Laura Riding, Experts Are Puzzled, ed. by George Fragopoulos, 2018. [1930.]
A nearly impossible text to categorize—is it a collection of short stories, prose poems, manifestos or something else entirely?—Experts Are Puzzled is one of Laura Riding's earliest and most intense examinations of poetry's and language's relationship to truth. In essayistic examinations such as the titular piece, "Introduction to a book on Money," and "An Address to America," Riding seeks to articulate a higher, more poetic notion of truth and truth telling, a project that would later result in her famous renunciation of poetry itself. As such, Experts Are Puzzled stands as an essential text in better understanding why it is that Riding rejected poetry and stopped writing it altogether in the late 1930s. While excerpts and selections from Experts have been published before, most notably in Riding's The Progress of Stories, the entirety of the collection has not appeared in print since its initial publication by Jonathan Cape in 1930.
It is wonderful to discover Laura Riding's all but unknown Experts are Puzzled, an oddity that is just short of being a masterpiece, wherein fiction and philosophy are inextricably and wonderfully melded. Now it is time to revive her other major prose works, notably the dazzling Progress of Stories and the historical novel, A Trojan Ending.—John Ashbery
excerpt:
At least, that is to say, I am a stranger of a fixed old age and I am not puzzled. Ask me anything you like and I will give you a not-puzzled answer. I will not give you an answer. I am a stranger. I do not live, I am only alive. I hear the birds with lice under their wings singing, but I do not understand because I am not a bird with lice under my wings singing. I am not an expert, I am not puzzled. I am a stranger. If you are in search of information you must listen to your own young familiar voice singing and scratch your own young familiar breast where it itches. I am only a poor stranger of a fixed old age and not at all puzzled
Laura Riding’s Experts Are Puzzled is a difficult book to classify. At times it looks like a collection of short stories or parables, at other times it looks like a series of philosophical observations. Regardless of this ambiguity, Experts Are Puzzled is a clear and intelligent exploration of syntax, semantics, and the history of the written word.
The book is split into a variety of short prose pieces (ranging from one to twenty pages in length). Each new section brings with it a new variation of this experiment: What is the function of language, and how can we explore and understand this function. Riding approaches this question with circular, bureaucratic language. She writes with a strong hand, wrapping herself in short phrases, which she pushes to their very limits, examining each way that these phrases might exist in a sentence. Experts Are Puzzled reads as if it is the first English language book. As if nothing before it knew of this communicative form, as if it was her job to display what this language was capable of, and how it might be utilized by her peers.
This is a world where language itself has managed to physically manifest. In a parable titled, “The Populating of Cosmania” the protagonist manages to create a world by bringing the language to describe it into being. The world of Cosmania is not created through the act of creating concrete materials, but rather by creating the words that might describe these materials. The signifier shifts into this role of the signified, where the word represents itself as a word.
In a later section titled, “Introduction To A Book About Money” Riding shows off this idea with the word ‘money’ which she treats as enigmatic and elusive. Each attempt to talk about money is interrupted by the attempt to talk about talking about money. The author frequently finds herself stuck in these endless feedback loops, attempting to attempt. In this regard, Experts Are Puzzled feels like a book without setting. Each section feels as if it takes place within the writing itself. Each story acts as the stage for its own performance. The signifier as it is signified, a word that represents a word (the same word). Where the word ‘tree’ does not represent a real tree, rooted in the ground, with long branches and green leaves, but where the word ‘tree’ instead represents the word ‘tree’.
Each section of Experts Are Puzzled feels like it is an examination of a certain word or phrase. The titular story (which also acts as an introduction to the book), “Experts Are Puzzled” revolves around the phrase, ‘fixed old age,’ whereas “Another Subject” revolves around the word, ‘money’. These moments appear philosophical. They shift from the realm of fiction into the realm of linguistics. These explorations can be long and difficult, but they can also be rewarding and funny. The reader experiences a fatigue as the collection progresses, where each section becomes another equation and its proofs.
Experts Are Puzzled is not made to entertain the desires of the audience, it is made with the intent to understand these capabilities possible within the English language. And this means that plots are rare, but what replaces them is more interesting and elusive than most narratives manage to be. - Mike Corrao
https://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/reviews/laura-riding-experts-are-puzzled-review
Laura Riding, Convalescent Conversations, ed. by George Fragopoulos, 2018. [1936.]
Originally published under the pseudonym Madeleine Vara in 1936 by Laura Riding's and Robert Graves's Seizen Press, Convalescent Conversations is one of Riding's least known works, and one of her most wonderfully idiosyncratic. A novel unfolding almost entirely in dialogue form, Convalescent Conversations tells the story of Adam and Eleanor, two patients recovering from unknown maladies in a nondescript sanitarium. Through a series of increasingly esoteric philosophical conversations regarding topics such as God, love, and the meaning of illness, Adam and Eleanor come to tell the stories of who they are and what they are suffering from. While not strictly an allegorical work, it is difficult to not see historical parallels between the suffering of the protagonists and the state of the world in the late 1930s. 1936 was also the year Riding and Robert Graves had to flee Mallorca, Spain following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.
Convalescent Conversations is an irreproachable jewel, equal in wit and ferocity and linguistic acuteness to the best fiction of the century. How I wish Jane Bowles and Ronald Firbank were here to read this rediscovered classic! Laura Riding is in their droll league: she turns sickbed colloquy into a minimalist spectacle as intemperately lancing as the wise patter of Grey Gardens.—Wayne Koestenbaum
Excerpt:
On their second morning together Eleanor and Adam talked about themselves. First they discussed childhood—because Adam had said that being ill was like being a child again; it was awkward being a child, and awkward being ill. Also, people behaved the same way to you. Eleanor would not agree that being ill was like being a child again. She had not enjoyed being a child, and she had enjoyed being ill. When you were a child people were always expecting things of you, and whatever you did was watched and weighed and commented on. When you were ill you were left pretty much to yourself. People were cruel to children, but kind to invalids.
Laura Riding, Contemporaries and Snobs. University Alabama Press, 2014.
This new edition of Contemporaries and Snobs, a landmark collection of essays by Laura Riding, offers a counter-history of high modernist poetics.
Laura Riding’s Contemporaries and Snobs (1928) was the first volume of essays to engage critically with high modernist poetics from the position of the outsider. For readers today, it offers a compelling account—by turns personal, by turns historical—of how the institutionalization of modernism denuded experimental poetry. Most importantly, Contemporaries and Snobs offers a counter-history of the idiosyncratic, of what the institution of modernism left (and leaves) behind. With Gertrude Stein as its figurehead, the book champions the noncanonical, the “barbaric,” and the undertheorized.
Riding’s nuanced defense of a poetics of the person in Contemporaries and Snobs represents a forgotten but essential first attempt to identify and foster what is now a well-defined poetic lineage that leads from Stein to the contemporary experimental avant-garde. In these essays, Riding takes her readers on a remarkably thorough tour through the critical scene of the 1920s. Among other influential treatises, she considers T. S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood and his editorial essays in The Criterion, Allen Tate’s “Poetry and the Absolute,” John Crowe Ransom’s essays on the modernist poet, Edgell Rickword’s essays in The Calendar of Modern Letters, and Herbert Read’s posthumous publication of T. E. Hulme’s essays. All of this criticism, Riding notes, gave modern poets a sheen of seriousness and professionalism, but was it good for poetry? Her decisive answer is “no.” This new edition includes an introduction by Laura Heffernan and Jane Malcolm that makes legible the many connections between Contemporaries and Snobs and the critical debates and poetic experiments of the 1920s, as well as explanatory notes, a chronological bibliography of Riding’s work, and an index of proper names.
“In theory, poetry has officially passed” (40). So proclaims Laura Riding in her opening essay to Contemporaries and Snobs, “Poetry and the Literary Universe.” Originally published in 1928, this new edition, edited by Laura Heffernan and Jane Malcolm, and republished by the University of Alabama Press, gathers three essays by a largely overlooked modernist critic and poet. Riding’s polemical proclamation—one that is not at all far from the often heard chant “poetry is dead”—rests less on a view of public incapacity, disinterest, or indifference, or even a seeming degradation of poetic quality, than on the observation that criticism itself has sought to dictate what poetry is and in doing so has displaced it. “A new universe without poetry might be expected,” Riding writes, “But instead a new criticism arises to proclaim poetry because there is no poetry, a criticism which shares the universe’s atavistic hunger for poetry” (40). Indeed, throughout the work Riding seems to be tacitly moving between certain poetic forms as failed cultural objects because of critical interventions and a poetry that is yet to come, incessantly desired, and on the cusp of its awakening. As Riding writes:
The truth is that critical modernism is really more interested in maintaining a defensive attitude toward the literary past than in sponsoring “new poetry.” It equivocates between an unreserved adherence to poetic formalism and an unreserved disavowal of poetic formalism. It outformalizes formalism and thus has a ready snobbism to employ against formalism or irregularity, as may be required. (4)
Writing just over 85 years before our own critical junctures of poetic production in an age of technological prowess, self-publishing, buy-in anthologies, digital poetics, machinic reading, reading machines, and information recycling—speaking largely to persistent anxieties about hermeneutics, authorial integrity, and textual production—Riding’s critical commentaries about poetry during her own time unsurprisingly reverberate with our own contemporary concerns.In their introduction to Contemporaries Laura Heffernan and Jane Malcolm argue that Riding “offers a counter history of the idiosyncratic, of what the institution of modernism left (and leaves) behind […] champion[ing] the non-canonical, the ‘barbaric,’ and the under-theorized” (ix). Indeed, “barbarism” remains one of the focal points of Riding’s critical remarks, taking shape in the second essay, “T.E. Hulme, the New Barbarism, and Gertrude Stein.” Heffernan and Malcolm argue that Contemporaries diverges from Riding’s initial foray into modernist criticism in A Survey of Modernist Poetry. Whereas the latter deployed close readings and meditated upon the relationship between public and private poetics of the high modernist era, the former turns to a “multicentury view of modernism’s development” (Heffernan and Malcolm xii), critical of those writers who set out to theorize and systematize poetry and poetics.
Heffernan and Malcolm identify Riding’s peculiar insistence on the poetics of the “person,” yet Riding’s style is totally evacuated of any kind of proximity that such a poetics would suggest. Considering the ways in which maleness—and what Rachel Blau DuPlessis has called in Purple Passages “male poetic power” (3)—were operating amongst her contemporaries, Riding’s prosaic stance of detachment and impersonality was most probably intentionally assumed not as an act of post-binarist or post-gender feminism, nor as a disavowal of feminist concerns. Rather, Riding understood the inner workings of the masculine machinery of poetics and poetic networks of social relations of her time. As DuPlessis writes:
The production of masculinity is everywhere, and almost everywhere it is invisible. Despite important social and literary studies of male subjectivity in past years, unless one is deliberately talking about gender it is still commonplace in viewing artworks by male writers to treat them as ungendered and universal in stance and not explicitly commenting on gender materials or ideologies. (18)
Amusingly, Heffernan and Malcolm note that “Riding refers to Eliot, Joyce, and Co. collectively as ‘ladies’ precisely because they ‘avoid the temptations of sentimentality inherent in the poetic faculty’ and thus reject the humanity inherent in their medium, language” (xvii). In this inverted gendered commentary, Riding, still holding on to some sense of gender stereotypes, basically calls out Eliot et al. on their inability to “man up” and face their emotions. More importantly, however, by choosing to take on the assumed universal poetico-critical power with an equally assumed universal logic and its rationalist overtones, Riding champions critical invectiveness by responding in kind.Riding’s stake in the “personal” might seem totally misplaced when we consider how her writing lacks any sort of intimacy, sensual affect, or particularity that one might expect from a “poetics of the person”. By contrast, Riding’s stylistic choices might seem to corroborate with the very kind of universalisms DuPlessis attributes to male modernisms. Arguably, such a critical stance straddles those gendered stereotypes which may attend reading “personal” with the “feminine.”
Riding’s terse prose speaks to a universalism as an absolute criticism of non-criticism that seeks not to displace already problematic critical views with a new dogma. For cert, Riding is too intelligent for that. As Heffernan and Malcolm argue:
Riding’s ironic use of gender demonstrates the depth of her scorn for the calculated modernist (im)persona, even as it suggests that we should understand her reclamation of the poet as person not as the romantic agenda of an iconoclast woman modernist, but as the cornerstone of a grittier, more authentic, and truly hard (both difficult and obdurate) poetics in and of the modernist moment. (xvii)
Peculiarly, whatever Riding’s conception of a “poetics of the person” is seems to be accessible only through poetry. Clearly, Riding is interested in a kind of critical distillation in which the poetic (what that is for Riding is unclear for she will not say for fear of being authoritarian) is distinguished from poetry, in addition to the removal of critical interruptions. “Criticism has a great deal to say about criticism,” Riding writes,
which means that it is highly philosophical. But as it has very little that is relevant and helpful to say about poetry itself—not as a philosophical abstraction but as poems—criticism becomes, in practice, highly philosophical nonsense. (69)
Moreover, despite the kinds of generic and technical opportunities that the novel may present, Riding is unabashedly anti-fiction. To quote Riding at length:
Criticism and creation do not face the same way, but face each other, criticism forgoing creation in order to be able to describe it. This purpose demands learning in criticism, because it is the author not of one poem, let us say, but of the history of one poem and the other and another (since when face to face with one poem the critic sees many others as well); but it does not mean that criticism may be substituted for creation, as would follow if that “ancient classification” were really invalidated. The novel perhaps shows the danger of such a substitution more clearly than any other kind of writing, being avowedly critical rather than creative, historical rather than poetic: it is a description of poetic reality by contemporary reality. Wherever the novel tries to create poetic values, it becomes false art, as with Proust, Joyce, Virginia Woolf and such American poetic novelists as Waldo Frank and Sherwood Anderson. (27)
Following such critical disarmaments and dagger-like prose are also hilarious jabs at her modernist “snobs.” Occasionally populating her dense and assertive prose are aphoristic gems such as:
Analogy is always false, but it is the strongest philosophical instrument of co-ordination. (65)
Whether or not Hulme formally inaugurated the new barbarism in contemporary criticism is a fine and irrelevant point of history. (68)
Classical art is therefore created to satisfy a desire for gloom which is really, however, a snobbish feeling about romantic gloom. (75)
*
In retrospect, Riding’s work seems to anticipate not only feminist but sociological, new historical, cultural materialist, and critical paradigms. Indeed, Riding had been attuned to the social and historical forces that were effecting poetry during her time—what she calls “historical effort” (52); perhaps a lone voice, yet unfortunately forgotten as modernist criticism attempted to celebrate the so-called “genius” of high modernism, which, as increasing scholarship has shown, was merely the textual products of those who knew who to know and knew how to know them. Such a paradigmatic shift in modernist studies is noted in the shift from Modernism to modernisms—attending to forgotten or lost texts, neglected texts, writers of colour, women writers, international modernisms, along with the necessary intersectional praxis of race, gender, and sexual relations within an Anglo-American and global context.
Riding’s second essay, “T.E. Hulme, the New Barbarism, and Gertrude Stein,” first published as “The New Barbarism and Gertrude Stein” in the June 1927 issue of transition, borrows “barbarism” from Eliot’s denigration of Stein’s writing whilst still maintaining a racist logic in its attempt to take up barbarism in the positive. Eliot writes that
Stein’s work is not improving, it is not amusing, it is not interesting, it is not good for one’s mind. But its rhythms have peculiar hypnotic power not met with before. It has a kinship with the saxophone. If this is the future, then the future is, as it very likely is, of the barbarians. But this is the future in which we ought not to be interested. (qtd. in Heffernan and Malcolm xix)Interestingly, Eliot’s claim that Stein’s bad writing has “kinship with the saxophone” and correlates with the future of the barbarians might need unpacking as some critics have explored the relationship between Eliot’s poetics and jazz, among other popular cultural forms.[1]
Aside from the racializing logic that equates bad writing with the saxophone—and by extension black cultural production—Riding, too, returns to a primitivist logic in hailing “intellectual barbarism” as a necessary poetics for her time. “[N]o one but Miss Stein has been willing to be as ordinary,” Riding writes, “as simple, as primitive, as stupid, as barbaric, as successful as barbarism demands [by doing] what everyone else has been ashamed to do” (78). Furthermore, “This new intellectual barbarism must, of course,” Riding writes, “differ from a natural historical barbarism. In the latter, mass-time and mass-humanity are real and automatically fixed and absolute, so that the poet is free of any conscious effort to construe his time.” (60)
Problematically, Riding’s relationship to “barbarism” still falls into Western popular imaginations of primitive amorphousness and the individuality of the modern European subject. There is certainly ample room for critical intervention to examine the ways in which barbarism is deployed as poetic prowess.
*
In Survey, Riding remarks that “the modernist poet means to keep the public out” (10). Such a statement seems wildly ironic given Riding’s own critical and hermeneutical demands, what Heffernan and Malcolm call “truly hard (both difficult and obdurate)” (xvii). Thus, to understand Riding’s style as both an intentional adoption of the very critical tones she was against and as a new kind of “truly hard” modernist aesthetic, we might begin by peeling back the layers of what only seems to glimmer between Riding’s densely lyrical form. For all of Riding’s anti-history and anti-philosophy, something else seems to lurk underneath the obdurate:
What is being fed to poetry now is the dregs of what poetry itself has produced, and produced long ago. Or, let us not say poetry, since it is a word spoiled by self-abuse. More specifically: science or any similar fetish of the concrete intelligence is a mere by-the-way of the suggestive intelligence, or intellect, a digression that becomes more and more irrelevant and wanting in meaning as it treats itself as a whole instead of as an enlarged incident of the suggestive intelligence. (34)
Here, Riding descries scientific rationalism, which had infused certain poetics of her time, and gestures towards “an enlarged incident of the suggestive intelligence.” What Riding sees in the application of scientific method to poetic praxis is the examination of poetry, its slicing it up, coring, exhuming, dissecting, and judging with incisive prose. Ultimately, Riding’s horizon for poetry and the poetic is an optimistic futural gaze. For Riding, critical modernism has had a “negative influence” since “it is a professional, critical self-consciousness, not a creative one” (54). Critical modes, or what Riding calls “social sentiment”, seems to move and invent poetry from one historical period into a new one:
What causes change, then, in the official inspiration of poetry is usually not a revolt on the part of poetry itself against the tyranny of social sentiment, but the absorption of poetry by a new social sentiment. … Literature, poetry in particular, is in this way an instrument for dramatizing the historical conflict between an old and a new. (36)
*
This new edition of Contemporaries, with a helpful critical introduction by Heffernan and Malcolm, marks both recuperative modernist scholarship and new critical and theoretical strides in modernist studies. Contemporaries provides a revitalized insight into different critical modes of the early 20th century that run counter to canonical interpretations and receptions of so-called canonical works of the high modernist era. Contemporaries provides alternative critical insights that resonate with increasing modernist scholarship on gender and social power, circulation, material culture, and could theoretically illuminate burgeoning studies linking modernist criticism and digital humanities.
Riding’s critical observations about the social strata of the early 20th century also return the poem and the poet to a more sacred position of authoritative value. “The poem cannot be absolute unless it belongs to itself,” Riding writes,
and it cannot belong to itself unless the poet belongs to himself. The poet, then, is the true companion absolute of the poetic absolute, which in this light acquires a simpler and more explicit critical character: it is the goodness of a poem without regard to its supplementary experience-value to the poet. But for a poem to be free of the necessity to provide experience-value the poet must have no poetic prejudice toward actual experience. (17)
Amidst all of Riding’s terse analytics, jabs at snobs, and logical mysticism the desire for the “goodness of a poem” should not be forgotten—not only in Riding’s critical endeavours but our own. Riding reminds us, after all, that our aim is poetry. - Prathna Lorhttps://lemonhound.com/2014/11/28/prathna-lor-on-laura-riding-contemporaries-and-snobs/
Laura Riding, The Progress of Stories, Persea Books; Reprint ed., 1994. [1935.]
This expanded edition of the 1935 classic collection includes the original eighteen stories, which "progress" from "Stories of Lives" to "Stories of Ideas" to "Nearly True Stories," plus twelve more early stories and one late story, all selected and arranged by Laura (Riding) Jackson in 1982. Though the principle of all her writing is that "words are for truth," she has said these "made-up" stories are designed to appeal to our universal love of storytelling, "the zest, the yearning, for the true".
"...unique and uniquely delightful.... One has to suspect these modern fairy tales of being perhaps quite a lot wiser than the ordinary realistic novel". - Rebecca West (1935)
"...one of the most important works of twentieth century fiction... When the history of modern literature is written some years from now, it will have to take [Progress of Stories] into account..."
John Ashbery
John Ashbery
Riding first published Progress of Stories in 1935, when she was living with the poet Robert Graves on Majorca and running the Seizin Press. She had already made a name as a modernist poet in the U.S., divorced her first husband, had an affair with the poet Allen Tate, attempted suicide and broken up Graves’ first marriage–although she cut off sexual relations with Graves early in their time as a couple. If Riding comes across as a woman inclined to take things to extremes, that comes across in her fiction.
In the words of Graves’ nephew and biographer Richard Perceval Graves, “Her plenipotent intellect and personality swept away all resistance, reducing to discipleship, abject servility, or virtual madness anyone who could not manage to shake him/herself free from her mesmerizing, tyrannical influence. Her most subjective responses to experience were translated (by her as well as her followers) into world-historical imperatives and aesthetic universals, while her insight into the multiple layers of human personality enabled her to manipulate everyone around her intellectually, emotionally, and sexually.” (There is a striking resemblance between accounts of Riding by people who knew her–and her responses to them–and those of another litmus-like figure, Ayn Rand.)
I must confess defeat through exhaustion in dealing with Riding’s life and a good deal of her opinions. This is a woman who, in her eighties, could chastise Harry Mathews over four lengthy paragraphs for referring to her in a New York Review of Books article of the 1982 of Progress of Stories as “Laura” rather than “Laura (Riding) Jackson” (her preferred name after her 1941 marriage to critic Schuyler Jackson). She also made sure to note that “my work and myself” were subjects “which no professional literary man or woman can afford to disregard in his or her position-taking.” And I nearly surrendered before even reaching the stories in Progress of Stories thanks to 33 pages of prefaces (the one to the 1935 edition, followed by a second for the 1982 edition).
From the start, Riding draws a stark line between her work and those of virtually all her predecessors: “There is a quaint cult of story-writing which practises what is called ‘the short story’; pompous little fragments in whose very triviality, obscurity and shabbiness some significant principle of being is meant to be read.” Instead, it is time, she declares, that “we should be telling one another stories of ideas.” This is no earth-shaking assertion, but soon after it, Riding challenges the reader to digest the following sentence: “Thus the story-telling model of human speaking, or, as speaking recorded for silent apprehending is literarily named, ‘writing’, persists, in its natural casting of speaking or writing as reduplicating the live processes of happening, into the open areas of knowledge and understanding that all minds share as the world of intelligent being—partaking, in their unitary reality as minds, of the identity of mind.”
I balked for a moment, but plowed on (write me if you can explain what she meant). Or rather, detoured past the rest of the preface material and headed into the stories themselves. The book is organized in three major sections: the stories from the 1935 edition, followed by a selection of stories from Riding’s first two fiction collections, Anarchism is Not Enough (1928) and Experts Are Puzzled (1930). It concludes with “Christmastime,” a story she wrote in 1966 and her own reflections on some of the preceding stories.
The Progress of Stories section represents something of a journey out of conventional story-telling into the new territory Riding proposes to discover. The seven stories in Part One, “Stories of Lives”, a written in a very spare style but still somewhat represent other short stories one might be familiar with, although rather as if being viewed under a microscope like a specimen.
In Part Two, “Stories of Ideas,” however, Riding sets the reader down in wholly unfamiliar material. “Reality as Port Huntlady” opens with a simple, traditional narrative sentence: “Dan the Dog came to the town of Port Huntlady with two friends, Baby and Slick.” OK, no problem there. But then Riding tells us that, “Port Huntlady was not a town as other towns are towns. It was rather like a place where one felt a town might one day be, or where one felt that perhaps there had once been a town.” Port Huntlady, in other words, is not your usual seaside resort town. No, it is a town that–like the story itself–hovers between life in the real world and life in a world of ideas: “Port Huntlady was a place where things might happen; not the things that happened in the world proper, which were personal experiences, but universal experiences, such as the end of the world, or great turning-points in the course of human events.”
At the center of Port Huntlady affairs is Lady Port-Huntlady–herself an orphic figure who might well be a fictional counterpart for Riding herself: “Never seeming to say anything—and yet, after one had left her presence, it seemed that she had said a great deal, at least that one had understood a great many things that one did not really understand.” Indeed, a cynic might say the same thing after finishing Progress of Stories
But it doesn’t really matter what Lady Port-Huntlady might or might not say during her soirees, since, as Riding soon tells us, “We are all aware that there is no such place as Port Huntlady. It may well be that there is a place to which Port Huntlady stands as a lie stands to the truth. In fact, this is not far from being the case.” The inclusion of details is, for Riding, part of the attempt the story-teller to be believable, but this is ultimately equivalent to hypnotism: “this true-seeming is the power of the story to keep your interest until you have abandoned, quite frankly, those rational standards of interest with which we all prop up our chins when our thoughts scurry between brain and heart and we can do no better than be proud. It is the moral pretence of the story created by our joint vanity in being conscientious, orderly and truthful creatures—before we give ourselves up to its gentle idiocy….”
“But, indeed,” she asks further on, “is our story very important? Is any story very important? I assure you that no story is of much importance; and I think you will agree with me. Are we not all agreed that only a few things are really important?” Though she introduces other characters and engages them in various actions, she notes that these matters are both pointless and, therefore, infinite in their possibilities: “… how Lady Port-Huntlady would have consoled the cats by bringing down the remains of their lunch from the lounge; and how Miss Bookworth would have left Port Huntlady soon after to take up a post as secretary to a wealthy invalid whose hobby was corresponding with patients in tuberculosis sanatoria, in which he had spent much of his own life; and how a story may go on indefinitely unless there is perfect understanding at the start of the limitations that keep a story from being anything but a story….” In the end, she writes, driving a last stake through any pretense of honoring the “laws” of fiction, “no amount of ingenuity can save a story from seeming, in the end, just a story–just a piece of verbal luggage, belonging to anybody who cares to be bothered with it.”
In an interview, the poet Lisa Samuels, who edited the University of California Press 2001 reprint of Riding’s 1928 collection, Anarchism Is Not Enough, argued that Riding was challenging the very conceptual basis of fiction itself, rather like Brecht breaking the fourth wall between the play and its audience: “Her tone can be crisp in those stories, as you say; but her combinations of the fantastic, fairy tales, interrogating language as power, investigating what it means to draw and disassemble characters, challenging the reader to be aware of their desire for narrative and syntactic seduction, and so on, make for a situation, in my reading, of multiple possibilities (rather than precision) and messy genres (excess – I mean that in a good way).”
If you wanted to know whether or not you would get anything out of Progress of Stories, you could actually just go straight to “Reality as Port Huntlady” and draw your conclusions from that. For me, reading it was rather like the experience of looking at a Magic Eye picture, where you can feel your visual perception of the image switching back and forth between what seems like noise and then, a moment later, becomes coherent. It was both disorienting and, in a way, almost thrilling.
Continuing on in this manner for another two hundred-plus pages, however, was a like being trapped in a gallery with nothing on the walls except Magic Eye pictures. A little bit is an exciting novelty; dozens of these pictures, one following the other relentlessly, was mind-numbing. Reviewing the 1982 edition in New York magazine, Edith Milton concluded, “All this self-consciousness makes for quite difficult reading, and, despite their formal brilliance, the stories pall.”
On the other hand, Harry Mathews–himself a veteran challenger of the conventions of fiction–considered Riding’s venture among the most ambitious in 20th century literature: “Riding’s aim in writing this carefully structured series of stories was to make articulate in the experience of her readers a knowledge of life that is both true and nonconceptual. It was as if she wanted to make the mechanisms of language, usually so approximate and reductive, accurate enough in the effect of their working to initiate the reader willy-nilly into an awareness of what she felt to be the pure, unmediated truth.”
Unfortunately, Mathews managed to express himself better than Riding herself. For her entry in the 1955 edition of Twentieth Century Authors, she wrote: “We did not fully understand the character of the mental operation required for definitions of the kind we wished to make until we perceived that we must liberate our minds entirely from the confused associations of usage in which the meanings of words are entangled–and that, for us, the act of definition must involve a total reconstituting of words’ meanings. Much of our work has been done upon our minds, rather upon words directly: and we have proceeded very slowly, in consequence.” Indeed, “a total reconstituting of words’ meanings” could present a fairly insurmountable obstacle if one is trying to pursue writing as a career.
After seeing Progress of Stories mentioned as an undeservedly neglected book for decades, I was glad to finally have the chance to read it, but in the end, I was reminded of something a friend of mine once said when returning a book he’d borrowed: “It was good, but not that good.”
- http://neglectedbooks.com/?p=4714
Mademoiselle Comet
Privateness by Laura Riding
They have a small bedroom. The bed is small, but they are not fat and they love each other. She sleeps with her knees neatly inside his knees and when they get up they do not get in each other's way. She says, "Put on the shirt with the blue patterns like little spotted plates," and he says, "Put on the white skirt that you wear the purple jacket with." They have no prejudices against colours but like what they have.
Their other room is not larger, but it is cleverly arranged, with a table for this and a table for that. He makes the sandwiches at one table while at another she writes a letter to a friend who needs money. She writes promptly to say they have no money and sends their love. It is not true that they have no money; but they are both out of work and must be careful with the little money they have. They are thinking of renting an office and selling advice on all subjects, for they are very intelligent people. The idea seems like a joke, and they talk about it jokingly; but they mean it.
They go to a large park. It costs little to get there and they know the very tree they want to sit under. It is more like a business trip than a holiday. They eat their lunch in a methodical way and afterwards look through the grass around them as a mother looks through her child's hair to see if it is clean. Then they think about their affairs and change their minds many times.
They walk about on the grass and feel sensible, but when they walk on paved paths they feel they are wasting their time. Finally they decide to commit suicide. They talk about it in natural tones because they may really do it -and they may not. There is an oval pond in the park with solemn brown ducks paddling in it, and they sit down by it, sorry for the ducks paddling in it, and they sit down by it, sorry for the ducks but not for themselves.
They go out of the park at a different entrance from the one they came in by. There are strange restaurants all around they would never think of eating in. It makes them feel lonely, so they speed home in a taxi, though they can ill afford this. At home there is the electric light, which makes them look at each other peculiarly. It is worth going out to be able to come home and look at each other in such a way - not a loving way or a tragic way, but as if to say, "It doesn't interest us what our story is - that is for other people."
by Laura Riding Jackson
We, then, having complete power, removed all the amusements that did not amuse us. We were then at least not hopelessly amused. We inculcated in ourselves an amusability not qualified by standards developed from amusements that failed to amuse. Our standards, that is, were impossibly high.
And yet we were not hopeless. We were ascetically humourous, in fact. And so when Mademoiselle Comet came among us we were somewhat at a loss. For Mademoiselle Comet was a really professional entertainer. She came from where she came to make us look.
But Mademoiselle Comet was different. We could not help looking. But she more than amused. She was a perfect oddity. The fact that she was entertaining had no psychological connection with the fact that we were watching her. She was creature of pure pleasure. She was a phenomenon whose humorous slant did not sympathetically attack us; being a slant of independence, not comedy. Her long bright hair was dead. She could not be loved.
Therefore Mademoiselle Comet became our sole entertainment. And she more than amused; we loved her. Having complete power, we placed her in a leading position, where we could observe her better. And we were not amused. We were still ascetically humourous. Thus we aged properly. We did not, like mirth-stricken children, die. Rather we could not remember that we had ever been alive. We too had long bright dead hair. Mademoiselle Comet performed, and we looked, always a last time. We too performed, became really professional entertainers. Our ascetically humourous slant became more and more a slant of independence, less and less a slant of rejected comedy. With Mademoiselle Comet we became a troupe, creatures of pure pleasure, more than amused, more than amusing, looker-entertainers, Mademoiselle Comet's train of cold light. We were the phenomenal word fun, Mademoiselle Comet leading. Fun was our visible property. We appeared, a comet and its tail, with deadly powerfulness to ourselves. We collided. We swallowed and were swallowed, more than amused. Mademoiselle Comet, because of the position we had put her in with our complete power, alone survived. Her long bright dead hair covered her. Our long bright dead hair covered us. Her long bright dead hair alone survived; universe of pure pleasure, never tangled, never combed. She could not be loved. We loved her. Our long bright hair alone survived. We alone survived, having complete power. Our standards, that is, were impossibly high; and the brilliant Mademoiselle Comet, a professional entertainer, satisfied them. Our standards alone survived, being impossibly high.
The Person I Am
A Mannered Grace
The Failure of Poetry, The Promise of Language
Anarchism Is Not Enough
Essays from Epilogue
First Awakenings
Four Unposted Letters To Catherine
Progress of Stories
Rational Meaning
The Laura (Riding) Jackson Reader
The Poems of Laura Riding
A Selection of the Poems of Laura Riding
The Telling
The Word Woman
Under The Mind's Watch
Sample Letters of Laura (Riding) Jackson
Essays
Laura Riding was a poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and publisher. While primarily known for the critical works that she co-authored with Robert Graves—A Pamphlet Against Anthologies and A Survey of Modernist Poetry—Riding also left behind an incredibly powerful body of poetry and prose works that, regrettably, remain little read today. These include The Close Chaplet, The Lives of Wives, and The Progress of Stories. Famously rejecting poetry early in her career, she spent the last decades of her life co-writing a theoretical work on linguistics, Rational Meaning, with her husband Schuyler Jackson. She was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1991, the very same year she died.
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