Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

Middle-aged, bespectacled, and stout, fiery Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was in the midst of delivering a five-week Sunday afternoon Yiddish lecture series sponsored by the Free Workers Group of New York City. Her talks included “Love and Marriage,” “The Revolutionary Spirit in the Modern Drama,” and “The Political Circus.” Perhaps the printmaker Martin Lewis introduced them, as he traveled in Goldman’s circle. Ridge had just missed hearing Goldman lecture in Los Angeles April 30, and in San Francisco where a crowd of 5,000 had gathered in May. Goldman, on her part, had announced at one of her many speaking engagements that year that she was sailing in January of 1909 for Australia, hoping to live a quieter life. The wealthy Melbourne anarchist Chummy Fleming, most famous for distributing champagne to the unemployed on behalf of a retiring governor-general, promised her the funds. But Immigration informed Goldman that if she left the country, she could never return.

  “Between 1890 and 1920, it is probably no exaggeration to say anarchism became the favorite doctrine of the literary and artistic avant-garde, in America as well as in Europe,” writes Paul Avrich, a noted historian of anarchy. James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw and Eugene O’Neill held to anarchist principles in their youth and often later. In a sense, Avrich argues, they were the pioneers of social justice. “Every good person deep down is an anarchist,” he writes. Adherents believed they were making the responsible choice by thinking for themselves, in congress with democratic ideals. Their beliefs were grounded in peace, love and brotherhood. In 1870 the Russian anarchist Bakunin defined anarchy as a daily practice: “I mean the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the name, liberty that consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person…” A glance through Paul Avrich’s who’s who in the back of his Anarchist Voices, however, shows that plenty of anarchists were plotting or practicing violence. Although Emma Goldman’s lover, Alexander Berkman (1870-1936), spent months in solitude for protesting the beating of other inmates, he was serving 14 years for attempted murder of robber baron Henry Clay Frick.

  The kind of anarchism adopted by many of the New York bohemians was “the red Jack London speaks of, the red of comradeship,” writes Guido Bruno, a proselytizer of all things bohemian in Greenwich Village. Anarchists there “danced and laughed and were happy and if anyone would want to call a gathering of young men and women like that dangerous, it wouldn’t be safe to attend an opera performance or to enter a subway train,” protests Bruno.

  An elderly lady in black silk evening dress, deep décolletée, diamonds in her ears, and around her neck and on six fingers, speaking to a gentleman in evening dress. He is immaculate like his shirt front: “I went to Emma’s lecture last night. Isn’t she a dear? She spoke about those darling children of the Colorado miners and she really made me cry. I’m so sentimental…” At another table, two men, the one looks rather prosperous; the other fellow looks like an artist. “I say,” he says, “this fellow Berkman makes me sick. Imagine a man being fourteen years in prison and living the balance of his life in telling his fellowmen of his experiences in prison.” A fat Italian plays on the harpsichord. Everybody eats roast chicken, drinks red ink and enjoys being in an anarchistic place.

  For a definition from the trenches, Bruno went on to interview Hippolyte Havel, a close friend of Emma Goldman and possibly another of her lovers. Havel practiced free love with the owner of the restaurant he worked in, Polly Holladay (“Polyandrous” according to playwright George Cran Cook), who complained vociferously when he didn’t commit suicide as he so often promised. They lived on 15th Street between Broadway and Fifth Avenue, very close to Union Square, a park renowned for its political orators of all stripes. “To be an anarchist means to be an individualist,” says Havel in his interview. “To be an individualist means to walk your own way, do the thing you want to do in this life—do it as well as you can.” When asked about throwing bombs and killing people, Hippolyte answered: “No true anarchist could destroy something that is existing. It would mean to deny his own existence, if he would not grant the right of existence to everybody and everything created.”

  Like most immigrants, Ridge had arrived in America with hope, then measured it against the strictures of class and money. America was in a recession. There were few jobs unless you were skilled. The unskilled went to work in sweatshops or factories where dehumanizing hours and treatment prevailed. The poor—and Ridge was one of them—lived poorly, often in situations worse than those they left behind. With her background in working-class New Zealand, and her abiding interest in labor and bohemianism, she had all the makings of an anarchist. Emma Goldman “addressed herself implicitly to all the people on the edge of leaving one thing—a marriage, a job, an identity, a town—for something else.” Ridge was ripe for Goldman’s influence.

  Goldman’s letter urges Ridge to finish an illustration for one of her pamphlets. Ridge’s only surviving commercial illustration (she drew one for Playboy magazine but it remains lost), the drawing was taking a lot of time to complete. “I hate to hurry you dear, but I ought to take the Patriotism manuscripts to the printer, if I want the pamphlet done before I go.” The published drawing depicts “Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty,” showing one mythical woman crushing another—not the most supportive of feminist images. Ridge had been laboring so hard on it that Goldman admonished her to take a little time off to attend the Mother Earth ball. Although there is no anarchists’ ball documented until May of the next year, Goldman often held such fundraisers for Mother Earth, her magazine “devoted to social science and literature.” Admission for these balls ranged from 10 to 20 cents, plus 15 cents to check your hat. An additional 15 cents was charged if one were reporting from the “capitalist press,” with socialist reporters turned away entirely because they were “false friends and that is worse than an open enemy.” The New York Times (whose correspondent must have paid 15 cents) reported that “persons who regard the anarchists as a saturnine and dyspeptic lot will have a chance to see how they disport themselves under the influence of music and dancing when they are out for a good time.” One year Goldman went as a nun and waltzed to “The Anarchists Slide.” In her letter to Ridge, Goldman wants to introduce her to Voltairine de Cleyre who was planning to attend, whom Goldman believed “a greater literary talent than any other American anarchist.” De Cleyre’s poetry and anarchist texts would have appealed to the passionate Ridge. She spoke for those

  whose every fiber of being is vibrating with emotion as aspen leaves quiver in the breath of Storm! To those whose hearts swell with a great pity at the pitiful toil of women, the weariness of young children, the handcuffed helplessness of strong men!

  De Cleyre opposed the state, marriage, and the domination of religion in sexuality and women’s lives. She tried to anticipate a future in which gender was not a defining characteristic for social roles. Her 1895 lecture “Sex Slavery” wasn’t just about prostitution, but also referred to marriage laws that allowed men to rape their wives without consequences. Like Ridge, she had a child whom she didn’t raise, a boy who, left with his father, was unaware of de Cleyre’s existence until he was 15 years old. DeCleyre—and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—had clearly defined theories about the education of children, but little love for their own. Candace Falk, a leading Emma Goldman scholar, hypothesizes that Goldman herself had a child whom she gave up for adoption sometime between 1902 and 1904. That may explain why she was highly critical of radical women who suffered too long over the loss of their children, and would have made Ridge loath to mention the existence of her son. In general, anarchists found children to be an insoluble problem. Just ten years earlier, two leading anarchist theorists argued that parents had the right to treat their offspring any way they wanted, short of murder, and that parents were not responsible for their upbringing or their support. One of them went even further:

  A child upon whom its parents at great cost to themselves have conferred…life is, on reaching maturity, under an obligation…to eithe
r make good to the parents the cost incurred by its production and maintenance, or else show, by committing suicide, that there has been no value received; failing in which obligation, the child should be subjected, by all decent people, to the…boycott.

  Anarchist feminists were antifamily at a time when the family was highly romanticized. Like Shulamith Firestone of second-wave feminism and Charlotte Gilman of the first, radical feminists understood that family life was at the root of gender inequality, that political and legal freedom wouldn’t free them from the gender trap. Perhaps Ridge understood this best, with women’s suffrage having been passed in New Zealand so many years earlier, yet producing only the appearance of change. Emma Goldman went a step further and announced that she was anti-women’s suffrage. “Suffrage is an evil…it has only helped to enslave people…it has but closed their eyes that they may not see how craftily they were made to submit.” She was particularly furious with suffragists who insisted that voting women would not cause any disruption in the society. For Goldman, disruption was necessary for change, and although she preferred education as a means, she espoused violence if there was no other way. De Cleyre, on her part insisted that “the ballot hasn’t made man free and it won’t make us free.”

  At the time of Goldman’s letter, De Cleyre would have been traveling to the ball from Philadelphia, where she was living and teaching among poor Jewish immigrants. Anarchist Gussie Denenberg described Ridge as “fragile looking and intense and reminded me of Voltairine de Cleyre. She had the same spirit.” De Cleyre suffered from similar debilitating migraines, hers connected to public appearances. According to Emma Goldman, she had “an extraordinary capacity to conquer physical disability—a trait which won for her the respect even of her enemies and the love and admiration of her friends.” This trait would be one that Ridge would emulate. Whether she actually met De Cleyre is not known, but such a meeting was possible since De Cleyre visited New York more than once around that time.

  Ridge was working for Goldman, but she also made money as an artist’s model, something she had done before in Australia, an archetypal job for a bohemian. Walt Whitman, that anarchist, celebrator of the body, and poetic model for Ridge, also seems to have modeled at least once. Recently, seven photographs that closely resemble an elderly Walt Whitman posing in the nude have been identified as part of the collection of Thomas Eakins, a friend of Whitman’s. It takes quite a bit of self-assurance—something neither Whitman nor Ridge lacked—to remove one’s clothing for an artist’s critical eye, and it also requires stamina if it’s not for the camera, hours of posing with aching muscles in cold, drafty lofts. In the 1910s the going rate for modeling in New York was one dollar an hour, about $25 in 2014, nice money if you could get the job frequently enough.

  Modeling could also lead to prominent recognition. Around this time, the Italian immigrant Tina Modotti became the most successful artist’s model in America. After a stint as a Hollywood silent movie star, she modeled for the photographer Edward Weston. Later, she was Diego Rivera’s model—and the lover of both artists. Trained as a photographer herself, raised as a revolutionary, Modotti published work on four covers of New Masses, a magazine in which Ridge published poems and acted as contributing editor. After being deported from Mexico as an insurgent, Modotti devoted herself to antifascist activities, only returning to Mexico City in 1939. She died under suspicious circumstances a year after Ridge, in 1942.

  The artist model whose life unfolded in ways most similar to Ridge’s was the poet, visual artist, and activist Helen West Heller. In 1892 she moved to Chicago from a farm at age 20 to support herself by modeling. She became a founding member of the Chicago No-Jury Society, a Salon des Refusés inspired by the Armory Show that had its first exhibition at the Marshall Field’s department store in 1922. Her poetry, first recognized by Jane Heap, editor of Little Review, was published in a number of literary journals. She knew Ben Hecht, Maxwell Bodenheim, and Edna St. Vincent Millay through the Towertown studio of the radical modernist painter, Rudolph Weisenborn. When Heller led a protest against WPA job layoffs in December 1936, she was beaten unconscious by police and arrested with several hundred other strikers.

  Peter Quartermain’s 1987 biographical sketch of Ridge claims that she also wrote advertising copy at this time, a serious source of income for writers. Advertising was just coming into its own: mergers had consolidated many independent firms, cars extended the reach of advertising to the roads, better transportation allowed better distribution of goods, chain stores and mail order had begun to dominate the retail industry. Although women were the country’s main purchasers, they were allowed to write advertising only for food, soap, fashions, and cosmetics. The most famous poet-copywriter was Hart Crane, who wrote ad copy for the J. Walter Thompson agency. “I got so I simply gagged everytime [sic] I sat before my desk to write an ad,” he writes in 1923. Although there is no example of Ridge’s practice, she later included ad copy in “Morning Ride,” one of her most accomplished poems. Perhaps she also put her familiarity with advertising to good use when she solicited ads for Broom years later.

  At the end of 1909, Ridge pencilled a series of desperate notes into a small gray notebook that contained her Australian cousin Eddie’s address, and a few others. The notebook must have been important to her as she managed to hold onto it for her entire life, when she lost nearly every other keepsake or manuscript. At the time she may have been working in Goldman’s office at 210 East 13th Street, where Goldman lived with her lover Ben Reitman and put out Mother Earth. Goldman was about to start on a 37-city tour in January and surely needed help. But Ridge was greatly preoccupied with other things.

  Nov. 19 ’09

  This day my affairs desperate. I shall not go to the office unless for mail. To deny will offend [?]

  Nov. 30 ’09

  I will never forget this desperate night. Oh to be able to see only one little hour into the future that would do it. I must act and yet action may be fatal!

  Dec 29 ’09

  This is a strange morning…how will it end? Well, a week from now, all things for my immediate future will be decided—perhaps for all time!

  Then Ridge quotes the opening lines of the Victorian poet William Ernest Henley’s melodramatic “Invictus,” her only act of invention to change “unconquerable” to “inconsolable.”

  Out of the night that covers me,

  Black as the pit from hole to hole,

  I thank whatever gods that be

  For my inconsolable soul.

  The entries continue:

  Dec. 30 12 a.m.

  No change

  Dec. 31 10:15 a.m.

  No change

  surely something must snap with the old year!

  2:30 p.m.

  I put my fate to the test once more[.] will the god’s turn their thumbs up or down?

  Jan 1st

  thumbs up.

  Could she have been pregnant? She was 36. “I must act yet action may be fatal.” An abortion? She would have had access to the latest in birth control from Goldman, who was smuggling contraceptives in from Europe. But Ridge’s “all things for my immediate future will be decided—perhaps for all time!” sounds more like a possible career break than the gradual revelations of a changing body. Whatever religion was, it was no longer a consolation, judging from “The Martyrs of Hell” published eight months earlier in Mother Earth:

  Not your martyrs anointed of heaven,

  The ages are red where they trod;

  But the hunted—the world’s bitter leaven,

  Who smote at your imbecile God:

  A being to pander and fawn to;

  To propitiate, flatter, and dread

  As a thing that your souls are in pawn to,

  A dealer that barters the dead;

  The conviction of mind evident in this poem is echoed in the otherwise fey potboilers she was selling to pay the rent. In “Clem o’ The Creek,” her 1909 novella about adventure in New Zealand, the strong-
willed heroine turns a gun on her lover after throwing out her husband. The Evening Chronicle of Charlotte said of its last installment: “through many strong climaxes [it] brings to a satisfactory conclusion an exceptionally fine novel.” Some of these stories—like the poems—she had already published in Australia. She eventually sold thirteen stories in America between 1909 and 1911. Seven ran in Gunter’s Magazine and its successor The New Magazine, with its full-color pulp covers, and contents containing adventure stories like Anthony Hope’s “Zenda” and those by Sir Henry Rider Haggard, whose work inspired the contemporary Indiana Jones film series. “Clem o’ The Creek’s” 52 double-columned pages is a page shorter than her other “novel,” “The Ladybird,” also published in Gunter’s. “The cities call me with a million lips” says the Ladybird, its mouthy, cross-dressing heroine who becomes a New Zealand cowhand. Couched in the pulp of “nameless dread,” “deep eyes of understanding,” “bosoms rising and falling tumultuously,” and men “vaulting lightly into rooms,” the stories’ thrills, to a modern reader, are mostly transgressive although they also provide a glimpse of Australian life and mores. Perhaps she would have continued writing them—except for Goldman’s letter of August 1911.

  Emma was having the first vacation of her life and had had time to read Ridge’s “The Undesired,” her latest potboiler. Alexander Berkman disagreed with Goldman about it being better than her last. “I am glad that you let me read it,” writes Goldman, “because I know now that you can write.” She must have meant “write fiction,” because she had already featured two of Ridge’s poems in Mother Earth. “Our gifted rebel poet,” Goldman described her later in her autobiography. Ridge must have discarded or retitled the story because it doesn’t show up in the list of her publications, and in December of that year she publishes her last. Was she derailed by Goldman’s final comment on her prose? “There is one thing I meant to ask you, why do you choose such remote and rather conventional themes? Surely you are sufficiently part of the great pulse of our time to convey something of that.”