BOOK REVIEW / Queen of all she depraved: 'In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding' - Deborah Baker: Hamish Hamilton, 25 pounds

LAURA RIDING possessed a large patchwork rug. Made of 'the finest silk and velvet rags that I could command from others', its squares had been worked, to her order, by 20 Cumberland ladies. The rug supplied her with a revealing image of her place in the world: 'And so each who made a square was my subject. And so I became Queen.' Power-crazed and despotic, Laura rampaged through the first half of her life in a self-promotional binge of destruction, portentously described as 'the search for truth'. What truth? What did she mean? Why was she so monstrous? What led to her mythic identity as Robert Graves's muse, his three-faced goddess? Her biographer, in time-honoured mode, trundles into her childhood for an answer.

Laura, not actually Riding but Reichenthal, was born in 1901 to impoverished parents, German-Jewish immigrants who settled in Brooklyn. Her early days sound depressing, but not dreadful. She had an adoring older half-sister who married a publisher and fostered her literary interests. She had a younger brother who aroused the not unusual reactions of rage and jealousy. Her father was involved in socialism, had a lively mind and encouraged reading. Her mother was plaintive, ill and odd: 'She wore a stocking round her eyes whenever possible; at home a white stocking; abroad a black stocking; and occasionally . . . a grey sock of my father's, fastened at the back of her head with a safety pin.'

Laura married Lou Gottschalk, a lecturer at Cornell, when she was 19; she dropped out of college, only returning to alarm her contemporaries with hints about sex and douches. She was writing obsessively; in 1924 she won the Nashville Poetry Prize and began to meet other poets. She left her husband and went to live in Greenwich Village, pursuing an illusory affair with Allen Tate and seeing her work published in magazines. Robert Graves wrote from England: he admired her poems and invited her to accompany him and his family to Egypt, where he was to lecture. Graves appears to have expected a literary secretary; Laura anticipated rather more. Tate had wearied of her. 'The maddest woman I have ever met,' he called her.

Laura returned triumphantly from Egypt; she had become Graves's confessor and advisor. Now she lived in a menage a trois with Robert and his wife Nancy in London. She took an Irish lover; one fine morning he rejected her. She ran downstairs, picked up a bottle of disinfectant, returned to her fourth-floor room and drank it in front of Robert, Nancy and the Irishman. No one stopped her. She then leapt out of the window. This, amazingly, resulted only in broken bones, but it brought an end to Graves's marriage. He left his wife and four children and on the proceeds of Goodbye To All That went off with Laura to live in Deya on Majorca. There Laura dressed in extravagant gypsy clothes, and flaunted a shawl embroidered with a 'representation of her damson-coloured surgical scar'.

For 10 years she and Graves wrote and lived together, attracting numbers of fellow writers and painters to join them on lengthy visits. Laura had her kingdom; from its security she continued to issue hostile blasts of didactic theory to the English literary scene. With Graves she had already brought out A Survey of Modernist Poetry in which she dismissed Pound, Wallace Stevens and Eliot; this is her only influential piece of work. Now she reiterated her windy notions of restructuring experience, purifying language, ridding it of 'stale, historical and mythic associations', but the verses she wrote were opaque, clumsy and repetitive, rendered almost incomprehensible by inverted syntax and an entirely personal use of words. As Virginia Woolf said, she was 'a damned bad poet'.

In Deya she developed her female- centred aesthetic theories. She stopped sleeping with Graves: 'I think that bodies have had their day.' Visiting couples were obliged to leave their bedroom doors ajar. She encouraged a young woman to spend a few nights with Robert, but when the girl became pregnant Laura insisted on an abortion, witnessed it, and then banished her. Despite her claims that women were fundamental and men secondary, she required the adulation of men and was hostile to women. She bullied and alienated innumerable friends; they saw her treat Graves 'like a dog'. She stopped writing poetry and embarked on sickeningly coy fairy stories with characters called Mr Thinking-Hard and Mr Thank-You-Very-Much. She planned a new moral order, a world reorganised on matriarchal lines, her First Protocol. And all this time Graves continued to support and idealise her.

With the Spanish Civil War, fascism reached Deya and they were obliged to leave. Laura's Collected Poems were published in America and reviewed enthusiastically by the critic Schuyler Jackson. In England, for years now, her work had been published only as a sop to Graves, whose I Claudius was enjoying world success. She felt an outsider in London, no longer a queen (but a 'Queen-bore' according to Geoffrey Grigson), and persuaded Graves to accompany her to America. There they met up with Jackson, his wife and family. Laura focused her basilisk eye, Jackson's wife was driven crazy, he abandoned his four children, they ran off together and married. Graves returned to England and, ultimately, to Deya. For the remaining 50 years of her life Laura lived in Florida, working on her husband's citrus farm and restyling her past to suit herself.

This goes a little way to excuse the confused and two-dimensional effect of this biography. Deborah Baker makes it clear that she had no help from her subject and wrote the book against her wishes. Riding was notoriously hostile to interviewers and she and Graves issued many mutually contradictory statements. The book focuses on their 14 years together, and this is entirely legitimate. But one derives no real sense of either as a human being. Laura is all persona; Graves is potentially far more interesting, but he remains a vague, background figure.

It is hard to read 400 pages about a woman so intrinsically unpleasant. The author's attempts to exalt her poetry and, somewhat in desperation, to present her wit, fall flat. Many of Baker's sentences are scarcely literate: 'Too much pain . . . than was practical', 'endearing' when she means 'enduring', death's 'veraciousness'. Cliches abound. Complex paragraphs begin with serial unrelated subordinate clauses; chapters plunge forward in time and then move smartly into reverse, making you feel you've travelled a long way for nothing. Really you can't wait for it all to be over.

Was there any point in starting? I think not. There is a story to be told, but it belongs to Graves. This is a bad book about a very bad woman.

(Photograph omitted)