"Electric Currents of Life:" Lola Ridge's Immigrant Flaneuserie

Abstract

"Electric Currents of Life:"Lola Ridge's Immigrant Flaneuserie Nancy Berke (bio) To Lola Ridge (1873-1941), the island of Manhattan was contradictory: it was beautiful yet repugnant, scintillating yet scary, welcoming yet alienating. Indeed she viewed the American city during the period of high modernism in much the same way that a century later sociologist Zygmunt Bauman would characterize the twenty-first century metropolis: "City living is a notoriously ambivalent experience. It attracts and repels" (89). When Ridge, an Irish-born, Australasian-raised poet, arrived in New York in 1908, she found a world of collisions. A confluence of immigrant enclaves and machine-age technology was transforming the city. A few lines from Ridge's long poem, "The Ghetto," typify these contradictions. They reveal the tensions at play in the poet's attempt to understand New York as urban phenomenon. LIFE!Startling, vigorous life,That squirms under my touch,And baffles me when I try to examine it,Or hurls me back without apology.Leaving my ego ruffled and preening itself. [End Page 27] In these italicized lines, Ridge the poet, in the guise of a flaneur, confides to readers the challenges tied to exploring and pinning down the new social formations, which invite yet resist descriptive glimpses. Finding words to categorize the new life surrounding her will no doubt frustrate Ridge. The communities that she celebrates in verse will "baffle" and repel her as she attempts a closer examination. Yet while her artist's ego is "ruffled" and in need of mending, she begins to discover that her own alien self is a part of the character and luster of lower Manhattan's immigrant experience in the sway of its looming technology. Lola Ridge is an immigrant flaneuse, a new world poet ambling the streets of her "vigorous," yet "startling" new home. Ridge's biography is eclectic, radical. She left a provincial marriage to a New Zealand gold mine manager to come to America, where she sought the visual stimulation and diverse community that a place like New York City has historically provided new immigrants. Born Rose Emily Ridge in Dublin, Ridge moved as a very young child with her mother first to New Zealand and then to Sydney, Australia. In Sydney she studied art under Julian Ashton at the Academie Julienne. After her arrival in New York City, Ridge found lodging on Manhattan's Lower East Side. She supported herself by working in a factory, as an artist's model and as an illustrator. She also became involved in the anarchist movement, assuming the role of organizer for the Francisco Ferrer Association's "Modern School," where she met and later married the Glasgow-born engineer David Lawson. It was also where she first encountered the cultural and political radicalism that infused so much of her poetry. The Modern School brought together a distinct group of artists and radicals including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, John Sloan and Man Ray, Hutchins Hapgood, and Will and Arielle Durant. Ridge's work appeared frequently in the "little magazines," which were actively shaping modernism in America.1 In 1923, she won Poetry magazine's Guarantor's Prize, whose other recipients include W.B. Yeats, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), and William Carlos Williams. In 1929 Ridge was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis and recurring bouts of illness left her semi-reclusive, decreasing her artistic output. During her career, Ridge published five books of poetry, including Firehead, an allegory of Sacco and Vanzetti's execution. In the 1930s, a Guggenheim Fellowship enabled Ridge to travel to Paris, Beirut, Baghdad, Taos, and Mexico. She received the Shelley Memorial Award in 1934 and 1935. Although Ridge's writing is not well known or studied in depth, when she died in 1941, her New York Times obituary eulogized her as one of America's leading contemporary poets. Cary Nelson maintains that the critical practices of American literary culture during the Cold War helped create a severe cultural amnesia about the preceding generation of radical poets, of which Ridge was a prominent member.2 Thus she became one of many casualties. While Ridge has long been an interesting footnote in the memoirs of writers as diverse as...