Collected Prose: Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces, Collaborations With Artists, and Interviews (54 page)

And talk in talk like time in time vanishes.

Ringing changes on dumb supposition,

Conversation succeeds conversation,

Until there’s nothing left to talk about

Except truth, the perennial monologue,

And no talker to dispute it but itself.

(from “The Talking World”)

These strengths, however, can also be weaknesses. For in order to sustain the high degree of intellectual precision necessary to the success of the poems, Laura Riding has been forced to engage in a kind of poetic brinkmanship, and she has often lost more than she has won. Eventually, we come to realize that the reasons for her break with poetry are implicit in the poems themselves. No matter how much we might admire her work, we sense that there is something missing in it, that it is not really capable of expressing the full range of experience it claims to be expressing. The source of this lack, paradoxically, lies in her conception of language, which in many ways is at odds with the very idea of poetry:

Come, words, away from mouths,

Away from tongues in mouths

And reckless hearts in tongues

And mouths in cautious heads—

Come, words, away to where

The meaning is not thickened

With the voice’s fretting substance …

(from “Come, Words, Away”)

This is a self-defeating desire. If anything, poetry is precisely that way of using language which forces words to remain
in
the mouth, the way by which we can most fully experience and understand “the voice’s fretting substance.” There is something too glacial in Laura Riding’s approach to gain our sympathy. If the truth in language she is seeking is a human truth, it would seem to be contradictory to want this truth at the expense of what is human. But in trying to deny speech its physical properties — in refusing to acknowledge that speech is an imperfect tool of imperfect creatures — this seems to be exactly what she is doing.

In the 1938 preface to the
Collected Poems
, at the moment of her most passionate adherence to poetry, we can see this desire for transcendence as the motivating force behind her work. “I am going to give you,” she writes, “poems written for all the reasons of poetry — poems which are also a record of how, by gradual integration of the reasons of poetry, existence in poetry becomes more real than existence in time — more real because more good, more good because more true.” Thirty years later, she uses almost the same terms to justify her equally passionate opposition to poetry: “To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth … But only a problem of art is solved in poetry. Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth. Poetic art cheats truth to further and finer degrees than art of any other kind because the spoken word is its exclusive medium….”

For all their loftiness and intensity, these statements remain curiously vague. For the truth that is referred to is never really defined, except as something beyond time, beyond art, beyond the senses. Such talk seems to set us afloat in a vast realm of Platonic idealism, and it is difficult for us to know where we are. At the same time, we are unconvinced. Neither statement is very believable to us as a statement about poetry, because, at heart, neither one is about poetry. Laura Riding
is
clearly interested in problems that extend beyond the scope of poetry, and by dwelling on these problems
as if
they were poetry’s exclusive concerns, she only confuses the issue. She did not renounce poetry because of any objective inadequacy in poetry itself — for it is no more or less adequate than any other human activity — but because poetry as she conceived of it was no longer capable of saying what she wanted to say. She now feels that she had “reached poetry’s limit.” But what really happened, it would seem, is that she had reached her own limit in poetry.

It is appropriate, then, that her work since 1938 has been largely devoted to a more general investigation of language, and when we come to
The Telling
we find a deeper discussion of many of the same questions she had tried to formulate in her poetry. The book, which fits into no established literary category, is positively Talmudic in structure. “The Telling” itself is a short text of less than fifty pages, divided into numbered paragraphs, originally written for an issue of the magazine
Chelsea
in 1967. To this “core-text” which is written in a dense, highly abstract prose almost totally devoid of outside references, she has added a series of commentaries, commentaries on commentaries, notes, and addenda, which flesh out many of the earlier conclusions and treat of various literary, political, and philosophical matters. It is an astonishing display of a consciousness confronting and examining itself. Based on the idea that “the human utmost is marked out in a linguistic utmost,” she pursues an ideal of “humanly perfect word-use” (as opposed to “artistically perfect word-use”), by which she aims to uncover the essential nature of being. Again, or rather still, she is straining toward absolutes, toward an unshakable and unified vision of the world: “… the nature of our being is not to be known as we know the weather, which is by the sense of the momentary. Weather is all change, while our being, in its human nature, is all constancy … it is to be known only by the sense of the constant.” Although Laura (Riding) Jackson has put her former poet self in parentheses, she looks upon
The Telling
as the successful continuation of her efforts as a poet: “To speak as I speak in it, say such things as I say in it, was part of my hope as a poet.”

The first paragraph of
The Telling
sets forth the substance of the problem that she confronts in the rest of the book:

There is something to be told about us for the telling of which we all wait. In our unwilling ignorance we hurry to listen to stories of old human life, new human life, fancied human life, avid of something to while away the time of unanswered curiosity. We know we are explainable, and not explained. Many of the lesser things concerning us have been told but the greater things have not been told; and nothing can fill their place. Whatever we learn of what is not ourselves, but ours to know, being of our universal world, will likewise leave the emptiness an emptiness. Until the missing story of ourselves is told, nothing besides told can suffice us: we shall go on quietly craving it.

What immediately strikes us here is the brilliance of the writing itself. The quiet urgency and strong, cadenced phrasing entice us to go on listening. It seems that we are about to be told something radically different from anything we have ever been told before, and of such fundamental importance that it would be in our best interests to pay careful attention to what follows. “We know we are explainable, and not explained.” In the subsequent paragraphs we are shown why the various human disciplines — science, religion, philosophy, history, poetry — have not and cannot explain us. Suddenly, everything has been swept aside; the way seems to have been cleared for a totally fresh approach to things. And yet, when she reaches the point of offering her own explanations, we are once again presented with the mysterious and unbelievable Platonism we had encountered before. It seems, finally, as if she were rejecting the myth-making tendencies of previous thought only in order to present another myth of her own devising — a myth of memory, a faith in the capacity of human beings to remember a time of wholeness that preceded the existence of individual selves. “May our Manyness become All-embracing. May we see in one another the All that was once All-One re-become One.” And elsewhere: “Yes, I think we remember our creation! — have the memory of it in us, to know. Through the memory of it we apprehend that there was a Before-time of being from which being passed into what would be us.” The problem is not that we doubt this belief of hers. We feel, in fact, that she is trying to report back to us about a genuine mystical experience; what is hard for us to accept is that she assumes this experience to be accessible to everyone. Perhaps it is. But we have no way of knowing — and would have no way of proving it even if we did. Laura (Riding) Jackson speaks of this purely personal experience in rigorous and objective terms, and as a result mingles two kinds of incompatible discourse. Her private perceptions have been projected on to the world at large, so that when she looks out on that world she thinks she sees a confirmation of her findings. But there is no distinction made between what is asserted as fact and what is verifiable as fact. As a consequence, there is no common ground established with us, and we find no place where we would want to stand with her in her beliefs.

In spite of this, however, it would be wrong simply to dismiss the book. If
The Telling
ultimately fails to carry out its promises, it is still valuable to us for the exceptional quality of its prose and the innovations of its form. The sheer immensity of its ambitions makes it an exciting work, even when it is most irritating. More importantly, it is crucial to us for what it reveals — retroactively — about Laura Riding’s earlier work as a poet. For, in the end, it is as a poet that she will be read and remembered. Whatever objections we might want to raise about her approach to poetry in general, it would be difficult not to recognize her as a poet of importance. We need not be in agreement with her to admire her.

Roses are buds, and beautiful,

One petal leaning toward adventure.

Roses are full, all petals forward,

Beauty and power indistinguishable.

Roses are blown, startled with life,

Death young in their faces.

Then comes the halt, and recumbence, and failing.

But none says, “A rose is dead.”

But men die: it is said, it is seen.

For a man is a long, late adventure;

His budding is a purpose,

His fullness more purpose,

His blowing a renewal,

His death, a cramped spilling

Of rash measure and miles.

To the roses no tears:

Which flee before the race is called.

And to man no mercy but his will:

That he has had his will, and is done.

The mercy of truth — it is to be truth.

(from “The Last Covenant”)

In one of the supplementary chapters of
The Telling
, “Extracts From Communications,” she speaks of the relationship between the writer and his work in a way that seems to express her aspirations as a poet. “If what you write is true, it will not be so because of what you are as a writer but because of what you are as a being. There can be no literary equivalent to truth. If, in writing, truth is the quality of what is said, told, this is not a literary achievement: it is a simple human achievement.” This is not very far from the spirit of Ben Jonson’s assertion that only a good man is capable of writing a good poem. It is an idea that stands at one extreme of our literary consciousness, and it places poetry within an essentially moral framework. As a poet, Laura Riding followed this principle until she reached what she felt to be “a crisis-point at which division between craft and creed reveals itself to be absolute.” In the making of poems, she concluded, the demands of art would always outweigh the demands of truth.

Beauty and truth. It is the old question, come back to haunt us. Laura Riding sacrificed here poetic career in a choice between the two. But whether she has really answered the question, as she appears to think she has, is open to debate. What we do have are the poems she left behind her, and it is not surprising, perhaps, that we are drawn to them most of all for their beauty. We cannot call Laura Riding a neglected poet, since she was the cause of her own neglect. But after more than thirty years of absence, these poems strike us with all the force of a rediscovery.

1975

From Cakes to Stones

A note on Beckett’s French

Mercier and Camier
was the first of Samuel Beckett’s novels to be written in French. Completed in 1946, and withheld from publication until 1970, it is also the last of his longer works to have been translated into English. Such a long delay would seem to indicate that Beckett is not overly fond of the work. Had he not been given the Nobel prize in 1969, in fact, it seems likely that
Mercier and Camier
would not have been published at all. This reluctance on Beckett’s part is somewhat puzzling, for if
Mercier and Camier
is clearly a transitional work, at once harking back to
Murphy
and
Watt
and looking forward to the masterpieces of the early fifties, it is nevertheless a brilliant work, with its own particular strengths and charms, unduplicated in any of Beckett’s six other novels. Even at his not quite best, Beckett remains Beckett, and reading him is like reading no one else.