Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser's Twentieth Century

By Rowena Kennedy-Epstein

Winner of the Matei Calinescu Prize

In Unfinished Spirit, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein brings to light the extraordinary archive of Muriel Rukeyser's (1913–1980) unpublished and incomplete literary works, revealing the ways in which misogyny influences the kinds of texts we read and value. Despite her status today as an influential poet, much of Rukeyser's critical and feminist writing remained unfinished, suppressed by the sexism of editors, political censure, the withdrawal of funding and publishing contracts, as well the conditions of single motherhood and economic precarity.

From Savage Coast, her novel of the Spanish Civil War (which Kennedy-Epstein recovered, edited, and published to great acclaim in 2013) to her photo-text collaboration with Berenice Abbott, essays on women writers, radio scripts, and biographies, Unfinished Spirit traces the creation, reception, and rejection of Rukeyser's most ambitious texts—works that continued the radical, avant-garde project of modernism and challenged an increasingly hegemonic Cold War culture. Bound together by Rukeyser's radical vision of artistic creation and political engagement, these incomplete texts open a space to theorize the politics of the unfinished for understanding women's artistic production, reasserting the importance of the archive as a primary site of feminist criticism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781501762338

Book preview

UNFINISHED SPIRIT

Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century

ROWENA KENNEDY-EPSTEIN

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

For Casey, August and Peregrine

For Theresa and Liz, who taught me the value of writing women’s lives

When you have left the river you are a little way

near the lake; but I leave many times.

Parents parried my past; the present was poverty,

the future depended on my unfinished spirit.

There were no misgivings because there was no choice,

only regret for waste, and the wild knowledge:

growth and sorrow and discovery.

Muriel Rukeyser, "First Elegy:

Rotten Lake" (1949)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Waste/Archives/Feminism

Part I. Novel Proliferations: The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1974

1. Costa Brava

2. Her Symbol Was Civil War: Recovering Savage Coast

3. Mother of Exiles: Spanish Civil War Writing

Part II. Being Process Itself: Feminism, Collaboration, and Influence

4. Bad Influences and Willful Subjects: The Life of Poetry , Many Keys, and Sunday at Nine

5. So Easy to See: The Unfinished Collaboration with Berenice Abbott

6. Pillars of Process: Franz Boas, Birth, and Indigenous Thought

Conclusion: The Rukeyser Era

Notes

Selected Sources

Index

Cover

Title

Dedication

Epigraph

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Waste/Archives/Feminism

Part I. Novel Proliferations: The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1974

1. Costa Brava

2. Her Symbol Was Civil War: Recovering Savage Coast

3. Mother of Exiles: Spanish Civil War Writing

Part II. Being Process Itself: Feminism, Collaboration, and Influence

4. Bad Influences and Willful Subjects: The Life of Poetry, Many Keys, and Sunday at Nine

5. So Easy to See: The Unfinished Collaboration with Berenice Abbott

6. Pillars of Process: Franz Boas, Birth, and Indigenous Thought

Conclusion: The Rukeyser Era

Notes

Selected Sources

Copyright

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Epigraph

Contents

Acknowledgments

Start of Content

Conclusion: The Rukeyser Era

Notes

Index

Selected Sources

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the result of a decade-long project that has evolved through collaboration, friendship, and support. It was begun while I was a doctoral candidate in English at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where I was supported by Jane Marcus (who is so very much missed) and Ammiel Alcalay, both of whom, in different ways, gleefully disregarded the orthodoxies of academia and left me free to follow who and what I wanted. They modeled an activist-scholarly approach that was exciting, humane, and generous, and most importantly, they sent me to the archives, the place where this book began. This work has also been possible only because William L. Rukeyser has been so giving with his time, careful editorial attention, and permission, supporting my research on his mother, whose life and work he lovingly tends. While Muriel Rukeyser did not believe in the idea that biographical writing could be authorized, working with Bill has been a pleasure and an invaluable resource. The community of scholars with whom I study Rukeyser has also placed value on the shared nature of our endeavors, which has been essential: thank you, Elisabeth Däumer, Eric Keenaghan, Catherine Gander, Stefania Heim, and Vivian R. Pollak.

This work first became visible, in essays and scholarly articles, through the stewardship of amazing and innovative editorial teams: Amy Scholder and Jeanann Pannasch at the Feminist Press; Ammiel Alcalay and the Lost and Found team at the CUNY Center for the Humanities; Anne Fernald and Urmila Seshagiri, whose rigorous editorial work for their respective special issues on feminism and modernism (Modern Fiction Studies, 2013; Modernism / Modernity, 2017) shaped new conversations and helped me understand my own work better; Claire Battershill and Alexandra Peat, who organized an illuminating conference and special issue, Modernism and Collaboration (Literature and History, 2019); Catherine Gander, who edited the special issue, The Life of Poetry (Textual Practice, 2018); and Elisabeth Däumer, whose commitment to publishing scholarship on Rukeyser and making her writing more visible, through her role as editor of JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory and the Rukeyser Living Archive at Eastern Michigan University, has been crucial for all of us. This work has also benefited from collaborations and discussions with Julia Van Haaften on Berenice Abbott and Alix Beeston on the unfinished and feminism. I’m indebted to the encouraging and insightful editorial work of Mahinder S. Kingra at Cornell University Press. And I have benefited from the institutional support of The CUNY Graduate Center and the University of Bristol.

I owe a special thanks to Tina Wexler and Tamara Kawar at ICM and to the Rukeyser estate for permission to publish extended extracts from Rukeyser’s published and unpublished writing. Thank you to the estates of Berenice Abbott, Eleanor Clark, Ella Winter, and Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska for allowing me to publish correspondences with Rukeyser. Permission to include the two Abbott images was given by Getty Images, and the permission for the inclusion of her letters was given by Ron Kurtz. Permission to quote from Louise Bogan’s reviews of Rukeyser was given by Elizabeth Frank. Archival materials and quotations have been republished courtesy of: the Muriel Rukeyser Collection of Papers, the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; the Boas-Rukeyser Collection, American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia; the Eleanor Clark Papers, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University; the Horace Gregory Papers, Special Collections and Research, Syracuse University; and the Ella Winter Papers, Archival Collection, Columbia University Libraries. Librarians and archivists, I am in your debt.

I’m also grateful to those, far and near, with whom I have been lucky to talk, study, and think: Cecily Parks, Miciah Hussey, Liza Bolitzer, Anne Donlon, Dominique Zino, Molly Pulda, Zach Samalin, Matthew Burgess, Nicholas Boggs, Kalayaan Domingo, Andrew Blades, Josie Gill, Tara Puri, Jane Wright, Sumita Mukherjee, Madhu Krishnan, Erin Forbes, Emily Coit, Karen Skinazi, Anna Snaith, Vike Plock, Richard Kaye, and Wayne Koestenbaum. To Kathy, Liz and Bobbi, Ann and Rick, Margaret, and my parents, Theresa and Perry (whom I miss every day), your support is reflected here. To Casey Hale, first reader and brilliant partner, and our two beautiful children, Augie and Perry, whose demand for joy makes us use our time well. I gave birth twice and lost my father during the writing of this book; my attention to it anchored me while grieving, and it brought me to my mind again, anew, after the overwhelming work of reproduction. Writing about Rukeyser has helped me think through our political, humanitarian, and environmental crises and to remain, as she models, a vulgar optimist.

INTRODUCTION

Waste/Archives/Feminism

Among all the waste there are the intense stories

And tellers of stories.

—MURIEL RUKEYSER, Letter to the Front (1944)

In a letter to Denise Levertov in 1965, Muriel Rukeyser writes, I feel like being fat is a visible sign of my dark side. Levertov responds by qualifying, You actually give the impression of lioness grandeur, of hugeness, but not of ugly fatness.¹ When I first read this in my early twenties, I was struck by the wicked perniciousness of sexism—that two of the twentieth century’s most exciting and radical women poets would spend time talking about their bodies in such a way deeply depressed me. But of course, now I realize that’s not the only thing they were writing about. They were really writing: What does it mean to be a woman who takes up space—not just physical space but intellectual, verbal, literary, and political space? And what does taking up that space imply about desires, appetites, affiliations, bodily acts, and artistic impulses? In Rukeyser’s first and only novel, Savage Coast—written through a formal approach that could not be classified as any one genre, one that exceeded the boundaries of form—she speaks of how it feels to be a big angry woman. Her editor rejected the novel in 1937 on the basis of a reader report that described it as BAD and abnormal. After one of the first lectures I gave on my rediscovery of the lost, unfinished novel and the reasons for its initial rejection, someone from the audience approached me and said, I studied with Muriel, she was a wonderful teacher, but so ugly. Others have spoken of the difficult and expansive unevenness of her work in the context of her difficult personality, and reviewers of her work in public and private also mistook her literary output for her gender manifestations, writing of her body and her sexuality while criticizing her texts and her politics, so that it can be difficult to tell what is under review: her inability to conform to gender orthodoxies or to textual orthodoxies.² She was called a Helen, who was a lesbian, a hussy who wrote like a deflated Whitman, a worn out sibyl, and the Common woman of our century, a siren photographed in a sequin bathing suit, who was confused about sex—criticism that both imbued her work and body with power while degrading that power at the same time.³ This critical doubleness recurs religiously in critiques of Rukeyser, figuring her as both a central and a peripheral figure in the twentieth century.⁴ It is no surprise, then, that Rukeyser herself would write about the reactions to her work and her body at the same time. What she muses on in the letter to Levertov near the end of her life, about what her body exposes about her intellectual, sexual, and formal interests, is an indication of how much gender politics has informed the reception of her work.

This is a familiar story for feminist scholars to encounter and theorize, both within a subject and within themselves.⁵ Through the recuperation and reevaluation of modernist women writers like Rukeyser, critics have developed a prolific and theoretically nuanced approach for thinking about the slippages between the literary act and the bodily act. The poet Anne Carson sums up this genre succinctly, writing that putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to present, and that women have been thought to have two mouths.⁶ We have a long history of women writers taking this slippage and nurturing it, turning the interstitial into the avant-garde revelations and narrative proclamations that have transformed the way we read and write over the past two centuries. While we’ve theorized the conflations of body and aesthetic, traced a tradition, named and made a lineage, women’s experiences of being gendered bodies are still the essential filter through which their works and lives are received and read. Thus misogyny continues to cut across us in a myriad of ways—whether we like to admit it or not, whether we identify as male or female, whatever class or race position we occupy. It’s there to cut off thinking, as Rukeyser would write, informing how we read and how we think. Our current public debates about women still center on what kinds of voices and bodies are allowed to have power, and the ways in which the restrictions on those voices and bodies affect the kinds of artistic work, intellectual labor, and political activity that women produce and that we, as readers or viewers or citizens, ultimately can access. These questions of access and agency remain the central crisis in our understanding of women’s textual production and political power today, and they are as central to understanding the movements of the last century as they are to our own times.

In examining Rukeyser’s vast archive of unfinished texts, one finds there is no way to understand the erasure of so much of her work without understanding how gender functioned at the inception and in the reception of women’s writing during the Cold War, and how that informs our own thinking about gender and texts today. The impact of this has come into renewed focus through our recent and ongoing reckoning with how sexual harassment and gender bias shape not only women’s careers but political, legal, and cultural frameworks as well, as exemplified in the #MeToo movement. One moment in particular has felt especially illuminating for me in thinking through larger questions of women’s artistic production. A few months after the groundbreaking New York Times exposé on the long and disturbing history of serial sexual harassment and assault by the movie producer Harvey Weinstein, the actor Salma Hayek published her personal account. It was one painful story in a flood of testimony that, like all great floods, is changing our landscape. Hayek was writing about her experience making and starring in her innovative film about Frida Kahlo, whose radical, avant-garde, feminist modernist vision changed modern painting and the way we view women’s artistic subjectivity. In the chilling New York Times op-ed, Hayek describes how Weinstein pursued her for years after he had agreed to produce her movie, asking her to have sex with another woman in front of him. She refused each time.

A typed list riffing on names for “the modern woman.”

Figure 1. Mistresse / Mastress. An undated note in a miscellany file in Rukeyser’s archive at the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

During filming, he began to demand things—that she sexualize Kahlo, change her traditional Tehuana dress, modify her bold eyebrows—and then, as she was finishing the film, Weinstein approached with an ultimatum: if Hayek did not add a full-frontal sex scene between Kahlo and the photographer Tina Modotti (played by Ashley Judd), he would kill the movie, shut down production, and bury it. Hayek wrote of having to make a choice: either capitulate to his humiliating fantasy, and vicarious sexual assault, in public, for every viewer to see in perpetuity, or lose the self-defining artistic project she had worked on for years. How, she writes, after so many people had contributed, could she let all this magnificent work go to waste?⁷ She did the scene and was nominated for an Oscar, popularizing Kahlo’s status as a feminist cultural icon as well.

In writing her #MeToo story, Hayek exposed a truth about women’s lives that is rarely articulated; it is a narrative about the struggle to produce work, to have a career, to be a public citizen under patriarchy, to say NO, but she also exposes how the aesthetics, history, and politics of an artwork, and an artist, are shaped by private tyrannies and servilities, as Virginia Woolf describes them in Three Guineas.⁸ Hayek conveys how the artist and work are not metaphorically but quite literally shaped: edited, altered, changed, redrawn by the desire, both singular (Weinstein’s) and global as well, to punish and humiliate women, particularly women who refuse to submit to gender and artistic norms. This is not a new revelation; in fact, one of Rukeyser’s most famous lines, what would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / the world would split open, has become ubiquitous for framing #MeToo stories.⁹ While this kind of silence-breaking has been an essential part of previous women’s liberation movements, what is new about this iteration is how effectively these stories have mapped the persistence of inequality in more exact ways for understanding the forces of change and reaction that have shaped the last one hundred years. Hayek’s sexual exploitation and abuse are written into Kahlo’s narrative, into the narrative of Mexican modernism, and into Modotti’s narrative. Every viewer of the film will also sexualize Kahlo in the way that Weinstein wanted Hayek, as Kahlo, to be sexualized, a sexualization that Kahlo self-consciously struggled against in her own work, in her own life. So the effects of Weinstein’s harassment influence multiple strands of women’s history and aesthetic legacies, and Hayek’s narrative shows us the precarious space between disappearance and visibility in which women’s work exists.

When I read Hayek’s piece, I had recently found in Rukeyser’s archive in the Library of Congress an unpublished essay on women writers titled Many Keys. The essay was commissioned by The Nation in 1957 but was ultimately rejected after submission for failing to communicate its point.¹⁰ In it Rukeyser writes of two kinds of influences found in women’s writing. One is the integration of the personal and political worlds; the other, she writes, fascinating and difficult to trace, consists of those influences rejected in the writer’s work. We hardly have the biographical methods, or the critical beginnings, to let us perceive the struggle against influences, and how these reactions may be used, turning rebellion, hostility, desires begun in hatred and in fear into the movements, reaching art, that may surpass [their] origins.¹¹ Just as Hayek’s narrative shows how her struggle against influence, and capitulation to it, was transformed into an aesthetic legacy, here Rukeyser, in the Cold War fifties, began to think toward such a critical stance, one that helps us read the complex gender politics of artistic production in the period and that anticipates the feminist activism and literary criticism that would arise around her work in subsequent decades.¹² The reading Rukeyser is describing takes into account forces that women writers have had to work against or with or in—the influences of teachers, critics, parents, editors, readers, lovers, mentors—as well as a literary heritage that positions women as object or audience and not the subject of literary and textual history. But she goes further, for she asks us to understand the aesthetic implications of such an influence: There is waste in nature, waste in art, and plenty of waste in the lives of women. Waste is an influence, and the making of poetry works against waste.¹³

By the time Rukeyser was commissioned to write Many Keys, she had become intimately aware of the gender politics of waste. Savage Coast, in the words of the reader report, has been a waste of time, and between the novel’s rejection in 1937 and the 1960s, Rukeyser would produce a series of large-scale projects that were rejected for publication and that remain unfinished in her archive.¹⁴ Theoretically ambitious, multigenre, sometimes collaborative, these texts continued the radical avant-garde project of modernism and traced a polyphonic American tradition that challenged an increasingly hegemonic Cold War culture. Ranging from the lost novel to her scientific photo-text collaboration with Berenice Abbott, to her biography of the anthropologist Franz Boas, to her suppressed lectures on women writers, to canceled plays and unproduced films and television and radio shows, her work did not linger in obscurity for lack of authorial energy or talent, or editorial stubbornness. Instead, her archive discloses a history of revisions, pitches, and rejections—documents of her commitment to her artistic and political vision in the face of an often hostile and sexist readership. By examining these unfinished works—the making, reception, and rejection of—we are better able to understand how the gender norms of publishing practices, aesthetic dictates, literary canons, and disciplinary categories were formed during the Cold War period, and the ways in which Rukeyser resisted these constraints. Each of Rukeyser’s unpublished works gives us a unique view of the conditions that produce a text’s unfinished-ness—the sexism of editors, the withdrawal of funding or publishing contracts, political censure or intellectual derision, motherhood and economic precarity—and they are also bound together by Rukeyser’s radical vision for artistic creation and political engagement, changing how we might read a period often defined by a conservative gender and artistic ethos. Despite their original rejection, the texts are themselves aesthetically rich, unique in their narrative focus on marginalized peoples and voices, and intellectually rigorous. Collectively these texts serve as examples of the important work that is lost when we undervalue women’s cultural contributions. It is through the recovery of these unfinished, wasted texts that we can better understand how twentieth-century ideologies of exclusion have been formed through literary and academic values; but it is also through these texts that we can uncover the kinds of complex feminist approaches necessary for dismantling the very same values.

I want to take a moment to clarify what I mean by unfinished. Rukeyser produced so much extraordinary work that has not been collected in reprint, or has never been in print, including a vast trove of prose writing that is in her archive. She wrote many film scripts and two major plays, and she worked in radio and graphic design. Her verse play The Middle of the Air was directed by Hallie Flanagan at the Iowa Theatre Workshop in 1945 and was headed to Broadway but was pulled because of the conservative chill covering Broadway in the late forties. The Middle of the Air is not unfinished per se but has disappeared.¹⁵ Another verse play, Houdini, which she never thought of as finished, was performed in 1973 and was published in 2002 by the Paris Press. She wrote and worked on films and television programs that seemed to get all the way to production and then were pulled, including The Mask, The Big Dome, and Adventures, and co-wrote three films that went into production: All the Way Home (1957) and A Place to Live (1941)—which were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York—and the propaganda film Stop Japan! (Garrison Films, 1938), directed by Joris Ivens.¹⁶ Rukeyser produced work far beyond what is currently in print, and even that work has been historically under-evaluated, though this has been changing with recent scholarship by Elisabeth Däumer, Catherine Gander, Stefania Heim, and Eric Keenaghan. These scholars build upon important foundational work by Kate Daniels, Anne Herzog, Adrienne Rich, Jan Freeman, Jan Heller Levi, David Bergman, Walter Kalaidjian, Clive Bush, and Louise Kertesz. Rukeyser’s poetry, which was the form in which she was published most consistently, was only collected in full in 2005, and her most important work of poetics, The Life of Poetry,