Anything That Burns You
Page 11
Secrets
Secrets,
infesting my half-sleep…
did you enter my wound from another wound
brushing mine in a crowd…
or did I snare you on my sharper edges
as a bird flying through cobwebbed trees at sun-up
carries off spiders on its wings?
Secrets,
running over my soul without a sound,
only when dawn comes tip-toeing
ushered by a suave wind,
and dreams disintegrate
like breath shapes on frosty air,
I shall overhear you, bare-foot,
scatting off into the darkness…
I shall know you, secrets
by the litter you have left
and by your bloody foot-prints. (Sun-up 64)
Many of the political events Ridge wrote about throughout her career occurred in 1917: the lynching of labor leader Frank Little (“Frank Little at Calvary”), the terrible riots in East St. Louis (“Lullaby,”), the first electrocutions—there were 45 in that first year of operation—(“Electrocution”), and the passing of the draft law for World War I (“The Fire”).
The Fire
The old men of the world have made a fire
To warm their trembling hands.
They poke the young men in.
The young men burn like withes.
If one runs a little way,
The old men are wrath.
They catch him and bind him and throw him again to the flames.
Green withes burn slow…
And the smoke of the young men’s torment
Rises round and sheer as the trunk of a pillared oak,
And the darkness thereof spreads over the sky….
Green withes burn slow…
And the old men of the world sit round the fire
And rub their hands….
But the smoke of the young men’s torment
Ascends up for ever and ever. (Ghetto 71)
Political activist Tom Mooney, tried for alleged participation in a bombing in San Francisco in 1916, began serving his 22 years of jail in 1917. Ridge’s poem on his incarceration written many years later helped free him. The Russian Revolution had at last begun in 1917, the inspiration for a number of her poems in her third book, Red Flag, and the revolution in Mexico, where she would spend several years writing, was then in full swing. In addition, “some 50,000 lumber workers in the Northwest and 40,000 copper miners in Montana, Arizona, and New Mexico were on strike at one time during 1917,” according to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Ridge often wrote about labor.
Most importantly, the Espionage Act was passed in 1917. This law made it a crime to interfere with the operation or success of the military. America’s first Red Scare ensued, with the Alien Immigration Act passed shortly thereafter, so the government could deport those who were not citizens. The Sedition Act passed the following year forbade Americans to use “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the government, the flag, or its army. Perhaps Goldman inspired this last bit of legislation. In June of 1917, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman spoke against the draft. 15,000 radicals waited outside, surrounded by mounted police armed with clubs and revolvers, with another 5,000 inside, standing cheek-to-jowl with agitators. Bottles and bricks thrown by these agitators broke the speaker’s table and a stage light during Berkman’s speech, and catcalls constantly interrupted him. Eventually soldiers tried to storm the podium, and fighting broke out. Goldman took the stage and called them to order.
‘I am an anarchist,’ she said, ‘and do not believe in force morally or otherwise to induce you to do anything against your conscience, and that is why I tell you to use your own judgement and rely upon your own conscience…If that is a crime, if that is treason, I am willing to be shot.’
Goldman and Berkman were arrested and imprisoned for trying to “induce persons not to register” for the new draft. Others, according to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “who made chance remarks on war, conscription or sale of bonds, were tarred and feathered, beaten sometimes to insensibility, forced to kiss the flag, driven out of town, forced to buy bonds, threatened with lynching.” Historian Lilian Symes describes German farmers whipped to make them subscribe to the Red Cross, religious pacificists beaten and tortured, an I.W.W. organizer hung from a tree by the chief of police until unconscious. She writes that when “the war fever was at its height, radicalism or pacificism in the smaller towns and rural communities was almost suicidal.”
Perhaps Ridge, wandering these small towns as an anarchist without proper papers, felt the authorities closing in. Or did she just run out of money? She returned alone to New York City in August 1917. Lawson returned in December.
III
Modernism in New York
1918–1928
Chapter 11
The Ghetto and Other Poems
The revolution for Ridge during her five years of exile was primarily aesthetic. What was she reading those crucial years? Her library at Bryn Mawr—culled by Lawson—contains only two literary works published before 1920: The World We Live In by Helen Keller and Children of the Frost by Jack London. Lawson may have sold the first editions of poetry that inspired her. In those years, “Rockets of poetry went up and burst in the sky over the heads of an amazed people,” according to poet James Oppenheim. A few months after Ridge left New York in 1912, Harriet Monroe, at the urging of Pound, began publishing modernist work in her new magazine, Poetry. As an ambitious poet traveling the Midwest, Ridge would have read the magazine, followed the uproar over the new free verse, and assimilated its tenets. Others magazine too had been launched and lauded, and she must have closely followed its trajectory as well since Ferrer colleagues like Man Ray published in it.
Soon after she settled with Lawson in Manhattan, she published thirteen modernist poems in the best magazines: five in Poetry, two in Current Opinion, one in Dial, one in Literary Digest, one in The International, two in Others, and three in the New Republic that April, including “The Ghetto,” which was then reprinted in Playboy, a serious avant-garde magazine with a full-page spread and a glamorous headshot taken by Esta Verez, the concert singer, pianist, and the companion of Ridge’s friend, Martin Lewis.
The son of a rabbi, publisher B.W. Huebsch (1876-1974) would have been interested in her subject matter, the Jewish immigrant, and he was known to only choose work that “appealed personally” to him. He had already published Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow. Hart Crane always wanted to be published by him. Francis Hackett, founder and editor at the New Republic and a journalist who wrote on the subordination of women and immigrants, made the connection to Huebsch for Ridge early that spring, and her manuscript was accepted May 4. Although Huebsch “refused to degrade literature by dragging it into the same marketplace with toothpaste and movies,” when he brought out The Ghetto and Other Poems that September, it created an immediate sensation.
Cool, inaccessible air
Is floating in velvety blackness shot with steel-blue lights,
But no breath stirs the heat
Leaning its ponderous bulk upon the Ghetto
And most on Hester Street…
The heat…
Nosing in the body’s overflow,
Like a beast pressing its great steaming belly close,
Covering all avenues of air…
The heat in Hester Street,
Heaped like a dray
With the garbage of the world. (Ghetto 8)
The New Republic, only four years old, emphasized the importance of Ridge’s The Ghetto and Other Poems by advertising the book on its cover alongside a notice for work by H.G. Wells. In preparation, Ridge published four very good reviews in the magazine from May to October. Hackett himself reviewed her book. “Miss Lola Ridge is capable of that powerful exaltation on the wings of real feeling which brings a new world into vision…[“The Ghetto”] is beyon
d doubt the most vivid and sensitive and lovely embodiment that exists in American literature of that many-sided transplantation of Jewish city-dwellers which vulgarity dismisses with a laugh or a jeer.” Conrad Aiken at The Dial gave her the left-handed compliment of “masculine”: “She arranges her figures for us with a muscular force which seems masculine; it is singular to come upon a book written by a woman in which vigor is so clearly a more natural quality than grace.” Although there were many instances at the time in all the arts when critics evoked the masculine to praise a woman’s work, in this case such an evocation was particularly paradoxical since the nine-part title poem situates the ghetto within the “cramped ova” of the female body. Consider the image of parturition put forward in these early lines:
The street crawls undulant,
Like a river addled
With its hot tide of flesh
That ever thickens.
Heavy surges of flesh
Break over the pavements,
Clavering like a surf—
Flesh of this abiding
Brood of those ancient mothers who saw the dawn break over Egypt…
And turned their cakes upon the hot dry stones (Ghetto 9)
“Miss Ridge is a trifle obsessed with the concern of being powerful,” Aiken added. His criticism contains the kernel of what would condemn her later—she evinced a literary power that threatened men. Other reviewers were more generous. Babette Deutsch in The Little Review wrote, “To read Lola Ridge is to shudder with the throb of unrelenting engines and the hammer on the pavement of numberless nervous feet.” Poet and anthologist and eventually U.S. poet laureate Louis Untermeyer announced that it was the discovery of the year, and for the New York Post he wrote, “Nothing is forced or artificialized in her energetic volume, which contains some of the most vibrant utterances heard in America since Arturo Giovannitti’s surprisingly neglected ‘Arrows in the Gale.’” Untermeyer also recognized her unique frame of reference: “Her early life in Australia has doubtless enabled her to draw the American city with such an unusual sense of perspective.” Then he conflates the poet with the poetry: “the still small voice of the poet makes itself heard—a strangely attenuated voice with a tense accent, a fineness that, seeming fragile, is like the delicacy of a thin steel spring.” Emma Goldman, who knew Ridge better than the others, wrote to her niece about the publication: “New Republic…contain[ed] a masterly poem by Lola on the mob—the finest thing she has written…she really is a poet, Stella dear—and what is more important, she is close to the people.” Alfred Kreymborg went further in Poetry: “She is a prototype of the artist rebels of Russia, Germany, and Austro-Hungary who were the forerunners of the present regime over there—men like Dostoievsky, Gorky, Moussorgsky, Beethoven, Heine, Hauptmann, Schnitzler.” He likened her work to Emily Dickinson, Adelaide Crapsey and H.D. When Ridge read excerpts years later to an admittedly captive audience at a sanatorium, “girls [who] had lived in the ghetto…were hurt and [had] tears behind their eyes because they were reminded of something they wished above all to forget.” She had captured something true.
In an early 20th-century photograph, an almost impassable Hester Street is filled with pushcarts and vendors and street hawkers and shoppers and vagrants and people who had no place to go other than the street. Known as “Pig Market” because the street vendors sold everything except pork, the street had one of the densest populations in the world. Roaches were stacked inches high in the apartments photographed by Lewis Hine, and garbage of all kinds was pitched out the windows: bones, feces, dead rats. People ate raw oysters from the carts, rented their dinner plates, and hung out their clothes between buildings, despite an ever-present rain of soot from the chimneys. The clomping of iron-shod horses, the occasional roadster, and the hawking and yelling of the immigrants kept the streets noisy. Children were left in nearby Seward Park to fend for themselves while their mothers worked. After a day in the sweatshops, these mothers came home to washing and ironing and cooking until 2 a.m. Instead of portraying them as victims or as subhuman, “snarling a weird Yiddish,” as Henry James had termed them, or the Jew squatting on the windowsill in Eliot’s “Gerontion,” or beneath the rats in his “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” Ridge found the possibility of renewal in their difficult lives.
Nights, she reads
Those books that have most unset thought,
New-poured and malleable,
To which her thought
Leaps fusing at white heat,
Or spits her fire out in some dim manger of a hall,
Or at a protest meeting on the Square,
Her lit eyes kindling the mob…
.…………………………………….
She reads without bias—
Doubting clamorously—
Psychology, plays, science, philosophies—
Those giant flowers that have bloomed and withered, scattering their seed…
—And out of this young forcing soil what growth may come—
what amazing blossomings. (Ghetto 11-12, 13)
An interview in 1919 revealed that she lived “in a five by seven room in an East Side tenement” when she first came to New York City, although Lawson maintained that she saw Jews for the first time only on a tour given by Konrad Bercovici around 1911. However, The Ghetto and Other Poems, published five years after she last lived in New York, displays an intimate knowledge of life on Hester Street. Working terms in the sweatshops would have been rough: nine hours a day on weekdays plus seven hours on Saturdays, with women earning between $7 and $12 a week. Her fellow workers would have been the Italians or Eastern European girls who ruled the neighborhood. She knew them well:
Bodies dangle from the fire escapes
Or sprawl over the stoops…
Upturned faces glimmer pallidly—
Herring-yellow faces, spotted as with a mold,
And moist faces of girls
Like dank white lilies,
And infants’ faces with open parched mouths that suck at the air
as at empty teats. (Ghetto 8)
Just fifteen blocks from Hester Street stood the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which employed hundreds of female garment workers. In 1909, after a wave of strikes when women “announced to the world women’s wage-earning presence,” the factory received notice from a fire-prevention expert, suggesting safety measures. The letter was ignored. “Let ’em burn. They’re a lot of cattle, anyway,” said another factory owner, reflecting the prevailing attitude. The shirtwaist factory had no fire escapes for the upper floors, unfortunately a common situation, and tiny bits of fabric floated through the air, ready to act as tinder. Within a year of the notice, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 garment workers, mostly women from the ages of 16 to 23, making it the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of New York City. Even the technology was against them. Although some of the women had been warned about the fire by telephone, they couldn’t get down, and when help arrived it was only a horse-drawn fire engine, although motorized equipment had been in use for several years. So many of the workers were driven to jump that it took an hour to find two survivors under a pile of 40 bodies. A few years later, one of the owners was fined $20 for locking the doors of the same factory again.
Sadie dresses in black.
She has black-wet hair full of cold lights
And a fine-drawn face, too white.
All day the power machines
Drone in her ears…
All day the fine dust flies
Till throats are parched and itch
And the heat—like a kept corpse—
Fouls to the last corner. (Ghetto 11)
Using the ghetto and its immigrants as subjects was at the time not so remarkable. Jacob Riis’s bestselling book of photographs, How the Other Half Lives, had been in circulation for a decade, and silent movies like Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1917) were popular. Israel Zangwill’s 1909 play The Melting Pot, based o
n his novel The Children of the Ghetto, earned accolades from former president Theodore Roosevelt, who leaned out of his box to shout, “That’s a great play, Mr. Zangwill, that’s a great play.” Morris Rosenfeld, the “pants presser poet,” had published Songs from the Ghetto in a Yiddish/English edition by 1898. Maudlin and Victorian in style, the book showed the reality of life in the sweatshop at the turn of the century as the inverse of Whitman’s Song of Myself: “My self is destroyed, I become a machine.” Ridge owned Hutchins Hapgood’s novel, The Spirit of the Ghetto, which was “an attempt made by a ‘Gentile’ to report sympathetically on the character, lives and pursuits of certain east-side Jews with whom he has been in relations of considerable intimacy.” The book is a series of prose sociological portraits that ends with Levitzky, an anarchist and young poet, declaring:
“I have written a poem on liberty which I intend to read at the meeting. Do you wish to hear it?” He drew a manuscript from his pocket and read enthusiastically a poem in which a turbulent love for man and nature, for social equality and foaming cataracts was expressed in rich imagery.
That certainly sounds like a prescription for Ridge.
“To The American People,” the epigraph to The Ghetto and Other Poems, immediately depicts the exuberant but bitter spirit of the disillusioned immigrant:
To The American People
Will you feast with me, American People?
But what have I that shall seem good to you!
On my board are bitter apples
And honey served on thorns,
And in my flagons fluid iron,
Hot from the crucibles.
How should such fare entice you! (Ghetto [7] )
Unlike Emma Lazarus, a comfortable middle-class Jew whose ancestors emigrated during the colonial period, whose “Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” is engraved on the Statue of Liberty, Lola Ridge knew the miseries and disappointments of the immigrants firsthand, as one of them. The persona driving “The Ghetto” rooms with a Jewish family, the Sodos, on the fifth floor of a tenement “in the little green room that was Bennie’s/with Sadie,” a room