Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  It darted back into his soul

  And closed the narrow opening. (Dance of Fire 67)

  The Sacco and Vanzetti trial continued to inspire many writers and artists. In September 1935, Ridge’s acquaintance Maxwell Anderson opened “Winterset,” a sentimental play on Broadway in blank verse about the case, receiving the first New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Ben Shahn had been working on a suite of twenty-three paintings on the executions that were finally exhibited in 1932. He also used the Crucifixion as a trope, the way Ridge had with Firehead. “Ever since I could remember I’d wished that I’d been lucky enough to be alive at a great time—when something big was going on, like the Crucifixion. And suddenly I realized I was! Here I was living through another crucifixion.”

  In The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti, a book written in 1948 examining the literary work written in response to the execution, critic Louis Joungin and lawyer Edmund M. Morgan studied 144 poems generated by the event and determined that “the longest and in many ways the most significant of the Sacco-Vanzetti poems is Ridge’s ‘Three Men Die.’” Ridge’s poem was judged better than the work of John Dos Passos, Amy Lowell, Babette Deutsch, Malcolm Cowley, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose poem “Justice Denied: Massachusetts” was published the day before the execution in the New York Times. “Lola Ridge’s verses most certainly deserve a permanent place among the chief American poems,” write the authors. “Her several volumes of verse are not widely known to the general public, [just seven years after her death, she had already been forgotten] but it is difficult to believe that this relative obscurity can continue indefinitely.”

  “Three Men Die” is much clearer and less metaphorical than the book-long Firehead. The third man executed with Sacco and Vanzetti was Celestine Madeiros, a young man who killed a bank cashier and had confessed that he, and not the other two, was connected with the robbery and murders for which they were all going to die. Ridge uses the Christian story as ethical and chronological framework and at one point, justifies this by acknowledging Eliot’s concern with tradition: “old myth/Renews its tenure of the blood/Recurrently.” Her description of her confrontation with the mounted policeman at the demonstration is the most striking part of the poem: “Drumbeats of the hooves…so close, so close,” she writes, “feeling the wet foam on his mouth, glimpsed spread/nostrils and the white/Fire of the eye, rolling as in agony.”

  Dance of Fire was not the Babylonian epic she had gone to Baghdad to write, nor the sequel to Sun-up that she had proposed in her Guggenheim application, nor part of the trilogy Lightwheel she had so grandly envisioned when she published Firehead. It was in-between, a portion of it politically minded, but an even greater measure of it inclined toward the metaphysical. “Via Ignis,” its very long sonnet sequence, received mixed reviews.

  This is to bear, with cleavage and in pain,

  Adhesions wrenched at and to suffer thrust;

  This is to feel the slip of the world’s crust

  And rage of forces, ages over-lain;

  To know in the whelmed spirit heavily

  The self’s eclipse, yet in each plighted grain

  Endure this radiant energy of dust. (Dance of Fire 44)

  Louise Bogan, then poetry editor for the New Yorker, lauded Ridge’s extended foray into the formal: “Three sonnets in the sequence “Via Ignis” of the present volume stand equal to the best modern work.” She condemned Ridge’s previous efforts in free verse by suggesting that they were old-fashioned: “[Ridge’s] early work—written in the free-verse form now so obsolete that it might be the product of the century before last…” Bogan, still valued today as a poet and critic, was being very short-sighted here, no doubt because of her own bias as a converted formalist. She ended the review with “Miss Ridge’s endowment is of the sort to celebrate the noblest and the bravest, and to cast over them some reflection from her inner and her symbolic fire.” Despite the praise, Ridge was not happy with the review. “As to the suggestion I should celebrate only the ‘noblest’ it merely makes me sick.” She would celebrate every man, the proletariat, anyone she liked.

  As early as 1924, Evelyn Scott reminded Ridge that it was not her sonnets but her free verse “by which posterity is going to judge you.” Ridge knew well enough of the dangers of the sonnet when she wrote in a review of Babette Deutsch’s work in 1925: “I hope, however, that she [Deutsch] will not become ensnared by the sonnet form—whose beguiling rhythms are as destructive as a happiness that arrests the artist’s growth by stroking him to sleep.” Nonetheless, Ridge began publishing sonnets in Red Flag in 1927. Even her friend Alfred Kreymborg disliked them. “The sonnets of Miss Ridge are not the equal of her poems in free verse,” he writes in Our Singing Strength, his history of American poetry. But by then Pound and Eliot had, for the most part, abandoned free verse for formal. Frost, of course, never really practiced free verse. Form’s commercial popularity was evident with Edna St. Vincent Millay’s triumphant sonnet sequence, Fatal Interview, a book that sold 66,000 copies in just a few months in 1931, a bad year in the Depression. Millay’s well-received Wine from These Grapes, published in 1934, contained the 18-sonnet sequence, “Epitaph for the Race of Man,” that prophesied the end of the human race, a subject equal in ambition to Ridge’s proposed Lightwheel.

  Other critics did not quite echo Bogan’s assessment of Ridge’s sonnets. The Nation critic writes in his bemused review “Not Easily Labeled”:

  The language of the sonnets is in the tradition, and occasionally even archaic, but it is not hackneyed…Miss Ridge is able to bring out the poetry latent in abstractions. When she errs, it is often because of inability to evoke a sense of immediacy.

  The New York Times notice ends with: “But in Dance of Fire she allowed herself to be enticed into unfortunate poetic paths.” Louise Adams Floyd, to whom the book is dedicated, forwarded a mostly positive review by a “Miriam,” probably Miriam Allen deFord, a leftist poet who wrote formal poetry.

  In spite of things which repel me—archaism, halting metre which is apparently deliberate but which offends me in a fixed verse form, such atrocities as dividing “anonymous” to rhyme with “anon”—it is authentic and fine poetry of the cerebral sort.

  In the otherwise sympathetic entry in A History of American Poetry 1900-1940, Horace Gregory writes that the sonnets of Dance of Fire “remained disembodied and curiously abstract.” Was Ridge’s advance into formal abstraction related to what was happening in the world of abstract expressionism? As Maurice Tuchman hypothesizes in The Spiritual in Art, “the genesis and development of abstract art is inextricably tied…to a desire to express spiritual, utopian, or metaphysical ideals that cannot be expressed in traditional pictorial terms.” She could, like Hart Crane, also be interested in what Crane called “the so-called illogical impingements of words on the consciousness” that provide “fresh concepts, more inclusive evaluation” than can be arrived at through reasoning. Horace Gregory noted in his anthology entry that

  In Dance of Fire Lola Ridge’s poetic maturity began, and it was evident that in the sonnet sequence, “Via Ignis,” which opened her last volume, Hart Crane’s revival of Christopher Marlowe’s diction left its impression upon her imagination. The poems were written at a time when many of those who had read Hart Crane’s The Bridge felt the implied force of Crane’s improvisations in archaic diction.

  Had Gregory forgotten that she used the same diction in Firehead, a year before The Bridge was published? Contemporary poet Robert Pinsky called her work a “premonitory echo” of Crane’s. As editor of Others and Broom, Ridge had seen a lot of Crane’s work before it appeared in book form, but couldn’t he have been equally as inspired by her poetry, with her “Brooklyn Bridge” opening so neatly in his copy of her book? Why couldn’t Crane be copying Ridge? Ridge didn’t hesitate to commemorate him. As Horace Gregory points out, she specifically recalled Crane’s suicide in Dance of Fire:

  The sea enfolds him; we shall not retrieve,

  Th
ough we should drag the waters to their mire,

  Either for earth or acquisitive fire

  His bones as we did Shelley’s…

  ………………………………

  Balanced on high arc precariously

  He saw the fire on all lands; the flame-

  Encircled waters drew him sweetly down… (Dance of Fire 35)

  Brian M. Reed, in his Phenomenal Reading: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Poetics notes the striking similarity to Ridge’s work in Crane’s lines “again the traffic lights…Skim thy swift/Unfractioned idiom…Beading thy path” in his long and most famous poem, “To Brooklyn Bridge.” Like Ridge, Crane also used “spoor” as a verb in “Cape Hatteras,” where “spouting pillars spoor the evening sky.” In A Life: Hart Crane, biographer Clive Fisher notes that Ridge’s “description of a sparkling traffic-burdened bridge at night would haunt him when he came to evoke a similar scene of his own.” According to critic John Unterecker, the lines Crane quoted from Ridge in his review that he later mimicked so closely reveals “his habit of adapting other people’s imagery and other people’s themes to his own purposes.” Unterecker goes on to write: “No critic could fail to see the relationship between Miss Ridge’s lines about the serpentine cars that cross the black bridge and Crane’s adaptation of the image in the brilliant ‘Proem’ he was to write years later for “The Bridge.” Yet Unterecker quickly qualifies this by writing that “no critic could honestly describe Crane’s lines as in any way ‘derivative’ from Miss Ridge…Crane barely echoed—certainly not borrowed.” However, Crane also borrowed very heavily from the less well-known poet Samuel Greenberg, in particular his early poem “Emblems of Conduct.” When Ridge reviewed Crane’s Key West and Collected Poems after his death in 1932, she began with the statement: “Like most men of creative power, Hart Crane lacked the ability to invent; he could only discover.”

  Abstraction—even “mysticism”—in poetry, was not unappreciated at the time. Wallace Stevens, the most abstract of poets, had just published his second book, Ideas of Order, with Knopf, and it was well received. But even Stevens, in his own way, injected politics into his work. “Who can think of the sun costuming clouds/When all people are shaken.” In absolution of some critics’ harsh evaluation of his abstractions, he writes:

  If they throw stones upon the roof

  while you practice arpeggios,

  It is because they carry down the stairs

  A body in rags.

  In addition to the publication of Dance of Fire in 1935, Ridge’s poem about Tom Mooney, “Stone Face,” was republished as a broadside. Printed on both sides so it could hang in midair, and big enough that its text was visible ten feet away, it was designed to be used at “Labor Day, May Day, Working Class and Mooney parades and demonstrations, Mass meetings, Union halls, and Workers headquarters” and sold to support Mooney’s defense committee. Distributed by the thousands all over the nation, the poem became an extremely powerful tool in keeping his face and the fact of his incarceration before the public. A survey published that year revealed that Tom Mooney was one of the four best-known Americans in Europe, after FDR, Lindbergh and Henry Ford. Although Mooney’s biographer, Richard H. Frost, wrote that “Mooney often called for a Zola but a Zola never came,” critic Nancy Berke suggests that, on the contrary, Ridge fulfilled that role well. New Zealanders now claim that Ridge’s poem remains perhaps the best circulated of any New Zealander’s poems in the U.S. Mooney was eventually released in 1939 but his health was broken and he died a few years later.

  Local politics in New Mexico drew Ridge only a month after she arrived, in particular, the miners who had been on strike in Gallup since 1933. Because its leaders had initially been effective, the miners were blacklisted and evicted from their homes, then charged with breaking and entering when they tried to return. After the police tear-gassed and open-fired on a crowd gathered after the trial, scores were wounded, hundreds were gassed, and an officer killed, most likely in friendly fire. Ten men were arrested under a statute that held all those present at the scene of the killing of an officer of the law were guilty of murder. The lawyer defending them was Daniel Levinson, who also defended Marinas Van Der Lubbe for the burning of the German Reichstag in 1933. Ridge’s Dance of Fire ends with “Fire Boy,” a poem on 24-year old Lubbe’s execution for protesting the Nazi’s encroachment, an event that Hitler called “a sign from heaven” and was used to establish his dictatorship.

  …There had been anger, valid, a bright

  point; shivering at impact; now

  There was no more rage in him against those who had

  denied him—let them

  Deny this! (Dance of Fire 99)

  “[Levinson] spent an evening in my studio with Carl Howes[,] strike leader last year against the American Coal Company,” Ridge writes Lenore Marshall.

  General Wood’s son and his hired thugs knocked all Carl’s teeth out last year, beat him up and threw him across the state line—he calmly walked back…it is dominated and terrorized by the Am. Legion…the artists who gave in Taos were actually afraid to sign their names to the fifty cents or dollar or so they gave.

  Ridge writes her husband and Louise Adams Floyd for money to support the cause. “This [underlined three times] is the revolution I expect since I have come here, and it is I believe now being plotted,” she writes Marshall.

  Two days later, David Levinson and political organizer Robert Minor met with one of the wives of the accused in a car parked in the plaza. Minor was a famous illustrator for The Masses before going into organizing, and had trained at the Ferrer Center while Ridge was in charge. Three men shoved revolvers inside the rendezvous car. Leaving the woman behind, the men drove Levinson and Minor into the desert and beat them brutally. “I lost consciousness and when I came to was again beaten,” writes Levinson.

  I was dragged out [of the car] and thrown on the ground, bleeding profusely, kicked on the knees and left again. “I heard Minor asking for his fountain pen. ‘You won’t need it in hell, they told him. I could not see him. A hood was placed over my head. I was sure they were going to hang us. I was dragged into an upright position and asked if I had anything to say.

  They were left to walk 12 hours through the desert.

  Ridge reported that some Greek hoteliers asked her friend the artist Ofer [Walter Ufer] how he could associate with Jews—the lawyer Daniel Levinson, defending for free the Mexicans falsely charged with murder in the strike. Ofer answered that “this was only one of the many signs of a world wide pogrom against the Jews [in] which they will again be slaughtered and outraged.”

  Ridge didn’t mention any further involvement with politics in New Mexico. Writing to Louise Adams Floyd at the end of the summer, she admitted that she had become discouraged. When she asked “Ted Stevenson a communist writer here about the chances of my going there and getting down into the mine,” he told her she would never get by the guard. Both he and his wife had been warned they would be killed if they attempted to enter Gallup.

  Chapter 34

  Poetry in the Southwest

  Mabel Dodge presided over the arts in Taos, the peyote-taking 1910s salonnière whose lavish Fifth Avenue apartment was just a few blocks from Ridge’s studio on 14th Street. Brought to Taos by her third husband in 1917, Dodge fell in love and married a fourth, the Tewa Indian Tony Luhan. She then pushed D.H. Lawrence to visit her in Taos. After he arrived, waves of artists came to stay with or near her, some 250 between the wars. These included Ridge’s friends Marsden Hartley, Jean Toomer, Alfred Stieglitz, and Paul Strand. Around the time of Ridge’s 1935 trip to Taos, composer Leopold Stokowski was staying with Dodge—now Mabel Dodge Luhan—and was soon to collaborate on scoring Fantasia with Disney.

  Through an introduction given by Evelyn Scott, Ridge met Dodge’s son, the novelist and later government official John Evans and his novelist wife, Claire Spencer. Spencer had been married to Ridge’s current publisher, Hal Smith. Ridge had certainly not been
happy with Hal and the two of them might have found a shared sympathy. Ridge wrote that she also met Evans’s first wife, Alice Oliver Henderson Evans, who had married at age fifteen, and whose mother was the assistant editor at Poetry and now literary doyenne of Santa Fe opposite Mabel. Alice is “the devoted wife of John Evans,” according to Ridge, although Alice and John had already been divorced for a number of years. Perhaps Alice was trying to play the devoted ex-wife hanging around Taos with their three children? She hosted Jean Toomer while Ridge was in Taos.

  Toomer had reasons for keeping his distance from Mabel, since he may have had an affair with her during an earlier visit. Luhan’s biographer, Lois Palken Rudnick, references an uncharacteristic Langston Hughes poem “A House in Taos” to suggest such an entanglement was known to at least a few of his friends. Luhan certainly lent him $14,000 in 1926 that he hadn’t repaid. One of the characters in his unpublished play, “A Drama of the Southwest,” reveals a fear of New Mexico’s “female fascism—[the] strong resourceful women who like the starkness and isolation of this country…It’s they, these women, who are claiming this land which used to be thought of as man’s country.” He was traveling with his second wife Marjorie Content, previously married to Broom publisher Harold Loeb, the woman who was Ridge’s friend and landlord while she edited the magazine. Content had become a very accomplished photographer since her Sunwise Turn days, and a portrait of Ridge taken in 1935 was purchased by the National Gallery of Art. Her marriage to Toomer, who wrote that “women want men genuinely to be their lords and masters,” was not easy—he later slugged her for suggesting that he was a fake—and was based on having access to her money.

  Around the time of his visit, Taos endured a three day “drizzle” that is known historically as “The Great Flood of 1935.” “I sat up all night in a chair by the fire in my little room, an umbrella over my head to catch the drips and falling plaster,” writes Ridge. Toomer’s play immortalizes it with a description of Ridge (as Riva Lentin).