Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  Perhaps Ridge feared that together, the two of them would starve. There were still poorhouses in the U.S. Only a few years later, the poet Marina Tsvetaeva would leave her daughters in a Russian orphanage during a famine, thinking they would survive better without her. Her two-year-old quickly died of starvation anyway. Where would Ridge find employment to feed her son? Who would care for him while she searched?

  Motherhood, for the women poets of 1915-45, was virtually compulsory, in that a childless woman was made to feel essentially a failure…no matter what else she might accomplish…The majority of woman poets who rose to prominence between the World Wars did not, however, have children, indicating the choice of an artistic identity as opposed to the threat of anonymity that motherhood represented. And those who did have children tended to be stricken with ambivalence and conflict, or highly unconventional…

  writes William Drake in The First Wave: Women Poets in America 1915-1945. Mina Loy (1882-1966) left two children, one her lover’s, the other her husband’s, for several years in Italy, returning only to deposit a third by Arthur Craven. When the children’s nanny suggested that leaving them again might damage them, Loy broke all the dishes. Heiress and publisher Caresse Crosby (1891-1970) housed her children in an icy toolshed so that Harry would not have to endure their company. Olga Rudge (1895-1996), Ezra Pound’s mistress, deposited Mary with shepherds until she was old enough to take dictation for them in Venice. Ridge’s friend, the poet Elinor Wylie (1885-1928), told everyone she had been pregnant eight times, but never mentioned the son she had abandoned when he was very young. Although Ridge gave her assistant, the poet and novelist Kay Boyle, $100 for her first abortion, Boyle subsequently had five more children, and left the first at Isadora Duncan’s brother’s commune in London. While Boyle typed her work across the street and took dance classes, her daughter wore tunics and sandals all winter and was severely punished for defecation. The novelist Evelyn Scott (1893-1963), another good friend of Ridge’s, had a child in the wilds of Brazil and dragged him through a ménage à trois with Thomas Merton’s father. D.H. Lawrence was so jealous of Frieda (1879-1956) seeing her children, she had to wait outside their school so she could talk to them and give them presents to “keep herself fresh in their memories.” The most positive of these unusual stratagems was that of the poet H.D. (1886-1961). Hilda Doolittle bore a daughter as the result of an adulterous fling with Cecil Gray, a Scottish music critic, when she was 28, and persuaded her husband, the poet Richard Aldington, to give the infant his name. A few years later she began a relationship with Bryher (1894-1983), the daughter of a British shipping magnate, who then married writer Robert McAlmon in order that, now married, she and H.D. could travel together, free of suspicion. McAlmon, initially attracted to H.D., acted as surrogate father until Bryher divorced him for Kenneth McPherson, a nascent filmmaker and critic who was also in love with H.D. H.D. then aborted McPherson’s child but allowed him to give his name to her daughter. Perdita, “the lost one,” had many last names but, in her case, they chronicled a history of fathers. She claimed to have been happy because she enjoyed two mothers, but she was also looked after by an extensive staff.

  Ridge and her son Keith, however, were alone.

  Chapter 7

  “Not Without Fame in Her Own Land”

  On September 26, 1907, the Moana docked first in Victoria, then in Vancouver, during a record dry spell not to be equaled until 2012. This meant the fjords of British Columbia were spectacular, the air and water crystal blue, the mountains, like those in Hokitika, in majestic evidence, and the bustling dockworkers in a good mood. Ridge’s accent and her assumed name—Robson—would have passed unnoticed, both common in Canada, then and now. Robson Street, at the center of downtown Vancouver, was named after John Robson, the premier of British Columbia from 1889-1892, Mount Robson is the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies, and by 1911, 40 Robsons lived in Vancouver.

  Ridge must have seen Canada as just another British colonial outpost unworthy of her long trip and all she had given up. Many Canadian artists felt the same way—half of all Canadian writers emigrated to New York at the turn of the century. Ridge transferred her son and their five pieces of luggage to The City of Puebla and sailed on to San Francisco without a break. Four days later, on September 30th, she arrived at her final destination. The front page of that day’s San Francisco Call screamed: “Parents To Fight for Custody of Babes.” A wealthy banker’s brother had knocked his sister-in-law to the ground while he was trying to retrieve her child for his brother. Not such a positive sign for the runaway Ridge.

  To conceal her departure from her husband, she had not only changed her name but had also declared herself 10 years younger on the ship’s manifest. She had begun taking years off her age in Australia, when she gave her birth date as three years later in a note to her publisher. It was an era in which it was socially unacceptable to ask a woman’s age, and official records were less detailed and accurate than they are today. This worked to Ridge’s advantage, and for anyone wanting to disappear. Her mother at various times had declared herself 8 and even 14 years younger than her estimated age. Whether or not it was more of Ridge following her mother’s footsteps, she must have realized that in addition to making it harder for her husband to trace her journey, she would be starting over in a new country, yet another new literary scene, and she would need more time to establish herself—and that youth more easily attracts opportunity. She hid the deceit well: no one knew about her true age until after her death.

  Her third subterfuge was to declare on the manifest that she was Australian, erasing the 24 years of the youth she spent in New Zealand. She did love Australia, and perhaps claiming it as her homeland suggested less esoteric roots, while explaining what was most likely not a regulation British accent. She certainly wouldn’t want to be mistaken for one of the English, who oppressed her Irish forebears. Perhaps she claimed the country as a way to express her gratitude to her cousin Eddie in Sydney—the one she refers to as “a dear cousin”—who might have helped her with their passage.

  Ridge was plucky and determined to rise in the world. She had no parent to frown on her efforts, no peers from school measuring her progress or condemning her chutzpah. Given that she claimed an aristocratic past, she might have felt she was regaining her proper station by reshaping her identity. She could have revealed her true age when she arrived, and she had the option of admitting her New Zealand youth, especially after she became friends in New York with several New Zealanders, including Thomas Merton’s father. She could have taken the name Reilly, for that matter, and strengthened her hold on her illustrious genealogy, or even kept her alias Sybill Robson. Pride in her literary achievements, however, made her want to claim those earlier publications, and she quickly published her first poem in America under the name Lola Ridge, the Australian. “Not without fame in her own land” read the introduction to her poem in the Overland Monthly of March 1908. “Miss Ridge is sure to win fame in the United States for her style is breezily strong, and, in her sentimental moods, appealingly beautiful.”

  The ballad she published, “Chronicles of Sandy Gully as Kept by Skiting Bill” is laden—or overladen—with the colorful language of the gold rush: “The sandy pug was risin’ an the claim was duffered out/The divy of the washin wouldn’t pay a three bob shout.” Anyone from New Zealand would have known the locale, and anyone who knew her pen name would know the poem was hers. But even if Peter Webster had spies on the lookout, poems in a San Francisco magazine weren’t going to tell him her location. Taken from her “lost” Verses manuscript, the poem was well worth resurrecting in her new country. Robert Service’s book of ballads, The Spell of the Yukon, had just become a bestseller and would go on to sell three million copies. The central poem in his book, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” drew on his gold rush experiences in the Klondike. With her poems on gold mining in the Antipodes, she was assured a positive reception.

  First edited by Bret Harte in 1868,
the Overland Monthly was deemed a “Western Atlantic Monthly,” where Harte ran his famous “The Luck of Roaring Camp” in one of its earliest issues. Willa Cather was a contributor, as was John Neihardt. Jack London received 15 cents a word for his stories in 1907. In June 1908, the editor accepted another of Ridge’s poems and writes: “Mrs. Ridge, in the “Under Song,” gives us a poet’s appreciation of the great australian [sic] mystery.” She must have thought well of his selection: “Under Song” appears as part of “Voices of the Bush,” the first poem in her Verses manuscript. Tucked in the Overland Monthly between the book reviews and the publisher’s note, the poem begins evocatively enough:

  The mystical, the strong

  Deep-throated Bush,

  Is humming in the hush

  Low bars of song:

  Far singing in the trees

  In tongues unknown—

  A reminiscent tone

  On minor keys: (Verses 1)

  The year before she arrived, San Francisco’s own gold-mining era had ended in the terrible fire caused by the earthquake. The city still smelled of ash, and bubonic plague had broken out. Rats were everywhere—even in the municipal government. It had been dismissed for graft, and hearings about the mishandling of relief funds resulted in the publisher of a leading newspaper being kidnapped, a witness’s house dynamited, and one of the country’s most notable prosecutors shot point-blank in the courtroom by a “madman.” President Theodore Roosevelt decided to hand over the relief money to the Red Cross. In May a streetcar strike resulted in “Bloody Tuesday,” with the police chief ordering shoot-to-kill, the governor threatening to send in troops, and three dead and scores wounded. Some streetcar conductors were still armed when she arrived. People made homeless by the earthquake were living in horse stalls, one-room shacks, and tents. Mary Kelley, a mother of two with an invalid husband, resented having to pay the city for donated shelter and teamed up with several other women to “liberate” flour from the city’s supply, accusing them of hoarding. On the other hand, the telephones were working within a few days of the quake, and saloons were closed for only two months.

  Ridge was certainly not unfamiliar with the chaos caused by earthquakes. New Zealand had had at least three major quakes while she was growing up, including one as strong as the 2011 earthquake that destroyed Christchurch. In the 13 stanzas of “Two Nights,” she had already commemorated a volcanic eruption, the terrifying Tarawa that killed 120 New Zealanders in 1886.

  A low, continuous, booming sound—

  Like beat of surf on the distant Sound,

  It swelling in the rumbling east;

  The deep hill heeled on the rolling ground

  And moaned like a waking beast. (Verses 65)

  As a result of the San Francisco gold rush fifty years earlier, some 7,000 Australians and New Zealanders settled between Telegraph Hill and the end of Pacific and Broadway, so many that it was known as “Sydney Valley” or “Sydney Town.” No Penfolds are listed in the 1907 San Francisco Directory, but there are three MacFarlane’s. Given that it was unlikely that she would find refuge with her husband’s relatives, perhaps Ridge knew someone through the Australian Martin Lewis (1881-1962), a student of Julian Ashton’s during the early days of the art school. Born in Castlemaine, a gold-mining town in similar decline to Hokitika’s, he traveled to New Zealand as a “posthole digger and a merchant seaman before settling into a Bohemian community outside of Sydney.” Two of his drawings were published in the Bulletin. After several years of training in Sydney, he painted backdrops for the McKinley presidential campaign of 1900 in San Francisco, and was working in New York by 1909. A teacher and friend of Edward Hopper’s, he eventually sold proto-social realist prints of city life to the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney. Described by his dealer as looking “like an escapee from a tramp steamer in an early Eugene O’Neill sea tale,” he saw quite a lot of Ridge after she arrived in New York, and he was listed on her second husband’s draft card as “one who would always know his address.”

  He may have already been in New York when she needed, at the very least, a babysitter so she could work. Daycare in San Francisco was five cents a day at the Holy Family Day Home, the only facility in the city at the time. Perhaps Ridge tried leaving Keith there, although with all the dislocation from the San Francisco earthquake more children would have been roaming the streets than ever. Some time after her arrival in San Francisco, she and Keith traveled to Los Angeles. Changing her name to Rosa Bernand, she posed as a widow, her mother’s ruse, and a part she had played long ago in “I’ve Written to Browne” in Hokitika, gave Keith the new surname and a new birthplace—Australia—and asserted that her husband in Sydney had died in 1904. She lied in order to hide her son from her husband, or to hide her deed from posterity, or to separate herself psychologically from what she was doing, and left her son at the Boys and Girls Aid Society on February 3, 1908, two weeks after his eighth birthday.

  In 1899, a Mr. Heap reported that the orphanage’s sister institution in San Francisco cared for “incorrigibles,” children arrested for minor offenses, abandoned children, and half-orphans. No more than 10 to 20 percent of the children were actual orphans, the balance being these “half-orphans,” children with at least one parent unable, unwilling, or unfit to care for them. According to The Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society, “single poor parents often regarded them [orphanages] as places they could leave their children temporarily until circumstances improved, or as places where their children could get a good education.” More than 100,000 children were living in American orphanages by 1910. Before the turn of the century, labor leader Rose Scheiderman’s mother put three of her children in an orphanage after the death of her husband while she cared for a newborn. Forty years later, Dorothea Lange left her five children in three different foster homes while she went off on photo shoots. One could think of Ridge’s act as analogous to placing the child in boarding school at the same age as British children, as children were not regularly adopted in orphanages then but taken home after the family crisis was over. Perhaps she hoped she would return to Los Angeles or send for him after she had settled in New York. She must have had some idea about the terrible conditions that typically occur with the overcrowding of children who were supported by the state—four years earlier Keith’s orphanage was home to 426 children. Like its sister organization in San Francisco, it received only $25 from the city and county for the first two months to care for each boy, and nothing thereafter. Ridge didn’t have to pay anything.

  Perhaps due to overcrowding, Keith was moved to the Los Angeles Orphan Home Society in 1909 and spent over a year there. A combination of orphanage and census records revealed that he returned to the Boys and Girls Aid Society in 1910. Neither Ridge’s executor nor any biographical entry has ever mentioned either placement, one measure of the stigma still attached to such an act. Keith remained in the orphanage until he was 14, the age when all orphans were then turned out into the world.

  Because New Zealand was a world leader in social legislation, Ridge was surely not ignorant of the possible emotional consequences of her actions. In just a few years, her soon-to-be-friend Theodore Dreiser would meet with President Roosevelt to press for the end of orphanages, arguing that families should be supported instead of torn apart. Decades would pass in America, however, before the orphanages emptied. In the 1930s, after muckrakers published the worst of the evils of the institution, orphanages were still burgeoning with Depression-era castoffs. Maybe Ridge did her son a favor, maybe she was not a good mother. A father, in the same circumstances, would not have risked social condemnation leaving his child at an orphanage. One hundred fifty years earlier, Jean-Jacques Rousseau abandoned five bastards on the doorsteps of orphanages to their probable deaths. A contemporary example is Apple founder Steve Jobs, who abandoned his daughter for many years.

  Perhaps Ridge never considered keeping Keith. Perhaps after erasing ten years of h
er life, she wanted the freedom to truly pursue that life. On March 20, 1908, just after she would have received payment for her first publication in the Overland Monthly, she sailed on the S.S. Finance from Panama to New York, a route cheaper than traveling by train overland. She arrived at Ellis Island a week later as Lola Ridge, claiming to be single and a U.S. citizen.

  II

  New York City and Beyond,

  1908–1917

  Chapter 8

  “Our Gifted Rebel Poet”

  Seven months after Ridge’s arrival, Emma Goldman, the most famous anarchist of the century, was writing her as “Dear Comrade.” Emma shared Ridge’s mother’s name and her monumental status in her life.

  Emma Goldman

  How should they appraise you,

  who walk up close to you

  as to a mountain,

  each proclaiming his own eyeful

  against the other’s eyeful.

  Only time

  standing off well

  will measure your circumference

  and height. (Sun-up 90)