Laura Riding Roughshod

Abstract

DRIVEN OUT of idyllic Mallorca, where she and Robert Graves wrote poetry and published small volumes of esoteric writing at the Seizin Press, the poet Laura Riding wrote a manifesto. There is nothing odd about a poet writing a manifesto in the thirties. It would be an odd poet who didn't. This three-page document was recently on exhibit at the New York Public Library among a remarkable collection of manuscripts from the Berg Collection in Thirties in England, organized by curator Lola Szladits, famous for her acquisition of modern British writers' papers. Across the room in another glass case were the drafts and typescript of Virginia Woolf 's Three Guineas (1938). What's odd is how alike the two manifestoes are in theme and argument, though Woolf s pamphlet is written with a speed and grace of symbol and metaphor, sensuous ap peals to the eye and ear and every literary trick in the bag?which Laura Riding, purest of pure poets, would have abhorred. Woolf 's anti-fascism was a tri-partite political stance of socialism, pac ificism and feminism, her original contribution being the argument that the origin of fascism was not in nationalism but in the patriarchal family. Laura Riding also believed in women's superiority, but in her case it was linked to a belief that because of their domestic isolation, women are bet ter at thinking than men. Because of female rationality, men, she suggests, ought to leave the running of the world to women so that war may be abolished and aggression stopped, locally and internationally. Few feminist protests were heard in what Auden called that low dis honest decade, especially when they were as high-minded and ferociously honest as Woolf 's and Riding's. The last thing that men wanted to hear as they mounted the barricades in a fight for freedom was that war was related to irrational male sex drives. Riding did not get much response to her plea and she and Robert Graves left London for New Hope, Penn sylvania, where their last literary experiment in living broke up in a per sonal debacle, and Laura Riding married the poetry editor of Time maga zine, Schuyler B. Jackson. She gave up poetry as too impure a medium for the pursuit of truth, and domestic thinking and linguistic study have been her occupation ever since. Chicago critic Joyce Wexler, who teaches at Loyola University, has