Savage Coast (5 page)

Rukeyser, in actuality, appears deeply politically and artistically consistent through the years following the Spanish Civil War: always she resisted totalizing systems that flattened subjectivity and that could inherently lead to totalitarianism; and she worked within “the changing forms” of both her literary genre and her political and historical moment. Against gender norms she asserted political and artistic authority, writing philosophical, historical, and worldly works, with little concern for generic or disciplinary borders. The formal complexity of Rukeyser's work, the “obscurity” she was so often charged with, seems just the opposite; read in the context of her historical moment, her work presents an obvious extension of the difficult ideas, forms, and histories she was attempting to render. The more complex her forms, the more complex her readings of politics and history.
⁶⁰
Perhaps Sylvia Townsend Warner's “wildly leftist novel”
Summer Will Show
, which Rukeyser quotes
inside
Savage Coast
as well, is a logical influence and partner. Published in 1936, the same year Rukeyser was writing her novel and the first year of the Spanish Civil War, Warner's heroine, Sophia, finds subjectivity in political engagement and activism during the 1848 French Revolution, finds liberation in free love, finds herself on the barricades, awakening. But Townsend Warner's work falls short of the radical textual experimentations Rukeyser was making to embody those very politics.

In
Between Past and Future
, Hannah Arendt writes of revolution that “as Malraux once noticed (in
Man's Fate
) . . . it saves those that make it.”
⁶¹
Rukeyser saw this in Spain, and writes it through Helen, as she watches the small town of Moncada collectivize, as she hears the people of Barcelona speak of transformation in their resistance to the fascist coup, as her lover Hans makes his way to Saragossa, and as she takes in this revolutionary potential as her own, back to her own country. The more Helen participates in the resistance, the more she becomes herself. The denouement of the novel is the miraculous moment when Helen stands alone on a street in Barcelona, surrounded by marchers, workers and soldiers about to leave for the front. She stands without fear, she acknowledges her changed self, describing it as a “life within life, the watery circle, the secret progress of a complete being in five days, childhood, love, and choice,” and she listens to Martín's speech, translated in language after language, wave-like, until it finally reaches her, and she is given what she wants: an acknowledgment of her desire for responsibility and value, the freedom to move and act. He says, “
If you have felt inactivity, that is over now. Your work begins. It is your work now to go back, to tell your countries what you have seen in Spain
.” Rukeyser finishes Helen's journey, and so we know that the young heroine of
Savage Coast
, standing in the middle of a street, in the middle of war, history, politics, sex—writing from its noisy center—learns to speak deeply, to say what she believes.

NOTES

WORKS CITED

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The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse
. Edited by Valentine Cunningham. New York: Penguin, 1980.

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Between Past and Future
. New York: Penguin, 1968.

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American Literary History
22, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 553–83.

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British Writers of The Thirties
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———.
Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War
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. Eds. Margaret Dickie and Thomas Travisano, 247–63. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.

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Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America
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. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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. Eds. Anne Herzog and Janet Kaufman. New York: Palgrave, 1999.

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Aaron's Rod
, by D.H. Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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Three Guineas
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———.
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———.
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———. “Barcelona, 1936.”
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———. “For O.B.”
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———.
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———.
Savage Coast
. Ed. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein. New York: The Feminist Press, 2013.

———. “We Came for Games.”
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———.
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EDITOR'S NOTE

M
uriel Rukeyser wrote and edited
Savage Coast
between 1936 and 1939, but the novel remained unfinished in her lifetime. Because of this, we don't know what she would have done with the text had she prepared it for publication herself. Rukeyser wrote the novel with unusual speed in the fall of 1936, and it was rejected by her publisher in the spring of 1937, but she continued to work on it throughout the war. The opening line, “Everybody knows who won the war,” was scrawled in handwriting atop the first page, and was obviously written after the fall of Barcelona in early 1939. The original manuscript has her editorial changes in type, pen, and pencil, indicating the multilayered nature of her editing process, and one chapter was left incomplete, with an outline appended. In this sense the text is still in flux as we encounter it now, especially considering how it interacts and overlaps with other texts she was writing at the time. The open-ended nature of the manuscript seems an appropriate reflection on both the motifs of movement in the novel and the ideas that Rukeyser was writing toward—ones of mutability, interaction, and wavelike discovery. In preparing the novel for publication, I tried as much as possible to follow her editorial directives. Rukeyser was so bothered by the bowdlerizing of editors, their insistence on “cleaning up” her grammar, that she had a stamp made to emboss “
PLEASE BELIEVE THE PUNCTUATION
” atop her manuscripts. With that in mind, I have tried to leave her words, sentence structures, and punctuation as she wrote them, though I have corrected her Spanish and Catalan spelling where necessary, as well as any misquotations, typos,
and grammatical inconsistencies. The paragraph breaks, which are almost like poetry, are hers, and remain. Only in the first chapter was I forced to make a difficult editorial decision.

During editing, Rukeyser crossed out the place names in the opening chapter with pencil, as if to signal that she wanted this beginning scene to be read as a moment in any country, at any historical moment, in any war. The opening sentence of the manuscript looks like this: “The train went flashing down
France
toward
Spain
, a stroke of glass and fine metal in the night.” However, she didn't change the sentence structure to accommodate her editorial decisions, nor did she insert any indication that she wanted to use a kind of ubiquitous proper-noun-replacing Victorian dash, such that it would have looked like this: “The train went flashing down ______ toward ______.” If the manuscript were reproduced faithfully, according to her editorial assertions, it would read like this: “The train went flashing down toward a stroke of glass and fine metal in the night.” This sounds kind of beautiful at first, but if one continued like this it would be like reading sentences off a cliff: “The train slowed down with a civilized grinding under the shed at.” Since Rukeyser did not continue this editorial practice throughout the novel, and abandoned crossing out place names by the second page of the second chapter, I've decided to leave the names in, for sake of clarity and readability, especially since
Savage Coast
is a text that renders, often times quite beautifully, the very specific geography of Spain at the moment of civil war.

—Rowena Kennedy-Epstein

To George and Elizabeth Dublin Marshall

 

 

T
his tale of foreigners depends least of all on character. None of the persons are imaginary, but none are represented at all photographically; for any scenes or words in the least part identifiable, innumerable liberties and distortions may be traced.

—Muriel Rukeyser

                 
On Saturday, according to all the latest reports, Barcelona was calm, and as yet not a shot had been fired.

—Reuters
dispatch

E
verybody 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.

The train went flashing down France toward Spain, a stroke of glass and fine metal in the night.

Its force of speed held the power of a water-race, and dark, excited, heavy before morning: it was traveling, lapping in the country, in speed.