Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  Marianne Moore (1887-1972) enjoyed Ridge’s parties, and her comments about them reveal their playful yet serious tone, for example: “I am interested in Marsden Hartley’s ‘exposition’ of the American quality in poetry. I am not just ready myself to say what I think that quality is.” Moore was no ingenue to the group. She had visited Kreymborg during her first trip to New York in December 1915, and picnicked with Kreymborg and Williams at the Ridgefield shacks. Others was among the several magazines that first published her work that year. “He [Kreymborg] thought I might pass as a novelty.” Moore “talked as she wrote and wrote as she talked, and the consummate ease of the performance either way reminded one of the rapids of an intelligent stream,” Kreymborg wrote in admiration.

  Although Moore never embraced anarchism, she did espouse socialism and supported suffrage. “Of course we all are Socialists,” Moore writes in a letter from college in 1909, “in so far as we know economics and are halfway moral, and want clean politics.” While Ridge was an editor of Others in 1919, she printed Moore’s poem “Radical.”

  Tapering

  to a point, conserving everything,

  this carrot is predestined to be thick.

  The world is

  but a circumstance, a mis-

  erable corn patch for its feet. With ambition, imagination, outgrowth,

  nutriment,

  with everything crammed belligerent-

  ly inside itself, its fibres breed mon-

  opoly—

  a tail-like, wedge-shaped engine with the

  secret of expansion, fused with intensive heat

  to the color of the set-

  ting sun and

  stiff.

  Contemporary critic Stephen Burt points out that roots are also radicals, therefore carrots are radical vegetables with possibly political overtones, and the orange carrots are “the color of the set-/ting sun,” not quite red. Moore’s continuing interest in the political world is indicated in a few of her titles: “To Statecraft Embalmed to Disraeli,” “To Disraeli on Conservatism,” “To Military Progress,” and her various anti-German poems, most importantly “You Say You Said,” with its uncharacteristically vehement lines: “I hate/You less than you must hate/Yourselves,” published in 1918. Wallace Stevens called her “a moral force in light blue.” Moore’s poem, “Spencer’s Ireland,” published in 1941, addressed her need to speak on Irish issues that Ridge shared. Found amongst Moore and Ridge’s correspondence are lines from the Moore poem, “Sojourn in the Whale,” written around 1915, which refer to Ireland’s political situation as well as the difficulties of gaining a literary reputation. The poem was written while Ridge was traveling and probably before they met, but it suggests the bond of asceticism between them.

  You have lived and lived on every kind of shortage.

  You have been compelled by hags to spin

  gold threads from straw and have heard men say:

  “There is a feminine temperament in direct contrast to ours,

  which makes her do these things.[”]

  Although Ridge eventually exchanged only a dozen or so letters with Moore and Mary, her mother, they considered themselves good friends. Judging from the number of entries in Moore’s “Daily Diary” from 1920, Ridge and Padraic Colum, another poet, were her main social contacts that year. “They are practically recluses,” writes Ridge. Like Ridge’s stepfather, Moore’s father was institutionalized for religious mania. Moore never met him, although she knew he had chopped off his right hand. Like Ridge, she too considered herself a visual artist and “did a little painting for fun.” According to critic Betsy Erkkilla, Moore believed that female identity could transform the world, and she, like Ridge, sought an Americanness that recalled a national, moral, and spritual destiny.

  A reading at one of Ridge’s parties marked the beginning of Moore’s famous association with The Dial. Recasting poetry from a fireside recitation into a more public occasion, Ridge encouraged guest participation by having them read from their work. Moore gave a command performance of her poem “England” at 2 a.m. one night after a number of other readings. “Even Stevens was inspired to try something,” writes Kreymborg,

  but Wallace waited for conversation to reach a fairly confused height before he drew forth a paper that looked like a poem but sounded like a tête-à-tête with himself. Orrick Johns, Krimmie [Kreymborg], Williams and the rest took their turn and finally Marianne Moore joined them…A beautiful poem few of the guests could hear distinctly, but which the mystery man from the Dial [Scofield Thayer] heard so well, he stole over to her and, after a whispered consultation, induced her to part with it.

  Scofield Thayer had previously rejected the poem. He then invited Moore to tea at his office, and walked her home. She wrote the angry, conflicted poem “Marriage” after he proposed to her a year later. Even before his resignation from The Dial as a result of mental instability, she replaced him as editor-in-chief in 1925.

  Hart Crane came to many of Ridge’s parties, and he may have been in attendance when Thayer “discovered” Moore. “My dear Hart Crane,” Ridge writes the 20-year-old in April 1919. “We will print one perhaps two of the three poems you submitted though I cannot use them this month—or even say just when they will appear.” Her tone is sternly editorial but he was a veteran of submitting to magazines, having had his first poem published at 16. He must have been happy to get even the suggestion of publication, since in 1918 Pound did not like his work and had ordered The Little Review never to publish him again. (Crane rented a room over their offices hoping to persuade them otherwise.) Williams accepted several of Crane’s poems for Others in 1916 but never printed them, possibly out of jealousy. At the time of Ridge’s first parties, Crane was reading all of Swinburne, making money as a shipping clerk, and about to return to Ohio to work in his father’s candy factory. Ridge’s writing and introductions proved to be very important for his poetic development. His copy of The Ghetto and Other Poems naturally falls open to her “Brooklyn Bridge,” where it is stained at the seam.

  One of the very few reviews Crane wrote was for The Ghetto and Other Poems. He conveyed much enthusiasm for the book, particularly for its imagery of the city:

  Over the black bridge

  The line of lighted cars

  Creeps like a monstrous serpent

  Spooring gold… (Ghetto 51)

  He insisted that Ridge’s sincerity was “the essential to all real poetry” and admired the book because it seemed “so widely and minutely reflective of its time.” He added, however, that her metaphoric technique sometimes devolved into a “barren cleverness.” Still, he would not forget her work when he came to write his “To Brooklyn Bridge.”

  Ridge introduced Mina Loy and her wild poetry to traditional poets such as Louise Bogan. At this juncture, the two of them had poetry and emotional upheaval in common. The 22-year old widowed Bogan had recently moved to the city and was getting over an affair with a Robin Hood who shoplifted furs in order to call attention to the needs of the poor, and Loy was in New York after giving birth to the baby of the boxer/artist Arthur Cravan, who had disappeared mysteriously off the coast of Mexico in a sailboat. Louise Bogan’s two poems, “Betrothed” and “Young Wife” appeared in the 1917 Others before Ridge’s tenure, when Bogan was living in Panama with her still-living husband and a new baby. Both poems are in free verse, a form she would later repudiate, and both concerned the difficulties of marriage. Mina Loy’s poems “The Dead” and “The Black Virginity” had been included in the Others 1919 anthology. Her “Summer Night in a Florentine Slum,” written in 1920 two years after Ridge’s The Ghetto and Other Poems appeared, echoed the style and subject of Ridge’s title poem. Although only two pages in length—compared with Ridge’s 22—its long prose lines concern watch-ing the neighborhood poor from a window on a hot summer night.

  I leaned out of the window—looking at the summer strewn street late in heat—lit with lamps, and mixed my breath with the tired dust. />
  Loy’s flâneuserie includes a legless woman on a board, a suicidal husband, and a madwoman with a knife. “Is the game fair?” asks the speaker. “Nature umpires!” In the window across from hers, a carpenter “stretched a lean arm across the table and pawed his young wife’s breast,” the same table he’d beaten her with that morning. She would return to the topic of the poor and oppressed in the 1940s with poems like “On Third Avenue” and “Mass Production on 14th Street.”

  Jean Toomer (1894-1967) attended a Ridge party in May 1920. Introduced by a mutual friend, Ridge was nearly the first person to recognize Toomer as a writer, telling him his work would be “talked about and studied twenty years hence.” She mentored him for a number of years, and he did indeed become an important figure, straddling the modernists and the Harlem Renaissance movement. She wrote her first response to his poetry in 1920:

  Your poems are delicately impressionistic—surfacey so and they show much whimsical fancy and a sense of form (unity) as well as of cadence—but most of them are weightless. They are surface impressions, light as petal blown delicately upward by a breeze…. They seem to be poems of concealment rather than of revealment—a placing of flowers and ferns before closed shutters and drawn blinds rather than the spirit singing or saying aloud its lonely questioning through open windows.”

  Toomer was poor gentility like Ridge. Although described by Ridge as “a young Indian boy,” his grandfather had been the first African American governor in the country, serving in the state of Louisiana for a month and a half. Toomer liked to use the phrase “First American” to describe his racial heritage and to suggest that he represented a new America unhindered by racial polarity. Extremely handsome, he dedicated himself to poetry—and to finding women to support him.

  Painter-poet Marsden Hartley was part of the Others circle from the beginning. When he was fourteen, his family left him in Maine to work in a shoe factory for a year, an experience that mirrored Ridge’s son’s. Shattered by it, he once described the New England accent to Stieglitz as “a sad recollection [that] rushed into my very flesh like sharpened knives.” As described by Kreymborg: “He wrapped his coat like a toga about his spare form, held his extraordinary nose in the air, used his aristocratic cough as a warning not to come too close.” Although now remembered mostly as a modernist painter, Hartley published in Poetry, The Dial, The Little Review, and five poems in the Others anthology in 1919, including “The Fishmongers,” which begins: “I have taken scales from off/The cheeks of the moon./I have made fins from bluejay’s wings.”

  Emmanuel Carnevali, mentioned as a guest by Kreymborg, was 22. An Italian immigrant who worked at menial labor in New York, he had won an important prize in Poetry that year. A chapter in his only book, A Hurried Man, chronicled the spirit of a Ridge party. Robert McAlmon, who convinced Williams to start Contact at a gathering in 1920, also immortalized her parties in several chapters of his novel Post-Adolescence. Marianne Moore took vivid notes of the parties verbatim. Her Conversation Notebooks, little bigger than postage stamps, are filled with quotes caught at the soirée, some of them annotated years later. Moore quotes William Saphier as saying: “Marsden Hartley—He’s always so bored. He’s so much above everything and some so much below it. I don’t see how we are ever to meet.” Someone answered: “If you don’t stop I’ll die.” Robert McAlmon—or “Piggy” as Moore liked to call him—insulted Harriet Monroe: “[She] can’t read. What she does…I don’t know what she tries to read. She’s chiefly concerned with the cross and the crown.” The next comments appear to be the critic Paul Rosenfeld’s: “cummings’ poem sounds like him he talks just that way when he has had a little more to drink so I like it better.” She attributed half of the following dialogue to Bryher:

  Isn’t Ezra married? Where is Mrs. Pound? She’s there in the flat usually. People come over from America and say poor Mrs. Pound. I assure you it’s quite the other way. She is one of those languid people without a spark of life that you couldn’t strike fire (then how do they get on?) Oh, occasionally Ezra forgets to wash the frying pan and she strolls off to her mother’s for a week and then she comes back.

  The camaraderie and community that these quotes reveal about these poets-in-action underscore the rivalry as well as the exchange of energies—if not always ideas—that went on at the gatherings. That Ridge was able to attract and hold the attentions of so many first-rate writers attests further to her position as a major influence on the modernist movement.

  But you do not yet see me,

  Who am a torch blown along the wind,

  Flickering to a spark

  But never out. (Ghetto 62)

  Chapter 15

  “Woman and the Creative Will”

  “They say there never has been, there is not, and there never will be a really great woman artist,” Ridge begins her speech “Woman and the Creative Will” 52 years before Linda Nochlin asks, “Why have there been no great women artists?” and ten years before Virginia Woolf published “A Room of One’s Own.” Ridge’s choice of title may have been influenced by Woman and Labor, an important book by the South African Olive Shreiner that outlined the social changes caused by technological progress and advocated new and expanded roles for women. A 1911 essay by the Australian Mary Pitt, “Women in Art and Literature,” advocated for gender neutrality in art, and the American Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1911 essay, “Our Androcentric Culture; Or, The Man-Made World” contained such stirring phrases as: “Neither the masculine nor the feminine has any place in art—Art is Human.” Feminist and Masses editor Floyd Dell published Woman as World Builders in 1913, which proclaimed equal opportunity for women in all things.

  In advance of Ridge’s arrival in Chicago where she was to give her speech for the Others Speakers Bureau, she writes to Mitchell Dawson, one of the organizers: “I would like…to be as quiet as possible and see as few people as possible before my talk on Tuesday night…I’m [in] a little nervous mood….”

  She had two speeches prepared. She kept changing the title of a speech on individualism, one that might have mentioned Nietzsche, Stirner and Ibsen, the triumvirate that stressed independence and self-reliance over social expectations. Or she could have taken a less political stance on the subject. According to contemporary anarchist Murray Bookchin, “individualist anarchism remained largely a bohemian lifestyle, most conspicuous in its demands for sexual freedom and enamored of innovations in art, behavior, and clothing.” Right before her arrival, Ridge decided to give the second speech, “Woman and the Creative Will.” “I shall try to show that woman has not only a creative will, but a very great future in creative art,” Ridge declares at the onset of her speech.

  Genius…is composed of the male and female principles of mental order and intuition vitalized by spiritual energy….And a work of creative art requires a union of these principles, just as the act of physical creation requires them….And for this reason—the dual sexuality of genius—men and women so gifted usually show characteristics of both sexes…

  She doesn’t deem any woman artist great. “There have been many gifted [women],” and lists Sappho, Bronte, Dickinson, and the 1914 Nobel Prize winner, the novelist Selma Lagerlof. Ridge had just written a very positive notice of Lagerlof’s work in the American-Scandanavian Review. No one in poetry is judged equal to Sappho until Dickinson, and she “belongs in spirit to the period upon which we are now entering.” No women novelists rival Flaubert, Ibsen, Balzac, or Dostoevski in psychological insight, and only Dostoevski and Turgenev understand women.

  The biological explanation of woman’s inferior status, she says, is only half true. “Even Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Strindberg—three of women’s most hostile critics—have agreed…in granting her [woman] the largest share of intuition.” Positing that intuition is the “first requisite of what we call genius,” she divides intuition into male and female principles which “must be united in one individual before we can have that perfect expression that results in a work of g
reat creative art.” The male principle is “the power of correlating thought” and the female’s is “the ability of the mind to grasp truth with a minimum of effort.” These two principles must be “coupled with an intense urge to expression” which is “easily squandered” in the “arduous years of child-bearing.”

  There is no separating the body from the mind. “Genius is a quality of the spirit rather than of the brain, and spirit is as much permeated with sex as the flesh.” Ridge asserts as popular belief that if a woman should create something of genius, she is not a woman. “In order to prove that no woman ever has been or ever could be a creative artist, [philosophers and critics generally] have said that…all the women of genius are…men.” But—and this is Ridge paraphrasing sexologist Havelock Ellis—homosexuality “is found in a greater proportion of male geniuses but no woman has yet made herself ridiculous by asserting that men of genius are women.” She sees that “the [male] artist is naturally predatory. His soul sits like a patient spider, throwing out infinite antennae, clutching and drawing within,” and writes that he allows women in the salons solely for his own stimulation.

  Her most vivid example of the opportunities withheld from women is illustrated in a reversal of genders. The Baroque painter Murillo leaves a canvas unfinished and his “mulatto” works on it without permission but is freed after showing great talent. Ridge postulates that “a girl slave who had the temerity to dream of painting a white Virgin would probably have been raped.” Transgressive creativity in a woman is not tolerated. “Sex antagonism has been expressed in every age,” and Ridge speaks of Athens, with its “strange spectacle of artists and philosophers on one side and stunted illiterate, cow-like women on the other” that is saved only by “the so-called courtesans.” She then turns to politics and notes that the “present occupation by women of men’s places in industry” was occurring only because of the war. If it had continued, the women would be once again at the “task of providing fodder for still more deadly cannons.” She doesn’t believe in the promotion of women’s rights “as much as a human rights movement.” She claims that “the aspirations of women and the aims of labor are two things that can no longer be dictated by governments” and that fear is the only thing holding them back. When women have realized “that art must transcend fear, and that thought is a spiritual substance to be molded like clay—they too will be the masters of dreams.” She refuses even to acknowledge the still current argument cultural critic Vance Thompson made twenty years earlier: “When with simian—the feminine is nearer the simian than the masculine—ease they imitate the gestures of an artist one must always look in the background for a man.” She sees “a great future for women in creative art.”