Laura Riding and Her Traveling Circus

...Both Martin Seymour-Smith and Richard Perceval Graves end their books with tributes to Beryl Graves, and that seems wonderfully fitting...

...Strapped as they were for money, Graves returned a generous check to his father because he didn't show enough sympathy for Laura...

...How could the splendid Graves have endured all those years living, loving and working with Laura Riding...

...rather, Laura] would supply the key definitions, making them not only exact but poetic...

...Geoffrey, emboldened by the prospect of exclusivity with Nancy, announced that he was leaving, whereupon Laura, aware that the poet Charlotte Mew had killed herself by drinking Lysol, imbibed some herself...

...Thus when she lost a topaz from oneof her rings and he, "by rationalised search," found it for her, Laura merely sneered, "You ought to buy a grocery shop and sell jams and pickles and say ? made them all myself.'That would be your madness...

...Harry Kemp, a young poet with whom Laura collaborated (she had a passion for working with men to whom she was attracted or vice versa), "found her physically unattractive" with "her undershot jaw, primly ascetic lips, rather prominent nose, curvaceous and tobacco-stained fingers, and wobbly eyes," not to mention her "too-theatrical costumes...

...Franco's takeover in Spain forced the abandonment of Majorca...

...They had something to offer each other, and in those days poetry was a club whose members could extend such invitations to fellow members...

...Laura "often seemed to those around her possessed of paranormal powers...

...She warned Robert and Beryl that they were "in danger of letting the secondary nature rule [them] and getting mixed in a merely sentimental Oscar-Lake Bottom way...

...So devoted was Robert to his spiritual guide that he unhesitatingly accepted Laura's estimate of her own significance...

...In fact, Graves was the real poet...

...In 1920, at age 19, she had married Louis Gottschalk, a graduate student at Cornell, where she was a junior...

...she was almost always most attractive either to slightly masculine women or to slightly feminine men— like the young and still un-self-assured Graves...

...Laura was...

...Graves and Beryl resumed the old life in Majorca...

...So that when they demand our subjection, complete obedience, and instantly, our tendency is to hear and obey...

...Continuing to treat Robert abominably, she summoned him to her bedroom one night at 4 A.M...

...Unfortunately, all three relevant books, Seymour-Smith's, Matthews' Under the Influence and this one, seem to have been written before he died in 1985, and so lack a sense of closure...

...He was not happy with Norah either and wrote Laura, who, with Robert in tow, promptly set out in pursuit, intending to draw Norah into a "five-life...

...Nancy was furious...

...The circus moved to England, where it suffered several setbacks: Alexander Korda's projected film of I, Claudius never materialized, other movie projects similarly evaporated, there were fairly serious problems with the eldest Graves daughter, Jenny, and Robert himself suffered from severe boils...

...days, Alan Hodge, who brought along afriend, Beryl Pritchard...

...She succeeded, driving Kit into a loony bin for a while...

...We are weakly and cowardly sane: they are strongly and indomitably crazy...

...Sheliveson,insublimatedfonm, as the White Goddess, as Livia in /, Claudius, and as the woman in a number of his love poems...

...When he arrived with his wife, Norah, at the trio's Hammersmith apartment, Geoffrey was given a royal welcome...

...Later, Matthews came to perceive her differently: "The texture of her skin was waxy to dead-dull, and her hands were surprisingly large and coarse for a woman's...

...Yet there was no denying her intellectual fascination that could somehow become sexual...

...Laura was published because of him, never widely recognized, and would shortly be forgotten...

...Graves started running downstairs after her, but on reaching the third floor, changed his mind and jumped in turn...

...It was not unlike the Shelley-and-Byron circle in Switzerland and Italy, except for involving a larger number of transient, and more maniacal, participants...

...This awesome question is, if not exactly answered, exhaustively and exhilaratingly confronted by Robert Graves: The Years with Laura, 1926-1940, the second volume Richard Perceval Graves has devoted to the life and work of his uncle...

...Laura was now writing political tracts and gathering associates around her for "moral action by inside people" that could prevent war...

...But finally Geoffrey bolted to France to rejoin his wife...

...Graves) is to be found in Matthews' book...

...The horrific climax was reached in Hammersmith, where the four-lifers argued furiously through most of the night...

...Back in England, however, Geoffrey started falling more seriously for Nancy and before long had to go into hiding with David Garnett, the very man who had seduced Norah when she first left Geoffrey...

...Graves believed she was a much finer poet than he, and Laura tacitly concurred...

...Amid this chaos, Robert was capable of writing his sympathetic sister Clarissa to accuse her of depravity and filthy-mindedness for f ailing to see that Laura was "absolute truth and goodness...

...Her poems soon made an impression on the group of Agrarian poets clustered around Vanderbilt University, led by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Donald Davidson...

...to remove that more serious threat Laura pointed Robert toward Nancy, whom Geoffrey had left to marry another...

...He himself said the poet has only two themes, love and death, an admirable precept that he felicitously kept forgetting...

...In time, Nancy was sucked into what Laura called their "three-life...

...Then he and Beryl Hodge seemed to be falling in love...

...They had four children...

...To the question: Why did we put up with Laura...

...In 1926, Robert Graves was 31 and a poet of some reputation who had been shell-shocked in the war, and had not yet fully recovered...

...Men were primarily "swingering swine," i.e., hard workers with control and determination, and secondarily "joulting pigs," i.e., possessed of an element of romantic wildness...

...Graves remained in the doghouse...

...Laura continued to deny herself to Robert, and because his collaborator on a book about T. E. Lawrence, Basil Liddell-Hart, did not respond to her sexually, tried in various low ways to break up the collaboration...

...It may have been partly her eerily brilliant brain...

...as primly neat as Robert was gawky...

...and true.'" At the Jackson farm, Laura and her acolytes worked on the Dictionary and on further plans "to save the world from war...

...They published her work in their magazine, The Fugitive, eventually even awarding her their big prize of $100...

...E. E. Cummings, Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas, and John Crowe Ransom follow closely, but Graves is "it...

...Laura did not earn much more than Robert's servile adoration (Graves served her breakfast in bed and did all the household chores) as she frenziedly attempted one unrealizable project after another...

...The Hodges (Alan had married the charming Beryl) lived with them, the Matthewses were down the road...

...It is not far-fetched to argue that, either through the mediation of William Empson or directly, those works were a major influence on the New Criticism...

...Robert got off without real injury...

...They could think of her as a goddess: She was certainly a figure of destiny...

...no, not so much minds as appetites...

...Things became especially comic once the traveling circusmovedtoavillain Lugano, and then to a ch?teau near Rennes...

...Laura, though hardly beautiful, was a particular Semitic type that a good many wasps perceive as exoticandsexy...

...This installment of the biography begins when Robert, who had studied at Oxford, accepted a professorship of English at the University of Cairo, ajob friends and relatives living in Egypt had procured for him...

...Now Graves showed up chez Garnett and threatened to "kill Geoffrey if he wouldn't return to Laura...

...Nevertheless, the m?nage ? trois chugged along, with Robert and Laura reading and commenting on each other's poetry and prose...

...Laura, no longer interested in going to bed with Robert, started starving him sexually and, at times, pushing him toward other women, onlyto reclaim him with insane possessiveness...

...She deserves no less...

...none is better...

...Lake...

...Laura broke four vertebrae, split her pelvis in three pieces, and bent her spinal cord severely...

...As the biographer puts it (apropos Gertrude Stein's warming "to the ambivalent character of Laura's carnality"), "if people would only love her, Laura could respond just as easily to lesbians...

...She wrote the kind of verse that could truly be called "modernist, whereas he was still partially stuck in Georgian poetry—very English-countryside and steeped in poeticism...

...Rosaleen thought this was all out of "the most incredible Russian novel...

...Subsequently, in an article in Time on the state of poetry, commissioned by Matthews, he declared that the age had only two real poets, Rilke (already dead) and Laura Riding...

...the answer is: Because people are in general vulnerable to bullying...

...And certainly no more...

...Lake, the only up-to-date surgeon in England...

...Since this had no immediate effect, she said "Goodbye, chaps," and jumped from the fourth-floor window with a "doom-echoing shout...

...One who did not want to come, despite urging, was Matthews' friend Schuyler Jackson, poet and gentleman farmer in New Jersey...

...She actually wrote an article about the joy of "seeing the interior of a man's leg .. cut open in a motor-car accident...

...But the young classical scholar Eirlys Roberts, the mistress of J. Bronowski, a scientist collaborating with Laura, found her "beautiful" and "a pleasure to look at...

...But let's not forget that Auden, who learned much from Laura's work (to the point of being accused by Robert and Laura of plagiarism), called Riding "the only living philosophical poet...

...She showed no gratitudeto Rosaleen, asking her fiercely, "How do you know that I didn't invent Mr...

...He has lyricism and humor in equal measure, passion and satire, erudition and directness, immersion in myth and down-to-earth common sense...

...In a black cape, withsomething round her head, she could look truly sinister: She then became tight and ugly and horrible," said Simmons, and there was "something genuinely evil" about her...

...Yet in some ways Laura and Robert were well matched: When W. B. Yeats, whom they hated as they did almost every literary competitor, died, the twoof them shared an "unholy satisfaction...

...For a while it was Robert and Laura in the city, working and playing, and Nancy in Islip with the children...

...On and on the circus rolled, until Laura and Robert settled down in Dey?, Majorca, where life was rustic, pleasant and cheap...

...These are the poems that Graves read...

...But by 1955, reviewing the latest Collected Poems, Lionel Trilling could confidently assert, "We have to see Graves as a poet of the first rank...

...In a Rouen hotel Geoffrey and Norah declined the offer, and "'God'in the Public Lounge threw herself on the floor, had hysterics, threw her legs in the air and screamed...

...When she was in full regalia her dignity matched and enhanced her costume [and no one thought it laughable] that she was crowned by [a gold band, fastened at the back with gold wire] that [in Greek lettering] spelled LAURA...

...As far as I know, she is still alive in Wabasso, Florida...

...The poems were clumsy, unclear, pretentious, and almost wholly lacking in sensuous appeal...

...Geoffrey and Nancy remained together in England, in a relationship not destined to last...

...For seven years Riding and Graves lived it up in Majorca, chiefly off his two major hits, the autobiography Good-bye to All That and the novel I, Claudius, both enviously derided by Laura...

...Laura began to study Kit, Schuyler'swife and the mother of his children, for the best method of breaking up her marriage...

...she embodied 'Finality...

...The nearest thing to an explanation of the Laura witchery (though unquoted by R...

...Because of my love for Graves, I tried to read the poems of Laura Riding, the woman with whom he was deeply involved for 14 years...

...He was "in a constant swivet of anxiety" over Laura, Matthews reports, though she "treated himlikeadog...

...To the sculptress Dorothy Simmons, Laura had power...

...The Robert-Laura-Nancy trio did not last long in Egypt...

...She only came out when Geoffrey lied for peace' sake and said I was much smaller.' "More serious was the fact that Laura had become more than a little unbalanced, and now revealed to Phibbs (as presumably she had already done to Graves) that she was more than human...

...Having broken up her marriage and had a brief affair with Tate, she was eager for fresh adventure...

...Laura was to recover completely, but in the hospital, even when out of pain, she would scream for the fun of it, regardless of the discomfort to others...

...Would that I had notforgotten them...

...Laura, who changed her name to Riding, was someone he wanted to meet and collaborate with on a study of the "new" poetry, so he invited her to join him and Nancy and the children as they set out for Egypt...

...There was even a time when Amy, Robert's mother, wished her son had died in the War rather than been driven insane by Riding...

...simplytoinform him of her sudden revelation that 'Love is a beautiful insincerity...

...She had tobe removed by two waiters...

...and on one occasion she is said [by Norah] to have 'locked herself in the lavatory for eight hours because Geoffrey said I was taller than she was (as I was...

...He expunged Laura from the revised 1957 edition of Good-bye to All That, and, most likely, from his heart as well...

...SeymourSmith estimates that Robert Graves "has made as long a journey—through nightmare—as most of us would wish to take, and one in which the baleful figure of Laura Riding stands out, ableak and still enigmatic landmark...

...But when I picked up Riding's Collected Poems, I was quickly bored, even repelled...

...Here I must quote at length: "One of the problems was Laura's extreme jealousy of [Geoffrey's] continuing affection for Norah...

...She bore him another set of four children, and wisely allowed him affairs with much younger "Muses," whom he needed for inspiration...

...Reviewing a couple of her volumes, Donald Davie (see his The Poetin thelmaginary Museum) observed, "Shehas raised the stakes so high that she has to lose...

...For a long time before, Laura had nurtured, sight unseen, an amour de t?te for Jackson, which she hoped someday to consummate...

...Robert's brother John, on the other hand, was annoyed by Laura's frequent finger-wagging and pointing, her exaggerated consonants, her odd way of speaking (saying "blee-oo" for blue) and accenting "Robert" on the second syllable...

...He was already smitten by the poetry of a young American Jewish woman of Austrian origin, Laura Reichenthal...

...To Matthews she suggested that he "work" with her and cede his beloved wife, Julie, to Robert...

...But they did produce at least two innovative, challenging, often highly pertinent critical-essayistic works, A Survey of Modernist Poetry and Against Anthologies...

...After a little sleep, the debate raged on...

...She could indeed look royal—a Hittite queen...

...which seemed to me to render her asexual, sibylline...

...Following his death 26 years later, she started publishing again, mainly reprints of her poetry and screeds against literature...

...But Norman, who cared about Elfriede, recognized Laura's true nature and was filled with horror...

...Phibbs also began to believe that there was some truth in Laura's pronouncements, and even jotted down some notes about time and history being either 'a projection from Laura,' or 'necessitated by Laura.' " This comedy had a shifting locale, including two adjoining houseboats on the Thames that Graves had bought...

...This created a discrepancy in their characters that Laura named "Oscar" in Graves and "Lake Bottom" in Beryl...

...And Martin Seymour-Smith.in his outstanding Robert Graves: His Life and Work, quotes Robert's friend T. E. Lawrence saying, "They are madhouse minds...

...He not only went on doing research for him, but the two even collaborated onacoupleofbooks...

...In preparation for the seduction of Schuyler, Laura gave up her chain-smoking and reduced her coffee intake from 15 cups daily to one or two...

...Once the "three-life" began to prove awkward, a young poet, Geoffrey Phibbs, was recruited to make it a "four-life...

...Laura started fancying bullfights and "developed a morbid fascination [with] thebeauty of cut flesh...

...Laura accepted...

...Quite a few sat at Laura's feet and worked with the goddess on their or her projects, notably what she hoped would be her magnum opus, the ultimate Dictionary...

...To Nancy, Robert wrote, "I love Laura beyond everything thinkable," while to Laura, Phibbs became "the Devil and also Judas and soon...

...and a bad conscience or even the normal amount of self-doubt, people with pretensions, who are sure they are superior beings, will always be dangerously attractive...

...The m?nage ? quatre commenced—a relationship the biographer calls "often baffling to [the four] themselves...

...WhenTomMatthews, the writer and editor of Time, first saw her (and he, too, was for a stretch under her spell), he described her as "a small severe woman...

...But Graves did at last, to use a word from one of his poems, disenthrall himself...

...The troubled m?nagereceived much-needed financial support from both the elder Graveses and the Nicholsons...

...According to Tom Matthews, that effort did not depend on "lexicographers to dig up the root definitions of key words...

...She never had a hair out of place, and her clothes, which were old-fashioned, never seemed odd...

...In the interim she was ordering oversized nightshirts for Robert as an anaphrodisiac...

...She always played the genius-teacher, and he the discipleslave...

...Graves' journalism also mademoney, as did, miraculously, his poetry...

...Occasionally a four-life would reform, as with the young poet Norman Cameron and a tubercular German girl, Elfriede, impregnated by Robert...

...Robert's physician sister, Rosaleen, summoned by Nancy, administered morphine, got special consideration at her hospital for Laura, and later secured the services of Dr...

...Early in 1939 Riding, Graves and some of their retinue accepted an invitation to settle down in a renovated auxiliary building on Schuyler Jackson's large farm near Princeton...

...When first shown Laura's verse, he pronounced it philosophy, not poetry...

...Graves' parents, brothers and sisters, though initially drawn to Laura, soon felt that she had "vampirized Robert from the first," and thought the threesome "immoral...

...Laura married Schuyler, who persuaded her to give up literature as inconsequential...

...He was ruggedly handsome: tall, somewhat ungainly, with a shock of dark hair and a broken nose...

...To spoil Robert and Beryl's chances, Laura tried to get them tos wallow a theory she had evolved...

...It can be enjoyed on several levels, but it is nothing short of sublime as high farce, an amalgam of Feydeau, Coward and Evelyn Waugh, plus a touch of Chekhov here and there...

...Other literary folks drifted to Dey?, many of them married or unmarried couples...

...Alan Hodge graciously yielded his wife to his master...

...It held that women wereprimarily "two-in-hand," i.e.,possessed of "intellectual grace combined with wisdom and self-control," and secondarily "one-in-the-bush," i.e., homemakers...

...To someone with a good brain...

...A series of fortunate incidents nonetheless did result in Robert and Beryl's marrying...

...The son of pious Christians—Alfred Perceval Graves, a civil servant and minor religious poet, and Amalie ("Amy") von Ranke, Alfred's second wife and niece of the great German historian Leopold von Ranke —Robert was married, not especially happily, to Nancy Nicholson, daughter and niece of famous artists, and herself an artist and feminist...

...Robert and Beryl had some joulting pig and bush in them, respectively...

...Schuyler and Laura became lovers, and flaunted the fact before the now often resentful yet still panting Robert...

...Norah was bundled off to a hotel and left to her own devices...

...Hospitalized, he was visited by ayoung disciple from the Dey...

...Fiction collaborations between Laura and Robert misfired, too...

...After a few months, to the dismay and detriment of those who had helped him, Graves breached his contract andreturned to England, establishing domiciles both in the country and in London...

...Laura, as a pure two-in-hand, and Schuyler, as a pure swingerer, were perfect together...

...You read it with goosebumpy fascination between spells of roaring laughter and profound sadness...

...No matter...

...He is in the tradition of the men who, by the terms upon which they accept their ordinary humanity, make it extraordinary...

...Reviewed by John Simon Forme, the Arch Poet of the modern English language has always been Robert Graves...

...Robert dutifully returned to England, where in spite of Nancy's hopes his passion was not rekindled...

...all the more so because the one evening I spent with Robert Frost was taken up mostly with wittily mischievous stories he told me about Graves and Riding...

...Other poets are greater(a vague concept...

...She, Robert and Nancy took to one another, especially she and Robert...