Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  When Kreymborg married his second wife, Dorothy, in the fall of 1918, he was “accompanied by a new and devoted pair of friends, Lola Ridge, the Australian poet and now one of the editors of Others, and her husband, David Lawson, an electrician from Wales.” Judging from Kreymborg’s description of the couple, his acquaintance with them never went very deep. Lawson was not yet her husband, and he certainly was not an electrician from Wales. That Kreymborg should not know the first is understandable, although odd at a wedding when such experiences are often shared (Ridge did not invite Kreymborg to their wedding a year later or Kreymborg, writing this memoir in 1925, would have been better informed). That he still didn’t know Lawson’s true nationality or occupation suggests their friendship was based more on the silence of the chess matches they must have had rather than the confidences between friends. Or does it suggest that Lawson had colluded with the “Australian” Ridge in presenting himself with less-than-truthful information?

  Kreymborg had tired of his editorial duties by the time of his marriage, and the magazine was falling apart. Ridge alone “kept the movement going,” according to his memoir. Although he states that she was already working as an editor in the fall of 1918, Ridge first appeared on the Others masthead December 1918. For three issues Ridge shared the associate editorship with the poet/illustrator William Saphier and Dorothy Kreymborg, and with poet Orrick Johns and art editor William Zorach for one and two issues, respectively.

  Presumably Ridge too picnicked with the boys—the back of her apartment at 21 East 15th Street joined the Kreymborgs’ backyard at 17 East 14th Street for almost a year. Off the masthead of The Birth Control Review since September 1918, Ridge published two poems in Kreymborg’s Others December 1918 issue, which included Wallace Stevens’ “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” Mina Loy’s “The Black Virginity,” and Carl Sandburg’s “I Tried the Door.” (This was around the time that Sandburg first read Ridge’s work. Two years later, Ridge would assert in the Double Dealer that Sandburg’s recent devaluation as a poet was due to critics who “fear to be identified with the crowd,” the crowd being his enormous number of readers.) “The Woman with Jewels” opens the issue. It had already appeared in The Ghetto and Other Poems, and concerns an “obscenely beautiful” woman covered in jewels who visits a bohemian basement event. On exit, “the mountainous breasts tremble,” her gems agitate and “quiver incessantly, emitting trillions of fiery rays…every step is an adventure.” Given that Ridge depended on wealthy women for support most of her life, the poem is oddly derisive, but she often framed political critiques with a sarcasm that mocked sentimentality, exposing the poem to a modernist self-consciousness. Her second poem, “Blossoms,” found in her book as part of “Song of Iron,” is an extended metaphor between molten ore and its similarity to the bloom of a flower. Kreymborg liked this poem so much he included it in the 1919 Others anthology.

  Put by your rod, comrade,

  And look with me, shading your eyes…

  Do you not see—

  Through the lucent haze

  Out of the converter rising—

  In the spirals of fire

  Smiting and blinding,

  A shadowy shape

  White as a flame of sacrifice,

  Like a lily swaying? (Ghetto 46-47)

  Later Ridge said she wished she had pulled out that lily by the roots.

  “Others is as important as Poetry to the development of free verse in America and better represents the insurgent, heterodox character of many modernist little magazines,” writes Suzanne Churchill in The Little Magazine, Others, and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry. “[Poetry] was less committed to formal innovation…and more intrusive in its editorial practices than Others.” Fiercely experimental, Others was uninterested in courting an audience and the magazine’s subscription base never rose above 300. Its motto revealed a casual approach to its eclecticism: “The old expressions are with us always, and there are always others.” Adolf Wolff and Carl Sandburg, anarchist, communist, or at least socialist writers, were published beside avant-garde poets Mina Loy, T.S. Eliot, Man Ray, and Marsden Hartley, as well as popular poets Sherwood Anderson, Louise Bogan, and Vachel Lindsay. Robert Frost wrote Ridge to apologize for not having a poem ready that he could offer—“Taking a poem out of me now would be like taking out a swallowed fish hook”—but sent a check and eventually three poems for its anthology. This collision of aesthetics—avant-garde, popular, and political—is what kept Others in the vanguard. Kreymborg’s refusal to produce a manifesto “should be considered a significant modernist choice,” according to John Timberman Newcomb in How Did Poetry Survive?: The Making of Modern Verse. In response, Poetry magazine derided Others. Instead of “the outworn conventions of the I-am-bic school, we now have the I-am-it school.” (NOTE: Les-I-am-its are not to be confused with Les I’m-a-gists, who are already out-classed and démodé.)” A critic from the Kansas City Star wrote: “Poetry is, shall we say, cutting its ‘I’ teeth,” in an article entitled “I-sores is the Modern Substitute for Poetry.” In the magazine’s defense, Williams responded that Others was “a free running sewer.”

  According to Newcomb in How Did Poetry Survive?, Others opened at least one new door for poetry, years before “The Waste Land” appeared, suggesting that long-form lyric verse was encouraged because it mirrored the experience of contemporary life:

  Others contributed to the expansion of modern poetic form by cultivating…the verse libre variation sequence which was premised upon an understanding of twentieth-century experience as perceptually disjunct and socially heterogeneous.

  Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and Mina Loy’s “Love Songs” were the two most famous “variation sequences” to appear in the magazine. Ridge, as the author of the 22-page poem “The Ghetto,” with its long, multifaceted parts, would have been sympathetic to the longer poem’s ambitions as an editor, but she did not publish any more of her own in Others.

  Belinda Wheeler writes in “At the Center of American Modernism: Lola Ridge’s Politics, Poetics, and Publishing,” that Ridge’s “enthusiasm for supporting American modernism, regardless of the form or the varying aesthetics used, broadened the purview of Others.” After Ridge was added to the masthead, Others had art on its cover, and other genres in its pages. Her influence as a promoter of freedom in all its aspects can be seen as early as January in this notice: “[T]he feeling is simply that everything of individual quality, whether poem, play, prose, or painting, should have equal chance of coming out in the magazine.” That included gender. Along with 40% of the contents being written by women, the sixth issue had been solely devoted to women’s work, guest-edited by Helen Hoyt, aunt of the poet Elinor Wylie. “At present most of what we know, or think we know, of women has been found out by men,” Hoyt writes in her introduction. “We have yet to hear what woman will tell of herself, and where can she tell more intimately than in poetry?”

  Ridge dedicated her poem “Jaguar” to Evelyn Scott in the March 1919 issue. She had wowed Ridge as “a mystery woman in far off Brazil,” and when they met sometime in 1919, the feeling was mutual. “I had thoroughly made up my mind,” writes Scott afterwards, “that it was impossible for two women to be honest in the same room.” She had just arrived in New York after a harrowing year of near starvation in South America with an unemployed husband, a crazy mother and a new baby. She sent Ridge a present and Ridge answered with a mash note: “your action is the greater gift, that I would not return if I could but shall keep always like a flower…” and “My thought reaches out to you and when it returns without touching you, I am as surprised as though a light had gone out” and, finally, “May [I] not know your name?” There is no evidence of them as lovers, although their ensuing 20-year correspondence is replete with over-the-top endearments like “Lola, I never think of you but with the taste of metal in my mouth as if the gods were moulding you with fire.” Scott was as straightforward about sex as a man, her affairs
legion, including attempted or successful seductions of Kreymborg, Sinclair Lewis, Waldo Frank, and year-long affair with Williams. Very shortly after they met, Ridge agreed to come to Rio with Scott and her husband Cyril Kay-Scott (whether or not with Lawson is unclear) but the plan must have fallen through because it was never mentioned again. To Ridge her vision was “an electric ray, that seems to focus—almost lovingly—upon decay and death” with “a ruthless eye which sees through rosy and gracious contours to the putrescence.”

  Jaguar

  Nasal intonations of light

  and clicking tongues…

  publicity of windows

  stoning me with pent-up cries…

  smells of abbatoirs…

  smells of long-dead meat.

  Some day-end—

  while the sand is yet cozy as a blanket

  off the warm body of a squaw,

  and the jaguars are out to kill…

  with a blue-black night coming on

  and a painted cloud

  stalking the first star—

  I shall go alone into the Silence…

  the coiled Silence…

  where a cry can run only a little way

  and waver and dwindle

  and be lost.

  And there…

  where tiny antlers clinch and strain

  as life grapples in a million avid points,

  and threshing things

  strike and die,

  letting their hate live on

  in the spreading purple of a wound…

  I too

  will make covert of a crevice in the night,

  and turn and watch…

  nose at the cleft’s edge. (Sun-up 39-40)

  Writing for The Little Review, John Rodker, whose work had taken up most of the entire fourth issue of Others, and who was not included in the 1919 anthology, dismissed many of the women who were with just a series of exclamation marks. “Lola Ridge!!’; M.A. [Marjorie Allen] Seiffert and Evelyn Scott!!!” He also noted in Marianne Moore’s work that “bits of the plaster are sadly trivial.” He skewered Mina Loy as well: “It is painful to notice that since the last ‘Others’ [Mina Loy] appears to have lost [her] grip.” Loy responded for them all in an article entitled “John Rodker’s Frog.” She begins by quoting from one of his poems: “I’d have loved you as you deserved had we been frogs,” and asserts that “perhaps to be loved like a frog is the best way to be loved by Mr. Rodker.” Loy insists that women be given full critical consideration and ends her riposte with: “Note. For information on the love of frogs the reader may purchase Margaret Sanger’s book, which will help boost the Birth Control Movement, aiming to suppress the only indulgence of frogs.” Her article was accompanied by a photo of Loy by Man Ray, and the poem “Lion’s Jaws” that ends with “impotent neurotics [wincing] at the dusk.” Married three times, Rodker may have had problems with women—here is an excerpt from his “Hymn of Hymns”:

  God damn

  woman

  mushroomy flaccid

  and smelling of old clothes woman.

  Rodker would reappear as the unofficial English editor of Broom while Ridge was working as the American editor in New York. For some reason, a manuscript of his forwarded to Ridge to secure a publisher was permanently mislaid.

  Chapter 14

  Soirées for Others

  Ridge hosted weekly soirées for Others in her one-room apartment at 21 East 15th Street. “She was older than most of the young writers,” Flossie Williams recalled, reminiscing about the varied guest list for one of Ridge’s parties. “There was John Reed, who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World; and Louise Bryant—they were all in that group.” Famous and not-so-famous writers and artists and activists poured into her apartment to discuss the future of art in America and its various freedoms: literary, sexual, and political. In his Autobiography, Williams writes: “It doesn’t sound exciting, but it was. Our parties were cheap—a few drinks, a sandwich or so, coffee—but the yeast of new work in the realm of the poem was tremendously stirring.” Kreymborg writes in his autobiography a few years later: “The printed page was not enough; one wanted to greet the other fellow, and failing such a meeting, wished to hear about him, read about him, talk about him.” Using her own money, which was very little, Ridge sent out invitations, arranged the refreshments, and made the introductions, becoming a major force behind the continuing publication of the magazine. “She was charismatic,” writes Cyril Kay-Scott,

  and Evelyn was not alone in falling under her spell. Few left her salon with anything but good words for their hostess. In a subtle way her influence on American letters was greater than many polemicists and clique leaders for, by virtue of her radiant, dedicated spirit, she made things happen.

  Regarding the very real achievements of the women who held these salons, Cecily Swanson writes in “A Circle is a Necessity: American Women Modernists and the Aesthetics of Sociability”:

  These women…have been difficult to “read” as important figures of literary modernism because their contribution was less literature as we are accustomed to perceiving it than a new conception of the literary, which championed the aesthetic merits of salon conversation.

  In Sinbad, Cyril Kay-Scott’s novel about Evelyn’s affair with William Carlos Williams, he recalls the guests at Ridge’s famous soirées with some sarcasm: “Little Celia St. John,”—surely Edna St. Vincent Millay—“ever the center of a group of men…recalled a wax lily.” He quotes her: “‘Well, tired little boy, if it’s too far to your place, you might spend the night with me, only one flight down in this same building…’ No one laughed.” He mentions Ridge wearing pendant earrings and speaking with an almost too perfectly modulated low-pitched voice, “her enunciation theatrically distinct, and her manner well-bred to the point of discomfort.” Overcompensation for a less than advantageous upbringing? Scott was never close enough to Ridge to discover why she worked so hard to disguise her origins: “[she] remembered with despair the bourgeois home from which she had escaped.” But he did acknowledge Ridge’s complexity: “[She] had a code of worldliness, and her vanity made her demand some sexual recognition from most of the men she met. But unknown to herself her tendency was toward a morally beautiful idealism.” On the same page, Scott has her admit: “I am a bitter female.”

  Literary soirées had flourished in lower Manhattan since the 1910s. They were used to solicit money to publish magazines, to celebrate a writer’s publication, and, most often, to talk over new ideas in politics and literature and art. Margaret Sanger held such soirées. From 1913 to 1916 Mabel Dodge invited guests on Wednesdays to her luxurious apartment just off Washington Square, salons launched in imitation of those of her friend Gertrude Stein in Paris. Willa Cather held hers on Fridays at 5 Bank Street in 1917. As soon as Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap brought the Little Review from Chicago to New York, they entertained in an apartment with lacquered black walls and a magenta floor “the color of the inside of a stomach.” Black chains supported a big divan. Jean Toomer also attended Ridge’s parties, and later founded the Harlem Gurdjieff reading group, which minutely recorded not only their discussion, but also the affect of each participant. Edna St. Vincent Millay made enough money writing potboilers in 1919 that she held soirées at 25 Charlton Street. According to critic Jeffry Kondritzer, “Of the many social and literary gatherings in Manhattan, those held at Lola Ridge’s tried most fervently to keep the flame of literature alive.” Kreymborg remembered that

  [Ridge] kept the movement going by giving a party nearly every time she sold a poem or an article, though editors sent her sums hardly ample enough to be converted into the refreshments gracing her dark room on Fifteenth Street….Some of the older members hob-nobbed about Lola’s room with some of the newer: Evelyn Scott, a green-eyed person with a satiric languor, Emanuel Carnevali, a young Italian with a tempestuous vocabulary that promised to usher new cadences into American poetry…Waldo Frank, one of the moving spirits of the now defunct
Seven Arts…and entering the room late in the evening, Scofield Thayer, who had recently bought out The Dial from Martyn Johnson.

  “We had arguments over cubism that would fill an afternoon,” William Carlos Williams recounts in his Autobiography. His father had died at the end of 1919, and that “may have intensified his quest for place and belonging,” writes one critic. Williams had begun to write about his love of America in both his fiction and poetry but he was also working hard to “make it new.” One result was Kora in Hell: Improvisations, a work so new few understood it. Ridge, however, appreciated his talent for experimentation: “The words of William Carlos Williams either rend and pull apart or set about erecting a new building,” she writes a few years later, reviewing In The American Grain in the New Republic. Williams called Ridge a “Vestal of the Arts,” to denote her dedication to the world of poetry. His relationships with other female poets varied wildly, ranging from punching performance artist/poet Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in the face (“I flattened her with a stiff punch to the mouth”) to the canonization of Moore (“Marianne was our saint”).