By Muriel Rukeyser and Rowena Kennedy-EpsteinThe Feminist Press at CUNY, 2013“Everyone knows who won the war,” reads the repeated refrain of Muriel Rukeyser’s Savage Coast. This reflection seems particularly cruel considering that Rukeyser’s unfinished novel, begun in 1936 but now published for the first time by the CUNY Feminist Press's Lost and Found series, is set in the period of optimism and enthusiasm immediately following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, an interval marked by rapid and seemingly successful pushes against the fascist rebels. The events of Savage Coast precede the Italian and German funding and weaponry that sent the Republicans to their defeat, bringing Franco to power and making Spain the testing ground for the fascist war machine.But Savage Coast relies on readers’ awareness of the war’s final outcome. The novel opens with a paragraph that nods to the violence to come, seeming to prime readers for a novel about war, which is never precisely Rukeyser’s focus. Its opening sentence will haunt the text and its readers:
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.
Though the first sentence’s re-phrasings nod to the ironic contrast between a romantic travel narrative and a bloody war lost to the Fascists, this opening prompts readers to reflect critically on their own optimism about the outcome of any war. That war has been lost. Why should this war be any different?Still in her early twenties, Rukeyser visited Spain to report on the People's Olympiad, an alternative to the 1936 summer Olympics in Berlin. Instead, Rukeyser found herself stuck on a stinking train in the heat of the Spanish countryside, immobilized by the General Strike that coincided with the first shots of the Civil War. Her novel, a shorter version of which was published during her lifetime as an essay in Esquire in 1974 (included in the Feminist Press's volume), follows her brief encounter with Spain and with her antifascist German lover.
Rukeyser is best known to current readers, if she is known at all, as a leftist poet and journalist. Her most famous works are a long-form protest poem about Union Carbide’s abuse of their miners, “The Book of the Dead,” and her mid-life reflection on the life of the writer in The Life of Poetry. Rukeyser was notorious to her contemporaries as a leftist enfant terrible with a growing FBI file. Rukeyser’s life, her work and the attention it attracted from Big Brother should become of renewed interest thanks to the publication of Savage Coast in the era of Wikileaks and Edward Snowden. Political commentators bent on asking why Snowden risked treason for his leaks might be well served to visit the world of optimism and political motivation that grounds Rukeyser’s novel.In the mid-1930s, when Savage Coast was written and originally rejected by her publisher Pascal Covici as “BAD” and “a waste of time,” Rukeyser was making a name for herself as a rabble-rousing journalist and award-winning poet. Rukeyser's first book of poetry, Theory of Flight, won the famed Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1935 and she was increasingly involved in writing for The New Masses and The New York Times. In 1936, she traveled to Europe in the employ of a couple writing about European cooperatives, where she met London's literati, including Robert Herring, who would send her to report on the People's Olympiad for his literary magazine Life and Letters To-day. Rukeyser was in Spain for only five days in July 1936, but in those days she witnessed the outbreak of the Civil War and the collapse of the anti-fascist People’s Olympiad. Though she continued to work on Savage Coast for some time after the rejection, Rukeyser ultimately left the novel behind. It was to be rediscovered in her archives by Rowena Kennedy-Epstein—misfiled, undated and unfinished.Helen, Rukeyser’s stand-in in the novel, is a reporter traveling outside of America for the first time. She relates to the Spanish landscape with naïve optimism that belies a war best known for the death of Lorca and the screaming holocaust of Picasso’s Guernica. But, despite an opening caveat that “this tale of foreigners depends least of all on character,” Rukeyser's novel puts civil war on the back burner in favor of a semi-autobiographical story of first love.
I can't help but speculate that the responses Rukeyser got from her publishers might stem from Helen’s sometimes whining anxieties, which play out on a scale of national strife and tragedy. Very early on, Helen frames this trip as the growing experience it conveniently turns out to be, neatly saying:
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 obligated to know more, to make more — but whatever she had touched had fallen into this conflict, she thought, dramatically…. 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 a fresh start.
Helen is constantly making sweeping comparisons between her unfulfilling life back in New York and the mass push against Fascism, and certainly these gestures can be frustrating. But as much as they are frustrating, they ring true to the inherent self-centeredness of someone in her early twenties. Rukeyser's novel might have seemed like a waste of time because it so accurately engages with the self-interest and drama that are the hallmarks of youthful self-loathing coupled with the over-identifying of the suddenly-radical. Rukeyser’s Helen seems more akin to Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood than to the picturesque Catalans she so admires, though she sees their struggle as hers.But despite Helen’s frequent inability to see six inches past her own nose, Savage Coast is far from a waste of time. Helen can be lucid. On the train she bonds with an interracial American couple. Later, in a conversation with the husband, she reflects on a meeting with Moncada’s mayor:
“Those people are, somehow, historic facts.”“Realer than any, more strong than any, more the clue?”“No,” she said. “We romanticize.”
This moment might read as a winking acknowledgement of Helen’s bad habits, but the tone of the moment, and perhaps the novel as a whole, reinforces this very same romanticizing, pointing to it as a fact of history. Pages later, talking to the same man, Helen responds to his call not to dramatize the events of the past few days in their memories by saying “But they dramatize it, don’t they? It dramatizes itself. They know, sooner than we, that it is the historic moment.”Savage Coast’s focus on an American swept up in the beauty of a foreign war might allow the novel to act as a prequel and companion narrative to Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. The insularity of Helen’s experience—contained by both her language barrier and the limited mobility necessitated by the General Strike—force an uncomfortable parallel between the war she witnesses but does not participate in and her own individual maturity and growth. To say it more simply: Helen feels the bloodshed but is not required to make such sacrifices herself. But like Hemingway’s love story between the American Robert Jordan and the Spanish Maria, Rukeyser’s novel is finally a meditation on the ways that war hypersensitizes the optimistic and naïve. Such witnesses are forced to live more life in a few days than they have so far in their quotidian bourgeois lives, and the only way for them to stay moored to the earth is to connect, physically and emotionally.In the tumult, stranded in the country town of Moncada, Helen encounters American tourists, the Hungarian Olympic team and some supremely idealized Catalan families. These scenes of expatriate union are rife with reflections on the cacophony of languages and with Helen’s frustration with her failures of communication. The train is “packed tight with words,” a “clatter of Catalan” and Helen is frequently “los[ing] every bit of language. God, she thought! Why should I care about speech this much? The blood pushed up behind her eyes, in her poverty.” Later she finds her “words falling on each other. If only I were fluent, she thought, I need words now!” Of course Helen has no shortage of words when reflecting critically on her own ignorance. Because of this, much of the novel is a portrait of youthful self-consciousness as we follow Helen’s anxiety-wracked attempts at negotiating for food and water from the (almost comically) generous Moncadans, who give one of the two town wells to the stranded travelers in spite of the very real threat of a food and water shortage.Despite her inability to translate or even to find the appropriate words, Helen meets Hans, who will become her lover before she learns his name. In an expatriate cliché, the American and the German share little common language (Rukeyser’s FBI file points out that she failed her German course at Vassar), conversing in French as they circle around one another and around the early wreckage of the war: “both were confined, but it would do.” Hans has fled Germany after the failure of his protests against Fascism and both he and Helen find in Spain the perfect venue for their failures of translation to be answered by the language of the body. Hans is, after all, an Olympic runner — a convenient foil for Helen. Her leg is crippled by an unspecified ailment, “the nerve in the leg pulled with a memory of past games, past sidelines, answers,” and she is “painfully conscious” of her own bulk, of herself as a “big angry woman.”With Hans, Helen allows her body to speak for her. She understands her sudden maturity and worldliness to be due as much to Hans as to Spain. In Hans, Helen seems to find a permanence and stability that defy the disorienting consequences of the war. He is solid ground to a woman unmoored:
As she shut her eyes, knowing the train lay dead in the dead in a dead station, she felt a powerful muscular motion around her: the train, the secret hills, the country, the whole world of war rushing down the tracks, headfirst into conflict like a sea, unshakable, the momentum adding until the need burst through all other barriers: to reach the center, to will continuance.
In a gesture that in context is more flattering than it might otherwise be, Helen constantly compares Hans's face to wood. But this is not a woodenness of emotion, “he was delicate wood, brown wood, white wood, struck by the pale night-light, behind shades, from the station, not speaking, only subtle, delicate, only strong.” He is wood because he is solid, allowing his passion and revolutionary fervour to flower, resisting the whirlwind of war moving past him. She “thought how clumsy her French must be, how she would not bear to tell him in over-simplified jargon that he was more reassurance to her than anything had ever been.” Hans is “complete” and avoids all of Helen's self-consciousness.Helen negotiates her burgeoning sense of radicalism alongside her growing sense of comfort in her own skin (thanks, largely, it seems to Hans's sexual attentions), and this negotiation sometimes involves groan-worthy optimism and an uncomfortable lack of engagement with the people actually involved in the fighting. Helen explains her identification with the Republicans as a non-political bond by saying, “It seems more a question of the presence of belief, of feeling.” It’s easy to dismiss Rukeyser's text as an American intrusion into international conflict, but this is, after all, more a coming-of-age text as it is a documentary of war despite the foreshadowing implied by her first paragraph. Rukeyser wants us to draw a parallel between a sexual awakening and a developing radical awareness. Eventually, Helen stops thinking and begins feeling,
She only saw his lips move, and felt the hot sunned space between herself and his body, and the hot truth of his biography.... Life within life, the watery circle, the secret progress of complete being in five days, childhood, love, and choice.
By this time, most of the train has finally arrived in Barcelona, and the grab-bag of expats have learned that the only universal language in Civil War Spain is the salute of the antifascist United Front. Though she has spent the entire novel panicking about things lost in translation (“‘Oh, Hans,’ she said in his language. ‘I wish I spoke German.’ Or English, either, she thought”), in Barcelona Helen discovers the communicative power of her feelings—or at least of her ability to express them with a raised fist. And though she ends the novel no closer to her Olympian beau in physical ability than when she first met him, Helen has found a different power, one that relies on neither her throbbing leg or her European languages phrase book.There is a simplicity to Helen's change that remains dissatisfying, or perhaps frustratingly willing to satisfy. But despite Helen’s character arc, the novel's ambiguity in its final pages resists neatness while still seeming to fulfill a checklist of pre-WWII novel tropes: “Besieged by confusion again, days shattered, a whole life lived in a few days, shattering down into confusion again?” wonders Helen.Savage Coast is certainly imperfect, certainly an example of juvenilia, certainly blissfully uncritical of its protagonist's cultural tourism and the crassness of setting a romance in a bloody war fought by others. But Savage Coast also allows its reader to identify with Helen's journey of self-discovery without chiding us for our own naïveté. It forms a snapshot of the strange period between American involvement in two European wars, and of the anxieties of this inter-war generation, who had not yet had to prove themselves on the scale demanded by the shell-shocked generation. Helen, like her contemporaries, must find a space in which to define herself. She finds it in war and in a reconciliation with her own body. Rukeyser's text proves unique not just because she is an American and a woman but also because we all know who won the war. Savage Coast shows what it meant to be a witness to it.____Samantha Carrick is a PhD. candidate in English at the University of Southern California, where she teaches and works on Modernist American poetry and visual archives.
