Savage Coast (41 page)

69
. Rukeyser had traveled to report on the second Scottsboro Nine trial in 1933 with the International Labor Defense (ILD). In 1931, nine black men were charged with raping two white women, and all but one were sentenced to death. The ILD worked on the case, and the Communist Party publicized it widely as indicative of racial and legal injustice under capitalism, engendering enormous attention from the international left, and forming important ties between the Communist Party and civil rights groups. During the trial, Rukeyser was jailed for fraternizing with African Americans and caught typhoid fever.

70
. A work stoppage of all but the most necessary professions (pharmacists, doctors) was called on July 19 to defend the Spanish Republic against the fascist insurrection. A coalition of left-wing groups, anarcho-syndicalists, and communists, came together to form the Popular Front.

71
. W.H. Auden,
The Orators
(1932).

72
. Rukeyser spent most of her time with the Swiss and Hungarian Olympic Teams. The American, British, and French teams were already in Barcelona.

73
. The six Americans on the train with Rukeyser were Ernest and Rose Tischter, David Friedman, Molly Sobel, Lillian Lefkowitz, and Mrs. Martha Keith “of Peapack, NJ” as described in the
New York Times
article “Start of Strife in Spain is Told by Eyewitness” (July 29, 1936).

74
. “The Communards' Wall” in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, commemorates the execution of Parisians by the French army during the last days of the Paris Commune. Considered the first successful workers' revolution, the citizens controlled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. Tens of thousands were massacred during the “bloody week,” and a great many more imprisoned or executed after the revolution was suppressed by the government. For a good history, see Donny Gluckstein's
The Paris Commune: A Revolution in Democracy
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011).

75
. John Reed was the author of
Ten Days that Shook the World
(1919), a firsthand account of the 1917 revolution in Russia.

76
. C.N.T., the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation
of Labor), was formed in 1910. An anarcho-syndicalist union, during the civil war they joined with the F.A.I., the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (Anarchist Federation of Iberia), thus uniting as the C.N.T.-F.A.I. The U.G.T., the Unión General de Trabajadores (General Union of Workers) was a Marxist-Socialist union formed in 1888. At the outset of war they joined forces as the Popular Front, along with many other workers' parties. Both the C.N.T. and U.G.T. are still active unions.

77
. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
The Communist Manifesto
(1848).

78
. General Goded was one of the many military leaders involved in the coup. When he surrendered, Lluís Companys, the president of Catalonia, forced him to make an announcement over the radio. He was executed that August. In his surrender speech he states, “Fortune has been against me and I am held prisoner. Therefore, in order to avoid more bloodshed, the soldiers loyal to me are free of all obligation.”

Companys's speech that followed: “Citizens: Only a few words, for now is the time of action and not words. You have just heard General Goded, who led the insurrection and asks to avoid more bloodshed. The rebellion has been stifled. The insurrection is put down. It is necessary for everyone to continue following the orders of the Government of the Generalitat (The Autonomous Government of Catalonia), heeding its instructions. I do not want to end without fervently praising the forces who, with bravery and heroism, have been fighting for the Republican cause, supporting civil authority. Long live Catalonia! Long live the Republic!”

79
. Chapter five remained unfinished, and is quite fragmentary, almost more impressionistic than narrative. Rukeyser appended a note to the manuscript outlining what she intended to do:

(Note to the reader of this ms: The gaps in this chapter are conspicuous. They are the only gaps in the ms and they will be filled in a day or two, but that does not excuse them.

One comes after p. 12 and is the story of the plans of the Hollywood executives to escape, their failure, and the transportation of a Spanish doctor to Barcelona in the car they had “commandeered.” Then the mayor's committee representative arrives, thanks the train for its letter and collections, and warns them that they have one hour to provision themselves and then they are to lock themselves in the train, for the Fascists are expected. The grocery scene (unfinished) follows. It concludes with a fight between the two German children and the passage through the town of the gun-cars.

Next scene on the train, expecting the Fascists. Conversations between Helen and lady from S. Am., and Helen, Peapack and two Moncada boys. Helen goes for a walk with Peter, who has been looking for a place to swim, and stops for food at a peasant's house. She is left alone while he returns to the train. The house is fired on by
snipers in the hills. She returns to the train. Bugle in town announces danger is past until further notice.)

80
. Sylvia Townsend Warner,
Summer Will Show
(1936).

81
. In this scene, Helen and Peter are trying to grasp the situation and the experience on the train, while cautious not to romanticize or “dramatize it.” Rukeyser crossed out a fantastic line, where Helen says: “It's very literary, that train,” a phrase that encapsulates so much about the moment in which she was writing. The self-conscious awareness of the line speaks to how Rukeyser was positioning herself and this work in the context of her contemporaries. By keenly referencing the novelistic trope of travel as transformative, it also highlights a common theme in writing about the Spanish Civil War, one in which “going over” is reflected in the movement of the train, of crossing the border into Spain.

82
. Rukeyser wrote a fragment that was never fully integrated into the chapter:

Helen looked over the water jug, as she drank, as its thick rim pressed against the bridge of her nose. The line of it set the little garden against the olive hill, cutting off the rest. The hill looked peaceful, cultivated. She finished drinking, and gave the jug to the woman.

“Peter!” she exclaimed, turned to the garden. “Vegetables!”

He sat the jug down at the wall, finished drinking in a moment, nodded to the nodding woman. “You have a fine appetite for water,” he said to Helen. She felt again the hot fear in her stomach.

“Spain makes me thirsty,” she answered, and smiled, looking at the hill.

“Scared?”

“Certainly.” They stood over the row, in the little garden. The ripe peas were round in the pod, cleanly seen under the thin green cover, each full bubble casting a small shadow. Succulence and freshness, the pottery jug, the rows of peas, the little, quiet house.

The woman bobbed and laughed, at the praise of her garden. Behind her, a larger woman and an old man were sitting in the sun, on a bench against the house. They watched the foreigners. The old man pulled out a long rope lighter and touched off his cigarette.

“That's what I should bring back!” Helen said. “There's a man in Connecticut who's been wanting a lighter like that—” She repeated to the woman.

“That's easy, in Barcelona. You can get them anywhere. One peseta.” Her face changed suddenly, and she laughed. “Not now,” she said. “Wait.
Huelga General
.”

Peter suddenly snapped his fingers.

“Maybe she'll make lunch for us.” he turned to her.

“Of course, anything, eggs, an omelette, perhaps?”

“Vegetables!” he said. “Could we have vegetables?” He grinned at Helen. “At this rate, I'll be a fresh-air fiend by tomorrow.”

“Certainly vegetables.” The woman turned and shouted at the other, larger one, in Catalan waiting for the answer.

“How many?” Peter counted them out: Olive, the bitches . . .

“And the Drews and the lady—” Helen added.

“All right, eight, then.”

“But they've got a lot of provisions. They won't want to leave the train, anyway,” Helen thought: And your provisions? Where had Peter been while they were buying food?

“Provisions! In the middle of the day! Well, say five then. Will you cook vegetables for at least five, please?” Peter was bargaining with the woman.

“Leave your young lady here,” she was shrewd, she wrinkled her nose and eyes at Helen, she waved Peter on, “bring the rest back.”

“You're hostage, Helen!”

Peter was running down the road.

83
. Edwin Rolfe, “To My Contemporaries” (1933).

84
. Chapter six opens with a passage from D.H. Lawrence's
Aaron's Rod
(1922). Including this text inside her own, such that her character is in communication with it, is significant.
Aaron's Rod
, like
Savage Coast
, is a travel narrative, one whose protagonist is also situated on the precipice between two eras. Rukeyser wrote in her journal about Lawrence during the period in which she was working on the novel, 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, and his
Studies in Classic American Literature
. Likewise, Rukeyser, like Lawrence, became a target of New Criticism, particularly by the critic R.P. Blackmur.

85
. T.S. Eliot,
The Waste Land
(1922). The line to which she refers is in “Burial of the Dead,” when Madame Sosostris reads the tarot cards: “Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, the lady of situations.”

86
. Hart Crane,
For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen
(1923).

87
. J.W. von Goethe, from
Wandrers Nachtlied
(
Wanderer's Nightsong
) (1870). The last two lines, which she recites, translate to “wait soon/you too shall rest.”

88
. André Malraux,
Le temps du mépris
(
Days of Wrath
) (1935).

89
. Horace Gregory, “Abigail to Minerva” (1936).

90
. The Catholic church had long been aligned with the ruling class and worked in the interests of the monarchy. During the war it supported the fascists, legitimizing the coup d'etat.

91
. Henry Adams,
A Dynamic Theory of History
(1904).

92
. Images of the Fascist Uprising.

93
. I suspect that Rukeyser might be describing Dr. Edith Bone, a Hungarian photojournalist who had become a British subject in the 1930s, and was in Spain with Felicia Browne, a painter who joined the people's militia in August. Browne was the first British subject to be killed at the front. Bone remained in Spain to support the Republic; eventually she returned to Hungary, where she was disappeared and imprisoned in 1949, accused of being a spy. Her book
Seven Years Solitary
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1957) recounts her experience.

94
. There are no Pyrenees, a phrase made by French supporters of the Spanish Popular Front indicating that the “front” extended across the Pyrenees border (Martin Hurcombe.
France and the Spanish Civil War: Cultural Representations of the War Next Door: 1936–1945
. [Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011]). The hope that France would form a United Front with Spain, along with England, was short lived. By August, France and England signed a nonintervention pact, along with Germany, Italy, and Russia, one that was supported by the United States. Nevertheless, Germany, Italy, and US corporations openly violated the agreement, and continued sending military aid to Franco's Nationalist Army. Mexico and Russia supported the Republican army, though minimally, in comparison.

95
. Franz Mehring,
Karl Marx: The Story of His Life
(1935).

96
. Hans refers to his political involvement with the militant
Rotfrontkämpferbund
(Red Front Fighters), part of the German Communist Party (KPD) during the Weimar republic. The party was suppressed by Hitler in 1933, and its leader Ernst Thälmann was imprisoned throughout the 30s, then shot at Buchenwald in 1944. German political exiles, like Hans, formed one of the first International Brigades in Spain, calling it the “Thälmann Brigade” in his honor, and saw the fight against fascism in Spain “as the German chance in or out of Germany.”

97
. Joris Ivens and Hanri Storick,
Misère au Borinage
(1933). A documentary film about a mining strike in Belgium.

98
.
“MES HOMES! MES ARMES!”
was a slogan used on U.G.T. and P.S.U. propaganda posters during the war. The full poster reads:
MES HOMES, MES ARMES, MES MUNICIONS PER AL FRONT
(More Men, More Arms, More Ammunition for the Front).

99
. Like Boch, between 1936 and 1939, around thirty-five thousand foreigners volunteered for the International Brigades.

                 
WE CAME FOR GAMES
*

                 
A Memoir of the People's Olympics, Barcelona, 1936

W
e could see very little from the train. But what we could see was full of sunlight and mystery at the same time: the Vaterpolo team out there on the station platform doing exercises, and all the yellow flowering mimosa trees full of little boys trying to see into the windows of the compartments.

There was the station, and the row of houses beyond. We showed no sign of starting. The engineer, somebody said, was sitting on the steps up front, eating bread and sausage.

I could hear a radio playing Bing Crosby songs, and then a wild yodeling broke in; it was the Swiss team in the car ahead.

An old Catalan woman said, “This train isn't going to move, not anymore.”