THE LIVES OF THE MUSES
Nine Women & The Artists They Inspired
by Francine Prose
Harper Collins, 374 pages.
Reviewed by Marie Jordan

We live in a time when we are assailed with expose and smarmy underpinnings of anyone bearing a hint of fame or notoriety. We not only know the sexual sins of our heroes, we’re privy to their private bathroom habits, their dietary quirks, naughty obsessions and detailed psychological disorders reserved for the head scratching of the psychiatric helping professions. Francine Prose, in her new book, “The Lives of the Muses,” gives us yet another dose of the ignominy we’ve become accustomed to in popular media.

Don’t expect exciting tales of love and beauty here. In these nine muses’ lives we find enough material on lies, jealousies, alcohol and drug addiction, suicide, countless sexual infidelities, betrayals, phobias, disease, misuse of money, and madness for more than a few Jerry Springer productions. In none of the partnerships do we find anything in the least resembling the norm of mature, consenting, requited love between two adult heterosexual adults.

Of the nine muses in this new Francine Prose book, two were writers, four were artists. All but three had children. Each of the women was fraught with ambition and resented their roles as muses because they weren’t allowed to reach their own potential as artists. Most unfortunate were the women who made demands or (perish forbid!) grew old. The aging muse had but one recourse: to do the rejecting first by her own death or cunning, the latter being the choice of Gala Dali who seemed to relish inflicting cruelty on the mad Salvador.

The classic Greek definition of muse is a female of divine proportion whose sole purpose is to inspire great art in a man. In the case of Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) the author of "Alice in Wonderland," the muse was a child of seven. Dodgson adored more than one child muse and photographed hundreds of little girls, many in the nude. His reputation, along with Ruskin who shared his love of little girls, was at best, shaky.

The nine women in Francine Prose’s book have little in common with the classic Greek muses Clio or Melpomene, or say Patriarch’s imaginary Laura, or Dante’s pubescent Beatrice, or Shakespeare’s dark lady, Milton’s unnamed angel. The unfortunate women in "The Lives of the Muses" demonstrate no angelic, divine qualities, for the Greek muses never grew old, never changed their hair or got fat and grouchy, never became drug addicts, threw up on the rug, or reinvented themselves. A muse, by the old cherished definition, must be immutable, must not shift from the divine to the human by outgrowing her sacred obligation to the work and comfort of her artist.

The women in this book are human, not mythical, not to be admired or envied, and in the case of little Alice Liddell, we see the naiveté of a child in 1858 easily charmed by the imagination of a charismatic story teller, thus transforming her into less the idealized muse than dumb prey.

The poet, Ranier Maria Rilke, wrote to his muse Lou Andreas-Salomé, who was also muse to Nietzsche and Wagner plus others, "I want to see the world through you; for then I shall not be seeing the world but only you, you, you! I have never seen you without thinking that I should like to pray to you[!] ..."

The lives of the nine muses here spanned from the eighteenth century to the present. Each muse’s task was to sprinkle her man (or men) "with the fairy dust of inspiration." The muse who took on the adult, though mundane, chores of mother, cook, housekeeper, manager, agent, bodyguard, negative cataloger, canvas stretcher and the like, was dethroned. To become wife proved fatal. Even Yoko Ono with all of her seductive and fluxus powers, couldn’t maintain with certainty her goddess role as John Lennon’s wife. Equal partnerships are rare in musedom.

The muse reinforces a stereotype of the corruptible Stepford woman who is at once worshipped and humiliated. (No male muse appears in this book.) Written in a dry, informational style, the biographies of Alice Liddell, Hester Thrale, Elizabeth Siddal, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Gala Dalí, Lee Miller, Charis Weston, Suzanne Farrell and Yoko Ono range from unfortunate to tragic. These stories, which read like a newscast, of degeneracy, lunacy, pain, sorrow, betrayal, suffering and early death or miserable old age, convince the reader to conclude the relationship between muse and artist is perhaps the most hopeless and deadly of all human alliances.