Savage Coast (4 page)

Near the end of the rejection letter for
Savage Coast
, the anonymous reviewer states, “This book has been a waste of time—I doubt if at any moment in the writing of it Miss Rukeyser had any confidence in setting down a single paragraph.” This sexist interpretation of a perceived textual instability might be read as a manifestation of Rukeyser's and Helen's difficulty in articulating and acting on their beliefs, of making a “coordinated” life, of speaking and acting with purpose and effortlessness, but the text itself embodies Helen's development and reflects the aesthetic and political destabilization that Rukeyser writes toward. Helen's difficulty in speaking, her “stutter,” as Susan Howe might call it,
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her self-made lyric interruption of documentary “facts,” is also a way to open up discursive space in the novel: it allows other voices to be heard and to participate in making meaning of history. The cesura opened by this hesitation mediates Helen's own sometimes romantic desire for action, against the actual and often brutal experience of the Catalan people at war. Helen describes her ambivalence as a foreign national unable to interpret the events fully, saying often how she “had never wanted language so much,” implying both a desire
to better communicate with the Catalans, with Hans, but also a desire for a language to describe and hold the complex meanings of events occurring around her. This ambivalence with language and speaking, though, exposes the actual difficulty in documenting the war as an outsider, thereby subverting any possibility of a singular hegemonic narrative of its history.
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This is exemplified in the scene where Helen is taken to the roof of the hotel in Barcelona by the Olympic guide:

“If only I were not outside,” she said, looking at him with her peculiar timidity after saying something she felt deeply. But this was a different life. There was nothing, no result of expression, to fear. He was talking. “Not so far outside, because you care so much,” he said. “But you still talk like an outsider, if you say brilliant—we have had the waste and the blood and the fighting. We hang on; it will take time for us to see the brilliance, what there is.”

The difficulty and fear in saying something “deeply felt” is such a central concern of the text that it appears in almost every layer of the novel—textually, narratively, psychologically, and physically— but more than anything it indicates Rukeyser's attempt to write about and create a form that discloses and explores issues of gender politics, to make a space where women's texts and their speech hold meaning.

From the outset this search for autonomy is described in somatic terms—the very motion of the text itself is made up of the conflict between movement and stasis, between speaking and silence, inertia and speed. The novel opens on a train speeding through France, as Helen describes a feeling of freedom and anticipation, hoping that this experience will “be valuable” and thus give her value. For Helen is filled by a desire for meaning, and to move beyond her gendered body. She suffers from an unspecified leg injury, an oblique disability, “a defect that reminds [her] of a time before this,”
that prevents her from running, and at times even from moving. The leg symbolizes the barrier to action that Helen must overcome, and Helen describes excruciating physical pain as the bombs explode outside—the internal mimicking the external, the personal and political intertwined. Ultimately, Spain's civil war helps Helen discover a unity and purpose of self that mends her internal “civil war” through political radicalization and sexual awakening. The responsibility she finds at the end of the novel allows her to speak, to move, to act freely, with “choice.” Her crippled body is, if not cured, made painless, by the final scenes of the novel, and she has begun to overcome her fears. Speaking to Hans, Helen says, “‘I
am
changed . . . I want you to know. You began anew—you set in motion —it is as though I had gone through a whole other life,' she said lamely. But she felt the truth of the words before she spoke them and they became timid and broken . . . ‘I was almost born again, free from fear. The ride in, or the morning at the Olympic.'”

It is unclear whether Rukeyser herself had an actual leg injury, though she makes mention of something similar in her diary earlier in the trip, while in England. There is also some biographical evidence to suggest that it could have been the residual effect of the typhoid fever she caught in jail during the Scottsboro trial, or a substitute metaphor for cancer treatment she had recently undergone.
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Whatever it may have been in reality, it proves a central symbol, not only for thinking through how Rukeyser constructs and writes about issues of gender (Helen is also uncomfortable with her large body, “as a big angry woman”), but as a depiction of the Jewish body: the novel takes place in 1936, as Helen, a Jew, is on her way to document a counter-Olympics against Hitler's Games, in which the perfect German body, as depicted by Leni Riefensthal's film
Olympia
(1938), would be reified. Ultimately, Helen's damaged body is intimately and erotically restored through sex with a German athlete, Hans, who is himself described as near physical perfection:

She walked with long safe strides beside him. He was not at all impeded by the load. The suitcase leaned against his strong thick neck, bending his head with its peasant broadness to one side; he was very tall, in the easy sweater and corduroys, looking high in shadow. The strained muscle in his neck stood out to the weight; it was fine and taut, symptom of his body. His walk was as balanced as before, he was master.

One must assume (or I want to assume) that Rukeyser was intentionally referencing Hitler's “master race” here, subverting and critiquing its ideology, and exposing a decade-long German resistance to the rise of fascism in Europe, since Hans is himself a political exile from Nazi Germany. Hans's “perfect dominance over himself, trained, disciplined, active,” will be used to struggle against those forces of annihilation. Like many German political exiles who fled repression and imprisonment in the early 1930s, he viewed the fight against fascism in Spain as “the German chance, in or out of Germany.”
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This Jewish/German love story between Helen and Hans is reflected by the interracial relationship between Peter and Olive, the American communist couple that Rukeyser befriends on the train, connecting the American debate around miscegenation and the color line with the eugenicist ideology of Nazi Germany's Nuremberg Laws. Many of Rukeyser's later poems on Spain weave together the struggle for civil rights in America with the struggle against fascism in Spain. We can see this intertextual history begin in the novel, but, importantly, it is only Olive, who is of mixed race, who comments on the irony of Helen and Hans's relationship: “‘Just imagine!' she cried, in a witty voice, ‘during a revolution, with a 100 percent Aryan!'”

Rukeyser's brief love affair with Otto Boch (Hans) is one of the most consistent images throughout all her writings on Spain. There are a few letters from Boch to Rukeyser from the front, between July 1936 and 1938, written in German, addressing her desire and
unsuccessful attempts to return to Spain, but more than anything speaking of his soldier's life, and his acceptance of their separation, since “everybody has their post in the war against Fascism.”
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Despite the brevity of their time together, their sexual encounter proved transformational. In the novel Helen and Hans meet the second night in Moncada, and with only that youthful kind of physical consent they have sex on the train, as soldier's boots can be heard on the platform, and before they even know each other's names. The quotation that begins the chapter is appropriately taken from Hart Crane's
For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen
. The symbolism of the scene is enormously overwrought—Lawrence's influence may be most notable here—as sex is framed allegorically in terms of unification, of the meeting of countries and continents, of bridging the divided spaces made by wars and borders: “And Europe and America swung, swung, an active sea, marked with convulsive waves, as if supernatural horses stamped through the night; a scarred country, that lies waiting for the armies to meet again.” It is a metaphor that will thankfully become more subtle and introspective over the following decades. In the subsequent years, Boch's body, “lying / blazing beside me / . . . / erotic body reaching,” turns into the “endless earth,” encompassing everything, existing in everything.
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After Rukeyser's departure, Boch joined the German Thaelmann Brigade and set off to Saragossa.
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He would die at the front in 1939 at the end of the war, as Rukeyser records in “We Came For Games”: “On the banks of the Segre River, at a machine-gun nest where six hundred out of nine hundred were killed that day. It is in the Franco histories. Their intelligence worked very well. They knew every gun position.”
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Boch acts as a poetic and mythological site, and Rukeyser uses his body and memory to frame the politics of many of her works, calling out to him—the script that runs through her history. In “Long Past Moncada,” she writes:

       
Other loves, other children, other gifts, as you said,

       
“Of the revolution,” arrive—but, darling, where

       
You entered, life

       
Entered my hours, whether you lie fallen

       
Among those sunlight fields, or by miracle somewhere stand,

       
Your words of war and love, death and another promise

       
Survive as a lifetime sound.
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In 1972, during the Munich Olympics, she published an obituary in numerous German newspapers memorializing him. It read:

       
In Remembrance of

       
OTTO BOCH

       
Bavarian, runner, cabinet-maker,

       
fighter for a better world.

       
Any of his family and friends

       
wishing further information,

       
please write to ___
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At the end of the 1974
Esquire
article, she connects the Spanish Civil War to the POWs in Vietnam, the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, “where the black athletes made their protest,” and the shooting at the Munich Olympics, reminding us of the political nature of the Olympic Games as a site of exclusion and also of resistance. Then she looks back, writing about hearing the news of Boch's death: “Things that endure to our own moment,” she writes, “not to let our lives be shredded, sports away from politics, poetry away from anything, anything away from anything.”
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She ends with the image of Boch, the runner, “Going on now. Running, running, today.”
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It is hard to imagine that the sexually explicit, politically partisan, and avant-garde nature of the novel did not influence Rukeyser's publisher to reject it and encourage her to focus on her poems instead. This says something about the kind of genre that Rukeyser
was attempting to take ownership of, and speaks to the increasingly conservative gender, aesthetic and political dictates that were emerging in the late 1930s. The rejection of the novel ushered in the kind of criticism that Rukeyser would receive for the following three decades, from both sides of the political and critical establishment. By the late 1930s, Rukeyser was under constant and continued state surveillance that persisted through the 1970s. Once considered one of the best poets of her generation, by the early 1940s her radical and experimental poetry had been marginalized. As she became increasingly engaged with the interaction between high and low art forms, with the big public works of biography, with a radical avant-garde aesthetic, her work was dismissed. The Cold War containment policies that permeated every aspect of American society found in New Criticism a powerful tool for excising certain kinds of writers from the canon and from history, successfully separating aesthetics from political and popular art forms, denigrating the latter and lauding the former.

Quite famously, and in a vein very similar to the criticism in the rejection of
Savage Coast
, the
Partisan Review
, once a proponent of her early work, attacked her in the early 1940s on political and artistic grounds. In what they themselves later dubbed “The Rukeyser Imbroglio,” the editors repudiated her for being both a “bad poet” and for being a “bandwagon” Stalinist, writing that her work “shifted back and forth between the orgiastic diction of D.H. Lawrence at his worst and a style suggesting that of
Time
magazine and a persistent effort to send many telegrams at small cost to oneself.”
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But this political stance was a thinly veiled attack on women's literary and political authority, a sexist position that the
Partisan Review
would continue to exercise in the 1940s and 50s under the guise of New Criticism and anti-communism.
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Likewise, Louise Bogan at the
New Yorker
spent an enormous amount of time pointing out that Rukeyser's work failed to live up to her notion of female lyricism, writing, “the chief virtue of women's poetry is its power to pin down, with uncanny accuracy, moments of actual experience.
From the beginning of the record, female lyricism has concerned itself with minute particulars, and at its best seems less a work of art than a miracle of nature.”
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Because Rukeyser's work did not shrink itself to fit these very tiny parameters, Bogan described her as having a “deflated Whitmanian rhetoric,” meant to imply that Rukeyser wrote merely in a non-procreative approximation of the male voice. Of course, this may be one of her greatest poetic strengths: Rukeyser was working in a form and language dissonant with contemporary readers' notions of women's writing and even American poetry.
Savage Coast
, described as being “too confused, too scattered in its imagery and emotional progression to be real . . . clearly an example of bad writing,” is a nascent example of the hybrid textual practice she was working in, a style deemed inconsistent by critics. And it was this “inconsistency” that she was charged with most, as David Bergman has astutely pointed out: personal (often she was described as “promiscuous,” both because she had sex with men and women, and particularly because she was an unwed mother), political (she never joined a party), and especially artistic (she was formally experimental and wrote in multiple genres).
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