In praise of the hellraisers: Lise Hand on the women who shook the system

On 2 February 1922, a book rolled off the printing presses, published in its entirety for the first time. It was the chronicle of a peripatetic day in the life of Leopold Bloom as he strolled the streets of Dublin city, and as he meandered along the byways of his own interior life.

Ulysses was brought into the world on its author’s 40th birthday, its prior serialisation having already established James Joyce’s work as a literary tour de force – or in some scandalised circles, as an obscene travesty. But Ulysses might have been a different book, had the writer’s path never crossed with that of Nora Barnacle.

On 10 June 1904, 22-year-old Joyce squinted at the figure of a tall redhead as she strode along Nassau Street, arms swinging. His eyesight was bad, but he could see enough to spur him into action; he approached her, and she agreed to meet him the following Tuesday evening on a corner of Merrion Square.

But she never showed up. Nevertheless, he persisted and wrote to her requesting that they should try another meeting – “If you have not forgotten me!” he wrote.

There is general agreement, although not absolute certainty, that their first rendezvous took place on Thursday 16 June 1904 – the date of Leopold Bloom’s peregrination around the capital. “To set Ulysses on this date was Joyce’s most eloquent if indirect tribute to Nora,” concluded Richard Ellmann, the Joyce biographer.

It may have been the most conventional of boy-meets-girl beginnings, but what followed was far from traditional, with the couple quitting Ireland still unmarried to begin a new life abroad. It was a gamble for Joyce, but for his convent-educated 20-year-old Galwegian lover, it was a fearless burning of bridges, a reputation-shredding, risk-filled move.

But he needed her, and it was a dependency that survived financial, emotional and familial upheavals for 37 years until Joyce died in 1941. “No human being has ever stood so close to my soul as you stand,” he once declared to her. As they moved from place to place, she kept the vagabond show on the road while he worked on the book which would become his masterpiece. While he had the innate abilities of a literary genius, he might never have summoned up the discipline and determination to harness it without Barnacle’s unswerving resilience and boundless loyalty.

During separations, they corresponded, and it was she who initiated the exchange of the famous ‘dirty letters’ in order to keep Joyce from visiting brothels. However, it was her more prosaic letters which had a significant influence on the writer. It was Barnacle’s late-night letters to him in which her words flowed, unencumbered by structure or punctuation which carved the path to Molly Bloom’s tour de force stream-of-consciousness soliloquy.

Fearless, forthright, and pragmatic, she was his partner in sexual adventure, and his most essential muse, a figure deeply embedded in his work. “Do you remember the three adjectives I have used in The Dead in speaking of your body?” he wrote in one letter. “They are these: ‘musical and strange and perfumed’.”

Nora Barnacle’s journey, which found her socialising with the likes of Hemingway, Beckett and Peggy Guggenheim in Jazz Age Paris, was an extraordinary one. Yet until the 1988 publication of Nora, an illuminating biography by Brenda Maddox brought her story to a wider audience, her life with her (eventual) husband was generally regarded as the marriage of unequals, or worse. For Barnacle was regularly dismissed as an immoral streel who had luckily hitched her wagon to a rising literary star, swiftly bearing him two children before he could tire of her and depart.

In a way, Nora Barnacle was typical of many women who were assigned the label of ‘muse’ to a panoply of male creative geniuses, with their own stories dimmed by the dazzling creativity of their more famous other half.

Yet behind many creatively fulfilled men stood fabulous, free-spirited, fascinating women who flouted social mores, broke taboos, raised hell and pushed against boundaries. Many thrived in the maelstrom, others survived it, and some were fatally sucked into it.

Inevitably, the visual arts have forever abounded with muse/mentor/lover scenarios, a vivid example being the tumultuous life of Alice Prin. From an early start living impoverished in rural France, she turned herself into Kiki de Montparnasse –model, nightclub singer, actress, memoirist, and painter who was feted as the roaring 1920s’ resident Renaissance woman, defying society’s expectations for women to be seen but rarely heard.

She began posing nude for sculptors at 14, and became model and muse to a variety of artists such Jean Cocteau and Amedeo Modigliani. She spent much of the 1920s in a relationship with Man Ray, the American photographer, and was the subject of some of his most famous images, including Le Violon d’Ingres in which she sits with her back turned to the viewer wearing nothing but a turban, while two ‘f’s slope gracefully down her lower back.

Crowned the Queen of Montparnasse by her adoring Bohemian subjects, she was a successful artist in her own right, and she wrote her autobiography, which included an introduction penned by Ernest Hemingway. “If you ever tire of books written by present-day lady writers of all Sexes, you have a book here written by a woman who was never a lady at any time. For about ten years she was about as close a people get nowadays to being a Queen but that, of course, is very different from being a lady,” he wrote.

Unsurprisingly, Kiki’s Memoirs caused a sensation in Paris, and the English translation was promptly banned by US censors. But her story didn’t have a happy ending and beset by alcohol and drug addiction, she died destitute at the age of 51.

Kiki de La Montparnasse was not Man Ray’s only muse. In 1929, New York model Lee Miller travelled to Paris with the intention of apprenticing herself to the photographer, and after some persuasion he did so, sparking an intense three-year relationship, Miller moved into Ray’s studio and he taught her everything he knew about photography. His artist friend Jean Cocteau was so mesmerised by Miller’s beauty that he coated her in butter and transformed her into a plaster cast of a classical statue for his film, The Blood of a Poet (1930). Her good friend Pablo Picasso painted six portraits of her. She inspired many of Ray’s iconic photographs; even when the couple split after three years. Tormented by the breakup he immortalised in her in one of his most recognisable works, a metronome adorned with a picture of her eye at the end of the ticker.

In 1942 Miller was accredited as a war photographer with the US army for Condé Nast, and became one of a few women photojournalists to cover live combat. She was present at the London Blitz, the chaos following D-Day, the liberation of Paris, and the American military’s entry into Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. A famous image shows her taking a bath in Adolf Hitler’s own tub in his Munich apartment which had just been raided by US soldiers.

Her life ended quietly in the English countryside, her attic full of dusty photos of a war which she – suffering from PSTD – wanted to forget. A trove of thousands of photos and negatives was discovered by her son after her death in 1977.

A few years before she died, Miller was asked in a New York Times interview what it was that drew her to photography. It was, she said, “a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you”.

Some artistic muses were public figures in their own right before they were cast into the role of muse. Before Ilona Staller, aka ‘La Cicciolina’ married American artist Jeff Koons she had found fame as both a hardcore porn actress and a member of parliament, simultaneously. She was the first politician to bare her breasts on Italian TV, she became a member of Italy’s first Green Party, then a Libertarian, then a founding member of the ‘Party of Love’, protesting nuclear power, championing human rights, and offering to sleep with Saddam Hussein in exchange for peace. She also claimed to have been a spy for the secret police while working as a hotel maid in her hometown of Budapest, before a brief marriage enabled her to emigrate to Italy.

Koons, struck by a photograph of Staller in German magazine Stern, and in what must be the most unlikely-ever How We Met story, persuaded her to collaborate on a series of sculptures and photographs of the two of them having sex in multiple positions, settings and costumes for Made in Heaven, an exhibition to be unveiled at the 1990 Venice Biennale.

The Biennale was duly shocked and the couple married in 1991, but divorced in 1994, sparking a bitter 14-year custody battle over their son Ludwig and prompting Koons to destroy some of the pieces from the exhibition. But many lauded the explicit series as a groundbreaking work. In an interview several years later, Koons explained, “Ilona was absolutely very comfortable with her body, so that was a very liberating aspect for me.”

Last summer, in July 2021, Cicciolina resurfaced in the Italian media when she took part in an exhibition of a very different kind – a chess tournament, taking on three professional players in simultaneous matches. “I started playing as a child with my father and very few knew my B-side,” she explained. “It’s all about concentration and logic. I am not just a porno diva.”

But muses can shine brightly and burn out, as the short life of Edie Sedgwick can attest. Beautiful, rich and deeply troubled, the socialite and Andy Warhol were for a short but intensely creative period in the mid-1960s, Pop Art’s golden couple and 21-year-old Sedgwick was a fixture at The Factory, his Manhattan art studio. She starred in a series of Warhol’s avant-garde films, beginning with Poor Little Rich Girl, until their relationship fell apart in 1965.

She was to die of a drug overdose at 28 years old, but managed to exert a huge influence on popular culture. Dubbed a “superstar” by Warhol, the phrase went mainstream due to the pair’s high media profile; her fashion looks were copied – mini skirts, leotards, Capri pants, heavy eye makeup, pixie haircut – and before long she was photographed by Life magazine and American Vogue under the heading “the youthquaker”.

She may or may not have had a brief affair with Bob Dylan, but several of his songs were reportedly written about her, including Like A Rolling Stone, as well as songs by The Velvet Underground and The Cult among others.

That’s the trouble about being lauded as a muse. Behind the glamour and fantasy, and off the pedestal whereupon they were placed, there were often bust-ups and heartbreaks, sacrifices and betrayals, just like real life.

Muses ran the risk of paying a price for being immortalised in paint, word or song. Marianne Faithfull was Mick Jagger’s girlfriend and the woman who gave him a copy of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, planting the seed for Sympathy for the Devil; the inspiration behind Wild Horses, Dear Doctor and You Can’t Always Get What You Want.

Their romance may have encapsulated all that was swinging about the sixties in England, but Faithfull robustly declared in an interview last year: “A muse? That’s a shit thing to be. It’s a terrible job. You don’t get any male muses, do you? Can you think of one? No.”

She and Nora Barnacle would probably have got on like a house on fire.