Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  Ridge must have finished Sun Up and Other Poems during the summer of 1920, while staying at the MacDowell Colony, an artist’s retreat in New Hampshire. For over a decade, the colony had been hosting composers, painters, and writers in rustic studios scattered throughout its 450 pine-and-birch strewn acres. The play Our Town would be written there a few years later, and the opera Porgy and Bess. “A disconcerting place for loafers” wrote the New York Times in 1922, emphasizing the amazing industry and concentration of the colonists. Ridge received her lunch in a picnic basket left in front of her studio, and enjoyed dinner in the camaraderie of all the other artists. She could have worked in a deck chair on her porch or strolled the grounds with pen and paper. MacDowell was especially welcoming to the artist who is “young but has made little money but who yet has given distinctive promise and shown unplumbed potentialities.” All but “young” certainly fit Ridge’s career arc at this point. Despite being fed and housed and coddled, however, she was ill during her stay, a situation she would repeat during visits to another artist colony years later. For admission to this one she needed two endorsements or else a personal invitation from Mrs. MacDowell herself. Certainly Edward Arlington Robinson would have written one for her, if Ridge’s friend Otto Theis was right about his enthusiasm for her work. Robinson was a great supporter of MacDowell. When he first arrived there, he brought along a fake emergency telegram in case he needed to escape—and then returned every summer for the next 24 years. Ridge knew many other poets from her editorship of Others who might have sent a second endorsement.

  In 1920 Ridge was featured in two satires of leading American poets, the insiders’ index of fame, or at least notoriety. That year Witter Bynner, best known for his translations from the Chinese and a bitchy book about D.H. Lawrence, wrote Pins for Wings, under the pseudonym Emmanuel Morgan. William Saphier, Ridge’s associate on Others and co-organizer for the Others Lecture Bureau, provided caricatures. The work of Eliot is described as “The wedding cake/of two tired cultures,” cummings: “Much ado/about the alphabet,” H.D.: “The Winged Victory/hopping,” Wallace Stevens: “The shine of a match/in an empty pipe,” and William Butler Yeats: “A pot of mould/at the foot of the rainbow.” Ridge’s entry is “grapes/on a ragged corsage,” that Saphier illustrates with her preferred profile: sharp-nosed, with her hair arranged on her head like a nun’s wimple.

  Such satire did not alienate the important poets. Witter Bynner was made president of the Poetry Society two years later. He was also a chief instigator of the Spectra Hoax, a group of poets who mocked the literary isms popular at the time. As a participant in the hoax, Ridge’s friend Marjorie Allen Seiffert wrote as a male. William Carlos Williams, as editor for an issue of Others, commended Seiffert for not taking the Spectra movement too seriously—in contrast to women. After the hoax was unmasked by Bynner himself, Seiffert wrote: “I have found my own emotions are not feminine.” Shades of Ridge’s “Woman and the Creative Will!”

  Margaret Widdemer, vice president of the Poetry Society, was responsible for the second satire: A Tree with a Bird in it: a symposium of contemporary american poets on being shown a pear-tree on which sat a grackle, published in 1921 under her own name. She dedicated it “with my forgiveness in advance to the poets parodied in this book and the poets not parodied in this book,” which implied the importance of being included. Invoking Ridge’s poetry that condemns industrialization and machines, Widdemer skewered her for being a confirmed city-dweller, her use of ellipses, the size of her ego, and her reputation as a poet who often wrote about intimacy, a point never discussed in her reviews.

  Lola Ridge

  (Who apparently did not care for the suburbs.)

  Preenings

  I preen myself….

  I…

  Always do…

  My ego expanding encompasses…

  Everything, naturally….

  This bird preens himself…

  It is our only likeness….

  Ah, God, I want a Ghetto

  And a Freud and an alley and some Immigrants

  calling names…

  God, you know

  How awful it is….

  Here are trees and birds and clouds

  And picturesquely neat children across the way

  on the grass

  Not doing anything

  Improper…

  (Poor little fools, I mustn’t blame them for that

  Perhaps they never

  Knew How….)

  But oh, God, take me to the nearest trolley line!

  This is a country landscape—

  I can’t stand it!

  God, take me away—

  There is no Sex here

  And no Smell!

  Chapter 19

  Sunwise Turn and Ridge’s Broom

  Two women—Madge Jenison, a journalist, and Mary Mowbray Clarke, a lecturer on art at Columbia and the author of an art history textbook—started the Sunwise Turn bookstore in 1916. “A Modern Bookshop” emblazoned its storefront like a book title, prescient in how its existence “coincided with the rise, triumph and assimilation of modernism.” A signboard painted with the words “The sunwise turn is the lucky one” hung beside the door, referring to Scottish folklore in which “sunwise” is the propitious direction, a turn toward the sun. The two proprietors almost rented the back of Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery a few doors down on West 31st Street and Fifth Avenue, but Stieglitz was about to pursue Georgia O’Keeffe and distracted, and he would instead close the gallery within months. His strategy of hanging photographs with paintings and sculpture in order to link them with the fine arts was similar to their own with regard to books. The bookstore’s décor was by Ferrer-trained Arthur Davies, the principal organizer of the Armory Show three years earlier. The store displayed batiks, Peruvian textiles, Rajput miniatures, Greek masks, batik hangings, Hopi bowls, African tiles, embroidery, and reproductions of Gauguin, Cezanne, and Matisse against burnt-orange walls. In their midst stood modernist sculpture and tables of rare books with signed editions, not to mention bookcases crammed with poetry, books on Gurdjieff and handwriting analysis, and advice on interior decoration. “Some of the artists who worked on the[book] designs made them so deliriously lovely that it was difficult to make up one’s mind to ever open them,” recounts Clarke. The partners quickly discovered that the ancillary material supported the store, not rare editions and esoteric books. But profit was not their main concern. They took a peculiarly anarchist stance with regard to sales, perhaps influenced by Clarke’s husband John. Also instrumental in mounting the Armory Show, he was deemed “Sculptor of Revolt” in a review by Upton Sinclair who wrote that he had never encountered so much anticlericalism “packed into a bit of plaster.”

  Ferrer Center regulars such as Eugene O’Neill and the art dealer Carl Zigrosser, Ridge’s successor as editor of The Modern School, frequented the bookshop. In 1918, the bookshop hosted a five-part conference on “libertarian education.” Copies of The Modern School and other anarchist magazines were shelved alongside first editions of Ulysses when it appeared four years later. Eventually the partners created a book club for their typical book buyer: “a recent college graduate just starting a missionary career in China.” Clarke boasted that “We read all the books before we sell them,” an impressive feat even then. Customers appreciated the bookstore’s avant-garde stock and decor, and its fireplace. But the store’s anti-capitalist approach did not bode well for its finances. Three years after their founding, they sold half the store to the wealthy Harold Loeb, and relocated in the Yale Club building across from the recently erected Grand Central Station.

  Harold Loeb’s first cousin, a very young Peggy Guggenheim, received her modernist education at the store as one of its eight unpaid apprentices, going out for “electric light bulbs and tacks dressed in a moleskin coat to her heels and lined with pink chiffon.” Her aunts came in to buy books for decorative purposes. Such customers also attended readings such as the one giv
en by Ridge on May 4, 1920 just before she went off to MacDowell, probably sharing drafts she would include in Sun-up. The bookstore acted as another fulcrum for Ridge’s career, introducing her to possible patrons and a supportive audience. Sunwise Turn perhaps even influenced Ridge’s choice of title. Each voyage in Ridge’s history turned east toward the sunrise, with all its implied optimism and hope: as a child, she and her mother sailing to Australia, and then further, to New Zealand, and as an adult setting off again with Keith across the Pacific.

  Other readers at Sunwise Turn included Kreymborg, Robert Frost, Thornstein Veblen, Lytton Strachey, and Amy Lowell. The bookstore put on an early performance of Kreymborg’s play Lima Beans in 1916 before he cast Williams and Millay in the main parts. After both the self-proclaimed founder of cubism Albert Gleizes and Stieglitz himself suggested to Kreymborg that Europe might be more interested in his theatrical experiments, Kreymborg was not ill-disposed when Loeb asked him if he’d like to sail off to Rome to launch a magazine he had started calling Broom. After all, Others had folded only two years earlier.

  Hemingway modeled the “offensive cad” and “Jewish bounder” Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises after Harold Loeb. Loeb’s friend Malcolm Cowley drew a less caustic portrait in his sketch “Young Man with Spectacles” that Loeb liked. In the story he’s

  a squat young man of thirty-four [who dreams of]…A broad leisurely America without machines and Methodism; Sunday baseball in Pittsburgh (or better, Sunday cricket;) open urinals and racetrack gambling; the works of Freud and Boccaccio and D. H. Lawrence sold at newsstands openly.

  Loeb went to Princeton, then laid concrete for the Canadian railroad before moving to New York post-war, falling in with the artists and writers congregating at The Brocken, the Clarke home in Rockland County, and eventually buying into the bookshop. He felt America was hounded on every side by Puritanism and that its art was underdeveloped. Using the proceeds of the share of his sale of the bookshop back to Clarke, some $9,000, he launched Broom. Like a number of other ex-pat magazines published abroad, he envisioned the magazine showcasing European work for Americans and introducing contemporary American literature to Europeans. As Michael North emphasizes in his address “Transatlantic Transfer,” Loeb’s impulse sounded a lot like another Henry James sailing off for England, hardly an avant-garde move. Loeb justified having his offices abroad by claiming that it would be cheaper to publish a magazine there as lavish as the one he envisioned. Leaving with Kreymborg for Rome in 1921 also allowed Loeb to escape “my mother’s family and its industrial achievements”—the Guggenheims—and coincided with his separation from his wife, Marjorie Content. Marjorie would not starve, as she too came from one of the wealthiest families in New York. Her brother, New York Assistant District Attorney Harold Content, helped deport Emma Goldman to Russia and was the attorney assigned to prosecute Margaret Sanger. Of a different political persuasion, Marjorie stayed in New York and worked alongside the bookstore’s radical women owners.

  Publishing from Rome turned out to be more difficult than Loeb had anticipated, both financially and logistically. While preparing the third issue for January 1922, Loeb and Kreymborg argued over financial and editing issues, and Loeb had to contradict suppositions that Kreymborg was founder. Loeb then dismissed Kreymborg, bought him out of his share in the magazine, and announced Kreymborg’s resignation due to “ill health” in the February issue. Loeb’s brother and his wife Marjorie suggested Ridge as the American editor to replace an incompetent Nathaniel Shaw, but really it was Kreymborg she would replace in terms of contacts and experience. Shaw generously gave her an excellent recommendation: “a very self-reliant young woman.”

  She had been living in Montreal for the last eight months—in “this ghastly country”—where her husband was looking for work as a draftsman. Funded to turn her 1919 speech, “Woman and the Creative Will” into a book, she was suffering from a “Russian paralysis of the will that [is] always with me [and] accompanies mental depression,” although she boasted that she had written two poems more than 400 lines in length. A number of her friends went off to Montreal occasionally to work: Evelyn Scott, Konrad Bercovici, Horace Traubel. In her exile, Ridge managed to stay in contact with Kreymborg. A few months after she arrived, she published “Hospital Nights” in Broom’s first issue. Elsewhere she hadn’t been doing too badly either. “I sold $60 of poems the last ten days,” she boasted to Mitchell Dawson, probably to Poetry.

  Dawson was still trying to get out another magazine. “Let me know when you are preparing for the first number and if you want anything of mine,” Ridge writes. By 1921 he had managed to put together two issues of a magazine he called Musterbook, the first issue with illustrations from the renowned German artist George Grosz, and the second with poems by Yvor Winters called “The Magpie’s Shadow.” “I like Musterbook, some of Winters 8,” writes Ridge, “single lines such as of “Spring: I walk out the world door,” but some fearfully trite: “The tented autumn gone.” Dawson asked Williams, his ex-partner, for enough work to fill another issue, but by then Williams was scheming to publish his own magazine, Contact.

  When Loeb asked Ridge to be his American editor at the beginning of February 1922, it was for a salary of $100 a month—$1,233.06 in 2014 dollars—an amount she often had to forgo, given the difficulties of the magazine. But she was very happy to be involved, and to leave Montreal. “All this has come about so suddenly…I’m full of enthusiasm for BROOM.” After detailing a direct mail campaign, and several other publicity ideas, she pledged her loyalty: “If after a reasonable try out we find I’m doing no good—well I’ll get from under without waiting to be pushed, but I will not ever leave you in the lurch.” She went to work at Broom’s New York offices, which operated out of Marjorie Loeb’s basement storeroom at 3 East 9th Street, right off Fifth Avenue.

  With Ridge onboard, Broom quickly became one of the “most widely circulated privately owned literary magazines of its time.” But before Ridge would agree to the position, she listed three conditions under which she would take the job:

  My name on BROOM as American editor.

  Full authority and power of veto on this side.

  All American MS. drawings etc. to come to this office.

  She also wanted to “separate what I consider very good from the doubtful and send sorted sheaves of both,” conditions which Loeb found “quite acceptable” but which sounded like a diminution of her second condition. Just after she took the job in February 1922, Shaw wrote Loeb to caution him: “Miss Ridge is extremely enthusiastic. She is getting the magazine talked about much more than I would ever have been able to do…” He adds: “There are matters in which she will appear headstrong. Be a good fellow and meet her half way.”

  From the very beginning, she plumped for an American number, to which Loeb responded: “I sympathize with the project of an all-American number, but let us wait a while and see what comes in.” He also conceded veto power—“Veto power is willingly conceded”—then reversed his stand in the same letter: “I shall value your obtaining of material but feel I must reserve full veto power.” He justified his waffling and offered conciliation: “You will run into difficulties as a refusal of a solicited manuscript is pregnant with trouble….I will of course give every consideration to your judgement that I can.”

  The magazine by then had published an impressive number of European writers and other “wide-ranging and often discordant contributions.” But Ridge had her own ideas.

  I think the French influence on the whole bad for American art—bad that is in the sense that we pay too much for what ever surface elegance we acquire. Anderson’s work or better comparison Sandburg’s of enormously greater importance to art than Pound’s for instance. Spiritually America makes me think of the dawn of creation—all the essentials are there—great sprawling oceans and uninhabited prairies waiting for the faintly stirring life that must take form and come up out of those deeps and none other…I should love to see Broom be—
the early visible symbol of this new birth. The French an influence—and the fact that they lead the world’s fashion in (mental or bodily) clothes is bad for this—what real growth shall we foster if we squeeze the feet of this giant child into a French shoe?

  But first she had to discourage Loeb from quitting. “For heaven’s sake don’t talk of quitting!…we should be able to make BROOM self-supporting.” Discovering that Broom had only $95 in the bank.

  Last night had a two [hour] talk with your mother who was most kind and sympathetic. She has promised five thousand dollars that I asked for this. The money will be available in fall. I am going to ask others. Don’t ever think of quitting. Broom will be safe.

  Loeb was astonished.

  Your influence on my mother has been admirable; you must be a fire of enthusiasm to carry away such a confirmed believer in money as the standard of success. I am deeply grateful for the five thousand [and] hope you will be equally successful elsewhere.

  Ridge responded by asserting her editorial opinion of the forthcoming machine-oriented issue:

  The machine age of America should by all means be represented but interpreted not reported. The artist has not yet arisen who has even sincerely tried to do it…Of course I agree with you [that] it ‘takes an artist to reproduce a locomotive and preserve the emotion’ but there is only a faint chance that you can get that artist by calling for him.

  Ridge was, in Loeb’s eyes, “one of the moaners whom machines were tearing apart,” and not an enthusiast for the industrialized world. As Loeb put it: “To her, capitalism was corrosive, its products corrupt. I felt that capitalism was impersonal, its products magnificent.” But she wasn’t against the depiction of the machine, if depicted critically. What she opposed was the attitude promulgated by Matthew Josephson who echoed Loeb in the June Broom: “The machine is our magnificent slave, our fraternal genius.” Edmund Wilson’s essay in Vanity Fair astutely criticized Josephson’s attitude and its Dadaist frame: