Savage Coast

by Muriel Rukeyser, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein (Introduction)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781558618206
Publisher:	Feminist Press at CUNY, The
Publication date:	05/07/2013
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	1,007,214
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) was a prolific American writer and political activist. Defying gender, genre and disciplinary boundaries, she wrote poems, plays, screenplays, essays, translations, biographies, history, journalism and fiction, at times combining multiple forms, on an equally wide variety of subjects. In 1935 her first collection of poetry, Theory of Flight , won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, and she went on to publish twelve more volumes of poetry. Coming of age in the radical 1930s, she used the documentary style of social realism, and often the documents themselves, while at the same time deploying aesthetic and experimental modernist techniques. Her work consistently documented, contextualized and archived stories of injustice, resistance, interconnection, invention and possibility, stories of the people and histories that were marginalized by the master narratives of war, capitalism, patriarchy and nationalism. She witnessed and wrote on the trial of the Scottsboro nine, the Spanish Civil War, the Vietnam war, and the imprisonment of poet Kim Chi-Ha in South Korea, to name only a few examples, and became a key figure for the women’s liberation movement. She taught at the California Labor School in 1945, was a faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College from 1955-1967, and served as the president of the P.E.N. American Center from 1975-76. There is no doubt that throughout her life she remained at the forefront of 20th-century political and artistic culture, influencing Ann Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds, Marilyn Hacker, to name a few. Despite a cold-war backlash and long-term FBI surveillance, she continued to write, teach and publish, receiving a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Levison Prize for Poetry, and the Shelly Memorial Award, among other accolades. The Life of Poetry (1949), perhaps her most famous work, is very much a text of the cold-war era, and in it Rukeyser challenges us to examine the violent binaries that produce wars and prevent thinking, calls us to look for the “history of possibility” that exists always, “around and above and under” the other histories. That the text resonates still is an indication not only of her extraordinary critique of the nature of art in times of crisis, but also an indication that the times have changed not nearly enough.

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein is the editor of Muriel Rukeyser’s novel Savage Coast and the edition “Barcelona, 1936” & Selections from the Spanish Civil War Archive (Lost & Found 2011). Her scholarship and writing have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies , The Journal of Narrative Theory , and The Paris Review Daily , among others. She received her PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center, and teaches at the University of Bristol.

Editorial Reviews

Rejected by her publisher in 1937, poet Rukeyser’s newly discovered autobiographical novel is both an absorbing read and an important contribution to 20th-century history. Rukeyser had already won the coveted Yale Younger Poets award when she traveled to Spain in 1936 as a journalist, to cover the ill-fated People’s Olympiad, a protest against the Olympics in Nazi-era Berlin. Her firsthand observations of the cataclysmic start of Spain’s Civil War, as seen through the eyes of her protagonist, a journalist named Helen, reflect the chaos, privation, and horror of the conflict’s early days with authentic detail. Helen is on a train that is forced to stop at the small Spanish town of Moncada, where soldiers come aboard. She becomes acquainted with most of the other passengers, a polyglot group of differing political sympathies. Her aroused political consciousness is augmented by a brief love affair with an antifascist German athlete, and they have a few days together once the group arrives in Barcelona. Throughout the narrative Helen reflects Rukeyser’s attempts to surmount her own emotional crises, articulating her need for a life of political action and expression. Ironically, the factors that led to the novel’s rejection—Rukeyser’s avant-garde impressionistic prose style, alternating with realistic scenes of brutal death and a few descriptions of sexual congress—are what make the book appealing today. While initially suspenseful, some longueurs intrude when Rukeyser attempts to cover nearly every hour of Helen’s five-day ordeal. Since the novel was left unfinished, albeit with Rukeyser’s notes regarding the chapters she intended to expand and edit, readers are not likely to cavil over its shortcomings, applauding instead her documentation of a crucial moment in history. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"At first Savage Coast is a train-of-fools comedy; later, it’s a cross-cultural love story Hemingway would have envied for its suddenness." —New York Times Book Review

"Rejected by her publisher in 1937, poet Rukeyser’s newly discovered autobiographical novel is both an absorbing read and an important contribution to 20th-century history.... Ironically, the factors that led to the novel’s rejection—Rukeyser’s avant-garde impressionistic prose style, alternating with realistic scenes of brutal death and a few descriptions of sexual congress—are what make the book appealing today."—Publisher's Weekly

"...Evokes a powerful sensory landscape, as if Gerda Taro were working at a long-duration shutter speed, capturing the movement of light on her photographic paper. . . . Rukeyser manages, throughout, to avoid both sentimentality and propaganda—no mean feat, especially in the 1930s, the heyday of propagandist literature." —The Daily Beast

"A passionate, callow, self-indulgent, rambling, sporadically dazzling personal essay, or perhaps piece of proto-New Journalism. Rukeyser’s sharp ear for dialogue and a filmic skill at evoking atmosphere are on full display, and Helen is a convincing, fully-rounded protagonist." —The Kenyon Review

"...Savage Coast also allows its reader to identify with Helen’s journey of self-discovery without chiding us for our own naïveté. It forms a snapshot of the strange period between American involvement in two European wars, and of the anxieties of this inter-war generation. . . . Rukeyser’s text proves unique not just because she is an American and a woman but also because we all know who won the war. Savage Coast shows what it meant to be a witness to it." —Open Letters Monthly

“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

“Muriel Rukeyser’s stature as a major poet was recognized in the 1980s largely through the work of feminist writers and critics. Now, the research of a younger critic Rowena Kennedy-Epstein brings us Rukeyser’s modernist novel of the Spanish Civil War’s beginning. Rooted in a germinal moment of the poet's life, its acute social and political observations weave the bildungsroman of a young American woman in Europe at a vital historical moment.”—Marilyn Hacker, author of Presentation Piece

“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

“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 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 Merce Rodereda, 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

From the Publisher