Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  From the time of Crane’s death until the mid-1970s, there seemed to be a concerted effort to promote him as a major poet. That effort, essentially, has failed. There are simply too many problems of diction, syntax, prosody, structure, and vision in Crane’s work to validate that kind of claim.

  Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Wright admits that “mostly I’ve loved lines.” David Young finds Crane’s work “overly sweeping and mythic, too grandiose and unanchored for its own good…” Marianne Boruch laments “his sentimentality, his predictable cadence and mannered language, his boosterism for America, for the ‘Machine Age,’ his fondness for bombast and excess and prophecy.” A queer studies critic from another symposium comments on what he believes is at the root of Crane’s difficulty, but he could also be referring to Ridge’s secret shame of abandoning her child:

  The intensity responsible for Crane’s particular form of difficulty involves not only linguistic considerations but also culturally subjective concerns. This intensity produces a kind of privacy that is comprehensible in terms of the cultural construction of homosexuality and its attendant institutions of privacy.

  Of course there is also the possibility that Crane and Ridge have accomplished an aesthetic leap that surpasses contemporary appreciation. As critic Catherine Daly suggests with regard to “Via Ignis,” a later poem of Ridge’s:

  The thees and thous, the verbs ending in “eth,”and the stilted diction may now seem ridiculous, but the archaism and spirituality expressed in these poems has a purpose: it subverts both the modernism and the Marxism Ridge held in complex and difficult relationship.

  Occasionally, Firehead breaks into intelligibility:

  I do remember how the old blue sea

  Shuffled in glistening coils about the day

  That cast thy shadow on our street and how

  From out the passing litters, in which bared

  White jeweled arms moved languidly their fans

  And topaz glimmered in the small pink ears

  That curled about thy voice, shrewd eyes outstared

  Outdiamonding the twinkling of the sands. (Firehead 69)

  Except for the “small pink ears” suddenly coming to life and curling, the lines follow grammatically and graphically, there is an identifiable speaker doing the reminiscing, and Ridge coins “outdiamonding” acceptably, if excessively, as a verb to describe glittering eyes.

  What becomes admired depends so much on taste and timing, as well as the proper publicity, the right psychological mix in the Zeitgeist that allows a poet to step into the light just when the hands of the audience are coming together—and not just the text, as New Critics would have readers believe. The value of poetry is always changing. As Cary Nelson writes:

  We tend to ignore evidence that promotion by oneself or others plays a role in building careers, preferring to assume it is the best poets, not necessarily those who are the most ambitious or most widely publicized, who retain long-term visibility.

  One example contemporary with Crane and Ridge’s technical rivalry is Hope Mirrlees, whose very modernist book-long poem Paris: A Poem perhaps outdoes Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” but was published three years earlier. Her volume was surely something he had seen since their mutual friend Virginia Woolf published it right after his Poems. However, Mirrlees never discussed it with him. “I am unaware whether he ever saw it,” she said. “We were not yet acquainted in 1919.” From a wealthy Scottish family, she grew up partially in South Africa, and was living with her former Cambridge tutor in Paris at the time the book was written. Although Mirrlee’s book focuses on the female and aberrant sex, “The Waste Land” echoes it, particularly in emotional resonance. Beautifully bound in a fleur-de-lis print, the handset volume in the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College contains Woolf’s penciled-in corrections. Woolf did not rewrite her poem as Pound did Eliot’s, and Pound also did not use his considerable skill in promotion that the new modernist work required and that Eliot embraced.

  Verlaine’s bed-time…Alchemy

  Absynthe,

  Algerian tobacco,

  Talk, talk, talk,

  Manuring the white violets of the moon.

  Mirrlees published her next book of poetry more than 40 years later.

  As for Joyce, his doppelgänger could be considered his friend Abraham Lincoln Gillespie, “Link,” who somewhat resembled him. Like Pound who was also a friend, Link was groomed for bourgeois life via the Quakers, and he too attended college in Pennsylvania. Also a friend of Stein’s, Gillespie published work in Transition in the late 1920s that outdid Stein and Joyce and Pound in typographical innovation.

  Sweettrustmisery-Eyed hurtbyherMan-Woman

  motherready-responsewarmth

  cashregisterAnnote dissemINFO…

  In Europe, Gillespie lived in a stone house that had one room with all the furniture fixed to the ceiling. After his return to the U.S. in the 1930s, Gillespie disappeared into dense sound experiments, speaking just the way he wrote, making sonic performances that brought down the house at New York’s Village Vanguard. His literary achievements went largely unrecognized, and his death certificate in 1950 listed his occupation as “none.”

  Chapter 28

  Return to Yaddo: Taggard and Copland

  Only ten months after leaving Yaddo, Ridge settled back in her old room. Her husband must have been relieved to have her gone. As she admitted to her friend Louise Adams Floyd in the spring of 1930:

  I’m in a beastly temper. Davy started it off this morning by an optimistic remark. He was crossing the room and my snarled retort caught him half way. He stood as though stuck fast staring at me with sharp bewildered eyes and hair standing up straight—he looked like the ram caught in the thicket.

  George Peabody, Katrina Trask’s second husband, and Mrs. Pardee, the nanny and eventually the Trask secretary, had invited her for this second stay, beginning July 9th, even though artists were then only allowed to visit once. Ridge began her work by reading Babylonian history, hoping this visit to capture the rise of culture in all humanity. Again too preoccupied to come down for dinner, she entertained visitors in her room.

  Her first was the radical poet and fellow guest Genevieve Taggard, who sent Ridge a note the day she arrived requesting to see her, the grand dame, reclusive, and ailing. Ridge had been featured in four anthologies in 1930, including Best Poems of 1929, and Firehead was a national hit. “At last you are here,” Taggard writes.

  They had much to share. The child of missionaries, Taggard spent her formative years immersed in the multicultural polyglot of the Pacific in Hawaii, which shaped her strong views on race and class. She helped publicize Sun-up when she worked for Huebsch, Ridge’s publisher in the 20s, and co-founded The Measure, a poetry journal, editing it the same time Ridge was editing Broom. Ridge’s poem “The Ailanthus Tree” was published in its second issue. While Ridge cited Dickinson as one of the few women geniuses in literature, Taggard had just published an adoring and prescient biography of Dickinson that year which suggested, among other claims, that Dickinson had had a fairly ordinary love life. Taggard and Ridge were also both contributing editors to New Masses that published many of Taggard’s poems, reviews, and articles during the 1930s. Taggard also shared Ridge’s “bisexual” belief in the source of creativity. In her preface to her collected works, she argued that her poems “hold a wider consciousness than that colored by the feminine half of the race. I hope they were not written by a poetess, but a poet.” She rephrased Ridge’s ideas on male and female creativity in her 1935 essay “Equal Rights”: “There is one impulse for control and its antagonistic impulse for abandon; one pushing inward, the other exploding at the Center.” The two of them also held similar views on the Russian Revolution, although Taggard professed an ideological fascination that Ridge, in the end, did not. While Taggard would visit Russia in 1936, Ridge decided that traveling to Baghdad was more important to her work, revealing once again that her political agenda was not doctrinaire.
According to William Drake, Taggard’s aim in her most proletarian book of poetry, Calling Western Union, published in 1936, was “to transform the isolated line into a script for collective chants,” something Ridge had already done in her work on Sacco and Vanzettti, chanting them at the demonstration before the execution. Taggard’s later interest in the African American lyric tradition intersected with Ridge’s work “Lullaby,” the ballad written in dialect on the St. Louis riots. As white women, they both had had to develop an appropriate strategy for speaking about another race.

  Fiercely liberal, Taggard would later be grouped with Kenneth Fearing and Muriel Rukeyser as one of the “Dynamo Poets,” who, with Ridge as a kind of foremother, took labor as a serious topic for poetry, but saw imagism as too static to convey the dynamic drive for social justice. Sol Funaroff’s magazine, Dynamo, celebrated this aesthetic. It appeared sporadically between 1934 and 1936, until its editor died from the deprivations of poverty. Rukeyser’s famous lines “Not Sappho, Sacco,” were first printed in Dynamo.

  Like Ridge, Taggard had developed a great interest in metaphysical poetry, especially Donne, perhaps sparked by Eliot’s influential essay “The Metaphysical Poets” in 1921, and his various writings afterwards. “Metaphysical poetry,” Taggard writes, “has been inspired by a philosophical conception of the universe and the role assigned to the human spirit in the great drama of existence.” This statement appeared in the introduction to Circumference, her anthology of metaphysical poetry, in which Ridge was not included. “Emotion, as a source of art forms, is in disrepute—it is more decorous to assume the mind, as well as incubating the egg, supplies the germs,” writes Ridge in her mostly positive review of the book. Perhaps during their meeting at Yaddo, Taggard thanked Ridge for the notice which appeared in the New York Evening Post that April.

  Aaron Copland was Ridge’s next guest. He arrived at Yaddo after Taggard had already left, but would later set Taggard’s poem “Lark” to music. With socialist and pro-Communist leanings, the 30-year-old composer was then defining what was American in music, a topic in literature very dear to Ridge. Her first impressions were good: “He is a lovely person. Everyone up here likes him. He mentioned some of his several hundred intimates whom he’d like me to meet—I think he’s the most friendful man in America.” He was working on “Piano Variations,” and also re-writing the rhythms of “Symphonic Ode,” a piece that he finally approved only in 1955. By September, he was inviting Ridge to his studio to listen to his drafts. She writes:

  I’ve only got to work today. I think I owe the fact that I have been going to Aaron Copland’s studio yesterday…he played…an adaptation of his Symphonique ode—the theme is The Creation. I guessed it at once before the first of the 5 movements were played. I asked him if it wasn’t that afterwards and he said yes. But this ode is the greatest music—in fact the only music…promise of greatness—that I have so far heard from any American composer. He has so far played it before only three or four people.

  Ridge had finally found a use for her study of music theory long ago in Australia. In addition, Henrietta Glick, a 27-year-old graduate of Chicago Musical College, had begun an oratorio based on Firehead in January. Glick, also a friend of Stein and Moore, composed symphonies that were performed in Italy and Rochester, New York. Ridge was collaborating: “I [am] reading aloud to her, describing musical themes that came to me during the writing of it.” In April, Ridge had also begun collaborating on a choral piece with the Chicago composer Dr. Wesley LaViolette.

  Copland visited her studio several more times. In contrast to Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Hindemith, and perhaps Glick, Ridge had faith in him as the future of composing: “I’ve heard enough of your music now to feel you belong definitely with the coming group of yea-sayers. You have experienced something of what the late dead that are yet alive have passed through, but you are already past it, with a perspective on it.”

  He was thoughtful in a response to her a year later: “I feel sure that there is a certain essence of contemporary reality which is expressed in the Variations which I was too young to grasp at the writing of the Ode.”

  Her opinion of his work had changed by the end of her life:

  Nov. 10. Last night we listened to Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid—the arrangement from music of the Ballet which I didn’t see. I didn’t want to listen—because the cowboy phase of America does not interest me—or rather the persistence of the theme disturbs me.

  Nov 11. The exuberance of the frontier man still in the American blood, the glorious energy, lacking direction, turned inward in the weak, the emotionally immature, making a vicious circle in the unit of being…that breast to breast grapple with nature the forefathers so intrepidly met meant too the barefisted grapple with our fellow man—here too the howling will to power—and all thrown on the dice for the moment of tawdry [?] glory. And how soon the guns for those who had had target practice on the Indians—gun to gun—I’ll beat them on the draw—and this yet in our alleys….There is a new race forming in America. Billy the Kid belonged and yet belongs in the childhood of that race.

  Her acquaintance Paul Strand also spent a month at Yaddo. He and Copland had been friends since 1927, sharing an interest of Stieglitz’s work and ideals. She doesn’t mention Strand at all in her letters, busy instead reading “Myths of the Origin of Fire,” an essay by Sir James George Frazer, and working on the sonnets that would fill much of her last book, Dance of Fire. In August, Bill Benét wrote to her from the MacDowell Colony, where he was reading Catullus and consorting with Edgar Arlington Robinson and Thornton Wilder: “Most certainly we will publish a book for you next year! We regard you as our ‘white hope’—though it’s a lot more than hope, naturally. We regard you as one of our stars.”

  Her need for Gynergen had not abated. She worked long hours under its influence and suffered all its side effects. On July 24, she writes: “I’ve opened my second bottle of Gynergen and in about ten or twelve days will need another…” She was asking for another bottle August 9. “A bottle of Gynergen goes to you tonight,” Lawson writes back on August 11. Ridge returned to New York for a few days so the requests were interrupted. “We’ll have some time together,” she had promised her husband. But the trip home would be for research purposes. “You’ll take me to [the] Museum of art [sic] [where] they have Babylonian things I want to see.” Davy wished she could stay a week “but I suppose you won’t want to.” By September 7, Lawson was sending her a clock and more Gynergen. Four days later she writes ominously: “I want more Gynergen soon,” and by the 22nd she ends her letter by underlining: “Don’t forget the Gynergen.” In her druggy intensity, she must have looked wild. Eloise Gard Wright, the Yaddo secretary remembered her vividly: “You are called up to me in white fire with only the black band of your hair to make my mind call you woman.” When Ridge came down with a cold, her room was flooded with flowers—eight vases. Sympathy she knew how to get.

  She sent her husband copies of what she produced and then chastised him for not answering her sooner. “Perhaps if you had more interest in my work.” She writes to him: “Sept. will not be possible [for you to come up] because Gorham Munson and a crowd of ‘humanists’ or near-humanists are coming up here for a powwow on the trend of American Letters.” Did a letter from a “Stan” dated September 9 have anything to do with her stalling? Addressed to “Darling,” and signed “all my love,” the letter is replete with compliments regarding her work and statements like “I…dare talk to you as an equal.” From the contents of the letter, however, it seems that Stan was an acquaintance from other than Yaddo, and not on the premises. Perhaps it was an affair, but rarely did she deflect her time or energy on anyone else. In “Woman and the Creative Will,” she established that women owed it to themselves and the world to recognize and use their expressive talents, but she had no answers to how they might fulfill their obligations to an intimate relationship or family.

  Although Mrs. Ames asked to meet Lawson at the beginning of Rid
ge’s stay, Lawson began to sound resigned to Ridge’s ambivalence about his visit:

  I am pleased that Mrs. Ames should have asked me up, but as I said in my last letter it won’t be possible for me to come up on account of my surveying work which will keep me extra busy for some time but I thank her very much, and hope to see her some other time

  In rather formal language, he made it clear he wasn’t as upset with her illness as she was. “The care and attention you are receiving should help you out of your present poor condition.”

  Ridge received another note from her publisher and deduced that “they seem quite eager to have my next book and indicate they will publish anything I write.” But in October Bill Benét lost his job and she had to find another publisher, perhaps ruining her plan to produce a book as quickly as she had the year before. She carried on, however. “Last night, when I knocked off after eleven hours of work, I was too tired….went to bed with a frightful headache and ready to scream with nervous strain but I woke up again at 5:30 a.m.” She managed to borrow money to have her teeth fixed but still needed her Gynergen. She became frantic for the drug, and once wrote her husband twice in one day asking for it. Her urgent requests continued until the very end of her stay: “I’m afraid I must (underlined twice) have Gynergen when I go down.”

  Fall at Yaddo is pronounced: the studios are surrounded by huge trees that respond vividly to the changing season. Perhaps Ridge was beginning to feel her true age—57—when she wrote:

  From my window I can see the gorgeous woodline of the trees like evening fountains of gold that look as though they had been struck still in the act of flowing and left miraculously in mid air. Others are going up like scarlet flames in between all the colors—royal browns shading into purples—that wonderful color you find in some eyes—deep burning oranges and sultry red—the tree I call Evelyn, still of a lovely green. Why can’t human old age be like that?