Savage Coast: A Novel

By Muriel Rukeyser and Rowena Kennedy-Epstein

The poet’s newly discovered novel of reporting on the Spanish Civil War “is both an absorbing read and an important contribution to 20th-century history” (Publishers Weekly).
 
As a young reporter in 1936, the pioneering poet and political activist Muriel Rukeyser traveled to Barcelona to witness the first days of the Spanish Civil War. She turned this experience into an autobiographical novel so forward thinking—both in its lyrical prose and its frank depictions of violence and sexuality—that it was never published in her lifetime. Recently discovered in her archive, Feminist Press finally makes this important work available to the public.
 
Savage Coast charts a young American woman’s political and sexual awakening as she witnesses the popular front resistance to the fascist coup and falls in love with a German political exile who joins the first international brigade. Rukeyser’s narrative is a modernist exploration of violence, activism, and desire; a documentary text detailing the start of the war; and a testimony to those who fought and died for freedom and justice during the first major battle against European fascism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781558618213

Muriel Rukeyser

Muriel Rukeyser was a poet and political activist. She was born in New York City in 1913 and attended Vassar College. She published over fifteen volumes of poetry in her lifetime and received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1966. She died in New York City in 1980.

Book preview

SAVAGE COAST

"What a treasure! Muriel Rukeyser takes us back to those crucial days when Spain became the first international battleground against fascism and hope for democracy, to tell a powerful story of personal, sexual, and political awakening. Savage Coast is bound to be an instant classic."

—ROBIN D. G. KELLEY, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

"Savage Coast now joins the lost brother and sisterhood of Spanish Civil War classics, from Arthur Koestler’s Dialogue with Death, the desolate modernist novels of the Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda, Andre Malraux’s Man’s Hope, Josephine Herbst’s The Starched Blue Sky of Spain, and the reportage of Martha Gellhorn. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein has rescued and edited a great story. Helen and Otto are not Emma and Sasha, nor are they Karl and Rosa, but the American radical poet who tells her story speaks to all of us."

—JANE MARCUS, distinguished professor of English and women’s studies, CUNY Graduate Center and the City College of New York

Muriel Rukeyser spoke of Spain as the place where she began to say what she believed. At the time, Hemingway’s and Orwell’s male-centered blood and guts novels were greedily devoured, while a woman writing a sexually explicit, gender truthful and politically radical narrative against a background of war was inevitably ignored. Spain changed Rukeyser and her protagonist, Helen. This novel will change the reader. An extraordinary gift!

—MARGARET RANDALL, author of To Change the World: My Years in Cuba

"Savage Coast is an astonishing book, too long lost, now a treasure for historians of the Spanish Civil War, equally a pouch of rubies for poets. Rukeyser captures the intensity of the moment—personal, political, and still contemporary."

—PETER N. CARROLL, author of The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade

LOST & FOUND / LOST & FOUND ELSEWHERE

LOST & FOUND: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative publishes primary sources by figures associated with New American Poetry in an annual series of chapbooks under the general editorship of Ammiel Alcalay. Lost & Found’s aim is to open the field of inquiry and illuminate the terrain of an essential chapter of twentieth-century letters. The series has published little-known work by Amiri Baraka, Diane di Prima, Robert Duncan, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara, Margaret Randall, Muriel Rukeyser, and many others.

Under the auspices of The Center for the Humanities, and with the guidance of an extended scholarly community, Lost & Found chapbooks are researched and prepared by students and guest fellows at the PhD Program in English of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Utilizing personal and institutional archives, Lost & Found scholars seek to broaden our literary, cultural, and political history.

LOST & FOUND ELSEWHERE is a unique new series of book-length projects emerging from this research. Working in partnership with select publishers, these books bring to light unpublished or long unavailable materials that have emerged alongside or as part of the Lost & Found project. Available in this series:

For more information, visit lostandfoundbooks.org

Published in 2013 by the Feminist Press

at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

Introduction copyright © 2013 by Rowena Kennedy-Epstein

Text copyright © 2013 by the estate of Muriel Rukeyser

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First printing May 2013

Cover design by Herb Thornby, herbthornby.com

Cover photograph of Muriel Rukeyser, circa 1936

Text design by Drew Stevens

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rukeyser, Muriel, 1913-1980.

Savage coast / Muriel Rukeyser ; Edited, with an introduction by

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-55861-821-3

I. Kennedy-Epstein, Rowena. II. Title.

PS3535.U4S38 2013

813'.54—dc23

2013004425

CONTENTS

Introduction

ROWENA KENNEDY-EPSTEIN

Editor’s Note

Savage Coast

A NOVEL BY MURIEL RUKEYSER

Notes

We Came for Games

FROM ESQUIRE MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 1974

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein

If this was real," thinks Helen, the protagonist of Muriel Rukeyser’s autobiographical novel Savage Coast, it was because it was nearer the sum of everything that had happened before it than anything had ever been. Stranded on a train in a small Catalan town during the first days of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Helen had just had sex with a German socialist who will soon join the first International Brigade, watched Catalonia begin to collectivize, and seen fascist soldiers escape into the hills, a plane flying low above her upturned head, hearing the bombs and rifle fire closer still—it is a perfectly modern moment, at the center of the novel. In addition to its avant-garde and genre-bending tendencies—toward documentary, abstraction, poetry—Savage Coast harbors the drama, the psychological exploration and the social critique of the realist novel. It is a bildungsroman of sorts, a novel of formation, tracing the political development of Helen—her transformation from tourist and witness into activist and radical, from girlhood liberalism to mature political engagement, from an awkward adolescence of rebellion and anger to a sense of sexual and historical subjectivity found in the collective experience of political action. Helen’s transformation is Rukeyser’s—she describes Spain as the place where I was born.¹

When Muriel Rukeyser sailed to Europe in June 1936 she never meant to go to Spain. Already a successful poet, she had won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1935 for her first book of poems, Theory of Flight, and had already engaged in political activism—she had traveled to report on the Scottsboro trial and was jailed for fraternizing with African Americans in 1933, and had completed her trip to West Virginia to document the Hawks Nest Tunnel mining disaster, an experience that would later become her most famous text, the modernist epic The Book of the Dead (U.S. 1, 1938)—when she was asked to travel to London as an assistant for a couple who were writing a book about cooperatives in England, Scandinavia, and Russia. This was her first trip abroad, and she was put in contact by the poet Horace Gregory with Bryher, Robert Herring and Petrie Townshend, the owners and editors of Life and Letters To-day, a prominent literary magazine that would later publish several of her poems.² It was through this group that Rukeyser was introduced to the London literary scene, meeting with T.S. Eliot and C. Day Lewis, and spending considerable time with H.D., writing in her diary: she’ll hate all the flaws that show in my poems.³ She spent a month in London with people who afterwards would be the Labor Government . . . poets and refugees and the League of Nations correspondent from the Manchester Guardian.⁴ When Herring asked Rukeyser to fill in for a colleague and cover the People’s Olympiad,⁵ meant to be a protest and alternative to Hitler’s Berlin Games, and one to which twenty-two countries were sending athletes,⁶ Rukeyser gave up her chance to go to Finland and Russia, for I was driven, she wrote, and set out to Barcelona.

Instead of reporting on the games, however, Rukeyser documented the outbreak of civil war, as the fascist-backed military coup that plunged Spain into violence occurred, not coincidentally, two nights before the People’s Olympiad was to begin, disrupting what would have been one of the largest international antifascist events of that period. Only twenty-two at the time, Rukeyser’s experience as witness both to the military coup and the revolutionary response in Catalonia proved transformational; she would write about Spain, its war, exiled and dead, for over forty years after, creating a radical and interconnected twentieth-century textual history. Rukeyser was only in Spain five days, from July 19 to 24, just long enough to see the primitive beginnings of open warfare of this period,⁷ but she subsequently cites the experience as the place where I began to say what I believed,⁸ and the end of confusion.⁹ In each work on Spain the same narratives, images, and phrases proliferate, re-contextualized inside her contemporary political and literary moment. In poems, reportage, memoir, essays and fiction, and more often in experimental forms that combine these genres, she reiterates, re-imagines, and theorizes her experience as a witness to the first days of the war and to her own moment of political, sexual, and poetic awakening.

Rukeyser’s narrative of the first days of the Spanish Civil War appears in four major essays written from 1936 to 1974, all of them uncollected—Barcelona, 1936 (Life and Letters To-day, vol. 15, no. 5, 1936), Death in Spain: Barcelona on the Barricades (New Masses, September 1936), Start of Strife in Spain Is Told by Eyewitness (New York Times, July 29, 1936), and We Came for Games (Esquire, October 1974),¹⁰ which is included in this volume—as well as in the introduction to The Life of Poetry (1949), in numerous poems that span her oeuvre—For O.B. (undated), Mediterranean (1936), Moment of Proof (1939), Other-world (1939), Correspondences (1939), 1/26/39 (1939), One Soldier (1944), Long Past Moncada (1944), Letter to the Front (1944), Elegies (1949), Segre Song (1968), Word of Mouth (1968), Endless (1968), Delta Poems (1968), Voices (1972), Searching/Not Searching (1972)¹¹—and, of course, in the autobiographical novel, Savage Coast, which you have here for the first time.

Written immediately upon her return from Spain in the autumn of 1936, Savage Coast is the most complete rendering of Rukeyser’s experience during the first days of the war, but the novel remained unpublished in her lifetime. It was brutally panned in the anonymous reader report,¹² and rejected by her editor Pascal Covici of Covici-Friede in 1937 for being, among other things, BAD and a waste of time, with a protagonist who is too abnormal for us to respect. Rukeyser was strongly encouraged to abandon the novel for a brief impressionistic sketch of her experience in Spain and to continue working on her poetry. Covici-Friede would publish the long poem Mediterranean in her second collection, U.S. 1 (1938), instead. This is to say, the first critics of Savage Coast discouraged Rukeyser from writing the kind of large-scale, developmental, modernist war narrative that she had begun—one that is sexually explicit, symbolically complex, politically radical (much more so than the communist sympathizing that the reviewer sneers at) and aesthetically experimental—in favor of the gender-appropriate lyric poetry of her first book and small personal narratives. Rukeyser, though, would never return to the more traditional lyricism of her early work, and did not abandon the novel. She continued to edit the manuscript, working on it throughout the war, publishing articles and poems on her experience in Spain in the meantime. It is not clear how much that first rejection letter shaped her editing process, but she did edit the text heavily, over several years. It is unclear when she abandoned the manuscript entirely, and it is unclear if she ever pursued its publication again. It was eventually misfiled in an unmarked and undated folder in the Library of Congress.

Finding this novel now is significant because, as Rukeyser’s large body of work on Spain attests, the Spanish Civil War was not only an essential part of her poetic and political development, part of her inclusive myth, shaping from within her subsequent commitments and writing,¹³ but her work on the subject is likewise essential to the literature of the Spanish Civil War. Rukeyser’s lost novel, written before Hemingway, Orwell, or Malraux’s major works on the subject, is only one of a handful of novels written by foreign women on the war, and provides us with a more complex understanding of women’s political and literary participation in its history, offering a unique view into how women positioned themselves within historical and social processes.¹⁴ As the discovery of The Mexican Suitcase has demonstrated about women’s contribution to the documentation of the Spanish Civil War, revealing how many of the most iconic war photographs were in fact taken by Gerda Taro, the discovery of Rukeyser’s lost novel reminds us of the important role women played in writing about and recording the political events of this era. Recovering this novel also alerts us (again) to the fact that the recuperation of women writers did not end in the 1970s, and that there is a continued need for archival work that restores feminist and radical texts and puts them in print. As Theresa Strouth Gaul points out, it remains crucially important to remember that, in the current moment, the availability of women’s texts in print still largely determines what is read and taught in classrooms and receives analysis in dissertations, scholarly journals, and monographs.¹⁵

RUKEYSER HERSELF WAS deeply engaged with challenging the kinds of histories that privileged certain narratives over others, and saw the need to archive, document, and secure in text the stories of those who had been left out of master narratives—particularly the exiled, women, and refugees. Like Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin, who were writing in the same moment, Rukeyser worked to develop a poetics of history that was particularly attuned to exploring the latent potentialities¹⁶ of the past inside the present. She writes, in The Life of Poetry, that there is also in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost,¹⁷ and she recuperates these lost histories through an open-ended, proliferating, multitemporal, multivocal, documentary approach, one that reach[es] backward and forward in history, illuminating all time.¹⁸ Savage Coast is essential to understanding this practice, one that she develops throughout her life, as she records and contextualizes the histories of those who traveled to Spain to participate in the antifascist games, many of whom were the first volunteers in the International Brigades, and as she records her own moment of political and sexual awakening alongside the Catalan resistance through an experimental, multigenre form that defies the rigid binaries of the two major literary modes of the 1930s: the political, didactic social realism and the a-political, aesthetic high modernism, both of which were regarded as mutually exclusive of the other.¹⁹ Ironically, of course, Rukeyser’s avant-garde and radical project, her disinclination to conform to the dictates of any aesthetic or political program or gender role, would prove to marginalize both her and her work for decades.²⁰

In this sense the rejection of Savage Coast by her editor in 1937 says more about the fraught literary and historical moment in which Rukeyser was working than it does about the novel itself. On the other hand, the Spanish Civil War would become one of the most literary of wars, with poets exploding like bombs,²¹ and Rukeyser was very much a part of this literary production. At the time of writing the novel, Rukeyser was involved in publicizing, fundraising and advocating for the Loyalist cause in Spain. Her poem Mediterranean was printed first as a pamphlet for the Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy, and she published articles on the subject in New Masses and the New York Times, among others. Like Rukeyser, many of her generation considered Spain the defining battleground against European fascism, and because of this it immediately became an international war, occupying a transnational imagination, seen as the last hope for the socialist and anarchist ideas that had flourished through the 1920s and 30s.²² The coup in Spain was also, like the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy, indicative of a more profound backlash against those very social and political changes, a backlash that was eventually absorbed into the Cold War policies of the US. The fascist project to cleanse society of an impure citizenry²³—the urban proletariat, the New Woman, the Jew, the homosexual, the communist, the artist²⁴— meant that Spain’s civil war was also viewed as a European civil war.²⁵ Likewise, Franco’s military success was made possible only because of the enormous international aid he received from Hitler and Mussolini, and from US corporations like Dupont,²⁶ who used Spain as testing ground for modern warfare.²⁷ The non-interventionist stance of Great Britain, France and the US determined not only the trajectory of fascism in Europe, dooming Republican Spain, but as Rukeyser herself noted in many of her essays, it reflected a larger political reality: that Spain was eventually viewed not as the place to stop fascism, but the place to stop communism.²⁸ She understood that what was allowed to happen in Spain would be allowed to happen elsewhere, placing the conflict in a much broader cultural and historical context. And she was right: the placation of fascism by the allied nations was not only a suffocation of the Popular Front in Spain, aided by blocking the sale of arms and support to the Loyalist army to defend its government, but it was a way of enervating political dissent and left-wing organizing in their own home countries as well.

As Rukeyser’s texts on the subject demonstrate, the Spanish Civil War also marked an important moment in women’s visibility in public political life; for both foreign and Spanish women Spain proved to be a site of great potential for the expression of women’s political and artistic agency. Women participated in, wrote on, and documented the war in Spain in great numbers, producing a significant body of work: Mercè Rodoreda, Simone De Beauvoir, Simone Weil, María Teresa León, Rose Macaulay, Dorothy Parker, Josephine Herbst, Martha Gellhorn, Genevieve Taggard, Virginia Woolf, Nancy Cunard, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Gerda Taro, and many more. What is striking is how little of their work on the subject is known;²⁹ and yet women’s participation in the war was in many ways the culmination of the decades-long fights for agency in the public sphere, especially considering that Republican Spain had some of the most progressive gender policies for its time, particularly in anarchist Catalonia: women held political office, were allowed to vote, fought on the front for the first time, used and had access to birth control, in some areas were able to obtain legal abortions and request a divorce, and were guaranteed equal protection under the law and equal access to employment. They were political leaders like Frederica Montseny, Dolores Ibárruri, and Margarita Nelken, and they were writers and artists who continued to produce work about the war long into exile.³⁰ Likewise, international women reported and photographed from the front in great numbers, volunteered as nurses and soldiers, and, like Rukeyser, remained dedicated to the Loyalist cause in Spain after the fighting had ended. The Spanish Civil War marked a vital moment in what was an undeniably important series of decades for women’s liberation and radical activity, and Rukeyser records and benefits from that history.

The events that unfold in Savage Coast reflect the biographical narrative of Rukeyser’s trip to Spain. Rukeyser and her fellow travelers, mostly international athletes traveling to the People’s Olympiad, were the last to cross the border when their train to Barcelona was stopped in Moncada (Montcada, in Catalan), just as the military coup began and a general strike was called in defense of the Republic. The people she met on the train—a Catalan family, the Hungarian Olympic team, French reactionaries, and American communists, among many others that populate her works—were real, their names appearing in articles she wrote at the same time she was working on the novel. As the novel depicts, Rukeyser witnessed the enactment of a radical Popular Front and the collectivization of the town, the local people burning religious icons, and then the dangerous trip in the back of a pick-up truck into Barcelona, a workers city, in the first days of the resistance, jewel-like and liberated. Rukeyser continued to correspond with her lover Hans, the Rotfrontkämpfer Otto Boch, a Bavarian, with a broad strong face like a man in a Brueghel picture, exiled from Hitler’s Germany and traveling to the games as a long-distance runner, after he joined the International Brigades. While the novel ends on the anarchist streets of Barcelona, as Rukeyser is given her responsibility by Martín, the organizer of the People’s Olympics, who says to those being evacuated, you will carry to your own countries, some of them still oppressed and under fascism and military terror, to the working people of the world, the story of what you see in Spain,³¹ other renditions of her narrative, like We Came for Games, describe the evacuation from Barcelona on a boat chartered by the Belgian team (the American consulate provided no assistance). She describes this in the epic poem Mediterranean as a voyage of exile and refugee to the port town of Sète, where those participating in the local fete-day raised their clenched fists in a new salute³² in support of the Spanish Popular Front, marking the opening of a new era of war and violence. It is on this boat when she is asked the question that frames her life’s work, and that begins her most famous book, The Life of Poetry: And in all this—where is there a place for poetry? She answers, I know some of it now, but it will take me a lifetime to find out.³³ Many of her poems and nonfiction works provide a nearly seamless epilogue, finishing from where the novel leaves off, fact and fiction overlapping. Sometimes the nonfiction texts specify details, blurred by her fictional narrative, while at other times the poems written across her lifetime extend and eulogize the memory of those who fought and died against fascism in Spain, or to meditate on the body of Otto Boch, who represents all the bodies of the dead in the unending violence of the twentieth century.³⁴

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 others³⁷—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 Rod³⁸ 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