Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  She does not waste time blaming men for suppressing women’s creativity, but proposes an androgynous blending between what Drake calls “the male/intellect-female/intuition polarity” that will enable “real equality and an end to sexual antagonism between men and women.” She puts it succinctly: “Woman is not and never has been man’s natural inferior.”

  What she wants is for women to work “not merely toward reorganization and reform, but toward the construction of a completely new social and economic fabric”—an insight that De Cleyre and Goldman would have agreed with, if not inspired. She is tremendously moved by the Russian Revolution and sees it as the place where feminism will result in liberty for both sexes, part of the “Woman Renaissance” that she feels is taking place. Her contention is that if men and women can work together, America will finally overtake Europe as the intellectual and artistic world leader.

  Ridge’s landmark presentation on February 25, 1919 was the first of five lectures by poets from the Others Speakers Bureau. Although Kreymborg claimed to have thought up the Bureau, it could well have been Ridge’s idea since her friend Emma Goldman had been doing such tours for decades. Other historians said it was conceived by William Saphier, funded by salonnière Margery Currey and directed by Dawson, but Ridge certainly helped organize the tour from the New York end. In correspondence with Carl Sandburg’s lawyer, Mitchell Dawson, “a red-headed poet at heart and a red-headed lawyer by avocation,” Ridge promised “lecture/readings” with Conrad Aiken, Kreymborg, Williams, Orrick Johns, and herself. Conrad Aiken, who reviewed her first book, is now best remembered primarily for his short story, “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” but eventually won every poetry award available including becoming the first two-term U.S. poet laureate. One-legged Orrick Johns won the 1912 Lyric Year contest that made the loser, Edna St. Vincent Millay, famous. After her poem narrowly failed to win, it received such extravagant praise that Orrick Johns felt too humiliated to show up in person to claim the prize. For some unknown reason, he was not included in the final Chicago schedule. Robert Frost originally declined an invitation to speak for the Bureau, and by the time he changed his mind, it was too late to accommodate him.

  “Respectable, high-minded persons are given to classifying writers of vers libre with dog stealers, ticket scalpers, wife deserters, and the Bolshevikii” begins “Miss Ridge to the Rescue,” the newspaper announcement of Ridge’s talk as the first of the series. The poets delivered their speeches up the elegant glass-doored elevator, past the panels of dark wood and pre-Raphaelite murals into the drama school of the Anna Morgan Studios in Chicago’s Fine Arts Building, the epicenter of Chicago’s bohemian art scene. For his part, Williams spoke on the 15th of April, describing poets as “rebels who took calculated chances,” in a speech entitled “A Provisional Scheme of the Universe.” He very much enjoyed the whole experience. “You could hear them breathe,” he wrote, describing his rapt audience. A 15-column review in the Chicago Daily Tribune of his lecture was subtitled: “Women Do Not Like His Poems, but They Seem to Like Him.” That weekend he slept with Marion Stroebel, the associate editor of Poetry, and proclaimed in a letter: “I had never before had the opportunity to be just a poet, the one thing I wanted to be.”

  Chicago was hot, at least in terms of poetry. The Jackson Park Art Colony of writers at the time—Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg, Harriet Monroe, Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters, Ben Hecht and soon-to-be New Yorker Margaret Anderson—circled around critic Floyd Dell who had moved with his wife into the old concession stands of the Columbian Exposition. Kreymborg himself had lived in the city two years earlier while editing a Chicago number of Others, which included four of Mitchell Dawson’s poems. Dawson and Kreymborg had met during the war when Dawson relocated to New York as a soldier. Spending all his evenings in the Village with artists and writers, Dawson—like Kreymborg—became caught up in starting his own magazine. Kreymborg knew just the man to collaborate with: Man Ray, fresh from their adventures with The Glebe three years earlier and Man Ray’s own Ridgefield Gazook, a single-issue four-page Dadaist magazine he published in 1915 before Dada was claimed by Europe. Man Ray, Dawson and the anarchist/sculptor Adolf Wolff put out one issue of the magazine TNT in March 1919, with assistance from the wealthy Henry S. Reynolds. TNT featured a preliminary drawing of “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” by Marcel Duchamp, a sound poem by Adon Lacroix (Man Ray’s lover at the time), and a poem by Philippe Soupault, one of the founders of surrealism in France, among other contributors. On Dawson’s return to Chicago, he met the writer/illustrator/machinist William Saphier, “a stocky Roumanian with dancing eyes,” perhaps through Saphier’s involvement in The Little Review, and the two of them set to work, collaborating with Ridge on setting up the lecture series. Also credited in the collaboration were the poets Marion Stroebel and Elma P. Taylor.

  Envisioned as a sort of sideshow for this new strange practice of modernism, the Others Speakers Bureau was to have toured other Midwestern cities, according to the March 1919 issue of the magazine. Ridge was the only one to have spoken in St. Louis where she delivered her “The Growth of Individualism in American Poetry” to a good crowd. Frost, Lindsay, Sandburg, and Stevens were to have lectured in Chicago in the fall and winter. But the first season of the lecture series was its last—no reason given. Nonetheless, William Saphier reported in the next Others issue that “the result [of the tour] was that Lola Ridge, Conrad Aiken, Alfred Kreymborg and William Carlos Williams visited Chicago, addressed hundreds of people, made a great many friends and sold lots of books.”

  Ridge’s speech received enough praise (although no reviews) that she repaired to Montreal with unsolicited money given to “individuals working for society along radical lines,” to expand her speech to book-length, with chapters on “Woman’s Creative Past, The Nature of Aesthetic Emotion, Man’s Conception of Womanhood as the Rib, Puritanism and Art, The Bisexual Nature of Genius, The Inner Room, Sex Antagonism, Motherhood and the Creative Will, and Woman’s Future in Creative Art.” But she sensed that the project wasn’t going to be popular. “People hate to mistake you for a lamb and then catch the glint of teeth,” she writes after her trip to Chicago. She never completed the book and finally discarded it nine years later when Viking, then her publisher, withdrew its support on the grounds that she would have no readers.

  Ridge revealed the debt she owed Dawson with regard to setting up the Others Speakers Bureau when she wrote to him a year later about setting up something similar for D.H. Lawrence:

  Huebsch [her publisher] asked me to speak to you about H. D. (sic) Lawrence. He is fetching him over here to lecture and wants some one interested really in poetry to help this matter along in Chicago and so that he gets a hearing[.] (I)f agreeable he wishes you to write to him. I hope you will—this time you’ll get the credit. I don’t mean that you didn’t get it before though—only its success was really all due to you….

  Dawson must have been very gentlemanly about who was due the credit—or Ridge was being modest. She very much valued the friendship, and they exchanged work and loaned each other books. “Send me what new stuff you have so that I can criticize fiercely [?] and perhaps you’ll do the same for me. Be sure to let me have “Antonia” back.” (Willa Cather had published My Antonia the year before.) “I could write to you standing in a trolley,” she exclaims, and later astutely evaluated her own approach to poetry with his: “I want to deny or destroy something and you want to…make affirmation.” She also held the wider view with regard to poetry’s squabbles: “Oh there’s nothing in the world that’s any good—after our work—but love and courage.”

  In May, 1919, fresh from the Others’ Chicago success, Dawson attended one of Ridge’s soirées. He had a wonderful time. “A tremendous party at Lola’s…Talk and talk till the room turned around.” Ridge’s Australian friend Martin Lewis came—“a brilliant conversationalist”—Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Kreymborg, and the very young Emmanuel Carneva
li who imagined Dawson doing “phallic dances in solitude.”

  This was the party that ended Others. Carnevali staged a filibuster about getting rid of the old guard—Williams, Ridge, Kreymborg—accusing them of having forgotten their youth. Carnevali began his rant with praise. His estimation of Ridge recalls the “bisexual” nature of her Others speech in Chicago, as well as Untermeyer’s reception to her first book:

  Virile?—it may be an insult to use that adjective since Lola Ridge has begun an era in which for a woman to be virile, i.e., masculine, might mean to be weaker. I think she is one of the most beautiful signs we have of woman’s emancipation and independence. Let her be a socialist; this rebellion of hers is pure beauty, it is sanctified, it is nothing less than burning human blood. It is no longer that particular fact of the revolt against actual social conditions, which is, unfortunately, what affects today’s socialists and anarchists. It is an eternal thing, the thing that caused Prometheus to be bound. It is the fire of heaven burning in this wonderful woman’s blood.

  “My Speech at Lola’s,” later recounted in a chapter of Carnevali’s book, A Hurried Man, quickly turned into an attack on the poets for “their preoccupation with technique instead of the ‘soul of poetry’.” The diatribe is described by Paul Mariani in Williams’s biography as “shrill, half-crazed.” Carnevali sets the scene:

  the suggestive violentism and the heavy scented drunken whirlwind that is Williams; the sweet simplicism and the capering bitterness that is Kreymborg; the voracious hunger of Lola Ridge—flashlights searching a battlefield, slicing a thick foul night, breaking one another to be drawn together into pools of swarming gold over corpses…How could I put them together?

  Then he damns them:

  My friends, Kreymborg, Bodenheim, Saphier, Williams and Ridge, I hate you…The fight you had started in the beginning has you exhausted….Who the hell are you, judging us and laughing and sneering at us, at me, out of what unknown unsaid miracles have you earned your right to write?

  He takes on some of the responsibility for his disillusionment himself:

  The dear sufferer Lola Ridge has spoken of a wind in such a way that I saw the hand of a god bringing clean stillness to man—and I was ashamed, I, the restlessness that has no direction….

  He unflatteringly compares the group’s theorizing to Pound’s:

  I am disgusted with your little review talk of technique and technicians. Easier than everything, commoner than everything is to have a technique, to talk like Ezra Pound does in his “Subdivisions of the Poetical Department Store with Antiques for Sale only to those Who Know how the Oriental Pooh-Pooh-Chink wore his Slippers.

  Then he rejects the whole enterprise, sounding as young as he was:

  If you are poets, as they say, I don’t want to be a poet….If you say nothing, then I’ll shout into your ears, the world expects a formal surrender from you….I’m ready…to knock you down and step over your bodies.

  With such an incitement, not even Ridge’s energies could stop William Carlos Williams, very prickly about being thought old guard, from pulling Others apart. He was already worried about the freshness of his experimental quest when he announced Others’ death in The Egoist three years earlier in an article entitled “The Great Opportunity.” Kreymborg had put him in charge of the July and August issues but Williams decided to declare it dead in July. Although Others had launched his career, he didn’t like where the gadfly Kreymborg was steering the magazine’s success, proposing a club house, a stock company and a bookstore—and he was moved by Carnevali’s speech. In the final issue, Williams praised Carnevali for being “wide, wide, WIDE open.” He announced that the magazine “has grown inevitably to be a lie, like everything else that has been a truth at one time.” His eight page essay “Belly Music,” appended like an encore at the end of the magazine, insisted that Others’ end was “the BEGINNING of artistic criticism.”

  Williams, Dawson, and Ridge may have already been planning another magazine. Eventually referred to as “the Compromise/New Moon project,” Ridge’s role in it was never specified. At the time, she wrote a number of letters to Dawson from the hospital where she was having tests. She also sent Williams a letter with some reservation about the project—“IF” as Williams quotes her—and it seems to have had something to do with money, because Williams then suggested that Dawson give him money to forward to her. “I will hold myself ready to act as a kind of intermediary,” writes Williams, then he goes on: “I will write to her at once telling her I know nothing as yet but as soon as I hear definitely—No. No. I’ll tell her nothing at all.” He then mentions Evelyn Scott as “a good ally,” that “the lady in question has more stuff packed away in her blond bean than any other of her sex I have so far poetically encountered,” but whether he was considering her as a possible collaborator is not clear. Their affair is still in the future. Dawson did end up sending a number of checks to Ridge, but he didn’t have the kind of money that was necessary for a magazine launch. “We need that sort of an acetylene torch to bore thru the steel that surrounds the money-boys,” he writes his mother. He and Williams were also supporting Carnevali who had abandoned his wife and children for a six-month stint as associate editor at Poetry, where Carnevali was known as “my dear boy” to Harriet Monroe.

  Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” begins the last Others issue, with “I, too, dislike it,” setting the tone for Williams’s renunciation of the poetry at hand, although she had no idea he would use it that way and did not appreciate its placement. Mitchell Dawson had a poem in the issue, as well as Marion Stroebel, Williams’s paramour. The upstart Carnevali’s poems appear twice, and of course there’s a Kreymborg poem. William Saphier, who helped so much in Chicago, also merits a poem. Alva N. Turner, who published three poems, was “an amateur poet” encouraged by Williams. “Never have I seen such ROTTEN work which gives such hope—such failure mixed with such an intangible something that is down in the ROCKS at the center of the world,” Williams writes to him. After Wallace Stevens’s two poems comes Ridge’s uncollected “Easter Dawn.” In her poem, the spring light runs over Grace Church across from her apartment, coming to rest on the “Winged Victory” above her bed.

  Dawn at my window…

  Dawn, a spent runner resting on white stones,

  stones of Grace Church,

  stones of Fifth Avenue,

  stones of the arch at Washington Square—

  touching now with a gaunt pallor

  the winged Victory above my bed.

  World War I had just ended, but victory for the late-coming Americans was hollow, given the number of casualties they suffered in such a short time. A photo of Ridge’s studio shows a three-foot-tall copy of Winged Victory looming in the background. Did she admire the sculpture in defiance of the futurist manifesto by Mina Loy’s boyfriend Filippo Marinetti: “a race-automobile which seems to rush over exploding powder is more beautiful than the ‘Victory of Samothrace’”? Or was the feminist statement—the headless yet powerful woman—the greater attraction? In her case, even the wings could be removed. “The winged Victory of Samothrace is greater as pure Victory without its wings. I only knew this after the wings of our cast of it were broken in moving,” she writes at the end of her life.

  Chapter 16

  Red Summer

  July 1919 marked the end of Others but also the middle of the violent “Red Summer.” Activist-poet James Weldon Johnson coined the term. Primarily remembered as a leader of the NAACP, Johnson published eight of his poems alongside Ridge’s in the 1919 Others anthology. His use of “Red Summer” described the wave of violence that engulfed the country as a result of friction between returning soldiers, white and black, who needed jobs. For the first time in America’s history of racial violence, blacks fought back. Red Summer resulted in 70 lynchings and serious rioting in more than 30 American cities, with hundreds killed and thousands left homeless between May and October of that year. Some of the worst violence occurred in Chicago, w
here a black teenager accidentally floated into the unofficially segregated part of Lake Michigan and drowned after a white man stoned him. Police refused to arrest the man.

  A particularly vicious prequel to Red Summer occurred in East St. Louis in 1917, when 10,000 white men rioted, seeking revenge on the blacks who acted as strikebreakers and kept their jobs. Josephine Baker was eleven at the time and remembered her brother asking: Is that a storm coming? and their mother answering: It’s the whites. The result was over 100 dead African Americans. Ida B. Wells, a famous black journalist whose report was kept secret for the next 69 years, writes: