View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE
provided by Iowa Research Online
Masthead Logo The Iowa Review Volume 12 Issue 2 Spring-Summer: Extended Outlooks: The Iowa Article 102 Review Collection of Contemporary Writing by Women
1981 Laura Riding Roughshod Jane Marcus
Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/iowareview Part of the Creative Writing Commons
Recommended Citation Marcus, Jane. "Laura Riding Roughshod." The Iowa Review 12.2 (1981): 295-299. Web. Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0021-065X.2771
This Contents is brought to you for free and open access by Iowa Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in The oI wa Review by an authorized administrator of Iowa Research Online. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Laura Riding Roughshod Jane Marcus
DRIVEN OUT of idyllic Mallorca, where she and Robert Graves wrote poetry and published small volumes of esoteric writing at the Seizin Press, a a the poet Laura Riding wrote manifesto. There is nothing odd about a an poet writing manifesto in the thirties. It would be odd poet who was on at didn't. This three-page document recently exhibit the New a York Public Library among remarkable collection of manuscripts from the Berg Collection in "The Thirties in England," organized by curator Lola Szladits, famous for her acquisition of modern British writers' papers. room case were Across the in another glass the drafts and typescript of VirginiaWoolf 'sThree Guineas (1938).What's odd is how alike the two are s manifestoes in theme and argument, though Woolf pamphlet is a sensuous written with speed and grace of symbol and metaphor, ap to ear peals the eye and and every literary trick in the bag?which Laura Riding, purest of pure poets, would have abhorred. was a stance Woolf 's anti-fascism tri-partite political of socialism, pac ificism and feminism, her original contribution being the argument that was the origin of fascism not in nationalism but in the patriarchal family. case was Laura Riding also believed in women's superiority, but in her it linked to a belief that because of their domestic isolation, women are bet ter at men. thinking than Because of female rationality, men, she suggests, to women so war ought to leave the running of the world that may be abolished and aggression stopped, locally and internationally. Few feminist protests were heard in what Auden called that "low dis were as honest decade," especially when they high-minded and ferociously as men honest Woolf 's and Riding's. The last thing that wanted to hear as a was war was they mounted the barricades in fight for freedom that sex related to irrational male drives. Riding did not get much response to her plea and she and Robert Graves left London for New Hope, Penn a sylvania, where their last literary experiment in living broke up in per sonal debacle, and Laura Riding married the poetry editor of Time maga as a zine, Schuyler B. Jackson. She gave up poetry too impure medium for the pursuit of truth, and domestic thinking and linguistic study have ever been her occupation since. at Chicago critic Joyce Wexler, who teaches Loyola University, has
295
University of Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to The Iowa Review ® www.jstor.org on written the first book this important and influential American poet: Pursuit Laura Laura Riding's of Truth (Ohio University Press, 1980). from Riding's critical essays and her several volumes of poetry, published a mind and an talent. 1926 through 1938, reveal powerful authoritative "You are the one to save America from the Edna Millays!" wrote Allen on T?te in 1925, commenting enthusiastically how intellectual, ironic and were. her and original her poems But the very authority of intellectual poetic presence militates against historical recognition of her achieve one in ments. She is of those figures, harsh and splendid rigor and dis one to. The cipline, whom would rather read than speak public per to sonalities of her former students and disciples, from Ransom T?te, now considered to be the founders of American New Criticism, to that man not grand old of English letters, Robert Graves, have obscured only on to criticism. her influence them, but her original contribution literary Joyce Wexler documents in detail Laura Riding's method of close doctrine to the Southern textual analysis and the way she taught this traces the which Fugitives, Ransom and T?te. Wexler also argument Graves and Riding developed inA Survey ofModernist Poetry (Hogarth, an his famous Seven 1927), argument William Empson claims inspired Wexler has rescued one of those "stranded Types of Ambiguity. ghosts" a as from literary obscurity and has told fascinating story well. But just as Wexler's has been Riding's poetry has been forgotten, book ignored one not by American journals. Irony is of history's games, too, just a revival with the rebellion poetry's. For the timing of Riding coincides too of feminist critics against the formal demands of New Critical exege was awoman sis. Will we be forced to acknowledge that it who invented Chinese footbinding of the critical imagination? not the least of Riding's reputation raises many provocative questions, are a mind locked in com which biographical. "Riding's poems portray so But bat with words and winning," Wexler writes. And they do. a where did such an original mind come from? How did Jewish girl from become Laura Brooklyn, Laura Riechen thai from Girls' High, Riding secure the queen of modernist poetry, reigning in the twenties and thir ties over the Seizin Press and her London and Mallorca disciples? Her wore a crown sceptre was invisible, but she actually gold wire which out no one it odd at all. spelled laura, and found
296 course ever Naming names is of what poetry is all about, since Adam. one concern In of Riding's poems she shows her about the poetic and act am am name human of naming: "I because I say / I say myself / I my / name name name name My is not my / It is the of what I say. / My is what is said. / I alone say. / I alone am not I. / I am my name. / My name name is not my name, / My is the name." This puzzling "truth act. telling" is Riding's definition of the poetic And though she won't was a admit comparisons, that poem clearly begotten by literary daughter of Emily Dickinson. Dickinson was a truth-teller too, but canny New Englander that she was, she demanded that the poet "Tell all the truth must man but tell it slant" for the "Truth dazzle gradually / Or every be blind." want to Riding, however, didn't the truth of her poems dazzle gradu ally, and she has been impatient with the blindness of critics. Her Jewish an socialist father had wanted her to be American Rosa Luxemburg. But a Laura Riechenthal went from Girls' High to Cornell, married history to to instructor, became briefly Laura Gottschalk, and went New York write poetry. The admiring Hart Crane first called her "Rideshalk at Godding," then, cooling her authoritative ways, termed her "Laura was name as Riding Roughshod." "Riding" the she chose for herself now to as poet, though she wishes be known Laura (Riding) Jackson. name as as That parenthesis around her chosen is distancing the famous parenthesis in which Mrs. Ramsay's death is revealed in Virginia Woolf 's To the Lighthouse. was a name Riding good choice. For "riding-rhyme" is the of the one heroic couplet that Chaucer used, and Chaucer's Cressida is of the as domestic heroines she admires. Her disciples thought of her Cassandra, but it was Cressida she held up to glory in A Trojan Ending (1937) in we see awoman a as a which retelling the tragic tale from domestic angle quarrel between Helen's husbands. Cressida says it is refreshing to get off the subjectof victory, "bloody cartsful of it off the battlefield." Riding says she wants to redeem the story of Troy "from its association with a schoolboys who do not weep when their mothers die." Her Helen is as war nearer housewife who works her cloth if every stitch brought the to an In Lives Wives a end. of (1939), historical fiction about the ancients, she says that the "male characters are here written of as husbands rather than as heroes."
297 to to Riding ought be restored the ranks of writers like Hart Crane as a our a and Gertrude Stein, where she belongs shaper of speech, poet of powerful and original irony. In what Riding calls "the stuttering slow us grammaring of self," it is language which makes human. She is the are least sentimental of love poets. For her, words superior to acts:
And I shall say to you, "There is needed now A poem upon love, to forget the kiss by more to And be love than kiss the lips." Or, failing your heart's talkativeness, I shallwrite this spoken kiss myself, . . . Imprinting it on the mouth of time
a name not a or "Riding" is only for rhyme but also for districts juris dictions in a county. And since she named the press she ran with Robert Graves, Seizin Press, we could guess that another territorial imperative was means being expressed, for "Seizin" legal possession of freehold a a are property. Both "seizin" and "riding" far bigger chunks of territory for awoman writer to claim than the "room of one's own" Woolf mod estly demanded. Is Riding's cult of domesticity feminist? Or does it simply lead to the inequalities of worship that cause poets like Robert Graves to make White Goddesses out of women? to "Analogy is always false," Riding argued, and tried purge poetry of metaphor, symbol and myth. What else is left but pure language and as cannot thought? If, she claims, things be known by their resemblance to a other things, then the poet is left with purged language. The reader often finds the poems too abstract, but Riding would claim that thinking itself is not abstract. The title of her second volume of poems, Love as as means. Love, Death Death, conveys what she Riding published Gertrude Stein's poems at the Seizin Press in 1929, and her kinship with Stein is a on clear. In Survey ofModernist Poetry, major influence "the Auden gen as eration," she praised repetition in Stein's work having "the effect of senses in breaking down the possible historical still inherent the words." a Since so much poetry alludes to past poetry, this is revolutionary ap an extreme proach. Riding's abstract poetry reads like Modernist mani so as festo. It resembles nothing much the Russian revolutionary early Cubist/Constructivist paintings of Goncharova and Alexandra Exter.
298 a These lines from "In the Beginning," about daughter's "unpentateuchal a genesis," for example, might be painted by surrealist: "She opens the out heads of her brothers / And lets the aeroplanes. / 'Now,' she says, 'you will be able to think better.'" The life of the Riding/Graves circle in London in the late twenties consisted of couples, triangles, rectangles, and great bursts of creative on a activity. It included Robert Graves's wife, Nancy Nicholson, barge in theThames with the children, the disruptions of the Irish poet Phibbs, the erring disciple, and Laura Riding's attempted suicide. She jumped out awindow and broke her back but survived to pursue truth in words, an authoritative poet and critic, retreating from the limelight to the solitary pursuit of linguistic purity. Graves and her ex-disciples quarrel about her influence. In an early poem, "Forgotten Girlhood," Riding answers them:
But don't call Mother Damnable names. The names will come back a At the end of nine-tailed Damnable Strap. Mother Damnable, Mother Damnable Good Mother Damnable.
LauraRiding's SelectedPoems (Faber and Faber, 1970) or her Collected are for the reader to start. Poems (Random House, 1938) good places Joyce Wexler does not discuss the prose, but both Lives ofWives (i939) andA Trojan Ending (1937) are fascinating. Itwas Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Presswhich published her first volume, A Close Chaplet, in 1926. Riding's a integrity, her withdrawal from the world and her truth-telling suggest is muse serves modern Emily Dickinson. For her truth "the that herself"; man's need to claim that his half truths are the truth leads to "Titanic dis us in an to her sipation." Let read Laura Riding again, attempt approach a are no abstract frontier of poetic truth. It is world where there myths to deceive us.
299