Francine Prose:The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists they Inspired

Reviewed by KAPKA KASSABOVA

The much ironised set-up where a female muse inspires a male genius is a "quaint, even suspect anachronism", admits the author of this riveting book. She proceeds to examine the anachronism through the lives of nine muses and their artists — nine to match the number of the classic Greek muses.

New Yorker Francine Prose has the novelist's magic touch when dealing with the stranger-than-fiction facts of these extraordinary lives, and a dry wit to match. We are taken on a roller-coaster ride of great art, high emotion, mutual manipulation and skilful abuse where the male artist's oversized ego clashes with the complex world of his multi-tasking muse in her attempt at self-determination and survival. But not always.

While the nine biographical essays share the obvious theme of this symbiotic, often tormented relationship, each couldn't be more different from the next. Arranged in chronological order, the star-studded and star-crossed biographies begin in the 18th century with a middle-aged Samuel Johnson and his platonic friend Hester Thrale, a prolific writer, brilliant conversationalist and mother of endlessly dying children. This is, however, the only dignified relationship in the collection.

The most uncomfortable of the lot is the story of eccentric Lewis Carroll and his Ideal Child Friend, Alice Liddell, who on a "golden afternoon" listened to his telling of what became the classic Alice in Wonderland.

Oxford scholar Carroll sought the exclusive company of children, and thanks to Victorian sensibilities, he was allowed to befriend them. The precocious Alice was his ultimate child muse in photography and literature, and the essay is accompanied by a gripping photo of Alice aged 9. Prose excels at suspending judgment in favour of illumination.

Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti had a twisted fixation on the unfortunate Elizabeth Siddal, who he decided was to him what Beatrice had been to the Italian poet Dante. Rossetti's obsession with his wife had little to do with the woman she was, and her premature death from depression and laudanum
overdose intensified his poetic morbidity. He had her exhumed to repossess a buried notebook.

More instructive yet was the fate of Charis Weston, a muse to maniacal American photographer Edward Weston, and later demoted to artist-wife. Passionate and talented, she began conventionally with nude posing, evolved into earthier preoccupations such as the bowel function of her artist, and ended in hell.

But much more interesting are the lives of the combative muses. Lee Miller is the most glamorous and dramatic. Extracting herself from a claustrophobic affair with acclaimed photographer Man Ray, she went on to create some of the greatest photography of her time as a war correspondent, married an Egyptian, then an English art-collector and, bored witless, slumped into
alcoholism and artistic sterility.

Ballerina Suzanne Farrell and Russian choreographer George Balanchine played each other off in a dangerous platonic duet for decades, almost at the cost of Farrell's career.

Lou Andreas-Salome was a serial muse and the queen of power games; no fewer than three damaged geniuses — Nietszche, Rilke and Freud — were terminally besotted with her, and this was without sex.

Conspicuously absent here is the most famous of serial muses — Alma Mahler, who successively married composer Mahler, architect Gropius, and painter Kokoschka.

The prize for grossest muse-artist arrangement goes to mad, bad and dangerous Dali and Gala. Their self-aggrandising, calculating partnership reeked of dysfunction and greed. Amoral surrealist muse Gala became more twisted and sexually insatiable with age, while the younger but seriously disturbed Dali went on to produce the first deliberately commercial paintings of the 20th century. Utterly dependent on her dark spell, he signed his paintings Dali-Gala.

Then there are John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who competed for the artist position, resulting in creative and personal decay.

If you ever thought that being an artist or an artist's muse was romantic and glamorous, read this marvellous book and think again.

HarperCollins, $34.99

* Kapka Kasaabova's most recent book is Someone Else's Life.