Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  Mrs. Elizabeth Ames, daughter of the president of the Yaddo corporation, was hired to administer the premises in 1926. Three years later she invited Ridge for a stay of the customary month. Ridge was offered another month in June when she arrived, and then perhaps more time if she wanted it. Ames particularly enjoyed the company of radical writers, and Yaddo’s policy included “the support of artists at political risk.” Thirteen years later Yaddo became the site of “The Lowell Affair,” when a paranoid Robert Lowell broke down and had a six-year visitor Agnes Smedley extracted by the FBI as a suspected Communist.

  Ridge may have been recommended to Mrs. Ames by her friend Alfred Kreymborg and Lewis Mumford, who recommended others. Their own work as editors and contributors to the influential American Caravan Ridge was in the process of severely criticizing for the Saturday Review of Literature. She held strong views and believed others could benefit from hearing them. “Americans are the most malleable of people,” she wrote in a review eight years earlier: “With a child-like confidence, amounting to hero worship with their leaders and hypocritically open to suggestion, they are a people whose art sense could be developed by intelligent direction.”

  She must have been in an especially self-destructive mood with regard to the American Caravan review:

  Heaven[s] what a job. I have now disposed of 37 writers, ignored 7, have 18 more to read and write about. I am saying exactly what I think of friend and foe and stranger. It is the first time I have done so without any reservations whatever.

  The review wouldn’t come out until the end of the month.

  She herself had just been reviewed positively in the New York Times along with Eliot, cummings, Moore, Williams, and others in Prize Poems 1913-1929. The review she was really worried about was that of Mrs. Ames, who might think that she was “too sure of myself and perhaps [I] give her a wrong impression.” Mrs. Ames warmed to few women and especially did not tolerate any foolishness. One female guest, known to have been entertaining a number of partners, returned from her breakfast one morning to find a single bed had replaced her double. But Ridge needn’t have worried. Mrs. Ames ended her 25 June note by saying, “I admire you with all my heart.”

  Ridge was given one of the best rooms in the mansion, with a spectacular view of the Green Mountains of Vermont. She didn’t stay long. “I do not however find this grand room ideal. It is too large. I like to be shut in and feel secret and hidden,” she writes Louise Adams Floyd. Five days passed and she wasn’t able to work. She became desperate, she wanted to leave. Mrs. Ames persuaded her to stay, moved her, and arranged to have her breakfast brought to the new room. “I seem to feel Mrs. Trask’s gentle presence in this room and she must have had a tender, innocent and [?] kind personality to judge from the distressingly bad full-length painting of her downstairs,” wrote Ridge.

  Ridge brought along a copy of T. Sturge Moore’s Judas she received from critic Llewellyn Jones in 1928. Jones would review all Ridge’s work glowingly in the Chicago newspapers, and was deemed by John Cowper Powys to have “the most comprehensive and the most scholarly knowledge of modern poetry of any man in America.” He had edited the Judas he sent, a book of poems that contained an unusual conception of the traitor’s character that may have influenced Ridge’s decision to choose the Crucifixion as her next subject, or shaped her own vision of Judas. Two weeks after she arrived at Yaddo, her husband mailed her a book on the historical Jesus, along with the Bible, her friend Laura Benét’s third book of poetry, Macabre Danse, and Robinson Jeffers’s Roan Stallion. This last is a long narrative poem that uses mythic characters to express mystical experiences. By then she herself happened to be writing a long narrative poem about the Crucifixion from a psychological vantage. Kahlil Gilbran’s koan-like book, Jesus, the Son of Man, came out the year before. Although she worried that people would think she “begged his idea,” she knew “Gilbran is more formalized, therefore more predictable than I.” Later in another letter she wrote to Floyd, “Note the poor little circumscribed, temperate, and slightly runish (?) Jesus of Kahlil Gilbran!”

  Her real competition was Jeffers. She had read most of his work, starting with Tamar in 1927, and she very much admired it. Perhaps she appreciated his acknowledgement of Australia—a rare literary nod—in his early “Eucalyptus Trees”: “Thankful…to him who first/Brought hither from Australia oversea/Sapling or seed of the undeciduous tree,” and his mention of the “long white southern road” that provided ecological and racial links between Australia and America.

  She withheld her assessment of Jeffers until the very end of her Saturday Review roasting. She starts off by condemning Sherwood Anderson, whose “shoddy monologue” opens the collection. About Hemingway she writes: “That which is called classicism is really the male principle functioning in art.” She talks of a “glass ceiling” in which Hemingway’s “exterior perfection” exists, using “boundaries individual talents may freely express themselves, but whose limitations they may not transcend.” She posits that the opposing female principle appeared during the Italian Renaissance, and puts forward Evelyn Scott’s story about a gunman as a contemporary example. She prefers Scott’s story to Hemingway’s because it is “life in flux” and not deterministic. Her comments on Gertrude Stein are interesting, given it had been six years since her resignation from Broom over Stein’s work: her “jazz is in the way of becoming the folklore of American intellectuals” and “has in it the mysticism of a child, who, twirling dizzily on its heels, isolates itself by staring blankly at the sky of which it does not even see the light.” Her criticism is not gender-biased. The remainder of the stories, particularly the women’s, “bear hysterical witness to that arch-romanticist, Freud.” H.D.’s story is “a jumbled litter of things and people, shaken to scintillance in a bright memory, throw[ing] off lustrous dust…her thoughts flutter like butterflies excited by a magpie.” She brings down the rod hard on her acolyte, Jean Toomer, and her colleague Alfred Kreymborg, declaring that they have not “produced at their former levels.” “Mr. Toomer rambles on like one who has learned a few words of a strange language and repeats them endlessly” and “Mr. Kreymborg’s failure is due partly to a slovenly presentation.” (American Caravan will be the last magazine he will work on.) She does praise Frost, Van Doren, Winters, and Babette Deutsch. She does not fully approve of Aiken’s contribution. “Whatever of creative utterance is his [Conrad Aiken] will be found embedded, still-born, in some lovely phrase.” And finally, she writes: “These plaintive murmurs make me crave, perversely, for the disturbing voice—how many eagle cries above—of that great death-carrier, Robinson Jeffers.” But by the end of the residency Jeffers and his forthcoming Dear Judas will nearly undo her.

  All of Ridge’s letters speak of a difficult time at Yaddo, despite the coddling atmosphere. She had “blind” attacks—migraines—and a debilitating pain in her side, terrible headaches, problems with her teeth, and insomnia. “One hour’s sleep at night will not keep you going,” writes her husband by August. In letter after letter she begs him to send Gynergen, an amphetamine prescribed for one of her many maladies. The addictive narcotic had side effects which could have caused the headaches, the sleeplessness, and possibly the pain in her side she complained of—and it certainly enabled her to finish all 200 plus pages of her poem Firehead in just fifteen weeks. Her husband was leery of sending her so many bottles at once, but neither he nor Ridge seemed concerned that it was habit-forming, nor that its side effects might be contributing to her feeling unwell. She also took Corax intermittently, also known as librium, to calm herself. Its side effects are similar to Gynergen’s and it is also addictive. Withdrawal causes constipation and hallucinations. In addition to her constant use of castor oil, she has visions: “The trouble has been I could not concentrate—even on reading a book—for five minutes at a time and I could not keep my thoughts from flying back to things that had distressed me. Now I am quite calm…but with a bad headache….have had strange dreams and apparitions.”r />
  In addition to the drugs she was prescribed, she may have been taking any one of the many medications that were still sold over-the-counter that caused addiction, or using contemporary products that contained narcotics such as cough syrup, Coca-Cola, and toothache powder. Even 7-Up contained the mood-stabilizing drug lithium citrate until 1950. Since Prohibition was in effect, drugs were legally easier to obtain than booze. Her friend Jeannette Marks published Genius and Disaster: Studies in Drugs and Genius in 1925. “Do not assert, as if there were some demoniacal logic in it, that Coleridge and DeQuincey were geniuses and ate opium. Chaucer, Milton and Wordsworth, Blake, George Eliot, and Robert Browning, were geniuses and they did not take opium,” she writes. Later in the book, Marks presents an idea that Ridge might have approved—that illness helps creativity:

  The biographical study of Stevenson’s life shows that when he was in an improved condition, his literary output was least. Emily Brontë’s life may have been shortened by consumption but in her poems power and passion were made greater by tuberculosis.

  In the last chapter Marks puts a positive spin on addiction, writing that “Opium taken within bounds lessens gastric secretions. Men who starve… find in it a blessing.” Ridge’s copy is inscribed: “For Lola from Jeannette.”

  Ridge also owned Dope: The Story of the Living Dead by “Annie Laurie,” the pseudonym for Winifred Black, who wrote human-interest stories for Hearst, and Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s classic The Hashish Eater with its resounding endorsement:

  My own personal acquaintance with this drug, covering as it did a considerable extent of time, and almost every possible variety of phenomena, both physical and psychological, proper to its operation, not only empowers, but for a long time has been impelling me to give it a publicity which may bring it in contact with a larger number of minds interested in such researches than it could otherwise hope to meet.

  Her husband sent drugs and money. He also acted as her reader and chief critic while she was so furiously writing. “You have a good sense of form and economy of words and often make many good suggestions,” she writes to him June 7, 1929. Eleven days later, she proposed that he join her somewhere near Yaddo to go over her work. He responded the next day: “I’m already looking forward to coming up and having you away with me for a few days.” They sounded like young lovers but she was a real 56 by now, to his 43. Three days later, she rescinded her offer, and he counteroffered to visit in another two weeks. Back and forth they went, Ridge expressing hope that he would come, but whenever he arranged the travel, she had an attack of illness or the work was too much, or there wouldn’t be room for him at Yaddo. This was a pattern they continued throughout their 20-year relationship: she invites him to wherever she’s retreated, then changes her mind when he tries to make plans, then she stays away months longer. It must have kept the relationship vital. “I’d like to have a whole week with you,” her husband begged by June 21st. He suggested he comfort her while she had her teeth worked on, he bought a suit for $28 so he’d look better when he saw her—maybe instead of his coming to Yaddo, she could come down to New York? But by mid-July she was in full swing with her writing. Her letters were filled with requests: Send me more paper, a book, what do you think of these sonnets? “I worked til 3 am. This morning slept 3 hours started again worked till 4 pm.” Finally, she took two days off and met him in Saratoga Springs, where they discussed her latest efforts together. “Our little holiday didn’t turn out much but I was glad to see you and read your poem,” writes her husband. As a way to lure her home, he began to fix up her studio at 220 West 14th Street, painting and repairing it, but she had already decided to stay the extra month of August. “This morning am starting the Bondman!” she writes Louise Adams Floyd. “So you see how well I am—beaten the last attack and mean it…I feel like a race horse getting the whip on the last lap.” By August 8th her husband writes: “I’m very pleased you’ve got so much done…I am sending you Gynergen….I hope you will be here Sept. 1st before going to Floyd’s.” Apparently she was already planning to retreat to the Long Island estate instead of returning to New York. He ends his letter with: “You are creating great literature.” She took that to heart, and four days later she reported: “I wrote 378 lines in two days but I had to work on them two days more.”

  She was in a hurry. Viking wasn’t taking another book, but Bill Benét had found her a new publisher, Payson & Clarke, who promised they would feature a book whenever she could produce it. Benét was to be her editor. She worked hard and seldom went down for dinner. Another resident, Emanuel Eisenberg, analyzed her proclivity for seclusion in the horoscope he cast, producing an accurate character sketch, one similar to many an ambitious artist:

  Yours is a nature of intense idealism. It is almost completely uninterested in the literal substance of human beings or in the constructional aspect of individuals. People are attractive and meaningful to you only insofar as they present ideas of themselves or symbols of their ideational significance. This provides you with the strength for solitude; you have no essential need for actual persons, having the ideas of them within you; it is your surest focus of existence.

  His insight is reinforced by Kay Boyle’s comment about Ridge made years earlier: “She is made for everyone to worship—and she doesn’t really give herself to or actually NEED anyone.” In Ridge’s extreme concentration she interacted with few of the other forty Yaddo guests. Nineteen-year-old Paul Bowles was in attendance. Eventually a composer, translator, and famed short-story writer, his works are now part of the Library of America. Ridge would enjoy meeting his lover/teacher Aaron Copland during her next Yaddo stay. Edward Dahlberg had just published Bottom Dogs, his book about being orphaned in America, with an introduction by D.H. Lawrence. She already admired Gerald Sykes, then a poet, later a critic, whose work she had complimented in her Saturday Review piece. “The one I like best is Gerald Sykes, one of the young writers in the last Caravan I picked in that benighted article.” Her friend Laura Benét arrived mid-July for two weeks, but Ridge found she couldn’t write after talking to her. Twenty-six year old Dudley Fitts, just a few years out of Harvard, was just then taking up the task of translating literary works from Latin that would occupy most of the rest of his career. Her good friend Evelyn Scott came for two weeks in July with her new husband, the Englishman John Metcalfe, who stayed on until the end of August. Scott had dedicated her bestselling and most critically approved book The Wave to Ridge that year. Ridge met Eda Lou Walton for the first time in June, the Navajo scholar, poet, anthologist, and critic who later became Henry Roth’s lover and helped him write and publish Call It Sleep in 1934. Even for the wild 20s, Walton’s sexual embrace was wide. Her friend, the-less-than-prudish Margaret Mead, found herself disapproving of Walton bedding both Mead’s brother and her husband. Like Ridge, Walton had a soft spot for “card-carrying communists, avowed or clandestine, fellow travelers, russophiles and voyeurs of the ‘liberal’ persuasion, zealots committed to the utopias of Trotsky and Marx or Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” Walton appeared on a Congressional list along with Rockwell Kent for UnAmerican Propaganda Activities in the 40s. She and Ridge published in Poetry together in 1920, and Walton would review Ridge’s last book in the New York Tribune.

  Like Walton, Ridge was not a believer in sexual exclusivity. She wanted the monogamous Lawson to loosen up while she was away, judging from his dismissive comment by mid-August: “I’m seeing no one and it wouldn’t help if I was.” But she needed his support desperately. On August 20th, she writes: “I must have more Gynergen….to help me through this ordeal,” but five days later she admits: “The Gynergen is failing me—my system is establishing a tolerance for it. I now take seven and eight before I can get an effect.” Two days later she writes that she was more ill than before she went to the hospital in the spring, but then finishes the letter with her signature fierceness: “I’ll do it. I’ll get out the poem and have it to them in first few days of September. Only death will stop me.” Davy respo
nded the next day by pointing out that “The most important thing is not that your book should appear Nov. 1st instead of Dec. 1st…in your present condition you can do more damage to yourself in two weeks work than can be undone in six months, and it isn’t worth it.” The next day he proposed that he come up to collect her. “What I really had in mind was that we would take the boat at Albany and have the nice ride down, and we would have a state-room.” When she didn’t respond, he writes: “Of course you must decide how long you stay there. Only your personal condition and work should decide.” The next day she became extremely distraught by the news that

  Robinson Jeffers is this fall bring[ing] out a book on my theme! He calls his Dear Judas. His will appear before mine two months….Jeffers’ theme is like mine on the crucifixion and his will foil any chance of mine selling.

  She finished Firehead anyway, and Davy met her at the train with roses.

  Chapter 27

  Firehead’s Success

  Firehead was a smashing success, published in time for Christmas giving, with 25 copies on handmade paper, 225 copies on rag paper, and a trade edition. It received 60 or so reviews across the country, almost twice as many as any of Ridge’s previous three books. Daumier’s woodcut Ecce Homo illustrated her full page New York Times review. Society pages talked about her book alongside new work by Countee Cullen and Edna St. Vincent Millay. “Poet Has Perfect Command of a Most Treasured Theme,” “New Poetic Heights are Attained in Firehead,” and “Fighting Pain and Death, Lola Ridge Writes Mighty Poem of Crucifixion” are a sampling of the headlines. She was “one of possibly three woman poets who hold first rank in this country,” according to the Helena Independent of January 12, 1930. In the Chicago Daily Tribune, her friend Stephen Vincent Benét wrote “This is magnificent work…In this long narrative poem of the crucifixion, her mature gift has come to unique fruition.” Louis Untermeyer, long a supporter, wrote in the Saturday Review of Literature that Firehead was “one of the most impressive creations of any American poet.”