Was it her infirmities in addition to her poverty that stood in the way of her progress? Ridge’s friend, the writer and art dealer Harry Salpeter, described her as “blood-drained, ravaged by illness.” Newspapers too noted her continued illness: “Lola Ridge…happens also to be one of our bravest and most invincible personalities, since she has been an invalid most of her life and wrote much of her material propped up in bed,” according to the Syracuse Herald.
“Pain,” writes critic Elaine Scarry, “is that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed.” All her adult life Ridge complained of migraines, “blind attacks,” and “stomach troubles,” but other than an occasional infection of the foot or tooth, and bad colds, she contracted nothing that might warrant the life of an invalid. She boasted that she was never seasick, did not fall ill “in that Lu. [Louisiana] swamp,” and took no precautions regarding food or drink in Mexico or Baghdad, where she later traveled. Yet she was hospitalized in 1919, 1920, 1926, 1929, 1936, and 1937, with an alleged surgery in 1924. “Again, seized with the old spasm,” Ridge writes in her poem “Ward X.” There was another element in play with her apparent ill health: “This pretense of being younger than her years would later increase the perception of sickliness and fragility that she inspired by making her worn appearance seem due to illness rather than age,” writes critic Emily Vicary.
Ridge was also too thin. In a send-up titled “The Lady Poets With Foot Notes,” Ernest Hemingway satirized the leading ladies in poetry, with Edna St. Vincent Millay as “One lady poet was a nymphomaniac and wrote for Vanity Fair” and Amy Lowell as “One lady poet was big and fat and no fool,” and Lola Ridge as “one lady poet who didn’t have enough to eat” and “It showed in her work.” In 1928 the five-foot-tall Ridge weighed less than 77 pounds. A year later she was down to 72. Although being a skinny “new woman” was an expression of sexual liberation and a rejection of the buxom Victorian female’s traditional role, Ridge was unusually thin. Perhaps this thinness was what caused contemporary observers to describe her as “tall” when in photographs standing beside her husband or Edna St. Vincent Millay, both known to be barely five feet, she matches them in height. Kay Boyle describes her as “fragile enough to be blown away like a leaf whenever a gust of wind came through the door.” In 1928 Marianne Moore exclaims: “The poor Lola looks as if she were about to die—though her face is animated and she is full of gratitude and humor but she weighs 70 pounds and is nearer to a skeleton physically than anything.” Moore should talk—her weight dropped at times to 75 pounds. Wylie was also extremely thin, and Woolf appears so gaunt in a photo with T.S. Eliot in 1932 that she looks barely able to stand. When Ridge’s weight dropped to below 70 pounds in August 1935, the doctors were baffled.
Was she so poor that she was starving to death? According to many of her biographers, she lived in “voluntary poverty,” such a state considered not as a moral flaw but one that was environmentally produced by society, in her case, by the lack of enough generous patrons. Suffering such extreme self-denial, Ridge radiated a saintly quality. She was “a devout believer in the humanity of letters,” according to Williams. “She made a religion of it.” Saints fasted and fainted and finally gave everything away until they had nothing but their lives to be rid of. Ridge borrowed considerably more than she gave away, but she did radiate an “unworldly presence,” as “a slender, tall, [!!] softly-speaking, thin-featured woman in a dark dress,” wrote Horace Gregory shortly after her death. “Even as one rereads her books one gains the impression that she regarded her social convictions and the writing of poetry in the same spirit in which an Irish girl invokes the will of God by entering a convent.”
The nuns had taught her well, or at least steeled her for the deprivations of her chosen lifestyle. After making a living writing potboilers, modeling, illustrating, and working in a factory, she decided around the end of her thirties that she would survive on only what she could make from writing. It was not as suicidal a gesture as it might seem today. The small magazines in the teens and the twenties paid relatively well, and often very quickly. In 1917 Smart Set sent a check for stories and poems in just four days. As earlier noted, in 1921 she boasted to Dawson that she had sold $60 worth of poems in ten days (almost $1,000 in today’s money). But it didn’t help her finances that she gave a party every time she sold her work.
Ridge was almost alone among the Modernists with regard to her lack of inherited wealth, spousal wealth, or the earned wealth of Willa Cather’s bestsellers. Ezra Pound married well and his mistress had money. Mina Loy began well with wealthy parents. H.D. came from a well-off family, and her partner Bryher inherited an enormous fortune. Elinor Wylie and Marjorie Seiffert were members of the wealthiest families in America. Millay married money. Although Ridge’s husband managed to pay his college tuition and professional licensing fees, he seldom held a well-paying job. A comment between two women in a 1915 Masses cartoon by Cornelia Barns illustrated the attitude of the emancipated woman of the time: “My Dear, I’ll be economically independent if I have to borrow every cent.” Ridge kept her own bank account but her husband had to give her money on many desperate occasions, and she was not immune to hoping that he would become a more reliable patron—she was always asking when could he pass his exams and get a better job. Were they separated in 1927, as Williams suggested? She liked to keep a studio in addition to their living quarters, which may have started the rumor. But how could she have afforded the second rent? Money was found to support her writing, more money than she could have made herself.
Ridge secured patrons in the manner of Isadora Duncan, who “held that it was the duty of rich people, and rich people’s hotels, to support geniuses.” The 1920s was the first (and the last?) time since the Renaissance in which artists expected to be supported by the more fortunate. Ridge’s decision was also inspired by the anarchists. Like artists, they also had to depend on handouts for their sustenance, although even Emma Goldman worked as a midwife and a masseuse when money was low. Later in life, Ridge would not accept (much) money from close friends like Mary Moore, only from her patrons Mitchell Dawson, Marie Garland, Jeannette Marks, and later Louise Adams Floyd, Corinne Wagner, Mrs. Mary Pratt Richter, Josephine Boardman Crane, and Lenore Marshall. It must have been at the Australian soirées that she learned the first lesson in patronage: to attract money from the wealthy you have to move among them, inviting contradiction, especially anarchist beliefs. But Ridge had her alleged descent from Irish royalty to bolster her confidence.
She attended Bryher and Robert McAlmon’s lavish wedding party in 1921. Bryher’s father was the only Englishman whose wealth rivaled the robber barons of America, as he was heavily invested in shipping, coal, newspapers, and property. Coal was especially subject to strikes at that time, the very topic Ridge often vilified. She certainly did not turn down Marie Garland’s Blue Moon round-the-world yacht trip. When she solicited funds, she felt entitled, like Isadora Duncan. “But is it not queer that people who have money to give should have to be coaxed by offering them something in exchange,” she writes her patron Louise Adams Floyd. Certainly male poets of the same era received sinecures: Edward Arlington Robinson secured his from none other than Theodore Roosevelt, Ezra Pound from the lawyer John Quinn, Hart Crane from financier Otto Kahn, and Robert Frost from Amherst, Dartmouth and Harvard, who competed for the honor. By the end of Ridge’s life, she was finished with patronizing liberal sympathy: “To hell with all their pity” she writes her husband—then she writes another letter for money. Two poems in her very first book illustrate her ambivalence: “Woman with Jewels” with its sneering description, and “Spires” that turns Grace Church, New York’s most fashionable house of worship, into a shameful icon of exploitation:
Spires
Spires of Grace Church,
For you the workers of the world
Travailed with the mountains…
Aborting their own dreams
Till the dream of you arose—
Scorning their hands. (Ghetto 53)
“To be married or buried within its [the Grace Church] walls has been ever considered the height of felicity,” according to Matthew Hale Smith in 1869. Ridge was not unaware of its snob appeal, and before she left it for one of her hospital stays in 1928-9, she described her apartment that faced it with a fillip of class-consciousness:
It is spacious, sunlight streaming through [the] entire length from [the] front windows looking out on the spires of Grace Church, opposite, and its mystic rise embalmed in stone….My bed pulled up next [to a] big coal fire…This—if one has to be ill—[is] a good place… in touch at one end with [the] life of [the] roaring city, at [the] other, the contemptuous silence of brick and stone.
Ridge’s patrons supported her hospitalizations and convalescence—sometimes even her doctor paid for her stays. Mitchell Dawson helped pay for a hospitalization in 1920, Jeannette Marks in 1924. In 1929, Ridge checked into the hospital compliments of Saturday Review of Literature editor Henry Seidel Canby and philanthropist Josephine Crane. Lenore Marshall paid for a workup after Ridge returned from Mexico in 1937. Ridge was determined to keep herself free from material concerns, even if it meant she suffered physically. In 1935, Ridge wrote Lawson in response to why she wouldn’t fill out an important questionnaire: “Sorry but I’m constitutionally unable to consider things which would advance me materially.”
But lack of means did not completely explain her dangerous thinness. Yaddo, the artists’ colony she visited twice, offered copious amounts of food.
The German chef—the best of her kind—was appal[l]ed at my turning down her gorgeous lunch—she came up to see me about it—I had an awful job explaining & it was as though I had said—‘It’s no use—I can’t stand your poems!’
Her behavior parallels many characteristics of the anorexic, including “the unusual handling of food, in particular the selection of low-calorie food and/or avoidance of regular meals.” Anticipating returning home from Yaddo, she writes Lawson: “I’m eating well and hope I shan’t worry you by playing with an inch of toast while you eat your dinner.” Five years later, a waitress brings her four pieces of toast and she “carefully picked out an occasional buttered part…” When she was served three meals a day at the Bent Hotel in Santa Fe, so much food made her sick. Or she could have had ulcerative colitis, a lifelong disease that causes erratic fever, weight loss, and stomach pain. She wrote once that the lining of her bowel was coming away. But those who suffer from this disease are fatigued. In comparison, anorexics present themselves as energetic, tireless, and impervious with “a striking physical and often intellectual hyperactivity (a strange endurance despite emaciation).” All that party-giving took a lot of stamina! Ridge also boasted at various times that she had written 127 lines before lunch, 400 as a prelude, 900 lines in bed—and she completed the 218 page Firehead after only six weeks at Yaddo while complaining in nearly every letter about severe illness. Among her papers at Smith is a reproduction of one of the paintings of Edward Middleton Manigault, whose work was not featured in Broom, indicating that Ridge had taken a personal interest in him. In 1922 he starved himself to death in Los Angeles trying to “see colors not perceptible to the physical eye.” He was only 35.
Severe anorexia often ends in heart disorders. Ridge tried nitroglycerin injections for her heart in New Mexico and complained of heart problems to Mitchell Dawson. Her friend Elinor Wylie was extremely thin and died at a young age of heart failure. Ridge herself died of “myocardial degeneration,” a heart condition that occurs with anorexia. The death certificate also lists pulmonary T.B., date of onset, 1929.
“I look pale,” said Byron, looking into the mirror. “I should like to die of a consumption.” “Why?” asked his tubercular friend Tom Moore. “Because the ladies would all say, “Look at that poor Byron, how interesting he looks in dying.” Also known as the unpronounceable phthsis, T.B.’s reputation as the sensitive young artist’s disease was still being touted in 1941 with O’Neill’s play, Long Day’s Journey into Night. Susan Sontag notes that T.B. made its victims interesting, romantic, and ethereal. Having T.B. was presumed to be a form of protest or rebellion, part of the myth of the bohemian who, while living in extreme poverty, celebrated a life of the spirit instead of the body. The disease has also been associated with youth and purity, with genius, with heightened sensibility, and with increased sexual appetite. According to Montaigne in 1583, girls swallowed sand to ruin their stomach lining to develop a tubercular pallor. Victorian women took arsenic to make their skin as pale as a tubercular, slowly poisoning themselves to death. Because patients often lose weight with T.B., it was imagined to be a disease of malnutrition, linking it to anorexia. Byron himself struggled with his appetite and took the “vinegar cure,” laxatives, and other diets to remain thin. Out of Ridge’s extensive experience in sanatoriums, she describes an enervated hospital patient—perhaps herself—in several lines of “Ward X”:
Her hands monotonously
scoop up the shallow moonlight,
pale as weak lemonade,
that spills through her fingers
over the white sheet. (Red Flag 90)
The archetypal bohemian died of T.B. Many Irish died of T.B.—“our great reservoir of consumption”—according to the British Home Office, and Ridge could have contracted the disease on one of her long voyages. Or the dust, dirt, rags, and dried sputum in any sweatshop she visited or worked in could have infected her. But it is unlikely the disease would have lain dormant for so many decades. In more than half of untreated cases it is fatal within five years. In the same era, tuberculars Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence died very quickly. One puzzled doctor in 1929 told her that the spot on her lungs was “in fact so large that if it was active you would be having night sweats, a short dry cough, and higher temperatures than you are having.” Several doctors were about to consult each other that day, but their final diagnosis was never mentioned in her letters. She does write a few nights later that she was
awake all night with pains in my legs—very severe—and very heavy night sweats. The nurse had to change my sheets and all my underwear at 2 a.m. I do not think it had anything whatever to do with my insides—it is either the other thing I’m supposed to have or something else.
Perhaps the doctors too decided it was menopause—the “other thing”—its onset unusually early since everyone thought she was ten years younger. She had no cough or chest pain. They treated her with castor oil for a pain in her side that had vexed her for ten years, but castor oil is also a laxative abused by anorexics. She had Davy smuggle in hard candy while she was a patient in a convalescent home, another way anorexics quell thirst and hunger. She was also prescribed both codeine and veronal, addictive barbiturates that keep you thin. At least she was grateful for the care. “Davy [,] [you] have been a beautiful and loyal person…I wanted to tell you…thank you,” she writes from the hospital in 1929. She also bemoans her incapacity to cure the suffering of others: “I seem always taking and seem unable to help anyone, even the [?] girl recovering from a wound in the head, who is my roommate.” When she was hospitalized in 1933, she went to a private sanatorium simply to gain weight, paid for by her doctor, who “liked her sonnets.” Over the years, her illnesses became less serious, albeit not her weight. Her hospitalization in the late 1930s for weighing less than 70 pounds gave her a clean bill of health despite nearly two years living in Mexico. By 1938, Evelyn Scott writes: “You darling Brunhilda of the sick bed, Jean d’Arc of the germs.”
Being ill allowed her to prioritize her needs over all others—and to pursue them in ways that a healthier woman couldn’t. No housework, for one thing, and much sympathy from her patrons. Being sick meant she didn’t have to be economically productive. She was free and encouraged to write. She didn’t have to answer letters or come to the door or entertain when she was ill, allowing her more time to concentrate on her poetry. The arche
typal T.B. sufferer was believed to suffer some passionate feeling that caused the illness and which she must express—often love, but also possibly political or moral beliefs. Having an illness similar to T.B. enabled Ridge to speak out. It was also a useful tool in asserting her gentility and rectifying her inferior social status—all that bed rest implied wealth.
A preponderance of her acquaintances spent enormous amounts of time in bed: Louise Adams Floyd, her patron, retired to her room for years, Evelyn Scott underwent numerous operations, botched and otherwise, Kay Boyle began nearly every letter with a listing of complaints, Elinor Wylie fell down the stairs in a faint and severely injured her back and suffered from chronic inflammatory disease of the kidneys. Perhaps all Ridge’s correspondents mentioned their ailments because they were trying to create a sympathetic bond. In contrast, William Carlos Williams didn’t ever seem to get sick, although he was always being exposed to disease as a doctor, and Amy Lowell, suffering from high blood pressure, retina deterioration, sporadic gastritis, heart trouble, obesity, and an umbilical hernia that made it difficult for her to climb stairs, seldom mentioned any illness. Would Ridge’s problem be a female complaint, a relative to 19th century hysteria? Critic Carroll Smith-Rosenberg in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America states that hysteria sometimes mimics T.B., heart attacks, blindness, hip disease, while a woman is in perfect health.
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