Savage Coast

“What a treasure! Muriel Rukeyser takes us back to those crucial days when Spain became the first international battleground against fascism and hope for democracy, to tell a powerful story of personal, sexual, and political awakening.
Savage Coast
is bound to be an instant classic.”

—ROBIN D. G. KELLEY, author of
Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

“
Savage Coast
now joins the lost brother and sisterhood of Spanish Civil War classics, from Arthur Koestler's
Dialogue with Death
, the desolate modernist novels of the Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda, Andre Malraux's
Man's Hope
, Josephine Herbst's
The Starched Blue Sky of Spain
, and the reportage of Martha Gellhorn. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein has rescued and edited a great story. Helen and Otto are not Emma and Sasha, nor are they Karl and Rosa, but the American radical poet who tells her story speaks to all of us.”

—JANE MARCUS, distinguished professor of English and women's studies, CUNY Graduate Center and the City College of New York

“Muriel Rukeyser spoke of Spain as the place where she began to say what she believed. At the time, Hemingway's and Orwell's male-centered blood and guts novels were greedily devoured, while a woman writing a sexually explicit, gender truthful and politically radical narrative against a background of war was inevitably ignored. Spain changed Rukeyser and her protagonist, Helen. This novel will change the reader. An extraordinary gift!”

—MARGARET RANDALL, author of
To Change the World: My Years in Cuba

“
Savage Coast
is an astonishing book, too long lost, now a treasure for historians of the Spanish Civil War, equally a pouch of rubies for poets. Rukeyser captures the intensity of the moment—personal, political, and still contemporary.”

—PETER N. CARROLL, author of
The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade

LOST & FOUND / LOST & FOUND ELSEWHERE

LOST & FOUND: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative
publishes primary sources by figures associated with New American Poetry in an annual series of chapbooks under the general editorship of Ammiel Alcalay. Lost & Found's aim is to open the field of inquiry and illuminate the terrain of an essential chapter of twentieth-century letters. The series has published little-known work by Amiri Baraka, Diane di Prima, Robert Duncan, Langston Hughes, Frank O'Hara, Margaret Randall, Muriel Rukeyser, and many others.

Under the auspices of The Center for the Humanities, and with the guidance of an extended scholarly community, Lost & Found chapbooks are researched and prepared by students and guest fellows at the PhD Program in English of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Utilizing personal and institutional archives, Lost & Found scholars seek to broaden our literary, cultural, and political history.

LOST & FOUND ELSEWHERE
is a unique new series of book-length projects emerging from this research. Working in partnership with select publishers, these books bring to light unpublished or long unavailable materials that have emerged alongside or as part of the Lost & Found project. Available in this series:

For more information, visit
lostandfoundbooks.org

Published in 2013 by the Feminist Press

at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

Introduction copyright © 2013 by Rowena Kennedy-Epstein

Text copyright © 2013 by the estate of Muriel Rukeyser

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First printing May 2013

Cover design by Herb Thornby,
herbthornby.com

Cover photograph of Muriel Rukeyser, circa 1936

Text design by Drew Stevens

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rukeyser, Muriel, 1913-1980.

  
Savage coast / Muriel Rukeyser ; Edited, with an introduction by

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-55861-821-3

I. Kennedy-Epstein, Rowena. II. Title.

PS3535.U4S38 2013

813'.54—dc23

                     
2013004425

Introduction

ROWENA KENNEDY-EPSTEIN

Editor's Note

Savage Coast

A NOVEL BY MURIEL RUKEYSER

Notes

“We Came for Games”

FROM
ESQUIRE
MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 1974

Acknowledgments

                 
INTRODUCTION

                 
Rowena Kennedy-Epstein

I
f this was real,” thinks Helen, the protagonist of Muriel Rukeyser's autobiographical novel
Savage Coast
, “it was because it was nearer the sum of everything that had happened before it than anything had ever been.” Stranded on a train in a small Catalan town during the first days of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Helen had just had sex with a German socialist who will soon join the first International Brigade, watched Catalonia begin to collectivize, and seen fascist soldiers escape into the hills, a plane flying low above her upturned head, hearing the bombs and rifle fire closer still—it is a perfectly modern moment, at the center of the novel. In addition to its avant-garde and genre-bending tendencies—toward documentary, abstraction, poetry—
Savage Coast
harbors the drama, the psychological exploration and the social critique of the realist novel. It is a bildungsroman of sorts, a “novel of formation,” tracing the political development of Helen—her transformation from tourist and witness into activist and radical, from girlhood “liberalism” to mature political engagement, from an “awkward” adolescence of rebellion and anger to a sense of sexual and historical subjectivity found in the collective experience of political action. Helen's transformation is Rukeyser's—she describes Spain as the place “where I was born.”
¹

When Muriel Rukeyser sailed to Europe in June 1936 she never meant to go to Spain. Already a successful poet, she had won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1935 for her first book of
poems,
Theory of Flight
, and had already engaged in political activism—she had traveled to report on the Scottsboro trial and was jailed for “fraternizing” with African Americans in 1933, and had completed her trip to West Virginia to document the Hawks Nest Tunnel mining disaster, an experience that would later become her most famous text, the modernist epic “The Book of the Dead” (
U.S. 1
, 1938)—when she was asked to travel to London as an assistant for a couple who were writing a book about cooperatives in England, Scandinavia, and Russia. This was her first trip abroad, and she was put in contact by the poet Horace Gregory with Bryher, Robert Herring and Petrie Townshend, the owners and editors of
Life and Letters To-day
, a prominent literary magazine that would later publish several of her poems.
²
It was through this group that Rukeyser was introduced to the London literary scene, meeting with T.S. Eliot and C. Day Lewis, and spending considerable time with H.D., writing in her diary: “she'll hate all the flaws that show in my poems.”
³
She spent a month in London with people “who afterwards would be the Labor Government . . . poets and refugees and the League of Nations correspondent from the Manchester Guardian.”
⁴
When Herring asked Rukeyser to fill in for a colleague and cover the People's Olympiad,
⁵
meant to be a protest and alternative to Hitler's Berlin Games, and one to which twenty-two countries were sending athletes,
⁶
Rukeyser gave up her chance to go to Finland and Russia, “for I was driven,” she wrote, and set out to Barcelona.