Savage Coast

by Muriel Rukeyser

  As Rukeyser’s texts on the subject demonstrate, the Spanish Civil War also marked an important moment in women’s visibility in public political life; for both foreign and Spanish women Spain proved to be a site of great potential for the expression of women’s political and artistic agency. Women participated in, wrote on, and documented the war in Spain in great numbers, producing a significant body of work: Mercè Rodoreda, Simone De Beauvoir, Simone Weil, María Teresa León, Rose Macaulay, Dorothy Parker, Josephine Herbst, Martha Gellhorn, Genevieve Taggard, Virginia Woolf, Nancy Cunard, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Gerda Taro, and many more. What is striking is how little of their work on the subject is known;29 and yet women’s participation in the war was in many ways the culmination of the decades-long fights for agency in the public sphere, especially considering that Republican Spain had some of the most progressive gender policies for its time, particularly in anarchist Catalonia: women held political office, were allowed to vote, fought on the front for the first time, used and had access to birth control, in some areas were able to obtain legal abortions and request a divorce, and were guaranteed “equal protection” under the law and equal access to employment. They were political leaders like Frederica Montseny, Dolores Ibárruri, and Margarita Nelken, and they were writers and artists who continued to produce work about the war long into exile.30 Likewise, international women reported and photographed from the front in great numbers, volunteered as nurses and soldiers, and, like Rukeyser, remained dedicated to the Loyalist cause in Spain after the fighting had ended. The Spanish Civil War marked a vital moment in what was an undeniably important series of decades for women’s liberation and radical activity, and Rukeyser records and benefits from that history.

  The events that unfold in Savage Coast reflect the biographical narrative of Rukeyser’s trip to Spain. Rukeyser and her fellow travelers, mostly international athletes traveling to the People’s Olympiad, were the last to cross the border when their train to Barcelona was stopped in Moncada (Montcada, in Catalan), just as the military coup began and a general strike was called in defense of the Republic. The people she met on the train—a Catalan family, the Hungarian Olympic team, French reactionaries, and American communists, among many others that populate her works—were real, their names appearing in articles she wrote at the same time she was working on the novel. As the novel depicts, Rukeyser witnessed the enactment of a radical Popular Front and the collectivization of the town, the local people burning religious icons, and then the dangerous trip in the back of a pick-up truck into Barcelona, “a workers city,” in the first days of the resistance, “jewel-like” and “liberated.” Rukeyser continued to correspond with her lover “Hans,” the Rotfrontkämpfer Otto Boch, a “Bavarian, with a broad strong face like a man in a Brueghel picture,” exiled from Hitler’s Germany and traveling to the games as a long-distance runner, after he joined the International Brigades. While the novel ends on the anarchist streets of Barcelona, as Rukeyser is “given her responsibility” by Martín, the organizer of the People’s Olympics, who says to those being evacuated, “you will carry to your own countries, some of them still oppressed and under fascism and military terror, to the working people of the world, the story of what you see in Spain,”31 other renditions of her narrative, like “We Came for Games,” describe the evacuation from Barcelona on a boat chartered by the Belgian team (the American consulate provided no assistance). She describes this in the epic poem “Mediterranean” as a voyage of “exile and refugee” to the port town of Sète, where those participating in the local fete-day “raised their clenched fists in a new salute”32 in support of the Spanish Popular Front, marking the opening of a new era of war and violence. It is on this boat when she is asked the question that frames her life’s work, and that begins her most famous book, The Life of Poetry: “And in all this—where is there a place for poetry?” She answers, “I know some of it now, but it will take me a lifetime to find out.”33 Many of her poems and nonfiction works provide a nearly seamless epilogue, finishing from where the novel leaves off, fact and fiction overlapping. Sometimes the nonfiction texts specify details, blurred by her fictional narrative, while at other times the poems written across her lifetime extend and eulogize the memory of those who fought and died against fascism in Spain, or to meditate on the body of Otto Boch, who represents all the bodies of the dead in the unending violence of the twentieth century.34

  Savage Coast, of all her work on Spain, is the most narratively and historically sequential, yet even while Rukeyser insists that this is a fictionalized account, making sure to point this out in a note to the reader, we are also instructed by her to read the text as documentary—from the inclusion of dated newspaper clippings that begin chapters, to the list of the dead that interrupts her own narrative near the end of the book, to the very fact that Helen and Hans are Muriel and Otto, their story and dialogue proliferating and repeated in other essays and poems, the novel itself only one of many iterations. This constant blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction—the creation of the self inside history, and by extension inside the text—is foundational to Rukeyser’s decades long desire to write cross-genre and hybrid poetry and prose where “false barriers go down.” It also speaks to the moment in which she was working, when the documentary form was not only de rigueur but was being used particularly by radicals and feminists to challenge and expose patriarchal and hegemonic narratives. The term documentary, though, is inherently slippery, for it contains so many possibilities; it implies archiving, recording, witnessing, collaging, photographing, and filming, as well as the hybridization of “high” and “low” art forms; and it can be traced back to the practices of scrap-booking in the women’s suffrage movement, left-front politics, social and socialist realism, travel narratives, war correspondences, epic poems, testimony, cinema, and reportage.35 It is a genre that has, as Paula Rabinowitz notes, “reshaped generic boundaries” as well as gendered boundaries.36

  Because of its representational mutability, the documentary form held immense potential for Rukeyser, particularly for developing an aesthetics that embodied her political and personal project, one that may be closer to and, appropriately, shaped by the anarchist principles she encountered in Catalonia, where “individuality was dependent on the development of a strong sense of connections with others”37—principles that were equally essential to the women’s movement and feminist literary praxis. This radical and relational politics is formally manifest in the hybridization of the personal, lyric, and internal, situated alongside and interacting with the historical, documentary and worldly. For example, in the final chapter of Savage Coast, during a march through the streets of Barcelona in support of the Republic—made up of Olympic athletes, foreign nationals, Catalan workers, and volunteers about to set out for the front—a message is read to the crowd from the evacuated French Olympic delegation who were the first to flee the war. It is read to the crowd and recorded by Rukeyser, next to and along with her own Sibyl-like lyricism:

  THE FRENCH DELEGATION TO THE PEOPLE’S

  OLYMPICS, EVACUATED FROM BARCELONA AND

  LANDED TODAY AT MARSEILLES . . .

  the tranquil voyage, Mediterranean, the

  tawny cliffs of the coast, cypress,

  oranges, the sea, the smooth ship passing

  all these scenes, promised for years,

  from which they had been forced away

  into familiar country, streets they

  knew, more placid beaches

  PLEDGE FRATERNITY AND SOLIDARITY IN

  THE UNITED FRONT TO OUR SPANISH

  BROTHERS . . .

  the bird flight sailing forced

  upon them, so that no beauty

  found could ever pay for the

  country from which they had

  been sent home and the battle

  which they had barely seen begun

  WHO ARE NOW HEROICALLY FIGHTING THE

  FIGHT WE SHALL ALL WIN TOGETHER

  Here
we have the interaction between the documentary text and the lyric poem, imitating Rukeyser’s own self-formation inside the collective political experience. The passage contains a double image, a fantasy of the French who have already sailed away and the actual voyage through the Mediterranean that Rukeyser herself will soon take, situated inside the text of a speech unfolding in the present time of the novel. It is the interaction of the lyric imagining of past and future with the factual and documentary text of the present that makes the moment so important, for it renders simultaneously the political implications of the documentary text—the very real possibility that the evacuation of the French Olympic team means that France will abandon Spain to fascism, which they do—and the profoundly individual effect that this experience has on Rukeyser’s political and personal liberation, so much so that “no beauty / found could ever pay / for the country from which they had / been sent home.”

  The autobiographical and documentary nature of Savage Coast, though, is not meant to undermine the fact that in this iteration of her story Rukeyser chose fiction for a reason, and out of all her tellings and retellings, Savage Coast is the most psychologically internal, most politically radical, most sexually explicit, and, at times, most comical. While not today known as a novelist, it is clear that Rukeyser was not only interested in writing in multiple genres, but was equally desirous of experimenting with the structures and tropes of the novel itself, as she does in every genre, from her use of documentary materials to the way she breaks her prose lines like poetry. The experimental nature of the text is enhanced by the nearly impressionistic, elliptical prose, made up of fragmented images and scenes, pieced together with the documents. It is hard to say, though, if part of this experimentalism is due to the unfinished nature of the novel itself. Because Savage Coast was so flatly rejected by her editor, we don’t know what Rukeyser would have done with the novel if she herself had in fact prepared it for publication, and if the fragmentary nature of the text would have been smoothed out. I hope it would not have been, because the prose that she writes is always nearer to poetry, and so the text has the feeling of an epic poem inside the realist novel; even the fact that her protagonist is named Helen and is narrating a war speaks to the innovation of a traditionally male genre.

  Most avant-garde, perhaps, is the way Rukeyser situates her female protagonist as the mediator, narrator, and embodiment of a changing twentieth-century political landscape, one whose voyage into a war results in sexual awakening, personal liberation, and political radicalism. In writing this narrative through a “Helen”—a name both autobiographical (her middle name) and mythological—Rukeyser also situates herself as a worldly authorial voice, a maker and subject of history, one who has the ability to critique and comment on politics and war. The very fact that at twenty-two Rukeyser positions her text next to and along with the most prominent male literary figures of her time says something about the authorial intent. Not only does Rukeyser buttress her novel with references and quotations from Auden, Spender, Eliot, and Crane, to name only a few—intertwining them with the daily documents, newspapers, and political pamphlets—but her own story ultimately internalizes her male cohorts, so that they become references or footnotes to her history. We might read this as a signal of how she was positioning herself and her work, and it is clear that with this novel she wanted not only to be taken as seriously as the male authors she cites, but to assert herself on equal terms with them.

  Consider the fact that Helen spends the entire trip reading D.H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod38 as she travels through Spain, and Rukeyser quotes it extensively in the text—his narrative structure and heavy prose hang around.39 Helen is reading Lawrence in the hope that it will provide a “clue” for “a way to reach action,” thinking, “perhaps, after trying for it so hard, she could find what she was looking for here. This might carry her deeper in. Lawrence could do that, striking for the heart, penetrating, on a dark journey . . . The book, to produce an equation, To bring an answer.” But just like the scene where the message from the French is read aloud, Helen interrupts Lawrence with her own lyric interpretation of the actual events happening around her, and she “clap[s] the book shut.” Helen’s narrative takes over, she becomes “the clue,” the person “that carries her deeper,” not Lawrence, not the document alone.40

  Like Savage Coast, Aaron’s Rod is a quest novel of sorts, but one in which love and women are rendered as inverting forces, and that ends with an anarchist explosion in Italy that destroys the protagonist’s livelihood and manhood. Rukeyser both sublimates and refutes Lawrence in the novel: radical politics, particularly anarchist politics, are a force of regeneration for her, as is sexual intimacy and free love; the camaraderie and empowerment found in the collective experience, especially multigenerational relationships between women—the Catalan grandmother, the lady from South America, and Olive—provide the psychological cohesion in the novel; and unlike Lawrence’s assertion at the end of Aaron’s Rod that “deep fathomless submission to the heroic soul in a greater man”41 will prove to preserve humanity in the face of war (an erie fascist premonition?), Rukeyser predicts that the self, empowered and formed in relation to the development of others, one that keeps moving toward “more freedom,” more openness and more connection, will change the future. Nevertheless, there are indeed generic similarities between the two texts. In both, the heroes flee their stifling pasts, represented by the confines and character of the nation state, in search of wholeness and value abroad. The portrayal of the housewife “Peapack” from New Jersey, whose face is always turning to “pudding” when a bomb explodes, embodies this Americanness that Helen is trying to escape. But it is Lawrence’s vision, illustrated in Aaron’s Rod, that “sees human existence as dialectic, a continual process of conflict between elements within the self as well as outside it,”42 that prefigures some of Rukeyser’s early development as a novelist and theorist, an influence that can be seen in the description of the protagonist in Savage Coast. Helen narrates her history in the opening scene:

  Her symbol was civil war, she thought—endless, ragged conflict which tore her open, in her relations with her family, her friends, the people she loved. If she knew so much about herself, she was obliged to know more, to make more—but whatever she had touched had fallen into this conflict, she thought, dramatically. The people she had loved best had been either willful and cold or weak in other ways. She was bitterly conscious of her failure, at a couple of years over twenty, to build up a coordinated life for herself.

  In this sense Helen is already wounded by “civil war” before the novel has even begun, and so she is herself a symbol for the changing political realities that the Spanish Civil War ushers in. At least in part, then, Savage Coast embodies one of the main tropes of the bildungsroman, in which “the [hero],” as described by Bakhtin, “emerges along with the world and he reflects the historical emergence of the world itself. He is no longer within an epoch, but on the border between two epochs, at the transition point from one to the other. This transition is accomplished in him and through him.”43

  Helen’s quest is to bridge this disunity, and not only to find “a way to reach action” but “to move past fear.” Her experience in Spain both exposes her feelings of ineffectuality and dependence and propels her toward independence and agency. Near the end of the novel, Helen thinks, “she had wanted a life for herself, and found she was unequipped; and adjusting her wants, cared to be a person prepared for that life.” This articulation marks an important turning point for Helen, in which she is able to assert her need for selfness outside the debilitating confines of the family, social and gender roles in which she was raised, those that leave her unprepared to act and live freely. She describes this coming to maturity in terms of war, as having “the fear of death replaced.” As Helen becomes increasingly free on the war-torn streets of Barcelona (“she would always have this street before her for a birthday”), speaking and acting without inhibition, she also becomes more radical
; it is thereby that Rukeyser weds gender liberation with sexual agency and political activism. This is why Hans proves such a powerful influence for Helen, both sexually and politically, for he “go[es] toward what [he] most want[s].” Hans is a decisive actor, and Helen describes his life as “single minded.” As a literary foil, he is used to model and mirror confidence, freedom and agency for Helen: “all his life, moving so steadily, watercourse! she thought; only let me move, too, keep on pouring free.”

  Near the end of the rejection letter for Savage Coast, the anonymous reviewer states, “This book has been a waste of time—I doubt if at any moment in the writing of it Miss Rukeyser had any confidence in setting down a single paragraph.” This sexist interpretation of a perceived textual instability might be read as a manifestation of Rukeyser’s and Helen’s difficulty in articulating and acting on their beliefs, of making a “coordinated” life, of speaking and acting with purpose and effortlessness, but the text itself embodies Helen’s development and reflects the aesthetic and political destabilization that Rukeyser writes toward. Helen’s difficulty in speaking, her “stutter,” as Susan Howe might call it,44 her self-made lyric interruption of documentary “facts,” is also a way to open up discursive space in the novel: it allows other voices to be heard and to participate in making meaning of history. The cesura opened by this hesitation mediates Helen’s own sometimes romantic desire for action, against the actual and often brutal experience of the Catalan people at war. Helen describes her ambivalence as a foreign national unable to interpret the events fully, saying often how she “had never wanted language so much,” implying both a desire to better communicate with the Catalans, with Hans, but also a desire for a language to describe and hold the complex meanings of events occurring around her. This ambivalence with language and speaking, though, exposes the actual difficulty in documenting the war as an outsider, thereby subverting any possibility of a singular hegemonic narrative of its history.45 This is exemplified in the scene where Helen is taken to the roof of the hotel in Barcelona by the Olympic guide: