Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  The next year Boyle abandoned her husband for the poet Ernest Walsh, who had his own magazine, This Quarter—and T.B. She casually mentioned his hemorrhaging in a letter to Ridge, but since she was now running This Quarter, to please send the subscription lists for Dial and Broom. Toward the end of their correspondence in 1927, after she returned to her husband with Walsh’s baby and This Quarter, she writes: “I wish you were near by so that you could edit and stimulate me.” Boyle asked for more money in nearly every letter, although early on she crowed that the quickly employed Richard had “had a fine raise.”

  Evelyn Scott was another friend who always asked for money. She begins nearly every one of her single-spaced, often several paged, letters (she wrote at least once a week for years) with sympathy for Ridge’s many illnesses, a catalogue of illnesses of her own, and an illustration of her current state of poverty. To her credit, she introduced Ridge to at least one patron. It wasn’t as if Ridge had the means to be a reliable patron herself. Her bank balance tended to hover at $100 but often sank below $10, and she often had to borrow from Lawson, who kept his accounts separate because she thought he couldn’t manage money. Between 1921-22, Scott was living on a monthly stipend from Marie Garland, the mother of Charles who managed the fund for social justice that rejected Boyle. Along with the stipend, Garland gave Scott a house in Bermuda with a cook, and had promised her a piece of land of her own. Scott invited Ridge to visit Bermuda and later France in nearly every letter, as did Boyle, but Ridge turned them both down. Perhaps in Scott’s case, the chaos of her ménage à trois with Thomas Merton’s father, the bisexual New Zealander Owen Merton, and Scott’s husband Cyril, along with Scott and Evelyn’s son Jig and Thomas Merton, both boys still quite young, might have been too much for her, all of them packed in a small Bermuda bungalow. Her stated reason was her new employment with Broom. With regard to Boyle, she had a new baby that was not her husband’s and was living as a guest of the Princess of Sarawak in Paris. Besides, Ridge had no money to travel, having no income from any editing position after the Broom debacle, and giving what little she earned on her poems to Boyle and Scott.

  One source of income was the $100 Ridge won for the Guarantor Prize in Poetry with “Fifth Floor Window” in 1923. Other recipients of this prize included W.B. Yeats, H.D., Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Vachel Lindsay, and William Carlos Williams. Poetry’s editor, Harriet Monroe, had been Ridge’s supporter from her first book. Monroe began her own poetry career with an audience of 5,000 for a commemorative ode she’d written on the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America. After the poem was published without her consent, she collected a $5,000 settlement, using it, together with 100 $50-a-year-for-five-years subscriptions from Chicago businessmen, to begin Poetry in 1912—and always paid poets for their work thereafter. A year after the magazine’s founding, her contributor Rabindranath Tagore won a Nobel Prize. This was also the year Monroe published “In a Station of the Metro,” written by Ezra Pound, her overseas editor, who also brought her T.S. Eliot’s “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In the first two years of the magazine she featured Robert Frost, H.D, Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, William Carlos Williams, and D.H. Lawrence. James Joyce appeared soon after. But Monroe did not confine herself to the literary elite. She also published African Americans, Midwesterners, unknowns—like Lola Ridge and Wallace Stevens—just starting out.

  Monroe published five poems from Ridge’s first book in 1918, and 12 more in subsequent years, the last poem right before Monroe’s death in 1936. All of Ridge’s books were reviewed in her magazine, two of them by Monroe. A woman with exquisite and catholic taste, she set a fine example for Ridge in her own editing. “The greatest poet is not always the noisiest,” she writes in a 1923 Poetry, the same issue that carried Ridge’s prize-winning “The Fifth Floor Window.”

  Ridge’s poem implicates a man in the death of his child who has fallen out a window, but the crowd of “shawled women” in the poem excuses him: “It’s hard on a man out of work/an’ the other gone out of his door/with a younger lover…” They look up at the window

  where the little girl used to cry all day

  with a feeble and goading cry.

  Her father, with his eyes at bay

  before the vague question of the light,

  says that she fell… (Red Flag 23)

  Ridge conflates the wind with the “shawled women” and their voyeurism.

  Now the wind

  down the valley of the tenements

  sweeps in weakened rushes

  and meddles with the clothes-lines

  where little white pinafores sway stiffly

  like dead geese. (Red Flag 24)

  Ridge’s response to the horror of the dead child is restrained modernism, not documentary. The burning cigarette found in the lines “Between his twitching lips/a stump of cigarette/smoulders, like a burning root” and the suspicions—and sympathy—of the shawled women assert the husband’s guilt, but without the suggestion that he will be punished. The speaker of “The Ghetto” also lived on the fifth floor—but whether “The Fifth Floor Window” was originally written as part of that poem is unknown.

  Evelyn Scott and Ridge stayed at Marie Garland’s compound in Buzzard’s Bay, Massachusetts, Scott in 1921, and Ridge some time later. Twenty-two acres with a dance hall, pool, tennis courts, and nearby beaches, the grounds were quite adequate for inspiration. Kahlil Gilbran drafted The Prophet on the estate in 1918-19. “Angel of the South Shore,” Marie Garland founded Home Colony Union, a school for arts and crafts on Cape Cod. She was also the mother of eight adopted children as well as two of her own, a confirmed suffragist, having attended an international convention in Switzerland, a supporter of the socialist La Follette, and a member of the Committee of 48 alongside her second husband, Swinburne Hale, who acted as counsel for the radicals held at Ellis Island during the Red Scare. The Committee of 48 was organized after Jack London’s 1906 speech at Yale where he asserted that a million workers “who begin their letters with ‘Dear Comrade’ were about to take over America.” Yale was so frightened that it banned speakers from Woolsey Hall for the next ten years. Originally headed by Upton Sinclair, the committee included Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Will Durant, and Sinclair Lewis—all Ridge’s acquaintances—and B.W. Huebsch, her publisher. Their aim was to form a third party by reaching “the home folks on Main Street” with their socialist propaganda.

  Marie’s son Charles must have absorbed some of the committee’s beliefs because in 1922, at the age of 21, he announced that he was refusing his Boston inheritance because he would not accept money from “a system which starves thousands while hundreds are stuffed.” A friend of John Reed, he said he acted not as a socialist but as a follower of Tolstoy, Christ, and H.G. Wells. Eventually Upton Sinclair convinced him to use the money for social change. As a result, Garland founded utopian communities in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, and gave away $2 million in grants to such radical organizations as a summer school for women workers, Sacco and Vanzetti’s Defense Fund, the N.A.A.C.P., and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Although he did not fund Kay Boyle, his family had a serious interest in supporting literature, especially poetry. His mother was the author of three books of poetry: The Winged Spirit, Marriage Feast, and The Potter’s Clay, the last which included a poem published in Poetry magazine. The title poem of her third book considers her young son’s dilemma of what to do with the family money:

  If we could take the world and “shatter it to bits”

  And “mold it nearer to the heart’s desire,”

  What would we make of it?

  Garland’s poem, “Because I am a Woman” does not approach the feminist: “If you were not the brute you seem/The tenderness you now show me/Would lose all meaning.” But there’s also a poem in The Potter’s Clay entitled: “We Women Who Have Lost a Child,” one that might have elicited Ridge’s sympathy or at least a buried sisterliness, assuming that Ridge did not r
eveal her own history in that regard.

  Scott left Garland’s Bermuda villa in 1923, after her relationship with Marie soured. Marie paid for Ridge’s passage on the Arcadian to visit Bermuda a year later, on April 28, 1924. Ridge was provided with a bungalow for a month, where other artists, including Georgia O’Keeffe, would also stay.

  Ridge wrote sonnets every morning. Not everyone thought that was a good idea. On hearing the news, Scott wrote:

  Lola dear, will you think I am an uncomprehending idiot insulting you by a misapprehension that could not be appropriate if I say that I pray you will not give up free forms? You are too completely creative in temperament to ever realize yourself completely in a predestined mould, and I don’t care how many sonnets you are writing.

  While Scott’s assessment was quite accurate, the only regret Ridge expressed was not dedicating the five sonnets to Marie Garland when she published her next book. While composing them, she befriended a very large spider she named Marcus Aurelius, after the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher. “I wouldn’t let them touch him. His den was over the ledge of the only door that opened outward to the sea. There he ate his cockroaches and dropped their bodies over the precipice of the door ledge.” But the vivid island flowers, not the spider, inspired her better sonnets. “The flowers there burned almost as intensely as the flowers one sees in one’s thought…”

  Not yet shall pansies, darker than a bruise,

  By torn-out scarlets of hibiscus lie

  In gaudy deaths, festooning the bleak ground,

  Nor faded pinks that have no more to lose:

  Petunias will be the first to die

  And go down quietly without a sound.(Red Flag 60)

  Ridge was home from Bermuda only a few months when she and Lawson applied for passports. The handwriting on Lawson’s forms looks very excited. He states they will leave the country by the yacht Blue Moon in five days, heading out from New Bedford to England, France, Egypt, Italy, Australia, Brazil, and China, and that they will be away for two years. Headlines all over the country announced the trip: “Blue Moon Schooner Yacht to Sail on Adventure Quest in South Seas” and “Romance Awaits the Blue Moon” and “Marie Garland Plans Two Year Tropical Cruise.” The yacht—“one of the finest of her kind”—was 106 feet long with accommodations for eight and a crew of nine, two dining saloons, and an elaborate refrigeration unit specially made for the tropics. Marie, one of the few female members of the New York Yacht Club, did not know exactly where they were going, but had invited

  Lola Ridge, whose book, Sun-up, is just published, and her husband David Lawson who will serve as one of the crew. Mrs. Lawson is a frequent contributor to the Dial…and will share my stateroom which has a skylight, affording good working light. I plan to do a good deal of writing myself…”

  Garland had also invited the young filmmaker/anthropologist Henwar Rodakiewicz, since they were not only making the trip as “inspiration for literary achievement” but also “to contribute to geographical information… and adventure.” The (envious?) poet Eda Lou Walton, Martin Lewis, Lawson, and Ridge were photographed on the yacht, with Ridge standing a bit away from Lawson, looking askance. She wears a beautiful coat with geometric designs on the sleeve, in keeping with the modernist taste she showed in photographs of her apartment, and perhaps Garland’s wardrobe.

  By the end of October, the newspapers and Ridge had announced that the trip around the world was off. Marie Garland, said to be a descendant of Henry the VIII, had suddenly decided to marry a fifth time. Described as “very, very sexy” by Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU and friend of the Garland family, she was 55 and Henwar Rodakiewicz, the young filmmaker, was 22. Rodakiewicz later worked with Paul Strand on Redes, his lyrical Mexican documentary, and made a noted fiction film about Georgia O’Keeffe.

  Of course the trip is off. So is Marie—on a winter trip to California and New Mexico—she’s put a lot into it and been done always on all sides by everyone concerned in the building, provisioning and everything else as far as I can make out, all those fine honest New Englanders made a good thing out of it. Of course Davy and I have been up in the air and no bottom in sight all summer and fall. He’s now hunting a job (he gave one up twice to make ready [to] join Blue Moon) when the end fell out of things. Marie gave us some money. We were roofless eatless and jobless—this enabled us to get our things out of storage and take this old studio and left Davy breathing space to look round for a job…

  Ridge had already met another supporter, Louise Adams Groat, at a 1921 Civic Club party celebrating the work of Zona Gale, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Groat had come in third for secretary of state in Massachusetts on the Socialist ticket in 1916. She had already visited Ridge’s neighborhood by 1918 as secretary of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society that met at the Washington Square Restaurant, discussing such topics as “Socialist Theory; Should It Be Revised?” Masses illustrator Art Young listed her along with Margaret Sanger, Genevieve Taggard, and Helen Keller as one of the “beautiful women I have met who were active in progressive or radical affairs.” Like Marie Garland, Groat served on the Committee of 48. She also organized the School of Social Science in Boston, one of the first workers’ schools in America.

  Groat would soon marry William Floyd, a direct descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. She herself was a member of the ultraconservative Daughters of the American Revolution. Given her leftist tendencies, however, the D.A.R. listed her as a “doubtful speaker” and blacklisted her in their membership book. Her husband declared himself a war resister during World War I, and published and distributed radical pamphlets like “War Resistance: What Each Individual Can Do For War Prevention.” He was also the director of the Peace Patriots, “the effort to make civilized people ashamed of war” and conducted walks with Louise’s “antiwar” St. Bernard. He wrote:

  It is difficult for capitalists to understand how a descendent of a signer of the Declaration of Independence and of William Bradford of the Mayflower can be a Red. To the Reds I am a bourgeois, the Socialists being the middle ground people hated by all.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman, most famous as the author of the strikingly feminist short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” also served on the Committee of 48. “There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver,” she writes in Women and Economics. In the same book, she asserts that marriage is primarily an economic arrangement. (For Ridge, it didn’t work that way!). Gilman, like Ridge, was often invited to stay at the Floyd estate with her on Long Island, “Old Mastic House,” with its 25 rooms, 12 outbuildings, a family cemetery, and 613 acres of forest, fields, marsh, and five miles of beach, but their visits did not overlap.

  Ridge’s stays at the Floyd estate were frequent throughout the 10-year period beginning in 1923. She also corresponded with Louise throughout that decade, and revealed parts of her life that she told no one else. Addressing her as “Elai,” Ridge became one among a number of radicals that Louise supported and entertained. Sometimes Ridge would bring Lawson to Long Island, and they would each inscribe a poem or a reflection in Floyd’s guestbook. Ridge thought well enough of the following inscription to include it in her next book. “Pine Needles” is the nickname for William Floyd.

  Portrait of Mine Host

  (To W.F.)

  Testy

  Pine needles

  Bristling on end

  And soothing velvet-soft under the touch…

  Out of the sharp grass

  Two hands

  Holding a rose…so gently. (Red Flag 99)

  It was at the Floyd estate that Ridge is captured in a 1925 photo wearing a black model’s smock. She must have been sitting for Louise, an amateur sculptor, who worked on a bust of Ridge until 1931. “The mouth bad,” says the note on the back of the photo of the finished piece. In a photo which includes Floyd and several friends, Ridge is turned to profile while everyone else faces the camera. Her expression
is solemn, as if sunk inside herself, two stanzas deep. She left the following epigram that year: “For a perfect peace as for a quarrel there must be two. Lola Ridge.”

  Chapter 23

  Politics and Red Flag

  “I am…an individualist, and I know individuals will always rule, no matter what the society,” writes Ridge in 1932. With beliefs derived from 19th-century romanticism, she followed the precepts of the anarchist Benjamin Tucker who held that “if the individual has the right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny.” Ridge would use her position in American literature to fight its encroachment. Although she refused the job of managing editor of the radical New Masses, she became one of its first contributing editors in 1926. The magazine replaced The Masses, a radical magazine started by an eccentric socialist Dutch immigrant in 1911. According to poet James Oppenheim, The Masses was interested in “socialism, sex, poetry, conversation, dawn-greeting, anything so long as it was taboo in the Middle West.” Max Eastman held open editorial meetings with John Reed, Louis Untermeyer, and others voting on its essays, fictions, illustrations, and poetry. Hippolyte Havel once interrupted with “Poetry is something from the soul! You can’t vote on poetry!” It attracted illustrators John Sloan from the Ferrer Center, Art Young and his bracing political cartoons, including his famous wanted poster for Jesus Christ, and even Picasso. The magazine shut down after the government put the editors on trial for conspiring to obstruct conscription at the beginning of World War I.

  After a trip to Moscow in 1925, the novelist/critic Mike Gold became convinced a new magazine was necessary. He had been a past contributor to The Masses, and had once before tried to revive it with the short-lived magazine The Liberator. After Ridge and other potential editors turned down the job, it fell to him to lead the way. Charles Garland’s fund contributed half the launch costs and New Masses became “the principal organ of the American cultural left from 1926 onwards.” Poems, short stories, journalistic pieces and “sketches” predominated at the beginning “to make the ‘worker-writer’ a reality in the American radical press.” Gold declared in a 1926 article “that poetry must become dangerous again. Let’s have poems thundering like 10-ton trucks and aeroplanes,” sounding like an old futurist but still attracting new blood like Langston Hughes to the masthead. One of Gold’s most famous articles was “Gertrude Stein: A Literary Idiot.” According to him, her works “resemble the monotonous gibberings of paranoiacs in the private wards of asylums…The literary idiocy of Gertrude Stein only reflects the madness of the whole system of capitalist values.”