Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  Some thought Ridge was a Jew. Two years after she died, imagist-turned-fugitive poet John Gould Fletcher wrote of persuading

  Scott Greer to take an interest in Lola Ridge, the only really good “proletariat” poet I have seen. Her work, especially Firehead (written after Sacco and Vanzetti were done to death) is very extraordinary; and I have spent years wondering why she is so neglected. As she, like Miss Rukeyser, was a Jewess, [his ital.] there is a similar intensity to her work—and her themes, of suffering and martyrdom and rebellion, are more humanly handled than Miss Rukeyser’s generally are.

  Rukeyser was indeed Jewish, but not Ridge. Ridge chose the immigrants she immortalized, and her triumph was in establishing a common ground between Jews and Americans, without compromising Jewish identity. Rukeyser, however, captured the aesthetic-political moment in the month of Ridge’s death with her poem “June 1941.” June was the month that Germany, Italy, Romania, and Finland declared war on Russia, Germany invaded Russia, the Jews were rounded up in Amsterdam, 11,000 Estonians deported to Siberia, 2,000 Jews massacred in Lithuania, 61 U-boats were sunk, Germany took the Ukraine, and the British occupied Baghdad. Rukeyser begins the poem, “Who in one lifetime sees all causes lost,/Herself dismayed and helpless, cities down.” A modernist Petrarchan sonnet, but with jumbled syntax and a final rhymeless couplet, expressed in both form and content the despair many Americans felt about winning a war that they hadn’t yet entered. Rukeyser’s many Whitman-inflected poems feature politicized labor as well as war, women in the city, and other subjects Ridge pioneered. Rukeyser’s motto: “Not Sappho, Sacco” concerning aesthetics and Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution, mirrored Ridge’s prioritizing of the human predicament. Ridge’s friend, Stephen Vincent Benét, editor of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, wrote the foreword for Rukeyser’s first book, Theory of Flight. His brother, William Rose Benét, wrote in the Saturday Review of Literature: “[Rukeyser] is a radical politically, but she writes as a poet not a propagandist.” Five poems from Rukeyser’s first book appear in the same issue of Poetry a page before a review of Ridge’s Dance of Fire, but there is no evidence of a personal meeting between them.

  Although Ridge mentored many poets, including Hart Crane and Jean Toomer, they did not champion her. In the mid-20s, Kenneth Rexroth recited Ridge’s poetry while hanging out at the Dill Pickle Club, Chicago’s avant-garde cabaret, and later bemoaned the erasure of her work and other proletarian modernists in an argument with Robert Lowell. “You have left out the whole populist period,” said Rexroth during their discussion of the history of American poetry that ignored Sandburg, Oppenheim, Lindsay, Moody, and Ridge. “With an expression of utmost contempt on his face “Cal” Lowell said, “well, of course, in the West, Rexroth, you haven’t learned that these poor people aren’t poets at all.”

  Robert Hayden, the prominent black Chicago poet, traced his early influences through the early Langston Hughes, the Dynamo poets and Lola Ridge—“though not the Lola Ridge of Firehead.” As critic Alan Wald writes of Hayden’s choices:

  Of course, one may hold the categorical view that the kinds of language and strategies promoted by a Funaroff [founder of the Dynamo school and magazine] are themselves less worthy than those of a Yeats or Eliot; but here one runs the risk of legislating the “proper” duties for a poet to carry out, a dubious theme in Western culture from Plato to Stalin.

  By 1941, traditional forms were ascendant, and flowers and the seasons better subjects than anything remotely political. This movement away from the hard-won freedoms of the 1920s reached its nadir in the 1950s with the castigation of all modernist experiment as well as any poetics embracing radical politics. It would take Allen Ginsberg to blast away at this critical shield, the son of a Communist but an aficionado of John Clare, Adrienne Rich throwing off the glittering meter and rhyme of her first collection to write Diving into the Wreck, a masterpiece of political free verse, Phil Levine publishing his many poems about workers in Detroit during the 70s and 80s, and Galway Kinnell writing his most famous poem, “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World,” extolling nearly the same neighborhood and issues as Ridge.

  But Ridge did not only write about the proletariat. She wrote most strikingly about her childhood in the Pacific. In aesthetics she embraced both formal and free verse. Her wide taste distinguished the contents of Others and Broom, but in her own poetry it made it difficult for critics to label her, especially the New Critics, with their emphasis on the poem as self-contained and self-referential. It didn’t help that she used arcane language and obtuse rhetoric like Crane in her last two books. In 1947 Kenneth Rexroth condemned her for “over-reaching ambition,” but mentioned this in the company of Whitman, Sandburg, and Ford Madox Ford. It was her guilt and drug-taking and the boasting about how many hundreds of lines she wrote in how short a time that drowned her in incoherence. Even Pound felt that need for coherence. A Selected will do; overpraise will not.

  Ridge’s opera has never been produced. The score remains with Ridge’s papers at Smith, and Glick’s obituary in 1994 rated the depressing headline of “Henrietta Glick, Secretary, Composer.” Painter-composer Charles Howard Marsh left behind a signed autograph score of music dated 1934 based on Ridge’s poem “Dawn,” Mildred Gardner, a fellow guest at Yaddo in 1930, set her work to music, Ned Rorem, “the world’s best composer of art songs,” set her poem “Electrocution” to music and recorded it twice, Edie Hill set “Thaw” for women’s voices in 2011, and the Parallel Octave Chorus convened September 9, 2012 to record “Sun-Up,” “Wall Street At Night,” and “Celia” with musical accompaniment. Interest has been picking up. In 2014, Frederick Frahm, commissioned by the London Festival of Contemporary Church Music, composed and performed a Firehead-inspired organ piece, Melissa Dunphy wrote two pieces from excerpts of “Sun-up”, and in Ireland, Sean Doherty won the Feis Ceoil choral composition and the Mornington Singers Composition Competition awards for his settings of Ridge’s “Dreams” and “Undersong.” Ron Wray’s compositions “Dreams” and “I Have Been Dreaming” were launched on YouTube in 2015.

  “She was all fire and spirit. The throat chokes, O she was/insatiable candor in a vase too frail,” writes her friend William Rose Benét in the poem “Of Lola Ridge” that appeared in the 1947 book he wrote after he won the Pulitzer. “Wild honey fed her, and the unwithering gourd/of the baptist crying in the wilderness/in the desert.” She had fire that he prophesized would last. “It is certain that her poem ‘Firehead,’ concerning the Crucifixion, will stand as one of the most remarkable long poems written by man or woman in our time,” according to a Saturday Review of Literature editorial, most probably written by Benét.

  “But for now, given the restless—and ephemeral—jostling for position among the living inhabitants of American poetry,” writes Don Share, the current editor of the now over 100-year-old Poetry magazine, “it’s no surprise that worthwhile poets have been temporarily discredited, disappeared, set aside for re-education, or forgotten.” Ridge’s executor allowed her books to go out of print, so few readers know of her existence and fewer poems anthologized. The executor also did not allow full access to her papers, making it difficult for her influence to be assessed. “People felt the necessity of either defending or abusing [Ridge] whenever her name came up,” wrote Kay Boyle. The abuse seems to have won. Those few who have heard of Ridge now, think of her as a writer of bad propaganda poems.

  Communism, with its belief in the forced sharing wealth, is the opposite of anarchy, but the two are alike in their theories having been besmirched by the violence and terror done in their names over the last century. (The violence and terror done in the name of democracy is another subject.) Anarchists are always present in a free society because they epitomize true freedom. Ridge learned her own every man for himself at the miner’s knee in New Zealand. In Australia the drunken Henry Lawson proved that anyone was free to rise up in the poetic ranks. In America her practice in personal freedom led her to a
bandon her son, to bigamy, to an open marriage, to poverty relieved only by patrons, and to politics that led her to celebrate the Russian Revolution and then to rebuke it. She traveled to remote parts of the world without itinerary, alone, to be free to experience the world around her. She saw that anarchy presented an “opportunity for more complete self-expression for all.” But she understood its limits. “Anarchy is the philosophy I feel closest to and shall always be, but I no longer believe in the possibility of its application to modern society.”

  Freedom was always her goal. “I have then the first requisite for a great book—the freedom of my own spirit, my own citadel and command of its gates,” Ridge writes in her diary a few months before she died. Freedom for Ridge as a woman meant changing the terms. No motherhood, no housework, no fidelity, if it came to that. But even that struggle she saw within a larger framework. As she put it in “Woman and the Creative Will”: “This is not—in its purely political and least significant aspect—a woman’s right as much as a human rights movement, that stands squarely linked with the rise and fall of the proletariat of the world.” She would see the world through a woman’s vision but illuminate all of it; she would have men’s strength too, not just a woman’s. When the flame such a vision engendered grew too bright, men, who felt its heat most, had to quench it. The quintessential picture of her arrest with Edna St. Vincent Millay, hustled off by a policeman—it may as well have been John Crowe Ransom muscling them away, condemning Edna as nonintellectual and a “little girl,” and Lola Ridge a saint and a Communist.

  Nearly 100 years after Ridge’s avowal of anarchy, philosopher Simon Critchley redefined it for the Occupy generation:

  One might say that contemporary anarchism is about responsibility, whether sexual, ecological or socio-economic; it flows from an experience of conscience about the manifold ways in which the West ravages the rest; it is an ethical outrage at the yawning inequality, impoverishment and disenfranchisement that is so palpable locally and globally.

  The Occupy generation that cites a continuous lineage from Whitman should be asking why today’s students read Fascist Pound or Eliot and think there’s no political bias in literature—and condemn the writing of proletariat modernism for being leftist. Why too are the futurists’ background in fascism always mentioned in literary histories but not an individual poet’s penchant for anarchism, the total freedom that Americans have historically espoused in art of all kinds? Women who focused on what shapes human consciousness rather than the individual psyche have been particularly neglected, as if that stance is a male prerogative. When Ridge wrote, modernism was open to politics as an unexplored subject, especially a woman and, for that matter, anyone else in subjugation. The question was how to freely represent their suffering and struggle. The activist-writers of the Occupy generation now have the opportunity to reoccupy that question.

  Lawson would send Marianne Moore an invitation to a celebration of Ridge’s birthday every year until 1971. She attended three times, in 1944, 1951, and 1960. He married a second time but divorced while having an intense relationship with chessmaster Mary Bain, then he married again. By the 1950s he was known as an established chess authority, and made friends with the master chess player Norman Tweed Whitaker, who was part of the confidence scheme around the kidnapping of Lindbergh’s baby. Lawson took Bobby Fischer out to dinner after his “Match of the Century,” and purchased the original score sheet for $50, now worth $100,000. He was Scotch. Frank Brady, as the 21-year-old editor of the newly launched Chess Life, remembers that Lawson always made him pay for dinner and refused to hand over the illustrations for the magazine’s first cover story until Brady paid him twice what they had agreed. Lawson’s third wife helped him with his Morphy book, which was finally published when he was 89 years old and sold very few copies before he died four years later. Now it has been reissued and is recognized as a classic. Lawson left a vast library, according to Brady, and only a portion of it was delivered to Bryn Mawr as Ridge’s.

  Ridge’s collection is suitable for any 60s hippie. Along with the eight volumes on sex and the phallus, the library includes a collection of black plays, books by Kahlil Gibran, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Engels, Lenin, Bakunin, and Marx, a book on yoga breathing, “Phantasmagoria” by Lewis Carroll, poetry translations from the Spanish, German, Russian, and Norwegian, a collection of Navajo and Blackfeet songs, a number of books with antiwar titles, three books on drugs, four books on black magic, three books on “other dimensions,” and Ulysses—but nothing by Shakespeare or Marianne Moore. Lawson’s decisions about which titles to include was another way of controlling Ridge’s legacy.

  Photographs of Ridge taken after she arrived in New York show how deliberate she was in creating her image, just as she determined that she would always be 10 years younger than her actual age, and an ex-pat from Australia rather than New Zealand or Ireland. In nearly all her photos her eyes are cast down or show only one side of her face. She always parted her hair down the middle and wore a chignon at the nape of her neck. No bob for her. Many bohemian Village women wore the same hairstyle. Saintly would be the adjective for her expression, abetted by her extreme thinness. In the photo taken at the Floyd estate, Ridge stands out from the other visitors because she’s turned to one side for the camera, while everyone else smiles into it. Even a snapshot of Ridge in her apartment on West 14th Street shows her posed, her head turned again toward the window, her hair drawn against her cheek. There’s only one photo of her smiling in the archive at Smith, and it was taken during her student years in Australia, before she assumed her American mask. All the dental problems mentioned in her letters may have contributed to her decision never to smile. Or maybe she wanted a pose that always implied seriousness, the way Emma Goldman portraits always show a scowl.

  Ridge was always serious. Evelyn Scott’s blurb for Firehead reveals how well her best friend understood her: “[Ridge] came to America seeking freedom—not the licentiousness that may go by that name—but the freedom of an artist, whose passion for form, for symmetry, was the passion for the most perfect justice—freedom with responsibility and the opportunity to create.” Gladys Grant, a poet and friend of Ridge’s, describes wandering into Ridge’s bedroom during the wake: “Here the austere simplicity and something of the windows open and looking far out over the roofs gave a sense of Lola. Everything was bare except for the winged victory by her bed…”

  Ridge saw very clearly where freedom’s repression could lead. Her brilliant sonnet “Electrocution,” written before Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, the only poem that matches her acute social conscience with her wavering ability with form, captures the way democracy deals, finally, with its people.

  Electrocution

  He shudders…feeling on the shaved spot

  The probing wind, that stabs him to a thought

  Of storm-drenched fields in a white foam of light,

  And roads of his hill-town that leap to sight

  Like threads of tortured silver…while the guards—

  Monstrous deft dolls that move as on a string,

  In wonted haste to finish with this thing,

  Turn faces blanker than asphalted yards.

  They heard the shriek that tore out of its sheath

  But as a feeble moan…yet dared not breathe,

  Who stared there at him, arching—like a tree

  When the winds wrench it and the earth holds tight—

  Whose soul, expanding in white agony,

  Had fused in flaming circuit with the night. (Red Flag 65)

  Author’s Note

  I would first and foremost like to thank the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund which gave me a small grant and large encouragement, and for the John Simon Guggenheim fellowship which, although awarded in fiction, allowed me to complete work on this book. I’m deeply indebted to poet and critic Michele Leggott at the University of Aukland who encouraged me at many critical junctures and read drafts. Gladys Bernand-Wehner, Ridge�
�s granddaughter who bears the alias Ridge gave her son, provided details about Keith’s life. Alison Clarke and Eliza McLennan revealed much about the Webster and Penfold sides of the family. Foremost among so many amazing librarians is Karen V. Kukil, Associate Curator of Special Collections at Smith College whose brilliance and enthusiasm were crucial to my progress. Catherine Daly’s transcription of Ridge’s books on Gutenberg was crucial. Craig Howes at the Center for Biographical Research at the University of Hawaii provided wry wisdom about both academics and biography. Simon Turkel’s help, especially overseeing the footnotes and generating the bibliography, was invaluable.

  At the very beginning of my research, Frances Flanagan and Brian Ward at Teichelman’s Bed and Breakfast oriented my husband and I historically and geographically to Hokitika—and showed off its glow worms. I was delighted to discover Dr. Ebenezer Teichelman’s signature in Lola Ridge’s album. Esther Bruns gave us a fabulous tour of the gold mining district. Mary Rooney, now retired but once archivist for the Hokitika Museum, ran down her hunches for me. Jan Harbison of the Australian National Maritime Miuseum Library knew everything about period boats and shipping in the Pacific. Poppy Johnson at the Floyd Memorial Library materialized “lost” books from Australia when Columbia University couldn’t find them.