Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  After this second stay, Elizabeth Ames invited her to become part of a group of artists who might suggest new guests every year. Ridge put forward several. But she was already planning travel to another retreat, a trip to ancient Babylon.

  Chapter 29

  Europe on Patronage

  Undaunted by lack of funds or the challenges of an exotic culture, Lola Ridge set sail alone for Babylon on the Tuscania in mid-May 1931. The Near East had been an interest of Ridge’s for some time, judging from the poems “Palestine” and “Babel” in The Ghetto. Perhaps she had seen her friend Martin Lewis’s 1929 print, Building a Babylon, a cityscape with a ziggurat skyscraper. She certainly had the support of her friends. “Joe [Brewer, her co-publisher] brought me books and a big packet [of] more letters of introduction,” she writes in her first onboard letter to Louise Adams Floyd.

  Warren [the other co-publisher] [brought] a box of magnificent flowers that nearly fills a table in the dining room. It, the box, was as big as himself…Martin Lewis also came and Martin, Davie, Laura Benét, and Eda Lou Walton waited to see me off and watched until I lost their dear faces in the dark.

  Mrs. Mary Pratt Richter gave her the funds to launch her trip. “Mrs. Richter (of the friends of music) has also sent me a hundred dollars….it was she who gave me the money to come to Europe this summer.” Two years earlier at Yaddo she had longed for a patron to fund travel to the Middle East while working on Firehead. “O Davy if only someone would have sent me to Palestine to write my poem!…everyone but me has been able to go to the location of their creative work and do it.” But Mrs. Richter hadn’t given her enough money to get all the way to Baghdad, and Ridge began asking around for additional funding a month into the trip. Gone were Ridge’s qualms about borrowing that resulted in the return of the kitty Scott had collected for her in 1927.

  Of course she traveled alone—Davy would just be another expense and distraction and apparently she still hoped he would move on. “Do not be lonely for me dear, make friends with other women,” she admonishes him just a week after sailing. He sent her $50 in July and said he would do the same in August, and she writes to Louise Adams Floyd: “I’m afraid this means he’s having a dreadful time, for he won’t have money to take any other woman around. This thought troubles me very much—but what can I do about it?” Yet her very first letter home points to her acute need for him and his assistance: “If only I had not forgotten the Babylonian notes and my slippers!”

  Traveling third class, she made one of her few references to her Australasian past in a letter to Lawson: “The sea…for years I lived within the compelling sound of it. Its thunderous song mixes up with so many of my memories.” Ridge prided herself on never getting seasick, and even managed to smoke during the voyage. “Needing a light for my cigarette, [I] said ‘got a match?’” In response, she received a lecture on smoking from an Englishwoman who was a missionary to India. The woman said she had been “‘astounded’ to see how many American women smoked. Ridge was a New Woman, so certainly she smoked, and an American New Woman, only now learning America’s place in the world from the point of view of Europeans. “Our table steward said to me as I said goodbye to him: “When America is [depressed] it hits the whole world. We’ve been depending on America.”

  She stayed in London two months, losing her purse, taking notes at the British Museum, waiting for her Babylonian notes to arrive. A friend of her publisher’s invited her to spend several weekends at a 17th century country house. “I’m enchanted with the English countryside,” she wrote. “[I]t is beautiful[,] rolling wild downs—no one told me how beautiful. I heard a cookoo [sic] sing at daybreak yesterday morning. I’m feeling better than I’ve felt for years and think the slower tempo of London responsible.” She had dinner with Evelyn Scott and “drank half a bottle of Algerian claret between us…they [Evelyn and Jack Metcalfe, her husband] had quarreled early in the day and she [Evelyn] was unhappy.” By June 8th, Ridge was frantic about her Babylonian notes, and accused Lawson’s mother of having taken them during a visit. “She hates me with the ruthless female hate of jealousy.” But Ridge received the notes two days later so they were obviously en route. She visited the publisher Jonathan Cape who told her he would have brought out Firehead in London, “only that times were so bad for books…He’s an old satyr, I did not like him.” She arranged a tête-à-tête with the novelist Richard Hughes, whose famous pirate novel High Wind in Jamaica had been published the year before. He had also edited Oxford Poetry with Robert Graves in 1921, making him an important contact. They had quite a visit, and he seemed to have had to concoct an elaborate escape. They began by dining at a little out of the way Italian place

  where we sat and talked for two hours, drinking delicious dry white Chianti, then he drove me along the Thames embankment and other parts of the city until four in the afternoon…He had promised to visit a child in hospital who had an operation, and read to her at three thirty, and after leaving me at my door rushed off, troubled that he was late and that she would be anxiously waiting.

  She left London by boat for Corsica, thinking it cheaper than overland. Five hundred people had drowned off the coast of France just before she left, when a ship capsized in high seas near Pointe Saint-Gildas. She managed to lose all her baggage en route, including her Gynergen, and immediately came down with a terrible headache, probably the result of withdrawal. Isolated in her illness and by distance, she recognized what a trial she could be to her husband: “To-day I remember with what contrition that it is your rare holiday, that you will be away at camp and that it [her letter] will worry you so…I cannot forgive myself for my stupid self-absorption.”

  Ajaccio, the Corsican capital, reminded her of New Zealand. Paintings of the time show a bay with an idyllic row of sailboats, edged by snow-topped mountains. Long a British vacation spot, it was (and still is) renowned as the center of organized crime in Europe. Ridge’s contact tried to reassure her about how secure the city was: “He [Thomson] says I’m as safe here as I would be in the middle of New York—I asked him if this were irony.” A couple of months after she left, the French army invaded the island to make arrests, the subject of the newsreel “Ajaccio. ‘Cleaning up Corsica!’” in which French troops launched a miniature war against Corsican bandits, “the curse of the famous Isle of Beauty,” complete with shots of soldiers enjoying the local cuisine.

  Ridge admitted the island had beauty, and had trouble getting down to work. But she still had ambition. When she received news that Evelyn Scott’s paramour, Owen Merton, had died, she writes: “Let him rest, poor chap, with his futile hunger to paint great pictures and attain fame—how many o lord, how many…well perhaps me too…”

  By the middle of July she had no money to buy bread, and she spent her last sous on a cable to her husband. It was as if the Depression and its deprivations didn’t exist for her. Penniless at its beginning, she could not have been much affected by the sinking economy of the world. The Depression did, however, affect her friends. In response to her request of $200 from her friend Ellen Kennan, she received only $50. “Well god knows,” Ridge writes, “I do not wish to take advantage of her or anyone. Simply the artist whose work is not accepted by his generation is pushed into the position of a parasite.” Kennan was a Denver schoolteacher who had befriended Emma Goldman on one of her tours, lost her job because of antiwar activism, and later became the lover of Cyril Kay-Scott, Evelyn Scott’s first husband. Ridge had had a falling out with Kennan in 1928—“malicious behavior”—a few years after Kennan traveled with Scott’s entourage of lovers and children to Europe. They must have patched it up for Ridge to have asked for such a large sum. Ridge tried to borrow money from other friends to pay Kennan back right away, but was always too poor by the time the money arrived to return it. She kept hoping Davy would have the money. “Did you get your expected raise?” she asked him, who was about to be fired, along with thousands of other workers. Or maybe the raise he said he was getting was a fabrication all a
long, invented to reassure her. Eventually she turned to all her previous backers, including Josephine Boardman Crane. “Now as to ways and means [of getting on with her travels]: I shall write to Mrs. W. Murray Crane who was so kind before when I was ill.” Mrs. Crane was the widow of a governor and senator who established the famous stationery business. She helped found the Metropolitan Museum of Art and held a weekly salon that Marianne Moore frequented. She had been sending Ridge checks since 1928.

  A month after Ridge’s arrival in Corsica, she noted that Ajaccio had “some epidemic on…It must be playing havoc with the children from the number of little coffins I see.” Writing to her husband, she tried to brush off the danger, she who was nearly always ill:

  “The sickness here killing so many is a bad form of malaria. Thomson is very afraid of it—I not at all. I don’t believe I catch anything…there is also light typhoid in the town. T[Thomson] would not accompany his friends to the movies the other night for fear he’d pick up a germ.

  She sounds as if she is whistling in the dark, trying to be brave. The next day’s letter began with her saying that she wasn’t well and hinted at another peril: “the water, which I drank (though only a little at a time, after medicine) unboiled for the first month.” This was the year that the British writer Arnold Bennett died in Paris after drinking a glass of French water to prove how safe it was.

  By the beginning of August, her Corsican landlord was asking for the rent in advance. She suspected Thomson had spread a rumor about her being broke. In the same letter that she begs Davy not to raise money for her trip to Mesopotamia, she mentions “the cost of traveling in Arabia enormous.” She wasn’t deterred. The day before she writes Louise Adams Floyd: “Planning when it cools to decrease by train the distance between me and Baghdad and the site of Babylon.” By August 3, she was very anxious to leave Ajaccio: “I’ll die with hatred of this city if I don’t get out.” She planned to go to Nice. After being harassed by a crazy person in the hotel, she reflects: “I feel more and more my place is with the outlaws and outcasts of the world. The thing is I’ve got soft. I shrink from dirt and poverty. But I’m not going to give in to it.” She vows to “try and harden myself more at Nice, I’ll try to get a studio[,] fix my own meals[,] and go out to dinner at night.” Ridge’s idea of roughing it with the “outlaws and outcasts” had not yet been tried by the squalor of the Middle East. Still in Ajaccio, she changed seats in the dining room to get away from a poor old Frenchman. He had moved with her, in seeming sympathy—and then lusted after her food scraps, she the anorexic!

  Trying to spare her husband, she wrote him not to send her $60 but the next day she wrote she might need money quickly because she feared her face would become disfigured by dental problems. She would send him a telegram so he could solicit their friends without her having to beg for money in separate telegrams. A few days later, she gladly accepted his $60, but chided him for withholding Paul Strand’s address since she hoped to write a paying article on Strand.

  “I learned to live cheaply and comfortably in Ajaccio—just two days before I left!” she boasted to her publisher. Soon after she arrived in Nice, she resettled in a cheaper motel, happy to be away from “all those bourgeois people,” a routine she maintained in every town. Evelyn Scott was impressed: “I have never been in Nice, because fearful of its cosmopolitan expensiveness.” It was the very fashionable French Riviera, and the climate both in sensibility and weather was perfect for art. The year before, Marlene Dietrich had starred in Blue Angel as Lola Lola, cavorting in the local nightclubs. Nabokov worked in a Riviera vineyard in 1924, Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald spent much time at Cap d’Antibes only 12 miles from Nice in the 30s. Art stars like Matisse worked in studios in the area. Ridge exclaimed that the wine was cheap.

  At the end of the month, she writes her husband: “No dear, do not think I am starving myself. I’m having fresh eggs and plenty of fresh figs and good wine. This last seems to help me very much.” Her face, with its possibly disfiguring dental problems, was better. In order to reassure him of her safety she writes: “I have seen only one policeman since I have been in Nice—and how different he looked beside my memories of the brutalized [ing?] new york cops.” But to Louise Adams Floyd she writes more seriously:

  I have little doubt but that communism will sweep the entire world….I do believe in communism…but I do not think America is ready for it….America is not yet a people in the large sense of this word. She is not only distracted…by the infected and as yet unassimilated bloods, but these bloods, or most of them, have suffered a loss of certain massing elements in their transfusion.

  The “massing elements” would seem to have gathered: unemployment in the U.S. was then at 16 percent and climbing. Her husband was refusing to reveal his job status to her. “I must not let my work spoil yours,” she wrote him. “Do not send me any money October. At least start in on your classes. If I can raise enough to cover the journey it will give you breathing space.” She writes him that she had started her long poem about Babylon. By October 3rd she mentions not so very reassuringly that she read in a French paper that “the plague has appeared in the valley of the Euphrates (it would, you know!)…it’s a big valley.” This was alongside reports that she had been successful in gathering funds to travel there: $50 from Mrs. Floyd, $100 from Mrs. Crane. She also explained the modernist movement by conflating rage and beauty, her own two sources of inspirations:

  The extremes of what we call modernism in music, poetry, particularly painting and sculpture is the expression, the symptom of a secret and frustrated rage of the mass-consciousness—a universal resentment that vents itself in a deliberate negation of beauty, that in itself (because it is perfectly sincere, at least at its beginnings in the deeps) achieves a new, a sort of hunch-backed beauty.

  Her husband sent only $7 on Oct 7. It was a bad year to send money anywhere abroad, with markets falling and the exchanges less than advantageous. She responds to the small amount with: “Yes, I know things very bad all over the world, everywhere whispers of revolution or war.” Six days later she writes: “Try and save a little so that you will not be penniless…. For me, I’m not afraid. If I’m stuck somewhere I may be able to get some kind of a job.” She had not had a job since editing Broom eight years earlier, let alone a job in Europe or in the Middle East. She was brave—or foolhardy?

  She chose the last cheap boat to Beirut and sailed via Alexandria. “Tonight I saw the most gorgeous sunset I’ve seen since leaving Australia.” But the view at her feet was different. “Huge rats are running about the deck to-night[,] I wonder why I have not seen them before.” She went ashore with an Austrian woman and admitted: “It’s very hard on me to live now in close proximity to others. I can’t think.” On the road to Damascus—for she had accumulated just enough money to cross the desert—the driver of the Buick she was traveling in discovered

  that someone had been murdered a few minutes before ahead of us on the road. He stopped the car by standing in the middle of the road, directly in its path, and wildly waving his arms. However we went on and saw no sign of either the dead man or his assailants. Perhaps, unlike New Yorkers they call one killing a day and go home.

  Ridge wasn’t the intrepid Isabel Bird, that 19th-century adventurer, traveling to Baghdad armed with her revolver and “tea-making apparatus,” or Gertrude Bell, the female Lawrence of Arabia, sometime spy and archaeologist who traveled there in the 1920s with a tin bath, a full Wedgwood dinner service, and a formal dinner dress for evening wear. Ridge did, however, travel with one of Bell’s books. Described by a male colleague as a “conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globe-trotting, rumpwagging, blethering ass,” Bell was also a linguist and the greatest female mountaineer of her age. She became so powerful in Iraq that it was she who drew its boundaries. “I had a well-spent morning at the office making out the southern desert frontier of the Iraq,” she wrote her father in 1921. She died of an apparent overdose of sleeping pills three year
s before Ridge arrived and Bell appeared as a ghost to Ridge, entreating her to disregard her own illness and continue her work. Ridge would hold her own. “I’m in the old mood, the one in which I landed in New York[,] with two dollars, all the money I had in the world.” She sat bolt upright for 28 hours across the desert, a feat that would put many contemporary travelers to bed on arrival. “Look, here is the Baghdad we heard about when we were little girls,” she writes.

  I opened my eyes on [the] toll bridge over a muddy winding channel which the blond cried out was the Euphrates[.] I saw dazedly clumps of green, a few palms, savage looking Arabs, one of whom out of whose fierce eyes hate streamed like a deadly fire, pointed a shaking and menacing finger at our driver.

  Chapter 30

  Babylon and Back

  Babylon, once the largest city in the world, is the ancient “Gate of the Gods,” the city of every evil, the name of a whore riding on a seven-headed beast who rules over all the kings of the earth, the city that produced the world’s first wheel, first agriculture, first code of law, first base-60 number system, and possibly the first writing. It’s the home of Hammurabi, whose principles of justice are still recognized today, where Sir Leonard Woolley in Ridge’s day uncovered scores of priceless artifacts and claimed it was the site of the ancient flood and Abraham’s birthplace. Nebuchadnezzar did not maintain his Hanging Gardens in Babylon but Fritz Lang shot his 1927 film Metropolis there, and the workers constructing the Tower of Babel destroyed it for better working conditions. It is also the location of Saddam Hussein’s $5 million “Disney for a Despot,” an elaborate re-creation of a single Babylonian palace the size of the Louvre. It is a city brought down by babble and trumpets, a meme for the incessant noise of technology today, and the name of extremely popular translation software. The Babylon a/k/a Camp Alpha occupied by the U.S. Army in 2003 and 2004 resulted in the wholesale destruction of much of the city’s 5,000-year history.