Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  Describing her search for a better place in Tepoztlán, Ridge “looked at innumerable hovels, and I finally agreed to take two rooms, standing by themselves, a tiny house, in fact…6 pesos a month.” She must not have been down to her last peso yet as she decided to cut off the top of the second door and put in glass.

  I hope some drunk with tequila will not take it into his head to shy a stone through it…the witchie is three or four doors down across the street. There are three little holes in a row…I forgot to ask where the well was…the door of my back room opens on a gorgeous view of the mountains…despite the horrible inconveniences it seems to me to offer a wonderful peace. Of course no light in town save candles.

  Ridge mentions that she had received a letter “from the Guggenheim, asking me to send them a sketch of my work and say how far it has advanced. I think that under the circumstances they have a great deal of nerve.” By then Ridge had “big rats running over me in bed at night, the hundreds of bulldog ants that walk over the floor, the scorpions, the food, the awful lack of hygiene… I also killed a black widow… Alfredo says they—the black widows—kill scorpions.”

  This was the first mention of Alfredo in Mexico. Had the two of them been traveling together all along, choosing Tepoztlán to work on his novel? Or did they rendezvous in Mexico City? She was back there on June 19 for the general strike, staying once again at the Hotel Moritz. This time she adopted the air of a seasoned revolutionary.

  There is a strange air of silence in the city. All over Mexico no light burns beyond the gleam of a candle. Here no wheel turns. The bread is already mouldy. Internationalist that I am, I believe I am now more Mexican than anything else.

  She added: “Davy, I may have something to say that you will not like.”

  Chapter 36

  Retreat from Mexico

  Some letter, now lost—burned?—revealed the particulars of the secret she had to tell her husband. In another letter she avoided coming to the point: “I’m trying hard to see a way out of the innumerable problems that are besetting me.” Perhaps the rigors of Tepoztlán ended her honeymoon with Alfredo, and she felt duty-bound to confess. She writes Marjorie Content in October that she had already told Davy about her lover, and that—surprise!—he was downcast. “At first I think he deceived himself and wrote me a fine letter…It hurts me terribly to hurt him, but I cannot help it.”

  By June 2nd, she had returned from the strike in Mexico City to Tepoztlán, “living practically on beans.” Her progress was slow learning Spanish “because it does not really interest me to learn a foreign language.” This certainly sounds as if her tutor, Alfredo, was doing all the translating. In an earlier letter to Content, she feared a Jo Vollmer would spread news of their affair around since she had seen them together in Mexico City. Ridge had “had hot words” with her while defending her patron Fred Leighton, the merchant who drove her around Mexico and introduced her to Diego Rivera. But everyone she saw in New Mexico must have known or suspected the relationship. In a July 22, 1936, letter, she gives Lawson an out: “Perhaps you do not feel like writing to me and would like me to discontinue writing to you?” By then she had left Tepoztlán for good, and returned to Mexico City. To Lenore Marshall she writes: One million thanks for telegraphed money…I’d gone down to 40 centavas [sic]—about 12 cents—when it arrived…” She sketches the situation in the city. “Electric strike; no light in city save candles, for three days…Last night I walked for hours with a flashlight through the darkened city…I’m still in the throes of emotional conflict, which I’ve attempted to resolve in one direction” It is as if the flashlight were searching through her conscience.

  She continued to write Lawson, but the letters were not especially reassuring, especially with regard to the entanglement of political violence with her romantic life:

  Two days after I left Tepoztlán I have since heard there was a gun fight between the military stationed there and the revolutionaries in the town; these are the type of fanatic catholics, called here “Cristos”[.] They would kill their own parents. (and have)…they [say] the “revolutionaries” hacked off the ears of one of the school teachers, a man, with a small pair of scissors [much crossed out.] No, the young school teacher had already gone—the one who hated me. She was not liked in the town and might have suffered the same fate…Me? I do not know…Alfred was always begging me to leave (he lived in an a[d]joining town, 30 [Ridge crossed out 60] miles away) and it was really through him I left when I did…The young school mistress hated me on account of Alfred. Though married she saw and wanted him at once. He was politely indifferent…I was more afraid of her than I was of all the rest of the town.

  She ended the letter saying that she would write to Beck Strand—“though she too hurt me by her jealousy—strangely a jealousy for[,] not of me.” Perhaps Strand too had a romantic interest in Ridge.

  Several weeks later, she told Lawson not to send her any more money. At the beginning of August, she was ebullient because she believed he had taken up with someone else. “I’m so glad to see from it or infer from what you say, that you are now interested in someone else… For the first time in my life I’m being secret with [much crossed out] writing (creative) and with everything else.” She had also been given—at last—a small extension of her Guggenheim fellowship, which meant she wasn’t about to return home until it was spent. She ends the letter with a triumphant flourish: “Give my love to whoever wants it and bless my friends…I am sick, torn to pieces with conflicting emotions—but feel strangely full of power. Bless you, dear Davy, wishing you success and happiness.”

  But Lawson “did not or would not see,” she wrote in a letter to Marjorie Content.

  It hurts me terribly to hurt him, but I cannot help it. I’ve a right to live completely, however brief the interval may be—and I had not lived for years, because I feel the pain of others I’m fond of as my own.

  She writhed, trying to cast off her chains. For a woman to “take up” with a younger man at her age, now 63, with someone outside her culture, required courage—or romantic foolishness. She had been married to Lawson for 17 years, albeit much of the time separated. But she was adamant. “My life with Davy is broken, Marjorie, and will not be taken up again by me—I mean though I hope for and will be proud of his friendship, I cannot live with him again.” She and Alfredo were working on his novel together, “which I think will turn out to be a Mexican epic.”

  No, not a poem, a novel, though it will have a poem running through it. He has no money and has tramped the streets of Mexico looking for work as well as other cities. Now he has gone off to take a miserably paying job in Taxco—so as I do not like Taxco and it is very expensive and full of tourists, we shall have to work as best we may by correspondence.

  But there was more to his out-of-town job search than she could admit.

  Something utterly crushed his childhood and I’ve been trying to straighten this out for months. There is much to him if he can only bring his own will to bear on himself and use all his undirected power. However I think it best for Alfredo and I to be apart for a while. There is a cloud over him that will not allow him to take help from his father.

  She pointedly didn’t tell Evelyn Scott about him. “I have never known what it was all about. Don’t you want to tell me?” writes Scott a year later, trying to fathom what had gone on. Considering that Scott confided all of her complicated love life to Ridge, even her sixteen-year-old son’s elopement, Ridge’s silence showed how estranged they were. Or had Ridge wanted to maintain her saintly reputation?

  Alfredo certainly didn’t seem to be sending her any of his wages. In Ridge’s next letter to Content she expressed gratitude for her loan of money when she had only “a peso (28 cents) enough to pay for two meals.” She added that “Random House seems to take kindly to the idea of the Mexican book (the novel),” and that she had received “a strange letter from Davy; it is on the defensive, but sad.”

  Lawson had moved to a heated basement apart
ment in the Village in order to save money. Ridge used a visit to a crystal gazer to try to force the truth out of him about his romantic life, presumably so she would feel less guilty about hers.

  This woman, a handsome Spaniard, asked me if it were not true that I had two husbands. I told her yes, I’d been married twice, but had left long ago one and that one was in America. She told me about it and described him, even to his right eye, also told me of his dual character…she said about you, among other things[,] that you were very blonde, that you had had a woman in your life, but that she was common and that you had parted. Now is this true?… She asked me had I one or two sons; she said she saw two, but no other children. Again I told her the truth—one dead in childhood[,] other disappeared…Well, this woman said that Keith was not dead, described him as fair—he would be called fair in dark Mexico—tall, with broad square shoulders. That he was alive, had married and had a fortune by the sea in some very hot place (also that he had changed his name) but she could not say where…

  The fortuneteller was appropriately prescient: Keith was at the time living in Chile, married to the German-Chilean Margarete Wehner, with two children, about to have a third. Ridge could not have known any of this, but she uses the crystal gazer’s guesses as leverage on Lawson.

  Now if you tell me that what she said about you was true—that you have had an affair—or something of the sort with a woman who (“but she’s common—nothing like you”) and that this is broken, I might believe there is something in what she says of Keith. So please tell me the truth.

  Lawson’s response is not in the Smith Collection. The end of November finds her again begging him for money. “I hope to be able to give it back some day when you need it.” She writes Lenore Marshall as well: “If I do not now conserve what you may give me[,] I shall be utterly stranded.” Ten days later she had an advance on her lodging with her American hotelkeeper but she was down to borrowing “forty centavos for a stamp.” Still she was not suffering too seriously: “I have a room with the door opening on the beautiful garden and extensive grounds, full of tall trees, palms and flowers and cut off from the street by one of those high, mysterious Mexican walls.”

  Lawson sent her $50, and she received another $35 from Lenore Marshall and paid another month’s rent and her debts. Then a large part of a letter to Lawson was x’ed out, followed by:

  I am too fierce and imperious, there is too much capacity for destruction in me, too little tolerance…too much pride. I notice that if I have a flower in my hand, I tear it to pieces—and that is what I do with life.

  She admitted to him she had had a break with Alfredo. She went on to write:

  From now on I must try to go on alone. I have not seen Alfredo for over two weeks. The conditions of his life and temperament are such, something may easily have happened—as it had done before. The entire book is done in a kind of very rough draft; the bulk of this is only notes from which whole chapters have been made. Yet I believe it will go quickly. I am writing a poem of the strange story of his grandmother, which I shall weave throughout the book. The first third of this is written. The story is told in the first person. But I am putting in interludes in the third person as well as the poem.

  What is more seductive than working in tandem with another writer on the secrets of his life? Of course the manuscript has disappeared. She had titled it Tiger Way and hoped it might be published as a play after its publication as a novel.

  But I have not mentioned this even to Alfredo. Anyhow, I’m going to try and make money this year. I must, if ever I’m going to write any more. I believe the book will make money, though it is psychological, tragic, somber. But—quien sabe.

  She mentioned that she had heard that Henrietta Glick tried to place Firehead in Hollywood. She was “very interested” but wondered “what the dickens does she mean? To put it on the screen and have the music accompany it?” She mailed Lawson a Christmas card. He sent her five dollars. He must have suggested again she return home, and she responded with a dramatic feint: “If I were to return to N.Y. now[,] Davy[,] I’d die. [The doctor] told Pat [her hotelkeeper] [the] bronchitis had, he feared, stirred up my so long sleeping T.B. I feel this is true.” Immediately after this statement she notes that a small black monkey was chained outside her window—as if it were the objective correlative to the disease. “You say you wish me happiness ‘more important than work.’ No—it is much less important and the nearest approach to happiness I ever expect is to be (temporarily) free of conflict!”

  By mid-January, she was “much better as regards my chest.” Someone had paid her doctor. She explained that “the lowest price on which one may live in the cities (for board and room) is three pesos a day. This is all I pay… for my room, three very good melals [sic] a day, use of telephone and so on…” She complimented her American hotelier’s food—very good—so she must have been eating it. Although she was down to 20 pesos (about $30 in 2014), she managed to see Paul Strand and his famous film, Redes, about a fishing community overcoming exploitation. Strand’s screenwriter was Henwar Rodakiewicz, who was now divorced from Marie Garland, Ridge’s 1920s supporter.

  Lawson continued sending money, and she was grateful: “It was corking of you to send me that check.” She owed $350 to her publisher Hal Smith, whose press had been taken over by Random House. “I’m only hoping to God I’m free of Smith.”

  The Book has been held up since late November, partly through my severe illness in December. Partly through Alfredo’s failure to help me. I saw him January 1st and he suggested taking it up with me again, but I refused to work with him any longer. I’ll do it alone now. But I felt a temporary disgust with the whole thing. I know, however, the only way to make money is through a novel—poems will never do it and if I am to do the really important work I have in mind (and which may not bring me a cent) I must have money to live on. I feel angry about everything.

  She had wanted to write a serious novel since 1928. It was an obvious move, although the last of her 15 potboilers had been published in 1911. “Great poetry is no more self-indulgent than martyrdom,” Evelyn Scott told her in flip consolation. Although Ridge’s romance had ended, she was determined to continue writing. Ridge wrote a letter to Lenore Marshall, enclosing edits to Marshall’s poems, and making her romantic situation even clearer:

  I believe all this upheaval [sic], we have both gone through, necessary. Our own walls even must burn and dissolve to be re-cast anew and give the growing consciousness space in which to expand. The being happy or not happy is relatively unimportant. I’ve broken with Alfredo for good [and] must go on with my work alone. His inner being is poisoned and in turn poisons the life around it, so that one who strives to help him is in danger of spiritual infection. I do not know if the last word between us has been spoken. But I cannot think of another to speak.

  Three weeks later, she writes Marshall that she was “far too close to my subject matter…the emotional strain involving both my work and life has made it [working on the novel] all very difficult.” She writes to Lawson from Cuernavaca with the news that she was writing poetry instead of the novel, along with a final assessment of her lover.

  Well, I’ll try [to] re-start the blasted thing again…I have, as you might suspect, broken with Alfredo. In fact, the only reason I dislike being in Cuernavaca (which I love) is that it’s his home town…Alas, I have not met him and I hope I won’t—though he has my camera which he borrowed. I believe, Davy, that he is or will be insane—a pathological case like Jack Metcalfe. Like Jack too there is a streak of genius.

  She left for the U.S. via San Antonio March 6th, staying in one of the 200 air-conditioned rooms of the Robert E. Lee Hotel. “As I told you in letter… impossible for me to go to N.Y. now,” she continued to insist. After a wide detour to the Carlsbad Caverns, she settled in Laguna Beach, borrowing money from Norris, the man who drove her cross-country. She needed it to pay for her apartment where she intended to “cook my own food, do my own house work and t
ry go on with my writing.” She complained that it was “beastly cold” but the low in Laguna Beach for the month of March, 1937 was 43 degrees, the high 86.

  At the turn of the century, the coastline around Laguna Beach had inspired a group of San Francisco artists to take up plein-air painting. Although it had only 300 inhabitants in 1918, the town founded its first art gallery that year. By the late 1930s, Laguna’s summers were filled with art exhibitions, community plays, a parade, outdoor street market, tours of artists’ studios, and a tableaux vivant of famous paintings, “Pageant of the Masters.” The town had become glamorous: the area was a playground for Hollywood stars, with Mary Pickford, Bette Davis, Judy Garland, Charlie Chaplin, and Mickey Rooney owning property nearby. Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn stayed weekends at the Hotel Laguna in the 30s. Hildegarde Hawthorne, the granddaughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, described Laguna “as a child of that deathless search, particularly by persons who devote their lives to painting or writing, or for some place where beauty and cheapness and a trifle of remoteness hobnob together in a delightful companionship.” Another perfect location for Ridge.

  But she had to have money. She writes Lenore Marshall that “I do not for a moment expect you to go on helping me—and if you cannot give me the remainder of the sum I asked for, please dearest Lenore do not worry about it.” She was puzzled about what to do next. “Davy wants me to return to him and live with him. Though I’m very fond of him, I do not wish to do this…Alfredo did more for me than he knew.” The politics of free love she espoused—indeed, had practiced if her bigamist union counted—had tangled with her emotions. She cared about Davy and he, in turn, refused to relinquish her. It wasn’t just the money. Over and over in her letters she apologized for abandoning him, she wished he could be with her. It couldn’t have all been ingenuous. She told Lawson that she didn’t want to borrow any more from Norris, who wanted “to be an artist photographer like Strand” and who intended to make some portrait studies of her. Had Norris been sleeping with her? It was the “free” part of “free love” she needed more than anything to do what she wanted, or, inversely, someone to support her. She didn’t want to return to New York and stalled, saying she couldn’t return until after April, but then she had to ask Davy for a loan. “The truth is T.B. is on me again. I’ve coughed heartbreakingly for six months”—except that five months earlier she wrote that the doctor said that her chest was fine. She was not optimistic about their inevitable reunion.