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

Art With the Proper Stranger

Back when I was a college student, in the early 1970s — at a tiny school in Tacoma, Washington — one of my fellow English majors was a lady named Tina. Tina was older than the rest of us: a married woman in her thirties who had come back to school to finish her B.A. She was rosy, bodacious, slightly dim-witted, and the first full-blown nymphomaniac of my acquaintance. Whenever we studied a new author, her favorite post-lecture question — leeringly posed when our little all-female klatch of majors met for coffee after class — was inevitably: what do you think X would have been like to sleep with? No matter how unalluring (or unavailable) the writer in question might seem to be — we hit on everybody from the Beowulf poet to Truman Capote — Tina insisted that we put our minds to the subject. She was eager for our views. Sometimes, in a dire refinement of concupiscence, she would pose the question as a stark Kierkegaardian either/or: whom would you rather sleep with, Donne or Marvell? Byron or Keats? Arnold or Swinburne? Henry James or Henry Miller?

Though chaste at the time — and already tending to eccentricity — I would try to play along. Do the author and I get to "do it" at my place or his? If I choose Keats, will he already be suffering from T.B.? (Coughing up blood: a definite turn-off.) Can I ask Arnold to trim those hideous sideburns and stop parting his hair in the middle? Tina was our expert. But there was also a certain pathos about her. She wanted some Great Writer under her erotic sway; it didn't matter if he had been dead for four hundred years. She yearned to be a femme fatale, even if only via the pages of the Norton Anthology. She ended up having an affair with one of our professors — a brawny young Joyce scholar with a black beard and hippie hair who turned out, she wistfully confided to us, to be impotent with any woman other than his wife. The poor man (ahem, ahem, ghastly stage whisper) had been molested as a little boy by a Catholic priest! So that explained it. Though this was the first time — our knowing looks notwithstanding — we had ever heard of that.

I thought of Tina, stalker of men, while reading Francine Prose's new book about muses. As her brazenly post-feminist subtitle — Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired — suggests, Prose is magnetized by what it means to be a muse: a woman who by some unique combination of personal charms — physical beauty, emotional receptivity, intellectual passion, or sheer knock-'em-dead charisma — inspires a man of genius. What is the curious alchemy, Prose asks, between an artist and his muse? What strange psychic powers do certain larger-than-life females exert over brilliant and gifted men? In search of answers, she offers a series of case studies — nine potted "lives of the muses" intended to plumb the deeper mysteries "of Eros and creativity." Now this is a project that Tina would have adored, not least because Prose invariably takes up the sex question. Did the muse ever sleep with "her artist," and if so, what was it like? Never mind — as she is forced to acknowledge — that some of her nine ladies never did, or that about the others we will never know.

Eros-wise, and in lots of other ways, the "muses" fęted here make up an ill-assorted pantheon. First among them, unpredictably enough, is Hester Thrale, the witty, often waspish friend of Samuel Johnson. (Abrasive and unbeautiful, she hardly seems to fit the classic stereotype of the muse.) Thrale is followed by Alice Liddell, the unnerving Victorian ten-year-old who prompted Charles Dodgson to write Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Then, by giddy turns, come Lizzie Siddal, the laudanum-addicted, melancholic consort of the Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Lou Andreas-Salomé, the brainy Russian vamp idolized by Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud; Gala Dalí, bitch-goddess wife of the visionary, odious Salvador; Lee Miller, war correspondent, Vogue model, and onetime lover of Man Ray; Charis Weston, artist's helper and household drudge to the photographer Edward Weston; Suzanne Farrell, the enigmatic prima ballerina who captivated Balanchine; and last but not least, the redoubtable Yoko Ono, Fluxus artist, rock star, primal screamer, and much-maligned "Bed-In for Peace" partner of John Lennon.

The jumps from one Great Man-Muse couple to the next are dizzying, to say the least. (How often do you find Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the Plastic Ono Band discussed in the same book?) Yet the oddity of its juxtapositions notwithstanding, it is easy to see what Tina would have relished in Prose's venture: the relentless focus, half intellectual and half lubricious, on a certain kind of female sway. I mean the kind that leaves men Enthralled and On Their Knees. From Thrale to Ono, each of Prose's "muses" is indubitably a killer babe. If you are interested in killer babes — or, better yet, if you are interested in becoming a killer babe — there is a great deal here to ponder.

Which is not to say that Prose is entirely upfront about what it means to be, as she puts it, a chronicler of "musedom." This is one of those books that pretends to a certain jadedness, even cynicism, about its subject. The mode is hip, knowing, worldly wise, unsentimental. One of Prose's guiding notions — put forth in a suave, emollient, and much too facile introduction — is that modern-day "muses" represent a bathetic come-down from the nine Muses of classical antiquity. The Greeks and the Romans worshipped their Muses as deities, Prose observes: to invoke the Muses was to draw upon the sacred sources of creativity itself. With the coming of Christianity, however, goddesses went out of fashion and artists had to seek inspiration in new and less exalted ways:

A vision of Jesus on the cross could inspire a great painting of the Crucifixion, but might put a bit of a damper on the erotic poet. There were no deities to oversee the lyric, the love song, the dance. Another source was needed, an alternate explanation for creativity — for what cannot be summoned at will and seems beyond the artist's control. Since a reversion to paganism was clearly out of the question, there was nowhere to go but down — from the divine to the mortal. And 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. Why does the artist write or paint? The artist must be in love. And so the troubadour's lady, the ideal unattainable object of courtly love, became the compromise candidate, positioned somewhere between the Virgin and an actual flesh-and-blood woman.

Over the centuries, Prose adds, these "earthly muses" have themselves been degraded. Since the Middle Ages, there has been a shift in Western culture from pristine, idealized angel-women — such as Dante's Beatrice — to conniving, in-your-face, monster-muses such as Gala Dalí, who stage-managed her husband's career as surrealist provocateur and resident art-world grotesque from the 1930s to the 1980s. It is Prose's notion that every epoch gets the muse it deserves, and in a period of soulless sexual exploitation, squalid celebrity cults, and frenzied self-promotion, someone like Gala embodies indeed the leaden Spirit of the Age.

Yet if modern-day muses don't quite match up to those of old, their lovers — including the strange minotaur-men whose lives and works Prose chooses to examine here — are not a particularly uplifting bunch either. Prose doesn't want us to think she romanticizes either men or heterosexuality, and she is quick to disparage the "geniuses" in her book who have treated their muses churlishly. Thus Edward Weston, a grim domestic tyrant who made the unfortunate Charis Weston slave away in his developing room inhaling toxic chemicals, is chastised for his emotional coldness and anal-retentive personality. Prose notes with revulsion that he was a "health nut" and vegetarian, liked to give himself enemas, and "always squatted to defecate." (Poor squatting defecators, one is tempted to opine: the last minority it is still OK to insult.)

John Lennon, unfaithful to Yoko and binging wildly on drink and drugs in the early 1970s, gets pegged as an infantile, self-involved buffoon. ("John sought solace and distraction at a nonstop Los Angeles party attended by an ever-changing cast of debauched rock and rollers, and by reporters eager to tell the world about the fallen Prince of Peace wearing a Kotex on his head and heckling the Smothers Brothers.") And the brickbats fall like rain on poor old Rossetti, who is savaged here as both a crummy artist (he could not draw, he picked dopey subjects) and a closet necrophiliac. He was a bit ghoulish, one must admit. After the young Elizabeth Siddal, his beautiful red-haired model-turned-wife, died of a laudanum overdose in 1862, he decided, as a tribute to her, to place in her coffin the only existing manuscript of his complete poems. While DG wept copiously, she (and it) were interred in London's Highgate Cemetery. A few years later, his grief having abated somewhat, he decided he needed the manuscript back and had her exhumed in order to retrieve it.

But neither does Prose want any guff from anybody about her great theme: what it is like to be a woman adored by a genius. She certainly has no time for dreary old feminists. Political objections to the "muse" topic are raised only to be quickly sidestepped or finessed. "Doesn't the idea of the muse," asks Prose in the introduction, playing her own devil's advocate, "reinforce the destructive stereotype of the creative, productive, active male and of the passive female, at once worshiped and degraded, agreeably disrobing to model or offer inspirational sex? Shouldn't the muse be retired for good, abolished along with all the other retro, primitive, unevolved sexist myths?" The answer is, well, erm, not exactly. Yes, Prose avers, we live in enlightened times: the demeaning sex roles of old, thankfully, no longer rule our lives. Women are now free to have "male muses" if they want them. Not only that, some people, mirabile dictu, now even have same-sex muses. "The lives of the muses repeatedly demonstrate," Prose suggests,

that such details as gender, physiology, and what is generally considered to be "normal" or "appropriate" heterosexual desire have little bearing on the alliance of Eros and creativity. Consider such unusual couples as Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell, or Gala and Salvador Dalí. History abounds in same-sex artists and muses — Diaghilev and Nijinsky, W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks — men and women who worked their inspirational magic often despite the additional strains and challenges of social censure and the need to keep their connection secret. Gertrude Stein's most appealing and accessible book was, after all, the putative "autobiography" of her loyal muse, Alice B. Toklas.

When it comes to pursuing such possibilities, however, Prose quickly veers away. Having nodded politely in the direction of Wystan and Chester, Gertrude and Alice, she instantly loses interest in same-sex muses. (After this single cameo appearance they are never mentioned again.) But neither can she get too excited about male muses. Having gamely posited the existence of such beings, she starts to backtrack. "There is probably no biological reason," she ventures, "why a man can't provide the elements of inspiration" — the energy, the passion, the mental stimulation — that "nurture" female creativity. (The comical "probably" here makes it suddenly seem a bit dubious. Might men's jaws be after all too prognathous, their backs too hairy and repulsive, for them to be truly nurturing? Drat that testosterone!) And when you get right down to it, viable male muses seem to be fairly thin on the ground. One of the few Prose can come up with is Denys Finch Hatton, the aviator-lover of the Danish writer Isak Dinesen. Visiting Dinesen on her Kenyan plantation, Finch Hatton would nod approvingly whenever the cagey baroness read bits of her work aloud to him. Such obligingness made for some nice moments, no question. But in extolling their peculiar on-again, off-again relationship (twice) as "luminous," a miraculous example of Sensitive Hunk Inspiring Great Woman Artist, Prose seems to have been dazzled by memories of Robert Redford — golden, begoggled, scrumptious — boinking Meryl Streep in the film version of Out of Africa.

True, Prose sometimes tries to beat the feminists at their own game. Contemplating the Farrell-Balanchine and Ono-Lennon pairings, she wonders why we never speak of Balanchine as Farrell's "muse" or of Lennon as Ono's. Both Farrell and Ono were accomplished women, she notes; each one was deeply and powerfully energized by her male partner. But once she gets to telling their life stories, such liberating thought-experiments do not count for much. Farrell will never shake the muse label, Prose asserts — and not simply because ballet itself "is still so firmly rooted in the aesthetic and the language of the past." Balanchine himself, of course, liked to speak of his favorite ballerinas as his muses; they were the source, he claimed, of all his inspiration. ("Woman is the goddess, the poetess, the muse," he liked to intone; "that is why I have a company of beautiful girl dancers. I believe that the same is true of life, that everything a man does he does for his ideal woman.") Farrell — along with everyone else — seems to have accepted this mumbo-jumbo without demur. (A recent video about her life and career is called Elusive Muse.) But Prose, too, gets swept away by the numinousness of it all. To see film footage of Farrell in Mozartiana or Don Quixote, she enthuses, is to witness "a degree of submission and faith generally available only to saints and martyrs." Farrell is the most paradoxical sort of muse: one who not only inspires but "embodies" the work of the genius. Yet her own genius is visibly sublimated, as she gives herself over, mind and body, to the "god-like" vision of the man plotting her movements.

In Yoko Ono's case Prose is more subtle, but the male-muse idea is again discreetly jettisoned. Prose seems not exactly to grasp what made Lennon one of the giants of twentieth-century popular music, or how precious and powerful even his difficult, uneven, post-Beatles music must remain for anybody devoted to rock and roll. (Wasn't this woman ever a Beatlemaniac?) She dismisses his late recordings as spacy, self-parodying, and inauthentic — effects attributable, supposedly, to his clownish willingness "to play Ike Turner to [Ono's] Tina" and to having "carpet-bombed his ego with opiates, speed, and psychedelics." But she cares even less for Ono's work. Prose may be right to complain that Ono's ululant vocals on the albums that she and Lennon made in the 1970s often sound more like "yowling" than singing — Yoko's musical talents were perhaps more hallucinated than real — but her rancorous view of Ono's drawings, films, and sculptures (currently on view across the United States in a traveling retrospective sponsored by the Japan Society) is strikingly uncharitable. Ono's Fluxus work is "abrasive," "irritating," and "unabashedly narcissistic," Prose adjudges, and critics who like it, such as Arthur Danto and Michael Kimmelman, have simply gulped down a big dose of "Zen Viagra." Having seen the show this week, along with a few thousand other San Franciscans and their children — all of whom, it must be said, seemed delighted by Ono's playful inventions — I think that Prose is wrong. One can only conclude that by discrediting the work, Prose wishes to discredit the view of Ono as a "real" artist. And if Ono is not a real artist, or so the subliminal logic seems to go, then we don't need to worry about whether she had a male muse in John Lennon. Whatever he was — a gullible loon from Liverpool? — she was certainly a poseur.

I mention these perturbations over male muses because they are symptomatic of Prose's disinclination to rock the boat. She is not really that interested in male muses — let alone lesbian, transsexual, equine, feline, or canine muses (nothing here on J.R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip) — because she is far more invested in traditional heterosexual role-playing than she is willing to admit. Though the book's jacket copy grandly announces that Prose "[defies] the feminist stereotype of the muse as a passive beauty put on a pedestal and oppressed by a male artist," Prose is not fundamentally concerned with her muses' own creative lives. Far more compelling, in her view, is how each woman was "beautiful, sexy, or gifted with some more unconventional appeal" — some voodoo charm, presumably — that left her artist on fire with "an intensity of emotion akin to Eros." We are clearly meant to be awed by such world-historical witchery. "For these artists, the love of — or for — their muses provided an element essential for the melding of talent and technique necessary to create art." But one cannot help but notice that Prose ends up not-so-tacitly endorsing a view of female authority that is at once maudlin, reactionary, and in some cases (Yoko Ono, Charis Weston) wildly contemptuous.

Which brings us back to Tina, professors, and the Norton Anthology. Cynical gestures aside, what clearly excites Prose most is the spectacle of a great man brought low (preferably to the point of humiliation or nervous breakdown) by a supremely erotic female. Aggressive siren-power is the goddess whom Prose worships, and her muses are successes to the degree that they are able to mobilize their charms in a devastating assault on masculine aplomb. To each of them the question posed is: tell me, muse, how did you do that voodoo that you did so well? And, as their mini-bios confirm, the answer is always the same: I was too darn hot!

This obsession with female spell-weaving explains, more than anything else, the oddly scrambled group of "muses" on display here. Witness the unpromising Hester Thrale. Samuel Johnson, as even Prose has to admit, is not the sort of writer we usually think of as having had a muse. (If anyone was, it was probably James Boswell.) Johnson met Thrale fairly late in his career; and while it is true, as readers of Beryl Bainbridge's According to Queeney will know, that she and her brewer husband nursed him tenderly when he suffered a severe mental breakdown in 1765, it is a stretch to say, as Prose does here, that she must therefore have "inspired" Johnson's later works. Though witty in company, Thrale was often fractious and preoccupied at the time of their friendship, no doubt because she was constantly pregnant by her somewhat oafish spouse and ultimately bore him twelve children, eight of whom died in infancy. Why, then, include her?

The answer — as Prose cannot wait to tell us — is that in one of her diaries Thrale refers to a mysterious "padlock" supposedly entrusted to her in secret by the great man just before his death. Some Johnson scholars — noting an odd addendum in his private papers that reads "De pedicis et manicis insana cogitatio," or "Insane thoughts about leg irons and handcuffs" — have speculated that the two shared some kind of sadomasochistic relationship. This surmise is all it takes for Prose to leap to imagining full-blown bondage sessions between them, with Mrs. Thrale cast in the role of a powder-wigged Betty Page. Enough evidence exists, Prose claims, to "suggest that the vocabulary of confinement and slavery [in Johnson's letters] was neither metaphorical nor accidental." And she offers up some titillating tidbits from Thrale's diary of the 1770s: "'Says Johnson a Woman has such power between the Ages of twenty five and forty five, that She may tye a Man to a post and whip him if She will.'" In a marginal note, she added, "this he knew of him self was literally and strictly true I am sure." That winter, Hester wrote, 'How many Times has this great, this formidable Doctor Johnson kissed my hand, ay and my foot too upon his knees! Strange Connections there are in this odd World!'"

The point here is not so much to illuminate Johnson and Thrale's intellectual relationship, however interesting it may have been; it is to implicate them in a lurid triple-x "scenario" involving "high drama, loss of control, and restraint." Great Sam on his knees before Hester, it would seem, is a kind of artist-muse primal scene: the lascivious ur-image of male embarrassment that Prose will look for again and again — however oddly transmogrified — in all the pairings that she examines.

Just about every chapter in Prose's book turns — pruriently at times — on some episode of masculine abjection. In the section on Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell, we learn first, by way of warm-up, how deeply Carroll was seduced when his seven-year-old "child muse" posed for his famous photographic portrait of her as the little beggar girl. "The look on the beggar child's face is one we associate with intimacy: the unwavering focus an adult woman might turn on a husband or lover." Then came the celebrated "golden afternoon," when the shy Oxford don, boating with Liddell and her sisters on the river, became so intoxicated by Liddell's nymphet charms that he had to start writing Alice in Wonderland in a mad, masturbatory rush as soon as he got home. (Prose carps about those who label Carroll a pedophile, but her own voluptuous disquisitions on his photography make him sound like a nineteenth-century Jock Sturges.)

Lizzie Siddal wove her spell over Rossetti, according to Prose, by looking weird and freaky and lamia-like: Prose compares the red-headed milliner's "discovery" by the top Pre-Raphaelite Brother to "the Cinderella star-is-born arc later associated with movie stars plucked from their earthy origins (Lana Turner, Schwab's drugstore) and installed in the Hollywood firmament." In a somewhat more active vein, Lou Andreas-Salomé — Nietzsche's tormentor and Freud's "great understander" — played the role of ultra-intellectual cock-tease: her favorite ruse was to set two great men in competition with each other, then refuse to sleep with either of them. As one might expect, Prose is captivated by a celebrated joke photograph from 1882 in which Salomé, leering out from behind a fake pony-cart in a Swiss photographer's studio, waves a riding crop over the heads of Nietzsche and his friend the poet Paul Rée, both of whom were in love with her at the time. Forced to imitate a pair of depressed dray-horses, the men look utterly mortified, especially the droopy-mustached Nietzsche. While "bossy Lou" brandishes the whip, the great philosopher gazes off into the distance in a state of deepest über-doofus misery.

Prose is not clear what ghastly sexual noumenon Gala Dalí possessed, but it must have been considerable, because Salvador (as García Lorca exclaimed in shock when he heard the artist had fallen in love with her) had until then been exclusively homosexual and could "only get an erection when someone [stuck] a finger up his anus!" Charis Weston, a lissome California teenager, managed to seduce the forty-eight-year-old Edward Weston while modeling nude for him: the sheer "erotic heat" between them made them "see their lives as a holy mission for which they [had] been divinely hand-picked and brought together." As for Yoko Ono — she of the Zen Viagra — she exerted such an exotic sensual pull on the hapless Lennon that there were "whispery accusations of witchcraft, rumors that the Lennons, in later years, did little to dispel by dabbling in Santeria, patronizing local botanicas and sketchy Colombian brujas."

Granted, in the chapter on Lee Miller — whose brilliant, scarifying photographs documenting the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1944-1945 she obviously admires — Prose makes an attempt, however briefly, to separate the woman and her accomplishments from the sex life of the muse. (Miller's chill, intransigent selfpossession — she was one of the first reporters into Bergen-Belsen — seems to cow Prose into discomfited respect.) But even here it is the sadistic way that Miller played the role of cold blonde love goddess to a series of infatuated male acolytes — Man Ray, Cocteau, Horst, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Roland Penrose — that really gets Prose going. She turns squirmy and triumphal, indeed, just thinking about Miller and Observatory Time — Man Ray's famous surrealist painting of a pair of giant female lips floating over the observatory in the Luxembourg Gardens. The "enormous, undulating lips" in the picture, she notes, were directly modeled on Miller's, "each lip resembl[ing] a body pressed against its mate." Man Ray was obsessed with the ball-busting Miller to the point of suicidal anguish, and sometimes he photographed her — as if in self-defense — made up like an "evil geisha." Prose rhapsodizes like a dreamy schoolgirl while recounting the artist's despair when Miller finally dumped him (after three years of "resolute" infidelity on her part) in 1932: "Man Ray reworked the canvas until 1934 — to get the lips just right. In the lives of the muses, little equals the heartbreaking, operatic excess of a depressed, suicidal artist spending two years of his life painting, rubbing out, and repainting the mouth of the muse who had abandoned him."

So goes the life of a muse and her plaything. There is a kind of just-between-us-gals oohing and ahhing in all of this — a compensatory glee over just how delightful being a muse can be. Sexual power, however transitory, is presumed to make up for any loss of self-esteem that a woman might feel at being reduced, if only by a disgruntled lover, to a pair of blimpish red lips. (Each time Prose referred, gossip-columnist-style, to a given muse and "her artist" — she does so fairly often — I found myself thinking mournfully of Chandra Levy boasting to her aunt over the telephone about "her man." He was buff for his age — at least according to what I read in The National Enquirer — and keen on motorcycle riding.) Being all-star booty is exciting, Prose implies, even if it doesn't last long or if you end up dead or in a mental hospital. If forced to choose between being Rose Beuret, Rodin's faithful housekeeper-turned-wife of many years, or Camille Claudel, the glamorous lover-rival who after her affair with him went mad and spent the rest of her days in a lunatic asylum, who would not — Prose asks pointblank — choose to be the sexy Camille?

I make The Lives of the Muses slightly more silly-sounding than it is, even if it is hard to imagine Dick Cheney taking time off from affairs of state to ponder whether he would rather be Rose Beuret or Camille Claudel. Prose is always an amusing writer, and especially if you are unfamiliar with the tumultuous personalities described herein, you will find a lot to entertain. (The chapters on Liddell, Farrell, and Ono are particularly absorbing, even when one disagrees with Prose's conclusions.) But as far as delving into "the mysteries of Eros and creativity" goes, the book is strictly a Lives of the Muses Lite. Indeed, perhaps even because of the fixation on libidinal themes, it may prompt a deeper kind of readerly mutiny — one having nothing to do, finally, with men and women or their sex lives.

Prose believes in muses, of course: why else write about them? But one might reasonably ask if such beings have ever existed at all — at least in the way we like to imagine them. One of the most unsettling things about the Muses of antiquity, as Prose notes in her introduction, is how fantastically cruel they were to those luckless mortals stupid enough to try to rival them. In one old story, when the bard Thamyris boasted about his singing and lyre playing, the Muses promptly challenged him to a music contest, then blinded him and took away his memory when he lost. After losing a similar competition, the proud Pierides, the singing daughters of Pierus, got turned into a flock of magpies. And when the satyr Marsyas bragged that he could play the flute better than Apollo, the Muses — as Titian's terrifying painting commemorates — sentenced him to be tied to a tree and skinned alive.

These grisly Muse-doings, Prose concludes with a little shrug, show that "sadly, as is so often the case, art failed to make the Muses nicer." But the ancient fables may also suggest more painful truths. What such stories intimate, quite baldly, is that far from being the helpful or inspiring presences we usually assume them to be, the Muses are in fact jealous, mean, and obstructing — hostile forces deeply inimical to human self-expression. Instead of rewarding the artist, they punish him. To challenge them at their own game is to perish.

The myths of the Muses hint that in fact there may be a profound sentimentality in our conception of the artistic process itself — in our belief that creativity "comes from" or can be "nurtured" by someone else. Might not true creativity depend, rather less comfortably, on getting away from the influence of other people, on blocking out other people and the various psychic obstructions and inhibitions that they represent? The Muses, in this view, would be merely mythic stand-ins for all those individuals in our lives who try to stop art: jealous parents and siblings, ambivalent lovers and spouses, mediocre teachers and contemptuous rivals, philistine readers and reviewers — all the inane, stultifying embodiments of tradition, morality, "family values," and the good of the state. We have to get away from them or we will die.

The poet's traditional "invocation" to the Muses would take on a new meaning in this context, becoming more of a ruse — a kind of propitiatory scam: I'll pay lip service to you if you leave me alone and let me do my work. Invoking the Muses would be a way of outwitting — and outliving — them. The Muses, after all, are pretty dumb. Give them a compliment and perhaps they will go away and start beating up on someone else.

This is not to say that another human being cannot model the process of getting free and making art, or show one, like a good coach, how to begin breaking loose from one's own customized set of psychic fetters. But the person who models the freedom of art is typically someone with whom one is not deeply intimate. More often than not, it is someone at a distance, with whom one does not share (contrary to Prose's view) "an intensity of emotion akin to Eros." According to this way of thinking, Picasso's principal inspirations were Velázquez, Manet, Cézanne, and Matisse, not Olga Kokhlova, Fernande Olivier, Jacqueline Roque, and Dora Maar.

We love the idea that art grows from an intimate (and usually sexual) alliance between a man and a woman — perhaps because we are, as human beings, created thus. But it may be that at the deepest and harshest level art is a work of singularity and solitude. The artists in Prose's book may have created not because of their muses but in spite of their muses. The kind of muse whom Prose describes, after all, is supremely replaceable. Had Alice Liddell never been born, there would undoubtedly have been another little Oxford girl for Lewis Carroll to photograph and swoon over; had Lou Andreas-Salomé stayed in Russia, Rilke would still have composed the Duino Elegies; had Suzanne Farrell never made it to New York, George Balanchine would yet have found such gifts, uncannily embodied, in someone else. Miraculous as it seems, creative genius always finds what it needs, even in the most dull, untoward, or impoverished circumstances.

And perhaps this is why discussions about male muses versus female muses and so on always seem so pious or pointless: there is something just plain wrong with the muse idea itself. Creative people, it is true, often say nervous, self-abnegating, pseudo-reverential things about the sources of their inspiration. Asked how he wrote his poetry, Philip Larkin would speak gloomily of "the Management upstairs." The best-selling romance writer Barbara Cartland couldn't do a thing, she claimed, without divine help: "I say a prayer and God gives me a plot immediately. I write almost as if it was dictated by him." But such comments seem more like superstitious feints than accurate reporting. As most writers and artists know, art erupts when you fly in the face of divine beings — when you start mocking and jeering, deep down inside yourself, at your own Very Important People. It has little to do with who you sleep with, or indeed with the people you love most painfully or passionately. It's strictly a matter of do-it-yourself — shut the door, sit down, unplug the phone, and get on with it.

• Read more about this book

Try four weeks of the New Republic Digital absolutely free For nearly 90 years, the New Republic has provided its readers with an intelligent and rigorous examination of American politics, foreign policy, and culture. Today, we're proud to offer a faster, easier, and more economical way to enjoy the magazine — TNR Digital. Subscribe today and we'll give you 4 weeks absolutely free. That's less than 36 cents/week for every word of content available in the print version, a downloadable replica of the print magazine, and an array of special online-only features! Click here to sign up.