Savage Coast Read online

  SAVAGE COAST

  “What a treasure! Muriel Rukeyser takes us back to those crucial days when Spain became the first international battleground against fascism and hope for democracy, to tell a powerful story of personal, sexual, and political awakening. Savage Coast is bound to be an instant classic.”

  —ROBIN D. G. KELLEY, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

  “Savage Coast now joins the lost brother and sisterhood of Spanish Civil War classics, from Arthur Koestler’s Dialogue with Death, the desolate modernist novels of the Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda, Andre Malraux’s Man’s Hope, Josephine Herbst’s The Starched Blue Sky of Spain, and the reportage of Martha Gellhorn. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein has rescued and edited a great story. Helen and Otto are not Emma and Sasha, nor are they Karl and Rosa, but the American radical poet who tells her story speaks to all of us.”

  —JANE MARCUS, distinguished professor of English and women’s studies, CUNY Graduate Center and the City College of New York

  “Muriel Rukeyser spoke of Spain as the place where she began to say what she believed. At the time, Hemingway’s and Orwell’s male-centered blood and guts novels were greedily devoured, while a woman writing a sexually explicit, gender truthful and politically radical narrative against a background of war was inevitably ignored. Spain changed Rukeyser and her protagonist, Helen. This novel will change the reader. An extraordinary gift!”

  —MARGARET RANDALL, author of To Change the World: My Years in Cuba

  “Savage Coast is an astonishing book, too long lost, now a treasure for historians of the Spanish Civil War, equally a pouch of rubies for poets. Rukeyser captures the intensity of the moment—personal, political, and still contemporary.”

  —PETER N. CARROLL, author of The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade

  LOST & FOUND / LOST & FOUND ELSEWHERE

  LOST & FOUND: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative publishes primary sources by figures associated with New American Poetry in an annual series of chapbooks under the general editorship of Ammiel Alcalay. Lost & Found’s aim is to open the field of inquiry and illuminate the terrain of an essential chapter of twentieth-century letters. The series has published little-known work by Amiri Baraka, Diane di Prima, Robert Duncan, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara, Margaret Randall, Muriel Rukeyser, and many others.

  Under the auspices of The Center for the Humanities, and with the guidance of an extended scholarly community, Lost & Found chapbooks are researched and prepared by students and guest fellows at the PhD Program in English of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Utilizing personal and institutional archives, Lost & Found scholars seek to broaden our literary, cultural, and political history.

  LOST & FOUND ELSEWHERE is a unique new series of book-length projects emerging from this research. Working in partnership with select publishers, these books bring to light unpublished or long unavailable materials that have emerged alongside or as part of the Lost & Found project. Available in this series:

  Robert Duncan in San Francisco

  Michael Rumaker

  Expanded edition, with selected correspondence and interview edited by Ammiel Alcalay and Megan Paslawski

  CITY LIGHTS PUBLISHERS

  A Walker in the City: Elegy for Gloucester

  Peter Anastas

  With an afterword by Ammiel Alcalay

  BACK SHORE PRESS

  Savage Coast

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Edited, with an introduction by Rowena Kennedy-Epstein

  THE FEMINIST PRESS

  For more information, visit lostandfoundbooks.org

  Published in 2013 by the Feminist Press

  at the City University of New York

  The Graduate Center

  365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

  New York, NY 10016

  feministpress.org

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by Rowena Kennedy-Epstein

  Text copyright © 2013 by the estate of Muriel Rukeyser

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First printing May 2013

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  This project was made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  Cover design by Herb Thornby, herbthornby.com

  Cover photograph of Muriel Rukeyser, circa 1936

  Text design by Drew Stevens

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rukeyser, Muriel, 1913-1980.

  Savage coast / Muriel Rukeyser ; Edited, with an introduction by

  Rowena Kennedy-Epstein.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-55861-821-3

  I. Kennedy-Epstein, Rowena. II. Title.

  PS3535.U4S38 2013

  813'.54—dc23

  2013004425

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  ROWENA KENNEDY-EPSTEIN

  Editor’s Note

  Savage Coast

  A NOVEL BY MURIEL RUKEYSER

  Notes

  “We Came for Games”

  FROM ESQUIRE MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 1974

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  Rowena Kennedy-Epstein

  If this was real,” thinks Helen, the protagonist of Muriel Rukeyser’s autobiographical novel Savage Coast, “it was because it was nearer the sum of everything that had happened before it than anything had ever been.” Stranded on a train in a small Catalan town during the first days of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Helen had just had sex with a German socialist who will soon join the first International Brigade, watched Catalonia begin to collectivize, and seen fascist soldiers escape into the hills, a plane flying low above her upturned head, hearing the bombs and rifle fire closer still—it is a perfectly modern moment, at the center of the novel. In addition to its avant-garde and genre-bending tendencies—toward documentary, abstraction, poetry—Savage Coast harbors the drama, the psychological exploration and the social critique of the realist novel. It is a bildungsroman of sorts, a “novel of formation,” tracing the political development of Helen—her transformation from tourist and witness into activist and radical, from girlhood “liberalism” to mature political engagement, from an “awkward” adolescence of rebellion and anger to a sense of sexual and historical subjectivity found in the collective experience of political action. Helen’s transformation is Rukeyser’s—she describes Spain as the place “where I was born.”1

  When Muriel Rukeyser sailed to Europe in June 1936 she never meant to go to Spain. Already a successful poet, she had won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1935 for her first book of poems, Theory of Flight, and had already engaged in political activism—she had traveled to report on the Scottsboro trial and was jailed for “fraternizing” with African Americans in 1933, and had completed her trip to West Virginia to document the Hawks Nest Tunnel mining disaster, an experience that would later become her most famous text, the modernist epic “The Book of the Dead” (U.S. 1, 1938)—when she was asked to travel to London as an assistant for a couple who were writing a book about cooperatives in England, Scandinavia, and Russia. This was her first trip abroad, and she was put in contact by the poet Horace Gregory with Bryher, Robert Herring and Petrie Townshend, the owners and editors of Life and Letters To-day
, a prominent literary magazine that would later publish several of her poems.2 It was through this group that Rukeyser was introduced to the London literary scene, meeting with T.S. Eliot and C. Day Lewis, and spending considerable time with H.D., writing in her diary: “she’ll hate all the flaws that show in my poems.”3 She spent a month in London with people “who afterwards would be the Labor Government . . . poets and refugees and the League of Nations correspondent from the Manchester Guardian.”4 When Herring asked Rukeyser to fill in for a colleague and cover the People’s Olympiad,5 meant to be a protest and alternative to Hitler’s Berlin Games, and one to which twenty-two countries were sending athletes,6 Rukeyser gave up her chance to go to Finland and Russia, “for I was driven,” she wrote, and set out to Barcelona.

  Instead of reporting on the games, however, Rukeyser documented the outbreak of civil war, as the fascist-backed military coup that plunged Spain into violence occurred, not coincidentally, two nights before the People’s Olympiad was to begin, disrupting what would have been one of the largest international antifascist events of that period. Only twenty-two at the time, Rukeyser’s experience as witness both to the military coup and the revolutionary response in Catalonia proved transformational; she would write about Spain, its war, exiled and dead, for over forty years after, creating a radical and interconnected twentieth-century textual history. Rukeyser was only in Spain five days, from July 19 to 24, just long enough to see “the primitive beginnings of open warfare of this period,”7 but she subsequently cites the experience as the place where “I began to say what I believed,”8 and “the end of confusion.”9 In each work on Spain the same narratives, images, and phrases proliferate, re-contextualized inside her contemporary political and literary moment. In poems, reportage, memoir, essays and fiction, and more often in experimental forms that combine these genres, she reiterates, re-imagines, and theorizes her experience as a witness to the first days of the war and to her own moment of political, sexual, and poetic awakening.

  Rukeyser’s narrative of the first days of the Spanish Civil War appears in four major essays written from 1936 to 1974, all of them uncollected—“Barcelona, 1936” (Life and Letters To-day, vol. 15, no. 5, 1936), “Death in Spain: Barcelona on the Barricades” (New Masses, September 1936), “Start of Strife in Spain Is Told by Eyewitness” (New York Times, July 29, 1936), and “We Came for Games” (Esquire, October 1974),10 which is included in this volume—as well as in the introduction to The Life of Poetry (1949), in numerous poems that span her oeuvre—“For O.B.” (undated), “Mediterranean” (1936), “Moment of Proof” (1939), “Other-world” (1939), “Correspondences” (1939), “1/26/39” (1939), “One Soldier” (1944), “Long Past Moncada” (1944), “Letter to the Front” (1944), “Elegies” (1949), “Segre Song” (1968), “Word of Mouth” (1968), “Endless” (1968), “Delta Poems” (1968), “Voices” (1972), “Searching/Not Searching” (1972)11—and, of course, in the autobiographical novel, Savage Coast, which you have here for the first time.

  Written immediately upon her return from Spain in the autumn of 1936, Savage Coast is the most complete rendering of Rukeyser’s experience during the first days of the war, but the novel remained unpublished in her lifetime. It was brutally panned in the anonymous reader report,12 and rejected by her editor Pascal Covici of Covici-Friede in 1937 for being, among other things, “BAD” and “a waste of time,” with a protagonist who is “too abnormal for us to respect.” Rukeyser was strongly encouraged to abandon the novel for a “brief impressionistic sketch” of her experience in Spain and to continue working on her poetry. Covici-Friede would publish the long poem “Mediterranean” in her second collection, U.S. 1 (1938), instead. This is to say, the first critics of Savage Coast discouraged Rukeyser from writing the kind of large-scale, developmental, modernist war narrative that she had begun—one that is sexually explicit, symbolically complex, politically radical (much more so than the “communist sympathizing” that the reviewer sneers at) and aesthetically experimental—in favor of the gender-appropriate lyric poetry of her first book and “small” personal narratives. Rukeyser, though, would never return to the more traditional lyricism of her early work, and did not abandon the novel. She continued to edit the manuscript, working on it throughout the war, publishing articles and poems on her experience in Spain in the meantime. It is not clear how much that first rejection letter shaped her editing process, but she did edit the text heavily, over several years. It is unclear when she abandoned the manuscript entirely, and it is unclear if she ever pursued its publication again. It was eventually misfiled in an unmarked and undated folder in the Library of Congress.

  Finding this novel now is significant because, as Rukeyser’s large body of work on Spain attests, the Spanish Civil War was not only an essential part of her poetic and political development, “part of her inclusive myth, shaping from within her subsequent commitments and writing,”13 but her work on the subject is likewise essential to the literature of the Spanish Civil War. Rukeyser’s lost novel, written before Hemingway, Orwell, or Malraux’s major works on the subject, is only one of a handful of novels written by foreign women on the war, and provides us with a more complex understanding of women’s political and literary participation in its history, offering a unique view into how women positioned themselves “within historical and social processes.”14 As the discovery of “The Mexican Suitcase” has demonstrated about women’s contribution to the documentation of the Spanish Civil War, revealing how many of the most iconic war photographs were in fact taken by Gerda Taro, the discovery of Rukeyser’s lost novel reminds us of the important role women played in writing about and recording the political events of this era. Recovering this novel also alerts us (again) to the fact that the recuperation of women writers did not end in the 1970s, and that there is a continued need for archival work that restores feminist and radical texts and puts them in print. As Theresa Strouth Gaul points out, “it remains crucially important to remember that, in the current moment, the availability of women’s texts in print still largely determines what is read and taught in classrooms and receives analysis in dissertations, scholarly journals, and monographs.”15

  RUKEYSER HERSELF WAS deeply engaged with challenging the kinds of histories that privileged certain narratives over others, and saw the need to archive, document, and secure in text the stories of those who had been left out of “master narratives”—particularly the exiled, women, and refugees. Like Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin, who were writing in the same moment, Rukeyser worked to develop a poetics of history that was particularly attuned to exploring the “latent potentialities”16 of the past inside the present. She writes, in The Life of Poetry, that “there is also in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost,”17 and she recuperates these “lost” histories through an open-ended, proliferating, multitemporal, multivocal, documentary approach, one that “reach[es] backward and forward in history, illuminating all time.”18 Savage Coast is essential to understanding this practice, one that she develops throughout her life, as she records and contextualizes the histories of those who traveled to Spain to participate in the antifascist games, many of whom were the first volunteers in the International Brigades, and as she records her own moment of political and sexual awakening alongside the Catalan resistance through an experimental, multigenre form that defies the rigid binaries of the two major literary modes of the 1930s: the “political,” didactic social realism and the “a-political,” aesthetic high modernism, both of which “were regarded as mutually exclusive of the other.”19 Ironically, of course, Rukeyser’s avant-garde and radical project, her “disinclination to conform to the dictates of any aesthetic or political program” or gender role, would prove to marginalize both her and her work for decades.20

  In this sense the rejection of Savage Coast by her editor in 1937 says more about the fraught literary and historical moment in which Rukeyser was working than it does about the novel itself. On the other hand, the Spanish Civil War wo
uld become one of the most literary of wars, with “poets exploding like bombs,”21 and Rukeyser was very much a part of this literary production. At the time of writing the novel, Rukeyser was involved in publicizing, fundraising and advocating for the Loyalist cause in Spain. Her poem “Mediterranean” was printed first as a pamphlet for the Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy, and she published articles on the subject in New Masses and the New York Times, among others. Like Rukeyser, many of her generation considered Spain the defining battleground against European fascism, and because of this it immediately became an international war, occupying a transnational imagination, seen as the last hope for the socialist and anarchist ideas that had flourished through the 1920s and 30s.22 The coup in Spain was also, like the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy, indicative of a more profound backlash against those very social and political changes, a backlash that was eventually absorbed into the Cold War policies of the US. The fascist project to cleanse society of an “impure citizenry”23—the urban proletariat, the New Woman, the Jew, the homosexual, the communist, the artist24— meant that Spain’s “civil war” was also viewed as a European “civil war.”25 Likewise, Franco’s military success was made possible only because of the enormous international aid he received from Hitler and Mussolini, and from US corporations like Dupont,26 who used Spain as testing ground for modern warfare.27 The non-interventionist stance of Great Britain, France and the US determined not only the trajectory of fascism in Europe, dooming Republican Spain, but as Rukeyser herself noted in many of her essays, it reflected a larger political reality: that Spain was eventually viewed not as the place to stop fascism, but the place to “stop communism.”28 She understood that what was allowed to happen in Spain would be allowed to happen elsewhere, placing the conflict in a much broader cultural and historical context. And she was right: the placation of fascism by the allied nations was not only a suffocation of the Popular Front in Spain, aided by blocking the sale of arms and support to the Loyalist army to defend its government, but it was a way of enervating political dissent and left-wing organizing in their own home countries as well.