Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship

Not Elizabeth to His Ralegh: Laura Riding, Robert Graves, and the Origins of the White Goddess

It is almost sixty years since Laura Riding and Robert Graves parted, time enough for a vast store of valuations of these two as people and writers to accumulate, for the comparative worth of their individual contributions to collaborative projects to be sifted and sorted, for the marks made on the literary record as a result of their involvement with one another to be interpreted and reinterpreted in memoirs, essays, biographies, letters, and myriad other texts. The sheer volume makes evident the multiple lenses through which people’s relationships with one another may be viewed (whether they should be is another question ), the histories unfolding from them, the literary uses to which such histories may be put, and the fascination they continue to hold. By the time her Collected Poems appeared in 1938 (she was then in her late thirties), Laura Riding had to her credit a large body of writing that had already begun to influence the work of others—including the poetry of Robert Graves and W. H. Auden and the methods of the New Critics. Yet within a few years she had publicly renounced poetry writing , as having lost, for her, its effectiveness as a means of truth-telling. Together with her second husband, Schuyler Jackson, she went on to 229 Not Elizabeth to His Ralegh Laura Riding, Robert Graves, and Origins of the White Goddess   manage a citrus business in Florida, place the name by which she was best known within parentheses, and effectively remove herself from the literary mainstream. Graves, on the other hand, returned to their home in Mallorca after the Second World War, and over a period of decades, saw his fame increase. Books like The White Goddess, which popularized his mythic view of poetry writing, and I, Claudius, a historical novel that became a successful TV miniseries—not to mention his own complex persona, which readily lent itself to anecdote and literary profiles— attracted a large following. The opposite trajectories of their respective careers were soon mirrored in the critical and biographical estimations of their work and personalities. I think it is fair to say that Robert Graves’s press—which was often generated by his friends, relatives, and acolytes, with whom he usually cooperated—tended to be plentiful and favorable (or at least sympathetic), whereas Laura Riding’s side of this significant literary partnership tended to be skirted by timid analysts or interpreted by biased observers or investigators who lacked all the facts. Such a disparity may have resulted, in part, from (Riding) Jackson’s refusal to cooperate with—and from her sometimes public criticism of—those she felt were creating an inaccurate record of her experience (and her understanding of that experience) for their own literary or professional purposes . It may have resulted from her reluctance, until the last decades of her life, to enter the biographical and autobiographical fray, to make that kind of defense. But it also seems to have resulted from a curious and steady sort of effacement by Graves and others of her part in a thirteen-year-long collaborative association, despite evidence of her authority and activity within it. My focus here is not the deletion of Laura Riding’s name by Graves and others from their shared bibliography, though this also occurred. Rather, I wish to trace a subtler and more interesting procedure by which an accomplished, influential, and real writer was replaced, in biography and literary criticism alike, by a more pliable fiction conjured by her literary partner. Graves’s famous White Goddess “is a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowanberries , startlingly blue eyes and long fair hair; she will suddenly transform herself into sow, mare, bitch, vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome hag” to whom poets since Homer have owed fealty.1 “The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs 230   down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust—the female spider or the queen-bee whose embrace is death” (12). Graves’s dramatic evocation of this figure was further vitalized by its entanglement and confusion with his life, and his work...