Portrait of a tangled triangle

Writer recalls outre history with troubled parents

Julia Blackburn (left) with her mother, Rosalie: ''Right from the start I was her sister and her confidante and, eventually, her sexual rival.'' (''The Three of Us'')

The Three of Us: A Family Story
By Julia Blackburn
Pantheon, 313 pp., illustrated, $26

"Dear Daddy, I hate you. Lots of love, Julia," the 6-year-old wrote her addled, drug-and-drink-soaked, alternately violent and tender poet father. As for her artist mother - abusive, hysterical, sex-obsessed - Julia Blackburn's memoir is charged with a much more focused hatred and, at the end, a late tide of love.

Blackburn is a powerful British writer whose idiosyncratic voice mixes passion, bleakness, and shark-toothed insight. Her writing unsettles more than soothes. Her biography of Goya (or autobiography, perhaps; she is there, painfully struggling, inside his skin) estranges us as a means of drawing us alarmingly close.

And if "The Three of Us" is a family story, as the subtitle has it, it is the family of Saturn, who, in Goya's celebrated dark painting, monstrously devours his offspring. Here of course, the child has survived to gnaw literarily upon her parental monsters.

Thomas Blackburn's excesses were spectacular. An English teacher and a prolific if mainly unsuccessful poet (we read a number of his lavishly self-referential poems), he was for years under the care of a psychiatrist who hooked him on barbiturates and prescribed extramarital affairs to unchain his demiurge.

Demiurge cut loose, he would lash out at Rosalie, his wife, or throw her into the bathtub. Once his fist landed by mistake on Julia. "So sorry, darling; no blood I hope," he hastened to apologize. He would describe his affairs in detail to Rosalie.

There was a touch of gruesome comedy in the horrors. Preparing to gas himself in the oven, he discovered a roast chicken in the refrigerator, changed his mind, and ate it. Irritated by Rosalie's reiterated "jolly good" as she prepared a dish of lamb's hearts, he threw his plateful at her. The dog went for the meat, he tackled the dog, the dog bit him, and his small daughter furiously hurled herself at her father's back.

Despite all this and much else, Blackburn recalls her father with only a modicum of bitterness. "I could be frightened of the madness and the drunken rages, but I never doubted the honesty of his relationship with me. . . . My mother, Rosalie de Meric, was very different."

And it is the mother-daughter battle that is the book's bloody heart. Rosalie was a woman of immense vitality and turbulent desires. Sexually promiscuous before the marriage, when she and Thomas split up she found herself, now in her 40s, both frustrated and obsessed. She took a series of male lodgers, making up to each until she came to Geoffrey, an art critic, with whom she began an affair.

From the time Blackburn reached puberty her mother had imposed a crude sexuality on her. She would strip, display her body parts, give her close-up views of her genitals (and at one point her hemorrhoids), and advise masturbation.

Once she acquired Geoffrey she burned with jealousy and the fear that her soon-flagging lover would go elsewhere. The jealousy was directed mainly at Blackburn. She ordered her daughter never to be alone with Geoffrey. In hopes of directing a still-unfledged libido elsewhere, she sent her off for a weekend with a boy, instructing them to "have fun." They didn't, much.

By her mid-teens, though, Blackburn was sleeping around enthusiastically. And as much out of confusion and resentment as desire, she let Geoffrey seduce her, and they moved away together. Rosalie's fury and anguish endured for years. There were violent scenes, with intervals of frail civility.

Blackburn writes it all as her defense against pain. "I described with extraordinary coldness and detachment what had happened," she tells us. In their obsessiveness the harsh detail and the iciness become hard to take. She withholds emotion; she places her mother and herself under the same unsparing glass.

At the same time she does something startlingly different. In a series of italicized passages interspersed through the bleak text, Blackburn writes of being with her mother in the final weeks of a fatal leukemia. There is tenderness, there is gaiety; the old woman looks back wonderingly at the pain she has suffered and caused.

"I have never been so happy in all my life. . . . How curious to be dying at the same time." She suggests her coffin be painted blue. She hopes to live a day or two beyond the first of April. "Well I'd better hold out till the second, no good dying an April Fool!" She has herself driven to her old house but quickly asks to leave. "She felt she was looking at rooms in which a stranger had been living."

Blackburn attempts to mate the reconciling with the horrors. It doesn't quite work; the two parts are not just different but so forcefully different as to produce antibody rejection. And she herself is only partly reconciled. Water under the bridge, both she and her mother agree of their past. But Blackburn's bridge is a movable one; it has pursued the water downstream too far and furiously to quite let it go.

Richard Eder reviews books for several publications.