Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  I don’t think I can work at my poem, throat sore but temper sorer. I’d like to knock things over and smash them up.

  Male artists have often forged careers as hypocritical egomaniacs, demanding enormous fealty and support of their mates and everyone else around them. Ridge’s rage might have been generated out of her frustration with the double standard, and the waning of her opportunities. Her male modernist equivalent might be considered Rainer Marie Rilke. Like Ridge, the Czech poet had a reputation as a saint, who instead of writing poems about the proletariat, wrote brilliantly of angels. But his reputed sainthood is contradicted on almost any page of Ralph Freeman’s Life of a Poet: Rainer Marie Rilke. “He was a seducer of other men’s wives, a pampered intellectual gigolo, and a virtual parody of the soulful artiste who deems himself superior to ordinary people because he is so tenderly sensitive, a delicate blossom easily punished by a passing breeze or sudden frost,” writes critic Michael Dirda, reviewing the biography. “He was a jerk,” declared John Berryman in his third “Dream Song.” Rilke began his life pandering to a mostly absent mother who imagined herself nobility, like Ridge’s. Throughout his childhood and indeed, throughout “the long convalescence which is my life,” he fell ill when confronted by any anxiety. Like Ridge too, he began writing in the vernacular, in his case, Bohemian folk songs, but he soon found his way to modernism. One of his first career moves was to take all his girlfriend’s savings to publish his first book, dedicate it to a baroness, and abandon the fiancée. Having the opportunity to write several of the world’s most important poems relied on handouts from the very wealthy whose money he spent profligately while ignoring his only child. Wittgenstein gave him nearly a half million dollars, and when that was gone, other patrons awarded him more, all of which he squandered in the most expensive hotels in Europe. After six months in Berlin’s very fashionable Hôtel Continental, Rilke repeatedly sent begging notes to his patron Karl von der Heydt, asking for additional funding. “The question, L.R. [lieber Rilke], ‘don’t you need something?’ has, to be honest, not entered my mind,” writes back von der Heydt. Just a year older than Ridge, Rilke’s work was probably known to her. Sunrise Turn published Rilke’s monograph on Rodin in 1919 after he married Rodin’s student, became his secretary, then moved in with him. “You must change your life,” he wrote most famously. He and Ridge made few adjustments.

  Although in her March entries to her diary Ridge claimed to be poverty-stricken, she invited Leonard Abbott over for dinner, her old friend from the Ferrer days. Perhaps they discussed her insight the day before in her diary that “capitalism is one of the great obstacles to a final disarmament…” When Evelyn Scott discovered through Laura Benét that Ridge entertained Leonard Abbott and not herself, she was angry. She wrote Ridge

  restrainedly but unmistakably in that inflamed, injured mood I know so well…

  As a matter of truth her friends are very loyal—we’ve all guarded her from the consequences of her reckless tongue.

  How can such a creative person with a mind so brilliant and profound be a prey to so many mean suspicions.

  To which Scott replied in a letter: “Well, I just don’t see how anyone can become angry at so old a friend and never say how or why.” Ridge didn’t know until that letter that Scott’s mother had just died. Nor did she know that Scott’s mental state was slowly disintegrating, and that Evelyn wouldn’t publish another book as a result of her increasing paranoia. Evelyn continued to write her despite such difficulties, after years of burdening Ridge or Lawson with her publication problems, her housing problems, her romantic problems, her parental problems, her health problems, and even her storage problems. Ridge was not immune to Scott’s demands. “I am upset over a letter from Evelyn,” writes Ridge in her diary, then nonchalantly mentions that on the day she asked Laura Benét over for dinner, Ridge thought she had had a heart attack. As a woman so concerned with her health, it is strange that she doesn’t mention her condition ever again in her diary. She could have been referring to one of her rages instead.

  “One rage leads to another,” she writes. “Once I’ve been made really angry as I was by Davy yesterday morning, I remain in a state of, not irritability, but of slow dark anger, smolder and any breath fans the half consumed embers of fury again to flame.” Later on she analyzed her rush of feeling: “I believe rage is simply the frenetic desire for equilibrium, or for the restoration of a disrupted harmony…and what is harmony but a type of beauty?”

  But beauty was waning. The next day she observed the pussy willow not as a harbinger of spring but as “pale green shoots, wavering outward, fragile, thin like the wasted arms of babies whose mothers have been starved….” Her next comment about the desert critiques her own isolation: “I love the desert… No green fraternities in the desert, each hardy growth fighting for its root hold…” Her insights were tending toward effacement, a withering away.

  On April 8th she notes: “Morning, I am not well. Blood last night.” She does not say where or why, she mentions the blood just as casually as the heart attack. It had been two and a half years since the doctors had given her a clean bill of health. Ridge went on with her forebodings in the same entry, imagining her death, and the light inside a stone singing:

  the imperishable light to perish for all alive and for me soon…soon… into that bluish twilight the other modes of being…is not this, too renascent? As the light[?]

  I love the light…That dim light what ever [lies] after being, must be like the dimness at the heart of stone. But the stone too, it basking in the strong sun, may admit the light, light filtering in through the stone’s pores into the wheeling communities of its silence that may be filled with infinite noises and even high singing.

  Reading Jung for the first time on April 14th, she was “amazed and delighted.” Certainly Jung’s theories on the shadow representing the dark side, aspects of the psyche that exist unacknowledged, would have appealed to her. In her speech, “Woman and the Creative Will,” she writes: “We must turn an even bolder front to the shadows,” and in her poem “Sun-up” she had written: “nothing…nothing…nothing…/but a shadow/with its eyes full of black light.”

  She had also been reading Santayana and a book about behaviorists. “Romanticism is spirituality in a state of immaturity,” she asserts in her diary. There was nothing romantic about the world situation that she was hearing about over the radio.. The U.S. was just then leading straight into war, the Nazis having conquered France, Norway, and Denmark, the Dutch were under siege, a U.S. admiral declaring that war with Japan was inevitable, and 22,000 Polish soldiers had been secretly slaughtered by Stalin—all this in April, 1940. Ten days later, in a letter to Louise Adams Floyd, she set out her objections to the current Communist practice: “I am appalled by the rigidity of contours already taking place in Marxian Communism—a mass religion—as though some essential essence had fled and a rigor mortis were setting in…”

  She continued by discussing what seemed to refer to the debate over the passing of the Smith Act just then in the process of being revived by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Very similar to the 1918 Alien Act that deported Emma Goldman, the Smith Act was being used against Australian-born union leader Harry Bridges who vocally opposed the coming war. The most famous trade unionist at the time, Bridges had appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1937, and ran for president against FDR. Ridge writes:

  The constitution must not be expanded to meet the altered conditions and changing lines of force—as it was in the beginning so let it be unto the end, Amen!…they could not have possibly foreseen the rise of Industrial Capitalism nor the Dragon’s form it was destined to become so that now all they think they can do is keep it from further swelling.

  The Smith Act became law that June, and Bridges was arrested but not ultimately deported although the government made four attempts. He became head of the ILWU and made it a pillar of U.S. trade unionism.

  Ridge couldn’t persuade Lawson of the seriousne
ss of the political situation. She commented: “There is in him a refusal to face things. A stubbornness—he will not see that which he does not wish to see. He does not so much evade reality as ignore it.” Her assessment of this tendency tallies with the executor’s discovery in the 1970s that Lawson refused to admit that Ridge was ever ill, poor, or radical despite Ridge’s mention of all three in nearly every letter of the hundreds she wrote.

  Ridge was not deluded about the state of her own health. She tried to be brave, at least to herself. “As a matter of truth, I’m making a paltry showing—we must get together on this—me, the crowd of me.” It wasn’t easy. “I must… if necessary continue on one meal a day[,] endure the headaches and ward off the migraine, that everlasting curse, and the colitis…” This is the only time in her life she gives her possible ailment a name.

  Fragments of poetry begin to crop up in the diary, as on May 5:

  Again shall reappear

  The bloodied perennial;

  By each appointed wall.

  In each more inclement year,

  The white stalk bearing

  Again the flower.

  Revelatory prose follows the poetry, with violent, almost Jungian imagery:

  After washing up, I was tired and lay down…As I lay waking, twilight soft at the windows, light streaming in through the open door from Davy’s study, this: I became aware of a terrible explosion from some deep deep place, a burning glow through which some shattered substance shot up and out as though [the] earth vomited. Separate flames tongued but downward in a vast angle; converged, the point of the angle in the center of the crater’s cup disappeared in this cup. A column of smoke pillared skyward…

  On May 11th, she recorded that she suffered a sharp pain on her left side, yet she “managed to get meals ready…Stress of news from Europe made me worse. I cannot help my violent reaction.” Two days later Lawson and Ridge had “no money even to buy papers until after 15th—and that will go in debts.” Such deprivation dug deep into her relationship with Lawson, for a week later she notes:

  I said something cruel. It was true, but how cruel the truth can be. I am cruel. Davy says I would destroy anyone near enough to be hurt by me. He said further my attitude toward the race was large and ‘all right’ but that I am destructive in my relationships with individuals—that I haven’t destroyed him but I would destroy most people…I’m glad Davy spoke—any speech to me more satisfactory because more clarifying, than a sullen and glowering silence.

  A second set of entries, these between May 28 and June 9, were torn out. “A record of problems, illness, angers,” she called them in her next entry. Then she mentioned that Lenore Marshall had visited.

  I felt better for her coming. For all her nervousness she has stability and pride…a year ago when an ex-ray showed [a] cyst in [my] jaw… she said she would pay the bill…I’ve tried to hang on—but pain in my ear scares me and I can hardly eat…Until Davy comes back on Thursday or Friday [he had gone to to his stepfather’s funeral in Massachusetts] I have only a nickel.”

  Leonard Abbott passed on the news of Emma Goldman’s death, and she responds: “the bravest woman I have ever known…Nothing daunted her. Leonard Abbott told me that to the last she was fighting and working for loyalist Spain.” Scott had asked Ridge for money to assist Goldman in her last illness, and she regretted not being able to help her.

  She continued reading. Spengler’s The Decline of the West was her most recent book, one that suggested that the Western world was witnessing its “winter time,” or last season of its culture. It also hypothesized that democracy, driven by money, was easily corruptible and that fascism always followed, and that the first of man’s “high cultures” was the Babylonian.

  She was also reading Sandburg’s biography of Lincoln, most likely The War Years, the volume that had been published the year before. A bestseller, it became the source of most of what Americans knew about Lincoln for decades. “A stupendous achievement…I met him [Sandburg] once—twenty-two years ago,” she writes, no doubt making his acquaintance during the Others Chicago tour in 1919. Now America would be about to face a darker crisis than any Lincoln knew in his war years

  but with vastly more terrible implications. The menace is of the same quality involving as it does the forcible subjection and enslavement of parts of the race by some part or parts that have outgrown themselves like a giant cell in the body of the race that becomes malignant in the larger and fairer life about them.

  But it is more terrible because it implies a spiritual, even more than a physical enslavement—blackout of the mind’s light.

  She had mixed feelings in her diary about the American Fourth of July celebration, although she was happy to celebrate the French Revolution. She analyzed the current American warmongering through a distinctly feminist filter: “The ancient primal Male Dance—from which woman is shut out same as a chattel, a breeder of warriors for the industrial handmaiden of warriors…Beware…there may be a Woman Dance…”

  On July 10 she decided that she couldn’t accompany Lawson to the funeral of her dear friend Laura Benét’s mother.

  I tried to dress to go with him to the service at the Little Church around the Corner in Manhattan but so sick I could not even finish dressing. We were so broke I could not even buy flowers to lay upon her gentle hands that will never clasp mine with warmth again…

  She began to suffer once more from ulcerated teeth. She was afraid of incurring debt with a dentist but Lawson insisted on borrowing money, if not for her teeth, at least for his university classes. “He feels he needs to finish—and this will be too late for me… I am even without underwear.” But Lawson must have felt guilty—or angry that she wouldn’t take his money. “Davy sullen all day, will not speak unless spoken to—and not then unless an answer is absolutely necessary. How depressing to sit at dinner with a person who will not speak. There seems to be no light in him.”

  She had been consoling herself by reading Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs, “a simple and sweet book wholesome as daily bread[,] a goodwill toward men.” Kropotkin was the mensch of anarchy, to such an extent that even the Atlantic Monthly approved of him and commissioned his memoirs in 1898-99, publishing them in serial form as “An Autobiography of a Revolutionist.” Emma Goldman delivered one of the eulogies at his funeral, which was also the last public demonstration of the Russian anarchists.

  Ridge concurred in the diary with Goldman’s 1920s condemnation of the Russian Communists, at least on aesthetic grounds:

  I think of those awful paintings at the Soviet building in the World’s Fair [New York’s]—the mindless grimace of assumed joy on the faces of the people depicted…this tawdry decoration of a smile stamped upon the faces of a people—the Smile, not only officially approved but officially imposed.”

  But she had a scarcely better opinion of capitalism in the U.S. Writing about “the glamor boy” Wendell Wilkie, who was then Republican candidate for president against Roosevelt, she deemed Wilkie

  an intelligent businessman, a shrewd advocate of capitalism… he implies a society of good capitalists—no more believable than a plague of good locusts—who out of their self-imposed self control should devour only selected crops—leaving a residue for the grateful croppers.

  In August she was ruminating over Sir Leonard Woolley’s excavations at Ur and his suggestion that it was the home of Abraham in early Jewish history.

  Abraham the first concept of the male, the mateless god, who was to topple from their pedestals so many goddesses…long before it was evolved in the working spirit of Abraham…it must have been a persistent though unidentified hunger in the males of the Jewish race.

  She fell on a recently washed floor and was now confined to bed. “To go forward, without fear toward the new,” Ridge insists in the diary. She writes that Lawson had to “cook all meals Saturday and Sunday. This he did sweetly, nervously and most incompetently. It took him fifty minutes to wash the spinach.” She had considerably less fortit
ude by the end of the month.

  I cried yesterday afternoon for a long time, very rare for me, once in a great while, in years. When I do my heart rocks itself for a long while…bound by the load it is dragging. The load is a part of itself that has fallen out and down but is held by its leg…so the heart cannot shake itself free.

  But she didn’t capitulate to the solace of religion. “I wish,” she writes, “that, like Lincoln,

  I could pray to a personal God, but I cannot. Because I cannot [,] L’s [Lincoln’s] contaminous appeals to the Almighty irritate, sometimes disgust me. His god was the god of battles, the mateless one, ruthless in shining to whom both sides in all battles (each of course believing in its absolute rightness) make a like appeal…

  Her old friend Hanna Astrup Larsen visited her. A Norwegian raised in Iowa who became an anthropologist, she wrote a book on the Zulu, focusing on the Zulu’s domestic, rather than warlike attributes. Larsen also wrote the biography of Selma Lagerlof, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Ridge had championed Lagerlof in “Woman and the Creative Will,” and reviewed The Holy City, her novel about Jerusalem. Certainly they must have discussed the recent Nazi invasion of Norway.

  At the end of September, Ridge and Lawson moved for the last time, from Columbia Heights to 111 Montague Street, into a building with an elevator. Five stories, it is still garlanded on the interior with bas-reliefs of bowers and quite respectable, with a beautiful twist of interior stairs. Just a few blocks away, W.H. Auden, composer Benjamin Britten, Carson McCullers, and Gypsy Rose Lee, and eventually, Paul and Jane Bowles lived together as a group around the same time, attempting to re-create the excitement of the early years of the literary 1920s. What would Ridge have thought of that? Thomas Wolfe lived a few doors down five years earlier.

  Reading Edna St. Vincent Millay’s new Make Bright the Arrows, Ridge notes in her diary, “She is too complacent. If she realized her limitations she might transcend them.” Millay’s poems, instead of continuing her antiwar stance, propagandized now against isolationism and encouraged U.S. entry into war. “Acres of bad poetry” was how Millay herself described them later.