Savage Coast (3 page)

Savage Coast
, of all her work on Spain, is the most narratively and historically sequential, yet even while Rukeyser insists that this is a fictionalized account, making sure to point this out in a note to the reader, we are also instructed by her to read the text
as documentary—from the inclusion of dated newspaper clippings that begin chapters, to the list of the dead that interrupts her own narrative near the end of the book, to the very fact that Helen and Hans are Muriel and Otto, their story and dialogue proliferating and repeated in other essays and poems, the novel itself only one of many iterations. This constant blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction—the creation of the self inside history, and by extension inside the text—is foundational to Rukeyser's decades long desire to write cross-genre and hybrid poetry and prose where “false barriers go down.” It also speaks to the moment in which she was working, when the documentary form was not only de rigueur but was being used particularly by radicals and feminists to challenge and expose patriarchal and hegemonic narratives. The term
documentary
, though, is inherently slippery, for it contains so many possibilities; it implies archiving, recording, witnessing, collaging, photographing, and filming, as well as the hybridization of “high” and “low” art forms; and it can be traced back to the practices of scrap-booking in the women's suffrage movement, left-front politics, social and socialist realism, travel narratives, war correspondences, epic poems, testimony, cinema, and reportage.
³⁵
It is a genre that has, as Paula Rabinowitz notes, “reshaped generic boundaries” as well as gendered boundaries.
³⁶

Because of its representational mutability, the documentary form held immense potential for Rukeyser, particularly for developing an aesthetics that embodied her political and personal project, one that may be closer to and, appropriately, shaped by the anarchist principles she encountered in Catalonia, where “individuality was dependent on the development of a strong sense of connections with others”
³⁷
—principles that were equally essential to the women's movement and feminist literary praxis. This radical and relational politics is formally manifest in the hybridization of the personal, lyric, and internal, situated alongside and interacting with the historical, documentary and worldly. For example, in the final
chapter of
Savage Coast
, during a march through the streets of Barcelona in support of the Republic—made up of Olympic athletes, foreign nationals, Catalan workers, and volunteers about to set out for the front—a message is read to the crowd from the evacuated French Olympic delegation who were the first to flee the war. It is read to the crowd and recorded by Rukeyser, next to and along with her own Sibyl-like lyricism:

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

Here we have the interaction between the documentary text and the lyric poem, imitating Rukeyser's own self-formation inside the collective political experience. The passage contains a double image, a fantasy of the French who have already sailed away and the actual voyage through the Mediterranean that Rukeyser herself will soon take, situated inside the text of a speech unfolding in the present time of the novel. It is the interaction of the lyric imagining of past and future with the factual and documentary text of the present that makes the moment so important, for it renders simultaneously the political implications of the documentary text—the very real possibility that the evacuation of the French Olympic team means that France will abandon Spain to fascism, which they do—and the profoundly individual effect that this experience has on Rukeyser's political and personal liberation, so much so that “no beauty / found could ever pay / for the country from which they had / been sent home.”

The autobiographical and documentary nature of
Savage Coast
, though, is not meant to undermine the fact that in this iteration of her story Rukeyser chose fiction for a reason, and out of all her tellings and retellings,
Savage Coast
is the most psychologically internal, most politically radical, most sexually explicit, and, at times, most comical. While not today known as a novelist, it is clear that Rukeyser was not only interested in writing in multiple genres, but was equally desirous of experimenting with the structures and tropes of the novel itself, as she does in every genre, from her use of documentary materials to the way she breaks her prose lines like poetry. The experimental nature of the text is enhanced by the nearly impressionistic, elliptical prose, made up of fragmented images and scenes, pieced together with the documents. It is hard to say, though, if part of this experimentalism is due to the unfinished nature of the novel itself. Because
Savage Coast
was so flatly rejected by her editor, we don't know what Rukeyser would have done with the novel if she herself had in fact prepared it for publication, and if
the fragmentary nature of the text would have been smoothed out. I hope it would not have been, because the prose that she writes is always nearer to poetry, and so the text has the feeling of an epic poem inside the realist novel; even the fact that her protagonist is named Helen and is narrating a war speaks to the innovation of a traditionally male genre.

Most avant-garde, perhaps, is the way Rukeyser situates her female protagonist as the mediator, narrator, and embodiment of a changing twentieth-century political landscape, one whose voyage into a war results in sexual awakening, personal liberation, and political radicalism. In writing this narrative through a “Helen”—a name both autobiographical (her middle name) and mythological—Rukeyser also situates herself as a worldly authorial voice, a maker and subject of history, one who has the ability to critique and comment on politics and war. The very fact that at twenty-two Rukeyser positions her text next to and along with the most prominent male literary figures of her time says something about the authorial intent. Not only does Rukeyser buttress her novel with references and quotations from Auden, Spender, Eliot, and Crane, to name only a few—intertwining them with the daily documents, newspapers, and political pamphlets—but her own story ultimately internalizes her male cohorts, so that they become references or footnotes to her history. We might read this as a signal of how she was positioning herself and her work, and it is clear that with this novel she wanted not only to be taken as seriously as the male authors she cites, but to assert herself on equal terms with them.

Consider the fact that Helen spends the entire trip reading D.H. Lawrence's
Aaron's Rod
³⁸
as she travels through Spain, and Rukeyser quotes it extensively in the text—his narrative structure and heavy prose hang around.
³⁹
Helen is reading Lawrence in the hope that it will provide a “clue” for “a way to reach action,” thinking, “perhaps, after trying for it so hard, she could find what she was looking for here. This might carry her deeper in. Lawrence could do that, striking
for the heart, penetrating, on a dark journey . . . The book, to produce an equation, To bring an answer.” But just like the scene where the message from the French is read aloud, Helen interrupts Lawrence with her own lyric interpretation of the actual events happening around her, and she “clap[s] the book shut.” Helen's narrative takes over, she becomes “the clue,” the person “that carries her deeper,” not Lawrence, not the document alone.
⁴⁰

Like
Savage Coast
,
Aaron's Rod
is a quest novel of sorts, but one in which love and women are rendered as inverting forces, and that ends with an anarchist explosion in Italy that destroys the protagonist's livelihood and manhood. Rukeyser both sublimates and refutes Lawrence in the novel: radical politics, particularly anarchist politics, are a force of regeneration for her, as is sexual intimacy and free love; the camaraderie and empowerment found in the collective experience, especially multigenerational relationships between women—the Catalan grandmother, the lady from South America, and Olive—provide the psychological cohesion in the novel; and unlike Lawrence's assertion at the end of
Aaron's Rod
that “deep fathomless submission to the heroic soul in a greater man”
⁴¹
will prove to preserve humanity in the face of war (an erie fascist premonition?), Rukeyser predicts that the self, empowered and formed in relation to the development of others, one that keeps moving toward “more freedom,” more openness and more connection, will change the future. Nevertheless, there are indeed generic similarities between the two texts. In both, the heroes flee their stifling pasts, represented by the confines and character of the nation state, in search of wholeness and value abroad. The portrayal of the housewife “Peapack” from New Jersey, whose face is always turning to “pudding” when a bomb explodes, embodies this Americanness that Helen is trying to escape. But it is Lawrence's vision, illustrated in
Aaron's Rod
, that “sees human existence as dialectic, a continual process of conflict between elements within the self as well as outside it,”
⁴²
that prefigures some of Rukeyser's early development as a
novelist and theorist, an influence that can be seen in the description of the protagonist in
Savage Coast
. Helen narrates her history in the opening scene:

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 obliged to know more, to make more—but whatever she had touched had fallen into this conflict, she thought, dramatically. The people she had loved best had been either willful and cold or weak in other ways. She was bitterly conscious of her failure, at a couple of years over twenty, to build up a coordinated life for herself.

In this sense Helen is already wounded by “civil war” before the novel has even begun, and so she is herself a symbol for the changing political realities that the Spanish Civil War ushers in. At least in part, then,
Savage Coast
embodies one of the main tropes of the bildungsroman, in which “the [hero],” as described by Bakhtin, “emerges
along with the world
and he reflects the historical emergence of the world itself. He is no longer within an epoch, but on the border between two epochs, at the transition point from one to the other. This transition is accomplished in him and through him.”
⁴³

Helen's quest is to bridge this disunity, and not only to find “a way to reach action” but “to move past fear.” Her experience in Spain both exposes her feelings of ineffectuality and dependence and propels her toward independence and agency. Near the end of the novel, Helen thinks, “she had wanted a life for herself, and found she was unequipped; and adjusting her wants, cared to be a person prepared for that life.” This articulation marks an important turning point for Helen, in which she is able to assert her need for selfness outside the debilitating confines of the family, social and
gender roles in which she was raised, those that leave her unprepared to act and live freely. She describes this coming to maturity in terms of war, as having “the fear of death replaced.” As Helen becomes increasingly free on the war-torn streets of Barcelona (“she would always have this street before her for a birthday”), speaking and acting without inhibition, she also becomes more radical; it is thereby that Rukeyser weds gender liberation with sexual agency and political activism. This is why Hans proves such a powerful influence for Helen, both sexually and politically, for he “go[es] toward what [he] most want[s].” Hans is a decisive actor, and Helen describes his life as “single minded.” As a literary foil, he is used to model and mirror confidence, freedom and agency for Helen: “all his life, moving so steadily, watercourse! she thought; only let me move, too, keep on pouring free.”