Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  Whenever Ridge saw an opportunity to go abroad—or protest, in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti—she miraculously recovered. She traveled solo in her 50s and early 60s to the Middle East, to Paris, to Mexico. Evelyn Scott knew Ridge well, and after Ridge couldn’t get a diagnosis out of her doctor, Scott writes to Lawson: “I feel that it maybe would take a genius equal, in his way, to Ridge herself, to really grasp and understand completely the problem of her health.” Ridge began to resort to the latest health cures. Scott asked if the osteopath was coming regularly and whether the “sun machine” was working, and in another letter she hoped Ridge was wearing her radioactive belt. Poet Leon Srabian congratulated Ridge on her new “catalyzing belt.” Ridge also suffered from chronic depression, what she called “the Russian intellectual sickness.”

  The psychological forces that might have borne down on Ridge’s unconscious and produced such sub-acute, chronic ill health might include the stress from her struggles for freedom. “My side…never bothers me unless I am very much irritated or in some way emotionally upset,” she confessed to Lawson in 1932. After all, she was not only a woman artist, a difficult situation she well described in “Woman and the Creative Will,” but also a poor immigrant poet without a suitable American background. Her unconscious surely housed Victorian mores that insisted she stay bound to the home and to strictly feminine roles. Less embedded in the unconscious were the new flapper codes that emphasized a youth she didn’t have, even after subtracting ten years from her age. As Paul Bennet writes in My Life a Loaded Gun: Female Creativity and Feminist Poetics: “The woman writer’s principal antagonists are not the strong male or female poets who may have preceded her within the tradition, but the inhibiting voices that live within herself.”

  If she couldn’t be forever young like Edna St. Vincent Millay whose tininess, long red hair, and penchant for clothes that made her look like a child well into her fifties, she would be ill. As an invalid, Ridge turned being female, an immigrant, poor, and a poet into assets. Were her posings worse than Pound the impresario with his cape and beard? Or Moore’s celibacy, her tricornered virgin’s hat like a nun’s flaring headpiece? Or Williams’s constant philandering? Or Scott’s ménage à trois? They were all branding themselves in the contemporary sense, flaunting their eccentricities while enduring the searing hot poker of the collective psyche bent on condemning the artist’s way of life. At least Ridge turned some portion of her personal powerlessness into compassion and indignation over the suffering of others. She left a legacy of poetry attuned to social justice that others could draw on, themes her poetic counterparts for the most part left unexplored.

  One of Evelyn Scott’s biographers, D. A. Callard, and Ridge’s composer friend Henrietta Glick suggested that Ridge committed suicide. Ridge mentions eating only one meal a day for nine days in her diary at the end of her life. Her ambition, combined with her various ailments, imagined or real, could have taken her body—and her spirit—too far.

  Chapter 25

  Sacco and Vanzetti

  A month after Williams wrote to Ridge so movingly about her illness and poverty, Ridge was standing vigil in a protest against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Some hidden reserves of strength and money must have allowed her to travel to Boston to the prison and witness the uproar that surrounded the last-minute pleas for the anarchists’ lives. Perhaps Ridge’s good friend, the Mount Holyoke scholar and writer Jeannette Marks, arranged her trip. She mentions Ridge in her personal account of the execution and its preparation in her book Thirteen Days.

  A fan of Ridge’s dating from the publication of The Ghetto and Other Poems, Marks had offered extravagant praise immediately: “I considered your poem the most brilliant piece of work I had seen in modern poetry.” She invited Ridge to speak on campus as part of her “Poetry Shop Talks,” a series which already included Robert Frost and Amy Lowell. Marks and Ridge began a decade-long correspondence that included Ridge’s last mention of “Woman and the Creative Will”: “I have not touched my woman book since July….” Ridge was about to take over Broom as American editor at the time, and asked in the same letter if Kreymborg had accepted anything of Marks’s. A poem by Marks appears in a later issue. After Ridge’s resignation, they continued to correspond in frank letters like the one Ridge writes Dec 23, 1923:

  Louis Untermeyer—I don’t care for him either. He was good about my work. But I can’t help it. He always makes me think of a spurious diamond stud. Are there two D’s in studd? It seems as though to me it ought to be, in Louis[’s] studd anyhow. I’ve had a hell of a summer which is why you haven’t heard from me for so long.

  Part of that hell might have referred to an illness that required a procedure that Marks will help pay for a few months later. Ensconced in the hospital, Ridge enjoyed “Sappho…I wish I could read Greek. What damn rot to call it a “dead language” when it is the container of living and eternal beauty…” Marks’s partner was Mount Holyoke president Mary Woolley, who was also an officer in William Floyd’s Peace Patriots.

  Marks had served on the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee since their trial in 1920. The case was a showdown between American patriotism and the radicalism that founded the country. Arrested a few days after anarchist Andrea Salsedo “fell” 14 stories out of a New York Department of Justice building, Sacco and Vanzetti were accused of murdering two men during an armed robbery of a shoe factory. They were not even at the scene of the crime, but suffered from “a dubious place in society, an unpopular nationality, erroneous political beliefs, the wrong religion socially, poverty, low social standing,” as Marks put it. Court appeals went on for six years. The handling of the case was so controversial that it is still open. According to historian Arthur Schlesinger, the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti ignited worldwide public feeling comparable to the Haymarket bombing in the 1880s, or the Dreyfus case in Europe, or even Pearl Harbor. George Bernard Shaw, Anatole France, and Albert Einstein wrote letters on behalf of the anarchists who said they had emigrated because the country promised them freedom. “I was crazy to come to this country,” Sacco said in broken English during the trial, “because I was liked (sic) a free country.” But Paul Avrich puts their presumed innocence in perspective:

  Both men…were social militants who advocated relentless warfare against government and capital. Far from being the innocent dreamers so often depicted by their supporters, they belonged to a branch of the movement that preached insurrectionary violence and armed retaliation, including the use of dynamite in an assassination.

  What the execution of the two Italians with so little evidence revealed was the true extent of the buried hate for new immigrants, an issue Ridge had been exposing her entire career in America: whose freedom is it? The newspapers announced that Lola Ridge would be one of “an imposing number of liberals” supporting Sacco and Vanzetti in silent protest outside the prison in Charlestown, Massachusetts. As Upton Sinclair observed: “The case worked upon the consciences of persons who were cursed with artistic temperaments.” Although a good number of poets and prominent intellectuals were protesting, Amy Lowell’s brother, president of Harvard, headed the commission that denied Sacco and Vanzetti a retrial, “earning [for] Harvard the name of Hangman’s Hall” among radicals.

  Ridge was arrested on August 8, 1927, along with 44 men and women, including John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Babette Deutsch, Hutchins Hapgood, Polly Halladay, and Mike Gold. Jeannette Marks described Dorothy Parker’s experience: “[She] was roughly handled by officers who bruised her neck and arms, marching her in the middle of the street up three cobblestone blocks…The mob watching the arrest started shouting “Hang her! Hang them all! Hang the anarchists!” White-gloved Parker, best known for her bon mots at the Algonquin Round Table and her writing in the New Yorker, was so struck by her bad treatment at the vigil that she became politically active, and eventually left her estate to Martin Luther King. Marks saw her crying later, badly shaken by the mob’s frenzy. “She was not an ana
rchist; she was not a Communist; she was not, so far as I knew, even that constitutional radical known as Socialist.”

  Marks spent most of her time at Defense headquarters in the North End’s poor Italian neighborhood. Most shocking to her was the manipulation of Sacco and Vanzetti’s situation by the Communist supporters. Short-story writer Katherine Anne Porter, who had covered the Mexican Revolution a few years earlier, reported it: “Rosa Baron…snapped at me when I expressed the wish that we might save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti: ‘Alive—what for? They are no earthly good to us alive.’”

  On the picket line Edna St. Vincent Millay held a sign that read: “If these men are executed, justice is dead in Massachusetts.” Ridge and Millay were filmed and photographed being marched away by a policeman between them. The two poets had the same demeanor—determined. Those who defended Millay and a few others in a sort of “show trial” included three-fourths of the Harvard Law School graduating class, Felix Frankfurter, Albert Einstein, G.B. Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Jane Addams. But for the rest of the 172 arrested, Porter writes:

  The judge, not just with a straight face but portentously, as if pronouncing another death sentence, found us guilty of loitering and obstructing traffic, fined us five dollars each, and the tragic farce took its place in history….A busy, abstracted woman wearing pinch-nose spectacles, whom I never saw before or since, pushed her way among us, pressing five dollars into every hand, instructing us one and all to pay our fines, then and there, which we did.

  The money was provided by Edward James, nephew of Henry.

  On the day the execution was scheduled, martial law was declared in Boston. Planes circled overhead, as if expecting a full-scale invasion from the Red Menace. The protesters did not leave. They waited under great tension for the final verdict and possible stay of execution at midnight. Meanwhile, the handsome Dos Passos flitted around, covering the situation for The Worker. He would later write The Big Money, using the Sacco-Vanzetti case to represent America’s growing corruption, commercialism, exploitation, and injustice. Somehow Dorothy Parker made her way into the prison where the prisoners were chanting, “Let them out! Let them out!” Jeannette Marks stayed hopeful.

  As we sat on, quiet in the tense office, messages coming and going, now and then a cup of coffee being poured or a sandwich eaten, in my thoughts were lines from Lola Ridge’s “Two in the Death House” which, repeated to me the week before, she was now chanting over in Salem Street.

  You have endured those moments, you

  Close to the rough nap of earth, and knowing her

  perennial ways.

  And when, on some one of your counted mornings,

  light

  That pulls at the caught root of things

  Has pierced you with a touch, or leavened air,

  You too have hoped—with the ardor of young shoots,

  renascent under concrete,

  And with them have gone down to defeat again.

  The railroad yards were lined with machine guns, and searchlights were placed in clusters of three at 20-yard intervals with 500 police officers on alert, 20 of them armed with riot guns. The remainder of the police had pistols and tear gas. Boats patrolled the river. A thousand cars blocked traffic, horns blaring. According to the New York Times, “motion picture photographers held aloft flaming calcium torches, lighting up a passing detail of mounted State police with a ghastly flicker and silhouetting their silent figures against the grim gray of the prison walls.”

  At 11 o’clock, without any directive from Defense Headquarters, Lola Ridge led a group of 50 demonstrators on the walk from the courthouse to the prison. They were met by mounted police armed with pistols, grenades and tear gas. Porter provided an eyewitness account of the assault 50 years later:

  They galloped about, bearing down upon anybody who ventured out beyond the edge of the crowd, charging and then pulling their horses up short violently so that they reared and their forehoofs [sic] beat in the air over a human head, but always swerving sharply and coming down on one side. They were trained, probably, to this spectacular, dangerous-looking performance, but still, I know it is very hard to force a good horse to step on any living thing….Most of the people moved back passively before the police, almost as if they ignored their presence; yet there were faces fixed in agonized disbelief, their eyes followed the rushing horses as if this was not a sight they had expected to see in their lives.

  Most of the people—but not Lola Ridge. Jeannette Marks recounts Ridge’s response to the police presence:

  With a young Scotchman [probably Lawson] and another girl, Lola Ridge slipped under the ropes and started straight for the cordon of mounted police and the prison doors. A young mounted guard, a boy, rode down upon her. As he reined in his horse fairly over her, she heard him whispering in a frightened voice, “What do you want?”

  Katherine Anne Porter gives another perspective to the confrontation. After describing the horse beating its hooves over her head and a bystander recognizing her, the man

  dashed into the empty space toward her. Without any words or a moment’s pause, he simply seized her by the shoulders and walked her in front of him back to the edge of the crowd, where she stood as if she were half-conscious. I came near her and said, “Oh no, don’t let them hurt you! They’ve done enough damage already.” And she said, “This is the beginning of the end—we have lost something we shan’t find again.” I remember her bitter hot breath and her deathlike face.

  Porter sat in a hotel room with other protesters after the midnight execution. “In my whole life I have never felt such a weight of pure bitterness, helpless anger in utter defeat, outraged love and hope as hung over us in that room.” Outside, others wept or fell silent, and went their separate ways, and many of them “marched the streets alone,” according to Malcolm Cowley. “Just as the fight for a common cause had brought the intellectuals together, so the defeat drove them apart, each into his personal isolation.” Ten thousand people had gathered in New York’s Union Square awaiting the verdict.

  They responded [to news of the execution] with a great sob. Women fainted in fifteen or twenty places. Others, too overcome, dropped to the curbs and buried their heads in their hands. Men leaned on one another’s shoulders and wept. There was a sudden movement to the east of Union Square. Men began to run around aimlessly, tearing at their clothes and ripping their straw hats, and women ripped their dresses in anguish.

  Emotional reactions to the execution swept the world. Forty people were injured when foot police charged 12,000 British sympathizers in London, Buenos Aires boycotted American goods, and an American flag was burned on the steps of Johannesburg’s Town Hall. Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Sydney, and at least two cities in France reported rioting. Even the peaceful Swiss mobbed the American consulate and the League of Nations Palace.

  A procession of 50,000 people marked the anarchists’ funerals. “One of the most tremendous funerals of modern times,” reported the Boston Globe, but all footage was destroyed by order of Will H. Hays, head of the movie industry’s umbrella organization. At the head of the coffin marched Mother Bloor, a veteran organizer, carrying a placard quoting Judge Webster Thayer: “Did you see what I did to those Anarchistic Bastards?” She was arrested for “distributing anarchistic literature.” The crowd marched arm-in-arm until it was charged by mounted police and a car filled with officers holding drawn guns, who diverted traffic into the cortège and clubbed onlookers.

  As Caroline Maun says in her Mosaic of Fire:

  [Lola Ridge] was prepared to martyr herself at a decisive moment in American history, where the future of a political movement she had been involved with for two decades hung in the balance, demonstrating that for her art and activism were one.

  Like some kind of doting Red mother, Emma Goldman, writing from exile to Evelyn Scott, noted her bravery: “I was glad to see that our dear Lola Ridge has taken such an active part in the Sacco Vanzetti protests.”

  IV

 
Yaddo, Firehead, Baghdad, Dance of Fire, Taos,

  1929–35

  Chapter 26

  Yaddo and the Writing of Firehead

  The artists’ colony Yaddo doesn’t share the bucolic spirit of the woodsy cabins at the MacDowell Colony that Ridge visited in 1920. With the ground’s Victorian 55-room mansion and its two-story-tall Tiffany windows, Yaddo is more “Henry James to MacDowell’s Henry David Thoreau,” according to one visitor of both. Yaddo’s main house boasts a massive staircase that a drunken John Cheever supposedly rode down on an 18th-century ice sleigh usually parked in the reception area. The mansion is situated next to the racetrack in Saratoga Springs, New York, and is said to be haunted by the founder’s wife, Katrina Trask, the housemaid, and her children—unless you favor the novelist Allan Gurganus’s theory that these visions have been reports of Cheever (or someone similar) caught flitting naked in the hallway between trysts.

  The first time Ridge arrived at the colony was June 1929, a few months after she left the hospital with her possible diagnosis of T.B. She would leave Yaddo just a month before the stock market crashed. Yaddo’s benefactor, Spencer Trask, founded the very successful Wall Street firm that still bears his name, backed Thomas Edison and Marconi, and saved the New York Times. He and Katrina built Yaddo together and had four children. But the children died, three of diphtheria within seven days of each other—and the original Yaddo mansion burned down in 1900. With the precedent of visiting artists—Edgar Allan Poe was said to have written part of “The Raven” there fifty years earlier—the Trasks decided to turn the property into an artists’ colony. Katrina Trask had visions of generations of those yet unborn strolling the lawns, “creating, creating, creating,” but before the guests began pouring in, Spencer Trask died in a train wreck. Katrina, writing poetry, survived him another 13 years, until 1922.