Old Gravy

Letters

Vol. 17 No. 19 · 5 October 1995

From Alan Clarke

Mark Ford (LRB, 7 September) speaks interestingly of Robert Graves’s line of 1945, ‘There is one story and one story only,’ while showing no awareness of its earlier history in Laura (Riding) Jackson’s thought and published work. See, for instance, her remarkable early story-sequence Progress of Stories, with its prefatory observation that ‘there is only one subject, and it is impossible to change it.’ Or see her poem ‘Disclaimer of the Person’ – its original version was hand-printed in 1933 by the equal partners Riding and Graves on their Albion at the Seizin Press:

There is one thing to say only.
There is one thing only.

Or:

The name is the one word only.
The one word only is the one thing only.
The one thing only is the word which says.

The human validity of ‘one story’ still requires protection from Graves’s memorable but regressive nonce-use. Such a haven is provided by Mrs Jackson in The Telling (1972), a quietly measured statement of her dedication to that true ‘one story’ which, however little honoured yet, comprehends everyone’s. I commend the entire book – its author’s ‘personal evangel’ – for impartial reading.

While it may or may not be true that Graves’s own ‘patterns of gender relation’, as Mr Ford puts it, reveal ‘a crassly stereotyped and cramping polarisation’, the attitudes exemplified in Graves’s Man Does, Woman Is book-title and poem, of 1964, have, among their several un-remarked Riding origins, a particularly identifiable one in a book originally addressed to one of Graves’s daughters (then aged eight), Four Unposted Letters to Catherine (1930):

And, dear Catherine, this is the way the world is. Only a small part of the doings in it are done for comfort or fun. The rest is just showing-off. The greatest showers-off and busy-bodies are men. And so this world is ruled by men, because it is a world not of doing but overdoing. A world of simple doing would need no ruling. It takes really very little doing to keep comfortably and happily alive. We ought not to pay much more attention to doing man to breathing.

And another, from the mid-Thirties, in The Word ‘Woman’:

When a woman meets another woman she knows what she is, in a way in which she cannot immediately know what any man is, or a man any other man: she knows that the other woman is a woman; whereas with a man the question of What is he? can only be answered by saying what he does – what particular kind of activity he represents.

The weirdest of Mr Ford’s biographer-engendered assertions is that Riding ‘later claimed’ to have ‘invented the notion of the White Goddess’. In the soaring 1938 preface to her Collected Poems, Riding – least backward-looking of writers – explicitly rejects the validity, for poets of her time, of myth-and-Muse accountings for the ‘tremendous compulsion’ of poetry: ‘it is dishonest to put the onus of compulsion on some outside force – one only does this by way of excusing one’s failures.’ Her own poetic employments of grand female personification are scrupulously delimited; as for instance in ‘The Flowering Urn’:

Will rise the same peace that held
Before fertility’s like awoke
The virgin sleep of Mother All …

What (Riding) Jackson later pointed out, trenchantly and in various registers, was that Graves’s ‘prodigious, monstrous, stupefying, indescribable book’ – as T.S. Eliot’s 1948 blurb memorably calls it – makes ‘a mauling use of [her] identity’ and a spirit-killing ‘literary transmogrification’ of her thought – both thought ascertainably recorded in print, and thought shared with Graves over 14 years.

Alan Clarke
Reading

Vol. 17 No. 20 · 19 October 1995

From Joan Anholt

Laura Riding was never as popular a poet as her partner, Robert Graves; she does not figure in the anthologies or books of quotations; and one can see why. Reading her essays (LRB, 7 September) was like hacking one’s way on a moonless night through an almost impenetrable forest. The first essay – worse when read aloud – almost defeated me. But gradually pathways became apparent, even a gleam of light though the branches above; and by the time I reached – at the sixth or seventh reading – the last little essay, on Wordsworth, Coleridge and Eliot, I began with some delight to discern the trees in the wood. Almost unwillingly, and probably in a way Riding herself would have disapproved, I began to admire her perceptiveness, honesty, and originality of mind. And then the poem: difficult ideas clothed in clear language, reminiscent of Kathleen Raine. Again this required several careful readings, but more and more it emerged as a moving statement of her life’s aims as a poet.

Joan Anholt
Lyme Regis

Vol. 17 No. 21 · 2 November 1995

From Editors, ‘London Review’

In our issue of 5 October, the three lines from Laura Riding’s poem ‘The Flowering Urn’ quoted in Alan Clark’s letter should have read as follows:

Will rise the same peace that held
Before fertility’s lie awoke
The virgin sleep of Mother All …

Editors, ‘London Review’