Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  You know how other-worldly Riva is, much here mentally but as if her body were absent-minded…The rain came down and the house leaked…Water was streaming down the walls. The floor was a puddle. Riva, on a chair in the middle of the room, had rubbers on! Over her head she held an umbrella and with her free hand she was writing poetry!

  Ridge also met the poet Spud Johnson, Mabel’s sometime secretary. Ridge and Johnson quarreled, but made up by the end of April, when he promised to review her new book. Ridge may not have wanted to get any closer to Luhan than Johnson, given Luhan’s propensity for manipulation. According to Mabel’s frequent visitor, Ansel Adams, the famous hostess would “insult, confuse and reject people,” and he described her as having “talons for talent.” Luhan’s mercurial personality resulted in her being “imagined dead in a greater variety of ways than any other woman in American literary history,” according to Louise Palken Rudnick, Luhan’s biographer. D.H. Lawrence was first on the list of those with that kind of imagination. While Ridge was visiting Taos, Lawrence’s wife, Frieda, ended a final tug-of-war with Luhan over Lawrence by cementing his ashes into a monument, rather than allowing Mabel to scatter them over New Mexico.

  Ridge reported on the feminine rivalry in Taos:

  There is here among the women suspicion and jealousy [and a] love of power (social power alas!!) to an extent which I have not met before—at least not since the New England small town’s…They twist and torture some perfectly harmless word into malefic [sic] meaning—and then carry it and there is something added from every fresh simmer of the spirit through which it passes.

  That was a fairly accurate portrait of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s behavior, but Ridge may have also been referring to Rebecca Strand’s. The ex-wife of Ridge’s friend, Paul Strand, “Beck” arrived in Taos with Georgia O’Keeffe, perhaps as her lover. The daughter of the manager of Buffalo Bill in Europe, she had inherited his strong ways and personality. “I’ve not come all this way to watch Becky Strand striding in front of the mountains,” writes Ridge. “She’s been awfully kind, but I cannot have her morning noon and night.” By the end of May she reports: “Rebecca…has stopped trying to dominate me,” but went on with an arte della furia:

  Why does everyone who becomes at all fond of me at once begin to lay out my life—try to manage me? I tell you I’d rather live in a treetop or a cave and sleep on stones even if they did collide with my thin spine and that frightened constriction of the spirit I suffer when others try to put their will on me is so terrible that I can imagine how people drift into murder of their nearest and supposed-to-be-dearest who have striven to dominate them for years. It is what I suppose an eagle would feel if some ground-loving, flat-footed garden fowls, that had somehow got hold of it by a wounded foot, held on to keep it off the crags because “crags” are dangerous. (yes I know I’m ungrateful).

  In the same letter, she notes that one of her supporters, Mrs. Murray Crane, was sending her a warm coat for Mexico.

  Ridge always saw herself embroiled in a fierce battle for freedom, emotionally, financially, politically, and aesthetically, including most importantly, her choice of subjects for poetry. In late May she wrote a stirring letter about this to a Miss Bartlett, most probably Alice Hunt Bartlett, American associate editor of the Poetry Review, the magazine of the English Poetry Society. Bartlett solicited many American writers for their views on poetry around this time, including Willa Cather, Robert Hillyer, and Robinson Jeffers. Ridge’s response justified her continued interest in things not conventionally “poetic,” in subjects political as well as personal, elucidating a modernist stance of inclusiveness that would be thoroughly assaulted by conservatives in the 1950s: “All life is the domain of poetry; not only the ancient rituals of love and birth and death, but all vast happenings, from wars, strikes, the endless crucifixions of labor to the being of the smallest flower.”

  In June, Ridge moved to Santa Fe, into “a beastly room” in Hotel Fidella, but didn’t stay in the hotel long, citing food poisoning. Rafael Alfredo (or Alfonso?—she used both names interchangeably), helped her find new lodgings in the historic and fashionable La Fonda in Santa Fe. He also located a doctor for her, made social contacts, arranged her excursions, and tutored her in Spanish, insisting that she not pay him. He was, according to Ridge, the son of one of the governors of Mexico, and “one of the loveliest spirits I have ever known.” They had met at least as early as April, having wine together, although most likely he was also the “Alfau” mentioned in a telegram who missed her when she first arrived in New Mexico at the end of March, and the “lovely “Alfon” who helped her April 2. He was working on a novel. Left in her correspondence with Lenore Marshall around that date was a slip of gold-orange paper with a note written in Ridge’s hand:

  that has nothing to do with the emotional attractions of one being for another in which while it lasts anyhow—dignity is pretty generally forced to abdicate—and most every other attribute of the ego that is likely to obstruct that very exclusive jealous and single urge…

  Alfredo was ten years younger than the 62-year-old Ridge although she, like many other contemporary women, tended to refer to him—and all men—as “boy.” That she became involved with someone who, as it became evident, was even more impecunious than herself is testament to her lack of calculation, her clinging to the notion of freedom in all exchanges even though it might mean disaster. It quickly became apparent in her letters that they had a growing intimacy. To her husband she writes: “The south west is infinitely more bigoted on the negro question than the East. And every one in Taos looks on Jean [Toomer] as a man of blood…Raffael [Alfredo] and I have discussed this together….” By the end of July, Alfredo was walking all the way to the doctor’s office to make sure she had gone. Perhaps to assuage her guilt, she tried to set up her husband by suggesting that Lenore Marshall call Davy “sometime…I think he’s mis-mated with the industrial world. He loves art in all its forms…”

  Becky Strand offered to help find Davy a job so he might join her, but Ridge, now embroiled with Alfredo, discouraged that possibility. Regardless of Ridge’s outrage with Strand’s manipulation, she continued to meet with her. Strand was then making striking modernist paintings on glass. Often symbolic, one of these paintings was a portrait of Ridge but it did not satisfy Strand and she destroyed it.

  Ridge threw herself into socializing. “I’m very popular—too darn popular, yet I cannot very well refuse to meet fellow artists and writers who wish to meet me.” She continues justifying herself: “I did need to see the country with the type of the idle rich who have taken me around.” She spent time with Witter Bynner, the gay fixture of Santa Fe, satirist of poets and novelists, past president of the Poetry Society, and translator of Chinese poetry. He writes of the aftermath of some wild evening: “I shall never forget your ecstatic soul-slumber on my library floor with the elfin smile… What a girl you are!” Mrs. Hoover from Chicago’s Jewish League Magazine recognized Ridge from Marjorie Content’s photo and invited her for dinner. They both had tea with Alice Corbin Henderson who had already scheduled a review of Dance of Fire by Hildegarde Flanner for October’s Poetry.

  Ridge struggled to keep up appearances. Her New York clothing was out of place. She wanted a black coat embroidered with silver, and was having a dressmaker make her a new dress. She had to “give up” a $27 dollar woven dress—worth $324 in today’s dollars—due to lack of funds. This in the face of the Depression, and her dwindling cache of awards and handouts. In the same letter she boasted that she had drafted the “Mexican sequence” and the “one carrying on my childhood from SunUp on.” Perhaps her husband was skeptical since she had written of similar feats throughout her year in Europe, yet returned home with nothing. By August 5 she writes that she gave herself an exhausting social schedule in order to have a “blind attack” come on so her new doctor could test a shot of nitroglycerin on her. He thought she had low blood pressure.

  Poetry warfare broke out in August. Willa Ca
ther’s friend and correspondent, Elizabeth Shipley Sergeant, invited Ridge to a reading by Robert Frost in Santa Fe. Ridge was anxious to reacquaint herself. They had exchanged letters in 1919 after her talk in Chicago, when she asked him for a poem for Others. She had made quite an impression with her speech because after his polite refusal to send her anything, he writes: “You of all people won’t want me to behave as anything else after what you said in Chicago.” She had also praised him lavishly and perceptively in a 1920 New Republic review. After his reading in Santa Fe to an audience of 200, Ridge “had a talk with Frost for the first time for years.”

  They wanted (a poem) from me and as I couldn’t remember I went away and wrote from memory the opening sonnet of Via Ignis. I had to read it twice as the first time only Frost and Bynner got it or seemed to (you know its rather complex)[.] I said [,] when I’d finished now you can all criticize (they’d criticized all the others)[.] Robert Frost said “No they can’t, this is different, it’s superb.” I was sorry—it would have been much more amusing to get reactions! Of course no one said a word after that. I’m giving Frost my book Dance. As for the next day, I went to a lunch Bynner was giving for Frost—Davy [,] it would take pages to describe the comedy of errors that ensued… Frost, in the first place, was two hours late (he’d been held up by a flood it turned out. He looked like a defiant rock and Hal like a playful weasel [?] with its tail between its legs….Bynner and Frost had an argument. Frost called Hal a Williams Lyon Phelps [a popularizer of lit]—and Hal emptied a glass of beer over Frost’s head.

  The argument was recounted differently in the official biography published by Lawrance Thompson and R.H. Winnick in 1981. Frost’s tardiness was one-upmanship for Witter Bynner’s late arrival as his introducer the day before. When Frost finally appeared for lunch, Bynner praised a book of poetry containing references to homosexuality, and Frost went along with him until Bynner challenged Frost to read his favorite. Frost read one of the more erotic poems but said that the 54-year-old Bynner was “too young and innocent to understand such verse.” That’s when the beer was poured over Frost’s head.

  In early July, Ridge asked Lawson to send her black kimono, and nearly two months later she asked for it again, mentioning in passing that she hadn’t seen Alfredo for ten days, and railing at Lawson, for being “rather uncommunicative.” He finally sent the kimono at the end of September. Perhaps he could read between the lines—or he read all the lines that suggested that Alfredo had replaced him. Her behavior towards Lawson was, as usual, ambivalent and, if anything, worse, given that she had a lover: she wanted him there, she didn’t, she didn’t want to come home, she would go to Mexico, she delayed leaving for Mexico by herself, insisting that the doctor wanted her to stay in Santa Fe until at least October.

  Although she had declared in April that she “want[ed] to do Cortez,” she kept returning to the possible Australasian poem. In May an astrologer guessed that she felt strongly drawn to travel to Antipodes-Australia, and by August Ridge admitted that she had “a great urge to go to Australia now for a long time…[The astrologer] startled me for it really was true.” In the same letter, Ridge talked of going to China. She had to get some writing done either way. A few days later she announced that she had written 255 lines of a poem—but not whether it is the Australasian one or another. She said she had added 340 lines to her “magnificent Prologue” by the end of August, and ten more by September 10.

  By early September she decided that the Prelude she had written would work for either poem, and began to study Cortez at the American School of Research. Lawson must have proposed that she return to New York before her money ran out, or travel again to France—at last he knows the language, having, on her urging, studied it for at least a year—for, in response, she became quite adamant about not returning:

  I can’t work there [New York] much and cook clean and all the petty details of housekeeping that litter the mind more than a straight day’s office work…Also I would not think of going to France now. France and its atmosphere fatal for [the] kind [of] book I’m writing—I want wild country…Everything depends on the book dear [.] I must [underlined twice] get it out. Meanwhile do not [also underlined twice] consider me in any way[,] do only what you wish.”

  She had already made arrangements to drive to Albuquerque to the Mexican consul for a permit to cross the border.

  I think best I start for Mexico alone…I could not pay your fare here and our two to Mexico to save my life…I do not expect to stay there more than two or three weeks…If you lose your job, telegraph me at once and I’ll telegraph enough if I can raise it, as I think I can by drawing ahead on Guggenheim, enough for you to join me….I may come back to Calif for winter…perhaps you could join me then in Calif?

  Two weeks later she wrote that someone had offered to put her on the train to Mexico. She asked Lawson to forward her blue dressing gown—now that she finally had the black kimono—then broke into recrimination: “you are a self-centered person who has besides a great deal too much to do for himself and I’m not blaming you for a combination of character and circumstance.” But she did blame him, the devoted husband who had been sending her books and money and sleepwear and medication for at least the last 10 years of her wanderings. Perhaps she was feeling guilty about Alfredo. As if justifying her trip, she reported to Lawson that an Ouija board urged her to travel to Mexico, even “spelling out Nahutl [sic] repeated several times—we kept losing words the glass went so fast—we had to separate letters later.”

  V

  Mexico, California, New York City,

  1935–1941

  Chapter 35

  Mexico and Romance

  In the 1930s a trip to Mexico for artists was as sought-after as a stay in Europe. According to Tina Patricia Albers, Tina Modotti’s biographer:

  Mexico City teemed with fanatics, bohemians, idealists, radicals, and visionaries. Intellectuals who had once looked to Europe for cultural revelation now turned their backs upon the old continent, embracing instead the genius of peasants and indigenous peoples whose inclusion in the Mexican community promised to bring forth the “regeneration and exaltation of the national spirit.”

  Mina Loy spent her brief romance with Arthur Cravan in Mexico City in 1918, William Carlos Williams sojourned over the border in a wild train ride even earlier, Mexico was where D.H. Lawrence began writing The Plumed Serpent in 1923, Archibald MacLeish wrote his epic Conquistador after his walk through Mexico in 1928, Katherine Anne Porter shuttled between Mexico City and Greenwich Village from 1920-1931 as a journalist, and Hart Crane committed suicide on his Guggenheim voyage returning from Mexico in 1931. In one of his last letters he wrote: “I do know…how emphatically I love [Mexico]—population, customs, climate, landscape and all.” During Ridge’s editorship of Broom, the magazine had championed pre-Columbian art as quintessentially American. Although very popular, travel to Mexico was just one destination for the modernists’ wanderings.

  “It is mainly poets, novelists, and a few painters who have lived this tortured spiritual impulse, [homelessness] in willed derangement and in self-imposed exile and in compulsive travel,” writes Susan Sontag about the modernists’ search for identity. As the critic Raymond Williams writes:

  They were exiles one of another…but without the organization and promotion of group and city—simultaneously located and divided. The [emigre’s] self-referentiality, their propinquity and mutual isolation all served to represent the artist as necessarily estranged, and to ratify as canonical the works of radical estrangement.

  Ridge’s friend, the moody and inconsolable painter/poet Marsden Hartley, was never able to find a home. Born in Maine, educated in Ohio and New York, he lived and worked in France, Austria, Italy, Germany, Mexico, Rhode Island, Bermuda, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, New Mexico, California, and Nova Scotia. Ridge was no better. Her hegira began in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, San Francisco, Montreal, New York—five years wandering the Midwest—then back t
o New York again, where she kept changing apartments. She always included a return address when she wrote Poetry editor Harriet Monroe, making it easy to track her movements beginning in 1918: 18 Vannest Place (demolished that year), 21 East 15th Street, 17 West 8th Street, 469 West 22nd Street, 114 East 121st Street, 3 East 9th Street, 252 West 12th Street, 793 Broadway, and 296 West 11th Street. Their correspondence ends in 1933, so it doesn’t include 47 Morton Street, or the two additional addresses at the end of her life in Brooklyn. During those years she also spent long stretches outside the city, in Long Island or Saratoga Springs or Montauk or Bermuda or Massachusetts, as well as a year wandering through Europe that ended in Baghdad, five months in Taos and Santa Fe, where she moved seemingly every few weeks, all over Mexico for a year, back to California again, then across the country to New York. She recognized her peripatetic nature. “I could never live in Santa Fe as a steady thing—my personality is too strong—that is, I could never live in it and be myself…I need a wilderness or a city big enough…” As a solo wanderer through the most exotic of ports, she was indefatigably ambitious in her travel, and seemed to relish her homelessness. “I feel always in ‘a room for the night,’” she writes from Mexico.

  Long before crossing its border, she listed all the difficulties of travel to the country—“the mosquitoes, the hygiene” but she trumped every objection with “but I’ve been to Baghdad!” Her trip, however, did not start off smoothly. “Curious holdup[,] something gone wrong,” she writes in a short note to her husband just before she crossed the border, and then elaborated later:

  I overheard one woman on the train ask a newly arrived passenger (the one who gave me this hotel address) what was to be done about a person who had been preaching sedition against Am. Government and had now gone to Mexico to stir up seditions and rouse!!! revolution against that government. She was Californian and they may be stirred up about my poem on Mooney.