Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  Ridge’s mother also lived in Kanieri Forks, whether with Ridge is unknown, but it was such a small community that she surely would have been near enough to help with the baby, making it possible for Ridge to write. In 1903 Ridge’s poem “The Dream Man” won first prize in the New Zealand Illustrated, an accomplishment which must have piqued her aspirations. Its title is captioned by fanciful script most likely Ridge’s own, with a tree forming the “T.” The poem rattles along—“Deep are the spells he weaves,/And dark is the path he goes,”—and it ends:

  And now from the distant sea

  And now from a far off range

  He calls to the soul of me,

  And plays in an unknown key

  A song in a rhythm strange! (Verses 38)

  Ridge was being lured away—but not by another man. Consider two lines from her early poem “At Sun-Down”: “Ah God: the strife for a remembered name!” and “My heart is throbbing for the roar of streets.”

  Ambition.

  Chapter 3

  “The Smoking Fuse”

  A woman artist had no place in New Zealand at the turn of the century—even if you never left like poet Jessie MacKay (1864-1938), whose political interests resembled Ridge’s. “We plowed a lonely furrow,” wrote MacKay. Ten years older than Ridge, this “thin, grey, fragile woman, with intense eyes, low-toned speech, and a slow smile” was raised in Christchurch just across the Southern Alps from Hokitika. She published her first book in Australia, but like Ridge, hoped to be part of the nationalist movement that Pember Reeves had exalted. By 1891 she was writing satirical and political poems about Prohibition and suffrage. In poems like “The Charge at Parihaka,” she likened driving the Maori off their lands to what had happened to her ancestors in Scotland with the English. An article profiling MacKay in the influential New Zealand Railways Magazine described her interest in the political: “The weaker side, the little nations oppressed by the powerful, have drawn her passionate championship.” She became editor of the Canterbury Times in 1906, where Ridge had published 14 years earlier. They also shared publication in the Otago Witness, the conservative illustrated weekly that was particularly popular in the rural areas of the south island. Like most of New Zealand’s female artists of the period except Ridge and Mansfield, she never married and achieved little fame in her own country. “MacKay’s place in the history of New Zealand poetry has been considerably under-recognised,” writes Heather Roberts in the New Zealand Encyclopedia.

  Ridge’s main competitor for “New Zealand’s best woman poet of the early 20th century” is another modernist, Ursula Bethell (1874-1945). “New Zealand wasn’t truly discovered,” according to critic D’Arcy Cresswell, “until Ursula Bethell, ‘very earnestly digging’, raised her head to look at the mountains. Almost everyone had been blind before.” Nearly Ridge’s exact contemporary, she lived half her peripatetic life in England where she was born, spent her childhood in Christchurch, was educated at the Oxford High School for Girls and a Swiss finishing school, and studied music and painting in Europe. Just after the turn of the century, she called off a marriage and met Effie Pollen, another single woman from New Zealand. At the age of 50, after working with the poor in London for 20 years, she moved back to Christchurch with Pollen, where they set up house, cultivated an extensive garden, and explored the countryside in “a big, black Essex motor car.” Perhaps Ridge would have felt differently about New Zealand if she had had the wealth of Bethell, whose house offered views of the Southern Alps, the Kaikoura Ranges and the Canterbury Plains, mountains that inspired Bethell’s best work. Influenced by Gerard Manley Hopkins and the more prosaic lines of Whitman, her subjects were often the natural world or religion, confronting the tension between “religious certainty and everyday experience.” Not exactly Ridge’s line, although she did not hesitate to use Christian iconography when it suited her purposes. Bethell, saintly and single, fulfilled the Anglo-directed expectations for women beloved of many literary gatekeepers, but published her books under the gender-vague pseudonym Evelyn Hayes, perhaps because of her relationship with Pollen. Like Ridge, she never felt as if she belonged in New Zealand, but existed as an exile of two countries. “I don’t belong anywhere in particular. I’ve dodged to and fro…I have not been able to settle.”.

  Jane Mander’s Story of a New Zealand River portrayed the difficulties of immigrant women with such intensity that it inspired Jane Campion’s Oscar-winning film, The Piano. Just four years younger than Ridge, Mander (1877-1949) moved 29 times growing up while her father struggled to make a living in the bush. She soon wanted to escape the “brain-benumbing, stimulus-stifling, sense-stultifying, soul-searing silence” of provincial New Zealand. To educate herself, she became what was known as a “pupil-teacher” and taught while she attended high school, then assisted her father in his election to Parliament. He, in turn, allowed her to work for two newspapers he now owned, at a time when few journalists were women. Like Ridge, she left first for Australia. There the future premier of New South Wales encouraged her writing until her mid-30s, when she traveled to America. Working to support her studies at Columbia University, she fell ill and couldn’t complete the degree. World War I delayed the publication of Story of a New Zealand River until 1920 but it was widely praised—outside New Zealand. The depiction of an adulterous affair and women with minds of their own so shocked those at home that conservative women forbade their daughters to read the book. Mander persisted, writing five more novels in New York and London. When a Greenwich Village bookstore closed in 1925, she and Ridge were noted as being among the literati who had scrawled their names on its wall. Mander returned in 1932 to care for her elderly father, wrote very little and died seventeen years later. Until 1966, her entry in the New Zealand Encyclopedia read: “She was a little too enthusiastic about new social and political movements without assessing their impact on the future, a fault she attributed to an undigested diet of Bernard Shaw and Nietzsche.”

  Short story writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was the only contemporary New Zealander with international ambition equal to Ridge’s. After having lived and studied in England with her family, Mansfield dubbed her hometown, Wellington, “Philistia itself” in 1906. Willa Cather, no stranger to the hinterland, writes about Mansfield’s return to New Zealand:

  But at eighteen, after four years of London, to be thrown back into a prosperous commercial colony at the end of the world, was starvation. There is no homesickness and no hunger so unbearable. Many a young artist would sell his future, all his chances, simply to get back to the world where other people are doing the only things that, to his inexperience, seem worth doing at all.

  It was only much later, in 1916, that Mansfield decided she wanted to make “her undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the Old World,” an ambition that Ridge fulfilled for Australia with Sun-up’s publication in 1920. According to poet Robin Hyde, New Zealand responded to Mansfield’s work by “mumur[ing] sympathetically if vaguely ‘Katherine the Great’… But she went far from us[.] Most of her tales were written in a subtle foreign language which is not yet fully understood out here [as] the language of twentieth century art.” Mansfield never returned to New Zealand. A chronic invalid suffering from venereal disease, she also contracted tuberculosis—perhaps from her friend D.H. Lawrence—but that disease proved virulent and Mansfield died at age 35. At the end she turned to the mystic Gurdjieff for help, and thought his prescription for her disease inspired: to stand on a platform above a feedlot and inhale the smell of dung.

  In Hokitika, Ridge had been hedging her bets with painting, perhaps taking lessons from two very skilled landscape artists working in the neighborhood: John Peele, an important Australian painter, who completed “A Bush Track, Kanieri River” in 1892, or Joseph Wharton Hughes, a New Zealand painter who signed her keepsake album in 1902. But for New Zealand women, the visual arts did not prove any more fulfilling than writing. Ten years younger than Ridge, Mary Margaret Butler, New Zealand’s first woman scu
lptor, grew up in Greymouth, a town 25 miles from Hokitika. Like Ridge, she was educated by nuns. By the time Butler was 30, her work far eclipsed her teacher’s, but it was another 10 years before she left New Zealand and spent a successful decade in Europe. On her return in 1935, the governor general called her “our local lady Praxiteles,” but New Zealand collectors saw no value in homegrown talent. For want of commissions, Butler gave up sculpture.

  Like Ridge, painter Frances Hodgkins was most famous for the work she did abroad. After her training in Europe, she returned to New Zealand only to teach. One of her pupils was Katherine Mansfield’s lover, Edith Bendall. But Hodgkins became discouraged by the provincialism Ridge felt, and like fellow New Zealand visual artists Dorothy Richmond, A. H. O’Keeffe, Margaret Stoddart and Grace Joel, she returned to Europe. Settling in England, she worked alongside Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, eventually becoming one of England’s leading artists.

  Ridge’s keepsake album dates from 1900 to 1905, when she was in her mid-twenties. It contains the usual sentimental inscriptions written by friends and relatives in New Zealand and, eventually, Australia. Dr. Ebenezer Teichelmann, a famous physician-photographer-mountaineer with three peaks named after him, inscribed the album in 1900. “There was a sense of intimacy in his photographs and writing,” according to his biographer Bob McKerrow, “and when he was moved by the beauty around him, would often quote from Longfellow, Stevenson or other romantic poets.” He moved to Hokitika in 1897 after being named surgeon general of Westland, and his signature indicated that Ridge held the esteem of prominent Hokitikans, or at least sought it.

  A schoolteacher, Evelyn MacFarlane, also left an entry in the album. MacFarlane was one of the two witnesses—both female—at Ridge’s wedding. As a contemporary, she was probably a relative of Ridge’s stepfather, a cousin or a niece, and her position as educator would have made her a reader with access to the more up-to-date periodicals. She chose a poem by Harriet Monroe, founder of Poetry magazine in Chicago and later publisher of Ridge’s poetry, that concerned leaving and lost love, which suggested that MacFarlane might have known that Ridge was having marital difficulties.

  A Farewell

  Good-bye!—no, do not grieve that it is over,

  The perfect hour;

  That the winged joy, sweet honey-loving rover,

  Flits from the flower.

  Grieve not—it is the law. Love will be flying—

  Yes, love and all.

  Glad was the living—blessed be the dying.

  Let the leaves fall.

  Other signers of the album included a bevy of actors and actresses from the area, appropriate to Ridge’s involvement in the theater, the minister who married her, various relatives by marriage, including Edith Grahame, whose brother Stanley shot seven people in 1941, and Jesse Matheson from nearby Greymouth who appeared in theater productions, an opera, and concerts. Everyone quotes Tennyson or Shakespeare or William McCall, the 19th-century hymnist, and such was the erudition at that time that they probably did not have to consult their libraries for an accurate passage.

  “The Trial of Ruth,” Ridge’s first published short story, appeared in the 1903 New Zealand Illustrated eight years after her marriage. Early published stories are sometimes romans à clefs. “It was rather a depressing outlook over the long uneven plain, dotted with slab huts, and here and there a grey line of tailings running into the creek,” she writes. The husband drinks and ignores his bride while his partner woos her with a kiss. “The world for him meant only two things—women and gold.” While the husband is incapacitated by drink, the partner asks for another kiss.

  “Ruth,” said the man, unsteadily, “A few weeks ago I took a kiss from you and you were angry. Will you be angry if I take one tonight? Answer me, Ruth, they will be here in a minute.” “No,” said the woman. “I will not be angry—”

  A page later, the lover attempts to kill the husband with dynamite. The young wife puts out the fuse just in time—“Are you mad? You will be blown to atoms!”—although her husband manages to get injured. Lying in bed, he wonders where his partner has gone because they’ve finally struck gold. She gives him a smile, her future now assured, with the “clean white page in the Book of Love” lying open between them, ready for rewrite.

  Ridge illustrates the story herself, drawing a woman on tiptoes snuffing out the dynamite. Her technique is Edward Gorey-like in detail—the dark line flaring at the bottom of her skirt as if a breeze might cause the fire to reignite, and the intricacy of the snaky tree roots crawling among the rocks at her feet. “Death hissed at her from a half inch of smoking fuse” reads the caption.

  Ridge’s neat solution of making the wavering wife the heroine is classic pulp, the kind of fiction that solves all the problems of their authors’ lives—escapist. To her credit, Ridge escaped. She gathered her determination from the pioneer gold rush milieu and her mother’s energy and example, but just as much she drew from her anger over the lack of opportunity in New Zealand, and a youth’s belief in possibility anywhere else.

  Three months after “The Trial of Ruth” appeared in 1903, Ridge left Hokitika and Kanieri Forks for Sydney, Australia, where she would continue her education in the arts. She and her mother and her three-year-old son Keith traveled saloon class, in style, since she had the support and consent—albeit reluctant—of her husband, whose company was touted as one of the most profitable in the district in 1901. They traveled to Wellington, where they boarded the steamer S.S. Mokoia for the four-day trip to Sydney.

  Chapter 4

  The Arts in Australia

  “I am an Australian by sympathy & association,” writes Ridge shortly after her arrival in 1903, beginning her disavowal of all things New Zealand: country, family, husband. Although she could have studied art at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in Wellington, Sydney was the more ambitious choice. At the time, the city was one of the largest in the Western world and terribly cosmopolitan: electric trams ran on the wooden streets, Her Majesty’s theater—very grand—had just reopened after a fire, and the movie playing when they arrived was “Battle of Gettysburg,” a “masterpiece of Cycloramic art.” The Sydney Art School, run by Julian Ashton, was considered the best in Australia. “There is no better teacher in Paris,” declared the internationally known painter George Lambert, a student of Julian Ashton’s until 1900. Ridge—and her mother—must have believed she had some talent for both of them to have left the security of New Zealand for her pursuit of the arts.

  The day they arrived was November 11, 1903—Ned Kelly Day, auspicious for Ridge as it is named after the Australian Robin Hood. With bulletproof armor and helmets made out of farm tools, the Irishman Kelly and his gang were forced into violence by the ill-treatment of Irish Catholics, according to his famous 56-page “Jerilderie Letter.” Police corruption was at the center of his protest. He not only killed three policemen, but he and his gang pulled off one heist dressed as cops. According to Australian historian Amanda Kaladelfos:

  Kelly articulated a struggle between rich and poor that resonated with many at a time when the Victorian government’s land policies disadvantaged small farmers, and thereafter during a period of growing Australian nationalism and the rise of the Australian labour tradition.

  On December 9, Ridge’s mother inscribed her autograph book with lines from the 17th-century poet Sir Samuel Garth: “To die is landing on some silent shore/Where billows never break nor tempests roar;/Ere well we feel the friendly stroke, tis o’er.” What was the message to Ridge? Comfort, in that Victorian attitude of oh-let’s-all-die-and-get-it-over-with? Or did her mother feel she had died to everyone she ever knew in the 24 years she spent in New Zealand, the country and husband she had turned her back on? Or did she have premonitions of her own death four years later? At the very least, the verses show that Emma must have had an education.

  By January, Ridge was asking the editor of the Sydney Bulletin, the most influential magazine in Australian cultur
e and politics from 1890 to 1917, to omit her married name in her contributor’s note. She had already published nine poems in the magazine, mostly as “Lola.” She was setting out her terms, declaring her marital independence, and announcing her literary identity. For the last eight years, she had been Rosa Webster or Lola Webster or Mrs. Peter Webster, and before that, Rosa MacFarlane after her mother’s remarriage, and before that, Rosalie Ridge and Rosa Delores Ridge. She was christened Rose Emily Ridge. Although Ridge would have three more name changes before she died, the result of marital estrangements and entanglements, from 1903 on she published as Lola Ridge.

  Such a decision was not without precedent. In the 1850s the American Lucy Stone kept her family name as a protest “against all manifestations of coverture,” a practice that had dictated a woman’s subordinate legal status during marriage and allowed the husband almost exclusive power, and custody of the children. Perhaps Ridge’s mother feared that her first husband would invoke coverture, and that’s why she fled Ireland. Reflecting women’s profound shift in social status at the turn of the century, Ridge’s generation were notable name changers: Hilda Doolittle taking on the sobriquet H.D., her lover Bryher’s choice of a single name, Willa Cather changing from Wilella Cather to William Cather, M.D., then back to Willa, Polly-turned-Caresse Crosby, and Mina Loy who omitted two letters from her father’s surname Lowry. Ridge had the opportunity of immigrant rebranding, but how much did her renaming have to do with a deeper psychological need to answer to someone new—Who am I after the century turns?

  Ridge received her only post-secondary education at the art school, and in music classes arranged under the auspices of Trinity College in Dublin, which still examines candidates for music in Australia. She passed four exams, and her education in music served her well when she met and befriended Aaron Copland many years later. Together with her son and mother, she lived at 193 West Street in North Sydney, at the center of Australia’s nascent bohemia, but still a somewhat rural area. Bullock teams hauling loads of tree trunks were not uncommon, and most of the houses were only two years old. The newness was perfect for a re-examining of goals and mores, the more bohemian the better. Frank Morton, editor of the Wellington magazine Triad, writes in 1908, “In New Zealand there is no Bohemia, and the few Bohemians who are the salt of the colony are like wrecked mariners on a desolate coast.” In contrast, according to literary historian Tony Moore, “By the turn of the century Australians had come to think that a writer or artist should be a bohemian.” In North Sydney, Ridge immediately came under the influence of the two major adherents of the Australian bohemian lifestyle: her art teacher Julian Ashton (1851-1942) and her publisher A.G. Stephens (1865-1933).