Savage Coast (2 page)

Instead of reporting on the games, however, Rukeyser documented the outbreak of civil war, as the fascist-backed military coup that plunged Spain into violence occurred, not coincidentally, two nights before the People's Olympiad was to begin, disrupting what would have been one of the largest international antifascist events of that period. Only twenty-two at the time, Rukeyser's experience as witness both to the military coup and the revolutionary response in Catalonia proved transformational; she would write about Spain,
its war, exiled and dead, for over forty years after, creating a radical and interconnected twentieth-century textual history. Rukeyser was only in Spain five days, from July 19 to 24, just long enough to see “the primitive beginnings of open warfare of this period,”
⁷
but she subsequently cites the experience as the place where “I began to say what I believed,”
⁸
and “the end of confusion.”
⁹
In each work on Spain the same narratives, images, and phrases proliferate, re-contextualized inside her contemporary political and literary moment. In poems, reportage, memoir, essays and fiction, and more often in experimental forms that combine these genres, she reiterates, re-imagines, and theorizes her experience as a witness to the first days of the war and to her own moment of political, sexual, and poetic awakening.

Rukeyser's narrative of the first days of the Spanish Civil War appears in four major essays written from 1936 to 1974, all of them uncollected—“Barcelona, 1936” (
Life and Letters To-day
, vol. 15, no. 5, 1936), “Death in Spain: Barcelona on the Barricades” (
New Masses
, September 1936), “Start of Strife in Spain Is Told by Eyewitness” (
New York Times
, July 29, 1936), and “We Came for Games” (
Esquire
, October 1974),
¹⁰
which is included in this volume—as well as in the introduction to
The Life of Poetry
(1949), in numerous poems that span her oeuvre—“For O.B.” (undated), “Mediterranean” (1936), “Moment of Proof” (1939), “Other-world” (1939), “Correspondences” (1939), “1/26/39” (1939), “One Soldier” (1944), “Long Past Moncada” (1944), “Letter to the Front” (1944), “Elegies” (1949), “Segre Song” (1968), “Word of Mouth” (1968), “Endless” (1968), “Delta Poems” (1968), “Voices” (1972), “Searching/Not Searching” (1972)
¹¹
—and, of course, in the autobiographical novel,
Savage Coast
, which you have here for the first time.

Written immediately upon her return from Spain in the autumn of 1936,
Savage Coast
is the most complete rendering of Rukeyser's experience during the first days of the war, but the novel remained
unpublished in her lifetime. It was brutally panned in the anonymous reader report,
¹²
and rejected by her editor Pascal Covici of Covici-Friede in 1937 for being, among other things, “BAD” and “a waste of time,” with a protagonist who is “too abnormal for us to respect.” Rukeyser was strongly encouraged to abandon the novel for a “brief impressionistic sketch” of her experience in Spain and to continue working on her poetry. Covici-Friede would publish the long poem “Mediterranean” in her second collection,
U.S. 1
(1938), instead. This is to say, the first critics of
Savage Coast
discouraged Rukeyser from writing the kind of large-scale, developmental, modernist war narrative that she had begun—one that is sexually explicit, symbolically complex, politically radical (much more so than the “communist sympathizing” that the reviewer sneers at) and aesthetically experimental—in favor of the gender-appropriate lyric poetry of her first book and “small” personal narratives. Rukeyser, though, would never return to the more traditional lyricism of her early work, and did not abandon the novel. She continued to edit the manuscript, working on it throughout the war, publishing articles and poems on her experience in Spain in the meantime. It is not clear how much that first rejection letter shaped her editing process, but she did edit the text heavily, over several years. It is unclear when she abandoned the manuscript entirely, and it is unclear if she ever pursued its publication again. It was eventually misfiled in an unmarked and undated folder in the Library of Congress.

Finding this novel now is significant because, as Rukeyser's large body of work on Spain attests, the Spanish Civil War was not only an essential part of her poetic and political development, “part of her inclusive myth, shaping from within her subsequent commitments and writing,”
¹³
but her work on the subject is likewise essential to the literature of the Spanish Civil War. Rukeyser's lost novel, written before Hemingway, Orwell, or Malraux's major works on the subject, is only one of a handful of novels written by
foreign women on the war, and provides us with a more complex understanding of women's political and literary participation in its history, offering a unique view into how women positioned themselves “within historical and social processes.”
¹⁴
As the discovery of “The Mexican Suitcase” has demonstrated about women's contribution to the documentation of the Spanish Civil War, revealing how many of the most iconic war photographs were in fact taken by Gerda Taro, the discovery of Rukeyser's lost novel reminds us of the important role women played in writing about and recording the political events of this era. Recovering this novel also alerts us (again) to the fact that the recuperation of women writers did not end in the 1970s, and that there is a continued need for archival work that restores feminist and radical texts and puts them in print. As Theresa Strouth Gaul points out, “it remains crucially important to remember that, in the current moment, the availability of women's texts in print still largely determines what is read and taught in classrooms and receives analysis in dissertations, scholarly journals, and monographs.”
¹⁵

RUKEYSER HERSELF WAS
deeply engaged with challenging the kinds of histories that privileged certain narratives over others, and saw the need to archive, document, and secure in text the stories of those who had been left out of “master narratives”—particularly the exiled, women, and refugees. Like Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin, who were writing in the same moment, Rukeyser worked to develop a poetics of history that was particularly attuned to exploring the “latent potentialities”
¹⁶
of the past inside the present. She writes, in
The Life of Poetry
, that “there is also in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost,”
¹⁷
and she recuperates these “lost” histories through an open-ended, proliferating, multitemporal, multivocal, documentary approach, one that “reach[es] backward and forward in history, illuminating all time.”
¹⁸
Savage Coast
is essential to understanding this practice, one that she develops throughout
her life, as she records and contextualizes the histories of those who traveled to Spain to participate in the antifascist games, many of whom were the first volunteers in the International Brigades, and as she records her own moment of political and sexual awakening alongside the Catalan resistance through an experimental, multigenre form that defies the rigid binaries of the two major literary modes of the 1930s: the “political,” didactic social realism and the “a-political,” aesthetic high modernism, both of which “were regarded as mutually exclusive of the other.”
¹⁹
Ironically, of course, Rukeyser's avant-garde and radical project, her “disinclination to conform to the dictates of any aesthetic or political program” or gender role, would prove to marginalize both her and her work for decades.
²⁰

In this sense the rejection of
Savage Coast
by her editor in 1937 says more about the fraught literary and historical moment in which Rukeyser was working than it does about the novel itself. On the other hand, the Spanish Civil War would become one of the most literary of wars, with “poets exploding like bombs,”
²¹
and Rukeyser was very much a part of this literary production. At the time of writing the novel, Rukeyser was involved in publicizing, fundraising and advocating for the Loyalist cause in Spain. Her poem “Mediterranean” was printed first as a pamphlet for the Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy, and she published articles on the subject in
New Masses
and the
New York Times
, among others. Like Rukeyser, many of her generation considered Spain the defining battleground against European fascism, and because of this it immediately became an international war, occupying a transnational imagination, seen as the last hope for the socialist and anarchist ideas that had flourished through the 1920s and 30s.
²²
The coup in Spain was also, like the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy, indicative of a more profound backlash against those very social and political changes, a backlash that was eventually absorbed into the Cold War policies of the US. The fascist project to cleanse
society of an “impure citizenry”
²³
—the urban proletariat, the New Woman, the Jew, the homosexual, the communist, the artist
²⁴
— meant that Spain's “civil war” was also viewed as a European “civil war.”
²⁵
Likewise, Franco's military success was made possible only because of the enormous international aid he received from Hitler and Mussolini, and from US corporations like Dupont,
²⁶
who used Spain as testing ground for modern warfare.
²⁷
The non-interventionist stance of Great Britain, France and the US determined not only the trajectory of fascism in Europe, dooming Republican Spain, but as Rukeyser herself noted in many of her essays, it reflected a larger political reality: that Spain was eventually viewed not as the place to stop fascism, but the place to “stop communism.”
²⁸
She understood that what was allowed to happen in Spain would be allowed to happen elsewhere, placing the conflict in a much broader cultural and historical context. And she was right: the placation of fascism by the allied nations was not only a suffocation of the Popular Front in Spain, aided by blocking the sale of arms and support to the Loyalist army to defend its government, but it was a way of enervating political dissent and left-wing organizing in their own home countries as well.

As Rukeyser's texts on the subject demonstrate, the Spanish Civil War also marked an important moment in women's visibility in public political life; for both foreign and Spanish women Spain proved to be a site of great potential for the expression of women's political and artistic agency. Women participated in, wrote on, and documented the war in Spain in great numbers, producing a significant body of work: Mercè Rodoreda, Simone De Beauvoir, Simone Weil, María Teresa León, Rose Macaulay, Dorothy Parker, Josephine Herbst, Martha Gellhorn, Genevieve Taggard, Virginia Woolf, Nancy Cunard, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Gerda Taro, and many more. What is striking is how little of their work on the subject is known;
²⁹
and yet women's participation in the war was in many ways the culmination of the decades-long fights for agency
in the public sphere, especially considering that Republican Spain had some of the most progressive gender policies for its time, particularly in anarchist Catalonia: women held political office, were allowed to vote, fought on the front for the first time, used and had access to birth control, in some areas were able to obtain legal abortions and request a divorce, and were guaranteed “equal protection” under the law and equal access to employment. They were political leaders like Frederica Montseny, Dolores Ibárruri, and Margarita Nelken, and they were writers and artists who continued to produce work about the war long into exile.
³⁰
Likewise, international women reported and photographed from the front in great numbers, volunteered as nurses and soldiers, and, like Rukeyser, remained dedicated to the Loyalist cause in Spain after the fighting had ended. The Spanish Civil War marked a vital moment in what was an undeniably important series of decades for women's liberation and radical activity, and Rukeyser records and benefits from that history.

The events that unfold in
Savage Coast
reflect the biographical narrative of Rukeyser's trip to Spain. Rukeyser and her fellow travelers, mostly international athletes traveling to the People's Olympiad, were the last to cross the border when their train to Barcelona was stopped in Moncada (Montcada, in Catalan), just as the military coup began and a general strike was called in defense of the Republic. The people she met on the train—a Catalan family, the Hungarian Olympic team, French reactionaries, and American communists, among many others that populate her works—were real, their names appearing in articles she wrote at the same time she was working on the novel. As the novel depicts, Rukeyser witnessed the enactment of a radical Popular Front and the collectivization of the town, the local people burning religious icons, and then the dangerous trip in the back of a pick-up truck into Barcelona, “a workers city,” in the first days of the resistance, “jewel-like” and “liberated.” Rukeyser continued to correspond with her lover
“Hans,” the
Rotfrontkämpfer
Otto Boch, a “Bavarian, with a broad strong face like a man in a Brueghel picture,” exiled from Hitler's Germany and traveling to the games as a long-distance runner, after he joined the International Brigades. While the novel ends on the anarchist streets of Barcelona, as Rukeyser is “given her responsibility” by Martín, the organizer of the People's Olympics, who says to those being evacuated, “you 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,”
³¹
other renditions of her narrative, like “We Came for Games,” describe the evacuation from Barcelona on a boat chartered by the Belgian team (the American consulate provided no assistance). She describes this in the epic poem “Mediterranean” as a voyage of “exile and refugee” to the port town of Sète, where those participating in the local fete-day “raised their clenched fists in a new salute”
³²
in support of the Spanish Popular Front, marking the opening of a new era of war and violence. It is on this boat when she is asked the question that frames her life's work, and that begins her most famous book,
The Life of Poetry
: “And in all this—where is there a place for poetry?” She answers, “I know some of it now, but it will take me a lifetime to find out.”
³³
Many of her poems and nonfiction works provide a nearly seamless epilogue, finishing from where the novel leaves off, fact and fiction overlapping. Sometimes the nonfiction texts specify details, blurred by her fictional narrative, while at other times the poems written across her lifetime extend and eulogize the memory of those who fought and died against fascism in Spain, or to meditate on the body of Otto Boch, who represents all the bodies of the dead in the unending violence of the twentieth century.
³⁴