Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  Early issues of New Masses featured articles on feminism, poetry by Robinson Jeffers and William Carlos Williams, a short story by D.H. Lawrence, essays by Leon Trotsky and John Dos Passos, and artwork by Stuart Davis, as well as writing by Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill, Ernest Hemingway, and Ralph Ellison. By 1928, Gold was pressing for proletarian literature rather than writing by literary leftists, and the magazine’s political view shifted from liberal to Stalinist/Trotskyist. He hoped to replace the New Masses board of contributing editors—“vague, rootless people known as writers”—with “a staff of industrial correspondents.” Joining Ridge as one of the “rootless” were Claude McKay, Eugene O’Neill, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair, Jean Toomer, Edmund Wilson, and Genevieve Taggard. By 1930, Gold had published his bestselling memoir, Jews Without Money, and was considered the preeminent author and editor of U.S. proletarian literature. His magazine’s popularity rose during the Depression, when leftist soothsayers appeared to have predicted the collapse of capitalism. After becoming a weekly in the late 1930s, the magazine struggled with ideological upheaval and ceased publication in 1948.

  Ridge contributed five poems to the magazine in 1926-27 just after its launch. The poem “Kelvin Barry” concerns the death of an Irish radical: “And your bare throat warm to the wishful rope.” “Re-Birth” begins: “Though your wild dreams/May die perhaps on the cemented stone/That they have cracked asunder…” “Russian Women” subtly charges politics with the suggestion of bisexuality: “You swing of necessity into male rhythms/that at once become female rhythms” and notes: “Yet in you there is no peace,/but infinite collisions,/impact of charged atoms/in ceaseless vibration.” In “Moscow Bells 1917” the bells ring “Loose/over the caught air that trembles like love-flesh/Songs of all wild boys who ride forth/to love and death…” The title of “Histrionics” must refer to the last words of its subject, the radical editor Albert Parsons who was hung because he merely talked about violence at the Haymarket gathering: “There will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.” All of these poems would appear in Ridge’s 1927 book, Red Flag. They did not, however, represent a strengthened commitment on her part to any political party. Like Elsa Gidlow, an anarchist poet who published the first explicitly lesbian poetry in the U.S. in 1923 and discovered she “could not see salvation in any brand of politics,” Ridge’s beliefs were rooted in a more inward looking anarchy. As early as 1920 she writes to Modern School director Leonard Abbott: “I’m beginning to realize I’m ‘without dogma’ except what I painfully construct for myself.”

  Red Flag is the book that came closest to being overtly political. Published in the wake of the Red Scare, when 28 states banned the public display of red flags, it benefited from well-publicized radical backlash. Isadora Duncan wore only a red flag when she appeared onstage in Boston in 1922, exposing her breasts to declare: “This is red, and so am I.”

  Despite the book’s radical appearance and title, Red Flag was well received. It was published with bright red covers by Viking two years after its founding, Huebsch having joined them. Harriet Monroe reviewed it for Poetry: “On the whole one finds in this book [Red Flag] a possibility of reconciliation with life, such as there was no hint of through the bitter fires of “The Ghetto.” Babette Deutsch, now a critic for the New York Herald Tribune, disagreed with Monroe: “The fire, the earnestness, the bitter and honey savors are here as in her earlier work. She has been wrought upon by the years on their passing, but she has not been changed by them.” Conrad Aiken, for his part, was not so positive in The Dial: “Miss Ridge’s free voice is oddly devoid of instinctive rhythm—one hardly ever feels under the shape a reason for the shape…One wonders, indeed whether she is not an excellent short-story writer gone astray.” But Aiken may have fallen into a reviewer’s solipsism by echoing his own fear, since he himself was in the throes of switching from writing very formal poetry to the short story form for which he is considerably better known.

  Evelyn Scott objected to the book’s title: “Bad because it misleads the average mind to accept the symbol as one of specific rebellion.” Scott did admire “Mo-ti,” the first poem in the book, perhaps because it shows Ridge’s political beliefs to be more complex than strictly those of the Russian Revolution. The placement of “Mo-ti” contextualizes and opens all the poems in the book to a reading broader than those of current ideologies. A Chinese philosopher from the fourth century B.C., Mo-ti believed in an agrarian communism brought about by benevolent rulers.

  You pitted your words against the words of princes,

  but softly, in even tones, and few listened…

  so that you were not nailed on four boards

  nor smeared with honey and left naked

  where sands crawl living under the sun. (Red Flag 11)

  The world that Mo-ti tried to change also contained women, a point usually overlooked by poets and politicians alike. “Did women…catch a garbled word or so/and mutely/quiver along the margins of their silence?” Ridge notes

  Only your

  words have floated out of the night

  …words still seeking in vain noise

  for some green hush to rest upon…

  Harriet Monroe read the book’s second poem, “Death Ray,” as one that concerned “the beauty of a city dawn.” This was the year when “death rays” were widely discussed, as a result of Englishman Harry Grindell-Matthews trying to sell one to the British Air Ministry. Two days later, the New York Times ran “The Death Ray Rivals,” about the competition worldwide to develop such a weapon, which included quotes from the chief militarist of the German Army who had invented “a device that will bring down airplanes, stop tank engines, and ‘spread a curtain of death.’” By September 1924, Americans claimed to have built one, the same month Winston Churchill speculated about such a device in the essay: “Shall we all commit suicide?” “Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings—nay to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?”

  The setting of “Death Ray,” a part-sonnet series of four poems, offers a “glamorous dim light” and “a joy [that] floats in the morning…” and “spires, swarming up the mauve mist” but in that innocent landscape: “There is that in the air, an imminence/Of things that hold the breath still and heart pale.” Christian iconography contextualizes the threat: “Jesus…Washed, as a white goat before the slaughter…” By the second section the poem turns with

  a stirring at the quick

  of some white palpitating core

  of such intensity as might

  burn up Manhattan like a reed.

  At this point, the poem becomes the first verse prescient of the nuclear threat, perhaps the first such poem in the world unless the excerpt from the Bhagavad-Gita as quoted by Oppenheimer during the first detonation counts. Indeed, a reference to the Hindi is appropriate, since the first section of the poem was published as “Om” in the New Republic in 1924.

  It is very unlikely that Ridge knew much about the nascent development of nuclear fission, although what little was known fascinated the public. Ridge might have read Among the Reeds, a 1913 novel by Australian Alice Musgrave in which her bohemian heroine peers into a Cooke’s spinthariscope, a device to view nuclear disintegration, “the Key of Life and Death.” The last section of Ridge’s poem describes the atomic bomb in eerie metaphor.

  This nuclear

  Period set against the rushing hour

  That holds there, motionless, the leaning sheer

  Stalk of its unfathomable flower.

  Was this Ridge’s intuition, that her favorite subjects, light and fire, might ignite some terrible weapon? The poem ends by implicating Christianity in the development of this weapon: “Yet know that there shall cleave forever there/A golden nailhead, burning in your palm.” But Ridge was no Christian Marxist. Her religious tropes gesture toward the most familiar of W
estern religions’ to stand in for the spiritual, the way in “Mo-ti,” Chinese philosophy frames agrarian communism. Her belief in Christianity was the same as her Marxism: nonexistent. But she does salute the flag:

  Red flag over the domes of Moscow…

  There gleaming like a youth’s shed blood on gold

  Red flag kerchief of the sun—

  Over devastation I salute you. (Red Flag 40)

  Lawson remembered that “we rejoiced over the Russian Revolution… It looked as if the world would open up,” echoing the beliefs of many other artists and intellectuals of the time. That year, Ridge spoke to the Irish Women’s Council on the third anniversary of the execution of Patrick Pearse, an Irish poet who helped lead the Easter Rebellion. Instead of bemoaning the situation of the Irish, she extolled the coming revolution in America in the wake of the Russian.

  Following “Death Ray” is the prize-winning poem “Fifth Street Window,” with its speaker witnessing the aftermath of the possible murder of a child in the ghetto. In a later section, “Morning Ride” is an equally stunning modernist depiction of violence. Written after Ridge resigned from Broom, the poem concerns the 1910 lynching of a young Jewish pencil factory manager in the South. Alternating between newspaper headlines about the man’s innocence and the commuter’s distractions on an open-air bus, the poem renders cubist the two intersecting worlds. The poem even uses the kerning type that Dos Passos employed in his books a few years later.

  Morning Ride

  Headlines chanting—

  y o u t h

  l y n c h e d t e n y e a r s a g o

  c l e a r e d—

  Skyscrapers

  seeming still

  whirling on their concrete

  bases,

  windows

  fanged—

  l e o f r a n k

  l y n c h e d t e n

  s a y i t w i t h f l o w e r s

  w r i g l e y ’ s s p e a r m i n t g u m

  c a r t e r ’ s l i t t l e l i v e r—

  lean

  to the soft blarney of the wind

  fooling with your hair,

  look

  milk-clouds oozing over the blue

  Step Lively Please

  Let ’Em Out First Let ’Em Out

  did he too feel it on his forehead,

  the gentle raillery of the wind,

  as the rope pulled taut over the tree

  in the cool dawn? (Red Flag 67)

  Anticipating the breeziness of a future Frank O’Hara invoking the distractions of the New York subway rider, the poem insists that the reader identify with the lynched man with the proffered intimacy of “your hair.” The cubist collage technique underscores the pathos of learning about a man’s wrongful death so casually. “The soft blarney of the wind” suggests the Ireland of her infancy, the country her mother fled for a better world, the same impulse Ridge acted upon 20 years later with her own child. But what a disappointment! In America she found lynchings, homelessness, senseless murders, epidemics, oppression of all kinds.

  Other modernists made similar formal innovations to pit the experience of traveling through a city’s right angles at great speed against the inherent inhumanity of advertising. Influenced by visual artists who used advertising in their work, Williams published “Rapid Transit” in 1923, two years before Ridge’s poem, with the lines: “Somebody dies every four minutes/in New York state—” and “AXIOMS//Don’t get killed//Careful Crossings Campaign/and “Take the Pelham Bay Parkway Branch/of the Lexington Ave. (East side)/Line and you are there in a few…” The poem ended with a subway ad. Jean Toomer’s “Gum,” written around the same time, uses two flashing billboards to illuminate the “gum-chewing missionaries” working the crowds on Seventh Avenue.

  STAR

  J E S U S

  The Light of the World

  …

  WRIGLEYS

  eat it

  after

  every meal

  It Does You Good

  Intermittently, their lights flash

  Down upon the streets of Washington,

  Red Flag is sprinkled with poems either dedicated to various contemporaries, including Amy Lowell and Adelaide Crapsey, or poems with the dedicatee’s initials in the title. For example, “After the Recital” is addressed to Roland Hayes, “Him black doll of the world,” the African American tenor who gave a command performance for King George V and Queen Mary of England in 1921. But unless the poems are elegies, they usually come off as closed and personal, the opposite of their intent to immortalize. Ridge had second thoughts about this practice. A few years after Red Flag’s publication she writes to Lawson: “I enclose the poem from Laura. It is very beautiful, but seeing my name on it in this way gives me a psychic shock—I shall never again even initial a poem to anyone in a book.”

  Two imagist-built poems are situated toward the end of the book. “Fame” with its reference to Aldebaran, a red star found in the constellation Taurus, the zodiac sign of the Bull, gives achievement its perspective—an interesting one, given Ridge’s great ambition.

  Fame

  The dewdrop on the sorrel-blade

  Is a tiny silver mirror

  Held to the high stars:

  Not the august eye

  Of Aldebaran

  Can miss the sorrel-blade

  On this dark night. (Red Flag 95)

  “Obliteration” offers the flip side of “Fame,” describing a sea of “wrinkled silence” that “holds in its blue vacuum/No bleached white evidence,” the absolute erasure of any struggle for recognition.

  Obliteration

  The sea is a wrinkled silence

  Moving darkly

  Under the audacious lustre of the air…

  The emptily effacing air,

  That has closed upon so many cries…

  Yet holds in its blue vacuum

  No bleached white evidence. (Red Flag 97)

  Ridge wrote Louise Adams Floyd that she had sent a copy of Red Flag to Trotsky. Had Ridge met him at the Ferrer Center in late 1917, when he was studying with Robert Henri? Or did she get his address from Max Eastman, the former Masses editor who was now Trotsky’s quasi-literary agent and translator? Her patron Corinne Wagner was delivering the book to Russia while traveling with a “Dr. Goldwater,” most probably Walter Goldwater, an iconoclastic Village bookseller who traveled to Russia in 1931, the likely date of the letter. Perhaps Ridge knew him through Lawson’s interest in chess, since Goldwater was an avid player. However, Trotsky probably did not receive the book since by 1931 he was living in exile in Turkey, working on his own book, History of the Russian Revolution.

  Ridge remained alert to the political landscape to the end of her life. Known—if she is known at all—as a Communist poet, she never embraced the dogma any more than Williams did with his poem “Russia” and its lines “O Russia! Russia! Must we begin to call/you idiot of the world.”

  Chapter 24

  “Brunhilda of the Sick Bed”

  While the reception of Red Flag was very good, Ridge appeared to be in trouble personally, at least to her friends. In July 1927, Williams heard that Ridge “was separated from her husband and was ill and in need of funds.” The poets and writers who attended her parties rallied. Williams’s mutual friend Marjorie Allen Seiffert sent Ridge $50 that Williams claimed to have supplemented. He wrote her a note a few days later, and perhaps that was when he enclosed his contribution, saying “I think I have a special privilege to ask you to lay aside delicate feelings in these matters for once, and to take freely what is freely given since I love and highly value the poetry you have given us all.” There’s a tally that survives of other contributors to what became Ridge’s fund, including $100 from Louise Adams Floyd, $15 from Louise Bryant (John Reed’s widow), and $50 in three installments from Evelyn Scott, who had just published her fourth novel—altogether some twenty or so contributions for a total of $620 (this is $8,225 in 2015 dollars). But everyone knew it was
n’t going to be easy to convince Ridge to take the money. Marianne Moore’s mother tried to persuade her: “I do feel that one who checks and throttles generous love, stultifies the life of another.” Then she went so far as to threaten: “To deny me would be to deny love, which from Marianne and me you have.” A few years earlier, when Mary Moore had sent Ridge a check, she described it as being “just in the rough my roses, or big loaf of brown bread.” This time she left a chicken at Ridge’s door. “I hope it gave whichever of my neighbors annexed it indigestion, but fear it was too well cooked,” writes Ridge to Floyd after the incident.

  As soon as Ridge got wind of the fund, she insisted on paying all the money back—“virtually throwing what’s left in the bank in the faces of the donors”—as Scott writes to Ridge’s husband. “Lola is showing us all what she thinks of the unheralded nerve and extreme vulgarity of said E. Scott.” Scott was especially sensitive. Always broke, always cadging for loans, she shared a similar disdain with Ridge for financial matters: “Money’s a nuisance, and I’m afraid I’m like that—incorrigibly improvident and quite unable to save.” A year later, she tried to explain to Ridge how the fund came about: “I went one night with Becky [Strand? Paul’s wife]

  to Romany Marie’s and was there introduced to large quantities of young and old poets. The question of poetry came up and your name. Someone mentioned that they had heard you were ill and seemed to wonder that your health did not improve. This went on to various discussions of your work and some very congenial praise of it, with some remarks to the effect that you did not seem to write as frequently…as a while back. I said I thought too much of your energy had to go in other things than writing. Somebody else said…that it was hell to make a living out of poetry, and that poets ought to be subsidized. That led to my saying good poets ought to be subsidized, and, finally, that you ought to be subsidized. Says someone, Well aren’t there any rich people who know Lola Ridge’s work who would subsidize her until she got back her health? Says I, I suppose there are but I don’t know any likely to do it in a tactful enough way to be acceptable to her.