The intimidator

Virginia Woolf begat Susan Sontag, who begat Francine Prose. It’s not just about the writing; it’s about the uncompromising ferocity. Prose’s books -- 11 works of fiction, three of nonfiction -- strike, sometimes fatally, at the heart of modern life in a politically charged way. “Blue Angel,” her novel of two years ago, for example, took on the issue of sex between professors and their students.

Her new nonfiction work, “Lives of the Muses,” looks at the lives of nine women who are credited (not always by the artist himself) with inspiring such luminaries as Edward Weston, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Balanchine, John Lennon, Man Ray, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll). They are, with few exceptions, extremely colorful, tragic lives -- musedom, it seems, is fraught with soul-threatening dangers.

Prose, 55, looks like a cross between Woolf and Frida Kahlo, which perhaps adds to the impression of intellectual ferocity. She is tall and very thin, with dark eyes and eyebrows and long fingers that run nervously through her hair. She almost always wears black.

But here’s the conundrum: She is deferential, careful in her manners. She is a considerate listener. She laughs easily and goes out of her way to make her guest more comfortable. She is not mean about other writers, with a few off-the-record exceptions. At a recent literary event in New York, she joined two men deep in conversation. The minute she joined, one walked away and wandered over to a group that, unbeknownst to him, included Prose’s husband. “I just had to get away from that terrible woman,” he said to Prose’s husband.

“Withering,” “scathing”: These are words often used to describe her. “I know at least three people who think I’m a very nice person,” Prose says. “Women with strong opinions are extremely unpopular these days, with other women as well as men. There’s something threatening about female intelligence, something dangerous and volatile. I don’t want to sound smarmy, but women are still expected to look good and keep quiet.”

All of the women Prose wrote about were beautiful, from 10-year-old Alice Liddell, the inspiration for “Alice in Wonderland,” to Hester Thrale, muse to Samuel Johnson in the 18th century, to Charis Weston, much-abused muse to Edward Weston. Even Yoko Ono and Lou Andreas-Salome, serial muse to Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud. They were not traditional beauties but somehow seductive and compelling. “Beauty seems to work,” Prose says.

In “Lives of the Muses,” Prose warns about several of the mistakes a muse can make, particularly the transformation into “art wife.” “Tenure is not an option in the lives of the muses,” she writes. They should not allow themselves to be domesticated and they should not demand credit. So what did they get? “These women were able to make exciting lives for themselves in times when women were hardly influential.”

Much of the book is driven by images: Dodgson’s photograph of a young Alice Liddell as a beggar child, in which she looks seductively at the camera with her dress falling from a cocked shoulder; Weston’s creepy 1943 photograph of wife Charis, in which she stands naked outside his studio holding a sign that says “Edward Weston, Carmel, Ca.” These images speak volumes of the varying roles of the muse. Young Alice is confident, looking for all the world like the puppeteer who pulls the artist’s strings, while Charis Weston is fully humiliated.

Prose is frequently criticized for her opinions. She raised some hackles with her negative review of a book by Helen Bransford, Jay McInerney’s then-wife, about face lifts. For “Muses,” she has been criticized for her low opinion of Rossetti, which one reviewer claimed was proof of her secret feminist leanings. “What really bugged me about him,” says Prose, “was that his paintings were not that great and Lizzie Siddal, who ended up an opium addict while he moved on to the next muse, was completely sacrificed to his mediocre talent.

“Everyone wants to be the famous artist,” she says. “No one wants to be the muse.”

On the other hand, Prose does not believe that Charles Dodgson was a pedophile, as so many feminists have alleged. “ ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is a stunningly sharp and beautiful book,” she says.

Her rabble-rousing pieces for Harper’s magazine, including a recent piece questioning the importance of Maya Angelou’s poetry, have also earned her a bit of acrimony among the literati.

They may be afraid of her, but she’s not afraid of them. “Frankly, who cares? What can they do to me? I have a great family life,” she says. Her two sons, 20 and 24, are successful and funny, she says. Her husband is a painter, illustrator and, by her account, a fabulous cook. She has also received a Guggenheim, a Fulbright and a Director’s Fellowship at New York Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers, which is how she wrote “Muses.” She has written for all the big rigs: the New Yorker, a column called Hers for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. She is a contributing editor for Harper’s.

As she greets a visitor in her hotel lobby, an insistent voice on the loudspeaker commands everyone to leave the building because it is on fire. Prose ignores the announcement and continues talking. Wow, this woman is cool. Nothing breaks her concentration. Sitting on the hotel patio, she is undisturbed by the wail of babies that fills the air, emanating from the preschool next door.

Prose is an old-fashioned intellectual, meaning she doesn’t care for the countryside; she drinks a lot of coffee and watches bad TV for its camp value whenever she can. She claims not to be tightly wound, just impatient, particularly in traffic. Malfunctioning appliances can also drive her insane and are in danger of being hurled against walls.

And to see her get really riled up, just mention a certain president and his potential war on Iraq. Clouds seem to gather around her head. “It’s the payoff for undereducating our children,” she says, her voice rising. “We’ve got a population that can’t even connect the dots between oil money and war anymore. It’s gotten worse, this exultation in the know-nothing American culture. Don’t get me wrong; I’m a patriot. I believe in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.”

It takes only her computer screen, which has a Pavlovian effect on her, to lift her spirits. Turn it on and she writes. “My parents got a TV when I was just a baby, and I spent a lot of time in front of it.” She edits everything, even her own e-mails. She hates self-indulgent writers. “I’m writing for people in dentists’ offices, people who are terrified on planes and want to be transported. I read to be in someone else’s life.”

“Muses” will be followed by a National Geographic book on Sicily and a young adult novel called “After,” about the gradual theft of children’s civil liberties. Since the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, many schools check student backpacks and randomly test for drugs. In the book, 14-year-old boys at a public school begin to disappear. The administration says they are being sent to drug rehab. But no.

Prose is also working on a new novel, -- though she is reluctant to discuss its plot--which means rewriting every chapter. “I never know if it will work until the very last sentence.”

See? She’s not so frightening.