Savage Coast (40 page)

1
. In
Savage Coast
, Helen calls Spain her “birthday,” and in the poem “Letter to the Front” Rukeyser calls Barcelona the “city of water and stone where I was born,”
The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser
, ed. Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005).

2
. These correspondences 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.

3
. “Diary” Box I:56, Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

4
. “We Came for Games,”
Esquire
, October 1974, 192–95, 368–70.

5
. Scheduled to take place July 19–26, 1936.

6
. Originally, both Spain and Germany had vied for the 1936 Summer Olympics. The Olympic Committee's choice of Germany proved to legitimize Hitler's regime rather than “open” it, as they had hoped.

7
. Introduction to
The Life of Poetry
(Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1996), 1.

8
. Ibid.

9
. “For O.B.,” “
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).

10
. In addition, upon her return she spoke at political meetings and wrote small articles in the
Daily Worker
and student newspapers.

11
.
The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser
, ed. Kaufmann and Herzog, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005).

12
. The review was most likely written by her mentor Horace Gregory, as a May 31, 1937 letter from Pascal Covici indicates that he agrees with Gregory's assessment of the novel. This correspondence 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.

13
. Anne Herzog, “‘Anything Away from Anything': Muriel Rukeyser's Relational Poetics,”
“How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet”: The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser
, ed. Anne Herzog and Janet Kaufman (New York: Palgrave, 1999), 33.

14
. Rita Felski,
The Gender of Modernity
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 8.

15
. Theresa Strouth Gaul, “Recovering Recovery: Early American Women
and Legacy's Future.”
Legacy
, vol. 26, no. 2 (2009): 262–83.

16
. Marina Camboni, “Networking Women: Subjects, Places, Links Europe-America, 1890–1939.”
In-Conference, How2 Journal
2.1 (2003).

17
.
The Life of Poetry
, 85.

18
. Ibid., 35.

19
. Kate Daniels. “Muriel Rukeyser and Her Critics,”
Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers
, eds. Margaret Dickie and Thomas Travisano (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996): 247–63.

20
. Ibid.

21
. W.H. Auden, “Spain,”
The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse
, ed. Valentine Cunningham (New York: Penguin, 1980), 100.

22
. See, for example, Beevor, Cunningham, Carroll, Graham, Nelson, Preston, Perez, and Thomas.

23
. Helen Graham.
The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 29. As Graham notes, Franco wanted not just to conquer but to fully supplicate and destroy the enemy.

24
. Graham, 29.

25
. Ibid., 32.

26
. Antony Beevor,
The Battle for Spain
(New York: Penguin, 2006). Beevor notes that many American companies had factories in Spain, including Ford and General Motors. Over the course of the war, along with Studebaker, they supplied twelve thousand trucks to Franco's army. Dupont provided forty thousand bombs, sent via Germany. The Texas Oil Company and Standard Oil supplied more than 3.5 million tons of oil, on credit, to the Fascists.

27
. Spain's was the first war in which aerial bombing of civilians was practiced, most famously in the bombing of Guernica by the German Condor Legion.

28
. “We Came for Games,” 370. Russia and Mexico (though minimally) were the only countries that actively supported the Republican government in defense of itself, and while much has been written about the “communist influence” and the rifts in the Popular Front between revolution and liberal democracy, between anarchism and communism, Helen Graham has noted that the influence, both ideological and military, of Communist Russia was nothing compared to that of Hitler and Mussolini.

29
. This is not surprising, considering that “going over” and volunteering in a militia was considered a crucible of masculinity for the bourgeois left, most famously rendered by Orwell, Hemingway, Spender and Auden, in whose works almost no women are represented, other than as sexual partners. Likewise, in literary volumes and poetry collections published in the 30s that addressed Spain, Popular Front politics or proletarian literature, women were almost completely ignored. See Nelson and Wald for a good overview of this publishing history.

30
. For more information on women in Spain, see Shirley Mangini,
Memories of Resistance: Women's Voices from the Spanish Civil War
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); and Martha A. Ackelsberg,
Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women
(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005).

31
.
“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).

32
. “We Came for Games,”192.

33
. Ibid. The question is phrased a bit differently in
The Life of Poetry
, and again in “Mediterranean.”

34
. Luise Kertesz,
The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser
(Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1980).

35
. For a more detailed discussion on the modernist documentary, see Stott, Entin, Kalaidjain, Robinowitz, Wald, and Marcus.

36
. Paula Rabinowitz,
Labor and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America
(Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 3.

37
. Ackelsberg, 21.

38
. D.H. Lawrence,
Aaron's Rod
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

39
. Rukeyser writes often in her journal about Lawrence, 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. Perhaps most important, though, is his
Studies in Classic American Literature.

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.