Blessed with a name that suggests she was destined to be a writer, Francine Prose has established a record for mordant, original essays, stories and novels. In this entertaining study, she addresses the eco-systems of creativity in the relations between artists and the women who inspired, nurtured, managed or manipulated them - sometimes all at the same time.
Being a living muse is not as simple as the Greeks imagined it to be. The nine Muses of classical mythology specialized in specific genres. Thalia inspired comedy, Clio inspired history, and they never showed up together in the artist's studio to confuse him or to engage in hair-tugging battles over which one got there first. For the Greeks there were no comic historians or historically minded comedians. Furthermore all the muses were female, and none of them had any ambition to be artists themselves especially since as goddesses they already had pretty good jobs.
Not so in real life, where being a muse is an outmoded job for a woman, with little security, no pension plan, and a none-too-inviting job description: the constant care and feeding of male artists who demand exclusive attention and instant response to their experiments in genre. As Prose acknowledges, "certainly, feminism has made us rethink musedom as a career choice."
The notion of the muse has become ironized and satiric, with the exception of a few society women who moonlight as ideal models and customers for fashion designers, such as Isabella Blow, the London-based muse of the hat designer Philip Treacy, who wears Treacy's surrealist lobsters, birds'-nests, sailing ships and helmets on all occasions. Prose suggests that musedom ought to be an equal-opportunity position, but concludes that while male artists get muses, female artists get, at best, "psychiatric nurses" such as Leonard Woolf. Perhaps only women are willing to put up with the servility, subordination, patience and daily humiliation of being the muse. "Whether we like it or not," Prose concedes, "the distribution of power is simply different depending on the gender of the artist and the muse."
The muses Prose selects - some of them "serial muses" with more than one artist to their name - span the 18th century to the present: Hester Thrale, Alice Liddell, Elizabeth Siddall, Lou Andreas Salome, Gala Dali, Lee Miller, Charis Weston, Suzanne Farrell and Yoko Ono. The first four studies seem rather wooden and perfunctory, more dutiful historical background than portraits driven by ideas. But the book gathers momentum and direction when we get to her hilarious and merciless chapter on Gala, the self-promoter who started her career as a muse with the poet Paul Eluard, but spent most of her life with the fetishist, hysteric and exhibitionist painter Salvador Dali, his declared soul-mate despite his fondness for rubbing himself down with goat dung, and his water and grasshopper phobias.
From this point on Prose's indignation, intelligence, scorching wit and critical insight have full play, as she explores the grotesque behaviors and gargantuan egos of the "artists" and the sad psychological trajectories of the "muses." The photographer Edward Weston emerges as a monster of complacent narcissism, coldness and sterility, and his wife, Charis, the most cruelly traduced, exploited and drained of all the muses. Prose portrays the war photographer Lee Miller as the most tragically "lost" artist of the group, primarily known as the short-term model and muse of Man Ray and the long-term wife of the minor surrealist painter Roland Penrose. Her 40 years with Penrose won her no plaudits; "the muses of failed or derivative artists," Prose declares, "are rarely celebrated for their labors."
Ballerina Suzanne Farrell, alone among the muses, seems to have fared well, both because Balanchine needed her in order to express his art at all - what is the choreographer without the dancer? - and because she refused to become his lover or wife. None the less when she married fellow dancer Paul Mejia, Balanchine fired them both from his company. And, in a concluding reversal, Prose is hardest on Yoko Ono, whom she mocks for her "perceived arrogance, careerism, and egomania" and whose collaborations with John Lennon Prose sees as producing his weakest work. She finds Ono's work "annoying" and sees her as sympathetic primarily because of her "dogged endurance." Lennon is the only male artist Prose treats uncritically, but the fate of his muse, too, must scare off any woman still enamored of the role.
The Washington Post
