Savage Coast

by Muriel Rukeyser

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  ———. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry & the Politics of Cultural Memory. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.

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  ———. Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

  Rukeyser, Muriel. The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Edited by Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.

  ———. “Barcelona, 1936.” “Barcelona, 1936” & Selections from the Spanish Civil War Archive. Ed. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein. New York: Lost and Found, The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, Series II (March 2011).

  ———. “For O.B.” “Barcelona, 1936” & Selections from the Spanish Civil War Archive. Ed. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein. New York: Lost and Found, The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, Series II (March 2011).

  ———. The Life of Poetry. Ashfield: Paris Press, 1996.

  ———. Savage Coast. Ed. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein. New York: The Feminist Press, 2013.

  ———. “We Came for Games.” Esquire. October 1974. 192–95, 368–70.

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  ———. Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Muriel Rukeyser wrote and edited Savage Coast between 1936 and 1939, but the novel remained unfinished in her lifetime. Because of this, we don’t know what she would have done with the text had she prepared it for publication herself. Rukeyser wrote the novel with unusual speed in the fall of 1936, and it was rejected by her publisher in the spring of 1937, but she continued to work on it throughout the war. The opening line, “Everybody knows who won the war,” was scrawled in handwriting atop the first page, and was obviously written after the fall of Barcelona in early 1939. The original manuscript has her editorial changes in type, pen, and pencil, indicating the multilayered nature of her editing process, and one chapter was left incomplete, with an outline appended. In this sense the text is still in flux as we encounter it now, especially considering how it interacts and overlaps with other texts she was writing at the time. The open-ended nature of the manuscript seems an appropriate reflection on both the motifs of movement in the novel and the ideas that Rukeyser was writing toward—ones of mutability, interaction, and wavelike discovery. In preparing the novel for publication, I tried as much as possible to follow her editorial directives. Rukeyser was so bothered by the bowdlerizing of editors, their insistence on “cleaning up” her grammar, that she had a stamp made to emboss “PLEASE BELIEVE THE PUNCTUATION” atop her manuscripts. With that in mind, I have tried to leave her words, sentence structures, and punctuation as she wrote them, though I have corrected her Spanish and Catalan spelling where necessary, as well as any misquotations, typos, and grammatical inconsistencies. The paragraph breaks, which are almost like poetry, are hers, and remain. Only in the first chapter was I forced to make a difficult editorial decision.

  During editing, Rukeyser crossed out the place names in the opening chapter with pencil, as if to signal that she wanted this beginning scene to be read as a moment in any country, at any historical moment, in any war. The opening sentence of the manuscript looks like this: “The train went flashing down France toward Spain, a stroke of glass and fine metal in the night.” However, she didn’t change the sentence structure to accommodate her editorial decisions, nor did she insert any indication that she wanted to use a kind of ubiquitous proper-noun-replacing Victorian dash, such that it would have looked like this: “The train went flashing down ______ toward ______.” If the manuscript were reproduced faithfully, according to her editorial assertions, it would read like this: “The train went flashing down toward a stroke of glass and fine metal in the night.” This sounds kind of beautiful at first, but if one continued like this it would be like reading sentences off a cliff: “The train slowed down with a civilized grinding under the shed at.” Since Rukeyser did not continue this editorial practice throughout the novel, and abandoned crossing out place names by the second page of the second chapter, I’ve decided to leave the names in, for sake of clarity and readability, especially since Savage Coast is a text that renders, often times quite beautifully, the very specific geography of Spain at the moment of civil war.

  —Rowena Kennedy-Epstein

  SAVAGE COAST62

  To George and Elizabeth Dublin Marshall

  This tale of foreigners depends least of all on character. None of the persons are imaginary, but none are represented at all photographically; for any scenes or words in the least part identifiable, innumerable liberties and distortions may be traced.

  —Muriel Rukeyser

  CHAPTER ONE

  On Saturday, according to all the latest reports, Barcelona was calm, and as yet not a shot had been fired.

  —Reuters dispatch

  Everybody knows how that war ended. What choices led to victory, reckoning of victory in the field with the armed men in their sandals and sashes running blind through the groves; what defeats, with cities bombed, burning, the plane falling through the air, surrounded by guns; what entries, drummed or dumb, at night or with the hungry rank of the invaded watching from the curbs; what changes in the map, colored line falling behind colored line; what threat of further wars hanging over the continents, floating like a city made of planes, a high ominous modern shape in the sky.

  EVERYBODY KNOWS WHO won the war.

  The train went flashing down France toward Spain, a stroke of glass and fine metal in the night.

  Its force of speed held the power of a water-race, and dark, excited, heavy before morning: it was traveling, lapping in the country, in speed.

  She got up, bending her head low, twisted the length of the sleeper, and pressed her face against the window. Now she could gather herself firmly in, twist in the sleeper, lie with her eyes washed over by black countryside pouring past, streaming over her as she stared out.

  She looked out with an intent look of finality: she expected everything of the day, of the long roll of night-country. In a blaze of excitement, the world changed: to speed, sleep and speed.

  The tense, desperate stroke of the train relieved all the passengers: no responsibility, no world, only sleep, sleep and speed in the black, the calm night falling, preserving speed, opening up the shadows, drawing away to morning.

  Casual and direct, the tourist train went down, flying like a high whistle across the air.

  South of Carcassonne the early morning, and with all the cocks crowing, the landscape
was changing now, the neat silvery fields giving way to white hills and cliffs, standing spread, catching the facets of bright windows in the wake of the train.

  Helen woke with brightness on her. She lay in the lower sleeper, looking out level at the gray terraces, the gasps of blackness as tunnels enclosed them, the careful white masonry of bridges and underpasses.

  High up one of the hills speeding past them, a man stood for an instant, leading a donkey.

  The black of another tunnel wiped him out.

  The tunnel-roar lasted for minutes, at last exploding into the shriek and light of a train whistling emergence. They were leaning around the shoulder of a mountain now.

  “Look!” she said, startled.

  The stranger in the upper berth moved her head lazily. The reflection swung in the door-mirror which had opened during the night. She was older and fairer than Helen, not so large, but flabby and lax in the early morning.

  “First time you’ve seen it?” she asked.

  “Any of this,” the girl answered.

  “But there’s plenty of cactus in the States,” the older woman said, yawning.

  The guard put his head in at the door, cutting her yawn short.

  “Ten minutes to Cerbère,” he stated, and shut the door.

  “Better get up, better get up,” muttered the woman, clamoring down the trim ladder.

  She stood on the floor of the little compartment, very smart in its dull green metal, very compact and comfortable. Lazily, she pulled her underwear to her over the top berth, and started dressing.

  Helen lay still, looking out.

  The hills dipped into green valleys, climbed steeply up, balanced tiny white houses with tile roofs on their edges, broke again, and rose into mountains. The Pyrenees produced their little churches and donkeys, plaster and stucco houses, enormous sweeps of green forests and bone-white rock. Fiery dark cypresses sprang up along the slopes, urging them up. The spread of the mountains was wingspread, white and terrible, or tawny, as if blood were beneath.

  The woman was out quite soon, looking for coffee down the aisle.

  The train slowed down with a civilized grinding under the shed at Cerbère.

  Helen swung her shoulders to the other end of the bed, looking out the large window.

  Across the double tracks was the bookstall, all the paper-covered books ranged cheerfully.

  Two porters, covered with tennis rackets, were helping a party across the station.

  The fat man in the beret looked up appealingly, walking alongside the windows until the right one was found, and he might tiptoe and flutter and assist.

  On the big walls the poster with its yellow diagonal, “Pour La Protection des Jeunes Filles,” stared across at her.

  Two boys, very daintily muscled, strolled up and down; the one in the maroon silk shirt had his arms across the other’s shoulders.

  The fine tonic heat rested on the shed.

  Helen began to get dressed.

  The last station in France. Spain opened up to her, in fifteen minutes!

  The twinge of excitement pulled the nerve in her leg. Sun would cure that.

  She drew the sweater over her head, and opened the door.

  It lay there, just on the other side in a pocket of hill, the old water, the Mediterranean. Gray and trembling with sun, and only a glimpse.

  Urgently now, the train began again. Finding its full speed, it whipped around the slopes.

  The sea went by, was covered, was laid out full again, cut with sunlight.

  Helen found the other woman in the next compartment.

  “We might just as well sit here for a few minutes,” the woman said. “The frontier’s next, and this place is so clean and vacant, just right. Have you changed your money yet? No, don’t go, I just want to tell you how glad I’ve been that you were put in my compartment—not some old Scotchwoman, I always think there’s going to be some old Scotchwoman stuck with me. But the minute I saw you—I knew we wouldn’t fight about the lower.”

  Helen laughed.

  “And then,” she went on, “I was so glad to show somebody those photos of my children—I guess I do miss them, no matter what they say—and, in a manner of speaking, we are neighbors, aren’t we, if you live in New York, and I’m just across the river in Jersey— in Peapack?”

  “The river isn’t very much, as far as barriers go,” agreed Helen.

  “And it was nice to talk to you about my friends in Barcelona. He’s really very attractive—you’d like each other, I think—you must meet them. Maybe we could all go to a bullfight this afternoon; there are always bullfights, Sunday afternoons, in Spain, aren’t there?” said Peapack.

  “I don’t know. But I have to look up the Olympiad man, as soon as I arrive,” said Helen.

  “Olympiad? What Olympiad?” asked Peapack. “The Olympic games are in Berlin, aren’t they? Why I planned to meet my husband at the end of the week and go on to Germany. He has some letters to some very interesting people there. And then we’re going on to Italy, to Milano—we’re going to meet some very interesting people there, too.”

  “These are against the German games,” said Helen. “People’s Olympiad,63 against the Nazi games, against Fascism.64 They are being held in protest against the others. In an entirely different spirit.”

  “Well,” said Peapack, “I like the spirit of sportsmanship. We have some very interesting contacts in Germany. Why should there be games against games?”

  The newspapers lay unfolded on the floor, carrying the headlines of Europe that spoke of war on every street, knew that the Undergrounds were not safe from air-raids now, put advertisements on its front pages asking for gas-masks recommended for children.

  Peapack went on. “I guess there can’t be too many games,” she said brightly, to make peace.

  Helen looked out the window.

  Spain began here, hot and confusing.

  The white road disappeared behind a church.

  A man with a wide black sash waved from a row of peas.

  Her mood had changed since yesterday. Then, she had crossed the Channel, gone down to Paris on the fast train, whipped across the city, and come on this one, all in a daze of excitement, carried away with the excitement of it, but still locked into herself, traveling alone. It was all new and must be important, must be valuable, in the same way that she was used to thinking she must grow to be valuable. It was too much to carry, all this self-consciousness, and it was beginning to relax from her in the heat and adventure here. She always drew into herself so painfully, conscious of herself years ago as the white, awkward child, and later as the big angry woman. Being that conscious, she knew enough to train most of it out of her, and had grown into a certain ease, an alliance among components, that resembled peace. But 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. This trip to Europe was to be a fresh start, in the same way that college had given her a fresh start. And now, nearing the end, with her work done and this week to spend at a People’s demonstration, as she chose, the tension was breaking a bit. The nerve in her leg, which had been so disturbing all year, was almost the only reminder. The rest was beginning to turn outward. She could give herself thoroughly to anything that broke down the tension, and this day was beginning to, with the warmth and whiteness, the first-seen cypresses, the inconsequential woman talking away.

  Europe, the thought of Europe swelled over the horizon, like a giant dirigible, strung with lights in a dream of suspended power, but filled, in the dream, with a gas about to burst into flame. When the porter had talked to her about war at V
ictoria Station the day before, premonitions crowded down on her; Paris made it worse, with its posters and notices of gas-masks and the gossip of cellar drills and war ritual.

  But all of it was beginning to wear away. France, strongly Popular Front, was a pillar after England’s mixed politics and mad conversation. Sun was restoration after London, and Spain, flooded with sun, backing a People’s Olympiad, had shaken her free before she reached the frontier.

  Let it all pass, American strikes and civil cases, grievance in love, looking for rest, seeing only tensions everywhere, nightmares of coming struggle, the concentration camp, the gas-mask face, night voices, German pain, threat of all forms of war.

  Let it pass in bursts like bursts of music, until there is some quiet after, quiet and heat and speed to wave over one, tide that waves over a woman lying on sand under a cliff, a cliff like the one here of white and green and cypress, heat like this heat that one can put the hand into, speed like this speed, a train flying south, quiet like this quiet, now that this train has come to final rest.

  Port Bou.

  The frontier.

  Porters ran screaming up and down the platform, valises fell and jostled through windows, passengers clutched each other, dropping down the perpendicular steps.

  The cataract madness of a new language filled the station, she had a porter who was pushing his way across, head down, Peapack had found somebody to take her five rawhide suitcases to the customs office.

  There was the young English couple, the fresh girl, the young husband, long soft eyes, long soft mustache, whom she had noticed head up crossing the Channel. His green porkpie hat had a faintly Latin air.

  She entered the customs building.

  The porter shouted, “First or third, lady?”

  Peapack signaled she was going first, as in France.

  Helen could see the wooden benches of third from where she stood.

  They were filling with Spaniards.