wits
stars
tough and terrible times
two boiled potatoes
and you in my bed
—RUTH KRAUSS, “Poem for the Depression” (1960)
While Dave and Charlotte were making friends with leftists in Greenwich Village, Ruth and Lionel were living nearby, in the West Village. She was at 325 West Twelfth Street (between Greenwich and Hudson), and he was two blocks north, at 78 Horatio Street (between Washington and Greenwich). At least, those were the addresses they gave to the Coast Guard in November 1934.
In 1934, Lionel and Ruth decided to travel down to Baltimore by boat for Thanksgiving. They joined writer and artist Richard Barry, who was taking his forty-foot cabin cruiser, the Henry S., to Florida and would stop in Baltimore along the way. The trio embarked on the evening of 24 November but got only as far as Long Branch, New Jersey, before the Henry S. ran out of gas and began to drift south toward Asbury Park. Barry took a gasoline tank and set off in the cruiser’s dory in search of fuel. But rough surf overturned his little boat, and “Mr. Barry was so exhausted by his efforts to reach shore that he was taken to hospital.” The Coast Guard ultimately rescued Ruth and Lionel.1
Ruth’s years with Lionel were exciting and difficult. Born in July 1905 on a Los Angeles farm, Lionel White moved east with his family as a child. His father worked for automobile manufacturers in Cleveland and later in Buffalo, where Lionel grew up with his twin brother, Harold, and sister, Betty. At eighteen, Lionel fell in love with and married a beautiful, volatile young Russian émigré named Julie. After a couple of years as a police reporter for newspapers in Ohio, he and Julie moved to New York, where he worked as a rewrite man and sports editor for several different papers. He was a gifted storyteller as well as a self-described drunk. Julie, too, was a heavy drinker, prone to leaving home for a few days on drinking binges. After taking off on one of these episodes, she simply failed to return. When Ruth came into his life, Lionel was writing and editing stories for pulp magazines. Following Lionel’s lead, Ruth began to write pulp adventure as well as detective stories, although she apparently published these works under a pseudonym, probably because pulps were considered a sensational venue not suitable for women writers. In the mid-1930s, the number of pulp magazines peaked at more than two hundred, and many writers tried their hand at the genre.2
It was a precarious existence, and Ruth and Lionel moved frequently, living in Dutchess County, New York; Bernardsville and Pittstown, New Jersey; and in small towns along the Delaware River in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. But the two were in love and decided to marry in the fall of 1935. Her mother, her aunt, and possibly her stepfather drove up to Philadelphia for the wedding on 25 November. In anticipation of meeting Ruth’s well-to-do relatives, Ruth and Lionel polished their car with bacon fat and bought a hat for Lionel and a four-dollar ring for Ruth. Donning the best clothes they could gather, Ruth and Lionel drove to Philadelphia, married, and immediately drove back to return her wedding band. They needed the four dollars more.3
Their early married life was difficult. Ruth later wrote, “We were literally ‘broke’—we’d get up some mornings—nothing in the house—no coffee, no salt, no soap, no eggs, no nothing.” The winter of 1935–36 was bitterly cold, and “we had 3 fires going in 1 room—a fireplace, a pot-bellied stove, and a ‘cook-stove.’” Ruth’s mother had no idea of her daughter’s financial circumstances and sent the young couple oriental rugs, which they hung on the ceiling and walls to keep the cold out. They slept huddled together in their clothes. The cottage lacked indoor plumbing, so Ruth and Lionel bathed in the river. To comb her hair in the mornings, Ruth first had to “unfreeze the water-container”; her newly combed hair would quickly freeze, “stand[ing] up stiff with ice like spikes.” They washed their clothes with water hauled from the river with a bucket on a rope. In March 1936, rising temperatures, melting snow, and an abundance of rain combined to cause flooding along the Delaware River that killed more than a hundred people and injured four thousand. The water topped the cabin’s roof, but Ruth and Lionel had already fled to higher ground.4
Despite the tribulations, Ruth enjoyed her bohemian years. When her mother sent packages of coffee and tins of caviar, Lionel and Ruth would host gatherings of their neighbors, all of whom were in similar financial straits. And as Ruth later wrote in her “Poem for the Depression” (1960), she may have had only “two boiled potatoes,” but she did have someone to share her bed.5
In 1938, however, Ruth discovered that Lionel had never divorced his first wife and was already seeing another woman, Anna Maher. Then living in New Jersey at “a small store house on a great Estate belonging to a man I had once had an affair with,” Ruth learned that Lionel “had ‘committed bigamy’ with me.” Heartbroken but hanging on to her marriage, Ruth went with Lionel back to New York City, where they checked into Greenwich Village’s Marlton Hotel. Determined to drive Ruth away from him, Lionel came up with a convincing lie. Walking east along Eighth Street, he told her that Maher was carrying his child. Ruth became so upset that she literally fell into the gutter. Only then did she decide to divorce Lionel.6
Ruth moved into a fourth-floor apartment at 36 West Tenth Street and slowly began to regain her bearings. The building’s owner, an older woman, lived on the second floor and frequently visited Ruth to chat. The landlady gradually furnished the room with a “small but comfortable compact armchair” with a “tiny diamond-shaped patch” on its upholstery, an “old-fashioned” green wing chair, and a new lamp with a chipped china base. When the room was relatively empty, Ruth felt empty, but as it filled, she grew comfortable and found solace in her new home: “I came to cherish its calm. If I had been out, I would look forward as I came along the street, to the awareness of entering it.” Eventually, “just sitting in my room became an affirmation to me. The coffee table and the two armchairs before the black fireplace were particularly good to look at…. I enjoyed so much sitting in the small yellow armchair with a cup of coffee before me on the table and a book or paper to read.”7
A few months later, Ruth boarded a ship for England, though she had no specific plans for what she would do when she arrived there. Another passenger, a “dopey guy” named Elwyn, suggested that she stay in London with a friend of his. Joan, a twenty-something teacher at the University of London, had a flat off of Trafalgar Square in St. Martin’s Mews that became Ruth’s home base during her stay in England.8
Ruth and her “newly acquired rucksack” joined two sixteen-year-old Cockney lads, one couple, and a German refugee who was studying at the University of London and “spent a week wandering … from hostel to hostel” around southern England. The episode later reminded Ruth of J. B. Priestley’s The Good Companions (1929), in which a group of people from diverse backgrounds meet and form a traveling theater troupe. Ruth subsequently set off on her own, traveling by bicycle, on foot, or by bus when she was “sick or it was too cold and raining or [she] was too tired to go on.”9
Ruth Krauss and unidentified person, ca. 1939. Image courtesy of HarperCollins Archives. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
In Kent, she spent a weekend with the Newnham family in “a wonderful and a slightly crazy” cottage. The family’s five children included a college girl who brought “the ‘intelligentsia’ and the Artistic and journalistic crowd” to the house. Ruth arrived at night and was shown to a room with two beds. A girl was asleep in one bed, so Ruth climbed into the other. When she awoke, her bed had three people in it, and the other bed had four. “It turned out this was the girl’s side [of the hall]. Across the hall was the boy’s side.” A pup tent in the yard housed another five people. Though Ruth spent “a pleasant dizzy week-end” with the Newnhams, she was also keenly aware of the hardships they faced. The family raised chickens and vegetables, bought milk from local farms, and ate red meat only “when guests bought it.” Mr. Newnham had not held a regular job since World War I. The weekend that Ruth was there, the Newnhams had a job picking hops for beer, for which they were paid a shilling a bin, “the bin being a rather huge affair and hops pretty frail things with which to fill it. I doubt if they made a shilling a day.” Twelve-year-old Mary worked “in a florist shop in Tunbridge Wells to which she traveled daily by bicycle and bus, several miles by bike before the bus. Her weekly salary was something like twelve shillings.” Mary “could not continue her schooling because she fainted each time she took the tests into what would be our equivalent of public high-school.” To attend a nearby vocational school, where she could learn the more lucrative skills of stenography and typing, Mary would have needed to pay a guinea per year, which her family could not afford. After leaving Kent, Ruth sent the Newnhams the money to send Mary to school.10
Returning to London, Ruth befriended artists living in a houseboat on the Thames. She was enjoying the trip, but her mother and aunt were worried. Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany, and the country had taken over Austria and Czechoslovakia. Though British prime minister Neville Chamberlain had predicted “peace in our time” the previous fall, war seemed to be on the horizon. While Germany’s invasion of Poland was yet months away, it was not a great time to be a Jew traveling abroad. Blanche Krauss Brager wanted her daughter to come home. In the spring of 1939, Ruth sailed back to New York.11