Rukeyser, Muriel

Eric Keenaghan

RUKEYSER, MURIEL (1913-1980). Championed during her lifetime by radical authors like Kenneth Rexroth and Horace Gregory, and openly celebrated by younger activist-poets like Adrienne Rich, Eileen Myles, and C.D. Wright, Muriel Rukeyser could be counted as one of the twentieth century’s most admired American left writers. Her long documentarian poem The Book of the Dead (1938), about a West Virginian community of poor white and African American miners who succumbed to silicosis, remains a benchmark in Popular Front and modernist literature. Because her radical legacy often is measured through this classic text’s social-realist lens, though, Rukeyser remains one of the most misunderstood leftist writers of her day. Just as important is the visionary lyric. Indeed, her work models how the lyricist’s singularity provides the chief means of accessing what contemporary post-Marxism refers to as commonality, or what Rukeyser herself in the late 1960s called “unverifiable fact.” Throughout her life, she avoided partisan affiliations and any ideological mandate. She synthesized various political philosophies—including Marxism, anarchist socialism, pragmatism, and process philosophy—into an idiosyncratic radical attitude that envisioned creators as responsible for imagining and establishing new, ever-evolving world orders, which emerge from their art and relationships with other artists.

Rukeyser was born into an upper-middle class, secular Jewish American family living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She often imagined that her father, the owner of a successful construction company until his bankruptcy during the Great Depression, was responsible for building modern New York City. Although for much of her life she was ambivalent about religion, she credited her family’s Jewish cultural heritage for her relationship to both political radicalism and poetry. The former influence was represented by the Old Testament and Torah’s Song of Songs, an exchange between two lovers that commemorates the Jews’ exodus from Egypt. Rukeyser traced her politically-radical Jewish leanings to the first- and second-century Midrash scholar and prophet Rabbi Akiva ben Yosef, from whom her mother’s family claimed a direct line of descent. As her New Left-era poetic sequence “Akiba” (in The Speed of Darkness, 1968) exemplifies, Rukeyser was drawn to this figure’s revolutionary example both because of the myth of his ability to have entered heaven and because of his historical role in Judea’s Bar Kochba revolt against the Roman Empire. Rukeyser’s claim to these poetic and the political influences from her Jewish heritage reveals some key characteristics of her radicalism, particularly her attraction to the idea of the heroic intellectual and her synthesis of erotic freedom and emancipatory vision. These qualities infused her lifelong social justice commitments, which were steadfastly anti-racist, anti-fascist, and pro-democratic commitments.

Rukeyser’s political awakening occurred between 1930 and 1932 at Vassar College, a center for both the first national student movement and politicized avant-gardism. For the college newspaper, she reported on developments in modernist poetry, activities by the Communist Party-sponsored Student League for Industrial Democracy, and the Pennsylvania coalmining strikes. She studied with Hallie Flanigan, who introduced into American theater European leftist experimentalist direction and staging innovations by Bertolt Brecht, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Erwin Piscator. Soon thereafter, Flanigan became the director of the Federal Theater Project, through which she sponsored community theaters’ populist Living Newspapers. Those productions influenced Rukeyser’s own later anti-fascist and proto-feminist play The Middle of the Air, which Flanigan directed in 1945 and championed as a tour de force of vanguardist political drama. The play was never published, like so much of Rukeyser’s other major nonpoetic works.

After her withdrawal from Vassar, Rukeyser continued her leftist reportage and literary vanguardism by clerking for Popular Front theater companies and writing for Communist news outlets such as Student Review and New Masses. Her reportage on the Oakley Johnson case for the Student Review put her at the center of the student rights movement, and her coverage of the Scottsboro trial clarified for her the anti-racist dimensions of American class politics. Combined with her passion for the literary modernism of figures like Robinson Jeffers and T.S. Eliot, her social justice vision informed her first poetry collection, Theory of Flight (1935).

Despite her commitments since her student days, Rukeyser herself claimed the Spanish Civil War as the true moment of her political awakening. While traveling to Barcelona in June 1936 to cover the Popular Olympiad, a protest of Nazi Germany’s hosting of the official Olympics, she witnessed the war’s outbreak. Her resolute anti-fascism grew from that experience and intertwined with her passionate affair on that trip with athlete and German radical Otto Boch, who would die fighting for the Popular Front. These involvements inform her posthumously published novel Savage Coast (2013). Upon returning to the United States, Rukeyser activelty opposed homegrown fascist threats, including white supremacy and Jim Crowism. Her unique combination of anti-fascist politics, American democratic traditions, and modernist aesthetic sensibilities took shape in The Life of Poetry (1949), a treatise marking the culmination of nearly a decade of lectures Rukeyser gave at Vassar College, Columbia University, and the California Labor School.

After Pearl Harbor, Rukeyser’s support of the war effort and her propaganda work for the Office of War Information’s Graphics Workshop set her at odds with many American leftists. A series of defamatory attacks were even launched against her in the pages of Partisan Review. Presented as politically ideological, the controversy actually was fueled by chauvinism and homophobia, targeting a bisexual woman well-connected to Jewish exile and lesbian anti-fascist circles. Consequently, Rukeyser retreated from activism in the first decade of the Cold War, raising her son, William (b.1947), and beginning an open relationship with her life partner and literary agent Monica McCall. She was still visible enough to be caught up in the Red Scare. She lost a multi-book deal with a major publishing house in the early 1950s, which included an unfinished biography of anthropologist Franz Boas. The American Legion attempted but failed to have her fired in 1958 from her teaching post at Sarah Lawrence College.

During the 1960s, Rukeyser reemerged as an activist-poet and reclaimed her former status as a public intellectual. New generations of readers embraced the work she published with the rise of the women’s liberation movement and eventually gay liberation. However, Rukeyser, critical of identity-based politics, distanced herself from these movements. She allied herself with racial justice movements and worked in community-based organizations such as an East Harlem arts education outreach program. She also was involved with the anti-nuclear movement. Rukeyser was opposed to the US war in Vietnam. Most famously, she joined fellow activist-poet Denise Levertov and Jane Hart, the wife of a US Senator, as unofficial peace emissaries to North Vietnam in October 1972. This mission followed her participation in, and arrest at, the previous summer’s protest at the US Capitol organized by RESIST. RESIST and its subsidiary, the Nuremberg Obligation, with which Rukeyser became involved, protested the war and fought for amnesty for conscientious objectors, draft resisters, and anti-war activists. Upon returning from North Vietnam, Rukeyser served a short jail term, shortened because of her poor health.

Rukeyser’s experience with the American carceral system led to her to advocate for political prisoners during her brief tenure, in 1975, as the first female president of the PEN American Center, an international organization supporting literary authors’ and journalists’ freedom of speech. This often-unremarked chapter of Rukeyser’s career included a trip to South Korea to advocate for the release of the detained Catholic poet Kim Chi Ha, documented in her late long poem “The Gates” (1975). She also campaigned for the release of writers imprisoned in Ghana, Iran, and the United States. Throughout this late period, her literary productivity did not flag. Rukeyser published several volumes of poetry, translations, essays and reviews and wrote scripts for experimental plays, films, and musicals. Although many were never produced or published, each presents a facet of, and offers insight into, her unique leftism.

Recommendations

Verso Gift Card

Gaza: The Story of a Genocide

The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and the Planet

Freud and the Non-European

Nuclear is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change

A Philosophy of War: Why We Fight

The Homegrown City: Reclaiming the Metropolis for its Users

Berlin Childhood around 1900

You’re viewing our site

Rukeyser, Muriel

Further reading