Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  A New Woman with bobbed hair, cigarette in hand, a divorcée with many affairs, and just then a lesbian in the Village, 28-year-old Frost was someone Ridge might have admired: “Arrogance and defiance were not negative terms to her,” writes Frost’s biographer, Margaret Edwards. “Nothing could comfort her.” Frost left Paul and his sister with their grandparents while she produced many children’s books, seven books of poetry, and four novels, including one bestseller.

  In 1935 Ridge’s co-winner was Marya Zaturenska, who won the Pulitzer Prize four years later. She was married to the anthologist Horace Gregory, and together they wrote A History of American Poetry 1900-1940, making them an extremely powerful couple within poetry circles. At 32, she was Ridge’s first rival as poet for the Lower East Side, being the only female Jewish poet from the neighborhood to publish in English, but her subjects usually veered into fantasy.

  Imperceptibly the world became haunted by her white dress.

  Walking in forest or garden, he would start to see

  Her flying form; sudden, swift, brief as a caress

  The flash of her white dress against a darkening tree.

  The publishing firm Brewer and Warren that advanced Ridge money in Baghdad, had by then brought out books by Cocteau, Dorothy Sayers, Rockwell Kent, Le Corbusier, and Ridge’s friend from the Ferrer days, Konrad Bercovici. After Firehead was published under the Brewer imprint of Payson & Clarke, the firm fell into difficulties. They were rescued by Putnam in 1931, just after its publisher G. P. Putnam married Amelia Earhart. Ridge was not brought along.

  In 1934 Evelyn Scott introduced her to the publisher Harrison Smith, who was also her editor for four of her novels. Known as “Hal” Smith, he and his partner Robert K. Haas published William Faulkner, Isak Dinesen, Robert Graves, and André Malraux, and eventually completed a merger with Random House in 1936. They took on Ridge and Lenore Marshall, one of the press’s literary advisors and editor of As I Lay Dying, became one of her patrons and sent baskets of food and checks. A wealthy woman, she was treasurer for the Writers League Against Lynching. She also helped found S.A.N.E., an organization that worked for the passage of the 1963 partial nuclear test-ban treaty. Her writing appeared in the New Yorker, the Saturday Review of Literature, and Partisan Review, and she eventually became the author of three novels, three books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and selections from her notebooks. She is remembered today for endowing the $25,000 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, administered by the Academy of American Poets for the most outstanding poetry book of the year.

  The Academy was founded in 1934 by Marie Bullock, assisted by Edward Arlington Robinson. Although Robinson had been very active in the Poetry Society—attending annual dinners, judging and collecting prizes, he wanted an alternative to its “notoriously quarrelsome” meetings. Anything named “the Academy” must certainly be less lively. In the 1980s, Betty Kray, its first director, held soirées in folding chairs encircling poet celebrities like Margaret Atwood in order to liven it up, and eventually founded a much more open institution, Poets House, in 1985. This organization was originally headed by Stanley Kunitz, who, under the pseudonym of Dilly Tante, interviewed Lola Ridge in the 1930s for a book on living poets.

  In 1934 there was also a downtown organization known as Poets House—more frequently referred to as the Poets Guild—that awarded Ridge a prize for a poem “lofty in thought and universal in feeling…it should not be patriotic in a war like sense.” Such constraints reflected the changing political climate of poetry. As critic Joan Shelley Rubin writes:

  At first glance, that directive appears to epitomize everything of which modernists accused their genteel predecessors: the exclusion of genuine emotion, the emphasis on uplift, the feminine sensibility (here symbolized by the condemnation of war)…Yet the purpose behind them was not to keep poetry on the safe ground of disengagement with the troubling aspects of reality; it was, rather, to make the genre serviceable for the attainment of social ends by untried means…

  The Poets Guild met at the Christadora, a 17-story settlement house on the Lower East Side with a swimming pool, a gym, and an arts program for underprivileged children. Organized by the poet Anna Hepstead Branch in 1921, its original members included (once again) Edward Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Sara Teasdale, and Edwin Markham. When Ridge received her $500 on October 30, 1934, Countee Cullen and Babette Deutsch were listed among poetry readers for the Christadora children.

  With the first Shelley Award and the Poets Guild money, Ridge had funds to travel again. But she still had to turn in her manuscript. To finish it, she contemplated leaving for Montauk in June for the home of her patron Corinne Wagner, but also suggested another plan: “have the telephone taken out, feed Davy on fried eggs and apples, say I’m out of town and see no one. I think it will work.” Ridge always demanded a great deal of isolation for her composition. In 1931 she elucidated its importance in her review of Paul Strand’s photography:

  The act of creation is an emotional as well as an intellectual process and calls for a concentration of the forces of the entire being on one glowing point of purpose. For that moment…the self must isolate itself from its familiar world and the litter that personality has accumulated must be continently shed.

  By the end of June she had left Davy to his own fried eggs and apples and spent the summer in Montauk and Mastic. “If only Davy could get a job,” she bemoans to Floyd in July. That remark would ring true for most of the American populace that summer. Davy was kept busy reading her work and writes: “It is not important people may not understand them [the poems] at first or tenth reading, nor will they all get the same meaning.” But he was not pleased when she returned in September. “I was very disappointed about your work and concerned about yourself.” Nevertheless, by the beginning of November 1934, she had added a hundred lines to her manuscript when Hal Smith climbed three flights to visit her frozen aerie on Broadway, a “little Klondike,” where she typed away with one finger. By the end of the month she was apologizing for her lateness to Smith: “Yes, I understand about the spring list and I am sorry not to have sent it in before.” She finally turned the manuscript in a week later. Haas hired her friend Bill Benét as either reader or editor but she was surprised by Benét’s response. He must have echoed Davy’s comment about the poem’s intelligibility. In a letter to Floyd she writes:

  his remarks are on the margins—very honest, very interesting [but] sometimes quite perturbing, because he apparently has no idea as to the actual meaning of some of the sonnets. He consequently thinks them “incoherent”—the last thing in the world they are. He has written on the margin of one: “I know she means something profound but I haven’t the faintest idea as to what it is.

  To Hal Smith, she writes: “Interested in Bill Benét’s reactions…but I do not think any of my sonnets are incoherent. But I’ll read them all over.” Smith writes back in Benét’s defense: “if there is too great a gap between the intelligence of the reader and the thought of the artist, the spark cannot flash between these two poles.” This being the first time her contemporaries have really ever criticized her work, she must have been devastated. Whether Ridge changed much of the material is unknown. Smith tried to smooth over the criticism with the news that “I saw an admirer of yours this weekend in the person of Archibald MacLeish.”

  But MacLeish was not someone she could depend on either, even if he were a friend of Kay Boyle’s in France. Early in his triple-Pulitzer career, MacLeish coined the motto for her arch-enemy, the New Critics, in his “Ars Poetica:” “A poem should not mean/but be.” He later rescinded that stance, slowly becoming convinced that poets could indeed mix the world and its politics with aesthetics. But he was neither an anarchist nor even a pacifist: he wrote war propaganda during World War I and became the first Librarian of Congress. Described by the left as an “unconscious fascist,” in 1933 he published “Background with Revolutionaries,” a poem that in his own words, “is pretty completely negati
ve, not with the revolutionaries but with the little New York Marxists.” The poem begins with the epigraph: “And the corn singing Millennium!/Lenin! Millennium! Lennium!” and mentions a Ridge:

  Also Comrade Edward Remington Ridge

  Who has prayed God since the April of ’Seventeen

  To replace in his life his lost (M.E.) religion

  Ridge assumed that he was referring to her. She didn’t bridle at being cast as a revolutionary, it was the accusation of any religious affiliation that aggrieved her. “Did you see the jibe at me?” she writes Lawson.

  [it] would perhaps surprise him…by telling him I “lost religion” in his sense of the word at twelve years old and having a larger one have never felt the need of searching for it—in or out of Red meetings as he suggests “since 1917.” Twas long before that alack!

  After walking across Mexico in 1931, MacLeish won his first Pulitzer Prize for Conquistador, which recognized the common man’s contribution to history, but also denied the rights of the Aztecs to their own country. Perhaps the book inspired Ridge’s trip to Mexico in 1935 to research the female equivalent. But first she would win a Guggenheim.

  Her friend Lenore Marshall called Mr. Moe, the director of the John Simon Guggenheim Fund, to suggest that he invite Ridge to apply. Ridge’s friends Aaron Copland and Stephen Vincent Benét were the first composer and first writer, respectively, to win. By 1926 the Foundation was receiving 900 applications a year, awarding only 39. “Miss Millay says her poetry is first rate and so does everybody else whom we consulted,” according to Ridge’s Guggenheim documentation. Such a positive endorsement from Edna St. Vincent Millay, the reigning queen of poetry, would certainly have cinched the award. Ridge won the sole poetry fellowship in 1935, with Langston Hughes one of the three fiction fellows. Only four women out of 60 recipients received fellowships that year but Ridge was optimistic: “This is very significant of something coming.”

  Ridge’s project was “The Passage of Theresa,” an extension of “Sun-up,” her second book’s long title poem. The Australasian girl is older in this proposed project and more cognizant of having a mother who is unable to cope, but both of them live dream lives. If only she had pursued the project! It might have led her back to the clarity and emotional freshness of those earlier poems.

  Ridge’s grant, along with her other three awards, would support her for the next two years, give or take various handouts. Travel was the way Guggenheims are most commonly spent, so much so there is a genre of “Guggenheim poems” written by recipients contemplating Europe’s beauties. Ridge told the Guggenheim Foundation she would be traveling to Ireland, but instead she headed south.

  Chapter 33

  Dance of Fire from New Mexico

  Similar to her peregrinations through Europe en route to Baghdad, as soon as Ridge set her sights on Mexico, she made certain that she missed none of the important literary stops in between. First would be the art colony at Taos. According to Ridge, the town was “without street names or numbers” and, at every turn, there were mountains that reminded her of the New Zealand Alps. Its population of Native Americans and Hispanics ensured that her stay would be both exotic and inexpensive. By 1935 Taos had been a destination for artists for 20 years, and this was the year that Dorothea Lange came through, taking pictures of the migrant poor struggling through the Depression.

  By March 29th, Ridge had moved into a room at Bent House, home of the first territorial governor. “I am here in horribly inconvenient but most attractive little studio—white adobe walls, woodwork green and rose, which I, if I stay[,] shall change to blue and dark red,” she writes Lenore Marshall. She might have regretted leaving New York so soon after the publication of Dance of Fire, or did she fear its reception, still smarting from Benét’s criticism? Its first reviews were beginning to appear. Horace Gregory in the Saturday Review of Literature best described the book’s genesis: “It was as though the wind in the alleys of ‘The Ghetto,’ ‘carrying flame,’ had discovered tinder and then transformed itself to larger meaning.”

  …Fire, of which our grain

  Is cored, in very nature treacherous,

  Fulfills itself in fire. (Dance of Fire 16)

  Her publisher was not at all happy about her going to Taos just then. She excused herself by saying that she was in a hurry to get to the Southwest for her chest and her ostensible T.B., but March was early for her annual exodus from New York. She acknowledged once she was settled that she should have stayed in the city, yet she accused Hal Smith of letting the publicity for her book go cold. “No ads, no reviews,” she lamented, although her friend Eda Lou Walton had just published a long review in the New York Herald Tribune. “I’ll bet it is as dumb as usual, though I understand it’s complimentary,” writes Evelyn Scott. It was indeed complimentary, and more importantly, it presented Ridge to a new generation. “Today, perhaps twenty years after [Ridge] knew her own loyalties,” writes Walton, “this poem finds a world of young writers and poets becoming convinced of all that she stated long ago.”

  Dance of Fire was no casualty of Depression frugality, having been published in a gleaming, metallic, copper-colored jacket with a Julian Wehr Art Deco cover image of a red Oscar-like figure holding the sun. Wehr had been trained by John Sloan and Max Weber, both of whom worked with Robert Henri at the Ferrer Center. Wehr sought to convey values of racial and social justice in his art. The cover image was appropriate, for the world was, according to Ridge’s note on the flap, “living in a dynasty of fire.” Hitler had just opened the first concentration camps, socialists battled Communists in a Madison Square Garden rally, and workers were striking all over the country—“in the midst of the fire-dance,” writes Ridge. She only hopes that “we may come forth, for a period, into the time of light.” Stephen Vincent Benét blurbed the book: “It is magnificent. There are some few books that bear the unmistakable stigmata of genius—this is one of them. I know of nothing like it in American letters.”

  But Ridge was not satisfied. By the end of the month Ridge complained to her husband that

  Harrison S. has determined to ruin me and kill my books. Well, I know only one thing and that is that he will someday suffer for it. I will never give him another book. As he has them all in his hands this means no more books will come out til after my death—but I’ll strike from my dust… Even if he destroys every book in his possession some one of them will escape to be discovered by future historians.

  Alas, no further books have been discovered, at least not in Smith College’s archives. She was always losing her luggage, her pens and souvenirs, her passport, her permits, and her manuscripts—if she actually wrote them. She published only two more poems, the first, “Lyric” in the 1935 summer Fantasy, a serious journal of genteel and formally conservative verse that had gradually become more radical in both politics and form. Her last published poem appeared in Poetry that October, the sonnet “This is to bear, with cleavage and in pain” collected in Dance of Fire.

  Her belief in Dance of Fire’s neglect was unfounded. That July, Marion Stroebel, the associate editor of Poetry whom Ridge met in 1919, covered an entire page of the Chicago Tribune with her review of the book: “This is major poetry…this is a fearless spirit of sexless energy…Whether or not the reader agrees with this concept he cannot fail to be scorched by Miss Ridge’s presentation.” Louis Untermeyer called it her best book and said her sonnets were “more deeply impassioned than Elinor Wylie’s or Edna St. Vincent Millay’s,” and proclaimed her “a revolutionary in a technical as well as a spiritual sense.” This was exactly the position she aspired to in the work. While writing the sonnets, she told her husband that they were “revolutionary and metaphysical.” The August review in the New York Times was written by P.H., most likely the Percy Hutchison who had written the rave review of Firehead in 1930. He harkened back to the accomplishments of her earlier books:

  Long before most of our proletarian writers became self-conscious in their art, long before they began
to analyze the evils of the day and explain the class basis of injustice, Lola Ridge, Irish and intense, was writing poems describing social injustices, poems about people living in the slums, poems in praise of that great labor.

  The Nation critic Philip Blair Rice wrote: “In “Dance of Fire” Miss Ridge has written more mature poetry than any other American who is motivated by sympathy with the workers’ cause.” He compared her to German symbolist Stefan George, with imagery and manner that suggested that of Dante’s “Vita Nuova” and even the work of “that other Dante, Rossetti.”

  The workers of all lands that day

  Looked toward the death house where the two

  Lay with a thief between

  ….....................................

  …These shall not die,

  Fell back upon them where they stood,

  Went round and round as men will go

  When they are lost in some deep wood

  And circle the same spot. (Dance of Fire 61)

  By the time the year was out, there would be 30 reviews appearing in newspapers across the country, from Alabama to Oklahoma to New Orleans, most of them very positive. Although not the sixty Ridge garnered for her previous book, this was still a substantial number, and in all the right places. Critics unanimously praised “Stone Face,” her poem on Tom Mooney, and “Three Men Die,” the irregularly rhymed long poem on the execution of Sacco, Vanzetti, and a third man convicted of thievery. “She presents them unforgettably but without bitterness,” writes Stroebel. “Her “[political poems] are remarkable for their restraint and lack of special pleading,” comments Rice. “She presents even the former Governor of Massachusetts as a human being.”

  And there did stir (for this I know)

  Some thing…there in the twilight zone

  Within the hollow of his spirit

  A thing…afraid and very lone…