Anything That Burns You
Page 20
The buildings are flattening us out; the machines are tearing us to pieces…The electric signs in Times Square make the Dadaists look timid; it is the masterpiece of Dadaism, produced naturally by our race, and without premeditation.
Ridge was right that Broom’s essays had been omitting the effects of such sudden and worldwide change. Even Matthew Josephson in his memoir Life Among the Surrealists eventually admitted that “Critics assailed us [justly, I now perceive] for unconsidered and over-optimistic pronouncements on the culture of the Machine Age, which ignored its human costs.”
Ridge had ideas about the artists who might best be able to depict the issue:
I think Stieglitz could do it—if he could form emotional contact with the machine…I shall go and see him and see if he will be interested. But perhaps you have already communicated with Paul Strand?
She had already communicated with Strand herself, and he was willing. Trained by Lewis Hine, the photographer who took such striking pictures of the ghetto at the turn of the century, Paul Strand’s abstract photographs were the perfect choice to interpret the machine aesthetically. With regard to Stieglitz, Loeb discouraged her from approaching him, but still he hoped she might persuade him to contribute. “We seem nearly in total agreement—especially with regard to Stieglitz’ work,” writes Loeb. She would not be dissuaded and pursued Stieglitz on her own. She reported that he was “quite indifferent to Broom when I first went in. Said the February number was dead and that the others only here and there made signs of life—life—life, that was his insistent cry.” She followed up with a note to Stieglitz. “I know that Harold would be as proud as I to this [possibly ‘means’] of introducing your work to Europe.” Stieglitz refused to be featured in the machine issue, but did want to be included in her American number. Eventually she secured the reproduction rights of both Stieglitz’s and Strand’s work for Broom. “It will be a big thing to reproduce photographs of Stieglitz,” writes Loeb. “Europe is exceedingly anxious to see them and also I think he is probably the most important American Artist.”
By May she had been so successful at stabilizing the magazine that Loeb was asking her to send him money in Rome. He wanted to forgo soliciting ads altogether and live on his mother’s gift. While he neglected to do anything much on publicity in Europe, she had mimeographed 10,000 campaign letters for the magazine’s support in America. In the letter she touts the Pirandello play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, that they were running serially, and work by Cocteau and Wallace Stevens whose publication she had overseen. The subscription rate was offered at the cost of an ordinary monthly, although the magazine was published in color and printed on handmade paper and weighed a full pound. She would send a sample copy if an interested party mailed her ten cents in stamps. She also compiled a mailing list and handed fliers out on street corners. Subscriptions flooded in from Japan, Hawaii, Philippines, Australia, India, and China. She asked Mitchell Dawson to take Broom circulars around Chicago to solicit advertising, since the anthologist-to-be Oscar Williams had quit. She also wanted Dawson to provide her with the names and addresses of modern art shops in Chicago that might be willing to carry Broom, and for him to inform her of anybody who needed a subscription at a discount (and he would get commission of a dollar). “Glad to do anything I can for Musterbook on this side if you will let me know,” she writes. Soon he was helping her sell subscriptions. “Bless your heart for sympathy… delighted to send subscription blanks,” she writes, and adds: “Yes please send me photographs of your brother’s work. We may be able to use some of them in Broom.” They did not run. Neither did Dawson’s poems. After Dawson married in 1921 and had his first child in 1925, the intensity of his relationship with poetry and Ridge waned.
Ridge wrote Williams in April to “send something good.” Among other things, he sent “Red Eric,” the first chapter from In The American Grain of the six that were to appear in Broom, the single most significant American work published in the magazine, according to critic Michael North. Loeb immediately accepted two of Williams’s poems that Ridge had put forward, and a poem each by Louise Bogan and Elinor Wylie. Although these were not new authors, Ridge was very clear about her intentions: “What I’d like is to have Broom discover, lead not follow.” Loeb admitted that “without New York…[Broom] is only fulfilling a fraction of its function…” Although Ridge had set the magazine back on its feet, Loeb was uneasy, suspecting that Ridge’s interest was primarily editorial. The preferred female editor archetype was Maria Jolas, who supported Transition with her inheritance, doing the translation and the administration while her husband Eugene took most of the credit. Ridge, on her part, wished that she “could let up a little on the financial end as its [sic] not at all the one I’m interested in.” By September she reiterated she was not so enamored of running bad work by “good” authors, she wanted to publish “the great unknowns who will be acknowledged ten years or five hence….”
Chapter 20
Broom’s Parties and the Making of an American Idiom
The knowns and the unknowns flocked to Ridge’s new round of parties. These events were so influential that even Pound noted their impact as late as 1928, while listing new publicity strategies for Louis Zukovsky. Cummings apologized profusely for missing one of her parties, enclosed six poems, and wrote:
I know you know the ropes which I do not and do not pretend to know, but I don’t know whether or no[t] you have the time to introduce these sensual integers of mine to people who would like to publish them—supposing that any such exist in These United States—nor Am I sure, perfectly, that you have what is vulgarly called “the inclination”! But if you haven’t, I shan’t be the least offended.
In view of the importance of her gatherings, she added one night a month in addition to her Thursday afternoons. American modernism was the topic, but also the importance of multiple aesthetics, and how to make a mix of genres and sensibilities interesting. Gone or deported were most of the anarchists that had harangued and declaimed at earlier festivities. The new mix of partygoers often came in evening dress, despite the place being unheated and bare to the point of bleakness. Between the wars, the atmosphere was serious yet buoyant, and Prohibition made parties necessary—and raucous. Harold Loeb sounded grateful:
Lola gave a party and nearly everyone in the city interested in the magazine came in late or early. The two rooms in the basement were jammed with writers, painters, musicians, dilettanti and old copies of the magazine. Joseph Stella turned up, as well as Maxwell Bodenheim, whose work, up to till then, had not been accepted. I did not know many of the faces. Eyes shining above her scimitar nose, Kay Boyle helped Lola make the guests welcome.
Nineteen-year-old Boyle had replaced Ridge’s friend, the poet Laura Benét, as Ridge’s third assistant. Kay Boyle (1902-1992) would become a noted short-story writer, novelist, and European correspondent for the New Yorker. “I naively took some of my poems to the Broom office, found Lola Ridge alone there trying to handle all the work, and we loved each other instantly,” Boyle recalled. Ridge wrote at once to Loeb to give her a salary of $18 a week. Boyle claimed Ridge as a mother figure—a very positive association, since Boyle was close to her mother: “I had the more satisfactory of childhoods because Mother, small, delicate-boned, witty, and articulate, turned out to be exactly my age.” Although uneducated, her mother managed to give Boyle a taste for the avant-garde and an appreciation for the proletariat. But “it was Lola who spoke the vocabulary I wanted to hear,” writes Boyle. Ridge “expressed a fiery awareness of social injustice” in “a woman’s savage voice.” Ridge gave her money for her first abortion, and according to Boyle’s biographer, the two of them danced together at the parties, with Boyle as the lead. Boyle’s first book, a volume of poetry, reflected Ridge’s political concerns and was structured in long Whitmanic lines. Ridge would publish a poem of Boyle’s in Broom. “She is always for me one of the rarest and most beautiful persons alive,” writes Boyle. “I cherished an
d protected her as tenderly if she were a small, bright flame I held cupped in my hand.” An excellent typist, Boyle lasted three months as an assistant, long enough for Ridge to encourage Evelyn Scott and Marianne Moore to read her work. “I sometimes feel that I am too pleasant to be great,” Boyle gushed later in a letter to Ridge. But she would be pleasant to Ridge’s guests, which included John Dos Passos, Marianne Moore, Elinor Wylie, Jean Toomer, Waldo Frank, Babette Deutsch, Edward Arlington Robinson, Bryher, H.D., William Carlos Williams, and Glenway Wescott. After selling Brooms in the lobby of a theater—“some forty-eight dollars’ worth during a Saturday matinee and evening showing”—Boyle would cut the cake that Ridge had scraped up the money to buy, wash all the cups and glasses in the apartment, spread a tablecloth, all the while asking Ridge who was coming and why, and would she introduce her?
It was at one of Ridge’s parties in 1922 that Jean Toomer caught his first glimpse of Waldo Frank (1889-1967), an important mentor, as “a light in that room of smoke and many faces and literary talk.” Frank, a slightly older Jewish pacifist and one of the associate editors of Seven Arts, had just published Our America, which saw the country’s culture as “an untracked wilderness but dimly blazed by the heroic ax of Whitman.” Instead of the cynicism of disengagement espoused by the “lost generation,” Frank’s book urged cultural and social involvement. Our America was well received and went through three editions in six months. During an inspirational trip to the South with Toomer, Frank passed for black while Toomer maintained his “racial composition” was of no concern to anyone but himself. Toomer’s Cane, a modernist classic, and Frank’s Holiday, a white man’s account of a Southern lynching, were published a year later, in 1922. They had hoped to have their books published together, but only managed to publish on the same day. Both were written in a fragmented modernist style, and Toomer wrote the dialogue for Holiday. Toomer was also good friends with Hart Crane, and the three of them would later explore Gurdjieff’s teachings together, whose influence some critics say ruined their writing.
When Frank suggested that Toomer try submitting work to Broom, he acknowledged Ridge’s influence on him by writing: “I do not know it; I do know the calibre of Lola Ridge.” The relationship between Frank and Toomer suffered after Toomer began an affair with Frank’s wife soon after they were introduced, and Toomer resented being identified as black in Frank’s introduction to Cane. After a romance with Georgia O’Keeffe in the 1930s, Toomer married the photographer Marjorie Content, O’Keeffe’s friend and Harold Loeb’s estranged wife, whose basement, being the Broom office, was the location for many of Ridge’s parties. Ridge tried to introduce Toomer to the “madonna-faced” Content at a party in 1920, but since she was just then separated and not yet divorced from Loeb, she stayed upstairs.
Marianne Moore continued to be a faithful partygoer. “Perhaps even you do not know how much you have given to me in your gentle solicitude,” she writes Ridge in 1927, long after the parties were over. They made sure they kept up with each other’s work. Ridge had already published twice in The Dial before Moore took over as editor, one a labor poem on the page facing Thorstein Veblen’s “Industry and The Captains of Industry.” Moore accepted a total of three of Ridge’s poems as editor. Her suggestion for a change in one of them was quite solicitous: “But should you rather not, I shall accept your decision understandingly and bear the disappointment with what patience I can summon.” (Ridge made the change.) Moore’s rejection of Ridge’s poem about Adelaide Crapsey was equally delicate: “A diminution of intensity at certain points which impairs the symmetry?” After the publication of Ridge’s third book in 1927, she writes: “Be sure your own book is sent to the Dial.” Ridge published Moore’s poetry and reviews in both Others and Broom and recommended her work to the editors of the New Republic. Moore (and sometimes her mother) even typed up Ridge’s manuscripts. As critic William Drake remarked on Moore’s generosity, “Imagine Frost typing up a long poem of Stevens.”
A Paris Review interview of Moore reveals her enthusiasm for Ridge’s frequent guest Hart Crane. “You remember Broom?” she asks,
Toward the beginning of that magazine, in 1921, Lola Ridge was very hospitable, and she invited me to a party—previous to my work on the Dial—Kay Boyle and her husband, a French soldier, and Hart Crane, Elinor Wylie and some others. I took a great liking to Hart Crane. We talked about French bindings, and he was diffident and modest and seemed to have so much intuition, such a feeling for things, for books—really a bibliophile—that I took a special interest in him.
Crane knew just how to entrance Moore. But when the interviewer mentioned that Crane complained of her changing a title of one of his poems and of making what he considered extreme revisions, she replied: “He was in dire need of funds,” then she equivocated: “Really I am not used to having people in that bemused state.”
A childhood friend of Marianne Moore’s was the poet Laura Benét (1884-1979), an early assistant of Ridge at Broom and a long time friend of both. Laura and her brother William Rose Benét (1886-1950), a classmate of Moore’s brother at Yale, were frequent guests. Laura became assistant editor for book reviews at the New York Evening Post and the New York Evening Sun, and substitute review editor for the New York Times in the late 20s and early 30s. Her first book of poetry, Fair Bred, had just come out in February 1921. Bill Benét, as he was known, cofounded the Saturday Review of Literature in 1924 and won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1942. Their brother, Stephen Vincent Benét, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, was also a friend, and reviewed Ridge’s fourth book, Red Flag, when he was the most widely read poet in the country.
The poet Elinor Wylie (1885-1928) would soon appear at Ridge’s parties as Bill Benét’s wife. She both wrote and spoke with “a lovely, amused formality,” according to critic Carl Van Doren, but she never pleased her sister-in-law Laura. Wylie wore slinky silver dresses with a chain-link weave, and Louis Untermeyer wrote admiringly of Wylie’s “imperious brows; the high cheekbones…the long smooth column of the throat.” “Her likeness could appear without identification in magazines like the New Yorker, one of many where her work appeared; readers were expected to recognize the “queen of poets.” She wrote highly detailed, short formal poetry. Edna St. Vincent Millay, who wrote her own share of formal poetry, reviewed only one book in her life, Wylie’s first, and said it was an important one. Wylie published three more books of poetry and four highly ornate novels between 1921-1928. When her first novel was published in 1923, Van Doren organized a torchlight parade in New York to celebrate its publication. He also claimed that her obsession with Shelley was so great that “he stood between her and living men.” Indeed, Sara Teasdale teased Wylie with lines illustrating the rivalry:
Elinor Wylie, Elinor Wylie
What did I hear you say?
I wish it were Shelley
astride my belly
instead of poor Mr. Benét.
Wylie and Benét spent four summers at MacDowell and Wylie is said to still haunt it. Extremely sensitive to the artist rivalries, she was not always comfortable at the artist colony:
Did you see how they hate me, how they all hate me? They are all trying to down me, to injure me, to keep me from working. But I won’t be downed! I have a typewriter and a better brain than any of them, and they won’t succeed. I’ll beat them all yet! Did you see how they asked me to recite so they could laugh at me? Did you see how they left the door open on purpose so that the mosquitoes would get in and bite me tomorrow when I’m trying to write? The mosquitoes—I tell you they will stop at nothing—
Wylie may have influenced Ridge’s later turn to mysticism. She was intensely interested in witchcraft because she had a distant relative who was convicted as a witch in 17th-century Massachusetts. After Wylie died of a stroke at age 43, Ridge had a vision of the “beautiful and great poet Elinor.” She “stood with crimson roses in her hands—in my high room in Thirteenth Street—three days after she died. Thank you, Lovely.”
Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s father, Louis Ginsberg, also attended the Ridge parties. A socialist, he published traditional poetry and his first wife—and Allen’s mother—was a radical Communist and nudist.
When Ridge was ill in September 1925, the poet Babette Deutsch substituted for her as hostess at a party where Vladimir Mayakovsky declaimed in Russian. Deutsch wrote Ridge that she liked how Mayakovsky “thundered out his tremendous strophes.” Williams remembered the Russian’s feet on the coffee table. Mayakovsky started writing futurist poems in 1912, and published his most famous book, Cloud in Trousers, in 1915. A handsome man, Mayakovsky was already a silent film star by 1918. In 1930, after having satirized Stalin in two plays, he died a suspicious suicide. Williams particularly appreciated his use of the demotic as the poems were translated at the party and stole from him the idea of long-fragmented lines.
Deutsch was the perfect choice to host the event. Banners, her first book of poetry, celebrated the Russian Revolution with precise imagist detail. In “Petrograd,” she writes: “Hunger and empty death and puny war:/The red hour loomed. The lunging city knew.” Ridge would have appreciated Deutsch’s poetry in that first book—and her first novel, A Brittle Heaven, which critically viewed the life of a writer, wife, and mother. Deutsch praised both The Ghetto and Other Poems and Ridge’s third book, Firehead, in major reviews.