The city of water and stone where I was born

Gen­eral Strike

Helen has been sent to re­port on the anti-fas­cist al­ter­na­tive to Hitler's Berlin Olympics, the Peo­ple's Olympiad due to start in Barcelona on July 19, 1936. The train from Paris car­ries a mixed bag of pas­sen­gers: the Hun­gar­ian, US and French teams to the Games, tourists, three Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­ers, local women.

The train halts in Mon­cada sta­tion (today, Mont­cada i Reixac), 10 miles short of Barcelona. A Gen­eral Strike has been de­clared against Franco's mil­i­tary re­bel­lion. The pas­sen­gers react in vary­ing ways to the news fil­ter­ing through. Helen makes friends with two Com­mu­nists, a black woman, Olive, and her white hus­band, New York­ers like her. She meets a Ger­man run­ner, Hans, and they have sex in an empty train com­part­ment. The Olympic teams go into the town and, de­spite the lan­guage bar­ri­ers, show their sol­i­dar­ity with the town on strike. Five fas­cists are killed. Re­li­gious pic­tures and icons are brought out of houses and burnt, but there is no loot­ing. There is shoot­ing in the hills. De­spite the brag­gado­cio of the Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­ers that they'll fix this stu­pid fuss, it be­comes clear that a full-scale Rev­o­lu­tion is tak­ing place.

The sec­ond half of the novel takes place in Barcelona, where the pas­sen­gers have been taken in a pick-up truck. There are still snipers around. One of the French Olympic team is killed. In a swirling kalei­do­scope of faces glimpsed and lost in the crowd and peo­ple rush­ing about, meals and ac­com­mo­da­tion are im­pro­vised. Self-or­gan­i­sa­tion is im­pos­ing its order.

This is an au­to­bi­o­graph­i­cal novel. Through­out, Rukeyser is keen to pin­point de­tail, which makes it a fas­ci­nat­ing first-hand source for his­to­ri­ans. There are not so many ac­counts of these days writ­ten im­me­di­ately af­ter­wards, while mem­ory is fresh and undis­torted. Women are Rukeyser's main speak­ers. At the be­gin­ning, three local women on the train are dis­cussing pol­i­tics. Helen can't un­der­stand their Cata­lan, but she catches “anar­quista”, “co­mu­nista”. Helen is lis­ten­ing all the time, learn­ing. She feels some­thing new. Rukeyser is ex­plain­ing how Helen and oth­ers are chang­ing under the im­pact of mas­sive events.

For the rest of her life Rukeyser would re­peat that Barcelona was “the city of water and stone where I was born,” even though she had only been in Cat­alo­nia for five days.

Gross re­jec­tion

Sav­age Coast (Rukeyser's trans­la­tion of Costa Brava) has an ex­tra­or­di­nary pub­lish­ing his­tory. In Au­tumn 1936, Rukeyser sent it to a pub­lisher who replied with a bru­tal let­ter of re­jec­tion: “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.” BAD, he wrote in cap­i­tal let­ters.

There is ev­i­dence that Rukeyser re-worked the novel until at least the end of the Civil War. Some of the mid­dle chap­ters are in­com­plete, though they are quite read­able. Later she mined it for poems and ar­ti­cles (one of which, from 1974, is in­cluded in this vol­ume). Never pub­lished in her life­time, Sav­age Coast was dis­cov­ered among Rukeyser's pa­pers in 2011 by Rowena Kennedy-Ep­stein, a re­search stu­dent and now the novel's ex­cel­lent ed­i­tor.

The novel is not per­fect. Helen's lover Hans is an ide­alised vi­sion of hand­some, heroic male strength. With Hitler in power mak­ing him home­less, he will stay to fight: “Spain is my coun­try now.” Rukeyser re­peat­edly calls two Amer­i­can women a jar­ring, “the bitches”, for no ex­plained rea­son. If you are out of sym­pa­thy with Helen's per­sonal jour­ney from con­fu­sion to com­mit­ment, you may find the book ir­ri­tat­ing, but it is not BAD.

The orig­i­nal re­jec­tion was so cu­ri­ously gross and in­ti­mately hurt­ful a re­sponse to a book that the novel must have deeply of­fended the pub­lisher.

But where could the of­fence lie? In its con­tent and its form, both ex­per­i­men­tal.

Kennedy-Ep­stein be­lieves that Rukeyser's young, sex­u­ally free and free-think­ing hero­ine was just too much for the pub­lisher. She was ahead of her time. The con­tent is fem­i­nism and rev­o­lu­tion. And the form is frac­tured and mod­ernist. Rukeyser in­cludes ex­tracts from nov­els, doc­u­ments (such as the fas­ci­nat­ing man­i­festo of the Peo­ple's Olympiad) and po­etry as well as prose. What John dos Pas­sos did in his huge 1930s novel U.S.A. was not al­lowed to a young woman. Kennedy-Ep­stein sum­marises that Rukeyser was dis­cour­aged from “writ­ing the kind of large-scale, de­vel­op­men­tal, hy­brid, mod­ernist war nar­ra­tive that she had begun – one that is sex­u­ally ex­plicit, sym­bol­i­cally com­plex, po­lit­i­cally rad­i­cal, and aes­thet­i­cally ex­per­i­men­tal.”

In the mov­ing cli­max to the novel, Helen stands alone in the mid­dle of a huge, heav­ily armed crowd shout­ing in lan­guages she can­not un­der­stand – and she feels safe and free. She is at home in the rev­o­lu­tion.