Francine Prose's 1981 novel Household Saints in 1993 was made into a movie starring Tracey Ullman.

The Lives of the Muses:Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired

Harper/Collins, 2002; 410 pages; $25.95

FROM THE DUST JACKET: In a brilliant, wry, and provocative new book, Francine Prose explores the complex relationship between the artist and his muse. In so doing, she illuminates the elusive emotional wellsprings of the creative process.

There is no ideal muse, but rather as many variations on the theme as there are individual women who have had the luck, or Francine Prose misfortune, to find their destiny conjoined with that of a particular artist. What are we to make of the relationship between the child Alice Liddell, who inspired Alice in Wonderland, and the Oxford don who became Lewis Carroll? Or the so-called serial muse, Lou Andreas-Salome, who captivated Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud — as impressive a list as any muse can boast? Salvador Dali was the only artist to sign his art with his muse’s name, and Gala Dali certainly knew how to market her artist and his work while simultaneously burnishing her own image and celebrity.

Lou, Gala, and Yoko Ono all defy the feminist stereotype of the muse as a passive beauty put on a pedestal and oppressed by a male artist. However, it’s rare to find an artist and muse who are genuine partners, true collaborators, such as ballerina Suzanne Farrell and choreographer George Balanchine.

What do the nine muses chosen by Francine Prose have in common? They were all beautiful, or sexy, or gifted with some more unconventional appeal. All loved, and were loved by, their artists, and inspired them with an intensity of emotion akin to Eros. For these artists, the love of — or for — their muses provided an essential element required for the melding of talent and technique necessary to create art.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Francine Prose was brn in 1947 in New York. She grew up in Brooklyn, where she attended the Brooklyn Friends School. Her mother was a dermatologist and her father a pathologist.

On the day that we talked — morning in California and early afternoon in New York — Ms. Prose said, about her parents, “They would both come home and talk about the cases they’d seen that day." She added, “My father worked in the morgue in Bellevue. His office was right next to the morgue. And in the summer of my sophomore year in high school, when I was 15, he gave me a summer job in the morgue. 1 heard the stories of every grisly murder. So it was great, great training for a writer. I’m sure my father would have rather I became a doctor, but that’s not how it worked out.” (Ms. Prose’s only sibling, a brother, is a doctor.)

I asked what Ms. Prose read when she was a child.

She laughed. “I liked all sorts of things. I was thinking about this the other day. I liked those big historical novels. I liked James Michener and I liked Gone with the Wind. I liked essentially anything that I could lose myself in. As I got older my taste improved, but essentially it stayed the same in the sense that I want to be taken over by a book. 1 want my attention to be totally drawn into what I’m reading.”

Ms. Prose graduated from Raddiffe College, where she majored in medieval English literature. She started graduate school in the English department at Harvard and then gave up on acquiring a graduate degree. (“I hated it,” Ms. Prose told another interviewer. “The thought of moving to the other side of the table and becoming like my professors was horrifying.”)

Ms. Prose is the author of 13 works of fiction, including Big-foot Dreams, Household Saints, Hunters and Gatherers, Primitive People, Guided Tours of Hell, and the National Book Award finalist Blue Angel. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Harper's Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, and Paris Review. The recipient of numerous grants and awards, including Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, Francine Prose was a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Sewanec Writers’ Conference, and Johns Hopkins University. Ms. Prose lives in Greenwich Village with her husband, the painter Howard Michels. The couple has two grown sons.

A CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR: Francine Prose’s newest book has delighted reviewers. Certainly, I was happy with her smart introduction to “muse-ology” and the nine muse minibiographies and Ms. Prose’s discussion of the original nine muses. About the latter, she writes, “Were the nine goddesses born in sequence or in a litter like puppies? Were they the result of one act of love or of a nine-night affair between the amorous Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory? The muses’ birth order may be unclear, but their lineage is inspired. Mate the life force with a sense of the past, and what you get is a culture. In Hesiod’s poem, ’Theogony,’ the nine muses appear to the poet and his fellow shepherds as they tend their flocks in the fields and tell them that without art and history, men are, essentially, bellies.”

What surprised me, when I read reviews of Ms. Prose’s book, was that no reviewer mentions how funny a writer Ms. Prose is (although her wit was noted in reviews of her last novel. Blue Angel, whose setting was academia and plot engine sexual harassment). I laughed out loud when I read that “Some muses, like Lou Andreas-Salome, Alma Mahler, and Vera Stravinsky, operate serially, progressing from genius to genius.” I laughed again when I read that many muses “concerned themselves with what their lovers ate. Lou had Rilke dining on groats and combing the forest for nuts and berries, Lee Miller put Man Ray on a bizarrely restrictive diet, Yoko introduced John to the joys of a strict macrobiotic regimen.”

“Hardly anyone,” Ms. Prose said, “has noticed that the book is funny.”

(Prose recently told another interviewer that she greatly admires “comic masters like Philip Roth and the late Stanley Elkin.”)

She added, “Most of the writers whom I admire used humor in their work. Shakespeare was funny. So was Chekhov. Beckett was hilarious.”)

I said, “I thought, as I read your book, that men have muses and women have this awful thing called the ‘men-tor.’ ”

I easily could imagine that Ms. Prose shuddered as she said, “Men-tor. Isn’t it a horrible word? Women get mentors, or, as happened with Virginia Woolf, they arc given male psychiatric nurses. It remains to be seen, as there are more and more women artists and women writers, maybe the tables will turn. Maybe there will be more male muses. 1 don’t know. But the mentor really is a different idea of inspiration, isn’t it?”

“It is odd,” I said. “The mentor teaches.”

“And sort of‘facilitates,’ but that’s quite different from providing the spark of inspiration.”

Ms. Prose writes in the book’s introduction, “We have, as a culture, reached the point at which nearly anything — geography, ambition, expensive tastes, an abusive childhood, poverty — seems a more probable motivation for making art than the promptings of longing or love.... Hunger — the wolf at the door — has had a long and brilliant career as muse.... And there is always debt.”

I asked Ms. Prose about this extension of inspiration. She said, “Everyone who’s ever written or painted or tried to knows that it can come from anywhere. One of my sons is a musician, and he talks about how you walk down the street, and you hear a jackhammer going a certain way, and that can be an inspiration.” “For artists — writers, painters, composers, whatever — the need for money,” I said, “can serve as muse.”

“Of course. Are you kidding? The need for money worked for Balzac, and it worked for Dostoyevsky. Balzac was a big shopper, and Dostoyevsky had those gambling debts.”

Some among the males who find themselves dazzled by a muse seem, I said, to suffer from fatal attraction.

Ms. Prose did not disagree. “Lifelong,” she said, “all-consuming, incredibly romantic — it kept them going. Whatever keeps you going. I think that most of these stories arc passionate and essentially unhappy love stories. And that seems to be part of what inspired these guys to do what they were doing.”

The late Lady Caroline Blackwood (1931-1996) is a perfect example of the “serial muse.” She first married painter Lucien Freud, then composer Israel Citkowitz, and finally poet Robert Lowell (Lady Caroline’s last husband attracted artistic women; his first wife was Jean Stafford, his second was Elizabeth Hardwick). Between husbands. Lady Caroline entranced artistic lovers. She was the model for Freud’s Girl in Bed and was addressed in Lowell’s "The Dolphin," which Lowell dedicated to her. When a fatal heart attack felled Lowell in a New York taxicab, the poet was clutching the Girl in Bed canvas. I asked Ms. Prose how she passed up Lady Caroline.

“Someone,” Ms. Prose said, “was working on a biography [Nancy Schoenbergcr, whose Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood was published in 2001]. But, also, my late editor, Robert Jones, was Caroline Blackwood’s literary executor. So 1 thought I would rather stay out of that whole thing.”

Lou Andreas-Salome (1861-1937) certainly qualifies as a serial muse (in his admirable and pleasure-giving Reading Rilke, William Gass writes of Lou that she “seduced and abandoned with migratory regularity”). Lou served — unintentionally, one thinks — as inspiration to Nietzsche (who begged her to marry him), Rilke (who died thinking of her), and Freud (who, when Lou failed to attend one of his lectures, confessed that he had aimed his remarks at her empty chair).

“Boy,” said Ms. Prose about Lou, “did she have a knack for picking guys that were going to go somewhere!”

Literary gossip has it that the 22-year-old Rainer Maria Rilke may have lost his virginity to the 36-year-old Lou, who made two journeys to Russia with the then-fledgling poet. But as to whether young Rainer was a virgin when he and Lou began their passionate three-year affair, Ms. Prose said, “It’s hard to know. It seems that way, but who can tell? She certainly turned his head around, that’s for sure. She treated him so badly. That famous kiss-off letter of hers...”

Ms. Prose writes that in February 1901, Lou, wearied by young Rilke’s dependency and general nuttiness, wrote him a letter she called her “last message” or “last appeal.” In this message, “Lou informed Rilke that his only hope lay in his work; he was simply too mentally ill for marriage; his whiny melancholia had turned her passion for him into ‘tragic guilt.’.... Meanwhile, Rilke should refrain from contacting her except in case of dire emergency.” Ms. Prose goes on to note, “Unhappily for Rainer, Lou’s analysis of his character and his destiny was all too accurate.”

Rilke wrote in The Book of Hours, after the breakup with his muse:

Put my eyes out: I can still see; slam my ears shut: I can still hear, walk without feet to where you were,

and, tongueless, speak you into being.

Snap off my arms: I'll hold you hard in my heart’s longing like a fist; halt that, my brain will do its beating, and if you set this mind of mine aflame,

then on my blood I’ll carry you

William Gass, whose translation the above is, notes in his Reading Rilke that “the poet is presumably addressing his god, but we know the divinity in question is actually Rilke’s quondam lover, Lou Salome.”

I said to Ms. Prose that, given what I’d read about Rilke and his romances, I couldn’t help but think he’d have made a wretched boyfriend.

Ms. Prose did not disagree. “Which one of the guys in this book would you have liked to have been romantically involved with? They were all a handful.”

“For sure,” I said, “I would not have wanted to have anything to do with that loathsome Dante Gabriel Rossetti.”

Rossetti’s poor little muse, Elizabeth Siddal, suffered mightily at the hands of the pre-Raphaelite poet and painter. Ms. Prose, rightly and brightly, notes that Rossetti “left an artistic legacy that speaks to its audience in the language of the gifted teenage contributor to the high school literary magazine,” adding that Rossetti’s “interior landscape was mired forever in adolescence.”

“What a story those two are,” Ms. Prose said, going on to refer to Siddal’s death from drug overdose and Rossetti’s subsequent ordering, seven years after the unfortunate woman’s death, her exhumation. Why Rossetti asked that Siddal’s body be exhumed was that, in a melodramatic gesture, he’d tossed into her coffin the manuscript of his poems. When he decided he wanted the manuscript back, he had the body dug up.

“He had second thoughts,” Ms. Prose said. “And then, whew, came the unsuccessful cleaning up of the manuscript — the soggy, worm-eaten pages.”

I asked, “Did you know that story of the exhumation before you began the muse book?”

“I’d heard it and then I’d forgotten it. When I was doing each of these chapters I was looking in each of them for a narrative quirk, really, an incident that seemed emblematic of the story. When I was reminded of that story about the exhumation, I thought, ‘Ah, that’s perfect. This is exactly what this story is about.’ ”

The next-to-last muse in Ms. Prose’s book is prima ballerina Suzanne Farrell, for whom George Balanchine created some of modem ballet’s masterpieces. I said to Ms. Prose that the relationship between Farrell and Balanchine seemed quite different from the relationships between Ms. Prose’s other muses and their artists. Why did Ms. Prose think that might be so?

“Well, Suzanne Farrell’s story was totally different from anybody else’s. She was the only one who really was a true collaborator. She permitted Balanchine to do things he couldn’t have done otherwise, because she was physically capable of doing things that none of the other dancers could do.

“When I was doing the final two chapters, the Suzanne Farrell and the Yoko Ono, I had videotapes, which was great. They were useful. Suzanne Farrell, as a dancer, was so different. She really kind of blew everybody else out of the water. Once she came along, Balanchine’s world could take a turn that it hadn’t been able to take before that, because she was completely different. And she was very, very self-determined.”

“The muse herself tells us something about the artist she inspires,” Ms. Prose writes. I asked her about this statement.

“Well, each one of these nine couples, each one of these love stories does seem made in heaven, although in some cases in a demonic way. All these couples, no matter how odd they were and peculiar, were perfect for each other. Among the things that these men were good at was finding the women who would give them precisely what they needed for their art and for their lives.”

In an interview Ms. Prose did some years ago with author Lydia Davis, Ms. Prose said, about inspiration, “I love when that happens when everything seems related to what you’re writing. It’s like everything has a little message that you’re being sent that will be useful to you someday. ‘Oh, look at the way that person holds that chicken drumstick; that’s what inspiration is.’ ”

When I read Ms. Prose her long-ago statement, she said, about that statement, “It’s true, it’s true. You know, actors are the most amazing that way because they’re watching all the time, and they’re categorizing how someone walks, how someone moves his hands, how someone holds his shoulder, how someone dresses. And it’s all useful to them. It’s all good. When they were making Household Saints into a movie [Ms. Prose’s 1981 novel Household Saints in 1993 was made into a movie starring Tracey Ullman], I met a bunch of actors. I would ask them, ‘How did you do that?’ or ‘How did you know how to do that?’ And I would hear amazing things from them.”

Ms. Prose writes, in the introduction to her study of Suzanne Farrell: “Perhaps we, as a species, have grown too old, too knowing and cynical to believe in the existence of an unrequited passion with the staying power to engender genius. Perhaps psychology has convinced us that the human psyche is too complex to derive something so tough and enduring as art from something so fragile and transitory as love; surely the roots of creativity are more likely to reach down into the shadowy history of the self, back to some unresolved question of sexuality, or an abusive childhood. And feminism has made us suspect the very idea of the muse as yet another passive, second-rate role to be foisted on women, an unsatisfactory substitute for the more primary satisfactions of making art of their own. Thus, to thank one’s muse, let alone to claim that one is a muse, has become the equivalent of admitting that one is an oppressor, or, alternately, a slave who loves her chains.”

I asked, “Were you ever anyone’s muse?”

“Not that I know of,” said Ms. Prose, laughing. “But, who knows how many poems or whatever are out there floating around? But certainly no one has ever said, ‘Oh, my God, you’re my muse.’ ”

I said that when one teaches writers, as Ms. Prose has, one must in a sense serve as these students’ muse.

“True. And also, because my husband is a painter, there are literally thousands of drawings and paintings of women who sort of look like me. So that must qualify.”

Ms. Prose wrote The Lives of the Muses during the year that she was a fellow at the New York City Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers.

“They bring together 15 scholars and writers and give them a year to spend in the library. You are given beautiful offices. The fellows draw lots for the offices. My office had a window, and my window looked straight down on the lions, so, really, it was heaven. You have access to all of the books in the library and enough money to live for a year and each other’s company. I loved it. It was one of the best years of my entire life. It was really good. Now, of course, that the funding for the library is drying up, the library is open one day less a week than it had been. So the Center is still open even when the library is closed but it’s sort of depressing.

“In my year there I got so much help from the other fellows — help translating Nietzsche’s letters from German, letters that hadn't been translated — and I got help from someone else, telling me about opium addiction. I got advice about music and information about pop culture. I got computer advice. I learned how to use Google.”