Laura Riding


Laura Riding Jackson, best known as Laura Riding, was an American poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer.

Early life

She was born in New York City to Nathaniel Reichenthal, a Jewish immigrant from Galicia, and Sadie, and educated at Cornell University, where she began to write poetry, publishing first under the name Laura Riding Gottschalk. She became associated with the Fugitives through Allen Tate, and they published her poems in The Fugitive magazine. Her first marriage, to historian Louis R. Gottschalk, ended in divorce in 1925, at the end of which year she went to England at the invitation of Robert Graves and his wife Nancy Nicholson. She would remain in Europe for nearly fourteen years.

Poetic development and personal relationships

The excitement stirred by Laura Riding's poems is hinted at in Sonia Raiziss' later description: "When The Fugitive flashed down the new sky of American poetry, it left a brilliant scatter of names: Ransom, Tate, Warren, Riding, Crane.... Among them, the inner circle and those tangent to it as contributors, there was no one quite like Laura Riding." Riding's first collection of poetry, The Close Chaplet, was published in 1926, and during the following year she assumed the surname Riding. By this time the originality of her poetry was becoming ever more evident: generally she favoured a distinctive form of free verse over conventional metres. She, Robert Graves and Nancy Nicholson lived in London until Riding's suicide attempt in 1929. It is generally agreed that this episode was a major cause of the break-up of Graves's first marriage: the whole affair caused a famous literary scandal.
She published her 477-page Collected Poems in 1938; Paul Auster in the New York Review of Books calls her "an important force of the international avant-garde". Her poems had many critics, including Americans such as John Gould Fletcher and John Crowe Ransom as well as Graves' family and friends.
When Riding met the Irish poet, Geoffrey Phibbs, in 1929, she invited him to join the household that already contained herself, Graves, and Graves's wife, Nancy. Phibbs agreed, but after a few months changed his mind and returned to his wife, referring to Riding as "a virago" in a letter to his friend Thomas MacGreevy. When they failed to effect a reconciliation, he rejoined the household but rejected Laura and moved in with Nancy. This was one of the catalysts for the incident of 27 April 1929, when Riding jumped from a fourth-floor window at the lodgings she shared with Graves, at the height of an argument involving Graves, Phibbs and Nancy Graves; having failed to stop her, Graves also jumped, but was unharmed, whilst Riding sustained life-threatening injuries.
Following the break-up with Nancy, until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Riding and Graves lived in Deià, Majorca, where they were visited by writers and artists including James Reeves, Norman Cameron, John Aldridge, Len Lye, Jacob Bronowski and Honor Wyatt. The house is now a museum. Progress of Stories would later be highly esteemed by, among others, John Ashbery and Harry Mathews. Between 1936 and 1939, Riding and Graves lived in England, France and Switzerland; Graves accompanied Riding on her return to the USA in 1939.
Riding and Graves were highly productive from the start of their association, though after they moved to Majorca they became even more so. While still in London they had set up the Seizin Press, collaborated on A Survey of Modernist Poetry , A Pamphlet Against Anthologies and other works. In Majorca, the Seizin Press was enlarged to become a publishing imprint, producing inter alia the substantial hardbound critical magazine Epilogue, edited by Riding with Graves as associate editor. Throughout their association both steadily produced volumes of major poetry, culminating for each with a Collected Poems in 1938.
Graves and Riding left Majorca in 1936, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, they moved to the United States and took lodging in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Their changing relationship is described by Elizabeth Friedmann in A Mannered Grace, by Richard Perceval Graves in Robert Graves: 1927–1940, The Years with Laura and by T. S. Matthews in Jacks or Better and also was the basis for Miranda Seymour's novel The Summer of '39. In 1939 Riding and Graves parted and in 1941 she married Schuyler B. Jackson, eventually settling in Wabasso, Florida, where she lived quietly and simply until her death in 1991, Schuyler having died in 1968. The vernacular "cracker" house in which they lived has been renovated and preserved by the Laura Jackson Foundation.
According to Graves' biographer Richard Perceval Graves, Riding played a crucial role in the development of Graves' thoughts when writing his book The White Goddess, despite the fact the two were estranged at that point. Laura Jackson was later to say: "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 had already written to the Editor of the Minnesota Review, in 1967, about how Graves had used her as a source: "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."

Renunciation of poetry

In about 1941, Riding renounced poetry, but it was fifteen to twenty years before she felt able to begin explaining her reasons and exploring her unfolding findings. She withdrew from public literary life, working with Schuyler Jackson on a dictionary that would lead them into an exploration of the foundations of meaning and language. In April 1962, she read "Introduction for a Broadcast" for the BBC Third Programme, her first formal statement of her reasons for renouncing poetry. An expanded version of the piece was published that year in the New York magazine Chelsea, which also published "Further on Poetry" in 1964, writings on the theme of women-and-men in 1965 and 1974 and in 1967, The Telling.

Later writings

The 62 numbered passages of The Telling, a "personal evangel", formed the "core part" of a book of the same title, thought by some to be her most important book alongside Collected Poems. Writings and publications continued to flow throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties, as Laura Jackson explored what she regarded as the truth-potential of language, free from the artificial restrictions of poetic art. "My faith in poetry was at heart a faith in language as the elementary wisdom," she had written in 1976. Her later writings attest to what she regarded as the truth-potential contained in language and in the human mind. She might be regarded as a spiritual teacher whose unusually high valuation of language, led her to choose literature as the locus of her work.
Two issues of Chelsea were given over to new writings by her, It Has Taken Long and The Sufficient Difference. Publication of her work has continued since her death in 1991, including First Awakenings , Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words, The Poems of Laura Riding, A Newly Revised Edition of the 1938/1980 Collection, Under The Mind's Watch, The Failure of Poetry, The Promise of Language, and On the Continuing of the Continuing. The latest book to appear is her two-volume literary memoirs, The Person I Am, following which three further early collections of her poetry have been re-published, edited and with lengthy introductions: 'The Close Chaplet', 'Love As Love, Death As Death' and 'Poet: A Lying Word'. 'Poems A Joking Word' is contracted to finalise the series. Her works have been published in France, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Poland, Brazil and Norway.

Selected bibliography