Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser's Twentieth Century 9781501762345

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Unfinished Spirit

Unfinished Spirit

Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2022 by Rowena Kennedy-Epstein All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2022 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kennedy-Epstein, Rowena, author. Title: Unfinished spirit : Muriel Rukeyser’s twentieth century / Rowena Kennedy-Epstein. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021026443 (print) | LCCN 2021026444 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501762321 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501762338 (epub) | ISBN 9781501762345 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Rukeyser, Muriel, 1913–1980—Criticism and interpretation. | Women and literature—United States—History— 20th century. | Feminism and literature—United States—History— 20th century. Classification: LCC PS3535.U4 Z739 2022 (print) | LCC PS3535.U4 (ebook) | DDC 811/.52—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021026443 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021026444 Cover illustrations: (top) Photograph of Muriel Rukeyser’s hand by Berenice Abbott. (bottom) Muriel Rukeyser’s Eye (1940s) by Berenice Abbott. Both photos courtesy of the Berenice Abbott Archive, Ryerson Image Centre © Ronald Kurtz, administered by Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc. Used by permission.

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

xi

Introduction: Waste/Archives/Feminism

1

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

25

1. Costa Brava

27

2. Her Symbol Was Civil War: Recovering Savage Coast

37

3. Mother of Exiles: Spanish Civil War Writing

66

Part II. Being Process Itself: Feminism, Collaboration,

and Influence

89

4. Bad Influences and Willful Subjects: The Life of Poetry,

“Many Keys,” and Sunday at Nine

91

5. So Easy to See: The Unfinished Collaboration with

Berenice Abbott

114

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

135

x

C o n te nts

Conclusion: The Rukeyser Era

160

Notes

169

Selected Sources

191

Index

201

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 doc­ toral candidate in English at The Graduate Center of the City Univer­ sity 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, glee­ fully 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 giv­ ing 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

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A c know l e dgme nts

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 discus­ sions 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 repub­ lished 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, Washing­ ton, DC; the Boas-Rukeyser Collection, American Philosophical Society

Ac knowled gmen ts

x iii

Library, Philadelphia; the Eleanor Clark Papers, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University; the Horace Gregory Papers, Spe­ cial 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 reproduc­ tion. 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 quali­ fying, “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 talk­ ing 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, affilia­ tions, bodily acts, and artistic impulses? In Rukeyser’s first and only novel, Savage Coast—written through a formal approach that could not be clas­ sified 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

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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, some­ one from the audience approached me and said, “I studied with Muriel, she was a wonderful teacher, but so ugly.” Others have spoken of the dif­ ficult and expansive unevenness of her work in the context of her dif­ ficult 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 pho­ tographed in a sequin bathing suit,” who was “confused about sex”— criticism that both imbued her work and body with power while degrad­ ing 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 fig­ ure in the twentieth century.4 It is no surprise, then, that Rukeyser her­ self 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 in­ terests, is an indication of how much gender politics has informed the re­ ception of her work. This is a familiar story for feminist scholars to encounter and theo­ rize, both within a subject and within themselves.5 Through the recupera­ tion and reevaluation of modernist women writers like Rukeyser, critics have developed a prolific and theoretically nuanced approach for think­ ing 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

Waste / Arc h ives /F emin is m

3

a lineage, women’s experiences of being gendered bodies are still the es­ sential 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, what­ ever 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 with­ out understanding how gender functioned at the inception and in the re­ ception 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 il­ luminating for me in thinking through larger questions of women’s artis­ tic 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 tes­ timony 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 subjectiv­ ity. 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.

4

I n t r o duc ti on

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 ulti­ matum: if Hayek did not add a full-frontal sex scene between Kahlo and

Waste / Arc h ives /F emin is m

5

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 pro­ duce 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: ed­ ited, 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 sexu­ alization 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

6

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was ultimately rejected after submission for “failing to communicate its point.”10 In it Rukeyser writes of two kinds of influences found in wom­ en’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, hos­ tility, 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, mul­ tigenre, 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 Ber­ enice 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,

Waste / Arc hives /F emin is m

7

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 unfin­ ished 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 con­ straints. Each of Rukeyser’s unpublished works gives us a unique view of the conditions that produce a text’s unfinished-ness—the sexism of edi­ tors, 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 narra­ tive 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 un­ derstand 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. Rukey­ ser 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 conser­ vative 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

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(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, had gone out of print but was reis­ sued in 1996. This is to say, there is an enormous amount of literary ma­ terial that one could turn to when discussing Rukeyser’s archive and the unfinished. In this book I focus on the major texts and ideas that she spent years and sometimes decades developing, ones that often offer explicit and implicit theorizations of gender through formal approaches one might un­ derstand as being in the tradition of a modernist avant-garde, and that in­ tersect with contemporary philosophical and political discussions. These are works that no editor would ultimately accept for publication and that are left quite literally unfinished: they have not been proofed; sometimes they are no more than a series of drafts and notes; they are often heavily annotated; and the trail of their creation and rejection can be followed through correspondence. These texts are rich sites of exploration for many reasons, but particu­ larly for the alternative vision of the twentieth century that they provide and for the formal processes in which that vision is reached. These are texts that make me ask: What if it had been Rukeyser and not Adorno who shaped our postwar thinking about culture and art and fascism? What if it had been the “Rukeyser era” and not the “Pound era”? What if we follow the unfinished, let it guide us to a more holistic and diverse un­ derstanding of the movements of women’s literary production, of theoreti­ cal developments, of radical histories, and of twentieth-century literature more broadly? Rukeyser’s unfinished texts also help us better understand, contextualize, and connect those she did get published, illustrating how she worked around a censorious establishment in order to move her ideas into the world, sometimes reusing the same material in different forms

Waste / Arc hives /F emin is m

9

repeatedly until it finally reached an audience. The proliferating nature of her writing was a direct result of the ways in which her work was being received, but also an indicator of her insistent radical impulse to keep alive the movements of political and social transformation that occurred in the 1930s, even as the literary and political norms of the forties and fifties were trying to stop them, trying to halt the “restless forward motion” of modernism, as the critic Louise Bogan described it.17 In her first lecture of “The Usable Truth,” written in 1940, Rukeyser asserts what will be an essential tenet in all her subsequent major projects—the theorization of waste in the context of systems of power, and the transformation of our material conditions through the imagination, what she describes as the “tradition of the audacious spirit”: First, to create an image of that peace, and then to bring it about. And, in the meantime, we need the audacity always to cry for more freedom, more imagination, more poetry with all its meanings. . . . We shall not be wrong, I think, at any point during the rest of our lives if we call always for more freedom, more honesty. Social, personal, aesthetic beliefs need to be shaken loose; all moulds are broken; our opinions of war and sex and tomorrow’s headlines need to be faced, re-cast. The last audacity will be this call: to de­ mand that people bring their lives, their mature wishes, to this effort. . . . It is necessary that the twenty-fifth century be able to discard our work, to re­ ject our time. Our Poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond them.18

The Spirit of Revolt “History is preserved not in the art object, but in the tradition of making the art object,” Jane Marcus wrote in 1984.19 Despite nearly half a century of feminist interventions that have asked us to reevaluate the forms and traditions we work within, that have recovered and published or brought back into print lost works by women, including exciting new work in fem­ inist modernist studies, the lasting effect of the gendered bias that Rukey­ ser encountered in the Cold War publishing marketplace is still evident in the texts we read, study, and teach today.20 Melanie Micir has noted that “the midcentury consolidation of modernism into an object of academic study took place primarily in male-dominated biographies, single-author

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studies, anthologies, and institutional archives. This is how we received the major players, texts, and aesthetic principles of the field. New Crit­ icism may have focused readers’ attention on the words rather than the lives, but these foundational biographical acts helped cement which words were remembered.”21 Single-author studies also became essential for mak­ ing visible women’s literary contributions a few decades later, expanding our notion of genre and period and situating the work of women writ­ ers into our literary histories (monographs on Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, H.D., and Zora Neale Hurston). Despite the genre’s importance, however, there remains a paucity of single-author studies on women writ­ ers today—especially those like Rukeyser, whose oeuvre is only partially visible, and who fails to conform to the androcentric literary and temporal categories that would otherwise position her works in the context of an easily recognizable political or aesthetic movement: she was never a com­ munist, despite three decades of FBI surveillance, but an unaligned leftist who fought for peace and justice throughout her life; her work is a com­ bination of formal, realist, and avant-garde styles; she was never solely a poet, but a public intellectual who wrote across every genre; she was an autodidact who refused to be limited by notions of scholarly authority, and was especially interested in the scientific imagination in a period when the sciences were dominated by men; she worked collaboratively in a pe­ riod that privileged the individual genius; and she was unbounded by sex­ ual definitions as well, romantically linked and living variously with men and women, and raising a child alone. It is precisely because of these dis­ sonances that the recovery and study of Rukeyser’s unfinished writing is so necessary for understanding the repressive currents of American cul­ ture, and for acquiring new ways for thinking about the forms, ideas, and people who resist those very powers. Especially important is Rukeyser’s unique history as a highly visible tar­ get of what she describes as “a power-culture.”22 While she was considered a rising star of the 1930s, winning the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for her first book, Theory of Flight, the books Rukeyser would get pub­ lished in the forties and fifties—including poetry, plays, and biography— were offered up by critics as examples of the kind of writing by women that they found transgressive. Cited as both politically and aesthetically weak, her work was openly derided in magazines like Partisan Review,

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11

The New Yorker, and The Nation, among others, and she was presented as a warning to other women writers. In the 1950s, Louise Bogan, then halfway through her nearly four-decade tenure as poetry editor of The New Yorker, wrote of Rukeyser’s “deflated Whitmanian rhetoric,” ar­ guing that women writers “are not good at abstractions and their sense of structure is not large,” and that their poetry is best when “attuned to minute particulars.”23 Bogan’s assessment of women writers’ capabili­ ties became a vital tool for policing the political and gender boundaries of American literature during the Cold War—a period during which the “history of the avant-garde” was uncoupled from the “history of radical­ ism,” and, I contend, one in which the history of prewar women writers’ political and formal modernist innovation was uncoupled from postwar literary and political culture.24 Writing for the Atlantic Monthly in 1947, the conservative American poet and theorist Peter Viereck announced a New Critical era: “The spirit of revolt is over, the revolt against poetic forms and disciplines.”25 This supposedly obsolete spirit of revolt against literary and political ortho­ doxies had been essential for women writers, who were perhaps its most productive and inventive avatars. In Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism, Ewa Płonowska Ziarek writes that women suffragists in the early twentieth century redefined the struggle for the “right to vote as the right to revolt,” and argues that our understanding of modernism as a radical and experimental site for political and linguistic upheaval be­ comes legible only when we read women’s writing of the period.26 In their 1986 article “The Female Imagination and Modernist Aesthetics,” San­ dra Gilbert and Susan Gubar similarly highlight women writers’ pivotal position within modernism, describing their problematic relationship with “the tradition of authority as well the authority of tradition” as “the major precursors of all 20th-C modernists, the avant garde of the avant garde.”27 By the late 1940s, however, many women writers once consid­ ered key figures in 1920s and 1930s modernist movements—writers as varied as Mina Loy, Josephine Herbst, and Zora Neale Hurston, among many others—saw their work fall out of print, or struggled to get new work published. In The Other Black List: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s, Mary Helen Washington writes of how it took Gwendolyn Brooks nearly the entire decade of the 1940s to get her

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“black leftist modernist feminist novel of the cold war” Maud Martha published, receiving rejection after rejection, which echoed Rukeyser’s experience. Publishers called it “too hampered with self-consciousness” and more “suited for poetry than prose.”28 Women’s exclusion from the literary marketplace, from canon making, and from cultural institutions was often carried out under the nominal charge of “aesthetic failure” or political naïveté. In actuality, the suppression of women within these spheres reflected a broader cultural animus toward feminists, lesbians, and single mothers, and against women who articulated views that ran contrary to both left and right political orthodoxies, or who pursued the sorts of theoretically abstract and formally inventive projects that Bogan deemed “unnatural” for women writers. Thinking about gender in this period leads us to revise how we define and constitute radical politics and its relationship to “revolutions” in artistic forms, since many women writers were unaligned or unaffiliated radicals, making them, as Rukeyser wrote, “vulnerable to both sides.”29 Understanding Rukeyser’s “vulnerable” position in this period is essential for understanding the period itself. As recent studies have shown, Cold War cultural institutions—from lit­ erary prizes, to museums, to literary magazines—were funded (sometimes secretly, sometimes not) by the CIA through the Congress of Cultural Freedom, as well as by the British Council and the Information Research Office in the UK. These outlets were used to justify the making of a new literary landscape, effectively constraining the scope of prewar modern­ ist literature to conform to the political and aesthetic agenda of a Cold War literary canon.30 Following the Second World War, the United States government funded the production of literary journals and academic monographs, the field of area studies was formed, and canons, prizes, and exhibitions were instituted—all to promote one version of AngloAmerican cultural hegemony and to counter the perceived threat of com­ munism. As Greg Barnhisel notes in Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature and American Culture, modernism, once constituted by “wildly dispa­ rate” artistic movements and politics, was newly “presented as a proWestern, pro-‘freedom,’ and pro-bourgeois movement.”31 The specter of communism, conflated with the avant-garde experimentation of the previ­ ous decades, was used to engender suspicion of feminism, homosexuality,

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sexual freedom, single motherhood, unaligned radicalism, pacifism, an­ tiwar and civil rights activism, and anticolonialism. Alan Filreis demon­ strates, in Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960, how radical modernism—the impulse to join both aesthetic experimentation and left-aligned radicalism—was ef­ fectively suppressed in the postwar years as “many heretical writers were ‘being rejected automatically by publishers and editors, not because of a deficiency of literary quality, but because they [had] dared being critical of prevailing political and cultural reaction.’”32 Through archival records, Filreis provides an intricate map of how writers once popular and cen­ tral to literary movements in the 1920s and 1930s (such as Genevieve Taggard, Winifred Holtby, Horace Gregory, and Marya Zaturenska, as well as Rukeyser) were systematically isolated and excluded from postwar publishing opportunities and left out of the literary canon making that occurred at midcentury. Most importantly, Filreis shows how the political and aesthetic aims of the Cold War were bound together: “Modernism,” he writes, quoting Gilbert Malcolm Fess, “‘has lasted much too long’ and behaved ‘like a totalitarian dictator gone to seed,’” and he is able to dem­ onstrate how formal experimentation was “dubbed . . . ‘bad poetry’” in order to enact a “restoration of language” and suppress the avant-garde, even “the idea of the avant-garde.”33 In looking at Rukeyser’s unfinished texts, I examine how gender com­ plicates this Cold War reshaping of the literary landscape and of the per­ sistence of a radical avant-garde, because the same moment that saw the “general pattern of midcentury efforts to forget or conspire to repress both radical left poets of the 1930s and Revolutions of the Word from the 1920s” also saw women’s newly won prewar roles in the public sphere under attack as part of Cold War political and aesthetic programs intent on reshaping women’s bodies and voices.34 As Landon R. Y. Storrs shows, anticommunists feared not only “that communism—and the liberalism they viewed as a slippery slope to it—would erode men’s control of wom­ en’s sexuality and labor” but that “popular antifeminism” was an effec­ tive strategy for “increasing public support for their other objectives.”35 What happened (and continues to happen) to the women writers who in­ vented new modes that not only couldn’t be defined by twentieth-century binaries and boundaries but actively defied them?

14

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She-Poets Rukeyser was keenly aware of the ways that reactionary political and cultural projects betrayed themselves through their attitudes toward women. After a series of sexist reviews from Bogan and Oscar Williams in The New Republic, and on the heels of what the Partisan Review itself described as the “Rukeyser Imbroglio”—in which a series of “anon­ ymous” reviewers attacked her work—she wrote in a 1944 letter to Marya Zaturenska: I think the whole thing has been reactionary in the extreme, a good sign of other reaction, and may very well be dealt with as such. My feeling is that when war becomes as horrible as it can be, the spectacle of a woman in­ volved in war no longer is ridiculous; no matter how the critics and the fair­ ies feel about women writing, when moral and intellectual life reaches such a point, its signs are in its attitudes toward women.36

What she identifies here—“attitudes toward women”—as symptomatic of the reactionary climate tells us not only important things about how and when we might define “the conservative turn”—since she is talking about how women are being read as war writers during World War II, not to mention how women understood the vulnerability of their work on the literary marketplace more broadly—but also that Rukeyser herself had a clear understanding about how gender functioned in the context of polit­ ical and cultural projects, a theoretical position she develops in the sub­ sequent decades.37 Rukeyser, however, is not an uncomplicated figure, for she too conflates these biases with the reviewers’ own gender transgres­ sions, using the same kind of rhetoric, as she indicts “the fairies” for their anti-woman control of the literary world, or when she implies elsewhere that Bogan’s sexual frigidity was essential to her critical coldness, writ­ ing that Bogan’s problems with her would be fixed if she had a “sex hor­ mone injected.”38 In this sense Rukeyser also traffics in gender ideologies that are just as essential to understanding the literary and intellectual cul­ ture of the 1940s as to her own critical reception and that of other women writers. Delmore Schwartz used Rukeyser’s lesbianism and bisexuality as a focal point in a long sexist critique of her work, titled “The Grandeur and Mis­ ery of a Poster Girl,” which he wrote anonymously with William Phillips

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and Philip Rahv for the Partisan Review, where Schwartz was also the edi­ tor. The history of this “imbroglio” has been amply covered, but impor­ tant highlights include assertions like “she 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”; and “she flew in an airplane like a character in Auden’s work . . . and cried Yes like Molly Bloom to the working class”— insidious transformations of a woman who authors into a woman who is authored by men.39 In private, Schwartz called her a “Helen who was a Lesbian,” and wrote that “she is stupid and knows nothing about po­ etry.”40 The Partisan Review editorial’s gendered language was emblem­ atic of a period in which women who asserted authority were consistently put in their place, and it appeared in an issue that might well itself have been the poster child for the anticommunist left, with two poems from Auden and essays by both Bogan and Lionel Trilling (his on E. M. Forster). Schwartz continued in the editorial that the “Usable Truth” lectures were delivered to “Vassar girls,” writing, “[Rukeyser] was revealed in a new role: that of a big-league representative of the ‘creative spirit,’ speaking her piece with all the unctuousness and culture-schmerz of a junior theo­ logian of poetics.”41 In his review in The New Republic, Oscar Williams opens by noting that he’s writing about “women poets” because “most of the male poets are in the armed services,” and goes on to refer to the publication of the first part of H.D.’s astonishing epic Trilogy: The Walls Do Not Fall and Marianne Moore’s Nevertheless as “little books.” Williams then spends two paragraphs backhandedly praising Rukeyser in a way that equates her poetic lines with her physical body, writing that her “general fault is an overabundance of material. In the midst of one poem she habitually begins another,” and that the “rhythmic shapes she uses [are] much like planks being tested by the foot of an elephant about to cross a chasm.”42 Rukeyser’s response to Williams’s not particularly subtle conflation of gender and genre norms was to write an angry letter stating, “You have written like some frightened hack who loves neither poetry nor women, and if you go over your review you will see how many positive attributes of creativity you have attacked as faults.”43 This question about the misreading of women’s “positive attributes of creativity” as “faults” is an essential element to how Rukeyser theorizes

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containment culture as gendered and aesthetic culture. In doing so she develops the kind of feminist analysis that scholars and writers would fur­ ther elaborate on in the seventies and eighties—that is, one that highlights the “attributes of creativity” that are disparaged in women precisely be­ cause they expose or confront the systemic inequalities that form the basis of their disparagement.44 In “Many Keys,” Rukeyser describes the ways in which women’s aesthetic choices are so often misread as “hesitation” and “inexperience,” and goes on to highlight how that misreading means we miss the radical potential of women’s writing. In her collaboration with Berenice Abbott she shows how a “failure to see” leads to the intellectual waste and creative amputation she describes in The Life of Poetry. How critics “feel” about “women’s writing” at midcentury, then, is a manifes­ tation of other political and cultural “reactions.” Rukeyser shows us that understanding the reaction to women writers in the period is essential for understanding the larger codes of Cold War literary and cultural suppres­ sion more broadly. These codes found an authoritative voice in Louise Bogan, who held the powerful position of poetry editor for The New Yorker from 1931 to 1969, and who deployed a particularly virulent form of explicitly gendered New Criticism. In a 1951 review she wrote, “From the beginning of the record, female lyricism has concerned itself with minute particulars. . . . [I]t is a flawless distillation, a pure crystallization of thought, circum­ stances and emotion.” In this same review she praises Adrienne Rich’s first book of poems for being “neatly and modestly dressed” (quoting Auden), attacks Rukeyser for putting on “sibyl’s robes, nowadays truly thread­ bare,” and writes that the latter’s work is “filled with gloomy humanitari­ anism.”45 Bogan often used Rukeyser as a foil for what she deemed “bad poetry” by women who’d kept the modernist and feminist spirit alive “for too long.” In the same review she also declares that a post-feminist, post­ modernist world had announced itself, writing: A younger generation of women poets began to get into print, in a scattered and uncertain way, in England and America during the war. This group is far less spectacular than its post-1918 predecessors, for a variety of rea­ sons. In the first place, the present period is not one of violent transition from an old to a new set of moral and aesthetic codes. The pressures that pushed young women artists to theatrical gestures of one kind or another no

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longer exist. One of these pressures—the “feminist” insistence that women could succeed in the arts and sciences only to the extent that they modelled themselves upon men—has fortunately, completely evaporated. The roman­ tic picture of a woman-as-sibyl has also petered out. .  .  . Finally, women poets, along with everyone else who has examined nineteenth-century liter­ ature in English, now recognize the distinct line that rules off formal from “popular” expression.46

Not only do Bogan’s assertions erase a generation of women modernists, but also her claim that women’s writing no longer needed to respond to the material and political conditions of the times (“popular” expression) rewrites literary history by inscribing the gender and aesthetic values by which writing would be judged “good.” That Bogan felt that “the pres­ ent period is not one of violent transition” in 1951—during the height of McCarthyism and massive surveillance programs, in a period of nu­ clear hysteria that saw the beginning of the Korean War, colonial revolt in Africa, independence in India, and civil rights movements at home— indicates how effectively radical dissidence as formal experimentation had been muffled in the preceding decade. Bogan had been crafting this kind of antifeminist / antiradical argument around women writers for over a decade, one that echoed long-standing assessments of women’s poetry—and by extension women—as antiintellectual.47 One of her most famous poems begins with the line “women have no wilderness in them,” and in her 1947 essay “The Heart and the Lyre,” she attempts to extrapolate genre attributes from women’s lived experiences, writing that women writers “are capable of perfect and poi­ gnant song. . . . [T]hough she may never compose an epic or tragic drama in five acts, the woman poet has her singular role and precious destiny.”48 Bogan’s ideas correlate neatly to the gender norms of the period, a reflec­ tion of a culture that privileged the physical smallness of the domesticated housewife of midcentury, whose apotheosis was self-effacement at home and on the page. Bogan’s literary historicizing is complicated, though, for she herself did not fit that mold either, and in fact her power as a critic was diminished because of the gender assessment of women’s literary value that she herself deployed. While Bogan worked to give women writers a place in a literary canon that was forming around the work of a par­ ticularly small group of male writers, she also made those women appear

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nonthreatening by delineating poetic forms that arose from subordina­ tion and that did not challenge male supremacy. Bogan’s negotiation is a good example of the ways in which women make careers for themselves through compromise and complicity, but it also shows us the rhetorical mechanism through which women can exist in the canon without trans­ forming it. Rukeyser offered a divergent but sometimes parallel path to Bogan’s in how she negotiated, or failed to negotiate, her career. Read next to each other they are an interesting study in women’s artistic agency, and in why detailing Bogan’s assessment of Rukeyser is so important for understanding the political and aesthetic crises of the period itself. As Elisabeth Dodd notes, “Bogan and her contemporaries faced condescen­ sion and arrogance from the time that they began to write, and to achieve literary recognition they had to contravene through various strategies, one of which was to dissociate themselves from the prevailing view of women poets.”49 This dissociation is crystallized in Achievement of American Poetry, Bogan’s addition to the canon making of the 1940s and 1950s, published just after Rukeyser’s Life of Poetry. At first Bogan seems to showcase the importance of women writers to the development of modernism, writ­ ing that “women’s subsequent rejection of moral passivity, economic de­ pendence, and intellectual listlessness in favor of active interests and an involvement with the world around them” meant they began to create interesting and exciting poetry.50 But this is faint praise, for Bogan seems to imply that this is a revolt against women’s inherently listless “nature,” not against gender or textual norms. She goes on to codify a highly con­ servative and masculinist modernism that conforms with Cold War stan­ dards, ones that are ultimately used against women writers. Significantly, in Achievement, she uses Rukeyser as an example of political and aesthetic “incoherence” under the chapter heading “Ideology and Irrationalism.” Bogan writes of Rukeyser that “her style, an amalgam of modern styles, was almost wholly unrelieved by moments of clarity, or her seriousness by moments of lightness. As a result, her argument was not able to project itself with force, and her long poems failed in impact, because of dramatic as well as structural incoherence.”51 Rukeyser is one of the few poets in­ troduced in Bogan’s canon as an example of bad practice, and she is only one of a handful of women writers in the book overall. This is to note that Rukeyser’s position in this newly forming Cold War canon is that of

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“in and out” at the same time—brought in only to be excluded. Bogan re­ turns to Rukeyser again and again in her New Yorker column, only to pan her work consistently, describing it in various ways as “incoherent” and “su­ perficial.” Louise Kertesz wonders “why Bogan didn’t simply refrain from mentioning Rukeyser’s books in the New Yorker column,” but it is clear why she does: at every juncture where Bogan declared that modernism’s “restless forward motion had ended,” Muriel Rukeyser would continue to push the spirit of revolt forward.52 Rukeyser’s response to Bogan’s con­ tinual attacks on her was to write that she had constructed “an attack” on a “group of she-poets on the grounds that they are she-poets,” and that not even Bogan herself would survive.53 In a 1942 letter to Horace Gregory, Rukeyser succinctly narrates the experience of women in the literary marketplace at midcentury as she tries to get her various projects published—the Willard Gibbs biography, the “Usable Truth” lectures that she had delivered at Vassar, and her long poem “The Soul and Body of John Brown”: Marshall Best and [Harold] Guinzburg [publishers of Viking Press] are so awful about everything I want to do that I felt very dreary about the con­ nection. It was Best who told me at a party that I was a nice girl, but had too many ideas. That was when I first spoke to him about the Gibbs. They turned that down, and the Vassar lectures, and the John Brown— sidestepping each time and trying to keep some sort of hold, hoping for a novel, I think. Now I hope to try a good many forms, but I haven’t the slightest to do with a novel—one about my friends was what they kept sug­ gesting! I sent in three pages of a little object called ORDEAL by Muriel to Curtis Brown in case they really wanted to see one. I am really proud of the first sentence. It begins, “There were footprints all over the sheets that morning,” and it is about a publisher who longs for a two-headed son. .  .  . A brilliant first novel about literary life in New York, and the world battlefronts.54

Despite being identified at the time by Rukeyser, gender politics are often missing from current scholarship about the antimodernist, conservative literary turn at midcentury and the development of an antiradical Cold War culture that has informed both our attitudes toward texts and toward women, and the ways in which a literary discipline was built around those attitudes. For example, if you follow the legacy of Harold Guinzburg,

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the co-founder of Viking, whom Rukeyser writes about in the letter just quoted, you’ll find that his son went on to be the first managing editor of the Paris Review, whose most recent general editor, Lorin Stein, resigned after a series of #MeToo exposés about his sexual harass­ ment of women authors, a reflection of the magazine’s historical bias against publishing women writers.55 These are important genealogies for understanding the persistence of Cold War literary legacies on who and what gets published and read. In Caliban and the Witch, Sylvia Federici reasserts that the feminist vision is “to redefine in fundamental ways the accepted historical categories and make visible hidden structures of dom­ ination and exploitation.”56 In thinking about women’s literary history, in thinking about the boundaries of modernism, and in thinking about women’s artistic production more broadly, our task is still to make visible those structures of humiliation and domination that censored, but also to make available texts and ideas that allow for new ways of seeing, inter­ preting, and confronting those histories. Rukeyser’s unfinished texts help us do that.

Recovering Rukeyser The first three chapters of the book begin where I began, with the discov­ ery of Rukeyser’s major unpublished work, Savage Coast, which was her first text to receive critical condemnation by editors and friends. It was also a narrative of an experience that was deeply transformational, as I show in chapter 1, engendering a lifetime commitment to advocacy for refugees and against all forms of fascism. Rukeyser describes the Span­ ish Civil War as “the place where I was born.” Traveling to Spain for the British magazine Life and Letters To-day to report on the People’s Olympiad (July 19–26, 1936), an alternative to Hitler’s Berlin Games, she instead witnessed the outbreak of civil war. Rukeyser was in Spain only five days, but she cites the experience as the place where “I began to say what I believed” and “the end of confusion.” She was only twentytwo at the time, but Rukeyser’s experience as witness to both the mili­ tary coup and the revolutionary response in Catalonia proved pivotal; she would write about Spain and its war, revolution, exiled, and dead for over forty years after, creating a radical and interconnected twentieth-century

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textual history. The story of Spain is most fully developed in the unfin­ ished autobiographical novel Savage Coast, which was rejected by her editor, Pascal Covici, in 1937 on the recommendation of her mentor Horace Gregory. But as I suggest in chapter 2, it was the book’s gendernonconforming and sexually liberated protagonist, along with the polit­ ically radical and experimental form of the novel, that ran counter to contemporaneous political and aesthetic gender dictates. Rukeyser says as much in a letter responding to Gregory, writing that the form “is not a novel, and I won’t make it compose like one.” The novel serves as an ur-text for her writing over the following five decades, and in chapter 3 I follow its afterlives, traceable in poems, reportage, memoir, and essays— and more often in experimental forms that combined these genres— circumventing the aesthetic and political criticism originally leveled against the text. By continuing to draw from her experience of the Spanish Civil War to write about war and crisis throughout her life, Rukeyser creates a fragmented epic endeavor, and a “memorial of the bittersweet,” as Nancy Cunard described the conflict, for those who fought and died in the first major battle against fascism.57 When Oscar Williams claimed of Rukey­ ser’s poetry that “in the midst of one poem she habitually begins another,” there is something astute in that assessment, but I would argue that her proliferating textual project on Spain is one of her greatest strengths that have been misread as faults. In chapter 4 I follow another one of Rukeyser’s proliferating and mul­ tigenre projects by exploring the unfinished, unpublished, rejected, and canceled lectures, essays, and radio programs that make up the large body of extra-textual materials that surround The Life of Poetry, a text which itself represents only a small part of the complex historiographic, feminist, and philosophical theories she was developing in the forties and fifties. In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser writes that the resistance to poetry arises not only because it is viewed as “intellectual and obscure and confused,” but also because it is considered “sexually suspect.”58 In bringing together questions about gender and genre from the outset, it is clear that one of Rukeyser’s central projects in the text is to unveil and confront the gender norms of Cold War containment culture, norms that positioned the queer body and the communist body as dangerous, and the male body as an­ tagonistic to the female body, in ways that underscore the policing of liter­ ary and disciplinary categories. The gender politics of the text, however,

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become fully legible only when it is read along with “The Usable Truth”— the title she gave to the lectures delivered through the 1940s, lectures that would form the foundation for The Life of Poetry—and in the context of her unpublished essay about women poets, “Many Keys,” commissioned but rejected by The Nation in 1957, which expands on underdeveloped ideas in The Life of Poetry and begins to set out her theories of waste and women’s writing. From the same materials, Rukeyser produced a se­ ries of radio shows in the late forties that deepen her thinking on questions of queer American traditions, the avant-garde, and Cold War politics; for example, in the first episode she discusses poems by Emily Dickinson in the context of music by Charles Ives. The chapter both recovers archival materials and highlights Rukeyser’s interest in thinking about the wasted texts, influences, and experiences we use to create and make with, what she often describes as “bad influences.” In chapter 5 I reconstruct the lost collaboration between the photog­ rapher Berenice Abbott and Rukeyser. In a period defined by the eleva­ tion of the sciences over the arts—when everybody could be “scientific Americans”—Rukeyser and Abbott shared a similar goal: to develop new methods for demonstrating the uses and relationships between the arts and sciences. For Abbott this was manifest in her desire to bring “science to the public by means of photography” through her invention of the Super-Sight camera, which functioned by reversing the operation of the camera obscura.59 Rukeyser’s interest in the sciences was about finding “a new language for discovery,” borrowing something of the al­ chemical processes of scientific inquiry.60 She spent much of the postwar years making a claim for the “use” of poetry—and the artistic imagination more broadly—as an untapped resource she considered just as valuable as scientific knowledge, as demonstrated in her major nonfiction works of the 1940s and 1950s. Together, probably as lovers and then as collaborators, they began an ambitious project that combined Abbott’s experimental photographs with Rukeyser’s theorization of “seeing.” While Rukeyser wrote two unauthorized biographies in the 1940s and 1950s, she was commissioned by Franz Boas’s son to write his biog­ raphy in 1942, the year of his father’s death. Despite deep and sustained research for a decade, in which she began to construct the Boas archive that is housed at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, her biography was never completed, and what remains are mere fragments,

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outlines, notes, and proposals. In part this unfinished-ness was due to the constraints of new motherhood (she gave birth in 1947) and economic precarity, for she could never get sustained funding in this period, and by the early 1950s she switched publishers as the anticommunist purge of the publishing industry meant her work, and her editors, were consid­ ered dangerous. Nevertheless, Rukeyser’s interest in Boas’s ideas, which she first encountered as a student at Columbia in 1933, was deeply influential: his radical, participant-observer anthropological approach, his antiracist theories, and his focus on non-Western aesthetic traditions and collaborative meaning making, developed especially in his work with the Kwakwaka’wakw people of the Pacific Northwest. After the birth of her son, the process-oriented aesthetics of the Kwakwaka’wakw’s mask dances that had proved so transformational for Boas’s formulation of cultural anthropology became equally important to Rukeyser, and she traveled to Vancouver Island with her almost two-year-old and stayed with the Kwakwaka’wakw for the summer of 1949. Chapter 6 explores this unfinished work on Boas and her engagement with cultural anthro­ pology and Indigenous knowledge systems that would be foundational for the work she was producing in the Cold War period, giving her new modes and histories to think through, and helping her find a language of process that she would use to describe the experience of birth and motherhood. Rukeyser’s work on Boas also shows the long influence of Indigenous thought on midcentury feminism and the aesthetics of the modernist avant-garde, tracing the legacies of American experimen­ talism and political radicalism to the ideas and practices of the First Nations peoples.

The Rukeyser Era The unpublished and unfinished work can move us toward new under­ standings, new networks, and new legacies while also exposing the his­ tories of suppression. In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser writes, “When the books do not exist, we must visit the houses for the papers them­ selves.”61 Aware of the ways in which people refuse to see and to con­ nect, Rukeyser asks us to look beyond what is most easily visible—the published text, for example, whose very existence as an object that we

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can hold means we already accept, to some degree, the value judgment of a literary and cultural marketplace invested in upholding (or, at times, breaking) norms—and to go to the archives. She spends decades devel­ oping a formal space that allows her to hold voices and histories that are suppressed, while acknowledging that their disappearance is not an in­ dication of their value. Of course, she would argue the opposite—their disappearance is often a sign of their very value for challenging systems of power. In doing so, Rukeyser also develops a theoretical and literary stance that positions the lost and wasted as the site of making, a pre­ scient and radical assertion about how we live and connect in the present moment. By following Rukeyser’s unfinished projects though the Cold War, we are given a wider, more complex literary history to work within, dissolving the rigid boundaries of disciplines and forms that Rukeyser always insisted were “false.” We are also asked to reevaluate the gen­ dered and raced norms through which we approach texts, images, histo­ ries, and ideas, not just by following modernism’s revolutionary project across the twentieth century, but also by thinking through the processes of tradition making itself, and by virtue of the subject, by following her “unfinished spirit” as she moves, always toward “more freedom.” In the unpublished sections of “The Usable Truth,” Rukeyser directs us toward these ends: “The uses of our knowledge are very wide, the uses of its ignorance fatal. Our lives, in a curious way, may rest on this; and our lives are our only metaphor.”62

Part I

Novel Proliferations The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1974

1

Costa Brava This history is the history of possibility. —Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (1949)

Archives are notoriously unstable spaces (or deceptively stable ones), de­ spite the appearance of stillness and order. They are built by fallible and invisible hands—librarians, family members, estate agents, patrons— who make all kinds of choices about aesthetics and politics, about what has value and what doesn’t, constructing a history out of those choices. Archives are never transparent, though we so often approach them as if they were made up of raw data. In the Muriel Rukeyser archive at the Library of Congress, time collapses. I was most interested in the period 1936–1939, the three years of the Spanish Civil War. Inside folders, in­ side boxes, wheeled out on squeaky dollies, I found photographs, jour­ nals, and lines of poetry written on napkins and the backs of receipts. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but there were things that I hoped to find. I was feeling a little breathless with anticipation. I was rummaging around among ghosts. I was looking for a lost revolution. I was follow­ ing a love story. Rukeyser knew that everything that has been lost can be

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found again: every history can be remade, turned around, and rewritten. All dusty things can appear again in someone else’s poems, a century later in someone else’s hands. “Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me,” she wrote.1 If those in power should fear one thing, it should be the greediness of the graduate student, the anarchy of the archive, the dedi­ cation of a child to his mother, the irregular heartbeat of historical move­ ment. They should fear those “men and women / brave, setting up signals across vast distances,” calling to one another, saying: yes, there has been injustice, we fought for this and it happened like this, you are not alone— here is the poem, the novel, the picture that wraps and twines like DNA, connecting us into eternity.2 The previous fall I had begun graduate school and read Muriel Rukey­ ser for the first time. The Life of Poetry begins during her evacuation by boat from Barcelona in the first days of the Spanish Civil War. In the pro­ logue to the book she writes of a profound and incendiary transformation, of how the passengers on the boat “spoke as if we were shadows on that deck, shadows cast backward by some future fire of explosion.”3 I’m not sure I understood or even realized the importance of that prologue until I read her second book of poems, published in 1938, which ends with an epic poem about “voyage and exile” through the Mediterranean, the fig­ ure of a man with “his Brueghel face” staring back at her from the dock, just a day before he will march to the Zaragoza front. He is a refrain, a call to action, his body a rhythmic and lyrical muse. In the next book of poems and the next, and then through the following decades until 1974, there are poems about the Spanish Civil War, unmarked graves scattered through her work, many of them about “this man, dock, war, a latent image.”4 Sometimes this is explicit, as in a book of poems dedicated to him, but more often he is obliquely rendered as a river, a song, the trace of a runner. Then there are the essays that have these same images and lines, published here and there over decades. Always they end with a moment of transformation and radicalization, when she learns “to say what she believes.” Always they speak “across time . . . as witness voice” to this man who is “the endless earth.”5 Muriel Rukeyser met Otto Boch on the train to Barcelona in July 1936. She was twenty-two and traveling to report on the People’s Olympiad, an alternative and a protest to Hitler’s Berlin Games. She was tall and had beautiful dark Jewish hair, which is the hair of literary heroines. She had

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already won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for her first book of poems, Theory of Flight (1935). A few years earlier, she had participated in publishing a radical and experimental literary magazine at Vassar College with Eleanor and Eunice Clark and Elizabeth Bishop, and then she dropped out of college and learned to fly a plane. She took a class on cultural anthropology at Columbia University in 1933 and became in­ creasingly involved in racial justice movements, traveling to report on the Scottsboro Boys trial in Alabama, where she was jailed for “fraternizing” with African Americans. In early 1936 she traveled to West Virginia to document the Hawks Nest Tunnel mining disaster, an experience that she would transform into her most famous text, the modernist epic on capi­ talism, race, and environmental disaster, The Book of the Dead (1938). In the spring of 1936 she was asked to travel to London as an assistant for a couple, George and Betty Marshall, who were writing a book about cooperatives in England, Scandinavia, and Russia. It would be her first trip abroad. In London she met Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), Robert Herring, T. S. Eliot, and C. Day Lewis. She went to a see Swan Lake with H.D., recording her nervousness about the meeting in her diary, writing, “She’ll hate all the flaws that show in my poems.”6 But H.D., the master precisionist, saw only good things in her work.7 After a month in London, Herring asked Rukeyser to fill in for a colleague and cover the antifascist games. She set off by train the next day. Otto Boch was traveling to the games as a long-distance runner. A member of the Bavarian Red Front, he was forced out of Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933. He was leading an itinerant life in Italy and France, earning money as a cabinetmaker; it was a life emblematic of the migratory experience of so many during the interwar years, as govern­ ments fell, endemic violence rippling across borders. Boch had no identity card, no homeland. He did have a “Brueghel face.” In one picture of him, sent to Rukeyser from Zaragoza and placed at the center of her 1974 Esquire essay about the war, he looks out at the reader from under a knit hat, smiling. His cheekbones are high, like “carved wood,” she wrote. He looks handsome and kind. I understand why she fell in love. They spent only five days together, and then she was gone, and he was dead. Five days is enough. On my first trip to her archive, in box 1:4, I found three letters by Boch, sent from the front, written in German—“Dear Comrade Muriel!” he

30

C h a pte r 1

always begins. With them were an unpublished poem written on a tornout sheet of notebook paper, titled “for O.B.,” her Esquire article ripped from the magazine, a tiny black journal from her trip to London and Spain, the ticket for her baggage, unused food vouchers for the People’s Olympiad that never happened, her eyewitness account of the first days of the war in the New York Herald Tribune, a hand-drawn map of the small town—Moncada (Montcada in Catalan)—where her train stopped as a general strike was called in support of the republic and war broke out, and an outline for a novel, but no novel.8 When I returned to the East Village with piles of photocopied mate­ rial, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how one understands the value of these kinds of things. In the tenement apartment where I lived on East Tenth Street, one that had been in my family since the 1960s, my aunt had found notes from the 1930s hidden behind the bricks in the wall. The notes felt important because they were secret, because they were connected to Jewish immigrant life echoing our own family’s history of

Figure 2. A map Rukeyser drew of Montcada. Box 1:56, Muriel Rukeyser Papers,

Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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diaspora—they represented the anonymous relationship that so many of us have to the multitude. Walter Benjamin alludes to how objects have an aura, how they give us access to ourselves in historical time, but they do more than that; they help us understand how power is constructed through material history, and how our ability to imagine and value lives lived can change our present. Saidiya Hartman writes, “Every historian of the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is en­ dowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor.”9 Rukeyser spent much of her life documenting the life of the multitude— the refugee, the migrant, the miner, the volunteer soldier fighting against fascism. In her writing on the Spanish Civil War, she imagined their lives intimately. Boch wasn’t anonymous, but he began to stand in for the many—names she encountered in a folder of refugees seeking aid, the im­ ages of thousands as they fled across the Pyrenees. For nearly fifty years she kept telling his story, returning to it, locating her poetry through it. Rukeyser also lived on Tenth Street, and in an archival fragment she writes: From this night, which seems the end, I must make a beginning. I look up from the paper and my writing hand: through the tall side windows in the bay over Tenth Street. I see the people coming and going up and down. The Avenue lampposts are cold fluted black with the frozen soldiers on them, pillars twined in ritual green tied in ritual red. The letter telling me finally that he was killed years ago, and how, is behind the light in its own pool of the number 300. That is 300 men on a river in Spain, cut down in a bat­ tle foreknown by spies. Three charges on that day years ago in the spring on the Segre. The second one, after two hours of waiting, was forced back. Two hours later (and what was I doing downtown in this city, trying to re­ member for what I was asking punishment?). The order came to advance for the third time. O. took two machine guns and went ahead. They were cut down. 300 of them. I love what I have always loved. I believe in faith and resistance. The growing of all, the right to grow and the flowing order. The extending wish to which the images lead me. The loss of our humanity is more depressing than the loss of life. But this you know, you have felt it many times.

32

C h apte r 1 Everyone rushing to surrender in his own way. If you will wait a mo­ ment. Now I will get ready, prepare in all the ways to go across country. I want my life as a woman; that is my life as a poet. It can only be lived by my growing enough life for me to reach the central motion of which the poems come—in that motion which seems to us stillness, since it is our own night location, the place where we speak to each other.10

Rukeyser kept this note to herself for decades, a few yellowing pages that she chose to include in the materials she donated to the New York Public Library when the archivist began to curate her collection on American lit­ erature. Rukeyser made sure this fragment was included. Repetition in text signals to us what we are supposed to pay atten­ tion to, learn from, embody. It is the refrain of a Greek chorus, the end rhyme of a sonnet, an image renewed. Repetition in politics, in government, and in history shows us how systems of power deny and suppress the urgency of transformation. To break “the nightmare of rep­ etition,” as Doris Lessing writes, is an imaginary and worldly pursuit.11 Rukeyser’s texts on Spain refract and interconnect, recurring and prolif­ erating across her life, creating a history that encompasses, intertwines, and documents a changing twentieth century. “For our time,” she writes, “depends not on single points of knowledge, but on clusters and combi­ nations.”12 The “moment of proof” she experienced in Spain is a call to action, something somatic, a personal history, and the story of the mul­ titude; it is also a line that appears in a poem, a novel, an essay, a pro­ logue, winding its way across literary time.13 Everything is in process, wavelike, in medias res. On my second trip to the archive, I found a series of obituaries for Boch that Rukeyser had placed in German newspapers during the Munich Olympics in 1972. Of him she wrote, “Love’s not a trick of light.” When I touched the fine, fragile, yellowing newspaper clips that read, “In Re­ membrance of OTTO BOCH / Bavarian, runner, cabinet-maker, / fighter for a better world. / Any of his family and friends / wishing further information, / please write to——,” I felt moved in an unaccountable way.14 I felt for the devastation of war, and for the way that devastation is animated in private life; I felt deeply for her devotion to him, and to the struggles against oppression that his death represented. But I also knew this story wasn’t really about Boch entirely but about Rukeyser’s

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own self-formation on the streets of Barcelona, her own development inside historical processes. She called Spain “the place where I began to say what I believe,” and the “end of confusion.”15 More than a love story, this was the story of a young woman finding herself, forming her vocation, her political commitments, her subjectivity. I knew that story. I recognized it. Like Rukeyser, when I was nineteen I dropped out of college. First, I traveled to El Salvador as an election observer. I marched in the streets with the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front  and felt part of something expansive and historical. When I returned, I moved to San Francisco and met the anarchists organizing the 1999 World Trade Or­ ganization protests in Seattle, later to be called the “battle of Seattle” and the “five days that shook the world.” Just five days. During this time I felt like a historical subject for the first time, as my feet splashed along the rainy streets with thousands of others, the city closing down around us, video cameras following our every move, the ominous shapes of police in full riot gear lingering on corners, tear gas blowing around. But more than anything else, I felt a sense of possibility in the experience of collective change, which is a singular feeling, I think, that comes in the quickest moment when something that seemed intransigent turns to dust. The summer following the Seattle protests I moved to Barcelona on a fellowship to study the legacy of the Spanish Civil War on con­ temporary anarchist movements. I’d never heard of Muriel Rukeyser, despite studying literature and politics—she was in no canon that I ever encountered in classrooms, though I was taught Orwell and Hemingway and Auden. Nearly a decade later, when I started to read Rukeyser’s work on Spain, I recognized its importance, and on a personal level I also recognized how the briefest moment can and does shape your entire life, how the experience of possibility is embodied, arriving like a shock. And I learned that in order to hold on to a sense of possibility in a culture of negation and perpetual warfare, you have to keep the affective possibilities of change alive, outside of ideologies, always in process and in connection with others: “to speak for more freedom, more imagination.”16 In Spain, Rukeyser wrote of a desire to “move beyond fear” and to speak and act with deep feeling.17 The actualization of this desire is a kind

34

C h apte r 1

of miracle. Sometimes this bodily manifestation of an idea ends in vio­ lence or death, as it did for so many who fought against fascism in Spain, and who continue to fight for justice and equity. But it can also be simply a moment in which your voice and body become public, and you experi­ ence the transformation of a private belief turned into a public action. Because of this marriage of public and private, which is at the heart of any meaningful revolution, it should not come as a surprise that Rukeyser’s affair with Boch, her experience of sexual liberation with him, is trans­ formed into an unending, embodied commitment to the fight for political justice. He wrote: “Dear Comrade Muriel! It is sad and I regret very much that we had to separate so quickly. But that is life and it always arrives differently than the way you think. And the two of us, I doubt that we will see each other again. You returned to New York and I am certain that I will remain in Spain.”18 Rukeyser was the only person Boch could write to. Fearing that his mother and brothers in Germany would be ter­ rorized by the Nazis if they received letters from the Spanish Republic, he protected them with his silence. Rukeyser’s letters to him are lost, perhaps with his body, somewhere between Huesca and Zaragoza. “Love’s not a trick of light.”19 They spent one night together, on the train to Barcelona—the fascist rebels fleeing through the countryside around them, members of popular sports clubs and Jewish athletes sleeping in the cars nearby, the hills lead­ ing to the Pyrenees already opening a path to the refugees who would pour out of Spain at the end of the war, over one million winding their way across the frozen border. Rukeyser never forgot the hot sun, the cy­ press trees, the glassy expanse of the Mediterranean, the mother running, silently wailing, behind her son as he set off to defend and probably die in Barcelona, an old rifle in his hand. She would never forget her lover, and the way his body moved, and the hope of anarchist Catalonia in the summer of 1936. She never forgot the partisan politics, the images of the refugees—dead, and nearly frozen dead—in the internment camps on the French border in the winter of 1939. These were things she could not stop writing about. In her archive, typed on pages and pages of fine onionskin paper, the history of those refugees is documented: their names and occupations, their politics, their children, and their medical condi­ tions. Along with them is an outline for a novel. There are character

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sketches and scenes mapped out. There is a journal that corresponds biographically to the other texts. It seemed impossible that she wouldn’t have written a novel—she could not forget. It was there the entire time. If you knew the title, you could have found it: Savage Coast. Savage Coast—Costa Brava, named for the rugged coast of the Mediterranean between Barcelona and the French border. In box 1:23, “Miscellany, undated,” hiding in plain sight, was the one remaining draft of the novel, with her scrawled corrections in pen and pencil. It is a strange and exciting text, telling the story of those five days, and the great hope engendered by the collectivization of Catalonia, not as the last battleground against fascism, but as an example of the promise of a real people’s state, “jewel”- like and “liberated.”20 It is a war novel, but it is not centered on force or violence; it is centered on the psychology of revolution, the desire for connection, the insecurity of gendered bodies, the precariousness of foreignness, the voice of the Catalans at war. She wrote the first draft in a white heat, the first autumn of the war in 1936. The typed pages are half-yellowing, out of order. They hold the pressure of revisions, rewording, rearranging, rereading. The unsigned rejection letter, which Rukeyser knew was written by her friend and mentor Horace Gregory, is the first thing you encounter when you open the folder: this novel is “one of the worst stretches of narrative I have ever read,” with a heroine “made to seem too abnormal for us to respect what she sees, hears and feels,” reminding the reader of “the terribly bad examination papers written by excellent students.”21 I assume Rukeyser left the reader report there, right on top, on purpose—she had a sense of humor; she was remembered for making decoupage wastepaper baskets out of her rejec­ tion letters. But it is the very fact of this rejection, of what it describes as unreadable in the novel—its peculiar mix of prose and poetry; its search­ ing, idiosyncratic, and sexually liberated heroine; its radical politics—that in fact makes the novel so important, for her text defies and remakes the artistic, political, and gendered categories of twentieth-century modern­ ism. This is what made me want to read it even more, made my hands clammy as I began, hunched over the long desk under the ugly lights. I read the entire thing right there. I don’t think that the writer of that rejection letter, so blindly bound to his own time, could have anticipated a moment when Rukeyser’s textual

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C h apte r 1

hybridity would be legible to a reader, when non-ideological radicalism would appear astute rather than flimsy, when a woman would encoun­ ter another woman’s work and have the authority to deem it valuable. He would not have believed that nearly three quarters of a century later someone like me would walk into Muriel Rukeyser’s archive and read this work and think, yes, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for.

2

Her Symbol Was Civil War

Recovering Savage Coast

“If this was real,” thinks Helen, the protagonist of Savage Coast, “it was because it was nearer the sum of everything that had happened before it than anything had ever been.”1 Stranded on a train in a small Catalan town during the first days of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Helen has just had sex with a German socialist who will soon join the first Inter­ national Brigade, watched Catalonia begin to collectivize, and seen fas­ cist soldiers escape into the hills as a plane flies 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, encapsulating many of the tropes of 1930s literature: women’s sexual liberation, radical politics, war, and psychoanalytic self-discovery. In addition to its avant-garde and genrebending 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 transfor­ mation from tourist and witness into activist and radical, from girlhood

Figure 3. Rukeyser’s telegram note written in Montcada, Catalonia, during the first days of the Spanish Civil War. Box 1:56, Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Manuscript Divi­ sion, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Her Symbol Was Civil War

39

“liberalism” to mature political engagement, from an “awkward” ado­ lescence of rebellion and anger to a sense of sexual and historical subjec­ tivity found in the collective experience of political action. Because Helen is Rukeyser’s literary counterpart, we read her transformation as the author’s—just as Helen describes Spain as her “birthday,” in other works Rukeyser describes it as the place “where I was born.”2 Instead of documenting the games, Rukeyser documented the out­ break of civil war as the Nazi-backed military coup that plunged Spain into violence occurred on July 17, 1936, a few nights before the People’s Olympiad was to begin, disrupting what would have been one of the largest international antifascist events of that period. Savage Coast is the most complete rendering of Rukeyser’s experience during the first days of the war, but rather than publishing the novel, Rukeyser’s editor, Pascal Covici, strongly encouraged her to abandon it for a “brief impressionistic sketch” of her experience in Spain and to continue work­ ing on her poetry.3 Covici-Friede would publish the long poem “Mediter­ ranean” in her second collection, U.S. 1 (1938), instead. The first critics of Savage Coast discouraged Rukeyser from writing the kind of large-scale, developmental, hybrid, modernist war narrative that she had begun—one that is sexually open, symbolically complex, politically radical, and aes­ thetically experimental—in favor of the more gender-appropriate lyric poetry of her first book and “small” personal narratives. The rejection of the novel highlights the constraints and expectations of women’s writ­ ing in the 1930s and 1940s, under which women were often lauded for their smallness and modesty, for writing work that “concerned itself with minute particulars,” as Louise Bogan asserted.4 It also demonstrates how the contemporary reader might have found the hybridity of such a work illegible, particularly the gender transgression implicit in its experimen­ tal intertwining of the quest narrative, the romantic plot, radical politics, and the epic impulse.5 As Paula Rabinowitz writes about 1930s wom­ en’s fiction, “because metaphors of gender prescribed the boundaries of genre, women’s texts necessarily became ‘anomalous.’”6 The rejection of Savage Coast for its “anomalous” form was the first of what would be­ come a steady stream of criticism of Rukeyser’s work—for her daring to think as both a poet and theorist, biographer and historian, for her ex­ plicit and implicit discussions of bodies and waste, and most especially for her cross-genre forms that wedded high-modernist aesthetics with mass

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culture documents. Its rejection also inadvertently elucidates what is now so valuable about the novel as an example of the radical avant-garde aes­ thetic that Rukeyser was self-consciously developing during the period in order to respond to the rise of fascism and authoritarianism, at home and abroad. Rukeyser, like many of her generation, considered Spain “the last bat­ tleground against fascism,” and because of this the civil war immediately became an international war, occupying a transnational imagination, seen as the last hope for the radical and liberatory ideas that had flourished through the 1920s and 1930s.7 The coup d’état in Spain was, 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 even­ tually absorbed into the Cold War policies of the United States. The fascist project to cleanse society of an “impure citizenry”—the urban proletariat, the New Woman, the Jew, the homosexual, the communist, the artist— meant that Spain’s “civil war” was also viewed as a European “civil war.”8 Likewise, General Francisco 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, which used Spain as a testing ground for modern warfare.9 The non-interventionist stance of Great Britain, France, and the United States not only determined the trajectory of fascism in Europe, dooming Republican Spain, but also, as Rukeyser herself noted in many of her essays, reflected a larger political reality: that Spain was eventually viewed not as the place to stop fascism but as the place to “stop communism.”10 She understood that what was allowed to happen in Spain would be allowed to happen elsewhere, plac­ ing the conflict in a much broader cultural and historical context. And she was right: the placating of fascism by the allied nations was not only a suf­ focation of the Popular Front in Spain, aided by blocking the sale of arms and support to the loyalist army to defend its government, but also a way of enervating political dissent and Popular Front organizing in their own home countries as well. Because of this, Spain remained for a generation, as it did for Rukeyser, “the core of all our lives / the long defeat that brings us what we know.”11 Written before Ernest Hemingway’s, George Orwell’s, or André Malraux’s major works on the subject—Helen at one point jokes that “Hemingway doesn’t know beans about Spain”—Savage Coast is one of

Her Symbol Was Civil War

41

only a few novels written by foreign women on the war, and provides us with a richer understanding of women’s political and literary participa­ tion in its history, offering a unique view into how women positioned themselves “within historical and social processes.”12 Just as the photo exhibition The Mexican Suitcase illuminated 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, Rukeyser’s novel reminds us of the important role women played in writing about and recording the political events of this era.13 As Rukeyser’s novel illus­ trates, the Spanish Civil War marked an important moment not only for the Popular Front but also for women’s visibility in public political life; for both foreign and Spanish women, Spain proved to be site of great potential for the expression of women’s political and artistic agency. Women par­ ticipated in, wrote on, and documented the war in Spain in great numbers, publishing a significant body of work: Mercè Rodoreda, Simone de Beau­ voir, Simone Weil, María Teresa León, Rose Macaulay, Dorothy Parker, Josephine Herbst, Martha Gellhorn, Genevieve Taggard, Virginia Woolf, Nancy Cunard, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Louise Thompson, and more. Like Rukeyser’s multigenre body of writing on the topic, many works by Anglo-American women on the civil war in Spain used documentary and multimodal forms in order to articulate contemporaneous concerns about antifascism, pacifism, and revolution, and to bridge the perceived separations between public and private, home front and war front. This formal development was essential for responding to the ideology of total war which by its nature exploded the distinctions between the two fronts. Women’s reportage and writing on Spain appeared regularly in literary and political periodicals in the 1930s, and then after the fall of the repub­ lic in poetry books, essay collections, and novels. Yet the first anthologies and studies of Anglo-American writing on the Spanish Civil War have vastly underrepresented women’s contributions, focusing primarily on the work of their male contemporaries like the “Auden group.” Not until the past quarter century or so have we begun to have a more holistic view of women’s contributions from the period, as scholars have begun to bring together out-of-print journalism and poetry, or focus their studies on the works of women writers who have incorrectly been viewed as adjuncts to male authors, like Martha Gellhorn and Josephine Herbst.14 Having access to women writers’ contributions during the Spanish Civil War has

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not simply changed how we interpret this period of antifascist activity but shown us how women’s roles as political theorists, documentarians, and journalists contributed to our understanding of it.15 Rukeyser’s work on Spain is important for how it brings together the aesthetic concerns of the modernist avant-garde with antifascist politics, but she is not alone in attempting to work out formal modes that might be used to make more complex critiques about how fascism functioned concomitantly with capitalism, racism, and patriarchy (critiques that be­ come the roots of second-wave socialist feminism). For women radicals, antifascism was not just about a moral or political imperative to “save democracy” and “artistic freedom” from censorious authoritarianism (some of the arguments made in Nancy Cunard’s famous 1937 survey Authors Take Sides on the Spanish Civil War); rather, for a generation who fought for, and benefited from, the fight for social, legal, and politi­ cal enfranchisement, women intuited the repercussions of a fascist ideol­ ogy that enforced a set of rigid gender and social norms. These women understood that the “New Woman” would be excised from public soci­ ety and reinscribed into the domestic, feudal, and subservient—whether in the form of Führer worship, Franco’s Catholic fever dream, or patriar­ chal capitalism. Fascist authoritarianism and its legacies rely on enshrin­ ing women’s “natural” characteristics: procreation, male comfort and support, reproductive labor, and the moral policing of other women. In Spain, after the war, Franco’s regime was notoriously brutal in reinstilling strict Catholic gender norms into “wayward” and imprisoned Republican women, in many cases taking their children and placing them with regime families, under new names. Gender transgression is so often considered a transgression against the moral power of the state, policed as fiercely and persistently as other kinds of political dissent, and the rhetoric around women’s bodies, their legal and political rights, proves telling, indicating the larger political programs of a particular move­ ment or government. As Virginia Woolf outlines in her 1938 multigenre documentary text on the Spanish Civil War, Three Guineas, “the public and private worlds are inseparably connected .  .  . the servilities and tyrannies of the one are the servilities and tyrannies of the other.” Like Rukeyser, Woolf emphasizes this through her formal choices in order to make connections between the private lives of women and public life under authoritarianism.16

Her Symbol Was Civil War

43

Just as the radical imperative of Woolf’s Three Guineas was recovered by feminist scholars in the 1980s, the recovery of Savage Coast alerts us (again) to the fact that the recuperation of women writers has not ended, and that there is a continued need for archival work that restores feminist and radical texts and puts them into print. Rukeyser herself was deeply engaged with challenging the kinds of histories that privileged certain nar­ ratives 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 and refugees. Rukeyser worked to develop a poetics of history that was particularly attuned to exploring the latency of the past inside the present. Savage Coast is essential to understanding this textualarchival practice, one that she develops throughout her life. In the novel, Rukeyser 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 records her own moment of political and sexual awakening alongside the Catalan resistance through an experimental multigenre form. This hybrid text defies, and bridges, the binaries of the two major literary modes of the 1930s: the “political,” di­ dactic social realism, and the “apolitical,” aesthetic high modernism, each of which has been “regarded as mutually exclusive of the other.”17 Ironi­ cally, of course, Rukeyser’s avant-garde and radical project, her “disincli­ nation to conform to the dictates of any aesthetic or political program,” would prove to marginalize both her and her work for decades.18

“It’s Very Literary, This Train” The events that unfold in Savage Coast reflect the biographical narrative of Rukeyser’s trip to Spain. Rukeyser and her fellow travelers, mostly inter­ national athletes traveling to the People’s Olympiad, were the last to cross the border when their train to Barcelona was stopped in Montcada, 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 Hungar­ ian Olympic team, French reactionaries and American communists, young women soldiers, among others—are real, their names appearing in articles she wrote at the same time she was working on the novel. As the novel depicts, Rukeyser met and fell in love with “Hans,” the Rotfrontkämpfer

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Chapter 2

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, who later joined the International Brigades.19 To­ gether they witnessed the enactment of a radical Popular Front and the collectivization of Montcada, watched the local people burning religious icons, and took the dangerous trip in the back of a pickup truck into Barce­ lona, “a workers’ city,” in the first days of the resistance. In Barcelona she saw the collapse of the People’s Olympiad, watched the building of barri­ cades and the first troops setting out to the Zaragoza front. She marched for the “fighting dead,” only to be evacuated a few days later. The novel ends on the anarchist streets of Barcelona—as Rukeyser is “given her re­ sponsibility” by Martin, the organizer of the People’s Olympiad, 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”—but other ren­ ditions of her narrative describe the evacuation from Barcelona on a boat chartered by the Belgian team.20 She describes this in the epic poem “Med­ iterranean” 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 salute” in support of the Spanish Popular Front, marking the opening of a new era of war and violence.21 It is on this boat that she is asked the question that frames her life’s work, and that begins 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.”22 Many of her poems and nonfiction works, like “We Came for Games,” writ­ ten for Esquire in 1974, provide a nearly seamless epilogue, starting 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 are used to extend and eulogize the memory of those who fought against fascism and died in Spain, or to meditate on the body of Otto Boch, which stands in for all the bodies of the dead in the unending violence of the twentieth century, as Louise Kertesz describes.23 Of all her works on Spain, Savage Coast is the most narratively and historically sequential. Yet even while Rukeyser insists that it is a fictional­ ized account, making sure to point this out in a note to the reader, she also instructs us to read the text as documentary—from the inclusion of dated

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newspaper clippings that begin chapters, to the radio addresses that punc­ tuate the narrative, to the list of the dead that interrupts her own story 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. This constant blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction—the creation of the self inside history, and by extension inside text—is foundational to Rukeyser’s decades-long desire to make a crossgenre and hybrid poetry and prose in which “false barriers go down.”24 It also speaks to the moment when she was working, when the documentary form was not only de rigueur but being used particularly by radicals and feminists to challenge and expose patriarchal and hegemonic narratives— a “new age,” as Alan Wald describes, that “demanded new styles and subject matters.”25 In part, Rukeyser’s use of the radical documentary techniques so prevalent in the 1930s was directed toward finding terms to describe the dynamic relationship between words and images, to make a “mod­ ern poetry that moves in terms of quick, rhythmic juxtapositions.” She often spoke of “extending the document,” borrowing from her work in film editing and reportage, extending from the culture at large, whether in films or newspapers, and overlapping with other media: “I wish to make my poems exist in the quick images that arrive crowding on us now (most familiarly from the screen), in the lives of Americans who are un­ praised and vivid and indicative, in my own ‘documents.’”26 Suggesting a kind of cultural materiality based on “real events” with tangible evidence (a newspaper article, a photograph, a quotation), the documentary form, particularly in the hands of women modernists, had been used to highlight the fact that “real” historical conditions had been narrated over. As Jane Marcus has argued about women’s documentary texts, the reader can trace the references, quotations, and newspaper clippings in the texts back to their original sources, and also can become a witness, archivist, and historian. In this regard the texts are interactive: they “create authority” through quotations and documentation, and simultaneously “teach us to dismantle it.”27 The term “documentary,” though, is inherently slippery: it denotes and contains so many possible materials, including memory, testimony, historical materials, quotations, bodies, cinema, text, ruins (the list could go on); it implies archiving, recording, witnessing, collaging, photographing, and filming, as well as the hybridization of “high” and

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“low” art forms; and it can be traced in the practices of scrapbooking in the women’s suffrage movement, left-front politics, social and socialist realism, travel narratives, war correspondences, epic poetry, testimony, filmmaking, and reportage.28 It is a genre that has, as Paula Rabinowitz notes, “reshaped generic boundaries” as well as gendered boundaries.29 Aspects of the documentary form held immense potential for Rukeyser because of its representational mutability. In particular, the form allowed for developing an aesthetics that embodied her political and personal projects, 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 others”—principles that were equally essential to the women’s movement and feminist literary praxis.30 The anarchist ideas of the 1930s that were taking shape in those first revolutionary months in Barcelona—before winning the war against the fascists took precedence over a real people’s revolution (one that threatened the interests of the bourgeois Popular Front)—were less concerned with cliché notions of senseless violence and overthrowing the state than with the enactment of a direct democracy in which the individual was empowered through participation in collec­ tive change; it was a politics based on free love, gender equity, mutual aid, and egalitarianism. Though these ideas were never fully realized in Spain, they provide an interesting theoretical model for thinking about how the public and private, documentary and lyric become inextricable within Savage Coast. Helen’s subjectivity is shaped and she is ultimately empowered by her involvement in social change. She becomes liberated through her responsibility and engagement with the collective. Refuting the cynicism of the “destructive element” that so defined a masculinist interwar modernism, and that would lead to the even more detached irony of the postwar New Critics, Rukeyser instead asserts a politics and poetics of connection and mutability. In The Life of Poetry she writes, “As we go deeper into conflict, we shall find ourselves more constrained, the repressive codes will turn to iron. More and more we shall need to be free in our beliefs, as we come to our forms.”31 This conceit is not unlike Emma Goldman’s assertion that anarchism “is a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions,” with “methods that do not comprise iron-clad program” but that “grow out of the economic

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needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental requirements of the individual.”32 This radical and relational politics is textually manifest in the hybrid­ ization of the personal, lyric, and internal, situated alongside and interact­ ing with the historical, documentary, and worldly. For example, in the final chapter of Savage Coast, during a march through the streets of Bar­ celona 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 del­ egation, 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 birdflight 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 TOGETHER33

Here we have the interaction between the worldly, documentary text and the internal, lyric poem, imitating Rukeyser’s own self-formation inside

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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 it did—and the profoundly individual effect that this experience has on Rukeyser’s po­ litical and personal liberation, so much so that “no beauty found could ever pay for the country from which they had been sent home.”34 Most avant-garde, though, 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 re­ sults in sexual awakening, personal liberation, and political radicalism. In writing this narrative through a “Helen,” Rukeyser also situates her­ self as a worldly authorial voice, one with the ability to critique and comment on politics and war. Like H.D., Rukeyser revises and gives voice to a Helen who has been persistently “othered,” flattened by the male gaze into a foil that has more often than not embodied the threat of women’s sexual and political agency.35 A fully formed female protago­ nist stands in contradistinction to the sexualized and subservient women of Hemingway’s Spain or the nonexistent women in Orwell’s. The Helen of Savage Coast is on her journey into the heart of a war, not as a passive subject but as the epic narrator who speaks the “tale of the tribe.” This kind of modernist revision of gender and genre is made more explicit in the way that Rukeyser asserts her authorial intention by position­ ing her text alongside the most prominent male literary figures of her time. 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 po­ litical pamphlets—but her own story ultimately internalizes her male cohorts, so that they become references or footnotes to her history. For example, she uses four lines from Hart Crane’s postwar poem “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” to introduce the chapter in which Helen and Hans have sex for the first time. The chapter opens with Crane’s

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lines “Accept a lone eye riveted to your plane / bent axel of devotion along companion ways,” articulating the collision of erotic desire and the mechanisms of modern life as the title characters of his poem meet on a subway car—a palimpsestic Faustus and Helen in New York City.36 Rukeyser adopts and reimagines Crane’s own mythic reworking—the Hans and Helen of Savage Coast meet and make love on the train, the war planes flying overhead—but this Helen is, more than anything else, Crane’s Faustian romantic poet, and Hans, like Helen, is the near perfect love object; we might even say that Rukeyser’s Helen embodies both figures—she is both poet seeking and sexual subject. Rukeyser’s intertextual revisions signal how she was hoping to position herself and her work. Even at the young age of twenty-two, it is clear that with this novel she wanted not just 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 Rod as she travels through Spain, and Rukeyser quotes it extensively in the text—his narrative structure and heavy prose hang around.37 Helen is reading Lawrence in the hope that it will pro­ vide 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.”38 But just as in the scene where the mes­ sage from the French is read aloud, Helen interrupts Lawrence with her own lyric interpretation of the actual events happening around her, and she “clap[s] the book shut.”39 Helen’s narrative takes over, she becomes “the clue,” the person “that carries her deeper,” not Lawrence, not the document alone: “Ah, but civil war would be different. I’ve no interest in fighting Germans. But a civil war would be different.” “That’s a fact, it would,” said Jim. “Only rather worse,” said Robert. “No, I don’t agree,” cried Josephine. “You’d feel you were doing something, in a civil war.” “Pulling the house down,” said Lily. “Yes,” she cried. “Don’t you hate it, the house we live in—London— England—America! Don’t you hate them?”

50

Chapter 2 “I don’t like them. But I can’t get much fire in my hatred. They pall on me rather,” said Lily. “Ay!” said Aaron, suddenly stirring in his chair. Lily and he glanced at one another with a look of recognition. “Still,” said Tanny, “There’s got to be a clearance some day or other.” A wagon marked LLET going down a small pale street followed by a machinegun mounted in a produce truck, a shot spat against a stucco wall, a handful of almonds whose shells are rubbed off between the fingers five slit throats and a red-bound wound a red-bound book on a stopped train with the track All Clear Ahead She clapped the book shut.

Here Rukeyser is able to meditate on the nature of political action, vio­ lence, and narrative—“There must be a way to reach action,” Helen asks herself and the Lawrence novel—as she opens up form in order to com­ plicate the questions posed by Lawrence, inserting her own lyric about the strange particulars of civil war: the image of the bloody throats of the five captured fascists killed that morning in the town (“red-bound wound”) corresponding to the red binding of the novel (“a red-bound book”).40 Like Savage Coast, Aaron’s Rod is a quest novel of sorts, but one in which love and women are rendered as enervating forces, and that ends with an anarchist explosion in Italy that destroys the protagonist’s liveli­ hood and manhood (the eponymous “rod”!). Rukeyser both sublimates and refutes Lawrence in the novel: radical politics, particularly anarchist politics, are a force of regeneration for her, as are sexual intimacy and free love; the camaraderie and empowerment found in the collective ex­ perience, especially multigenerational relationships between women—the Catalan Grandmother, the Lady from South America, and Olive—provide the psychological cohesion in the novel, and unlike Lawrence’s assertion at the end of Aaron’s Rod that “deep fathomless submission to the he­ roic soul in a greater man” will preserve humanity in the face of war (an eerie fascist premonition), Rukeyser predicts that the self—empowered

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and formed in relation to the development of others, one that keeps mov­ ing toward “more freedom,” more openness, and more connection—will change the future.41 Nevertheless, there are indeed generic similarities between the two texts. In both, the heroes flee their stifling pasts, rep­ resented by the confines and character of the nation-state, in search of wholeness and value abroad. The portrayal of the housewife “Peapack” from New Jersey, whose face is always turning to “pudding” when a bomb explodes, embodies this Americanness that Helen is trying to es­ cape. But it is Lawrence’s vision, played out in Aaron’s Rod, that “sees human existence as dialectic, a continual process of conflict between ele­ ments within the self as well as outside it,” that prefigures the first de­ scription of the protagonist in Savage Coast.42 Helen narrates her history in the opening scene: Her symbol was civil war, she thought—endless, ragged conflict which tore her open, in her relations with her family, her friends, the people she loved. If she knew so much about herself, she was obliged to know more, to make more—but whatever she had touched had fallen into this con­ flict, she thought, dramatically. The people she had loved best had been either willful and cold or weak in other ways. She was bitterly conscious of her failure, at a couple of years over twenty, to build up a coordinated life for herself.43

In this sense Helen is already wounded by “civil war” before the novel has even begun, and so she is herself a symbol for the changing political realities that the Spanish Civil War ushers in. Rukeyser writes an equiv­ alent relationship between the political upheaval of the 1930s and the psychological realities of her character, asserting that the conditions that lead to the civil war in Spain are the same kinds of conditions that create Helen’s internal bifurcations—capitalism, patriarchy, social, reli­ gious and familial repression, rigid political ideologies. At least in part, then, Savage Coast embodies one of the main tropes of the Bildung­ sroman, in which the hero, as described by Mikhail Bakhtin, embod­ ies the transition of history, as “he emerges along with the world and he reflects the historical emergence of the world itself. He is no longer within an epoch, but on the border between two epochs, at the transi­ tion point from one to the other. This transition is accomplished in him and through him.”44

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Helen’s quest is to bridge the disunity that has shaped her, and not only to “find a way to reach action” but to be “free from fear.”45 Her experi­ ence in Spain both exposes her feelings of ineffectuality and dependence and propels her toward independence and agency. Near the end of the novel, Helen thinks, “She had wanted a life for herself, and found she was unequipped; and adjusting her wants, cared to be a person prepared for that life.”46 This articulation marks an important turning point for Helen, one in which she is able to assert her need for agency and self­ ness outside the debilitating confines of the familial, social, and gender roles in which she was raised, those that leave her unprepared to act and live freely. She describes this coming to maturity as having “the fear of death  .  .  .  replaced.”47 While Helen begins her journey into Spain as a traditional heroine of the “quest” narrative, by the end of Savage Coast, Rukeyser challenges the notion that subjectivity is formed only through the violent conflict of binary oppositions. Helen ultimately comes to ma­ turity through love, sexual pleasure, political solidarity, and worldliness, arriving to find a kind of mythic connection to all things, where the public and private come together. She continues, “She would always have this street before her for a birthday; she was proud in herself for a moment: this is how I come of age! she thought.”48 As Helen becomes increasingly free on the war-torn streets of Barce­ lona, speaking and acting without inhibition, she also becomes more radi­ cal; it is thereby that Rukeyser weds gender liberation with sexual agency and political activism. This is why Hans proves such a powerful influence for Helen, both sexually and politically; as he says to her, “I go toward what I most want. You. This war, which is my World War.”49 Hans is a decisive actor—in “Mediterranean” Rukeyser describes Boch’s life as “straight, like a single issue.”50 As a literary foil in the novel, he is used to model and mirror confidence, freedom, and agency for Helen: “All his life, moving so steadily, watercourse! she thought; only let me move, too, keep on pouring free.”51 But he also ushers in a deepened commitment to the fight for freedom and justice, where she ultimately replaces her foil. Hel­ en’s first awakening in the novel is brought about by surviving the trip into Barcelona as Catalonia is under siege; by the end of the novel, though, she describes a second transformation on the street, amidst a marching crowd, one not linked to violence: “He bent down and kissed her, tense; the rich sunlight, the rich shadow, the heady cheering, were lost, and she

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was absorbed again and dark, and knew she was about to change again, but without violence, through natural slow force.”52 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.”53 This 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 “coordi­ nated” 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, her self-made lyric interruption of documentary “facts,” is also a way to make discur­ sive space in the novel.54 The caesura 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, remarking often how “I had never wanted language so much,” implying a desire to communicate better 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 speak­ ing, though, exposes the actual difficulty in documenting the war as an outsider, thereby subverting any possibility of a singular hegemonic nar­ rative of its history. This is unique for documentary works of this period, especially for a style that often sensationalizes its subject. Orwell has been the object of such criticism, as have Auden and Spender. Likewise, the depression-era documentary projects of James Agee, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White have been accused of “sensationalism.”55 Hesitation might be what separates Rukeyser’s use of the documentary in Savage Coast from the perspective of many of her male contemporaries, who write on the subject with an untroubled authority, and this indi­ cates a particularly proto-feminist aspect of her formal project.56 This is exemplified in the scene when 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 ti­ midity after saying something she felt deeply. But this was a different life.

54

Chapter 2 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.”57

The difficulty and fear in saying something “deeply felt” is such a central concern of the text that it manifests in almost every layer of the novel— textually, narratively, psychologically, and physically—but more than anything else, 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.

Force of Speed 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 move­ ment and stasis, between speaking and silence, inertia and speed, the still documents alongside the lyric. 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: The train went flashing down France toward Spain, a stroke of glass and fine metal in the night. Its force of speed held the power of a water-race, and dark, excited, heavy before morning: it was traveling, lapping in the country, in speed. She looked out with an intent look of finality: she expected everything of the day, of the long roll of night-country. In a blaze of excitement, the world changed: to speed, sleep and speed.

Helen begins her journey embodying the movement of the speeding train, its movement through the landscape enveloping her, in its “tense, des­ perate stroke.” This embodied and somatic mode of documentation be­ comes essential to the text, as we soon learn that Helen suffers from an unspecified leg injury, an oblique disability, “a defect that reminds [her]

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of a time before this,”58 that prevents her from running, and at times even from moving. This paralysis is always set in contradistinction to the speed of events that propel her forward, like the opening passage the book alternates between “sleep and speed.”59 At times, the leg symbol­ izes the barrier to action that Helen must overcome, but it also reflects the sensory experience of place. At one point Helen describes excruciat­ ing physical pain as the bombs fall outside—the internal mimicking the external, the personal and political intertwined. Laura Hartmann-Villalta writes of how, for Rukeyser, the body is used as a form of “embodied witness” in the novel, as a “dependence on the flesh, the body, and the eyes for this experience.”60 In this way Rukeyser documents the affective and somatic life of political crisis, and her texts from Savage Coast on­ ward turn toward this sensory witnessing, from war to birth. Ultimately, Spain’s civil war helps Helen find the integration of self that mends her in­ ternal “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 “defective” body is, if not cured, made painless by the final scenes of the novel, and she has begun to over­ come her fears. Speaking to Hans, Helen says: “‘I am changed. . . . I want you to know. You began a new—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.’”61 It is unclear whether Rukeyser herself had an actual leg injury, though she makes mention of sciatica in her diary earlier in the trip, while in England, and in her letters. 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.62 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 un­ comfortable with her large body, “as a big angry woman”—but also as a depiction of the Jewish body, for it’s impossible to miss the fact that the novel takes place in 1936, as Helen, a Jew, is on her way to document a counter-Olympics to Hitler’s Games, where the perfect German body, as depicted by Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia (1938), would be reified.

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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.

Rukeyser deploys Hitler’s “master race” here, reshaping and critiquing its ideology and exposing a decades-long German resistance to the rise of fascism in Europe, since Hans is himself a political exile from Nazi Ger­ many. Hans’s “perfect dominance over himself, trained, disciplined, ac­ tive,” will be used to struggle against those forces of annihilation.63 Like many German political exiles who fled repression and imprisonment in the early thirties, he viewed the fight against fascism in Spain as “the Ger­ man chance, in or out of Germany.”64 This Jewish-German love story between Helen and Hans is reflected by the interracial relationship be­ tween Peter and Olive, the American communist couple whom Rukeyser befriends on the train, connecting the American debate around miscege­ nation and the color line with the eugenicist ideology of Nazi Germany.65 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 begun in the novel, but, importantly, it is only Olive, who is biracial, who comments on the irony of Helen and Hans’s relationship: “‘Just imagine!’ she cried, in a witty voice, ‘during a revolu­ tion, with a 100% Aryan!’” But these intersections, and that history, will remain with Rukeyser.66 Rukeyser’s brief love affair with Otto Boch is one of the most consistent images throughout all her writings on Spain. The few letters from Boch to Rukeyser sent from the front, between July 1936 and 1938, respond­ ing to her desired and unsuccessful attempt to return to Spain, are more than anything else a document of his soldier’s life, and his acceptance of their separation, since “everybody has their post in the war against Fas­ cism.”67 Despite the brevity of their time together, their sexual encounter proved transformational. In the novel Helen and Hans meet the second

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night in Montcada, and before they even know each other’s name, with a spontaneous physical consent they have sex on the train, as soldiers’ boots can be heard on the platform. 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.”68 It is a metaphor that will, thankfully, become more subtle and introspective over the following decades. In the subsequent years, Boch’s body, “with its touch, its weight,” turns into the “endless earth,” encompasses every­ thing, exists in everything.69 It is hard to imagine that the rejection of the novel was not influenced by Rukeyser’s depiction of a heroine who is more like the complicated female protagonists we encounter in our culture today—with her at­ tention to the smell of waste coming from the stalled train or a comical depiction of a child playing with his penis—as much as by the politically radical and avant-garde nature of Savage Coast. This says something about the kind of genre, or multigenre, that Rukeyser was working in, and speaks to the increasingly conservative gender, aesthetic, and politi­ cal dictates emerging in the late 1930s that positioned her and her work as undisciplined, abnormal, and inconsistent.70 Rukeyser, in actuality, appears deeply politically and artistically consistent through the years following the Spanish Civil War: always she resisted totalizing systems that flattened subjectivity and that could inherently lead to totalitarian­ ism; and she worked within “the changing forms” of both her literary genre and her political and historical moment. Against gender norms she asserted political and artistic authority, writing philosophical, histori­ cal, and worldly works, with little concern for generic or disciplinary borders. The formal complexity of Rukeyser’s work, the “obscurity” she was so often charged with, seems just the opposite; read in the context of her historical moment, it presents an obvious extension of the difficult ideas, forms, and histories she was attempting to render. The more com­ plex her forms, the more complex her readings of politics and history.71 Perhaps Sylvia Townsend Warner’s “wildly leftist novel” Summer Will Show, which Rukeyser quotes in Savage Coast, is a logical influence and

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partner, as it was published in 1936, the same year Rukeyser was writ­ ing her novel and the first year of the Spanish Civil War. Warner’s hero­ ine, Sophia, also finds subjectivity in political engagement and activism during the French Revolution, finds liberation in free love, finds herself on the barricades, awakening; but Warner’s work does not employ the kinds of radical textual experimentations Rukeyser was making to em­ body those very politics. In Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt writes of André Malraux’s novel Man’s Fate that revolution “saves those that make it.”72 Rukeyser saw this in Spain, and wrote it through Helen, as she watches the small town of Montcada take collective action, as she hears the people of Barce­ lona speak of transformation in their resistance to the fascist coup, as her lover Hans makes his way to Zaragoza, and she takes in this revolutionary potential as her own, to her own country. The more Helen participates in the resistance, the more she becomes herself. The denouement of the novel is the miraculous moment when Helen stands alone on a street in Barcelona, surrounded by marchers, workers, and soldiers about to leave for the front. She stands without fear, she acknowledges her changed self, describing it as a “life within life, the watery circle, the secret progress of a complete being in five days, childhood, love, and choice,” and she listens to Martin’s speech, translated in language after language, wavelike, until it finally reaches her, and she is given what she wants: an acknowledgment of her desire for responsibility and value, the freedom to move and act. He says: “If you have felt inactivity, that is over now. Your work begins. It is your work now to go back, to tell you countries what you have seen in Spain.”73 Rukeyser finishes Helen’s journey, and so we know that the young heroine of Savage Coast, standing in the middle of a street, in the middle of war, history, politics, sex—writing from its noisy center—learns to speak deeply, to say what she believes.

“It Isn’t a Novel and I Won’t Make It Compose Like One” While Rukeyser left the novel’s rejection letter, written by her mentor Hor­ ace Gregory, on top of the one remaining manuscript—a self-aware com­ ment, perhaps, on how much reception has shaped our understanding of

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her work—she also responded to his criticism in a series of undated letters written to Gregory and his wife, the writer Marya Zaturenska, between the winter of 1936 and the summer of 1937, while Rukeyser was living in Hollywood with her collaborator and friend Nancy Naumburg.74 Her own defense of her work shows not only the ways in which the process of writing Savage Coast informed the development of her radical avant­ garde aesthetics but also how much those choices challenged the prevail­ ing norms of the period. In the letters, Rukeyser articulates an artistic vision that would come to define her writing in the subsequent decades. Responding to Gregory, who had the only copy of the manuscript, she writes: I want my manuscript, and I want it out. Let Covici drop it, I’ll do some re­ writing and peddle it. It can’t balance, it ought to be the story and that’s all, I know the big faults and can get those out and the right thing in, but it isn’t a novel and I won’t make it compose like one. I don’t know what it is and I don’t care. But I can make it good now, and I want it out. Please, if it’s in your house, send the ms on; I’ve written Pat for it too, I don’t know where it is and I’ve never heard a word from his office.75

Her assertion that her book is “not a novel” before she began redrafting is significant, since the heavily edited archival manuscript is titled Sav­ age Coast: A Novel, signifying how she may have responded to the re­ jection by shaping her text to conform to more middlebrow novelistic expectations. Her failure to make the novel cohere, though, would not be the last time that her experimental choices would hamper her ability to sell her work. In an unpublished interview with Louise Kertesz she says, “I wish there was a category called Book”—that is, a category not defined by genre specifications, but something that contains a “tale told,” as she writes in another letter to Gregory.76 Rukeyser wrote Savage Coast be­ cause she believed the tale was worth telling, but also to engender interna­ tional support for the Spanish Republic in the early days of the war, and for money—she wanted to sell the book and get back to New York from Hollywood, and then return to Spain to report on the conflict and rejoin Boch. There is no point in her career from the late thirties onward when the desire to control her own artistic processes doesn’t run up against her often precarious economic reality.

Figure 4. Reader report for Savage Coast. N.d. Box 1:23, Muriel Rukeyser Papers,

Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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In another letter, Rukeyser responds to Zaturenska’s insistence that she abandon the novel: The criticism was a slap I needed, and I know it thoroughly. Pat sent me Horace’s report to him, too. I was haywire about the book, feeling I HAD to get it out right away, tied up with Spain (Hank thinks Otto is dead, I heard from him from the hospital of the International Column, he’s been wounded, I don’t know how badly) and I’m all tied up and far away out here. I can take everything he says, except that he thinks it can’t be rewrit­ ten; and I do, and I want to; I can’t even go back to Spain until I get that

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Chapter 2 book finished; and I know how to rewrite it now. I was spang up against it in New York, and now I’m further from that week. Besides, I had two dol­ lars left when I wired Pat, and was scared about money. And I can’t ask him for money on an MS he doesn’t believe in. I’d rather take it to another pub­ lisher as a rough draft and give him a book of poems. . . . Only please once trust me a little, because how can I have any faith at all if you and Horace have none in me.77

Challenged to articulate her own artistic vision, Rukeyser also worried about the complex personal and economic repercussions of having her work rejected by mentors she loved as friends and artistic and political collaborators, whom she also depended on for career opportunities. It was through Gregory and Zaturenska that she was introduced to the Lon­ don literary world of Eliot and H.D., and Gregory was then on the ex­ ecutive board and poetry editor of New Masses. Gregory’s formidable standing in the poetry circles of the 1930s was crucial for Rukeyser’s con­ nections. He would help her get published in Poetry, The Nation, and The New Yorker. These relationships were so important that she held back on pursuing a Melville project because Gregory was already work­ ing on one.78 And while Gregory ends his rejection of the novel by cit­ ing Rukeyser’s brilliance, his insistence that her writing is either “lousy” or “the very best,” and never “mediocre,” reflects his particular vision of aesthetic production in the 1930s.79 In his chapter on Virginia Woolf’s posthumously published Common Reader, for example, he takes a simi­ lar tack between genius and failure that reads as highly gendered: “If one admits that the familiar essay was among the vehicles of her genius, one need not concern one’s self too deeply over the questions of her ability in literary criticism. She was not, I believe, vastly disturbed by the prob­ lems of the intellect. . . . [S]he exerted an influence in literary matters be­ cause of her gifts and her intelligence, and because her artistry embraced the arts of persuasion and character.”80 Gregory’s reading of Woolf il­ lustrates Rabinowitz’s observation that we have failed to read “women writers as political theorists, in part because the cultural and historical analyses that established a gendered division between public and private spheres have implied a certain closure regarding the form and content of women’s writing.”81 Woolf is the only woman writer under discussion in his book The Shield of Achilles: Essays on Belief in Poetry (1944), and

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her words, according to Gregory, often make the sounds of “little bells.” While Gregory and Zaturenska were deeply important allies for Rukeyser, especially during the 1930s debates about left poetry, Alan Wald has also noted that they “had powerful convictions about their superior abilities to judge verse,” judgments that Rukeyser herself would challenge and out­ grow, beginning with her formal and political choices in Savage Coast.82 In much of the correspondence about Savage Coast, the Gregorys and other friends, like the writer Eleanor Clark, were worried about Rukey­ ser’s reputation and feared that the novel would damage her position as a rising literary star. Clark wrote to Rukeyser in 1937: “I don’t think it should be published. I think it would hurt you, and it isn’t good enough for you, and I think so quite strongly.”83 Their critiques were formed in a protective manner, one aimed toward maintaining not only Rukeyser’s reputation—and there is no doubt that “reputation” is gendered—but also a literary standard that was anti-Stalinist and that unified “emotion and imagination,” reflecting contemporaneous debates about aesthetics and politics; Clark describes that year’s Congress of American writers (later League of American Writers) as a “stinking hypocritical bourgeois mess,” for example.84 Responding to Rukeyser’s desire to rework the novel for a different publisher, Gregory writes: I wish I could convince you not to take the time out now rewriting it: it WON’T GO in its present form, and no matter what you do to it, you must compress it, giving it at least the unity of emotion. I wish you were convert­ ing it into a poem or a group of poems. I’m sure the novel is bad, but I’m also confident there’s not a mediocre line in it. Don’t misunderstand me: you can write and have written fine prose. But you’ve neither released nor uni­ fied your imagination in the novel. . . . All this may sound like impertinence, but I know I’m right.85

Despite Gregory’s assessment of the novel, he also situates Rukeyser’s ce­ lebrity on the same level as that of Auden and Day-Lewis, writing in the same letter: “I don’t want you to publish something you’ll regret later: Auden is being pounded to hell for F6 [The Ascent of F6: A Tragedy in Two Acts]. It’s not a mediocre play, it’s lousy, bad writing”; he adds em­ phasis by calling a recently published Day-Lewis play almost “literary sui­ cide.” His concern that the publication of Savage Coast, a novel with an

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autobiographical heroine that he had already deemed “abnormal,” would tarnish her reputation, in a changing political climate, is also intimated in Clark’s response. Gregory’s insistence that Rukeyser “compress” the novel and give it a “unity of emotion” and “imagination”—that is, make the text provoke a single emotional affect from the reader—elucidates a particular vision of what American literature, and lyricism, should do.86 Rukeyser would complicate this idea of form and emotion only a few years later in her “Usable Truth” lectures, writing: “As a matter of fact, unity is the hero of the Formalists. Every poet is in love with some hero. . . . All devices such as rhyme are unifying devices, although they seem to speak variety. When we leave them and go to the naked unity of emotion, many readers feel balked. They wanted to recognize more than that.”87 Rukeyser’s use of the documentary and extra-textual materials alongside recurrent rhythms and themes in Savage Coast eschews a sense of reso­ lution, or a single response from the reader and allows us to “recognize more” than a “naked emotion.” In the same “Usable Truth” lecture she goes on to advocate for a radical reimagining of unity, asserting that the reader, not the form, is the hero of the poem: “And if you come with your lives to meet what is here, you are the heroes of the poems, for there is the meeting-place. And that defines the form and content of the poetry I tell you. Facing and communicating, that will be our life, in the world and poetry.”88 On Gregory’s recommendation, however, Rukeyser began to work on the series of poems that would make up her book U.S. 1—The Book of the Dead and Two Voyages, which included “The Cruise” and “Mediterranean”—in order get her next advance from Covici. But Greg­ ory’s editing was never free of the gender politics of the period. Respond­ ing to a draft of what would become Two Voyages, the first of her two long poems about the sea voyage to Europe and then out of Spain, that she would publish in lieu of the novel, he quibbled with certain phrases that he describes as a “chiffon pageant,” writing: “There you go suddenly feminine in a way that’s out of tone with the rest of the poem—. .  .  .  [T]he image is weak, the sort of image in that particular place that a poet as good as you are should never use—come, come don’t give me wet chiffon, not now.”89 While she did not always accept Gregory’s editorial sugges­ tions, she would follow some of his advice on the novel, which shaped her editing process: the only remaining draft has large sections cut in the

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manner that Gregory suggested, place-names taken out to compress lines, descriptive passages removed in order to “unify” emotion and imagina­ tion, perhaps. Nevertheless, she did defy his assertion that “it WONT GO,” and she continued to work on it—the opening line, “Everybody knows who won the war,” was scrawled atop the first page, and was obvi­ ously written after the fall of Barcelona in 1939. In a 1957 review of her poetic biography of Wendell Willkie, One Life, Richard Eberhart writes of her “individualistic method of composition. It is a medley of news reports, historical scenes, poetic cross references, dream inferences, realistic depictions and subjective truths summoned across a large canvas to appraise the deep American idealism of the hero.”90 This appraisal could have been written about Savage Coast, only Savage Coast situated a young woman at the center of this heroic conceit. Its rejection on the grounds of a heroine “too abnormal” to be “liked” may have influenced Rukeyser’s choice of future subjects to embody her expansive and idiosyncratic vision, one that “recalls ancient forms, the epic and the ballad”—forms that have been historically gendered male, centered on a male world, narrating a flawed, likable hero—but in Savage Coast, her first prose project, those “ancient forms” are embodied by a young woman and she is born in Spain.91

3

Mother of Exiles Spanish Civil War Writing

The world is full of loss; bring, wind, my love,

My home is where we make our meeting-place,

And love whatever I shall touch and read

Within that face.

Lift, wind, my exile from my eyes;

Peace to look, life to listen and confess,

Freedom to find to find to find

That nakedness.

—Muriel Rukeyser, “Song” (1941)

Writing about the poem “Mediterranean,” which would be her first major work on Spain to be published, Rukeyser states to Gregory and Zaturen­ ska: “But I’ve been having a very hard time doing the Spanish poem, and that has to be done before I can go ahead. It’s practically a year now, and I still have difficulty about getting a hold on that week, as far as words on paper go.”1 Perhaps this early difficultly of getting “words on paper” to

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articulate the experience of the Spanish Civil War contributed to Rukey­ ser’s continuous return to those five days. She goes on: “The story is tough for me to manage, you know how I haven’t learned to do direct narrative of any sort, I’m temperamentally away from story, I don’t like stories very much except to listen to, prefer moments of proof or sequences edited in climaxes, but this takes care of story, I think.”2 Rukeyser’s preference for the filmic “moments of proof” or “sequences edited in climax” is demon­ strated in the ways in which she constructed Savage Coast, cinematically building toward imagistic revelation, but this style is also developed in her poems and essays, as Rukeyser continues to document and recuperate the narratives of those who fought against fascism in Spain and those mar­ ginalized by “History’s revision”—women, activists, exiles, and refugees.3 For over thirty years Rukeyser continued to evolve a radical avant-garde aesthetic for writing about the Spanish Civil War, attempting to connect moments of political crisis and personal revelation through a formal pro­ cess that elides easy categorization, offering a dilating and dialogic repre­ sentation of history inside an ever-changing present. In addition to Savage Coast, Rukeyser’s narrative of the first days of the Spanish Civil War ap­ pears in four major essays written from 1936 to 1974, all of them uncollected—“Barcelona, 1936” (Life and Letters To-day 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 Her­ ald Tribune, July 29, 1936), and “We Came for Games” (Esquire, Octo­ ber 1974)—as well as in the introduction to The Life of Poetry (1949) and in numerous poems that span her oeuvre: “For O.B.” (undated), “Med­ iterranean” (1936), “Moment of Proof” (1939), “Otherworld” (1939), “Correspondences” (1939), “1/26/39” (1939), “Song” (1941), “One Sol­ dier” (1944), “Long Past Moncada” (1944), “Letter to the Front” (1944), Elegies (1949), “Segre Song” (1968), “Word of Mouth” (1968), “End­ less” (1968), “Delta Poems” (1968), “Voices” (1972), “Searching / Not Searching” (1972), and others. In these poems and essays—many published, some unpublished or uncollected—we can connect Rukeyser’s recurrent use of Spain to the development of her larger literary project, one that subverts the per­ ceived separation between political and aesthetic poetry so inculcated in mid-twentieth-century literary culture, and that expands the bound­ aries of gender and genre through formal experimentation—combining

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documentary and lyric, epic and hermetic, personal revelation and histori­ cal critique—mapping her own moment of political and sexual awakening inside the larger public history of war, revolution, and social change. This multi-decade project paved a path for the feminist poets of the 1960s, who would look to Rukeyser as the “mother of everyone,” to use Anne Sex­ ton’s phrase.4 In this sense, she served as a bridge through the Cold War, connecting the radical avant-garde modernism of the thirties to the femi­ nist experimentation of the late twentieth century. Adrienne Rich could not have written of a “lyric on a battlefield” without Rukeyser’s Elegies, first published in 1948 but begun in Spain:5 When you have left the river you proceed alone;

all love is likely to be illicit; and few

friends to command the soul; they are too feeble.

Rejecting the subtle and contemplative minds

as being too thin in the bone; and the gross thighs

and unevocative hands fail also. But the poet

and his wife, those who say Survive, remain;

and those two who were with me on the ship

leading me to the sum of the years, in Spain.

When you have left the river you will hear the war.

In the mountains, with tourists, in the insanest groves

the sound of kill, the precious face of peace.

And the sad frightened child, continual minor,

returns, nearer whole circle, O and nearer

all that was loved, the lake, the naked river,

what must be crossed and cut out of your heart,

what must be stood beside and straightly seen.6

Rukeyser’s Elegies, begun in 1939, track her often solitary political and artistic positions as she returns again and again to “the sum of the years, in Spain.” Rukeyser’s Spanish Civil War poems model the kinds of politi­ cal and historical critiques she would continue to develop in the forties and fifties—a transtextual and transhistorical network in which all events can be read as interconnected, within the same narrative scope, amplified through the personal lyric voice. Rukeyser’s proliferating Spain discloses the “latent” potentialities of the past inside the present (while simultane­ ously exposing the particulars of injustice in a specific moment). In this

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way she explicitly challenges traditional formations of history that follow, as Marina Camboni notes, “a sequence of inevitable causalities . . . that hide the fact that the present and the ‘continuous present’ of each his­ torical moment were much more complex and held in their bosom many more possibilities than were actually developed.”7 She writes in “Mediter­ ranean” the movement of this history: The wheel in the water, green, behind my head.

Turns with its light-spokes. Deep. And the drowning eyes

find under the water figures near

in their true picture, moving true

the picture of that war enlarging clarified

as the boat perseveres away, always enlarging,

becoming clear.

Boat of escape, your water-photograph

I see this man, dock, war, a latent image.8

This image of Spain is significant to how we might understand her work on the subject, as she describes the moment in multivalent terms—an image in time, a country, a body, a war—that not only hold and reveal multiple signs, but also are always enlarging and clarifying as she moves farther away from them, both physically and temporally; the meanings of the events of Spain develop in the “present and the ‘continuous present.’” Experimenting with and expanding the notion of the documentary, Rukeyser’s narratives of Spain provide a more complex and avant-garde manifestation of the “camera-eye” that drives the “documentary im­ pulse.”9 These works exaggerate the documentary quality of the text to the point of process, highlighting the very construction of meaning making, of historical narrative, of “fact,” and the inherent omissions and fallacies made by the maker and viewer of history. The “latency” that she describes as being inside the historical moment becomes increasingly visible over time as it interacts with and is formed by other historical processes, not un­ like the chemical process of photographic development in which the image (the meaning) slowly reveals itself. For Rukeyser, this poetic and historical process occurs over forty years, as her texts on Spain interact not only with one another but also with the changing political and cultural land­ scape in which she is writing. While “Mediterranean” was drafted on the boat evacuating Barcelona, it anticipates a kind of poetics of history that

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Rukeyser will spend much of her life writing toward, one that is “reach­ ing backward and forward in history, illuminating all time,” and that is exemplified throughout her writing on Spain.10 Additionally, Rukeyser’s forty-year literary memorial for Spain reflects the period of Franco’s dic­ tatorship (1939–1975). Her last essay on Spain, “We Came for Games,” was published in 1974 to correspond with the Munich Olympics to remind readers of the previous German Games and the other history of Spain that was not yet in the past. The noninterventionist stance that allowed Franco unmitigated power for forty years also engendered the first major refugee crisis of World War II, as nearly half a million Spaniards were forced to flee into exile. Rukeyser’s commitment to archiving in her texts the history of Spanish resistance that was silenced in its own country is a reminder of Spain’s central legacy in the history of twentieth-century struggles for political justice and also for theorizing the place of the refugee, alerting us always to the transnational interconnections of both oppression and social change. Rukeyser’s poetry and essays about Spain expand, over de­ cades, on what she began in Savage Coast. They not only hold histories that threaten to disappear but also interrogate the very foundations on which war and nationalism are predicated, documenting the deformity and humiliation of bodies lying facedown on tennis courts as bullets riddle the walls, staring into the barrel of a gun, looking up at a plane, on boats as refugees, gazing back at a face that is already a ghost. She also documents resistance and possibility: the people’s militias marching to the front, the determination of the foreign nationals to understand how to act and sup­ port what Rukeyser describes in an interview thirty years later as “a real Popular Front: fierce people in an anarchist country.”11

Voyage and Exile Rukeyser’s writing on Spain is marked by the enormous transforma­ tion that occurred between the voyage in and the voyage out of Spain. That much in the poems and writing on Spain is centered on movement, border crossing, and the effect of travel on time—a space between two countries, two moments in history—is crucial for the way she structures her personal, poetic, and political development. In the opening of Savage

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Coast, her autobiographical character Helen describes a deep feeling of hope in this trip abroad: Her mood had changed since yesterday. Then, she had crossed the Channel, gone down to Paris on the fast train, whipped across the city, and come on this one, all in a daze of excitement, carried away with the excitement of it, but still locked into herself, traveling alone. It was all new and must be important, must be valuable, in the same way that she was used to think­ ing she must grow to be valuable. It was too much to carry, all this selfconsciousness, and it was beginning to relax from her in the heat and ad­ venture here.12

Like so many of her generation’s “dominant metaphors,” the journey over the border was defining, highlighting the great possibilities of selfactualization outside the boundaries of nation and national identity.13 In this sense Rukeyser’s writing on Spain is particularly emblematic of modernist writing of this period, as her character seeks to understand her place “within historical and social processes,” with a desire to “grow to be valuable,” transcending her class and gender confines.14 Nearly all of Rukeyser’s texts begin on the train speeding through France, down the coast into Portbou, a small border town in the Pyrenees. Walter Benjamin would commit suicide there in 1940, and Hannah Arendt would escape from the Gurs internment camp along the western portion of the same border. By 1939, thousands would die crossing out of Spain into exile, or out of France into another exile, or in the camps nearby.15 Rukeyser later wrote that this border “was the paradigm of all boundaries”—it marked a generation.16 It seems fitting to continually encounter her here in this liminal twentiethcentury space between wars and nations, theorizing through the violent binaries on which war, nationalism, and patriarchy are predicated, the border itself one of their more obvious manifestations. She writes of re­ turning to this border in “Word of Mouth: The Return”: Along my life and death backward toward that morning

when all things fell open and I went into Spain.

One man. Sardana music. Where I now come again.

This frontier.



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Chapter 3 I stop. I do not pass. Wave under wave like the divisive South afire in the country of my birth. A moment of glass. All down the coast I face as far as vision, blue, memory blue. See now. Why do I not go in? I stand I cannot pass. History, destroyed music.17

Written in 1968, this poem is a particularly good example of how Rukey­ ser contextualizes and interconnects histories: the civil rights movement in the United States—“the divisive South / afire in the country of my birth”— is intertwined and doubled with this other movement for freedom and justice and the violent forces against both, the borders overlapping, the moments in this poem referencing others and thereby broadening both meanings and asserting a transnational and transhistorical view of both war and social change, the genealogies visible. The voyages across bor­ ders that she describes in these works are not merely physical, obviously, though they are that too, but almost always they are frontiers that do dou­ ble or triple work, metaphors that describe the temporal, literary, psycho­ logical, or historical boundaries that she views as inherently false, that her work attempts to disrupt and transgress. Situating Spain’s history in a larger political context, “The Return” simultaneously asserts the centrality of the place both to the period of unrest that the war ushered in and to Rukeyser’s biography; it is the place where “all things fell open”—a double metaphor of political and sexual “opening,” as she includes Otto Boch, “one man” whose life and death “survive as lifetime sound.”18 Returning to the language of one of her first poems about Spain, “Mediterranean,” to describe Boch (“I see this man, dock, war, a latent image”), she makes him a refrain, brought back over thirty years later, the two texts interacting across larger his­ torical time. Rukeyser herself doesn’t return to Spain until decades after her first trip; rather, the poem, like so many others, depicts the mood of the exile, of the outsider looking back and in, standing on the border. And while she is not literally exiled from Spain, the political life that she describes as having begun there continues to isolate her in her own

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country for decades. It was upon her return that the FBI began to follow her, and it would do so until 1974. Like the journey over the border, nearly every one of her texts on Spain ends on the boat sailing through the Mediterranean, “refugeed,” marking her own transformation from tourist to activist, witness to radical, citizen to exile. “Mediterranean” begins: At the end of July, exile. We watched the gangplank go cutting the boat away, indicating : sea. Barcelona, the sun, the fire-bright harbor, war. Five days. Here at the rail, foreign and refugee,19

That she identifies herself with the exiled is significant: like the exile, who stands between two moments in history, two countries, the poem is struc­ tured around this relationship, acting as a mnemonic device of “between­ ness,” mediating the shifting relationships between people and a rapidly changing political landscape, one that now holds her in its grip: “Exile and Refugee, we land, we take / nothing negotiable out of the new world; / we believe, we remember, we saw.”20 She performs this movement by piec­ ing together the images of Spain exploding—“rifle-shot in street, / carburning, bombs, blank warning, fists up, guns”—with the discourse on the boat of refugees—“speaking, somehow, the opinions, which, later, their countries held”—and the image of a sea that is both peaceful and “the frontier of Europe,” a “sea of war.”21 All these things, as well as her place within them, she asserts, are connected. That she locates these re­ lationships in the specificity of small moments—“the black boxer,” the “twice refugee” Otto Boch—within the occurrence of larger histories— “Egypt, Greece, Rome, jewel Jerusalem / giant feudal Spain, giant England, this last war”—speaks to her creation of a poetics of interconnection in which no event should be separated from historical motion. The boat sail­ ing through the Mediterranean holds these histories, as does the poem: “dock, war, a latent image.”22 The poem’s progress, like the sea itself, is one of discovery and return, every moment dilating upon the last and opening the frames of history and who is included in its scope. By re-creating a backward-looking ges­ ture inside the text itself, as it unfolds in real time, Rukeyser makes Spain

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exist in the present, securing, if not the vision of Spain’s radical political history, then her own self-creation in that moment of Spanish history. In “We Came for Games,” she describes, after landing in safety at Sète, how “I rented a little kayak and, after I paddled about two hundred yards out, let it drift and I cried at last. I did not want to go on, but they came for me.”23 This is both a forward-and backward-looking gesture, for Rukey­ ser describes it in 1974 (on the eve of Franco’s death), in the context of a long history that has already elapsed. Likewise, because the poem repeats the same images and phrases throughout, and then refigures them again in other works, she begins to enact something like Adorno’s “part of the totality of the work that opposes totality,” for through this proliferation, the poem’s text and history remain always open, never finished.24 Another series of poems written in 1968, many of them referencing the Vietnam War, are, as Louise Kertesz writes, works that “cannot be closed . . . can­ not be completely linear or straightforward, for Rukeyser considers the war in Vietnam as part of the continuing war of our century . . . a night­ mare of returns.”25 In “Delta Poems,” Rukeyser writes of Otto Boch as well as two Vietnamese soldiers, all killed “at the edge of waters.”26 This continuous, wavelike recitation of the same moments across time and texts can be even better understood through her experimentations with the epic structures of voyage and return. In part this is seen in her mythic descent to recuperate the body of Otto Boch, re-corporealized in text, from the wastelands of war. We might even call the long proliferation of her work on Spain over decades a kind of fragmented epic endeavor, a radical revision of the male-centered modernist epics.27 In Savage Coast, Rukeyser’s character is named Helen, and like H.D. in Helen in Egypt, she re-centers the epic journey: Helen tells the story of the Spanish Civil War; it is through her that we see and hear its narrative. And yet, through the use of documentary evidence and multivocal narratives, Rukeyser’s epic is focused not on individual heroism but on collective transformation. In “Mediterranean” she writes: If we had lived in our city sixty years might not prove the power of this week the overthrown past tourist and refugee

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And the war in Peace, the war in war, the peace,

the faces on the dock

the faces in those hills.28

Here she narrates the great political events of a generation, standing on the boat, in her sea voyage, bringing together the voices and stories of the “refugees,” gathering the “cultural materials” of her time, speak­ ing of a historical “we,” proclaiming both peace and war—a woman who, as Juliana Spahr writes in reference to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s late-twentieth-century epic Dictée, is “engaged with large public worlds that are in turn shared with the reader . . . expanding and changing our notion of the public, of everybody.”29 In a 1935 Daily Worker review of Horace Gregory’s epic poem Cho­ rus for Survival, Rukeyser writes, “There has been a demand for heroic structure that would be adapted to our life and to revolutionary thought: this book suggests and contains one solution, for its progress, as narrative and as formal scheme, builds up to a resemblance to the old epic that is no longer usable,” and she writes of this new epic as a refutation to Eliot’s “denial” of “his country” and “the past,” and Robinson Jeffers’s “idea of the dead Western world.”30 Like Gregory, Rukeyser is opening “a new form for the epic idea” as she narrates this war, an exiled epic visionary: Voyage and exile, a midnight cold return,

dark to our left mountains begin the sky.

There, pointed the Belgian, I heard a pulse of war,

sharp guns while I ate grapes in the Pyrenees.

Alone, walking to Spain, the five o’clock of war.

In those cliffs run the sashed and sandalled men,

capture the car, arrest the priest, kill the captain

fight our war.

The poem is the fact, memory fails

under and seething lifts and will not pass.31

Rukeyser asserts that the poem is both a document of history itself— a “fact” that “will not pass,” more powerful than a “memory” that “fails” under the currents of history and time, which, like the sea itself, can erode—as well as the embodiment of historical, political, and per­ sonal development. The poem is both a static synchronic force that holds

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history (hermetic) and diachronic as it interacts with and exists through a changing historical time (worldly).32 She develops this idea more fully in The Life of Poetry, particularly in her modification of Charles Peirce’s triadic model and through her interest in the storytelling process of the Kwakwaka’wakw mask dances.33 In adapting these modes, she explores the potentiality of a poetic space that is unclosing, perhaps even unending, the poem’s meaning always made new as it is being read in time, created through the relationship between poet, poem, audience / witness. This idea anticipates Lyn Hejinian’s groundbreaking essay on women’s experimen­ tal texts, “The Rejection of Closure,” in which she writes: The “open text,” by definition, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, eco­ nomic, cultural) hierarchies. It speaks for writing that is generative rather than directive. The writer relinquishes total control and challenges author­ ity as a principle and control as a motive. The “open text” often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers, and thus resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material and turn it into a product; that is, it re­ sists reduction and commodification.34

In thinking about openness, then, we can read the enjambment of Ruke­ yser’s “Mediterranean” in multiple ways: “memory fails” or “memory fails under . . . and will not pass.” It does both, really: it disappears and it remains.

“The Symbols Are Never Finished” Rukeyser’s textually experimental and politically radical project is re­ flected across all her works on Spain, and one of the most important ways this is enacted is by using the exact same lines, scenes, and images across multiple texts, putting works in dialogue with one another. The cluster of images, snippets of conversation and sounds that make up her works on Spain have an incredible elasticity. Though the images are repeated, be­ cause of the way Rukeyser structures her narratives, each rendering of an event is a clarification and an intensification, expanding upon the same

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moment in another text. As Catherine Gander notes, Rukeyser often re­ lied on musical as well as mathematical metaphors, like “phase-change,” to demonstrate these recurring themes that are returned to, modified, en­ larged over time.35 In her poem “Käthe Kollwitz,” she quotes a letter Koll­ witz wrote to her son: “The process is after all like music, like the development of a piece of music. The fugues come back and again and again interweave. A theme may seem to have been put aside,

but it keeps retuning—

the same thing modulated

somewhat changed in form.

Usually richer.

And it is very good that this is so.”36

“The phrase in a different position is new . . . a time binding, a physical binding, a musical binding,” Rukeyser states in an interview.37 For ex­ ample, threaded through each major text is the crucial moment in which Rukeyser is told by the organizer of the People’s Olympiad that she is to go back to America and tell of what she saw in Spain.38 This scene is central to Rukeyser’s political transformation, as she is “given her respon­ sibility” and explains why she keeps reiterating the story of the first days of the war. It also exemplifies how she uses language like a photograph, a tangible object that can be moved and reframed, thereby making it mul­ tivocal and multihistorical. In “Mediterranean,” this moment is manifest in a disembodied voice; one of the many voices that permeates the poem, it is de-contextualized, made lyric: “you stay for victory; foreign? Your job is: / go tell your countries what you saw in Spain.”39 In “We Came for Games,” we hear of other speeches, those from the international athletes in solidarity with the republic, prepared to fight, and she writes of how the “Catalan government told us we were welcome to stay, the men if they could fight, the women if they had medical experience.” Rukeyser has neither, so when Martin speaks, she writes, “He is speaking to me di­ rectly, at least that is how I hear his open words.”40 In The Life of Poetry, she writes: “They had seen how, as foreigners, we were deprived; how we

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were kept from, and wanted, above all things one: our responsibility. This was a stroke of insight; it was true. ‘Now you have your responsibility,’ the voice said, deep, prophetic, direct ‘go home: tell your people what you have seen.’ We had seen the beginning, much more would come.”41 In Savage Coast, this scene is rendered as the truly cinematic climax of sexual and political subjectivity, as Helen and Hans (Rukeyser and Boch) declare their love between fragments of Martin’s speech, the text panning through the crowd, catching others’ intimate conversations as the speech unfolds, each of their political beliefs being formed and changed in this crowded public square on the streets of Barcelona. In “Barcelona, 1936,” published in Life and Letters To-day in the au­ tumn of 1936, the speech is the final scene that transforms a seemingly traditional prose piece of 1930s reportage into a radical and modernist hybrid. The changes in the formal structures of the text occur as Rukey­ ser’s political commitments are formed. The essay begins quick, dialogic, filmic, describing the scene on the train. Yet as the circumstances of Rukey­ ser’s journey change from sports reporting to war reporting, the text itself becomes increasingly complex, interspliced with revolutionary documents and long lyric passages, as in Savage Coast. Relying heavily on avant­ garde collage techniques—situating newspaper reports, excerpts from the tourist brochure and the Olympic program between dynamic scenes of violence in the hills and stillness on the train—she exaggerates the sense of urgency and witness for the reader, while at the same time subverting a seemingly “objective” testament of the events: as in the novel and in “Mediterranean,” she quotes extensively the differing views of others on the train to narrate the debate around contemporary politics, creating a manifold reading of political history, one that resists ideological fixity. As the narrative moves toward political and personal climax, Rukeyser opens form, the prose breaking apart and expanding into poetry as her own subject position, voice, and political allegiance become clear. The essay ends in poetry and, like the other renditions, on the anarchist streets of Barcelona, where she is given “her responsibility”:

The torn armies left the city, blankets over their shoulders, a few

helmets here and there, several women, many men with red scarfs

about their heads.

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We made a demonstration, wearing black for the fighting dead. The governments sent their boats. It was easy to foresee the long voyages into the Mediterranean. But now Martin, his square face with the heavy yellow eyebrows large over the crowd, was shouting to a mass meeting: “The athletes came to attend the People’s Olympiad, but have been privileged to stay to see the beautiful and great victory of the people in Catalonia and Spain! "These have come for games, but have remained for the greater Front, in battle and in triumph! "Now they must leave, they must go back to their own countries, but they will carry to them . . . (the tense sunlit square, Martin about to start for Saragossa, the people shouting “Viva!” in the streets, the friends among workers, the soldiers who stopped to talk to foreigners, the salutes, international and strong) they will carry to their own countries, some of them still oppressed and under fascism and military terror, to the working people of the world, the story of what they see now in Spain.”42

By rewriting the same moment in multiple texts, Rukeyser not only forces the reader to make connections between her various works but also essentially asserts that history is neither fixed nor immutable—that the many ways we narrate and remember something can make it more complete, that memory creates our present experience and that we can remember an event for its usefulness in our own moment: “art has life in time.”43 In this way, our attention is drawn to the mechanism of creation and we are asked to view history as reproduction on the one hand, but on the other hand as enlarging, becoming richer through the repetition of important themes and ideas. While the poet is archiving resources that she wants us to know and engage with, she is also making visible the process of constructing history through the fragmented, documentary, and openended nature of the works; the very fact of her continued reproduction of events, often slightly altered, attests to this kind of visible construction. In doing so, rather than writing a purely revisionist “left” history, where one narrative supplants another, she creates a formal structure that disrupts notions of linear or hegemonic time, opening narrative rather than closing it down, as Hejinian describes.

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This multiplicity is essential to her role as a documentarian. Rukeyser was afforded a unique view: she witnessed the war and revolution by accident, not as an international volunteer or as a war reporter, and she records the events always aware of her position as an outsider, meditating on her own desire for real political action and connection. In The Life of Poetry she writes: “Everything we had heard, some of all we loved and feared had begun to be acted out. Our realization was fresh and young, we had seen the parts of our lives in new arrangement. There were long pauses between those broken images of life, spoken in language after lan­ guage.”44 She also describes her own ambivalence as a foreign national unable to interpret the events fully, writing often of how “I had never wanted language so much,” implying both a desire to better communi­ cate with the Catalans, with her German lover Otto, and yet also a desire for a language to describe and hold the complex meanings of what was occurring around her. In many of her texts, particularly the novel, she highlights the multiplicity of languages and the instability of meaning. This is one of the more striking ways in which her texts are an important counter to those by Hemingway, who has been consistently chastised for flattening and othering his Spanish protagonists, making them childlike, and most especially for his vulgar English approximation of Spanish. And while Rukeyser cannot, obviously and admittedly, render this war in the way that a Catalan writer might, she nevertheless, through dialogic docu­ mentation, is able to avoid a bourgeois and colonial reading of the work­ ers and militiamen of Spain, a country already at once romanticized and denigrated by a western European gaze as “backward” and “primitive,” a quasi-colonial state. Ultimately, Rukeyser subverts writing the kind of history that is a “functional fantasy of the West.”45 This is unique for documentary works of this period, especially for a style that often sen­ sationalizes its subject, and at times fetishizes or fabricates. Rukeyser’s ability to allow those in the text to “speak” also magnifies the impact of the war. She writes in multiple works, “We know how that war ended,” as if to imply that the ultimate outcome is the least important aspect of this history. In these texts we hear and encounter the voices of the dead, and the people she references are undoubtedly real. The reader, hearing the voices speak “across time,” can only imagine how, as embodied subjects, they will soon vanish: into unmarked graves, in trenches and camps, or into exile after exile—the militiamen and women marching to Zaragoza,

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the athletes who stayed and joined the international column, Otto Boch, the Catalan boys with mismatched guns. As readers we know how Boch will die, and we are almost glad that he will die on the front fighting fas­ cism as he so desires, for he has no other home, no return—he remains the archetypal exile of the twentieth century. Rukeyser uncannily preserves in text a deeply powerful assertion of these lives lived and their voices, ones that may not be remembered any other way.

Gifts of the Revolution The image of Boch runs through the center of Rukeyser’s texts, and she writes about him throughout her life. His voice echoes in the poems as the voice of the fallen in Spain and as a voice of possibility. Boch acts as both an allusion and a representation of the antifascist struggle, not only as a shred of the poet herself which she left to die in Spain, asserting her place in the history of war, but also as a link to other fights for freedom and justice. As discussed earlier, Rukeyser’s depiction of their love affair in Savage Coast is central to the narrative and political arc. In the novel Rukeyser writes, “Through Hans. Transformed,” as Helen tells him: “I am changed. . . . I want you to know. You began a new—you set in motion—it is as though I had gone through a whole other life.”46 In her posthumously published poem “For O.B.,” which remained unpublished in her archive, she writes: When you said you loved me, I saw the future stand up

free and alive, but through the open window

the railroad tracks led into silence, a wild cup

of silence held the year whose fires would not stop

while the world lay under war-shadow.

When I left you, you stood on the pier and held

your face up and never smiled, saying what we had found

was a gift of the revolution—and the boat sailed

while for a moment my sons emerged and stood in the world

as a line of shadows that fell back in that ground.47

Like Martin’s speech, Boch’s farewell to Rukeyser is one of the most often repeated refrains through her entire body of work on Spain, reshaped

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and reimagined over time. In the novel Hans says: “The whole revolution. It gave us to each other, that doesn’t end anywhere. We know what we have to do.”48 Boch also gives Rukeyser “her responsibility” to keep tell­ ing; she writes, in “We Came for Games”: Otto, on the dock, looked deep into me. “You will do what you can in Amer­ ica,” he said, “and I in Spain.” He smiled, with his own happiness. He was not going to run in the games. He had joined the militia, and he was going off to Saragossa. . . . We spoke of my coming back to Spain, but it was not very real. These days were all we could look at. “Gifts of the Revolution,” he said. He had been waiting to fight against fascism since Hitler came to power.49

After Rukeyser’s departure, Boch did indeed join the German Thael­ mann Brigade and set off to Zaragoza.50 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.”51 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.52

Rukeyser had been in correspondence with him, and when news of his death finally reached her, she worried that the last cable she had sent him, only days before the fall of the republic, had gotten him killed. This ques­ tion haunts many of her poems as well, binding her to his exiled body, lost to war—one loved body that encapsulates all the bodies loved and dead from war. In “Endless” she writes: I look down at the one earth under me,

through to you and all the fallen

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the broken and their children born and unborn

of the endless war.53

At the end of the 1974 Esquire article, she connects the Spanish Civil War to the prisoners of war in Vietnam, the 1968 Mexico 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 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 any­ thing.”54 She ends with the image of Boch, the runner: “Going on now. Running, running, today.”55 Even her final collection of poems, The Gates (1976), ends with the image of the runner: “How shall we speak to the infant beginning to run / To all those beginning to run.”56

Two Spains In thinking of these works, and especially her early poems, in the con­ text of her modernist peers, and next to a poet like W. H. Auden, whose “Spain” is perhaps the most famous of its kind, the one that begins all the most famous anthologies of poetry on the Spanish Civil War—“Yesterday all the past. The language of size”—Rukeyser provides us with a more in­ tricate reading of history, one that is “always enlarging, becoming clear.” As is well known, Auden had a conflicted history with Spain, both the place and the poem, and even more so with the left, and while he re­ nounced much of that particular poem by 1940, it has nevertheless re­ mained emblematic of the poetry of that era.57 Yet it is a poem that seems to avoid its subject; it bears no witness, and interprets anemically the pol­ itics and history of its time in broad metaphors: “I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain.” And despite its continual reference to history and revolution, it reads as strangely ahistorical and antirevolutionary— critics have described it as “cold.” Nevertheless, the poem has been touted as the “the best” of the poetry of the Spanish Civil War.58 “Spain” anticipates the separation between political and aesthetic art (and Auden will become an exemplary poet for New Criticism), where even though the speaker calls out for a moment of decisive antifascist

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political action, he is unable to envisage a future that is anything more than that of his own bourgeois world: “Tomorrow the bicycle races / Through the suburbs on summer evening. But today the / struggle.” In The Auden Generation, Samuel Haynes asserts that “Spain” is “an open and unresolved poem,” and “there is no implication in the poem that the fu­ ture will take any political form.”59 But this reading belies the poem’s formal and political structures, which are enormously ideological. The future in “Spain” is a “golden age” of male camaraderie and “romantic love” and “tomorrow the walks by the lake”—not only a dull future, but a frightening one for those never included in its scope, a revolutionary utopia that opens to the image of a patriarchal past. Auden’s poem is formally traditional, written in lyrical four-line stan­ zas, as is the history it represents: the past, present, and future are dis­ cretely rendered, following a seamless narrative arc. In Rukeyser’s work, the more radical the reading of history, the more experimental her forms— an unmoored muscular free verse, entwined with documentary pastiche, that moves “backward and forward in history.” Whereas Auden, in the years after traveling to Spain, came to write that “poetry makes noth­ ing happen,”60 for Rukeyser Spain engendered a lifetime commitment not only to fighting for political justice but also to working out the role and forms of the poet in the twentieth century. As if to answer Auden, she writes in The Life of Poetry: Poetry will not answer these needs. It is art: it imagines and makes, and gives you the imagining. Because you have imagined love, you have not loved; merely because you have imagined brotherhood, you have not made broth­ erhood. You may feel as though you had, but you have not. You are going to have to use that imagining as best you can, by building it into yourself, or you will be left with nothing but illusion. Art is action, but it does not cause action: rather, it prepares us for thought. Art is intellectual, but it does not cause thought: rather it prepares us for thought.61

“My Home of Complex Light” In the decades that followed the Spanish Civil War, and especially in the forties and fifties, during which Rukeyser found herself and her work out

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of favor, much of her writing relies on Spain’s re-creation in the memorylife of the poem. It is in the context of these works that we can understand more clearly Rukeyser’s proliferating poetics: the “responsibility” that she was given in Spain becomes increasingly urgent as the political and artis­ tic climate becomes more restrictive, obliterating that particular history, one that represents her intellectual and political home, and that, with the fall of Barcelona in 1939, exiles her, leaving her, like many radicals, bereft, isolated by fascism abroad and anticommunism at home. She was living in Mexico at the time of the defeat—Ernst Toller gave her the news—and she wrote in “Correspondences: 1/26/39”: When Barcelona Fell, the darkened glass

turned on the world an immense ruinous gaze,

mirror of prophecy in a series of mirrors.

I meet it in all the faces that I see.62

The “mirror of prophecy” that Rukeyser writes of was manifest. War and its twin, ideological hegemony, created intellectual homelessness, rending huge gaps between language and meaning, obliterating mem­ ory in service of the dominant discourse of power. In this sense her po­ etic stance as exile that she describes in those early poems is actualized. This can be viewed most starkly in Rukeyser’s artistic and political es­ trangement at home.63 Rukeyser saw that exile and displacement hap­ pen on both a metaphysical level—within ourselves, because of “false barriers”—and in the very physical reality of the exile. Her poems on Spain in the war years grapple with these ideas, and considering the cli­ mate in which she was living, one that essentially questioned her sta­ tus as citizen, woman, and poet as she grew more critical of prevailing political norms, Spain becomes the reimagined site where she creates a homeland, one made of language and memory. In “Letter to the Front” (1944) she writes: Home thoughts from home; we read you every day,

Soldiers of distance. You wish most to be here.

In the strange lands of war, I woke and thought of home.

Remembering how war came, I wake and think of you,

In the city of water and stone where I was born,

My home of complex light. What we were fighting for,

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Chapter 3 In the beginning, in Spain, was not to be defined.

More human than abstract, more direction than end.64

For Rukeyser, the politics that made up her “home of complex light” were not merely a poetic stance. Her political activism was equally vital to her narratives of Spain—the one inextricable from the other. This can be seen in her friendship with and commitment to the volunteers of the Abra­ ham Lincoln Brigade, and in her work with the Spanish refugees forced to flee to France at the end of the war. Rukeyser worked for many years with Spanish Refugee Aid, Inc., and in her archives there are hundreds of notes on individual refugees, notes that are themselves a kind of catalogue of the finite devastation of the Spanish Civil War. Some of these stories find their way into her poems, as she imagines, in outrage, the body of the refugee, most notably in “Fourth Elegy: The Refugees” (1949). In this poem, a portion of a much longer work that is part Cold War metaphor, part documentary history, she writes of the refugee: “Cut. Frozen and cut. Off at the ankle. Off at the hip / Off at the knee. Cut off. / Crossing the mountain many died of cold.” She continues, “they are the real creation of a fictional character / they fuse the dead world straight.”65 Importantly, it is in the context of these poems that she asserts the expe­ rience of women in war and the role of the poem as action against violence. For example, in “Letter to the Front” she writes, “women and poets see the truth arrive.” In these works she asserts the possibility of regeneration from the wastelands of war, rather than turning inward toward the mysticism of Eliot or cynicism of Auden. She continues, in “Letter to the Front”: “But in the dark weeping helpless moments of peace / Women and poets believe and resist forever: / The blind inventor finds the underground river.” That she locates possibility and resistance in the body of the woman and the eye of the poet is wholly self-referential, but it also stands as a way to show his­ tory outside of paradigmatic patriarchy when she writes: “Surely it is time for the true grace of women / Emerging in their lives’ colors, from rooms, from the harvests, / From the delicate prisons, to speak their promises.”66 This sentiment is similarly expressed in H.D.’s postwar epic Trilogy, written in the same years, which describes how the chasm, schism in consciousness

must be bridged over;

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we are each householder,

each with a treasure;

now is the time to re-value

our secret hoard

in the light of both past and future.67

Both H.D. and Rukeyser saw great potential in the debris, in the ar­ chives and lost narratives of history.68 Rukeyser’s continual reimagining of Spain is testimony to a history—both personal and global—that she asserts is necessary to understanding our own moment, one made up of complex networks of experience that move across time, across forms, across continents and bodies. Rukeyser’s poetics of history embodies this process, “wave by wave.” By proliferating Spain, weaving it through over forty years of writing, she asks a connected reader to acknowledge and bring the events of the Spanish Civil War into our daily history, our con­ temporary politics. And to remember that which she repeats the most, for in her repetition it is spoken to us as well: at the end of almost every iteration of her narratives of Spain, she describes a feeling of political responsibility, quoting that speech given by the organizer of the People’s Olympiad, who said to the those being evacuated, “You will carry to your own countries, some of them still oppressed and under fascism and mili­ tary terror, to the working people of the world, the story of what you see in Spain.” Rukeyser does just that, understanding that the conditions of oppression and military terror are not the exception but the rule, and so she keeps on telling.

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

In the note from the author at the beginning of The Life of Poetry, Ruke­ yser writes that the resistance to poetry comes not just from its being viewed as “intellectual and obscure and confused” but also because it is considered “sexually suspect.”1 Shortly afterward she observes: “Have you noticed that our bestselling books are written in reaction to the dom­ inating woman? This code strikes deep at our emotional life.”2 When Rukeyser sets up these questions at the outset of her book, it is clear that one of her central projects in The Life of Poetry is to unveil and con­ front the gender norms of Cold War containment culture, norms that not only drove the policing of literary and disciplinary categories but also positioned the queer body and the communist body as dangerous, posi­ tioned the male body as antagonistic to the female body, and reinforced the gendering of literary genres: “Almost any man will say that [poetry] is effeminate.”3 The gender politics of the text, however, become fully leg­ ible only when read along with “The Usable Truth”—the lectures deliv­ ered through the 1940s that would become The Life of Poetry, published

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in 1949—and in the context of her short-lived radio program Sunday at Nine, which aired the same year, as well as her unpublished essay about women poets, “Many Keys”—commissioned but rejected by The Nation in 1957—which expands on underdeveloped ideas in The Life of Poetry.4 While Rukeyser was deeply engaged in thinking about the place of the woman writer, it is important to consider the conditions that contributed to the absence of a more overt gender analysis in the published text, as well as to explore Rukeyser’s radical approach to thinking about gender and the body, one that eschews ideological binaries for progressive notions of sexual fluidity and multiplicity. In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser’s reluc­ tance to discuss gender explicitly as a condition of literary production is contradicted by her attention to women’s bodies and voices: in her use of Diotima (the only female interlocutor in Plato’s Symposium) to situate her poetics, and in her own autobiographical narratives that open and close the book; in her analyses of Walt Whitman’s, Hart Crane’s, and Herman Melville’s poetic drives in the context of sexual conflict; in her discussion of Emily Dickinson’s archival obscurity at the hands of her family’s moral and editorial silencing; in her description of the “amputated” conscious­ ness of American masculinity and her use of the feminist psychoanalyst Karen Horney; and in her analysis of the wasted potential of women, who are themselves an “untapped” resource. Ultimately, The Life of Poetry offers important revelations about the deeply powerful “repressive codes” at midcentury that affected the bodily and intellectual life of both men and women. Rukeyser’s recuperation of a radical and homosexual Whit­ man as a defining force in American poetry, for example, stands in con­ trast to his heretical position at midcentury.5 When Rukeyser writes of the critical assessment of Whitman’s “bad poems” and “bad influence,” she is describing a poetry that “cannot be imitated,” in which the musicality prized in English poetics is “lost” and replaced with “one’s own sources, the body and the ancient religious poetry.”6 That is, she is situating not only Whitman but her own work as well in a tradition that stands out­ side of Western patriarchal literary norms. She extends this by identifying herself with other “bad influences” targeted by the “power culture”: “‘the Negroes, the Reds, the Jews,’ the ‘place’ of science, the ‘place’ of labor, the ‘place’ of women.”7 Not just bad influences, these categories contain narratives of “willful subjects,” as Sara Ahmed describes, those who per­ severe “in the face of having been brought down, where simply to ‘keep

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going’ or to ‘keep coming up’ is to be stubborn and obstinate. Mere per­ sistence can be an act of disobedience.”8 In order to understand the cen­ trifugal forces at work in The Life of Poetry, one has to better understand Rukeyser’s persistence in the face of Cold War gender and sexual norms, norms her critics often accused her of breaking. The text—its proliferating forms, the lineages it traces, and the story of its production—is a narrative of “willful subjects.”

“Tradition Is Not Repetition” In 1941, as Rukeyser began teaching and lecturing on the material that would become the final version of The Life of Poetry, F. O. Matthiessen would publish American Renaissance, John Crowe Ransom The New Criticism, and in 1943 Robert Penn Warren would publish “Pure and Impure Poetry.”9 There is no doubt that the “conservative turn” was re­ making American literature and the idea of America itself, and that this remaking, at least in a literary context, was dependent on a suppression of not only avant-garde modernism but also the larger American legacies that paved the way for its most radical avatars—women—whom Mat­ thiessen, like many others, situates outside the purview of their studies. Rukeyser’s work, then, was part of a project in which American norms were being consolidated, delineated, exported around the globe, and made into a discipline, and she believed she was offering a particularly important intervention into what she termed the “Old ‘new’ Critics.” Her attention to sex, to the body, and to women writers is ultimately a challenge to the stability of any singular reading of American literature. Her relationship with Matthiessen, who was one of her most avid defend­ ers against critics in this period, could in fact help us read the unorthodox queerness of his own scholarship and thus the subtextual queer history that his narrative was making along with hers, despite a critical reception that tried to diminish its importance.10 The fact that she was a woman and a theorist was essential to her diminishment, as postwar norms were reshaping women’s bodies and voices, and the queer body was classified as “sick.”11 Consider how Betty Friedan describes the gender back­ lash that occurred in the postwar years as marriage age and college attainment dropped dramatically for women, noting that “by the mid-fifties

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60 percent dropped out of college to marry, or because they were afraid too much education would be a marriage bar.”12 Rukeyser’s work of literary and cultural criticism was written through this matrix of forces and was received in this context as well. Her recep­ tion was so negative that she developed her own critical apparatus to counter the criticism, as Kate Daniels has argued, writing that Rukeyser was “complicit” in the attacks against her, since she “knowingly flung herself headfirst into the literary quarrels.”13 But this kind of assess­ ment feels close to victim blaming. “The punishment for willfulness is a passive willing of death, an allowing of death,” writes Ahmed, and Rukeyser’s “willful choices” that were met with such intense criticism are in fact, as Daniels herself outlines, what makes her work exciting and timely today.14 They “transcend contemporary or topical work in favor of what she considered more enduring artistic qualities.”15 And the “critical apparatus”—The Life of Poetry—that Rukeyser built to counter such criticism is an intervention into the very cultural norms that determine the value of texts. As evidenced in one of Louise Bo­ gan’s pronouncements, the parameters for what was considered “good poetry” were becoming ever narrower in this period. “Finally,” Bogan writes in 1951,“women, along with everyone else who has examined nineteenth century literature in English, now recognize the distinct line that rules off formal from ‘popular’ expression.”16 Perhaps Bogan was writing intentionally against The Life of Poetry, published not long be­ fore this review, for in it Rukeyser writes that Whitman, with whom she strongly identified, “remembered his body as other poets of his time remembered English verse. Out of his own body, and its relation to itself and the sea, he drew his basic rhythms. . . . Not out of English prosody, but the fluids of organism.”17 Rukeyser began the project that would become The Life of Poetry at a moment when she wanted to engage in a multi-materiality that in­ cluded cross-genre, politically radical, and collaborative works, ones that countered an increasingly hegemonic and policed cultural moment. She was invited to give the “Usable Truth” lectures by the president of Vas­ sar College, who had read a piece by Louis Untermeyer in the Saturday Review that described Rukeyser, (almost) a Vassar alumna, as a “com­ mitted writer relevant to the day’s ‘divided democracy’ who is ‘against

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war, conscription, the forcing of others into war. Yet she knows what she must fight; she is unconditionally pledged to oppose Hitlerism and preserve civil liberties.” Her conflicted feelings, Untermeyer asserts, are shared by “more than her own generation”; yet, unlike most, she op­ timistically “affirms the life of people and the life of poetry.”18 As Eric Keenaghan writes, on the “compositional history” of the text, “Unter­ meyer’s high praise veils neither Rukeyser’s radicalism nor the fact that, although young, she ‘has already had her disciples and her detractors.’”19 Rukeyser’s invitation signifies her visible position in the literary left in the early forties, but as the lectures develop over the decade, she begins to ab­ sorb and critique the changing political climate within the text: the work she had hoped to undertake at the Office of War Information as a visual information specialist in 1942 was rejected and replaced with ad men’s commercial propaganda—“There were many ways of selling out,”20 she writes; her radical photo-text collaboration with Berenice Abbott was re­ jected multiple times by publishers; her experimental biography of Wil­ lard Gibbs ran up against both his family’s wariness of her project and archival closure, as well as the often scathing reviews at her presumption to write about science; and she became a target of FBI surveillance. With this in mind, it is important to situate her lectures and the final published version in the context of the relationship between state sur­ veillance and the conservative turn occurring culturally—that is, while public-private boundaries were being annihilated by the state’s ability to monitor, investigate, and legislate private lives, the conservative cultural response was to mask that process by creating the appearance of ever more rigid boundaries between public and private, between disciplinary and formal categories, between bodies and nations (from a woman’s “place” in the home to isolationist policies). “The Usable Truth” begins by exploring these contradictions as a source of artistic and cultural tradition making: There is, under all the surface shouting of the year, a silence in this coun­ try now. We feel it in the contemplation of the facts, too large, too violent to accept with reason; we know this silencing in its symptoms, the turn of the arts, the glossing over of the presidential election, all the omissions of the deep conflict which we feel this year. I wish to speak of this silence, the

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C h apte r 4 fear which has fathered it, the communication which may break it, making it possible to meet the world with all the resource we have, the fund of faith, the generous instruments of imagination and knowledge. We have our own tradition to retrace. So many times, when our scholars have talked of tradition, they have been thinking, “Repeat! Repeat!” mourn­ ing some Golden Age to whose special knowledge they were admitted. But tradition is not repetition, that is blasphemy against tradition. Tradition is, rather, the search for the clue—to know oneself in one’s own labyrinth, and be suddenly aware that by a thread, a subtle thread, by a thread only, could the center be reached.21

Rukeyser’s call for a new tradition, one that does not repeat the forms and ideas of the past, is essential to understanding the literary and queerfeminist projects she is undertaking in The Life of Poetry. She knows that women have historically been left out of canonical narratives of intel­ lectual and literary traditions (though not tradition making itself), but so too have those whose bodies and works have failed to conform to gender and textual norms, a queerness like the one Eve Sedgwick describes in the essay “Queer and Now” in her book Tendencies as “the open mesh of pos­ sibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”22 Mel­ ville and Whitman are her main subjects of analysis in the final text, in part because they were under-acknowledged and excluded in their own time while undergoing a revitalization in the 1940s (as Catherine Gan­ der describes in her essay on Rukeyser and the “Melville revival”), but also because they offer examples of those who searched for the “clue” through new forms and who were able to write of their experiences of contradiction, in the context of political crisis, and turn them into art: Melville’s poetic transformation of “the human integral clove asunder” and Whitman’s “lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory.”23 In Savage Coast, Rukeyser’s autobiographical heroine Helen asserts that “her sym­ bol was civil war,” an echo of the nineteenth-century American tradi­ tion of inner and outer conflict that Whitman, Melville, and Dickinson represent.24 In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser reads these writers through their inter­ nal and bodily contradictions: she writes of reading Whitman’s autopsy, and how, “in light of what we know about the suprarenal–pituitary–sex

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hormone relation, certain conclusions probably may be reached” about the “inclusive personality which Whitman created from his own conflict”—that is a resolution of male and female characteristics— conclusions that offer “proof of a life in which apparent antagonisms have been reconciled and purified into art.”25 The women writers she references most—Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Stevie Smith—are unified by their transgressions of gender and genre norms. In both their biographies and their poetic processes, each of these authors performs and subverts their gender role. Of Smith, Ogden Nash famously wrote, “Who or what is Stevie Smith / Is she woman / Or is she myth?”26 And Stein’s sounds of lesbian sex and “laugh like a beefsteak” made Hemingway recoil forever in fear of women’s unconstrained voices.27 Included also are transcripts of recordings from the intersex Navajo weaver and ceremonial singer Hosteen Klah.28 Rukeyser returns most often to Dickinson, whose work remained almost entirely unpublished in her own lifetime, but who had an “unappeasable thirst for fame” that ran contrary to gender and fam­ ily norms. Dickinson’s “willfulness,” Rukeyser recognizes, “persists even after death.”29

Women and Waste In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser asks: “And these poems of Emily Dickin­ son? How much shall we leave to natural waste here? How much of the loss is the story of our art, with its curious penalties and guilts under this cultural sun?”30 In “Many Keys,” she expands her thinking on Dickinson further, along with a “flight” of modern women writers, titling her essay after a line from one of Dickinson’s poems—“the earth has many keys.” But unlike in The Life of Poetry, in “Many Keys” she elevates Dickinson’s work beside Whitman’s as another “bad influence.”31 It is clear from her references—her discussion of Otto Rank in both works, her attention to waste and influence, an expansion of her analysis of Anne Bradstreet— that her essay dedicated to women and poetry expands from the materi­ als she used in making The Life of Poetry.32 In “Many Keys” Rukeyser beautifully theorizes what it means for a woman to be a producer of art in the context of family, education, the work of motherhood, and the ex­ perience of the young girl as she comes up against silencing gender roles; but most importantly, the essay is an exploration of how women learn to

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author, to come to their own speech, and find their own traditions. This is especially crucial because, as she notes in a draft of the essay, to trace the influence on women poets is a difficult task, for women’s lives do not necessarily conform to the “Poet’s Plotto” whereby one can follow “a set of recognizable influences whose elements are juggled.”33 That is, wom­ en’s lives do not fit the same patterns as men’s, and their work by exten­ sion does not necessarily reproduce the materials of the patriarchal canon that can be easily spotted by male critics and poets alike, and therefore may be judged as inferior. Instead she demonstrates how women have turned to their own inimitable music and sources: she quotes Bradstreet’s “I took my power in my hand / and went against the world,” and Marie de Laveaga Welch’s “The black of magic / Is in not knowing / Oneself / the Ma­ gician.”34 But understanding women’s influences, Rukeyser notes, goes beyond finding new forms to represent their lives, because women’s lives are also defined by “waste”—in the form of lost time, unfinished projects, suppressed texts, rejected ideas, anonymous publications, and stunted imaginations. She elaborates: “There is waste in nature, waste in art, and plenty of waste in the lives of women. Waste is an influence, and the mak­ ing of poetry works against waste.”35 In her 1974 preface to Louise Bernikow’s anthology of women poets, not surprisingly titled The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552–1950, Rukeyser begins with a recol­ lection of the 1940s and 1950s: “Why should there be a book of poems by women? ‘If they are any good,’ a publisher (male) says, ‘they can stand up in an anthology with men.’ What shall such a book be, a kind of wastebas­ ket?”36 Rukeyser’s interest in wasted imaginations not only is fundamen­ tal to the literary reassessments of women’s writing being made during the second-wave feminist movement but also is the foundation to most of her work—the “buried lives” and texts of those who were dissonant with the moral, artistic, and political codes of their times. But in the “Usable Truth” lectures, written in the 1940s, she was already anticipating new forms of feminist literary criticism, and talks specifically about the reper­ cussions of women’s wasted talents, texts, and ideas—the literal detritus of “good” literature that the male publisher alludes to. Rukeyser writes: For you see why I am so angry at all the lack, all the hesitation and loss. It is again the spectacle of the history-books, and at every page the countless faces

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of the anonymous going down; the search through country after country for greatness, for great women—take an example—when one may be sure that, as far as women are concerned, the great ones are all anonymous; the drives in art that have pushed through to set the great ones at the top, great rush of energy and spirit, laughter, darkness, and the marvelous knowledge; and so many wishes gone down in hesitation and despair and decoration.37

There is no statement in the published version of The Life of Poetry that so explicitly addresses the experience of women as this one, which alludes to Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929)—a text that Bogan described as “quaint” and outdated, and where Woolf, whose own “great rush of en­ ergy” opened a century revolutionized by women writers, famously de­ scribes the anonymous woman poet, and the tragic fate of “Shakespeare’s sister,” whose brilliance, so transgressive and unacknowledged, drives her to her death. “Undoubtedly,” Woolf writes, “I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned.”38 There are interesting parallels between the hybrid political and liter­ ary form of Woolf’s and Rukeyser’s texts, as well as thematic parallels— Woolf’s discussions of the rise of European fascism and the place of women writers, and Rukeyser’s discussions of Cold War America and gender norms. Rukeyser extends this thinking on women’s wasted tal­ ents, anonymity, and hesitation in “The Usable Truth,” engaging not just Woolf’s work but Simone de Beauvoir’s contemporaneous discussions of the social constraints placed on the young girl’s development which dimin­ ish her mind and imagination. A decade later, in “Many Keys,” Rukeyser begins to articulate her thinking on this more clearly, echoing the section on “girlhood” in The Second Sex, which was translated into English for the first time, in 1953, only a few years before Rukeyser submitted her rejected essay. She writes: We all know the hesitation before experience which is one of the most deeply-felt truths of the adolescent girl. She goes through a discipline so im­ placable toward her growing powers, in our civilization, that only the disci­ plines of art are fair mirrors of it, or the spiritual discipline that brings one consciously to the next level of one’s life. But on the writing of the young who express the images of this hesitation you will often find the teacher’s single word, “IMMATURE.”39

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Here Rukeyser is being very explicit about another kind of bad influence, one that informs women’s work: the sexism that stunts imaginations and that prevents women from participating in the world. In the rejection letter from The Nation, Robert Hatch claims that Rukeyser fails to ex­ plain her ideas fully to the reader, writing: “As you go further into your ideas, you tend to overlook the probable stumbling stones. For example, the notion of influences resisted—extremely interesting in itself—is never brought to the point of illustration, or at least I do not find the examples. By the time you have reached page 4, I am afraid you have left your read­ ers behind.”40 In fact, on page four of “Many Keys,” Rukeyser is extraor­ dinarily clear about the influences we need to look for in women’s writing: she states, “In a group brought up primarily to be audience, there are shared attitudes towards experience and towards art.” Women, she points out, have to learn “to write as if oneself were the audience.”41 Without a feminist theorization of the position of women in society, Hatch could not see Rukeyser’s influences, and so he marked his inability to understand the lineages and sources she is writing about as a sign of her own deficits. Her analysis of women’s writing—that the hesitation to be an author and maker, when one has been conditioned to be a passive listener, is misread as immaturity—engenders the same misreadings as the works themselves. In part, then, we might read Rukeyser’s muffled discussions of women and gender in The Life of Poetry as a response—or a reflexive response—to her continual misreading by critics. To return again to the rejection of Savage Coast, a novel that explores a young woman’s “hesitation before experience” and ultimately its trans­ formation into action, Horace Gregory, failing to perceive this crucial trope, assumes it was the author’s own lack of confidence and her im­ maturity that was the problem. Surely this is the stamp of “IMMATURE” that Rukeyser refers to in her essay decades later, for the tone of the letter is patronizing, associating the adult woman writer with a student who has gone astray, who has willfully flouted the norms so dramatically that the norms must be reevaluated by those in authority “who know better.” It is unsurprising that after this, Rukeyser would need to begin to theorize waste and hesitation, and to respond to the ways in which women’s work is evaluated not on its own terms but through the patriarchal gaze that turns every gesture, every line, into a reading of their bodily and intellec­ tual deficiencies.

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As discussed in the introduction to this book, Rukeyser would experi­ ence a particularly public and gendered criticism along similar lines, from being described as an opportunist to a poster girl. In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser provides a psychoanalytic reading of her critics. She writes, “We have seen the crooked ascendance of a sort of criticism by projection, in which the ‘critic’ suffering from a specific form of guilt accuses the writer of that particular guilt.”42 In the only footnote of the entire text, which billows across the bottom of two pages, she speaks of this criticism, which she experienced so often: The pattern is this: there is a general accusation, likely to be personal or political—it is hardly ever aesthetic—which is followed by an open lie. Then the accusation is declared proved. 1) The critic will say the poet’s most re­ cent book is bad, but the book before that was good, and the decline in the work is unfortunate, and then produce the lie; 2) the critic will say that the poems all demonstrate one sorry fact about the poet (without, of course, of­ fering the reader even a fragment for his consideration), and then produce the lie.43

That The Life of Poetry frequently reads as a personal defense highlights the gender politics of the text itself. Even though Rukeyser fails to name it directly, her question “Have you noticed that our bestselling books are written in reaction to the dominating woman?” is not just a ques­ tion about American masculinity but a question about what happens when that woman writes a book, when that woman authors and speaks. As noted earlier, Delmore Schwartz’s response to her “Usable Truth” lectures was to diminish them as “immature”; “she was revealed,” he wrote, “in a new role: that of a big-league representative of the ‘creative spirit,’ speaking her piece with all the unctuousness and culture-schmerz of a junior theologian of poetics.”44 The published version would induce a similar kind of response—at the Virginia Quarterly Review, the critic wrote that The Life of Poetry was “merely the pretense of reasoning all wrapped up in a kind of pseudo-poetic gauze to disguise the author’s ap­ parent inability to think in a straight line.”45 Despite her critics, Rukey­ ser continued to deliver her talks on poetry from the 1940s onward—at Vassar, Columbia, and the California Labor School—and published ed­ ited and altered versions in magazines such as Poetry. She first tried to

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Figure 5. Sunday at Nine radio script. Box II:14, 1949, Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Man­ uscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

collect the talks as a book in 1941, sending a manuscript to Oxford Uni­ versity Press, but as Keenaghan uncovered, “no press would touch the book. An editor at Simon and Schuster noted that the lectures seem ‘to date in a way that might make them seem too much of the moment if they are incorporated in a book.’”46 She did not let the materials go to

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waste, however, but repurposed them in different forms across decades. She let nothing go to waste.

Sunday at Nine The subversive traditions that Rukeyser began theorizing in the lectures, the queerness and crisis of form and body, were also brought together for a radio broadcast titled Sunday at Nine that she developed for KDFC in San Francisco.47 She began the radio series the same year The Life of Poetry was published, in 1949. The intention of the broadcast was to pair readings of poetry with music. In her first program she declares that the aim of the broadcast is to bring the “warmth of feeling” that people have for music to poetry, writing in her draft of the script, “A first-rate poem, a fine poem, will reach you intellectually . . . or may I say that when you read it, you reach it intellectually too. . . . But the way is through emotion . . . through what we call feeling,” anticipating questions about the affective life of texts that will be theorized decades later.48 She then describes the scope of future broadcasts: “Sunday at Nine will offer an evening of the blues, their words and their music. And other fourth Sundays, we will have movie poetry and movie music, children’s poetry, street cries, theatre poetry. . . .and so on.”49 The choice of subjects is most important—from the blues and children’s po­ etry to street cries, her broadcasts extended directly from her arguments in The Life of Poetry, a bringing together of the many different kinds of cre­ ating that make American culture. The first Sunday at Nine pairs poems of Emily Dickinson with Charles Ives’s Housatonic, from Three Places in New England, a multimovement composition that Alex Ross describes as “more than evocations of places. . .[but] meditations on American destiny.”50 Ives, like Dickinson, is often positioned as a queer and contradictory figure who stood outside contemporaneous artistic centers, and whose proto-modernist, avant-garde dissonances sounded the larger currents of American tradi­ tions. Rukeyser focuses one of her biographical poems, “Lives,” on Ives as well. In the 1940s, both Ives and Dickinson found new audiences, and Rukeyser would reuse the radical images of both Ives and Dickinson to begin “Many Keys,”51 writing: Certain music, a band playing on a village green, with instruments coming in, each from its own distance, and some of the trumpets really far away

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on rooftops, was heard by Charles Ives. And Emily Dickinson took hymns, making so personal a thread of faith out of the sounds she heard that for a hundred years there would be people to complain her ear was off. These ways of music, perfectly evident in the poems, in Ives’s music, came flowing in, were taken and used fully, are offered new to us.52

Highlighting Dickinson’s musicality and dissonances, the radio pro­ gram offers Rukeyser’s most extensive reading of Dickinson, developing the materials left out of the published version of The Life of Poetry and later picked up in “Many Keys.” Rukeyser’s attention to Dickinson con­ tributes to the beginning of a Dickinson revival, with new biographies and poetry collections published in 1945.53 Many women writers saw Dickinson as a key figure for forming an American women’s literary tra­ dition, and many of those in Rukeyser’s own radical milieu, like Marya Zaturenska and Genevieve Taggard, were writing or had already written books on Dickinson, while poets like Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore saw her as a germinal influence.54 In 1942 Rukeyser had begun to reference Dickinson as a crucial influence on American thought, writ­ ing in Willard Gibbs of how Dickinson “uses the old forms, pulls on the churchbell-rope, to call attention to the vivid and changing moment in an unheard-of way.”55 Rukeyser’s pairing  of Dickinson’s heretical sounds, which changed how we hear and read, with Ives’s own sonic experimentation demonstrates her prescient thinking about American art, reorienting her listeners to its “bad influences” and their radical possibilities. While Rukeyser produced only four broadcasts of Sunday at Nine, the program offers another example of the ways in which she was engaged in proliferating her ideas across forms and media and how this material illuminates not only her published work but her contribution to defin­ ing literary and theoretical traditions as well.56 Sunday at Nine, like her lectures and her collaboration with Abbott, demonstrates how popular forms of expression—the radio, the cinema, the camera—are vital tools for enriching democratic participation, keying into the newly emergent field of American studies. In doing so, Rukeyser also challenges the perni­ cious high-modernist conceit that “obsessively genders mass culture and the masses as feminine, while high culture, whether traditional or modern, clearly remains the privileged realm of male activities.”57 She makes a case

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for the uses of these varied forms by actively highlighting their aesthetic and cultural importance. In this sense Rukeyser quite explicitly continues the 1930s project of joining avant-garde and proletarian art forms and reaffirms its feminist and radical value. These choices are not only about challenging the way she herself was denigrated through her association with mass culture—resisting the “poster girl” label—but also about en­ gendering a new kind of poetic readership, or listenership in this case. Dickinson is an essential figure for Rukeyser to develop these ideas at midcentury, because, as Vivian Pollak describes, this was a period when “Dickinson was considered shameful,” reflecting how “skepticism about the relationship between text and context organized logics of sexed and gendered self-representation.”58 Rukeyser dismantles this logic through her own broadcast and writing on Dickinson. In a draft of “Many Keys,” she writes of how Dickinson’s negotiation of the conflict between “life and art” is emblematic of “the life of most women who do any kind of creative work—in fact, of most women who work.”59 Through this crisis between gendered norms and artistic creation, Rukeyser writes that Dickinson, like “any man or woman who has risked his life” for “self-rebirth” to create “the poems that they would wish to write,” was met with detractors who could not “forgive them” for this “risk.”60 This theorizing of Dickinson is developed in the context of her radio program, as she locates Dickinson in place—historical and geographical— animated by the comparison with Ives. In the radio show, she describes the “legend of Emily Dickinson receding like a thick movie sequence into the empty space of unreality,” as more publications of her poems become available. Through this recovery “a free life begins to make coherence out of all the flashes and fragments of greatness we had until now. The rareness of the woman, the rareness of her gift, and her view of life as rareness— of moments and communication—all come through”; that is, we can come to understand the important position of Dickinson only through the recovery of her unfinished and unpublished poetry. She then theorizes Dickinson’s reception, writing of how our understanding of her poetry and life has been “a problem of display”: Emily Dickinson was a recluse, yes. She lived in her house and in her gar­ den, and her queer concern, even for New England in her time, was truth. She knew how dangerous the light of truth –

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If Truth is a light, what is a poet then? She writes:

The poet lights but lamps Our age disseminates Emily Dickinson. We see the directness in which she lives. She was a recluse not because the outer world was too much for her: she lived at the center of her intensities, and told of them, of almost all of them. She gave us her animals of emotion; and she gives us her art, in all its ferocity, in all of its movement of hope –61

That Rukeyser writes of how Dickinson told of “almost all” of her inten­ sities in a period that could not and would not recognize them not only signifies the lesbian subtexts of her poems but also highlights the singular genius that she nurtured despite the restrictive gender and literary norms of nineteenth-century New England, ideas that prefigure queer theoreti­ cal and feminist scholarship on Dickinson. (Sedgwick’s essay “Queer and Now” opens with a Dickinson reference, for example.)62 By contradicting the notion that Dickinson’s “gifts” are “withdrawn,” and instead turn­ ing the focus to the reader, to a cultural industry that does not understand what the gift is, Rukeyser exemplifies the ways in which she wants to reframe American traditions. Rukeyser’s analysis of Dickinson with Ives only strengthens this argu­ ment, as Ives’s musical motifs are informed by his own crises with turn­ of-the-century masculinity—the gender crises that Rukeyser theorizes as an essential part of an American tradition in The Life of Poetry. In one instance, Ives framed his own musical production in the context of gender, writing that a concert he had attended was “a whole evening of melliflu­ ous sounds, perfect cadences, perfect ladies, perfect programs, and not a dissonant cuss word to stop the anemia and beauty during the whole evening.” After a while, Ives felt that he was “resting his ears on a perfumed sofa cushion—so got out.”63 Despite his fear of the “engulfing feminine,” Rukeyser’s interest in him was similar to her interest in Dickinson— because he made sounds that had been “un-heard” before, and that his music offered “dissonant cuss word[s]” reorienting traditional sonic norms: he was another “bad influence” in an era of literary and sexual conformity. She ends the last stanza of her “Ives” poem with the lines He gathers the known world total into music,

passion of sense, perspective’s mask of light

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into suggestion’s inarticulate

gesture, invention.

..................

balanced between the crisis and the cold.64

Aaron Copland, who knew Rukeyser well (she had introduced him to Leonard Bernstein in 1937), first staged his own Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1950, also referencing the influence of Ives on his composi­ tion.65 Perhaps, then, Rukeyser’s work on Dickinson and Ives can be read as a bad (but good) influence on Copland’s own musical choices—their friendship and connection as queer artists forging together new tendencies in American traditions.

Tendencies “For poetry,” Rukeyser writes in The Life of Poetry, “in the sense in which I am using the word, is very like the love of which Diotima told Socrates. She, speaking of love, told how it was of its nature neither good nor beautiful, for its desire was the beautiful, its desire was the good. I speak, then, of a poetry which tends where form tends, where meanings tend.”66 In “Sorcerer Love,” Luce Irigaray argues that Diotima’s teachings are not dialectical in the Hegelian sense, but rather that “she establishes an intermediary that will never be abandoned as a means or a path. . . . It is love that both leads the way and is the path.”67 For Rukeyser it is po­ etry, a form of love, that “leads the way and is the path.” That Rukeyser situates Diotima in such a way in her own book is important, for Diotima is a spectral presence, the first female philosopher, whom we never hear nor read, but whose vision of becoming shapes the text. Here is how Iri­ garay introduces her: In the Symposium, the dialogue on love, when Socrates finishes speaking he gives the floor to a woman: Diotima. She does not take part in these ex­ changes or in this meal among men. She is not there. She herself does not speak. Socrates reports or recounts her words. He praises her for her wis­ dom and her power and declares that she is his inheritor or teacher when it comes to love, but she is not invited to teach or to eat. Unless she didn’t want to accept the invitation? But Socrates says nothing about that. And Diotima is not the only example of a woman whose wisdom, especially about love, is recorded in her absence by a man.68

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Rukeyser engages Diotima in a dialogue; Diotima’s intermediary love is an analogy for Rukeyser’s poetic tendencies. According to Irigaray, Di­ otima, of whose voice and presence there is almost no record except the record of a man speaking her words, “teaches the renunciation of already constituted truths.”69 For Rukeyser to situate Diotima’s speech as the foundation for her own theoretical exploration into “the renunciation of constituted truths”—a fitting way to describe The Life of Poetry—is to embody a female legacy that has failed to be fully corporealized and vocal­ ized because, as Anne Carson notes, “putting a door on the female mouth

Figure 6. First page of “Many Keys,” n.d. [1957], unpublished. Box 1:16, Muriel

Rukeyser Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present.”70 By animating theories that resist teleological systems and “false barriers” which are made to seem intrinsic, Rukeyser participates in a tradition that makes a space for women’s voices in public. In “Many Keys,” Rukeyser writes that one tradition in women’s writ­ ing is “fascinating and difficult to trace, consists of those influences re­ jected in the writer’s work. We hardly have the biographical methods, or the critical beginning, to let us perceive the struggle against influences, and how these reactions may be used, turning rebellion, hostility, the desires begun in hatred and dread into the moves that, reaching art, may surpass these origins.”71 This “struggle against influences” is essential to The Life of Poetry, and to works by women more generally: How do we trace the cultural and literary influences that demand women’s silence, obedience, and conformity, influences that are renounced in order to produce the very work itself? How do we trace the influences of “waste”? Rukey­ ser is anticipating a feminist criticism that will develop in the subsequent decades, one that uses interdisciplinary methods similar to her own for uncovering the struggles against patriarchal influence. Perhaps the most radical and feminist position in The Life of Poetry is that, like Diotima, it is teaching us to read for “the renunciation of already constituted truths” and to look for the place where that renunciation is transformed into po­ etics: “the truths of outrage and the truths of possibility.”72 In “Many Keys” Rukeyser continues: It is easy enough to find the long tradition. We all, women and men, know it in ourselves. It is that of the woman as listener. Trained to perfect her­ self in receiving, educated as appreciator, she classically was exalted, set on a mountain as a muse; one of those for whom Pegasus struck open with his hoof the moon-shaped Well of Poetry; one of those who taught the Sphinx the riddle which finally lay in wait for answering Oedipus. That the answer to the riddle was known to such women, and simply confirmed by Oedipus, is not taught either to girls or boys.73

In 1973 she will of course return to this in “Myth”: Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the

roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was

the Sphinx. Oedipus said, “I want to ask one question.

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Why didn’t I recognize my mother?” “You gave the

wrong answer,” said the Sphinx. “But that was what

made everything possible,” said Oedipus. “No,” she said.

“When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning,

two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered,

Man. You didn’t say anything about woman.”

“When you say Man,” said Oedipus, “you include women

too. Everyone knows that.” She said, “That’s what

you think.”74

In The Life of Poetry, as well as “Many Keys,” Rukeyser has trouble locating female foremothers and so returns often to classical traditions in order to locate them, like the Sphinx herself. This is as much a part of the modernist turn to antiquity as it is a revision of women’s place in those histories. She writes in “Many Keys”: “But Sappho was here. And before her, the lyric of the old testament: Miriam’s song.”75 Echoing her quota­ tion in The Life of Poetry of Stein’s “Who do you write for? . . . Myself and Strangers,” in “Many Keys” Rukeyser quotes Georg Misch’s asser­ tion that Sappho changes autobiography because she “opens the search for melody in the soul,” and that “the audience, as it were, is the writer herself.”76 Rukeyser adds: “This is one of the starting points of selfportrayal. To do this, to write as if oneself were the audience and to make communication, means that one had dived deep enough to reach the place where obscurity, that terrible middle depth is passed, deep enough to be where all is shared again.”77 Autobiography is an essential part of The Life of Poetry: it opens the book as she delineates the circumstances of her poetic and political un­ dertaking; it is how she describes the act of poetic composition, using her poem “Orpheus” as the example; and it is the bildungsroman of “willful­ ness” that illuminates her theoretical conceit in the penultimate chapter. Carson writes: “Every sound we make is a bit of autobiography. It has a totally private interior yet its trajectory is public. The censorship of such projections is a task of patriarchal culture that divided humanity into two species”; Diotima does not speak, but Rukeyser speaks for her and speaks for herself.78 For the woman writer to write of herself is an act of libera­ tion, as feminist criticism has long taught us, but it is also the beginning of literary craft. In the biographical section of The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser asserts a particularly important radical and feminist conceit, foundational

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to the tendencies in queer theory: “One works on one’s self; one writes poems, makes the movie, paints, and one is changed in the process. The work is what we wanted, and the process. We did not want a sense of Oneness with the One, so much as a sense of Many-ness with the Many. Multiplicity no longer stood against unity.”79

Willful Archives “There is no building in which the documents of willfulness are depos­ ited,” writes Ahmed, but “perhaps a document is a building, one that houses or gives shelter. A willfulness archive would refer to documents that are passed down in which willfulness comes up, as a trait, as a charac­ ter trait.”80 The archive is where you might find the narrative of the willful subject but also the texts that act as archives. Rukeyser’s archive offers us a tradition that has otherwise been marginalized as suspect, queer, female, and contradictory, but has persisted in spite of that. “When the books do not exist, we must visit the houses for the papers themselves,” Rukeyser advocates.81 In The Life of Poetry, she writes that the reasons given for why Dickinson’s manuscripts were kept out of the public eye had to do with their economic value, asserting, “The rights of the reader are surely the rights of the people,” not merely the “art business.”82 But she does not say that underneath that economic imperative there was a social one: that Dickinson’s family altered, destroyed, and kept some of her work out of the public eye for fear of what the archival materials would disclose (lesbian desire, antinomianism, a young woman wearing “a beard” and speaking of herself in Calvary); or that Dickinson did not publish widely in her lifetime because she did not want to alter her prosody or the content of her poems to comply with the gender and genre demands of the literary marketplace of her time. It wasn’t that Dickinson was withdrawn; it was that we failed to see. Dickinson’s archive offers us insight into the relation­ ship between the economic reality of women’s lives and women’s artistic production; Rukeyser’s archive offers something similar. As with much of her work, The Life of Poetry, its reception, and the surrounding texts that illuminate it exemplify the conditions of the woman cultural worker at midcentury who failed to conform to the prevailing gender or genre norms and suffered economically because of it. Just as Virginia Woolf’s

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Three Guineas (1938) details the sexual politics of money, in The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser is continually aware of the rewards for conforming—for “selling out”—aware of growing up in a “materialist world that exposed the American danger, in materialism, to be mystical about material val­ ues.”83 But it is also clear that her motivations to continually reshape and reiterate the ideas and projects that make up this proliferating series of texts were economic as well as artistic. Raising a young son alone, Ruke­ yser produced work in the postwar years that was often aimed toward commercial ends—films, plays, popular magazine articles, mystery sto­ ries, even expansions on previously published work such as an additional chapter of The Life of Poetry proposed in 1959—while at the same time attempting to preserve her radical vision. The gender politics of The Life of Poetry become truly legible only when read across Rukeyser’s archive—when we readers or scholars are also “willful subjects,” as we seek out this work, so often denigrated or misread or wasted, and bring it into view again. In an unpublished 1978 interview by Louise Bernikow, Rukeyser articulates her most queer and feminist vision of poetics, illuminating The Life of Poetry’s attention to those who failed commercially and failed to conform poetically in their own time: “What I care about in Whitman is the extreme fight to keep my skin together, the extreme contradictions. I don’t turn my back. The violence, shamefulness, willfulness are in myself. I wish to make music of them.”84 Speaking of women poets she continues: So much is possible for everybody. People assume we have to have national and paternal civilizations, but it has to be re-imagined. The woman poet seems to me the sign of it. . . .I wish we were better. I wish the cute and coy element were purged. I know it’s attractive, but it isn’t what I need in poems. I think a lot of June Jordan, Alice Walker and Audre Lorde. Black women know how to rebel. I try to hold in my mind somebody who sees it all— some future unborn black woman poet. The woman’s movement is turning loose fantasy in poetry. Woman’s own music will emerge. I think we also will find the lost poems of this—these secrecies and these rebellions. At least, I hope so, but that may be my vulgar optimism.85

Rukeyser’s prescient vision of an intersectional, bisexual feminist poetics underscores her consistent effort to connect social justice movements for racial and gender equality within American literary and artistic traditions,

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and to show the ways in which those intersections can engender transfor­ mative thinking and being not confined by patriarchal nationalism. The three women writers she cites—Jordan, Walker, and Lorde—have indeed shown us new ways “to rebel” and also how to narrate that rebellion. By reading Rukeyser’s lost and unpublished works, we can trace the emer­ gence of her own gender politics—“the secrecies and rebellions” of how women writers produce and persist under patriarchy: a history of “bad influences” and, ultimately, “vulgar optimism.”

5

So Easy to See The Unfinished Collaboration with

Berenice Abbott

On August 5, 1948, the photographer Berenice Abbott wrote to Rukeyser: Darling Muriel, I was overjoyed to hear from you and I hope you will write me often and tell me more about yourself. As you must know I miss you very much and need you. There is a very important place in my heart for you that I doubt very much another will fill—a trace / force / focus of abstraction and recog­ nition of sorts—a much needed support, communication, call it what you will. I was acutely sad to see nothing of you here. I wish we could finish that book but you need to be here. . . . I am indeed curious to know why the next holds so much for you. I need your moral support. I have been poor with all this waiting— every thing goes out—nothing comes in—or could I see some exchange. I hope we can do some work together some day. Do you think that will be possible?1

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In truth they had probably been lovers before Rukeyser left New York for California to raise her young son alone.2 More importantly, Rukeyser and Abbott were each other’s intellectual and artistic foils—and sometimes collaborators—in the Cold War period, a relationship between two of the twentieth century’s most versatile artists that has been, for the most part, relegated to the archives. For much of the 1940s and 1950s and into the 1960s, in a period in the United States defined by the elevation of the sci­ ences over the arts—when everybody could be “scientific Americans”— they shared a similar goal: to develop new methods for demonstrating the uses of and relationships between the arts and sciences.3 For Abbott this aim was manifested in her desire to bring “science to the public by means of photography” through her invention of the Super-Sight camera. By “re­ versing the operation of the camera obscura,” the camera enabled her to enlarge an object’s projection before exposure, producing an incredibly detailed image (as in the close-up of Rukeyser’s eye).4 Already a master of modernist realism, as demonstrated in her Paris portraiture and the Fed­ eral Art Project–funded series Changing New York (1939), Abbott de­ veloped the Super-Sight to gain “greater realism in pictures.” This would prove beneficial not only to making detailed images of scientific methods in action but also to the development of photographic realism.5 Seeking funding for her project, Abbott wrote in a letter to Charles C. Adams of the New York State Museum: We live in a world made by science. But we—the millions of laymen—do not understand or appreciate the knowledge [that] thus controls daily life . . . The function of the artist is needed here, as well as the function of the recorder. The artist through history has been the spokesman and conservator of human and spiritual energies and ideas. Today science needs its voice. It needs the viv­ ification of the visual image, the warm human quality of imagination added to its austere and stern disciplines. It needs to speak to the people in terms they will understand. They can understand photography preeminently.6

Rukeyser’s interest in the sciences was about finding “a new language for discovery,” borrowing something of the alchemical processes of sci­ entific inquiry.7 She spent the postwar years advocating for the “use” of poetry—and the artistic imagination more broadly—as an untapped re­ source she considered just as valuable as scientific knowledge. This was

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demonstrated in her major nonfiction works of the 1940s and 1950s, in­ cluding The Life of Poetry as well as her experimental biographies about the physical mathematician Willard Gibbs, the politician Wendell Willkie, and—an unfinished book— the anthropologist Franz Boas. In each work she used experimental formal strategies to situate her subjects in a way that demonstrates, as Peter Middleton notes, their roles in “making pos­ sible vital new modern American theories of the public life of social, as well as physical, systems, theories that point to a progressive American future.”8 In The Life of Poetry Rukeyser writes: “If [poetry] were a metal, the Un-American Activities Committee, and several other committees, would concern themselves. Our scientists would claim their right of experiment

Figure 7. Photo of Muriel Rukeyser, “Eye,” taken with Abbott’s Super-Sight camera in the 1940s. Berenice Abbott Archive, Ryerson Image Centre © Ronald Kurtz, adminis­ tered by Commerce Graphics Ltd.

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and inquiry.”9 Both Abbott and Rukeyser wanted to make a claim on the sciences as women and artists, during a time when the field was domi­ nated by men and the notion of specialization was used to separate fields of study from one another, defining who had the right to participate in intellectual inquiry. In 1959 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists put out a special issue titled “Science and Art” that featured almost exclusively the writings of male scholars and scientists (and one “wife”) about the work of male scientists and artists.10 Through their collaboration, Rukeyser and Abbott worked against these gendered and bifurcating systems in order to show how “science and art meet and might meet in our time” as sources of imaginative possibility and social progress.11 In doing so, they engen­ der questions about what kinds of collaborative practices are sanctioned, about women’s bodies and lesbian desire, about the ontology of things and the everyday, about materialist philosophy, and about the radical possibilities of interdisciplinarity. Despite the fact that their collaborative photo-text project was to be titled So Easy to See, it is anything but that—the final version has been lost, or was never fully completed, and instead what remains are drafts, descriptions, correspondence, and fragments, to be pieced together from across various archives. The incomplete record of Rukeyser and Ab­ bott’s collaboration is not particularly surprising, considering the kinds of artists they were—radicals, dissidents, women, lesbians—and that they were self-taught scientists, as well as the politics of the works themselves, which challenged the accepted gender and disciplinary binaries inculcated by postwar cultural institutions. Experiencing similar career trajectories, Rukeyser and Abbott both earned a tremendous amount of early success at the forefronts of transatlantic modernist and left-wing political and artistic movements, and both experienced difficulties during the Cold War period, a time that saw the effective de-politicization of artistic produc­ tion and public discourse, and the reinscription of the gender and disci­ plinary binaries that had been challenged in the previous decades. While the two women ran up against the sexism of Cold War artistic norms and academic sciences, Rukeyser also found herself hounded by the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee, which compounded her difficulties in finding support for the kinds of experimental projects she wanted to undertake. Despite their marginalization, both Rukeyser and Abbott, individually and together, produced work throughout the

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subsequent decades that formulated new ways of seeing and reading, often through collaboration, work that was for many years undervalued and overlooked, and thus effectively lost. By making visible this lost collaboration, this chapter participates in the recovery of an innovative and exciting modernist partnership and asks us to see the lost potential of its inventiveness as well as to contextualize its disappearance. In order to see their work, we must also undertake an exploration into the cultural mechanisms that obfuscated it at midcentury. The recovery of such a project demonstrates the continued importance of collaboration between women, not just between artists but between schol­ ars who teach each other how to see and look for things—texts, histories, images—that are not readily visible and available. Collaboration has been and continues to be essential for effective feminist scholarship, dependent as it is on archival recuperation and the reconstruction and reanimation of texts and authors who have been lost.12 This is necessary not only so that women can be read and taught as makers and subjects of history, but also because scholarly collaboration produces a better and more com­ plete understanding of the histories, networks, modes of production, and communities that defined the modernist period.13 Through this recovery another kind of collaborative project blooms, between an author and a scholar, the person who encounters a work in an archive decades later, who will become the editor, publisher, translator, and theorist. Collaborat­ ing, then, becomes a particularly complex feminist project about recov­ ery, legacies, counter-canons, and pedagogy, as well as about the ways in which the writers and artists in the period were themselves producing and communicating with one another. In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser writes of how a work is formed through a collaboration between the writer and reader, changing always in that moment of encounter. She writes: “Facing and communicating, that will be our life, in the world and in poetry. . . . This is the knowledge of communication, and it is the fear of it which has cut us down. Our lives may rest on this; and our lives are our images.”14

Use, Democracy, and Collaborative Modernism When Abbott writes to Rukeyser of their shared intellectual and artis­ tic sympathies, it not only gives a sense of the intimate bond between the

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two in formulating and stimulating each other’s work but also signals something of the important nature of collaboration for modernism more broadly. Both Abbott and Rukeyser had undertaken multiple collabora­ tive projects with other artists before working together, engaging many of the aesthetic and political aims of modernism. In many ways their in­ sistence on experimental and collaborative formal practices underscores their radical vision for the uses of art in democracy, something they be­ lieved So Easy to See would demonstrate, while also indicating how col­ laboration can create alternative spaces of knowledge and solidarity in periods of political repression. In a draft of the introduction to their book, Rukeyser begins: In our time there has been much talk about the differences between truth and reality. We are familiar with contradictions, our society is based on them. And this division, with truth on the one hand and reality on the other, is known to us; it is as clear and obvious as moonrise and morning, or bombing in peacetime. The contradictions around us are not simply con­ tradictions of meaning, but of the whole visible world. In the process of setting barriers between truth and reality, we have gone ahead with barrierbuilding. And now, all around us, we see the walls: between people and peo­ ple, between art and science, between idea and idea. Those of us who mean in our lives the unity of people, the unity of nature and knowledge, mean also the unity of imagination.15

Through their collaboration Rukeyser and Abbott assert that by failing to see the complex “unity” in the visible world, we learn to accept the “con­ tradictions in meaning” of the symbolic world, and that it is upon these divisions that hierarchies and oppression are predicated. Rukeyser’s ex­ ample of this violent contradiction, of course, is to identify that peace is not merely the absence of war. Ultimately, she is making an assertion about what forms of thought, and what art forms, make possible a fully realized democracy—that is, one in which we see ourselves as mutually in­ terdependent and connected. In 1958 Robert Oppenheimer would write: “We can have each other to dinner. We ourselves, and with each other, by our converse, can create, not an architecture of global scope, but an im­ mense, intricate network of intimacy, illumination, and understanding. Everything cannot be connected with everything in the world we live in. Everything can be connected with anything.”16 Rukeyser returns to this

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idea over and over, warning in the late seventies “not to let our lives be shredded, anything away from anything,” and she worked to create a language for thinking that could demonstrate this.17 Of the composition of Willard Gibbs she would write, “I needed a language of transforma­ tion. . . . And I needed a language that was not static, that did not see lan­ guage as a series of points, but more as a language of water.”18 By the time Rukeyser and Abbott began to work together, Rukeyser was deeply immersed in finding a “‘system of relations’ that could be ex­ pressed symbolically,” and there has been considerable attention paid to the ways in which she developed formal modes to translate these theories, from radical documentary and avant-garde poetics to experimental the­ ater, but especially through the combination of text and image.19 She was already practicing this “unity of imagination” through a series of collab­ orative projects and multiform experiments, beginning in the mid-1930s. With the photographer Nancy Naumburg, she famously documented the stories of miners dying of silicosis in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, result­ ing in her modernist masterpiece The Book of the Dead (1938), though it was not published with the photos until a new edition in 2018.20 She con­ tinued experimenting with the photo essay in “Adventures in Childhood” and “Worlds Along Side” for Coronet magazine in 1939, and she created with Rudolph Von Charles Ripper, an Austrian artist and political exile who fought in the Spanish Civil War, a long illustrated poem, The Soul and Body of John Brown (1940), about the American abolitionist who tried to lead a slave liberation movement and was hanged for treason. With the filmmakers Ben Maddow and Lee Bobker, Rukeyser wrote the scripts for two films about the poor and socially marginalized: A Place to Live (1941), which was shown at a documentary film festival at the Museum of Modern Art in New York along with other WPA-era classics like The River; and another film, All the Way Home (1957). She also collaborated on text and image projects while working for the Office of War Informa­ tion as a visual information specialist in 1942, a position from which she resigned in 1943 after FBI director J. Edgar Hoover began an investiga­ tion of the OWI as a “pro-communist” agency, an investigation in which Rukeyser found herself a central target.21 In response to her disappointing experience at the OWI, she wrote an essay, “Words and Images” (1943), in which she elaborates on photo-text collaboration: “The point is not the naming of a picture, but a reinforcement which is mutual.”22

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Like Rukeyser, Abbott collaborated often. In 1920s Paris she was preeminent as a portrait photographer, first learning from and working for Man Ray, and then working on her own with a successful Left Bank studio and giving solo exhibitions as well. Ensconced in the expatriate community, she photographed the major artists of her day, and particu­ larly the women of the Left Bank, still considered to be the center of ex­ perimental, lesbian, and radical modernisms in the 1920s—Djuna Barnes, Romaine Brooks, Janet Flanner, Jane Heap, among others. She curated and recuperated Eugène Atget’s work, which she described upon first see­ ing it as “the shock of realism unadorned,” and brought it to the United States.23 In 1929 she moved back to New York City and remained a vital figure throughout the thirties with her ten-year New Deal federal art proj­ ect, Changing New York (1939), which she produced with her partner Elizabeth McCausland, who wrote the captions. During Abbott’s Paris portrait phase she had also wanted to collaborate with writers, accord­ ing to Julia Van Haaften, and in the 1950s and 1960s she was in con­ versation with Janet Flanner, Kay Boyle, and Peggy Guggenheim about possible collaborations, though none was ever realized. Abbott asserted a view of photography more generally as collaborative, recognizing that her style appealed more to women than Man Ray’s because she treated women sitters as “human beings” rather than “beautiful art objects.” She wrote in 1963: “To photograph a person there must be an exchange—a cooperation. . . . No one was ever a still life—a pattern—an ‘expression of myself.’”24 This is not dissimilar to Rukeyser’s notion of a mobile and interactive poetry of “meeting places,” where meaning is made between writer, text, and reader. Abbott’s notions of collaboration and interaction found their apotheo­ sis in her documentation of the transformation of the social landscape of New York City, and America more generally, in the 1930s. With McCaus­ land, the progressive art critic, she developed a theory for a modernistrealist mode. Terri Weissman writes: Abbott’s idea of a realist image did possess certain unvarying characteristics, including emphasis on the relationship of photography to history and on a communication-oriented practice. The image’s communicative role: it is conceived not as a one-way message but as a two-way dialogue. Abbott ex­ pected her viewers to question—and act on—their own perceptions. Rather

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than distinguish between the social and communication oriented and the modern, or the documentary and the realist, or the realist and the avant­ garde, Abbott hoped to eliminate these boundaries.25

Abbott and McCausland’s desire to work across boundaries was manifest in what they described as their “Great Big Democratic Book” of America that mixed the former’s photographs and the latter’s text. But the version of Changing New York (1939) that was published was considerably dif­ ferent from the radical and lyrical one Abbott and McCausland first made together. In the original version, the transformation of the social and polit­ ical landscapes of New York is shown through the interaction of text and document. The publisher, E. P. Dutton, however, wanted the project to be a simple guidebook (it was published just before the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens). Suzanna Calev, an archivist at the Museum of the City of New York, has written about the drastic differences between the unpublished and published versions of the book. For example, McCausland’s original text that accompanied Abbott’s photograph “Gunsmith and Police De­ partment, 6 Centre Market Place, Manhattan,” theorizes the ways that “content is inseparable from form,” how “subject matter is form.” De­ scribing the significance of the image, McCausland writes, “To the New York of 1937 the photograph says one thing: Here is a gun, pointing at a police department. It is an unavoidable comment”—a comment only Ab­ bott could capture so remarkably.26 The published version is a prosaic description of the history of “Frank Lava’s gun shop”; McCausland’s mul­ tivalent discussion of aesthetic and political forms is replaced with mun­ dane captioning.27 As both Terri Weissman, in The Realism of Berenice Abbott, and Catherine Gander, in Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poet­ ics of Connection, point out, the kinds of multidisciplinary and crossgenre photo-text projects that Abbott and Rukeyser undertook, alone and together, were emblematic of the ethos of the WPA-era thirties. (Not surprisingly, the only recent monographs dedicated to each artist are on this radical mode of documentary.) Abbott describes the photo book as a “loud speaker,” writing: “It amplified what is said. Not hidden away in portfolios, not put on a wall necessarily, but published—that is the right­ ful destiny of photographs.”28 Rukeyser writes in her 1938 poem U.S. 1 that “poetry can extend the document.”29 She continues, in The Life of

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Poetry, that in situating a text and image “in this combination . . . there are separables: the meaning of the image, the meaning of the words, and a third, the meaning of the two in combination. The words are not used to describe the picture, but extend the meaning.”30 In this sense, she saw collaboration as a way not only to make new modes of representation but to make new modes of thought as well.

Seeing Things “Photography is a new way of seeing,” Abbott opens her 1941 Guide to Better Photography; “it is a matter of the imagination, of seeing what the human eye had been too lazy or too blind to see before.”31 In 1942 Ab­ bott began to develop what would become her Super-Sight camera, “an ingenious and deceptively simple system of direct image capture,” as her biographer Julia Van Haaften describes it.32 Abbott wrote her idea down and sent it to herself, with witnesses, in order to “prove and date her in­ vention.” As she explained: “I had previously projected objects in my en­ larger, but only transparent objects can be so treated. While considering how to make photographs which possess greater definition and roundness and so are more faithful to their real appearance, I suddenly thought: Can I not project opaque objects if they are lit from the front?”33 Van Haaf­ ten writes that “the genius of Berenice’s invention resides in her clear un­ derstanding of camera optics and her conceptual leap to the mechanics of image enlargement,” whereby an image “of any three-dimensional object, when illuminated inside a closed dark box, in a darkened room, is trans­ mitted or projected via an enlarging lens mounted on the side of that box. When received by a photosensitive surface outside the box that trans­ mission creates an enlarged image of the thing itself, with no intervening ‘noisy’ medium to filter or dilute the image, as does, for example, grain in a negative.” Through this device, Abbott could make “beautifully re­ alistic images of a thing photographed, with its most salient qualities and dimensionality in startling detail.”34 Abbott understood that this kind of photography would be particularly beneficial to the sciences, and as Van Haaften demonstrates, she spent a good portion of the 1940s and 1950s trying to prove its use to scientists at MIT and Swarthmore, for example, and the Carnegie Mellon Corporation and IBM, while also arguing for its

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aesthetic achievement to museums and publishers. While applying for a Guggenheim in 1941, she outlined the contributions the development of the Super-Sight would make, arguing “that democratic life can only be maintained and developed where the whole citizenry is alert to problems of social existence and informed as to their nature.”35 But her project met with almost continuous patriarchal doubt, and she was rejected for the Guggenheim twice. Likewise, her contentious relationship with Edward Steichen, director of photography at MoMA, didn’t help. She was criti­ cal of his “pictorialism,” and he often marginalized her while supporting the work of other women photographers. Of Steichen she later said, “He rode roughshod over me.”36 Her experience of sexism and discrimination proved a constant impediment to recognition and income. Nevertheless, she persisted. From 1944 to 1945, Abbott worked as photo editor of Science Illustrated, exploring the theme “Adventures in Seeing.” She envisioned a Super-Sight series on “laws of nature” and an­ other called “Eyes,” writing, “‘Whose / what eye is this?’ Specific animals to photograph included ‘frog, owl, reptile, bird, horse, cat, human, rat, cow, and bat,’” but the project never materialized.37 Her famous SuperSight picture “Soap Bubbles” appeared in the magazine, but by 1946 the magazine had been bought out and now featured models in the photo­ graphs, at which point Abbott resigned. While seeking greater support for her projects, she exhibited a few of the Super-Sight series in Steichen’s 1948 show at MoMA, In and Out of Focus, and at the Akron Institute of Art in 1950. In 1948 a few of the photos were included in a high school biology textbook. In 1953 she revised her Guide to Better Photography to include the science pictures. In 1957 she was hired by the Physical Science Studies Committee at MIT to illustrate physics textbooks, for which she developed a specific photographic approach, but in 1960 she was replaced by a younger man. Her science photos appeared in numerous textbooks in subsequent decades. According to Van Haaften and Weissman, however, Abbott’s Super-Sight photographs were not showcased in her lifetime, and most of them have still not been published together.38 Abbott and Rukeyser met in 1939, just when Rukeyser was working on her unauthorized biography of the physical mathematician and chem­ ist Willard Gibbs. The book begins: When one is a woman, when one is writing poems, when one is drawn through a passion to know people today and the web in which they,

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suffering, find themselves, to learn the people, to dissect the web, one deals with the processes themselves. To know the processes and the machines of process: plane and dynamo, gun and dam. To see and declare the full disas­ ter that the people have brought on themselves by letting these processes slip out of the control of the people. To look for the sources of energy, sources that will enable us to find the strength for the leaps that must be made.39

Rukeyser makes a claim for the uses of language for disclosing and trans­ lating the process of scientific knowledge making back to the people. Like Abbott, she understands the democratic implications in the failure to see the processes in which we are enmeshed. As if speaking to Rukeyser di­ rectly, Abbott writes in the same moment of “the problem of document­ ing science . . . and yet of endowing this material so strange and unfamiliar to the public with the poetry of its own vast implications.”40 Rukeyser’s work on Gibbs and other discipline-defying topics in the 1940s provoked consistent sexist rebuke. As one reviewer sums up neatly in discussing Gibbs: “Both before and after writing this book, Miss Rukeyser has re­ ceived for her intrepidity a number of slaps on the wrist—and even, from a particularly malicious review, one in the face. That a young woman poet should be so bold as to do a full-length intellectual biography of a ne­ glected mathematical physicist, an abstruse man who still has terrors for specialists, obviously proved her a hussy and the book no good.”41 Like Abbott, Rukeyser consistently challenged the boundaries within which she worked, and while, as Stefania Heim points out, “poets like Rukeyser who engaged scientific language, topics, metaphors, or methods were met with doubt and even ridicule,” there is also no doubt that for both Abbott and Rukeyser, the fact that they were women proved the greater barrier to success than the fact that they were attempting to develop new aesthetic, mechanical, and formal modes for understanding science.42 According to Van Haaften, Rukeyser, who sat on the board of Abbott’s House of Photography, was the only other person who knew how the SuperSight camera worked, as Abbott guarded its process closely for fear of copyright infringement. Through their shared interest in the sciences and their personal relationship, they developed their book project, alternately titled Certain Ways of Seeing, Things, Seeing Things, and ultimately So Easy to See. The book, as Rukeyser describes it, would consist of three parts: “a brief introduction to ‘prepare’ the seeing of these pictures”; “the photographs, accompanied by a running text set opposite the pictures,

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which occupy the right side of each spread. . . . The text is photographed by the method of the pictures”; and “a brief conclusion on the nature of possibility.”43 In the archive there is a beautiful list of possible images to be included in the book—apple, walnut, bug, watch, eye, corn, grass roots—along with Rukeyser’s numerous drafts of the first section. They first pitched the book to Rukeyser’s editor at Doubleday, John Sargent, who agreed to publish it on the condition that Edward Steichen would exhibit the works at MoMA as well. When Steichen declined, the publisher backed out. Abbott and Rukeyser pursued other publishers—Scribner, Crown, and Simon and Schuster, and in 1962 they even corresponded about pitching their collaboration to World Publishing—but the project was never realized;44 only a small portion of Rukeyser’s text was later used to introduce Abbott’s first collection in 1970.

Figure 8. Berenice Abbott Super-Sight Apple, ca. 1958–1962, gelatin silver print. Ber­ enice Abbott Archive, Ryerson Image Centre © Ronald Kurtz, administered by Com­ merce Graphics Ltd.

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Another Kind of Realism In one draft of Rukeyser’s introduction to So Easy to See, she opens with this narrative about the photograph of an apple (intended for the cover of the book): “It’s the moon!” said a child. I lived for a while in a room of an unfinished house where the carpenter and painters were still at work, and two or three of these pictures were on the walls. The painter came in and stopped short. “What’s that?” he asked. And then he saw what it was. The carpenter had to see that, he said, and called the carpenter in. “Nothing like that,” said the carpenter of the apple, “has ever been seen in the world.” He went and got the contractor, brought him to face the apple, and said, “What do you make of this? Tell me what you think it is, don’t tell me what it reminds you of.” Some have seen wood or a cock in the walnut, leather in the oak leaf, the lines of the eyebrow in the iron fillings, fish-eye and butter-fly wing. But it is not only correspondences that are seen here; it is the close familiar thing seen new. One woman protested. “No, I don’t want it,” and she made a ges­ ture, “I’m just now used to modern painting and the atom bomb, and I can’t take another kind of seeing. It’s too disturbing!” But the house painter’s disturbance was of a different order. He asked, “Why didn’t I know what they were, when I first saw the apple and the wal­ nut? They’re right in front of me. Nothing is artsy or faked; these are won­ derful pictures. What’s the matter with me, that I didn’t see the things?” And after a while, “I’m a layman—how are you going to be sure the layman can see them? You’ll have to prepare people somehow.” Prepare people to look at what they know? Prepare them to see things that are deep in our lives, deep in childhood—a face, a wing, a hand? Prepare people to see?45

Rukeyser’s rhetorical astonishment that people need to be “prepared” to see what they already know from childhood, that we harbor a latent open­ ness to the connectivity of things and that we can derive meaning from sources of knowledge otherwise obfuscated by hegemonic norms, can be understood in part through her interest in Jung’s symbolic interpretations, but it is how she endows the aesthetic symbol with the power to open us to those sources of knowledge that is particularly important. Whereas Barthes would assert in Camera Lucida that “every photograph is contin­ gent (and thereby outside of meaning), that photography can not signify

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(aim at generality) except by assuming a mask,” Rukeyser and Abbott believe that the Super-Sight produces a photograph that can actually ex­ pose to us the “essence” of a thing that we fail to see ordinarily but know to be there.46 In Rukeyser’s narrative, the painter looks at an image of a roughly sliced half of an apple that is somehow as startling as the knowl­ edge of the atom bomb for another. The image is startling in its realness, absolutely, but it’s also startling in its “correspondences.” It is impossi­ ble to not see the image’s vaginal approximation. “The apple,” Rukey­ ser continues, “is here in its wetness and life, with its many textures, its flesh, its moment of ripeness—and its infinite suggestive correspondences with other textures and other flesh.”47 What Abbott’s invention can do is make us see what the “human eye can almost see” but doesn’t. The SuperSight brings the texture of the flesh, the seeds, the core so close to the eye that it would be hard not to see also its “correspondences” to other “close familiar things.” The viewer makes meaning by holding together both the real and the referent simultaneously. This is not an apolitical asser­ tion that undermines what Walter Benjamin describes as the “dialectical image,” where the past and present meet and are interpreted through his­ toriographic language, but an even more radical assertion about a deeper knowledge that Rukeyser and Abbott feel is “clouded,” and that can be recovered through “another kind of seeing.” Rukeyser continues: “An­ other kind of realism is possible through these photographs. And physi­ cal realism—of which our lives have very little indeed—lead[s] at once to spiritual materialism. The sentimental eye has closed over many of these perceptions; here it is freed again.”48 It is hard not to read their project as one partly about lesbian desire— that their narrative of seeing / not seeing might be something like Terry Castle’s “Apparitional Lesbian,” a spectral presence, something that we know is there but that we choose not to see, or what Avery Gordon calls a “visible invisibility.”49 Shawn Michelle Smith writes that “photography expanded the realm of the visible, but it also exposed its limits, both psy­ chological and technological. Enabling one to see more, it simultaneously demonstrated how little is ordinarily visible.”50 When Rukeyser asks if we need to be prepared to “see” what is actually in front of us, she is asking us complex things—about the work itself and how images are ab­ sorbed, to be sure, and the political and social implications of mediated culture. But we are also invited to think about the things we know to be

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true—the symmetry of the apple and the vulva, and thus the connected­ ness of the biological worlds. Maybe it is a question of reading the apple’s “correspondences”—which make us think about the environment, bees, pollination, molecules, the atom (Adam), myth, bodies, birth, lesbian de­ sire, sex, the work of women—things we might understand intuitively but fail or refuse to see. There is no mistake that when Rukeyser and Abbott open their book with the image of the split apple, along with Rukeyser’s narrative of the vulva analogy, they are themselves making more than a series of correspondences about the relationships between the arts and sci­ ences, for they are also signaling us to think about the myth of Adam and Eve, about the apple and its trailing questions about female sexuality and agency. It suggests Newton and his apple, then the splitting of the atom and nuclear physics and the atomic bomb. “Analogies are dangerous,” Rukeyser writes in Willard Gibbs, “but they are most dangerous when they are most usable.”51

A Kind of Thinking and a Kind of Hope Rukeyser and Abbott’s intent was to begin So Easy to See with a quota­ tion from Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620), in which he theorizes the development of the scientific method and inductive reasoning. (Ab­ bott would use a portion of the same section in her reprint of A Guide to Better Photography.) In the quotation Bacon writes of the inadequacy of the microscope, stating, “For if the invention could be extended to greater bodies, or the minute parts of greater bodies, so that a piece of cloth could appear like a net, and the latent minutiae and irregularities of germs, liquids, urine, blood, wounds and many other things could be ren­ dered visible, the greatest advantage would, without doubt, be derived.”52 In framing Abbott’s work in the context of Bacon, Rukeyser foregrounds her brilliance and inventiveness in a history of scientific discovery in which women have almost always been made to seem invisible. At the same time, Rukeyser is engaging contemporaneous philosophical debates by way of Abbott’s inventions. In 1944 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, liv­ ing in exile in the United States, circulated their Dialectic of Enlighten­ ment, in which they question the very notion of scientific progress and enlightenment thinking. How, they wonder, can the progress of modern

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science, meant to liberate people through knowledge, also usher in a con­ tinuous period of totalitarianism, war, and the development of weapons of annihilation? They turn to the work of Bacon, in particular, for promoting the “instrumentalization of reason.” They write: The “many things” which, according to Bacon, knowledge still held in store are themselves mere instruments: the radio as a sublimated printing press, the dive bomber as a more effective form of artillery, remote control as a more reliable compass. What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts. Ruthless toward itself, the Enlightenment has eradicated the last remnant of its own self-awareness. Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myths.53

Rukeyser seems to situate her collaboration with Abbott in response, writ­ ing: “In work like these pictures, nature is used as a symbol of itself; but the realism goes farther than we have yet gone. And there is always the danger of the real, which assumes a mythological character, an aspect of menace in a society that hides and evades and hurries toward compromise, hurries toward self-censorship. These pictures offer another attitude toward reality and toward truth.”54 It’s not that the unending calamity of war and geno­ cide isn’t a central concern in their work and life—it’s precisely because those are their central concerns that they, working in the atomic age, situ­ ate scientific discovery as central to questions of ontological inquiry. Is it possible for Abbott’s images to do this kind of political and philo­ sophical labor alone, or do we need Rukeyser’s text to help us get there? It is, I think, the job of the viewer / reader to make those leaps, to find the correspondences. Perhaps that is the particularly interesting aspect of this collaboration—it is at once doing a kind of midcentury theorizing about the political role of art, while offering a particularly feminist intervention: it wants to democratize our sight, it wants to dissolve the gendered dis­ courses of specialization, it wants to reveal to us the systems of power and knowledge broadly, to make visible the bodies and desires that are so often apparitional. Rukeyser ends the outline of the project with this assertion: It will deal with the way science and art meet and might meet in our time. It will talk about the role of novelty in our life, and how—in art—its func­ tion is partly to give us the sense of sameness, the sense of repetition, since

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only through invention do we receive again the freshness that comes with each step in art and life. It will talk about these photographs, and the ex­ traordinary declaration of the essence of the things which they make. . . . These photographs give us a fierce and concentrated fish-life of the fish, for example, with the subjective element reduced to a minimum, through clar­ ity and concentration. We consider the purity that goes into a new art-form, and the moment in time that calls for the invention of new forms. We look at the general corruption of consciousness about us, and how many pres­ sures in our life ease us toward that kind of death. We see the truest of the materialists in art trying again and always to free us, and we see what these correspondences in the shapes of life, and what these attempts at freedom in every kind of thought, can mean. The photographs are part of a kind of thinking and a kind of hope.55

These “correspondences” are manifest in Abbott and Rukeyser’s relationship— the back-and-forth of written communication and the dialogue essential to collaborative practices—as well as in the project itself, one that seeks to expose objective representation and to liberate the viewer from the ideo­ logical and subjective interpretations that “cut off” thinking: sexism, rac­ ism, disgust at the body. In a radical democratization of high modernism, Rukeyser asserts that the “direct treatment of the thing”—the exposure of its essence—frees us to find deeper equivalencies, ones that connect us, make us face one another. To bring the “fish-life of the fish” to the viewer is to provide “a new beginning, another acceptance of life.”56 Clearly, Rukeyser and Abbott’s interest in the ontology of things—their aura, essence, and power—can be read in a matrix of modernist thought and art (Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, among others), in how it troubles epistemological and ontological boundaries. There is something uniquely forward-looking about their collaborative project in other ways, too. Think of how Bill Brown frames his work on “thing theory” in 2001: “The real, of course, is no more phenomenal in physics than it is in psychoanalysis or, as in psychoanalysis, it is phenomenal only in its effects. Somewhere beyond or beneath the phenomena we see and touch there lurks some other life and law of things, the swarm of electrons.”57 In So Easy to See, Rukeyser and Abbott theorized an interdisciplinary approach to the “thing” in similarly complex ways half a century earlier, only they weren’t recognized for it. Interestingly, Brown’s special issue of Critical Inquiry dedicated to the

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topic uses Sidney Nagel and Itai Cohen’s science photo of “a drop of glyc­ erol breaking apart inside another fluid” on the cover.58 Rukeyser and Abbott’s lost collaboration—so connected to and ex­ panding upon the theoretical, scientific, and artistic modes of the twentieth century—was never realized because of their status as scientific amateurs, as women and lesbians, as philosophical, artistic, and political others. They did recuperate each other, though: Rukeyser uses Abbott’s photograph of her eye for her book about the Enlightenment explorer and astronomer Thomas Hariot, and Rukeyser writes the 1970 foreword to Abbott’s book Photographs. It is impossible not to perceive the loss of their work as a result of deeply ingrained sexism, of the failure to see women as inventors and discoverers, philosophers and geniuses, and it should provide another warning, among many, about how much is lost, is wasted, by our failure “to see things as they really are.” Rukeyser ends the foreword to Abbott’s first collection on this note of loss: But there are those who lived through the period when the pictures were made and never recognized what had happened. I think of the magazine ed­ itor before whose office I waited until Berenice Abbott came down with the series of big “science” pictures still under her arm (the series from which the penicillin mould is the single one included here). She came out with her clown look, the pure child in grief. “He turned them down. But he said they have very little grain,” she told me in wry despair; another picture editor who could not see. Look at that penicillin until it opens you, brilliant and round, producing its droplets. Also, the picture has no grain. It is made with an invention of Berenice Abbott’s. These have been called marvellously objective pictures. I myself do not know what this means. They are extreme works of art, carrying the art­ ist and the object and ourselves to us, carrying poetry and the big concepts she has always undertaken: a road down the length of the Atlantic coast, the cycle of the year in one spot in Maine, pictures of things seen with such concentration that they can be called science pictures; New York; and al­ ways portraits. I think that the witnesses of this art, coming to it for the first time, will see that Berenice Abbott has given us the vision of a world in which all things look at us, declaring themselves with a power we recognize. A power that is related to something in the human face. How is it possible that this book was not with us years ago? Is it that the time has finally come around to this artist, explorer, discoverer, and these forms pour through her self to us.59

Figure 9. Abbott’s photo of Rukeyser’s hand taken with her Super-Sight camera. Ber­ enice Abbott Archive, Ryerson Image Centre © Ronald Kurtz, administered by Com­ merce Graphics Ltd.

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In one of her final poems, “An Unborn Poet,” written in 1979, Rukeyser situates her relationship with Abbott as part of a twentieth-century net­ work of women recuperating and collaborating with one another. It is a poem dedicated to Alice Walker, with fragments of experiences with Zora Neale Hurston (whom Walker would famously recuperate) and Denise Levertov, but Abbott is given two stanzas, lovingly. I’ll end on the first: Peddler, drowned pier, birdcage—images

caught in your lens forever, Berenice.

You said, “I need a light

great as the sun. No. Greater than the sun.”

You said, “I must invent: clothes, architecture,

a camera that is a room, the child of

camera obscura.”

I went journeying in Baptista della Porta.

I went marketing on Sixth Avenue

and so we found the fish-head, Berenice,

you turned his teeth to icicles,

and his great tongue—

I found the apple and the ear of corn.

Twelve huge lights went off blazing at my left eye.

Visionary lavender, flaming. Then lime-green burning. A vision of sight.

Then blindness. Blindness. Black, returning me to night.60

6

Pillars of Process Franz Boas, Birth, and Indigenous Thought

In a 1947 letter to Ernst Boas, the son of anthropologist Franz Boas, Muriel Rukeyser confesses: “May I tell you how, as it begins to open before me, how much this inquiry into your father’s life is meaning to me? The stories are very beautiful, the clues to further meaning are illu­ minating. I begin to see the power of the connections. I am very happy to be doing this.” In the same letter she writes that she is pregnant, a “happy” complication to the work.1 Rukeyser was writing the first biog­ raphy of Boas, the “father” of American cultural anthropology, commis­ sioned by his son the year of his father’s death, in 1942.2 Uniquely suited for such a task, she was at the forefront of the emergent field of science history, having just published her biography of the mathematical physi­ cist Willard Gibbs the same year, which marked the beginning of her turn to life-writing as an “exploratory entrance into new ‘way[s] of thinking,’” as Eric Keenaghan has noted.3 While Rukeyser would write numerous biographies, the Boas project is significant: it was the only authorized biography she was commissioned to undertake, and it was the only one for

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which she built the archive on which the narrative would be based, con­ tacting Boas’s colleagues and family members and cataloguing their cor­ respondence, collecting his journals and private writing, and traveling to Vancouver Island to live with and interview the Kwakwaka’wakw peo­ ples, whose artistic practices, myths, and lives were foundational to Boas’s theories. While the Boas biography was never finished, despite decades of research, Rukeyser’s engagement with the methods and origins of cultural anthropology would be career-defining, as she would find fruitful direc­ tives for her own work in many of the ideas and practices she encountered through her research on Boas and her time on Vancouver Island. As Cath­ erine Gander writes, “her lifelong poetic project of America was arguably informed partly by Boasian anthropological motives.”4 In Boas’s writing, she found arguments for tracing a radical tradition across cultures, gen­ ders and races, where, in his words, “all human activities may assume forms that give them aesthetic values.”5

Figure 10. Rukeyser with her son, Bill, in San Francisco in 1947. Photo included in a letter to Eleanor Clark. Eleanor Clark Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. With permission to publish from the Clark and Rukeyser estates.

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Rukeyser’s engagement with Boas and his circle began in an under­ graduate anthropology course at Columbia University in 1933, as a stu­ dent of Ruth Brunzel, Boas’s own student and colleague. Her earliest political and journalistic activity grew out of this class and was shaped by the antiracist theorizing and activism of the group. While at Columbia, Rukeyser became the publicity chairman for the “Conference on Negro Student Problems,” and the event’s committee included Boas, as well as radical intellectuals and artists from Alain Locke to Augusta Savage. For her role as publicity chair, Rukeyser traveled to Alabama to report on the trial of the Scottsboro Boys for the Student Review; the leaflets for the event provided evidence for her arrest in the Jim Crow South.6 Her friend­ ship with Zora Neale Hurston, whom she also met through Boas, would prove equally important. Hurston asked Rukeyser to accompany her on an ethnographic trip to the south in the mid-1930s. Rukeyser didn’t go, but Hurston’s transformation of the role of the anthropologist from one of “participant-observer” to “observing participation,” as Fatimah Tob­ ing Rony describes, as well as her “transgressions” of the academic norms of ethnographic writing is reflected in Rukeyser’s own documentary jour­ nalism: from an indigenous festival in the Coachella valley in 1939 to her ethnographic narrative, The Orgy, published in 1962.7 The influences of cultural anthropology and Indigenous artistic practices can also help us better understand some of Rukeyser’s most recognizable poems of the second wave feminist movement about birth, sex and motherhood, and these influences can be traced in a lost film script, The Mask, as well as in her “Usable Truth” lectures and The Life of Poetry (1949). Much as she used her experiences during the Spanish Civil War over and over again, she followed these ideas like a “clue” for developing literary and political strategies to reorient our traditions and knowledge systems away from Western imperial sources, to write about the lives of others, and about the lives of women in particular—their desires, the experience of birth and motherhood, and their intellectual and artistic practices in patriarchy. Working in the archive of the American Philosophical Society, Rukey­ ser was the first researcher to begin to collect and catalogue Boas’s mate­ rial history, from Germany to the Pacific Coast, constructing a narrative of his life as well as the lives he recorded, piecing together a history that we can reorient ourselves within and imagine upon. The archive, so ob­ scured in spatial terms, becomes a site of expansive visibility; as Isaiah

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Lorado Wilner writes, “We can investigate the Indigenous origins of global consciousness if we make use of new methods to study an untapped archive: the corpus of thought and action collected by anthropologists.”8 Rukeyser’s revisionist influences can be traced directly to Boas’s own in­ tellectual project, which she was cataloging, but also to those of his col­ laborators and students—women, nonwhite, and Indigenous theorists and researchers—who would come to represent and define the radical and hu­ manist possibilities of the twentieth century. Boas’s circle engendered new understandings of race, gender, sexuality, immigration, nationalism, and culture itself.9 And his central conceit, that “if we are ever to understand human behavior we must know as much about the eye that sees as about the object seen,” as Catherine Gander has shown, “appealed to Rukey­ ser’s own belief in responsible, reciprocal witness.”10 Boas’s work, and that of his most important colleagues, collaborators, and students—Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Cara Deloria, Paul Radin, and Edward Sapir—challenged the very hierarchies of difference that defined the political and social world of the nation-state, and in doing so shaped our own understandings about the cultural constructs of race and gender, sexuality and aesthetics.11 Boas’s theorization of cultural rela­ tivism was essential for demonstrating that race is a “social reality not a biological one,” and would prove vital to antiracist critiques of Nazism in Europe, Japanese internment, and Jim Crow laws in America during the time Rukeyser was forming her own critique of war culture and state vio­ lence.12 The ideas that Boas and his circle developed, however, arose from their engagement with Indigenous knowledge systems, and as Wilner shows, the anthropologists arriving “amidst the maelstrom of colonialism .  .  .  were the tape recorder of an emerging global society” where “indigenous intellectuals offered the people who had come to categorize them into mediums of indigenous thought.”13 One of the most important legacies of Boas’s circle for the twentieth century was the groundbreaking thinking on sex and gender that his colleague Ruth Benedict, along with her student and partner Margaret Mead, would under­ take. It was their comparative ethnographic work that would show that biol­ ogy alone is not one’s destiny, that gender is not a stable category, that sexual desire is fluid—theories of difference that would become crucial for Rukey­ ser in the postwar years, as Benedict and Mead would provide the material basis for so much of second-wave feminism.14 As the feminist anthropologist

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Marilyn Strathern, who describes the study of anthropology as “study­ ing relations with relations,” wrote, “It matters what ideas one uses to think other ideas [with].”15 Rukeyser’s work on Boas and cultural an­ thropology gave her new ideas to think with: the lives of the obscure and anonymous, the bodily life that has been denigrated in Western culture, that has “separated ourselves from ourselves”—especially birth, sex, and death—were all part of a project in which she was developing radical counter-narratives to the binaries of Cold War thinking that “categorizes and segments,” rendering Indigenous and other forms of knowledge “si­ lent.” As she wrote in The Life of Poetry, “Indian culture ‘values its po­ etry’ but is ‘driven into captivity and repression by a power-culture that sets no store on this art.”16 The materials Rukeyser collected for her biography are an archive inside the larger Boas collection in the American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia, called the Boas-Rukeyser Collection. It is an “untapped” space that helps us understand the cultural contexts, nar­ ratives, impulses, and interconnected origins that Rukeyser deemed im­ portant to Boas’s work.17 Despite its unfinishedness, Rukeyser’s Boas biography was full of promise when she began in 1942. Originally, she contracted with Doubleday to write the biography, as well as to publish two of her poetry collections and the Willard Gibbs biography. By 1950, however, Rukeyser had become unhappy with the press after it delayed and rejected many of her other projects. (The Life of Poetry would be published by Wynn instead.) When Doubleday declined to publish a Boas reader along with the biography, which Rukeyser believed essential to her project, and then refused to increase her advance, she argued, “to the sum adequate to allow me to deal with the material, which includes—in Philadelphia—a collection of 65,000 letters, among other papers,” she decided definitively to get out of her contract.18 Working closely with Alfred Kroeber at Berkeley, a student of Boas’s (the first to graduate with a PhD in anthropology from Columbia), who worked with the Yahi peoples (Yana of northern California), and in regular correspondence with Ernst Boas, Rukeyser spent years trying to find funding for the proj­ ect. She could not get support from any foundation, however, not even from the American Philosophical Society itself, where the Boas papers were housed, because, as Gander notes, she had an “unscientific back­ ground.”19 In 1951 she joined Angus Cameron’s list at Little, Brown.

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He eagerly agreed to take the Boas biography and reader, as well as her new books of poems. She described herself as filled with excitement “that the plan I had been heading for the last twelve years has at last matured.”20 By 1952, however, Cameron and thirty-one of his authors had become part of a targeted campaign by the right-wing anticommunist “vigilante sheet” Counterattack. A campaign against Cameron was begun in 1947 by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who accused him of communist sympathies after he rejected George Orwell’s Animal Farm for publication, and cul­ minated with Louis Bundz, former editor of the Daily Worker, naming Cameron before the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Secu­ rity, known as the McCarran committee.21 In 1952 Cameron, having re­ fused to renounce his “communist sympathies,” was fired and went into hiding. Rukeyser’s contract had not been publicly announced at the time, so she was not included on the original Counterattack list, yet she still found her advance money and copyrights frozen. As she wrote in a letter to Ella Winter, one of the thirty-one authors named as communist sympa­ thizers by Counterattack, who had fled to London by then, “the Dragon is at breakfast here, and there’s steak for breakfast.”22 This would be the beginning of an increasingly hostile period for Rukeyser, ending with the American Legion trying to get her fired from her teaching job at Sarah Lawrence in 1958 for communist activities. In another 1953 letter to Winter, Rukeyser discusses the profound difficulty of the period, of living for a year without steady income while supporting a young child, the bureaucracy of single motherhood before women had equal protec­ tion, and the forbidding political climate: I have tried to get a passport; and have still to turn in affidavits about the changing of my name from Muriel Wolff back to Muriel Rukeyser, and the fact of Laurie’s name being Laurie Rukeyser. My affidavits have to be signed by two friends who knew me under both names. But I have not been able to plan anything, really, because I have not earned anything for a year and more—not since Little, Brown. I have made about thirty starts—some that I wanted and some “practical” ones—all of them false starts. But I feel that clearing myself through this past month may clear all my air. I will finish my Willkie book, now, I am sure. Because I seem to have taken the whole Little, Brown forbidding and cutting off money and rights as part of a general for­ bidding. . . . The climate here is very poor; but then I think of all your floods and fogs and illnesses. This climate is a record one, however; the Times has

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a weirder report every day. And today Dulles assured the Senate that the US Govt would not sign the codes of human rights, rights of women, and the genocide convention.23

Rukeyser’s unfinished work on Boas is a key to understanding the con­ ditions of her fragmented midcentury life, but its unfinished nature also shows how her work continued to develop and grow despite the lattice of anticommunist and anti-woman strictures that she would learn to work around and through, a history that becomes visible only as you follow her in and out of the archives. Her research and writing on Boas, which at first appears marginal, not worthy of study for its incompleteness, is in fact central to her literary and political projects, taking us deeper into the forms she used to find a language for birth, for process, and for the sources of American culture that might contradict the violence of Cold War thinking. Her work is about the study of relations as a system of knowledge that anticipated what Strathern would later theorize. Despite going unacknowledged, Rukeyser’s effort to write the narrative of Boas’s life, one that gave us “the foundations of all the social sciences that we have,” as she declares in the book synopsis, would have lasting impact.24 She would contribute to the apparatus, the archive, and the narrative of his biography that future scholars would depend on. Rukeyser’s intellectual labor, though, is vastly undervalued, nearly invisible. In his book Gods of the Upper Air, for example, one of the more recent renderings of the importance of Boas’s work on contemporary culture and thought, Charles King consistently relies on the Boas-Rukeyser Collection to construct his narrative of Boas’s life. Rukeyser’s assertion in her book proposals—that the only way to understand Boas’s importance is to understand the ways his ideas can be seen to shape our own times—is how most contemporary Boas scholars have framed their own work, but Rukeyser herself is not cited as an intellectual or authorial source, only the collection, as if the material aggregated itself. Her unfinished project on Boas offers a sense of the ways in which her intellectual work shapes that of others, and how her own searching, her own investigative scholarship, lays the foundations for the radical forms and thought that we work within today. In the synopsis of Boas’s life, Rukeyser describes him as a person who did not allow life to “be separated, he would not allow . . . fragmentation,” writing that “he made out of these scenes and of his life a growing adventure in unity.”

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In fact, this is the story of Rukeyser’s own life, where “the process never stops . . . we are offered the continual opening of the spirit.”25

Vancouver Island In 1949, almost two years after the birth of her son, Rukeyser traveled with him to Port Hardy on Vancouver Island to live with and interview the Kwakwaka‘wakw (then called by the settler colonial name Kwakiutl) people about Boas, whose collaborative work with the Pacific Northwest First Nations peoples changed twentieth-century thinking about culture.

Figure 11. Rukeyser on the boat to Vancouver Island, summer 1949. Courtesy of her son, William L. Rukeyser.

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The notes from her anthropology class in 1933 detail Boas’s perilous trip to the same Northwest coast she would arrive at over half a century later. In traveling to Port Hardy to interview the subjects of Boas’s early work, she wanted to understand how the anthropologists were received and per­ ceived by the people they were documenting. In her own ethnography The Orgy, about the Puck Fair celebration in County Kerry, Ireland,26 she re­ calls this period of research: I was ten years back, on the north of Vancouver Island with my small son, not yet two years old; on the track of Franz Boas, I was, and one of his in­ formants had just told me why they liked him—we liked Boas she said—you know why? and told me something I could get from no book in the world. We liked him because he was on time for meals. I looked out to where my little son was sitting on a huge cedar log with two little Kwakiutl boys, twins, and my own was showing his “old friend car”—a red metal car the one toy he had brought. Perhaps it was battered and more silver than red, where the paint had worn; he had lost it that morning, and the twins had helped him find it in the long pale grass. The informant said to me, It is good that you brought your child with you; you know none of these white scien­ tists bring any family with them. . . . [N]o children, nothing; they just appear here, one white man, another white man, asking us silly questions and mis­ pronouncing. You know what our chief amusement in the summer at Port Hardy is? Telling lies to white scientists.27

Rukeyser’s account highlights an essential aspect of her work on Boas and her larger midcentury project as well: to reorient our forms of knowledge away from nationalistic and paternalistic ideologies, to present more com­ plex origin stories of an “interconnected global culture,”28 and to use all of our resources—from myths to poetry to scientific methods—to chal­ lenge pernicious Western hierarchies. By taking cues from the people she was visiting, and using some of the tools developed by Boas and his cir­ cle to analyze that circle itself, Rukeyser begins to demonstrate the ways in which whiteness and masculinity were constructed through social and disciplinary knowledge systems. In her account of her trip to Vancou­ ver Island in The Orgy, she implies that she had unique access as a re­ searcher because she was a mother, whose interests and perspectives may have been different from those of the lone white men who would ap­ pear on the shores of Vancouver Island each summer to “collect” stories.

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In emphasizing this difference, she privileges the perspective of women and mothers as scholars, and women and children as subjects of study, while also exposing the problematic relationships between hosts and guests in a system that has historically asserted a one-directional view of culture written by the West. While Rukeyser’s original task was to write about Boas, a near hagio­ graphic account—of the “many thresholds in his life,” according to the book proposal she was submitting to publishers—the archive she built around his life, and the literary and theoretical work she wrote in response to her experiences with the Kwakwaka‘wakw peoples, point to more com­ plex thinking about settler colonialism and Western imperialism, the lega­ cies of Indigenous thought and art for modernity, and the limits of genre for writing about the varied influences that make American culture.29 Rukeyser’s engagement with Indigenous art helped her think through some of her most important ideas about how authority and knowledge are constructed, about gender and birth, about the role of participatory narrative systems and dialogic aesthetic processes, as well as the ways that modes of collaboration can produce new artistic forms and histories.30 It is only through exploring her unfinished research on Boas that Rukey­ ser’s sources become visible, as does another strand of the long influence of Indigenous practices on the American modernist avant-garde, an influence that Kirby Brown has argued is essential to understanding the production of American modernism more broadly, showing how it is “impossible to understand American modernity and literary modernism absent a legiti­ mate engagement with the literatures of the First Peoples of these lands.”31 It is clear across much of her work that Rukeyser thought similarly. In the author’s note to the 1944 publication of her poem “Dream-Singing Elegy,” which references the Ghost Dance, part of the Elegies sequence that begins during the Spanish Civil War, she connects contemporaneous poetic forms and political crisis to Indigenous sources, writing: “I have used some of the Indian material in this poem, and especially a paper by Philleo Nash, ‘Revivalism on Klamath Reservation,’ included in  So­ cial Organization of North American Tribes. This material appears to me to have certain connections with expression in the over-run countries of our own time.” In a section titled “The Buried History: Some Ritual Chants” in The Life of Poetry, she writes: “The tribes[’] .  .  . creation myths are based on this continent. In their relation to our culture, which

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had denied them and severed them at the root, they tell us they still live, and that we may rise to full life at any time. . . . [T]he buried voices of the Indian chants have hardly reached our written literature”; and she quotes a 1945 paper by John Collier, the former commissioner of Indian affairs, who describes the United States government as perpetuating “the longest ‘colonial’ record of the modern world” and notes how, despite this, the American Indians “excel in art propensities, and in truthfulness.”32 In a period when white male supremacy was violently re-ascendant in Europe and America, with forced removals, internment, and genocide, Rukeyser begins to collect materials that ask us to turn toward the nar­ ratives and histories that have already been adapted to confront similarly violent “holocausts,” told by those “who know the narrative from the inside.”33 In doing so Rukeyser develops her own critique of the Cold War American imperialism defined by military intervention and aid, as Philip Metres notes—in China (1945), the Philippines (1945), Italy (1947), Greece (1947), the Korean War (1950–1953), Albania (1949), Guatemala (1953), Iran (1953), Cambodia (1955), the Middle East (1948–), Indone­ sia (1957–58), and the start of the Vietnam War (1955–1975).34 In look­ ing to non-imperial histories to form her analysis of American culture, she asserts, “Simply, the line of culture was begun in America at the point of open conflict. All the wars of European thought began thus, and Eastern balance has not yet come in,” formulating a theory of America, and of American modernity, that both acknowledges conflict and settler colonial­ ism as the source but also still traffics in the simplistic binaries of East and West.35 The work she produces, however, is much less simplistic, telling us that the “history of possibility” which surrounds the history of violence is “not vaguer than the other principle, it leads to definite things; but since these are future things, they cannot be described under the present day­ light, the present poems are not their songs but will be their old ballads, anonymous, and their traditional tune. All we can do is believe in the seed, living in that belief.”36

“Waste That Is Never Waste” A few years before her trip to Vancouver Island, living in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, Rukeyser wrote to one of her oldest

Figure 12. Letter from Muriel Rukeyser to Eleanor Clark, undated (ca. 1947–48).

Eleanor Clark Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke

Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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friends, Eleanor Clark, in 1947: “The small object is kicking now, and that is marvelous. There are times of being scared, but they are growing fewer. I feel, as September approaches, that I am going to die or be born— and / or be born, I suppose it is.”37 A pivotal figure in the burgeoning San Francisco Renaissance, though often not read in this context, Rukeyser chose to stay in the Bay Area to have her only child, away from censori­ ous parents in New York City, who did not want their pregnant and un­ married daughter to return. Not naming the father, she was economically supported by the suffragettes, scholars, and poets Sarah Bard Field and Henriette Lehman, who bought her a ring to wear in the hospital in order to avoid stigmatization as an unwed mother.38 Rukeyser also used the pen name of one of her closest film collabora­ tors, Ben Maddow, for the father’s name on her son’s birth certificate— David Wolff—as described in the letter to Winter. Maddow would later recall how much he admired Rukeyser, saying: “I was very moved by the fact that she was a lesbian who wanted a child and went deliberately about getting and raising one. She was really a wonderful woman who, all her life, felt she was very ugly.”39 Maddow would base a short story on her, an explicit and intimate fictionalized account of an affair that would result in her pregnancy.40 The birth, she would write to Clark a few months later, was “complicated: a Caesarean after thirty hours of labor and then much more surgery—but this is very much between us.”41 The experience of traumatic birth, of choosing to have a child alone, of the ways in which these experiences are shaped by sexism, and the joy she found in mother­ hood despite that, influenced the kind of work she was producing, inform­ ing her research interests and formal strategies—birth and death, myths, masks, and counter-histories, critiques of gender and nationalism, and of the bodily forms of knowledge we exclude from binary Western histories. In a review for Poetry in 1949, titled “A Simple Theme,” she writes: There is no poetry of birth in the literature that reaches us. In our own time, we can count the poems on our fingers; there is a great blank behind us, in our classic and religious literature. There we might expect to find the clues to human process and common experience. In our religious literature, birth is not faced until the moment after: we are given the scene with the kings and the animals and Joseph, Mary holding the newborn; the Pharaoh’s daughter discovers the newborn. I cannot think of a scene of birth (and we edit out the little children nowadays) in Greek drama, or all the way up to

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Gargantua; of any representation in graphic art other than the tribal statues, African, Mexican, Polynesian. I can not think of anything in films, or in the literature that tries to give us the stream of consciousness; or in music. I can not think of anything in western poetry, other than formal Nativity odes, until this century. I may be mistaken here, and I shall be glad to know of the existence of any poems of birth or pregnancy. But it seems to me that there is a great lack, one that has scarcely been noticed. . . . [T]here is an entire area of experience which has not reached poetry. And it should hardly be necessary to say that this is a universal, and at the same time a scene one hardly ever sees in this civilization. How many of you have ever seen a birth, or have been conscious while you gave birth?42

Translating this area of experience “which has not reached poetry” be­ comes a crucial project after the birth of her son. In response she begins to formulate theories about a placenta-like “waste that is never waste,” as she writes in her poem “A Birth,” about those materials whose sole sig­ nificance is to “nourish the process.”43 These kinds of ideas can be traced across her unfinished work in the forties, where she explores new modes of seeing and feeling, excavating sources that exist “above and around our other histories”—visible in her collaboration with Abbott, in her plays and radio shows, in her reviews and essays on women and poetry, in her choice of biographical subjects. Like the feminists who would come in her wake, Rukeyser understood that one had to make the forms, find the his­ tories, write the narratives in order to understand oneself as part of the processes of our world—“the hero of this movement in our lives being process itself,” as she would write in her poetic hybrid biography of Wendell Willkie, One Life.44 The birth of her son in 1947 also came at a moment of increased conservatism and hostility toward writers and women who lived like her, marking a period of decreased public visibility. Her book of poems, Elegies, would be the last new collection to appear for nearly a decade after its publication in 1949, the same year as The Life of Poetry, which would quickly fall out of print. Her play The Middle of the Air, which was headed toward Broadway after a 1945 production in Iowa City, also failed to materialize for various political and personal reasons. And while the biography of Boas, begun in 1942, would never be completed, despite continued effort, she did publish One Life in 1957. As Rukeyser takes pains to point out in her 1959 essay “Many Keys,” for women writers

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“there is almost constant conflict between modes of life and modes of creativity,” and in a self-referential gesture to her own period of early motherhood she writes: “Another time—apart from the psychic and eco­ nomic crises of all our lives—comes in the long rearrangement of life that predictably will come to women who write, after the birth of their chil­ dren. This change of level may take about ten years, and, like the others, can stop the function of the artists or be taken as ‘influence.’”45 These “conflicts between life and art,” Rukeyser continues, are the crisis that can lead to extraordinary innovation, and so while Rukeyser seems to acknowledge the toll that raising her child has taken on her ability to produce work, she also asserts that the experience of motherhood is an influence that can move the “buried voice to find its poetry.”46 In her poem “A Birth,” written after her summer with the Kwakwaka’wakw and part of a suite of six poems published in Poetry magazine in 1952 under the title Tree of Meanings, a reference to the totem pole, she writes: So came I into the world of all the living

The maimed triumphant middle of my way

Where there is giving needing no forgiving.

Saw now the present that is here to say:

Nothing I wrote is what I must see written,

Nothing I did is what I now need done.—

The smile of darkness on my song and my son.

Lately emerged I have seen unfounded houses,

Have seen spirits not open, surrounded as by sun,

And have, among limitless consensual faces

Watched all things change, an unbuilt house inherit

Materials of desire, that stone and wood and air.

Lit by a birth, I defend dark beginnings.

Waste that is never waste, most-human giving.47

Masks One of the ways Rukeyser found the forms to articulate her experi­ ence of childbirth—to write what “needs to be written”—is illuminated by the period in Boas’s life that she focuses on in the traces of biogra­ phy that exist, centered on his trip to the Pacific Northwest coast, where

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Boas found, as Wilner writes, his “affective inspiration.” Boas’s time with Kwakwaka’wakw peoples transformed his thinking about anthropology from a field defined by “categorization” and collection into one of “commu­ nication.”48 Wilner argues that this happened for Boas as he witnessed the Kwakwaka’wakw’s transformation mask dances, “where masks and myths are parts of a whole. The mask, once worn, allows a dancer to inhabit a his­ tory and share it with others. . . . As mnemonic devices, masks serve as cues to ideas, affording access to silenced narratives.”49 The Kwakwaka’wakw modeled a way to “transmit a history that defied categorization,” and “as a result, Boas’s interest began to shift from masks as objects of collections to an interest in the mnemonic knowledge they encoded.” It was this shift away from viewing the masks as aesthetic objects and toward the processes of meaning making that would shape modern cultural anthropology.50 The evolution of Boas’s thinking about the mask dances went into his 1895 report The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians.51 It is in this report that Rukeyser would first encounter the sto­ ries, myths, and transformation masks of the Kwakwaka’wakw, narrative accounts that she would begin to draw upon as well, moving beyond Boas to engage directly with a material history that she saw as an essential model for articulating otherwise unarticulated experiences. In possession of Boas’s original films of the mask dances and his ethnographic report, and later as witness to them on Vancouver Island, Rukeyser is aware of her posi­ tion as outsider, as she describes in her accounts of Vancouver Island.52 But she also participates in a long legacy of cultural appropriation and engage­ ment with the narratives and artistic practices of the tribes of the Pacific Northwest coast.53 The adoption of the mask, which has long been a sym­ bol of modernist “primitivist” appropriation, also demonstrates the ways in which indigenous artistic practices inform and transform modernist and feminist ones.54 By “facing east” in the ways that Brown and Wilner argue, we can see how the influence of the Kwakwaka’wakw changed her work in groundbreaking ways, as much as it did Boas’s. The suite of poems that begins with “A Birth,” which I quoted ear­ lier, and including “Return” and “Unborn Song,” creates an intercon­ nected narrative about childbirth, Rukeyser’s trip to Vancouver Island, and the Kwakwaka’wakw mask dances of transformation which shows the processes of death and rebirth, articulating new modes for exploring otherwise unarticulated experiences—“I am going to die or be born—and /

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or be born, I suppose it is,” as she wrote to Clark. In the final poem of the suite, “The Place at Alert Bay,” she writes about the site of what is now the ‘Namgis First Nation burial ground on Vancouver Island, of the totem pole, the transformation masks, and the thunderbird who can open his head to reveal a human: Our branched belief, the power-winged tree.

Tree of meanings where the first mothers pour

Their totems, their images, up among the sun.

We build our gifts: language of process offers

Life above life moving, a ladder of lives

Reaching to time that is resumed in God.

Did the thunderbird give you yourself? The man mourning?

The cedar forest between the cryings of ravens?

Everfound mother, streaming of dolphins, whale-white moon.

Father of salmon-clouded seas, your face.

Water. Weatherbeaten image of us all.

All forms to be resumed in God.

For here, all energy is form: the dead, the unborn,

All supported on the shoulders of us all,

And all forever reaching from the source of all things.

Pillars of process, the growing of the soul,

Form that is energy from these seas risen,

Identified. Resumed in God.55

By ending her suite of poems about birth with the images of the trans­ formation masks and of the totem pole, Rukeyser connects her ability to write openly about the experience of birth with her experience with the Kwakwaka’wakw and their artistic and cultural practices which empha­ size a “language of process.” Her focus on the “first mothers” pouring the images out, and the assertion that “all energy is form,” could be read as an affective metaphor for the experience of giving birth, that is, the ab­ straction of the fetus inside the uterus into a physical manifestation—the human revealing itself inside the mouth of another: “Did the thunderbird give you yourself?” In the decade following the birth of her son, while she continued her research on Boas, the image of the mask, and its communicative

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possibilities, would become a recurring theme for Rukeyser’s discussion of gender—a feminist poetics she began to articulate in the late forties, eventually taken up by second-wave feminists to describe women’s abil­ ity to speak truthfully about their lives through the unmasking of “silenced narratives.” Rukeyser’s declaration in her most famous poem, “The Poem as Mask,” “No more Masks! No More Mythologies!” has often been used to describe this act of truth telling, but it is an over­ simplification of the ideas Rukeyser was developing, which more closely align with the Kwakwaka’wakw use of the mask as a complex mnemonic device, one in which the poem “is not an object: the poem is process,” “made of change itself.”56 Responding to her own postpartum poem “Orpheus”—a mythic revision of the life-and-death narrative of Orpheus and Eurydice, which describes her C-section and hysterectomy, the body torn apart by male doctors, and then the body pieced back together—she writes “The Poem as Mask” in 1968, emphasizing cyclical self-masking and self-revelation as poetic process. In the poem, Rukeyser does not view the mask as an object to be cast off in order to reveal a true self, but rather, as Lorrie Goldensohn has written, the speaker “performs a series of much more complicated maneuvers of recognition and retrieval, maneuvers that hardly dismiss the adoption of masks or personae.”57 Rukeyser herself, Goldensohn notes, confirms as much, writing in the New York Quarterly Review “craft interview” that when the phrase “No more Masks! No more mythologies!” is spoken, “the myth begins again .  .  .  as soon as the refusal is made. It’s a movement that brings together things that are very far apart.”58 That is, to refuse the mythic imperatives in our lives is to call the myth into being—we cannot extricate ourselves from “our dark beginnings.” For Rukeyser, the mythological is what outlines our impulses; it is our dreams that we must live awake with, our ecologies and intercon­ nections with the animals and landscapes. The transformation masks of the Kwakwaka’wakw demonstrate how this kind of knowledge is trans­ formed into practice. The thunderbird (KwanKwanxwalige’) myth and mask, so crucial to their origin narratives, can transform between human and animal, can live between the human and spirit realms, traverses them, and in this sense embodies “things that are very far apart.” Wilner notes: “In the European outlook familiar to Boas, a mask concealed: it hid the wearer’s true identity, superimposing a flat front. For the Nuxalk

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and Kwakwaka’wakw . . . a mask enabled its wearer to alter states, to don a second face. It provided a new way of being and seeing.”59 In this way, “The Poem as Mask” transmits meaning when “worn,” or spoken in this case, and upon wearing it, the speaker is reconstituted through the process of meaning making: When I wrote of the women in their dances and wildness, it was a mask, on their mountain, god-hunting, singing, in-orgy, it was a mask; when I wrote of the god, fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone, down with song, it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from myself. There is no mountain, there is no god, there is memory

of my torn life, myself split open in sleep, the rescued child

beside me among the doctors, and a word

of rescue from the great eyes.

No more masks! No more mythologies! Now, for the first time, the god lifts his hand,

the fragments join in me with their own music.60

The unification of fragments performed in “The Poem as Mask” can be seen in Rukeyser’s research and witness to the use of the transformation dances on Vancouver Island; the thunderbird transformation mask, for ex­ ample, becomes animated when the dancer pulls a string to reveal the head of a human—an allusion to the self-splitting experience of birth, as well as to the transformation that Rukeyser experienced doing ethnographic fieldwork for The Orgy. The dancer who wears the mask is herself trans­ formed in the process, just as the audience is transformed by accepting the character of the mask and not the person performing.61 Rukeyser’s poem is a verbal approximation to this performance in which cultural myths are embodied and shared, as Rukeyser seems to imply in her craft interview— this is a collective experience that, like the mask dances, “link[s] speaker and listeners, messages and mediums.”62 This relational process antici­ pates the feminist performance poetics of the late twentieth century, as Rukeyser insists that the poem is not a static art object but a dynamic and

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relational process between “poet, the poem, and the audience”—similar to the “enacted idea” that “brings thought into being” through the “inter­ play” of “addresser and addressee, context, reference, contact and code,” which is the foundation for a significant amount of later poetry by exper­ imental women writers.63 Rukeyser’s poetic theories, then, show the long influence of Indigenous art and thought on American avant-garde exper­ imental practices. It was not just the affective and dialogic strategies of the Kwakwaka’wakw that were so important for Rukeyser but the way they incorporated into their stories “sex and waste, greed and hate. . . . There were no observers, no outsiders, no Others.”64 In The Orgy, Rukeyser recalls how crucial this encounter with collaborative processes on Van­ couver Island was, and also the openness about waste and sex and bodies, the “waste that is never waste”: I thought of the story the Indian woman told me on Vancouver Island—Did you ever see a woman split down the middle? No, I said. I have; she was standing in what we call the community house, and everyone came in and she stood there and said the strong voice, Won’t somebody come and kill me? A shudder of shock and release went through me. This is the thing one is never supposed to say. Then, said the Indian woman, the shaman came into the house, he walked forward with the obsidian knife gleaming black in his hand and he said I will—and drew his sharp knife hard down her front till the blood spilled on the ground. He held the entrails up. We all saw them. Then we left the house. Next day we came back. We stood in our places around the big room. There was the woman who was killed. She was wearing the evergreen leaves at her temples; she danced the dance of rebirth. What was it? I said. Some of us knew—the old people, and some of the others of us knew, that there was a young dead seal under her robe—when he did that, she was wearing the young dead seal. But it was for the sake of the second day. For the dance of rebirth. When I first heard that, I told them, I remember the shudder of shock and release that went through me. “I still feel it, I was brought up not to talk about three things: sex and money and death. And the excrement, the wet and dirty—you know how they work, on our cities to keep them dry? to try to display life as not sticky, not wet? I don’t know why they should do this—”65

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Rukeyser’s own formal choices here enact a nonhierarchical structure, di­ minishing the differentiation between listeners and speakers. It is unclear who in fact is telling and listening, and who is having the response. The retelling of the story creates an affective response across multiple tempo­ ralities of participants, where we as readers are in the circle as well, and there are no clear distinctions, “no observers, no outsiders, no Others.” While these radical formal strategies can be essential aspects of the mod­ ernist avant-garde, they are also, as Wilner asserts, the “civilizing influ­ ences” of Indigenous thought on modernity.66 In one of the final scenes in The Orgy, Rukeyser writes: “Something is happening to me, as if I were at a play that I fully accept. I do not identify with the heroine. I do not identify with the hero, or the murdered farther, or the lustful mother who marries the new kind. I identify with the whole play.”67 In identifying in this way, as observing participant, she creates a disorienting text that asks you to wear the mask and participate, just as the narrator does, as she meditates in great detail on the sensory and geographical spaces of settler colonialism in Ireland, with long passages dedicated to the lives of the tin­ kers, whose experiences of “hatred . . . jealously, longing, despisals,” she writes, “correspond” with the experiences of African Americans, “brave, long-suffering beyond belief, controlled somehow in an insane situation. And the tribes of Indians cut off from the ways and still aware of tribe. As these tinkers, even when they put cars before the caravans instead of horses, even when it’s plastics and not tin.”68 Likewise, for Rukeyser, the repression of the “wet and sticky”—of the bodily life and psychic drives that define us, that birth us—is also a failure of finding the artistic processes that can encompass these stories. She sees these denials as part of a patriarchal, racist, and political system that de­ nies us any chance of a unified self, of equality, of imagination. She writes in “A Simple Theme”: “There is a terrible fear of birth abroad. It is close to the fear of poetry; and I do not know how closely it is connected with the agonies of our wars and with the daily crushing of the fiery life. I know that there are strong bonds here; and the matter before me, the poetry of birth, seems to be one clue.” After the birth of her child—in a culture that gave no form for the narratives that come from the female body—this impetus is clarified. She continues: “Now birth as a trauma has an im­ portant repressive role in our art—our literature in particular. Few of the women writing poetry have made more than a beginning in writing about

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birth. There is exceptional difficulty in giving form to so crucial a group of meanings and experiences.”69 But what she encounters during her re­ search on Boas and the foundations of cultural anthropology, and what she discovers on Vancouver Island as she follows his trail, helps her find these forms. In her poem “Clues,” which follows “The Poem as Mask” in its original publication format in Poetry, she writes: Indian Baptiste saying, We painted our dreams. We painted our dreams on our faces and bodies. We took them into us by painting them on ourselves. When we say the water mystery of the lake after the bad dream, we painted the lines and masks, when the bear wounded me, I painted for healing. When we were told in our dreams, in the colors of the day

red for earth, black for the opposite, rare green, white.

Yellow. When I dreamed of weeping and dreamed of sorrow

I painted my face with tears, with joy.

Our ghost painting and our dreams of war.

The white brow, the streak, the hands and sex, the breast.

The spot of white, one hand black, one hand red.

The morning star appearing over the hill.

We took our dreams into our selves

We took our dreams into our bodies.70

In the manuscript version of the poem, she acknowledges the documentary evidence of this story: “There is a people of Indians on a river / on the north Pacific that do this: / Baptiste Ironstone told me”; and in her 1972 “craft in­ terview” in the New York Quarterly Review, she agrees with the interviewer that her poem “Clues” is “defining of [her] use of dreams”—a “use taken from the Thomson River Indians [the Nlaka’pamux of the Salish coast] who painted dreams on their bodies, that is they do not let them go.”71

A Fossil of Perception In 1937, living in Los Angeles with Nancy Naumburg while editing Savage Coast and working on The Book of the Dead, Rukeyser traveled to Palm Springs on assignment for The Nation to write about an “Indian fiesta” in

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the Coachella Valley that showcased Indigenous dances and songs from many tribal nations. Produced by the federal Office of Indian Affairs, the event took place with the assistance of Hollywood lighting technicians and directors, so that the desert appeared like a stage. “The moon,” wrote Rukeyser, “is unimportant for the five terrific spotlights are turned on the clearing.”72 As in her filmic journalism from the Spanish Civil War, she jux­ taposes the brochure and newspaper advertisements about the event with descriptions of the performers, editing the scenes together—describing, for example, the Cahuilla spiritual elder Salvador Lopez being interrupted by a lighting technician. In doing so she is able to show an image of the Holly­ wood version of Native American performance next to images of the per­ formers, who, “after the white people left,” played their own games, sang to their babies, joked, and let her join them around a fire as they prepared their performances for the next day. Rukeyser offers a critique of Holly­ wood culture without trivializing the fact that the reservation “took in a haul” from the event. But Hollywood is also where she begins to think about the different kinds of media we can use to tell our polyphonic cul­ tural narratives, and that the “linkages and collisions” found in the pro­ cesses of filmmaking are the “two relationships” that “mean growth, the process of birth and love,” as she describes in the “Usable Truth” lectures.73 In the late 1950s she began an avant-garde art film called The Mask, based on the Italian American mime and mask maker Salvatore Guida, with music arranged by Aaron Copland. Though the film was never fin­ ished, in the photographic stills of Guida’s dances you can see the reflec­ tion of Rukeyser’s three-decade-long engagement with questions of how global culture, myth, and ritual circulate through the mnemonic device of the mask. Her attention to the mask as a mode of narrative is academic, in many ways, as she explores its use in multiple forms and cultural spaces; her attention to sight, to her own eye, even, in Berenice Abbott’s SuperSight photograph, correlates to the significance of the eyes in the masks of Vancouver Island—an experience she recounts, again, in The Orgy, where she writes: “The clearest fire I have ever seen was when a photographer set up a bank of lights to make a close-up of my left eye, and the blaze went off beside my head. There was the moment of black; and then two flames in sequence, the most intense lime-green, the most appalling lav­ ender, that I have ever seen, burning beyond all color. Earthly color is the shadow of what I saw.”74 In Primitive Art, Boas observes that the “most

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striking decorative form which is used almost everywhere .  .  . consists of the ‘eye design.’”75 It was used, as Wilner notes, to “decorate ‘nearly every spoon, blanket, and mask’ of the North West coast” showing how “the people of the coast depicted themselves as Eyes, not Others: vision seekers, vision speakers” whose ability to see what others have missed is “capable of altering a situation, thus bringing about a transformation.”76 The correspondences, as Rukeyser theorizes with Abbott in So Easy to See, are everywhere. Abbott’s invention transforms our ability to see the potentiality of our world; she was a “vision seeker.” In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser excerpts a series of Navajo songs, writ­ ing that they exist not as a past but “in their relation to our culture.”77 She then reproduces inside her text three translations of the songs from recordings by Hosteen Klah (Hastiin Klah), the intersex Nadleehi (trans­ lated as “one who is transformed” or “one who changes”), a weaver and ceremonial singer who occupied both genders and undertook both male and female artistic practice. By including these songs, Rukeyser empha­ sizes the possibilities that exist, and continue to exist, in our culture but which we repress, possibilities that offer us alternative ways of being and seeing and making, processes that do not constrain us through “false” binaries—gendered or artistic. In the Boas-Rukeyser Collection, there is a series of typed quotations from Boas’s Primitive Art, his theory of aesthet­ ics that disproved Western notions about an “evolution of art” defined by a progression from realism to abstraction, a theory of culture extended to justify white supremacy. The quotations Rukeyser pulled out from Boas’s texts are clues to her own radical theories of artistic practice: All human activities may assume forms that give them aesthetic values. What then gives to sensation an aesthetic value? . . . control of the pro­ cesses, developed and controlled techniques. . . . Intimate relation between technique and feeling for beauty. . . . when a natural object is used in daily life . . . handled, perhaps modified, by technical processes. . . . [I]t would seem that only in this way form impresses itself upon the human mind.

In the “Usable Truth” lectures, she adapts and adopts these ideas, returning them to their Indigenous sources: Belief has its structures, and its symbols change, its tradition changes, all the relationships within the structure are interdependent. We look at the

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symbols, we hope to read them, we hope for communication. . . . In sub­ jugated peoples, you will find the poet as witch-doctor, as politician, as an evasive voice. I think of the Indian tribes of California, who after the last subjugation in 1870, turned to dream-singing, sang their hopes that the ghosts of the warriors would return and fight the battles again and have the victory; and soon lost that, and dreamed and sang of how they would rise and fight; and losing that, dreamed and sang and fused their wishful dreams into their religion.78

And in her 1978 book Breaking Open, she translates, with the help of Boas’s student Paul Radin, a suite of Eskimo (Netsilingmiut) songs that describe sex, birth, daily life. These ideas about the relationship between form and daily life found in Boasian cultural relativism made a space for a radical modernist avant-garde that challenged hierarchies of race, nation, and gender, drawing, in part, on Indigenous sources and forms of meaning making. These are at the heart of Rukeyser’s feminist Cold War project, as she begins to articulate the experience of birth through a language of process that connects the body to systems of knowledge. Again and again, these connections are made through an acknowledgment of the peoples whose lived conditions have forced them to adapt their forms in the face of violence and injustice—processes of adaptation and change that she argues we must learn from in order to survive.

Conclusion The Rukeyser Era

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)

To begin again: What if it had been the Rukeyser era and not the Pound era? What if Rukeyser’s theories of aesthetics and politics shaped our postwar thinking and not Adorno’s? What if the twentieth-century lit­ erary canon was made by Rukeyser, the “vulgar optimist,” who ac­ knowledged half a century ago what we are just accepting today: that the most exciting, field-expanding, and politically radical work is being

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written by Black women? What if the “ideas we use to think other ideas with” are about the “regret for waste and the wild knowledge: / growth and sorrow and discovery”? Through Rukeyser’s unfinished work, through her ontological unfinished-ness, we can find radical openings, revisions, and connections. Through the waste, in all her polymorphic and contra­ dictory uses of the term—signifying the lost and suppressed, the unused and undervalued, the dead of war and the ruins of imperialism, the biolog­ ical and bodily matter we shed and share—we are offered a new way for thinking and being and reading. What if the spirit of our age is an “unfin­ ishing” one, neither fixed nor closed but polyphonic and polymorphous? And what if we thought and taught through that? Often when I think of Rukeyser’s use of waste I’m invariably reminded of the image of Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” his metaphor for a radically fragmented historical materialism that redefines our own re­ lationship to the past. Responding to the political crisis of the Second World War, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” is his final, unfinished work, written just before his death at the same French-Spanish border town that also defined Rukeyser’s life and work, the place she described as the “paradigm of all boundaries.” Revelatory once—and perhaps overused now, in a sign of his pervasive influence on our thinking about the “irresistible ruins” of the twentieth century—Benjamin’s Angelus Novus (his interpretation of the 1920 monoprint by Paul Klee) is swept backward toward the future in the storm called “progress,” irrevocably caught, watching paralyzed as a pile of debris rises in its wake. The Angel wants to stop and “awaken the dead,” but he can’t as he is compelled forward. Rukeyser also offers us a vision for how we might engage the waste and ruins of total war and explore the “state of emergency” that is not “the exception, but the rule,” as Benjamin wrote.1 For Rukeyser this engagement is embodied: the very nature of emergency is that it is felt and experienced in oneself—it makes you hot, your heart beat fast. Emergency is the somatic experience of sex, birth, and death and declares itself at the points where we meet our body’s own dissolution—the point, to which Rukeyser so often alludes, where the act of making begins, the crisis within our bodies, “a battleground of forces,” as she wrote of Whitman.2 The aftermath of emergency is often the emergence of the “wet and sticky” effects of sex, birth, and death, of excess, excrement, and leakage. Emergency can also engender connection, a moment when

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we come together to meet and face one another. In 1942, in response to the same wreckage encountered by Benjamin, albeit from a safer vantage point in America, Rukeyser writes: We know the darkness of the past, we have a conscious body of knowledge— and under it, the black country of a lost and wasted and anonymous world . . . jungle-land, wasteful as nature, prodigal. . . . Our living moment rides this confusion; it is torn by the dead wars; seizes the old knowledge; speeds on the imagination of the living and the dead, and passes, fertilized. But the hidden life today continues among all the silence, and in the midst of war. The hidden life of the senses, the vivid, speculative life of the mind. The man over his table, glass shine of the test-tubes reflected in the eyes; the woman staring into her thought of the child not yet born.3

“Wasteful as nature, prodigal,” “fertilized,” and the “child not yet born”—images that speak to the embodied, chaotic, and commingling materials of making in the wreckages and pleasures of our world, of the processes that we are all born from, and that we create in. What Rukeyser does with this “prodigal” waste is a radical reaffirmation of the emergency of our present, in which “all the invention turns to one end: the fertiliz­ ing of the moment, so that there may be more life.”4 In Staying with the Trouble, written nearly seventy years after this, Donna Haraway, echoing Rukeyser unknowingly (or knowingly, even), writes of how in our own mo­ ment of emergency “we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. . . . Alone, in our separate kinds of expertise and experience, we know both too much and too little.” For Ha­ raway now, as for Rukeyser then, we are asked to use all of our resources, because our time “requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanish­ ing pivot between awful or Edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific fu­ tures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings”—our “future depends on [our ] un­ finished spirit.”5 This is the Rukeyser era. One early reader of this book was resistant to my assertion that Rukey­ ser’s gender was the reason why so much of her work remained unfin­ ished, noting that, in fact, she was a very successful poet who won many awards. This is not the first time a reader or listener (often male-identified) has told me in one way or another that Rukeyser’s times were cruel, fueled by anticommunism, anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, and that

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“gender” was only one of many things at play in her exclusion, evidenced by the fact that left-wing male writers were suppressed too. This false equivalency is rooted in the same repressive logic through which her work was diminished, and her exclusion, perhaps reflecting a myriad of other reasons, most often took the form of gender. This kind of response to assertions about endemic sexism is also why it’s so hard to revise our canons—Rukeyser’s recuperation is dependent on our total reevaluation of gendered and racialized literary traditions that normalize the under­ valuing of the efficacy of women writers’ aesthetic choices and theoretical expertise. It also depends on undoing the biases that undermine our ac­ ceptance of women scholars as experts on their subjects. There is no doubt that Rukeyser was a successful poet, that she was a foremother and an influence, and she is sometimes taught on syllabi, perhaps under the week designated “women’s writing” or “the 1930s.” But that is precisely the point: she has never been considered a “good” or successful theorist or novelist or screenwriter or journalist or biographer or translator. She is barely even known as such, and when she is, it is often said that her prose writing is obscure and abstract and difficult—that, in effect, it deserves its obscurity. Her fragmented, unfinished visions of waste do not pervade our thinking like Benjamin’s, they have not been the ideas we follow and struggle to untangle. Her poems are no synecdoche for her times; they are never taught to stand in for the whole in the way we teach other writers—for instance, Eliot for modernism—and that is, in part, because we have so little of her other writing available, and so few ideas and theories that situate and contextualize her as speaking to her historical moment. But the real reason is that she is a woman. Other than Woolf, and maybe Dickinson, I can think of few women who are taught to represent a period, or a theoretical or stylistic movement. In principle, maybe that’s okay, because the very idea of such a hierarchy, such a solipsism, runs contrary to the radical project Rukeyser was em­ barking on. But it’s also infuriating, because she is exactly that: she is eradefining. Her thinking is so prescient that she seems more audacious than Haraway—she already wrote about “the compost” in 1942 and called it fertilizer! She is foundational to queer theory, articulating “tendencies” a half century before Sedgwick. And she imagined on and in the archives in ways that have now become central to literary, theoretical, and historical studies. She wrote ideas that predated some of the most influential work

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on intersectionality, interdisciplinarity, ecocriticism, and feminist praxis, and challenged, in the moment of emergence, the distorted tradition mak­ ing that has informed our own ways of learning and reading today. Her work changes our orientation. Rukeyser’s great failures, her unfinished works, are not (yet) esteemed as brilliant for their iconoclasm; she is not (yet) a hero of her time for resisting conformity and political pressure in those deep Cold War years, the “terrible times.” Her work, for a certain kind of reader, remains proof that she just wasn’t that “good” at those genres and styles. There is no amount of evidence that can stop the ideo­ logical persistence of a literary and theoretical canon, and by extension an identity group, that benefits from racial and gender aesthetic norms, that keeps a certain body in the center and the rest on a diversity rotation for the final three weeks of the semester. When I began my studies as an undergraduate, I did not encounter Muriel Rukeyser in my literature or writing courses; I did not encounter her work on Spain when I wrote a thesis on the Spanish Civil War; and I did not read her writing during my MFA in poetry. It was not until my PhD program, when I happened to read her poetry and writing, assigned as secondary reading to someone else’s poetry and writing, a man’s. Over my decade and a half of higher education, I’ve read so many white male authors that I could not even begin to calculate a number: from antiquity to the present, I know their line breaks and theories, their decades and tastes, their beards and bald spots, their eating habits and sexual drives. I’ve read the minor ones and the friends of the minor ones, and the sons of the middlebrow ones. I certainly know their opinion of women, and it has shaped my opinion of myself. My knowledge of white men is granular; it will never reach the point of finitude. I often joked that some professors would find anyone to teach us except women. They would rather teach us the juvenilia of a man who was at best a satellite to Ginsberg than teach us Diane Di Prima. Even when I was hired at a uni­ versity explicitly to teach women writers and fill these gaping, yawning, grotesque omissions, a male colleague complained to another colleague that in a class of twelve weeks I spent half of them on women, when I was supposed to be teaching “modernism.” And in all these years, I have rarely, maybe never, heard someone say that a white male author wasn’t “the real thing”—which Rukeyser was charged with—or heard him derided for a lack of “talent.” Men’s right to authorship has never

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been questioned. But I have heard that said over and over again about women writers. Despite the half century of work that has been done to make a space for women’s voices and texts in institutions and classrooms and publishing, we have not been able to truly untangle ourselves from the long ideological illogic of the Cold War’s “counterrevolution” and its delineation of “good” and “bad” writing, of the idea that only pro­ gressive politics are “political” and reactionary conservatism is not, that artistic language not legible to the tastes of a predominantly white male literary history is “not the real thing.” But what if it had been the Rukey­ ser era? What if we all learned to historicize and theorize in Rukeyser’s fertilizer of the unfinished? In following her work through the archive, I have had to reevaluate my own aesthetic judgments about “good” and “bad” writing that were informed by the racial and gender prejudices in which I was schooled, shaped as they were in an academy and a culture rooted in my own and others’ inferiority. This inferiority is infectious, and it makes you wary of studying, and by extension allying yourself with, writers like Rukeyser who have been marked as “bad,” lest you too become “bad” by association.6 In the Rukeyser era, however, we must all turn to our “bad influences”; we are all tasked with this reevaluating and unmaking. I ultimately came to Rukeyser because—no surprise—a feminist pro­ fessor sent me to her archive. And the archive remains, for those who want to look beyond the narrow canons we are taught, an extraordinary space to imagine upon and remake within. Rukeyser’s archive is still un­ tapped in many ways. There are more unfinished projects that I have not had the capacity to write about in this book: a TV show called The Big Dome (1953) about the United States Capitol Building, the production of which was stopped quite literally on the morning of shooting—you can find the entire script in the New York Public Library; her planned films Everychild and Adventures (1950), about childhood education, which she made in collaboration with the Bank Street School—the scripts are also in the NYPL; her film The Mask (1957), for which the script has yet to be found, but the plan, stills, and correspondences are in the NYPL; her work as a screenwriter on a Joris Ivens film called Stop Japan, the ma­ terial trace of which is currently unknown. Her two other known films, A Place to Live (1941), written with Ben Maddow, which was shown at MoMA, and All the Way Home (1958), were finished but have effectively

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disappeared. There were other film treatments and plans. There are traces of her 1940s work on Melville—a reader, a biography—that she stopped working on because Horace Gregory was doing “his own Melville.” She wrote short stories and published them often, but they are not collected; there are reviews and essays that also remain uncollected. Her transla­ tions are many, and are only just being given the attention they deserve— her translation of Rimbaud’s “Voyelles” has recently been recovered by Chris Clarke and published by Lost and Found, tracing its history and showing how it was originally published in Sergei Eisenstein’s The Film Sense (1942).7 It is a far superior translation to the one her embittered critic Delmore Schwartz published in the same period—should we be sur­ prised he spent so much time trying to undo her credibility? There is early journalism on civil rights and literary criticism for the Vassar Review and Vassar Miscellany, her founding of the literary magazine Housatonic (after Ives) with Elisabeth Bishop and Eunice and Eleanor Clark. There is her work with Thomas and Erika Mann on the short-lived but influential Decision magazine, which is being explored by Vike Martina Plock.8 There is her work with the San Francisco Exploratorium. There are her plays—The Middle of the Air, Houdini, and The Colors of the Day—which have received almost no scholarly attention but for a few articles. In the archive you can also trace networks and communities that are rarely explored—a life that I’ve seen in glimpses which is radical, glamor­ ous, innovative, complicated: the image of Rukeyser watching the first run of the Orson Welles–directed Federal Theater Project production The Cradle Will Rock; her 1930s political and artistic communities from Paul Robeson in Harlem to Lola Ridge on the Lower East Side; parties at Norma Shearer’s in Hollywood with Charlie Chaplin and Paulette God­ dard; her friendships with Copland and Bernstein; her time in San Miguel de Allende in the late 1930s; her collaborations with not just Abbott but Dorothea Lange and the feminist intellectuals of Berkeley in the 1940s; her correspondence with Hurston about Boas and anthropology; her in­ fluences on radical literary movements across the twentieth century. There is copious evidence of her long and complicated intellectual and artistic correspondence with women lovers and friends, from Carson McCullers to Edna St. Vincent Millay to Ella Winter to Alice Walker. (Marya Zaturenska joked in the early 1940s about being the only “non-lesbian”

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woman poet of “her generation.”)9 Her longest romantic partnership was with her literary agent Monica McCall. Rukeyser died at McCall’s apart­ ment. But she did not use the term lesbian to describe herself in public, as far as I have found. The history of midcentury American literature could be written through women’s artistic collaborations and friend­ ships, in the ways that Julie Abraham and recently Melanie Micir have rewritten European lesbian modernist networks in Are Girls Necessary? and The Passion Projects. The unpublished and unfinished work—the archival fragments—can move us toward these new understandings, to recognize communities and aesthetic legacies while also exposing the histories of suppression. Aware of the ways in which people refuse to see and to connect, Rukeyser asks us to look beyond what is most eas­ ily visible—the published text, the very existence of which as a tangible object that we can hold means we already accept, to some degree, the value judgment of a literary and cultural marketplace—and to go to the archives instead. She spends decades developing a formal space that allows her to hold voices and histories that have been suppressed, while acknowledging that their disappearance is not a sign of their value. Of course, she would argue the opposite—their disappearance is often a sign of their extraordinary value for challenging systems of power. As she wrote in her sixth “Elegy” in 1940, “I being wasted everywhere saw waste.”10 The unfinished work—messy, fragmented, diffuse, and hard to read, found in miscellany folders, in a folder in someone else’s archive—is, I think, the condition of women’s writing, and women’s lives, to a large extent. It should never be assumed that at any time the fraction of work that women have had published is at all representative of what they have actually produced. We need to move away from the assumption that pub­ lication confirms authorship, and that what is left incomplete in an ar­ chive confirms obscurity or unimportance. For what happens between the moment of creation and the moment of publication is a series of negotia­ tions with power structures that shape not only the culture in any given period but also the forms of the works themselves, and then our responses to them. The ideas and people Rukeyser focused her work on—the waste that leads to creation—affirm the need to situate the archive as a primary source if we want to gain access to a full understanding of our material and cultural histories, and find the fertile sources that help us understand

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and feel our complicated present. Rukeyser ends the final draft of her rejected essay on women writers, “Many Keys,” with this: To use the possibilities so that life is allowed and nourished; the life also of the forms. To make the forms so that experience is seen to include the world, so that all things of daily life are seen in their essential and full vi­ tality (so that the mysticism of the material will not survive as a deaden­ ing force among us); to understand the withdrawals before experience, when they are made in generalization, in the impersonal and anti-sexual, and then are for the sake of more life. To move as listeners, until criticism becomes a response to the world with that particular work of art in it. To explore the recurrent, to explore the receptive in its full relationship to all creative aspects of life. To move with the receptive until it finds its forms, so that the buried life finds its poetry, in all its voices, approaching alive and now.11

To approach, to be open, to be in the processes of. On the earth, in the waste and irresistible ruins, in the compost, in the body. When I started this book, I believed that the importance of reading Rukeyser’s unfinished work was ultimately about finding a way toward a more equitable and radical future, a utopian strategy—that her work looks to some future where people are valued, where bodies can exceed their boundaries and desire whoever they want, to a time when white nationalist patriarchal capitalism is not the state of emergency we are always living in. But that’s not the whole story. Rukeyser’s work, finished and unfinished, is about learning how to be “receptive” to the world we are living in right now. It asserts that any future worth imagining actually depends on the accep­ tance of our unfinishedness in the present, on the recurrences of searching, looking, undoing, on the connections we form and in the prodigal waste we are born into and make our way through. The unfinishedness is about learning to be always “approaching alive and now.”

Notes

Introduction 1. Muriel Rukeyser as quoted by Denise Levertov in a letter that Levertov sent to Ruke­ yser, ALS, June 17, 1965, Incoming Correspondence, 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, hereafter cited as MRC, NYPL. All archival and unpublished work cited with the generous permission of William L. Rukeyser. 2. In Kate Daniels’s 1985 essay “Searching/Not Searching,” Poetry East 16–17 (Spring/ Summer 1985): 70–93, about her failed Rukeyser biography, she writes about the kinds of things people said when she interviewed them: “I think of all the people I’ve interviewed, men and women, whose first comments have so often been about Muriel’s appearance. ‘She was very obese,’ a famous critic said immediately to me, and waved his hand dismissively. I didn’t know her well” (92). But equally odd is how Daniels herself focuses on Rukeyser’s body too, writing about how, looking at a picture, “I go over and over the bulge of chin, the furrows of slack skin in her cheeks” (72), as if she too can’t stop focusing on the female body as the sub­ ject of her biography. 3. These comments are from reviews by Delmore Schwartz (“A Helen”) as quoted in James Brock, “The Perils of a ‘Poster Girl’: Rukeyser, Partisan Review, and Wake Island,” in How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet? The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser, ed. Anne Herzog and Janet Kaufman (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 258; Louise Bogan (“a sibyl”) in “Verse,” The New Yorker, November 3, 1951, 150–51; Randall Jarrell (“a siren”) in

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“A Verse Chronicle,” The Nation, May 8, 1948, 512–13, reprinted in Poetry and the Age (New York: Vintage Books, 1953), 163–64; and R. P. Blackmur (“confused”), “Notes on Eleven Poets,” Kenyon Review 7, no. 2 (Spring 1945): 346–47. 4. For more on Rukeyser’s critics, see Kate Daniels, “Muriel Rukeyser and Her Literary Critics,” in Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers, ed. Margaret Dickie and Thomas Travisano (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 247–63; Brock, “Perils of a ‘Poster Girl,’” 254–63; Louise Kertesz, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Ruke­ yser (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980); Walter Kalaidjian, “Muriel Ruke­ yser and the Poetics of Specific Critique: Rereading the ‘Book of the Dead,’” Cultural Critique 20 (Winter 1991–92): 65–88; and David Bergman, “Ajanta and the Rukeyser Imbroglio,” American Literary History 22, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 553–83. 5. For foundational feminist scholarship, I’m thinking of the field-changing work of San­ dra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Elaine Showalter, Susan Stanford Friedman, Cheryl Wall, Jane Marcus, Mary Helen Washington, Hazel Carby and Alicia Ostriker, among others, that so many of us have learned to think through. 6. Anne Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” in Glass, Irony and God (New York: New Di­ rections, 1996), 121. 7. Salma Hayek, “Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too,” New York Times, Decem­ ber 12, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/13/opinion/contributors/salma­ hayek-harvey-weinstein.html. 8. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, ed. Jane Marcus (New York: Harcourt, 2006), 128. 9. This line is from a 1968 biographical poem about the German artist Käthe Kollwitz; it is about the complex aftermath of the world wars. See The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, ed. Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 460. 10. Robert Hatch, [The Nation], typescript letter to Muriel Rukeyser, April 22, 1957. MRC, NYPL. 11. Muriel Rukeyser, “Many Keys,” unpublished [1957], box 1:16, Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, hereafter cited as MRP, LOC. 12. Rukeyser’s own words would be used to frame the new feminist literary studies, with lines of her poems used for the titles of works such as Florence Howe and Ellen Bass, No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women (New York: Doubleday, 1973); Louise Berkinow, The World Split Open: Women Poets, 1550–1950 (New York: Women’s Press, 1979); Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (New York: Penguin, 1999); and Margaret Atwood’s more recent, though depoliticized, contribu­ tion, The World Split Open: Great Writers on Why and How We Write (Portland, OR: Tin House, 2014). 13. Rukeyser, “Many Keys,” 11–12. 14. Reader report for Savage Coast, n.d., box 1:23, MRP, LOC. 15. Lexi Rudnitsky has written about the play in “Planes, Politics, and Protofeminist Poetics: Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘Theory of Flight’ and The Middle of the Air,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 27, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 237–57. 16. These can be found in the MRC, NYPL. The MoMA films are in the public domain. Ivens made The Spanish Earth with Hemingway. 17. Louise Bogan, “Verse,” The New Yorker, November 3, 1951, 150. 18. Muriel Rukeyser, “The Usable Truth,” in drafts and related material, “Life of Poetry,”1940s, box 1:43, MRP, LOC, 25. 19. Jane Marcus, “Still Practice A/Wrested Alphabet: Toward a Feminist Aesthetics,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 3, no. 2 (1984): 79–97.

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20. I refer to monographs such as Melanie Micir’s The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019); Alix Beeston’s In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); and Jill Richards’s The Fury Archives: Female Cit­ izenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes (New York: Columbia Uni­ versity Press, 2020), as well as special issues on feminism and modernism edited by Anne Fernald (Modern Fiction Studies, 2014) and Urmila Seshagiri (Modernism/Modernity Print+, 2017), and Cassandra Laity’s journal Feminist Modernist Studies (begun in 2018), among others. 21. Micir, Passion Projects, 139. Anne Fernald has also written about the importance of biography for feminist literary studies in her 2017 article “Choice and Change: Modern Women, 1910–1950,” Modernism/Modernity Print+ 2, cycle 2 (August 7, 2017), https://doi. org/10.26597/mod.0024. 22. Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press/Wesleyan University Press, 1996) 88. 23. Bogan, “Verse” (1951), 151, and “The Heart and the Lyre,” in Selected Criticism: Prose, Poetry (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), 342. 24. In Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), Alan Filreis discusses a 1959 essay by Hilton Kramer, “To Hell with Culture,” that describes the “fortunate” shatter­ ing of the “alliance” of a radical-modernism brought on by the Cold War (47). 25. Filreis, Counter-Revolution of the Word, 98. 26. Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 21. 27. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “Introduction: The Female Imagination and the Modernist Aesthetics,” Women’s Studies: An Inter-disciplinary Journal 13, no. 1–2 (1986): 1. 28. Mary Helen Washington, The Other Black List: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 181. 29. Rukeyser wrote this in a letter to Louis Untermeyer in 1940, as quoted in Filreis, Counter-Revolution of the Word, 115. 30. Frances Stonor Saunders details this intricately in The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2001). 31. Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplo­ macy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 2. 32. Filreis, Counter-Revolution of the Word, 98. 33. Filreis, 166, xi. 34. Filreis 105. See, for example, Ruth Rosen’s detailed history of women’s lives in the 1950s in The World Split Open. 35. Landon R.Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 106. 36. Muriel Rukeyser to Marya Zaturenska, n.d., Horace Gregory Papers, Special Collec­ tions Research Center, Syracuse University Library, hereafter cited as HGP. 37. This is the phrase Michael Kimmage uses to discuss the anticommunist left in his book The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of AntiCommunism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). 38. This is in a letter from Rukeyser to Marya Zaturenska, n.d., HGP. Lexi Rudnitsky also quotes a similar remark about Bogan and “sex hormones” in a letter Rukeyser wrote to May Sarton, which can be found in the May Sarton Papers, folder 13, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library.

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39. R. S. P. (the editors), “The Grandeur and Misery of a Poster Girl,” Partisan Review 10, no. 5 (September 1943): 471–73. This review is discussed extensively in Daniels, “Muriel Rukeyser and Her Critics”; Bergman, “Ajanta and the Rukeyser Imbroglio”; Kertesz, The Po­ etic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser; Filreis, Counter-Revolution of the Word. 40. Quoted in Brock, “Perils of a ‘Poster Girl,’” 256–58. 41. R.S.P., “Grandeur and Misery of a Poster Girl,” 472. 42. Oscar Williams, “Ladies’ Day,” The New Republic, October 23, 1944, 534. 43. Muriel Rukeyser to Marya Zaturenska, n.d., HGP. 44. For example, Rukeyser’s observation predates the scholarship of foundational fem­ inist theorizing and criticism of Adrienne Rich, bell hooks, Elaine Showalter, Jane Marcus, Alicia Ostriker, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Hazel Carby, Cheryl Wall, Lillian Robin­ son, and many others. 45. Ironically, as Rukeyser scholars like Kertesz have pointed out before, Rich would soon revolt from her position as modest daughter of postwar lyric poetry, remaking herself as one of the most radical poets of the new women’s movement in the mold of Rukeyser, whose work Rich would champion and keep alive for decades. 46. Bogan, “Verse” (1951), 150–51. 47. John Crowe Ransom’s 1937 essay “The Poet as Woman,” for example. 48. Louise Bogan, “Women,” in Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923–1968  (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 19; Louise Bogan, “The Heart and the Lyre,” in Selected Criticism: Prose, Poetry (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), 341. 49. Elisabeth Caroline Dodd, The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet: H.D., Louise Bogan, Elisabeth Bishop, and Louise Gluck (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 94. 50. Louise Bogan, Achievement in American Poetry (New York: H. Regnery Co., 1951), 92. 51. Bogan, 92. 52. Kertesz, Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser, 241. 53. Rukeyser to Zaturenska, n.d., HGP. 54. Muriel Rukeyser to Horace Gregory, 1942, HGP. 55. See the VIDA count, for example: https://www.vidaweb.org/. 56. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004), 13. 57. Nancy Cunard, “Pamiatnik—Memorial of the Bittersweet,” The Poems of Nancy Cu­ nard from The Bodleian Library (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2005), 40. 58. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 17. 59. Berenice Abbott, from a proposal Abbott sent to the Carnegie Mellon Corporation (Charles Dollard, Carnegie Corporation to BA, TLS, Mar 25, 1940, CG) quoted in Julia Van Haaften, Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography (New York: Norton, 2018), 280. 60. Muriel Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs (New York: Dutton, 1942), 5. 61. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 94. 62. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, drafts and related material, 1940s, box 1:43, MRP, LOC. 1. Costa Brava 1. Muriel Rukeyser, “Waterlily Fire,” in The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, ed. Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2005), 403. 2. Muriel Rukeyser, “Poem,” in Collected Poems, 554. 3. Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press/Wesleyan University Press, 1996), xi. 4. Muriel Rukeyser, “Mediterranean,” in Collected Poems, 144.

Note s to Pages 2 8 –4 0

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5. Muriel Rukeyser, Elegies, in Collected Poems, 299–328; and “Segre Song,” in Col­ lected Poems, 434. 6. Diaries, box I:1, Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, hereafter cited as MRP, LOC. 7. H.D. to Rukeyser, n.d., folder: Incoming Correspondence, Muriel Rukeyser Collec­ tion of Papers, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Lit­ erature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, hereafter cited as MRC, NYPL. 8. “For O.B.” can be read in Muriel Rukeyser, “Barcelona, 1936” & Selections from the Spanish Civil War Archive, ed. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein (New York: CUNY, 2011), 24. 9. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (New York: Norton, 2019), 7. 10. Muriel Rukeyser, note, n.d., manuscript box, MRC, NYPL. 11. This is a recurring motif in Doris Lessing’s midcentury novels, and it echoes Ruke­ yser’s and Woolf’s work. Lessing first uses the phrase in Martha Quest (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 9. 12. Muriel Rukeyser, “Josiah Willard Gibbs,” Physics Today 2, no. 2 (1949): 10. 13. Rukeyser uses the phrase “moment of proof” in many different poems and texts, even ones written before she went to Spain, but the phrase opens her 1939 book A Turning Wind (1939) in the Collected Poems, 155. 14. Muriel Rukeyser, box 1:52, MRP, LOC. 15. Rukeyser, “For O.B.,” 24. 16. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 30. 17. Rukeyser, Savage Coast, 301. 18. Otto Boch to Muriel Rukeyser, box 1:4, folder: General Correspondence, MRP, LOC. 19. Rukeyser, “Mediterranean,” in Collected Poems, 150. 20. Rukeyser, Savage Coast, 168. 21. Reader report for Savage Coast, unsigned, n.d., box 1:23, MRP, LOC. 2. Her Symbol Was Civil War 1. Muriel Rukeyser, Savage Coast, ed. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein (New York: Feminist Press, 2013), 142. 2. Rukeyser, 184. 3. Pascal Covici [Covici-Friede], typed letter to Rukeyser, 1936, Incoming Correspon­ dence, 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 Founda­ tions, hereafter cited as MRC, NYPL. 4. Quoted in Louise Kertesz, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser (Baton Rouge: Lou­ isiana State University Press, 1980), 43. 5. For further discussion of modernist women writers’ transgressions of traditional liter­ ary boundaries, see Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of 20th-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); and Paula Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America (Cha­ pel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 6. Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire, 96. 7. Valentine Cunningham, Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), xix. You can read comprehensive discussions about the centrality of the civil war for antifascist modernist writers in Antony Beevor, Valentine Cunningham, Peter Carroll, Helen Graham, Cary Nelson, Paul Preston, and others.

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8. Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 29. As Graham notes, Franco wanted not just to conquer but to fully subjugate and destroy the enemy (29, 32). 9. Many American companies had factories in Spain, including Ford and General Mo­ tors. Over the course of the war, along with Studebaker, they supplied twelve thousand trucks to Franco’s army. Dupont provided forty thousand bombs, sent via Germany. The Texas Oil Company and Standard Oil supplied more than 3.5 million tons of oil, on credit, to the fas­ cists. See Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 (New York: Penguin, 2006). After Mussolini bombed Addis Ababa in May 1936, Spain used the aerial bombing of civilians as a war tactic, most famously in the bombing of Guernica by the Ger­ man Condor Legion. 10. Muriel Rukeyser, “We Came for Games.”  Esquire, October 1974, reprinted in Sav­ age Coast, 296. Russia and Mexico (though minimally) were the only countries that actively supported the Republican government in defense of itself, and while much has been written about the “communist influence” and the rifts in the Popular Front between revolution and liberal democracy, between anarchism and communism, Helen Graham has noted that the in­ fluence, both ideological and military, of communist Russia was nothing compared to that of Hitler and Mussolini. 11. Muriel Rukeyser, “The Gates,” in The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, ed. Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2006), 550 12. Muriel Rukeyser, manuscript of Savage Coast, box1: 23, Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, hereafter cited as MRP, LOC; Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 8. 13. The Mexican Suitcase was a 2007 exhibition at the International Center of Photog­ raphy on lost Spanish Civil War photographs taken by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and Chim (David Seymour). 14. There is ongoing work on Josephine Herbst, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Nancy Cu­ nard that is aggregating their vast out-of-print writing on the war. Martha Gellhorn’s collected essays, The Face of War (London: Granta, 1998), begins with her Spanish Civil War journal­ ism but has only recently become the subject of scholarship on the Civil War. 15. Cunningham, Spanish Front, and Paul Preston, The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), tend to eschew women’s par­ ticipation entirely, though Cary Nelson’s continued work on the subject offers an important view of American volunteers and correspondents that includes women. In addition to Span­ ish Front, Cunningham also edited The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse (London: Penguin, 1980). 16. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Mariner, 2006), 168. 17. Kate Daniels, “Muriel Rukeyser and Her Literary Critics,” in Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers, ed. Margaret Dickie and Thomas Travisano (Phil­ adelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 247–63. 18. Daniels, 247. 19. Rukeyser, “We Came for Games,” 284. 20. Muriel Rukeyser, “Barcelona, 1936” & Selections from the Spanish Civil War Ar­ chive, ed. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein (New York: CUNY, 2011). 21. Muriel Rukeyser, “Barcelona on the Barricades,” New Masses, September 1, 1936, 11. 22. Rukeyser, “We Came for Games,” 192. The question is phrased a bit differently in The Life of Poetry and again in “Mediterranean.” 23. Kertesz, Poetic Vision. 24. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 20. 25. Alan M. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-TwentiethCentury Literary Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 305.

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26. Rukeyser, from her autobiographical entry “Muriel Rukeyser” in Twentieth Cen­ tury Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature, edited by Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycroft (New York: H. H. Wilson, 1942), 1210. For more on Rukeyser’s radical uses of the documentary, read Catherine Gander’s invaluable Muriel Rukeyser and Documen­ tary: The Poetry of Connection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 27. Jane Marcus, introduction to Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf (New York: Mari­ ner, 2006), xlvi. 28. For a more detailed discussion of the modernist documentary, see William Stott, Joseph Entin, Walter Kalaidjian, Paula Rabinowitz, Alan Wald, and Jane Marcus. 29. Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire, 3. 30. Martha Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Eman­ cipation of Women (London: AK Press, 2005), 21. 31. Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press/Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 30 32. Emma Goldman, Anarchism: What It Really Stands For (New York: Mother Earth Publications, 1911), 7. 33. Rukeyser, Savage Coast, 264. 34. Rukeyser, 264. 35. H.D. rewrote the narrative of Helen of Troy in her experimental epic poem Helen in Egypt. 36. Hart Crane, “For the Marriage of Helen and Faustus,” The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (New York: Liveright, 2001). As quoted in Savage Coast, 111. 37. D. H. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Ruke­ yser writes often in her journal about Lawrence, and his influence on her early work is clear, particularly his explicit renderings of sexuality and his discussion of a dynamics and meta­ physics of poetry. Perhaps most important, though, is his Studies in Classic American Litera­ ture (New York: Seltzer, 1923). 38. Rukeyser, Savage Coast, 93. 39. Rukeyser, 94. 40. Rukeyser, 95. 41. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod, 317. 42. Mara Kalnins, introduction to Aaron’s Rod by D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1998), xxvi. 43. Rukeyser, Savage Coast, 12. 44. M. M. Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. Mcgee, edited by Caryl Em­ erson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 23. 45. Rukeyser, Savage Coast, 93 (“reach action”) and 266 (“free from fear”). 46. Rukeyser, 184. 47. Rukeyser, 184. 48. Rukeyser, 184–85. 49. Rukeyser, 219. 50. Rukeyser, “Mediterranean,” Collected Poems, 145. 51. Rukeyser, 267. 52. Rukeyser, 267. 53. Reader report for Savage Coast, unsigned, n.d., box 1:23, MRP, LOC. 54. Susan Howe writes that the “stutter,” or “what is silenced or not quite silenced,” is an essential trope of American literature, in The Birth-Mark. Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 181. 55. William Stott, Documentary Expression and 30s America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 78.

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56. In the works of Orwell and Hemingway, for example, the narrative is centered on an unrealistically prescient and competent foreign, male protagonist, emphasizing a paternalistic and imperialist rendering of the workers and militiamen of Spain. 57. Rukeyser, Savage Coast, 171. 58. Rukeyser, 113. 59. Rukeyser, 7. 60. Laura Hartmann-Villalta, “Witness to War: Photography, Anglophone Women’s Writing, and the Spanish Civil War” (PhD diss., Northeastern University, 2016), 156. 61. Rukeyser, Savage Coast, 266. 62. Thanks to William Rukeyser and Jan Heller Levi for their thoughts on this. 63. Rukeyser, Savage Coast, 114. 64. Rukeyser, “We Came for Games,” originally published in Esquire, October 1, 1974, republished as an appendix in my edition of Savage Coast, 293. 65. James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 66. Rukeyser, Savage Coast, 135. 67. Boch wrote this in a letter to Rukeyser, in box I:4, MRP, LOC. 68. Rukeyser, Savage Coast, 118. 69. Kertesz, Poetic Vision, 319. The lines referenced are from “Endless,” The Collected Poems, 445. 70. See R.P.S. (the editors), “The Grandeur and Misery of a Poster Girl,” Partisan Review 10, no. 5 (September 1943): 471–73. 71. This is a concept Julie Abraham develops for reading women modernists in Are Girls Necessary? Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 72. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1968), 8. 73. Rukeyser, Savage Coast, 268. 74. Rukeyser and Naumburg collaborated on The Book of the Dead, with Naumburg’s photos accompanying the original text, finally printed together in Catherine Venable Moore’s edition (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2017). 75. Muriel Rukeyser to Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska, n.d., box 11, Horace Gregory Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, hereafter cited as HGP. 76. This is from a conversation I had with Kertesz about her discussions with Rukeyser when she was writing her monograph, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser. “A tale told” is from a subsequent letter to the Gregorys. Muriel Rukeyser to Marya Zaturenska and Hor­ ace Gregory, n.d., box 11, HGP. 77. Muriel Rukeyser to Marya Zaturenska, n.d., box 11, HGP. 78. Muriel Rukeyser to Marya Zaturenska and Horace Gregory, n.d., box 11, HGP. 79. Reader report for Savage Coast, unsigned, n.d., box 1:23, Miscellany, MRP, LOC. 80. Horace Gregory, The Shield of Achilles: Essays on Belief and Poetry (New York: Harcourt, 1944), 192. 81. Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire, 6. 82. Wald, Exiles, 123. 83. Eleanor Clark to Muriel Rukeyser, n.d., TLS, 1937, folder: Incoming correspondence, MRC, NYPL. 84. These ideas reflected a renewed interest in John Dewey and the American Pragmatic tradition, as Catherine Gander deftly outlines in her essay on Rukeyser and Pragmatism, “Poetry as Embodied Experience: The Pragmatist Aesthetics of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry,” Textual Practice 32, no. 7 (2018): 1205–29.; Clark to Rukeyser, n.d., MR, ALS, folder: Incoming Correspondence, MRC, NYPL.

Note s to Pages 6 3 –7 1

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85. Gregory to Muriel Rukeyser, n.d., MR, ALS, folder: Incoming Correspondence, MRC, NYPL. 86. Gregory to Rukeyser, n.d., MR, ALS, folder: Incoming Correspondence, MRC, NYPL. Gregory’s idea probably refers to Poe’s in “The Philosophy of Composition,” published in 1846, where Poe asserts a view that a writer should work to engender one kind of response from the reader. W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s poetic-drama The Ascent of F6 was produced in 1936. 87. Muriel Rukeyser, “The Usable Truth,” in The Life of Poetry, drafts and related mate­ rial, 1940s, box 1:43, MRP, LOC, 42. 88. Rukeyser, “Usable Truth,” 31. 89. Horace Gregory to Muriel Rukeyser, n.d., MR, ALS, folder: Incoming Correspon­ dence, MRC, NYPL. 90. Richard Eberhart, review of One Life, “Willkie’s Life and His World in this ManySided Medley,” New York Herald Tribune Book Review, April 28, 1957, 4. 91. Eberhart, 4. 3. Mother of Exiles 1. Muriel Rukeyser to Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska, n.d., box 11, Horace Gregory Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, hereaf­ ter cited as HGP. 2. Rukeyser to Gregory and Zaturenska, n.d., box 11, HGP. 3. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 30. 4. Ann Sexton. This phrase was used in a letter to Rukeyser, November 1, 1967, in Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters, ed. Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 322. Adrienne Rich and Erica Jong used similar phrases to describe Ruke­ yser’s influence. 5. Adrienne Rich, “Quarto,” The Nation, May 20, 2009. 6. Muriel Rukeyser, The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, ed. Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 299. Unless otherwise indi­ cated, all poems are quoted from this source. 7. Marina Camboni, “Networking Women: Subjects, Places, Links Europe-America, 1890–1939,” In-Conference, How2 Journal 2, no. 1 (2003), https://www.asu.edu/pipercw center/how2journal/archive/online_archive/v2_1_2003/current/in_conference/networking­ women/camboni.htm. Included in this issue is an essay by Gigliola Sacerdoti Mariani on Rukeyser’s archive at the New York Public Library. It is one of the first essays to map Rukey­ ser’ Spanish Civil War writing through her archival materials. 8. Rukeyser, “Mediterranean,” Collected Poems, 149. 9. The Book of the Dead, if not yet canonical, is certainly an exemplary text of doc­ umentary modernism, and the one work of Rukeyser’s discussed with any consistency. For more detailed discussion on the modernist documentary, see William Stott, Joseph Entin, Walter Kalaidjian, Paula Rabinowitz, Alan Wald, and Jane Marcus. 10. Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press/Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 35. 11. Louise Kertesz, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 121. 12. Muriel Rukeyser, Savage Coast, ed. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein (New York: Feminist Press, 2013), 11. 13. Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

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14. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 8. 15. These include Camp Gurs, Camp Vernet, and Camp de Rivesaltes. 16. Muriel Rukeyser, “We Came for Games,” Esquire, October 1974, reprinted in Savage Coast (Feminist Press, 2013), 297. 17. Rukeyser, “Mediterranean,” 442. 18. Rukeyser, “The Return,” 233. 19. Rukeyser, “Mediterranean,” 144. 20. Rukeyser, “Mediterranean,” 151. 21. Rukeyser, “rifle-shot” and “sea of war” from “Mediterranean,” 145–46; “speaking, somehow” from The Life of Poetry, 2. 22. Rukeyser, “Mediterranean,”145. 23. Rukeyser, “We Came for Games,” Savage Coast,  290. 24. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2004), 57. 25. Kertesz, Poetic Vision, 319. 26. Rukeyser, Collected Poems, 426. 27. Traditionally the “epic” is, of all the poetic structures, the one most attuned to history, the one used to write politics and war—one that the poet Alice Notley describes in Homer’s Art as occupied with “the grand events of men” (in Selected Poems of Alice Notley [Hoboken, NJ: Talisman House Press, 1993], 113). Throughout the twentieth century, women writers have often revised, remade, and rewritten the epic form to include women. This practice can be traced from Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti to Hope Mirrlees, H.D., Gwendolyn Brooks, and Alice Notley, continuing into the twenty-first century. 28. Rukeyser, “Mediterranean,” 148. 29. Juliana Spahr, “Postmodernism, Readers, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée,” College Literature 23, no. 3 (October 1996): 30. 30. Muriel Rukeyser, “The Long Step Ahead Taken by Gregory in New Epic Poem,” Daily Worker, March 19, 1935, 2. 31. Rukeyser, “Mediterranean,” 147. 32. Susan Stanford Friedman’s germinal 1986 essay “Gender and Genre Anxiety: Eliza­ beth Barrett Browning and H.D. as Epic Poets,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5, no. 2 (1986): 203–28, is foundational to my understanding of Rukeyser as an epic poet, and in her discussion of the ways in which genres have been gendered. 33. This is discussed further in chapter 6 on Franz Boas. 34. Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure,” in The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 43. 35. Catherine Gander discusses this in various ways in Muriel Rukeyser and Documen­ tary: The Poetics of Connection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Rukeyser modifies Gibbs’s idea of “phase rule” from his theory of thermodynamic equilibrium, but it is also a musical metaphor, for example, one that Steve Reich uses in his tape work in the 1960s, what is referred to as “phase music.” 36. Rukeyser, “Käthe Kollwitz,” Collected Poems, 461. 37. “Craft Interview,” New York Quarterly Review, no. 11 (Summer 1972): 24–25. 38. This can be found in “Mediterranean” and her early poems on Spain; in her articles in Life and Letters To-day, New Masses, the New York Times, and Esquire; in the introduc­ tion to and text of The Life of Poetry; and in Savage Coast. 39. Rukeyser, “Mediterranean,” 147. 40. Rukeyser, “We Came for Games,” 294.

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41. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 2. 42. Muriel Rukeyser, “Barcelona, 1936” & Selections from the Spanish Civil War Ar­ chive, ed. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein (New York: CUNY, 2011), 22. 43. Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, 187. 44. Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, 3. 45. This idea is from Édouard Glissant, “The Known, The Unknown,” in Caribbean Dis­ course: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989), 65. 46. Rukeyser, Savage Coast, 266. 47. Rukeyser, “Barcelona, 1936” & Selections, 25. 48. Rukeyser, Savage Coast, 266. 49. Rukeyser, 265. 50. A good history of this brigade is in Arnold Krammer, “German’s against Hitler: The Thaelmann Brigade,” Journal of Contemporary History 4, no. 2 (April 1969): 65–83. 51. Rukeyser, “We Came for Games,” 296. 52. Rukeyser, “Long Past Moncada,” Collected Poems, 232. 53. Rukeyser, “Endless,” 445. 54. Rukeyser, “We Came for Games,” 300. 55. Rukeyser, 300. 56. Rukeyser, “The Gates,” Collected Poems, 570. 57. There was a huge amount of fanfare from the left press about Auden “going over.” See Haynes, The Auden Generation; and Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties. 58. Valentine Cunningham, introduction to The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse (London: Penguin, 1980), 69–70. 59. W. H. Auden, “Spain,” in The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse (London: Penguin, 1980), 100. Haynes, The Auden Generation, 253. 60. An important note is that this line is from a poem that eulogizes Yeats, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” who was pro-Franco. 61. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 25. 62. Rukeyser, “Correspondences,” Collected Poems, 165. 63. See Kate Daniels; Kertesz, Poetic Vision; and David Bergman, “Ajanta and the Ruke­ yser Imbroglio,” American Literary History 22, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 553–83. 64. Rukeyser, “Letter to the Front,” Collected Poems, 242. 65. Rukeyser, “Fourth Elegy: The Refugees,” 242. 66. Rukeyser, “Letter to the Front,” 239–46. 67. H.D., The Walls Do Not Fall: Trilogy, ed. Aliki Barnstone (New York: New Direc­ tions, 1998), 40. 68. These are also the works that Oscar Williams belittled in his review “Ladies’ Day,” New Republic, October 23, 1944, 534. 4. Bad Influences and Willful Subjects 1. Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press/Wesleyan University Press, 1996), x. 2. Rukeyser, 17. 3. Rukeyser, 11. 4. “Many Keys” was originally titled “The Glass Woman” and was rejected by Robert Hatch, literary editor of The Nation. For the correspondence, see Ben Blake to Muriel Ruke­ yser, April 22, 1957, and Robert Hatch to Muriel Rukeyser, January 28, 1957, and April 22,

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1957, in folder: Incoming Correspondence, The Nation, New York, to MR, TLS, Berg Collec­ tion, New York Public Library. Eric Keenaghan has written about the publication history and contexts of “Many Keys” in “There Is No Glass Woman: Muriel Rukeyser’s Lost Feminist Essay ‘Many Keys,’” Feminist Modernist Studies 1, nos. 1–2 (2018): 186–204. 5. This is very nicely documented in Alan Filreis’s book Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960 (Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Likewise, F. O. Matthiessen, a friend of Rukeyser’s, had al­ ready begun a revaluation of Whitman in his 1941 American Renaissance: Art and Expres­ sion in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), but he came up against similarly repressive codes as Rukeyser. She wrote a poem dedicated to him after his suicide. 6. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 79. 7. Rukeyser, 9. 8. Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 2. 9. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (London: Oxford University Press, 1941); John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1941); Robert Penn Warren, “Pure and Impure Poetry,” Kenyon Review 5, no. 2 (Spring 1943): 228–54. Not to mention, in 1946, on the other side of the Atlantic, Orwell wrote an entire essay on “bad influences,” in “Politics and the English Language,” Horizon, April 1946. 10. Matthiessen wrote a response defending Rukeyser in the Partisan Review during the “Rukeyser Imbroglio” phase. 11. Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 12. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Penguin Classics, 2010), 45. 13. Kate Daniels, “Muriel Rukeyser and Her Literary Critics,” in Gendered Modern­ isms: American Women Poets and Their Readers, ed. Margaret Dickie and Thomas Travisano (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 250. 14. Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 3. 15. Ahmed, 3. 16. Louise Bogan, “Verse,” The New Yorker, November 3, 1951, 150–51. 17. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 77. 18. Louis Untermeyer, “The Language of Muriel Rukeyser,” Saturday Review, August 10, 1940, 11–13. 19. Eric Keenaghan, “The Life of Politics: The Compositional History of The Life of Po­ etry and Muriel Rukeyser’s Changing Appraisal of Emotion and Belief,” Textual Practice 32, no. 7 (2018): 1108. 20. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 207. 21. Muriel Rukeyser, “The Usable Truth,” in The Life of Poetry, drafts and related ma­ terial, 1940s, box 1:43, Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, hereafter cited as MRP, LOC. 22. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer and Now,” in Tendencies (Durham: Duke Univer­ sity Press, 1993), 8. 23. Catherine Gander, “Muriel Rukeyser, America, and the ‘Melville Revival,’” Journal of American Studies 44, no. 4 (November 2010): 759–75; Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 74, 76. 24. Muriel Rukeyser, Savage Coast, ed. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein (New York: Feminist Press, 2013), 8. 25. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 76. 26. Quoted in William May, Stevie Smith and Authorship (New York: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 2010), 130.

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27. Ernest Hemingway, A Movable Feast (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), 118. 28. This is discussed in the next chapter, on Franz Boas. 29. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 90; Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 1. 30. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 95. 31. Muriel Rukeyser, “Many Keys,” typescript draft, n.d. [1957], unpublished, box 1:16, MRP, LOC. 32. Otto Rank, also well loved by D. H. Lawrence, was an Austrian psychoanalyst who used psychoanalytic theory to study legend, myth, and art, and also studied birth trauma. 33. Rukeyser, “Many Keys.” “Poet’s Plotto” is a nod to the pulp fiction idea that there are only a set number of possible “plots” in a novel and that a book will inevitably fall into one of those categories. Women’s lives, Rukeyser argues, are not legible in such a way. 34. Rukeyser, 11–12. 35. Rukeyser, 9. 36. Muriel Rukeyser, “Women of Words: A Prefatory Note,” in The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552–1950, ed. Louise Bernikow (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), xiii–xv.  37. Rukeyser, “Usable Truth,” 32. 38. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), 42. 39. Rukeyser, “Many Keys,” 7. 40. Hatch to Rukeyser, April 22, 1957, 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. 41. Rukeyser, “Many Keys,” 4. 42. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 48. 43. Rukeyser, 47–48. 44. R.S.P. (the editors), “The Grandeur and Misery of a Poster Girl,” Partisan Review 10, no. 5 (September 1943): 472. 45. “Notes on Current Books,” Virginia Quarterly Review 26, no. 2 (Spring 1950): 6. 46. Eric Keenaghan, “Life of Politics,” MLA Special Session Roundtable “Re/Considering Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry,” 2016, 4. 47. Kenneth Rexroth, whom she knew well, would go on to produce his own poetry radio program from KPFA/Pacifica not many years later. 48. Muriel Rukeyser, Sunday at Nine radio script, box 11:14, MRP, LOC, 1. 49. Rukeyser, Sunday at Nine, 2. 50. Alex Ross, “Pandemonium: Charles Ives,” The New Yorker, June 7, 2004. 51. David C. Paul, Charles Ives in the Mirror (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013) and Vivian Pollak, Our Emily Dickinson: American Women Poets and the Intimacies of Dif­ ference (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 52. Rukeyser, “Many Keys,” 1. 53. The Dickinson editions that Rukeyser had access to while producing the radio show would have remained heavily edited by Dickinson’s family members. It would not be until she was writing “Many Keys” that she might have had a truer sense of Dickinson’s vast formal scope; the Thomas H. Johnson edition didn’t come out until 1955. 54. See Pollak, Our Emily Dickinson. 55. Muriel Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs (New York: Dutton, 1942), 100. Vivian Pollak writes in her book on Dickinson’s influence on twentieth-century women writers that this was in fact an embellishment of a letter Dickinson wrote to her brother (Our Emily Dickinson, 4), but it shows us why Rukeyser identified her as a key radical figure who used “old forms” to think through our present forms.

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56. In the first radio script Rukeyser continued to develop a reading of American artistic production that not only ran counter to the pervasive New Critical approaches that were re­ defining tradition and form but also exemplified the “collisions and linkages” that she viewed as essential to artistic creation and democracy, developing ideas about the relationships be­ tween form and content, as she notes in the “The Usable Truth” lectures. Furthermore, as Catherine Gander shows, the ideas of Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and the emergence of American studies were equally influential for understanding the aesthetic and historical con­ cerns of the period. 57. Andreas Huyssen’s discussion in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) focuses on the pernicious reading by male modernists that women represent passive consumerism (46). 58. Pollak, Our Emily Dickinson, 9. 59. Rukeyser, “Many Keys,” 10. 60. Rukeyser, 9. 61. Rukeyser, Sunday at Nine, 3–4. 62. See also Martha Nell Smith’s Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992) and Judith Farr’s The Passion of Emily Dickinson (Cam­ bridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 63. As quoted in Harold C. Schonberg’s “Natural American, Natural Rebel, Natural Avant-Gardist,” New York Times, April 12, 1974. 64. Muriel Rukeyser, “Ives,” in Collected Poems, 198. 65. This is a really interesting history. In a letter from her friend and colleague I. Ber­ nard Cohen (also a history of science professor who helped her and Abbott), Cohen writes that Rukeyser made Copland’s career by introducing him to Bernstein (I. Berard Cohen to Rukeyser, box 11:1, MRP, LOC). The first introduction is detailed in Howard Pollack’s book Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (Champaign: University of Illi­ nois Press, 2000), 193. 66. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 20. 67. Luce Irigaray, “Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium, ‘Diotima’s Speech,’” in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 20–21. 68. Irigaray, 20. 69. Irigaray, 20. 70. Anne Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” in Glass, Irony and God (New York: New Di­ rections, 1995), 121. 71. Rukeyser, “Many Keys,” 2. 72. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 66. 73. Rukeyser, “Many Keys,” 3. 74. Muriel Rukeyser, “Myth,” in Collected Poems, 480. 75. Rukeyser, “Many Keys,” 3. 76. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 97; Rukeyser, “Many Keys,” 3. Georg Misch was a German philosopher who wrote the multivolume work A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, the first part of which was published in 1950. 77. Rukeyser, “Many Keys,” 3. 78. Carson, “Gender of Sound,” 130. 79. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 207. 80. Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 13. 81. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 94. 82. Rukeyser, 97. 83. Rukeyser, 206.

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84. Louise Bernikow, “Biography,” 1978, box 1:4, 8, MRP, LOC. 85. Bernikow, 9. 5. So Easy to See 1. Berenice Abbott to Muriel Rukeyser, August 5, 1948, unpublished, ALS, Muriel Rukeyser Collection, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, hereafter cited as MRC, NYPL. 2. Rukeyser and Abbott met at a party in 1939 and were neighbors in Greenwich Vil­ lage for some time. 3. Peter Middleton traces the relationship between the arts and sciences in this pe­ riod in his book Physics Envy: American Poetry and the Sciences in the Cold War and After (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 4. Julia Van Haaften, Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography (New York: Norton, 2018), 245. 5. Terri Weissman, The Realism of Berenice Abbott (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 81. 6. Berenice Abbott to Charles C. Adams, TLS, April 24, 1939, box 1:5, Berenice Abbott Papers, New York Public Library. 7. Muriel Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs (New York: Dutton, 1942), 5. 8. Middleton, Physics Envy, 3. 9. Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press/Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 17. 10. Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 15, no. 2, “Science and Art” (February 1959). 11. Muriel Rukeyser, So Easy to See, outline text, n.d., unpublished, box 11:12, 2, Mu­ riel Rukeyser Papers, Library of Congress, Washington DC, hereafter cited as MRP, LOC. 12. See, for instance, the work of Jane Marcus, Elaine Showalter, Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, among others. 13. For example, I could not have produced this work if Abbott’s biographer Julia Van Haaften hadn’t shared archival resources, or Stefania Heim hadn’t already worked through the archival traces of Willard Gibbs, or Catherine Gander hadn’t written about Rukeyser’s other photo-text projects. 14. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 40. 15. Muriel Rukeyser, introduction to So Easy to See, n.d., unpublished, box 11:12, 1, MRP, LOC. 16. Robert Oppenheimer, “The Growth of Science and the Structure of Culture,” Dae­ dalus (Winter 1958): 76. 17. Muriel Rukeyser, “We Came for Games,” Esquire, October 1974, reprinted in Savage Coast, ed. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein (New York: Feminist Press, 2013), 281–98. 18. “Craft Interview,” New York Quarterly Review, no. 11 (Summer 1972): 32. 19. See, for example, Catherine Gander’s Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); or my introduction to Savage Coast. 20. Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead, ed. Catherine Venable Moore (Morgan­ town: West Virginia University Press, 2018). 21. Muriel Rukeyser, FBI file, obtained through a FOIA request. 22. Rukeyser, “Words and Images,” New Republic 2 (August 1943): 140. 23. Quoted in Weissman, Realism of Berenice Abbott, 76.

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24. Weissman, 76. 25. Weissman, 79. 26. Suzanna Calev, “Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland in Changing New York,” MCNY Blog: New York Stories, https://blog.mcny.org/2013/06/25/berenice-abbott­ and-elizabeth-mccausland-in-a-changing-new-york/. Sarah M. Miller’s book Documentary in Dispute (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2018) restores Abbott and McCasuland‘s orginal project. 27. Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland, Changing New York (New York: The New Press, 1999). 28. Calev, “Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland.” 29. Rukeyser, “Endnote to the ‘Book of the Dead,’” in The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, ed. Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 604. 30. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 137. 31. Berenice Abbott, A Guide to Better Photography (New York: Crown, 1941), 1–2. 32. Van Haaften, Berenice Abbott, 249–50. 33. According to Van Haaften, Abbott wrote this in a registered letter that she sent to her­ self as a way to copywrite her invention in 1942 (248). 34. Van Haaften, 249. 35. Abbott’s Guggenheim application from late 1941 in Van Haaften, 251. 36. As quoted in George Sullivan’s Berenice Abbott, Photographer: An Independent Vi­ sion (New York: Clarion, 2006), 117 37. Abbott, as quoted in Van Haaften, Berenice Abbott, 256. 38. In 2012 the extraordinary science experiment photographs were finally published to­ gether in Berenice Abbott, Documenting Science (New York: Steidl, 2012). 39. Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs, 12. 40. Berenice Abbott, “Manifesto,” quoted in Weissman, Realism of Berenice Abbott, 181. 41. Philip Blair Rice, “Gibbs and the Age of Power,” review of Willard Gibbs by Muriel Rukeyser, Kenyon Review 5, no. 2 (1943): 310. 42. Stefania Heim, ‘‘‘Another Form of Life’: Muriel Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs, and Anal­ ogy,” Journal of Narrative Theory 43, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 368. 43. Rukeyser, So Easy to See, outline text, 1. 44. The conversation about World Publishing can be found in Rukeyser and Abbott’s correspondence, MRC, NYPL, and MRP, LOC. 45. Rukeyser, introduction to So Easy to See, draft, 4. 46. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 34. Perhaps Rukeyser was reading Heidegger around this time: “Has the thing never yet come near enough for man to learn how to attend sufficiently to the thing as thing?” Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hoftstadter (New York: Harper Perennial, 1975), 171. 47. Rukeyser, introduction to So Easy to See, draft, 4. 48. Rukeyser, So Easy to See, outline text, 6. 49. Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Cul­ ture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 16. 50. Shawn Michelle Smith, At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 6. 51. Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs, 365.

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52. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, included with the outline for the text of So Easy to See, n.d., unpublished, box 11:12, 1, MRP, LOC. The  original Bacon quotation can be found in The Works of Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England, Volume 3 (Philadelphia, 1944), 402. 53. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 2. The German text was circulated in the 1940s and published in 1947, but there was no English translation until the 1970s. I don’t think, though, that this should preclude the possibility that both Abbott and Rukeyser— situated as they were in literary, artistic, and political circles and able to read in multiple languages—didn’t have access to it. 54. Rukeyser, introduction to So Easy to See, 4. 55. Rukeyser, outline of text for So Easy to See, typed draft, n.d [with materials from 1946], 4. 56. Rukeyser, introduction to So Easy to See, draft, 6. 57. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001); 16. 58. Sidney R. Nagel and Itai Cohen’s image in “The Two Fluid Drop Snap-off Problem: Experiments and Theory” Physical Review Letters 83, no. 6 (February 1999): 6. 59. Muriel Rukeyser, “Foreword,” Berenice Abbott: Photographs (New York, 1970), 10. 60. Muriel Rukeyser, “An Unborn Poet,” in The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, ed. Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 591–92. 6. Pillars of Process 1. Muriel Rukeyser to Ernst Boas, 1947, MS coll. no. 10, Ernst P. Boas Papers, ser. 1: Correspondence, Muriel Rukeyser, American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia. 2. Zora Neale Hurston famously called him “Papa Franz.” 3. Eric Keenaghan, “Biocracy: Reading Poetic Politics through the Traces of Muriel Rukeyser’s Life-Writing,” Journal of Narrative Theory 43, no. 3 (2013): 266. 4. Catherine Gander, Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 166. 5. Franz Boas, Primitive Art (New York: Dover, 1955). 14. Rukeyser highlights this phrase in her own notes. 6. This was the newspaper of the National Student League, a grassroots communistaffiliated organization for high school and college students started at City College of New York. 7. Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 210. 8. Isaiah Lorado Wilner, “Transformation Masks: Recollecting the Indigenous Origins of Global Consciousness,” in Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas, ed. Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Lorado Wilner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 4. 9. Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019), 8. 10. Boas-Rukeyser Collection, box 3, American Philosophical Society: “His work de­ scribed by some of his contemporaries,” quoted in Catherine Gander, Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 154. 11. Deloria was Boas’s student and collaborator, a translator and ethnologist of the Da­ kota Sioux. Her book Waterlily is a beautiful modernist hybrid ethnographic novel about the life of a young Sioux woman. Her sister Mary Sully was an avant-garde artist whose work is only now being recognized.

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12. King, Gods of the Upper Air, 9. Boas, a secular German Jew, like Rukeyser, would develop his theories about the fictive nature of racial difference informed by his own experi­ ence of anti-Semitism. 13. Wilner, “Transformation Masks,” 4. 14. Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (New York: Kodansha USA, 1995), 5. 15. Marilyn Strathern, Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship, and the New Reproductive Technologies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 10. 16. Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press/Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 88. 17. “Untapped” is Wilner’s term in “Transformation Masks.” 18. Muriel Rukeyser to Alan Collins [president of Curtis Brown, LTD], April 11, 1951, box 1:5, Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, hereafter cited as MRP, LOC. Gander discusses why Rukeyser believed the documentary material of the Boas reader was crucial for the project, and that this was a continuation of his work. Gander, Mu­ riel Rukeyser and Documentary, 153. 19. Gander, Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary, 153. 20. Rukeyser to Alan Collins, MRP, LOC. 21. Considering Rukeyser and Orwell’s profoundly different political response to the fall of the Spanish Republic, their polarized positions in the literary establishment by the fifties of­ fers a stark illustration of how the antileft and antimodernist Cold War project can be traced to the fall of the republic in 1939. See Michael Wreszin, “Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: ScholarActivist in Cold War America, 1946–1956,” Salmagundi, no. 63/64 (1984): 265. 22. Muriel Rukeyser to Ella Winter, 1952, ser. 1: Catalogued Correspondences, Muriel Rukeyser, Ella Winter Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 23. Rukeyser to Winter. 24. Muriel Rukeyser, “Book Synopsis,” MSS B.B61ru, Boas-Rukeyser Collection, Franz Boas Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, hereafter cited as FBP, APS. 25. Rukeyser, “Book Synopsis.” 26. Rukeyser was sent to Ireland by the filmmaker Paul Rotha to scout a documentary film about the festival, but the film never came to be, and she wrote the book instead. 27. Muriel Rukeyser, The Orgy (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press/Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 15. 28. This is Wilner’s phrase, used in “Transformation Masks,” 4. 29. Rukeyser, “Book Synopsis.” 30. Traditionally, scholars look to nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century male theorists like Charles Sanders Peirce, Alfred North Whitehead, and John Dewey (Boas’s colleague), among others, to ground Rukeyser’s philosophical thinking by situating her process-poetics and participant-observer experimentalism in a visibly white and male lineage. While it’s true that Rukeyser read and was interested in those theorists, this chapter suggests that Rukey­ ser’s multidecade engagement with Indigenous culture, informed by her deep research for the Boas biography, might be far more foundational to her radical midcentury theoretical and lit­ erary projects. 31. Kirby Brown, “American Indian Modernities and New Modernist Studies’ ‘Indian Problem,’” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 59, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 11. 32. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 86; John Collier, “United States Indian Administration as a Laboratory of Ethnic Relations,” Social Research 12, no. 3 (September 1945): 302. 33. Wilner, “Transformation Masks,” 27. 34. Philip Metres, “‘With Ambush and Stratagem’: American Poetry in the Age of Pure War,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 341.

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35. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 68. This kind of thinking about “Eastern balance” corre­ sponds with the racial-spiritual imaginary of the San Francisco and West Coast poetry scenes in the postwar period, cultivated by writers like Kenneth Rexroth, Philip Whalen, Gary Sny­ der, Allen Ginsberg, Joanne Kyger, Anne Waldman, and others. But this is not an anomaly; the use of “Eastern” and American Indigenous ideas can also be read in William Carlos Wil­ liams, D. H. Lawrence, Mary Austin, and others. 36. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 62. 37. Muriel Rukeyser to Eleanor Clark, n.d., box 32, folders 464–466, Eleanor Clark Papers, Bienecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, Yale University. 38. This information can be found in the Katherine Field Caldwell oral history interview conducted by Suzanna B. Reiss, in 1992 and 1993, Regional Oral History Office, Univer­ sity of California, Berkeley. Both of these women have interesting histories in California— both were married to Berkeley professors and were intellectuals and radicals themselves. The transcript from the interview with Caldwell is worth sharing: “Henriette and my mother became very great friends. The thing about Henriette was she was enormously gen­ erous, but she was always anonymous. I’m told—again, this is probably an exaggeration— that if the symphony or the opera had a deficit they’d appeal to her and she’d pick up the tab. Now, to what extent—. Anyway, she never wanted to be given credit for her generosity. She and my mother were allied in the support of—turn that off. Just a minute, I must think of her name. [pauses] Muriel Rukeyser. My mother and Henriette decided to finance this woman through her pregnancy. And you can imagine years ago this was something! They insisted that she must have a ring when she was in the hospital, or the nurses would not like it. So they financed this. For years and years and years, Muriel would not say who was the father of this child. It was a boy, turned out to be very successful, I think in journalism [William L. Rukeyser]. Anyway, she decided to tell who the father was, and you’ll just never believe it! It was one of Robinson Jeffers’s sons. She said they had ‘a toss in the hay’ after a cocktail party. That’s what I heard.” 39. Interview with Ben Maddow in Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s, ed. Pat McGilligan (Berkeley: University of California Press 1997), 169. 40. The story was called “You, Johann Sebastian Bach.” It was published in the Hud­ son Review in 1967 and won the O’Henry Prize. The Rukeyser figure, as the title implies, is not a poet but a classical pianist in the story. It is not clear if Maddow and Rukeyser stayed in touch beyond the late forties. Maddow discusses Rukeyser in an interview for Backstory 2, a scholarly book on left-wing Hollywood. Maddow also named names dur­ ing the Red Scare, and it’s possible that this, among other things, affected her relationship with him. 41. Muriel Rukeyser to Eleanor Clark, n.d. [1947], box 32, folders 464–466, Eleanor Clark Papers, Bienecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, Yale University. 42. Muriel Rukeyser, “A Simple Theme,” Poetry 74, no. 4 (July 1949): 236–39. We now have a much bigger canon on the poetry of birth, particularly with the work of Mina Loy, which had fallen out of print by then. 43. Rukeyser, “Many Keys,” n.d. [1957], unpublished, box 1:16, 9–11, MRP, LOC. 44. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 61; Muriel Rukeyser, One Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), xxii. 45. Muriel Rukeyser, “Many Keys,” n.d. [1957], unpublished, box 1:16, 10, MRP, LOC. 46. Rukeyser, 9–11. 47. Muriel Rukeyser, “A Birth,” in The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, ed. Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 334. 48. Wilner, “Transformation Masks,” 12. 49. Wilner, 12.

188

N o te s to P age s 150–157

50. Wilner, 12. The fact that Boas undertook much of his work in collaboration, and ef­ fectively coauthorship, with George Hunt, the English-Tlingit translator who collected sto­ ries, artifacts, and material histories with him and for him, has complicated Boas’s legacy. As Wilner and others have shown, not only was Hunt’s role at first completely obscured in the history of cultural anthropology, but also even now, while Hunt has become far more visible, unsettling the notion of a single authority in ethnographic accounts, the role of prominent In­ digenous women in Boas’s documentary process is still often ignored. Likewise, while Boas’s collaborative mode of ethnographic work with the peoples he was recording could be read as innovative, dialogic, and open-ended, ideas Rukeyser certainly engaged with, he also col­ lected the cultural and linguistic history of colonized peoples for the consumption of a white audience. 51. Franz Boas, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, “Report of the United States National Museum for the Year Ending June 30, 1895,” 309–738, https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/29967. 52. Boas, 443. 53. In a letter to Ernst Boas, Rukeyser discusses having the films and bringing them from New York to Boas’s daughter in the Bay Area. Rukeyser, “Many Keys,” 12. 54. See the cluster Indigenous Modernities, ed. Kirby Brown, Modernism/Modernity Print+ 5, cycle 4, March 23, 2021. 55. Muriel Rukeyser, “The Place at Alert Bay,” in Collected Poems, 357. 56. No More Masks is the title of Florence Howe’s anthology of women’s writing, for example. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 174. 57. Lorrie Goldensohn, “Our Mother Muriel,” in How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet? The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser, ed. Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 122. 58. “Craft Interview,” New York Quarterly 11 (Summer 1972): 30. 59. Wilner, “Transformational Masks,” 9. 60. Muriel Rukeyser, “The Poem as Mask,” in The Collected Poems, 413. 61. Wilner, “Transformational Masks,” 5. 62. Wilner, 5. 63. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 50; Shira Wolosky, “Relational Aesthetics and Feminist Poetics,” New Literary History 41, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 571–91. 64. Wilner, “Transformational Masks,” 13. 65. Rukeyser, The Orgy, 67. 66. Wilner, “Transformational Masks,” 28–29. 67. Rukeyser, Orgy, 85. 68. Rukeyser, 73. This formal structure is repeated again in her 1961 play The Colors of the Day, written for the Vassar centennial. The title is taken from a story she was told while on Vancouver Island. The play is a surrealist revision of the story of Ishtar, the young woman stripped and then reborn, but told through the chorus of characters representing the history of the women’s college. There are also a series of myths from the Pacific Coast that have sim­ ilar narratives. 69. Rukeyser, “A Simple Theme,” 237. 70. Muriel Rukeyser, “Clues,” in Collected Poetry, 416. 71. “Craft Interview,” 29. 72. Muriel Rukeyser, “Indian Fiesta Huge Success,” The Nation, May 29, 1937, 616–18. 73. Muriel Rukeyser, “The Usable Truth,” 27. 74. Rukeyser, The Orgy, 26.

Note s to P ages 1 5 8 –1 6 8 75. 76. 77. 78.

189

Boas, Primitive Art, 276 Wilner, “Transformational Masks,” 9. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 86. Rukeyser, “The Usable Truth,” 41.

Conclusion 1. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writ­ ings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 392. 2. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 74. 3. Muriel Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs (New York: Dutton, 1942), 1. 4. Rukeyser, 1. 5. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 1. 6. And I’m not talking about the “bad modernism” that Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Wollkowitz write about in Bad Modernisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), but “bad” as in the disparaged, denigrated, and shameful evaluation that is attached to writers, especially women, who have been situated as “not the real thing.” 7. Chris Clark, “the difficulties involved”: Muriel Rukeyser’s Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud (New York: CUNY, 2019). Catherine Gander first wrote about Rukeyser’s work with Leyda and her translations in Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Con­ nection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 8. Vike Plock has only begun this work and we have been speaking about it. 9. Marya Zaturenksa to Rukeyser, ALS, October 15, 1940, Incoming Correspondence, 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. 10. Rukeyser, “Sixth Elegy: River Elegy,” Collected Poems, 311. 11. Muriel Rukeyser, “Many Keys,” unpublished [1957], box 1:16, Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 9.

Selected Sources

General Published Sources Abbott, Berenice. A Guide to Better Photography. New York: Crown, 1941. ——. Documenting Science. Edited by Ron Kurtz. New York: Steidl, 2012. Abraham, Julie. Are Girls Necessary?: Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories. Minne­ apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Ackelsberg, Martha. Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Eman­ cipation of Women. London: AK Press, 2005. Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 2004. Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin, 1968. Ahmed, Sara. Willful Subjects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Auden, W. H. “Spain.” In The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, edited by Valentine Cunningham, 100. New York: Penguin, 1980. ——. “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” In The Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson, 245. New York: Modern Library, 2007.

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Bakhtin, M. M. “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism.” In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. Mcgee, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 10–59. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Barnhisel, Greg. Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980. Beevor, Antony. The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. New York: Penguin, 2006. Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Volume 4, 1938–1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 389–400. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Bergman, David. “Ajanta and the Rukeyser Imbroglio.” American Literary History 22, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 553–83. Blackmur, R. P. “Notes on Eleven Poets.” Kenyon Review 7, no. 2 (Spring 1945): 346–47. Boas, Franz. Primitive Art. 1927. New York: Dover, 1955. ——. The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians. “Report of the United States National Museum for the Year Ending June 30, 1895,” 309–738. https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/29967. Bogan, Louise. Achievement in American Poetry. Washington, DC: H. Regnery Co., 1951. ——. “Verse.” The New Yorker, October 21, 1944. ——. “Verse.” The New Yorker, November 3, 1951. Brock, James. “The Perils of a ‘Poster Girl’: Muriel Rukeyser, Partisan Review, and Wake Island.” In How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet? The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Anne Herzog and Janet Kaufman, 254–63. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Brown, Bill. Introduction to Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001): 1–22. Brown, Kirby. “American Indian Modernities and New Modernist Studies’ ‘Indian Problem.’” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 59, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 287–318. Camboni, Marina. “Networking Women: Subjects, Places, Links Europe-America, 1890–1939.” How2 Journal 2, no. 1 (2003). https://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2 journal/archive/online_archive/v2_1_2003/current/in_conference/networking-women/ camboni.htm. Carroll, Peter N. The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Carson, Anne. “The Gender of Sound.” In Glass, Irony and God, 119–42. New York: New Directions, 1996. Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictée. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Crane, Hart. “For the Marriage of Helen and Faustus.” In The Complete Poems of Hart Crane. New York: Liveright, 2001.

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Cunard, Nancy. “Pamiatnik—Memorial of the Bittersweet.” The Poems of Nancy Cunard from The Bodleian Library. Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2005. Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. ——. Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Daniels, Kate. “Muriel Rukeyser and Her Literary Critics.” In Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers, edited by Margaret Dickie and Thomas Travisano, 247–63. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. ——. “Searching/Not Searching: Writing the Biography of Muriel Rukeyser.” Poetry East 16–17 (Spring/Summer 1985): 70–93. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Dodd, Elisabeth Caroline. The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet: H.D., Louise Bogan, Elisabeth Bishop, and Louise Gluck. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992. Dupee, F. W. “RPW and Others.” The Nation, November 25, 1944. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of TwentiethCentury Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Eberhart, Richard. “Willkie’s Life and His World in this Many-Sided Medley.” New York Herald Tribune Book Review, April 28, 1957. Entin, Joseph B. Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in TwentiethCentury America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004. Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Fernald, Anne. “Choice and Change: Modern Women, 1910–1950.” Modernism/

Modernity Print+ 2, cycle 2. August 7, 2017. https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0024.

Filreis, Alan. Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern

Poetry, 1945–1960. Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Penguin Classics, 2010. Gander, Catherine. “Muriel Rukeyser, America, and the ‘Melville Revival.’” Journal of American Studies 44, no. 4 (November 2010): 759–75. ——. Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. “Introduction: The Female Imagination and the Modernist Aesthetics.” Women’s Studies: An Inter-disciplinary Journal 13, no. 1–2 (1986): 1. Goldensohn, Lorrie. “Our Mother Muriel.” In How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet? The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Anne Herzog and Janet Kaufman, 121–34. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Goldman, Emma. Anarchism: What It Really Stands For. New York: Mother Earth Publications, 1911.

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Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minne­ apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Graham, Helen. The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riot­ ous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2020. Hartmann-Villalta, Laura. “Witness to War: Photography, Anglophone Women’s Writ­ ing, and the Spanish Civil War.” PhD diss., Northeastern University, 2016. Hayek, Salma. “Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too.” New York Times, December 12, 2017. H.D. T he Walls Do Not Fall: Trilogy. Edited by Aliki Barnston. New York: New Directions, 1998. Heim, Stefania. “‘Another Form of Life’: Muriel Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs, and Analogy.” Journal of Narrative Theory 43, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 357–83. Hejinian, Lyn. “The Rejection of Closure,” in The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 40–58. Hemingway, Ernest. A Movable Feast. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964. Herzog, Anne F. “‘Anything Away from Anything’: Muriel Rukeyser’s Relational Poet­ ics.” In “How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet:” The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Anne Herzog and Janet Kaufman, 32–41. New York: Palgrave, 1999. Howe, Susan. The Birth-Mark. Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Hynes, Samuel. The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s. New York: Vintage, 1992. Irigaray, Luce. “Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato, Symposium, ‘Ditotima’s Speech.’” In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill, 20–33. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Jarrell, Randall. “A Verse Chronicle.” The Nation, May 8, 1948, 512–13. Reprinted in Poetry and the Age. New York: Vintage Books, 1953, 163–64. Kalaidjian, Walter. “Muriel Rukeyser and the Poetics of Specific Critique: Rereading the ‘Book of the Dead.’” Cultural Critique 20 (Winter 1991–92): 65–88. Keenaghan, Eric. “The Life of Politics: How Muriel Rukeyser (Re)Composed The Life of Poetry in an Evolving “Power-Culture.” MLA Special Session Roundtable “Re/ Considering Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry.” Modern Language Association, Austin, TX, January 7, 2016. ——. “The Life of Politics: The Compositional History of The Life of Poetry and Muriel Rukeyser’s Changing Appraisal of Emotion and Belief.” Textual Practice 32, no. 7. Special Issue, The Life of Poetry, edited by Catherine Gander (2018): 1103–26. ——. “There Is No Glass Woman: Muriel Rukeyser’s Lost Feminist Essay ‘Many Keys.’” Feminist Modernist Studies 1, nos. 1–2 (2018): 186–204.

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Kertesz, Louise. The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Kimmage, Michael. The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. King, Charles. Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Re­ invented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century. New York: Penguin Ran­ dom House, 2020. Krammer, Arnold. “Germans against Hitler: The Thaelmann Brigade.” Journal of Con­ temporary History 4, no. 2 (April 1996): 65–83. Lawrence, D.H. Aaron’s Rod. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Lessing, Doris. Martha Quest. New York: Harper Collins, 1996. Maddow, Ben. Interview in Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s. Edited and with an introduction by Pat McGilligan, 157–93. Berkeley: Uni­ versity of California Press, 1997. Mangini, Shirley. Memories of Resistance: Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Marcus, Jane. Introduction to Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf. Edited by Mark Hussey and Jane Marcus. New York: Harcourt, 2006. ——. “Still Practice A/Wrested Alphabet: Toward a Feminist Aesthetics.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 3, no. 2 (1984): 79–97. May, William. Stevie Smith and Authorship. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Mead, Margaret. Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years. New York: Kodansha USA, 1995. Metres, Philip. “‘With Ambush and Stratagem’: American Poetry in the Age of Pure War.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Cary Nelson, 331–68. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Micir, Melanie. The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Middleton, Peter. Physics Envy: American Poetry and the Sciences in the Cold War and After. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry & Politics of Cultural Memory. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. ——. The Wound and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Spanish Civil War. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Notley, Alice. “Homer’s Art.” In Selected Poems of Alice Notley, 113–14. New Jersey: Talisman House, 1993. Oppenheimer, Robert. “The Growth of Science and the Structure of Culture.” Daeda­ lus (Winter 1958): 67–76. Patterson, Ian. Guernica or Total War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Paul, David C. Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Pollack, Howard. Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man. Cham­ paign: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Pollak, Vivian R. Our Emily Dickinson: American Women Poets and the Intimacies of Difference. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

196

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Rabinowitz, Paula. They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary. New York: Verso, 1994. ——. Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. Cha­ pel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Rice, Philip Blair. “Gibbs and the Age of Power.” Kenyon Review 5, no. 2 (1943): 310–12. Rich, Adrienne. “Quarto.” The Nation, May 20, 2009. Rony, Fatimah Tobing. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Ross, Alex. “Pandemonium: Charles Ives.” The New Yorker, June 7, 2004. R. S. P. “The Grandeur and Misery of a Poster Girl.” Editorial. Partisan Review 10, no. 5 (September 1943): 471–73. Rudnitsky, Lexi. “Planes, Politics, and Protofeminist Poetics: Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The­ ory of Flight’ and The Middle of the Air.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 27, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 237–57. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Queer and Now.” In Tendencies, 1–20. Durham: Duke Uni­ versity Press, 1993. Smith, Shawn Michelle. At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism.” New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975. Spahr, Juliana M. “Postmodernism, Readers, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s ‘Dictée,’” College Literature 23, no. 3 (October 1996): 23–43. Stanford Friedman, Susan. “Gender and Genre Anxiety: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and H.D. as Epic Poets.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5, no. 2 (1986): 203–28. Storrs, Landon R. Y. The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Stott, William. Documentary Expression and Thirties America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Strathern, Marilyn. Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship, and the New Re­ productive Technologies. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992. Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: New Press, 2001. Untermeyer, Louis. “The Language of Muriel Rukeyser.” Saturday Review, August 10, 1940. Van Haaften, Julia. Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography. New York: Norton, 2018. Wald, Alan M. Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. ——. Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Washington, Mary Helen. The Other Black List: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Wheelwright, John. “U.S. 1.” Partisan Review, March 4, 1938. Williams, Oscar. “Ladies’ Day.” The New Republic, October 23, 1944.

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Wilner, Isaiah Lorado. “Transformation Masks: Recollecting the Indigenous Origins of Global Consciousness.” In Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas, edited by Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Lorado Wilner, 3–41. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Wolosky, Shira. “Relational Aesthetics and Feminist Poetics.” New Literary History 41, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 571–91. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929. ——. Three Guineas. Edited by Mark Hussey and Jane Marcus. New York: Harcourt, 2006. Wreszin, Michael. “Arthur Schlesinger Jr: Scholar-Activist in Cold War America, 1946–1956.” Salmagundi, no. 63/64 (1984): 255–85. Ziarek, Ewa Płonowska. Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Works by Muriel Rukeyser Published Books The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Edited by Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. The Life of Poetry. Ashfield, MA: Paris Press/Wesleyan University Press, 1996. One Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957. The Orgy. Ashfield, MA: Paris Press/Wesleyan University Press, 1996. Savage Coast. Edited by Rowena Kennedy-Epstein. New York: Feminist Press, 2013. Willard Gibbs. New York: Dutton, 1942.

Published Essays and Articles “Barcelona, 1936.” In “Barcelona, 1936” & Selections from the Spanish Civil War Ar­ chive, edited by Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, 9–22. New York: CUNY, 2011. “Barcelona on the Barricades.” New Masses, September 1, 1936, 9–11. “Craft Interview.” New York Quarterly 11 (Summer 1972): 15–38. “Foreword.” Berenice Abbott: Photographs. New York, 1970, 9–12. “Indian Fiesta Huge Success.” The Nation, May 29, 1937. “Josiah Willard Gibbs.” Physics Today 2, no. 2 (1949): 6–27. “The Long Step Ahead Taken by Gregory in New Epic Poem.” Daily Worker, March 19, 1935. “Muriel Rukeyser” in Twentieth Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Lit­ erature, edited by Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycroft. New York: H. H. Wilson, 1942, 1210. “A Simple Theme.” Poetry 74, no. 4 (July 1949): 236–39.

198

S e le c te d Sourc e s

“We Came for Games.” Esquire, October 1974. Republished in Savage Coast. New York: Feminist Press, 2013. 281–98. “Women of Words: A Prefatory Note.” In  The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552–1950, edited by Louise Bernikow. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. “Words and Images.” New Republic, August 1943.

Unpublished Drafts Franz Boas biography. Book proposal and fragments. MSS. B.B61ru, Boas-Rukeyser Collection, American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia. “Many Keys.” Typescript draft, n.d. [1957]. Box 1:1, Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Manu­ script Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Savage Coast. Unpublished manuscript, n.d. Box 1:23, Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Manu­ script Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. So Easy to See. Outlines and drafts of Abbott collaboration. n.d. Box 11:12, Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Sunday at Nine. Handwritten scripts, 1948–49. Box 11:14, Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. “The Usable Truth.” In The Life of Poetry, drafts and related material, 1940s. Box 1:43, Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Correspondence Letters to Ernst Boas. Ernst P. Boas Papers, American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia. Letters to Eleanor Clark. Eleanor Clark Papers, YCAL MSS 315, series 11: Correspon­ dences, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, Yale University. Letters to Alan Collins [president of Curtis Brown, LTD]. Box 1:5, Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Letters to Horace Gregory. Horace Gregory Papers, box 11, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. Letters to Ella Winter. Ella Winter Papers, series 1: Catalogued correspondence, Muriel Rukeyser, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Letters to Marya Zaturenska. Horace Gregory Papers, box 11, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library.

Incoming Correspondence Abbott, Berenice. Letters to Muriel Rukeyser. Folder: Incoming Correspondence, ALS. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.

Se l e cted So u r ces

199

Clark, Eleanor. Letters to Muriel Rukeyser. Folder: Incoming Correspondence, TLS. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library. Covici, Pascal [Covici-Friede]. Letters to Rukeyser, 1936. Folder: Incoming Corre­ spondence, TLS. Muriel Rukeyser Collection of Papers, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library. Gregory, Horace. Letters to Muriel Rukeyser. Folder: Incoming Correspondence. Mu­ riel Rukeyser Collection of Papers, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library. Hatch, Robert. [The Nation], typescript letter to Muriel Rukeyser, April 22, 1957. Muriel Rukeyser Collection of Papers, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library. H.D. Letters to Muriel Rukeyser. Folder: Incoming Correspondences, ALS, n.d. Muriel Rukeyser Collection of Papers, The Henry W. and Albert A.  Berg  Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library. Levertov, Denise. Letter to Muriel Rukeyser. ALS 1965. Muriel Rukeyser Collection of Papers, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Liter­ ature, New York Public Library. Zaturenska, Marya. Letters to Muriel Rukeyser. Folder: Incoming Correspondence, ALS. Muriel Rukeyser Collection of Papers, The Henry W. and Albert A.  Berg  Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.

Index

Note: The abbreviation MR refers to Muriel Rukeyser. Italic page numbers refer to illustrations. Abbott, Berenice: Changing New York, 115, 121–22; Documenting Science, 184n38; “Eye,” 116, 132, 157; Guggenheim application of, 124, 184n35; Guide to Better Photography, 123–24, 129; MR’s collaborations with, 16, 22, 104, 115, 117–19, 132, 148, 166; MR’s hand photograph, 133; MR’s relationship with, 22, 114–15, 118–19, 124–25, 131, 134, 183n2; and MR’s theorization of “seeing,” 22, 125–27, 132, 184n46; Photographs, 132; “Soap Bubbles,” 124; “Super-Sight Apple,” 126, 126, 127–29; Super-Sight camera invented by, 22, 115, 123–25, 128, 132, 134,

158, 184n33. See also So Easy to See (Abbott and Rukeyser) Abraham, Julie, 167, 176n71 Adorno, Theodor, 8, 74, 129–30, 160, 185n53 aesthetics: of Cold War, 16; conflations of body and aesthetic, 2–3, 39; cultural constructs of, 138, 158; and influences, 6, 23, 159; of literary canon, 7, 12–13, 18–19, 96, 160, 163; of modernism, 119; MR’s radical avant-garde aesthetic, 40, 43, 52, 57, 59, 67–68, 76, 78, 159–60 Ahmed, Sara, 92–93, 94, 111 anarchism, 33, 34, 44, 46, 50, 70, 78, 174n10

202

I n de x

anticommunism, 13–14, 19, 23, 85, 93, 95, 140–41, 171n37 archives: authority of, 31; of Franz Boas, 22, 136–39, 141, 144, 158; lost and unpublished works in, 113, 117, 167–68; of MR’s unfinished texts, 3, 4, 5–8, 24, 27–30, 32, 36, 165–68; and restoration of texts, 43, 118; and study of modernism, 10; willfulness archive, 111–13 Arendt, Hannah, 58, 71 Auden, W. H.: The Ascent of F6, 63, 177n86; Louise Bogan quoting, 16; cynicism of, 86; and documentary form, 53; “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” 179n60; and the left, 83, 179n57; and literary canon, 33; MR compared to, 63, 83–84, 86; MR quoting, 48; Delmore Schwartz on, 15; “Spain,” 83–84 Beauvoir, Simone de, 41, 99 Benjamin, Walter, 31, 71, 128, 131, 161–63 Bernikow, Louise, 98, 112, 170n12, 182n65 bisexuality, 10, 14–15, 112 Black women writers, 11–12, 112–13, 160–61 Boas, Ernst, 22, 135, 139, 188n53 Boas, Franz: collaborative work of, 142–43, 150, 188n50; cultural relativism theory, 138, 159; MR’s engagement with, 137–39, 156, 166, 188n50; MR’s unfinished biography of, 6, 22–23, 116, 135–42, 144, 148–51, 186n30; Primitive Art, 157–58; on racial difference, 138, 186n12 Boch, Otto: death of, 32, 34, 72, 81–83; MR’s correspondence with, 29–30, 34, 82–83; MR’s meeting of, 28, 29, 43–44; MR’s relationship with, 59, 61, 72, 80; in MR’s Savage Coast, 43–45, 48–49, 52–53, 55–58, 78, 81–82; in MR’s writings on Spanish Civil War,

31–32, 43–45, 52, 57, 72–74, 81–82; as runner, 27, 29, 32, 44, 83 Bogan, Louise: Achievement of American Poetry, 18; essays of, 15, 17; “The Heart and the Lyre,” 17; on modernism, 9, 16–19; MR’s comments on, 14, 19, 171n38; on women writers, 11–12, 16–18, 39, 94; on Virginia Woolf, 99 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 11–12, 178n27 Carson, Anne, 2–3, 108–9, 110 civil rights activism, 13, 56, 72 Clark, Eleanor, 29, 63–64, 145, 146, 147, 151, 166 Cold War period: American imperialism of, 145; as backlash against social changes, 40; function of gender during, 3, 6–7, 9–11, 13, 39, 62; gender norms of, 16, 21, 91, 93, 99, 141, 164; literary and cultural suppression during, 16, 18, 92, 165, 180n5; literary canon, 7, 12–13, 18–19, 96, 160; literary legacies of, 12, 20; radical modernism during, 12–13, 171n24; relationship of sciences and arts during, 22, 115–17, 119, 125, 129–32 Columbia University, 29, 101, 137 communism, 12–13, 21, 91. See also anticommunism Copland, Aaron, 107, 157, 166, 182n65 Covici [Covici-Friede], Pascal, 21, 39, 59, 64 cultural anthropology, 17, 136, 141, 143–44, 147–48, 150, 188n50 Cunard, Nancy, 21, 41–42, 174n14 Daniels, Kate, 8, 94, 169n2 Dickinson, Emily: Aaron Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, 107; manuscripts of, 92, 111; MR’s “Many Keys” on, 97, 103–5, 181n53, 181n55; MR’s Sunday at Nine on, 22, 103–6, 181n53; period represented by,

I n d ex 10, 96, 163; Vivian Pollak on, 105, 181n51, 181n55 Diotima, 92, 107–10 documentary form, MR’s use of, 45–48, 53, 64, 68–69, 74, 80, 84, 120, 122, 137, 177n9 Doubleday, 126, 139 Eliot, T. S., 29, 48, 62, 75, 86, 163 fascism: Theodor Adorno on, 8; antifascist politics, 42; Otto Boch fighting against, 81, 82; MR’s response to, 40, 85; MR’s Savage Coast on, 20; rise of, 40, 56, 99; Spanish Civil War as battle against, 21, 40, 56, 58, 70 feminism: and autobiography, 110; collaboration in feminist scholarship, 118; cultural animus toward, 12; documentary form used by feminists, 45–46; feminist poets of 1960s, 68; influence of Indigenous thought on, 23; MR’s feminist theories, 21, 112, 164; MR’s proto-feminism, 6, 53, 106, 109; performance poetics of, 153; and popular antifeminism, 13; secondwave feminism, 42, 98, 137, 138, 152; and structures of domination and exploitation, 20 feminist literary studies, 16, 43, 98, 109, 170n12, 171n21, 172n44 feminist scholarship, 2, 9, 170n5 Fernald, Anne, 171n20, 171n21 Filreis, Alan, 13, 171n24, 171n29, 180n5 First Nations peoples, 23, 142–43, 150, 151, 188n50 Franco, Francisco, 40, 42, 70, 74, 82, 174n8, 174n9 Gander, Catherine: on American studies, 182n56; on MR, 8, 77, 96, 122, 136, 138–39, 176n84, 178n35, 183n13, 186n18, 189n7 gender: cultural constructs of, 138; explicitly gendered New Criticism, 16;

203

male body as antagonistic to female body, 21, 91; mass culture gendered as feminine, 104; metaphors of, 39; MR’s theorizations of, 8, 14, 21, 48, 147, 152, 158; transgression of, 10, 42 gender bias, 3, 9–10, 14, 163 gender norms: Louise Bogan on, 17; and boundaries of genre, 39, 48, 57, 62, 65, 67, 74, 91, 97, 111, 178n27, 178n32; of Catholic Church, 42; of Cold War, 16, 21, 91, 93, 99, 141, 164; and Emily Dickinson, 97, 105, 106; failure to conform to, 5, 96; MR’s breaking of, 93, 100; of publishing practices, 7, 24 gender politics: of artistic production in Cold War, 6, 9–13, 19, 21; of literary heritage, 6, 10–12, 164–65; of MR’s The Life of Poetry, 21–22, 91–93, 101, 112–13; of MR’s Savage Coast, 54; in reception of MR’s work, 1–3, 58–59, 64; in reception of women’s artwork, 5; of scientific fields, 117; and systems of power, 2, 3, 17, 167; of waste, 6, 16, 97–103 genre: Cold War gendering of literary genres, 91; and gender norms, 39, 48, 57, 62, 65, 67, 74, 91, 97, 111, 178n27, 178n32; MR on limits of, 144; and MR’s experimental choices, 59; MR’s multigenre writing, 6, 41, 48, 57, 67, 78–81, 137 Gibbs, Willard: MR on “phase rule” of, 178n35; MR’s experimental biography of, 19, 95, 104, 116, 120, 124–25, 129, 135, 139, 183n13 Gilbert, Sandra, 11, 172n44, 183n12 Gregory, Horace: on Herman Melville, 166; MR’s correspondence with, 19, 59, 63, 66, 176n76; MR’s review of Chorus for Survival, 75; on MR’s Savage Coast, 21, 35, 58–59, 61–65, 100; publishing opportunities, 13; on Virginia Woolf, 62–63 Gubar, Susan, 11, 172n44, 183n12

204

I n de x

Haraway, Donna, 162–63 Hayek, Salma, 3–6 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle): and epic form, 178n27; Helen in Egypt, 74, 175n35; in literary histories, 10; MR compared to, 48, 87; MR’s relationship with, 29, 62; Trilogy, 15, 86–87 Heim, Stefania, 8, 125, 183n13 Hejinian, Lyn, 76, 79 Hemingway, Ernest, 33, 40, 48, 80, 97, 170n16, 176n56 Herbst, Josephine, 11, 41, 174n14 Hitler, Adolph, 20, 28–29, 40, 44, 55–56, 82, 95, 174n10 Hollywood, 59, 157, 166, 187n40 Hurston, Zora Neale, 10, 11, 134, 137–38, 166 Indigenous art and knowledge systems, 23, 138–39, 144, 150, 154, 156–57 influences: and aesthetics, 6, 23, 159; MR on Charles Ives as, 106–7; MR on influences in women’s writing, 6, 22, 98–100; MR on waste as, 6, 22, 97–98, 109; MR’s cultural anthropology influences, 137, 141, 143–44, 147–48; in MR’s The Life of Poetry, 92, 97, 109, 113, 165; in MR’s “Many Keys,” 99–100, 104, 109 Irigaray, Luce, 107–8 Ivens, Joris, 8, 165, 170n16 Ives, Charles, 22, 103–7, 166 Jewish identity: and fascism, 40; Helen’s Jewish body in Savage Coast, 55–56; Jewish athletes, 34; Jewish immigrant life, 30–31; MR as Jewish, 28, 92, 186n12 Kahlo, Frida, 3–5 Keenaghan, Eric, 8, 95, 102, 135, 180n4 Kertesz, Louise, 8, 19, 44, 59, 74, 172n45, 176n76

Kollwitz, Käthe, 77, 170n9 Kwakwaka’wakw people: MR’s interviews with, 136, 142–45, 149–50, 154–55, 188n68; transformation mask dances of, 23, 76, 150–53, 157 Lawrence, D. H., 15, 49–51, 57, 175n37, 181n32, 187n35 lesbian identity: cultural animus toward, 12; lesbian desire, 111, 117, 128–29; marginalization of, 132; MR as lesbian, 2, 10, 14–15, 117, 166–67 Levertov, Denise, 1–2, 134 Life and Letters To-day, 20, 67, 78, 178n38 The Life of Poetry (Rukeyser): on anarchism, 46; autobiographical narratives of, 92, 110–11; on collaboration between writer and reader, 118; on cultural anthropology, 137; on evacuation from Barcelona, 28, 44; on gender and the body, 92–94; on gender crisis, 106; gender politics of, 21–22, 91–93, 101, 112–13; on historical time, 76; on Indigenous poetry, 139, 144–45; on influences, 92, 97, 109, 113, 165; on intellectual waste, 16, 97–103; Navajo songs in, 158; on place of poetry, 44, 84, 174n22; publication of, 18, 91–92, 101–3, 139, 148; and public-private boundaries, 95–96; reissue of, 8; on scientific knowledge, 116–17; on Spanish Civil War, 67, 77–78, 80, 178n38; and Sunday at Nine broadcasts, 103, 104; on suppression of women’s writing, 23, 93; on tendencies, 107–11, 163; on text and image, 122–23; vision of intersectional, bisexual feminist poetics, 112–13, 164; on Walt Whitman, 92, 94, 96–97, 112, 161; on willfulness archive, 111–13

I n d ex literary canon, 7, 12–13, 18–19, 33, 96, 160, 163–64 literary marketplace, 11–12, 14, 19–20, 24, 111, 167 Maddow, Ben, 120, 147, 165, 187n40 “Many Keys” (Rukeyser): on conflict between modes of life and creativity, 148–49; on Emily Dickinson, 97, 103–5, 181n53, 181n55; first page of, 108; influences in, 99–100, 104, 109; rejection of, 5–6, 22, 100, 168, 179–80n4; on Sappho, 110; theorization of waste in, 22, 97–99; on women poets, 22, 92, 97–98; on women’s aesthetic choices, 16 Marcus, Jane, 9, 45, 172n44, 183n12 mass culture, 39–40, 104, 105 Matthiessen, F. O., 93, 180n5, 180n10 “Mediterranean” (Rukeyser): Otto Boch’s life in, 52, 72–73; differing views, 78; and epic form, 74–75, 178n32; MR on writing of, 66–67, 69–70; on place of poetry, 174n22; on Spanish Civil War, 39, 44, 64, 67, 69, 72–77, 178n38 Melville, Herman, 62, 92, 96, 166 Micir, Melanie, 9–10, 167, 171n20 modernism: and antiquity, 110; boundaries of, 20; collaborative modernism, 118–23; democratization of, 131; and T. S. Eliot, 163; masculinist modernism, 18; midcentury consolidation of, 9–10, 12; MR remaking categories of, 35; passive consumerism, 182n57; and primitivist appropriation, 150; radical modernism, 12–13, 19, 23, 78, 171n24; and realism, 121–22, 127–30; revolutionary project of, 24 modernist avant-garde: influence of Indigenous practices on, 23, 144, 155, 159; and MR on gender, 8; MR’s radical avant-garde aesthetic, 40, 43,

205

52, 57, 59, 67–68, 76, 78, 159–60; and MR’s work on Spain, 42; and radical modernism, 23, 171n24; and spirit of revolt, 9–13; suppression of, 13, 93 modernist women writers: Julie Abraham on, 176n71; Louise Bogan on, 16–18; documentary form used by, 45–46; exclusion from literary marketplace, 11–12; recuperation of, 2; and spirit of revolt, 9–13; Mary Helen Washington on, 11–12; Ewa Płonowska Ziarek on, 11 motherhood and birth: cultural animus toward single mothers, 12–13; MR as single mother, 7, 10, 23, 112, 115, 140, 142, 147, 149, 187n38; MR on poetry of birth, 147–48, 155–56, 187n42; and MR’s cultural anthropology influences, 137, 141, 143–44, 147–48; MR’s poems on, 150–51 Museum of Modern Art, New York, 8, 120, 124, 126, 165, 170n16 The Nation, 5–6, 11, 22, 62, 92, 100, 156–57 nationalism, 70, 71, 112–13, 138, 147 Naumburg, Nancy, 59, 120, 156, 176n74 Nelson, Cary, 145, 174n15 New Criticism, 10, 11, 16, 46, 83, 93, 182n56 New York City: Berenice Abbott’s photographs on, 115, 121–22, 132; MR bringing Ernst Boas’s films from, 188n53; MR’s archive in New York Public Library, 4, 32, 165, 177n7; MR’s parents in, 147; MR writing in, 19, 34, 59, 62 The New Yorker, 11, 16, 19, 62

New York Quarterly Review, 152, 153,

156

206

I n de x

Olympics of 1936, Berlin, 20, 28–29, 55–56, 70 Olympics of 1968, Mexico, 83 Olympics of 1972, Munich, 32, 70, 83 Orwell, George, 33, 40, 48, 53, 140, 176n56, 180n9, 186n21 Partisan Review, 10, 14–15, 180n10 patriarchy and patriarchal culture: Anne Carson on, 2, 108–9; denial of unified self, 155; and documentary form, 45; fascism functioning with, 42; literary norms of, 92, 98; in MR’s poetry, 71, 86; in MR’s Savage Coast, 51; patriarchal nationalism, 112–13; women’s intellectual and artistic practices in, 137; women’s struggles to produce work under, 5, 124; women’s writing judged by, 100, 113, 165, 168, 189n6 People’s Olympiad (July 19–26, 1936), 20, 28–30, 39, 43–44, 47, 77, 79, 87 photographic realism, 115, 127–29 Poetry magazine, 62, 101, 147, 149 Pollak, Vivian, 105, 181n51, 181n55 Pound, Ezra, 8, 131, 160 power, systems of: and anarchy of archive, 28; and authority of archive, 31; denial and suppression of transformation, 32; and gender politics, 2, 3, 17, 167; MR on powerculture, 10, 92; MR’s challenging of, 10, 24, 130–31; and MR’s theorization of waste, 9, 24 process, language of, 23, 32, 125, 141, 147–48, 151–52, 159, 186n30 queer body, 21, 91, 93 queer history, 93, 106 queer theory, 111, 163 Rabinowitz, Paula, 46, 62 race, Franz Boas on, 138, 186n12 racial justice movements, 29, 137

Radin, Paul, 138, 159, 188n65 radio: Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer on, 130; MR’s radio shows, 6, 7, 21, 22, 92, 102, 103–6, 148, 181n53, 182n56; in Savage Coast, 45 Rich, Adrienne, 8, 16, 68, 172n44, 172n45, 177n4, 183n12 Rukeyser, Muriel: Berenice Abbot’s hand photograph of, 133; Berenice Abbott’s “Eye” photograph of, 116, 132, 157; on boat to Vancouver Island, 142; challenging narratives of history, 43, 67–69, 79, 147; collaborative work of, 6, 10, 59, 120–21, 123; containment culture theorized by, 15–16, 21; critics on, 2, 10–11, 14–15, 39, 84–85, 93–94, 100–101; disruption of notions of time, 79–80; documentary form used by, 45–48, 53, 64, 68–69, 74, 80, 84, 120, 122, 137, 177n9; economic precarity of, 7, 23, 59, 62, 64, 112, 140; on embodied experience, 33–34, 46, 48, 54–55, 65, 80, 153, 161–62; as era-defining, 8, 23–24, 160–68; FBI surveillance of, 10, 73, 95, 117, 120; feminist poets of 1960s on, 68, 177n4; formal experimentation of, 8, 10, 67–68; humor of, 35; on interconnected global culture, 143; as Jewish, 28, 92, 186n12; map of Montcada, Catalonia, 30, 30; “Mistresse / Mastress” note, 4; narrative focus on marginalized voices, 7, 20, 31, 67, 70, 73; outsider perspective of, 53–54, 72, 80, 150; photo-text projects of, 120, 183n13; physical appearance of, 1–2, 15, 28, 147, 169n2; on poetics of history, 43, 87; political activism of, 9, 86; political and historical critiques of, 68–69; “poster girl” label of, 14–15, 101, 105; radical avant-garde aesthetic of, 40, 43, 52, 57, 59,

I n d ex 67–68, 76, 78, 159–60; on realism, 127–29, 130; on reciprocal witness, 138; recovering works of, 20–23; on repetition, 32, 79, 87, 96, 130–31, 173n11; on sciences as language for discovery, 22, 115–16, 117, 124; and spirit of revolt, 9–13, 19; telegram note written in Montcada, Catalonia, 38; theorization of “seeing,” 22, 125–26, 127, 132, 184n46; underevaluation of work, 8, 163; unfinished texts of, 3, 6–9, 10, 12–13, 20, 22–23, 24, 161, 162–68; on women’s truth, 5 Rukeyser, Muriel, works of: Adventures, 7; “Adventures in Childhood,” 120; All the Way Home, 7–8, 165–66; “Barcelona, 1936,” 67, 78–79; The Big Dome, 7; “A Birth,” 148, 149, 150; The Book of the Dead, 29, 64, 120, 156, 176n74, 177n9; Breaking Open, 159, 188n65; “Clues,” 156; The Colors of the Day, 166, 188n68; “Correspondences,” 67, 85; “The Cruise,” 64; “Death in Spain: Barcelona on the Barricades,” 67; “Delta Poems,” 67, 74; “DreamSinging Elegy,” 144; Elegies, 67, 68, 144, 148, 167; “Endless,” 67, 82–83; “For O.B.,” 67, 81; “Fourth Elegy: The Refugees,” 86; The Gates, 83; Houdini, 7, 166; “Ives,” 106–7; “Käthe Kollwitz,” 77; “Letter to the Front,” 67, 85–86; “Lives,” 103; “Long Past Moncada,” 67, 82; The Mask, 7, 137, 157, 165; The Middle of the Air, 7, 148, 166, 170n15; “Moment of Proof,” 67; “Myth,” 109–10; “1/26/39,” 67, 85; One Life, 65, 148; “One Soldier,” 67; The Orgy, 137, 143–44, 153–55, 157, 186n26; “Orpheus,” 110, 152; “Otherworld,” 67; “The Place at Alert Bay,” 151; A Place to Live, 8, 120, 165–66; “The Poem as Mask,” 152–53, 156;

207

“Return,” 150; “Searching / Not Searching,” 67; “Segre Song,” 67; “A Simple Theme,” 147–48, 155; “Song,” 67; “The Soul and Body of John Brown,” 19, 120; “Start of Strife in Spain Is Told by Eyewitness,” 67; Stop Japan!, 8, 165; Sunday at Nine, 22, 92, 102, 103–6, 181n53, 182n56; Theory of Flight, 10, 29; Tree of Meanings, 149; A Turning Wind, 173n13; Two Voyages, 64; “An Unborn Poet,” 134; “Unborn Song,” 150; U.S. 1, 39, 64, 122; “Voices,” 67; “We Came for Games,” 29–30, 44, 67, 70, 74, 77–78, 82–83; “Word of Mouth: The Return,” 67, 71–73; “Words and Images,” 120; “Worlds Along Side,” 120. See also The Life of Poetry (Rukeyser); “Many Keys” (Rukeyser); “Mediterranean” (Rukeyser); Savage Coast (Rukeyser); So Easy to See (Abbott and Rukeyser); “The Usable Truth” (Rukeyser) Rukeyser, William L. (son): birth of, 147, 148, 151, 152; MR as single mother, 10, 23, 112, 115, 140, 142, 147, 149, 187n38; photograph of, 136; travel to Vancouver Island with mother, 142–43 San Francisco, California, 103, 146, 147, 187n35 San Francisco Exploratorium, 166 Savage Coast (Rukeyser): as Bildungsroman, 37, 51–52; as biographical narrative, 43–54, 56; civil war as Helen’s symbol, 51–52, 55, 96; critical condemnation of, 20–21, 39–40, 59, 61–64; documentary form in, 45–48, 53, 64, 74; editor’s rejection of, 1–2, 6, 21, 35, 39, 53, 57–59, 62, 100; formal approach of, 1, 21, 63, 64, 67; Hans as Otto Boch’s literary counterpart in, 43–45, 48–49, 52–53, 55–58, 78, 81–82; Helen as MR’s

208

I n de x

Savage Coast (Rukeyser): (continued) literary counterpart, 39, 43–45, 49–51, 56–57, 71, 74, 78, 81, 96; Helen as sexually liberated, 21, 35, 48–50, 52, 55–57, 64–65; Helen’s autonomy described in somatic terms, 54–58; Helen’s Jewish body, 55–56; Helen’s political development in, 37, 39, 46–48, 50, 52–55, 58; lyric passages of, 39, 46–50, 53–54, 64, 78; MR’s editing of, 156; MR’s outline and notes for, 34–35; MR’s redrafting of, 59, 61–65; on multiplicity of languages, 80; quotes of differing views of others in, 78; reader report for, 2, 6, 35, 53, 60–61; sequential narrative of, 44–45; on Spanish Civil War, 35, 39, 40–41, 51, 70–71, 78, 178n38; textual hybridity of, 35–36, 42, 43, 44–50, 58, 64–65, 78 Schwartz, Delmore, 14–15, 101, 166 sciences: as male-dominated field, 117, 124–25, 129; relationship of arts to, 22, 115–17, 119, 125, 129–32; science history, 135 Scottsboro Boys trial, 29, 55, 137 second-wave feminism, 42, 98, 137, 138, 152 Sedgwick, Eve, 96, 106, 163 sexism, 1, 7, 100, 117, 124, 131–32, 147, 163 sexual harassment, 3–5, 20 So Easy to See (Abbott and Rukeyser): and art in democracy, 104, 119; arts and sciences in, 22, 115, 117, 125, 129, 132, 182n65; and collaborative modernism, 6, 118–23; MR’s outline of, 125–31, 158, 185n52; rejection by publishers, 95, 126 Spain: European gaze, 80; MR’s proliferating textual project on, 21, 32, 34–35, 42, 56, 67–70, 85–87; MR’s self-formation in, 20, 33, 39, 43, 47–48, 74; Popular Front in, 40, 41, 44, 46, 70, 174n10

Spanish Civil War: American companies involved in, 40, 174n9; International Brigades of, 37, 43–44; MR on voyage and exile, 70–76; in MR’s archival materials, 177n7; MR’s documenting life of the multitude, 31–32, 34, 80–81; MR’s Esquire essay on, 29, 30, 44, 67, 70, 74, 77; MR’s multigenre writing on, 41, 48, 57, 67, 78–81, 137; MR’s poetry on, 28, 31, 66–70, 85–86, 178n38; MR’s Savage Coast on, 35, 39–41, 51, 70–71, 78, 178n38; MR’s transtextual and transhistorical network on, 68, 69–74, 76–81, 83–84, 87, 157; MR’s twentieth-century textual history, 20–21, 32; MR’s witnessing outbreak of, 20, 30, 44, 77, 80; George Orwell’s political response to, 186n21; women’s writing on, 41–42, 174n14 Strathern, Marilyn, 139, 141 Taggard, Genevieve, 13, 41, 104 US government, 12, 40, 116–17, 140–41, 145 Untermeyer, Louis, 94–95, 171n29 “The Usable Truth” (Rukeyser): on artistic practice, 158–59; critics on, 15, 101; on cultural anthropology, 137; gender politics of, 91; and The Life of Poetry, 22, 94–95; MR’s attempts to publish, 19; relationship between form and content in, 64, 157, 182n56; theorization of waste in, 9, 98–99; unpublished sections of, 24 Vancouver Island, 142–45, 142, 150–51, 153–54, 157 Van Haaften, Julia, 121, 123–24, 125, 183n13, 184n33 Vassar College, 15, 19, 29, 94, 101, 188n68

I n d ex Vietnam War, 74, 83, 145 Viking Press, 19–20 Wald, Alan, 45, 63 Walker, Alice, 112–13, 134, 166, 183n12 Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 41, 57–58, 174n14 Washington, Mary Helen, 11–12 waste: MR’s theorization of, 9, 16, 22, 24, 97–103, 109, 148, 161–63, 167–68; recovery of “wasted” texts, 7, 102–3, 132 Weinstein, Harvey, 3–5 Weissman, Terri, 121–22, 124 Whitman, Walt, 2, 11, 92, 94, 96–97, 112, 161, 180n5 Williams, Oscar, 14–15, 21 Willkie, Wendell, 65, 116, 140, 148 Wilner, Isaiah Lorado, 137–38, 150, 152–53, 155, 158, 188n50 Winter, Ella, 140, 147, 166 women: access and agency of, 3, 8–9; artistic production of, 3, 5, 20, 111; collaboration of, 118; fascist attitudes toward, 40, 42; liberation movements of, 5, 46, 172n45; MR on attitudes toward, 14, 19; MR on legibility of women’s lives, 98, 181n33; MR on women poets, 22, 92, 97–98; MR on women’s experience in war, 86; physical and intellectual space of, 1; political and cultural attitudes toward, 14–16, 21; political participation of, 6,

209

11–12, 41–42, 46, 174n14, 174n15, 39; position as object, 6, 109 women’s literary production: Louise Bogan on, 11–12, 16–18, 39, 94; movements of, 8; single-author studies on, 10; and spirit of revolt, 11, 13; suppression of, 12, 13, 23–24, 93, 98, 167; vulnerability on literary marketplace, 11–12, 14, 19–20, 111; and women as poets, 14–21; and women as war writers, 14, 41–42, 174n14 women’s writing: and autobiography, 110; critics on, 16; Emily Dickinson’s influence on, 104; function of gender during Cold War period, 3, 6–7, 9–11, 13, 39, 62; MR on influences in, 6, 22, 98–100; patriarchal judgment of, 100, 113, 165, 168, 189n6; sexism in evaluation of, 163; on Spanish Civil War, 41–42, 174n14; undervaluing of, 7, 167. See also modernist women writers; women’s literary production Woolf, Virginia: Common Reader, 62; Horace Gregory on, 62–63; on modernism, 131; period associated with, 10, 163; on private “tyrannies and servilities,” 5; on repetition, 173n11; A Room of One’s Own, 99; on Spanish Civil War, 41–43; Three Guineas, 42–43, 111–12 Zaturenska, Marya, 13–14, 59, 61–63, 66, 104, 166–67, 171n38, 176n76 Ziarek, Ewa Płonowska, 11