, the affections) of Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, Christina Stead, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Flannery O’Connor. When asked for his opinion of Lowell, the poet W. H. Auden replied: “I don’t like men who leave behind them a smoking trail of weeping women.”

Like Lowell, J’s husband Arnold “is a man who likes women to do him credit. If he takes out a woman to a restaurant he likes her to have an electric effect on the other diners, so that they all crane their heads and stare at him with envy.” In her previous relationships, Blackwood simply had to walk into a room. For Lowell, she had to bring out a novel. The Stepdaughter’s existence is, among other things, part of a private, perhaps unspoken, marital arrangement. Imagine the pressure. What if her book had been bad? What if she hadn’t managed to finish one at all? (She did, after all, have a son under five, three kids from her marriage with Citkowitz, and a flighty, bipolar husband.) But maybe this is what she wanted. Maybe she was tired of being the muse. Maybe she wanted to be the one writing the dedications.

All this backstory makes The Stepdaughter breathlessly good as gossip. Everything in Blackwood’s messy and often tragic life is here, just thinly masked. Overseas affairs, psychiatric wards, stepdaughters—J experiences all of these too, only the perspective is all scrambled up. Blackwood was the ruthless spouse having the overseas affair, while Lowell was the one locked up in the psych ward unable to care for his daughter (Harriet, 15 years old when he married Blackwood). J’s prior occupation, painting, which childcare has taken her from, points back to her marriage to Freud. We even know that Blackwood had something of Renata in her: her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes that “as a teenager she was plump, ungainly, and lacking in confidence; her stockings were always falling down.” There is also the less funny, more bitter fact that Blackwood’s daughter Natalya (not the one in the burn ward) was a troubled teenager herself. Two years after the novel’s publication, she died of a drug overdose.

Blackwood was not the first of Lowell’s wives to have her writing molded by the intense experience of living with him. Stafford’s 1944 debut Boston Adventure makes for a useful comparison. Like Blackwood’s first novel, Stafford’s refers to Lowell’s frequent hospitalizations, and like Blackwood, she displaces the hysteria onto a female character—in this case, a mother, trapped “behind high walls whose corridors rang with maniacal laughter and groans of the hopeless damned souls of this hell on earth.” Stafford’s novel was an acclaimed bestseller, which allowed her to buy a house. Lowell, not yet famous, poured an ocean of envy into his poems, and the collection he published two years later won him his first Pulitzer Prize. It was put out by Stafford’s publisher and named after Lowell’s nickname for the house (Lord Weary’s Castle).

These were young, competitive people. Blackwood’s situation was different. Lowell had already been on the cover of Time, had already served as poet laureate, and had already won all those Pulitzers. She wasn’t in competition with him. But there was presumably some pressure to publish, to live up to her talent, to show that she wasn’t the first flop in a marital line of female genius. The Stepdaughter, like so many novels, was written to wave in the face of a few specific people. Mission accomplished, but it is telling, I think, that J worries about the aftermath of such an artistically fruitful marriage. At one point, she muses: “It may well turn out that my painting was only something that it was possible to do within the context of a marriage.” This was a challenge that came up quickly. The year after The Stepdaughter was published, Lowell had a heart attack on his way to reconcile with Hardwick. He was found dead in a taxicab, clutching one of Freud’s portraits of Blackwood. His death, however, did not scotch her creativity: she went on to produce seven more books before her own death in 1996.

There have been intermittent attempts to revive interest in her work in the decades since. In 2010, Counterpoint released her collected short fiction and nonfiction, Never Breathe a Word, and NYRB Classics has brought out reissues of two of her novels, Corrigan (1984) and Great Granny Webster (1977). The NYRB reissues, already cursed with octogenarian titles, were poorly served by their old-timey black-and-white-photo covers. The Counterpoint release, even with the gorgeous Freud painting of Blackwood on the cover, was a poor entry point too—why read the collected work of an author you don’t know? The Stepdaughter is not only Blackwood’s best book but also a better introduction to her gossipy life story. Along with McNally Editions’ other recent reissues, such as John Bowen’s The Girls (1986) and Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife (1929), it deserves to be a cheeky summer hit. Lowell scorned Blackwood, even if he died of heartbreak almost instantly. Now, almost half a century later, is McNally finally doing right by her?