Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  Paris was freezing in mid-March when she admitted that “you know I am strangely hardy.” Indeed she was, having accomplished her goal of traveling to Baghdad and back with a minimum of illness, really not much more than any other traveler, now or then. She also told her husband that she finally had “one of the scenes in the first part of Lightwheel finished” and that “The stately and rather weighty content seems to demand the sonnet form.” She describes the narrative: a pregnant Babylonian woman is watching for her husband from the roof of her house when she goes into labor and “she cannot get back. The exact thing I’ve done here and the forces at work in the woman have not been done before. I think it’s good.” No poem with those lines has been found, and perhaps at this point her husband suspected that all she had on the section were just notes. A few weeks before her departure, she begged him not to have her publisher meet her boat. “I’d have to go at once into explanations of [the] book’s delay. I think I should die right there.” Her ambivalence about returning to New York evidenced itself materially when she lost her passport on March 24. She had no identification number, she knew no one who could help her, and she was nearly out of money. Somehow she sailed.

  Chapter 31

  The Radical Left in the 1930s

  By May 1932, Ridge was again living in her apartment at the top of 793 Broadway across from Grace Church. Just a block away was the office of the Emergency Committee for Southern Political Prisoners, of which she was a member. Founded in 1930 by the John Reed Club and the International Labor Defense Committee, the legal arm of the Communist party, it began its mission by assisting six workers who faced the death penalty for holding protest meetings on unemployment in Atlanta and, in the next year, by defending the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama. Its chairman was Theodore Dreiser. Dos Passos was treasurer, and 16 writers along with Ridge served as committee members, including Josephine Herbst, Edmund Wilson, Carl Van Doren, Alfred Kreymborg, Louis Untermeyer, Scott Nearing, and Upton Sinclair. Dos Passos wanted to appeal to middle class liberals to see past Communist propaganda toward a more fair treatment of fellow citizens. “We can’t affect the class war much, but we might possibly make it more humane.” In the New Republic, Edmund Wilson hoped the Committee would “take Communism away from the Communists” and realign it more with the American democracy. When the organization became the National Defense of Political Prisoners a year later, a precursor to PEN, its committee had been expanded to include (among others) Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and, interestingly, the Australianist C. Hartley Grattan who was, like Ridge, also a member of the Writers League against Lynching.

  Radical poets in the 1930s rejected the idea that poetry occupied a separate sphere in the national life and promoted conscious participation. The work was not all party cant. According to critic M.L. Rosenthal, the style was “anarcho-individualistic, Freudian,” and written as much “in the image of D.H. Lawrence” as of Lenin. Contrary to critiques made in the ultraconservative 1950s, jargon and lockstep demagoguery were abhorred, and experimentation à la the 1920s flourished. Indeed, Gertrude Stein was still being reviewed positively by radicals. Critic Alan Filreis notes that poet-lumberman “Joe Kalar…agreed that “revolutionary poetry written in conventional rhythm and meter often enough seems naïve, sentimental and hackneyed.” Ridge’s friend and critic Babette Deutsch, whose early work, Banners, venerated the Russian Revolution, wrote that the new generation had many issues in common with the modernists, among them “disgust for institutionalized religion and for a facile idealism.” Still, she omitted nearly all leftists poets of the 1930s, including Ridge, in her important anthology, Poetry in our Time, and even tried to discredit W.H. Auden by likening him to “some wild incomprehensible ‘modernist’ like [Tristan] Tzara,” according to Kenneth Rexroth. Even The Left: A Quarterly Review of Radical and Experimental Art neglected radical women in 1931, as Ridge was the only female contributor out of 32.

  “Just the other day I discovered that the John Reed Club plans to hold another Red Poets Night in the near future,” Edwin Rolfe wrote Ridge a month after her return from Europe, asking her to read at a venue that was enthusiastically Communist. Rolfe would become poet laureate of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion after his experiences in Spain. For leftist poets, it was a heady time since their agenda seemed almost prophetic—the Depression calling out for the revolution they had envisioned. It is unclear whether Ridge accepted his invitation or not. She may not have felt recovered from her European travel or felt that her political views were not Red enough, even though she was still a contributing editor to New Masses. Surely it was important to her standing as a poet that on her return she would so soon be invited to read. She had plans to finish her manuscript, and within the month she abandoned the city to work on her writing in seclusion.

  Marianne Moore and her mother met Davy on the streets of New York just after she left.

  Outside Schulte’s we were joined by David Lawson, Lola Ridge’s husband. He was very kind, said he would urge us to come to his rooms to tea but he didn’t want to have us climb the stairs on a hot day and so on. He said Lola had been in Mesopotamia but was now visiting Mrs. Floyd, and was going later to Yaddo.

  Ridge got to work at the estate in July 1932. She composed a strong draft of a poem about Tom Mooney, the activist who had been wrongly convicted of a bombing in San Francisco 16 years earlier and was now serving time in San Quentin. Like the Sacco and Vanzetti case, protest against Mooney’s incarceration was seen by the right as a “money-making agitation for the Communist Party and the excuse for countless riots, strikes, demonstrations and profitable collections.” During the 1932 LA Olympics, the defense committee sent six members of the Young Communist League onto the track shouting, “Free Tom Mooney” with the words printed across their chests and backs. While Mooney remained in prison, James Rolph, the governor who could have pardoned him, condoned a California lynching. Ridge published “Stone Face” in The Nation of September 14, 1932.

  The first line of “Stone Face”: “They have carved you into a stone face, Tom Mooney,” echoes and complicates a line from the title poem in her 1920 book, Sun-Up and Other Poems: “when you do something great/people give you a stone face.” But all bear responsibility for his imprisonment: “disparate signatures are scrawled on your stone face/that all/Have set some finger on…” Then she immortalizes his face like a president on Mt. Rushmore: “set up in full sight under the long/Gaze of the generations—” The poem was nearly the last of her political efforts, only the long “Three Men Die,” a poem truly about Sacco and Vanzetti, was still to be written.

  Louise Adams Floyd, who was involved in the Mooney defense, may have worked on Ridge’s bust while she was visiting. Ridge writes later: “I’m very proud of that bust you have—the first one. I recognize in it something [that] is essentially me.” When Ridge worried out loud to Louise about her husband’s loss of pay, she gave Ridge $25 to cover her fare to Saratoga Springs. After nearly three weeks, she traveled upstate to stay near, but not at Yaddo itself, with Elizabeth Ames footing the bill. She had found Ridge a “quiet little home on the outskirts of Saratoga where there is light and air and silence and only two grown persons who are mouselike in all their habits.”

  Ridge reported on her new work location to Floyd and commented rather optimistically on how the locals were faring the economic downturn:

  There is no noise except the honking of an occasional Ford. (All the farmers have autos now). Fields of cabbages and corn, carrots, squash, peppers, cucumbers are growing outside the windows. The biggest cauliflowers I’ve ever seen…These people here in Saratoga seem less hit by the depression than any I’ve seen anywhere….Miss A. tells me no man has come to the house and asked for anything in years….

  The mother of her friend Laura Benét sent a note from Europe, where she and Laura were touring: “It is bad in America now…and we don’t know what we shall have to live on when we get back.” If the wealthy Benéts were feeling the deprivations o
f the Depression, times were quite serious for everyone. A few days later, Ridge wrote Floyd with her not-so-red view of the political situation:

  Just now I think the communists are more fit to rule than any other group, but I tremble to think of the result once the greater part of the world has become communist. When Ibsen said “the majority is always wrong” it stood for then, to-day and a hundred years hence.

  Still, Ridge wanted to visit a factory where there was a strike on, or go to a Communist or a socialist meeting and take notes. But she had fallen into despair. She told her husband that she had a “dream of Keith which always results in a couple of days intense depression,” indicating that she still had strong feelings about his abandonment, and then went on to describe yet another change in writing tactics, perhaps as a result of the dream:

  I want to take my own life as a theme only not in the sense of strict or obvious autobiography—and do that in a long poem. I’d begin with childhood, picking it up about where I left off in Sun Up. No[,] the Babylonian poem is by no means given up, but it will have to initiate its own expulsion. I do not think it is quite ready.

  Then she went three nights without sleep and asked again for her Gynergen.

  The pressure of producing another book took its toll. She was home by the end of August when she wrote Louise Adams Floyd: “I was so weak Davy had to take me to the [doctor’s] office. Dr. H. thought I should go at once to the hospital but I protested so much he agreed that I should wait a few days.” At the same time her ambitions grew. She promised her publisher that she would “have [a book] next fall. I’m writing very much the way I did at Firehead—circling and going from place to place except that now, instead of having one book, I have a whole series—a cycle.”

  She stayed out of the hospital as long as she could, attending a party given by her friend Eda Lou Walton at the end of January, 1933—“so you can’t be sick all the time” writes Evelyn Scott to Davy because he had taken over her correspondence. But by July Ridge weighed only 72 pounds. She was admitted to Mt. Sinai Hospital under the care of her beloved Dr. Hyman, then moved to the Loeb Home for Convalescence in East View, New York. “It is a little like Yaddo in general surroundings. Sixty-nine women in the place of all types. A lot of young girls—five or six…” The rules were strict: “one has to rest and do absolutely nothing from 11:30 until 2:30—a big hole in the day. Lights out at 8:30 p.m.” Her codeine was stopped. She had written most of her 25 sonnet sequence, “Via Ignis” before she arrived so perhaps it was overwork on top of weight loss that caused the crisis. Ridge reported to Louise Adams Floyd on August 1st that she was fighting for her life, and her weight had dropped below 70 pounds. By August 5, she had given up lipstick, but she was still asking Lawson to send her things: “I must have my white silk slip. My black sweater with white stripes—Mary will find it if you cannot…(no darling this is not being sarcastic…) Isn’t anything international happening?” She may well have been concerned about the Simele massacre on the border between Iraq and Syria that had just taken place, with 300 Assyrian men killed, a number that would increase to 3,000 several days later, the slaughter truly Old Testament, Babylonian.

  The grim political and economic situation wore on in the States. In 1933 DuPont and J.P. Morgan united with other millionaires—including President George W. Bush’s grandfather—to overthrow Roosevelt and install a fascist government. They tried to recruit General Smedly Butler, offering him a half million war veterans and unlimited funds to finance a military coup, but he revealed the plot to Congress. No one was prosecuted, according to a BBC report released decades later.

  Meanwhile, Evelyn Scott had befriended Emma Goldman to the extent that Goldman helped her arrange an abortion. Scott’s letter to Ridge in July 1933 reveals the depth of their relationship, and Goldman’s continued interest in Ridge:

  I know Emma can make the most brutal and unperspicacious gestures and has probably been insulting to many people whose mental-spiritual plans she couldn’t reach. She has been a very good friend to me, but that is a matter of getting off with the foot which happened not to step on her corns. I would have been more remembering about you except that I always mention you and she always asked after you as if all were o.k.

  That November Scott asked Ridge to sign a petition to allow Goldman into the United States for a brief tour. It isn’t clear whether Ridge signed it. Goldman subsequently spent 90 days speaking across the country, confined to the subjects of literature and drama. Thousands were turned away although sometimes the audiences were disappointing. Old radicals, now referred to as the “lyrical left,” stayed away, including Ridge, although Goldman spoke in New York several times. “Today the Anarchists are a scattered handful of survivors, and the extreme left is divided among the various communist groups…Emma Goldman is not a symbol of freedom in a world of tyrants; she is merely a wrong-headed old woman,” wrote The Nation.

  By August 20, Lawson had his pay reduced again on his new job. “It’s too bad about your cut, but we’ll manage somehow—as long as you let me handle the money.” Given Ridge’s ineptitude at finances, perhaps Lawson bridled at her suggestion, although this was unlikely; he seems so even-tempered in his letters.

  “I gained 14 pounds [at the hospital],” she writes Floyd by September. Plump and full of ambition, she left for the Jersey Shore as soon as she could. Henrietta Glick had returned from Rome with most of the music for the Firehead oratorio finished. Glick anticipated “a performance there next Easter…she wants me to write an opera, she to compose the music and I’m thinking of this—or will try to work out an American theme as soon as I have the present book out of my hands.”

  Chapter 32

  Shelley Awards, a Poets Guild Prize, and a Guggenheim

  Evidence of Ridge’s secure place in poetry in the early 30s was a request from her previous editor and close friend, Bill Benét, to contribute to his Fifty Poets: An American Auto-Anthology. Marianne Moore, Louise Bogan, Frost, cummings, Stevens, Eliot and Jeffers were also to be anthologized. Each poet was to pick one “briefer” poem that he would want to be remembered for. “Bill…has asked me for the poem of mine (published) I consider my best—Jiggered if I know,” she writes Floyd. She selected “Light Song,” a section of Firehead.

  Light omnivorous and without mercy

  Consuming all things for fuel—

  Denying no toad beast man fowl worm,

  Seizing, transfixing the mean norm,

  Leaving it starrily, as it left Peter

  Pierced with the white crow of dawn

  In the arrested moment, like a spear,

  To remain without falling and without flight,

  A cynosure to burn forever there

  Impaled on the implacable light. (Firehead 52-53)

  The poem’s irregular rhythm and rhyme make it neither free nor formal. The structural ambiguity reflects the subject matter: Peter impaled on his disbelief, in stasis until, one assumes, Christ, as the light, frees him after his repentance.

  Two years in a row, in 1934 and 1935, Ridge’s colleagues at the Poetry Society of America honored her with the Shelley Memorial Award. “I wish we could bring you the world you don’t need on a platter and you could chuck away all but the rare best part your divine intuition would unerringly select,” congratulates Evelyn Scott the first time. Named after one of Ridge’s most revered poets, the prize was endowed by the wealthy poetry-lover Mary Pratt Sears four years earlier. The award is still given to an American poet every year, “selected with reference to his or her genius and need, by a jury of three poets—one appointed by the president of Radcliffe, (now Harvard), one by the president of the University of California at Berkeley, and one by the Poetry Society of America’s board of governors.” The first winner was Conrad Aiken, the poet, short story writer and critic who was on the bill of the Other’s Speakers Bureau with Ridge. When he won the Shelley, he had just been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, but two years later he attempted suicide.

  Although
the amount of the Shelley award is now between $6,000-9,000, it was $1,750 during the Depression, nearly the same as a Guggenheim, equivalent to about $30,000 in 2014 currency. Ridge shared the prize with Frances Frost in 1934. Splitting the award has been a common occurrence throughout its history, here perhaps because of the Depression’s difficulties, especially with regard to women’s finances. Frances Frost, best known as the mother of the poet Paul Blackburn, wrote verse in traditional form and meter, like the other Frost in Vermont. Published nine years after “The Road Not Taken,” her poem “Dare” begins: “The wood’s-edge thicket holds a path/Twisty enough for any seeker” and ends “best go the long way round/Or find another road to take.”