Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  Ridge’s radicalism would have been seen as positively conservative in Mexico. Although officially the Mexico Revolution had been over for ten years, the Cristeros war between the Catholic church and the government continued until 1934, the year socialist Lazaro Cardenas became president. In order to quell the effects of the Depression in his country, he had nationalized much of the land, the oil, and the railroad, and empowered the peasants to run collective farms in the south. It worked. At the time, Mexico City had a million inhabitants whose cars flooded the main avenues, their terrible pollution still a few decades off, who enjoyed parks equipped with “outdoor radios” and whose nightclubs celebrated the latest in jazz in the Zócalo, although the women, always the last to feel any improvement, still carried water on their heads in the suburbs.

  Ridge stayed three days at the Imperial, one of the most expensive hotels in Mexico City, then moved to “a most comfortable Spanish-German home.” She crowed that she was drinking the “water[,] eating all foods[,] vegetables[,] and fruits[,] which I was particularly warned against…feel fine[,] no medication since I was here. I’ve felt this from the first—accepted by Mexico,” and she wasn’t ill for another two months. She was delighted with the country and “amazed about D.H. Lawrence—he was simply terrified of Mexico—frightened every moment he was here.” But the hotel took all her funds, and it would be another three weeks before the Guggenheim Foundation would send her another installment of her fellowship. When it came, she had quite a bit of trouble cashing the check, even with the intervention of the American consul. “The Mexicans are…against the very idea of the Guggenheims being permitted to amass their vast fortunes,” she writes her husband. The Chase Bank manager was incredulous about her trials getting the money. “The idea of a poet hatching a plot!” In the end, the chief postmaster of Mexico endorsed her check. However, more trouble loomed: her travel permit was lost.

  But Ridge had less tedious concerns. The first was, happily, recognition. “My book must be becoming known for I’ve received so many letters from strangers…It is somehow getting harder for me to remain obscure.” She still hadn’t sent her husband a copy of her new pages. “You spoke of my poem—my not sending you carbon[s] of the Prelude. Why dear, with all this bother I can’t even get my mind serene enough to work.” An undated note showed that she had at last sent a copy of the thirteen-page “Prelude” to Lawson just before she left for a trip to Guadalajara. “My mind has been too divided in copying it—which I did in great haste to do any revision.” Her “Prelude” has all the grandiloquent posture and ambition of a Jeffers narrative, and begins with a mathematical creation myth:

  …What if mind, busily com-

  puting that

  Which is numbered and the final sum set down irrefutably,

  Take tally of the heart, endlessly rocking, or of the

  teeming

  Atoms of this stone;

  There is the cosmic sexual awakening:

  You, omnipresent, witness of the bright births, knew

  The long shudder; the upheaving

  Spin of the continent; the tender

  Thrust of the rock, yet barely

  Set in its too hot mold,

  Lifted and wrenched apart…

  When man appears many lines later, his instincts are not so innocent:

  —He who had coerced all harmless things,

  stone and fishbone and the innocent woods, to

  Take on malign life… And from his hand, that menaced all things,

  leap

  Forth fanged and lightninged. He climbed high cliffs and the great

  thighs of hills, till from a thousand

  Times his little height his small eyes roved over the world.

  He saw

  His stone-arm twitching, the vast herds, grazing and

  the desert wrinkled in the winds, her sands

  Taking again the wild postures of the sea (he smelled (no

  flagrant

  Tang of empire yet on the sea’s breath, a salt, sweet smell…

  In preparing to take the first woman, man makes a sacrifice:

  Plucked the hearts from out live things and with bloody

  and propitiate hands, arms flung out like two stakes (the Cross

  implicit in that gesture) upheld them bleeding to the light.

  The final lines move toward mourning humanity’s eventual subjugation:

  Who shall attest

  Scanning bronze slab or a chipped cone, how oft and in

  what ages the anonymous

  Swarming out of the galleys and the black pits

  Struck without vizor; taking the down-stroke…Nebuchadnezzor

  Drove us on the wall; into the great moat… harried us

  as we

  Lifted up the gate of Ishtar, as we cast out of our burning

  The silver serpents and winged bulls.

  Whatever poem “Prelude” was to proceed, it would have to equal or surpass this introduction.

  Guadalajara was a 400-year-old city, where Miguel Hildago abolished slavery in 1810 and initiated the country’s independence movement. The Independent University of Guadalajara was founded there in 1935 as a rebuke to the socialist education put forward by President Cardenas. With its spring climate and wide avenues of baroque and neoclassical colonial buildings, the city has always been very appealing and now hosts the largest colony of foreigners of any city in the world.

  Ridge’s friend Idella Stone lived there with her father, a dentist, and published Palms between 1923-1930. An influential magazine, it included the work of Stone’s former writing professor, Witter Bynner. D.H. Lawrence, a friend of her father’s, helped design several of the magazine’s covers and also offered poems. Pound deemed it the best poetry magazine of its time. Its poems were published without authors so they could be judged on their own merit, the names revealed in the next issue. Ridge contributed “Pain” to one of its last issues in 1930. Retitled “Drunk with Old Youth” in Dance of Fire, the speaker plunges deep into the ocean, as if framing Crane’s suicide: “Shall I—bootlessly turning…evade,/In bubble-eyed waters…a sword-blue streak,/Turning on its back.”

  Stone had visited Ridge earlier in New York, and ran a Mexican gold mine for two years after Ridge visited Guadalajara. She then taught creative writing in Los Angeles, became a riveter during World War II, directed a Scientology center, and contributed twice to books on D.H. Lawrence. She remembered him as being pursued by women everywhere, and “petulant, cranky, rude and inconsiderate.” Like Ridge, her first baby died soon after birth. She went on to write many children’s books but is chiefly remembered as the author of Thirty Classic Mexican Menus in Spanish and English, 14 Tales of ESP, and Never in this World, a sci-fi anthology she edited which contained stories by Poul Anderson and Isaac Asimov, and received the Fawcett Gold Medal. Her pop fame rests on adapting Felix Salten’s Bambi for Walt Disney. Her father, Dr. George Edward Purnell, “a most kind gentle, honorable and utterly impractical old man,” introduced Ridge to several people, including Fred Leighton who imported Mexican pottery and handicrafts. He and his wife offered to take her around to the small towns and villages. “I have never been more interested and excited anywhere in my life, so above all do not worry about me,” she writes Lawson.

  I have crossed the country states from Mexico City to Guadalajara and back, stopping at each town by the way, making detours to villages and pueblos and following trails to their ends in mountains where tourists do not go. From the Town of Singing Instruments to silver mines and factories and to the poor homes in which the Indians weave their fabrics very much as they did in pre-Cortez days.

  But it wasn’t all tourist stops and trading opportunities. On December 23 they

  took a taxi and visited a silver mine where there was a strike on. The men were receiving two pesos (64 cents) per day and had struck for time. We found a committee of strikers guarding the mine—and this is one very fine thing the present government has done for the workers…t
he miners themselves and none else may guard the mine during a strike. They can prevent all from entering—even the mine-owners themselves dare not pass the gates. I thought—how different from our mine strikes!

  They also visited the small town of Salvo, where they “saw parades of workers marching and wearing the red-and-black strike flag in favor of the present government.” She writes Marjorie Content: “I’ve never—not even in the old days of the Ferrer School or around America at election time—seen anything like the confusion [,] the intrigue [,] and the warring within parties that apparently exists in Mexico.”

  She delayed her return to Mexico City for six weeks. On her arrival, she received Lawson’s letters—“depressing” she reported—and didn’t accept his Christmas gift because she refused to pay the duty. Besides, she “cannot wear that hard, glittering type of jewelry—like glass or diamonds. It is too unbecoming to me.” He must have asked to join her in the new year because she writes back:

  It will take me at least a year to do my book—maybe more if you come [and] you will have to help and not hinder me—it is my last book and I’m desperate. To do this you will have to learn Spanish—had you been interested in coming you would have started Spanish long ago, when I asked you last September….of course you will not be able to get any kind of a job here—

  The admission that she thought it would be her last book must have rattled him. She also admitted in this letter that she was not working on the Australasian poem. “In comparison, a record of personal experiences, enclosed in the slight segment of a life seems not worth while….” By February 5, she writes that the Prelude—for some poem—was now 22 typed pages.

  On January 21, 1936, she went with the Leighton’s to visit Diego Rivera, at the time Mexico’s most celebrated artist. “Like him; he has the reality I need,” writes Ridge, “but can’t agree with all his opinions. He’s a Trotskyite—believing in a world uprising and I think that at the present time this would result in a race of Fascist dictators.”

  Rivera had been back from Moscow for two years and was repainting his destroyed Rockefeller Center masterpiece at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, inserting a likeness of abstemious John D. Rockefeller, Jr. drinking with a woman in a nightclub. A plate of syphilis bacteria wafts over their heads. Married to Frida Kahlo, Rivera was having an affair with her sister that prompted one of Frida’s most graphic paintings, “A Few Small Nips,” showing a blood-covered nude woman and her attacker. When Ridge met Rivera again in July, he was accompanied by Frida, who “looks like a Persian—and dresses for the part.” The next year Frida would seduce Trotsky when he came to live with them in exile.

  Ridge never wrote that she was homesick nor that she missed her husband, her mother, her friends, or anyone else. She did remember her son in March, but only in false conjecture, as previously mentioned. She did not elaborate as to how she might have discovered his imagined death—perhaps through a crystal gazer or fortuneteller. In the same letter that she mentioned Keith’s presumed death, she accused Lawson of being “strangely secretive,” and confessed to having already lost the fountain pen Lawson had sent her to replace the jewelry she refused during the holidays. She had received the pen from him just a day earlier. Had Alfredo followed her to Mexico? All the rejection is suggestive of her own secret.

  She travelled from Mexico City to Oaxaca—“frightfully expensive”—but with mariachis “playing guitars in the park near by…The strolling German bands used to live in the same precarious way in Sydney.” A few days later she was back at the pricey Hotel Regis in Mexico City. The Guggenheim turned down her request for an extension. “I put my arms around you and tell you to have faith in me and in my power to achieve against all obstacles,” she writes Lawson. As part of her research, she talked and took photos for two hours with Dr. Alfonso Caso, who had unearthed carved stones from the Monte Albán archaeological ruins of “a civilization that existed long before the Toltecs,” writes Ridge. It would be the Olmecs’.

  A few days later she told Lawson to apply at once for an engineer’s license in California because that’s where she was going as soon as she received her last check. She hypothesized that Monterrey “or somewhere along the coast line where Carmel is” would be “stimulating and creative.” She felt certain that she could “rely on Lenore Marshall to pay my fare to California when you are ready to come.” In the meantime, she applied to renew her permit to remain in Mexico for another three months. The officials waived the fee after she showed them a copy of Dance of Fire.

  Ridge ran into the noted folklorist Frances Toor on a Mexico City street. Toor was, at the time, editor of Mexican Folkways, the first bilingual literary magazine in Mexico. With covers by Diego Rivera, the magazine “touched upon art, music, archaeology, and the Indian himself as part of the new social trends, thus presenting him as a complete human being”—an effort that resonated with Ridge’s work on Broom. Ridge told her about planning to move to Tepoztlán, a town about 45 minutes away by car. “O Lola, you may not even get a bed!” warned Toor. On the lookout for solitude, Ridge’s comment was droll. “Well[,] the idea of a cell for a room does tempt me.” Idella Stone had offered Ridge a job caring for her new baby in Guadalajara, but she refused, thinking Tepoztlán a better location for getting down to work.

  Tepoztlán was the birthplace of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god of ancient Mexico. By the 10th-century it was inhabited by the Toltecs. Centuries later, it was razed by Cortez when the villagers refused to meet him. Situated in a lush valley surrounding by strange mountains, then undiscovered by weekenders from Mexico City, it was fiercely proud and independent. In 1994, the townspeople ran the city government out of town, sealed the city, occupied government offices, and repelled state military until developers backed out of a deal to build a golf course, a development on communally held lands, and a funicular to the top of one of their pyramids.

  Just the kind of community spirit Ridge might admire. In terms of her own housing, however, she managed to get more of a cell than she had perhaps wanted: no mattress, only a trough to wash in, no vegetables, very little fruit, no cheese but her landlord did provide a table for her typewriter, and removed the junk in the convent room—all for 15 pesos a month, the price she paid in a day for her room, meals, massaging, taxis, and beggars in Mexico City! She made do and even met “a major poet,” Carlos Pellicer Cámara, who stayed in town for a couple of days. A contemporary of Octavio Paz, and founder of the “Solidarity Group of the Workers’ Movement” with Rivera, Orozco and others, Carlos Pellicer Cámara was one of the first Mexican modernist poets. At the time he was exploring the historical and spiritual implications of his experience with nature, with ambitions similar to Ridge’s. She left a book of his in her library at Bryn Mawr, and there is now a museum in his name in Tabasco, where he served as a senator, which specializes in Olmec and Mayan art. His poetry verges on the surreal, his “Desires” beginning with the lines: “Tropics, why have you given me/hands full of color?”

  “I fear Tepoztlán and its discomforts too much for me,” Ridge writes her husband. “I’ve lost almost every trinket in my possession.” Nevertheless, she announced that she had received her permit to stay in Mexico until October, and she asked him to send a copy of a chapter from a book he’s translated. This little chore, along with mailing her many additional books on Mexican history she couldn’t find or that she had already lost in Mexico, must have been a challenge for Lawson with a full-time engineering job. Ridge expected her husband to match her in energy. Although dangerously thin and always ailing, she climbed one of Tepotzlán’s pyramids, then made her way back to Mexico City in time for huge May Day parades and strikes:

  The great strike starts tomorrow…Lenore sent me $100…Did I tell you also I was down to forty centavos—and still walking with my head held high…I actually went without one meal. No[,] these things do not crush me and deflate my spirit as they do some others.

  She maintained a tone of superiority even about
her poverty. But how poor had she ever been if going without a single meal merits a mention? Nonetheless, she felt a great deal of solidarity for the strikers. It was the first time since organizing for Goldman that she had had such an intimate experience with crowds of revolutionaries. She reported:

  all shops in the nation shut—including bakeries, etc. no food permitted to be sold; no hotel service—all servants in the hotels and private houses out for the day; no street cars running or automobiles or buses—only the thousands upon thousands of workers marching. I was greatly cheered by the spectacle… Suddenly I heard a familiar yelling—a tremendous noise—roaring battle cries…I thought the Communists!—and so they were. Along they came, their heads up, their eyes alight, smiles on their faces—the eyes burning with ardor and intelligence. I felt my drooping spirits lift, and the conviction came to me: here is the hope of the world. A handsome young Communist, a standard bearer, passing me. I smiled at him and clapped my hands. He smiled or rather beamed back and stuck out his clenched fist in the Communist salute. I returned the salute…

  The closest Ridge came to affiliation with the Communist Party was putting her name on the 1936 “call” for the formation of the League of American Writers, somehow accomplished while she was in Mexico. Founded as a support for the Communist Party’s Popular Front agenda, the League was devoted to promoting the collapse of capitalism and pressed writers to speed its demise as participants in the class struggle. “Many famous anti-fascist writers were rescued from concentration camps in Europe by [its] Exiled Writers Committee; thousands of dollars were collected for medical aid to the Spanish Loyalists; violations of civil liberties and instances of illiberalism in the United States were publicized and protested,” according to the library that holds its papers. Those who joined the “call” with Ridge included Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, James Farrell, and Archibald MacLeish. A number of her friends were among those who served on the first executive council: Alfred Kreymborg, Waldo Frank, Joseph Freeman, and Genevieve Taggard. Waldo Frank stepped down as president in 1937, when he questioned Stalinist tactics, the same year that Ernest Hemingway gave the keynote speech. Just back from the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway spoke of fascism as “a lie told by bullies,” and stated that “a writer who will not lie cannot live or work under fascism.” In the keynote address two years later, Langston Hughes likened the situation of the blacks in America to that of the Jews in Europe. By 1943, after several reversals of policy including moving from antiwar to pro-war, the League was dissolved.