The Magician’s Assistant

Ancient Greeks had nine goddesses to explain the mystery of inspiration, each Muse mistress of her own branch of art. When Christianity displaced paganism, an alternate, mortal explanation for creativity was required. In “The Lives of the Muses,” Francine Prose, many of whose novels focus on obsessive relationships, investigates passion as a major source of artistic inspiration.

Prose acknowledges that few artists today outside fashion houses and dance companies have muses and observes, “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.” Yet she is fascinated by the complex, often obsessive dynamic between artists and their muses. She explains, “ ... since falling in love is the closest that most people come to transcendence, to the feeling of being inhabited by unwilled, unruly forces, passion became the model for understanding inspiration.”

Her title, “The Lives of the Muses,” echoes Samuel Johnson’s “The Lives of the Poets.” Prose profiles nine women who inspired artists, ranging from Johnson’s longtime friend Hester Thrale to John Lennon’s “muse-witch,” Yoko Ono. Like Phyllis Rose’s portraits of five Victorian marriages, “Parallel Lives,” “The Lives of the Muses” is a study of couples. It is a thoroughly researched, highly opinionated series of fascinating double biographies that charts some of the multivariate forms partnerships--and love--can take. What it doesn’t do is clarify the mystery of inspiration, even as it relates to passion. Though Prose identifies various commonalities among her carefully selected group, she leaves us convinced that inspiration--like passion--is quirky, highly individualistic and often ineffable.

By limiting her selection to nine, Prose has made some tough exclusions. Among the absent are Alma Mahler, Zelda Fitzgerald and all of Picasso’s mistresses. Some might quibble with her choices. It can be argued, for example, that Kiki de Montparnasse or Juliet Man Ray were greater influences on Man Ray than Lee Miller.

Prose acknowledges the sexism inherent in the supportive role of muses and wryly comments, “Certainly, feminism has made us rethink musedom as a career choice.” She briskly dismisses men as being socially unsuited for musedom, more “psychiatric nurses like Leonard Woolf.” Yet surely women artists have been fired by passion, and men, wittingly or not, have served as their inspiration. She mentions but doesn’t dwell on same-sex muses such as Sergei Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky, and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Wife-muses also get short shrift. She cites the “downward slide from an exalted goddess to the more human, unenviable and inglorious role of helpmate and art wife” that Charis Weston took: from posing nude on Oceano beach to labeling slides. “Except in extremely rare cases--Gala Dali’s, for example--tenure is not an option in the careers of the muses,” she concludes.

Why? Because, as Prose so glaringly documents--in her novels too, including “Blue Angel”--passion is short-lived, one of the least sustainable emotions. Also, “the power of longing is more durable than the thrill of possession.” Two of the four muses who married their artists--Weston and Lizzie Siddal--suffered mightily. Most tragic was Siddal, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s pre-Raphaelite stand-in for Dante’s Beatrice, who died of opium addiction. Prose is tough on both Rossetti and Edward Weston, surprisingly critical not just of their egoism but of their art, and she defends their muses with somewhat anachronistic feminist indignation.

Muses who pointedly asserted their independence by having affairs and marrying others fared little better. Johnson repudiated Hester Thrale when she married her daughter’s Italian voice coach, and George Balanchine banished Suzanne Farrell and Paul Mejia from his New York City Ballet Company after they wed. In her disappointingly leaden chapter on Lou Andreas-Salome, Prose shows how the Russian-born “seeker of truth,” who inspired first Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and then Rainer Maria Rilke, maintained the upper hand in her relationships by refusing to settle down. Her platonic marriage to Friedreich Carl Andreas, a linguist, left her available for multiple attachments, including an intellectual bond with Sigmund Freud, who called her “the great understander.”

Eros is a powerful undercurrent in the muse-artist connection, and most of Prose’s muses were sexually liberated women unfettered by convention. Gala Dali was married to the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard when she met Salvador Dali, the neurotic, homosexual painter with whom she ended up having a 53-year marriage punctuated by countless affairs on both sides. Weston, who at 19 was no sexual novice, discovered true passion in her “high heat” relationship with 48-year-old Edward Weston. These intimations of intimacy, of course, provide juicy reading. The biographical revelations, however, are more compelling than Prose’s attempts to link longing for the woman in question to the artist’s creative development. Many of her artists made their name long before these muses arrived on the scene, and continued to produce definitive work long after they departed.

One of Prose’s most compelling subjects is Farrell, who, because of her Catholicism, the 43 years that separated them and a wily instinct for self-preservation, refused to become Balanchine’s mistress or fifth wife. Prose’s admiration for Farrell’s ability not only to inspire the brilliant choreographer but to excel as an artist herself animates this tale. Who was whose muse here?

Admiration also enriches Prose’s chapter on the photographer Miller, “perhaps the most heroic, inventive, and determined of the muses.” Miller, a blond American beauty, was Man Ray’s apprentice, model and lover for three years. Her lips are the beguiling red cushions that float through the sky in Ray’s “Observatory Time: The Lovers,” and her lavishly lashed eye adorns the metronome in his “Object to Be Destroyed,” both completed after she left Ray to open her own studio in 1932.

Fashion was Miller’s bread and butter. But according to Prose, the restless Miller flourished as a photojournalist during World War II, documenting the Normandy invasion and the liberation of Buchenwald for Vogue. Prose makes an ardent case for the magnificence of Miller’s war pictures but leaves one wishing for visual backup.

Occasionally, Prose’s visual interpretations read like satires of critic-speak. For example, she ends hundreds of words on Lewis Carroll’s portrait of Alice Liddell with this over-the-top assessment: “Indeed, the photo of Alice as the beggar child is a devotional picture, a retablo commemorating a Victorian miracle. In the depth and fervor of its barely concealed passion, it evokes Flemish and Italian Renaissance art, those swooning saints, Sebastian, Theresa, apparently unconscious of the eroticism of their ecstatic postures.”

Animosity can be as much a driving force as passion, and it is the spark that ignites Prose’s last profile. Few muses have been as vilified as Yoko Ono, blamed for the breakup of the Beatles and the dilution of John Lennon’s talent. Prose is deliciously vicious about Ono’s influence on Lennon’s last albums. In her view, even Ono’s autonomy as an artist can’t redeem her sorry performance as a muse because Ono’s art is “annoying” and “irritating” art, which she hastens to add is not the same as disquieting or discomforting. “Daily life provides enough friction without seeking more in high culture,” she comments on Ono’s “Cough Piece.”

Throughout “Muses,” many of Prose’s bolder assertions are flagged by the word “if.” We’re prepared, therefore, for a resounding conclusion when she climaxes her Ono attack: “If, as Kafka suggested, art is an ax with which to break up the frozen sea within us, Ono’s art suggests that the water is colder than we’d thought.” Prose’s stimulating study has a welcome warming effect.

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From ‘The Lives of the Muses’

The desire to explain the mystery of inspiration, to determine who or what is the ‘moving cause’ of art, resembles the impulse to find out a magician’s secrets. It’s a childish, suspect desire; we fear the truth will spoil the fun. Doesn’t the mystery add to our delight? Still, it’s human nature to want to see through the sides of the box in which the magician’s assistant is being sawed in half, or into the mind of the poet at the instant when the sonnet appears in all its neonatal glory.... To create anything is to undergo the humbling and strange experience--like a mystical visitation or spirit possession--of making something and not knowing where it comes from. It’s as if the magician had no idea how the rabbit got into his hat.