{"id":53906,"date":"2013-06-11T10:50:37","date_gmt":"2013-06-11T14:50:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=53906"},"modified":"2013-06-11T09:34:57","modified_gmt":"2013-06-11T13:34:57","slug":"recovering-muriel-rukeysers-savage-coast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/06\/11\/recovering-muriel-rukeysers-savage-coast\/","title":{"rendered":"Recovering Muriel Rukeyser\u2019s Savage Coast<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Muriel<\/a><\/p>\n

In the Library of Congress archive of the American poet Muriel Rukeyser, there is a vast network of one-sided correspondence, incomplete drafts, unpublished texts, notes, proofs, diaries, and datebooks. It is a space of the unfinished, of process, and of radical possibility. Its silences represent the often violent effects of cold-war intellectual suppression, the sexism of editors, and the deaths of lovers. Over the course of six years I came and went, making the trip from New York to D.C., piecing together a literary history about a writer whose life and work are notoriously difficult to map.<\/p>\n

The archival breaks, aesthetic pronouncements, and biographical lacunae that characterize Rukeyser\u2019s archive do not feel particularly surprising for a writer whose career and work appear always disrupted and open-ended\u2014visible and invisible at the same time. Rukeyser\u2019s poems, biographies, and essays have persistently challenged the rigid artistic, political, and intellectual binaries that have shaped the twentieth century, and because of this she has experienced a continual burial and recovery. She has been alternately denigrated and admired for being an avant-garde and radical poet, a feminist, a theorist, an activist; for being sexually liberated and a single mother. She has been viewed from both sides of the critical establishment as being either too aesthetically experimental or not aesthetically rigorous enough, as too radical or insufficiently Marxist. These dichotomous readings of Rukeyser highlight the ways in which her work defied and remade the political and artistic programs of her historical moment. \u201cFor our time depends not on single points of knowledge,\u201d she wrote in The Life of Poetry<\/i>, \u201cbut on clusters and combinations.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Life of Poetry<\/i> begins on a boat evacuating Barcelona during the first days of the Spanish Civil War. In it, she describes an experience of profound transformation, writing of Spain as the place where \u201cI began to say what I believed.\u201d I followed that thought into her archive and back out again. Almost no one had written on the subject; her writings on Spain were like unmarked graves scattered through her work, identifiable only by a phrase or image repeated and refigured in other works, some of them long out of print, others lost and buried in the archive. But the silences of each gave access to the other: a line in a poem made a map into the archive; the material recovered in the archive made visible not only that which was hidden in her already published work, but elucidated new literary and political histories. Rukeyser wrote about Spain for more than forty years, in every genre. The texts overlap and echo each other; they proliferate across decades and are intertwined with other histories. Always they carry a sense of urgency, and always they return to just five days in 1936. <\/p>\n

\"Identity<\/a>

Identity card given to the athletes participating in the People\u2019s Olympiad.<\/p><\/div>\n

In July 1936, Rukeyser was sent to Spain on assignment for Life and Letters To-Day<\/i> to cover the People\u2019s Olympiad in Barcelona, a protest and alternative to Hitler\u2019s Berlin Games. Instead, she witnessed the first days of the Spanish Civil War. Rukeyser was on the last train to cross the Spanish border as the military coup began and a general strike was called in defense of the Spanish Republic. While stranded on the train in Moncada, she met and fell in love with the Rotfrontk\u00e4mpfer Otto Boch, a \u201cBavarian, with a broad strong face like a man in a Brueghel picture,\u201d who had been exiled from Germany and was traveling to the Barcelona games as a long-distance runner. Together, Rukeyser and Boch rode in the back of a pickup truck to Barcelona, \u201ca worker\u2019s city\u201d in the first days of the resistance, \u201cjewel-like\u201d and \u201cliberated.\u201d There, she watched the building of barricades, saw the first troops setting off to the Zaragoza front, marched for the \u201cwar dead\u201d and was given her political \u201cresponsibility\u201d by the organizer of the People\u2019s Olympiad, who said to those being evacuated, \u201cYou 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Rukeyser's<\/a>

Rukeyser\u2019s list of the events on her second day in Moncada.<\/p><\/div>\n

Forming a kind of craggy geologic site, archives are built by many hands that add things at random and sort them with all the distractedness of someone carrying a baby on one hip. Reading the archive, particularly this one, is a memory game in which things appear parallel and proliferating. One piece of the puzzle arrives in a cardboard box, sometimes just a slip of scrawled, yellowing paper in a manila folder, and then it disappears. The other part\u2014missing text, a strange piece of ephemera\u2014arrives in another box a month, a year, two years later. In one folder is a hand-drawn map of Moncada, where Rukeyser was stranded when the Fascist coup erupted, and a diary entry that meticulously documents every moment of those five days. In another is a list, written in smudged pencil, about the first day of the war: \u201croosters, \u201cbombs,\u201d \u201cfire,\u201d \u201cbreakfast,\u201d \u201cAaron\u2019s Rod<\/i>,\u201d \u201cOtto.\u201d There is an outline for a novel, tentatively titled \u201cIn the Whale,\u201d after Edmund Burke\u2019s \u201cSpain\u2014a great whale stranded on the shores of Europe,\u201d as quoted in the hallucinatory catalogue that opens Moby-Dick. <\/i>Tucked elsewhere is a lost poem <\/i>entitled \u201cFor O.B.,\u201d a brochure for the games, unused meal tickets, and a baggage claim from her journey. In a box from decades later is a series of identical clippings from German newspapers in 1972 with an obituary for Boch, who died more than thirty years earlier, at the end of the war.<\/p>\n

And then, there is the one remaining draft of the novel Savage Coast<\/i>, the pages yellowing, the revisions heavy, at times burdensome, a rejection letter hovering above the first pages. Written immediately upon her return from Spain in the autumn of 1936, the novel remained unpublished in her lifetime. It was brutally panned in her publisher\u2019s rejection letter, from 1937, for being, among other things, \u201cBAD\u201d and \u201ca waste of time,\u201d with a protagonist who is \u201ctoo abnormal for us to respect.\u201d Rukeyser was strongly encouraged to abandon the novel for a \u201cbrief impressionistic sketch\u201d of her experience in Spain and to continue working on her poetry. This is to say, the first critics of Savage Coast <\/i>discouraged Rukeyser from writing the kind of large-scale, developmental, hybrid, modernist war narrative that she had begun\u2014one that is sexually explicit, symbolically complex, politically radical, and aesthetically experimental\u2014in favor of the gender-appropriate lyric poetry of her first book and the brevity of \u201csmall\u201d personal narratives.<\/p>\n

The rejection of the novel highlights the constraints and expectations of women\u2019s writing in the thirties and forties, when women were often lauded for their smallness and modesty, for writing work that, as Louise Bogan recommended, \u201cconcerned itself with minute particulars.\u201d The rejection also demonstrates how the contemporary reader found the hybridity of such a work illegible, particularly the gender transgression implicit in its intertwining of the quest narrative, the romantic plot, the radical documentary, and the epic impulse. Despite this criticism, Rukeyser would never return to the more traditional lyricism of her early work, and she did not abandon the novel; she continued to edit the manuscript, working on it throughout the war, editing and rewriting with an eye, I imagine, toward us, her future readers. I don\u2019t know when she stopped working on the novel entirely, but it was eventually misfiled, left on the outermost edge of the archive, under the heading \u201cMiscellany.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n
\"A<\/a>

A baggage ticket from Rukeyser\u2019s transatlantic voyage from New York to London.<\/p><\/div>
\n<\/center><\/p>\n

The discovery and publication of Savage Coast<\/i> is significant, not only because, as Rukeyser\u2019s large body of work on Spain attests, the Spanish Civil War was an essential part of her poetic and political development, but also because it also provides us with new perspectives on the literature of the period. Written long before Orwell\u2019s or Hemingway\u2019s major texts on the Spanish Civil War\u2014at one point she editorializes, \u201cHemingway doesn\u2019t know beans about Spain\u201d\u2014Savage Coast<\/i> is only one of a handful of novels by foreign women on the subject and gives us a more complex understanding of how women positioned themselves within historical and cultural processes, offering a unique view of the political, artistic, and intellectual networks that shaped early twentieth-century global solidarities.<\/p>\n

Rukeyser\u2019s work on Spain likewise offers new methods for exploring the relationship between political radicalism and textual experimentation, as she grapples with issues of documentation and aesthetics, attempting to harness what Virginia Woolf called \u201cgranite and rainbow,\u201d within a single text. Savage Coast<\/i> is both a journalistic account of the first days of the Civil War as well as a fragmented and \u201cvisionary\u201d lyric about the formation of Rukeyser\u2019s own political, sexual, and artistic subjectivity inside its history. Her writings, then, give us new forms and vocabulary to work with: they change how we will read other works, seek out and represent suppressed histories; they \u201copen out of the future,\u201d to use Derrida\u2019s phrase.<\/p>\n

Savage Coast<\/i> is now available<\/a> for the first time, from the Feminist Press. It is Rukeyser\u2019s only novel. At one point in the narrative, the protagonist Helen says, \u201cI\u2019ve been wanting a country like this for a long time; I thought perhaps there was none.\u201d I felt the same way when I read the novel for the first time, sitting alone at a desk under the still fluorescence of the library, the pages a little brittle in my hands.<\/p>\n

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein is the editor of Muriel Rukeyser\u2019s novel <\/em>Savage Coast and the edition <\/em>\u201cBarcelona, 1936\u201d & Selections from the Spanish Civil War Archive. She received her Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the Library of Congress archive of the American poet Muriel Rukeyser, there is a vast network of one-sided correspondence, incomplete drafts, unpublished texts, notes, proofs, diaries, and datebooks. It is a space of the unfinished, of process, and of radical possibility. Its silences represent the often violent effects of cold-war intellectual suppression, the sexism […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":541,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[33,1302,571,11045,11047,952,11044,11046,3056],"class_list":["post-53906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-archives","tag-edmund-burke","tag-ernest-hemingway","tag-feminist-press","tag-george-orwe","tag-moby-dick","tag-muriel-rukeyser","tag-savage-coast","tag-spanish-civil-war"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRecovering Muriel Rukeyser\u2019s Savage Coast by Rowena Kennedy-Epstein<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"June 11, 2013 \u2013 In the Library of Congress archive of the American poet Muriel Rukeyser, there is a vast network of one-sided correspondence, incomplete drafts,\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" 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