! 1! “Hospitality to Words”: Laura Riding’s American Inheritance and Inheritors Philip John Lansdell Rowland Royal Holloway, University of London Submitted for the Degree of PhD ! 3! Abstract This thesis situates the work of Laura Riding in an American tradition of “hospitality to words” extending from Emerson and Emily Dickinson through Gertrude Stein to John Ashbery and contemporary language-oriented writing. The theme is introduced in terms of her linguistic and spiritual ideal of home as a place of truthful speaking, related in turn to her identity as an American writer who renounced the craft of poetry in mid-career. First, Riding’s poetry is “hospitable” in ways akin to Dickinson’s, broadly characterized by Riding’s term, “linguistic intimateness.” There are similarities in their word-conjunctions and styles of poetic argument, as well as their ideas of poetry as “house of possibility” and spiritual home. Riding’s work is then compared with that of her older friend of the late 1920s, Gertrude Stein. The chapter details the shift in Riding’s critical view of Stein; then focuses on the similarly “homely” characteristics of their prose writing and poetics, with particular reference made to Riding’s “Steinian” poems. The central chapters clarify Riding’s conception of truth and related questions of authority, history and responsibility. Chapter 4 explains her poetic vision of “the end of the world” as the introduction to a new world and potentially a new home, and chapter 5 extends the account to include her post-poetic work, The Telling compared to her earlier, collaborative The World and Ourselves. These concerns are then related to Riding’s poet-inheritors. Her acknowledged influence on John Ashbery is explained in terms of his “celebration” of the “failure” that Riding came to find in poetry; and the work of language- oriented writers including Carla Harryman and Lisa Samuels is shown to develop her critique of poetry’s truth-telling properties further. Finally, the thesis reflects on their thoroughly de-familiarizing “hospitality to words” in relation to the broader tradition described. ! 4! Acknowledgements First and foremost, I am deeply grateful to Professor Martin Dodsworth for his encouragement, advice and patience over the years. This project would not have been possible, nor have come to fruition, without his kind support. I also wish to thank Professor Robert Hampson for additional help, particularly in preparing for the viva. Finally, special thanks go to my wife Yuriko and two-year-old daughter Haruka Sophie, for bringing joy during the completion of this project; and to my parents, who have been there from the start, and to whom this thesis is dedicated. ! 5! TABLE OF CONTENTS ABBREVIATIONS................................................................................................................ 7 1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ 8 i. The Question of Consistency: Riding’s Renunciation of Poetry and “American-brand Immediacy” ............................................................................... 12 ii. The Critical Reception of Riding’s Work: An Overview ............................... 18 iii. The Scope of the Thesis .................................................................................... 26 iv. Homeliness and the Idea of Home .................................................................. 29 2. “LINGUISTIC INTIMATENESS”: RIDING AND EMILY DICKINSON ..... 37 i. “Count Death Not Necessarily Logical”: Dickinsonian Wit in Riding ........ 40 ii. “Amazing Sense / Distilled”: Dickinsonian Argument and Word-Conjunctions in Riding ................................................................................ 45 iii. The House of Possibility: Poetry as House and Home................................. 61 3. RIDING AND GERTRUDE STEIN: A QUALIFIED ADMIRATION............ 71 i. Homeliness and Letter Writing........................................................................... 80 ii. Riding’s “Steinian” Poems.................................................................................. 86 iii. “This is not exactly what I mean”: Two Views of Language and Writing. 96 iv. “As Many Questions as Answers”: Concluding Remarks ..........................102 4. THE “PURSUIT” OF TRUTH AND THE MEANING OF DEATH..............109 i. Duality, Non-dual Truth, and the Double Sense of Death ..........................112 ii. The End of the World, and After....................................................................122 iii. The Question of Authority..............................................................................129 5. HISTORY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND THE TELLING ......................................134 i. History and “The New Time” ..........................................................................134 ii. “Personal Authority” and Responsibility .......................................................139 iii. From The World and Ourselves to The Telling....................................................144 ! 6! 6. “CELEBRATION OF FAILURE”: RIDING’S INFLUENCE ON JOHN ASHBERY ................................................................................................151 i. Misreading Riding ...............................................................................................151 ii. The Poetics of Pain............................................................................................156 iii. The “Middle Way”............................................................................................159 iv. “Stylized Failure-of-Expression”: Signs of Riding’s Influence in Ashbery’s Later Poetry......................................................................................166 7. A “SENSE OF THE FURTHER”: MODERNISM AND BEYOND................170 i. Riding and “Genuine” Modernism ..................................................................171 ii. Hospitable Acts of Language: Riding and Language Writing .....................174 iii. “Come, Words, Away”: from Riding to Lisa Samuels ................................177 iv. “Hospitality to Words” in Riding and Harryman.......................................184 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..............................................................................................................190 ! 7! Abbreviations A Anarchism Is Not Enough CS Contemporaries and Snobs FA First Awakenings: The Early Poems PLR The Poems of Laura Riding RA Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words SMP A Survey of Modernist Poetry SP Selected Poems: In Five Sets T The Telling WO The World and Ourselves WW The Word ‘Woman’ and Other Related Writings 8 Chapter 1 Introduction Few writers have insisted on the self-sufficiency of their work as strongly as Laura (Riding) Jackson—to the dismay of many an admiring critic. She considered any “purpose not to see [her] work as a whole” to be misleading, even “ill-willed,” and reportedly asked, in breaking off communication with the author of the first book on her work, why “interpretations and explanations were necessary at all. Were her words not good enough in themselves?”1 As Christopher Norris has pointed out, this meant that for (Riding) Jackson “the only honest or answerable way of respecting her original intentions” was “commentary—and preferably detailed, line-for- line commentary.” “Argued critique,” on the other hand, would inevitably distort her “unique particularities of thought and style,” privileging the critic’s frame of reference over the precisely articulated body of work itself.2 Accordingly, her response to criticism was almost invariably (and meticulously) corrective, and has justly been characterized as “a prevailing disapproval of anybody whose interest in or admiration for her writing is expressed in terms other than those which she herself condones.”3 Or as John Ashbery pithily puts it: “Laura Riding was what we would 4 call today a ‘control freak.’ ” More to the point, she was “adamant about controlling her meanings” (Lisa Samuels) even if that meant exclusion from the canon and a marginal place in literary history.5 By suppressing her poems for several decades after the publication of the Collected in 1938, later allowing their re-presentation only on 1 (Riding) Jackson’s words are from FA, xvi. Joyce Piell Wexler relates how (Riding) Jackson “broke communication with” her, upon reading a draft of her book, in Laura Riding’s Pursuit of Truth (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1979), xii. 2 Christopher Norris, “An Exchange: Laura (Riding) Jackson and Christopher C. Norris,” Language and Style 19, no. 2 (spring 1986): 211. 3 K.K. Ruthven, “How to avoid being canonized: Laura Riding,” Textual Practice 5, no. 2 (summer 1991): 253. 4 John Ashbery, Other Traditions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 101–2. 5 Lisa Samuels, Poetic Arrest. Laura Riding, Wallace Stevens, and the Modernist Afterlife (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1997). The quoted phrase is from a longer version of her dissertation abstract, available in 1999 on the Laura (Riding) Jackson homepage, http://www.unc.edu/~ottotwo/partner.html. 9 condition that she had “leave to tell why there are no more” (SP, 16), she deliberately contributed to their neglect. Her career may thus be seen as something of a lesson in “how to avoid being canonized.” In 1991, the year of her death, more than fifty years after the publication of her Collected Poems and over a decade after their return to