SOURCE: “Ridgely Torrence,” in Music in My Time, Greenwood Press, 1938, pp. 140-45.

At our evening gatherings in the Judson the chief entertainer was always Ridgely Torrence. Ridgely was tall, thin, and very blonde. Singularly penetrating eyes gave to the long lean face under his high forehead an effect of spirituality, almost asceticism. Anyone prepared for that side of him by the mystical beauty of his poems might well have been puzzled when, in his more social mood, those very eyes that had just awed you with their seeming penetration into your inmost secrets would unexpectedly relent in friendliest smiles, or twinkle at some sudden conceit. Sometimes an almost imperceptible signal would show you, when the ironic aspect of his subject struck him, that their seriousness had changed to mock-seriousness. He selected his words with the deliberation of the fastidious writer, and had a way sometimes of under-emphasizing, almost slurring over, a peculiarly unexpected and pat one, that made it irresistible. He talked always slowly, savoring his matter in a way that took for granted and therefore challenged minute attention.

He was an incomparable mimic. He could look drunk entirely by facial expression, with no easy staggering to help out. Then he would become a Fourth of July orator, one hand between buttons of coat, the other with finger-tips on table, head thrown high, stilted voice beginning “Fellow Citizens”. … Then there was Cap'n Benny, whom he had studied at Cos Cob in the summers. One day the players in a moving picture came to be photographed in the streets of Cos Cob, and Cap'n Benny, his high soprano voice quite silenced by the intensity of his curiosity, followed them fascinated for hours. Once only, when in getting over a fence the leading lady showed a generous amount of leg, Cap'n Benny, startled, piped up in mechanical soprano: “You needn't tell me she's a good woman!”

But the greatest impersonation of all was his Missionary. This was originally borrowed from that other great mimic of my day, “Tommy” Safford of Jabberwocky fame, as Ridgely was always most careful to state, protesting that he used Safford's very phrases and invented nothing. But disclaim as he might, not only had he received from heaven a leanness and an ancient mariner fanaticism of eye that made his impersonation unique, but his profundity of imaginative realization wove that missionary into our very lives. Before he said a word, when you simply beheld him swaying back and forth, sucking his lower lip, and giving one of those unexpected but quintessential dips by letting his knees suddenly bend, you would laugh with premonitory mirth until it almost hurt. Then, in a singsong chant, bringing out key words with a sudden rasping of the voice, struggling with a supposedly revolving front tooth that produced strange whistlings and sibilations, and punctuating with dips at the most unlikely moments, he would tell the brethren how he had “landed on the west coast of Africa.” “Our first task,” he would go on, “was to learn the language [dip] of the tribes there re-s-s-siding” [hissing tooth]. The climax came with the confession: “But after nine years' hard labor, my brethren, we found that what we had learned was not the language of the [dip] west coast of Africa, but that of the [rasped in fortissimo] hill tribes of India.” It ended, I recall, with the admonition: “One piece of advice I have for you, my young friends. Never lose an opportunity.”

Ridgely had in his letters more than any other I have known the Stevensonian faculty of pure, divine nonsense. For years after our Judson winter he was likely at any moment to endue without warning the personality of his missionary, or any other that struck his fancy, and to lapse from prose into poetry, or at least into what looked like prose but sounded like verse—and not “free verse” either. In the summer of 1910, when I had sent to him in his native Xenia a parody, Chickory's Fountain, I had made on Robinson's recently published Vickery's Mountain, this answer came back.

“Xenia, Ohio, July 19 [1910]

“How are the heavens so full of the sun? That requires no answer, it's only rhythmical utterance. I thought—as the unaccustomed say—that I would write you a letter. I think of you as I think of St. Peter, with your hand upon the keys, with your halo round your neck, in a smock, letting few pass perspirant, with the recording angel not far off, and you on, by, with or in a cloud, hearing heavenly choirs, humming very bold, strike their golden wires never catching cold.

“I cannot go to you but you often come to me and I wish that you would bring your music as clearly as my memory holds your stories and your hearty self. But I am weak, I cannot project you bodily. As the poick so nobly sings

The feathered tribes on pinions cleave the air.
Not so the mackerel, and still less the bear.(1)

“I wish that you and I were sitting round some heavenly board, on these hot days, with about half a stigtossel of dogglegammon, (that ghostly porridge) between us. Wouldn't we be a pair of cool ones as ever went up? But here is summer madness, here are summer ants, here the heavy sadness, wearing heavy pance. What's the news of the Muse, does she use any booze? If she does, Professor Mason, you should give it to her strong, you should hand it in a basin till she lifts a song. But call her Muse, or Maude, or Sadie, never go too far, Mrs. Mason's more a lady than the Muses are.

“Yours, R. T.

“This is merely to certify that Uncle Dan'l McGregor is a member of the inner council of Poet's Union No. 7, and all members of Pittsfield Lodge are to yield to him because of his great achievement in singing of Chicory's Fountain, the highest sprouting and the strongest lyrical ecstasy since the last strike was called. The members of Xenia Lodge cried with joy over it. It is a perfect thing. More concerning it later.

“(Signed) With a headache.

‘The Talking Delegate’”

Three summers later, when my wife and I were spending our vacation in southern France, there came across the Atlantic this edifying advice.

“Now that you have set out in life and are fairly embarked with a help-mate and an avocation, my advice to a young man of your age would be: make the most of your opportunities, adapt yourself to your environment, live within the income which your labours have won for you and lay up a little each day if it be only a few pennies, be obedient to those in authority, connect yourself with some professing body of Christians (I will not urge any particular denomination upon you but leave that to the behests of your own judgment) and contribute plentifully towards the work in the foreign field. Never presume to set up your own opinion against those of laws and customs established by authority.

“In conclusion I have one injunction which I would always give to a young man (or maiden) and it is a very precious one. A great bishop whispered it to me in two words years ago and oh, they sank into my heart. ‘Be discreet,’ he said. Oh golden syllables, they ought to be engraved over the door of every young man's (and maiden's) heart. They ought not only to exercise them in the Sunday School but also abroad, in the daily walks of life, in the counting house and marts of trade especially. One of the oldest living life members of the American Bible Society, speaking at our Chautauqua on The Land of the White Elephant told us that the same rule applies also in that far-off country.”

And again after many years, when in 1928 he was himself spending with his wife (the former Olivia Dunbar) a summer on the Lake of Geneva, his “word” to me was:

“Geneva, May 13, 1928

“… I hope that you had a pleasant voyage over the Atlantic Ocean, that great body of water, and that your monthly stipend from the American Board arrives regularly. There is a great work to do here among the native tribes. I am at present learning their language so that I can address them in their own native tongue. Thus far I have learned the words “onze fines—vingt bières—quinze rhums”—which I find are constantly used among our own countrymen residing here in Geneva, City of Refuge.

“Let me hear from you, Brother, here in the foreign field,

“RIDGELY”

I do not fear that any lover of Ridgely's poetry will blame me for thus emphasizing his fun and irresponsibility. It was the other side of the same sensitiveness that shows in the four lovely stanzas of “The Son,” into which he has been able to pack such richness of human nature, and in the incomparably plastic rhythms and spiritual discernments of longer poems like “Eye-Witness.” That most haunting (for me) of all his poems I found in a magazine I picked up in my wife's club on Christmas Eve of 1916.

With what delight I read:

My heart went open like an apple sliced;
I saw my Saviour and I saw my Christ. …
He went to the doors but he didn't have the pay,
He went to the windows, then he went away.
Says, “We'll walk together, and we'll both be fed.”
Says, “I will give you the ‘other’ bread.”
Oh, the bread he gave and without money!
O drink, O fire, O burning honey!

Early in the new year Ridgely and Olivia dined with us, and I noted in my journal:

“It was fun to tell Ridgely how we loved his poem. He says that some of the tramp ballads use the four-beat line, and that the negroes use the ‘Says’ (without the ‘He’). He got the idea one day when he was working on a New Republic article in the Columbia Library, the measure taking possession of him first, and walked all the way down to Waverly Place composing it.”

Note

1. See Stevenson's St. lves. Thistle edition, page 404.