Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  Although Loeb had not been interested in any American art other than images by Strand, Stieglitz, and Man Ray, Ridge put forward a cover done by “MC” that he liked—and it turned out to be the work of his ex-wife, Marjorie Content. But subterfuge was not confined to the New York office. That October, the same month Broom moved to Berlin, Matthew Josephson came forward to admit his part in the editing of Broom, “a confession of faith:”

  I was all set to go back to America and work in a bank, [but] I find myself here in Berlin helping edit Broom, plotting and scheming with HL for campaigns and programs months ahead. Personally I think being an editor is a disagreeable and ungrateful task. But the conditions of this outfit are far too good, offered too much chance for fun and experimenting…[speaking of Loeb] we can trust each other perfectly when our backs are turned….As for me, no doubt a surprising development in the Broom staff, there is no use investigating my past record. You will only hear bad things said of me.

  He exclaimed over the American issue in terms that suggested he was claiming it: “here is something we have both been dreaming of,” and in his memoir, Life Among the Surrealists, written 25 years later, he further asserted his editorship over the issue. The memoir also shows him claiming the Dostoevsky publication Ridge had found “as our pièce de résistance.” He ends his October letter to Ridge by name-dropping Williams, admonishing her to give his regards to him. The next issue features Josephson as associate editor. By mid-November Josephson had asked Ridge to use his essay “The Great American Billposter” to promote the magazine. She had already set in motion the idea, thinking that Josephson was on her side. That was not the case. “Since becoming associate editor of the magazine,” Josephson writes in his memoir, “we had been at loggerheads with Lola Ridge, the American editor, an excellent woman who wrote rather dull free verse.” Loeb’s correspondence with Ridge, however, acknowledged her contribution thus far: “We have a good fund of American poetry now, most of which you have sent,” he writes on November 4, 1922.

  Broom’s November issue was organized around Strand’s tardy photographs, a Malcolm Cowley poem, another Ivor Winters poem, a Hans Arp illustration, and Josephson’s most notorious essay, “The Great American Billposter,” in which he dismissed European influence on American writing but suggested that only in Europe can one appreciate American work, a slight refinement on Loeb’s essay in the September issue. As confusing as their argument was, it related to the conflict that was soon to evolve between Loeb and Ridge that led to Ridge’s resignation: the inclusion of work by the expatriate Gertrude Stein in Ridge’s American issue.

  The December issue featured dance, beginning with Halicke’s cover of ballerinas. Its literary component started with a piece by Ridge’s protégé, Jean Toomer, “Seventh Avenue,” that breaks into prose and back again into poetry. Containing the line: “God would not dare to suck black red blood,” the poem would soon appear in his masterpiece Cane. Despite Loeb’s stated intentions, he was never very excited about publishing new American writers, but Ridge had pressed for inclusion of Toomer’s work: “Jean Toomer, almost unknown…Stuff has rhythm color flavor of smoke-acrid like the burning of green roots.” By then she had been critiquing Toomer’s poetry for several years.

  Toomer had written Ridge to tell her he could blend “the rhythm of peasantry [sic] with the rhythm of machines. A syncopation, a slow jazz, a sharp intense motion, subtilized [sic], fused to a terse lyricism.” Corresponding with him over the editing of “Seventh Avenue,” she suggested numerous cuts. With regard to his “Kabnis,” which would be published in Broom after Ridge was gone, she told Loeb, “I sent the story back to Jean and asked him to hurry with it. Asked him to take out Louis [sic], cut out first four pages and sharpen and condense the whole.” To Toomer she writes: “Lewis in the poem is “not convincing…he seems to have been yanked into your story from some other source entirely without your own experience and therefore he is not authentic—he has not been felt by you.” Toomer revised it twice more before the piece ran. Although Waldo Frank has most often been credited with mentoring Toomer, critic Jeffry B. Kondritzer writes, “the brilliance of his [Toomer’s] contributions is apparent in both ‘Karintha’ and ‘Kabnis,’ neither of which would have found their way into Broom had it not been for Lola Ridge’s diligent championing of the young Toomer.” Critic Bryce Conrad identifies Broom’s influence as one of the “major forces working on [him] as he composed Cane.” Toomer was not without gratitude: “I thank you Lola Ridge for pushing me to the work.”

  Toomer heard that Loeb was planning “a Negro number.” He didn’t hesitate to identify as black if that opened up a venue. He heard the rumor

  through a friend of mine here who is in touch with several people out in Hollywood. It seems as if they’ve been reading me out that way. On learning that this fellow knew me, they wrote him asking about me, and expressing the hope that I would be well represented in the Negro number which Broom was planning. When do you expect to run it?

  Loeb referred to the issue as the “nigger” number, one that would carry “the great negro sculpture also origined [sic] poetry and prose…[James Weldon] Johnson should be able to help.” Johnson had just published The Book of American Negro Poetry. Loeb had great hopes for this issue, wanting to push it forward to May. “Should be our star number.” Karl Einstein in Berlin was the “world authority” and he was providing assistance. Nephew of Albert, Einstein’s theories about African art were central to the European discovery of its aesthetics. Loeb already had photos of “very wonderful” sculpture, never before published, on hand. “We also have an unlimited stock of African prose and poetry, epic, religions [sic] and narrative, I wish to complete the number with an assortment of American Negroe [sic] English writing. Can you get it?…Has Toomer any negroe [sic] blood[?]” These and other enthusiasms, including a plan for a Mongolian number, did not materialize.

  Pablo Picasso’s lithographs of ballerinas also appeared in the December issue alongside an “Instant Note on Waldo Frank.” Josephson was the author. He reviewed Frank’s Rahab, a modernist novel about a woman who struggles to overcome sin. Ranting against the Puritanism of earlier times in America, Josephson writes: “The shocking sex-repression of the nineteenth century has reaped the shocking sex-outletting of the twentieth in our unhappy land.” The magazine ended with a full page announcement of Mayan sculpture and architecture in the January Broom, alongside contemporary American prose and poetry:

  BROOM from old Europe will present in the JANUARY number an array of AMERICAN writings such as no magazine in America has yet ventured…BROOM has never lacked faith in the Artistic future of America…The January number of BROOM is a challenge to America to recognize a national art as profoundly American…

  In response to a contemporary enthusiasm for all things Mexican, the announcement goes on to tout Mayan art as central to this American-ness, perhaps also preparing its readers for Williams’s forthcoming essay on Mesoamerica, “The Destruction of Tenochtitlán.”

  Conceived some ten centuries ago, it [Mayan art] remains the magnificent expression of one of the noblest races which inhabited America. Since then, many races, many cultures have come and gone. All but the topography of North America has ever altered. But the new races which populate the transformed continent are also creating a new art which mirrors as faithfully the astonishing environment they have made for themselves. Why not read them now?

  There’s also a contest with a first prize subscription to Broom for life! Ridge had won her battle for an American number.

  When the issue finally appeared in January 1923, Loeb had already admitted that 90 percent of it was due to Ridge. To start, Ridge published another excerpt, Toomer’s “Karintha,” “to be read accompanied by the humming of a Negro folk-song.” Ridge also introduced Hart Crane’s work to Europe in this issue. He had been fearful of publishing in Broom, but she pushed him, playing a major role in encouraging him to submit “The Springs of Guilty Song.” As Belind
a Wheeler points out in At the Center of American Modernism: Lola Ridge’s Politics, Poetics, and Publishing, “Though Crane had published a couple of poems around 1916 and 1917, it was not until he wrote and published [‘The Springs of Guilty Song’] in Broom that he began reaching a wider audience.” The poem would become part of his famous “The Marriage of Helen and Faustus.” “No one else writing in the magazine captured the spirit as lyrically as did Crane,” writes Kondritzer, “and Ridge, once more, was the person who endorsed Crane’s work for the magazine.” As a result of Ridge’s friendship with Marianne Moore, “it was Ridge who brokered Moore’s post-Kreymborg contributors to Broom,” according to critic Robin G. Schultze. Ridge had to encourage Loeb to publish Williams’ essays: “He has the fine idea of writing an American history in a different way.” In all, the issue “pushed its readers to forgo colonial histories of triumph, consider the authentic history of violence and loss, and ponder America’s present and future,” writes Wheeler. Josephson crows over its contents in his memoir as his own, admits on the next page that Ridge selected most of the material, then states that “her literary taste was retrograde.” She had no idea of his animosity, responding to his “confession” the month before by writing to him: “I have been much encouraged by your cooperation.”

  The issue contained essays on baseball, the jazz band, the cinema, and the dizzying skyscraper, all chosen to be “fundamentally in harmony with the Art of the ancient Mayans,” as the magazine proposed. Kenneth Burke’s story, Williams’s essay, and Marianne Moore’s review of H.D.’s “Hymen,” her last contribution to Broom as a result of the insults administered by Matthew Josephson later in the issue, were featured. Kay Boyle’s poem begins “Morning creeps in across his hair.” There was fiction by Josephson—he couldn’t be left out—concerning “Ribald libidinous lickerish Mr. Excrement!,” a shaped poem “Circle” by the Baroness Elsa von Freitag-Loringhoven, and “Wear” by Gertrude Stein. The final article was Josephson’s unflattering review of Marianne Moore’s work. He begins by condemning American women: “Let us admit to begin with that the great shortcoming of American women is their brutality, their coarseness, as seen in manners, gowns, habits, books, dew-daws.” Moore herself is “a rebuke to our heedless womanhood: the humility that goes with knowledge—the pride that goes with sensibility. Emotion in her is calcined to a thin ash.”

  An ad for Broom on the last page asks: “Is Broom too Conservative?” and mentions that a Philadelphia bank director had “revoked his subscription on the grounds that the work of a noted American poetess was unfit to be read by his daughter, aged sixteen.” But it was not the Josephson insults nor the lascivious content that brought down the magazine, but the small Stein poem.

  Six months earlier, Loeb had asked Ridge: “Is there any general interest in Stein?” Ridge responded with her opinion: “mostly blah! Blah!…In a few years her work will be on the rubbish heap with the rest of the literary tinsel that has fluttered its little day and grown too shabby even for the columns of a daily.” To feature Stein, the expatriate, as representative of the best new American writing was a slap in the face. Ridge sent Loeb a telegram on November 15, 1922, saying “RESIGN ON INCLUSION OF GERTRUDE STEIN IN AMERICAN NUMBER.” But Loeb wrote that he felt that Stein’s influence on American literature was so pervasive that any review that left her out would be flawed. Ridge gave him another chance on November 23: “Am rushing everything in case you should refuse to keep G. Stein out of American number.” Broom in New York was in an uproar. Even Marianne Moore had heard about it. Her letter November 27 to Ridge thanking her for Broom’s check includes her sympathy: “You amaze me—by your exertion on my behalf—in the midst of so much calamity.”

  A week after Ridge’s resignation by cable, Josephson wrote unofficially to Gorham Munson, his co-editor on Secession, with “a proposition.” He outlined Ridge’s involvement with Broom by stating that she “has been our New York office for some time, rather than American Editor.” He called her resignation “hysterical,” and that what Broom needed was “a man, a man this time to get right in and drive it along…In such a pinch, I think he [Loeb] would agree to replace L.R. with you as American Editor.” Josephson called Secession a “sporadic group magazine…with a wholly different aim” than Broom’s which was “For the present…trying the slant of presenting a form of ‘American culture’”—primarily Ridge’s idea. He tried to suggest that the job would be a snap, but inadvertently revealed his lack of commitment: “I don’t know how many hours Lola puts in. Sometimes she calimes [claims] to stay up till morning. But we never spend more than five or six hours here.” He boasted about how many ads they had (most of which Ridge had secured) and that “this could considerably round out your income, as well as the possibility of contributing steadily.” He suggested mismanagement on Ridge’s part: “From what I know of the BROOM accounts, it would immediately be on its feet, if some honest American low common ‘efficiency’ were applied.” But like Loeb, he did not relinquish power and offered him the same deal that Ridge had been given: “Final responsibility stays in Europe.” Anticipating that an American magazine might best be edited from America, he writes: “Ultimately BROOM may come to America and establish itself permanently.” Then he couldn’t help but damn Secession with this admission: “I am the last one to want Secession to die off.” At the end of the letter he contradicted his earlier statement that Loeb knew nothing about the letter, by saying that Loeb had already approved his making the offer. Defending himself, Loeb, in his aptly-titled memoir, The Way It Was, flatly denied knowing the letter’s contents. “Josephson refused to send it to me on the plea that it was personal.” Munson, for his part, was infuriated—he could see that his magazine was being dumped and himself demoted. His relationship with Josephson ended a year later with a wrestling match in the mud in upstate New York. According to Josephson’s memoir, Munson eventually showed Ridge the letter, but she didn’t sound as if she had seen it in the contemporary correspondence. Along with her polite reply to Josephson’s “confession of faith” in December, she writes in January that “The co-operation of Josephson since last September has been one of the things that made me feel that I might be able to continue some time longer with BROOM.”

  Ridge resigned again in her 2 January 1923 letter to Loeb. This time she must have sensed that Loeb wasn’t being difficult all on his own, but thought that he’d been swayed by Sherwood Anderson’s recent review of Stein’s work in the New Republic.

  I see that you advance his slushy sentimentalities about her in the New Republic as an argument in support of your opinion of her importance. I object to her work in BROOM, not because of the missing substance in her work, not because she merely plays with words, but because she does not do it well enough. If you must play with words, as such, with no impetus or passion behind, then you must do it skillfully as a swordsman plays with rapiers—as Marsden Hartley, Amy Lowell, Wallace Stevens have done it. G. Stein’s words—house-wifes [sic] canning plums—peanuts rattling in a straw hat—at best, corn popping in a skillet.

  Then Ridge went over the top.

  Personally, I have nothing against Miss Stein. I do not know her, but she is doubtless a lady of charm. Witness her power thereof in her literary reputation—a bladder blown up by many breaths. Well, my breath will not help to fill this particular bladder.

  In this case, even the Baroness was a genius when set against the work of Gertrude Stein:

  The Baroness writes a great welter of words, lit with an occasional flash of something that is near genius…One is a crazy artist, the other a tricky craftsman whose highest attainment is an occasional flippant cleverness of presentation.

  No less a personage than T.S. Eliot found Stein’s work more than challenging:

  It is not amusing, it is not interesting, it is not good for one’s mind… IF this is the future, then the future is, as it very likely is, of the barbarians. But this is the future in which we ought not be interested.

  Mu
ch earlier, Kreymborg had published a negative review in the Morning Telegraph titled “Gertrude Stein—Hoax and Hoaxtress: A Study of the Woman Whose ‘Tender Buttons’ Has Furnished New York with a New Kind of Amusement.” Even Matthew Josephson dithered in the American issue of Broom alongside her poem: “The din of Gertrude Stein’s barbarous chants rises relentlessly: one may succeed in being indifferent to it with taut muscles.” But it was most likely not so much the New Republic review that swayed Loeb as Josephson. Twenty-five years later Josephson admitted that he knew that “Miss Ridge…had no liking for the work of Gertrude Stein, whom I found so intriguing and whose publication I strongly favored.” He also claimed that “Loeb and I insisted on publishing more of Gertrude Stein….over Miss Ridge’s protests…”

  Whether Stein was aware of the furor over her work isn’t known, but her poem “Wear” wasn’t high enough on her list of favorites to be collected in any future Stein volume. Loeb had not yet met Ridge and couldn’t believe that she was so upset: “the effect is entirely disproportionate to the cause.” But Ridge found Stein’s nihilistic doctrine of art for art’s sake polar opposite to her commitment to the world at large. She had other reasons too and set them out.

  I took hold of BROOM early last March for the purpose of saving a failing venture in which I felt strongly interested. But I did not propose to do this either as your agent or as your mss. reader, but as the American editor….I should not have greatly objected to it [Stein’s poem] in any other [issue]…you are right in believing that the Stein poem was not the sole cause of my resignation, but merely the last jerk that snapped the string.