8 September 2016
Fading Icons – We Are Not A Muse
Where should we look for inspiration?
by J.R.Thomas
It’s one of those stories that probably isn’t true, but should be. Leonard Cohen, writing his first album in New York whilst his great love, muse, and inspiration, Marianne, was in the Cohenesque paradise of Hydra, came up with lyrics that to those of us who lived the joys and pains of life in the last quarter of the twentieth century are so evocative of painful endings. “So Long, Marianne, it’s time that we began to laugh and cry…” echoes the ballad that has marked so many break-ups that it would be laughable mush if it were not so beautiful. But Cohen has said (or is alleged to have said) that it was never intended to begin “So Long Marianne…”; the intent was “Come On, Marianne…”, a rallying cry for a relationship struggling through distance and creative stress. But a hit beginning “Come On…” had already charted whilst Cohen was writing his comforting words to his muse, and so Cohen ended up accidentally writing a goodbye song. Marianne heard it, misinterpreted it, and left.
Whatever the truth, Marianne, who died last month, was certainly one of the great inspirations of modern times, a muse for a hippy world. Cohen met her, the daughter of a traditional Norwegian family, whilst she was on Hydra with her husband, a Norwegian novelist (plus, less romantically, her baby son), and for ten years she inspired Cohen’s poetry and music. Her photograph appears on album covers; she was constantly by his side as he rose from being a penniless poet to a music icon; she was, said Cohen “the most beautiful woman he ever saw”. The perfect muse in fact, almost on a par with Jane Burden, a beautiful girl from a humble background taken up as a model by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, later inspiring (and marrying) the more reliable and well set up William Morris, then becoming again Rossetti’s lover, and later still that of Wilfred Scawen Blunt. A triple muse in fact, and one who also inspired a Pre-Raphaelite belief that only dreamy red-heads could feature in the best paintings.
Muses and even triple muses have not been confined to music and art – Robert Lowell, the Bostonian poet, was the third man to be inspired by the radiantly beautiful Lady Caroline Blackwood, daughter of a great Anglo-Irish aristocratic family, who also provided muse services to the painter Lucian Freud and the pianist Israel Citkowitz, Lady Caroline being not only brazenly cross-sector in the aesthetic world but also marrying all three of them. Marriage seems to be the big hazard of a muse’s life, inevitably going wrong; all of Lady Caroline’s marriages ended in various degrees of unhappiness (though, it should be said, she inspired extraordinarily powerful work in each man). Perhaps then it is better to stick to being an inspiration, to be chased and cherished and sighed over, not to be regarded over the breakfast table or argued with over who is to pick the kids up from school. Lady C, it should also be said, was a considerably talented writer; her Great Granny Webster is a short, brilliant, joyful riff on families and death.
Also recently deceased is a muse of a different sort, John Woolford, born Wulff Scherchen in 1920 in Weimar Germany. Wulff, son of a conductor, met the 20 year old composer Benjamin Britten in Florence in 1934. A friendship grew up between them which became intense, though how intense we do not know. Certainly he seems to have been a considerable inspiration to Britten in the late 1930’s as Britten’s career began to take off, being the source of Britten’s ideas for “Young Apollo”. Scherchen and his family came to London to escape the SS, only for Wulff to be arrested as a potential enemy alien and sent to Canada. When he finally was able to return to England in 1942 he found that Britten had moved on in his inspirations. Wulff got over it, married, and had a long and happy family life with four children, dying at the age of 96. He kept sporadically in touch with Britten, but seems not to have inspired him further.
So, where are the muses of today? Do our great creative talents still need the inspiration, the distraction, the maddening contemplation of a modern muse? Do they still need to be aroused by that so sensual and defiant cast of the perfect chin, fight down the near nausea of extreme jealousy, burst with gratitude at the unexpected visit and soft words? We live in an age when doting by either sex upon the other is somewhat frowned upon, where relationships are independent and self-guiding, where worship of the other is decidedly uncool (especially if the party of the male part is of considerably maturer years than the party of the female part – and even more so if the female party is under twenty years of age). The role of muse, if it is to drive the artistic one to their best work, to throw the very essence of their soul onto the canvas, or paper, or into the pulsing laptop, is to be much more than just a lover. It is to be a sacred object of desire, there but never fully obtainable, surrendering only a small part of themselves, perfect, yet in the muse’s flighty and wide ranging spirit, flawed. None of this chimes with modern times. Wide-ranging moral compasses some of us might have, but the willingness to sit and listen to the artistically inspired gush and goggle whilst they wield brush or tinker on the piano for hours on end, seems to have departed potential muses; they prefer time in Harvey Nicks or playing on-line action games.
In doing my research for this piece I asked a small sample of arty types if they had, or had ever had, or even felt the need of, a muse. One painter doubted that as a depicter of primarily industrial decay and pollution a muse would add much, nor be willing to provide much musing in the rather robust and dirty places of their endeavors. The writer felt a muse would be an awful distraction from the close attention he needed to pay to his keyboard and thesaurus, and in any case, he doubted whether his wife would stand for it. Another artist (male) said that he had once employed a model (female) whom he began to feel was driving him to work of remarkable strength. But in the end her obsession with both her trade (hairdressing) and her requirement for prompt payment in cash for each session rather undermined the inspirational benefits, leaving him with a number of unsaleable portraits.
Which does rather touch on a further difficulty in taking on a muse. Like the problem of modern aristocrats unable to afford the services of a hermit to haunt restored grottos, muses have a cost implication. Writers, the observant reader must have noted, are earning less than ever, with price wars raging in the publishing world. Poets cannot make anything at the game (the Ted Hughes days of the Devonshire old rectory are long gone), and one needs to be a bank manager or game-keeper or dispatch rider to have both income and time to compose sonnets. (Apologies to game-keepers and dispatch riders if this suggests a lack of application to the day job – bank managers can look after themselves.) There is a bit more money in painting and photography, so I understand, but not enough to defray the cost of retaining a person simply to be sighed over.
But maybe the modern art dealer, impresario or publisher is missing a trick in getting the best out of their stable of talent. If a company car and a company healthcare scheme, why not a company muse? I’ll just pop round to the editor and suggest an immediate appointment.
If you enjoyed this article please share it using the buttons above.
Please click here if you would like a weekly email on publication of the Shaw Sheet
