Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  Ridge arrived at the end of October 1931 and claimed to have moved into Baghdad’s cheapest hotel. But like the hotel in Damascus, the stationery she used bore the Ritz heading, and the price included three meals, afternoon and early-morning tea. She even indulged in breakfast in bed, “on special request so suppose it is more”—with all the imported luxuries: sausage, bread and butter, jam, and bananas. She met another American poet who was writing his own poem about Babylon, but she didn’t mention his name. “These things are in the air,” she writes. But the air was also “filled with sand that has been ground to a fine dust by innumerable feet and wheels. This dust is filled with appalling filth, it blows in one’s face [,] fills one’s mouth nose and eyes.” Still she was thrilled with her arrival and feeling up to its challenges, not the least of which was once again, a lack of funds. “It’s true I’ve lost my figure and my looks and can’t pose as a model now, but I’ll make out somehow, or someone will come to the rescue.” But she had certainly pushed her luck. In the same letter she confesses: “I did not stop at Beirut to use my letters of introduction, I’m without reliable information of any kind.” The next day she negotiated a lower hotel rate so she wouldn’t have to move. She says she had become fearful of relocating to a cheaper place because she and another woman were stoned by the locals while touring the neighborhood. “I asked the woman born in Baghdad before I left the ship, why Americans were hated in Alexandria. She said in innocent surprise, ‘Are they not hated everywhere?’”

  Ridge had four days of good health in Baghdad before coming down with a fever. A doctor attended to her twice a day, an Indian practitioner who in the end charged her nothing. He told her that her “old lung trouble [was] stirred up now.” She had two servants to tend to her. Again she reassured her husband by listing the epidemics raging “at present—pneumonia (Baghdad very bad for chest) cholera—not epidemic—always on—and typhoid fever. Malaria also, the Baghdadese have always with them. It’s possibly the worst climate or one of the worst in the world.” She was wrong about the cholera—it was an epidemic. Newspapers at the time reported that hundreds refused to be treated and died, with the death toll at 415 out of 787 cases. She wrote Louise Adams Floyd about the sickness too, justifying the danger with: “But the last two weeks has given me more for my poem than a year’s research. I’m glad I’ve come.”

  Everyone told her that Hillah, where ancient Babylon is seated, was a terrible place for tourists. “Hilla[h] very bad town, very dirty town, much sick, bad Arabs in Hilla[h],” mimics Ridge. Those with whom she consulted, taking one look at her genteel shabbiness, urged her to spend her money in Baghdad. Ignoring their advice, she wrote her husband about her plans:

  I think I will have enough money left after I pay my hotel bill here to go to Hillah, and back, for a couple of days then I’ll come back here to the same hotel, where, if necessary I can stay for 2 weeks without paying my bill…Yes, dear, it’s a bit like living on my wits, I know, but it seems I haven’t much else to live on.

  Then she broke down and became, in her bravado, downright maudlin: “We ought to get together soon. I think the world is going to break into war or bust up in revolution and it may then be impossible….America dearest country in world to live in….” She may have sensed the Arabs’ growing sympathy for the newly elected Hitler. One-third of Baghdad’s population was Jewish in the early 1930s. Animosity toward them had increased, and it would eventually result in Iraq’s own Kristallnacht in 1941. Arab boys were already being sent to be educated in Germany to organize paramilitary groups modeled after the Nazis’. Of particular concern would have been the Iraqis’ wish to be rid of the British and democracy, and to return to Islamic values.

  Ridge ended her letter to her husband with: “I’ll get out my book [,] only death will stop me.” Although she had written the same thing to him while at Yaddo while she was working on Firehead, this time she must have felt that death was more of a reality. But she still enjoyed the comforts, both psychological and physical, of the British rule, even if she couldn’t tolerate the narrow-mindedness of her fellow travelers. An Englishwoman derided Ghandi

  stirring up the poor Indians, deceiving and lying to them. It was too much for me and I descended on her. You should have seen how she looked! Like an out-raged turkey-hen who has confidentially approached what she looked on as another lady-turkey hen, feeling indisposed…

  Ridge arrived in Hillah by train on November 15th. In 1924, when Gertrude Bell visited Hillah, she found a taxi at the train station to take her 12 miles farther to the digs at Kish. When the taxi fell into a canal and eventually broke down and no car arrived in rescue, she climbed a ziggurat and hailed four horsemen and commandeered two of their horses. Ridge didn’t mention any transportation problems during her six-day visit, but touring the town must have been memorable. Thick mists often surround the canals and channels of the river Euphrates, which runs right through Hillah, and the city is dotted with palms planted to reduce the effect of the desert’s aridity. Excavations had been taking place on the site since 1875, with the Iraqis continuously selling antiquities to the British from three huge mounds. Of the sights in ancient Babylon Ridge writes: “There is little left, portions of walls[,] arches, the great stone lion intact but for the head which the Germans hacked off and brought to Berlin.” She began to enjoy the local people: “The Arab peoples are beautiful….they wait on one with a chieftain-like air, as though they were the hosts [which they were] and it was their pleasure to make you comfortable.” Her maternal role, however, was tried:

  They dragged out a mattress and cushions upon which I sat with some misgivings, and made me tea—which willy-nilly I had to drink. They set the baby on my lap—it seemed I had to hold her—it was some kind of a ritual—she peed copiously before I could give her up. She had sore eyes and a bad cold.

  She needn’t have interacted with the Iraqis at all. “A very nice Irishman, a Mr. Halbert and his wife are [,] it seems, in control here.” They and other ex-pats provided the logistical support she needed for her solo adventures. But she needed more money. She calculated that she would be penniless on her return to Baghdad and asked for a $100 advance from her publishers. “You are dear persons and angel-publishers…I shall try to have the mss. in your hands by June but at this stage cannot promise this for certain.” She writes her husband that “They [her press] seemed to be wondering how they are going to get through the winter. I suppose its the same with most everyone.” Then she hit him up too. “If you could send me fifty dollars a month it would keep me.” Still she was charitable toward his own dilemma. “Yet if you are to be out of work and in trouble, then I want to be in New York and help you to bear it, even in the winter.” She also casually mentioned that “Cholera was in Baghdad [,] Dr. Lewes told me (not yet official) [,] and they have 6 cases of Bubonic plague” [,] which is confirmed by contemporary newspaper accounts. Although she admitted she was down to three rupees for her return trip, she bought two trinkets for a rupee and a half apiece from the Irishman Halbert. If this was not hair-raising enough for her husband, she adds:

  I killed a scorpion tonight. I hated to do it, but he was running up the wall and into my coat, which I put on the bed at night…I had only a shoe…However I felt it some inadequacy in my development that I had to kill him…everything responds to love. Well…I have no time to tame scorpions.

  She went on to Kish, an archaeological site 12 miles from Hillah, an ancient city of Sumer brimming with ancient bricks and pottery. On her return to Baghdad, a car was waiting for her at the train station. Imagine her two servants securing her bags in the car, with Ridge secretly terrified, knowing, with counter-intuitive exhilaration, that she was again only a few coins away from destitution. This time poverty would be a bit different than New York’s—the Baghdad streets had its beggars in rags, its hungry rats, and the desert just outside the city gates.

  Ridge did not dwell on her problems. Once back in her hotel, she wrote that she preferred to move to Beirut
or Jerusalem to work on her poem in a better climate. But first she needed to see more. Her husband had sent her $38 out of his final paycheck, which she promptly decided would be best traveling going to Ur

  if I can get any concession. Writers and all professionals, who are going to places for their work and not for pleasure, get this but I could not—I think because I have a husband in New York; at least after this fact came out I could not get any reduction.

  Obviously any woman wandering the Near East and staying at the Baghdad Ritz had a husband with money, and Davy, bless his heart, had done his best. She was not as grateful as she could have been.

  The Royal Tombs at Ur were well worth the trip. Just two years earlier, Woolley had discovered “The Great Death Pit,” containing “six armed guards and 68 serving women.” A complex set of streets with houses, a school, shops, shrines—even a fast food restaurant—had been uncovered as well. Ridge viewed the ruins of Ur’s great Sumerian ziggurat from 21 century B.C. that Jacob-ladders about 50 feet up. With her interest in female achievements, she might have been drawn to the temple of the goddess Ningal, situated immediately southwest of the ziggurat. The Sumerian goddesses were extremely important from Neolithic times until the old Babylonian period when they were married off to the gods. Woolley himself gave Ridge the tour.

  Close to penury on her return from Ur, Ridge expressed gratitude toward her publishers and friends for sending her funds. “My wonderful friends—as with Firehead it’s they that are writing my book as well as me… in reality no one ever does anything alone.” Her generous Indian doctor was returning home and had invited her to visit. Nonplussed by her hand-to-mouth existence, she schemed with ever more abandon: “I’d love to make India.” She had already begun a campaign to drum up sympathy for her trip out of Baghdad by mentioning that all the tourists had fled. “Perhaps…the cholera, of which everyone seems terrified, has kept them away…from Baghdad.” By Dec. 8 she had received another $50 donation from Louise Adams Floyd, enough to cross the desert again. Her doctor wanted her to go to the hospital instead. Although the trials of the desert journey had increased—“There’s snow in a neighboring town[. I]t will be close to zero now in the desert at night and I have inadequate covers”—she didn’t seem to even remotely consider the hospital. Ridge did, however, have a personal revelation, a moment of clarity, with regard to her temperament in contrast to Davy’s:

  Your brave clear spirit is like crystal water with none of the dark tinctures that are in mine. I who fling snarls and curses at everything that abrades or even obstructs me [,] feel respect for your endurance but that you should have to endure hurts me. You never pity, never dramatize yourself. I do both—although my self-pity is always of the dramatic order, therefore never quite real.

  She barely endured the long difficult desert crossing, her head pounding against the roof of the car so hard it brought on an attack of vomiting, and she almost missed her bus to the docks because the mist over the snow-capped mountains en route to Beirut turned into sheets of ice. The driver understandably ignored her urgings for speed. Within hours she was happy be in a storm at sea en route for Trieste. “The sky ahead of us is black and like another and darker sea. The two seem about to join and rush madly into one. As usual the approach of danger has put me into high spirits.” She wasn’t in the least seasick.

  Before leaving the boat, she decided to stay in Paris. An Englishman told her fortune, advising her that she should wait there before going on to New York. She often consulted fortune tellers at important junctures of her life, and they always told her what she wanted to hear. Docking in Marseilles, she discovered that the patron who sent her the $100 that enabled her to finally leave Baghdad was her Park Avenue doctor in New York.

  After sunny Trieste, Rue Arago in Paris must have been quite gloomy. The neighborhood featured the high walls of the Broca hospital and the Paris Observatory, the nearby entrance to the Catacombs, and worst of all, the Prison de la Sante. President Doumer would be assassinated by a Russian patriot that May while talking to an author at a book fair, and the assassin guillotined in the prison by September. The Depression made the city even gloomier. As one French journalist put it:

  On street benches and at métro entrances, groups of exhausted and starving young men would be trying not to die. I don’t know how many never came round. I can only say what I saw. In the rue Madame one day I saw a child drop a sweet which someone trod on, then the man behind bent down and picked it up, wiped it and ate it.

  Ridge moved to Rue Arago after two weeks at the fancy Hotel Slavia. The thrills of her sea voyage and arrival in Paris had worn off by Christmas Day 1931, when she grumbled to her husband that he hadn’t written for three weeks. “I’m surprised at your silence…I’m praying to be well enough to start work tomorrow.” She announced then that she couldn’t possibly return to New York until April. “It would be practically suicide.” A few days later, faced with the prospect of starting work, she began to complain of her side. She wasn’t, however, suffering from symptoms of T.B. She credited Baghdad with having “some mysterious force—rays of some kind possibly—[that] acted on my weak chest and eliminated all the bad germs.” She then changed the wallpaper in her room, ordered breakfast in bed, and chose to stay there until noon in order to conserve heat. She reported on the rest of her day: “Then I get up, go out and buy a roll and a slice of ham and return and make myself hot tea. Then I sit down and type what I wrote in bed longhand.”

  To Louise Adams Floyd, she writes: “Hitler will make Paris—unless he dies on the way…The earth-crust has worn thin and the fire about to break through.” Hitler had a half-million recruits and many more in the wings, with six million hungry unemployed in Germany. His followers kept the country in continuous turmoil. Like many other Germans, Hitler saw France as the archenemy, being rankled, in particular, by the French occupation of the Ruhr in the 1920s. Dispelling various gloomy scenarios, Ridge wished William Floyd “a good fighting year of peace.”

  Out in the cold drizzly streets of Paris, Ridge caught sight of Emma Goldman, who must have been there consulting her editor on Living My Life, the autobiography she was then writing.

  No, she did not see me. I turned and walked a few steps, observing her. She looks much older and smaller. I had forgotten what a short woman she is. No, I made no move to speak to her. Our ways have long since parted and to get now into a group of Paris anarchists, which I should have to do if I met Emma, would deflect my thought from my work….Well, Emma has had a difficult, yet a rich and varied life. She has seldom been bored. She is not to be pitied but envied by countless women of drab and colorless lives. If I had the means I would aid her in any way I could but I feel no desire to take up a lapsed friendship. There are many who mean much more to me and even for them I have not time or energy. My work, my work…

  But Ridge wasn’t working. Despite repeated reassurances, she finally confessed to her husband: “I haven’t really done any work on my poem since I left! I got a start on [it] in Nice, but couldn’t go on.” Goldman, on the other hand, was still fighting for the cause—the pursuit of personal freedom—and writing the summary of her life to inspire others. Although Ridge had taken an equally grand stance in her plan to capture the fire of life through all of history, it was still just a plan. Her failure was not too surprising, given that the plan was daunting, even without completing a grueling nearly yearlong itinerary over difficult terrain. Still, a meeting with Goldman might have been humiliating.

  Typical of Ridge to have cast Goldman’s triumph in feminist terms, comparing her life to those “countless women of drab and colorless lives,” and not a man’s. Goldman’s influence on her must have been great, either directly, through her example and rhetoric, or indirectly, through all the contacts she provided in grooming Ridge to organize the Ferrer Center. Certainly Goldman’s support and the publication of Ridge’s poetry came at a critical time for Ridge and her emergence in America as an artist. Goldman always noted her work when i
t came to light, both poetic and political, and expressed her approval in letters to her niece Stella Ballantine or Evelyn Scott. In a letter to Louise Adams Floyd, Ridge put their loss of contact to differences in temperament and politics.

  [We] had not corresponded for years. Ever since Red Flag—of which I sent her an inscribed copy which she did not acknowledge—I have never heard from or received any message from her. She did not like me much though she was very kind to me always, but she was very fond of Davy. I think her silence after Red Flag was because at the time she was very much against communism. Then she is against violence of all kinds and there is much incipient violence in me that I think she felt.

  “I have not forgotten you, dear Lola,” wrote Goldman’s lover Alexander Berkman on Christmas Day of 1927 four years earlier. But Ridge seemed to have forgotten him. She didn’t visit him in St. Tropez, where he was living when she was twice in Nice 65 miles away. It would be only another nine years before he killed himself, suffering from cancer, still in exile.

  I cannot reach my hands to you…

  would not if I could,

  though I know how warmly yours would close about them.

  Why?

  I do not know…

  I have a sense of shame. (Sun-up 88)

  Ridge found it hard to imagine returning to the U.S. “Although I have dear friends in New York [,] the only thing I am going back for is you,” she writes Davy. However, she had no other choice. She couldn’t get a job in Paris because she couldn’t speak French well enough, and her supporters’ donations could not be counted on forever. She made certain, however, of the terms under which she was returning, no trivial matter with the press of gender expectations: “I’ll be able to cook cheaply for us both, and you’ll have to help me with the cleaning up of the big room—I can’t scrub or sweep but can wash up, cook and dust and other light things.” For now, she had to focus her energies on finding “some way to help raise my passage money. I wish I wasn’t so rotten bad at asking for help.” But that was a task she had performed splendidly, having financed nearly the whole of her trip from donations solicited $50 to $100 at a time. In less than a month she obtained a down payment for her ticket home. “I’m puzzled as to how to raise the rest,” writes Ridge. “If Mary Marquis [artist and photographer] will loan us fifty [,] I can perhaps borrow a little elsewhere.” She deflected Davy’s suggestion to ask her doctor for more. “No, I won’t take advantage of [Dr.] Hyman’s generosity for I feel assured that everyone else does.” But she had complete confidence in some patron coming through with the money because she went on in the next paragraph to tell Davy not to worry if he didn’t see her right away—U.S. immigration would take a while. She was a bit like Isadora Duncan who bought all the lilies in New York for a single performance, partied all night with the remainder of her money, then sat on the dock with her dance troupe the next morning until someone—a schoolteacher—arrived with her life savings and bought them return tickets to Europe.