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Experts Are Puzzled
A nearly impossible text to categorize—is it a collection of short stories, prose poems, manifestos or something else entirely?—Experts Are Puzzled is one of Laura Riding’s earliest and most intense examinations of poetry’s and language’s relationship to truth. In essayistic examinations such as the titular piece, “Introduction to a Book on Money,” and “An Address to America,” Riding seeks to articulate a higher, more poetic notion of truth and truth telling. As such, Experts Are Puzzled stands as an essential text for understanding why Riding came to reject poetry in the late 1930s. While excerpts and selections from Experts have been published before, most notably in Riding’s Progress of Stories, the entirety of the collection has not appeared in print since its initial publication by Jonathan Cape in 1930.
- GenresFiction
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1930
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About the author
Laura Riding
42 books10 followersLaura (Riding) Jackson was an American poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer.
1923-1926 as Laura Riding Gottschalk
1927-1939 as Laura Riding
1963-1991 as Laura (Riding) Jackson
She also published under the pseudonym Madeleine Vara.
1923-1926 as Laura Riding Gottschalk
1927-1939 as Laura Riding
1963-1991 as Laura (Riding) Jackson
She also published under the pseudonym Madeleine Vara.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 3, 2019
When the 20-year old Cornell undergraduate, Laura Gottschalk, accompanied her husband, the historian Louis Gottschalk, to Urbana, Illinois -- in 1921 a small group of buildings dropped into the middle of the Central Illinois farms -- how fateful a trip must that have been! She'd come up in Hell's Kitchen, married a Cornell historian and found herself in Urbana. When her husband-historian took another academic job in Louisville, Kentucky, Laura Riding Gottschalk began sending out her poems to local literary magazines, including the Nashville, Tennessee magazine,The Fugitive.
Quite by her own design, she was beginning the first of her life's two phases. In the first, mostly in Europe between 1925 and 1938 -- a period of 15 years -- Laura Riding, as she re-named herself, was involved in poetry, climaxed by the writing of "When The Skies Part," in France (the poem went buried in the European diasporic files for 50 years) in 1938; there would be only a handful of poems thereafter. Then, with her companion, Robert Graves, she sailed for America. Invited to stay at the Pennsylvania farm of an American journalist, Schuyler Jackson, the group began a period of "re-shuffling intimacies;" the upshot was that Jackson left his family, began a period of lexicographical scholarship with Riding, and in 1943, they moved to Florida. She and Jackson married, making a go of being citrus farmers until his health problems forced the couple to sell the business in 1950. At this point their language work was changing also, and by 1955, for Stanley Kunitz's 20th Century Authors, Laura Jackson (she as yet had not refurbished her authorial name) made her first "cautious generalization" with regard to her renunciation of poetry. This begins her final phase. By a 1962 BBC radio reading the renunciation had become explicit, as had her new authorial name, Laura (Riding) Jackson. There were two major works to come -- the second of these, co-authored with her husband (who died in 1968), was Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Meaning of Words published posthumously; the first was published just before her husband's death, The Telling (1967), described by her as her "personal evangel."
In the part of her life dominated by her involvement in poetry, one might begin with her book of fables, Experts Are Puzzled, one of six books she prepared in 1930. It's a storying miscellany, the central work of which is a novella-length fable, "Miss Banquet," flawed by Riding's dabbling in race theories. The shorter fables are fascinating, veering off into essays on America, money, atheism, and into dramatic monologues, but puzzling when she imitates Gertrude Stein, using Stein's first name, along with Graves', and probing about for Stein's misgivings with being a Jew. (Stein broke off her correspondence with Riding in the summer of 1930 -- probably after she read Riding's "Obsession.")
Quite by her own design, she was beginning the first of her life's two phases. In the first, mostly in Europe between 1925 and 1938 -- a period of 15 years -- Laura Riding, as she re-named herself, was involved in poetry, climaxed by the writing of "When The Skies Part," in France (the poem went buried in the European diasporic files for 50 years) in 1938; there would be only a handful of poems thereafter. Then, with her companion, Robert Graves, she sailed for America. Invited to stay at the Pennsylvania farm of an American journalist, Schuyler Jackson, the group began a period of "re-shuffling intimacies;" the upshot was that Jackson left his family, began a period of lexicographical scholarship with Riding, and in 1943, they moved to Florida. She and Jackson married, making a go of being citrus farmers until his health problems forced the couple to sell the business in 1950. At this point their language work was changing also, and by 1955, for Stanley Kunitz's 20th Century Authors, Laura Jackson (she as yet had not refurbished her authorial name) made her first "cautious generalization" with regard to her renunciation of poetry. This begins her final phase. By a 1962 BBC radio reading the renunciation had become explicit, as had her new authorial name, Laura (Riding) Jackson. There were two major works to come -- the second of these, co-authored with her husband (who died in 1968), was Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Meaning of Words published posthumously; the first was published just before her husband's death, The Telling (1967), described by her as her "personal evangel."
In the part of her life dominated by her involvement in poetry, one might begin with her book of fables, Experts Are Puzzled, one of six books she prepared in 1930. It's a storying miscellany, the central work of which is a novella-length fable, "Miss Banquet," flawed by Riding's dabbling in race theories. The shorter fables are fascinating, veering off into essays on America, money, atheism, and into dramatic monologues, but puzzling when she imitates Gertrude Stein, using Stein's first name, along with Graves', and probing about for Stein's misgivings with being a Jew. (Stein broke off her correspondence with Riding in the summer of 1930 -- probably after she read Riding's "Obsession.")
August 7, 2020
I'm not an expert, but I sure am puzzled!!! I did enjoy bits of this, but most of the time I was just moaning, "Laura, what???" Maybe this will squelch my predilection to buy obscure, pretentious books in used book stores...... (It won't.)
January 2, 2024
Some intellectual seeming people were giving this away on the street and subject matter seemed intriguing. Read it tonight on robitussin and felt like I was reading dr. Seuss
April 20, 2024
He entendido más o menos el 20% de este libro y por eso le pongo dos estrellas. Creo que el problema soy yo. O a lo mejor es que no hay que entenderlo.
July 9, 2019
A few passages from Experts Are Puzzled:
Their hands, with which they wrote, were a-tingle, but their feet, with which the hesitated, were numb, and their faces, with which they regretted what they wrote, were blue. And so they went on, hoping to write something that they would not regret, but continually regretting and therefore growing continually more and more blue-in-the face.
What then of fiction? What then of truth? The only answer that may be given is that it is not possible to lie.
My friends love me. My lovers adore me. I must choose among them, though I do not wish to, since my beauty demands action.
I miss the rendez-vous by a shyness of the inexact, you by a shyness of the insufficient. We do not touch. But our language is the language of the rendez-vous.
And so I don’t want you to think that even fundamentally the subject of money bores me. Nothing that can be turned into writing bores me.
Obtuseness is a time-proved protection against the danger of facing facts more squarely than one’s interests require.
Their hands, with which they wrote, were a-tingle, but their feet, with which the hesitated, were numb, and their faces, with which they regretted what they wrote, were blue. And so they went on, hoping to write something that they would not regret, but continually regretting and therefore growing continually more and more blue-in-the face.
What then of fiction? What then of truth? The only answer that may be given is that it is not possible to lie.
My friends love me. My lovers adore me. I must choose among them, though I do not wish to, since my beauty demands action.
I miss the rendez-vous by a shyness of the inexact, you by a shyness of the insufficient. We do not touch. But our language is the language of the rendez-vous.
And so I don’t want you to think that even fundamentally the subject of money bores me. Nothing that can be turned into writing bores me.
Obtuseness is a time-proved protection against the danger of facing facts more squarely than one’s interests require.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews