Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  It was very good of you [,] Davy [,] to ask me to live in your place—but I think we’ll both be much happier if I do not. And as for doing housework, it is out of the question…But I should love to be in the same town with you and this tempts me to N.Y.

  By the end of March, she said she had only two dollars left in the world. Lenore Marshall and Mary Marquis (“who has so little”) sent her money but it was only enough to stay alive, not enough to leave. She refused to have Lawson approach Dr. Hyman again, who was so generous when she was stuck in Baghdad. Lawson suggested that she contact the California poet Sara Bard Field for help. As the current expert in long poems on biblical themes, Ridge had written a mostly positive review of Field’s dramatic narrative, Barabbas, in 1932. Field and her wealthy lover, the satirist C.E.S. Wood, patronized the arts and supported political causes, defending Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger, and working on the pardon of Tom Mooney. They were also friends with William Rose Benét. But Ridge replied that C.E.S. Wood had been

  pronounced radical and most unpopular with capital in Fascist Calif. They’d have no influence whatever. Also the gap between artists and industrialists too complete to allow one to influence the other. The only way art can approach industry is cap in hand.

  By May 3 she had deduced that most Californians were “downright… reactionaries.” Her friend Agnes “handed Dance of Fire to one of her friends to read. The friend opened it at the Mooney poem[,] read it and hurled the book from her, saying she’d never read another word of mine.” As for Ridge’s penetration of Hollywood: “No, H. Glick did not write to me. She won’t sell…Firehead in Hollywood in 20 years—and especially not Henrietta!”

  Victor Hugo Point in Laguna featured a long pier that shot out into the Pacific. Facing the ocean she left behind, Ridge would have seen its waves plied by the enthusiastic surfers of the ‘30s. Bodies were worshipped in California. She had just left her Mexican lover, he who “did more for me than he knew”—that Hollywood phrase. What if she left the relationship and its debris—the unfinished novel—behind, and started over in Laguna? Turning back to a shoreline dotted with easels, she might have thought of painting again, and then dismissed the idea—where would she get the money for that? Even anorexic poets have to eat. Here she had no one she could really rely on—just one new friend, Agnes. No one loved her enough to support her, no one remembered her power in the literary world, how she slew thirty-seven poets in one review. Books curled in the salt air. And if she should really fall sick, who would arrange her stay in a nice sanatorium?

  All she had left of her Mexican sojourn was a trunk that contained a broken plastic calendar stone, a serape, and her volumes of the Sagun history of Mexico—and this was being held up at customs. “I’m utterly no good in looking after any practical matters. Heavens only knows how I’ve got around the world. However [,] it has been the help I’ve got from others of course.” Then on May 4, Louise Adams Floyd sent her $100 for her return fare to New York. Traveling by bus—and considering stopping at the Grand Canyon—she lost her glasses, her recently retrieved trunk (which also contained her manuscript), and the pills Lawson had sent her. She wandered through Chicago “to 17 restaurants” looking for a meal. Instead of staying with a poet friend, she put up at the Midland Club Hotel, a sleek Art Deco skyscraper in downtown Chicago. By May 10 she was back in New York.

  Chapter 37

  Anti-Woman, Anti-Experiment, Anti-Radical

  Ridge probably didn’t stay long in Lawson’s basement apartment. Summer was coming and she hated spending the season in New York. In previous years she had always found some supporter with a spare room to house her through the worst of the heat. In August 1937 she spent a week at a sanatorium, the “House of Rest,” where doctors thought she had something wrong with her spine, but she had definitely returned to the city by October when Thornton Wilder’s sister, Charlotte, offered to bring cookies and cake to a meeting. Ridge had been introduced to Wilder by Evelyn Scott, and she had supported Wilder’s application in an unsuccessful bid for a Guggenheim in 1936.Wilder won the Shelley Award in 1937, two years after Ridge’s second award, sharing it with Ben Belitt. Two years later, Wilder apologized for having some kind of breakdown in Evelyn Scott’s apartment.

  Ever since I left Evelyn’s so abruptly, on that unfortunate afternoon, I have wanted to write you, and apologize for the performance, always so disturbing to a social group; and so humiliating to the one who hasn’t the will power to avert it.

  Wilder was eventually locked up in a sanitarium and given a lobotomy. She had been living with Scott. Despite insinuations that Scott and Wilder were lovers, Scott had repeatedly tried to get her released from the sanatorium, although she too had begun to suffer her own severe psychiatric symptoms. The October 1937 cake-and-tea meeting with Wilder may not have taken place since Ridge was back in the hospital by November, being treated with injections of sugar. Physically Ridge was not in good shape, and psychically, forces at the end of the 30s tried her feminism, her politics, and her poetry.

  Two students of the proto-New Critic John Crowe Ransom—Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks—led the assault on women and poetry by targeting their criticism on the most successful and famous of them all, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Tate complained in 1931 that she was a second-rate poet with merely “a sensibility, not an intellect.” He was perhaps responding with envy: Fatal Interview had sold an amazing number of copies that year. Four years later Cleanth Brooks wrote: “Miss Millay has not grown up” because he felt she lacked irony, but overlooked her brilliant use of irony in “Justice Denied in Massachusetts,” insisting that her “preoccupation with social justice” had produced “disappointing” results. The execution? Brooks also conflated the poet with the speaker of the poem and wrote that Millay had the “attitude… of a child whose latest and favorite project has been smashed,” equating all women—at least women writers—with children.

  John Crowe Ransom published his notorious essay, “The Woman as Poet” in 1939. In it he attributed Millay’s and all women’s poetry to “personal moods” concerning “natural objects which call up love and pity.” He suggested that women were close to “the world of the simple senses,” which left them “indifferent to intellectuality” and that their minds were “not strict enough or expert enough to manage” complex poetic forms. He wrote that women threatened 20th-century poetry with immature emotionalism and obsolete formalism. “A woman lives for love,” he wrote, particularly referencing Edna St. Vincent Millay. “Miss Millay is rarely and barely very intellectual, and I think everybody knows it.” The New Critics and their followers effectively blotted out politics or the personal as subjects for decades for both genders, and along with that, the careers of many accomplished poets. As William Drake writes in First Wave: “So thorough was the denigration of the women poets who flourished between 1915 and 1945 that their continuity with a later generation of women poets has effectively been destroyed.” Even Adrienne Rich, educated at Radcliffe in the 40s, struggled with the strictures between feeling and form, then believing that “a too-compassionate art is half an art.” By insisting that poetry about politics could not also be beautiful, the art form was emasculated and emptied of an important source of inspiration for another thirty years.

  Joining the New Critics’ virulent antifeminist attacks was the burgeoning movement against radical poetry of all kinds, to the point that by the 50s, critics had recanted nearly all the work of the 1930s. “A sordid decade of liberal hypocrisy and self-deception,” was how the fifties saw the 30s, according to critic Alan Filreis. The 1950s’ critic Murray Kempton accused poets of the 1930s of having “felt a kind of literary contempt for their craft… and [were] devoid of education.” That, of course, was blatantly untrue. The modernists’ penchant for experimentation was looked upon hand-in-hand with its radical politics and perceived as threateningly chaotic, with Communist taint, echoing the New York Times’ reception of free verse in 1913 of “poets who defy syntax and decency.” The
militarism that went along with the World War II did not tolerate the least whiff of socialism except for those measures necessary for men to band together to fight. The political reforms lauded and indeed heralded by the poets of the 30s had to be put down. Ridge would have been just beginning to feel the vise of this anti-Communist witch-hunt that silenced or exiled many poets of the 1930s. Her friend Eda Lou Walton nearly lost her job at NYU on account of her radical interests. Alfred Kreymborg discovered even “his old friend Tom Eliot” wouldn’t publish his work because of its “embattled pacifism.” Louis Untermeyer was named before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and was so unmoored he did not leave his apartment for a year and a half, according to Arthur Miller. FBI surveillance of Muriel Rukeyser began in 1936, and she was followed by an FBI agent almost daily during the Cold War. Before Genevieve Taggard died in 1949, she told a Sarah Lawrence colleague that “they destroyed me,” referring to a red-baiter—another poet—whose undermining forced her to resign her position. William Carlos Williams did not escape the political turmoil: red-baiting prevented him from serving as U.S. poet laureate. By 1955 even the anarchist revolutionary poet Walt Whitman had been deradicalized, he who was thought to put “the average man on a pedestal” but in fact, according to archconservative David Daiches, “had no such idea in his head.” Alan Filreis in Counter-Revolution of the Word coined the term “immaculate modernism” as a ploy critics of the 50s invented in order to skip the 30s poets altogether, and put canonical figures like Pound and Eliot in a “direct unsullied continuity from the 1910s and 1920s.”

  On November 22nd, 1937, Ridge thanked Lenore Marshall for sending roses to her hospital room, where she was undergoing a neurological exam and X-ray of the stomach. Marshall paid for the stay. “T.B. dead, not active, no germs,” Ridge reports. “I received all kinds of tests…nothing wrong with me at all except the migraine.” The next day she wrote Marjorie Content: “Lenore Marshall and Dr. Lipkin interested a migraine specialist Dr. Brickner in me. As we thought[,] nothing wrong with me except arrested T.B. germless now.”

  Ridge and Lawson moved from the basement of 9 East 12th Street to the seventh floor of 47 Morton Street. On the fourth of July, 1939, Ridge wrote Beck Strand for the first time since she had returned to New York, explaining the lapse in her correspondence amid the fireworks:

  I’m writing by the windows of a high apartment in Greenwich Village…already the explosions are beginning—it’s half past nine. I’ve just been listening to a MacDowell concerto over the air. Strange to remember he composed in this century. What has his tuneful and charming tinkle to do with us who willy-nilly are grappling atoms of our time…After I reached New York from Mexico, via California, I went down ill and with brief respites of half well or better, stayed so for two years….

  She told Strand that she had seen her ex-husband Paul once in ’37 (probably at the Mexican Redes screening) and that she had hung a picture of hers “on the wall of our tiny crowded apartment.” She gave it an oblique critique by quoting Davy: “too much yellow in the red” and another visitor’s comment: “I don’t care for it, it’s like a phallus.”

  The phallus was a continuing preoccupation of the Ridge/Lawson household. Lawson wrote his name inside four of the eight books on phallic worship he left in Ridge’s library, two of them heavily illustrated compendiums. In the context of the times and Freud’s impact, such an interest is not so surprising. Will Durant discussed the phallus in art and religion at the Ferrer Center, and D.H. Lawrence found its symbolism quite important, according to Kate Millett. All the books study the cross cultural and religious beliefs that surround the phallus—in particular, the practices in India, Japan, China, Mexico, Ceylon, and the ancients. Ophiolatreia, with its drugstore-sounding name, begins “O, the worship of the serpent, next to the adoration of the phallus, is one of the most remarkable, and, on first sight, unaccountable forms of religion the world has ever known.” Ridge noted of the author of Volume 2 of Sex Symbolism in Religion that “This man is too biased and undeveloped.” Phallicism in Ancient Worship shows lots of pictures of pillars and columns, and The Story of Phallisms devotes a large number of pages on prostitution in Rome and all the various categories and subcategories of women who were for sale. Ridge’s statements on bisexual creativity are affirmed in Sex and Sex Worship, published a year after her speech in Chicago. Philo, a Jewish philosopher contemporaneous with Jesus, says that Adam was a double, androgynous, or hermaphroditic being “in the likeness of God.” Surely Ridge knew Plato was the first to note the androgyny of humans. The book states he “explained the amatory instincts and inclinations of men and women… Zeus separated them into uni-sexual halves, and they seek to become reunited.”

  She and Lawson seemed to be managing in their own uxorial style. “Davy is looking for a new place… [He] is very trustful of others and rushes into things. Against my advice he was about to sign a two-year lease. The money of course is a dead loss.” She commented that “I think women are more determined to live and the vital urge in them, not to be denied.” By November 1939 the two of them managed to move again, this time to Brooklyn Heights. The neighborhood was a bit down-in-the-mouth with the Depression still on, probably more so than when Whitman or even Hart Crane had lived there. Their new apartment, however, was located at 165 Columbia Heights, in a carriage house with beautiful arched windows situated very close to the Esplanade, with a magnificent view of Manhattan. Complaining about the housekeeping that she shared with a woman who came once a week, she writes: “Much work in this large apartment which [we] must have for Davy’s book,” indicating that Lawson had begun serious work on his biography of Paul Morphy.

  New Orleans chess genius Morphy was the world champion in the mid-19th century, and stopped playing after beating everyone of note. Lawson may have become interested in the man when they lived in New Orleans. Throughout his life, Lawson played excellent chess, taking on Marcel Duchamp and Alfred Kreymborg, as well as prominent chess professionals. His study of French became useful not in chasing after Ridge in Europe but in reading Morphy’s original documents. All those years that Ridge had promised to do her writing in exotic locales—now it was his turn.

  Answering the 1940 census from Brooklyn, she used Lawson’s name, and declared herself 59 years old. She was 67. Such fabrications were common throughout their census reports: in 1925 she said she was 25 (she was 52) and Lawson 35, and that both were born in the U.S. In the 1930 census she was both the wife and head of household, 45-years-old, and not naturalized, although by then she had held an American passport for at least a year. What’s particularly striking in her 1940 reply was that, for the first time, she didn’t declare herself a poet.

  Chapter 38

  “The Fire of the World is Running Through Me”

  In January 1940, Ridge started a diary, writing as “Rose Emily Ridge,” a name she hadn’t used since her childhood. It would be “a record of life as it passed, obstructed or attracted me…by turns absorbed, enraged, tender, amazed, but never hated…under the deepest hell is another hell.” She tore out all the pages from January to March 2—“through the most intense darkness the self can know.” An early March entry chronicles a fight with Davy, and much about her struggle to maintain a separate relationship while being so dependent on him. She writes that she

  talked in bed this morning with Davy, tried to help him deal with a family problem—his family. As usual when we talk we flew apart. I irritated and made him nervous…disturbed me…to no good purpose. We simply cannot meet…Partly, perhaps, all my fault. We move at different tempos. Not that I fail in understanding, but in adjusting the movements of my spirit, swift, impetuous, moving strongly like a wind (perhaps—too—like a wind unpredictably, flying off at tangents) to his—the slower pace. Talking with him sometimes like dragging a heavy or resisting child (by the hair of the head!) through new-ploughed ground. Thinking this makes me laugh—laughter the great restorer of upset equilibriums—I feel all right…but could not pa
ss the funny little image on to Davy…He’d become dour…reduced to resentful silence. Yet he is good, very good—not from any mental concept of goodness pressed like a straitjacket upon an unwilling spirit…but in the very substance of the self.

  The rest of the entry reveals that she was suffering from a migraine, and down to only one meal a day, waiting for Lawson’s paycheck to fill the larder.

  I note with concern I’m getting addicted to self-pity—something I’ve always despised. How I’ve condescended to others when I’ve noticed its manifestation in them…