Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory

When Biographers and Critics Take Up the coherence of Laura Riding’s career as a whole—both her earlier writings, especially poetry, and her later philosophical works published under the name Laura (Riding) Jackson—they inevitably and quite reasonably point to her lifelong commitment to the uncovering of truth.¹ Yet Riding’s pursuit of this uncovering—her “endeavor to open up language in its entire breadth and depth to human experience in its entire breadth and depth”—often took shape in polemic against particular forms of untruth (Poems of Laura Riding xxxviii–xxxix); the most famous of these is her polemic against poetry, a genre whose well-meaning enchantments she came to see as malevolent obscurity. This position demanded, in her view, a renunciation of poetry. As Riding told a radio audience in 1962, she ceased to write poetry after the publication of her 1938 Collected Poems, for at that point she had come to realize that

. . . language does not lend itself naturally to the poetic style, but is warped in being fitted into it; that the only style that can yield a natural and happy use of words is the style of truth, a rule of trueness of voice and mind sustained in every morsel of one’s speech; that, for the practice of the style of truth to become a thing of the present, poetry must become a thing of the past. (Laura (Riding) Jackson Reader 204 )

Prior to her renunciation of poetry, however, Riding’s desire for a “natural and happy use of words” was not limited to verse. Before the outbreak of World War Two, Riding also wrote a great deal of fiction, and [End Page 85] there too she sought a form of truth-telling. The failure of this fiction, like the failure of her poetry, was not, in her later view, a literary failure, but was due instead to the limitations of literature as such. “Products of art are things in excess of that which has natural and necessary presence among us,” she wrote in a retrospective preface to her Progress of Stories (xxii). What she wanted were “stories that are products of nature, that come naturally to the mind for telling, reflecting the infinite progression of circumstances in which reality of live being consolidates itself reiteratively” (xxii). Broader, then, than Riding’s polemic against poetry or fiction was her antagonism to artifice, an antagonism extended to poetry and fiction only after she accepted the fact that truth’s naturalness and literature are incompatible. In her earlier work, where literature remained a plausible avenue to truth, Riding’s polemic on behalf of nature was waged instead against the artifice of history. Tracing out this anti-historical argument is important for two reasons. First, it helps to show that the coherence of Riding’s lifelong pursuit of truth is discernible precisely in the persistence of her effort to root out specific forms of untruth—an effort that hardly began with her renunciation of poetry. Second, it helps to explain why storytelling survives in Riding’s late work, even as literature is set aside.

Part of the interest of Riding’s argument with history is the versatility with which she defends her position, as if its necessity could only be established by pressing her thesis in all of the modes of writing that held her attention. In what follows, I will look at several of these modes, beginning with three early critical works that set forth the basic terms of her critique, Contemporaries and Snobs (1928), Anarchism Is Not Enough (1928), and Four Unposted Letters to Catherine (1930)—books that present history as a state of untruth, a fundamental distortion of life’s natural condition. I will then turn to Riding’s fiction, examining in detail her Progress of Stories (1935), a collection of allegorical and philosophical fairy tales that carry the critique of history forward while championing an artistic form that Riding will later uphold as the natural rhythm of the mind, a kind of heartbeat. For reasons of space, I will give only glancing attention to Riding’s two works of historical fiction, A Trojan Ending (1937) and Lives of Wives (1939), which compromise with history while attempting to subjugate it to literature. Nor will I take up, except in a few brief quotations, Riding’s treatment of history in her poetry, as my particular focus here is the opposition Riding establishes [End Page 86] between history and storytelling.² One aspect of this opposition is history’s unnaturalness; another is divisiveness. To give some sense of how Riding responds to this divisiveness, I will look briefly at Epilogue, the journal she edited with Robert Graves between 1935 and 1937, as their collaboration, which began in 1927, moved toward a close (the final break came in 1941, and soon after, Riding abandoned literature for the study of language).³ In Epilogue, Riding made her last significant attempt as a poet to defend literature for the general public and, although no longer concerned to call herself a “modernist,” made a significant last attempt to arbitrate poetic purity for her peers. I will conclude my discussion with The Telling (1972), the first book Riding wrote and published as Laura (Riding) Jackson and her first book of new writing after the start of World War Two.⁴ There, looking beyond “literary pluralism” (171) and beyond the fragmentary teachings of the individual scholarly disciplines, (Riding) Jackson calls for “one comprehensive story” (10), a sharing of language “that parts us from the world of history, in which we live with self-destructive difference from ourselves, and takes us into the world of truth” (149).

Riding’s anti-historical stance was not unique among her contemporaries. As Paul de Man noted long ago, “a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present,” was one of modernism’s constituent features (148). The characterization is particularly apt for Riding. In “The Secret,” she imagines the entire city of London caught in a state of temporal arrest, obscured by the “shadow of the British Museum,” the metonymic presence of the city’s historical past. The cumulative effect is fateful. “Living in London,” complains a young American tourist in the story, “makes you feel that the present does not exist. . . . It is . . . as if the world had come to an end and people went on living just the same, like historical puppets” (Progress of Stories 31). In de Man’s view, however, the desire to wipe out history ever opens onto a dilemma, since every “true present” necessarily “discovers itself to be a generative power that . . . engenders history”; “considered as a principle of life, modernity becomes a principle of origination and turns at once into a generative power that is itself historical” (150). Riding was certainly aware of this dilemma. In her preface to A Trojan Ending, she rejects the common belief that “history governs history” (xxvii), offering Homeric epic and ancient legend as living proof that the ever-renewing present of storytelling performs this [End Page 87] function. Yet Riding was not content with this state of affairs. In “The Time Beneath,” she describes “the premortuary tomb / Of ancient time” as “the pit of future,” a place where “the great dead still sleep . . . / . . . in ghastly triumph of will” (Poems of Laura Riding 170). Here temporal progression becomes a principle of life worse than death; the fact that legend may initiate the progress makes no difference. For Riding, as for de Man, “The distinctive character of literature . . . becomes manifest as an inability to escape from a condition that is felt to be unbearable” (de Man 162); her eventual rejection of literature takes shape in relation to this unbearable condition.

The modernist aspect of Riding’s polemic against history is clearest in one of her first books of criticism, Contemporaries and Snobs, which promotes literature as a privileged space of radical newness detached and independent from any kind of historical preoccupation. Here, as elsewhere, Riding’s definition of history fuses two distinct meanings: “history” as temporal, causal process; and “history” as present-day social and political reality. Attacking her contemporaries on the basis of both meanings, she finds that their appeal to “social sentiment” has “obscured the anarchic nature” of the literary act and that they have committed the unforgivable mistake of trying to “justify” literature “by showing that it is an effect of history” (90). At stake in this mistake is literature’s domestication into the prosaic boundaries of the social. One year earlier, in A Survey of Modernist Poetry (written with Robert Graves), Riding had argued that the “faith in history” of these so-called modernist poets had created a “false” modernism opposed to a “genuine” modernism based on “faith in the immediate, [in] the new doings of poems” (158). Acting on this belief, Riding contends in Contemporaries and Snobs that her contemporaries have traded literature’s present for the present of history, and as a first consequence of this have transformed the absolute presentness of writing into a merely historical occurrence, a way station in the logical progression of time. Bent under the weight of this overbearing “historical effort” (124)—“normalizing and leveling literature to the understanding of its age” (90)—their works have sunk into a muddle of mediocrity.

Riding’s list of muddled modernist poets includes her most prominent American and European contemporaries, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce among them. Gertrude Stein is excused, but not absolved, for Riding detects in her “primitivism” a precarious balance [End Page 88] between the “academically” fashionable and genuinely modern (81). Paul Valéry, she writes, has brought “the concrete and the poetic intelligence . . . to a deadlock and exerted a damping influence on creative enthusiasm” (22); James Joyce’s Ulysses is an epic “devoid of creative values and . . . designed to produce catharsis of stale emotional matter” (35); T. S. Eliot gives “no sign of intellect per se in the Waste Land,” for “as soon as an independent mental act needs to substantiate itself historically it ceases to be intellect” (84). More acceptable in her account is the “vocabularistic whimsicality or quaintness by which poets like E. E. Cummings and Edith Sitwell inoculate themselves against the Zeitgeist” (80), since, for Riding, “Zeitgeist poetry is out-of-date poetry because it describes an emotion derived from history” (30).

These themes return in Riding’s second book of criticism, Anarchism Is Not Enough (a hybrid work that also includes didactic fiction, sketches, and fragments of novels). Here Riding identifies the task of poetry as a denunciation of the stifling epistemological contract that people maintain with reality, a contract aimed at creating and organizing the “social corpus” (28), which for Riding exerts an oppressive influence on poetic endeavor, subjugating the individual to “social sanity” (115). History—the collectively agreed-upon temporal consolidation of reality—becomes a means to sedate and control the individual. As Riding writes, shared reality “admits nothing new: all is revision, memory, confirmation. The individual cosmos must submit itself to the generalized cosmos of history, it must become part of its growing encyclopedia of authorities” (28). Poets, she contends, must never yield to this proliferation of controlling authorities, must never fall into history’s trap. Poetry, indeed, is precisely the escape from this trap, from the crude positioning within history demanded by collective life. “The only position relevant to the individual is the unreal, and it is relevant because it is not a position but the individual himself . . . . To put it simply, the unreal is to me poetry” (69). Poetry’s “particular purefaction” (96), then, depends on an author’s ability to creatively disengage from reality, “the original social contract, [which] was not between man and man, but between men and the universe of men or society” (28). In Riding’s view, “The material with which the author works is not reality but what he is able to disentangle from reality . . . . An author must first of all have a sure apprehension of what is self in him, what is new, fresh, not history, synthesis, reality” (96). Hence, “man’s powers for reconstructing [End Page 89] reality are really a misuse of his powers for constructing himself out of the wreckage which is reality” (114). What lies immediately outside this wreckage is always fresh in its beginnings, is nature.

If Anarchism Is Not Enough gives a theoretical elaboration of the assumptions guiding Riding’s practical criticism in Contemporaries and Snobs, her Four Unposted Letters to Catherine indicates the purity of thought she achieved as a result. A pedagogical exercise after the fashion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the letters, addressed to Riding’s “Emile,” the eight-year-old daughter of Robert Graves, celebrate virtue, and in particular the virtue of thinking, in terms that become increasingly dire. Each of the letters provides a clear exposition in simple language of a basic theme: “knowing” in the first letter, “doing” in the second, “learning” in the third, and “history” in the fourth. But Riding does not reveal this last theme until the end, speaking instead of “the muddle” (53). Introducing “history” at last, Riding writes:

And if, dear Catherine, after carefully avoiding the use in an important way of any word that I hadn’t prepared you for beforehand—if then, dear Catherine, I come to the most discouraging or the dullest word that I know, why, it is the best possible word for me to close on. For I can be sure that, if I have done nothing else, I have at least not cheered you up or interested you.

(69)

In this final letter Riding combines her habitual emphasis on the necessity of breaking free from shared reality with the predication of a perfect state of nature endlessly reproducing itself in instances of fresh beginnings. History, in contrast to this pure generation, does not have a proper origin, nor a meaningful conclusion: it is the discouraging condition of being caught in “the middle of things,” stuck in “a really wrong muddle,” “a sort of stale nature” with “neither a beginning nor an end” (68). History, Riding argues, does not just happen: rather, it is a mistake “that people create . . . themselves” by abandoning that natural condition of complete and self-reliant individuality that, in her view, constitutes our truest, most perfect state. Unlike the spontaneous, inconsequential creativity of nature, history proliferates like a disease, one that, set loose in the world, “interferes” (67) with the ability of people to “belong to a straight way of things” (56) and so produces moral chaos. [End Page 90]

The opposition of nature to history set forth in Four Unposted Letters to Catherine finds its imaginative demonstration in Progress of Stories. This Riding makes explicit in her 1982 preface for the book’s reprint edition (an edition that added several stories originally published in Anarchism Is Not Enough and Experts Are Puzzled [1930]). In her original, 1935 preface Riding announced to her readers, “I have written these . . . stories . . . for the discipline which story-telling lays upon one’s truth-telling instincts. My function as a writer is not storytelling but truth-telling: to make things plain” (xii). Expanding on this point forty-seven years later, she asserts, “The initiating impulses from which the stories issued were not impulses of art, not impulses to construct stories but to tell stories” (xxi–xxii), for “stories that are products of art are things in excess of that which has natural and necessary presence among us” (xxii). The stories in Progress of Stories are by contrast “products of nature”; they respect “the natural model for all telling of the true—what the mind knows to be happening or to have happened, knows to be so, as it tells it” (xxii). Her stories, she explains,

come naturally to the mind for telling, reflecting the infinite progression of circumstances in which the reality of live being consolidates itself reiteratively, mirroring to the mind its own live reality. I view the stories presented here . . . as written upon a natural premise of the mind . . . that life is all happening: it makes itself into a story, stories, it begins and ends as a story, or is a continuous story, or a world of stories.

(xxii)

To distinguish the progress of these stories, their forward movement in language, from the hypnotic movement of poetic language—which Riding by this time had rejected as “linguistically freakish,” not “the natural spiritual speech of human beings” (Laura (Riding) Jackson Reader 206 )—she speaks of the stories as conveying “the sense of a pattern of movement, of a rhythmic beat of consciousness” (Progress of Stories xxvii): “Precious to the mind,” their progress (“what I should prefer to call . . . meaning-progress”) “helps the mind to feel its beat: I am tempted to say ‘heartbeat’” (xxiv).⁵ In Riding’s conception, stories “clarify the travel-lines of the natural,” their progress determined by the heartbeat-like rhythm of the mind (It Has Taken Long 152). [End Page 91]

The “travel-lines of the natural” are temporally nonlinear, leading to a truly ahistorical fiction, marked formally by diegetic disruption: narrative progressions turn backward; story lines return to their beginnings, or undo themselves in complications, or fragment in multiple open outcomes. The “progress” of these stories is metaphysical, not chronological. Understood in spatial terms, they present an arrangement of sites without determining order. “What are stories,” Riding asks in “A Crown for Hans Andersen,” “but a direction away from one place that is also a direction towards another?” (Progress of Stories 275). The distances they accommodate, like their chronology, tend toward collapse, so that “the end of stories comes when the direction away turns entirely into a direction towards: when the direction towards is almost the same as the place towards which it is the direction” (275). At the thematic level, this collapse of time and distance is epitomized in the figure of Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish writer of fairy tales. Andersen, writes Riding, “was alive now,” as a consequence of the radical atemporality (and ahistoricity) of storytelling. This “now” she pits against the “then” of the “history-men” and their emblematic authority figure, King Arthur:

Then is the now of the history-men. The now of fairy tales is . . . a little moment in always. But the history-men are not satisfied with a little moment . . . . And so their now is only a then, always a then. Their now was then. Hans Andersen was alive now, but their story-king, King Arthur, is alive then.

(257–58)

To borrow a formulation from Riding’s poem “Echoes,” Andersen’s achievement is to “cheat[ ] history— / which stealing now has only then” (Poems of Laura Riding 66 , emphasis added). Hence the crown Andersen earns from “Queen Story,” different in kind from the crown worn by King Arthur (“That crown is no real always, only an always of eternal dying”), is a sign of victory in a contest in which the reader too is implicated (Progress of Stories 358). Explaining the contrast between storytelling and history, separating truth from falsity, right from wrong, Riding asks her readers to try to think as “story-men,” to evaluate the monumental falsity of history, and then make the right choice, which is, of course, to side with the storytellers. “Look around you and see how [End Page 92] big everything looks. And it’s all lies and closed eyes. To tell the truth you have to look at the truth . . . and [see] small and [talk] small” (257). Those who do so, Riding promises, will “learn to die, to make a child’s play of [their] immortal souls, to enter gracefully into death” (259). Here, truly, the progress of storytelling reveals itself to be metaphysical in orientation; what it teaches “is not how, from dying, to go back to life, more life, but how, from dying, to go on, . . . to know for your moment the meaning of always” (259). Unlike history, whose mortal present is perpetually becoming a “then,” the present of storytelling perseveres within a vast temporal horizon, a plane of existence in which past and future coincide. This is why Riding is able to write, and mean literally, that Hans Christian Andersen “was” alive “now.”

Occupying as she does the all-encompassing horizon of “always,” Riding cannot resist deriding the narrowness of historical experience and historical knowledge.⁶ Not merely a storyteller after the fashion of Andersen, Riding is also a defender of storytelling. In her book’s original edition, this derision of history is also expressed by Riding’s characters, especially those with whom the reader is meant to sympathize. But one early story offers a significant exception. First published in Experts Are Puzzled (1930), “The Fable of the Dice,” included by (Riding) Jackson in the 1982 reprint edition, complicates Progress of Stories by allowing that a history-minded person might well excel all others in her capacity for hewing to truth. This complication is important, moreover, because it suggests that Riding’s apparent compromise with history in the second half of the 1930s, when the muddle of history became an especially ominous threat, was not a retreat from her earlier position of rejection, but an attempt to subjugate history to anti-historical ends. The implication is that a wise person’s awareness of history in all its dangerous flux will not manifest itself in social or political agitation (which, in Riding’s view, would only exacerbate the problem), but in a deepening commitment to the permanence of truth and to the ahistorical temporality of storytelling. This commitment takes the form of quietism in “The Fable of the Dice,” which is probably why Riding excluded it from the 1935 edition, when the threats posed by Fascism and the likelihood of a new world war brought a new urgency to Riding’s critique. Later in the 1930s, as I will show, Riding’s resistance to social and political agitation, resisting quietism as well, took the form of an anti-historical community established around the journal Epilogue.⁷ [End Page 93]

“The Fable of the Dice” has as its protagonist “an accurate old woman with a sharp sense of history,” an “honest and happy person” who is nonetheless aware that her town is “doomed to destruction” (Progress of Stories 348–49). Accepting this fate, she decides to spend her last three months dancing and making merry on a pink cloud, rejecting the avoidance behavior of the town’s other inhabitants, who unite and turn against her (348). In a chilling sentence, Riding informs her readers that the “old woman was burned for a witch, having first been tortured for a mad-woman” (349). Rising up on her pink cloud, she calmly tells herself, “They have burned me because I am historical” (349). Unlike the “misty-minded old men” of the town, who “played dice in order to substitute chance for certainty, confusion for order, inaccuracy for accuracy” (348), the old woman cheerfully dances, letting history do its work as it will.⁸ She exists, despite her knowledge of history, in the “always” of storytelling, a fact that Riding signals by having the old woman answer the townspeople who ask her the name of her dance, “It is the dance of doom, which will befall us in three months and which therefore has already fallen” (349). Collapsing time, what will befall already has.

Riding’s uncomfortable recognition of her own fate should a doom befall Europe—if that, indeed, is what her fable articulates—highlights the stakes involved in her subsequent, surprising turn to historical fiction. To be sure, this turn was partly inspired by her competition with Robert Graves, whose best-selling novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God appeared in 1934 and 1935. Riding had no literary or philosophical interest in the genre as such. As she wrote in her preface to A Trojan Ending, “I consider the historical novel, as a literary form, a ghoulish, at least a somewhat parasitic performance: it is only by telling what we are that we can show grace and wisdom and sincerity” (xviii). Moreover, despite her reliance on historical research in composing the books, she is emphatic that the “truth” of past events “is to be measured by the insistence of their claim on our attention, regardless of our lack of compatible historical details” (A Trojan Ending xx). Yet there is no mistaking her fascination with “then” in these books. Admitting history into the self-contained “always” of storytelling, they exhibit what (Riding) Jackson retrospectively describes as “an impartiality admitting of proportions of partiality—of partialities presided over by a generous impartiality” (Lives of Wives 327). Her position, then, would be like [End Page 94] that of the old woman in “The Fable of the Dice”: cognizant of history, but using her knowledge to affirm her in a purpose for which history can provide no assistance.

Riding attests to the difficulty of this position in her preface to A Trojan Ending. Immersed in the preparatory research for the novel during the precipitous events that brought on the Spanish Civil War (she finished the novel in March 1936 as Palma was being bombarded; shortly after she was forced to leave Mallorca for good), Riding had the impression that “the officially historical history of ourselves” was “an alien record,” as if “the whole historical past was an experimental series in which one theoretical present succeeded another” (xvii). Nor was the historical present any truer: “We look upon the monstrous war preparations going on around us with false fear: we know that we are really unkillable” (xvi). Here, however, Riding’s emulation of the old woman’s lightness of heart and courage begins to seem a false bravado; meditating on the Trojan War has apparently brought Riding to a point where the present of storytelling is no longer impervious to history, a point where the muddle of reality threatens to overwhelm the purer nature of truth. Edging with some discomfort toward a threshold where history and story might converge, Riding remarks that, in history, “all the fears of life become articulate” (xx).

Fear tinged with disgust is what history inspires in “A Fairy Tale for Older People,” in which the protagonist of this story finds that history is a box of “shiny insects of every possible colour, with scarcely any space to move about in and yet crawling horribly all over one another, making a noise such as paper makes when you crumple it dead and throw it into the basket” (Progress of Stories 221). Shook out on the ground, the insects are revealed to be “only coloured bits of paper,” and fear gives way to fascination (221). But fascination is risky also:

Yes, it was all very interesting. Ugh! It was like banquets and balls and lantern parties—and the next morning, how sick it made you, and how ashamed of the things you had done and said, and yet how you went on thinking about it all. Just so she was ashamed of history, and the silly bits of paper. Should she tear them up fine, and let them lose themselves in the wind? She did tear them up fine, but instead of getting into the wind [End Page 95] they seemed to get into her head and whirl about, making her feel confused and giddy . . . .

(222)

The fascination of history is in this depiction not very different from the fascination of art, hence the dangers of history remain a potential outcome in any act of creation, especially those that are not motivated by love of truth. This Riding demonstrates in “Miss Banquett, or The Populating of Cosmania,” in which the title character creates and populates a planet out of sheer vanity—that is, in order to be seen and worshipped for the beauty of her mind. The error here is of biblical proportion. Having established her own world, Miss Banquett is caught in the aggravating situation of having invented history, and, what is worse, of having become responsible for a fictional population seriously engaged in honoring its fictional-yet-historical origins with various religious rituals. After a series of travails, travels and misfortunes, Miss Banquett swallows herself, terminating the planet. Thus history and religion—the latter an especially annoying consequence of the former—disappear, and Miss Banquett returns with great relief to the solitary peace of her unseen beauty, feeling “herself solidly inside herself” (Progress of Stories 158).⁹

Not unlike Miss Banquett, Riding often showed signs of annoyance with the unintended consequences of her own acts of creation. As she was well aware, any sharing of language, storytelling not excluded, unfolds within history, and thus, despite her hope for a determination of meaning unaffected by chance or change, is ever at risk of falling into the errancy of misreading, misunderstanding, miscommunication. “There are so many of us” she writes, “that one has to be careful of accidents” (Progress of Stories xviii). The only measure of care that can preserve truth from being fragmented and confused by history’s chaotic plurality is a discursive strategy that operates upon truth’s transmission, a strategy that alters the very conditions of storytelling. Thus, in her original preface to Progress of Stories, Riding clarified the conditions necessary for storytelling to function as a form of truth-telling:

Truth is trying to talk, and each of us overhears something of what it is trying to say, and we tell what we hear to others. And what we hear is not hearsay, because we hear it in ourselves, not in others. . . . At the end what we tell one another must be [End Page 96] exactly the same as what truth tells itself . . . . We must speak practically as one person . . . or it is no good.

(Progress of Stories xviii)

The peaceful solitude of Miss Banquett, unsatisfying as it may be to vanity, does satisfy the more austere demands of truth, which requires the consolidation of plurality in oneness. If stories are part of a dialogue—and this is Riding’s own conception—then the dialogue must be controlled in order for the story to communicate truth. This condition of controlled dialogue, which might better be described as a monological conversation, is absolutely essential for truth to survive in human society where diversity is the rule and—as (Riding) Jackson later put it in Rational Meaning—“there is not meeting of minds, but scattering of minds” (42).¹⁰

Riding’s hortatory call for a monological conversation—for a self-consciously regulated dialogue carried on by a “we” that speaks as an “I”—emphasizes what needs to be changed in discursive practice for storytelling to accommodate a flawless transmission of truth. Riding illustrates the need for this change through a fictional history of storytelling. Back in the early stages of storytelling, she explains, “we had not really begun to say anything to one another”; “there was no ‘we,’” no “talking together,” and consequentially no conversation (Progress of Stories xvi). Propagated with no sense of purpose by an indistinct group of speakers, this primitive form of storytelling generated a false “world of hearsay” and dwelled in a “state of language” that Riding calls “obscure”: “There was nothing but stories of lives. These went around from mouth to mouth—nobody’s mouth in particular. And it all happened long ago—at any rate, long before we began coming together. It was all history, and none of it was important . . .” (xvi). Supplanting these stories of lives in the evolution of storytelling were “stories of ideas . . . not altogether important, altogether true,” but important to tell because they helped to establish a company of people desirous of truth (xviii).¹¹ In the last stage, there is a “thinning” of the company to a select few, one-minded, who “begin trying to tell the truth to one another” until, finally, “there is nothing besides truth . . . involved . . . and there are no accidents” (xvii, xviii); history is left behind. On the one hand, then, history appears in this fiction as the original condition of storytelling, a random collection of “stories of lives” passed around by [End Page 97] anonymous mouths without communal existence. On the other hand, storytelling is conceived as history’s antithesis, a communal sharing of truth in which accidents are no longer possible. Of course, the evolutionary difference proposed here between history as storytelling and stories as truth-telling is itself a story, but since truth only emerges in this story when history is left behind, a more historical account would hardly be fitting. The point, in any case, is that the monological conversation resolves for Riding the most difficult fact about truth, the fact that its telling, which requires at least two participants, is no less important than its discovery, for which one person is sufficient and perhaps even best. Only by escaping history and thinning out the unobliging can the controlled dialogue essential for truth-telling occur.

Written into the preface of Progress of Stories, Riding’s fictional history of storytelling points toward a mode of truth-telling beyond fiction, one that Riding had not yet achieved in 1935, as she herself knew. Even at that stage of her career, Riding had no qualms about stating that her stories, however truthfully conceived, were only “guesswork,” “probable truths which are not demonstrably truth” (xi). Moreover, because the task of storytelling was at that middle stage of its evolution the assembling of a company that would eventually have to be thinned, compromise with the audience was accepted as an occasional necessity, however unpleasant. Thus, in “Reality as Port Huntlady,” Riding addresses her readers in a metafictional aside to explain that, although “it is obvious that to tell a story is to persuade people of something almost false,” this “pious” lie should not be questioned lest the more unpleasant truths regulating the contractual nature of fiction stand revealed:

We must not do violence to the charm of the story . . . by reminding ourselves too brutally at any point of the nature of this transaction, which is, after all, a cold exchange between your desire, on the one hand, to pay your respects to the really important things without getting actually involved, . . . and, on the other hand, my desire . . . to make somewhat light of the really important things . . . .

(Progress of Stories 96, 97)

In presenting her disenchanted efforts to construct a semblance of truthful fiction, Riding transforms the monological conversation of truth-telling into a fashionable tea party, where the writer plays graceful [End Page 98] hostess. But her conviviality is only a lie, and not a pious one, masking her stern appraisal of the reader. As she coldly confesses: “I do not mind giving you a cup of tea, if that is all you want. But I do not like being forced into a conversation about the really important things when all you want is a cup of tea” (98). Despite her plea that no “violence” should be inflicted on “the charm of the story,” Riding plunges on with an increasingly caustic mixture of disillusionment and contempt: “I give you the false excitement that you want, without obliging you to inquire exhaustively into the problem of which the story is only a philosophical dilution. . . . My real perfection is, I hope, not so obvious to you as the perfection of my manners” (ibid.). In the preface, Riding is more direct, abandoning the pretense of charm: “I do so want us to speak the same conversation; I insist on our all speaking the same conversation. And will those who are incapable of this please, please go away now, if you have not already gone away” (xix).

Looking back on these stories in 1982, from the far side of her abandonment of literature, (Riding) Jackson offers a more dispassionate appraisal of the disparity between fiction and truth and what this means for a reader. “Do not, I beg of you,” she writes, “fall into liking any particular one or ones of these stories—or all altogether—too much. They neither will nor can do you any good...[other than] stirring you to feel hungrily the void that all stories leave, which can [only] be filled by the story of us all, the compacted story of everything” (Progress of Stories xxxii). Her fictions, she acknowledges, are only “the sympathetic pleasure-counterpart of truth-telling—a version of it at low-intensity appreciation of the necessity of an (ultimate) all-serious unity of concerns exercised in . . . the one-story . . . the all-story, truth” (xxxi). All-serious, the truth, unlike fiction, “does not delight: it heals the mind” (xxv). Yet fiction’s delight is still meaningful, for it can signify that “a story or stories . . . , though told as not being and known not to be truth, flush the expanded word-scenery of the mind with a truth-like radiance” (xxiv). Delight, then, of the right kind is the constitutive feature of the “meaning-progress” of stories—“the touchstone of the necessary naturalness that a story’s makeup should have as a course of happenings told with an immediate presence to them of narrating words”—and is probably also the main reason why (Riding) Jackson never repudiated her fiction as she did her poetry (xxiv, xxv). In a story, the truth-telling “faculties of the mind . . . exercise themselves in a joyful freedom of trial [End Page 99] of their powers,” and this holds true for both the teller and those who attend to the story (xxiv). As she notes in a passage I have already cited, “The progress [of a fictional story] is only story-progress, but the feel of the progress is precious to the mind, help the mind to feel its beat: I am tempted to say ‘heartbeat’” (xxiv). Yet fiction also breaks the heart. The delight it brings (“the essence of the love of stories” [xxiv]), arouses an anticipation of a truth that does not yet arrive:

The words . . . precipitate in the mind consciousness of the nature of truth, though the actuality of the told is not true, rather, an accidental course of thought that has timed itself to the narrative properties of truth. The effect—the name of the quality—is heart-breaking . . . . The satisfaction a story yields, that stories yield, is that of the passingly sweet flavor of knowledge of what might be. It is heart-breakingly real to the mind as experience of what might be . . . .

(xxv)

In this retrospective analysis, (Riding) Jackson does not take up the importance of her own gifts as a writer—her powers of rhetoric, her ability to cause “words to precipitate” in the mind a feeling like heartbreak—but in speaking of the “narrative properties of truth” she is presumably accepting a writerly quality in truth-telling that does survive her abandonment of literature.¹²

Riding’s progress of truth, however, is not simply an evolution of storytelling from history to fiction and beyond; a corresponding development of the audience—of those who attend to the story—is also involved. For Riding, there can be no truth so long as stories are passed around from mouth to mouth in disconnected fashion. Only by “talking together” in “the same conversation” can truth-telling overcome both vain pluralism and the small-minded pleasures of sociability (Progress of Stories xvi, xix). Recognizing this, Riding began in the mid-1930s, just after the publication of Progress of Stories, an ambitious experiment in literary community, a monological conversation promoted and sustained in the pages of Epilogue, the journal she founded with Graves, one intention of which was to “dispense with the idea of the reader in the historical sense” (1:149). This intention was apocalyptic in the literal sense: a revelation of possibilities for truth-telling that history had obscured. But history—and those who lived in or by it—was now [End Page 100] “passing into extinction,” revealing at last “the prospect of minds . . . at full work, at last making thought identical with existence, at last cleaning up the sprawling mess that consciousness has been” (3:3–4). In Riding’s view, “the immediate moment” was “a summary moment,” allowing “the truly contemporary mind to be finally, rather than historically, alive” (1:4). In the words of the journal’s epigraph, placed before Riding’s editorial in every issue:

Now time has reached the flurrying curtain-fall That wakens thought from historied reverie And gives the world to uninfected discourse.

This “uninfected discourse” was in Epilogue the discourse of literature, a discourse that “operates not in history, but in itself” (2:5), and in which “people must be measured as words are measured: for their truth, not their humanistic vitality—for what they are ultimately, not historically” (2:2). From such a vantage point, literary community becomes indistinguishable from the work of literature. Drawing together a small number of like-minded contributors, the journal actualized Riding’s purely hypothetical description in Progress of Stories of a single conversation in which a small group of truth-tellers speak with single mind:

Our activity is collaborative, and there can be no collaboration without an adjustment of interest to a central theme. Our central theme is time-surviving truth, and a final unity of values in this truth. We welcome collaborators who will take pleasure in thus adjusting their interests, which is to say their work, to a governing standard: who feel the need of stabilizing their work in accordance with a standard whose finality is verified by its applicability to other work, other interests, other subjects as well.

(Epilogue 1:4)

Riding, of course, subsequently disavowed the identification of literature with truth, but as an experiment in community Epilogue’s monological conversation survives as a model of truth’s discovery and sharing, of what The Telling calls the “one comprehensive story,” which “cannot be all-told . . . unless we tell it to one another” (10, 21).

In The Telling, then, the “governing standard” of Epilogue and “story-progress” of Progress of Stories are re-coordinated in an evangelical [End Page 101] discourse, “a book of one continual making” in which Laura Riding’s progress of stories becomes Laura (Riding) Jackson’s progress of truth (53):¹³

Some, reading here, may know earlier efforts of mine to clear a way for the storying of us. Perhaps in those I seem more graceful, and to go faster. I advanced then on the still wings of forevision of a time of telling true. Here I endeavor to advance into truth’s actual time, the measures and harmonies and very progress of which we must make as we go.

(32)

As in Progress of Stories, history is derided for its narrowness and mortality: “sureness resting on history is the sureness of those who lock themselves, and others with them, in historical ‘truth,’ a self-consuming story—it ages in the telling, it has begun to end with its beginning” (175). Literature likewise is derided, described by (Riding) Jackson as “a cruel elevation of pitiableness to admirableness,” a “pluralistic enthusiasm . . . for the false freedom of total incertitude” in which “writers multiply, hoping less, . . . telling less” (79, 95). To achieve truth, then, writers must speak singly and tell more, must “see in one another the All that was once All-One rebecome One” (54). Abandonment of literature is the prerequisite for this, and (Riding) Jackson is quick to uphold her own progress in truth-telling as a model. “Late in my own poetic professionalism,” she writes, “I renounced the satisfaction of poetic success in words. The Telling is descended from that renunciation.” (66). Yet in calling her truth-telling a story, (Riding) Jackson does evoke a continuity with her fiction, does suggest that the storytelling of her literary years kept faith with truth in a way that her struggle with poetic language could not.¹⁴ This difference between storytelling and poetry is made explicit in her late essay “Story, and Story-Style.” There (Riding) Jackson asserts, “While there is, in my view, no possible ideal of rehabilitation of poetry, a purifying rebirth of it, I do regard a rehabilitation of story-telling practice, a rebirth of the natural story instinct, as ideally envisageable” (It Has Taken Long 152).

The complex, perhaps paradoxical relationship Riding maintains between truth and storytelling, a relationship that passes through fiction, is maintained at each stage of her development—sometimes with misgivings—as the necessary alternative to the muddled storytelling of [End Page 102] history, which Riding categorically rejects. Moreover, insofar as truth-telling involves a sharing of language akin to the sharing of stories, Riding further distinguishes between the chaos of dialogue in history and the monological conversation of truth. In The Telling, the narrative properties of truth survive fiction precisely because they animate a collective sense of storying. “The weakness of history is that it begins late and ends early . . . . Poetry leaves us otherwise lacking . . . . There is no answer outside the story of us, true-told by us to one another” (The Telling 11, 38). Telling this story, “we shall have arrived at our ultimate identities, selves that Agree. And none will be missing from the count” (56).