Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  She had found herself circumvented and frustrated.

  Contributors in New York and abroad have sent their work to you, sometimes after I had returned it. It has happened that I have opened a new BROOM to see some shivering bit of mediocrity that I had rejected cheeping feebly out of the pages.

  It also wasn’t as if Loeb had been the ideal business partner. Not only was he thousands of miles away, he lost letters, misplaced work, shipped the magazine late. He would agree to publish material Ridge put forward and then he wouldn’t, he didn’t proof paid advertisements—the funniest mistake was “Practical Home Study Course of Inferior Decoration”—he printed Strand’s work upside down, he mixed up contributor’s names, he would write that he was finished with the magazine and then wire that he was not.

  In her January 2 letter, Ridge still hoped that she might convince Loeb of Stein’s obsolescence:

  Ten years ago, when Kay Boyle was a child of ten, Gertrude Stein was quite the rage in her mother’s literary set in Cincinnati…I mention the fact to show the incongruity of the inclusion of Stein—a woman who reached the height of her noteriety [sic] a decade ago—in the group of unknown or little known moderns mentioned in your ad.

  Loeb, writing later in his memoir, lays part of the blame for the rift between them to Kreymborg, and then reinterprets the whole Stein incident:

  Lola did not approve of Gertrude Stein’s work. I didn’t either. But I had been persuaded by Alfred Kreymborg to run several bits of it in early numbers. It didn’t seem to make any difference. Nobody read it anyway. Now I proposed to run another small piece of Gertrude’s meaningless prose (she had formerly written meaningful prose such as ‘The Lives’ in the American number which Lola had suggested. My thought was that regardless of the worth of Gertrude’s contribution, her prose had influenced several important writers, especially by its effective use of repetition…

  By January 2nd, Ridge was once again accusing Loeb of being unable to think on his own—“I knew that I should always be struggling with obscure forces—the invisible rather than the visible editor.” Instead of suspecting Josephson’s intrigues, she thought that Boni [of Boni and Liveright] was complicating the situation, as he and Loeb had been discussing publishing books under the Broom imprint.

  Loeb visited New York a few weeks later, when the reception of the American number was at its height, and met Ridge for the first time. Marianne Moore remembered a Broom party with both Ridge and Loeb present:

  Dinner at the Broom Tuesday was very enjoyable. Dr. Williams, Harold Loeb, Lola Ridge and Mr. Lawson on a wooden table in the kitchen. Mole [Moore’s mother] gave me a chicken to take which was greatly praised and enjoyed grapefruit (first), peas, sliced ham, roquefort cheese, 3 kinds of bread, sherry wine, fruit jelly and cake (coffee and tea). Harold battled nobly but less as Glenway Wescott said of Mrs. Monroe “his intellect didn’t sustain him.” We laughed a great deal, belabored Louis Untermeyer and various upstarts.

  Loeb did not find it too hard to come to terms with Ridge. As he remembers it:

  At first there was a watchfulness between Lola Ridge and me. But she had a warmth that was hard to resist. Quickly we became friends. Although Lola did not withdraw her resignation, she agreed to carry on until we heard from my uncles.”

  Loeb was too much of a coward to meet his uncles in person to ask for money and sailed before they could convene, preferring to negotiate by mail. Ridge had warned Loeb earlier to be more businesslike, counseling him to at least show that he had done some publicity on his side. “These big businessmen may think it strange that more of this has not been done in Europe.” The Guggenheim uncles were not impressed. They deemed Broom a “magazine for a rich man with a hobby.”

  Ridge and Boyle worked on the magazine for nothing for another month. Ridge asked that Loeb print a poem he had held for a year and eight months, and gave editorial comments to Toomer. By the end of February, Boni had withdrawn his offer because the German mark had gone up, and another backer pulled out after being told he should put his money “into a vacuum cleaner rather than into BROOM,” and Loeb’s mother now refused to meet with Ridge at all. Ridge telegrammed an offer to buy Broom herself, a detail that has never been mentioned in any previous history of this altercation:

  I offer you one thousand in monthly payments for complete ownership BROOM beginning April. Debts included. Willard approves offer. If you agree I will distribute March. Cable yes or no.

  Willard was Loeb’s brother. She reiterated her offer by letter:

  If you accept my offer I shall fight along to keep BROOM going ahead. I shall try to raise enough money from friends to bring out the April number in America. I only thought of this at 4:00 o’clock yesterday. Went up immediately and talked it over with Willard, who was quite in favor of the offer.”

  Where she was going to get $1,000 when she had drawn no salary since June remains a mystery. Nonetheless it sounded like a serious offer to Loeb. On March 1st, he accepted by cabling back “Yes.” After all, she was the obvious person to take over—she had been very successful arranging publicity, soliciting advertising, befriending patrons, securing manuscripts, and negotiating with lawyers. She had proved herself quite competent—indeed, Loeb admitted that “probably you can edit a review better than I can; I mean this sincerely.” That she would care enough to take over after all the abuse and trouble she had had with him was testament to her admiration for what the magazine had become, and its potential.

  Thirty hours later, she received a second cable from him: “Second thought, no.” She then quickly sent her own cable: “Returning subscriptions. Closing office. Cable if other plans.” She received no answer for nine days. In the meantime Willard suggested that she sign over the subscribers to The Dial, a common practice to finish out a subscription when a magazine had failed. Hearing nothing from Loeb, she turned the lists over to The Dial, notified dealers, and returned subscriptions. Josephson, in his memoir, asserted that he was the one who insisted the lists be returned. “About the time that I received your [Loeb’s] March 12th cable asking me to hold subscriptions,” writes Ridge on April 7, “I was informed from outside sources that Mr. Josephson’s father had bought Broom for Matthew Josephson.” Josephson and Cowley had bought 2/3 share of the magazine, leaving Loeb with 1/3. Whether this was a better deal than Ridge offered, is not clear. She was never allowed to negotiate. She ended her letter reiterating this, and by refusing to honor his request to destroy the letter in which she stated why she had resigned: “No, I will not withdraw carbon of my letter setting forth the true reasons for my resignation from the files.”

  Loeb forwarded a letter he’d written in March dated February to (very clumsily) cover his tracks. “Your offer to distribute March was made contingent on my selling Broom to you and I had thought that it was your health that prevented you from closing up.” As Josephson put it: “At the New York office [Loeb] had found things in a state of confusion…chiefly because Miss Ridge was ill and tired and was merely waiting for someone to supplant her.” Loeb apparently never seriously considered her taking over Broom, or was persuaded not to consider it by Josephson who was planning to take over with his friend Malcolm Lowry and remake it as a Dada magazine. Lowry, then in Paris, was described by Hemingway as “that American poet with a pile of saucers in front of him and a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada movement.” Of course a publisher has every right to sell a magazine to anyone he pleases but by Loeb never mentioning her offer to anyone, and by suggesting to others that she had disappeared from the masthead because of reasons of health, he insulted her initiative. Perhaps he feared she would succeed. He could not resist an elaborate self-justification and re-interpretation:

  If you look it up you will find that I reserved absolute veto power to myself. Within two months you were much put out because I stuck to this reservation and would not permit an American number assembled by you. I am still puzzled how you could have expected this.

  “Then a le
tter from Lola Ridge reached us,” writes Loeb in his memoir. “This is to inform you that after March 25th no mail will be opened, no order attended to, or any other business transacted by us.” As Ridge wrote novelist Mary Austin years later: “Ridge and Loeb quarreled (expensively) by cable and Ridge resigned, also by cable, and thereafter with regularity every month, but was not permitted to let go until April-May 1923.”

  He asked that she deny that she “sacrificed herself” for Broom without pay. “The small salary balance still owing you I consider a personal debt and hope to forward it to you next autumn.” He went into much more self-justification in an unsent letter, stating that her quibble about his consulting “a third trained intellect” when differing with the opinion of a poetess of “at least ten years older connection with the arts, with a reputation and prestige greater than one’s own…would be laughed out of any business, army, or governmental office.” On her part, she made the mistake of not telling him the whole truth about his finances, apparently so as not to discourage him. He should, of course, have intuited that the magazine had financial problems from her repeatedly forgoing her salary.

  Because issues are put together months in advance, Ridge’s resignation still meant that Broom would feature much of the material she had already assembled. The inclusion of George Grosz’s work in February is probably a result of her correspondence with Mitchell Dawson, who had recently put out his issue of Musterbook on Grosz. Toomer had another poem in the magazine that she had had a hand in, Williams published another piece from In The American Grain that he’d read at one of Ridge’s parties. Ads began to drop. Man Ray did the cover of the March issue, which included a Carnevali poem she had sent Loeb.

  In all, Ridge’s tenure at Broom spanned 13 out of 21 issues, quite a number for an editor whose work is today seldom even mentioned. She solicited and shepherded the publication of Crane, Toomer, Strand, Stieglitz, Wylie, Boyle, Moore, Bogan, and Williams, obtained Yarmolinsky’s translation of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, and negotiated the copyright issues for the first appearance in America of Six Characters in Search of an Author, most of which accounts for Broom’s posthumous fame. “One of the most important collaborators [for Loeb] was Lola Ridge,” writes Kondritzer. At the time when Loeb finally made her resignation public, he allowed her some credit:

  It is with deep regret that we announce the resignation of Miss Lola Ridge. Much of the progress which BROOM has made toward establishing itself in America can be ascribed to Miss Ridge’s wholehearted and unselfish labors.—THE EDITORS.

  Josephson and Cowley at last had a shot at the magazine. Josephson was given “an equal voice in editorial matters” by Loeb. Then Loeb was pushed out. By September, he complained that he had received no books, magazines, manuscripts or letters from the new editors at all. Although 50 years later Malcolm Cowley would retire as one of the eminent editors of Viking Press, in 1924, he and Josephson ran Broom into the ground within four numbers, shrinking it precipitously issue by issue, discovering that money was indeed a problem, no matter how many essays were written about how little it mattered to art, and ironically confirming the Dada tenet that a magazine should destroy itself. As Cowley put it:

  In the life of any magazine [the editors] decide whether to struggle on…They search for new benefactors with thousands to give, for those with hundreds, for any kind soul, at last, who will contribute five or ten dollars toward the printer’s bill. They begin subscription campaigns that are doomed to failure; successful campaigns cost money.

  All these “doomed” efforts had been successful under Ridge. As Wheeler points out, the magazine’s failure so soon after her resignation emphasized Ridge’s power and influence at the height of its importance. When Ridge met Josephson in 1923 in the midst of all this wrangling, he condescendingly recorded Ridge’s aesthetic: “[Her] idea of the poem is a snowflake sparkling and melting in the sun” and accused her of promulgating “the snowflake school” of poetry—she, the author of poems on labor, riots, murder, lynchings, Wall Street, and political executions. Gorham Munson, his partner on the magazine Secession that also failed, rated Josephson a “dishonest, treacherous, irresponsible, self-seeking, and an intellectual faker.” Language failed Marianne Moore entirely after a long conversation with him at a party around the same time: “Words couldn’t do justice to the revolting inanities of it & as I said to Mole [her mother], the many limitations [of his] which should enlist one’s pity merely alienate me.”

  Loeb worked for the government in administrative positions for the rest of his life. Embittered, when he saw Evelyn Scott’s name on a hotel register years later, he avoided her. “For Evelyn had caused unwittingly nearly as much trouble between Lola and myself as Gertrude Stein…I no longer wanted to meet ES or anyone else.” As editor, Ridge twice sent him Scott’s article on American aesthetics, and pushed to include the review of Scott’s first novel, Escapade. The book was not only outrageous in its treatment of sex but it also tore apart form. But Ridge was not wrong about her importance and influence. When Scott was briefly a bestselling author, her enthusiastic support of The Sound and The Fury catapulted Faulkner to fame. He never thanked her. In 1940, when Faulkner was asked if there were any talented women writers, he said: “Well, Evelyn Scott was pretty good, for a woman….”

  Michael North cites Loeb’s reversal of the aesthetic aims of the magazine at the root of the problem between Ridge and Loeb. Loeb was hamstrung either way: American writers were either valued because they published in Europe (which made the writing European) or because they were wholly American and refused to. The mostly confused satires in Broom written by Cowley and Josephson highlighted this conundrum. Belinda Wheeler, on the other hand, reviewed the argument between Ridge and Loeb from a feminist viewpoint. She writes: “Ridge’s pivotal role at Broom is noteworthy because the disagreements she had with Loeb highlight prescribed roles female editors encountered.” That is, a woman editor was expected to stick to the administrative tasks, not the editorial.

  Ridge was as important to this period of American modernism as Pound was to the European. She had edited two important modernist magazines, she wrote books of modernist poetry to excellent reviews, she recommended other modernists’ work be taken. Rather than pit American writing against European like Pound, she wanted Americans to recognize and be recognized for what was American about their work. She set contemporary American writing in the context of avant-garde art and photography, she used ancient cultures as a way to explore the contemporary, and she requested essays on new directions in American writing. The best writers and intellectuals in the country convened at her apartment to consider the question of American art, which made her a fulcrum for modernism when the whole venture could have collapsed or retreated to Europe like surrealism. Even the placement of work in the magazine emphasized its Americanness: Toomer’s “Karintha” against the Mayan sculptures, for example. Moore offers the best illustration of Ridge’s goals at the end of the issue with her famous dictum that her poems were “written not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!”

  Chapter 22

  Finding the Means: Marie Garland and Louise Adams Floyd

  Twenty-year-old Kay Boyle went off to Europe in 1923 with her French husband, and soon took it upon herself to confront Loeb in Paris on behalf of Ridge. Rousing him in Paris from his bed with his mistress, she “told him with heat and bitterness what I thought he had made of Broom, and he apologized for almost everything in it and excused his part of it by saying:

  ‘You see, I’m practically out of it. The main reason why I let my name appear on it is because I get paid a salary.’ How Harold! Richard [her husband] detests him—I think men do—but I finished by liking him, without having the slightest respect for him.

  Loeb apologized: “I should never have sent that first cable,” then said he had no idea they worked for nothing through March. But Kay had in her possession his letter thanking her f
or just that sacrifice. But while she may have condemned Loeb, she didn’t hesitate to send him a poem for Josephson to consider in the next Broom.

  Boyle’s husband did not yet have a job. She persuaded Ridge to try to get her a grant from the Garland Fund that funded liberal and radical causes. Despite Garland having helped send off an issue of Broom, and having been on the committee that funded her work on “Woman and the Creative Will,” Boyle’s few days dropping off Eugene Debs leaflets in Chicago did not seem radical enough, nor did the fund see how her modernist poetry would further working class causes. She was much disappointed. Ridge’s response was to send $100 to Boyle’s mother, who had sold her carpets in order to join her daughter in Europe. Boyle then insisted that Ridge read the book of fiction she had written. “I want you to see it and write me all you think of it.”

  Boyle was also thinking of starting her own magazine without Ridge, using her health as an excuse. “You are not strong, [and] that prevents me from suggesting any sort of cooperation.” But then Boyle asks Ridge to send anything she found, and Boyle would publish it, listing Ridge as associate editor, with Boyle as publisher. In 1924, she suggested that Ridge take her (unread) novel to her publisher. By 1925, Boyle was demanding that Ridge re-read her novel after she had given her comments—and to send her the name of an agent. Ridge introduced her to Evelyn Scott, a relationship that proved more enduring than theirs. The two had much in common: both began as poets, lived abroad for very long stretches, praised Faulkner and Joyce, wrote experimental prose, and pursued unconventional lives.