Savage Coast

by Muriel Rukeyser

  40. In The Book of the Dead, which Rukeyser wrote in 1937, after the novel, she asserts that “poetry can extend the document.”

  41. Aaron’s Rod, 317.

  42. Mara Kalnins, introduction to Aaron’s Rod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  43. M.M. Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism,” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern Mcgee, eds. Carol Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986).

  44. Susan Howe writes that the “stutter,” or “what is silenced or not quite silenced,” is an essential trope of American literature, The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1993).

  45. This is unique for documentary works of this period, especially for a style that often sensationalizes its subject, and at times fetishizes or fabricates. Orwell has been the subject of such criticism, as well as Auden and Spender. Likewise, the Depression-era documentary projects of James Agee, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White have been accused of “sensationalism.”

  46. Thanks to William Rukeyser and Jan Heller Levi for their thoughts on this.

  47. “We Came for Games,” 370.

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

  49. Kertesz, 319.

  50. A good history of this brigade is in Arnold Krammer’s “German’s Against Hitler: The Thaelmann Brigade,” Journal of Contemporary History 4.2 (April 1969): 65–83.

  51. “We Came for Games,” 370.

  52. The Collected Poems, 232.

  53. Box 1:52, Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  54. “We Came for Games,” 370.

  55. Ibid.

  56. You can read full accounts of the “imbroglio” in Kertesz, Kalaidjian, and Bergman.

  57. Michael Kimmage, The Conservative Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

  58. As quoted in Kertesz, 43.

  59. Bergman, 570.

  60. This is a concept Julie Abraham develops for reading women modernists in Are Girls Necessary?: Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

  61. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1968), 8.

  62. At some point Rukeyser edited the title of the novel to reflect the transnational nature of the text, calling it Savage Coast (Costa Brava).

  63. Scheduled to take place July 19–26, 1936 in Barcelona, Spain, the Olimpiada Popular, or People’s Olympiad, was an international event organized by the Second Spanish Republic, meant to be a protest and alternative to Hitler’s Berlin games (scheduled for August) and one to which twenty-two countries were sending over two thousand athletes. Nine Americans were sent by the Committee of Fair Play in Sports. Two hundred athletes who had traveled to Spain for the games stayed or returned to volunteer in the International Brigades. More information on the People’s Olympiad can be found in: Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 (New York: Penguin Books, 2006); Peter N. Caroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); the New York Times (February 22,1936); the Daily Worker (July 23, 1936), and in the ALBA Collection at the NYU Tamiment Library.

  64. Robert Herring, the editor of Life and Letters To-day, asked Rukeyser to travel to Barcelona to report on the antifascist games; instead, they published her account of the war as “Barcelona, 1936” in the autumn of 1936. Her correspondences with Herring 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. You can read her essay in, “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).

  65. C. Day Lewis, The Magnetic Mountain (1933).

  66. “The Catalan women” on the train are debating contemporary politics; it is July 19, 1936 and the military revolt is already underway. The terms that Rukeyser is catching, “anarquista, comunista, monàrquica,” etc., demonstrate the complexity of Spanish politics at the outbreak of war. Catalonia had and continues to have a long history of Anarchist resistance, and, as the novel depicts, the Anarchists were on the forefront of organizing in response to the coup, securing parts of Spain, including the industrial centers of Madrid and Barcelona, against the Fascists. The Second Spanish Republic, while Socialist-Democrat, was not particularly loved by many parts of the Left, for it had failed to make the kind of far reaching reforms necessary for a more equitable society. On the other hand, the people of Spain rallied in defense of their Republic against the church-, elite-, and fascist-backed coup, and in Catalonia particularly they did this with an eye toward revolutionary change—from the collectivization of the land and factories to women’s liberation. One of the great issues on the left during the war was that the Communist Party proposed that the workers’ revolution should wait until after the war was won in order to build a strong Popular Front against fascism, one that included the middle class and that framed the fight against Franco as one for the preservation of bourgeois democracy. The Anarchists believed that the revolution and winning the war were one and the same. Orwell, of course, wrote a famous critique of the Communist Party in Spain in Homage to Catalonia (1938).

  67. By the 1930s, Hungary, which had already instituted anti-Semitic laws in the post-war era, had become increasingly aligned with and dependent on the fascist powers. Many Jews and radicals moved to Paris. Robert Capa (née Endre Ernő Friedmann), for example, perhaps the most famous photographer associated with the Spanish Civil War, was one of many Hungarian Jews working and living in Paris by the mid 30s.

  68. The military coup against the Second Spanish Republic began as a revolt in the Spanish garrisons in Morocco on July 17, 1936, and marked the beginning of the civil war. Spain’s colonial history in North Africa, and its loss of empire worldwide, proved to be an important factor in the uprising. Not only was there a large and well-trained military class that wanted to maintain its political, economic, and social place in an era in which there was little opportunity for external military action, but, as Helen Graham describes in The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), because of this the war was fought like a colonial war turned inward against “insubordinate indigenous people.” The military elite viewed themselves as having an “imperial duty” to maintain unity against the internal social and political changes in Spain. Not only did the military techniques practiced during the colonial war in North Africa play an important role, but the use of North African soldiers in Franco’s army is an equally important and understudied part of this history.

  69. Rukeyser had traveled to report on the second Scottsboro Nine trial in 1933 with the International Labor Defense (ILD). In 1931, nine black men were charged with raping two white women, and all but one were sentenced to death. The ILD worked on the case, and the Communist Party publicized it widely as indicative of racial and legal injustice under capitalism, engendering enormous attention from the international left, and forming important ties between the Communist Party and civil rights groups. During the trial, Rukeyser was jailed for fraternizing with African Americans and caught typhoid fever.

  70. A work stoppage of all but the most necessary professions (pharmacists, doctors) was called on July 19 to defend the Spanish Republic against the fascist insurrection. A coalition of left-wing groups, anarcho-syndicalists, and communists, came together to form the Popular Front.

  71. W.H. Auden, The Orators (1932).

  72. Rukeyser spent most of her time with the Swiss and Hungarian Olympic Teams. The American, British, and French teams were already in Barcelona.

  73. The six Americans on the train with Rukeyser were Ernest and Rose Tischter, David Friedman, Molly So
bel, Lillian Lefkowitz, and Mrs. Martha Keith “of Peapack, NJ” as described in the New York Times article “Start of Strife in Spain is Told by Eyewitness” (July 29, 1936).

  74. “The Communards’ Wall” in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, commemorates the execution of Parisians by the French army during the last days of the Paris Commune. Considered the first successful workers’ revolution, the citizens controlled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. Tens of thousands were massacred during the “bloody week,” and a great many more imprisoned or executed after the revolution was suppressed by the government. For a good history, see Donny Gluckstein’s The Paris Commune: A Revolution in Democracy (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011).

  75. John Reed was the author of Ten Days that Shook the World (1919), a firsthand account of the 1917 revolution in Russia.

  76. C.N.T., the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labor), was formed in 1910. An anarcho-syndicalist union, during the civil war they joined with the F.A.I., the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (Anarchist Federation of Iberia), thus uniting as the C.N.T.-F.A.I. The U.G.T., the Unión General de Trabajadores (General Union of Workers) was a Marxist-Socialist union formed in 1888. At the outset of war they joined forces as the Popular Front, along with many other workers’ parties. Both the C.N.T. and U.G.T. are still active unions.

  77. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848).

  78. General Goded was one of the many military leaders involved in the coup. When he surrendered, Lluís Companys, the president of Catalonia, forced him to make an announcement over the radio. He was executed that August. In his surrender speech he states, “Fortune has been against me and I am held prisoner. Therefore, in order to avoid more bloodshed, the soldiers loyal to me are free of all obligation.”

  Companys’s speech that followed: “Citizens: Only a few words, for now is the time of action and not words. You have just heard General Goded, who led the insurrection and asks to avoid more bloodshed. The rebellion has been stifled. The insurrection is put down. It is necessary for everyone to continue following the orders of the Government of the Generalitat (The Autonomous Government of Catalonia), heeding its instructions. I do not want to end without fervently praising the forces who, with bravery and heroism, have been fighting for the Republican cause, supporting civil authority. Long live Catalonia! Long live the Republic!”

  79. Chapter five remained unfinished, and is quite fragmentary, almost more impressionistic than narrative. Rukeyser appended a note to the manuscript outlining what she intended to do:

  (Note to the reader of this ms: The gaps in this chapter are conspicuous. They are the only gaps in the ms and they will be filled in a day or two, but that does not excuse them.

  One comes after p. 12 and is the story of the plans of the Hollywood executives to escape, their failure, and the transportation of a Spanish doctor to Barcelona in the car they had “commandeered.” Then the mayor’s committee representative arrives, thanks the train for its letter and collections, and warns them that they have one hour to provision themselves and then they are to lock themselves in the train, for the Fascists are expected. The grocery scene (unfinished) follows. It concludes with a fight between the two German children and the passage through the town of the gun-cars.

  Next scene on the train, expecting the Fascists. Conversations between Helen and lady from S. Am., and Helen, Peapack and two Moncada boys. Helen goes for a walk with Peter, who has been looking for a place to swim, and stops for food at a peasant’s house. She is left alone while he returns to the train. The house is fired on by snipers in the hills. She returns to the train. Bugle in town announces danger is past until further notice.)

  80. Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show (1936).

  81. In this scene, Helen and Peter are trying to grasp the situation and the experience on the train, while cautious not to romanticize or “dramatize it.” Rukeyser crossed out a fantastic line, where Helen says: “It’s very literary, that train,” a phrase that encapsulates so much about the moment in which she was writing. The self-conscious awareness of the line speaks to how Rukeyser was positioning herself and this work in the context of her contemporaries. By keenly referencing the novelistic trope of travel as transformative, it also highlights a common theme in writing about the Spanish Civil War, one in which “going over” is reflected in the movement of the train, of crossing the border into Spain.

  82. Rukeyser wrote a fragment that was never fully integrated into the chapter:

  Helen looked over the water jug, as she drank, as its thick rim pressed against the bridge of her nose. The line of it set the little garden against the olive hill, cutting off the rest. The hill looked peaceful, cultivated. She finished drinking, and gave the jug to the woman.

  “Peter!” she exclaimed, turned to the garden. “Vegetables!”

  He sat the jug down at the wall, finished drinking in a moment, nodded to the nodding woman. “You have a fine appetite for water,” he said to Helen. She felt again the hot fear in her stomach.

  “Spain makes me thirsty,” she answered, and smiled, looking at the hill.

  “Scared?”

  “Certainly.” They stood over the row, in the little garden. The ripe peas were round in the pod, cleanly seen under the thin green cover, each full bubble casting a small shadow. Succulence and freshness, the pottery jug, the rows of peas, the little, quiet house.

  The woman bobbed and laughed, at the praise of her garden. Behind her, a larger woman and an old man were sitting in the sun, on a bench against the house. They watched the foreigners. The old man pulled out a long rope lighter and touched off his cigarette.

  “That’s what I should bring back!” Helen said. “There’s a man in Connecticut who’s been wanting a lighter like that—” She repeated to the woman.

  “That’s easy, in Barcelona. You can get them anywhere. One peseta.” Her face changed suddenly, and she laughed. “Not now,” she said. “Wait. Huelga General.”

  Peter suddenly snapped his fingers.

  “Maybe she’ll make lunch for us.” he turned to her.

  “Of course, anything, eggs, an omelette, perhaps?”

  “Vegetables!” he said. “Could we have vegetables?” He grinned at Helen. “At this rate, I’ll be a fresh-air fiend by tomorrow.”

  “Certainly vegetables.” The woman turned and shouted at the other, larger one, in Catalan waiting for the answer.

  “How many?” Peter counted them out: Olive, the bitches . . .

  “And the Drews and the lady—” Helen added.

  “All right, eight, then.”

  “But they’ve got a lot of provisions. They won’t want to leave the train, anyway,” Helen thought: And your provisions? Where had Peter been while they were buying food?

  “Provisions! In the middle of the day! Well, say five then. Will you cook vegetables for at least five, please?” Peter was bargaining with the woman.

  “Leave your young lady here,” she was shrewd, she wrinkled her nose and eyes at Helen, she waved Peter on, “bring the rest back.”

  “You’re hostage, Helen!”

  Peter was running down the road.

  83. Edwin Rolfe, “To My Contemporaries” (1933).

  84. Chapter six opens with a passage from D.H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod (1922). Including this text inside her own, such that her character is in communication with it, is significant. Aaron’s Rod, like Savage Coast, is a travel narrative, one whose protagonist is also situated on the precipice between two eras. Rukeyser wrote in her journal about Lawrence during the period in which she was working on the novel, 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, and his Studies in Classic American Literature. Likewise, Rukeyser, like Lawrence, became a target of New Criticism, particularly by the critic R.P. Blackmur.

  85. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922). The line to which she refers is in “
Burial of the Dead,” when Madame Sosostris reads the tarot cards: “Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, the lady of situations.”

  86. Hart Crane, For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen (1923).

  87. J.W. von Goethe, from Wandrers Nachtlied (Wanderer’s Nightsong) (1870). The last two lines, which she recites, translate to “wait soon/you too shall rest.”

  88. André Malraux, Le temps du mépris (Days of Wrath) (1935).

  89. Horace Gregory, “Abigail to Minerva” (1936).

  90. The Catholic church had long been aligned with the ruling class and worked in the interests of the monarchy. During the war it supported the fascists, legitimizing the coup d’etat.

  91. Henry Adams, A Dynamic Theory of History (1904).

  92. Images of the Fascist Uprising.

  93. I suspect that Rukeyser might be describing Dr. Edith Bone, a Hungarian photojournalist who had become a British subject in the 1930s, and was in Spain with Felicia Browne, a painter who joined the people’s militia in August. Browne was the first British subject to be killed at the front. Bone remained in Spain to support the Republic; eventually she returned to Hungary, where she was disappeared and imprisoned in 1949, accused of being a spy. Her book Seven Years Solitary (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1957) recounts her experience.

  94. There are no Pyrenees, a phrase made by French supporters of the Spanish Popular Front indicating that the “front” extended across the Pyrenees border (Martin Hurcombe. France and the Spanish Civil War: Cultural Representations of the War Next Door: 1936–1945. [Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011]). The hope that France would form a United Front with Spain, along with England, was short lived. By August, France and England signed a nonintervention pact, along with Germany, Italy, and Russia, one that was supported by the United States. Nevertheless, Germany, Italy, and US corporations openly violated the agreement, and continued sending military aid to Franco’s Nationalist Army. Mexico and Russia supported the Republican army, though minimally, in comparison.