Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  The drunken, bisexual, pretty party-boy Robert McAlmon, a self-described Michelangelo, had a reputation for bitchiness that moved F. Scott Fitzgerald to remark: “God will forgive everybody—even Robert McAlmon.” Hemingway called McAlmon “that disappointed half-assed fairy English jew ass-licking stage husband,” and Joyce, offended because McAlmon depicted him as more of a drinker than a writer in his memoir, Being Geniuses Together, dismissed his work as “the office boy’s revenge.” McAlmon published Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Joyce as well as Gertrude Stein’s huge Making of Americans in his Contact Editions. The cost of the last ruined him.

  Born the youngest of ten children in Kansas, McAlmon wandered to California as an itinerant farmhand and cowpuncher. In 1920 he dropped out of USC after publishing six poems in Poetry, and traveled to Chicago to consort with the poet Emmanuel Carnevali, who was unfortunately already in the insane asylum. Marsden Hartley discovered McAlmon on a garbage scow on the East River a few months later, where he was living on wages he earned from modeling. Hartley tried to seduce him but ended up kissing his hand. Or so the story went. McAlmon fell for the poet H.D. but married her friend, the 26-year-old Bryher, perhaps to play a part in a ménage à trois. Bryher’s father was one of the wealthiest men in the world, another attraction. He wrote a firsthand account of the gay subculture in Germany in Distinguished Air: Grim Fairy Tales, and The Scarlet Pansy, a gay classic. Kay Boyle inserted her own autobiography into McAlmon’s memoir, Being Geniuses Together, and wrote that she had slept with McAlmon who’d slept with Lord Alfred who’d slept with Oscar Wilde. He was primarily the reason Mitchell Dawson had to publish his own magazine and not the one Williams was planning to found to replace Others. In all, McAlmon co-published five issues of Contact with Williams, whom he’d met at Ridge’s party that night he arrived with Hartley.

  The party must have been in the early summer of 1920, after Others, but before Broom, when Marsden Hartley was still around. He read “On the Hills of Caledonia,” and Marianne Moore read “Those Various Scalpels,” a taunt to Mina Loy. Perhaps Ridge read a poem as well. According to Williams’s biography, McAlmon “distrusted people like Ridge for their liberal championing of the oppressed masses without themselves ever having experienced firsthand the lives of the poor.” Ridge obviously had not made public her humble beginnings in New Zealand, her dire financial straits as an immigrant in America, or her own experience as an artist’s model, nor was he familiar with her views on bisexuality. His novel Post-Adolescence satirizing her party was published in 1923, just a few years after he made his important connection with Williams. It is unusually bitter and angry toward women, especially those of power.

  The book opens with a woman accidentally spitting in the narrator’s face. He thinks “O well, have to take her as she was—too bad there wasn’t somebody else to go out with nights to dance…” Later, he is not “unwilling to kiss her.” By page 24, one of the female characters suggests: “We’ll have to form a union of women to show the men up, and make ourselves exhibits A and B of horrible examples.” Three pages later, even the coffee tastes like vinegar. The narrator notes on page 31 that most of the faces on the subway are Semitic, and there’s a dead horse on a curb when he emerges.

  “Dora”—Ridge—has invited him to a party by page 50. “She sent me a note saying she was having a number of people at her studio in honour of—think who—that lady poetess Vere St. Vitus—the jumpy cooey little thing…” he tells his friend Jimmy—William Carlos Williams. Vere St. Vitus must be Edna St. Vincent Millay, whom the narrator later seduces. “But lordy,” the narrator exclaims, “if Nora [sic] gets up and starts to evangelize any of that verse of hers! Ouch!.” He goes on: “She begins swaying and spouting with a super trance look in her eyes at the perspiring moon or the hot belly of that illegitimate child of industrialization, the city…”

  Nevertheless, he and his friend arrive at Dora’s address and start up three flights of stairs to a blue door. Sometimes Ridge moved her parties out of Broom’s headquarters to her own apartment at 793 Broadway, where revelers had to climb several flights up to a blue door at the top. “He saw that Dora’s glance evaded his,” writes McAlmon, “and helped her in the evasion.” He continues: “Darned little she and he had to say to each other, poor old thing, pretending to be revolutionary and flaming with passion when a few good meals would change all of that perhaps, except that she had still been pathetic.” Then another partygoer says: “We fête all these English novelists and poets…but never do we fête our own worker” which reflected Ridge’s interest in a truly American literature. Oddly enough, after McAlmon founded Contact with Williams, that was his interest too. He wanted to be “writing about one’s own place in one’s own idiom straightforwardly, without obeisance to European models.” Later McAlmon admits in the novel that

  the evening was not actively painful however until Reginald Crackeye read an extract from his play “The Mummy”…and became dramatic about it [,] much worked up apparently over his inability to keep his long hair out of his eyes…‘Are these my eyes looking at me in the mirror. Am I then that matter of a man?’…Torture me not thus… Everyone applauded the reading, enthusiastic at all costs…Verses were read by several ladies, and by one young man whose verses were, according to Dora, “‘very sensitive.’”

  Could that last reader have been Hart Crane?

  “God…isn’t this modern poetry movement awful?” asks the narrator. “Lemon water, anguish, sand and sweat.” Another character says “I’d like to take art and drown it in the river.” The narrator decides that “Jimmy [Williams] needed to be rescued from a woman [Ridge?] who was sure that he’d be a greater poet if he would put more social content into his work.” Williams was no longer the faun-eared young man as described by Matthew Josephson and had a “spinsterly aversion” to Marianne Moore, thought H.D. “an utterly narrow-minded she-bard,” and called Harriet Monroe a “she-ass.” Under McAlmon’s pen, his equivocal evaluation of Ridge is: “I used to think she had a sense of what not to do once…I used to like Dora, and thought I liked some of her things. What’s there to say anyway?” He and the narrator escape from the party, walking down the street while continuing to trash the evening. They order at a cafe and the narrator makes the mistake of quoting his own poetry: “What does one do? What does one do?” and doesn’t pay for his coffee, betraying the shallowness of his own social conscience by remarking: “It’s only ten cents, they can stand it.”

  By the 17th chapter, the narrator has slept with the Millay character, only McAlmon skips the sex, she’s making him breakfast the morning after, while “he wondered why more moments of tenderness such as they’d felt for each other in intercourse did not occur in life.”

  An autographed copy of McAlmon’s self-published 1929 book, North America: Continent of Conjecture, is part of Ridge’s library housed at Bryn Mawr. It is inscribed “To Lola Ridge with fond memories of some of her good and often gaga gatherings.” The poem inside—“unfinished”—satirizes every modernist topic: Wall Street, race riots, Native Americans, advertising on the subway, the ghetto, the mechanized city, and the sex-obsessed.

  Machine Dance Blues

  O O O the lovely gushing

  of oiled machines rushing.

  Love, love, love, lovely machinery.

  Dream pistons slushing,

  super-lubricated pushing,

  machine’s sex dream.

  Perhaps Ridge hadn’t read his novel Post-Adolescence, or perhaps she managed to admire his talent despite his attitude. Or did she pity him and his envy of women and his situation with Bryher? Perhaps she agreed with Marianne Moore, who “questioned both the stability of his sentences and his poor choice of vocabulary.” He’d sent one of the first books of the run to Ridge—it is the fifth copy out of only 305 copies. She had been writing reviews. Perhaps he valued her opinion.

  Chapter 21

  Broom and Its Demise

  Broom was gorgeous. Oversize, 11 by 13 inches, it ca
me printed on handmade paper with its artwork tipped in. “I hoped that the glamor of Broom’s format would carry us over till our ideas crystallized,” writes Loeb. On the back cover, a sailor danced with a broom over a quote from Melville that suggests (perhaps tongue-in-cheek like Melville) that editors are slaves to their readers.

  What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain’t a slave?

  In June 1922, the month Ridge’s name first appears on the masthead, Broom’s cover by the Hungarian stage designer Ladislas Medgyes (misspelled in the credits), was strikingly cubist/futurist. Among the issue’s offerings were the first half of Nobel Prize-winner Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of An Author, and an essay by Cocteau about a bust made by Lipchitz: “The critics have never been able to remove a hair from my head, but Lipchitz has decapitated me,” writes Cocteau. Wallace Stevens’s poetry began the magazine with “Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion,” and a second poem, “Stars at Tallapoosa,” appeared later in the issue. Ridge’s poem “Waste”—later renamed “Debris”—was printed after Gertrude Stein’s serialized “If You Had Three Husbands.” The essay “Made in America” by Matthew Josephson also appeared. Then an editor of a rival magazine Secession, Josephson fancied himself an American Dadaist but eventually wrote mostly biographies and a book of economic history. His essay in the June issue satirized “Foreign Exchange,” an article Loeb had written for the previous issue. In Josephson’s piece, the editor of a “pretentious magazine” discovers that America is “all the rage” in Europe. Although the argument about money and art is confused, with cheeky Josephson both identifying with it and mocking its contradictions, Michael North calls it “an elaborately odd job application,” and Josephson’s name eventually appeared on the masthead as associate editor.

  In July, Ridge writes Loeb: “I am further hindered from getting the best work in either art, poetry or prose, because the bigger artists refuse to have their work accepted by me and returned—after a delay of weeks—from Europe by you.” Loeb had rejected most of what she had put forward, and still complained that he had no American material. But he wanted her support: “If you are still a comrade I shall be happy.” Loeb asked her to find a publisher for a manuscript by her old nemesis, John Rodker, the critic who had made fun of her work in Others, and ended the letter with: “One cannot express gratitude for assistance such as yours, one can only be thankful that you exist.”

  The first feature of the July issue was a poem by e.e. cummings that faced a Picasso drawing. Another three e. e. cummings poems appeared later. There were more drawings by Picasso and one by Modigliani. Elinor Wylie’s poem preceded Evelyn Scott’s. Matthew Josephson translated several poems by Paul Eluard, and his article “After and Beyond Dada” also ran. Pirandello’s play was continued. Blaise Cendrars gave a negative review of the movie “The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari,” and there were more new ads from art galleries in New York. The cover was by Léger.

  The Bookman Anthology of Verse for 1922 noted that “With her wiry energy and her frail determination…[Lola Ridge] has now settled as head of the American offices of “Broom.” But Loeb’s relationship with Lola Ridge deteriorated steadily. He criticized Ridge’s stubbornness: “anyone who failed to agree with her felt that she pitied his inability to see or feel the obvious.” He argued that “Broom is no longer a forum…It is becoming an organ with a strongly held point of view…But because of it I must cling to veto power. I do hope you can follow me far enough to continue with the glorious energy and enthusiasm with which you have revived Broom.” Ridge replied:

  In regard to the American number; you say in your letter of May 1st, “I have every sympathy with the project!” And then, “can you get together such a number efficiently even though the material is subject to veto on this side?” My answer is: “I can not.

  He did not respond.

  A few weeks later, they tangled over an article on “American Esthetics” by Evelyn Scott. “I like [her] poetry…but I dislike intensely her criticisms. They seem to me hollow, erudite obscurity.” He promptly lost her manuscript. Scott, for her part, admonished Ridge: “for GODS SAKE don’t get onto [sic] any arguments with Harold Loeb re the Scott family.” Three years later, Scott remembered Ridge’s Broom days:

  I could just see you at the kitchen table laden with everything you ought not to eat dispensing a lunch that had, besides some flavors commonly recognized as approved, a psychic seasoning which made it the most delicious you ever ate. There would be a sofa with a few hundred of rejected or approved mss and something by an unknown author that you wanted to show me but had maybe mislaid in the coal bin, and there would be a dressing table sink and a chiffonier on which hairpins intermingled with the ingredients for salad, etc. etc. and Davy would come in with every determination to resist affection and couldn’t quite and I would have that sadistic masochistic attraction to his hair which I always want to pull because it is most exceptionally lovely, and we would have a long, long talk…then the world, if it would listen, would know just exactly all about modern art and people in general.

  The cover of the August issue was by the Polish cubist Louis Macoussis who later illustrated Apollonaire’s Alcools. The work of his wife, the painter Alice Halicke, who was collected by Gertrude Stein, was also featured in a later issue of Broom. Reproductions of their work can be found in Ridge’s papers. Max Weber, whom Ridge knew from the Ferrer Center, provided several woodcuts, Yvor Winters contributed a poem from Marianne Moore, there was more Pirandello, the Williams poem “Hula-Hula,” many translations from the Russian, German, and French, a big announcement of the works of George Moore by Boni and Liveright, and an ad for a Robert Henri monograph on Nietzsche, most probably solicited by Ridge since she knew him from her Ferrer days. The full-page ad at the end provides an interesting effort in cross promotion:

  The Smart Set readers of Broom will find it a natural complement and the two magazines together will furnish an intellectual diet that contains the proper proportions of proteins, vitamins, and other properties essential to perfect intellectual and spiritual nourishment.

  August was the month that Ridge suggested Loeb contact his mother. “Why don’t you write your mother, Harold? She is anxious about you.” The promised $5,000 was scheduled to arrive in the fall. Ridge reported that she was now hoping to interest the wealthy widow of poet and playwright Vaughn Moody in funding the magazine, who was hosting Ridge in her Massachusetts home. Moody, whose husband had written anti-war poems about the Spanish American War, invited many writers for visits, including Robert Frost. Ridge told Loeb that she proposed that Moody give her the names of a hundred wealthy patrons who also had an interest in modern art who might contribute $100 yearly. In the same letter to Loeb, Ridge captures the excitement around the magazine by describing the Broom office activity, with the radical millionaire philanthropist Charles Garland pitching in:

  Vachel Lindsay also here the other day, [Gorham] Munson, Ridgley Torrence, Bill Williams, [Maxwell] Bodenhiem [sic], Benéts, Stephen and Bill, Marie Garland—mother of too famous Charles (whom I’m asking for a fund) Evelyn Scott, Waldo. The strangely unlike drift in and out. If there is anything doing, they sit around Davy’s wonderful table—brought for me from his old studio on 14th—and lick stamps, close or address envelopes—sometimes—but how they hate this!… Charles Garland wrapped up and tied nearly one whole issue of BROOM.

  Unfortunately, that was the extend of Garland’s contribution.

  Juan Gris illustrated the September cover. D.H. Lawrence’s books were advertised just inside. “Little Birds and Old Men,” a poem by Lawrence Vail, who had married Peggy Guggenheim that year, appeared opposite a very phallic sculpture. There was an essay on Buddhism and a number of South I
ndian illustrations, a translation by John Rodker who was now the unofficial English editor for Broom, a prose poem by Pierre Reverdy translated by Josephson, and a poem by Ridge’s friend William Rose Benét. Josephson appeared again with “One Thousand and One Nights in a Bar-room or the Irish Odysseus,” an essay on Joyce that would have annoyed him. Loeb’s essay, “The Mysticism of Money,” suggested that if you lived in America you couldn’t appreciate American art. Only by being an expatriate could you come to understand its value. In the advertising, Ridge, along with Hart Crane, Babette Deutsch, and Sherwood Anderson, was listed as one of the authors featured in The Double Dealer, “the only honest literary magazine in the U.S.” There were also two new bookstore ads, and an ad for “The Forum,” whose speakers include sexologist Havelock Ellis, philosopher George Santayana, and philanthropist Otto Kahn.

  “You do so much, nearly all the disagreeable work and get such scanty thanks or help from this office,” writes Loeb that month. “Your working without pay over the summer is the devil…” Why hadn’t he paid her? Was she supposed to take her salary out of the receipts? Such denial was an indication of her dedication to the magazine. Under the influence of Matthew Josephson, Loeb had decided to move to Berlin, but didn’t give her the new address for another six weeks. In the meantime, the magazine was a month late in delivery, losing publicity, customers, and ads. Although Ridge had increased the subscription base from 600 to 2,500 in less than a year, (and eventually to 4,000) the magazine could ill afford such mishandling.

  Cubist-rendered big machines appeared on the October cover. Although it lacked Strand’s photographs—he had not turned them in on time—it was known as the “machine issue.” It contained an advertisement for the New York production of Pirandello’s play, noting that Broom had first published it. Ridge had spent a month straightening out its copyright situation so it could run. The Ridge-solicited translation of new chapters from The Possessed translated by Babette Deutsch’s husband, Avhram Yarmolinsky, chief of the Slavonic Division of the New York Public Library, also appeared. According to his introduction, these were found among Dostoevsky’s papers in a tin box inside the Central Archives in Moscow. A reclining nude by Matisse, a translation of science fiction prose poems by Blaise Cendrars, a Francis Picabia poem, more Matisse, an essay on Constructivist art in Russia, and an essay by the futurist Enrico Prampolini on the aesthetics of the machine followed. Ridge’s friend, the New York Evening Post editor Henry Seidel Canby, advertised its “Literary Review.”