|
Lola
Ridge's Firehead
(New York: Payson & Clarke, 1929)
by Julia Lisella
Judging from the available critical literature
on Lola Ridge, Firehead is probably one of Ridge’s least
discussed works (my guess, though, as I’ve learned with much writing
from this period, is that as soon as I write this, five or six
separate studies will appear!). Even in extensive discussions
of Ridge’s work, such as Nancy Berke’s Women Poets on the Left,
there are often only one or two paragraphs devoted to the
text. Firehead is Ridge’s second-to-last verse collection;
Nancy Berke and William Drake both report that Ridge wrote this
long poem during a six-week stay at Yaddo in the summer of 1929
(Berke 40, Drake 199), in response to the 1927 execution of anarchists
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The speed with which this
poem was written places it in a tradition of other quickly written
long poems of the period, such as Margaret Walker’s “For My People,”
first published in Poetry in 1937, suggesting that poets
felt a sense of emergency and purpose toward their work of responding
to social and political injustice. Suffice it to say, however,
that Firehead is a particularly difficult text to talk
about for a variety of reasons. Critics looking for Ridge’s most
“political” work will look to earlier books, such as The Ghetto
and Other Poems; and readers more interested in Ridge’s evolving
mysticism will look to her last book, Dance of Fire. To
a large extent, Firehead serves as thematic, linguistic,
and contextual bridges for Ridge between these two impulses.
In this more-than-200-page poem, Ridge experiments with a variety
of lyric techniques. She further investigates her feelings about
mass social movements, her own commitment to anarchism, and her
growing interest in communism as a social movement through her
exploration of Christ’s seduction of individual apostles and of
“the multitude” to carry out His work of “brotherhood.” And although
this is the story of a male hero, Ridge’s vision in this poem
is decidedly feminist.
While Firehead is a retelling of Christ’s
crucifixion and essentially a response to “perhaps the twentieth
century’s worst miscarriage of justice” (Berke 53), the execution
of Sacco and Vanzetti, not all critics agree on the extent to
which we must read Firehead as either a politicized or
a spiritual and emotional response. Nancy Berke claims Firehead
“refigures Christ as our most famous victim of institutionalized
murder” and that “Ridge is not concerned with Christ’s body as
it is embraced and contemplated in Christian ritual. She is interested
in refiguring the martyred body through its symbolic subjectivity
as another politicized body in pain” (40). I don’t believe it’s
as easy to distinguish between the politicized and the ritualized
body in this poem. Rather, I think Ridge wants to do both, to
ritualize the politicized body or bodies of the many players in
this story and to suffuse each body with its political, often
feminized, often heroic value. William Drake describes Firehead
in much more spiritual terms as signifying “the divine
spirit in humanity, burning fiercely, destructive to complacency
or to the entrenched powers that resist it. The creative spirit,
in bringing into the world something new and valuable, was itself
not innocent of violence” (199). Indeed, Ridge undercuts almost
every biblical story with the “true” story of each of the characters’
jealousies and obsessions, which are forms of inner violence —
she depicts Mary Magdalene’s long-standing jealousy of the much-loved
disciple, John; Judas’s jealousy of Mary Magdalene for the pureness
of her love for Jesus; even Mary’s (Christ’s mother’s) jealousy
of Jesus’s followers and his passion for those followers. Ridge’s
feminist convictions are revealed in her many inversions of stories
she tells as well. But she does not completely secularize the
event of Christ’s crucifixion. For example, Ridge’s treatment
of the Holy Spirit, which remains for me one of the strangest
and most difficult of Christian concepts to grasp, is visceral.
The Holy Spirit becomes as idiosyncratic a character in this story
as Judas or John. Ridge favors one famous biblical tale of the
Holy Spirit’s power, its infiltration of the body of Peter, the
apostle responsible for institutionalizing Christianity, over
the story more often chosen by women writers, the insemination
of Mary:
Peter beheld the paradigm
Of light that on his palm did sit
Arise, a glowing bird, and wheel
Three times about his head and then
Make itself small and enter him
By unused way and secret lane
It made its way up to his head
And whirled amid the pillared frame
. . .
Around about the shining thing,
The riddle of the light it loved . . .
And he had all but solved . . . and grooved
A path of fire within his brain.
(158-159)
As the quote above begins to show, Firehead
is also important to consider in terms of the hybrid nature
of lyric in modernist political poetry of the period. Ridge intersperses
a variety of soft and strong end rhymes with long, free verse
lines, and short rhyming couplets, throughout the poem. On the
Modern American Poetry website coordinated by Cary Nelson, Donna
Allego describes Firehead as a “prose poem.” The temptation
to describe it as prose has much to do with the poem’s strong
narrative thread. But the poem is also filled with almost Shakespearean
dramatic monologues with all of the archaic language that goes
with this form, and cinematic flashbacks and theatrical hallucinations
and asides that reveal the interiority of each of the characters
involved in this story. The difficulty to name or to define Ridge’s
range of prosodic techniques may also have to do with our own
contemporary inability and discomfort with modernist political
writing of the 1920s and 1930s that bridged so many genres and
systems of intellectual classification. Joseph Harrington notes
in Poetry and the Public that a “strange combination” of
work that was modern and derivative “was not unusual in the 1910
and 1920s as it would seem for later generations” (128). Even
in Ridge’s time critics ranged in their response to her inconsistent
poetics and her “antiquated diction” (as Horace Gregory and Marya
Zaturenska characterized Ridge’s use of language in their entry
on Ridge’s work in A History of American Poetry 1900-1940).
In addition to Ridge’s odd lyricism that
bounces between rhyming couplets, dramatic monologues, and almost
free, but cadenced Whitmanian verse (most clearly seen in the
“Peter” section of the poem), I am drawn in my own most current
reading of this poem to Ridge’s gendered and highly sexualized
and sensualized anthropomorphic descriptions of nature and religious
phenomenon, her use of high and often misplaced diction at unexpected
moments, and her tirelessly extended metaphors. The poem is of
great interest in terms of the history of women’s radical poetry
of the period, as well, for its allegiance to what was in 1929
already fast becoming an anachronistic poetess-like lyric style
in the service of clearly un-lady-like material. Here is an example
of a highly wrought Romantic diction in service of a bloody story:
He may have heard a woman wail
Who kneeled far off — upon a mound
In the bright sunshine — like a bird
With white wings folded. If He heard
Or longed to wrap his wounds around
In her blue cooling shadow, she
Had never known by any sign —
(17-18)
As the stanza progresses, the imagery moves
from the woman’s “blue cooling shadow” to the “blue obesity” of
the waning day, from birds to flies:
And when day sank, at menopause,
In blue obesity, to lean
Low upon the curving spine
Of the horizon . . .
. . .
When light palls and the heart loses
Pride of propelling to such things
As gnaw, unheard, save in imaginings
On under sides of leaves
Or propagate beneath the stones
Or crawl out, wingless, from the slime
Of water holes . . . and nature oozes
At all her pores as with a pus
And torpid flies are venomous —
(ellipses, as always, LR’s)
(18)
As Andreas Huyssen reminds us in After the
Great Divide, the masses were often figured as female in modernist
literature, and the repulsion of these masses was enacted by many
modernist artists as repulsion of the female body. Here, Ridge’s
feminized language investigates that anxiety of Christ’s
association with the masses; images and words like “menopause”
and “curving spine” as well as “ooze”
and “pus” resonate around this depiction of Christ
suffering on the cross; thus Ridge inverts this modernist anxiety
and associates Christ's heroic body with the feminine body, whether
that body is victimized and degraded, or triumphant.
Ridge’s language ranges from wildly extravagant
grammatical usages of words such as “The day was arteried with
fire” (emphasis mine) (17) to graphic moments such as the nature
oozing a pus we see in the quote above, emphasized by its position
and rhyme with “venomous,” as well as the heightened vocabulary
one might find in other high modernist poems of the era. There
are cynosures (53) and diapasons (43), bantlings (155) and threnes
(156).
Whether or not a contemporary reader fights
against the tide of this language or revels in it, the individual
stories remain compelling. Almost all the characters describe
their seduction by Jesus. And Jesus’s charisma is always associated
with his anarchist spirit. John says:
. . . and thy full
Lip curved on me in tender scorn; thine eyes
Pierced all my poor defences till I stood
Abased before their intolerant love.
Ah, this is why they hate thee. . . only blood
Can cool the searing fire of that glance
That tears apart the calyx without seam
And without blemish, starrily revealing —
Under the lustrous dust in the guarded
Darkness beyond the radiant pallor —
The destitude of the mean room.
(71)
We can only know Jesus through other characters,
but Ridge reveals him to be a feminist and a liberator whose philosophies
always call into question the status quo:
Jew. . . He was a man dangerous to governments,
a despiser
of rules, making a mockery of ordinance. . .
(203)
Myrenne, the mother of Thaddeus, an early
convert to Christianity, will say of Jesus, “he hath raped my
son out of my womb!” just as she grudgingly accepts Christ’s radical
views: “He did speak / Of woman as a man might of his own friends!”
(165) and he “proclaimed all men were brothers” (169). Many characters
share this grudging passion for Christ in Ridge’s version of the
story. Even Mary, his mother, talks about Christ’s relationship
to the crowd, the mass, the multitude as of more importance to
him, more vitality, than whatever he could feel in intimate relationships:
“Only a multitude could fan his eyes / To that deep blaze of tenderness”
(134). It’s interesting to note that the story of Jesus’s life
is told almost exclusively by Mary; she is the only character
to whom Ridge extends this kind of narrative authority. In the
final part of Mary’s section, which has been mainly in free verse,
the lines break down, or perhaps break out into, a nursery rhyme
rhythm, as Mary reasserts her maternal rights over Jesus’s now
dead body, “swaddle him downily hide him from sight / wash
his pale hands in the milk of the light / hush his wild tongue
on the strings of the sky / sounding its stammering fifth
let him lie” (146). So that rather than formal verse tightening
its hold on this section, the verse is used to radicalize the
Christian paternal vision by returning power to the maternal figure.
One of the final characters Ridge portrays
is the artist figure, Tiro, an “image maker of Sicily / Who was
slave of Saius, captain of Pilate’s guard” on his own now because
Saius has become “meat for the dogs”. Tiro stands in for Ridge
and her fellow artists who attempted to respond to the extended
shock of Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution:
. . . my grandfather
Made songs about Athenion. . . Athenion rode forth with
his herdsmen.
Brothers, ye have been patient, ye sitting still for a long
while,
not turning your heads to right nor left,
I am happy ye shall carry off my words in your hearts . . .
I
was afraid
I had waited too long . . . numbers on infinite numbers . .
.
Out of the chasms . . . out of the hymning clay . . .
(all ellipses LR’s)
(207)
Perhaps Ridge wondered if she were too late
with her image, her song. And if she could trust “the people”
to respond to it. This poem is important, finally, because it
expresses so well Ridge’s variety of feelings toward and confidence
in mass movements. In Firehead, Ridge alternatively describes
people pejoratively as a “crowd” or “mob” who condemned Jesus
to death, or more benevolently as “the people” or “a multitude”—“The
infinite murmur of the multitudes / That run out of their doors
from a stone’s eaves” (59) seduced and convinced by Jesus’s philosophy.
The section called “Peter” establishes the connection between
the “hero” and the masses. And Peter questions whether he can
maintain the relationship:
Hundreds of thousands upon thousands swarming
In the cavities of those hills that are so steep and straight
They all but meet above me . . . brothers, have I provoked you,
Backs turned quietly working, that ye will not look upon me
On whom ye shall build his church that shall also be my
church—is it that the harlot
Entereth the holy house? But I say unto you, the harlot
Is the last word made woman, not even He shall put away. . .
There were many such did follow him up the steep hill. . . (all
ellipses LR’s)
(156-157)
Later in the story, in the section called
“The Bondman” in which the craftsman Tiro is introduced, the masses
are described :
Little black figures that were like beetles
but less nimble and
seemed to attach one to the other
Until the slow-moving line stretched about the crosses like
a
snake.
He saw the undulations of the jointed body that seemed pulling
at h
his own
And felt its dim and angry vibrations, saw the multiple
Head, of which he was a forlorn and unassembled eye,
Sway, torpidly iridescent, and made signs upon his skinny
fingers,
Urging to some gaudy action, that which was enraged and
quivering
And yet that did not strike. Now he turned from this coiled
inertia of the crowd
(199-200)
Nancy Berke quotes a portion of a letter
Ridge wrote to her husband in 1923 that pertains well to the convictions
Ridge explores in Firehead: “I’m not a pacifist and am
an individualist and I know individuals will always rule, no matter
what the society . . . even in a democracy. . . . Just now I think
the communists are more fit to rule than any other group, but
I tremble to think o f the result once the greater part of the
world has become communist” (quoted in Berke at 53). As an anarchist,
Ridge had great confidence in individual free will to guide governments
and politics. But she must also have wavered in her confidence
that once gathered, well-meaning individuals would make the right
decisions. It was clear by 1927 that mass movements could quickly
spurn mob violence, and conversely, that individuals could feel
themselves inert and powerless in the face of injustice. Firehead,
then, serves as a link between political and mystical writing
for Ridge. It enables Ridge to work out some of her feelings about
anarchism and communism by way of her representations of Jesus
toward the “masses.” It also reveals Ridge’s commitment toward
an ever-complex gendered and class vision of human liberation.
Works Cited:
Allego, Donna. “Lola Ridge: Biography.” Modern
American Poetry. http://www.enlish.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/ridge/bio.htm
Berke, Nancy. Women Poets on the Left:
Lola Ridge, Genevieve Taggard, Margaret Walker. Gainesville:
UP of Florida, 2001.
Drake, William. The First Wave: Women
Poets in America 1915-1945. New York & London: Collier
Macmillan, 1987.
Gregory, Horace and Marya Zaturenska. A
History of American Poetry 1900-1940. Excerpt rpt in “Criticism
on Ridge” Modern American Poetry. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/ridge/criticism.htm
Harrington, Joseph. Poetry and the Public:
The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
UP, 2002.
Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide:
Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington &
Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1986.
Bio: Julia Lisella is a lecturer in
History and Literature at Harvard University, specializing in
modernism, women’s literature and the 1930s. Her essay on the
poet Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni is forthcoming this spring in the anthology
The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism (Praeger
Press). She has also written extensively on Genevieve Taggard,
Muriel Rukeyser, Margaret Walker, Lucille Clifton, and Maxine
Hong Kingston. She is a poetry editor for the online journal The Mystic River Review. Currently she is at work on a
book based on her dissertation that explores maternity, the lyric,
and women’s political radicalism from the 1930s to the present.
Her poems have appeared in such journals as Crab Orchard Review,
Pleiades, and Paterson Literary Review.
readings index
table of contents
|