Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  At the end of October, Ridge had 13 teeth removed and still lisped for the want of front teeth by the end of November. “Can’t very well go out. Look droll.” She felt she was being shunted aside anyway:

  I note that for some time now the friend tries always to arrange a tea date for Saturday or Sunday, when Davy may be expected to be present [,] also that at these times the friend converses almost wholly with Davy—even rushing to get in words when I begin to speak…

  And even when she did speak:

  When I talk with the very few people I am now able to see it is as though we were trying to communicate over some bridgeless space, the winds whirling between, blowing away our words so that we do not hear each other or only imperfectly understand what we do hear…

  How difficult for Ridge, the hostess whose parties were once so important to the literary scene! She had leveraged every avenue of power a poet could: her own poetry, of course, but also as reviewer, hostess, and editor—and now she felt shunned. She retreated into her own fierce world.

  My thought is now a strong current rushing against seemingly insurmountable obstacles, sometimes making a clear path through these, more often held up, but fighting to penetrate, to blaze its way—never evading or going around, or leaving that obstruction for the one who comes after to tunnel through.

  Ridge writes to Marshall that “The fire of the world is running through me.”

  Lawson attended a party for Richard Wright, a noted Communist writer at the time, and Ridge’s colleague as a fellow New Masses contributing editor. Wright had just published Native Son, the first bestselling novel by a black American, which would also open soon as a play on Broadway, directed by Orson Welles. Dental troubles prevented Ridge from attending.

  On her birthday December 12, she wrote:

  Vibrations from Europe and Asia streaming through the air…The peoples moving against each other, shattered and shattering. The armies, the men who are doing the killing and maiming and getting killed and maimed seem to be moving in some kind of a frightful trance, the fleeing people, crawling into caves and holes in the earth as they did long ago in the early mornings. The radios on all sides bruiting the bare facts or segments of the facts.

  A few days later, she had her teeth fixed again and refocused her radical politics on her own body:

  Our bodies must be swarming with this life, beautiful, benign and destructive life.

  How many worlds within us, civilizations, groups, entities, cooperative worlds repairing their little houses in our dust. Little workers, you too loving, hoping, hating, cherishing. I’m sorry not to have considered you enough, not to have considered you at all.

  Ridge’s body, neglected and starved for so long, contracted rheumatoid arthritis from her periodontal problems. She tried to raise her spirits with the fire of her ambition: “Through this drying reed of me…Well, I believe I can write this book, the first novel dealing with my childhood concurrently with my poems.” So much ambition! Two books at once! She was not totally deluded about her ability to write prose since she had published very competent long form prose thirty years before. But she became frustrated with poetry. “When I am angry and disturbed as I so often am, I cannot write poetry.” A few days earlier, she completed a lengthy entry in her diary about a Christmas Day in Australia in which her mother ignored her and gave away all their money. How did she deal with that frustration? She took after her mother. She often distributed what little money she accumulated to friends or beggars on the streets of Mexico or Baghdad. Surely this habit annoyed Ridge’s husband and her benefactors.

  She dealt with her frustration with writing by writing:

  O splendid obituary the will rampant unleashed to

  devour, there, emblazoned

  in the bare

  grandeur of whatever fire…

  No snowflakes in this excerpt, the image that Matthew Josephson attributed to her aesthetic. Throughout March she put down poem after poem in her diary, often returning to the Whitmanesque vision of the working man that she celebrated decades earlier, but with great detachment, viewing the worker as another of her beloved insects. The following excerpt of “Red Ants” suggests that she had been once employed in a bag factory in New Orleans.

  The factories had emptied.

  Workers

  Adrift from toil and the moist heat, trickled in alleys and back streets,

  shedding their dank smells. (In the small, high windows of

  the bag factory, these too glorified,

  Fluming sunlight in the long room, the tough

  Rough-fibered bags, hard to pull inside out,

  Mended, folded and laid away

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

  The workers

  Left a quiet in their wake, an all but hush

  As New Orleans had spent her breath and

  Lay sweet as the newly dead, a city

  In the sight embalmed.

  The hard too

  Bestilled in shadow, Pharaoh’s ants,

  Like the workers, had gone back into the mounds, no more than a

  thumbnail high, the scanty

  Soil at the roots of the sunflowers sent up a faint scent—earth

  Smelling on her sweet pits, her native

  Odor mingling with the man smells.

  She hadn’t given up on sonnets but seemed to have discovered that free verse was truly her métier. She recorded another poem in free verse:

  Heart

  Knowing, as if it were in them, the still core

  Of hurricanes, holding without bruise such things

  As the dragonfly, the over-hovering wings,

  The dove, the hawk in the old return

  Of flight, pursuit, pursuit and flight again…

  Oh, heart.

  By March 28, she had named the new book of poetry, Hymn for Liberty. “If I were only well enough to work all the time.” She exchanged poems with Dr. Rena Sabin, the first woman to hold a full professorship at Johns Hopkins, the first woman elected to the National Academy of Science, and the first woman to head a department at Rockefeller Institute. Now a retired T.B. researcher, perhaps Sabin would have donated her services to treating Ridge, had there been time, in a barter relationship like the one Ridge had with Dr. Hyman. But it was her old friend, Louise Adams Floyd, that Ridge thanked for giving her money to pay the bill for her teeth.

  Ridge awoke on April 8th with a cry. She had a premonition that Greece had been taken by the Nazis—and it had. Fear about her own end might have been mingled with those for Greece. Three days later she writes: “Davy will have to get his own breakfast which he so hates….With all my sickness he’s not had to get his own breakfast—or any other meal once in nineteen months.” But she was on fire with the terrors of beauty and death and wrote her last sonnet—to beauty. She begins in prayer: “Show me thy way. Though I have held thy name,/That tremulously now my lips let fall” and then invokes the deity directly: “Beauty, beyond all./Be with me in this hour…In thy high company—/Whereof all things are free.”

  The last entry in her diary, dated Easter morning, April 14th, reads:

  Have not been able to get the doctor as he’s not yet paid for last time. Anyway he could do nothing—the last time he said I should stay in bed—but I went on working until a few days ago. Davy gave breakfast in bed again this morning.”

  Her husband had at last brought her toast and tea in bed, her favorite luxury—such a poignant recognition of her state, The End writ in uxorial service.

  Ridge died on May 19, 1941, five months after Joyce, two after Woolf.

  Chapter 39

  Legacy: Fire and Smoke

  [Ridge] had proven that women bore in them a capacity to shatter the patriarchal mold and penetrate to the heart of sacred power, claiming it as their own. For this, she stands at the center of women’s development in the twentieth century.

  —William Drake

  For all her faults, Ridge behaved as if poetry were worth
her life, a dedication that few achieve. “Poor Lola, she deserved far greater recognition than she received, but we still starve poets, don’t we?” writes Ridge’s Ferrer School friend, Harry Kelly.

  Ridge’s death certificate reports that she died of a heart attack, myocardial failure. The rheumatoid arthritis she contracted can cause inflammation of scarred lungs and death by heart failure. The certificate also mentions, secondarily, her supposed tuberculosis. It also has her age at 57—she’s 68. Twenty-two years of marriage, and Lawson still didn’t know her true age. Neither did he know her mother’s maiden name, nor her father’s given name. He wrote “Ridge” for the mother, her first husband’s surname, not MacFarlane, her second, and Robert Ridge as her father—-it was Joseph Henry Ridge. Although she had never mentioned Lawson in her work as “husband,” she was buried as Lola Ridge Lawson. He was a good foil for Ridge’s flights, literal and metaphoric. He mailed her the black kimono, he found the books she needed. Were the genders reversed, his place in her life would have been devoted wife, just what any working writer requires. Ridge dedicated the sonnet “Still Water” to D.L. with its opening “I know you flower darkly,” but her poem “Two” is more tender:

  Two

  He would have breasted space,

  Moved wing to wing,

  Struck stars,

  Met hurricanes…instead

  He was the hangar

  Where ungratefully

  She rested after flight. (Red Flag 100)

  None of her patrons attended the funeral, as chronicled by Marianne Moore:

  Yesterday afternoon, since I had been specially notified—I went to Lola Ridge’s funeral—here in Brooklyn. A clergyman who seemed somewhat like a layman, conducted the service and nothing more real or exalted at a funeral—have I known at all. Many passages of scripture that we don’t associate with sadness were read, there was a prayer, and William Benét read three poems by Lola Ridge. The room was full of laurel and summer flowers and all present were somewhat acquainted—or if not, spoke together afterward without introduction—Ridgely Torrence, Aaron Copland, Paul Strand, Mrs. Canby, Martin Lewis, Stephen, Laura [who nursed Ridge at the end] and Rosemary Benét [Stephen Vincent Benét’s wife].

  Emma Goldman’s niece, Stella Ballantine attended, as did Hanna Astrup Larsen, who had visited Ridge so recently, and Nancy Cox-McCormack Cushman, who lived a few doors down from Ridge in Brooklyn. McCormack, sculptor of the heads of Frank Lloyd Wright, the Benéts, Gandhi, and Harriet Monroe, had cast Ridge’s life mask. Torrence was the poetry editor for the New Republic between 1920-33, when Ridge published nine poems and seven reviews in the magazine, and good friends with William Vaughn Moody, whose widow had hosted Ridge in Massachusetts. The restaurateur gypsy Romany Marie was also at the funeral. Queen of the tearoom craze that began in the 1910s, Romany Marie had known Ridge since the Ferrer Center days. Her sister married Lola’s friend, Leonard Abbott. Millay wrote about her candle burning at both ends at Romany Marie’s, probably at the poets’ table, and it was there that Evelyn Scott took up the collection for Ridge that she summarily refused—and then, bit by bit, borrowed back.

  Keith Bernand, Ridge’s son, is not mentioned in the obituary. After Ridge left him in Detroit, he studied electrical engineering. He was working as a radio operator and engineer for the Detroit News by the time he was 22, sending messages into the void as he perhaps had been doing all along in the orphanage. It was as a radio operator on merchant ships that he arrived in Santiago, Chile, where he married a German immigrant, Margarete Wehner, in 1927 and had three children: Gloria, Herbert, and Gladys. He kept a subscription to the Saturday Review of Literature and must have received notice of his mother’s death via William Rose Benét’s appreciation and farewell in that magazine. “He was affected by a big depression,” wrote his daughter. He was probably unaware that Ridge had written several poems that might have been addressed to him: “The Mother to Son,” “The Compress” (“Very well, son…you are free”) and “Son to Mother.” They remain unpublished (and unseen), the manuscripts held by the executor.

  Given that poets are artists who capitalize on their sensitivity, and that the children of poets might be more sensitive than others, these children might be prone to problems resulting from that sensitivity at birth, even if their parent’s history isn’t fraught with poverty or abuse. Out of Robert Frost’s six children, three died very young, one was institutionalized, and one committed suicide. “I took the wrong way with him. I tried many ways and every single one of them was wrong,” wrote Frost. Elinor Wylie’s abandoned son reappeared only at her funeral, and committed suicide eight years later. She never acknowledged him. Three of Kay Boyle’s daughters attempted suicide. Anthologist Louis Untermeyer’s son hung himself at age 19, after his father left his mother to put himself “in a class with the greater artists of his time.” As for an evaluation of Evelyn Scott’s mothering, her son felt that her monstrous ego had a cruel innocence “such as a shark or a crocodile may be said to have.” In the next generation, Sylvia Plath’s son, a fisheries biologist, hanged himself in 2010. “Welcome to hell,” wrote James Wright upon learning that Franz, his abandoned son but eventually a Pulitzer Prize-winner like his father, had published his first poem.

  Keith committed suicide on December 9th, 1942. Keith’s father, blind when he died, outlived his son by four years, although his obituary mentions one living son. According to Keith’s daughter Gladys, Keith didn’t even know his father’s name, nor that he had been born in New Zealand. That Ridge never publicly acknowledged her son, and no biographical piece in her lifetime and for a long time afterwards mentioned that she had a child is odd. As a free thinker and advocate of open marriage, she wouldn’t have been castigated for having had a child.

  Five months after Ridge died, the poet/politician Samuel A. DeWitt endowed a Lola Ridge Memorial Prize for the Poetry Society of America with money he made in a tool company, “House of a Thousand Bargains.” Idylls of the Ghetto and Other Poems, the first of his eight books of poetry, was published in 1927. It details in the tenements Ridge had extolled. He was most famous for being expelled from the New York State Assembly in 1920, along with four other assemblymen, for being a member of the Socialist Party. DeWitt’s friend, Upton Sinclair, based a character on him in The Jungle. Aaron Kramer, a fellow poet/socialist, remembered him putting the Poetry Society in its place:

  One month I found the whole group beyond endurance for its aridity and egocentrism, but was not yet entrenched enough to dare say so. But Samuel DeWitt of Yonkers, a down-to-earther respected by the bluebloods surrounding him only for the wealth with which he endowed the Lola Ridge and other awards, got up to his full six-and-a-half feet, waved the pages of sterile verses we had just heard, and declared: “There are three kinds of poetry: epic, lyric, and pupik. These are perfect examples of pupik poetry!” The silence that greeted him was one of tolerance—they knew the word was Yiddish but could not guess that it meant “belly-button.” I, however, broke the silence with a bellow of laughter as rough as his comment, and rushed from my seat to shake his hand.

  The Lola Ridge Memorial Prize of $100-$150 was awarded for ten years, between 1942-1952. “The general theme should be to find some meaning in our own time and an attempt to interpret the forces of our day…the type of poetry which should be energized with ideas and visions,” reads its call-for-entries. Louis Zukofsky and Louis Simpson were among its ten winners. Jeremy Ingalls won twice, an erudite poet who also won two Guggenheims, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, the Yale Younger Poets Prize, a prize from the Ford Foundation and the Shelley Memorial Award—and whose work, like Ridge’s, is now unread. When McCarthyism asserted itself in the 50s, it made even the mention of Ridge’s third book, Red Flag, a red flag.

  Thirty-six years after her death, in an interview with the executor, David Lawson said her son was killed in a car accident. Perhaps that’s what Ridge told him. A smokescreen around Ridge’s life began to rise almost immediately after she died
. In William Rose Benét’s final piece in the Saturday Review of Literature, he described her as “harassed by bodily infirmity which she scorned to have mentioned because she despised the thought that it might win suffrage for her work on extraneous grounds.” As one of the editors of Firehead, Benét would have remembered its flap copy, which began: “For years Miss Ridge has devoted herself wholly to her art, handicapped by persistent ill-health,” and which went on to mention her health a second time: “impeded as she has been by dangerous illness…” A number of her reviews mentioned her health as if her sick, saintly persona sold the poems, for example: “Fighting Pain and Death, Lola Ridge Writes Mighty Poem of Crucifixion.” Even Alfred Kreymborg, who knew her longest, could not resist dramatizing her fragility: “She lived on intimate terms with death… when her friends who saw her when she first arrived at the age of twenty-seven, it seemed as if she could not survive beyond that year.”

  Sainthood was also put forward. Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska canonize her a year after her death in their anthology. “[Ridge’s] devotion was one that can be described only in terms of a saintliness…” Even Evelyn Scott wrote: “Going up your stairs is like mounting Jacob’s ladder with the angels.” Ridge makes her “feel as people would feel in a church if religion weren’t fear worship and god really divine intelligent love.” Alfred Kreymborg was perhaps closest to the truth of her supposed sainthood: “The Ghetto was felt by a saint who wasn’t afraid to mix with the earth.”

  Ridge had husbands—for most of her life, two at once. She couldn’t endure her child, she lived through the trials of a crazy stepfather, and was too close to a distant embattled mother. She wrote of the world, unlike her friend Marianne Moore with her quaint “habit” of the three-cornered hat and cape, whose poetry was often devoid of human connection. She was not a political saint like Simone Weil, starving for her beliefs—Ridge starved to have money for time to write, or as an affectation, or to avoid upsetting a delicate constitution. Nor did Ridge reflect the portrait Emma Goldman and others painted of the radical Voltairine de Cleyre as an ineffectual saint cut down in her prime. Although Ridge’s look-alike was also taught by nuns, her disinterest in mothering mirrored Ridge’s, and she lived a life full of contradiction. Ridge’s presumed sainthood was a front for a woman whose writing against injustice in the home and the world was useful for her great ambitions. Did she give away her things to the poor, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless? Her political fervor seldom extended to personal activism but she chronicled lynching and murderous parenting with sophistication and subtlety that is still appreciated today.