POETS Day! Laura Riding, Poet/Muse
It’s tempting to try and grab a game on one of these last few Fridays left in the baseball season, but my advice is to hold on to that escape excuse. Put it in your back pocket and save it for the playoffs, especially if you’re a Baltimore fan. We don’t get to say “Orioles” and “playoffs” together very often. The birds are usually mathematically eliminated from the post season by the end of April.
This week’s plan to get an early go at the weekend should involve a claim to do something that would make your mother proud and then by saying you’re going to do it and not, make your mother cry.
Giving blood. Say you’re going to give blood. Your mother would be so proud of her selfless little angel, thinking of others like that. If it’s a slow Friday afternoon and you ask your boss to leave a few hours early for such a noble activity in front of enough people, I can’t see a refusal.
If your mom knew you were going to a bar instead, that you Eddie Haskelled your way toward Gomorrah, she’d actually for-real cry. You might as well show up at her house with a neck tattoo that says, “I have crabs.” So don’t go to a bar. That would be mean. Run with scissors instead.
The sewing scissors.
Just get out of work. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. But make time for a little verse first. Nothing that rhymes with Nantucket.
***
Laura Riding’s poetry caught the attention of The Fugitives, a Vanderbilt literary group that counted Robert Penn Warren, Alan Tate, and Jahn Crowe Ransom as leading members. Whether it was her publication in The Fugitive magazine, the group awarding her with The Nashville Prize, or by other means, she attracted the attention of Robert Graves with whom she would spend more than a decade living and working mainly in Majorca, but variously in Europe and later Pennsylvania.
The regard Graves held her in is apparent in this from The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain 1918-1939, written by Graves with the historian, Alan Hodge, and published in 1940, a year after his break up with Riding:
“Laura Riding was remarkable as being in the period but not of the period, and the only woman who spoke with authority in the name of Woman (as so many men in the name of Man) without either deference to the male tradition or feminist equalitarianism: a perfect original.”
Graves requires his own glossary; he imbues words with meanings that, once explained, are tossed freely about with an expectation that everyone got the earlier memo. His archetypes of Man and Woman are best explained, conveyed really, in the following poem written in 1964, so unlikely to be about, but possibly informed, by Riding. At this point in my life, I’m far too urbane and erudite to have something so bourgeois as a “favorite poem,” but if I were to indulge the urge, it would be:
Man Does, Woman Is
Robert Graves (1895-1985)Studiously by lamp-light I appraised
The palm of your hand, its heart-line
Identical with its head-line;
And you appraised the approving frown.I spread my cards face-upwards on the table,
Not challenging you for yours.
Man does; but woman is –
Can a gamester argue with his luck?
From the same collection:
At Best, Poets
Woman with her forests, moons, flowers, waters,
And watchful fingers:
We claim no magic comparable to hers –
At best, poets; at worst, sorcerers.
Both poems were published twenty-five years after their split, but Graves awe of Woman is a constant throughout his literary career. He held her beyond what anyone could have been.
A more prosaic view of her can be found in the article “The conscious genius” by D.J. Taylor from the November, 2018, issue of The New Criterion.
In 1929 Riding was part of a love quadrangle consisting of her, Graves, Graves’ wife Nancy Nicholson, and the poet Geoffrey Phibbs. I should note that I’ve read several accounts of the following incident and each one makes sure to categorize Phibbs as an Irishman even though Wikipedia says he was born and educated in England. He married an Irishwoman, though he left her for Riding. For whatever reason, it is tradition that I pass on that he’s an Irishman and that attended, I can say that he soured on Riding and left, causing her to either drink Lysol, as one account says, drink a cleaning solution, as I read elsewhere, or that “she pretended to have taken poison,” as D.J. Taylor writes, and then, with a “Goodbye, chaps,” flung herself out of a fourth story window of the West End apartment the four shared.
I like Taylor’s account:
“In 14A, Riding’s fictionalized treatment of the jump, a lightly disguised version of Laura describes herself, without obvious irony, as a kind of moral stimulant who “in sufficient doses . . . might cause the people around her to become either very, very good (like herself) or absolutely horrid.” In real life, desperate to follow her into the “strange region” advertised by her “doom-echoing shout,” Graves tore down half a flight of stairs in pursuit and then, finding no exit to the back part of the house, hurled his six-foot-two-inch frame out of a window one floor below. His own injuries were negligible, but the moral stimulant had cracked her skull open and sustained multiple fractures of the pelvis. Her unexpected recovery, deftly engineered by a surgeon named Lake, who managed to repair her shattered vertebrae, was attributed (at least by Graves) to sheer force of will.”
It’s a bit long to quote, but “the moral stimulant” cracks me up.
During the period she and Graves were together, he wrote his “historical grammar of the language of poetic myth,” The White Goddess. Wikipedia notes that in the collection of Riding’s memoirs (in the 1940s she took her second husband’s last name, Jackson), The person I am: the literary memoirs of Laura (Riding) Jackson, we find her claim,
“As to the ‘White Goddess’ identity: the White Goddess theme was a spiritually, literarily and scholastically fraudulent improvisation by Robert Graves into the ornate pretentious framework of which he stuffed stolen substance of my writings, and my thought generally, on poetry, woman, cosmic actualities and the history of religious conceptions.”
She earlier wrote that Graves had used her as a source for the book. Again, from Wikipedia:
“In my thinking, the categorically separated functions termed intellectual, moral, spiritual, emotional, were brought into union, into joint immediacy; other conceptions put the sun and moon in their right rational places as emblems of poetic emotionalism, and lengthened the perspective of Origin back from the skimpy historical heavens of masculine divinity through a spacious dominion of religious symbolism, pre-sided over, for the sake of poetic justice, by a thing I called mother-god.”
If you’ve read any of The White Goddess, even dipped a toe in here and there as I have, the above actually makes a kind of sort of sense in the walled off world of the book’s theme, albeit in a hard to believe but true way.
I’m tempted to believe that she was at least a sounding board for Graves when writing The White Goddess, but I’d be surprised if it’s “stolen substance.” People discuss things when they live together, ask opinions and whatnot. I’d be surprised if she didn’t set his mind in various directions, but he’d shown a willingness to share the spotlight with her. The two worked together on the 1927 publication A Survey of Modernist Poetry. It seems he ceded the lion’s share of credit for that pivotal work to her.
A Survey of Modernist Poetry is cited as inspiration of William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, itself considered one of foundations upon which The New Criticism was built. From Empson:
“First-type ambiguities arise when a detail is effective in several ways at once … In second-type ambiguities two or more alternative meanings are fully resolved into one . … The condition for the third type ambiguity is that two apparently unconnected meanings are given simultaneously. … In the fourth type the alternative meanings combine to make clear a complicated state of mind in the author. … The fifth type is a fortunate confusion, as when the author is discovering his idea in the act of writing … or not holding it in mind all at once. … In the sixth type what is said is contradictory or irrelevant and the reader is forced to invent interpretations. … The seventh type is that of full contradiction, marking a division in the author’s mind.”
Riding was interested in the truth of words and truths that can be revealed by poetry in her early career. She played with words, moved them around something central in order to reveal what she then believed couldn’t be defined. In “Footfalling” the listener is aware of a meaning conveyed by an act though the act is insufficient without context.
Footfalling
A modulation is that footfalling.
It says and does not say.
When not walking it is not saying.
When saying it is not walking.
When walking it is not saying.
Between the step and alternation
Breathes the hush of modulation
Which tars all roads
To confiding heels and soles and tiptoes.
Deep from the rostrum of the promenade
The echo-tongued mouth of motion
Rolls its voice,
And the large throat is heard to tremble
While the footfalls shuffle.It says and does not say.
When the going is gone
There is only fancy.
Every thought sounds like a footfall,
Till a thought like a boot kicks down the wall.
Walking conveys something like saying but is not saying so it isn’t walking. It’s playful and enjoyable but as I read I can’t help but think of how elegantly H.D. evokes one thing and another and makes them both and neither in her seemingly simple six line poem “Oread.”
I really enjoy Riding’s poetry, but it does set me in mind of Pinto at Professor Jenning’s place in Animal House (“That means…one tiny atom in my fingernail could be…Could be one little…tiny universe…Could l buy some pot from you?”). She very much wants to get at concepts from a different angle. There’s an assumption that if a tree falls in the woods and there’s no one around to hear it, it’s because we aren’t listening hard enough.
The Troubles of a Book
Laura Riding (1901-1991)The trouble of a book is first to be
No thoughts to nobody,
Then to lie as long unwritten
As it will lie unread,
Then to build word for word an author
And occupy his head
Until the head declares vacancy
To make full publication
Of running empty.The trouble of a book is secondly
To keep awake and ready
And listening like an innkeeper,
Wishing, not wishing for a guest,
Torn between hope of no rest
And hope of rest.
Uncertainly the pages doze
And blink open to passing fingers
With landlord smile, then close.The trouble of a book is thirdly
To speak its sermon, then look the other way,
Arouse commotion in the margin,
Where tongue meets the eye,
But claim no experience of panic,
No complicity in the outcry.
The ordeal of a book is to give no hint
Of ordeal, to be flat and witless
Of the upright sense of print.The trouble of a book is chiefly
To be nothing but book outwardly;
To wear binding like binding,
Bury itself in book-death,
Yet to feel all but book;
To breathe live words, yet with the breath
Of letters; to address liveliness
In reading eyes, be answered with
Letters and bookishness.
“Bury itself in book-death,/Yet to feel all but book;” is koan-like. I feel refreshed by her poetry, like I’ve just had a cup of coffee. It’s a crossword puzzle to get your mind going. To her it wasn’t a mind game. Perception was something she nipped at with purpose.
She’s important among minor poets as her ideas set others thinking in ways that had consequence for later movements. There’s not a school of imitators that I know of, but her influence is felt in how we read, rather than how we write. Her great contribution was to influence the influencers. She’s a background figure, but that’s to be expected when you’re associated with Graves, Ransom, and Tate.
Shortly after giving up Graves, Riding gave up poetry; renounced it in fact as inadequate a tool to her quest for meaning and truth. As quoted by poetryfoundation.org:
“At the beginning of the ‘forties, [I] made the drastic decision that [I] must renounce poetry, as imposing irremovable obstacles to the realizing of the full potential afforded by language, when words are used faithfully, as they mean, of general human speaking, writing, in what [I] called, in an introduction to a reading of [my] poems in 1962 on a British Broadcasting programme, ‘the style of truth.’ [My] work on language was accompanied by a long look at not only poetry and literature but the entire human scene, historical and contemporary, with clarifying perception of the so far largely unfulfilled responsibility that human beings have of telling the ‘one story’ of their being, and the world—the central theme of all [my] earlier work. [I] came to think that this story required a personal truth exceeding literary, poetic, and all other categorically professionalized intellectual points of view, and linguistic styles.”
She married Shuyler Jackson in 1941 and the two worked on Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words, a dictionary reflective of their views on language and truth. Shuyler died in 1968. She continued on, completing the work in 1974, though it wasn’t published till two decades after her passing. She also wrote It Has Taken Long (1976) and The Sufficient Difference (2001), the latter published posthumously.
I’ve not read any of those three books, but from what I have read of her, I’m guessing that they are flighty, not serious. Also serious, not flighty. I am certain that when they are not flighty, they are not serious. She’s got a hold of something, though.
