Savage Coast

by Muriel Rukeyser

  Deeper in the crowd, Collins the Irishman helped back the bakery wagon against the curb for speakers to stand. Shoulder against it, he complained to the Welshman that, given broader shoulders, he might have been the weight-thrower he wanted to be; he gave the first speaker a hand up, and stood back among the English.

  The straight lines of mourning black were dissipated now. Spotted among the Spaniards in the square, the Olympic people were hard to find, even by the armbands, for the opening was so completely filled that the crowd pressed tight; only the heads were seen, the arms below the shoulder were lost and invisible. The crowd became single minded, uniform, Catalans and foreigners welded finally. All the faces turned up to the balcony, the soldiers against the laundry, the fierce sky that rained light down on that coast, that city; they turned to look up to the speaker.

  It was the committee-member who represented the Games, telling of the place of the Olimpiada in the fight, introducing representatives of all countries, to repeat here what had been said in the earlier meeting, and to tell the participants the government’s position now.

  Peter whispered to Olive in the crowd, “We were right, the Games have embarrassed the government all along. Foreigners, to create situations—what parasites we become!”

  In the balcony, the metal-faced Communist appeared, leaning over, looking down with a recognizing glint at the heads of those he had brought in. The committee-member spoke of the glory of the war, and his words were blotted out. The Catalans shouted in a breathy cry of relief, the soldiers on the roof moved together, leaning on the bright guns. A painful line of sunlight ran down the metal of the guns and buttons. Quicksilver brilliance escaped over the square of faces, a noonday smile of light.

  “. . . all countries defending the Popular Front, the need we have now to keep it whole and fighting . . .”

  A car blasted three times with its horn, trying to force through from a side street, but the group shifted for a moment at the corner, someone ran off to speak to the driver, and he backed down, taking another street. The entrance of every tributary was filling with people, who edged in, contracting the space around the speaker until the wagon he used for platform hardly showed, tided with listeners. Only a few heavily shadowed doorways stood free.

  Helen found Hans in one of these, as Martín was announced. He climbed on top of the car, dominating the meeting immediately. She recognized him before the introduction; his square impressive head with the fierce blond eyebrows marked him. He had been in the doorway of the Olympic, he had spoken in the street for the Olimpiada committee; but now he was introduced as the organizer of the Games, the force that had set in action this week which had become so different from what was planned, the leader of the committee, about to start for Saragossa. He would speak, in a few minuets; but first, he wished to have a speaker for the French delegation read the message from the French.

  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

  “Hans,” she said, standing close to him in the recess of the doorway. The crowd almost reached them, sunny and receptive in the square, pressing close to the speaker. She looked up into his face, brown, darkened by the arch over them, and, turned on the speaker, the weird eyes. The loved mouth.

  “I know what you are doing,” she said in English, “bravery. Whatever has happened to change me is ended now, in this week, all added up. Whatever you do, I have come along—”

  He looked down at her with an unchangeable mute look, still carrying something of the look he gave to the speaker, but darker, close.

  “Oh, Hans,” she said in his language. “I wish I spoke German.”

  Or English, either, she thought. The change, the proof in her, the moment of proof given her by the war, the academic sadness she knew before, reaching, inarticulate; all the life she was beginning to see belonged to him, discoverer, inventor.

  He took her elbow with his arm that was deep in the shadow and held her against his side. He was strong, his will was clear, he knew quickly.

  He spoke in French. “Helena, shall we play word-games?” His thought was always visible on him, small, a change like water-change; he remembered the train. He went on. “The gifts of the revolution. Shall we say: if it had not been just so at Port Bou on a Sunday morning, if a certain train had not stopped at such a town—? The whole revolution. It gave us to each other, that doesn’t end anywhere. We know what we have to do. Even when you go—” he turned his head painfully.

  Her face came up, colored and blurred. All division, all the denial of the time was bearing down on her. She protested it.

  The voice she spoke in was mad, she felt she cried out, but the words did not issue so very loud.

  “Hans, shall I stay with you, shall I stay?” She was repeating and desperate now, wanting to be something else, in a different position, possible.

  “We know what we have to do,” he said evenly. He moved his head from side to side, with a menagerie-animal slinging motion. “Helena,” he repeated without looking at her, in a dull fever. “Helena.”

  The crowd shouted at something the speaker said. Martín was up again, on the car, his square face and heavy yellow eyebrows dominating the square.

  “I am changed,” Helen told him. “I want you to know. You began anew—you set in motion—it is as though I had gone through a whole other life,” she said lamely. But she felt the truth of the words before she spoke them and they became timid and broken.

  “Yes,” he said. He was still suffering.

  “I was almost born again, free from fear. The ride in, or the morning at the Olympic.”

  The crowd bore forward against the speaker on an immense cheer, drowning Hans’s response. The boy standing on the roof of the car put up his hand for silence, and Martín went on, in Catalan. He was to repeat this speech in all the languages. The crowd quieted. Hans repeated the word.

  “Earlier,” he answered, and smiled for the first time that day. “I saw you on the station platform. It was there that I saw you, you know,” he said, with love. She admitted all his feeling, she was ready for anything he would disclose, anything the crowd or the world disclosed, sensitized to their wish. Through Hans. Transformed. “There was a pregnant woman—and the Hungarian told you it was General Strike, and walked away. I saw your face change, and a look entered. It was a beautiful thing for me to watch.”

  She hardly heard his words, as the meaning struck her. She only saw his lips move, and felt the hot sunned space between herself and his body, and the hot truth of his biography. She saw quickly the children in the trees, the lady from South America who was mother to her in her half-day of adolescence, the friends, the leadership, the deep terrible truck ride, the whole progress of a life within her life. And then she saw what he was saying.

  “And you!” she cried.

  Now it was clear.

  Life within life, the watery circle, the secret progress of a complete being in five days, childhood, love, and choice.

  Now it was coming to this.

  She could see what was coming.

  She was riding to it, down its st
reet, its track.

  “I am German,” he said.

  Slowly and magnified, like automobile accidents in the hour-long moment before the fender smash.

  “It was clear to me from the beginning.”

  All his life, moving so steadily, watercourse! she thought; only let me move, too, keep on pouring free. It had always been clear to him; he was continuing.99

  “Even before I came to Spain, I think it was clear. And the necessity.”

  The cheering of the crowd was growing tremendous. The speech was being finished for the first time, in its first language, going on, stopping for the cheers, swinging ahead like the truck, the fierce journey geared to halt at barricades, swinging through speeches and lifted fists.

  They must go back to the demonstration.

  He bent down and kissed her, tense; the rich sunlight, the rich shadow, the heady cheering, were lost, and she was absorbed again and dark, and knew she was about to change again, but without violence, through natural slow force.

  “I love you,” he said, and put his hand on her, again. “Red Front,” flashing the memory. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  He was in the crowd, turning, moving so rapidly with his runner’s acuteness, his entire body aware and turning, so fast that she could not see him as he passed through its depth. She went forward, to the first step at the doorway. Now she could see the crowd plainly. The long sea of faces was all one face, repeated always over the entire square and into the fingers of streets stretching away from it, one face always, set in vigor and effort.

  After a moment it broke: she could see Olive and Peter standing about ten yards from her. She edged through the crowd to where they stood, listening.

  “Now he will repeat in French,” Peter whispered. Martín threw his head up. The short second introduction was over. He was beginning again.

  “Comrades; Olympic athletes; spectators, friends of the Olympics, Catalans:

  “You came to Barcelona to see the Games of the Popular Front . . .”

  Olive swung to Peter with her whole body, frankly. “I want something,” she said.

  “. . . You have been privileged to remain to see the glorious victory, the real victory, of that Front.”

  “I want a child. I want us to have a child,” she said in a clear profound voice.

  “Many of you come from countries which have begun this war, and you know that it is the war we all face, throughout the world. It is the war of our times. We know that now.

  “Many of you come from countries suffering the same oppression we have suffered. Your countrymen will have another example of victory. The people of Spain have many gifts. This struggle is their gift to all countries.

  The victory, thought Helen, in all countries. Planes, the bombs of war, the illustrious words, love, my love, my love. The coast, the voyage?

  “You have come to this country as foreigners in the moment of our war, and you have felt the unreal constraint of acting as aliens when you are our brothers, when this war belongs to all of us. You have been placed in the position of provocation to the Fascists; they have fired on your demonstrations, they have killed your men.

  The faces lifted in pride and knowledge. The crowd of nations sealed in, small, unified.

  “You have felt the inaction of strangers, but you are not strangers to us.

  The silence, the attention, the knowledge of all of them, now, finally, of each other, the hurrah in the enormous sunlight (soldiers, blazing white, the coast, the sea, the words at last, promise and condemnation) like the hurrah of big guns, and the speed like sleep, like victory, of the cheering in their ears.

  “Now you are about to return to your own countries. The boats are ready: the English will leave on their own boat, the Belgians will take all others on a ship they have chartered. If you have felt inactivity, that is over now. Your work begins. It is your work now to go back, to tell your countries what you have seen in Spain.”

  NOTES

  1. In Savage Coast, Helen calls Spain her “birthday,” and in the poem “Letter to the Front” Rukeyser calls Barcelona the “city of water and stone where I was born,” The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, ed. Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005).

  2. These correspondences can be found in The Muriel Rukeyser Collection, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, at the New York Public Library.

  3. “Diary” Box I:56, Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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

  5. Scheduled to take place July 19–26, 1936.

  6. Originally, both Spain and Germany had vied for the 1936 Summer Olympics. The Olympic Committee’s choice of Germany proved to legitimize Hitler’s regime rather than “open” it, as they had hoped.

  7. Introduction to The Life of Poetry (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1996), 1.

  8. Ibid.

  9. “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).

  10. In addition, upon her return she spoke at political meetings and wrote small articles in the Daily Worker and student newspapers.

  11. The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, ed. Kaufmann and Herzog, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005).

  12. The review was most likely written by her mentor Horace Gregory, as a May 31, 1937 letter from Pascal Covici indicates that he agrees with Gregory’s assessment of the novel. This correspondence can be found in The Muriel Rukeyser Collection, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, at the New York Public Library.

  13. Anne Herzog, “‘Anything Away from Anything’: Muriel Rukeyser’s Relational Poetics,” “How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet”: The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser, ed. Anne Herzog and Janet Kaufman (New York: Palgrave, 1999), 33.

  14. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 8.

  15. Theresa Strouth Gaul, “Recovering Recovery: Early American Women and Legacy’s Future.” Legacy, vol. 26, no. 2 (2009): 262–83.

  16. Marina Camboni, “Networking Women: Subjects, Places, Links Europe-America, 1890–1939.” In-Conference, How2 Journal 2.1 (2003).

  17. The Life of Poetry, 85.

  18. Ibid., 35.

  19. Kate Daniels. “Muriel Rukeyser and Her Critics,” Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers, eds. Margaret Dickie and Thomas Travisano (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996): 247–63.

  20. Ibid.

  21. W.H. Auden, “Spain,” The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, ed. Valentine Cunningham (New York: Penguin, 1980), 100.

  22. See, for example, Beevor, Cunningham, Carroll, Graham, Nelson, Preston, Perez, and Thomas.

  23. Helen Graham. The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 29. As Graham notes, Franco wanted not just to conquer but to fully supplicate and destroy the enemy.

  24. Graham, 29.

  25. Ibid., 32.

  26. Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain (New York: Penguin, 2006). Beevor notes that many American companies had factories in Spain, including Ford and General Motors. Over the course of the war, along with Studebaker, they supplied twelve thousand trucks to Franco’s army. Dupont provided forty thousand bombs, sent via Germany. The Texas Oil Company and Standard Oil supplied more than 3.5 million tons of oil, on credit, to the Fascists.

  27. Spain’s was the first war in which aerial bombing of civilians was practiced, most famously in the bombing of Guernica by the German Condor Legion.

  28. “We Came for Games,” 370. Russia and Mexico (though minimally) were the only countries that actively supported the Republican government in defense of itself, and while much has been written about the “communist influe
nce” and the rifts in the Popular Front between revolution and liberal democracy, between anarchism and communism, Helen Graham has noted that the influence, both ideological and military, of Communist Russia was nothing compared to that of Hitler and Mussolini.

  29. This is not surprising, considering that “going over” and volunteering in a militia was considered a crucible of masculinity for the bourgeois left, most famously rendered by Orwell, Hemingway, Spender and Auden, in whose works almost no women are represented, other than as sexual partners. Likewise, in literary volumes and poetry collections published in the 30s that addressed Spain, Popular Front politics or proletarian literature, women were almost completely ignored. See Nelson and Wald for a good overview of this publishing history.

  30. For more information on women in Spain, see Shirley Mangini, Memories of Resistance: Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); and Martha A. Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005).

  31. “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).

  32. “We Came for Games,”192.

  33. Ibid. The question is phrased a bit differently in The Life of Poetry, and again in “Mediterranean.”

  34. Luise Kertesz, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1980).

  35. For a more detailed discussion on the modernist documentary, see Stott, Entin, Kalaidjain, Robinowitz, Wald, and Marcus.

  36. Paula Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 3.

  37. Ackelsberg, 21.

  38. D.H. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  39. Rukeyser writes often in her journal about Lawrence, and his influence on her early work is clear, particularly his explicit renderings of sexuality and his discussion of a dynamics and metaphysics of poetry. Perhaps most important, though, is his Studies in Classic American Literature.