It is safe to say that in the 1910s, the vogue for writing free verse—poetry that was unrhymed and unmetered—became what landscape painting had been for young people, especially young women, in the 1890s, a way to define oneself as an artist and to distinguish oneself from a family background seen as philistine or soulless.
Publishers rushed to discover and issue women’s poetry in runs of thousands. Critic Edmund Wilson wrote in the early 20s: “I find [the women poets] more rewarding than the men. Their emotion is likely to be more genuine and their literary instinct surer.” The entire modernist movement was seen as a woman’s attack on men in a 1920 editorial of the Philadelphia Record:
The vigorous male note [is] now seldom heard in the land, and almost never at all in the pages of Poetry…Poetry is edited by a woman; its policy is largely dominated by another woman with radical and perverse notions of the high art of singing, and most of its contributors are feminine by accident of birth, while the majority of the male minority are but thin tenors.
William Drake asserts that “Most of the women poets…did not think of themselves as rebels, however, but simply aimed at achieving the same kind of success as men.” Likewise, Ridge’s approach was not particularly feminist, she tended not to weigh in on either gender. Although she makes many references that derive from a female perspective, referring to women at least as often as men in her poems, and she twice organized books around the nine-month gestation period, she strove for equality in this perspective, and such equality can seem, in this masculine-weighted world, a focus on the feminine.
Mothers waddling in and out,
Making all things right—
Picking up the slipped threads
In Grand Street at night—(Ghetto 16)
is balanced by:
What if they tweak his beard—
These raw young seed of Israel
Who have no backward vision in their eyes—
And mock him as he sways
About the sunken arches of his feet—
They find no peg to hang their taunts upon.
His soul is like a rock (Ghetto 18)
A number of critics have labeled Ridge’s approach maternal. Drake writes: “Ridge’s poetry is marked both by rage at injustice and by a fiercely maternal urgency, as if the disorder of the world arose out of a separation from the spiritual center the mother represents.” Donna Allego, author of The Construction and Role of Community in Political Long Poems by Twentieth-Century American Women Poets, which often focuses on Ridge, writes:
[Ridge] uses the maternal role to support laborers in the work force, and thereby redefines an American notion of liberty so that it is consistent with the intrinsic value of labor, labor’s contribution to society, and violent and destructive confrontations between labor and management.
“Maternal” isn’t the word used when men support social causes in their poetry, and designating her point of view as “maternal” denigrates her work with the taint of the 19th century “sentimental.” Given Ridge’s behavior with her own child—consigning him to an orphanage—she must not have had many overt maternal feelings, and those she had were complex.
Caroline Maun, author of Mosaic of Fire, a study about Lola Ridge and her friends Evelyn Scott and Charlotte Wilder, suggests that Ridge had “maternal” feelings toward them. The exchanges in their letters, however, seem rather quid pro quo and not particularly maternal. Ridge writes letters to publishers and editors for Scott and Wilder—but she also writes these for the Armenian poet Leon Srabian Herald and Mitchell Dawson. If anything, Evelyn Scott seems the more maternal, perhaps because she raised her son herself and expresses her concerns about Ridge in the same breath that she worries about him. She frets over Ridge’s health, offers to take her in, arranges for a new publisher for Ridge, gives her all her contacts, and worries about her output. Ridge’s letters to the editor/poet Idella Stone were more solicitous but they stopped after Ridge returned from visiting Stone’s father in Mexico, suggesting that Ridge’s concern was more to secure introductions for herself. Rather than the maternal urge, Ridge was more interested in sex.
Chapter 12
“Sex Permeates Everything”
“Sex permeates everything” is scrawled across Ridge’s little gray notebook from 1909. “All over the city…candlelit tea-rooms echoed with discussions of erogenous zones and similar intimate matters,” crows one history of the time. Free verse was free in subject matter as well as line—even from a woman’s point of view, surely one reason poetry began to fly off the shelves. Even dour, stout, 45-year-old Amy Lowell was publishing suggestive material by 1919:
The Weather-Cock Points South
I put your leaves aside,
One by one;
The stiff, broad outer leaves,
The smaller ones,
Pleasant to touch, veined with purple,
The glazed inner leaves,
One by one
I parted you from your leaves,
Until you stood up like a white flower.
Not far from licentious Greenwich Village, the Tenderloin district supported some 2,000 brothels, and judging from the number of abortions performed at the turn of the century on the Lower East Side (about 100,000), nearly everyone in the ghetto was having sex. At the Ferrer Center, sex enthusiasts included Goldman and her acolyte Margaret Sanger, Will Durant who spoke on sex psychology—he who had fled the seminary shortly before teaching at the Modern School—and Theodore Schroeder, who talked up free speech in “Obscene Literature.” Leonard Abbott, the Ferrer Center’s leader, professed bisexual encounters, and the gay Englishman poet/philosopher Edward Carpenter influenced Goldman in her talk, “The Unjust Treatment of Homosexuals.”
But a pale pink dream
Trembles about this young girl’s body,
Draping it like a glowing aura.
She gloats in a mirror
Over her gaudy hat,
With its flower God never thought of…
And the dream, unrestrained,
Floats about the loins of a soldier,
Where it quivers a moment,
Warming to a crimson
Like the scarf of a toreador…(Ghetto 38)
Sexuality was a central force in Ridge’s work, celebrated but not separated from the rest. To isolate it was to vulgarize and trivialize it. She was primarily a sensualist, following Baudelaire’s declaration of “modernité,” with art acting as a vessel for aesthetic values that embody “the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent.” She simply did not forget the rest of the world in those sensual glimpses.
Birth control was the corollary of all this interest in sex. Goldman worked as a nurse on the Lower East Side 30 years before Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) and smuggled contraceptives into the U.S. for those in need. Goldman had also lectured on the subject of birth control since 1908, six years before Sanger’s single-issue campaign began with the publication of her newsletter The Woman Rebel. “No Gods, No Masters” emblazoned Sanger’s cover, a slogan that was pure anarchist. “Women were subjugated,” Sanger proclaimed, “by the machine, by wage slavery, by bourgeois morality, by customs, laws and superstitions.” Goldman supported and encouraged Sanger, selling copies of Sanger’s journal on her lecture tours.
Sanger described Ridge at the Center as that “intense rebel from Australia” and as its “organizing secretary.” Ridge would have met Sanger soon after the Ferrer Center opened. As a nurse working on the Lower East Side in 1911, Sanger had the authority to lecture on “The Limitation of Offspring,” and to give talks on birth control at the Ferrer’s mothers meetings. Like Ridge, Sanger had little formal education, and the Ferrer Center acted as a sort of university of the liberal arts for her, providing lectures and debates by leading thinkers on many areas of the humanities, as well as anarchist tips on rallying the masses. The Ferrer Center was most likely where Sanger met the Greek anarchist and dentist John Rompapas, who may have given her money to launch The Woman Rebel in 1914, si
nce they were having an affair and he had already funded Hippolyte Havel’s journal Revolutionary Almanac. Although Sanger and her husband professed an open marriage, her relationship with Rompapas may have increased their estrangement and brought her closer to the Ferrer community of anarchists.
Sanger’s eldest son Stuart was one of the first pupils at the Modern School. Sanger donated the many-volumed Book of Knowledge to the classroom after Will Durant asked: “What do I teach them?” The books must have served as inspiration—Sanger later judged his teaching as “extraordinarily effective.” She certainly knew Ridge’s work as editor of the magazine The Modern School.
After Sanger fled the country (under the name “Bertha Watson”) following her 1914 arrest by anti-obscenity officers, Goldman mustered support for her from the anarchist community. Ferrer Center art student Rockwell Kent had already designed Sanger’s logo and Bill Shatoff printed her publication “Family Limitation” that landed Sanger’s husband in jail in the U.S. around the same time. Abbott acted on behalf of the Free Speech League by helping her and her husband with strategy. Abbott warned Sanger: “If you do return, you will get a long prison sentence,” and then, more encouragingly, “There is undoubtedly growing interest in the whole issue of birth control.” She was fighting the charge of obscenity and for “inciting murder and assassination” because she had published “In Defense of Assassination” about birth control. From Europe, she criticized Goldman for not doing enough for her, but Goldman and her magazine Mother Earth continually brought her case to their reader’s attention, collected funds for her, and distributed her pamphlets. She took up the birth control issue for her again in 1915 and was arrested twice trying to publicize it. Goldman was so certain that she would be incarcerated the second time that she took a book with her to read in jail. Her 15-day sentence was eclipsed by Sanger’s trial, which was conducted around the same time.
While exiled in England, Sanger began an affair with the martyred Ferrer’s close associate, Lorenzo Portet, and traveled with him to London, Wales, Paris, and Spain. She was planning to resettle with him and the children in Paris when she received the news that her five-year-old daughter Peggy was ill. Peggy had been left with her older brother in the care of the Modern School, which now offered only very spartan living conditions in its new location in New Jersey. Eva Bein, who slept next to Margaret Sanger’s children, describes the school facilities: “We had only one stove in the middle of the dormitory. The Sanger girl came down with pneumonia, and Mother feared that I would catch it too.” She continues: “In the morning, when we went to wash, there was ice. The toilet was outside.” Another child remembered waking up with her hair frozen to her pillow, and that children stayed warm by exercising beside bonfires.
Sanger became haunted by a series of dreams about Peggy in which she pleaded for her mother to come home. But Sanger delayed. Within days of her arrival, Peggy was transferred to a New York hospital, where she lingered for a few more days and died. Sanger had returned to face trial, and sympathy for the loss of her daughter was part of the reason the prosecution dropped the charges. Sanger dreamt of little girls for years afterwards and believed she actually saw and spoke to Peggy during then fashionable Rosicrucian rituals. Ever alert to the implications of guilt, by 1953 Sanger suggested that her use of the word “guilt” in a letter to Emma Goldman was more similar to “regret.” But she finishes this letter to Goldman by using the word “leave” three times: “As to leaving the children I knew it was a necessary sacrifice to leave them to prepare my defense in order to leave them a clear record of their mother’s work.” The Modern School and the Ferrer Center were blamed for the death, but Sanger did not desert the radical cause right away, and wrote “To My Friends and Comrades” a year later in Havel’s magazine, Revolt.
Sanger’s involvement with the Modern School and the Ferrer Center lasted a total of five years, and her experiences and education there were formative. They also provided support and strategies to achieve radical reform—not to mention several love affairs and mentoring by Emma Goldman. In 1918 Sanger and Ridge rekindled their acquaintance, despite both being away from New York. By then Sanger had repudiated Goldman, and cut ties with her entirely, and so had Ridge. Sanger hired her to be one of six literary editors of her newly reorganized magazine, The Birth Control Review. Sanger’s former managing editor had absconded with everything in the office, including the furniture, in an effort to oust control of the movement. Sanger had gone to the district attorney for help, which alienated the radicals. She had already recognized that she needed the support of upper-class women more than theirs, and organized the New York Women’s Publishing Company to finance the new review from wealthy benefactors. Perhaps Ridge saw her association with Sanger and editing her magazine as a way of finding her own wealthy supporters.
“ASIDE, DARE NOT retard my passage!” begins the poem that opens an essay by the art editor Gertrude Boyle in the May 1918 issue. Magazines like Sanger’s and The Modern School were meant to be not only an outlet for polemic but “a place of expression for the young idealists in arts and letters” like Goldman’s Mother Earth. Editors then believed that all people, not just idle wealthy men, deserved contact with the arts, and that the arts, in this case, might also attract an audience of women who would contribute to the cause. In June the magazine published two more poems of Boyle’s, “To the Little Unfortunates,” about babies born in the tenements, and “Woman of the Street,” about prostitutes, which begins: “I stretch my hand to thee—.” In the July issue, Maude Durand Edgren asks “What is there between the deep sea of celibacy and the devil of sex gluttony?” Almost in answer, Ida Wright Mudgett writes in another article: “The bitter injustice [of] the women of the poor, who are compelled to be the mothers of enormous families.” Ridge must have been partial to these women since she included a multitude of ghetto babies, both at home and at work, in her first book.
And ah, the little babies—
Shiny black-eyed babies—
(Half a million pink toes
Wriggling altogether.)
Baskets full of babies
Like grapes on a vine. (Ghetto 16)
Immigrant women were often the subject of The Birth Control Review articles. Many must have subscribed, since circulation jumped from 2,000 in 1917 to 10,000 by 1922. Like Ridge, they had made the decision to emigrate, survived the passage, found a way to support themselves—in many cases without any system of welfare or relatives—and now knew they needed access to Sanger’s information. Although Ridge was at the time 45 years old, a decade earlier, when she was a newly arrived immigrant, she may have had some contraceptive worries. After all, she and David Lawson lived together throughout that period.
In the eyes of those who knew Ridge in New York, by living with Lawson she was committing the sin of fornication, not adultery, because it was unlikely anyone knew about her marriage in New Zealand. She did not suffer the terrible scandal that the poet Elinor Wylie had when she left her husband and their three-year-old for another man and fled to England. At the time President Taft sent a note of consolation to Wylie’s mother and offered to use his diplomats to negotiate her return. Few had the financial resources to so brazenly affront public morality. Those without such social ties or money had to somehow support themselves if they were then rejected. Ridge understood their plight too.
A Worn Rose
Where to-day would a dainty buyer
Imbibe your scented juice,
Pale ruin with a heart of fire;
..............................................
What favour could she do you more?
Yet, of all who drink therein,
None know it is the warm
Odorous heart of a ravished flower
Tingles so in her mouth’s red core… (Ghetto 76)
Most probably Ridge’s life of sin increased her cachet. It was, after all, the Roaring Twenties.
Chapter 13
Others and Its Editors
He may have met Ridge through their mutual association with Man Ray at the Ferrer Center. Ridge was already out of town in 1913 when Kreymborg and 23-year-old Man Ray were friends enough to move from New York across the Hudson to Ridgefield, New Jersey, and live in shacks that over the next few years became a sort of artist colony. “On one memorable afternoon there, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp played a game of tennis without a net—the first Dada sports event,” writes historian Ross Wetzsteon. Others began after Ezra Pound suggested in a letter that Kreymborg contact William Carlos Williams, who then drove down to their enclave and became friends. They planned the first issue of Others with Wallace Stevens and another of Williams’s friends, the poet Skipwith Cannell. Picnicking on Sundays, they would play a little ball, and talk, writes Kreymborg in his reminiscences of the period, Troubadour. They met with “the purpose of working together and of condemning the world at large.” Many of the visual artists who frequented the colony contributed both their artwork and their writing to Others, and these included Picabia and Marsden Hartley as well as Man Ray. Poet, avant-garde art collector, and salonnière Walter Arensberg provided the funds to launch the first issue, dated July 1915. By March 1916, the monthly had also published an annual for collectors. At a time when “everybody is reading poetry; yes, and nearly everyone, from the hotel porter to the overseas veteran, is writing at it,” when as Harriet Monroe noted, poetry was stacked high at the front of bookstores, and “crowds of people, three and four deep, were reaching over each other to buy it.” the appearance of Others made headlines. The most graphic of its many reviews was “This Summer’s Style in Poetry, or the Elimination of Corsets in Versifying” in the New York Call. “It is with this magazine [Others] and the group that grew up around it that modernism in American poetry really begins,” according to critic and poet Kenneth Rexroth.
Anything That Burns You Page 13