Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection by Catherine Gander 9780748670536, 9780748670543, 9780748670550, 9780748670567

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 The Photo-text
Chapter 3 The Lives
Chapter 4 Documentary and the Emergence of American Studies
Chapter 5 Landscape, Navigation and Cartography
Chapter 6 Conclusion
Appendix: illustrations
Sources Cited
Index

Citation preview

MURIEL RUKEYSER AND DOCUMENTARY

MURIEL RUKEYSER AND

DOCUMENTARY

Catherine Gander

The Poetics of Connection

Cover image: Seacoast in Moonlight, 1890, Albert Pinkham Ryder, the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Cover design: Michael Chatfield

ISBN 978–0–7486–7053–6

MURIEL RUKEYSER AND

DOCUMENTARY The Poetics of Connection

Catherine Gander

Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary

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For Dad

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Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary The Poetics of Connection

Catherine Gander

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© Catherine Gander, 2013 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 7053 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 7054 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 7055 0 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 7056 7 (Amazon ebook) The right of Catherine Gander to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

1

Introduction

1

2

The Photo-text

23

3

The Lives

73

4

Documentary and the Emergence of American Studies

121

5

Landscape, Navigation and Cartography

167

6

Conclusion

208

Appendix: illustrations

215

Sources Cited Index

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Acknowledgements

For the production of this book, I am warmly grateful to my parents, for their unending support and love, Alan Marshall, for his kindness and his criticism, Clive Bush, for introducing me to an old friend of his, Shamoon Zamir, for his insightful suggestions, numerous friends and colleagues, who have helped me in more ways than space permits me to list, and to Andrew Cummins, for his boundless belief. Parts of Chapters 3 and 5 have previously been published in different form. Extracts from ‘Muriel Rukeyser, America, and the “Melville Revival” ’, Journal of American Studies 44:4 (2010), © Cambridge University Press 2011, are reprinted with permission; extracts from ‘The Senses of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead’, European Journal of American Culture 30:3 (2011) © Intellect Ltd, are reprinted with permission. Extended extracts from The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, copyright © 2005 by Muriel Rukeyser, Janet. E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog, are reprinted by permission of ICM. I extend special thanks to Vianny Cruz for her help and Bill Rukeyser for his kind support and assistance. Other extracts from Muriel Rukeyser’s works are quoted and reprinted from: I Go Out, © 1961 by Muriel Rukeyser and Leonard Kessler; The Life of Poetry, 1st edition © 1949 by Muriel Rukeyser, © 1996 by William Rukeyser; Mazes, © 1970 by Muriel Rukeyser and Milton Charles; One Life © 1957 by Muriel Rukeyser; The Speed of Darkness © 1968 by Muriel Rukeyser; The Traces of Thomas Hariot © 1970, 1971 by Muriel Rukeyser; Willard Gibbs: American Genius © 1942 by Muriel Rukeyser, reprinted by permission of William L. Rukeyser. Quotations from the Rukeyser–Boas Papers appear courtesy of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia; quotations from materials held at the Library of Congress appear courtesy of the Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington DC.

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Extracts from ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ by Walter Benjamin are from Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz © 1978 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, reprinted by permission of the publisher; extracts from Another Way of Telling © 1982 by John Berger and Jean Mohr; extracts from The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911: A Franz Boas Reader, ed. George Stocking Jr, Basic Books, 1974; extracts from ‘On Creating a Usable Past’ by Van Wyck Brooks, in Van Wyck Brooks, The Early Years, copyright 1968, 1993 by Claire Sprague; extracts from On Intersubjectivity and Cultural Creativity by Martin Buber, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt © 1992 by The University of Chicago, reprinted by permission of the publisher; extracts from The Writings of Martin Buber, ed. Will Herberg © 1956 by Meridian Books; extracts from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria © J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1965, 1975; extracts from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Continuum, 2004), reprinted by permission of the publisher; extracts from Film Form: Essays in Film Theory by Sergei Eisenstein, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda © 1977 by Jay Leyda; extracts from The Film Sense by Sergei Eisenstein, trans. and ed. Jay Leyda, Faber & Faber, 1943; extracts from Our America by Waldo Frank, Boni & Liveright, 1919; extracts from On Native Grounds by Alfred Kazin, Jonathan Cape, 1943; extracts from The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser by Louise Kertesz © by Louisiana State University Press, reprinted by permission of the publisher; extracts from The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz, Northwestern University Press, 1988, reprinted by permission of the publisher; extracts from Totality and Infinity by Emmanuel Levinas, translated by Alphonso Lingis © 1969 Duquesne University Press, reprinted by permission of the publisher; extracts and images from Land of the Free by Archibald MacLeish, Da Capo, 1938, reprinted by permission of Springer Verlag; extracts from Moby Dick or The Whale by Herman Melville, copyright © Northwestern University Press and The Newbury Library, 1988, reprinted by permission of the publisher; extracts from Picture Theory by W. J. T. Mitchell © 1994 by The University of Chicago, reprinted by permission of the publisher; extracts from Ryder [1847–1917]: A Study of Appreciation by Frederic Newlin Price, New York: William Edwin Rudge, 1932; extracts from Time and Narrative, vol. 3 by Paul Ricœur, translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, © 1988 by The University of Chicago, reprinted by permission of the publisher; extracts from The Port of New York by Paul Rosenfeld © The University of Illinois Press, reprinted by permission of the publisher; extracts from In the American Grain © 1933 by William Carlos Williams, reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

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Image permissions are gratefully acknowledged: all Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographs are reprinted by permission of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA / OWI Collection; ‘Gitane’ © 1933 The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld, reprinted by permission of Nadia Blumenfeld on behalf of Henry Blumenfeld; ‘Rest in the Peace of His hands’, grave relief by Käthe Kollwitz, © 2012 by Susanna Forrest, reprinted with permission and special thanks; page images of The Land of the Free, Da Capo, 1938, reprinted by permission of Springer Verlag. Despite extensive researches, the copyright holder of Coronet magazine (defunct in 1971) was not located. Every effort has been made to establish copyright before publication; however, the publisher would be pleased to be contacted if any errors or omissions exist.

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Chapter 1

Introduction

Muriel Rukeyser – poet, biographer, novelist and playwright – remains surprisingly neglected by scholars of American literature and culture. Although a handful of scholars (whose important scholarship will be referred to in the course of this book) are helping to initiate a recovery of her work, Rukeyser is too often omitted from academic reading lists, library bookshelves and poetry anthologies. My reason for writing this book was principally to address this lack and to help instigate a proper reclamation of Rukeyser’s writing, situating her firmly in the canon of essential twentieth-century American poets and acknowledging her role as a critical cultural figure of her age. Hailed by the poet and critical essayist Kenneth Rexroth as ‘by far the best poet of her exact generation’, Rukeyser (1913–80) was born in New York City to Jewish parents, Lawrence and Myra Lyons Rukeyser.1 She lived and worked in America for the duration of her life, either in New York or California, and began writing in earnest in the 1930s, publishing her first book of poetry, Theory of Flight, in 1935. Throughout her life, Rukeyser wrote with the conviction that there are two kinds of poems: the poems of unverifiable facts, based in dreams, in sex, in everything that can be given to other people only through the skill and strength by which it is given; and the other kind being the document, the poem that rests on material evidence.2

This inherent ‘doubleness’ in her work, as Rukeyser termed it, allowed her poetry to become the ‘meeting-place’ of ostensibly opposed discourses, disciplines and modalities. For Rukeyser, who admitted to being ‘deeply concerned with the evidence of the world’, the ‘facts’ of human existence were to be ‘reported’ via the confluence of subjective and objective, ‘artistic’ and ‘scientific’ ways of experiencing reality.3 The concern of this book is to argue that her work was shaped particularly

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by the wide-ranging aesthetic and ideological concerns that developed contemporaneously with her ‘exact generation’ – a generation that came of age during a period in which documentary represented the principal means of communicating cultural values and reporting social and personal experience. I therefore argue for a distinct and direct correlation between Rukeyser’s writing and the modes, techniques and ideologies of the documentary movement as it flourished during the 1930s. After the 1929 Wall Street Crash gave rise to the Great Depression, documentary discourse infused much of the literary and artistic output of America. By examining Rukeyser’s poetic style and theory as it developed during the 1930s and beyond, I trace the dialogue that emerged between her relational poetics and documentary’s similarly intertextual and interdisciplinary approach to the realities of the world. Further, I posit that the sources of documentary in Rukeyser’s work extend beyond the 1930s moment to a broader sphere of influence. The principal texts that have informed my understanding of documentary expression are: William Stott’s seminal Documentary Expression and Thirties America (1973), which, even after forty years, remains the most incisive critical study of the subject; Alfred Kazin’s On Native Grounds (1942), which offers an invaluable (but still undervalued) contemporary interpretation of early to mid-twentiethcentury American literary culture, as well as constituting a hybrid documentary text in itself; Warren Susman’s chapter, ‘The Thirties’, in Stanley Coben and Lorman Ratner’s The Development of an American Culture (1970); Richard H. Pells’s Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (1973); and Paula Rabinowitz’s They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (1994). Michael Renov’s Theorizing Documentary (1993) includes essays by Philip Rosen, Brian Winston and Bill Nichols, and raises the issue of a still relatively unexplored ‘breadth and dynamism of the documentary past’.4 Film theory is addressed in Nichols’s Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (1991) and Winston’s Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and its Legitimations (1995), while Michael Thurston’s Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry Between the World Wars (2001) provides an insightful discussion of the politically motivated poetry of the 1920s and 1930s, specifically reading Rukeyser’s ‘partisan poetry’ through Marxist disputes over the effects of corporate capitalism on the American labourer.5 The four main chapters of this book examine how a different aspect of the documentary genre is at work in a range of Rukeyser’s poetry

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and prose. However, the following sections of this introductory chapter offer some historical and contextual insight into documentary’s origins and governing ideologies – vital to an understanding of Rukeyser’s engagement with the movement’s methods and principles, as well as her relations and collaborations with several leading documentarians. The following exposition of documentary focuses on the two principal aspects of the genre, film and photography, that bear particular relevance to Rukeyser’s work. Other aspects of documentary will be examined throughout the book.

Documentary film The term ‘documentary’ was coined by the British filmmaker and critic John Grierson in 1926 to describe Irish–American filmmaker Robert Flaherty’s Moana, an ethnographic film providing ‘a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth’.6 Grierson’s coinage was an Anglicisation of the French term for travel films, documentaire; however, his application of the word incorporated an important new aspect – ‘the creative treatment of actuality’.7 Moana, and Flaherty’s earlier film documenting Inuit Eskimos, Nanook of the North (1922), offered dramatic, romantic reports of the lives of cultural and ethnic others. In 1924, Grierson had moved to the US on a three-year Rockefeller Research Fellowship to study the psychology of mass media propaganda. During this time, he met Flaherty, wrote film criticism for the New York Sun (which he referred to as his ‘hobby’),8 and introduced the films of the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein to the American public, arranging for the first US screening of Battleship Potemkin (1925).9 Studying propaganda, Grierson had become influenced by the Soviet style of filmmaking, and soon advocated the quick-cut, rhythmic and imagistic styles of Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovkin and Dziga Vertov in his approach to documentary. On his return to the UK in 1927, Grierson began writing film criticism in earnest and, in 1933, announced his belief that film represented the best method of communicating social problems and political standpoints to the public: ‘I look on cinema as a pulpit, and use it as a propagandist.’10 Grierson’s own subject for propaganda was primarily ‘Britain’s struggle to solve her social and industrial problems’, and his first film, Drifters (1929), addressed the British herring industry.11 As his biographer, Forsyth Hardy, noted, the on-site shooting of the film, coupled with its dynamic editing and symphonic structure, made it a unique

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contribution to previous studio-based British film efforts, and aligned it with the stylistic techniques of Russian non-fiction films.12 The success of the government-funded Drifters allowed Grierson to expand his ideas. Between 1930 and 1933, he constructed a film unit at the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) and trained its members: among them, Paul Rotha. The ethos of the unit was that the ‘documentary idea’ relied on its ‘social use’,13 which might be arrived at ‘in any fashion which strikes the imagination and makes observation a little richer than it was. At one level, the vision may be journalistic; at another, it may rise to poetry and drama.’14 After the EMB dissolved in 1933, Grierson developed a film unit at the General Post Office (GPO), working alongside W. H. Auden, Walter Leigh and Benjamin Britten in the production of documentary films with voiceovers and musical soundtracks, such as Coal Face (1935) and Night Mail (1936).15 Later, when Grierson was appointed the executive head of the National Film Board of Canada in 1939, Rotha, his colleague at the EMB and the GPO, succeeded Grierson as the British documentary movement’s chief historian and theorist.16 Rotha’s book Documentary Film (1936) was the first extended theoretical treatise on the subject. Similar to Grierson, whose preface to the revised edition argued the instructive potential of the form,17 Rotha envisaged documentary film as both a social and ethical tool ‘for education and democracy’ that would ‘interest imaginations for several years hence’.18 His emphasis was on a balanced composition of ‘views’, ‘movement and symphonics’, ‘natural material’ (shot on location, without professional actors), ‘photography’, ‘editing’, ‘sound’ and ‘music’. These elements constituted the interconnecting ‘energies’ of the final product, whose effective social message relied on their dramatised tension.19 Rotha followed Grierson in drawing upon the example of Soviet cinema to support his contention that propagandist film demanded high creative endeavour. For Rotha, Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929) epitomised ‘documentary’s task’: ‘the dramatisation and bending to special purpose of actuality’.20 Thus, Rotha’s exposition of documentary closely adhered to the Griersonian definition of the form as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’. The principal message of his book is that ‘there must be creation in the very act of using the mechanical apparatus’ designed to record and reproduce reality. Regarding documentary filmmaking as both an artistic and a socio-political practice, Rotha argued that this conjunction of technique and function aligned the advent of ‘the documentary method’ with ‘the birth of creative cinema’.21 Despite admitting in 1936 that ‘Britain appears to be leading the world in this type of film,’ in

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1938 Rotha acknowledged ‘the growing recognition of this kind of filmmaking in the US’.22 Rotha placed Flaherty’s Nanook alongside Vertov’s cinematic experiments, Grierson’s Drifters, Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (France, 1926) and Walter Ruttman’s Berlin (Germany, 1927) in a list of films he believed represented the ‘beginnings’ of documentary.23 In the revised final section of the book, Rotha noted that the ‘increased demand for truth’ in Britain and America had found a creative outlet. ‘In America especially,’ argued Rotha, ‘most modern forms of fact communication – Radio, Press, Film and Theatre – have been used to present actualities with dramatic statement.’24 He referred specifically to projects established under the aegis of the federal government’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), part of a vast programme of emergency public employment proposed by the Roosevelt administration as part of the New Deal initiative to tackle the economic effects of the Depression. Branches of the WPA included the Federal Writers’ Project, the Federal Art Project, the Federal Music Project and the Federal Theatre Project, which produced a series of ‘Living Newspapers’ – dramatised stage enactments of current and historical events. Rotha also referenced The March of Time, a news programme financed by Time, Inc., begun in 1931 as a radio broadcast and transferred to the cinema as a monthly newsreel in 1935.25 Each twenty-minute programme transmitted news to the general public via dynamically edited on-site footage, intercut with reports, witness testimonies and acted interpretations of events, and overlaid with a dramatic voiceover. By highlighting these developments in American documentary, Rotha recognised the effort being made in the States ‘to establish the production of realist films away from the Hollywood sphere of influence’. He noted the achievements of the Communist International-sponsored Film and Photo League (FPL, 1930–6) and its splinter group, New Film Alliance, as testament to a growing preoccupation within American intellectual circles as to the creative treatment of social realities.26 Rotha also highlighted Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) as proof that ‘the documentary film was no longer the monopoly of Europe’.27 Documenting both the problem of the over-tilling of rural farmland and the New Deal reform projects addressing it, The Plow was funded by the Resettlement Administration (RA), a New Deal initiative established in 1935 to relocate struggling rural and urban families to communities that had been financially aided by the federal government. In 1937, the RA was incorporated into a new body, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which ran until 1942. Working with Lorenz on the cinematography of The Plow were the American documentary photographer / filmmakers Ralph Steiner

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and Paul Strand. Steiner was a former member of the FPL, where he had constructed workers’ newsreels and class-conscious documentary films such as National Hunger March (1932) and The Scottsboro Boys (1934), alongside progressive filmmakers such as Irving Lerner, Jay Leyda and Leo Hurwitz. Another FPL photographer / filmmaker to advance American Marxist documentary was the Vassar graduate Nancy Naumburg, whose films Sheriffed (1934) and Taxi (1935) are now unfortunately lost, and whose name has been largely forgotten, not least due to the internal sexual politics and artistic conflict of the Left.28 However, extant reviews describe an ‘undeniably impressive’ ‘vitality, freshness and honesty’ to Naumburg’s treatment of the farm crisis (Sheriffed), and commend her ability to capture cinematically ‘the raw meat of social reality’ in covering the New York taxi strike of 1934 (Taxi).29 In 1935, Steiner, Lerner and Hurwitz formed Nykino (an amalgamation of ‘New York’ and ‘Kino-Eye’, the latter taken from Vertov’s name for his montage experiments) in an effort to relax the rigidity of the documentary approach endorsed by the FPL in order to include dramatic re-enactments, and creative photography and editing. Nykino’s output was slight, and consisted mainly of short propaganda films that, according to Steiner, aimed at ‘exposing the brutalities of capitalist society’.30 Although, as Russell Campbell notes, Nykino was essentially ‘a transitional grouping’ with minimal production, it enabled several like-minded filmmakers and photographers to develop the documentary method, if largely in theoretical terms. In 1937, Nykino was converted to the non-profit organisation Frontier Films under the presidency of Strand. Members included Steiner, Hurwitz, Lerner, Leyda, Willard Van Dyke, Ben Maddow and the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens. Lack of funds caused Frontier to fold in 1942, although many of its members left the group in 1941 to become actively engaged in war efforts. Among Frontier’s major films were China Strikes Back (1937), The Heart of Spain (1937), using footage of the Spanish Civil War, and Native Land (1942), a feature-length history of the violation of union workers’ rights in America, of which Strand was both director and cinematographer, stylistically combining music, symphonic movement, poetic image sequencing, subjective narration and re-enacted scenes of actual events. Having worked as a photographer during the 1920s and 1930s, Strand was able to apply his expertise in ‘straight’ image composition to documentary film, and his contribution represents a key moment in the construction of an American documentary method. The critic Charles Wolfe has noted that the ethos and style cultivated by Strand and his photographer / artist associates, including Charles Sheeler and

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Charles Demuth, were a precedent to the aesthetics and techniques of documentary filmmaking in the US: ‘For these artists, the optics of the camera offered a new metaphor for visual perception that was precise, uncluttered, focused upon the contours and textures of commonplace objects.’31 In 1917, Strand had written an essay entitled ‘Photography’ for the intellectual magazine Seven Arts. Defending ‘straight photography’ as a method of bridging a cultural gap between art and science, Strand argued that the camera represented a method of both factual documentation and creative expression, incorporating the objectivity of reality and the inevitable influence of the photographer’s subjective perspective.32 By 1922, Strand had developed his thinking to propose the photographer as an almost deistic figure, who had established ‘spiritual control over a machine’ and had thereby ‘joined the ranks of all true seekers after knowledge, be it intuitive and aesthetic or conceptual and scientific’.33 Wolfe traces several different paths of connection between American photography and the birth of social documentary film in the US, including the Californian Group f.64, whose principal member, Van Dyke, often associated with FSA photographer Dorothea Lange and her social documentarian husband Paul Taylor, was a member of Nykino, and who subsequently worked at Frontier Films, as well as alongside Lorenz on his second New Deal project, The River (1937).

Muriel Rukeyser and documentary film As welcome as Wolfe’s insightful observations remain after they were first made in 1995, Rukeyser made similar connections as early as 1949 between transcontinental trends in photography and the development of documentary film in America. Van Dyke is among several photographer / filmmakers whose work Rukeyser praised in her book, The Life of Poetry, a treatise on the importance of creative and truthful communication to all aspects of human living, and a ‘tour de force exploration of American culture’.34 Noting the ‘completely realised’ quality of the films Night Mail, China Strikes Back and The River, Rukeyser highlighted the documentary talents of filmmakers Ivens, Grierson, Lerner, Steiner, Strand, Hurwitz, Flaherty and ‘the groups that formed behind such productions as Spanish Earth, Crisis, Native Land, The City, and Heart of Spain’. Rukeyser celebrated ‘the documentary methods that made a young art’, approvingly quoting Rotha’s Documentary Film and asserting that such methods ‘were real functions of real information’.35 Like Rotha, Rukeyser applauded the communicative value of a balanced

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‘relationship of images’, commenting that ‘the selection and ordering are a work of preparation and equilibrium . . . The single image, which arrives with its own speed, takes its place in a sequence which reinforces that image. This happens most recognisably in films and in poetry.’36 Rukeyser’s understanding of imagistic sequence and relation, and their use-value, will be explored in detail throughout this book. Rukeyser’s association with documentary film began at an early age, and The Life of Poetry contains several references to Rukeyser’s experiences cutting, editing and writing for motion pictures, as well as her admiration for the ‘unity of imagination’ in American and British documentary film efforts.37 Having studied film editing in 1935, Rukeyser collaborated on a number of Frontier Films projects in the late 1930s and early 1940s, during which time she became friends with many documentary filmmakers and writers, including Ivens, Maddow, Strand and Hurwitz.38 She co-wrote with Ben Maddow (a.k.a. David Forrest) the script to the 1941 documentary short A Place to Live, distributed by Documentary Film Productions Inc. and directed and produced by Lerner.39 The film, for which Rukeyser is also credited for providing the ‘scenario’, addressed slum clearance in Philadelphia, and emphasised the continuing need for new, sanitary housing projects, asserting that ‘all that has been done is just a beginning’. Rukeyser remained involved in film production long after Frontier Films had disbanded, writing the filmscript to All the Way Home (1958), a documentary short produced and distributed by Dynamic Films Inc. and directed by Lee Bobker. All the Way Home presents a dramatised account of the reaction in an all-white neighbourhood when a homeowner considers selling his house to an African–American. Hope for an integrated community is implied at the denouement, as the narrator encourages the audience to reflect on the documentary’s message: ‘The way we meet the difference in people, this can give us strength. The range, the variousness that we have – this is a source of power always, when it is met well, and used.’40 Archival material at the Library of Congress also suggests Rukeyser’s attendance at a festival of documentary film held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the late 1940s, at which A Place to Live was screened, alongside films such as Berlin, Moana, The River and The City.41 As a student at Vassar between 1930 and 1932, Rukeyser worked as a reporter for the college newspaper Student Review, covering, among other events, the trial of the ‘Scottsboro boys’, a story also covered by the FPL’s Nancy Naumburg, another Vassar student. Rukeyser met and forged a friendship with Naumburg, travelling to Hawk’s Nest in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, in 1936 to report on a major industrial

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disaster that had led to the deaths of hundreds of American miners. Rukeyser and Naumburg travelled to the location in the capacity of reporter and photographer respectively, and although a collaborative piece of work was apparently never published, Rukeyser’s poem series The Book of the Dead (U.S. 1, 1938) addresses several aspects of the tragedy, including its discovery, its physical and emotional after-effects, and the subsequent court proceedings. It also situates ‘the photographer’ in a role central to the recording and reporting of events. Letters from Naumburg to Rukeyser suggest that the photographer / filmmaker offered direction to Rukeyser regarding the political exposé emphasis of the poems, urging her to stress ‘the necessity of a thorough investigation in order to indict the Co., its lawyers and doctors and undertaker, how the company cheated these men out of their lives’.42 Rukeyser appears to have acted on Naumburg’s advice, attempting several times to find a producer / director for a documentary film exposing the social injustice of the Hawk’s Nest incident; the Rukeyser papers contain letters to both Paramount Pictures and Rotha over the issue.43 Rukeyser’s friendship with Rotha appears to have begun in the late 1930s, and it is likely that they first met during his visit to the US in 1937.44 At that time, Rukeyser was serving on the board of advisors for Frontier Films, where she had forged friendships and working relations with Strand, Ivens, Hurwitz, and Maddow in particular.45 The film historian William Alexander has written that, although Rotha’s apparently superior attitude caused friction among American filmmakers, specifically Strand and Lorentz, Rukeyser remembered the tension as based partly on jealousy of both Rotha’s work and the success of British documentary film in general, recalling his ‘superior stance as a viable teaching method’.46 Her friendship with Rotha appears to have continued until her death, and the pair corresponded regularly.47 In the late 1950s, Rukeyser wrote a film proposal entitled Puck Fair, which explored the myths and practices surrounding an annual Irish folk festival. Sent by Rotha, Rukeyser had travelled to Ireland to make extensive anthropological notes on the ritual in preparation for a documentary film. However, despite his initial enthusiasm, Rotha demanded that the proposal have ‘more story-plot’, and the film was never made.48 Rukeyser’s 1965 book The Orgy, a combination of anthropology, poetic impressions, travel reportage, psychological autobiography, and fiction, was the result of the project. Rukeyser’s archives contain several of her notes on documentary film forms, including newsreels, and extended quotations from Ben Maddow’s writings on documentary film and writing, especially his 1936 article for New Theatre entitled ‘Film into Poem’.49 It is likely that

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Maddow’s case for a ‘cine-poem’, a film of ‘close emotion’ that would express a more individualised and intense expression of ‘the complex patterns of our lives’, appealed to Rukeyser’s similar thoughts regarding the compatibility of film and poetry.50 When Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead was published in 1938, Maddow praised it in a review for New Masses, commending the ‘poetic force’ of the documents Rukeyser had utilised.51 Rukeyser’s utilisation of filmic editing and imaging methods in her poetry stemmed from her appreciation of the structure of film as a rhythmic succession of still, photographic images. As I will examine, Rukeyser’s experience cutting film, as well as her interest in the documentary montage techniques of Eisenstein and Vertov, contributed to her own poetic style of image juxtaposition. Constantly seeking ‘new openings for the combination of word and image’, Rukeyser was deeply involved in documentary methods of pictorial / textual collaboration, admiring those documentarians who were pioneering visual and verbal modes of representing social realities.52 The following sections outline the development of documentary photography in America, and Rukeyser’s associations therein.

Documentary photography Unless sponsored by the government, documentary films were rarely shown in mainstream film theatres, instead being screened in union halls, workers’ clubs or art-house theatres. The audience of such films was thus significantly smaller than that of documentary photography, which appeared in several popular picture magazines such as Survey Graphic, Life, Time and Fortune, published throughout America. The principle source of such photographs was the Photography Unit of the FSA’s Historical Section, headed by Roy E. Stryker. Its remit was to produce and collect photographic evidence of the living and working conditions of the middle and southern states, and to document the rural rehabilitation afforded by New Deal reform projects. Stryker employed many accomplished photographers, including Dorothea Lange, Jack Delano, Walker Evans, Edwin Rosskam, Ben Shahn, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein and Russell Lee, and would send his photographers to the field with ‘shooting scripts’ – detailed briefs specifying the location, subject and mood of the image he required.53 All negatives and prints remained the property of the federal government, and were subsequently lent to various publications to be used singly, but more often in photo-essays.

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Many critics consider Stryker to be largely responsible for the development and popularity of documentary photography in America during the 1930s. This is partly due to his unwavering commitment to the dissemination of FSA images, but perhaps principally due to the file’s apparent construction according to the guidelines of what Alan Trachtenberg has termed Stryker’s ‘epic ambition’ to form a nostalgic, inclusive picture of the US.54 Trachtenberg has explored the file’s status as a pictorial narrative of American cultural history, arguing that, ‘viewed from the perspective of the file’, the FSA project ‘presents the dilemma of representing society, of telling stories about American life, through photographs’. As such, the file ‘contains an unresolved tension between “objectivity” and “subjectivity” ’ that renders it both epic and lyrical, realist and dramatic.55 John Tagg’s treatment of the same theme also situates Stryker’s ‘world view’ as the commanding, driving force of the project, which incorporated a nostalgia for the director’s own past, and consequently a wish for ‘life as he . . . wished it to be’.56 The truth value of the FSA photographs relied upon the intersecting discourses of documentary, government propaganda and aesthetics, and Tagg, like Trachtenberg, comments that the photographs participated in a collective truth that aimed at epic narration: a ‘wider “truth” of the file itself, as a composite picture of rural America in the late 1930s and early 1940s, conceived apparently by one man, but called into being, administered and employed by specific government agencies’.57 Individual photographers, both within and outside the FSA, upheld their own beliefs as to the ethical and aesthetic requisites of documentary photography. Both Lange and Evans, for example, advocated a ‘hands off’ approach that documented the photographic subject without fabrication, either during the picture-taking process or after.58 Lange insisted (perhaps a little disingenuously) that she did ‘not molest or tamper with or arrange’ her compositions, whilst Evans similarly understood documentary to mean the visual transmission of unadulterated reality: ‘that’s where the word “documentary” holds: you don’t touch a thing’.59 By contrast, Margaret Bourke-White, a staff photographer for Life, endorsed the view that manipulation of a scene, via object rearrangement, the use of props, unusual camera angles or sharp flashes, was acceptable in the pursuit of an image that dramatised actuality.60 Rothstein also admitted to stage management, believing that ‘[p]rovided the results are a faithful reproduction of what the photographer believes he sees, whatever takes place in the making of the picture is justified.’61 Perhaps the most essential factor in documentary photography was the evocation, sought by photographers and Stryker alike, of an

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‘emotional’ and ‘sensory’ connection felt by the viewer of the image toward the subject photographed.62 Stryker noted in 1941 that the documentary photographer . . . feels obliged to bring home more than a cold record. Somehow he has to incorporate into that rectangle which he has cut out from the surrounding and therefore formless reality, what the real thing sounded like, what it smelled like – and most important, what it felt like.63

Rothstein likewise stressed the importance of communicating not only truth, but also pathos. By imagining a correlation between ‘the eye of the person looking at the print’ and ‘the lens of the camera’ during the image’s initial registration, he argued that the documentary photograph encouraged the viewer to ‘feel’ ‘the real thing’ – the circumstances and sentiments of numerous American citizens affected by the Depression – and so act charitably.64 Stryker’s understanding of documentary ‘as an approach’ echoed Rotha’s earlier emphasis on ‘the documentary method rather than on documentary as a particular kind of film’.65 In 1986, Rothstein reiterated that ‘the word documentary describes a style and approach’ that incorporate both a ‘deep respect for the truth and the desire to create active interpretations of the world in which we live’.66 According to Rothstein, the documentary image’s capacity to evoke identification ‘with the photographer’s eyewitness concern for the subject’ was reinforced by its reproduction and captioning.67 Printed next to written text, the photographs were given additional emotive and educational power in widely circulated picture magazines. When Fortune magazine launched in 1929, owner and chief executive Henry Luce declared that, ‘in this new publication, words and pictures should be partners’.68 Beaumont Newhall, art historian and director of the first photography department at the New York MoMA (1940–8), wrote in the early 1940s of the powerful ‘third effect’ that was achieved via the combination of documentary images and text.69 In many cases, words seemed to help ‘decipher’ the photographs; FSA images, for example, were filed only under ‘objective content’ until 1942, which, according to Rosskam, rendered the collection an assemblage of ‘hieroglyphs’.70

Rukeyser and documentary photography Rukeyser’s involvement in photographic practice and theory is explored at length in the following chapter; however, it is worth outlining briefly here. As I have noted, her affiliation with Frontier Films and with the

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FPL allowed Rukeyser to build professional and personal relationships with several photographer / filmmakers, and during the late 1930s, Rukeyser became increasingly engaged with documentary methods of presenting social realities via a combination of printed image and word. In 1939 she published two photo-texts in the picture magazine, Coronet. Several of the photographs that Rukeyser utilised for these ‘photonarratives’ were provided by the FSA, and archival evidence indicates her wish to become deeply involved in the production of photo-textual articles and stories for popular consumption. Between 1942 and 1943, Rukeyser developed her ideas on the poetic confluence of verbal and visual representation when working as a Visual Information Specialist for the Office of War Information (OWI). In charge of creating poster campaigns in support of the American war effort, Rukeyser was able to further her commitment to the documentary blending of word and image in the pursuit of transmitting a powerful social message.71 In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser wrote of her valuable experience at the Graphics Division, collaborating with artists such as Ben Shahn and Henry Koerner. Although she resigned from the Office due to her frustration at the attitudes of the ‘advertising men’ in charge, Rukeyser noted that she had ‘learned . . . the impact that a combined form may have when the picture and text approach the meaning from different starting-places’. Similar to Newhall, Rukeyser understood there to be ‘separables’ in photo-textual combination: ‘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 to extend its meaning.’72 Although Rukeyser’s assertion that words do not ‘describe the picture’ opposes Rosskam’s contention that words were needed to ‘decipher’ the FSA images, his reference to the file as an assemblage of ‘hieroglyphs’ is pertinent to Rukeyser’s own employment and understanding of documentary. As I argue throughout this book, Rukeyser’s engagement with documentary images centred on their strength in multiplicity and connection to each other. Rukeyser believed that words and pictures can combine to create what Walt Whitman, when offering a definition of his leaves of grass, termed ‘a uniform hieroglyphic’: a symbolic, compound and connective image of all humanity. Rukeyser hoped for unification ‘not only for symbols that may be related to other symbols, but for meanings that are hieroglyphs of the world’.73 In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser detailed her appreciation for the documentary photography of ‘Paul Strand and Walker Evans, Ralph Steiner, Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, Helen Leavitt, Ansel Adams, and Berenice Abbott’.74 Noting that photography’s ‘immediacy answers the

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need that our newspaper readers have for the eye-witness, a need that runs through all culture’, Rukeyser celebrated the vitality and truthvalue of documentary photographs whilst lamenting the ‘worn, descriptive, faded writing’ of most accompanying text. She was a close friend of Abbott’s, whose ‘radical new methods’ she saw as pioneering relations between art and science, and for whose 1970 book, Photographs, she wrote the foreword.75 Rukeyser remained committed throughout her life to promoting documentary photography as a method of conveying the unembellished actuality of social and personal realities. As I discuss throughout this book, the still and motion camera as instruments of truth registration and manipulation assume vital roles in her writing.

The ethos of documentary I have hopefully demonstrated in this very brief outline that documentary was a new and developing term in the 1930s, applied by various practitioners of the movement to convey and incorporate a variety of methods and messages. Soon after coining it, Grierson himself admitted to disliking the word, bemoaning its ‘clumsy description’ of the principles he wished it to represent.76 In 1984, Newhall wrote that ‘[d]ocumentary photography is a term that has defied definition ever since it was first introduced in the 1930s,’ claiming that a more accurate label would be ‘humanistic’.77 In 1989, Trachtenberg labelled it ‘the most troubling of categories’.78 Documentary’s shifting definitional parameters and constantly evolving ideological and aesthetical scope seem to be intrinsic to it. During the late 1930s, for example, American documentary returned to its etymological roots, when its emphasis on visuality extended to include a mode of travel writing that sought to imitate the apparent objectivity of the camera in style and motive. Depression travel reportage offered verbal snapshots of the country whilst simultaneously recording a personal and historical account of the American landscape. A series of informational, inventorial guide books, published by the Writers’ Project branch of the WPA, followed. Associations between documentary and poetry have existed since Grierson’s ‘first principles’. Highlighting the difficulty in transmitting a ‘sense of social responsibility’ whilst utilising footage of unsightly ‘actuality’ in ‘a very laborious, deep-seeing, deep-sympathising creative effort’, Grierson argued that ‘realist documentary . . . has given itself the job of making poetry where no poet has gone before it’.79 The hybridism of creative and realist methods in successful documentary lent the form an imagism that, according to Grierson, meant ‘the telling of story

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or illumination of theme by images, as poetry is story or theme told by images: I mean the addition of poetic reference to the “mass” and “march” of the symphonic form’.80 Similarly, Rotha underlined the ‘poetic’ qualities of documentary, and raised the question of why, apart from Auden, no poet had been enlisted to narrate a documentary film: ‘We have talked of poetry in style and poetry in visual image but there has been scarcely any attempt to introduce poetry into film speech.’81 Practitioners of documentary photography during the 1930s were less inclined to draw analogies between their own images and techniques and those of poetry. This is perhaps because of the ‘poetic’ connotations attached to photographs that tended to enhance, embellish or romanticise reality, especially those of the Pictorialists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Trachtenberg has written that the New York Pictorialist group, headed by Alfred Stieglitz, provided a legacy against which documentary photographers such as Walker Evans rebelled. Asserting that, at the turn of the century, a ‘polarised language entered photography criticism’ largely due to Stieglitz’s influence, Trachtenberg notes that, in the resultant opposition between ‘personal expression’ and ‘factual reporting’, FSA photographers committed themselves to the latter.82 The ‘straight photography’ practised by Strand, for whom Stieglitz was initially self-appointed publicist, prepared the ground for a realist photography that acted as an instrument of social reform. The use-value of photographs as ‘human documents’ was further promoted by Stryker. Despite sending a series of FSA images to Newhall for display at MoMA, Stryker expressed stern disapproval of their mounted and framed presentation. He informed Newhall that they should be physically experienced by visitors, picked up and thumbed through: ‘[w]hen they become dog-eared and worn out,’ said Stryker, ‘I’ll send you another batch.’83 Documentarians wished their work to be used and useful. Grierson’s original claim that he saw cinema ‘as a pulpit’ and used it ‘as a propagandist’ informed various documentary practices in the States, and several critics have noted the Leftist leanings of the documentary discourses that took shape in America between the two world wars. Stott commented that, although federal documentary reform projects supporting the New Deal often adopted an apolitical stance, examples of ‘radical’ documentary in the form of exposé reportage and participant observer studies were essentially driven by the same ideological force as ‘conservative’ documentary – towards a democratic and inclusive America.84 Monique Vescia notes that ‘the American documentary movement tended to dignify and sometimes even mythologize human labour and leaned toward populism in its implied politics,’ and Thurston argues that

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documentary ‘influenced poetry on the Left’, giving the Dynamo School of Poets, among whom he counts Rukeyser, as example.85 American documentary was not confined to domestic issues, and many documentarians turned their attentions towards crises overseas, especially the Spanish Civil War. Cultural dialogue in America during the 1920s and 1930s was energised by international conflicts and, as Paula Rabinowitz has argued, conditions that helped forge a national public culture in the United States . . . were a direct result of the collusion of popular and populist cultures, such that The Spanish Earth has much in common with The River, despite the differing political affiliations and purposes of their directors.86

As a young reporter, Rukeyser was involved in documenting the crisis in Spain, travelling to Barcelona in 1936. Her resultant poem, ‘Mediterranean’ (1938), was printed in the New York Writers and Artists Committee publication in aid of Spanish democracy, and recommended in Alan Calmer’s 1938 anthology Salud! – Poems, Stories and Selections of Spain by American Writers.87

This book’s contribution to scholarship Criticism of Rukeyser’s work attending to her engagement with documentary forms tends to focus exclusively on The Book of the Dead. Michael Davidson’s Ghostlier Demarcations (1997) examines it as an example of literature ‘brought about by the 1929 crash’,88 imbued with a ‘documentary character’ that enables Rukeyser to present American history ‘as a material record of diverse constituencies’.89 Walter Kalaidjian’s American Culture Between the Wars (1993) describes The Book of the Dead as ‘a critical documentary’ that conformed to ‘the definitive textual styles of the 1930s’ by splicing together ‘the generic conventions of photomontage, reportage, participant observer, and informant narrative modes’.90 Similar to John Lowney in his essay, ‘Truths of Outrage, Truths of Possibility’, and Shoshana Wechsler in her essay, ‘A Mat(t)er of Fact and Vision’, Kalaidjian rightly highlights the recurring trope of the camera in the poem series, drawing parallels between Rukeyser’s poetry and 1930s trends in documentary photography and filmmaking.91 Thurston also aligns Rukeyser’s treatment of the Gauley Bridge tragedy with documentary imaging techniques, finding specific correspondence between Rukeyser’s portrayal of the grieving mother, Mrs Jones, in the poem ‘Absalom’ and ‘the strong and stoic

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mother figure represented over and over again in the work of BourkeWhite and Caldwell or, perhaps most famously, that of Dorothea Lange’.92 Tim Dayton’s insightful monograph, Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” (2003), examines separately what he understands to be the ‘lyrical poems’ and the ‘documentary poems’ within the series, and argues that the latter convey an epic tendency ‘disciplined by the concreteness and definition of its object’.93 Many critics have focused on the Leftist perspective of Rukeyser’s early poetry. Thurston, for example, argues that Rukeyser adeptly wove ‘the techniques of documentary culture’ with ‘the Communist Party’s Popular Front’.94 Both Estelle Novak and Robert Shulman have examined her early writing in terms of its Marxist, Popular Front politics. Novak has written that Rukeyser’s publication alongside Kenneth Fearing, Sol Funaroff and Ben Maddow / David Wolff in the Leftist literary journal Dynamo during the mid-1930s situated her as a leftwing poet who confronted the economic crisis by blending social realism with ‘the Marxist dialectic’.95 Shulman has argued that, as ‘a young poet who combined political passion with a modernist sensibility’, Rukeyser wrote the ‘radical documentary’, The Book of the Dead, out of a shared wish for a change to the frameworks of capitalist social practices.96 Cary Nelson has also argued convincingly that ‘politically conscious poetry’ written in America between 1910 and 1945 was more than Leftist propaganda, but constituted an articulate response to the social realities of the time in a manner that sought to connect poetry ‘with the rest of social life’.97 Recent scholarship examining documentary poetics includes Marsha Bryant’s Auden and Documentary in the 1930s (1997) and Vescia’s Depression Glass (2006), the latter of which explores the visual imperative in three texts issued by the Objectivist Press in 1934: George Oppen’s Discrete Series, Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony and William Carlos Williams’s Collected Poems, 1921–1931. Although Vescia mentions Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead in relation to its transcendence of the ‘functionality’ of evidence via the confluence of ‘document’ and ‘artwork,’ she restricts her investigation to 1930s Objectivist poetry, whose unembellished, impersonal tone and style she believes to have ‘anticipated the important documentary photography of the decade’.98 Despite their often brilliant insights, what all of the above studies neglect to consider, and what this book concerns itself with, is Rukeyser’s sustained involvement with documentary forms and ideologies throughout her working life. My own study therefore does four things: it contributes to existing critiques of Rukeyser’s engagement with 1930s textual styles by offering a deeper reading of the poetical,

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personal and political motives behind her utilisation of documentary forms than has hitherto been given; it highlights the broad scope and shifting aesthetic and ideological boundaries of the term ‘documentary’, suggesting that Rukeyser’s similarly indefinable poetic style and theory share this characteristic for a number of reasons; it explores documentary aspects within Rukeyser’s work that have been given little or no critical attention, as well as examining examples of her prose and poetry that have apparently never been analysed in print; and it investigates the enduring influence of documentary on Rukeyser’s writing, positing that her interest in and connection with its many facets represented a profound association that lasted until her death, going some way to explaining her guiding poetic principles. The book’s four main chapters are as follows. In Chapter 2, ‘The Photo-text’, I explore Rukeyser’s experimentation with the popular documentary form of the photo-text for Coronet magazine in 1939. By demonstrating how Rukeyser employed documentary techniques to teach an ethical, relational approach to the reporting of reality, I highlight the importance to Rukeyser’s poetics of the confluence of words and images in what she conceived of as ‘the communication of truth’. In Chapter 3, ‘The Lives’, I extend my examination of Rukeyser’s use of the human portrait made in Chapter 2, exploring her enduring interest in biography. I investigate the extent to which the documentary impulse of the thirties towards the aesthetic, ideological and iconographical illustration of representative Americans influenced Rukeyser’s own forms and methods of biographical depiction. I also examine the preDepression sources of composite and representational portraiture in Rukeyser’s life projects. Chapter 4, ‘Documentary and the Emergence of American Studies’, broadens the contextual field of my study, and situates the sources of documentary in Rukeyser’s work within the academic, cultural and political environment of the American Studies discipline. By examining Rukeyser’s work against the backdrop of a burgeoning scholarly discourse and intellectual and cultural re-visioning of American literary history, I also hope to allow for a wider understanding of documentary expression in America. I pay attention to Rukeyser’s role in what has been termed the ‘Melville revival’ of the mid-twentieth century, examining her understanding and utilisation of the subjective and documentary aesthetics of Herman Melville, especially during a time of war. In Chapter 5, ‘Landscape, Navigation, and Cartography’, I examine Rukeyser’s methods of mapping, touring and travel reportage – documentary genres that took shape during the 1920s and pervaded documentary writing and image-making into the 1940s. Rukeyser’s second book of poetry, U.S. 1, was published the same year as the WPA

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Highway Guide of the same name, and addresses many of the tropes, symbols and ideologies embedded within the American Guide series. By exploring the ways in which Rukeyser maps the American landscape both topologically and historically, I demonstrate how she is able to forge paths that connect disparate topographical and discursive fields. The book concludes with an examination of Rukeyser’s last published poem, ‘An Unborn Poet’ (1979), in which the themes and styles of documentary still pervade.

Notes 1. Letter from Kenneth Rexroth to Hal Sharlott to be quoted for publicity of Rukeyser’s The Speed of Darkness, dated 30 December 1967 in the Muriel Rukeyser Papers (hereafter MR Papers), Library of Congress (LoC), Washington DC, Box II:7, folder 8. Biographical information in this chapter, unless otherwise stated, is from Kertesz’s The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser, for which Rexroth provided the foreword, repeating his claim (p. xi). 2. Rukeyser, ‘The Education of a Poet’ (1976), in Sternberg, The Writer on her Work, p. 226. 3. Draft preface for The Speed of Darkness, 18 June 1967, MR Papers, Box I:23. 4. Renov, ‘Towards a Poetics of Documentary’, in Renov, Theorizing Documentary, p. 20. 5. Thurston, Making Something Happen, Ch. 4. 6. Grierson’s review for the New York Sun (8 February 1926) is quoted in Hardy, Grierson on Documentary, p. 11. Hardy’s text informs this discussion. 7. Ibid., p. 11. 8. Ibid., p. 12. 9. Ibid., p. 14. 10. Grierson, Sight and Sound (Winter 1933–4), in Forsyth, Grierson on Documentary, p. 13. 11. Ibid., p. 20. 12. Ibid., p. 14. 13. Grierson, The Fortnightly Review (August 1939), in Forsyth, Grierson on Documentary, p. 15. 14. Ibid., pp. 18–19. 15. Ibid., p. 18; See also Bryant, Auden and Documentary in the 1930s, p. 7. 16. Grierson on Documentary, pp. 20–1. 17. Rotha, Documentary Film (Grierson provides the preface to the revised 1938 edition). 18. Ibid., pp. 278, 12. 19. Ibid., pp. 153–256. 20. Ibid., p. 91. 21. Ibid., pp. 131, 131, 68. 22. Ibid., pp. 16, 18.

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23. Ibid., p. 77. 24. Ibid., p. 245. 25. Ibid., p. 247; see also Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America, p. 126. 26. Ibid., p. 260. 27. Ibid., p. 262. 28. Koszarski, ‘Nancy Naumburg: Vassar Revolutionary’, pp. 374–5. 29. Irving Lerner (as Peter Ellis), ‘A Revolutionary Film’, New Masses, 25 September 1934, p. 30; Robert Gessner, ‘Movies About Us’, New Theatre, June 1935, p. 20, both quoted in Koszarski, , ‘Nancy Naumburg’. 30. Quoted in Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back, p. 118. 31. Wolfe, ‘Straight Shots and Crooked Plots’, p. 239. 32. Strand, ‘Photography’, Seven Arts (August 1917), reprinted in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography, pp. 141–4. 33. Strand, ‘Photography and the New God’, Broom, vol. 3 (1922), pp. 252–8, reprinted in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays, p. 151. 34. Freedman, ‘Publisher’s Note’ to Rukeyser, The Orgy, p. x. 35. Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, p. 149. Hereafter referred to as LP. 36. Ibid., pp. 148, 143. 37. Ibid., p. 143. 38. Kertesz, Poetic Vision, p. 391; Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations, p. 138. 39. Kertesz dates the film 1941, as does an online filmography of Maddow (www.filmreference.com). The Prelinger archives at the Library of Congress date the film c.1948. 40. Emphasis in original. Both films belong to the Prelinger collection (LoC). They are in the public domain, and may be viewed and downloaded free of charge at www.archive.org. 41. Although there is no date on the programme, the date of the last films being screened is 1946. MR Papers, Box II:15, folder 9. 42. MR Papers, Box II:2. 43. MR Papers, Box I:11, Box I:42, folder 7. Rotha’s Documentary Diary also mentions a failed film deal in collaboration with Rukeyser, p. 211. 44. Correspondence in the MR Papers between Rukeyser and Rotha appears to date from 1939 and is affectionate in tone. 45. Only two critics briefly mention Rukeyser’s participation in the Frontier branch of the FPL: Alexander in Film on the Left and Davidson in Ghostlier Demarcations. Neither of them reveals how Rukeyser attained the position. 46. Alexander, Film on the Left, p. 246. 47. Archives reveal a correspondence that lasted close to forty years (Box I:11). 48. Several letters from Rotha express this opinion, dating from 1959 to 1965: MR Papers, Box I:11. 49. MR Papers, Box I:43, folder 4. 50. Ben Maddow, ‘Film into Poem’, pp. 23, 36. 51. Ben Maddow, ‘Document and Poetry’, p. 21. 52. LP, p. 138. 53. Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth, and Hurley, Portrait of a Decade both discuss Stryker’s ‘shooting scripts’.

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54. Trachtenberg, ‘From Image to Story’, p. 58. Other critics to explore this theme are Curtis, Hurley, Stott and Wood in ‘Portrait of Stryker’, and Tagg, The Burden of Representation. 55. Trachtenberg, ‘From Image to Story’, p. 57. 56. Tagg, Burden, p. 170. 57. Ibid., p. 173. 58. ‘First – hands off!’ was Lange’s initial rule for making a photograph. Lange quoted by her son, Daniel Dixon, in ‘Dorothea Lange’, p. 68. 59. Dixon, ‘Dorothea Lange’, p. 68; Walker Evans in Walker Evans, intro. by Szarkowski, p. 12. 60. Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, p. 137; Stott, Documentary Expression, pp. 219–23. 61. Rothstein, ‘Direction in the Picture Story’, p. 1357. 62. Stryker, ‘Documentary Photography’, p. 1365. 63. Ibid., p. 1365. 64. Rothstein, ‘Direction’, p. 1357. 65. Rotha, Documentary Film, p. 131. 66. Rothstein, Documentary Photography, p. xix. 67. Ibid., p. 34. 68. Henry Luce, quoted in Rothstein’s Documentary Photography, p. 79. 69. Ibid., p. 116. Beaumont Newhall commenting on Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor’s An American Exodus. 70. Rosskam quoted in Trachtenberg, ‘From Image to Story’, pp. 53, 55. 71. Perreault, ‘Muriel Rukeyser: Egodocuments and the Ethics of Propaganda’, p. 145. 72. LP, pp. 136–7. 73. Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’, 1891–2 edition of Leaves of Grass, in Moon, Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, p. 30. Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs: American Genius, p. 81. 74. LP, pp. 138–9. 75. LP, p. 139; Abbott, Photographs. 76. Grierson, ‘First Principles of Documentary’ (1932–4), in Forsyth, Grierson on Documentary, p. 78. 77. Newhall, ‘A Backward Glance at Photography’, in Featherstone, ed., Observations: Essays on Documentary, p. 1. 78. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, p. 191. 79. Forsyth, Grierson on Documentary, p. 84. 80. Ibid., p. 85. 81. Rotha, Documentary Film, p. 209. 82. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, p. 174. 83. Newhall, ‘A Backward Glance’, pp. 4–5. 84. Stott, Documentary Expression, Chs 10 and 13. 85. Vescia, Depression Glass, p. 27; Thurston, Making Something Happen, p. 171. 86. Rabinowitz, They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary, p. 180. 87. New York: Writers and Artists Committee, Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy, n.d., Kertesz, p. 394; Calmer, Salud! – Poems, Stories and Sketches of Spain by American Writers, Afterword.

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22 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations, p. 138. Ibid., p. 140. Kalaidjian, American Culture Between the Wars, p. 166. Both essays appear in Herzog and Kaufman, How Shall We Tell Each Other About the Poet?, pp. 195–208, 226–40. Thurston, Making Something Happen, p. 197. Dayton, Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Book of the Dead’, pp. 39–40. Thurston, Making Something Happen, pp. 172–3. Novak, ‘The “Dynamo” School of Poets’, p. 527. Shulman, The Power of Political Art: The 1930s Literary Left Reconsidered, pp. 181, 186. Nelson, Repression and Recovery, p. 19. Ibid., pp. 20, 29–30.

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Chapter 2

The Photo-text

In the mid- to late 1930s, a new sub-genre of documentary developed in America. Magazine articles reporting the effects of the Depression were relying increasingly on the immediacy of visual impact, and the FSA’s photographic file soon became the primary source of images. In January 1936, Survey Graphic was the first non-governmental magazine to feature an extended article on the programmes of what was then the Resettlement Administration, publishing photographs of sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the South. By the end of 1936, other picture magazines, notably those of the Luce empire, Fortune, Life and Look, had also featured RA spreads. These reports became known as ‘picture stories’ or ‘photographic essays’: ‘stories told in pictures, organised so that the communication of ideas and emotions became most effective’.1 Although the vast majority of the photographs used were government property, there were some exceptions. The photographer Margaret Bourke-White, who worked originally in freelance advertising, became one of the most prominent Depression photographers, working for Fortune magazine in 1934 before becoming Life magazine’s first staff photographer in 1936.2 In 1937, she and the writer Erskine Caldwell (whom she married in 1939) extended the photo-essay format in the first collaborative American documentary photo-book of the 1930s, You Have Seen Their Faces. In each of the book’s sections, a short essay by Caldwell describes various aspects of tenant life, followed by a collection of captioned photographs by Bourke-White. As William Stott has noted, Caldwell’s text is typical of the sociological journalese of the time, both sentimental and detached.3 The generalised manner of Caldwell’s description connotes the sharecroppers’ portrayal as representative social types – ‘their clothes became a little more ragged, their faces became a little more haggard’4 – and the captions to the photographs reinforce the pitying and often condescending tone of the prose. As the

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authors explain in the introduction: ‘The legends under the pictures are intended to express the authors’ own conceptions of the sentiments of the individuals portrayed; they do not pretend to reproduce the actual sentiments of [the] persons.’5 By installing their own persuasive rhetoric in place of their subjects’ voices, Bourke-White and Caldwell created a work that leaned heavily towards the subjective, artistic element in documentary. Bourke-White wrote later that she and Caldwell ‘wanted a result in which the pictures and words truly supplemented one another, merging into a unified whole’6: a whole that was none the less envisaged and devised without the input of those persons whose lives it apparently represented. Thus, beneath a head-and-shoulders portrait of a farmer runs the caption, ‘It ain’t hardly worth the trouble to go on living’; the last woman sharecropper to be pictured in the book is ‘quoted’ as lamenting, ‘I’ve done the best I know how all my life, but it didn’t amount to much in the end.’7 Bourke-White’s propensity to shoot from a ‘caterpillar view’ compounded the creative dramatisation of the sharecroppers’ lives,8 and while several of her photographs demonstrate technical and compositional mastery – the scholar John Puckett going so far as to argue that she participated in an idealisation of the worker akin to propagandist Soviet poster art9 – the artistry of Bourke-White’s pictures complicates their status as documents of recorded fact. Furthermore, Bourke-White’s admission in the ‘Notes’ section of the book to having manipulated her subjects in order to get ‘faces or gestures [that] gave us exactly what we were trying to express’ contradicts her later celebration of the camera as the only recorder of unadulterated truth, through which ‘the only rays that come in to be registered come directly from the object in front of you’.10 The book sold well and was met with critical approval.11 In a review for New Republic, Malcolm Cowley praised the capacity of BourkeWhite’s pictures to take the place of words in conveying ‘drama . . . class conflicts, and stories’.12 For the first time, Cowley argued, ‘pictures state the theme of the book, whereas the prose serves as illustrative material’.13 Arguably ‘the period’s leading arbiter of taste’,14 it seems likely that Cowley’s approbation of the book aided its critical acclaim. However, James Agee, in what Alfred Kazin called at the time ‘that documentary book to end all documentary books’, made known his and co-author Walker Evans’s disgust at Bourke-White’s approach.15 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) represented a restyling of the photo-book that separated text and image but argued for their status as ‘co-equal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative’.16 In the ‘Notes and Appendices’ section of the book, Agee reprinted a New

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York Post article on the fashionable Bourke-White, who by this time was ‘one of the highest paid women in America’. Discussing her tenant farmer photographic subjects, Bourke-White is quoted thus: ‘They seem to live on snuff and religion . . . They are so beaten down and their lives are so drab and barren and lonely that they have nothing.’17 After nearly 400 pages of text in which Agee endeavours not to exploit or demean the tenant farmers whose lives he is documenting, this frivolous article seems to reveal Bourke-White as crass, insensitive and exploiting the lower classes for profit. More recent critiques of You Have Seen Their Faces, most notably those by Stott and Paula Rabinowitz, have made vocal Agee’s unspoken condemnation, highlighting the book as a prime example of how 1930s documentary methods risked objectivising and patronising those people whose lives were being recorded.18 That said, the contemporary influence of You Have Seen Their Faces was significant. For Cowley, it was the pioneering text of ‘a new art’, in which the ‘quotations printed beneath the photographs . . . [were] exactly right’ and the photographs themselves were ‘almost beyond praise’.19 Soon after the publication of Bourke-White and Caldwell’s text, the documentary photo-book developed as a sub-genre in its own right. In 1939, the FSA photographer Dorothea Lange and her husband, the sociologist and economist Paul Schuster Taylor, documented the Dust Bowl migration in their collaborative photo-book, An American Exodus. Regarded by its authors as ‘a pioneering effort to combine words and photographs’,20 the project combined the pursuits of truth and aestheticism, with emphasis on the former: ‘we were after the truth,’ Lange wrote later, ‘not just making effective pictures’.21 The captions in this book were comprised of excerpts from documents of the Committee on Farm Tenancy, transcriptions from statistical reports, and quotations from the people photographed. In what seems a direct rejection of Bourke-White and Caldwell’s approach, Lange and Taylor wrote of their avowal to ‘adhere to the standards of documentary as we have conceived them. Quotations which accompany photographs report what the persons photographed said, not what we think might be their unspoken thoughts.’22 For Lange, textual accompaniment to visual material should ‘fortify’ the image ‘without directing the person’s mind’: the caption was a way to extend the image’s meaning, giving the reader ‘more with which to look at the picture’.23 The cluttered, ‘scrapbook’ layout of the original edition (the format was changed under Taylor for the 1969 reprint) aided its reception less as an artistic photographic catalogue and more as an ethnographic record. The filmmaker Pare Lorentz, for example, wrote admiring

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reviews of Lange’s work, but criticised the organisation of An American Exodus for its spatial integration of diverse materials (which included clippings from newspapers, maps, and quotations from agricultural magazines), arguing that separate sections would have allowed the ‘more powerful’ photographs proper appreciation.24 However, it was the authors’ intention to create an ethnographical / documentary work in which all elements remained equal: [The book’s] particular form is the result of our use of techniques in proportions and relations designed to convey understanding easily, clearly, and vividly. We use the camera as a tool of research. Upon a tripod of photographs, captions and text we rest themes evolved out of long observation in the field.25

The equal, triadic relation of caption, text and image ensures the balanced presentation of ‘long observation’. Additionally, by refusing to speak for the people featured in the book, the authors wished for a closer communion between the reader and the people photographed. Captioning the photographs with allegedly direct quotations from the subjects pictured, the authors claimed to ‘so far as possible . . . let them speak to you face-to-face’, provoking a more active, responsible role in their plight.26

Documentary photography and the human face The majority of the photographs in the photo-books discussed above are portraits, arguably due to their capacity to involve the reader / viewer humanly as witness to the events depicted. Roy Stryker, Head of the Photographic Department of the FSA’s Historical Section, stressed that ‘a good documentary should tell not only what a place or a thing or a person looks like, but it must also tell the audience what it would feel like to be an actual witness to the scene’.27 This vicarious visual and emotional participation was sought primarily via close attention to the human face. Stryker, whose own vision of America to a large extent dictated the shape and content of the FSA catalogue, admitted after its closure that ‘the faces to me were the most significant part of the file’.28 Indeed, many Depression photographers believed that a person’s face may bear both ‘the expression of tragedy’ and ‘the ability to endure’ – essential propagandistic tools during the Depression.29 Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’ image was perhaps the most singularly effective photograph of the era, reproduced numerous times in books, magazines, exhibitions and posters. For Stryker, ‘Migrant Mother’ was

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the picture of Farm Security . . . She has all the suffering of mankind in her but all of the perseverance too. A restraint and a strange courage. You can see anything you want to in her. She is immortal.30

Rabinowitz has written that Lange’s ‘attention to the individual face’ allowed the photographer to connect a single person’s story with a national, historical narrative, in turn enabling a face such as the Migrant Mother’s to transcend imagery to iconicity.31 By bringing a middle-class audience ‘face-to-face’ with the dispossessed, documentary photographers hoped to contrive a direct correlation between the ‘lens of the camera’ and ‘the eye of the person looking at the print’.32 However, by frequently figuring the dispossessed as representative types, it remains contentious whether those involved in documentary image production did much to narrow the social and existential gap between the two ‘worlds’ of those depicted in photo-books and those who read them. The documentary fascination with the human face originated outside of America, and before the 1930s. Writing on photographic innovations in 1931, the critic and theorist Walter Benjamin postulated that the Russian film of Eisenstein and Pudovkin had established a ‘politically educated sight’ in which ‘the human face entered the image with a new, immeasurable significance’.33 Understanding that this facial imaging ‘was no longer a portrait’, Benjamin questioned what it was, and suggested that it was ‘the supreme accomplishment of a German photographer’ to have found the answer.34 In 1929, August Sander had published his photographic book Antlitz der Zeit (The Face of Our Time), a series of faces of diverse German ‘types’, taken during his trip through Germany in the 1920s. The book categorised the photographs into seven sections, corresponding ‘to the existing order of society’, and although Sander’s project was ostensibly ‘scientific’, Benjamin stressed that the results were ‘sensitive and tender’, due to the creator’s instruction by ‘direct experience’ rather than by ‘racial theoreticians or social researchers’. Benjamin believed that Sander had devised a new way of seeing the nation in response to the contemporary ‘power shifts’ taking place in Germany. Times of political crisis, Benjamin asserted, ‘generally allow the education and sharpening of the physiognomic conception into a vital necessity’; Sander’s work was therefore ‘more than a book of pictures: it is a book of exercises’.35 Testament to the visual and political power of Antlitz der Zeit was the Nazis’ decision in 1934 to censor it for being ‘anti-social’.36 Walker Evans was also aware of Sander’s project, praising it as ‘enough of a cultural necessity to make one wonder why other so-called

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advanced countries of the world have not also been examined and recorded’.37 However, during the 1930s, America began to be ‘examined and recorded’ in a similar manner: documentary photo-texts provided portraits of a portion of the nation by relying heavily on the narrative, educational qualities perceived within an indexical taxonomy of human faces. The FSA file, which furnished the majority of the texts, itself represented an extended exercise in bringing the American citizen face to face with his / her homeland. Stryker was later to comment on the file: ‘I’d say it was more education than anything else . . . We introduced Americans to America.’38 Another way in which the public was brought face to face with ‘America’ was in exhibition. The First International Photographic Exposition, which ran for one week during the Spring of 1938 at New York’s Grand Central Palace, attracted over 100,000 visitors, several of whom commended the FSA exhibits as ‘real pictures of real people’.39 Facial portraits of rural workers seem to have had the most impact on the viewing audience, according to visitor feedback.40 Reporting on the show, the critic Elizabeth McCausland noted that the photographs revealed not only ‘the faces of the American people’, but ‘also (if we are completely honest and fearless intellectually) the faces of ourselves’.41 Photographer and curator Edward Steichen, assembling the photographs for publication in the U.S. Camera annual, added to the visualnarrative rhetoric: ‘Have a look at the faces of the men and women in these pages. Listen to the story they tell.’42 But if these ‘faces’ told the collective ‘story’ of the nation, they told it anonymously: the FSA photographers rarely asked the subjects their names, nor were names often printed alongside the published photographs.43 If we are to believe McCausland, inspection of the ‘hard, bitter reality’ of the faces pictured also provoked introspection. By picturing a way of life wholly other than that of the middle-class gallery visitor, the FSA photographs questioned the self’s social and psychological place in the dynamic of viewer and viewed, and the large images’ exhibition at eye level enhanced their specular quality. Additionally, the photographs situated both participants in this visual dialogue within a narrative history of America. Stryker’s aim of creating a ‘slice of history’ through photographic documents was apparently realised: one reporter of the show commented enthusiastically on how the procession of pictures was ‘American history rolled before your eyes’.44

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Land of the Free The month before the exhibition at Grand Central Palace opened, Archibald MacLeish published Land of the Free, a hybrid text of documentary photographs and poetic social comment. Approximately onequarter of the FSA photographs included in the exhibition featured in the photo-book. In the Summer of 1937, impressed by the FSA images he had seen in circulation, MacLeish met with Stryker to view 200 pictures from the file.45 There is also evidence to suggest that some photographs were shot explicitly for inclusion in MacLeish’s book: following his stipulations, Stryker wrote to Lange of this ‘very important job’, and issued special shooting scripts to all his photographers, asking them to bear MacLeish’s project in mind whilst on location.46 MacLeish’s initial intention to write a Depression-era poem to which the FSA photographs ‘would serve as commentary’ was, he admitted, soon altered: ‘so great was the power and stubborn inward livingness of these vivid American documents that the result was a reversal of that plan’.47 Yet, despite MacLeish’s claim that his writing is secondary to the images (thirty-three of which are by Lange) in Land of the Free, the photographers’ names feature only on the index pages. Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’ (1936) features early in the text, following seven other photographs depicting the unsmiling or frowning faces of the American dispossessed. Walker Evans’s ‘Graveyard and steel mill in Bethlehem, Penn.’ (1935), Russell Lee’s ‘Hands of the wife of an Iowa homesteader now on relief’ (1936), several photographs of over-ploughed fields, families migrating along dirt tracks, labour riots and children dressed in rags help build a powerful compound portrait of an American people during a time of economic crisis and political unrest. Underlining the people’s bewilderment and suffering, MacLeish’s poetic commentary is sparse: ‘We don’t know,’ states the first page; ‘We aren’t sure,’ comprises the second.48 This refrain of uncertainty is repeated in variant forms twenty times throughout the poem. Jefferson Hunter has commented that MacLeish’s words render the photographs more melancholy than they had previously been read: ‘Faces of ordinary Americans which in other contexts might seem heroic here seem full of doubt.’49 The principal reason for this is that the juxtaposition of each photograph with a small fragment of poetic commentary presents the words as captions to the images. Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’, for example, faces the line ‘Now we don’t know’ (Figure 1). The possibility of reading any strength or stoicism in her features is greatly reduced; Stryker’s contention that ‘you can see anything you want in

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her’ is almost annulled by MacLeish’s words. Furthermore, through the repetitive use of the pronoun ‘we’, MacLeish not only imagines all Americans to think in a similar manner, but also, like Bourke-White and Caldwell, attempts to speak for individuals who may not have shared his sentiments. By purporting to express the collective confusion and anxiety of the people photographed, MacLeish assumed knowledge of their plight and authority to speak on their behalf. The repeated refrain throughout Land of the Free of ‘we’re not talking’ serves as an ironic reminder that MacLeish’s peroration does not include the voices of those pictured. On each double-page spread, a black-and-white photograph is printed on the recto, filling it widthways. Facing the photograph on the verso, MacLeish’s poetic text is written under a horizontal blue line, labelled at the beginning of the book ‘The Sound Track’. As A. D. Coleman noted in the introduction to the first paperback edition of the book, MacLeish’s use of the term ‘is an obvious reference to motion pictures’.50 Hunter has argued that MacLeish’s text is typical of a spate of ‘late thirties books posing as movies’.51 The book versions of Lorentz’s The River and Joris Ivens’s The Spanish Earth were published the same year as Land of the Free (1938), featuring stills of the films with the scripts printed beneath. MacLeish seemingly wished his photo-book to be received as an analogue to documentary film, his poem the voiceover to a succession of visual impressions. However, his decision repeatedly to break the ‘soundtrack’ by only printing it on the textual pages fractures any cinematic fluidity and simultaneity the book may have. Contemporary reviews and more recent critical appraisals express a common complaint: MacLeish’s writing does not match the emotive power of the photographs. Lorentz reviewed the writing as ‘thinblooded and cool’, giving ‘chief credit’ to Lange for ‘putting on celluloid what MacLeish failed to put into words: the sorrow, the dignity, and the blood of the people’.52 The photographs garnered the majority of the praise the book attracted. A reviewer for The Nation wrote that the ‘soundtrack’ felt ‘contrived’ next to the honesty of the pictures; Babette Deutsch for Poetry took MacLeish to task for allowing the photographers to provide his imagery for him, and for writing a poem which was neither illuminating nor illustrative; T. K. Whipple for The New Republic thought the verse ‘necessary and effective’, but argued that ‘the pictures are the thing’; and Muriel Rukeyser for New Masses criticised MacLeish’s verse for falling into ‘loosenesses and sentimentalities’ but maintained that ‘the pictures are splendid’.53 In more recent studies of the documentary photo-book, critics have also highlighted Land of the Free as an example of a textual-imagistic imbalance. Contending

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that MacLeish’s writing is ‘flabby’ and ‘unequal to the photographs it accompanies’, Puckett maintains that the poem ‘in many cases limits or distorts the photographs’ significance’.54 In a more neutral critique, Hunter concludes that MacLeish’s text remains important for the influence it had over subsequent photo-books, encouraging ‘other writers and photographers to approach ever more closely a quasi-cinematic technique, a balance of elements, a reworking of old ideas of captioning and illustrating’.55

Rukeyser’s review of Land of the Free Rukeyser used her review of MacLeish’s text for New Masses in April 1938 as an opportunity to proffer her own ideas on such a ‘balance of elements’. Favourably commenting on MacLeish’s extensive use of RA images, Rukeyser specifically celebrated the narrative quality of ‘individual portraits’ among the selection, which allowed the reader to see, along with the ‘story of America spoiling itself, the people this waste affects’, as well as ‘what happens to these people’s lives and faces’.56 Her appreciation of the documentary photography of the time is made obvious: she extolled the pictures as ‘excellent’, ‘pure’, ‘splendid’ and ‘brilliant’, and selected images by Van Dyke, Ben Shahn, Rothstein, Bourke-White, Lange and Evans for special attention.57 Rukeyser felt profoundly that MacLeish’s endeavour was ‘adventurous and right’, and whilst she lauded the ‘strong dramatic sense’ of his image arrangement, she lamented the fact that the book fell short of its aspirations towards cinematic simultaneity and balance. For Rukeyser, ‘the form deserved a new kind of poetry if it was really to carry itself along’. The poem must therefore not rely on the photographs for message or movement, but, through a meeting of textual forms and styles, collaborate with the images to create a new, communicative art form: ‘Here we need something like a poem, something like movie titles, something like news in lights around the Times building.’58 It is likely that Rukeyser’s experience working in cinema and journalism helped to inform her thought on this matter, and the comment is characteristic of a developing sensibility within her writing towards a relational poetics that sought to connect ostensibly separate fields. At the end of the review, Rukeyser argued that Land of the Free failed to confront the issues it raised, and thereby failed to bring the reader face to face with an immediate social problem. Furthermore, the book highlighted the problem of the artistic, equal presentation of image and text. Believing that MacLeish’s work demonstrated ‘a great lack

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of balance’ between the two, Rukeyser argued for ‘the cleanest, sharpest, most alive words we know to meet these faces and these scenes’. MacLeish had admittedly recognised the ‘stubborn inward livingness’ of the photographs but had not responded with words that matched their visual vigour. Rukeyser objected to MacLeish’s puzzled, unsure refrain, stressing the need for ‘direct questions put after the “we wonder” ’. For Rukeyser, inquiring after the direction of the country allowed the population to ‘ask all the questions we like, but to carry in our questions our wish; to show continually the lives of our own people under the times they carry’.59 The following year, Rukeyser was moved to create her own poetic narratives to a selection of photographs, several of which were from the FSA file.

Rukeyser and the photo-text In the introductory chapter, I noted that Rukeyser’s interest in photography has recently been given critical attention, and how her writing is particularly indebted to innovations in camera and film use during the thirties, the decade in which she began publishing her work. Although there is little archival evidence to indicate Rukeyser’s attendance at particular photographic exhibitions, there is much in her writing to suggest that throughout her life she took an active interest in the development of photography as a documentary and an artistic medium. In her review of MacLeish’s Land of the Free, for example, Rukeyser noted her recognition of a number of the images from their exhibition in the Spring of 1937.60 This would indicate her probable attendance at the hugely popular Grand Central Palace exhibition the following year, not least as she was living in New York at the time. Additionally, Rukeyser voiced her appreciation for the talents of Weegee, Evans, Strand, Ralph Steiner, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, Helen Levitt, Ansel Adams and Berenice Abbott in The Life of Poetry.61 Following Rukeyser’s introduction to the documentary photo-text, both the human face and photographic methods of looking at the world manifested strongly in her poetry. In 1939, Rukeyser published her own photo-texts in the September and October issues of Coronet magazine, entitled respectively, ‘Adventures of Children’ and ‘Worlds Alongside’. These poetic pieces were sixteen pages each in length, consisting of a ‘portfolio of photographs’ supported by a ‘narrative’ by Rukeyser. Of the photographs featured, just over one-third were RA images (presumably obtained via Stryker), while the rest were from a variety of American and European sources held in Coronet’s archives.

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Coronet was among the few American publications that printed photographs, and the editor, Arnold Gingrich, took the magazine’s stance on aesthetics seriously: each issue featured an illustrated profile of a leading artist or photographer.62 John Raeburn has observed that Coronet ‘distinguished itself from Life and Look’ by lavishly displaying ‘thirty to fifty prominently credited pictures, reproduced one to a page and approximating a gallery show’.63 During its run between November 1936 and October 1961 under the publisher, David Smart, Coronet proved to be a popular women’s magazine; a quarter of a million copies of its inaugural issue sold out in two days, and according to Raeburn, by 1940, although its circulation had begun to decline, it was still competing with Esquire, Life and Look, selling in the region of 100,000 copies. Although Coronet sold well, it did not make a substantial profit.64 One reason for the magazine’s losses might have been Smart’s decision to spend a large amount of money on image acquisition. Apart from despatching a small team across Europe to photograph scenes, people and artworks in adherence to the original concept of Coronet’s content as ‘infinite riches in a little room’,65 Smart additionally bought from agencies such as Black Star, which represented photographers like Bill Brandt, André Kertész, Cartier-Bresson and Brassaï. Indeed, many of the photographers on file at Black Star were given their first transatlantic publication through Coronet, and the inclusion in Rukeyser’s photonarratives of pictures from Budapest, Paris and the Black Star agency aided their exposure.66 Although Coronet was slow to give attention to American photography, in the late thirties it ran a series of profiles on leading American photographers, including Bourke-White in January and Lewis Hine in February 1939.67 As I noted in Chapter 1, Rukeyser’s interest in the communicative and artistic confluence of image and word was further developed during her time working as Visual Information Specialist in the Graphics Department of the Office of War Information (OWI) between 1942 and 1943, an office established in 1942 by MacLeish, who in 1941 had been placed at the head of Roosevelt’s newly formed Office of Facts and Figures. Raphael Allison has observed that Rukeyser was ‘a vigorous proponent of the war poster’, prizing it ‘above other forms of propaganda since it combined two media: visual imagery and linguistic print content’. Rukeyser’s poetics of connection allowed her a niche in the OWI, designing posters that formally captured ‘the idea of political pluralism, which accommodates varied perspectives, as opposed to fascistic or totalitarian forms of unity, which accommodate only one’.68 However, with most of her poster ideas rejected, and frustrated by what

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she lamented as the Office’s division into ‘people who believe the war is something to be sold and people who believe the war is something to be fought’, Rukeyser resigned in May 1943.69 In August 1943, Rukeyser wrote a short article for New Republic entitled ‘Words and Images’, detailing her ideas regarding the ways in which the conflation of picture and text may constitute ‘one of the cleverest means of communication’, and expressing her disappointment at her former colleagues’ refusal to ‘test’ the ‘images of war’ beyond caricature and simple advertising techniques.70 Her short time at the OWI strengthened a poetics of collaboration and visuality that had first found expression in her photo-narratives, and Rukeyser referred to it again in The Life of Poetry as a lesson in ‘the impact that a combined form may have when picture and text approach the meaning from different starting places’.71 Rukeyser had wished to exercise this combined form in magazines more than she was able to. In March 1939, she wrote to Henry Luce suggesting that she and Strand collaborate on a ‘travel-piece, a farmpiece, a city-piece’.72 I have found no evidence that these photo-essays were published or drafted. In July 1939, Rukeyser published an instructive ‘photographic essay’ on the dial phone in Life, with photographs by Bourke-White.73 In 1951, Rukeyser wrote to Ted Patrick of Holiday magazine, enclosing a poetic piece she had written entitled ‘The Red Bridge’, which she hoped would be ‘set up as accompanying text for a picture’, and claiming to have held the post of Coronet’s ‘photography editor’, a position in which she had apparently ‘worked out the form which they have continued as their Photo Story’.74 I have been unable to find any documentation to verify Rukeyser’s claim. Gingrich’s memoirs do not mention Rukeyser, and she is not listed as staff on the index pages of the magazine. Rukeyser was still emphasising her belief in the unused potential of photo-textual collaboration a decade after she had first voiced her ideas on the subject. Her proposal to Patrick for ‘a story of picturesequences’ was, she asserted, informed by her time working for magazines and for the OWI, as well as her work ‘with documentaries and exhibitions’, all of which had led her to a profound understanding of how ‘writing with pictures . . . calls on many instincts [to] provide a reinforced method’ of communication. Arguing that ‘the excitement and strength of this method have hardly been discovered,’ Rukeyser outlined pictorial stories of Vancouver Island, ‘a single aspect of New York City’, ‘The mouths of Rivers’ and ‘One-Track Towns’. However, she was ‘as much interested in the method itself as in the separate stories’:

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I am deeply interested in the method, and in working further with it. . . . There is hardly any adequate writing for picture-stories. I hope for quick, fluent copy and memorable pictures. The words would not ‘describe’ the pictures; the pictures would not ‘illustrate’ the words. Together they would carry a stamp and tell a story.75

This letter was apparently the only correspondence between Rukeyser and Patrick, and it seems that Rukeyser’s ideas were not adopted by Holiday magazine. Rukeyser later adapted her ‘writing with pictures’ for a younger audience in a number of illustrated children’s books. The collaborative book I Go Out, written in 1954 and published in 1961, features poetry by Rukeyser and coloured ink illustrations by Leonard Kessler.76 Tracing the path taken by an unnamed ‘city child’ through his urban environment, the poem stresses the learning potential of first-hand visual encounter. The child regards the ‘harbour’, the ‘park’, ‘the streets’ and ‘the silver plane’, finding in them ‘games and faces’. Through exploration and participation, the child learns that ‘the entrances he makes’ are ‘along with other children’.77 Mazes (1970), a hybrid text of poetry by Rukeyser alongside photographs by Milton Charles, tells a similar story of a young boy exploring the unknown streets of his own city. Whitman-esque in its ‘song’ to the adventure of taking to the road, the book is perhaps also influenced by Rukeyser’s own learning experiences.78 In The Life of Poetry Rukeyser recalls a moment in her childhood when her teacher asked her class, ‘how many of you know any other road in the city except the road between home and school?’ Remembering that she had not raised her hand in response to the question, Rukeyser notes that ‘these are moments at which one begins to see’.79 Mazes, like I Go Out, introduces children to the necessity of first-hand observation and personal exploration by linking the imagery of the photographs with the imagination of childhood, presenting poetry that works with pictures to trace the boy’s adventure through diverse parts of his ‘world’. The poem teaches the tolerance of difference via the acknowledgement of underlying similarity; as the boy wanders through the city, he is both looking for new experiences and searching for his own room. At the close of the book, he follows the road home: And in himself, he finds, we find, And has found and go on finding The way through the mazes, The way through the maze.

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A street is a maze, A day is a maze, A store is a maze And the school’s ways ... These are all mazes, The mazes of the world, Our ways go in And out again Out in the world From the middle of the maze.

The boy’s physical and existential adventure is extended to include the young reader, whose own adventures in unknown ‘mazes’ are not unlike those described in the book. That the child is situated ‘in the middle of the maze’ both connotes the egoistic selfhood of childhood and encourages the idea of necessary involvement in the happenings of the world. The boy eventually finds that ‘the way through the mazes’ is ‘in himself’: Rukeyser demonstrates that the way towards an understanding of the unknown and a positioning of oneself in relation to others relies on the exploration of the self, and begins in childhood. The themes of Mazes, as well as their presentation via pictorial and textual techniques, were originally expounded in the first of Rukeyser’s photo-narratives, ‘The Adventures of Children’. Also in 1970, Rukeyser wrote the foreword to Berenice Abbott’s Photographs. Rukeyser’s admiration for Abbott’s work apparently centred on the photographer’s ability to forge connections between diverse subjects by rendering them in some way ‘human’. The ‘expressive power’ of Abbott’s photographs resided in her method of perceiving the world in terms of its ‘forces’: macro shots of penicillin, portraits of the rich and famous, ‘buildings, streets, shop windows, a cart, and a clock’ are, according to Rukeyser, ‘all seen by this photographer as human faces’.80 At the end of the foreword, Rukeyser summarises Abbott’s ‘science’ pictures as presenting ‘forces like faces’, concluding that the witnesses of this art . . . 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 recognise. A power that is related to something in the human face.81

‘Worlds Alongside’: Rukeyser and the face-to-face encounter In both photo-narratives, Rukeyser explores the separate yet parallel social spheres of wealth and poverty, of civilised sophistication and

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primitive simplicity. The potential for communication between these worlds resides in the ocular dialectic that Rukeyser highlights as symptomatic of the era’s dependency on visuality: a dialectic between the objectifying gaze belonging to the world as spectacle, and the inward gaze generated by documentary modes. Whilst the FSA pictures of American faces encouraged introspection and self-recognition, late 1930s travel reportage also resulted in self-examination and autobiography. Writers who went on the road to witness the effects of the Depression discovered that the loneliness of travelling and the suffering that they encountered led them to question their own positions within America’s social and cultural narrative. As the cultural historian, Richard Pells, has observed, ‘trying to describe the external world, writers sought also to restructure their own lives’.82 Rukeyser’s photo-narratives address this self–other dialectic in a number of ways, notably in ‘Worlds Alongside’ by establishing a face-to-face encounter between representative images of ostensibly social or ethnic opposites. Exploiting what Edwin Rosskam in the same year had termed the ‘new unit’ of communication, ‘the double-paged spread in which word and image complemented each other’, Rukeyser contrives one ‘world’ to face another, juxtaposing, for example, Lange’s photograph of dry, barren landscape with a photograph of the ornate spire of a city cathedral.83 Her method of picture juxtaposition was unusual for the time; other photo-texts had not utilised paired, contrasting images (An American Exodus was published just after the photo-narratives). Rukeyser’s presentation highlights difference and evokes concern for those regions of the country battered by drought and poverty. Under Lange’s photograph, which dominates the verso and bleeds into its edges, Rukeyser evokes an ‘American’ sun that ‘whips more flat the flat lands that have no features, no water, no grace, no reflections’.84 Opposite, under the photograph of the gothic spire, runs the line, ‘as the rich city has, racing tower against tower’85 (Figure 2). The image of the spire appears multiplied, the camera positioned behind the window of an adjoining tower. Rukeyser’s text alludes to the ‘reflections’ of the two towers on the window’s glass, as well as the photographs’ capacity, in collaboration with the text, to provoke contemplation in the viewer / reader. Rukeyser also plays with the notion of mirrored worlds. The photographs are presented as opposites, contrary ‘worlds alongside’ that highlight the difference between two American ways of life: the ‘flat’ landscape is parched, conditioned by poverty; the tall city is ‘rich’, and by implication, comparatively graceful. In simple terms, the images are ideological and aesthetical inversions of each other: opposite yet the same, and each needing the other to reinforce its

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meaning. Additionally, Rukeyser’s observation that the ‘flat lands’ have ‘no reflections’ indicates both the lack of attention given to the poor by the ‘rich’, and the former’s relatively uncivilised state in terms of technological advancement and architectural construction. Warren Susman has observed that, during the 1930s, a strong dichotomy arose between national perceptions of ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’ in America.86 A significant number of books were written addressing the fact that ‘culture’ was no longer considered to be ‘the highest achievements of men of intellect and art through history’, but rather, as Robert Lynd phrased it at the time, ‘all the things that a group of people inhabiting a common geographical area do, the ways they do things and the ways they think and feel about things, their material tools and their values and symbols’.87 Social sciences grew in popularity alongside documentary, and Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) became a widely read anthropological work, addressing a national need to ‘domesticate’ culture by rendering the term inclusive rather than elitist. In ideological opposition to ‘culture’, ‘civilisation’ grew as a term to be equated by thirties critics and writers with urban-industrial growth, and was often considered ‘the enemy’.88 The documentary turn towards the country’s ‘folk’ and their ‘culture’ was a turn away from the chaos of an industrial Depression. Agrarian victims of capitalism were focused upon and romanticised in accordance with their perceived honesty and lack of culpability in either capitalism or its collapse. An exploration of the American folk opened the way to invest new meaning in America, its customs, crafts, skills and frontier heritage. Consequently, rural America was figuratively excavated. Jerrold Hirsch has noted that the prime concern of the FWP programmes was ‘rediscovering, acknowledging and celebrating the nation’s cultural pluralism’.89 In so doing, they aimed to ‘provide Americans with the cultural understanding that would provide the basis for a new form of national integration’.90 As documentarians turned their attentions to the land and its more primitive inhabitants, there was a sense not only of salvage but also of salvation; the 1930s and the documentary literature it produced represented a type of homecoming. Indeed, Malcolm Cowley commented that many of the American intellectual ‘exiles’ were returning to their homeland due to their realisation that the US ‘possessed a folklore, and traditions, and the songs that embodied them’.91 Stryker’s comment that the FSA file ‘made a contribution to public education’ by introducing ‘Americans to America’ reflected the common understanding that American culture was correlative with the American people. FSA photographers helped to perpetuate the idea that poor, agrarian folk

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represented a more accurate portrait of American reality; the file, as Stryker was later to admit, was ‘more than a little bit sociology’.92 Rukeyser’s pairing of Lange’s Depression photograph with the gothic tower in her attempt to depict ‘worlds alongside’ is therefore fairly typical of the dialectical ideology characterising documentary expression at the time. Additionally, the ‘forceful juxtaposition of contrasting social elements’ was, as Charles Wolfe notes, a ‘recurring pattern’ of the politically charged films produced by the Workers Film and Photo League, with whom Rukeyser was affiliated during the late 1930s.93 On the central pages of the photo-narrative, Rukeyser reiterates her message, utilising two contrasting human faces, one ‘primitive’, one ‘civilised’. However, her belief in the communicative and connective power of word and image is extended to unite these supposed opposites: These worlds alongside bring together faces: the primitive waiting face that is ready to receive history upon itself, a dark genesis for us all. It lies beautiful and receptive, a living rock . . . and the finished face of the dancer turning to her audience.94

This text appears on the verso, under a photograph of the upturned head of a young African woman, and opposite a full-page head and shoulders photograph of the dancer Martha Graham. The women are facing each other so that their chins almost touch (Figure 3). By emphasising the act of coming face to face, Rukeyser was responding to documentary’s contradictory relationship with the human face as ethical and phenomenological figure. This central pairing reveals Rukeyser’s understanding of the important position of the face in the dynamic of difference, and both contributes to and challenges notions of alterity and sameness. In an effort to ‘bring together faces’, Rukeyser attempted to create a dialogue between the representatives of different ‘worlds’, without assimilation. It is helpful at this point to offer a reading of Rukeyser’s poetics as manifested in ‘Worlds Alongside’ through the theory of the ethical philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. I would like to note that Michael Renov’s recent application of Levinasian theory to 1980s American documentary film techniques encouraged me to investigate Levinas further, and apply his theory of the ‘face-to-face’ to Rukeyser’s photo-narrative. Renov argues that documentary filmmaking has within the last two decades become a means for examining and constructing selfhood.95

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However, Rukeyser’s utilisation of documentary methods and motifs to the same ends as early as the 1930s appears to have gone unnoticed until now.

Rukeyser, Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas Although I can find no record of Rukeyser having read the work of Levinas, the terms she employed to expound her theory of the poetic confluence of opposites are in many cases identical to those used by Levinas to explain his interpretation of phenomenological ethics. Rukeyser did, however, read extensively the work of the philosopher and Zionist leader Martin Buber, whose writings Levinas listed as among his greatest influences.96 No critical attention has been paid to the triadic conjunction in Rukeyser’s work between her poetics and the religious (Jewish) and ethical theories of Buber and Levinas. Buber’s (1878–1965) religious and social philosophy is structured upon a belief in the potential for intersubjective creativity within relationship and dialogue. In 1923, Ich und Du was published in Germany, and translated into English as I and Thou in 1937. I and Thou situates man in dialogic relations with man and with God. Via a commitment to strong, interpersonal associations, man transcends institutionalised and formalised frameworks in order to reach a sacred realm of intercourse. Dialogue between man and God combines with an inner dialogue of the self, giving rise to the crystallisation of a common discourse, which in turn is essential for social cohesiveness. Buber calls this transcendent dialogue a ‘meeting’ between consciousnesses.97 In Between Man and Man (1936, trans. 1947), Buber developed his theory of ‘meeting’, highlighting his belief in the necessity of self-reflection to the ‘philosophical knowledge of man’. Discussing ‘philosophical anthropology’, Buber proposes that everything that is discovered about historical and modern man . . . must be built up and crystallised round what the philosopher discovers by reflecting about himself . . . He can know the wholeness of the person and through it the wholeness of man only when he does not leave his subjectivity out and does not remain the untouched observer.98

The philosopher / anthropologist must therefore be both a participant and an observer in human relations in order to understand them. Buber’s ‘wholeness of man’ is in opposition to both individualism, which to his understanding ‘sees man only in relation to himself’, and collectivism, which ‘does not see man at all, it only sees “society” ’. Further, Buber

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uses the figure of the face to demonstrate his understanding of these ‘different stages’ of ‘the same human condition’: ‘with the former man’s face is distorted, with the latter it is masked’.99 Positing that the ‘fundamental fact of human existence is man with man’, Buber states that this relation is ‘rooted in one being turning to another’. This communication is not reducible to the spoken word, and exists in its own sphere, which Buber terms ‘the sphere of the “between” ’: a sphere in which ‘an “outer” event and an “inner” impression’ come together to create a ‘third alternative’.100 Buber provides an example: In the darkened opera-house there can be established between two of the audience, who do not know one another, and who are listening in the same purity and with the same intensity to the music of Mozart, a relation which is scarcely perceptible and yet is one of elemental dialogue.101

The ‘sphere of the “between” ’ exists in moments in which two realms overlap and create a shared third realm of experience. This is where ‘I and Thou meet . . . the realm of the between’.102 Buber proposed that his theory may constitute ‘an advance’ towards a ‘transformed understanding of the person and . . . of community’, concluding that the meeting ‘of the One with the Other’ represents an initial position from which to answer the question of ‘what man is’.103 Levinas was to carry Buber’s theory into the philosophy of ethical relation. Rukeyser’s papers contain numerous references to the work of Buber dating from the early 1950s, and in 1961 she acknowledged the debt her poetics owed to Buber’s thought in a footnote to the publication of the poem, ‘Akiba’, in American Judaism.104 The poetics of connection on which Rukeyser lectured during the 1940s, and developed into the book The Life of Poetry, bear a striking similarity to Buber’s theory of ‘meeting’. As Janet Kaufman has noted, Rukeyser employed similar terminology to Buber, speaking and writing often of her belief that poetry could provide a ‘meeting-place between all the kinds of imagination’.105 Kaufman provides valuable insight into what she terms the ‘Jewish’ influences upon Rukeyser’s work by highlighting the importance of relationship and dialogue to both Buber and Rukeyser. Building on Kaufman’s critique, I argue that Buber’s ‘third alternative’, created in the ‘sphere of the “between” ’, has its correlative in Rukeyser’s idea of poetic exchange. Believing that ‘the giving and taking of a poem’ is a relation that ‘can never be reduced to a pair’, Rukeyser maintained that poetry constitutes a ‘triadic relation’ involving ‘the poet, the poem, and the audience’.106 In the following passage from The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser explains her poetics of connection via a description of the

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human ‘meeting’ occurring in a darkened theatre that is almost identical to Buber’s example of the moment in the ‘darkened opera-house’. Whereas, for Rukeyser, the exchange results in poetic creation, for Buber, the outcome is the first step towards cultural creativity through a spiritual intersubjectivity: You sit beside me in the house dark, with the light thrown from the stage on your face, and shadows at your back. When you laugh, I feel it, and I feel the man in front of me . . . But we are not separate from the play . . . We sit here, very different from each other, until the passion arrives to give us our equality, and to make us part of the play, to make the play a part of us. An exchange is being effected.107

In its similarity to Buber’s thought, Rukeyser’s recognition of the (wordless) creative exchange that can take place between two people who are ‘very different from each other’ but none the less ‘equal’ prefigures Levinas’s thought regarding the self’s non-objectivising response to the alterity of the other. Levinas’s (1906–95) first philosophical opus, Totality and Infinity (1961, trans. 1969), in which he sought to articulate an ontology that involved ethical thought, was directly influenced by Buber’s dialogical philosophy. Levinas’s terminology in this and succeeding texts responds to and builds upon the theories of ‘philosophical anthropology’ first formulated by Buber during the 1930s.108 Buber’s ‘sphere of the “between” ’, rooted in ‘one being turning to the other’, provides the precedent for Levinas’s ‘face-to-face’, a meeting of beings that respects both distance and proximity, and which situates the One and the Other in a reciprocal dialogue of teaching and receiving. In Otherwise than Being (1974, trans. 1981), Levinas expanded upon his theory of the ‘face-to-face’ to describe a ‘communication’ between beings that begins with a ‘responsibility’ for others.109 This ‘responsibility’ is signified in the face of a ‘neighbour’: when a being responds to the ‘non-ego’ of its neighbour, that being understands its own place in the world without reducing the face of its neighbour to an object or to the self-same.110

Levinas’s ‘face-to-face’ and Rukeyser’s ‘Worlds Alongside’ Totality and Infinity explores the ethical position of the other as a precondition for self-knowledge. According to Levinas, the ‘notion of the face’ opens a number of ‘perspectives’ on the self and the other, whose ethical and phenomenological co-existence depends upon a relationship

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of irreducible difference.111 Similar to Buber’s fully participatory ‘philosophical anthropology’, Levinas’s theory of the face stresses the dangers of a purely observational approach to the other. Both modes of thought help us to understand that documentary discourses that tended to objectify and possess the other under a spectatorial or voyeuristic gaze – for example, You Have Seen Their Faces – subsequently denied the self any reciprocal relation with alterity. They thus contributed to what Levinas terms ‘a philosophy of injustice’: Thematization and conceptualisation, which moreover are inseparable, are not peace with the other but suppression or possession of the other. For possession affirms the other, but within a negation of its independence. ‘I think’ comes down to ‘I can’ – to an appropriation of what is, to an exploitation of reality.112

Levinas argues instead for a comprehension of being that is commanded by the self’s relationship with the other. If we are to understand ‘the face’ as ‘the way in which the other presents himself’,113 it follows that we are to understand the self within the general economy of the ‘face-toface’: a meeting or ‘conversation’ of immediacy, enacted at the level of reception. The other must not and cannot be reduced to the self-same, but must be met with an ‘openness’ to alterity, ‘possible only starting from me’.114 When Rukeyser contrives the primitive and the sophisticated to come together face to face on the printed page, she appears to highlight alterity by means of proximity. The anonymous African woman is Graham’s literal and metaphorical neighbour, and through the face, the otherness of each is reinforced and better appreciated in a reciprocal dialogue of being. However, there exists in Rukeyser’s hybrid text a critical third element: that of the reader. The faces attest to what Levinas terms ‘the presence of a third party, the whole of humanity . . . the eyes that look at me’, for ‘the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity’.115 This ‘third party’ must partake in the experience of the face-to-face, fulfilling the requirements of both observer and participant. In so doing, the ‘third party’ experiences a selfhood that cannot be reached solely through the self, but only via the responsive and responsible witness of an Other. Rukeyser’s theory of poetic relation and Levinas’s theory of ethical relation are comparable in terms of their irreducibility to two components, and their subsequent dependence on the presence of a ‘third party’, referred to by Rukeyser as the ‘witness’. In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser explains her preference for the term ‘witness’ over ‘reader’ or ‘audience’ to express the tripartite relationship she hoped to achieve in the poetic act of bringing together:

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I should like to use another word: ‘audience’ or ‘reader’ or ‘listener’ seems inadequate. I suggest the old word ‘witness,’ which includes the act of seeing and knowing by personal experience, as well as the act of giving evidence. The overtone of responsibility in this word is not present in the others; and the tension of the law makes a climate here which is that climate of excitement and revelation giving air to the work of art, announcing with the poem that we are about to change, that work is being done on the self.116

Rukeyser theorises that ‘work’ may be ‘done on the self’ via the assumption of ‘responsibility’ for something outside the self. This ‘responsibility’ in turn results from a visual and cognitive personal experience of the other. By positing that ‘these worlds alongside bring together faces,’ Rukeyser encourages her reader / witness to engage in the visual dialogue played out on the pages of her photo-narrative. Her hope, similar to Buber’s and Levinas’s hopes for ‘a transformed understanding of the person and . . . of community’, and an expression of ethical ‘justice’ respectively, is to create a ‘meeting-place’ of supposed opposites in which self and other are face to face and viewed by each other and by a third party as equal but necessarily different.117 Levinas also employs the word ‘witness’, applying it to a being experiencing an immediate relation with another’s vulnerability. This vulnerability is recognised through proximity. One is involved in the other before one could have chosen to be, and in so being, is bound to the other at a level of response and responsibility: ‘Proximity, difference which is non-indifference, is responsibility. It is a response without a question . . . It is the passivity of exposure, a passivity itself exposed.’118 According to Levinas, one is claimed by the face of the other, and articulated as a responsible individual before one can articulate oneself. The vulnerability of the other is explicit in the nakedness of the face, which ‘presents to me the destitution of the poor one and the stranger’. However, this stranger ‘presents himself as an equal’.119 Such equality arises from a ‘fraternity’ (Levinas uses Buber’s word) that is present in the face-to-face encounter. It begins with the ego ‘bearing witness of itself to the other’.120 Encountering the face of the other, I am called by it to responsibility before I could have chosen it. The proximity of the other therefore calls forth its authority in the articulation of my own subjectivity. The other is irreducible to the self-same, but remains alongside me visibly and ethically: ‘It is my responsibility before a face looking at me as absolutely foreign . . . that constitutes the original fact of fraternity.’ The face-to-face is thus ‘an ethical relation’; for both Rukeyser and Levinas, it is rooted in a dynamic of ‘witness’ and ‘responsibility’.121 Six of the photographs used by Rukeyser in ‘Worlds Alongside’ are facial shots, and Rukeyser makes explicit reference in her narrative to

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the human face on five occasions. Directly after the central facial combination, Rukeyser pairs Lange’s candid image of a migrant family’s arrested car journey along a US highway with Rothstein’s posed composition of a well-dressed man seated at home, reading a book (Figure 4). Rukeyser’s text stresses the existence of a ‘range’ of worlds in America, ‘from the migrants who pile their house in a Ford and head west for work . . . to the Virginia postmaster at home in the evening’. The text layout is as follows: to the Virginia postmaster at home in the evening. Crowded into his corner is the record of effort that ends in some buildings, a ritual of business, belief in a god in the room, a few household objects, and his face.122

In what appears to be the only piece of critical writing to address ‘Worlds Alongside’, Jefferson Hunter condemns Rukeyser’s use of documentary photographs as reinforcing the genre’s objectivising ethos, asserting that the only observation that can confidently be made about her photo-narrative ‘is that it denies individuality to dwellers in the poor, simple world’. He supports his argument by contending that Rukeyser’s treatment of Rothstein’s photograph situates the subject as ‘fully interpreted and thus fully categorized’.123 Hunter may have a point, but his reading seems too hastily dismissive. Rukeyser recognises that the postmaster’s life may be documented and summarised as a collection of fragments, all of them objects, and all of them in some way perpetuating documentary photography’s aesthetic of recorded objectification and mimetic reproductivity: ‘a few household objects’ are a mirror and two lamps, figures of reflection and illumination essential to photographic technology; ‘some buildings’ are pictures of monuments hanging on the wall; ‘belief in a god in the room’ is another wall hanging, with an image of a family meal (connoting the Last Supper), accompanied by a brief text reminding us of Christ’s invisible omnipresence. It is also worth noting that, by drawing attention to ‘belief in a god in the room’, Rukeyser underlines the pluralisation of god afforded by the mechanical reproduction of an iconic image that takes the place of the referent. The last element in this ‘record of effort’ comprises the page’s last line of text. By isolating and centring the final item in this otherwise meagre catalogue of the vital components of the postmaster’s existence, Rukeyser aligns it with the initial line, creating a visual symmetry that reads: ‘to the Virginia postmaster . . . and his face’. Positioned thus, the text both salutes the subject and directs one

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towards it. Likewise, in Levinasian theory, the face of the other both greets and summons the self towards a meeting. Yet this double-page spread is indicative of Rukeyser’s tendency throughout both photo-narratives to elicit questions from her reader / witness to which she does not provide adequate answer. The obvious contrast between these two ‘worlds’ is in the former’s transience and vagrancy and the latter’s financial stability as indicated by his material comforts, but Rukeyser’s language is ambiguous. Does, for example, the postmaster’s ‘belief’ extend from ‘a god in the room’ to ‘his face’? Or has ‘his face’, despite Rukeyser’s formal positioning of it outside the catalogue of objectified phenomenal existence, been thematised and collected by the documentarian in the same manner as have his ‘household objects’? Rukeyser’s understanding of the world and of poetry (the two are inseparable for Rukeyser) was built upon a philosophy of eyewitness that involves responsibility to the self and the other. An objectifying look can, in both Rukeyser’s and Levinas’s philosophies, suppress and possess the other, freezing the continuity of life, and creating further distance between faces. Inability or refusal to respond responsibly to the other is equal to an inability to see the world and the self’s place within it. Rukeyser’s decision to position overleaf from this spread a full-page photograph of another, anonymous face whose large, open eyes are discernibly blind, may therefore be understood in the light of Levinas’s ethical rhetoric. Responsibility arises from both Levinas’s and Rukeyser’s understanding of ‘regard’ as incorporating both a way of seeing and the act of giving particular care.124 Rukeyser’s poetic caption categorises the woman’s face as ‘the still look’, whilst beneath the opposite image of a whirlpool resembling a large eye, the caption responds with a reference to ‘the inward look of waters, carrying their currents’ (Figure 5). Rukeyser’s combination of image and text again alludes to ethical and poetical ways of looking at the world, which naturally include perception of both an outer event and an inner impression. Encountering the face of an Other provokes immediate introspection, and Rukeyser confirms that these dual elements of perception must ‘dance in unique balance’.125 The last image of the photo-narrative indicates the necessity to consider the ‘look’ of others, and features what Rukeyser captions as ‘the Mexican boy in his look at the silver plane’.126 This contrast of visual perspectives foregrounds the act of looking at the world while highlighting the camera’s role in the presentation of others. By extending the photographs’ meanings, the narrative provides a subtle interrogation of the reader / witness, who is made to re-evaluate his / her own position within the dynamic of visual and ethical regard.

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Language with or without words: ‘the face speaks’ There exists in Rukeyser’s photo-narrative a graphic symmetry and reciprocity that are absent from MacLeish’s. Whilst Rukeyser acknowledges that it was MacLeish’s intention to subordinate his text ‘to the position of illustration to the photographs’, her problem with MacLeish’s text resides principally in the fact that he could not adequately respond to the faces in the photographs, only attempt to ‘translate’ them: ‘He has taken these people’s faces and translated the inarticulate physical life seen in them to a lost periodless quality.’127 According to Levinas, the face-toface involves an encounter with language prior to our own speaking. Before we can speak for ourselves or for others, ‘the face speaks’: The face is a living presence; it is expression. The life of expression consists in undoing the form in which the existent, exposed as a theme, is thereby dissimulated. The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse. He who manifests himself comes . . . to his own assistance. He at each instance undoes the form he presents.128

Responsibility is interpreted by Levinas as response, which is in turn interpreted as saying, aloud or not. Levinasian theory posits that the communicability of the face transcends objectivity by involving a saying that is both the essence of being and the commencement of ‘the presence of exteriority in language’.129 Levinas terms this initial saying as an affirmative ‘ “Here I am,” ’ from the book of Isaiah: ‘Before they call, I will speak.’130 It is a command issued from the face of the other to awake one to response and responsibility. It is the exposure of the self to the other, a saying of the self, because ‘saying is witness, it is saying without the said, a sign given to the other’. Consequently, it is ‘a fraternity, a proximity that is possible only as an openness of self . . . It is thus exposing of exposure . . . the one-for-the-other.’131 The ‘physical life’ seen in MacLeish’s chosen faces is ‘inarticulate’, according to Rukeyser, because it should not be reduced to language of the self-same; the self as witness can only be called to respond to the other, not to speak in his / her place. Whilst MacLeish acknowledges ‘the power and the stubborn inward livingness’ of the photographs, his constant use of the first person plural indicates his attempt to adopt the Other’s point of view. Such a style was often employed in Depression literature to highlight the importance of social community over the needs of the individual; however, since MacLeish obviously cannot be counted among the rural labour contingent of America, his attempt to counter the human face with the pronoun ‘we’ results in a representation of the other and a presentation of the author’s own self in what Levinas terms ‘a borrowed light’.132

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What Hunter has called ‘MacLeish’s ventriloquial ingenuity’ has proved a problem for many critics of the book.133 Puckett, for example, argues that the pronoun ‘we’ is employed ‘to overcome the individuality of the individuals shown in the photographs . . . The poem generalizes, the photographs specify, and to make his corporate statement, MacLeish must distort their meaning.’134 The poem’s overwhelming tone of doubt and insecurity helps to thematise the face of the other. The variant refrains on ‘We don’t know’ are linked by ‘We can’t say’ and ‘we’re not talking.’ MacLeish’s decision to counter these three words with Lange’s photograph of two farmers evidently in conversation, contradicts the image and undermines their human exchange (Figure 6). By denying the people pictured the opportunity to ‘say’, MacLeish negates their presence as equals in the face-to-face encounter. In ‘Worlds Alongside’, Rukeyser also employs the first person plural. In her review of Land of the Free, she argued that ‘[t]he “we” so many critics suffer over is not so important, once the tone is there. The thing really is not to fall into the grandiose tone that is in another tradition altogether’ – a tone aided by MacLeish’s quotations from official documents such as the Declaration of Independence. Rukeyser’s problem with MacLeish’s words was her belief that they were ‘in somebody else’s mouth’.135 The pictorial / verbal imbalance of the book is thus the result of MacLeish’s inauthentic response to the faces he encountered. Additionally, the text and the vast majority of the photographs in the book portray inaction. Americans are often pictured as stoic and unmoving, whilst MacLeish’s text highlights the people as ‘waiting’ and ‘wondering’. For Rukeyser, this passivity must be countered ‘with direct questions’. Her belief in the need ‘to supply the cleanest, sharpest, most alive words we know to meet these faces and these scenes’ prefigures the ethical obligation Levinas perceives in the human act of meeting.136 According to Levinas, words are most ‘disfigured or “frozen” when language is transformed into documents and vestiges. The living word struggles against this transfer of thought into vestige.’137 MacLeish’s quotation from American documents, coupled with the repetitive refrain of ‘we can’t say,’ highlights both the power and impotence of language. What was once accepted as truth on the basis of its utterance – ‘we told ourselves we were free because we said so’ – is now accepted as meaningless.138 In Land of the Free, words have lost their life; they have become so ‘disfigured’ as to provoke a lapse of faith in the original Word: ‘Maybe God Almighty wrote it out / We could shoot our mouths off where we pleased and with what and no Thank-yous.’139 The immediacy of saying is again absent. Even God, whose word is traditionally delivered verbally, is figured as a scribe. This degradation of words

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leads, at the end of Land of the Free, to a stubborn refusal on the part of the collective nation to ‘say’, ‘tell’ or ‘talk’: ‘We can stand till sundown with our mouths shut . . . All we know for sure is – we’re not talking.’140 According to the ethics of both Levinas and Rukeyser, MacLeish’s textual interpretation of the faces in the photographs does not constitute a response, but a misreading. However, it is debatable whether Rukeyser succeeds in creating and sustaining a textual / pictorial equilibrium in her photo-narratives. Her text at times constitutes an immediate response to the images, arguably allowing the Levinasian ‘ “Here I am” ’ quality of the face to manifest itself, and affording a markedly different effect from that of the faces MacLeish helped to categorise as ‘lost’. Additionally, the phrase ‘Worlds living now!’, occurring twice alongside human faces, might be seen to undermine the ‘periodless’ quality that Rukeyser thought MacLeish had given to the faces in Land of the Free.141 Yet it is difficult to believe that such a phrase, despite its emphasis on ‘living’, demonstrates what Rukeyser intended when she made a plea for the ‘cleanest, sharpest, most alive words we know’ to accompany the FSA photographs. Furthermore, in an effort to expose the revelatory quality of the faceto-face encounter, Rukeyser must inevitably employ the photograph as representational symbol. Whilst she avoids speaking for the other, the imagination governing her text represents the other as a poetic image. She is thus unable to maintain a generosity towards the other’s face that is over and above its presentation as an image, and whilst Rukeyser at times transcends visual objectification, or at least points the way to its transcendence, there exists within ‘Worlds Alongside’ occasional slippage into thematisation of and condescension towards the perceived other. ‘The face of the Other’, asserts Levinas, ‘at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me.’142 By employing the static image of the photograph as a means of overcoming the distancing effect of an objectivising vision, Rukeyser risks reducing alterity to symbolism, augmented by her tendency at points to fix the other as type. This is most evident in the central pairing of the faces of Graham and the young African woman, to whom Rukeyser refers as ‘primitive’. This term needs further elucidation in relation to the frameworks of the photo-narratives and 1930s documentary in general.

The primitive In his short critique of ‘Worlds Alongside’, Hunter is right to refer to the pictured African woman as ‘portentously symbolic’.143 Approached on

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Levinasian terms, her face embodies Graham’s confrontation with irreducible alterity, and Rukeyser’s description of it as ‘ready . . . beautiful and receptive’ offers a lesson in the open ‘passivity’ that Levinas states is necessary for an ethical and phenomenological encounter with the other.144 Furthermore, the face’s readiness to ‘receive history upon itself’ situates it beyond the province of systematic knowledge that Levinas terms ‘totality’. It is before and without history, and as such, is a symbol of ‘infinity’ that may insinuate itself into my world as my interlocutor.145 It is necessarily my self’s precondition. However, Rukeyser’s further characterisation of the ‘primitive’ face as ‘a dark genesis for us all’ and ‘a living rock’ both define the image according to the terms of a primitivist aesthetic inherited from the 1920s, and situate it within the burgeoning visual-anthropological discourse of the period. The photograph in question is by Attilio Gatti, an Italian film director and anthropologist whose film Siliva the Zulu (1928) was one of a growing number of ethnographical films made during the 1920s.146 As I noted in Chapter 1, it was in a review of filmmaker Robert Flaherty’s ethnographical enterprise, Moana (1926), that John Grierson, praising the film’s portrayal of the ‘beauty of primitive beings’ coined the term ‘documentary’.147 The development in America of ethnographical film and photography can in part be attributed to the work of the   anthropologist Franz Boas, regarded as the founder of American visual anthropology.148 Rukeyser was fascinated by Boas, and for most of her working life she researched his biography, collecting a wealth of material on and by him.149 Boas’s work focused on understanding ‘the relation between the objective and subjective worlds’ of different cultures,150 and George Stocking has argued that the American anthropological turn in the 1930s towards the interrelation of culture and personality was in fact a return to a duality voiced by Boas thirty years before.151 Boas’s principal thesis – that the folklore of a people provided the best means of judging their character – resurfaced in the travel documentary of the late 1930s and early 1940s, and was reworked into the WPA American Guide series as a way of rediscovering America whilst reaffirming its traditions and values. However, it was Boas’s involvement with the visual media of film and photography that, arguably, led ultimately to the production of the documentary photo-text. In his examination of physiognomy especially, Boas found the recording tool of the still camera invaluable.152 Ira Jacknis has noted that ‘by far the most predominant subject’ for Boas’s camera was the ‘portrait’, taken in order to record the different racial features and expressions of the human face.153 Boas soon became equally interested in film, and on

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his last field trip to the northwest coast in 1930, aged 71, he worked a motion camera for the first time. In 1933, Boas was engaged in lengthy correspondence with Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America in the hope of collaborating on a project to film ‘the primitive races’.154 The project never came to fruition, yet the surviving letters reveal Boas’s appreciation of Nanook as anthropological project, and reveal his plans to produce a film that ‘would be at the same time scientific and popular in character’ and hopefully preserve ‘a native life which is disappearing altogether too rapidly’.155 Boas’s enthusiasm for visual anthropology was inherited by his student, Margaret Mead, who in 1942, in collaboration with Gregory Bateson, published the results of fieldwork conducted between 1936 and 1938 in the first anthropological photo-text, Balinese Character. In 1928, Mead had published Coming of Age in Samoa: A Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation, appealing to the era’s fascination with the exoticism of the cultural Other, and alluding to a connection between primitivism and childhood that involved the ideological location of the ‘primitive’ in a more innocent, irretraceable past. Rukeyser’s utilisation in her photo-narratives of FSA, anthropological and childhood photographs indicates an engagement with the self / other dialectic embedded within documentary and ethnographic discourses. Additionally, the fact that Rukeyser had studied anthropology, psychology and the short story over two summers at Columbia University during the early thirties seems to have aided the content and construction of her photonarratives.156 Conjoining techniques of story-telling and documentary, the photo-narratives represent brief exercises in philosophical anthropological discourse. The cultural theorist Lila Abu-Lughod has argued that anthropology’s colonialist roots render it ‘the discourse of the self’, further proposing that ‘the Western civilised self was constituted in part through this confrontation with and picturing of the savage or primitive other’.157 By formally picturing a confrontation between the face of the African woman and ‘the finished face of the dancer’, Rukeyser would seem to underline the progressive civilisation of the ‘Western self’. Her characterisation of the ‘primitive’ as ‘beautiful’ and ‘a living rock’ contributes to an established primitivist rhetoric that figured the other in romantic, natural terms. Furthermore, the photographs are positioned on the pages so that the African gazes upwards to Graham, who appears to look down upon her. Yet Rukeyser’s utilisation of such imagery is complex, and involves a conflict between established perceptions and new creative perspectives. Fatimah Tobing Rony has written of the ‘redemption motif of anthropology’, the idea that the primitive is an uncorrupted example

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of the values of the West: fraternity, independence and perseverance.158 Indeed, contemporary filmmakers and critics alike were aware of films such as Nanook representing a ‘romantic desire to summon, preserve for posterity, the purity and “majesty” of a way of life not yet spoiled by the advance of civilisation’.159 The thirties’ impulse towards an alignment of the agrarian, land-labouring life with ‘culture’, in opposition to an urban-industrial ‘civilisation’, at times found expression in such crude anthropological terminology. However, the term ‘primitive’ was also used pejoratively. Caldwell, for example, marvelled at the tenant farmers’ ability to get by on so little, calling them ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’, but concluding, ‘but they are still people, they are human beings. They have life.’160 In ‘Worlds Alongside’, Rukeyser’s narrative posits that ‘we make cities out of the need for four walls and a door . . . and the two values live alongside each other, the elaborate gesture and the simplest motion’.161 The text appears under the dual images of a carefully composed Brassaï photograph of a waiter pouring rows of glasses full of red wine, and the less artful portrait of a rural worker, pouring water from a metal beaker into his mouth. In contrast to MacLeish, Rukeyser does not ‘wonder’ what has happened to America, but asserts that the American people as a nation have made choices resulting in its present state. The parallel ‘worlds’ of wealth and poverty are living proof of the nation’s impulse to segregate and discriminate. New Deal ideology, exemplified by the FSA file, sought to reform society collectively towards a national community.162 However, in ‘Worlds Alongside’, Rukeyser highlights America’s internal alterity (the ‘range in our own country’), encouraging her reader / witness to confront, both visually and morally, an inherent, national duality. Rukeyser’s narrative thus assumes a responsibility for the state of America that has its ‘genesis’ in face-to-face visual witness: the type of witness that Levinas understood as providing access to the ‘primordial affective relations through which human existents apprehend the world’.163 In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser wrote of the ‘primitive’ in terms of the romantic aesthetic of redemptive lesson: We can understand the primitive – not as the clumsy, groping naïf of a corrupted definition, or even the unskilled ‘unsophisticate’ of modern aesthetic usage – for what he was and what we have to be: the newborn of an age, the pioneer, Adam who dares.164

Infusing her language with the ‘myth and symbol’ rhetoric of the age, Rukeyser urged Americans to learn from the primitive, pioneer spirit. Criticising those modern poets (including MacLeish) who ‘go blaming,

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blaming’, and ‘who emerge with little but self-pity’, Rukeyser endorsed a poetic sensibility that relied on moral responsibility and expansive inclusion, rather than ‘the smallness of things’.165 This responsibility is founded upon ‘the only things with survival value’: ‘our relation to each other and to ourselves’.166 The ‘primitive’ was a psychological, poetical and anthropological motif of expansion and experiment for Rukeyser: ‘a source in ourselves which we had almost lost’.167 It is in this capacity that she characterises ‘the primitive waiting face’ as primordial, ‘a dark genesis for us all’. In the ‘newborn of an age’ resides the potential to return to the reality of the world, a reality that Rukeyser believed was only half-seen in her lifetime: a ‘century’ which, according to Rukeyser, had ‘only halfprepared us to be primitives’. Believing that ‘the time requires our full consciousness, humble, audacious, clear,’ Rukeyser argued for a return to a primitive state of being whose receptivity and capacity for direct experience could also be found in childhood.168

The primitive and childhood: ‘The Adventures of Children’ In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser insists that the way to undo ‘the repressive codes’ of modernity can be found in the fearlessness and innocence of childhood. ‘Adventures of Children’ appears to test methods of transmitting that message. This photo-narrative also begins with a comparison of primitiveness and civilisation, and Rukeyser’s characterisation of the ‘primitive’ as ‘the newborn of an age’ alludes to an anthropological association of the ethnographical other with childhood. An apparent allusion to Mead, ‘They grow up in their own way in Bali,’ provides the caption for the first photograph: five children swimming naked in a river. Opposite, a small blonde girl has her hair tugged into order by the hands of an unseen adult: ‘but our civilisation has its rigors’.169 The parallel seems trite, a disappointing application of new documentary methods of text and image interrelation, yet it indicates the initial stages of development in Rukeyser’s thinking on poetry and childhood. Ten years after the publication of ‘Adventures of Children’, Rukeyser postulated that the child’s potential for creating meeting-places is inextricable from its natural relationship with poetry. According to Rukeyser, the fear of poetry that arrives with adulthood leads to a lack of interpersonal communication: ‘fear of poetry is against all imagination and the work that is closest to imagination: experiment in human relation . . . Little children do not have this fear.’170 A primitive way of ‘growing up’ is associated from the start of ‘Adventures of Children’ with the joys of

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childhood: unembarrassed nudity; a corporeal connection with nature; a freedom to move in one’s own world. The ‘rigors’ of ‘our civilization’ may seem slight when figured in a photograph of a little girl having her hair combed; however, the adult’s hands, which pull the child’s head back as they make her hair more socially presentable, provide a metaphor for an imposing restraint. The ellipsis after ‘rigors’ guides to the next page, where the line concludes, ‘leading to many ends’.171 This subsequent double-page spread provides two examples of how ‘our civilization’ regards its children (Figure 7). In a ballet school, little girls are trained in ‘grace’, in time to be ‘singled out by the spotlight’s discipline’. Alongside, the child of a tenant farmer appears awkward and unwashed in the squalor of her home, ‘lost in her past and her family’.172 Rukeyser’s emphasis on the disparity between two apparently civilised ways of looking appears clichéd, not only because of the obvious juxtaposition of the child as beautiful spectacle and the child as wretched example of a nation’s (previous) tendency to avoid confronting social ills, but also because of the uninspired narrative: ‘against this kind of decoration, against this life, she is hardly distinguishable from the furniture’.173 Ironically, Rukeyser herself avoids confronting a further visual dynamic. Carl Mydans’s RA photograph of the young tenant girl is an example of a vast project that was driven by a visualising ideology. It is likely that the little girl ‘backs against the wall’ because there is a stranger in her house, pointing a camera lens at her. She is in the process of being made into spectacle. The remainder of ‘Adventures of Children’ is a short explication of how children learn to live in the world, and as such, indicates a lesson in being-in-the-world. Rukeyser’s fascination with childhood appears to flow from the confluence of three discourses, which together were afforded a resurgence in an era specifically characterised by the documentary genre: alterity, primitivism and mimesis. To help elucidate this argument, I turn to the modernist cultural commentary of Walter Benjamin. Although Benjamin’s writings on the ethical and social implications of the popularity of the camera have informed many recent critiques of thirties documentary culture,174 his thoughts on the imagery of the child’s world have attracted surprisingly little attention among critics.

Walter Benjamin, the primitive and childhood Susan Buck-Morss has suggested that the paucity of critical attention given to Benjamin’s writing on children is a symptom ‘of precisely the repression of childhood and its cognitive modes which he considered

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a problem of the utmost political significance’.175 For Benjamin, the primordial nature of a child’s reactions is an indication of the ‘primitive’, ‘mimetic faculty’ of all human beings.176 Buck-Morss posits that Benjamin’s attempt to penetrate ‘the as yet undistorted world of the child and its creative imagination’ conceptually stemmed from a belief that the child’s ‘unsevered connection between perception and action’ helped to distinguish a ‘revolutionary consciousness in adults’.177 This connection was not a behaviourist stimulus–response reaction, but a creative, impulsive form of mimesis. In ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ (1933), Benjamin wrote that ‘the highest capacity for producing similarities’ belonged to man rather than nature, an indication of ‘a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. . . . Children’s play is everywhere permeated by mimetic modes of behaviour.’178 Benjamin’s appeal to what he, in the same essay, terms ‘the primitive’ was provoked by modernity’s technological advances in the mimetic faculty, exemplified most obviously by the mechanically reproductive media of film and photography. In 1936, Benjamin noted that Western people’s drive towards mechanical mimesis was ‘just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction’.179 The danger in the modern world’s fascination with mechanical mimesis was the interchangeability of the object world with the visual copy. However, the camera especially represented for Benjamin a way of opening up what he labelled ‘the optical unconscious’ by arresting the flow of perception: Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man . . . The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.180

Art historian Rosalind Krauss has noted that Benjamin’s essays, ‘A Short History of Photography’ (1931, in which the term ‘optical unconscious’ first occurs) and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), figure the camera as an instrument that ‘enlarges vision’.181 Rukeyser’s injunction, in the poem ‘The Book of the Dead’ (1938), to ‘widen the lens and see’ appeals to the same technological metaphor. Whereas Benjamin employed the camera’s visual field as analogue of the unconscious, Rukeyser used it as analogue of human consciousness: an instrument to promote both personal and social awareness. Believing in the power of visuality, Rukeyser argued that ‘defense is sight’ and extolled the FSA file for providing ‘an important and widened picture’ of American people and events.182

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Buck-Morss asserts that, by highlighting the child’s innate, primitive mimetic faculty, Benjamin hoped ‘to instruct the collective to employ this capacity effectively, not only as a defence against the trauma of industrialisation, but as a means of reconstructing the capacity for experience that had been shattered by the process’.183 Benjamin’s proposal parallels Rukeyser’s. For both, the most convincing evidence of a child’s primitivism resides in language.184 The child’s method of verbal communication is both imitative and structured around the body, in that it constitutes a pleasurable expression of the self’s connection with the world.185 Asserting the origins of language to be ‘onomatopoeic’, Benjamin encourages a return to ‘the kind of thoughts that appear in their most primitive form’, hoping that ‘this can be developed and adapted to improved understanding’.186 Rukeyser similarly believed that the primitivism of childhood ‘cannot be satisfied or judged by adult standards’, but may provide, through the genesis of language, ‘possibility and not limitation’.187 The potential of poetry to create human relations thus relies on a better understanding of childhood on its own terms. ‘Poetry is foreign to us’ in the same manner that the ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ is foreign to us in the civilised world; the route to both is through the child, who does not try to suppress or reduce alterity, but ‘is interested in things as themselves’.188 ‘Adventures of Children’ touches upon, yet ultimately fails to explore these themes. The most effective spread is comprised of four photographs picturing children engaged in different forms of mimetic activity. On the recto, a photograph of two African–American children playing dice sits atop a group scene by Mydans: on one side of some iron railings, four young, white boys play cards. Three children stand behind them and watch, whilst behind the railings, three African–American children of descending height lean as close as the barrier will permit, watching both groups of white children. On the verso, we are presented with two types of procession; the first, again by Mydans, depicts two boys amidst the regalia of a small-town carnival, while the second, by Shahn, pictures a young boy striding along a railroad after an adult, possibly his father. Rukeyser’s strip of narrative cuts through the arrangement: ‘Learns what all children learn, somehow, at play; or, barred out, watching those at play’ (Figure 8). Similar to Benjamin, Rukeyser highlights the mimetic quality of ‘children’s play’ in relation to their capacity to learn and also to teach. The arrangement of the photographs, each taken from a different angle, presents a montage of viewpoints indicating both active involvement in and voyeuristic inspection of the lives of others. Remembering Rothstein’s intention to correlate the camera lens with the eye of the

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photograph viewer, we may interpret Rukeyser’s collage as an extension of the metaphor to include a lesson in being-in-the-world via looking and mimesis. The affirmation that ‘all children’ learn by interactive playing, or by ‘watching those at play’ reasserts the dictum embedded in ‘Adventures of Children’ that ‘being with teaches the most’.189 It is only through relation to others that children become ‘ready’ for ‘further contact’ in the world. The most successful pairing of image and text in ‘Adventures of Children’ is on the last page, where the themes of mimesis, primitivism and contact with the real converge. A child sits on the ground in the shadow of an iron gate, the design of which is discernible as a sun, emanating rays. The real sun shines strongly, and the child is in the centre of the iron sun’s shadow, the long shadows of its rays radiating from her. She appears absorbed in her chalk and slate drawing: a smiling sun, casting long rays of sunshine, and rising above a gently sloping hill (Figure 9). The child’s imitative behaviour indicates a human faculty that both Benjamin and Rukeyser locate in a nostalgic past of primitive being, and by utilising modern mechanical methods of reproduction, Rukeyser is able to offer the child as mimetic lesson. The child approaches the world with what Rukeyser elsewhere terms a ‘sense of simplicity’.190 Her use of the word ‘adventure’ is a purposeful appropriation of childish language, describing what as adults we term ‘experience’. The relations between childhood, poetry and experience and the lessons to be found therein informed Rukeyser’s poetics throughout her life; the initial poem in her first published collection was entitled ‘Out of Childhood’, and began ‘Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.’191 The caption to this photograph, which describes the child as ‘ready to make something out of adventure’ anticipates the ‘ready’ face of the ‘primitive’ in the subsequent issue of Coronet.192 As the child draws lines of connection on her slate, so the lines of poetry create communication and community, for it was Rukeyser’s central belief that ‘art and nature are imitations, not of each other, but of the same third thing – both images of the real, the spectral and vivid reality that employs all means’.193 The word ‘adventure’ reawakens us to a primitive relationship with reality, a savage witness of the world that modern experience has destroyed. It also represents new beginnings. In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser explains that ‘the experience of a woman giving birth to a child is primitive’. Adamant that the term not be used as ‘the aesthetes’ have used it, Rukeyser argues that the word ‘primitive’ indicates a ‘complicated’ state of existence due to it being ‘full of dark meaning’ and ‘insisting on discovery’. As such, the primitive leads to poetry, opening a way to ‘creation’, which may only exist in an

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‘exchange’ between ‘human energy’ and the world. It is at moments of ‘the impact of crucial experience’ that poetry is made, and its conception leads to a dual understanding of the present and our own primordial past: ‘then we become more of our age and more primitive’.194

Image and text It remains for me to examine Rukeyser’s formalistic approach to the photo-text. Rukeyser’s short time at the OWI strengthened a poetics of collaboration and visuality that had first found expression in the photonarratives. In her essay ‘Words and Images’, Rukeyser describes ‘one of the cleverest means of communication’: It is the single image, as used in a photograph or a painting – or the frame of a film – to which words have been added to enlarge the context. The method is not the same as that by which most paintings are named. It is closer in its performance to what dialogue does to a movie, to what the caption does to a good poster. The point is not in the naming of a picture, but in a reinforcement which is mutual, so that the words and picture attack the same theme from slightly different approaches.195

Rukeyser’s belief that ‘poetry can extend the document,’ voiced first in an endnote to U.S. 1, became invested in the printed word’s capacity to ‘enlarge the context’ of a visual image.196 The reciprocal work done by words and images is a ‘performance’, implying a certain amount of drama and spectacle, and the words must also possess that quality which MacLeish had strived to achieve: enough synchrony with the image to put one in mind of the ‘dialogue . . . to a movie’. ‘Dialogue’ is an important element in Rukeyser’s poetics, for it includes communication and the act of coming together. The hint of aggression in her phraseology (‘attack’) may have been informed by the ostensible ‘theme’ of her article, written at the time of America’s involvement in World War II for the promotion of a new type of propagandist poster art. However, Rukeyser’s message is one of life affirmation and, arguably, patriotic nationalism; her intention for the poster campaign was supported by a belief that ‘as a whole country, we need the images and words which will strengthen our lives, for war and for peace’.197 When Rukeyser acknowledges that this need had in part been addressed by ‘certain portfolios of photographs, and certain picture books’, she appears to refer to her own photo-narratives, whose ‘sharp text’, she argues, ‘adds life to the pictures as the pictures add life to the words themselves, and a new expressive form is before us’.198

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A few years later, Rukeyser cited James Agee and Wright Morris as authors who had indicated a photo-textual ‘fertility of combination’, referring to Agee and Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as ‘a milestone in our literature of meeting-places’. Criticising the ‘worn, descriptive, faded writing’ of ‘powerful picture magazines’ such as Life, Rukeyser lamented the monotony of their descriptive text as ‘a generation behind’ the narrative quality of the photograph. Presented alongside such copy, a picture is inevitably reduced to saleable commodity: ‘the captions for the photographs repeat the images and are printed in blocks beneath, for all the world like labels on cans of soup’.199 Suggesting that the ‘pocket magazine’ provided the best format for the complementary relationship of imaginative writing and images, Rukeyser again appeared to allude to her own work for Coronet.200 However, whilst she recognised the potential collaborative power of words and images, Rukeyser was aware of the importance of their difference. Writing in 1949, Rukeyser reiterates that, in the combination of images and words, ‘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 to extend its meaning.’201 Her theory of the creative energy generated from such a combination recalls both Buber’s ‘sphere of the between’ and Levinas’s notion of the irreducible distinctness of the self and other: ‘The relation with the Other does not nullify separation. It does not arise within a totality nor does it establish a totality, integrating me and the other.’202 Where two ‘separables’ meet, a third is formed, which does not obscure the meanings of the original two, but reinforces and extends them. This triadic relation must, however, exist in delicate ‘balance’.203 This balance, sought first by Rukeyser in reviewing The Land of the Free, is contrived in various ways in the photo-narratives. Each piece features one double-page spread on which are positioned four photographs and a thin ribbon of text, which runs horizontally across the pages’ centre (Figure 10). By contriving the text to appear as a strip of film negative, with the monochromes of the words and their background reversed, Rukeyser alludes to the technical aspects of still photography whilst simultaneously creating a sense of motion in the text’s progression across the spread. The words of the text in ‘Worlds Alongside’ reinforce the parallelism with which the entire photo-narrative is concerned: ‘We freeze into placeless art the shadows and bright waves . . . and out of poverty-thin religion we raise up Mont St. Michel.’204 The ‘bright waves’ of water, associated by Rukeyser with the fluidity of life, are carved into stone in the first photograph, yet are arrested by the camera in the photograph

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beneath. Rukeyser seems to struggle with her meanings here: her choice of the word ‘freeze’ would appear to indicate a certain lament at art’s tendency to remove and isolate moments from time, yet by choosing to depict the rush and motion of life in a photograph of a speeding yacht, Rukeyser undermines her own message. No matter how dynamic the photograph’s angle and composition allow it to be, it remains a frozen representation of life. Additionally, the homophony of the word ‘freeze’ with ‘frieze’ not only refers to the nature of the artwork figured in the first picture, but also further indicates the nature of Rukeyser’s narrative as it provides a band of narrative decoration across the pages. It is in this capacity that the words, in their short statement of fact, become ‘something like a poem . . . something like news in lights around the Times building’, their white colour against a black setting evoking the luminescent lettering of moving headlines. The Times building is here replaced by two churches, and Rukeyser seems to suggest that the splendour of Mont St Michel is constructed upon unstable moral foundations, a ‘poverty-thin religion’. The small clapboard church that displays a welcome sign above its open door is structurally unsound, yet provides primitive, spiritual shelter. At the end of the photo-narrative, Rukeyser imagines a ‘little congregation going into the Zion church’, categorising the worshippers among a collective ‘world’ that ‘waits’ whilst people in ‘the other world’ ‘use their luck’ (rather than faith?) to ‘speed across’ it.205 Rukeyser’s style in this last passage approaches journalese, prompting Hunter to dismiss critically those parts of the text in which Rukeyser writes ‘as if she were still writing for New Masses’.206 However, in any critical examination of Rukeyser’s photo-narratives, one needs to remember that, as examples of documentary discourse, they constitute an experimental contribution to an ongoing ethical and aesthetical project. As I discussed in my introduction, documentary, loosely and suggestively defined by Grierson as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’, was an evolving and shifting term in the thirties and forties, and Rukeyser’s photo-narratives represent her initial efforts towards a new means of communicating reality.

Rukeyser’s use of montage techniques Unlike the photo-essays printed in Life or Fortune, which presented a sequential array of photographs depicting a specific social problem, Rukeyser’s photo-narratives juxtapose photographs without logical sequence, from a variety of locations, times and sources. The resulting fragmentary effect would seem to be in opposition to Rukeyser’s

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insistence on the photo-text’s need for the rhythm and continuity of film; however, the narratives’ conflation of multiple viewpoints alludes to documentary film’s origins in the montage experiments of Dziga Vertov during the 1920s. Vertov’s ‘kino-eye’ method sought to capture moments of life – ‘bits of energy’ – and edit them into a ‘tectonic whole’.207 In montage, ‘pieces’ of film are ‘placed in a rhythmical order such that all the links of meaning coincide with visual linkage’.208 Having worked in film editing and production during the 1930s, Rukeyser was aware that ‘selection and ordering are a work of preparation and equilibrium’. Likening the frame of a film to the image of a poem, Rukeyser notes, in The Life of Poetry, that ‘the single image, which arrives with its own speed, takes its place in a sequence which reinforces that image’.209 Her preferred term for this sequence was ‘cluster’ or ‘constellation’: a ‘gathering-together of elements so that they move together according to a newly visible system’.210 ‘Worlds Alongside’ especially represents this ‘gathering-together’; a collection of ‘elements’ and ideas whose ideological and philosophical relations are linked by the dynamics of looking, and reinforced by their spatial relations. Rukeyser’s sustained analogy of the photo-narrative with film reconfirms its participation in an ethical discourse that once again recalls Levinas: ‘the cutting of films is a parable in the motion of any art that lives in time, as well as a parable in the ethics of communication. (I say “ethics” because of the values and obligations involved . . . ).’211 The diversity of the photographs allows Rukeyser to present a wider picture of reality, to ‘enlarge the context’ and ‘extend the meaning’ of each image and of the words she sets alongside it. The photographs and the text therefore present narratives, rather than descriptions, of their own and each other’s meanings, as well as a wider narrative of modern American life. John Berger has written on the singular perspective of ‘the reportage photo-story’, noting the prohibitive nature of standard practice on journalists: ‘to speak of their experience with images it would be necessary to introduce pictures of other events and other places, because subjective experience always connects. Yet to introduce such pictures would be to break the journalistic convention.’212 It was Rukeyser’s aim to create a ‘literature of meeting-places’ by breaking such ‘convention’, and her disappointment at the lack of risk being taken in combinative works of text and image relates to her lament at a general and pervasive ‘fear of poetry’: ‘Editors have grown timid . . . a brave advance is almost inevitably followed by quick back-tracking, generally by dilution and debasement of the original intention.’213 The cluster of diverse images

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in ‘Worlds Alongside’ is indicative of the variety of life and the occasions for contact it creates. Joined by the common ‘themes’ of visuality and connection, the photographs refer and respond to each other, both across the double-page spread and beyond it: the face of the postmaster reminds us of the faces of the African, the dancer and the blind gypsy; ‘the Mexican boy in his look’ on the last page refers us to the ‘inward look’ of the whirlpool, the ‘still look’ of the woman, and our own act of looking at them all. This cross-referencing is in part due to the ‘separate’ nature of the images. Berger explains that the photo-story narrates ‘through montage’: In a sequence of still photographs . . . the energy of attraction, either side of the cut, does remain equal, two-way and mutual . . . In fact, the energy of the montage of attractions in a sequence of still photographs destroys the very notion of sequences . . . The sequence has become a field of co-existence like the field of memory.214

Rukeyser’s intention is to bring a ‘field of co-existence’ into her readers’ field of vision. Encountered in this way, the photographs are restored to life; their context is enlarged to what Berger labels ‘a context of experience’ in which ‘their ambiguity at last becomes true’.215 Apart from the déjà-vu quality of the FSA photographs, which were in wide circulation, the photographs in the photo-narratives possess the quality of historical and psychological memory in their connection to the primitive. It is in this capacity that some of the images Rukeyser employs extend beyond the objective document to engage the viewer / witness in a reflection on the nature of the image itself.

The image as hypericon This employment of the image, as communicative symbol of the real, may be helpfully read through the picture theory of W. J. T. Mitchell. Raphael Allison has referred briefly to Mitchell’s writings on ekphrasis – the poetic description of visual texts – to support his reading of Rukeyser’s poem ‘Ajanta’. Citing Mitchell’s ‘ekphrastic hope’ of ‘the overcoming of otherness’ as a principal element in Rukeyser’s poetry, Allison astutely argues for her engagement with pragmatism and its association with graphic representation, although his lack of mention of the exemplary photo-narratives indicates their unfortunate obscurity.216 Rukeyser’s narratives are not ekphrastic. Her words do not attempt to describe the pictures, and in any case, Mitchell rules out the possibility of ‘mixed arts’ such as ‘illustrated books’ from the canon of ekphrastic

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writing.217 However, Mitchell’s notion of the narrative power of the visual image provides a model against which to read Rukeyser’s choice of photographs. Mitchell gives the term ‘hypericon’ to dialectical ‘figures of figuration’ such as Plato’s cave, Aristotle’s wax tablet, and the camera obscura.218 These, he asserts, ‘provide our models for thinking about all sorts of images – mental, verbal, pictorial and perceptual’.219 The hypericon thus signals the possibility of interplay between the subjective and the objective, philosophy and metaphor, science and art. Following from this, it becomes easier to see how Rukeyser’s own poetics of relationship are iconologically manifested in the photo-narratives. Mitchell asserts that hypericons occur whenever ‘the nature of images becomes a subject for philosophical reflection . . . [on] the nature of man’220 Notwithstanding Rukeyser’s text in both photo-narratives, which proffers an authoritative statement on how ‘we’ as humans, and more specifically as Americans, behave, the images themselves comprise an ethical and philosophical comment on our being-in-the-world. The last image in ‘Adventures of Children’, for example, is a site of thematic and metaphoric convergence, and as such, may be seen as a hypericon. However, perhaps the best example of Rukeyser’s use of hypericons is the double-page spread of the blind face and the whirlpool. These images represent what Mitchell calls ‘multistable’ or ‘metapictures’: images which specifically indicate their own ambiguity and openness to interpretation.221 Notably, Mitchell contends that ‘multistable images are also a staple feature in anthropological studies of so-called “primitive art,” ’ including art that figures ‘profiles or frontal views’ of faces, given their ‘ “fort-da” or “peek-a-boo” effect’.222 Understanding primitiveness to mean a self-awareness that invites introspection, Mitchell posits that ‘metapictures’ are primitive ‘in their function as reflections on the basic nature of pictures’; they ‘show themselves in order to know themselves: they stage the “self-knowledge” of pictures’.223 Rukeyser’s images are both reflections on the nature of pictures and on the nature of looking at pictures. The blind woman’s face is overwhelming in its near life-size immediacy. The smaller photograph of the whirlpool is pictured at the woman’s eye-level, an arrested swirl of motion with a black, pupil-like abyss at its centre. That these images prompt us to address the theme of visuality is clear; what remains unclear is how we should address it. Yet questionability is a defining aspect of the metapicture: ‘if the multistable image always asks, “what am I?” or “how do I look?”, the answer depends on the observer asking the same questions’.224 Rukeyser’s observer / witness is thus engaged in a dialogue of interrogation wherein boundaries between the objective and the subjective are constantly shifting. Significantly, Mitchell notes that

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‘the figure of the whirlpool’ is the multistable image par excellence in that it suggests a way of picturing the ‘ “Vortex Effect” ’ of metapictures. The image greets the beholder, pulls him / her into a dialogue, and so doing, ‘enfolds the observer as object for the “gaze” of the picture’.225 We are therefore able to approach the ultimate image in ‘Worlds Alongside’ from a multiplicity of perspectives, having been prepared by the figures preceding it to question the nature of looking and of appearance. The young Mexican boy in the last photograph looks upwards, and Rukeyser speculates that he is contemplating a silver plane (Figure 11). Whether we take her word for the picture is not the point. The image as multistable, hieroglyphic icon depends on our own reflection upon how the boy is looking (the ambiguity in this phrase is intended). If he sees a plane, is he, in the manner of a primitive, awed and impressed? Does he lament the rapid progressions of modernity? Or is he raising his eyes in prayer? As Mitchell attests, ‘the words “reflection,” “speculation,” and “theory” indicate [that] there is more than a casual relation between visual representation and the practice called theorizing (theoria comes from the Greek words “to see”)’.226 Rukeyser draws attention to this relation, contriving her reader to become witness to ‘worlds’ where, as Berger asserts, ‘appearances become the language of a lived life’.227 Rukeyser explains the image as symbol in her prose biography, Willard Gibbs (1942), which she was researching at the time the photonarratives were published.228 Applauding Baudelaire’s idea of ‘the universal analogy’, Rukeyser describes her hope ‘not only for symbols that may be related to other symbols, but for meanings that are hieroglyphs of the world’.229 Believing that these meanings exist in meetingplaces between ostensible opposites, for example, ‘where scientist and poet share the world’, Rukeyser argues for a ‘combined power’ that ‘does not call for a knowledge of types alone, but for a search among deviations’.230 In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser cites the spiral as the prime example of such a universal symbol in its combination of organic, scientific and imaginative elements. Rukeyser gives the spiral many names: ‘the life-giver and carrier, the whirlpool, the vortex of atoms, and the sacred circuit’.231 With its origins in the imitation of natural forms, the spiral represents both an organic process and the development of creative imagination. As such, the spiral contains ‘the history of human passion for a relationship’ and ‘an expression of the most deep connection’.232 Rukeyser’s recourse to symbolism within the photo-narratives, especially her use of the whirlpool as connective figure of inward and outward ‘look’, documents the emergence of what would endure as the defining ethos of her poetics. ‘The emphasis’, Rukeyser asserted, is ‘where it must be, in spite of all

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specialization: on combining.’233 There exists in the meeting of separate discourses or elements a moment of creative potential that Rukeyser recognises as an analogy for poetry. In these moments, new images are formed, which provide lessons in the ethical relations between human beings. Fear of poetry is thus the fear of new combinations: ‘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.’234

A concluding note: the photo-narratives’ public reception On the back page of the September issue, the editors of Coronet explained their reason for changing the format of the magazine’s regular photographic portfolio feature. Admitting that conventional methods of captioning tend to force the viewer to read something into a picture ‘after it has been made’, the editors hoped to have found a solution in the form of ‘Adventures of Children’, in which ‘the photographs become no longer pictures in a gallery but an integral unit that does a creative job’.235 In the October issue, the editors printed an appeal to their readers to respond to the new narratives, asking whether Rukeyser’s ‘treatment’ implemented the photograph ‘as a significant commentary on human existence’.236 The readers’ replies were not printed, but archival evidence points to a largely negative response to the new format.237 Comments included an objection to Rukeyser’s ‘obtrusive’, ‘limiting’ and ‘awful’ text; an accusation that the magazine was attempting to ‘harness’ imagination; a pejorative comparison of the format to ‘a movie short’, and a complaint that the poet was ‘painting the lily on both sides’. However, some readers responded positively. Thayer Roberts from The Original Floating Theatre wrote that Rukeyser’s photo-narratives were ‘a great improvement over the old display’, but hoped that the format would not ‘confine or regulate the selection of material’. Roberts’s affirmation that ‘we need the narrative . . . badly’ was echoed by John Rogers, for whom the narratives were explicitly ‘documentary’. Contending that ‘America is still years behind the British, European and Russian documentary film,’ Rogers suggested that Coronet’s ‘new manner of using photographs should help improve the situation’. Rogers believed that the problem resided not with documentary photographers, who he commended as doing ‘excellent work’, but with those in charge of ‘direction and script material’. The praise of Roberts and Rogers went unheeded by the editors of Coronet, who in the November issue returned the magazine’s

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photographic feature to its original format. However, the reader feedback allows us to comprehend the difficulty Rukeyser had in introducing her imaginative new method of communication to a public audience. The majority of responses requested a return to the separatist attitudes that Rukeyser was reacting against, and emphatically stated a popular preference for a series of linked photographs with either no text or short, descriptive captions, prefiguring the similar opposition Rukeyser was to encounter during her time at the OWI. The photo-narratives remain an important example of Rukeyser’s early work for the principal reason that they illustrate many aspects of the poet’s work and philosophy in gestation. They also upset generally accepted models of the 1930s documentary photo-text, providing an additional ethical and ontological element that has hitherto been given very little critical consideration. That the photo-narratives are not representative of Rukeyser’s most sophisticated work is partly due to their status as experiments. As Rukeyser noted, ‘the process of combining depends on experimentation. Knowledge and effective action here become one gesture; the gesture of understanding the world and changing it.’238

Notes 1. Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890–1950, p. 81. 2. Puckett, Five Photo-Textual Documentaries from the Great Depression, p. 110. 3. Stott, Documentary Expression, p. 218. 4. Bourke-White and Caldwell, You Have Seen Their Faces, p. 77. 5. Ibid., no page number. 6. Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, p. 136. 7. Ibid., pp. 85, 83. 8. Ibid., p. 147. 9. Puckett, Five Photo-Textual Documentaries, p. 33. 10. Quoted in Agee and Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, p. 403. 11. Stott, Documentary Expression, pp. 220, 222. 12. Cowley, review of You Have Seen Their Faces, New Republic, p. 78. 13. Ibid., p. 78. 14. Stott, Documentary Expression, p. 222. 15. Kazin, On Native Grounds, p. 495. 16. Agee and Evans, Famous Men, p. 10. 17. Ibid., pp. 401, 402. 18. Stott, Documentary Expression, pp. 216–23; Rabinowitz, They Must Be Represented, pp. 68–71. 19. Cowley, review, New Republic, p. 78.

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20. Lange and Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, Preface to the new edition, ‘Focus 1969’, p. 13. 21. Quoted in Nat Hery, ‘Dorothea Lange in Perspective’, p. 10. 22. Lange and Taylor, An American Exodus, p. 15. 23. Dorothea Lange: The Making of a Documentary Photographer, oral interview by Susanne Riess, quoted in Puckett, Five Photo-Textual Documentaries, p. 100. 24. Lorentz, ‘Dorothea Lange, Camera with a Purpose’, p. 97. 25. Preface, 1939 edition, p. 15. 26. Lange and Taylor, An American Exodus, p. 15. 27. Stryker, ‘Documentary Photography’, p. 1364. 28. Wood, ‘Portrait of Stryker’, p. 14. 29. Ibid., p. 14. 30. Ibid., p. 19. 31. Rabinowitz, They Must be Represented, p. 87. 32. Rothstein, ‘Direction in the Picture Story’, p. 1357. 33. Benjamin, ‘A Short History of Photography’, originally published in Literasche Welt in 1931, printed in English in Artforum (February 1977), vol. 15, trans. Phil Patton, reprinted in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays in Photography, p. 210. 34. Ibid., p. 210. 35. Ibid., pp. 210, 211. 36. Sontag, On Photography, p. 60; Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 36. 37. Evans, ‘The Reappearance of Photography’, Hound and Horn (October– December 1931), vol. 5, reprinted in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays, p. 188. 38. Stryker, ‘The FSA Collection of Photographs’, p. 9 (emphasis in original). 39. Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography, pp. 187, 280. 40. Hurley, Portrait of a Decade, p. 132. 41. McCausland, ‘Rural Life in America as the Camera Shows It’. 42. U.S. Camera 1939, p. 44. 43. This is widely commented on. The best discussions are by Stott, Stange and Trachtenberg. 44. Reilly, ‘The Camera World on Parade’, p. 76. 45. Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution, p. 173. 46. Correspondence between Stryker and Lange (April, May and October 1937), quoted in Hunter, Image and Word, p. 81. 47. MacLeish, Land of the Free, p. 89. 48. Ibid., pp. 1, 2. 49. Hunter, Image and Word, p. 83. 50. A. D. Coleman, ‘Introduction’, no page number. 51. Hunter, Image and Word, p. 86. 52. Lorentz, ‘We Don’t Know’, p. 6. 53. Review in The Nation (2 April 1938), p. 390; Deutsch, ‘Meaning and Being’, pp. 153–6; Whipple, ‘Freedom’s Land’, pp. 311–12; Rukeyser, ‘ “We Aren’t Sure . . . We’re Wondering” ’, review of Land of the Free, pp. 26–8. 54. Puckett, Five Photo-Textual Documentaries, pp. 48, 50. 55. Hunter, Image and Word, p. 87.

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68 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary Rukeyser, review of Land of the Free, p. 26. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 26. LP, pp. 138–9. Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution, p. 5. Ibid., p. 196. Gingrich, Nothing But People: The Early Days at Esquire, p. 214. Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution, p. 196; Gingrich, Nothing But People, p. 122. Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution, p. 197. Marks, ‘Portrait of Bourke-White’, pp. 163–74; ‘Portrait of Lewis Hine’, pp. 147–57. Ibid., p. 4. Rukeyser, ‘Words and Images’, p. 141. Ibid., p. 140. LP, p. 137. Rukeyser–Luce correspondence, 11 March 1939, MR Papers, Box II:5, folder 12. Life, 17 July 1939, pp. 56–63. Rukeyser is not listed as the magazine’s contributor, but there can be little doubt that the story is hers. In a letter to Luce, 11 March 1939, she wrote, ‘Here is the A. T. & T. story,’ and asked for another assignment that ‘did not need so much teaching’. MR Papers, LoC, Box II:5, folder 12. Rukeyser–Patrick correspondence, May 1951, MR Papers, Box I:16. Ibid. Rukeyser and Kessler, I Go Out. An endnote reveals the original date of the manuscript to be 1954. Proposal for I Go Out, MR Papers, Box I:21. Rukeyser and Charles, Mazes. LP, p. 199. Rukeyser, ‘Foreword’ to Berenice Abbott, Photographs, p. 11. Ibid., p. 13. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years, p. 197. Rosskam, Washington: Nerve Centre, p. 7. Rukeyser, ‘Worlds Alongside’, p. 84. Ibid., p. 85. Susman, ‘The Thirties’, in Coben and Ratner, The Development of an American Culture, pp. 179–218. Susamn, ‘The Thirties’, p. 184; Lynd, Knowledge for What? The Place of the Social Sciences in American Culture, p. 19, quoted in Susman. Susman, ‘The Thirties’, pp. 184, 188. Hirsch, ‘Cultural Pluralism and Applied Folklore: The New Deal Precedent’, in Feintuch, The Conservation of Culture: Folklorists and the Public Sector, p. 49. Ibid., p. 49. Cowley, Exiles’ Return: A Narrative of Ideas, p. 107.

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105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126.

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Stryker, ‘The FSA Collection of Photographs’, p. 8. Wolfe, ‘Straight Shots and Crooked Plots’, p. 250. Rukeyser, ‘Worlds Alongside’, p. 90. Renov, The Subject of Documentary, Chs 9 and 10. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis, pp. 68–9; Levinas, Outside the Subject (1987), trans. Michael B. Smith, pp. 4–19. Buber, I and Thou, in Herberg, The Writings of Martin Buber, pp. 43–62. Buber, Between Man and Man, in Eisenstadt, On Intersubjectivity and Cultural Creativity, p. 34. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., p. 41. MR Papers, Box I:21; American Judaism, April 1961, p. 13. Rukeyser cites as influences ‘the works of Martin Buber, particularly Faith and Judaism and Teaching and Deed, in The Writings of Martin Buber, edited by Will Herberg, Meridian Books, New York, 1956; and Buber’s Moses, Harper Torchbook edition, 1958; Maurice S. Friedman’s Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue, University of Chicago, 1955’. Kaufman, ‘ “But Not the Study”: Writing as a Jew’, in Herzog and Kaufman, How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, pp. 45–61; LP, p. xi. LP, p. 174. Ibid., p. 120. An excellent investigation into the proximity and reciprocity of the two philosophers is in Atterton et al., Levinas and Buber: Dialogue and Exchange. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, trans. Lingis, p. 119. Ibid., p. 88. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 51. Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., pp. 39, 40. Ibid., p. 213. LP, p. 175. Buber, ‘Between Man and Man’, p. 41; Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 72. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 139. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 213. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, p. 119. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 214, 202. Rukeyser, ‘Worlds Alongside’, p. 93. Hunter, Image and Word, p. 143. Hunter mistakenly attributes the photograph to Russell Lee. Vasseleu discusses Levinas’s ‘regard’ in Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigary, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty, p. 88. Ibid., p. 95. Ibid., p. 98.

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70 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167.

Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary Rukeyser, review of Land of the Free, p. 27. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 66. Ibid., p. 302. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, pp. 142–9. Ibid., pp. 150–1. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 67. Hunter, Image and Word, p. 90. Puckett, Five Photo-Textual Documentaries, p. 60. Rukeyser, review of Land of the Free, p. 27. Ibid., p. 28. Levinas, ‘The Transcendence of Words’, in Hand, The Levinas Reader, pp. 148–9. MacLeish, Land of the Free, p. 7. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., pp. 74, 76. Rukeyser, ‘Worlds Alongside’, pp. 83, 94. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 51. Hunter, Image and Word, p. 143. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 139. Wyschogrod, ‘Language and Alterity in the Thought of Levinas’, in Critchley and Bernasconi, The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, p. 190. Prins, ‘Visual Media and the Primitivist Perplex’, in Ginsberg et al., Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, p. 61. Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle, p. 97; Hardy, Grierson on Documentary, p. 11. Jacknis, ‘Franz Boas and Photography’, p. 2. Now housed at the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society, p. 126. Boas is also attributed as the first scientist to use the term ‘culture’ in both singular and plural terms: Stocking, Jr, Race, Culture, and Evolution, p. 203. Ibid., p. 214. Jacknis, ‘Franz Boas and Photography’, p. 4. Ibid., p. 16. Jacknis, ‘The Picturesque and the Scientific: Franz Boas’s Plan for Anthropological Filmmaking’, p. 59. Ibid., pp. 59–60. A selection of these letters is also among the Rukeyser– Boas papers in Philadelphia. Kertesz, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser, p. 391. Abu-Lughod, ‘Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?’, p. 24. Tobing Rony, The Third Eye, p. 131. Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 273. Bourke-White and Caldwell, You Have Seen Their Faces, p. 168. Rukeyser, ‘Worlds Alongside’, pp. 86–7. Pells, Radical Visions, p. 114. Wyschogrod, ‘Language and Alterity in the Thought of Levinas’, p. 188. LP, p. 177. Ibid., p. 176. Ibid., p. 177. Ibid., p. 177.

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Ibid., p. 177. Rukeyser, ‘Adventures of Children’, pp. 24, 25. LP, p. 15. ‘Adventures of Children’, p. 26. Ibid., pp. 26–7. Ibid., p. 27. Among them, Rabinowitz’s They Must be Represented and Rosen’s ‘Document and Documentary’, in Renov, ed., Theorizing Documentary, pp. 58–89. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, p. 263. Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, in Demetz, Reflections, trans. Jephcott, pp. 333–6. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 263. Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, p. 160. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Arendt, Illuminations, trans. Zorn, p. 217. Ibid., p. 230. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, p. 179. Kaufman and Herzog, The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (hereafter CP), p. 110; Rukeyser, review of Land of the Free, p. 26. Buck-Morss, The Dialectic of Seeing, p. 268. Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, p. 161; LP, pp. 105–8. Ibid., p. 106. Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, p. 161. LP, p. 106. Ibid., p. 107. Rukeyser, ‘Adventures of Children’, p. 35. LP, p. 107. Rukeyser, ‘Poem Out of Childhood’, CP, p. 3. ‘Adventures of Children’, p. 38. LP, p. 26. Ibid., p. 172. Rukeyser, ‘Words and Images’, p. 140. CP, p. 604. ‘Words and Images’, p. 142. Ibid., p. 140. ‘Portfolio’ was not a common name for the photo-text; of the major picture magazines, only Coronet employed the term. LP, p. 139. Ibid., p. 140. Ibid., p. 137. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 251. LP, p. 137. Rukeyser, ‘Worlds Alongside’, pp. 88–9. Ibid., p. 97. Hunter, Image and Word, p. 142. Michelson, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, p. 20. Ibid., p. 90. LP, p. 143.

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72 210. 211. 212. 213. 214. 215. 216. 217. 218. 219. 220. 221. 222. 223. 224. 225. 226. 227. 228. 229. 230. 231. 232. 233. 234. 235. 236. 237. 238.

Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 142. Berger and Mohr, Another Way of Telling, p. 279. LP, p. 140. Berger and Mohr, Another Way of Telling, p. 288. Ibid., p. 289. Allison, ‘Muriel Rukeyser Goes to War’, p. 12. Mitchell, Picture Theory, p. 157. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, p. 158. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 158. Mitchell, Picture Theory, Ch. 2. Ibid., pp. 45–6. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., p. 82. Berger and Mohr, Another Way of Telling, p. 289. Rukeyser was researching Gibbs during the late thirties: Kertesz, Poetic Vision, p. 109. Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs, p. 81. Ibid., p. 82. LP, p. 37. Ibid., p. 38. Willard Gibbs, p. 82. LP, p. 40. Coronet, September, p. 120. Coronet, October, p. 120. All quotations in this paragraph are taken from correspondence in the MR Papers, Box I:5. Willard Gibbs, p. 82.

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Chapter 3

The Lives

This chapter further explores Rukeyser’s use of the human portrait, analysing her methods of documenting what she termed ‘exemplary lives’, and examining the extent to which the 1930s documentary impulse towards the aesthetic, ethical and iconographical representation of human beings informed Rukeyser’s own methods of biographical representation. Rukeyser said, ‘[t]he poem seems to me a meeting place just as a person’s life is a meeting place.’1 By investigating the ways in which Rukeyser depicts human lives as ‘meeting places’, I will demonstrate how the biographies, individually and as a group, represent the coming together of several of the figures who helped to shape her aesthetic. They may therefore be regarded as a combination of portraiture and self-portraiture, simultaneously charting the lives of those people whose stories Rukeyser believes need to be heard, and providing multiple voices with which to communicate her own philosophical and political concerns.

Biography in 1930s America The Depression climate of economic instability and political isolationism generated a renewed interest in biographical forms in America, as writers and artists sought to reaffirm American values to bolster national morale. Those who had chosen to leave America for Europe a decade before returned to their homeland intending to unearth and reassert traditional cultural practices in the hope of defining and uniting America. The critic Edgar Johnson commented in 1938 that biography had taken the form of a ‘vast exploration . . . of the heroes of American history and folklore’, seeing the reason as a renewed appreciation of the fact that ‘what we are is the product of the America that was’.2 Alfred Kazin wrote in 1942 that at the centre of such rediscovered patriotism

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lay ‘a devotion to the heroic example’.3 Noting the national tendency of the time to locate and valorise representative Americans, Kazin posited that this impulse was a result of both the ‘hungry traditionalism of a culture fighting for its life as it moved into war’ and the unfolding story of ‘national self-discovery’ that had begun with ‘the documentation of America in the Depression’.4 Consequently, he argued, cultural forms of the period collectively constructed ‘a people’s and a nation’s biography’.5 A ‘new army of biographers and historians’ worked in an exceptionalist vein towards both resurrecting a lost tradition and highlighting a contemporary heroism.6 According to Kazin, as the spirit of ‘Americanism’ shaped a literature that placed value on documented fact, ‘[n]owhere in the enormous descriptive literature of the thirties did this new spirit reveal itself so vividly as in biography, where it had its triumph.’7 Overtly political, the meaning of an ‘Americanist’ stance was a highly debated issue. In a symposium published in leading Leftist-intellectual magazine Partisan Review and Anvil in 1936 on ‘What is Americanism?’ writers including Newton Arvin, Josephine Herbst, Robert Herrick, Kenneth Burke, Waldo Frank and William Carlos Williams supplied their thoughts on ‘Marxism and the American Tradition’.8 Proposing to shed connotations of individualism and the assumed right to material acquisition from the term ‘Americanism’, contributors shared a common concern that it should incorporate ideas of national pride but also of revolution against capitalism. Arvin argued for a ‘realisation’ of an ‘American past’ via a socialism that posited ‘American farmers, artisans, mechanics, miners, and industrial workers’ as the true representatives of the country. Asserting that ‘younger American writers of proletarian fiction, poetry, drama and criticism’ constituted ‘the present representatives . . . of what is best and strongest in our inherited national culture’, Arvin aligned ‘Americanism’ with radicalism and a Marxist mindset.9 Herrick also argued for a return to ‘the American tradition’ as he saw it embodied in ‘the careers of many “typical” Americans’: for example, ‘Emerson, Whitman . . . Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln’.10 Frank supported Herrick’s view, contending that ‘this Great Tradition must be, not fulfilled, but kept alive’ by ‘Marxist action’.11 The symposium provides an example of modes of thought among writers and intellectuals during the 1930s regarding the representation of America. The need to locate exemplars of American tradition and heroism opened the way for a proliferation of biographical studies, invariably of well-known politicians or literary figures of the past, who were almost invariably male. In fact, in Kazin’s extensive survey of the period’s biographical output, George Whicher’s Emily Dickinson

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(1938), is conspicuous in its choice of female subject.12 Several of the biographies, including Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln: The War Years (1939), reclaimed American heroes by piecing together numerous fragments and documents from their lives. In the process of reconstruction, Kazin argued that Sandburg had built an art form out of a life, rendering Lincoln grander than the sum of his parts: ‘More than a symbol of a distinct American experience, he had become the propulsion of a great symphonic poem; more than a leader, the people’s legend of him now seemed the greatest of all American works of art.’13 Kazin’s observation opens to critical examination notions of the representation of an ideal or mythical America, as well as the cultural and ontological importance of a literary tradition. In 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson had written of the poet’s role as ‘representative’ of nature and society and unifier of the two.14 His assertion that ‘America is a poem in our eyes’ anticipated Walt Whitman’s similar claim in the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass that ‘the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem’.15 However, whereas Emerson figured the poet (whose attitude was inseparable from his own) as ‘a sovereign’ who ‘stands on the centre’ of the beauty of creation, Whitman sought to place himself amongst ‘the common people’ of America, whose ‘manners, speech, dress, friendships’ could be reconciled easily with those of the poet who represented them.16 During the 1930s, Emerson and Whitman became representative subjects themselves, as writers turned to them as heroes of a great American literary tradition. Van Wyck Brooks’s life study, The Life of Emerson (1932), for example, began a biographical project that extended to the story of America, finally including The Flowering of New England (1936) and New England: Indian Summer (1940).

The biographical tradition: Emerson and Carlyle Brooks’s ‘epic’ biography of Emerson, written out of a desire to reclaim ‘a lost heroic tradition’,17 was not unlike Emerson’s own biographical projects. Representative Men (1850) was a series of essays written by Emerson in the 1840s on the lives of Plato, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon and Goethe. In the volume’s introductory essay, entitled ‘The Uses of Great Men’, Emerson notes that the representative is both symbol for and part of what he represents: ‘he is not only representative but participant. He can only be known by like.’18 Manifesting the many in the one, the representative man is much like Emerson’s ideal poet, able to be both portrait and process of life.

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Despite Emerson’s publicised wish for a distinctly American literature and character, his selection of representative men is not restricted to Americans; as F. O. Matthiessen commented in 1941, Representative Men ‘is by itself ample evidence of his freedom from any restrictions of nationalism’.19 However, during the 1930s and 1940s, the rediscovery of Emerson himself as a representative man rested greatly on the fact that he was American. Matthiessen’s own revivalist response to the era’s need for tradition and identity, a seminal treatment of the literature of the 1850s ‘American Renaissance’, placed Emerson’s Representative Men alongside Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) as a defining text of American imagination and expression. Emerson’s pronouncement that ‘there is properly no History, only Biography’ reiterated Thomas Carlyle’s precept that ‘the history of the world is but the biography of its great men,’20 and the latter’s 1841 lecture series, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, appears to have impacted heavily on Emerson.21 The two men had entered into correspondence during the 1830s, and upon reading Emerson’s 1838 ‘Divinity School Address’, Carlyle had urged him to put his teachings into practice: ‘You tell us with piercing emphasis that man’s soul is great, shew [sic] us a great soul of a man, in some work symbolic of such.’22 Emerson did so, although he objected to Carlyle’s advocation of the ‘worship’ of great men on religious as well as social grounds, centring his work on a more democratic faith in the accomplishments of the human race.23 Emerson’s representative men are therefore symbolic and typical of the human spirit, inspirational figures to be ‘used’ as teachers rather than idols, and lauded as metaphorical ‘map-makers’ and ‘roadmakers’ whose achievements might instruct following generations to ‘extend the area of life, and multiply our relations’.24

Walt Whitman and the common American In many ways Emerson’s ideal American poet, Whitman too objected to Carlyle’s promotion of hero worship, seeing extraordinary biographies in the everyday lives of American folk. In an open letter to Emerson included in the second edition of Leaves of Grass (1856), Whitman wrote that ‘always waiting untold in the souls of the armies of common people, is stuff better than anything that can possibly appear in the leadership of the same’.25 Seeking a community with the ‘common people’, Whitman dedicated his life to inscribing the collective song of their stories, interwoven with his own.

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Scholars of the 1930s concur that Whitman became an important ideological figure for the decade. Stott, for example, has noted that ‘no other time so prized the Whitmanian “I” – able to see, incorporate, and give voice to all human experience’.26 Several writers of the thirties admitted to being influenced by Whitman’s poetics of eye-witness, among them Jack Conroy, who considered himself ‘a witness to the times rather than a novelist. Mine was an effort to obey Whitman’s injunction to “vivify contemporary fact” ’.27 Beaumont Newhall also suggested Whitman’s words as a definition of documentary photography: ‘an approach which makes use of the artistic faculties to give “vivification to fact” ’.28 But it was Whitman’s emphasis on first-hand experience with the diverse inhabitants of America that most informed the documentary aesthetic of the thirties; the ‘common people’ that Whitman relied on to represent the country were called upon to do the same in the years during and directly after the Depression. Whitman, more than Emerson, became a hero of the times, and Newton Arvin published his biography, Whitman, in 1938. As Whitman and his more radical, democratic poetics located exemplars of American stoicism and self-reliance in average men and women, likewise, several of the contributors to the 1936 ‘What is Americanism?’ symposium mentioned the importance of the working class as representative of a typically American character. Embodying an ethic of hard work, and victims of the mechanisms of capitalism, manual labourers were the contingent most affected by the economic crisis. By focusing on them, writers could trace a path back to the American mythologies of human connection with the land, of endurance, and of perseverance against adversity. Kazin recognised that the  sharecropper especially represented during the thirties ‘all that had to be recognised and redeemed in America. He provided an occasion for catharsis; he was a special contemporary phenomenon that fixed the general sense of outrage and quickened the sensibility of fellowship.’29 Consequently, several documentary photo-stories focused on representatives of America’s tenant farmers and sharecroppers, among them James Agee and Walker Evans’s book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (begun in 1936, published in 1941). Evans’s photographs and Agee’s collaborative prose stand apart from the majority of phototexts on similar subjects primarily due to the authors’ wish to present the ‘Gudgers’ – the sharecropper family with whom they stayed – as individual people rather than symbols of a mass. Throughout the book, Agee is at pains to express his understanding that ‘George Gudger is a human being, a man, not like any other human being so much as he is

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like himself.’30 The original Fortune assignment to record the life of ‘an average white family of tenant farmers’ proved impossible to the pair, who could not find ‘one family through which the whole of tenantry in that country could be justly represented’.31 Picture magazines also featured stories of the successes of New Deal reform projects, often featuring men and women as representatives of the changing face of America rather than as individuals who were enduring change. Life ran cover photo-stories such as a ‘weekin-the-life’ biography of ‘the common steel worker’, whose pictured daily routine stands for another ‘500,000 like him in steel mills from Bethlehem to Chicago’.32 The magazine also targeted ‘typical’ American towns. Bourke-White’s photographs of ‘Muncie, Indiana, the great US “Middletown” ’ provide ‘a vital document of US life’ that afford readers a look at an array of ‘typical Middletown faces’. Although this photo-essay unusually supplies names, it partakes in the typological documentary discourse of the era by asserting that ‘here, set down for all time, you may look at the average 1937 American as he really is’.33 Collages of photographic portraits such as these became common spreads in picture magazines, and provided in miniature examples of Roy Stryker’s desire to build a compound portrait of America. As Alan Trachtenberg has insisted, ‘the hold’ of this desire ‘on Stryker and many other Americans cannot be exaggerated’.34 Close-shot facial portraits not only lent pathos but also, according to Stryker, stirred a sense of national solidarity. ‘The ability to endure’ could be read in the face of a man who has lost his home and job; Stryker saw ‘something in those faces that transcends misery’.35 Portraits of the American working class thus became propagandist symbols of national self-belief. The June 1937 issue of Life, for example, featured a full-page portrait by Lange of an aged farmer, with the caption, ‘Dust Bowl farmer is new pioneer.’ The copy continues: ‘This man is one of the great army of farmers driven from their land by the dust blight. A Resettlement Administration photographer met him in a battered car on the Oklahoma–California highway, took his picture but not his name.’36 The farmer’s status as symbol is clear not only in his anonymity, but also in the fact that, forced by economic hardship to forge a new path, he is figured by the middle classes as one of an ‘army’ of ‘new pioneers’. Lawrence Levine has written that, during the 1930s, many Americans ‘wanted and needed to see’ both victimisation and dignity in documentary portrait,37 and Lange’s images in particular were transformed into icons that were aimed at reaffirming a collective personality rather than celebrating individuals from whose life-stories others might take inspiration.

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Rukeyser and biography Rukeyser wrote biographically throughout her life. Her first biographical works were published together under the heading ‘Lives’, and comprise the second section of the poetry collection, A Turning Wind (1939). Beginning with an untitled poem that prepares the reader for the themes and concerns to follow, the poems are lyrical biographies of: Willard Gibbs (1839–1903), the Yale physicist and mathematician who established the phase rule in physics; Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917), the visionary painter known principally for his dark seascapes; John Chapman (1862–1933), the author and essayist; Ann Burlak (1911–2002), the working-class labour-leader; and Charles E. Ives (1874–1954), the modernist classical composer. In a prefatory note to A Turning Wind, Rukeyser explained her choices, stating her intention to include these ‘lives’ in a ‘projected work’ entitled U.S. 1, although she had already published a work of that name in 1938: ‘The five people around whom it is written are Americans – New Englanders – whose value to our generation is very great and partly unacknowledged.’38 When this series of ‘Lives’ was reprinted in Waterlily Fire (1962), Rukeyser noted that she was constructing a group of biographical poems that would include ‘ “Gibbs,” “Ryder,” “Chapman,” “Ann Burlak,” “Ives,” “Timothy Dexter,” “Akiba,” “Käthe Kollwitz,” “Bessie Smith,” and “Boas.” ’39 The latter two of these poems were seemingly never written. However, in Body of Waking (1958), Rukeyser included ‘Suite for Lord Timothy Dexter’, and in The Speed of Darkness (1968) another ‘Lives’ section occurs, consisting of ‘Akiba’ and ‘Käthe Kollwitz’. In another note, Rukeyser acknowledges the poems’ place in a ‘sequence’. Explaining that ‘Akiba is the Jewish shepherd–scholar of the first and second century, identified with the Song of Songs and with the insurrection against Hadrian’s Rome,’ Rukeyser notes that her mother had told her she was descended from Akiba – ‘unverifiable, but a great gift to a child’.40 Kollwitz (1867–1945) was another non-American subject: a German artist, printmaker and sculptor whose work was characterised by profound empathy for the poor and destitute, especially as a result of war. Rukeyser also wrote three prose biographies. Her first was Willard Gibbs: American Genius (1942), and situated the physicist in a tradition of strong American will and imagination alongside Henry Adams, Melville and Whitman. In an interview in 1971, Rukeyser explained that she regarded the book as ‘a footnote to the Gibbs poem’, expanding its themes, and responding to her own need to point the way toward reconciliations of oppositions within American life.41 In 1957, Rukeyser

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published One Life, a biography of Wendell Willkie (1892–1944), the 1940 Republican presidential candidate who lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Rukeyser’s decision to write this life stemmed principally from her appreciation of him as an American through whom ‘we can see our lifetime,’ and as an emblem of the process of simultaneously ‘finding himself and finding the world’.42 Her last biography, The Traces of Thomas Hariot (1971), charts the life of the Elizabethan astronomer, mathematician and navigator (c.1560–1621). Similar to Gibbs, Rukeyser claimed that her biography of Hariot was a ‘footnote to the Outer Banks poem’, a poem in The Speed of Darkness, evoking literary and cultural ancestry, and the beginnings of America as colony and country.43 The influences behind Rukeyser’s decision to write biography are diverse. Working within the field of magazine picture publishing, Rukeyser was no doubt aware of the public demand for biographies of the famous and of the anonymous, as well as the trend during the Depression to locate representative faces of America. Her work as a film editor during the thirties and her interest in film forms, especially those of montage and documentary, also appear to have contributed to the content and structure of her biographical writing. It is also likely that Rukeyser was aware of Partisan Review and Anvil’s 1936 ‘Americanism’ symposium. Rukeyser’s Theory of Flight was favourably reviewed by the poet Ruth Lechlitner for the publication in March 1936.44 In 1938, in the renamed Partisan Review, John Wheelwright gave a tepid review of U.S. 1, criticising its ‘revolutionary writing in the snob style’.45 In 1943, following Rukeyser’s essay ‘Words and Images’ in The New Republic, the editors of Partisan Review published a highly personal and insulting article, attacking Rukeyser’s political poetics as ‘fashionable’ examples of ‘bandwagon’ jumping and patriotic ‘neo-Americanism’.46 Articulate ripostes from Rebecca Pitts and F. O. Matthiessen were published in subsequent issues, defending Rukeyser’s work and integrity.47 Rukeyser was irrefutably a patriot, and her poems reveal a deep commitment to finding the images in life that might provide ‘proof of America’.48 However, the ‘Americanism’ of her poetics is not confined to or defined by a particular period of her life, and Partisan Review’s editors revealed their own adherence to ‘fashionable’ journalism by assailing Rukeyser’s political poetics for not matching their own. Rukeyser was also aware of developments in the tradition-seeking, scholarly biographies of the time. Notes she made during the forties reveal a reading list that included The Life of Emerson and The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947) by Van Wyck Brooks, and American Renaissance by Matthiessen, with whom she had become friends in the

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early forties.49 Among the sources for her poem, ‘Ryder’, Rukeyser lists the ‘conversation’ of Marsden Hartley.50 An artist and biographer similarly engaged in documenting American ‘nativeness’, Hartley sought to establish what characterised American-born art in an effort to position himself as consonant with a national tradition.51 In 1937, lauding Ryder as a traditional American master, Hartley wrote that regarding a Ryder seascape was a spiritual experience comparable to reading the Bible or Emerson’s essays.52 Similarly, when asked towards the end of her life whether her ‘Lives’ had personal connections, Rukeyser responded in the affirmative, citing her mother’s ‘gift’ of her ‘unverifiable’ blood relation to Akiba, and recalling the only two books her mother kept in the house: ‘the Bible and Emerson’.53 With the exception of Gibbs, Rukeyser’s biographies have received very little critical attention. Louise Kertesz mentions each of the poems in the ‘Lives’ series and discusses briefly the prose works, but the scope of her book does not allow her a probing analysis. Janet Kaufman has explored the ‘Jewish’ theme to some of Rukeyser’s poems, including ‘Akiba’, Ruth Porritt has written an analysis of ‘Käthe Kollwitz’, and Michele Ware has examined the themes of The Traces of Thomas Hariot.54 However, these appraisals, although valuable, necessarily isolate Rukeyser’s biographies rather than examining them as internal elements of a continual process of growth and experiment. They also do not fully acknowledge the importance of documentary techniques and theories to their formation and underlying ideology.

Rukeyser’s theory of biography Although specific analysis will be made throughout the chapter regarding Rukeyser’s reasons and intentions for her individual life projects, a brief examination of her understanding of biography’s relation to poetry will prepare the theoretical and ideological ground upon which to meet the works in question. Much evidence of Rukeyser’s thinking on the subject may be found in The Life of Poetry, whose title provides a further indication of the importance of biography to her poetics. Throughout The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser explains biography as one’s involvement in the forms and processes of the life of another human being. Rukeyser’s message is that ‘poetry depends on the moving relations within itself. It is an art that lives in time, expressing and evoking the moving relation between the individual consciousness and the world’. To understand the power of poetry, Rukeyser argues, people must first understand its position in the world as an organic, living

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thing. Once met on these terms, poetry may allow ‘people to use it as an “exercise,” an enjoyment of the possibility of dealing with the meanings in the world and in their lives’.55 According to Rukeyser, to appreciate one’s own life fully, especially in relation to the life of another, one must first appreciate the life of poetry. Human life and poetry are at times interchangeable terms for Rukeyser, as she understands that ‘there are gestures in our lives that stand in direct relationship to the image in poetry’56: the whole life becomes an image reaching backward and forward in history, illuminating all time. The life of Jesus; the life of Buddha; the life of Lincoln, or Gandhi, or Saint Francis – these give us the intensity that should be felt in a lifetime of concentration, a lifetime which seems to risk the immortal meanings every day . . . These lives, in their search and purpose, offer their form, offer their truths. They reach us as hope.57

Although Rukeyser would seem to be offering a catalogue of already recognised ‘great men’, her list of representative people continues to include the historically anonymous: ‘the Danish people’ in Nazioccupied Denmark; a nameless German poet who read anti-war poems to the Hitler Youth; ‘miners, anonymous women, those suffering and poor, and the privileged of all functions in life, those gifted with insight so that they understand the beauty of unconditional love’. The ‘gestures’ of these lives are described by Rukeyser as the ‘ “singular points” in history’, which in turn constitute the poetic life. If history is written in words, it is lived in images: ‘The gestures of the individuals are not history; but they are the images of history.’58 For Rukeyser, one life cannot be viewed as separate from others. The meeting of lives leads to the creation of poetry and vice versa, for within the ‘exchange’ of human energy exists the power of poetry, itself a necessary ingredient to human life: I know that our sufferings and our concentrated joy, our states of plunging far and dark and turning to come back to the world – so that the moment of intense turning seems still and universal – all are here, in a music like the music of our time, like the hero and like the anonymous forgotten; and there is an exchange here in which our lives are met, and created.

As our mingled ‘states’ turn to ‘come back to the world’ from their various points in history, they live in a moment that becomes at once specific and timeless; their ‘turning’, although defined by movement, is none the less ‘still and universal’ in its status as spiral emblem. ‘All’ come together to stand for one life in a ‘music’ that is historically relevant, yet, in Levinas’s terms, not the self-same (‘like the music of our time’). For

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Rukeyser, both the lives of ‘the hero and the anonymous forgotten’ will be resurrected and documented, not in order to be worshipped, but to be learned from in a process of exchange. This type of documentary poetics creates life and poetry via existential encounter, and each of Rukeyser’s biographical projects combines moments, figures and forms from multiple lives across history. The lives of others, like poetry, are ‘useful’ if ‘met’ in an open communication of teaching and learning.

Rukeyser and Gibbs Rukeyser’s decision to write Gibbs’s biography stemmed from her appreciation of him as an ‘axiom-breaking’ American pioneer.59 Perceiving him as a challenger to established systems, Rukeyser wished to demonstrate Gibbs’s belonging to this ‘deepest of American traditions’.60 Critical response to the book reflected this wish, placing Rukeyser within a growing tradition of American revivalists. Kazin, reviewing for The New Republic, saw the biography as a ‘brilliant’ effort at both recovering ‘an American ancestor’ and at understanding ‘the human imagination’, whilst Eunice Clark of Common Sense asserted that ‘for mastery, human transference, and style’, Rukeyser had ‘left Van Wyck Brooks miles behind’.61 Rukeyser’s book is an impassioned act of resurrection, countering the lack of attention afforded Gibbs hitherto – ‘without a biography, he has died’ – with a faith in his legacy: ‘Gibbs’s life refuses to end with his death.’62 The biography repeatedly emphasises Gibbs’s importance to ‘the history of American culture’ by highlighting his concerns, similar to Rukeyser’s own, for the unity of imagination, and the ‘meeting-place’ of apparently separate ‘fields’.63 In an article for Physics Today (1949), Rukeyser reiterates her message that Gibbs’s story is ‘an emblem of the naked imagination’, and as such, might help us ‘see the relationship past barriers’.64 These barriers exist in all aspects of life, and Rukeyser stresses the responsibility of those who come to Gibbs’s life to learn from it that such obstructions are needless: The fault is in the ignoring of possible meeting places, between people and what the academic and business worlds call ‘fields,’ – between the kinds of imagination. It seems to me that a function of poetry is the meeting place. But I would not even seem to put poetry on a pedestal: this is also a function of science, or of the best of any creative work.65

An essential characteristic of Rukeyser’s biographical projects is her resistance to putting any of her subjects ‘on a pedestal’. Her belief

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that each life story meets and connects with others in an equal, living system surfaces repeatedly throughout her œuvre, and in the poem, ‘The Speed of Darkness’ (1968), Rukeyser asserts the governing rule of her poetics that ‘the universe is made of stories, / not of atoms’.66 Her choice of Gibbs as her initial ‘story’ was due largely to his work within the knowledge of ‘systems’. Explaining that ‘[p]oets and scientists give themselves closely to the creation and description of systems,’ Rukeyser finds analogies between Gibbs’s commitment to establishing equilibrium among the components of systems in physics and her own efforts to forge connections between the various elements of a poem. According to Rukeyser, Gibbs’s work is especially relevant to her own era because ‘our time depends, not on single points of knowledge, but on clusters and combinations’. Such relational systems are also in poetry, ‘with its clusters of emotion, clusters of fact’, elements that Rukeyser elsewhere labelled the ‘unverified fact’ and the ‘document’, and which constitute ‘the relationship between people’.67 In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser refers to this ‘relationship’ as ‘truth’. Citing Gibbs’s theory that ‘truth is . . . an arrangement of components,’ Rukeyser describes the ‘relations between the words and images’ of a poem in similar terms.68 According to Gibbs, truth is an accord that makes the whole ‘simpler than its parts’.69 Rukeyser adopts this maxim to explain her own theory of the interconnectedness generated by poetry: ‘when the whole poem has taken its effect . . . then the originality is absorbed into a sense of order’. The words and images of the poem were known to the poet and the reader before its creation, ‘but they were not arranged before the poet seized them and discovered their pattern. This arrangement turns them into a new poem, a new science.’ As with all things, argues Rukeyser, ‘the arrangement is the life’.70 When describing the interconnectedness of poetic imagery, Rukeyser employs the same diction as she applies to her evocation of Gibbs. Within the system of a poem, images ‘move like a cluster travelling from one set of positions to another’; they are a ‘gathering-together of elements’, a ‘constellation’ constantly in motion, and providing ‘a clue as to a possible kind of imagination with which to meet the world’. Working together, they constitute a ‘unity which depends on many elements, all inter-dependent’.71 In the introductory poem to the ‘Lives’ series, Rukeyser evokes these themes as they are tied to Gibbs, the process of a life and the process of poetry. Rukeyser’s papers suggest that this poem was originally part of ‘Gibbs’.72 The poem in its early stages was a direct address to an unspecified ‘you’, presumably the reader, but possibly Gibbs, whose life is intertwined with various ‘lives’ of history. A more immediate encounter is imagined in the unpublished draft of the poem:

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They walk in the streets; in the twenty centuries . . . until darkness falls when their faces in the exposure of superhuman light flows into the features of your well-known faces . . . they are dead and they live; or are alive, they breathe your name also, they walk in your street.73

In the final version, Rukeyser rejected this image of past lives ‘walking’ along streets populated by the living and the dead in favour of a more layered image of ancestral extraction and abstraction: The faces are normal; the superhuman light saves, kills, and saves; is mixed, and they fall fighting; and wake to climb the streets in the vigour of their blood grown changed and abstract, whose faces begotten of faces crack in their bitterness light through all faces with the familiar strain of features that have earned a general grace.74

The words ‘normal’ and ‘general’ replace ‘well-known’, for the exemplary lives that Rukeyser evokes are not characterised by fame but rather their connection to the lives of everyone; their stories ‘stand for imagination at its essential points’.75 In this way, the ‘lives’ represent humanity, or rather the potential for imaginative communication within human systems. Whereas an anonymous ‘they’ ‘breathe’ the ‘name’ of the reader in the early draft of the poem, the final version pictures a collection of ‘faces’ (the word is repeated six times in the poem) combining in a resurrected, ‘risen image’, whose ‘force’ escapes the strictures of its own lifetime or archive to ‘shine’ upon a present generation, and give it a name. The act of naming is equivalent to the act of awakening ‘forms among the profuse creative / promises of the mind’, for it is an act of creation.76 The published poem begins, ‘The risen image shines, its force escapes, we are all named.’77 Rukeyser’s inclusive ‘we’ involves her within the poem’s process as an intrinsic element to the ‘portraits’ she will subsequently construct.78

‘Gibbs’, Francis Galton and the composite portrait ‘Gibbs’ follows immediately from the introductory poem. In it, Rukeyser demonstrates, via allusion to Gibbs’s scientific theories, her own belief that the connection between images in poetry is correlative to the relation between the ‘components’ of a life. I would like at this point to offer a reading of ‘Gibbs’, and of Rukeyser’s biographical series as a whole, through the application of the theories and experiments of the English

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Victorian polymath Francis Galton. Although not American, nor a contemporary of Rukeyser, Galton’s work on composite portraiture, together with his ideas on the subject of mental imagery and memory, provide interesting documentary and psychological models with which to appreciate Rukeyser’s own biographical projects better. I am not arguing for the direct influence of Galton upon Rukeyser’s work here, although I would suggest that, by citing Galton as a source to support her theories of image connection in The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser aligns herself with at least one aspect of his thinking, and opens for consideration the possibility of further correlation between Galton’s work and her own.79 In 1879, Galton, anthropologist and cousin of Charles Darwin, presented a paper to the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland entitled ‘Composite Portraits, Made by Combining Those of Many Different Persons Into a Single, Resultant Figure’. The aim of these experiments was to provide a method of portraying ‘typical characteristics’ of different segments of society for the purposes of indexicality.80 In 1877, Galton had been requested by the Inspector of Prisons to enquire into the possible connections between types of crime and facial characteristics. Given a file of criminals’ mug-shots and information pertaining to their crimes, Galton categorised them before constructing a composite portrait of each category on a single photographic plate.81 Extending the method to other ‘types’, Galton experimented with pictures of consumptives, ‘historical personages’ and Jews.82 Galton’s method was relatively straightforward. By contriving the superimposition of several identically posed facial photographic portraits, he was able to produce one composite image through multiple exposure to the same plate. The result was, in his own words, ‘a generalised picture; one that represents no man in particular, but portrays an imaginary figure possessing average features of any given group of men’.83 Eight photographs usually composed the portrait, and any individual facial irregularities were either erased or significantly blurred by dint of the fractional duration of their exposure: ‘Those of its outlines are sharpest and darkest that are common to the largest number of the components; the purely individual peculiarities leave little or no visible trace.’84 Associating his technique with an imaginative, artistic temperament, Galton maintained that ‘a composite portrait represents the picture that would rise before the mind’s eye of a man who had the gift of pictorial imagination in an exalted degree’.85 By exhibiting an equilibrium of internal components to produce a unified whole, the composites presented ‘ideal faces’ which had ‘a surprising air of reality’.86 They could

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thus be viewed as model examples of particular races, classes and families. Galton envisioned their use in biographical study to produce the best likenesses of historical figures, via the blending of existent historical portraits. However, his principal hope for the composite portrait was to inquire into ‘the hereditary transmission of features’.87 Galton’s emphasis on heredity and ancestry informed many of his experiments, including those of fingerprint indexing, and led to his involvement in eugenics. By Galton’s own admission, his photographic composites of Jews offered the best proof of the scientific existence of racial types. Alan Sekula has observed that, at a time when ‘there was no clear anthropological consensus on the racial or ethnic character of modern Jews,’ Galton’s ‘discovery’ constituted a ‘landmark’ in anthropological photography, although his findings were later to play a part in Nazi policy for ‘improved’ racial stock.88 Daniel Novak, whilst noting the implicit anti-Semitism in Galton’s project, has highlighted the central role of eugenics in the Jewish religion.89 Novak quotes an article published in The Jewish Chronicle in 1910, which references the pertinence of the work of Galton (then Sir Francis Galton) to the study of Judaism. Understanding eugenics to be ‘the study of the conditions under human control which improve or impair the inborn characteristics of a race’, the author of the piece argues that ‘Moses, the Lawgiver, was [therefore] the first and greatest of all eugenists’ due to the accepted wisdom that ‘the whole law of Moses is, in fact, a remarkable body of eugenic effort – a wonderful comprehensive code for the building up of a strong and “fit” people’.90 Joseph Jacobs, a Jewish social scientist and critic whose idea it was for Galton to compound photographs of Jewish faces to verify his idea of ‘the Jewish expression’, declared that because these composites provided the most satisfactory evidence of pure racial type, they constituted scientific evidence that modern Jews were directly descended from those of the Bible: ‘the photographic lens seems in these composites to traverse the aeons of time and bring up into visible presentment the heroes of the past’.91 Galton’s composite portraits therefore occupy an ambiguous, dual role in the history of documentary photography, anthropology and portraiture. As Miles Orvell has suggested, Galton’s portraits parodied the typology of photographic practices by blurring and imprisoning the individual in a social identity as opposed to raising him or her ‘to the power of the general’.92 Sekula has noted that Galton ‘produced an unwitting caricature of inductive reason’ by attempting ‘to elevate the indexical photographic composite to the level of the symbolic, thus expressing a general law through the accretion of contingent instances’.93 Critical discussions of Galton’s composites, of which there have been surprisingly

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few, tend to offer Foucauldian readings concerning institutional power, knowledge and examination.94 However, by creating images of the human ‘ideal’, and by resurrecting past ‘heroes’ via a combination of the imagination and a desire to trace the lineage of a person or race, Galton deserves to be regarded as a contributor to modern documentary discourses of representation, biography and cataloguing. Galton’s method of collapsing recorded evidence into a single image (what Sekula refers to as ‘collapsing the archive’)95 was used by the American social documentary photographer, Lewis Hine, in 1913 for the crude composition of a number of composite portraits of girl mill-workers in order to demonstrate the accumulated physical effects of child labour.96 Sekula sees correspondence between Galton’s project and the American ‘Photo Secession’ neo-symbolists’ movement to elevate photographic practices, arguing that both Galton and Alfred Stieglitz wanted ‘something that would match or surpass the abstract capabilities of the imaginative or generalising intellect’.97 Sekula finally cites Walker Evans as the documentary photographer whose book American Photographs (1938) represented a natural progression from Galton’s composite racial index to the meeting-place of ‘the “poetic” structure of the sequence’ and ‘the model of the archive’.98

Galton and the mental image Galton’s analogy between the composite image and the mental image of a person endowed with ‘the gift of pictorial imagination in an exalted degree’ reveals the scientist’s dependence on a poetic, creative disposition for the reception of his work. By Galton’s account, a composite portrait was a depiction, not of a real individual, but of ‘an imaginary figure’.99 As such, Galton’s composites portrayed people who could not be encountered in the real world, but who existed as ideals within the human imagination. The more abstract and impressionistic the composites were, the more they were considered scientific fact: authentic and exemplary representations of ideal ‘types’. Galton’s work in portraiture led him to theorise about memory and the capacity for mental visualisation. Postulating that memories were comparable to ‘abstract ideas’, Galton argued that the better term for ‘abstract’ would be ‘cumulative’, due to the mind’s propensity to gather and store a number of specific memories under a generic idea or image.100 For Galton, ‘the ideal faces obtained by the method of composite portraiture appear to have a great deal in common with these socalled abstract ideas’, not least because, as the human mind accumulates

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images from external stimuli, the memory extracts their common elements in the way that the photographic plate records the most common features in composite portraits.101 In ‘Mental Imagery’ (1880), Galton reported his ‘inquiry into the mode of visual presentation in different persons’.102 Accosting random people with the words, ‘I want to tell you about a boat,’ Galton recorded their descriptions of the image the word produced in their mind. He found that responses offering a ‘specific’ interpretation to the word were given by those who were naturally ‘opposed to philosophic thought’, whereas those who dealt with ‘abstract ideas’ were given to ‘suppressing mental imagery’.103 Believing, however, that ‘there is no reason why this should be so,’ Galton argued that ‘if the faculty is free in its action, and tied to reproduce hard and persistent forms, it may then produce generalised pictures out of its past experiences quite automatically’.104

Rukeyser, Galton and the ‘Lives’ Rukeyser’s papers contain several notes on ‘Galton and impression’, and she refers to his boat imagery ‘challenge’ in The Life of Poetry to support her argument that relations between words and images are often either severed or restricted to specific, exclusive lines of connection.105 Rukeyser approvingly paraphrases Galton: ‘if the faculty is free in its actions, Galton said, it can select the images it needs, shift them in any way it wishes, and use and take pleasure in its actions’. Citing Galton’s findings as a crucial example of people ‘starving their visual faculties’, Rukeyser posits that the results of the inquiry were symptomatic of the ‘split and duality that has afflicted our approach to every human act’.106 That Rukeyser interprets Galton’s notion of producing ‘generalised pictures’ out of ‘past experiences’ as a method of free image selection and application indicates the close ties of her own concerns with poetic imagery to memory, experience and the composite image. Rukeyser’s notebooks suggest that she was reading Galton in the midforties. At that time, Galton’s work on ‘mental imagery’ was published in the same book as his paper on composite portraits (Inquiries into the Human Faculty and its Development), and it is probable, therefore, that Rukeyser had encountered this too. In the introductory poem to ‘Lives’, Rukeyser imagines the resurrection of several nameless ‘faces’ representing the ‘ancestors’ of a present generation.107 Although ‘the faces are normal,’ they are seen in a ‘superhuman light’, which reveals them as the symbols of ‘achieved spirits’, ‘whose faces begotten of faces

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. . . light through all faces with the familiar strain / of features that have earned a general grace’.108 By composing the poem as a meeting-place for the ‘faces’ that she will uncover for public show, Rukeyser merges them genealogically and imagistically. The faces of the ‘ancestors’ flow through ‘all faces’ with a familiarity that earns them ‘a general grace’. Rukeyser does not present the ‘faces’ as individuals, but blends them with the faces of all humanity, awarding them the dual status of representatives of the human race and haunting ‘spirits’. Remembering Rukeyser’s emphasis on the Americanness of the first series of ‘lives’, one might see Rukeyser’s ‘faces’, like Galton’s composites, emerge as a sign of a compound, historical national body. Galton’s portraits, fusions of individuals yet portrayals of none, represent ideals that exist through the human faculty of imagination. The composite portrait, with its blurred outlines and ‘general’ features, was, as Jacobs asserted, ‘more ghostly than a ghost, more spiritual than a spirit’.109 Rukeyser’s evocation of multiple lives – ‘the many-born’ – in her introductory poem presents a similar picture. The coming-to-life of the ‘faces’ relies on the imagination of the poet and her reader / witness; they meet and unite to indicate an ancestry ‘grown changed and abstract’ yet ‘familiar’ and ‘general’ in its ‘features’.110 Whereas the following ‘Lives’ will indicate and honour individuals, the opening poem constructs an image of multiplicity and representative generality that none the less will infuse the series. In ‘Gibbs’, Rukeyser extends the theme of simultaneity, describing the scientist driving ‘moments of coexistence into light’. Imagining Gibbs’s own mental imagery, Rukeyser pictures him looking ‘through the wounds of law / at the composite face of the world’. By appealing to a governing idea of Gibbs’s life, that there exist vital relationships between ostensibly separate things, Rukeyser builds her poem upon the similarities between her own relational poetics and the connective theories of Gibbs. An image of Gibbs merges with an image of his ‘thought’, which in turn ‘becomes / an image of the world’. Austerity, continence, veracity, the full truth flowing not out from the beginning and the base, but from accords of components whose end is truth. Thought resting on these laws enough becomes an image of the world.111

The ‘components’ of Gibbs’s thought, life and poem form an accord ‘whose end is truth’, and his abstract idea that ‘the whole . . . is simpler than any of its parts’112 informs the poem’s structure as a condensed, composite biography.

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Throughout the poem, Rukeyser imagines the patterns of Gibbs’s philosophy: ‘Condense, he is thinking. Concentrate, restrict. / This is the state permits the whole to stand.’113 By approaching the ‘truth’ in a similar manner, Rukeyser condenses the many ‘phases’ of Gibbs’s ‘face’ to a poem 109 lines long. ‘Gibbs’ is therefore a collapsed archive of biographical facts; moments from the scientist’s life have been concentrated and restricted to provide a whole, general picture whose truth is simpler than the sum of its components. Several of Rukeyser’s notebooks are full of comments and annotations pertaining to her research on Gibbs, and her subsequent prose biography is over 450 pages long. However, in her poem of Gibbs’s life, she layers images in rapid succession, creating a portrait of the man in which only the most defining moments of his life are visible. No one part of the poem is therefore an indication of Gibbs’s ‘truth’, which can only be understood as a poetic ‘whole’. As noted above, Rukeyser envisions defining elements in biography as ‘gestures’ of a poetic life. These ‘gestures’ constitute ‘moments of proof’ of the unity of imagination in a personal history that extends to the universal.114 ‘Gibbs’ is therefore both an evocation of the great American scientist, and a poetic experiment in the blending of boundaries between science and art, documentary biography and imaginative story-telling. Rukeyser’s wish to locate and communicate equilibrium between poetic components is mirrored in Gibbs’s desire to know ‘the composite / many-dimensioned spirit, the phases of its face’, and thereby find ‘the tremendous level of the world’.115 By ending her poem with the pronouncement that Gibbs was able to ‘bring the great changing world . . . into its unity’, Rukeyser promotes a universalism and governing sense of oneness that might gather her ‘lives’ into a single, unified and composite ‘face’ of human possibility. As poetic documentarian and biographer, Rukeyser assumes the Emersonian responsibility of performing this task. When asked what prompted her to write biography, Rukeyser responded that the idea grew out of her understanding of ‘the structure of a life being an art form’.116 Connecting the constant motion of organic living with the fluidity of water, Rukeyser explained that her choice of Gibbs was ‘about the ways of getting past impossibilities by changing phase’. Needing a ‘language of changing phase for the poem’, Rukeyser sought a method of communication ‘that was not static . . . but more as a language of water’.117 In Rukeyser’s various writings on Gibbs, she often makes reference to ‘a plaster model of “the statue of water” ’, made by James Clerk Maxwell in accordance with Gibbs’s theory.118 Gibbs had worked on equations that ‘could be represented only by a solid, whose curves and hollows, reaches and valleys, would be like a mountain which one could read – a solid which would explain

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ice, water and steam’.119 Within this sculpture, apparently abstract yet actually specifically representative, a theory and a pattern of life could be seen and read. Rukeyser’s appreciation of Gibbs’s model came from her understanding of it as a meeting-place of biography, art and science. Her belief that ‘the structure of a life’ is ‘an art form’ may have influenced her decision to include the German printmaker and sculptor, Käthe Kollwitz, in her canon of ‘exemplary lives’.

‘Käthe Kollwitz’ In ‘Käthe Kollwitz’, the artist is figured as the poet’s artistic and emotional counterpart, whose ‘lifetime’ ‘among wars’ echoes Rukeyser’s own, ‘held between wars’.120 Rukeyser’s principal material resource appears to have been the deeply personal autobiographical material found in a published collection of Kollwitz’s diaries and letters; in a notebook among Rukeyser’s papers dated 1965–70, a great number of handwritten quotations are taken from The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz.121 The publication also contains a number of illustrative plates of Kollwitz’s art works, and Rukeyser’s notes refer to her wish to give these ‘animation’, as well as to Kollwitz’s musings on the relevance of art in times of conflict, and her testimony to the personal and political events of her life during two world wars.122 As Ruth Porritt observes, ‘Rukeyser’s interest in Kollwitz is similar to her interest in Willard Gibbs.’123 Unfolding during the Civil War, ‘the story of Gibbs’ is for Rukeyser ‘that of the pure imagination in a war-time period’. Gibbs lived in a time in which outside forces aimed at suppressing his creativity, for ‘[w]ar and after-war are filled with hatred, and this hatred turns against imagination, against poetry, against structure of any kind.’124 Gibbs’s strength to ‘create the creative’ against these forces of ‘hatred’ aligns him in Rukeyser’s mind with Kollwitz in her ability to do the same.125 Rukeyser first refers to Kollwitz in The Life of Poetry, describing her wish to apply her own writing to Kollwitz’s drawings in her poster designs. She was denied the opportunity by ‘advertising men’, who, according to Rukeyser, thought her ideals were to be ‘sold’ rather than ‘fought for’,126 but Rukeyser’s return later in her life to the art works of Kollwitz, together with her attention to the artist’s writings, continue her profound interest and involvement in the relationship between the verbal and visual transmission of ideas. The poem ‘Käthe Kollwitz’ complicates this theme by engaging in ekphrasis.127 Both James Heffernan and W. J. T. Mitchell write that ekphrasis

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is an ancient, important, yet relatively obscure literary genre, involving ‘poems which describe works of visual art’.128 Rukeyser’s ‘Käthe Kollwitz’ may be considered an ekphrastic text due to its participation in the discursive practice of the verbal representation of visually representational art forms. By interweaving themes of biography, portraiture and self-portraiture into an essentially ekphrastic poem, Rukeyser connects ideas of documentary, artistic expression and self-representation. The structure of her own life is bound to that of Kollwitz’s, whilst both lives assume artistic form. A composite portrait of the two women begins to emerge early in the poem, as Rukeyser introduces elements of her own life and poetics to meet and overlap with images of Kollwitz’s art and influence. and death holding my lifetime between great hands the hands of enduring life that suffers the gifts and madness of full life, on earth, in our time, and through my life, through my eyes, through my arms and hands may give the face of this music in portrait waiting for the unknown person held in the two hands, you.129

As Porritt has noted, Rukeyser refers in this passage to Kollwitz’s 1935 relief sculpture for a grave, ‘Rest in the Peace of His hands’130 (Figure 12). The ‘great hands’ of the piece are represented by Rukeyser as those of both ‘death’ and ‘life’, yet they also merge with the poet’s hands, and with the hands of their original creator, Kollwitz. The ‘enduring life’ of the art form is therefore inextricable from the enduring influence of Kollwitz’s life on Rukeyser’s sensibility. The artist’s suffering is seen and felt by the spectator of the art work, here figured as the poet by Rukeyser’s repeated use of ‘my’. The direct address that ends this section of the poem with the word ‘you’ both implies an imagined dialogue between Rukeyser and Kollwitz, and extends the exchange to include the reader of the poem, ‘the unknown person’ who holds the poem in their ‘two hands’. The model for the relief was likely to have been Kollwitz herself, for as she admits in her diaries, she could rarely afford to pay a sitter for her works. Rukeyser would have known this, and her intention to ‘give the face of this music in portrait’ indicates her understanding of both her own work and that of Kollwitz as essays in (self-)portraiture. Speaking of her need to write ‘lives’, Rukeyser highlighted her respect for the movements and changes within music, explaining that she saw it as a metaphor for organic life, but had not been able to extract from it ‘the verbal meanings’ that she needed. Believing that ‘poetry is a clearer metaphor’ than music, Rukeyser gives a ‘face’ to Kollwitz’s ‘portrait’

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via an ekphrastic imagery that alludes to her own and her reader’s participation in the process.131 In the fifth section of the poem, entitled ‘Self-portrait’, Rukeyser makes her identification with Kollwitz explicit, and cements the multiple relations between artist, artwork and receiver, or ‘witness’, to use Rukeyser’s terminology: Mouth looking directly at you eyes in their inwardness looking directly at you half light half darkness woman, strong, German, young artist.132

Rukeyser’s striking imagery of a ‘mouth looking directly at you’ refers at once to the open, reciprocal look of Kollwitz’s face as it is figured in art, and the blended boundaries within the poem of visual and verbal representation. The ‘inwardness’ of the looking eyes in the second line recalls the ‘inward look of waters’ from ‘Worlds Alongside’, a text similarly concerned with the collaboration and reciprocity of words and images, and another example of Rukeyser’s engagement with themes of understanding the self via encountering the other. By ‘looking / directly at you’ whilst also looking ‘inward’, Kollwitz’s ‘eyes’ draw the viewer into her world of experience, and represent a portal through which the viewer becomes ‘witness’ to her / his own life and the life of another. Rukeyser’s note for the poem, not used in the final draft, underlines her message behind the ‘lives’, and ‘Käthe Kollwitz’ in particular: ‘The power that flows in your choosing is the irrational, the fiery poem that is an image of your life, that looks out of your mouth and eyes into every other living face.’133 Rukeyser’s use of ‘you’ in the ‘Self-portrait’ part of the poem refers both to the ‘witness’ of Kollwitz’s art, which includes Rukeyser herself, and to the ‘witness’ of the poem. ‘Self-portrait’ is therefore not only a double portrait of Kollwitz and Rukeyser, as Porritt argues, but also, I contend, a double rendering of the art work, itself seen by Rukeyser as the metaphor for a human life. Mitchell has suggested that ‘ekphrastic poetry is the genre in which texts encounter their own semiotic “others” ’. Consequently, ekphrasis is characterised by the hope of ‘the overcoming of otherness’.134 Arguing that, ‘like the masses, the colonized, the powerless and voiceless everywhere, visual representation cannot represent itself,’ Mitchell contends that ekphrastic discourse is its only hope of being represented.135 However, whilst Rukeyser’s poem engages in the verbal representation of visual art works, its aim is not to ‘overcome’ the semiotic alterity of Kollwitz’s creations, nor the ontological alterity of

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her status as ‘other’. Through evocations and descriptions of ‘looking’, Rukeyser transmits a profound identification with Kollwitz in which the women and their art forms represent both themselves and each other. By assuming the poet / biographer’s task of representing Kollwitz, her art and her experience, Rukeyser appears to be attempting ‘the overcoming of otherness’ on Kollwitz’s behalf. Halfway through the poem, Rukeyser poses the question, ‘[w]hat would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?’ and answers it immediately with the line, ‘[t]he world would split open.’136 Her identification with Kollwitz throughout the poem indicates that she understands her ‘truth’, despite having arrived at it either via the ‘silent’ medium of Kollwitz’s visual art, or the personal communications of her letters and diaries. Rukeyser tells Kollwitz’s truth, speaking out against those who do not see the meanings of art works because they fail to ‘look’. The ‘tight-lipped man’ of the poem, whose closed mouth is in opposition to Kollwitz’s open, ‘looking’ mouth, is representative of the ‘otherness’ which Kollwitz (and with her, Rukeyser) must overcome; his dismissal of Kollwitz’s art as ‘too black and white’ indicates a reductive point of view towards women and towards art.137 Speaking for Kollwitz and for herself, Rukeyser occupies what Mitchell terms ‘a middle position between the object described or addressed and a listening subject who (if ekphrastic hope is fulfilled) will be made to “see” the object through the medium of the poet’s voice’.138 The ‘triadic relation’ which Rukeyser builds within the poem, by use of the pronouns ‘I’ and the doubly referential ‘you’, corresponds to her poetic ideal of the ‘cooperation’ between ‘the poet, the poem, and the audience’ (who, as I have noted, Rukeyser subsequently renames ‘witness’).139 Mitchell also posits a ‘triangular relationship’ between ‘poet’, original artwork and ‘audience’: ‘a ménage à trois in which the relations of self and other, text and image, are triply inscribed’.140 Complicating these relations is Rukeyser’s quotation from Kollwitz’s personal writings, and her use of secondary material in the form of a book already arranged and edited by someone else, to tell the ‘truth’ about Kollwitz’s life. At points throughout the poem, Rukeyser portrays Kollwitz in her own words, using speech marks. ‘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 returning –

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the same thing modulated, somewhat changed in form. Usually richer. And it is very good that this is so.’141

The words are taken from a published letter from Kollwitz, possibly to her son, on 19 December 1912: The process is after all like the development of a piece of music. The fugues come back and interweave again and again. A theme may seem to have been put aside, but it keeps returning – the same thing in a somewhat changed and modulated form, and usually richer. And it is very good that this is so.142

Porritt contends that the small discrepancies between Kollwitz’s words and Rukeyser’s poetic use of them are an indication that Rukeyser ‘has not resolved all of the tensions between coherence and correspondence’.143 Yet perhaps Rukeyser’s slight changes to Kollwitz’s words (already changed through translation) reflect her understanding of the process of a life ‘being an art form’. The letter fragment is rendered into poetry by minor changes in space and repetition; Kollwitz’s words ‘return’ with Rukeyser, ‘in a somewhat changed and modulated form’, but perhaps ‘richer’ for it. In its original context, the extract is from a letter in which Kollwitz appraises her life, and recognises those moments in which she ‘pulled [her]self out of a state of suffering and came to a clear sense of [her] own powers’.144 Her description of these moments in her life – what Rukeyser would term ‘moments of proof’ – as forming a ‘process’ like the development of ‘music’ is very similar to Rukeyser’s interpretation of a life as a ‘process’ of ‘changing phase’ for which ‘music’ acts as metaphor. In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser writes of her belief that ‘the poem’ represents ‘testimony to the truths of experience as they become form and ourselves’.145 By arranging Kollwitz’s words to portray her life, Rukeyser, as poet-biographer, is ‘intellectually giving form to emotional and imaginative experience, with the music and history of a lifetime behind the work’. Understanding the poet’s need to offer ‘a total response’ to the experience of the other, Rukeyser also sees the ‘witness’ to the poem as an integral element to its life: someone who ‘receives the work, and offers a total response, in a most human communication’.146 In the ‘Self-portrait’ section of the poem, Rukeyser ekphrastically represents a series of Kollwitz’s art works, which appear in corresponding sequence in The Diary and Letters. In her notes for the poem, Rukeyser mentions her wish to provide ‘animation’ to the ‘pictures’.147 By portraying the series of visual works in a strip of short-lined verse

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streaming rapidly down the page, Rukeyser evokes a cinematic structure and movement that goes some way to fulfilling this wish. The refrain ‘flows into’ occurs eight times as Rukeyser arranges each image to lead into the next: flows into wounded brave mouth grieving and hooded eyes alive, German, in her first War flows into strength of the worn face a skein of lines broods, flows into mothers among the war graves.148

The poem’s emphasis on facial portraiture continues in this section. Kollwitz is referred to as ‘the face of our age’,149 recalling the thirties documentary rhetoric of iconic representation, in particular the face of the ‘Migrant Mother’, whose image distilled the thoughts and feelings of Depression America into a single face. The poem rhythmically closes in, then cuts away from images of Kollwitz’s life and art in the manner of a montage film. I have briefly discussed Rukeyser’s interest and work in montage and documentary film during the forties and fifties. In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser recalls her experience in the cutting room, insistent that the continuity of film, in which the writer deals with a track of images moving at a given rate of speed, and a separate sound track which is joined arbitrarily to the image track, is closer to the continuity of poetry than anything else in art.150

The persistent strain within Rukeyser’s poetics towards the communicative, creative relationship between image and word takes the form, in the last section of ‘Käthe Kollwitz’, of an ekphrastic representation of multiple art forms of different media. The verbal representation of the visual is rhythmically structured to evoke the continuous ‘animation’ of film, whilst simultaneously working as a type of ‘sound track’ to the moving images.151 Knowing that the motion of a film is created by the  rapid sequence of static images, Rukeyser writes that it is the responsibility of the editor, whose analogue is the poet, to arrange the rhythm and length of the sequences: ‘The selection and ordering are a work of preparation and equilibrium, of the breaking of the balance and the further growth.’152 In her understanding of the techniques and theories of film, Rukeyser

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appeared to rely heavily on the films and writings of Sergei Eisenstein. Her description of the moving components of a film in terms of ‘balance’ and ‘growth’ calls on a lexicon identical to Eisenstein’s, and Rukeyser’s papers indicate that she maintained an interest in his work throughout her life. Whilst both ‘Käthe Kollwitz’ and the photo-narratives contain elements that may be traced to Eisenstein’s influence, Rukeyser’s booklength biography of Wendell Willkie, One Life (1957), is perhaps the best example of how Rukeyser merged poetic biography with documentary filmic techniques.

One Life In order to write Willkie’s life, Rukeyser gathered reports, newspaper clippings, articles and books on the man and his political environment.153 She acknowledges her ‘many sources’ in the foreword of the book, noting that the majority of the quotations are taken from ‘The New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, Time, and a series of documentary volumes, America, published by the Americanisation Committee of the Veterans of Foreign Wars’, as well as ‘several books of senatorial committee hearings’.154 Although unacknowledged, Rukeyser made extensive notes from Willkie’s similarly titled book, One World (1943), in which Willkie recounted his 1942 global trip as F. D. Roosevelt’s special envoy.155 Rukeyser also explains that her decision to write Willkie’s biography stemmed from her perception of the man as both ‘real’ and ‘a myth’. Unable to categorise One Life into either ‘fiction’ or ‘non-fiction’ due to its hybrid nature as poetry, prose, dream sequence, catalogue, reportage, drama and fictional encounter, Rukeyser argues against its restrictive classification as ‘biography’, contending that the book is both ‘a story, and a song’.156 For Rukeyser, Willkie is a ‘hero’ of modern times because of his simultaneous ‘way of finding himself and finding the world’ – an exemplary ‘process’ of living among others.157 Rukeyser’s assertion that Willkie’s ‘life is not in his accomplishment; his life is in his energies’158 recalls her appraisal of Gibbs as an American ambassador for the human spirit of creative and mobile energies: ‘The imaginative act, in all its delicacy, in all its explosiveness, realises these energies and the continuity behind them – the continuity of force, and of the human spirit alive in many lives.’159 According to Rukeyser, Willkie is similar to Gibbs in his understanding of the world in terms of the continual process and procession of its images. The true ‘hero’ of the biography is, Rukeyser argues, not Willkie himself, but the approach to the world that he represents. By

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presenting his life as a montage series of moments and images, Rukeyser hopes to convey her own poetic belief in the necessity for ‘movement’ in life: ‘[t]he hero in this movement in our lives being process itself; in his own terms, Willkie becoming a hero of this process.’160 Public reception of One Life was varied. Philip Booth for the Saturday Review understood the structure of the book as a metaphor for the life of Willkie and of America; ‘episodic, dissonant, fragmented, and explosive – as Willkie’s life was and his country still is’.161 Booth applauded Rukeyser’s wish not to ‘heroize’ Willkie, but rather to demonstrate ‘the heroic dimensions in his search for identity and his capacity for growth’. Situating it firmly in the documentary trend, Booth speculated that the book was ‘perhaps the best attempt since “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” to define a segment of America’.162 It is likely Rukeyser would have been pleased with this review; she noted her own esteem for Agee and Evans several times throughout her life, and aligned Agee’s documentary approach with her own.163 Although the non-linear, interdisciplinary structure of One Life recalls that of Famous Men, it is Rukeyser’s reverence of the multiple aspects of a human life that perhaps most closely parallels Agee and Evans’s work. Both texts employ documentary techniques in order to transcend the genre’s often objectivising way of looking, and search for a mode of communication that draws lines of connection between the self, the other and the world. In the New York Times Book Review, Paul Engle congratulated Rukeyser on having ‘invented an original form’ of documentary writing, which although it ‘captures Willkie’s state of motion’, at times proves too ‘heavy’ for its subject. Wishing for the occasional ‘quiet statement in simple prose’, Engle concludes his review by describing the book as a living thing, asserting that ‘as an interpretation of a man whose life meant One World, the book breathes and quarrels and proudly believes’.164 However, whilst Charles Rolo of Atlantic praised Rukeyser’s ‘new biographical form’, he criticised it as inappropriate ‘to a controversial figure such as Willkie,’ arguing that the ‘emotional key in which her story-song is pitched’ precludes a ‘cool and searching analysis’ of Willkie’s character.165 Reviewers saw Rukeyser’s application of documentary techniques to biography as both an inventive and risky endeavour. For Booth, the outcome of Rukeyser’s ‘risk’ was worth its taking; for others – for example, Murray Kempton from the New York Post – it resulted in a ‘performance’, the ‘scheme, the structure, the lyric sense, [and] the imagery’ of which was ‘on a level below argument’.166 Richard Eberhart, reviewing for the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, called Rukeyser’s style ‘an individualistic method of composition’ which

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reflected the ‘deep American idealism of the hero’.167 Eberhart likened Rukeyser’s method to ‘some new kind of extended, extensive, rapid-fire telegram recreating the turbulence of the world in Willkie’s time’, and Rolo drew similarities between Rukeyser’s many-faceted portrait of Willkie’s life with the ‘documentary techniques’ in ‘the “Camera Eye” and “Newsreel” sections of [John] Dos Passos’ U.S.A.’, itself a landmark in documentary literature through its confluence of fiction, reportage, biography, cinematic newsreel, montage and kino-eye techniques.168 Dos Passos’s documentary methods are similar to Rukeyser’s, yet the epic impersonality of his work as a whole is opposed to the personal, inclusive tone of Rukeyser’s book, which ultimately seeks affirmation and instruction in a way that U.S.A. does not. However, both authors acknowledged their admiration for the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Dos Passos asserting that ‘the artist must record the fleeting world the way the motion picture film recorded it,’169 and Rukeyser at several intervals throughout her life aligning her poetics with the filmmaker’s montage approach. Devoting several pages in The Life of Poetry to the examination of documentary film, Soviet film and their combined offspring, the public announcement newsreel, Rukeyser noted the extreme editorial importance of the latter to documentary expression of all kinds.170 Among Rukeyser’s notes for her first ‘Lives’ series are drafts of an unspecified piece of writing, in which Rukeyser asserts that the ‘undoubtedly best’ method of ‘tying’ her poetic ‘series’ together is an evocation of the ‘Newsreel process’. Citing Luce’s The March of Time as a reference, Rukeyser notes the effectiveness of its ‘animated’ procession of images as a metaphor for the changes and rhythms of the lives she wishes to portray.171

Rukeyser and Sergei Eisenstein The fact that Rukeyser acknowledges the influence of Eisenstein’s The Film Sense (1942) on The Life of Poetry would indicate that her poetics align significantly with the filmmaker’s theory of film technique and form.172 Rukeyser’s papers reveal several notes from the ‘Word and Image’ chapter of The Film Sense, and she was actively involved in its publication in America, providing the translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Voyelles in Chapter 2 of the English-language version of the book.173 During the 1950s, Rukeyser was also interested in Eisenstein’s Film Form (1949), a collection of essays written between the late 1920s and the early 1940s, which she later wished to feature in an anthology on ideas of ‘creation’.174

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Considering the relevance of Eisenstein’s theory to Rukeyser’s writing and poetics, it seems remarkable that there have been no critical appraisals of his influence on her work. The critics who name Eisenstein as a potential influence on Rukeyser, Kertesz, Tim Dayton, Stephanie Hartman and Shoshana Wechsler, mention him very briefly in connection with modernist techniques of fragmentation and Poundian ideogrammic method, restricting their discussions to Rukeyser’s poetry of the 1930s.175 Dayton’s observation that Rukeyser’s use of montage is governed by an understanding of its aesthetic effect rather than its political implications, however, is important, especially when examining her montage biography of the highly political figure of Willkie.176

Eisenstein and montage In ‘Word and Image’ (1938), Eisenstein explains that montage is the carefully edited juxtaposition of shots in order to create a meaning that might only be made via multiplicity: ‘two film pieces of any kind, placed together, inevitably combine into a new concept, a new quality, arising out of that juxtaposition’.177 Rukeyser copied this phrase of Eisenstein’s, along with several others, into a notebook containing her thoughts on poetic form and imagery.178 Her particular attention to Eisenstein’s reference to the work of the psychologist Kurt Koffka relates her interest in montage to her affinity with Gibbs, whose biography she had only just published. Eisenstein quotes from Koffka’s The Principles of Gestalt Psychology: It has been said: the whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is more correct to say that the whole is something else than the sum of its parts, because summing is a meaningless procedure, whereas the whole–part relationship is meaningful.179

Eisenstein employs Koffka’s ideas regarding human mental–visual patterns to demonstrate his theory that ‘the juxtaposition of two separate shots by splicing them together resembles not so much a simple sum of one shot plus another shot – as it does a creation’. Arguing that the result of any combination of elements ‘is qualitatively distinguishable from each component element viewed separately’, Eisenstein concludes that montage is thus ‘a creation rather than the sum of its parts’ due to the universality of ‘this law of physics’.180 Rukeyser’s inclusion of this passage in her notes, together with her repeated reference to Gibbs’s phrase rule that the ‘whole’ as ‘creation’ is more important ‘than the

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sum of its parts’, suggests a strong connection between Eisenstein’s theory of creative confluence and her own creative poetics of connection. Her insistence on the need to break rigid boundaries between ‘fields’ of science and art also corresponds to Eisenstein’s belief that physical laws may be applied to all ‘spheres’ of intellectual thought and practice. In an earlier essay, Eisenstein had traced the origins of artistic montage in the Japanese haiku, a form of poetry itself descended from the hieroglyph through the oriental ideogram (a fusion of hieroglyphs to create a composite portrait of a thing) combining imagism and simultaneity.181 Eisenstein argued for montage’s natural expression in poetry, finding further examples in the ‘documentarily selected representations’ of Pushkin and ‘dynamic characteristics’ found in Milton, Keats and Mayakovsky.182 Rukeyser’s similar interest in the hieroglyph is most evident in her reading of the Egyptian Book of the Dead for her poem series of the same name (1938), in which documentary techniques of reportage, testimony and camera imagery are combined with translations from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs concerning the afterlife. In ‘Ajanta’ (Beast in View, 1944), and again in The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser recalls the pictographic representations of the life of Buddha by monks on Indian cave walls, celebrating their ‘movement and meaning’, whereby each pictogram anticipates the next in a ‘rhythm’ that creates significance through ‘connection’.183 Additionally, Rukeyser’s papers reveal her attempt, at a date unspecified, to learn Chinese ideogrammic writing.184 For Eisenstein, montage is a combination of documentary / realist and artistic aesthetics. As a method of representing the real, montage also represents the way one’s mind registers and stores images, building them into a ‘whole’ that has ‘significance for the memory’.185 ‘Montage construction’ therefore calls to life and forces into the light that general quality in which each detail has participated and which binds together all the details into a whole, namely, into the generalised image, wherein the creator, followed by the spectator, experiences the theme.186

By likening montage to ‘the process of remembering’, Eisenstein establishes an organic, imaginative context to film technique, and recalls Galton’s theory of the composite image as analogue for the general mental image called up by memory.187 Such characteristics lend themselves well to biography, for according to Eisenstein, montage enables the ‘final kinship and unity’ of apparently separate ‘spheres’ of knowledge and practice, characterised at base by

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‘vitalising human qualities’. A writer, therefore, should master ‘all the subtleties of montage creation in all cultures’ to create a true and realistic image of the world.188 Rukeyser’s quotation of this in her notebook, together with Eisenstein’s strikingly similar thoughts on film and poetry – ‘there is no inconsistency between the method whereby the poet writes . . . [and] the montage exposition and construction of [an] entire film’ – indicates her profound affinity with Eisenstein’s aesthetic theory.189 One Life is the ground upon which Rukeyser puts this theory into practice.

One Life and montage In the section of the book entitled ‘Campaign’, Rukeyser layers images to evoke the forward thrust and repetitive reverberation of a fastmoving train as she relates Willkie’s journey across the States to canvas votes. The section begins with an imagist poem: Sun on the faces. On the knotted rocks. Sun on the iron. Sun on the dust of the roads. The ravel of cloud, the silver chalkings of track Lying westward through the dappled pass South of the city where the mist flowed in.190

‘The faces’, the ‘rocks’, ‘the iron’ of the train track and ‘the dust of the roads’ are images connected by that of the sun, illuminating the snapshots of America glimpsed by Willkie from the window of the carriage. The rapid succession of the images evokes both the momentum of the train and Willkie’s literal and figurative progress. By selectively assembling ‘shots’, Rukeyser adheres to the process of montage, and ‘a new concept, a new quality’ arises out of their juxtaposition.191 By aligning sunlit ‘faces’ and ‘rocks’, for example, Rukeyser creates a third image of the impenetrability of the American electorate, whose thoughts and distrust are ‘written’ on their faces. Rukeyser’s later repetition in the poem of the line ‘they make no sign’ reinforces the image, playing with the semiotic ambiguity of montage, and highlighting the difficulty of Willkie’s task. The internal workings of this poem do not constitute a closed system, but are a phase of the book. In the same section, Rukeyser’s montage recalls the quick-cut camera work of newsreel: ¶ As for the charge that Miss Hepburn is against me, I can only say that Mary Pickford, Robert Montgomery and Walter O’Keefe are on my side. *

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Now the professionals are feeding him another tactic: he would call Roosevelt a warmonger. * Eggs thrown. Eggs, eggs. A rock. His voice slurring now so that sometimes the sense is lost. * ¶ Words on a banner: ROOSEVELT FOREVER, WIN WHAT WITH WILLKIE * “. . . If we do not prevail this fall, this way of life will pass.” * The campaign train on its journey eastward. Willkie goes deep into America; into himself. *192

Running down the page in this manner, the images from Willkie’s campaign prefigure the chain of portrait images in ‘Käthe Kollwitz’, and imitate the layered ‘shots’ in montage, whereby ‘each sequential element is perceived not next to the other, but on top of the other’.193 The quotations combine verbal and visual elements in the suggestion of a soundtrack to a newsreel, whose compound images of opposition dramatically represent scenes from Willkie’s life. Driven further ‘into America’ and ‘into himself’, Willkie experiences a personal awakening through a procession of images. When Willkie loses the election, Rukeyser imagines his coming to terms with defeat as ‘a work of images, like mourning or falling in love’.194 The moment recalls Rukeyser’s poem near the beginning of the biography in which she encourages her reader to understand life as ‘a succession of desires’ in the form of mental images: ‘If you see your life as a procession of images / You will know that you have not forgotten a single meaning.’195 Connecting mental imagery with memory and with the pattern of human life thus, Rukeyser further establishes links between her work and the montage theory of Eisenstein. Rukeyser describes transitional moments, such as those in Willkie’s life, as moments of ‘changing phase’. Applying Gibbs’s phase rule to the patterns of movement and change within a human life, she argues that film and poetry provide the best metaphors for this language of ‘transformation’.196 Writing of the pathetic effect of ‘moments of culmination and substantiation’, Eisenstein likewise utilises the phase rule to explain the compositional image representation of a transitional moment in life: We understand a moment of culmination to mean those points in a process, those instants in which water becomes a new substance – steam, or ice-water, or pig-iron-steel. Here we see the same thing going out of oneself, moving from one condition, and passing from quality to quality.197

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This process of ‘moving’ between conditions is understood by Eisenstein and by Rukeyser as growth. The philosopher and film theorist Gilles Deleuze notes that Eisenstein’s specific symbol of movement is the ‘spiral’, whose organic form of development especially represents his theory of the ‘pathetic’ quality of montage: If the pathetic is development, it is because it is the development of consciousness itself: it is the leap of the organic which produces an external consciousness of society and history, of the social organism from one moment to the next.198

Progressing by ‘growing through oppositions or contradictions’, the spiral ‘can extend vectors which are like the strings of a bow, or the spans of the twist’.199 The form thus encourages infinite connections between opposites, whilst continually expanding and growing. In Chapter 2, I examined Rukeyser’s utilisation of the spiral symbol to demonstrate internal and external reception through organic process. The structure of One Life, in its connective procession of images, carries the past into the present, and its turning, non-linear progression evokes the form of the spiral. At crucial moments in his story, Rukeyser figures Willkie himself as symbol of spiralling growth: he is referred to as a whirlwind, a ‘water-spiral’, a ‘whirlpool’, ‘a spiral staircase down the height of the sky’.200 The spiral – according to Rukeyser, a symbol of man’s need to see relationship between ‘growth and form’201 – is the ideal representative symbol for a man whose heroism resides in ‘his way of finding himself and finding the world’.202 The process of Willkie’s ‘way’ gathers all elements of his life into an organic unity, or ‘one life’.

Rukeyser and Samuel Taylor Coleridge The epigraph to One Life is a quotation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and reads, ‘Everything has a life of its own . . . we are all one life,’ suggesting that Rukeyser named her book after Coleridge’s influence.203 Indeed, Rukeyser’s papers contain extensive notes from Coleridge’s notebooks, letters, poetry and essays, and contain the handwritten note, ‘suppose my book were called One Life. Epigraph from Coleridge.’204 Researching The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser made notes from Biographia Literaria, particularly Chapter 14, in which Coleridge theorises the poet’s task to ‘bring the whole soul of man into activity’.205 Coleridge’s ideas in this chapter regarding the poet’s responsibility for diffusing ‘a spirit and tone of unity’ that ‘blends’

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separate elements via the ‘imagination’ must have appealed to Rukeyser’s similar poetic ideal. Asserting the need for ‘the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities’, Coleridge argues for a meeting ‘of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative’.206 Rukeyser’s biographical projects aim at achieving such ‘reconciliation’, constructing meeting-places of ‘opposite’ fields, methods, persons and influences, blending the ‘individual’ with the ‘representative’ through a procession of images to form an instructive lesson in living poetically. In The Traces of Thomas Hariot, Rukeyser returns to the Coleridge quotation that informed the shape and meaning of One Life. Referring to the original source as ‘the crucial letter to [William] Sotheby’, Rukeyser quotes more of the extract: Imagination . . . This the Hebrew Poets appear to me to have possessed beyond all others – & next to them the English. In the Hebrew Poets each Thing has a Life of it’s [sic] own, & yet they are all one Life. In God they move & live, & have their Being – not had, as the cold System of Newtonian Theology represents / but have.207

Coleridge’s conviction that an equal meeting of contraries reveals the human capacity for ‘imagination’ appealed to Rukeyser’s own poetics of connection. Throughout her life, she repeatedly asserted that ‘imagination’ remained a vital component in the utilisation of poetry and of a poetic tradition, maintaining that it is impossible to imagine falsely: ‘the imagination is a function of belief and experience: that is, of course, why the realisation of a poem is an event of belief and experience’.208 Meg Schoerke has noted that Rukeyser’s quotation of Coleridge indicates that her poetics were likely to have been influenced by his writings on the organic life of poetic form; however, the connection between the passage and ancient Jewish poetry has apparently hitherto gone unexplored.209 In ‘Akiba’, a poem first serialised in American Judaism in 1961 and included in the last ‘Lives’ series, Rukeyser traces through belief and imagination her own Jewish ancestry, linking it to ideals of communicative, unified living.

The document and the unverified fact As I have discussed, Rukeyser’s reason for writing Akiba’s biography arose from her mother’s story of her family’s ancestral descent from the Jewish rabbi. In 1976, four years before her death, Rukeyser wrote

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again of her mother’s story, describing it as ‘an extraordinary gift’, and associating it with ‘the kind of poetry’ she considered as ‘unverifiable fact’. Rukeyser argues the existence of ‘two kinds of poems’: ‘The poems of unverifiable facts, based in dreams, in sex . . . and the other kind being the document, the poem that rests on material evidence.’210 In a draft preface for The Speed of Darkness, which inexplicably never went to print, Rukeyser wrote of her concerns on the same theme. It is worth quoting at length: I have been deeply concerned with the evidence of the world: document (as movies use document), scenes, questions, and answers, pieces of evidence used in linkage and collision, as film is cut, to offer testimony of the world with ourselves not as spectators and readers but more, as the ones doing the offering and accepting the offering, as witnesses. And I am concerned with the unverifiable fact: with the reporting of that part of life which must be given conviction only by what the reporter can give: sex, dreams, the inner life. I do not believe that these are two separate parts of life. The unity and bonds of unity are central to my meaning and my poems . . . One of the keys for me is in the two lines in the poem, ‘The Speed of Darkness’: The universe is made of stories, not of atoms . . . This book is for the reader, for you, the unknown, to whom I dedicate these poems.211

It is interesting that, when describing the most personal moments of experience, Rukeyser continues to employ documentary terminology. ‘Sex’ and ‘dreams’ are referred to as ‘facts’, although untraceable, and must be ‘reported’ by the poet. In a lecture given to Scripps College in 1968, entitled ‘Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact’, Rukeyser defended her use of such terminology, affirming that ‘we live in a period of caring about the document, about the documented fact, the kind of fact that can be assimilated in memory’.212 Asserting her belief in both this and another type of fact, which ‘cannot be verified by anyone else’, but can and must be ‘share[d] with other people’, Rukeyser promoted a poetic imagination that blended document, memory, and dream.213 The centrality to Rukeyser’s work and thought of the unification of documentary evidence and poetic testimony appears to be demonstrated best in her biographical work, which expresses her use of document ‘as movies use document’, and for which the two lines from ‘The Speed of Darkness’ serve well as epigraph. The projected preface seems to reference the ‘Lives’ in the book: ‘the unknown’ person, or ‘you’, is readdressed in ‘Käthe Kollwitz’; the ‘witness’ who both offers testimony of the world, and accepts the offering, is figured throughout ‘Akiba’ in reference to the teachings of Martin Buber.

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‘Akiba’ and Martin Buber As I discussed in Chapter 2, the ethical and socio-religious philosophy of Martin Buber provides a helpful theoretical context against which to read Rukeyser’s poetics of connection. Further, Rukeyser’s admitted indebtedness to many of Buber’s writings for her explicitly Jewish (auto) biographical poem, ‘Akiba’, situates the philosopher and Zionist leader as a principal influence on her work.214 Although Rukeyser asserts the ‘unity’ within her poems of the ‘document’ and ‘the unverifiable fact’, there is little, if anything, in ‘Akiba’ that could be viewed as objective factual evidence. Instead, the poem seems to offer a lesson in how to approach the world and others, providing the figure of Akiba as a representative ideal both of Jewishness and of open, imaginative and communicative living. ‘Akiba’ also represents Rukeyser’s exploration of her own unverified and factual ancestry. Of Jewish origin, she is descendent from the Israelites who feature in the poem. Told by her mother that she was of Akiba’s blood, Rukeyser also chooses her lineage. Rukeyser argues in The Life of Poetry that freedom (a human right) involves the ability to ‘choose a tradition’, and to select representatives of that tradition.215 In an essay entitled ‘Under Forty’ (1944) for a Jewish publication, Rukeyser expounds on the idea: ‘if one is free, freedom can extend to a certain degree into the past, and one may choose one’s ancestors, to go with their wishes and their fight’.216 As Janet Kaufman has noted, by relating the act of choosing to the act of ‘meeting’ and witnessing the other in ‘Akiba’, Rukeyser aligns her poetics with Buber’s theory of the meeting of I and Thou.217 Buber’s ‘I–Thou’ philosophy establishes the self–other relation in terms of a meeting of consciousnesses, whereby ‘the I of man is twofold’: ‘I become through my relation to the Thou; as I become I, I say Thou.’218 It relies on the assumption that a ‘unity’ between beings in the world, and between beings and God, is ‘part of the basic truth’.219 When ‘meeting’ occurs between the I and the Thou, each party experiences their subjectivity via a profound understanding of the impressive alterity of the other. ‘The Thou confronts me. But I step into direct relation with it. Hence the relation means being chosen and choosing, suffering and action in one.’220 Rukeyser’s comprehension of her heritage constitutes her position as being related to the ‘chosen’ people who were taught by Akiba, whilst her decision to believe her mother’s story as ‘fact’ represents her ‘choosing’ her tradition or ancestry. Additionally, by rendering this doubleness into poetry, Rukeyser establishes a connection between the act and the reception of the meeting

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between I and Thou, and in the giving and taking of the poem. We remember that Rukeyser prefers the term ‘witness’ to apply to the receiver of a poem. Choosing this word because it ‘includes the act of seeing and knowing by personal experience, as well as the act of giving evidence’, Rukeyser opines that the word has connotations of ‘responsibility’ and ‘excitement’, which announce ‘with the poem that we are about to change, that work is being done on the self’.221 Similarly, Buber describes ‘meeting’ as a moment in which ‘something happens to the man’. The man who emerges from the act of pure relation that so involves his being has now in his being something more that has grown in him, of which he did not know before and whose origin he is not rightly able to indicate.222

In ‘Akiba’, Rukeyser imagines the Exodus of the Israelites as they became their opposites, ‘slaves refusing slavery’, walking ‘through the opposites’ of ‘city and cleave of the sea’, moving ‘from I to opened Thou’.223 In this section of the poem, ‘Thou’ is God, whose word had been received by and spoken through Moses before he led the chosen race to safety. Buber’s book, Moses, which also informs the poem, argues that from the ‘midst of the legend’ arose ‘a biographical and historical truth’ which allowed a religion and a race to promulgate.224 In the poem’s last section, ‘The Witness’, ‘Thou’ is replaced by a capitalised ‘You’. After recounting the martyrdom of Akiba, in which ‘all the opposites’ of life are ‘made whole’, Rukeyser questions whether Akiba’s legacy of unity ended with his death: Who is the witness? What voice moves across time, Speaks for the life and death as witness voice? Moving tonight on this city, this river, my winter street?225

Searching for a representative to witness and continue the teachings of Akiba in her own time and place, the poet assumes the responsibility unto herself, ultimately extending the task to the ‘witness’ of the poem. As in ‘Käthe Kollwitz’, pronouns are confused, and the quasi-religious ‘You’ merges with ‘you’, ‘me’ and ‘Who’ to create an inclusive meeting of lives across history. You who come after me far from tonight finding These lives that ask you always Who is the witness – Take from us acts of encounter . . . Tells us this moment, saying You are the meeting. You are made of signs, your eyes and your song. Your dance the dance, the walk into the present.

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All this we are and accept, being made of signs, speaking To you, in time not yet born. The witness is myself. And you226

Apparently addressing Akiba as ‘You’, Rukeyser seems to direct the lower-case ‘you’ at the ‘unknown’ witness, receiving the poem. By living on in the memories and stories of present and future generations, Akiba represents an ethical and poetic ‘meeting’. His existence is composed of the symbolic ‘signs’ of a life given to others, the ‘eyes’ of visual encounter, and the ‘song’, which is the Song of Songs, arguably the greatest example of Hebrew poetry (remembering Rukeyser’s quotation of Coleridge on the subject), and representative of God’s relationship with the human soul. In his essay, ‘Teaching and Deed’, another source for the poem, Buber explains that true ‘teaching’ cannot be proven, only ‘given’, thereby renewing ‘the spirit of a people’.227 His thoughts on the subject correlate with Rukeyser’s consideration of her mother’s story of her ancestry, or ‘tradition’, as an ‘unverifiable fact’: a ‘total gift to a child’. Buber writes that ‘tradition does not consist in letting contents and forms pass on, finished and inflexible,’ but that ‘a generation can only receive the teachings in the sense that it renews them’.228 In the last lines of the poem, which allude to choosing and being chosen, ‘all this we are and accept,’ Rukeyser renews Akiba’s and her mother’s teachings by forming meetings between lives, past, present and future. The lines, ‘The witness is myself. / And you’ stretch forward formally on the page as they indicate an advancement of Akiba’s, and the poem’s, teachings into the future, the ‘time not yet born’. The ‘acts of encounter’ will continue because, as Rukeyser’s final line asserts, ‘the signs, the journeys of the night, survive’.229 Buber also argued that the ‘meetings’ between human beings and God ‘may live and bring forth life’ only when the teachings between generations ‘assume the form of a human link’.230 Akiba, a human representative of God, assumes this form in Rukeyser’s poem, and his teaching is passed to the poet, herself the representative of a unifying ideal.

‘Akiba’ as Jewish and poetic ideal Configuring ‘Akiba’ as a representative life, an evocation of unifying, imaginative (Hebrew) poetry and the pattern of her own unverifiable ancestry, Rukeyser blends sources, images and memory to create a

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Jewish and poetic ideal. Rukeyser’s presence within the poem is evident in the ‘witness’, the first-person evocation of sentiment, and the Exodus image of ‘the red splatter, abstraction, on the door’.231 This mark of blood invokes the theme of heredity, as well as Rukeyser’s own genetic ‘abstraction’ from the Israelites. The assertion in the poem that ‘all creation’ is ‘created in one image, creation’,232 refers to a holy unity that extends to the act of creating poetry, wherein Rukeyser’s philosophy of the unifying interconnectedness of things may also reflect upon her subject of ideal yet abstract Jewish being. Among her papers for The Speed of Darkness is a page entitled ‘Jewish’, upon which Rukeyser theorised the meaning of the word. Jewishness, according to Rukeyser, entails ‘one’s existence in others’, but excludes the notion of ‘loss of self’. Rather, it involves ‘making the next place in the world and in the self’.233 Whilst there is no further indication as to what ‘the next place’ might be – one might guess it is heaven – these few words indicate Rukeyser’s thinking that the self’s encounter with and existence through the other is a particularly Jewish phenomenon. Rukeyser, after Buber, appears to believe that Jewishness historically involves the meeting between the self and the other, in which alterity is both asserted and transcended. Returning to Galton’s composites of ideal Jews, which, according to Galton and Jacobs, proffered the best scientific, documentary evidence of racial types, one might draw parallels between Galton’s creative experiments in heredity and representation, and Rukeyser’s poetic project toward the same end. Galton’s composite portraits portray no one person in particular, but rather a general image of an ideal type. Novak sees this blending of science and invention as ‘photographic science fiction’, asserting that the composites offer ‘a photographic embodiment of the aesthetics and ethics of racial difference’.234 This convergence of ‘abstract fiction and biological fact’ would seem to correlate with Rukeyser’s understanding of the ‘unverifiable fact’, upon which rested her portrait of Akiba, and its relation to her Jewish ancestry.235 Additionally, Novak’s observation that the composite portraits represented the ‘meeting place of difference at which difference is at once affirmed and effaced’, reflects Rukeyser’s thoughts, informed by Buber, on the theme of the ‘meeting’ of the self and other, or ‘I’ and ‘Thou’, in which alterity is recognised, confronted and transcended.236 In Galton’s portraits of the Jewish type especially, Jacobs saw a representation of a composite body that amplified an abstract Jewish ‘expression’, and indicated a ‘ghostly’ Jewish inherited ‘look’ that was ‘more spiritual than a spirit’.237 Further, he argued that, ‘as the components can in all probability trace back to a common ancestor,

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the composite face must represent, if it represent anything, this Jewish forefather’.238 The composite Jewish portrait, according to Jacobs, was the bodiless embodiment of racial and mystical inheritance, calling ‘into visible presentiment the heroes of the past’.239 In ‘Akiba’, Rukeyser achieves the same level of componential ghostliness, compounding images of the lives of several of her Jewish ancestors by imagining a series of the ‘signs’ of spiritual inheritance. The ‘achieved spirits’ who awake and ‘climb the streets’ in the introductory ‘Lives’ poem are figured at the close of ‘Akiba’ in the image of the Rabbi’s spirit, which traverses the poet’s ‘winter street’.240 Rukeyser’s evocation of Moses and Akiba is an act of imagination based on the ‘document’ of the scriptures and the ‘unverifiable fact’ of her bloodline. Galton’s composites similarly resurrect ‘the heroes of the past’ through a process of imagination, for we remember it was Galton’s claim that ‘a composite portrait represents the picture that would rise before the mind’s eye of a man who had the gift of pictorial imagination in an exalted degree’. Remembering the role of Moses in the history of eugenics, it is possible to view Rukeyser’s ‘Akiba’ as an exercise in tracing the lineage of the model, representative Jew, from Moses, through Akiba, to herself. The layered, composite structure of her poem, together with the reference throughout to the ‘signs’ of the ‘face’ and ‘body’, points towards her own experimentation in constructing ‘creation itself’: a spectral portrait of a Jewish historic body, envisioned in the compound form of ‘one image’.241 The section of ‘Akiba’ that is written as an ode to the Song of Songs, ‘celebrates’, as Kaufman observes, ‘not only the Biblical poem but also, implicitly, Akiba as the Jewish upholder of poetry for its own sake’.242 Further, by weaving her own story into that of Akiba, Rukeyser celebrates her position as Jewish inheritor of religious, imaginative poetry. By so doing, she implies her connection to those ‘Hebrew poets’ whose ability to unify all living things into ‘one life’ so impressed Coleridge.

Conclusion Rukeyser’s repeated reference to Coleridge’s ideal poet of the imagination, who ‘brings the soul of man into activity’ via a ‘balance’ between ‘the idea, with the image’ and ‘the individual, with the representative’, reveals the governing poetic force behind her ‘lives’. Through imagination, the most important component in each of her biographical evocations, Rukeyser constructs compound portraits of exemplary lives in order to demonstrate what she believes to be ideal ways of approaching

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the world. As such, her poetic portraits involve the type of self-infused lesson in living-in-the-world that Emerson’s poet – himself the representative ideal of humanity’s ability to unify lives and things – looks to offer. Rukeyser’s biographies seek ancestors, for herself, but perhaps most importantly, for America. Of all of the projects, the only two ‘Lives’ that are not American, ‘Akiba’ and ‘Käthe Kollwitz’, relate to the patterns of Rukeyser’s own life in connection with others. The prose biography of Thomas Hariot charts the life of an Englishman, yet Hariot’s historical standing as one of the first men to navigate between England and the New World situates him among the group of pioneers who helped shape America. Rukeyser’s comment in the prefatory note to the first ‘Lives’ that ‘the five people around whom it is written are Americans – New Englanders’ suggests her ongoing project to construct her own canon of specifically ‘pioneering’ American lives.243 Reviewing Willard Gibbs, Kazin proclaimed that the book was both ‘an effort at the recovery of one of the most extraordinary achievements in the history of the human imagination’ and ‘a recovery of our American pride, of still another phase of our growing American self-knowledge and celebration’.244 Louis Untermeyer wrote to Rukeyser that One Life was ‘native to the core . . . a dramatic story which is also a symbol and saga of America’.245 Through a series of imaginative biographies, Rukeyser was gradually documenting the story of America and her place within it. Although not complete – the collection is missing the projected stories of Bessie Smith and Franz Boas – the biographies constitute a compound portrait of America. The country’s cultural and intellectual history, received and figured both as documents and as unverifiable facts, is assembled largely via documentary methods. Accepted and chosen in such a way, the biographies represent links between the past, present and future, at once particularised evocations of representative types and compound sites of a larger, composite national body.

Notes 1. Rukeyser, in Packard, The Poet’s Craft: Interviews from the New York Quarterly, p. 132. This is a reprint of The Craft of Poetry (New York: Doubleday, 1971). 2. Johnson, ‘American Biography and the Modern World’, p. 368. 3. Kazin, On Native Grounds, p. 487. 4. Ibid., pp. 487, 485. 5. Ibid., p. 486. 6. Ibid., p. 489.

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7. Ibid., p. 506. 8. ‘What is Americanism? A Symposium on Marxism and the American Tradition’, in Partisan Review and Anvil, 3.3 (April 1936). 9. Ibid., p. 4. 10. Ibid., p. 7. 11. Ibid., p. 11. 12. Kazin, On Native Grounds, pp. 505–7. 13. Ibid., p. 508. 14. Emerson, ‘The Poet’, pp. 183–98. 15. Ibid., p. 196; Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1st edn (1855), in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, pp. 616–36. 16. Emerson, ‘The Poet’, p. 185; Whitman, Preface, p. 617. 17. Kazin, On Native Grounds, pp. 513, 511. 18. Emerson, ‘The Uses of Great Men’, in Representative Men, p. 11. 19. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, p. 631. 20. Emerson, ‘History’, in Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, p. 108; Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, p. 26. 21. Patterson, ‘Emerson, Napoleon, and the Concept of the Representative’, p. 231. 22. Letter to Emerson from Carlyle, 1839, in Slater, The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, p. 215. 23. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. 632. 24. Emerson, ‘The Uses of Great Men’, p. 11. 25. Whitman, ‘Whitman to Emerson, 1856’, in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, p. 641. 26. Stott, Documentary Expression, p. 36. 27. Conroy, ‘The 1930s: A Symposium’, p. 39. 28. Newhall, The History of Photography, from 1839 to the Present, pp. 144, 238. 29. Kazin, On Native Grounds, pp. 496–7. 30. Agee and Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, p. 211. 31. Ibid., p. 9. 32. ‘The Common Steel Worker Gets His Pay Raised to $5 a Day’, Life, 15 March 1937, pp. 13–15, 13. 33. Ibid., p. 16. 34. Trachtenberg, ‘From Image to Story’, p. 60. 35. Stryker quoted by Wood in ‘Portrait of Stryker’, p. 14. 36. Life, 21 June 1937, p. 65. 37. Levine, ‘The Historian and the Icon’, p. 36. 38. Reprinted in CP, p. 609. 39. Ibid., p. 610. 40. Ibid., pp. 624–5. 41. Rukeyser in Packard, The Poet’s Craft, p. 130. 42. Rukeyser, One Life, pp. xiii, xiv. 43. Rukeyser in Packard, The Poet’s Craft, p. 130. 44. Lechlitner, review of Theory of Flight, pp. 29–30. 45. Wheelwright, review of U.S. 1, pp. 54–6. 46. R. S. P., ‘Grandeur and Misery of a Poster Girl’, pp. 471–3.

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47. What was named ‘The Rukeyser Imbroglio’ spanned two issues (Winter and Spring 1944) after publication of the original article. 48. Rukeyser, Wake Island, in CP, p. 201. 49. MR Papers, Box I:30, folder 1. Rukeyser published an elegy to Matthiessen in Body of Waking (1958), CP, p. 343. Rukeyser’s relationship with Matthiessen will be examined in more detail in Chapter 4. 50. CP, p. 610. 51. Cassidy, ‘Competing Notions of American and Artistic Identity in Visual and Written Autobiographies in the 1930s and Early 1940s’, in Bak and Krabbendam, eds, Writing Lives: American Biography and Autobiography, p. 63. 52. Ibid., p. 71. 53. Rukeyser in Packard, The Poet’s Craft, p. 130. 54. In Herzog and Kaufman, How Shall we Tell Each Other of the Poet? 55. LP, p. xi. 56. Ibid., p. 32. 57. Ibid., p. 35. 58. Ibid., pp. 35–7. 59. Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs, p. 9. 60. Ibid., p. 8. 61. Kazin, ‘Gibbs: Another Ancestor’, p. 752; Clark, ‘The Mind Behind the Age of Plastics’, p. 461. 62. Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs, pp. 7, 9. 63. Ibid., p. 4. 64. Rukeyser, ‘Josiah Willard Gibbs’, p. 6. 65. Ibid., p. 9. 66. CP, p. 467. 67. Rukeyser, ‘Josiah Willard Gibbs’, p. 10. Emphasis in original. 68. LP, p. 167. 69. Ibid., p. 167; Rukeyser, ‘Josiah Willard Gibbs’, p. 27. 70. LP, p. 167. 71. Ibid., p. 19. 72. MR Papers, Box I:29. Handwritten versions of the poem are headed ‘Gibbs’ and ‘for Gibbs’. 73. Ibid. 74. CP, p. 181. 75. Rukeyser, ‘Josiah Willard Gibbs’, p. 6. 76. CP, p. 182. 77. Ibid., p. 181. 78. Ibid., p. 182. 79. LP, p. 134. 80. Galton, ‘Composite Portraits, Made by Combining Those of Many Different Persons Into a Single, Resultant Figure’, p. 132. 81. Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas About the Mind, trans. Vincent, p. 125. 82. Galton, ‘Composite Portraits’, p. 141. 83. Ibid., pp. 132–3. 84. Ibid., p. 134. 85. Ibid., p. 134.

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116 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 141. Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’, p. 51. Daniel Novak, ‘A Model Jew: “Literary Photographs” and the Jewish Body in Daniel Deronda’, pp. 62–3. Quoted in ibid., pp. 62–3. Original source: ‘Jews and Eugenics’, Jewish Chronicle (29 July 1910), p. 6. Quoted in ibid., p. 71. Original source: Joseph Jacobs, ‘The Jewish Type and Galton’s Composite Photographs’, Photographic News, 29:1390 (24 April 1885), p. 269. Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940, p. 94. Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’, p. 55. Emphasis in original. Notably Orvell’s The Real Thing and Tagg’s The Burden of Representation. Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’, p. 54. Now at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’, p. 55. Ibid., p. 59. Galton, ‘Composite Portraits’, p. 132. Galton, Inquiries into the Human Faculty and its Development, pp. 183–4. Ibid., p. 184. Galton, ‘Mental Imagery’, first published in Mind 5 (1880), pp. 301–18. Reprinted in Inquiries in the Human Faculty, p. 83. Ibid., p. 109. Ibid., p. 110. MR Papers, Box I:30, folder 1; LP, p. 134. Ibid., p. 134. CP, p. 181. Ibid., p. 181. Quoted in Novak, ‘A Model Jew’, p. 70. CP, p. 181. Ibid., p. 184. Ibid., p. 185. Ibid., p. 183. LP, p. 26. CP, p. 185. Rukeyser in Packard, The Poet’s Craft, p. 130. Ibid., pp. 130–1. Rukeyser, ‘Josiah Willard Gibbs’, pp. 8–10, Rukeyser, Gibbs, pp. 202–3. Rukeyser, ‘Josiah Willard Gibbs’, p. 8. Rukeyser, ‘Käthe Kollwitz’ (1968), in CP, p. 460. MR Papers, Box I:31, folder 8. Ibid. Porritt, ‘ “Unforgetting Eyes”: Rukeyser Portraying Kollwitz’s Truth’, in Herzog and Kaufman, How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, p. 164. Rukeyser, Gibbs, p. 7. Rukeyser, ‘Josiah Willard Gibbs’, p. 27.

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LP, pp. 136–7. Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, in Picture Theory, p. 152. Ibid., p. 152; Heffernan, ‘Ekphrasis and Representation’, pp. 297–316. CP, pp. 460–1. Porritt, ‘ “Unforgetting Eyes” ’, p. 168. Rukeyser in Packard, The Poet’s Craft, p. 131. CP, p. 463. MR Papers, Box I:31, folder 2. Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, p. 156. Ibid., p. 157. CP, p. 463. CP, p. 462. Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, p. 164. LP, p. 174. Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, p. 164. CP, p. 461. Kollwitz, The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz, trans. Winston, p. 141. Porritt, ‘ “Unforgetting Eyes” ’, p. 181, n. 7. The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz, p. 141. LP, p. 212. Ibid., p. 212. MR Papers, Box I:31, folder 8. CP, p. 464. Ibid., p. 464. LP, p. 141. Porritt also notes the cinematic quality to this section of ‘Käthe Kollwitz’. LP, p. 143. MR Papers, Box I:29; I:30, folders 2 and 3; Box I:34, folder 5; Box II:6, folder 6. Rukeyser, One Life, p. xv. MR Papers, Box I:29. Rukeyser, One Life, p. xiii. Ibid., p. xiv. Ibid., p. xii. Rukeyser, Gibbs, p. 82. Rukeyser, One Life, p. xii. Booth, ‘One Life, Many Americas: Review of One Life’, p. 12. Ibid., p. 12. LP, MR Papers, Box I:30, folder 2; Letter from Rukeyser to Mr Levine, dated 24 July 1976, MR Papers, Box I:6, folder 8. Engle, review of One Life, p. 16. Rolo, ‘An American Odyssey’, review of Muriel Rukeyser’s One Life, p. 82. New York Times Book Review, p. 16; Kempton, review of One Life. Eberhart, review of One Life, p. 4. Ibid., p. 4; Rolo, ‘An American Odyssey’, p. 82. Dos Passos, ‘What Makes a Novelist’, p. 31. LP, p. 151.

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118 171. 172. 173. 174. 175.

176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188. 189. 190. 191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199. 200. 201. 202. 203. 204. 205. 206. 207.

Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary MR Papers, Box I:34. LP, p. 215. Rukeyser used the Harcourt, Brace edition (1942). Eisenstein, The Film Sense, ed. and trans. Leyda, p. 76. This anthology project is discussed in Chapter 4. MR Papers, Box I:21, show her extensive notes from the book. Dayton, Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Book of the Dead’; Kertesz, The Poetic Vision; Hartman, ‘All Systems Go: Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” and the Reinvention of Modernist Poetics’; Wechsler, ‘A Mat(t) er of Fact and Vision: The Objectivity Question and “The Book of the Dead” ’, the latter two both in Herzog and Kaufman, How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet? Dayton, Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Book of the Dead’, p. 128. Eisenstein, The Film Sense, p. 14. MR Papers, Box I:35, folder 3. Eisenstein, The Film Sense, p. 17. Copied verbatim in MR Papers, Box I:35, folder 3. Eisenstein, The Film Sense, p. 17. Eisenstein, ‘The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram’, in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Leyda. Eisenstein, The Film Sense, pp. 46, 47, 58. LP, pp. 153–5. Rukeyser made notes from Kurt Wiese’s You Can Write Chinese (New York: Viking, 1945). The Film Sense, p. 23. Ibid., p. 19. All italics in original. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 59. LP, p. 153. Rukeyser, One Life, p. 117. Eisenstein, The Film Sense, p. 14. Ibid., p. 130. Eisenstein, ‘A Dialectic Approach to Film Form’, in Film Form, p. 49. Rukeyser, One Life, p. 146. Ibid., p. 31. Rukeyser in Packard, The Poet’s Craft, p. 131; LP, p. 141. Eisenstein, ‘The Structure of the Film’ (1939), in Film Form, p. 173. Deleuze, ‘Montage’, in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983), p. 36. Ibid., pp. 33, 35. Rukeyser, One Life, pp. 171, 49, 195. LP, p. 38. Rukeyser, One Life, p. xiv. Ibid., p. vii. MR Papers, Box II:8, folder 5; Box I:34, folder 5. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, p. 173; MR Papers, manuscript for LP, Box I:21. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, p. 174. Letter to Sotheby, 1802, Friday 10 September, in Jackson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Selected Letters, p. 115; Rukeyser, The Traces of Thomas Hariot, p. 228. Rukeyser does not quote the first line.

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208. LP, p. 49. 209. Schoerke, ‘ “Forever Broken and Made”: Rukeyser’s Theory of Form’, in  Herzog and Kaufman, How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, p. 19. 210. Rukeyser, ‘The Education of a Poet’, p. 226. 211. MR Papers, Box I:23. Dated New York, 18 June 1967. 212. Rukeyser, ‘Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact’, 13 February 1968, MR Papers, Box I:43, folder 8; published in Scripps College Bulletin. 213. Ibid., pp. 10–11. 214. In an endnote, ‘Akiba’, in American Judaism, Rukeyser cites as influences on the poem ‘the works of Martin Buber, particularly Faith and Judaism and Teaching and Deed, in The Writings of Martin Buber, edited by Will Herber, Meridian Books, New York, 1956; and Buber’s Moses, Harper Torchbook edition, 1958; Maurice S. Friedman’s Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue, University of Chicago, 1955’: American Judaism, April 1961, p. 13. 215. LP, p. x. 216. Ibid., p. x; Rukeyser, ‘Under Forty’, p. 8. 217. Kaufman, ‘ “But not the Study”: Writing as a Jew’, in Herzog and Kaufman, How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, p. 55. Kaufman’s essay as a whole offers an excellent appraisal of the influence of Jewishness on Rukeyser’s life and poetry, although her discussion of Buber’s influence on Rukeyser is brief. 218. Buber, ‘I and Thou’, in Herberg, The Writings of Martin Buber, pp. 43, 46. 219. Ibid., p. 52. 220. Ibid., p. 56. 221. LP, p. 175. 222. Buber, ‘I and Thou’, p. 60. 223. CP, p. 455. 224. Buber, Moses, p. 38. 225. CP, p. 459. 226. CP, pp. 459–60. 227. Buber, ‘Teaching and Deed’, in Herberg, p. 317. 228. Ibid., p. 318. 229. CP, p. 460. 230. Buber, ‘Teaching and Deed’, p. 324. 231. CP, p. 454. 232. Ibid. 233. MR Papers, Box I:31. 234. Novak, ‘A Model Jew’, pp. 58, 60. 235. Ibid., p. 76. 236. Ibid., p. 77. 237. Quoted in ibid., pp. 69, 70. 238. Jacobs, ‘The Jewish Type’, p. 269. Quoted in ‘A Model Jew’, p. 71. 239. Ibid. 240. CP, pp. 181, 459. 241. Ibid., pp. 454–60. 242. Kaufman, ‘ “But Not the Study”: Writing as a Jew’, p. 54.

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243. CP, p. 609. 244. Kazin, ‘Gibbs: Another Ancestor’, p. 752. 245. Quotation given to Rukeyser from Untermeyer for publication, MR Papers, Box II:6, folder 6.

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Chapter 4

Documentary and the Emergence of American Studies

It is necessary at this point to locate the sources of Rukeyser’s engagement with documentary within a larger intellectual sphere of influence. This chapter examines Rukeyser’s poetics as they developed contemporaneously with a new academic discipline, American Studies. By examining Rukeyser’s work in the context of a burgeoning scholarly discourse and intellectual re-visioning of American literary and cultural history, I wish to provide a larger framework within which to locate her involvement with documentary than has hitherto been discussed, as well as allowing for a broader understanding of documentary expression in America beyond its arguable culmination in the art and literature of the 1930s.

The emergence of American Studies: a ‘usable past’ Although American Studies did not emerge as an academic subject until the 1930s,1 its founding ideology may be traced to the plea for an autonomous national literature during the first half of the 1800s, perhaps best sounded by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson’s call for a poet who might pull together the disparate parts of America into one unified voice was based on his understanding that America lacked a literary tradition that could afford the country true cultural heritage. His 1937 Harvard address, ‘The American Scholar’, articulated his contention that Americans had ‘listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe’2 and must cultivate a national cultural independency based on lived experience: ‘We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.’3 When Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, Emerson wrote to Whitman, congratulating him ‘at the beginning of a great career’, and celebrating ‘the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed’.4

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Despite Whitman’s vernacular poetry, as well as the endeavours of many other writers to write a specifically American literature, among them Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, by the end of the nineteenth century the criteria for a ‘native’ American literature were still undefined.5 In 1913, Harvard graduate John Macy wrote that he knew of no critic who could give a good account of ‘ “American” characteristics’, and defined the majority of American literature as ‘English literature made in this country’.6 Even Whitman, whom Macy described as ‘pugnaciously American’, was deemed ‘universal’ due to the ‘cosmic’ nature of his ‘sympathies’ and ‘vision’.7 Macy’s book relaunched the search for a specific American literary ‘spirit’ at the same time as it identified such a spirit as ‘myth’.8 In 1915, Van Wyck Brooks published what Kazin named the ‘significant critical testament’ of his generation: America’s Coming-of-Age, an extended essay on the state of American culture that was both ‘an indictment of American life’ and ‘a call to arms’.9 Lamenting the lack of ‘a certain density, weight, and richness’ that might provide historical ground upon which to build a new national literary consciousness,10 Brooks saw the ‘American mind’ as ‘deadlocked’ between ‘stark utility’ and ‘desiccated culture’, the ‘lowbrow’ acquisition of material wealth, and the ‘highbrow’ elitism of intellectual isolationism.11 Brooks selected Whitman as hero for the new age; the only literary figure belonging to a ‘middle tradition’ that ‘precipitated the American character’ by combining theory and action.12 Yet, imagining America as ‘a vast Sargasso Sea’ in which ‘all manner of living things [were] . . . rising and falling, floating and merging,’ Brooks saw America as ‘unchecked, uncharted, unorganised’. Whilst American society remained in this ‘pre-Darwinian state’, claimed Brooks, it would not be ‘worked into an organism’. Hope and possibility resided in the image of America as ‘a welter of life’ with ‘vitality like that of the first chaos’,13 an argument that Brooks developed in his essay ‘On Creating a Usable Past’ (The Dial, 1918), which asserted that the spiritual welfare of America depended wholly upon ‘the fate of its creative minds’.14 Contending that America was disabled by its inability to conjoin practical and creative life, Brooks argued that the country had ‘no cultural economy, no abiding sense of spiritual values, no body of critical understanding’: The present is a void, and the American writer floats in that void because the past that survives in the common mind of the present is a past without living value. But is this the only possible past? If we need another past so badly, is it inconceivable that we might discover one, that we might even invent one?15

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According to Brooks, the way to fill the ‘void’ of the present was to retrieve history by a process of creation and selection. A national tradition must be chosen, and Brooks urged his readers to ‘elect to remember’, directing them towards historical reinterpretation in order to construct national identity.16 A year later, Yale graduate Waldo Frank, a colleague of Brooks on The Seven Arts magazine, published Our America.17 Sympathising with Brooks, Frank noted the importance of creating a usable past: In this infancy of our adventure, America is a mystic word. We go forth all to seek America. And in the seeking we create her. In the quality of our search shall be the nature of the America that we create.18

Frank added an element of mysticism to the argument, largely by applying his Jewish faith to literary and political criticism. Indeed, Frank drew a parallel between Whitman and Moses as two ‘heroic’ pioneers who ‘blazed’ a path through the ‘wilderness’.19 Asserting that both men ‘talked with God’ – Whitman ‘standing upon America as Moses upon Sinai’ – Frank reasoned that ‘America therefore is a holy land.’ By electing Whitman as his cultural ancestor, Frank believed himself to be doubly ‘chosen’: his Jewishness located him among the chosen people led by Moses out of slavery; his American citizenship awarded him another blessing for, since Whitman, like Moses, ‘was chosen’ by God, ‘his was a chosen people’.20 Included in Frank’s own canon of representative men were Brooks, who, according to Frank, was ‘organising an American tradition’,21 and Albert Pinkham Ryder, the visionary painter of the nineteenth century who, by grace of his ‘will to recapture the reality of life’, renounced the Puritan principles of denial that ossify it.22 At the close of the book, Frank delivered a message of radical cultural change by compounding a call for creativity with an imaginative re-visioning of the American past, and a religious, mystical appreciation of one’s place in America: ‘We must begin to generate within ourselves the energy which is the love of life. For that energy, to whatever form the mind consign it, is religious. Its act is creation. And in a dying world, creation is revolution.’23 In 1925, poet and critic William Carlos Williams published In the American Grain a book-length exercise in recovering an American usable past that included original documents such as journal entries, court hearings, declarations and addresses combined with Williams’s own poetic imaginings. Believing in the necessity of bringing the past into the present, Williams posited that the past is ‘our greatest well of inspiration, our greatest hope of freedom’.24 His book represents an

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integrated and creative reconstruction of American history, described by Horace Gregory in 1939 as ‘proof’ of America’s ‘living heritage’.25 Several other intellectual endeavours to define the American mind were made, including associate editor of The Dial Lewis Mumford’s The Golden Day: A Study in American Literature and Culture (1926) and James Harvey Robinson’s The Mind in the Making (1921). Both built on the arguments first put forward by Brooks. During the 1920s, concerns regarding the direction of American culture began to filter from intellectual, literary circles into the academy. Vernon Louis Parrington’s three-volume Main Currents in American Thought (1927) represented the convergence of academic and nonacademic approaches to the project of building a national cultural heritage.26 Gene Wise is one of several American Studies scholars to view Parrington’s achievement as a ‘monumental accomplishment’ in the Emersonian vein,27 submitting him as the ‘intellectual founder of American Studies’: an American mind who constructed an American past, ‘usable also in offering a way to create order and direction from masses of disparate materials on the whole history of American experience’.28 In 1929, Frank’s The Re-Discovery of America represented a further combination of mysticism, lament and hope. Arguing that America was a ‘mystic structure’ whose internal relations between science and religion were ‘nothing but the tension between the parts and the whole’,29 Frank claimed the transcendentalists joined ‘the Jews of the ancient western peoples’ in having ‘realised their sense of self as a focus of the Whole’.30 Concepts of ‘American beginnings’ and rebirth play a crucial role in the book, strengthened by Frank’s belief that ‘a tradition lives only when each succeeding generation recreates it’.31 Believing that ‘any creative act – and any life – is the attempt to form some kind of whole from chaos,’ Frank asserted that ‘this whole . . . is of the imagination’.32 Assessing the advances made in American culture studies over the preceding ten years, Frank noted that ‘the critical effort’ in America had ‘gone towards a beginning. It had begun to reconstruct our past, to make it usable.’33 For Frank, the apotheosis of such ‘effort’ was Williams’s In the American Grain, which, although still awaiting ‘the honour it deserve[d]’ was, he noted, the work of an author ‘more ambitious than Brooks’ at ‘trying to forge a new aesthetic image of our past’.34 The next two decades saw significant advances in American Studies in the academy. In 1929, American Literature journal was founded, and conventions on the subject began, sponsored by the Modern Literature Association (MLA).35 During the thirties, American Studies courses began at Yale and Harvard, and in 1939, Harvard’s Perry Miller

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published the first volume of The New England Mind, a study of the literary, spiritual and cultural origins of American life. In 1941, F. O. Matthiessen’s seminal American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman was published.36 In the book’s preface, Matthiessen cites Parrington, Brooks, Lewis Mumford and Miller as influences, asserting that he intends not to add to their ‘partial portraits’, but rather to extend their scholarship through ‘analysis and synthesis’.37 Matthiessen employs Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s idea of poetic imagination, and T. S. Eliot’s concept of ‘tradition’ as ‘the presentness of the past’ to support his claim that the 1800s produced a welter of American literature unrivalled in ‘imaginative vitality’.38 A large portion of Matthiessen’s critique centres on the figure of Melville, whose poetic prose he saw as an example of Coleridge’s principle of the imaginative reconciliation of opposites. His attention to Melville may be viewed as a scholarly participation in a ‘Melville revival’ that lasted over three decades. As American Studies gradually grew in universities, scholarly and critical attention to the formative history of the American mind was precipitated by the Depression during the 1930s and energised by America’s entry in the Second World War in the early 1940s. As Kazin observed, American writing, especially during a time of ‘fumbling recovery and tension and war’, was governed by a profound need to ‘recover America as an idea – and perhaps only thus to build a better society in the shell of the old’.39 Yet whilst this pro-active creation of a literary tradition, coupled with the search for a mythic and conceptual cultural ideal, forged together American values of transcendentalism and pragmatism,40 it also had its origins in a certain containment culture that valued exceptionalism and white, Protestant heteronormativity. Numerous scholars, Wise and Eric Cheyfitz among them, have noted that the original call of Brooks and Frank ‘for a national literary history . . . within an international, or comparative context’ eventually served a specifically national exceptionalism within the United States.41 Michael Denning has argued that the absence of any real political criticism within American Studies during the 1930s into the 1960s is because the ‘Americanism’ of the time was itself ‘a system of ideas, a solemn assent to a handful of final notions – democracy, liberty, opportunity’.42 As such, Americanism took the place of Socialism, and ‘the peculiar formation of “American Studies” . . . served as a substitute for a developed Marxist culture’.43 Elaine Taylor May asserts that the ideology informing American Studies shifted from ‘Karl Marxism’ in the 1930s and early 1940s, to ‘Leo Marxism’ in the 1950s, when the Cold War encouraged American exceptionalism in both politics and letters.44 Donald Pease notes that

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‘the field of American Studies promoted U.S. exceptionalism as the basis for the institutionalisation of the American Studies Association in 1950’.45 The Association desired a disciplinary method that would be equal to the notion of ‘American culture conceived as a unified whole’.46

The Melville revival Brooks had written that the creation of a ‘usable past’ might begin with the publication of the biography of Herman Melville.47 In 1921, Raymond Weaver, a literature professor at Columbia University, published Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic, thereby inaugurating the ‘Melville revival’.48 Weaver’s achievement in directing critical and intellectual attention to Melville should not be underestimated: he edited over sixteen collections of Melville’s works between 1924 and 1935.49 Several other investigations into American cultural identity featured analyses of Melville, most notably D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature (1922) and Lewis Mumford’s The Golden Day (1926). In 1929, Mumford wrote the theoretical biography, Herman Melville, and in 1938, Princeton academic Willard Thorp published the anthology Representative Selections of Herman Melville. Several texts investigating Melville’s life and work followed, including an unpublished biography by Harvard psychology professor Henry Murray, whose Jungian analyses of Melville influenced Mumford.50 Other notable Melville monographs of the period include William Ellery Sedgewick’s Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind (1944), Richard Chase’s Herman Melville: A Critical Study (1949) and Newton Arvin’s Herman Melville (1950). The reason for Melville’s revival was arguably due to a confluence of cultural and social needs and anxieties. Melville’s sea-tales, laced with autobiography and the observations of the participant author, provided a personalised narrative of adventure that imposed form upon experience. Spanning two world wars and the Great Depression, the ‘Melville Revival’ took shape during an extended period of cultural and economic national crisis. Many of Melville’s works represented a fusion of fiction and fact, and as such, spoke to those Americans who were, as Wise observed, driven by the need ‘to explain things, to make one’s own experience, and the world around that experience, comprehensible’.51 Additionally, in an era that saw the advent and development of documentary in the States, Melville’s novels were examples of what might be called proto-documentary writing. The combined creative story and encyclopaedic explanation of shipping and whaling experience in

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Moby-Dick, for example, found a modern correlative in documentary travel narratives, and adhered closely to John Grierson’s definition of documentary as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’.52 Mumford wrote in 1929 that, far from interrupting the forward flow of the narrative, the cetological chapters in Moby-Dick are ‘profoundly part of it’: ‘the universal, symbolic aspect of the story, and its direct, scientific, practical aspect move in and out like the threads of a complicated pattern: one modifies the other, and is by turns figure and background’.53 Here was an example of what Brooks had searched for at the beginning of the twentieth century: the ‘practical’ and the ‘symbolic’ aspects of life merged into one, inclusive approach to reality. The style and structure of Melville’s novels helped to inform poet and literary critic Charles Olson’s metaphysical critique Call Me Ishmael (1947), in which reports of whaling disasters and excerpts from letters are interspersed with Olson’s own analysis. Jay Leyda’s The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819–1891 (1951) consists of a two-volume catalogue of letters, certificates, diary entries, reviews, chronological notes, photographs and other biographical documents. Constructing Melville’s identity by collating the proof of his past, Leyda perhaps came closest to answering Brooks’s appeal to create a usable past in order to infuse the present with ‘living value’, claiming he had tried ‘to give each reader the opportunity to be his own biographer of Herman Melville, by providing him with the largest possible quantity of materials to build his own approach to the complex figure’.54 Leyda was an American avant-garde filmmaker and historian, one-time assistant to the photographer and filmmaker Ralph Steiner, and acquaintance of Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White. Taught by Eisenstein at the Moscow State Film School, Leyda went on location with Dziga Vertov and Joris Ivens in 1932, and became the assistant curator of MoMA’s new film department in 1936.55 The diversity of Leyda’s work, which includes a translation of Eisenstein’s The Film Sense, represents the interdisciplinary appeal of American Studies. According to Leyda, The Melville Log was born out of Eisenstein’s wish to make a film of Moby-Dick; although the film was never made, the vast amount of material Leyda had accumulated for his mentor was put to good use in a book that is distinctly documentary in tone, method and style.56 Another reason for the revival rested on the perception of Melville and his works as emblems of American character. Lawrence saw the Pequod as ‘the ship of the soul of an American’57; Mumford saw MobyDick as ‘an epic of the human spirit’. According to Mumford, one might read Moby-Dick and ‘discover an equivalent of its symbolism in one’s own consciousness’.58 The relevance of Melville’s symbolism to

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modern American experience was explored in detail by Matthiessen, who saw Melville’s portrayal of the Pequod as America writ small, its crew a racially and ethnically diverse assemblage of persons correlative to America’s multi-ethnic population. In 1953, Trinidad-born C. L. R. James extended this theme in a transnational critique. Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In was written while James was under detention on Ellis Island for ‘passport violations’, and his work heralded a new approach to American Studies, examining America’s place in the Atlantic and Pacific world. The racial composite of the Pequod’s crew represented the ‘melting pot’ of modern America, and provoked an interest in the ‘primitivism’ of the original ‘American mind’.59 Subsequent assessments of native American identity focused on both the noble savagery of the American Indian and the heroism of the pioneers. Yale professor R. W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam (1955), for example, attempted to outline the origins of ‘a native American mythology’ in which ‘the authentic American [is] a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities, poised at the start of a new history’.60 Lewis classified Melville as the ‘apotheosis of Adam’.61 Both Lewis’s and James’s critiques built upon the ‘myth and symbol’ method of American Studies, first fully elucidated by Henry Nash Smith in Virgin Land (1950). Smith used the term ‘to designate . . . an intellectual construction that fuses concept and emotion into an image’.62 During the 1950s and 1960s, American Studies flourished, strengthened and synthesised by this conceptual trend. Leo Marx, who had been taught by Matthiessen and Miller at Harvard, and who had explored the tension between the pastoral ideal and the progressive quest for power in American literature in The Machine in the Garden in 1964, described in 1969 how Melville’s Moby-Dick remained the best example of literary evidence of a ‘usable past’. Marx’s theory of the evidential significance of a text rested heavily on what he termed its ‘inherent capacity . . . to generate the emotional and intellectual responses of its readers’.63 Classifying American Studies as ‘unscientific’ and ‘humanistic’, Marx drew upon Mumford’s definition of the ‘generalist’ to explain the capacity of the American Studies scholar: ‘one whose special office is “that of bringing together widely separated fields” ’.64

American Studies and documentary Documentary and American Studies should not be considered as separate movements, not least because both took definable shape in the 1930s as

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interdisciplinary approaches to the recording and comprehension of American experience. Denning posits that American Studies ‘emerged as both a continuation of and a response to the popular “discovery” and “invention” of “American culture” in the 1930s’,65 best demonstrated by the decade’s documentary impulse, and George Lipsitz has written that ‘the creation of American Studies had everything to do with the cultural and intellectual spaces opened up’ by documentary endeavours of the 1930s, especially those supported by New Deal Works Progress projects.66 A founding principle of American Studies was the belief that the high literature of the past was a faithful testament to past realities. Leo Marx defended the stance of most scholars in the field regarding the preference for the study of Melville’s Moby-Dick (which at the time of publication in 1851 went practically unsold) over the ‘historical documents’ of the period which expressed ‘public opinion’, such as popular novels.67 Marx’s reasoning relied on the confluence of the ‘document’ of the past with the creative imagination of the present; the ‘compelling truth value’ of Moby-Dick arose from its ‘continuing’ capacity ‘to provide us with satisfaction, and to shape our experience of past and present’. According to Marx, Moby-Dick’s longevity awarded it status as a true document of American letters, which kept the past ‘effectively alive in the present. The importance we attach to the novel arises, in the last analysis, from the fact that today it is read, studied and incorporated in our sense of ourselves and of our world, past and present.’68 However, although American Studies began as an investigation into ‘high cultural history’, from the late 1930s onwards it incorporated the study of mass culture due to contemporary documentary developments in the examination of all elements of the American folk. Kazin highlighted the documentary shift in focus from ‘reporting the ravages of the Depression’ to the inventory of ‘the national inheritance’, and Richard Sklar believes it was this influence which allowed American Studies to grow and prosper after 1945.69 The vast catalogues of Americana in the form of folk songs, tales, art works and crafts compiled during the thirties and forties helped to demonstrate that the history of American culture was not solely the history of intellectual productions.70 As Sklar has observed, ‘the significant task of documenting and interpreting the nature of cultural contexts is one which American Studies practitioners have traditionally claimed as their central purpose’.71 The renewed interest in Whitman and Melville as representatives of a usable past during the first half of the twentieth century corresponded to the two writers’ own methods of recording American experience. ‘For the first time,’ wrote Frank at the close of the 1920s, ‘the aesthetic and

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the national . . . are joined dynamically in American literary action.’72 The confluence of stark, factual documentation and psychological narrative in Melville, and the accumulative, poetic catalogues of visual experience in Whitman helped render them subjects of an American past to be studied and emulated both within and outside the academy.

Rukeyser and American Studies The evolution of American Studies coincides chronologically with the span of Rukeyser’s life. Born in 1913, Rukeyser was on the staff of Vassar College’s Student Review in 1930, and by 1935 had published her first book of poetry.73 As Jane Cooper has astutely noted, Rukeyser ‘came of age during the thirties . . . a period of the most intense interest in all things American’. As a result, her work must be considered in context with ‘John Dos Passos’ trilogy U.S.A., James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with criticism by Van Wyck Brooks and F. O. Matthiessen, photographs and documentaries by the great black-andwhite photographers of the Depression years’.74 While Cooper helpfully highlights the contextual and intertextual nature of Rukeyser’s work, she overlooks how closely Rukeyser’s interests either followed or prefigured shifting concerns within the American Studies movement, and writes that, while historians and scholars ‘were engaged in radical reassessments of the American legacy’, Rukeyser was ‘engaged in recovering her own usable past’.75 However, Rukeyser’s involvement in the movement for many reasons represents what I have noted to be Frank’s literary ideal of the national and the aesthetic combined, and despite the clear relation of Rukeyser’s poetics to the cultural criticism of Brooks, Frank and Mumford, the subject has received very little critical attention.76 Rukeyser’s papers contain a great deal of her notes and quotations from Brooks’s writing: in particular, The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947), which she appears to have taught in conjunction with volume three of Parrington’s Main Currents at New York University in 1956.77 Rukeyser acknowledges her debt to ‘the writings of Frank’ in her note to the first ‘Lives’ series, and it is probable, given the similarity in tone between her own biographical portrait of Ryder and that of Frank’s in Our America, that Rukeyser was influenced by his celebration of the painter. Additionally, the Jewish, mystical element in Frank’s appraisals of American experience, together with his emphasis on selecting an ancestry, locate his writing in a tradition characterised best by the philosophy of Buber, which is analysed in relation to Rukeyser’s poetics in the preceding chapters.

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Rukeyser also made notes from Mumford’s Herman Melville in preparation for her own work on the subject, corresponding with Mumford through the fifties and sixties. A letter that she wrote to him in 1965 states her high regard for his cultural values, congratulating him on speaking ‘for things central to the writing I hope for our time’.78 Mumford also admired Rukeyser’s work, writing to her in 1963 that he had finally got around to reading Willard Gibbs, recommended to him in 1943, and had found it ‘one of the most important books of our epoch’.79 Among Rukeyser’s papers are numerous notes, page references and quotations from Matthiessen’s American Renaissance, which she also lists in her acknowledgements in The Life of Poetry, along with Eliot’s Essays, Ancient and Modern.80 Matthiessen’s defence of her in the ‘Rukeyser Imbroglio’, coupled with his letters to her offering encouragement and praise for Gibbs and the poem ‘The Soul and Body of John Brown’, highlight his understanding and support of her writing as working for the same values and beliefs as his own.81 Upon his suicide, Rukeyser wrote a moving elegy entitled ‘F. O. M.’, in which she imagined Matthiessen a ‘living face’ among the ‘lives’ she had evoked in her first untitled biographical poem in A Turning Wind.82 Rukeyser’s engagement in promoting American nationalism in accordance with the principles and values of American Studies is perhaps best illustrated by a proposal for a series of films under the heading Our Native Land. Dated July 1953, the proposal is labelled by her as either ‘rejected’ or never submitted.83 The idea was pitched at a new generation; Rukeyser intended the films to be ‘about America for young people’ due to ‘a tendency among our young people to feel disconnected from our past sources of strength’. Positing that young people wish to know how America can be ‘related to their own lives’, Rukeyser suggested the films ‘relate our lives to our tradition’ by picturing ‘images of growth’ in the ‘American landscapes’. These scenes were to be juxtaposed with ‘testaments of individuals from widely different [American] origins’, pictured in ‘the wild American country’, ‘ranch life’ and ‘industrial scenes’. The soundtrack was to be a fusion of ‘folksongs’ with ‘the words of Whitman and Emerson’ in an effort to ‘make and preserve our heritage’ through the balance of image, word and music. As in the majority of her work, Rukeyser wished the ‘inner form’ of the films to be ‘set in the deep connections, by our affirmation of the receptivity to life, as action, in America’.84 Rukeyser’s published work also engaged with aesthetic and ideological concerns commensurate with American Studies. As discussed, Rukeyser’s intention for her biography Gibbs was to establish for the scientist ‘a

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unique place in the history of the imagination, and particularly in the history of American culture’.85 By figuring Gibbs as ‘a parable of human freedom and a free attitude toward the gifts which the imagination makes’, Rukeyser opened to her reader the opportunity of inventing his / her own (American) tradition. According to Rukeyser, the ‘imagination’ of Gibbs ‘belongs to the stream of that great tradition from which free people are at liberty to choose their own ancestors’.86 Thus a substantial amount of the critical praise given to Gibbs upon its publication focused on the book’s position in the growing trend among intellectuals to recover American ancestry. The critic Bernard Jaffe commented that Gibbs was a book of cultural historicism ‘in the tradition of Parrington’s Main Currents of American Thought’, whilst Eunice Clark wrote that Gibbs was most effective as ‘mass biography’, a significant addition to volumes on the ‘revival of the life and mind of the 19th century’, and ‘left Van Wyck Brooks miles behind’.87 David Barber, also arguing that Rukeyser wrote in the ‘tradition . . . of Van Wyck Brooks’, has highlighted the striking similarity in terminology between Rukeyser’s Gibbs and Frank’s Virgin Spain (1926), a book which attempts to describe the people and ‘soul of a country’ in a fusion of travel writing, mysticism and history.88 Frank’s repeated phrase, ‘create the creative’, is utilised by Rukeyser at three separate points throughout Gibbs to support her message of the self-perpetuating power of imaginative process. As Alan Wald notes, Rukeyser’s adoption of a ‘semi-mystical politics’ is one reason why her critics find it difficult to identify her political stance. Wald argues that her politics were ‘inspired by a pre-Popular Front vision of militant anti-fascist and anti-capitalist collaboration by a range of radical tendencies she witnessed at the outset of the Spanish Civil War’.89 He quotes Rukeyser on her reluctance to define her poetics in terms of political policy and agenda: I believe in poetry. I believe that the life of people and the life of poetry must ultimately mean the same thing, in the different terms involved. I believe in the life of the spirit generally walking the earth, against war, against slavery, for the giving of all the processes and inventions and art and technique of living.90

Describing her politics simply as ‘Left’, Rukeyser wished to avoid stereotyping.91 However, several scholars have commented on her associations with Marxism and the Communist Party, despite her refusal to become a member of the Party for fear of losing her creative autonomy.92 Wald has traced the development of Rukeyser’s political poetics, locating the origins of her affiliations with the literary Left at Vassar and her work for the college’s paper, Student Review, run by Communist

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student activists. Michael Thurston and Robert Shulman have both highlighted Rukeyser’s close associations with the Communist Party, and her involvement with Popular Front campaigns during the 1930s, exploring how her poetry of the time was influenced by its politics. Thurston notes that Rukeyser often attended the Party-funded organisation, the International Labor Defense (ILD), and that her poetry was often published in The Daily Worker.93 Shulman situates Rukeyser among the ‘Left avant-garde’ in that her writing ‘combined a vanguard critique of the middle class, a probing of relatively unexplored areas of American experience, and vital experiments in form and language, sometimes modernist, more often within the conventions of realism-naturalism’.94 However, Rukeyser’s ‘experiments’ and ‘probing’ of ‘American experience’ were driven by an ideology that combined Leftist politics, art, and perhaps most importantly, science. As Wald asserts, ‘Rukeyser’s optimism about revolutions in society was linked to the hopes and expectations arising from “revolutions” in physics and biology.’95 Her choice of the physicist Willard Gibbs as archetypal representative of American imaginative and creative tradition reflects this hope, and by underlining Gibbs’s affiliations with Herman Melville and Walt Whitman, she demonstrated her own political stance to involve an antifascist belief in the opening of diverse channels of communication, and in practical and imaginative progress.

Rukeyser, Whitman and Melville In the chapter of Gibbs entitled ‘Three Masters: Melville, Whitman, Gibbs’, Rukeyser notes the similarities in the three Americans’ creative approaches to the world, citing Matthiessen’s comment that the fact Melville and Whitman ‘never came into contact’ serves as testament to the enduring isolation of the artist in America.96 By arguing that Whitman expressed ‘the attitudes of science in poetry’, and Gibbs expressed poetic principles in science, Rukeyser attempts to enlarge the American canon of creative minds.97 In The Life of Poetry, she cites Whitman as the quintessential American ‘poet of possibility’.98 For Rukeyser, the strength of Whitman’s poetry derives from his struggle to unite the multitudinous ‘you’ of America with the contradictory ‘me’ of himself: ‘it is in the remaking of himself that Whitman speaks for the general conflict in our culture. For, in the poems, his discovery of himself is a discovery of America.’99 Like Brooks, Rukeyser regarded Whitman as a representative ancestral figure whose legacy needed to be fully retrieved and understood in order to build an American tradition.

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Several Rukeyser scholars have placed her in the Whitmanian tradition of the inclusive, democratic American poet, highlighting similarities in their poetic styles and sensibilities.100 However, very little critical attention has been given to Rukeyser’s affiliation with Melville, the importance of whose contribution to American letters Rukeyser considered equal to that of Whitman: ‘Melville is the poet of outrage of his century in America, Whitman is the poet of possibility; one cannot be repeated more than the other.’101 It is clear from Rukeyser’s published and unpublished work that she considered Melville’s prose and poetry to be of great importance, both to the reconstruction of an American cultural tradition and to her own artistic principles. During the 1940s, Rukeyser corresponded with her publisher, Doubleday, and literary agency, Curtis Brown Ltd, regarding her wish to edit a book club edition of a selection of Melville’s writings. Plans collapsed, as did Rukeyser’s hope to edit a ‘deluxe trade edition’ of Melville’s selected writings, but her preparatory notes for the projected publications indicate that she widely read both primary and secondary material, including Parrington, Chase, Thorp, Olson, Matthiessen and Mumford.102 Rukeyser continued to make notes, especially from Leyda’s The Melville Log,103 to inform lesson plans on Moby-Dick and Clarel and Whitman’s Specimen Days and Leaves of Grass during the fifties.104

Rukeyser and a usable tradition: ‘The Usable Truth’ In 1941, Rukeyser wrote an article for Poetry magazine entitled ‘The Usable Truth’, in which she bemoaned the American attitude to poetry in ‘education’ as something ‘to be memorised and stored . . . [but] not to be used’.105 In learning environments, strong emphasis was being placed on the use-value to modern life of written documents and historical artefacts.106 However, Rukeyser noted that, although a usable ‘tradition’ was being taught to a new generation, poetry was still considered a purely aesthetic art with no practical value: There is just this one learning, this one branch of your heritage, left. It is very precious, it is to be preserved – in fact, it preserves us, whole ages are given to us by its grace alone . . . This, of course, is poetry. In a utilitarian culture, this one knowledge is to be taught as being Not for Use.107

Rukeyser’s oratory tone places her article in the American tradition of public address perhaps best demonstrated by Emerson, and revived by Brooks at the beginning of the twentieth century. Between 29 October and 1 November 1940, Rukeyser gave a series of lectures at Vassar

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on ‘Communication and Poetry’, under the same title: ‘The Usable Truth’.108 These lectures were subsequently compiled and edited to produce the book, The Life of Poetry, in 1949, indicating that, during the 1940s, Rukeyser’s ideas concerning the communicative usefulness of poetry took shape, aided by the emerging discipline of American Studies, from whose lexicon Rukeyser appears to have borrowed significantly. Having admitted to the influence of Frank upon her writing two years before, Rukeyser appears to allude to his understanding of American heritage as part of an organic ‘whole’. Stressing that ‘whole ages are given to us’ by the ‘grace’ of ‘poetry alone’, Rukeyser constructs an extended metaphor wherein the lessons of past ages are written both on the leaves of poetry books and the fallen, compacted leaves of trees, which help to comprise the ground beneath the present generation’s feet. Rukeyser argues that the ‘earth of our learning’ is not the ‘dust ground out of rock’, but rather the ‘packed and leafdrift earth of centuries of falling lives, fallen under our feet, anonymous’.109 Her rhetoric recalls that of Brooks and Frank in their use of natural imagery to recover the imaginative minds of dead representative Americans; however, in her use of the words ‘fallen’, ‘lives’ and ‘anonymous’, Rukeyser employs a language that also situates her call to arms within the immediate crisis of international conflict. Throughout the article, Rukeyser develops the idea that poetry is a usable and vital part of American ‘heritage’ and ‘tradition’, ready to enter into a reciprocal relationship with the American public in which each side ‘preserves’ the life of the other. This type of preservation is the antithesis of archival storage, or academic isolation, whereby the document is deemed ‘Not for Use’; Rukeyser’s article sees poetry as utilisable ‘equipment’.110 Written on the brink of America’s entry into World War II, Rukeyser’s article is a defence of poetry’s use as a powerful energiser and weapon. Far from offering a method of escapism, Rukeyser promotes poetry and ‘the attitude of poetry’ as a ‘fierce’ and ‘vivid spirit’ ‘with which we can face these battles’.111 The reason for poetry’s use in moments of crisis is due to its enduring ‘attitude’ of creativity, and its ability to make ‘progress’ via connection and communication. Rukeyser asserts that poetry is ‘the usable truth’ of the nation; its ‘truth’ lies in its ‘communication . . . between human beings’, which has always been an American ‘tradition’.112 According to Rukeyser, ‘fear’ of poetry corresponds to ‘the form and content of fear’ characterising the ‘machines of fright’ which generate war, and whilst Rukeyser does not advocate war, she confronts its reality, offering an approach to human relations which draws on the lessons of an American ancestry, distilled in its poetry. The American ancestor whose lessons Rukeyser chiefly draws upon in ‘The Usable Truth’ is Melville. Her language is infused with patriotism

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and hope as she declares, ‘[w]e can remember all our pride now, all our truth – in Melville’s phrase, “the usable truth.” We in America breathe the air of possibility.’113 One year later, in Willard Gibbs, Rukeyser again referenced Melville’s phrase, revealing that it originated from a letter from Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne.114 Rukeyser provides a lengthy quotation from the correspondence, in which Melville expounds upon the term ‘the usable truth’ to mean ‘the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things as they strike the eye of the man who fears them not, though they do their worst to him’.115 In The Life of Poetry, under the subheading, ‘The Usable Truth’, Rukeyser again prints a quotation from Melville’s letter, listing ‘Letters of Herman Melville and Battle Pieces and Aspects of War’ in the acknowledgements.116 It is worth noting that Melville’s phrase, ‘the usable truth’, is probably a misquotation of ‘the visible truth’.117 The letter from which the term originates was written to Hawthorne in 1851, and transcribed by Hawthorne’s son Julian for publication in 1884. Scholarship on the matter dating from the mid-forties favours the interpretation, ‘the visible truth’, due to palaeographic examination, proof of Melville’s bad spelling, and Julian Hawthorne’s poor transcription techniques.118 Harrison Hayford, who first suggested the amendment in 1945, noted in 1959 that ‘no other phrase of Melville’s was singled out more often in critical works of the 1940s than “the usable truth.” ’119 Matthiessen used it in 1941 to address Melville’s ‘steady inspection of life’,120 and Sedgewick’s 1944 monograph on Melville also relied on the quotation to interpret his character and writing. In Davis and Gilman’s Letters, ‘the usable truth’ was changed to ‘the visible truth’, and all subsequent publications of the letters adhere to this amendment.121 Of course, Rukeyser’s interpretation and application of the phrase ‘the usable truth’ does not alter in the light of the scholarly controversy that later surrounded it. Indeed, for Rukeyser, whose poetics were infused with the documentary aesthetic of visibility as testament to actuality, ‘the visible truth’ served as a necessary component to usability and communication. By hoping to make the American public view poetry, and therefore each other, openly and connectively, Rukeyser wished to convey the message that ‘very closely, our lives are all implicated’ in the making and preserving of poetry, and the creation of a usable past.122

Rukeyser and a usable tradition: politics Rukeyser’s emphasis throughout the 1940s on poetry’s use-value reveals a pragmatic turn to her politics, and an engagement in a prevailing

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nationalism that documented and celebrated all areas of American experience. As discussed in Chapter 2, Rukeyser’s work at the OWI creating posters supporting the American war effort was guided by her belief that the usable and principal truth of the image–text combination she advocated was always communication. In ‘The Usable Truth’, Rukeyser writes of the American dead offering the living ‘lines of tradition, and emblems’.123 These ancestral ‘emblems’ stand in opposition to what Rukeyser ‘speak[s] in anger against’: ‘the emblem of pre-surrender, with treaties signed before battles themselves are fought’.124 In ‘Words and Images’ (see Chapter 2), Rukeyser wrote again of the importance of poetic emblems, of ‘symbols . . . simple and usable’ at times of conflict.125 Rukeyser’s resignation from the OWI was prompted by the Office’s support of what she saw as ‘emblems of pre-surrender’, images to ‘sell’ the war rather than generate meaning and belief, and a debasement of national attitudes and pride. Her resignation letter, released to the national press, stated her conviction that ‘posters, like poems, are vivid and concise emblems of the spirit,’ and that during a time of war, ‘words and images are weapons’.126 Raphael Allison had argued convincingly that, during the war, ‘Rukeyser underwent a distinct shift from a poet of the literary Left to an American pragmatist who aligned herself with the United States war effort and the political ideals of democratic pluralism.’127 Noting that Rukeyser read the works of the pragmatists William James, C. S. Pierce and John Dewey in preparation for her book Willard Gibbs, Allison posits that she interpreted Gibbs as ‘a promulgator of a pluralistic, democratic, cultural form of pragmatism’.128 In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser also refers to patterns of pragmatic thought, drawing parallels between the theories of Pierce regarding the triadic nature of artistic reception and her own relational poetics.129 The shifting, hybrid nature of Rukeyser’s politics renders specific Marxist, Pragmatist or Socialist critique of the body of her work very difficult. Although her writing contains elements of each of these political stances, Rukeyser never declared her allegiance to any political party. The overall ideology of her œuvre is not dictated by adherence to specific political strictures, but rather characterised by a governing belief in the possibilities for human communication and connection. Wald notes that the ‘genius of Rukeyser is that she refuses to fashion a definite choice, declining to break entirely with one aim or advance completely to another’.130 However, Rukeyser herself acknowledged the difficulties that such a position brought her: ‘I do not belong to any party or organisation, and that is why I say I am vulnerable from both sides.’131 Both Adrienne Rich and Michele Ware have commented that Rukeyser’s

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poetic value became a target due to her refusal of formal and aesthetic conventions.132 Rukeyser suffered her most virulent attack from the editors of Partisan Review in 1943 (discussed briefly in Chapter 3). Philip Rahv, William Phillips and Delmore Schwartz pilloried Rukeyser for what they saw as her political ‘backsliding’ and jumping on the ideological ‘bandwagon’ for the ‘purposes of literary aggrandisement’.133 The title of their article, ‘Grandeur and Misery of a Poster Girl’, refers to her ‘Words and Images’ piece, which the editors glibly read as an affirmation of her belief that ‘a poet with a poster can win the war’.134 Misunderstanding her pluralistic political attitude as an irresolute following of changing political trends and a commitment to none, the editors accused Rukeyser of shifting her position ‘from New Masses proletarianism to neo-Americanism’: according to them, her ‘citing Waldo Frank as a source of her ideas . . . exposed her proper affiliations’.135 However, the article fails to specify what the editors believed these ‘affiliations’ to be, and the eloquent responses in Rukeyser’s defence, including a letter from Matthiessen, revealed a public and critical appreciation for Rukeyser as a ‘radical democrat’.136 Although Rukeyser’s pluralism and emphasis on use-value appear to situate her thinking within pragmatic theory, her conjunction of pragmatism with documentary ideologies, plus her evident and frequent recourse to transcendental and individualistic Romanticism, extend her poetics to a multi-faceted philosophy more concerned with generating human contact and renewal than adhering to social or political paradigms. As M. L. Rosenthal noted in 1953, the sources of renewal lay for [Rukeyser] not merely in some overtly plausible social program but in the touching of certain kinds of courage within oneself, certain potentials of will and imagination which could, despite the apparent subjectivity of the whole procedure, bring one directly into the sense of reality – provide an epiphany of the flesh and thereby a grasp of the meaning of wholeness.137

Rosenthal’s astute reading of Rukeyser’s poetics highlights the importance she attached to allowing her reader / witness an immediate experience of (American) reality. The documentary methods and aesthetics that she employed in order to retrieve and report American history and bring it into the present represent another aspect of this governing ethos to her work. The American ancestor whom Rukeyser most wished to bring ‘directly into the sense of reality’ was arguably Melville. The poem ‘Ryder’ is the earliest reference to Melville in Rukeyser’s published works, and

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represents an important point of confluence between elements of a usable American tradition, documentary aesthetics and methods, and the poet’s belief in the communicative influence of past lives. As such, ‘Ryder’ is perhaps the best example of how Rukeyser blends American Studies concerns with documentary ideologies and techniques.

‘Ryder’ ‘Ryder’, the second biographical poem in the ‘Lives’ section of A Turning Wind, has hitherto been given very little critical attention. Kertesz is the only scholar to have examined the poem in any detail, and her critique centres on Rukeyser’s ekphrastic evocation of Ryder’s canvases, and the appeal of Ryder’s rejection of ‘dead formalism’ to Rukeyser’s progressive poetics.138 Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917) was a visionary painter, whose subject was primarily the fierce, moon-lit seascapes that characterised his New England home. In a prefatory note, Rukeyser lists her among sources the writings of Paul Rosenfeld.139 Rosenfeld’s Port of New York (1924), in which are compiled fourteen essays on biographical subjects including Van Wyck Brooks and William Carlos Williams, seems to have been a particular influence on Rukeyser in terms of creative and critical intention. Rosenfeld’s project was heavily influenced by the ‘cultural myth’ that Brooks and Frank had first created in their psychological–historical interpretation of America,140 and the book was intended to comprise a composite portrait of ‘American moderns’ that might lead to ‘the discovery of the “new” America’.141 Rukeyser borrowed significantly from Rosenfeld’s essay on Ryder, at times lifting entire phrases, at others utilising motifs and ideas. Citing that Ryder was a ‘New Englander, American, inheritor of pioneer blood’, Rosenfeld argued that Ryder’s paintings represented ‘the first deep expression of American life in the medium of paint’.142 Likewise, in the poem, Rukeyser labels Ryder as a man who embodied the ‘irresponsible pioneer’.143 It is likely that Rukeyser found in Rosenfeld’s writing a sensitivity to the poetry in Ryder’s life and art that corresponded closely to her own understanding of the meaning and use-value of poetry. Rosenfeld wrote of Ryder’s canvases: In us, too, in the moment of perception, the Ryders create a sum. The realm of feeling into which they initiate us brings to a close a long cycle of wandering . . . there comes something full of what lies between us and American life . . . to be an American and to have shared in the painful western adventure becomes a wonderful thing.144

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Rosenfeld’s belief that ‘in the moment of perception, the Ryders create a sum’ of imagination and experience is echoed in Rukeyser’s emphasis on the visuality of Ryder’s life and work, and her repeated allusion to the ‘assemblages’ of waters and distinctive currents of thought that punctuate his physical and psychological environment. The poem begins: Call himself unbegun, for the sea made him; assemblages of waters gave him his color. But not the sea; coast-line, coast-water, rising sfumato from smokeholes of the sea, pitching onto the black rock of the ocean-edge. But not the coast-line; the Atlantic coast, flinging him headlong from its rigors into his art.145

Kertesz notes that ‘the first stanza’s long lines have the movement of the sea, which was the chief influence on Ryder’.146 The rhythmic swell of the sea, ‘rising . . . pitching . . . flinging’, carries the reader to the place of Ryder’s art, which Rukeyser would have known from her research was New Bedford, Massachusetts, a busy whaling town on the east coast. By figuring Ryder as ‘the Atlantic coast’ itself, Rukeyser suggests Ryder as the starting point of American cultural tradition, and the swirling waters that gather at ‘the ocean-edge’ serve as symbol of the movement of his thoughts and experience. Ryder’s status at the start of the poem as ‘unbegun’ is similar to the supposed state of America before the arrival of the first European settlers. Rukeyser’s reader / witness approaches Ryder at the point of his conception by the poet as an American ancestor, and as such, he is figured as a ‘Great salt-swept boldface captain, big-boned New Englander’. Echoing Rosenfeld, Rukeyser imagines Ryder ‘drowning deep / among the mysteries of the painful western adventure’. His passage to the New World is imagined as an experience close to death, as he arrives at the coast ‘drowning’ and ‘circling / in unappeased circles’,147 and the repetition of ‘tempests’, ‘lightning’ and ‘whirlpools’ throughout the poem helps to construct a pervading theme of the cruelty of untameable nature. However, Rukeyser is able to highlight the ‘terrible foreboding’ aspect of Ryder’s canvases by setting it in opposition to the themes of life and birth that she recognises as also present in his works. The perpetual presence of the sea in the poem constitutes both a threat to human safety and a reminder of the first passage to the new world; a symbol of beginning that both Ryder and Rukeyser utilise in their work. Hence, Ryder is the ‘irresponsible pioneer’,148 embracing the destruction that the ocean’s contact with the land and those who dwell upon it might bring, yet holding simultaneously the ‘mind’ of America within his own poetic and artistic sensibility:

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Impervious, first of all to paint the tragic landscape that breeds us here, the deep life, the terrible foreboding whose soil is in our mind, the imagination of this geography.149

Rukeyser connects Ryder with America both geographically and genealogically, at the same moment as she connects the soil of America with the collective imagination of its people. Her reference to the idea of an American ‘mind’ further situates ‘Ryder’ within the American Studies project to define the same. Additionally, by referencing the Atlantic Ocean and coast throughout the poem, Rukeyser arguably responds to Brooks’s image of America as a ‘vast Sargasso sea’ in which a ‘welter of life’ was ‘drifting’ without direction. Painting both ‘the tragic landscape’ and the ocean, Ryder was able to translate visual experience into art; his canvases are, for Rukeyser, ‘emblems’ of usable truth: ‘Ryder, emblematist, / divorced from the arts, believing in art alone, / master of meaning’.150 As I have previously argued, circular symbols and spirals constitute important emblems of origin and growth throughout Rukeyser’s entire œuvre. They feature prominently in ‘Ryder’, in the mixing ‘waters’ by the shoreline; the ‘thunder revolving’ in Ryder’s mind; ‘the moon stark in the sky as a centre of whirlpool’; and ‘his head that was moon the centre of the storm’.151 Cyclical patterns of death and renewal are also present in Rukeyser’s evocation of one of Ryder’s most famous pieces, ‘Death on a Pale Horse’, in the lines, ‘Ryder, whose racecourse with its big horse Death / runs round the brain’.152 As Ryder moves away from what Rukeyser terms ‘formal painting’ to ‘mystic reconciliations’ (we remember Frank’s assertion that ‘America is a mystic word’), he feels ‘the world enlarge / and never complete itself’.153 The form and motion of Ryder’s world – a world all Americans have inherited – is spiral; it expands as it comes full circle, allowing a new perspective on what has gone before. For Rukeyser’s Ryder, ‘the usable truth’ begins in a ‘moment of perception’, or, as Rukeyser later termed it, ‘a moment of proof,’ that leads to the dual working of imagination and memory.154 Under ‘The Usable Truth’ section of The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser asserts that ‘art and nature are imitations, not of each other, but of the same third thing – both images of the real, the spectral and vivid reality that employs all means’. When this reality is spoken through poetry, a repressed need for both the tradition and the ‘immediacy’ of meaning is addressed, for ‘we wish to be told, in the most memorable way, what we have been meaning all along’.155 This ‘ritual moment, a moment of proof’, begins with visual awareness, as in ‘Ryder’:

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He believes with his eye, he lives in the foreboding empty tempests of the mind, thunder revolving among his blackest noons; remembers voyages to fabulous harbours whose event was sea.156

Rukeyser again seems to rely heavily on Rosenfeld here, who had stressed Ryder’s capacity to retain and ‘work from the image in the brain’, rather than in situ.157 However, Rukeyser’s choice of the word ‘believes’ allows Ryder an understanding of truth that correlates with her idea of poetic communication. By re-visioning Ryder’s own visuality, Rukeyser identifies the man and his art as both usable and visible truth. Ryder is thus located in the past and the present simultaneously, and the poem becomes an injunction to follow Ryder’s example of believing by looking, rather than of looking to believe. This utilisation of visible truth retained in the memory aligns Ryder with Melville for Rukeyser. Importantly, Rukeyser’s unpublished notes suggest that she intended ‘Melville to be illustrated by Ryder’ in the poem.158

Melville and ‘Ryder’ Allusion to Melville arguably occurs in the first line, ‘Call himself unbegun,’ recalling the famous opening injunction of Moby-Dick: ‘Call me Ishmael.’159 Rukeyser’s early depiction of Ryder as a man ‘made’ by, and involuntarily drawn to, the sea, recalls Ishmael’s initial confession to a desperate need to go to sea whenever he is oppressed by the ‘civilised’ strictures of American life. By beginning her poem in such a way, Rukeyser establishes Ryder as a man shaped by the sea and by the life of a fellow American; it is thus Melville who is established before Ryder as one of the ‘many-born’ who charge ‘our latest moment with their wave’.160 Rukeyser’s opening line is equally striking for the fact that it appears to begin with an imperative that is followed by a third person reflexive pronoun. Must we, as cultural descendants of Ryder, then call him ‘unbegun’? Or must we understand that this is how the Ryder of the poem considers himself? The character of Ishmael in Moby-Dick likewise presents several problems of identification. He at times serves as a mouthpiece for Melville’s own philosophical musings, and his role as first-person narrator creates an additional authorial autobiographical element, especially when we consider that Melville’s own experiences on a whaling ship informed the novel.161 By instructing his audience to ‘call’ him Ishmael, the narrator of Moby-Dick establishes an unstable dynamic between himself,

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his story and his audience in the sense that beneath the imperative is the implication that ‘Ishmael’ is an assumed name. At the outset of the tale, the character of Ishmael introduces a dialectic of truth and possibility, which relies partly on the giving and assuming of names and purpose.162 By poetically re-visioning Ishmael’s injunction, Rukeyser transfigures ‘me’ into ‘himself’ and ‘Ishmael’ into ‘unbegun’, thus opening several dialogues between Melville, Ryder, their works and their ‘witnesses’ at the outset of the poem. Persons are both fused and confused; Rukeyser allows the reader / witness identification with Ryder at the same time as she allows Ryder identification with the sea, yet in the next line she withdraws from her position of certainty: ‘But not the sea; coast-line, coast-water. . .’. In lines that surge forward and retreat like ocean waves, Rukeyser reimagines Ryder as a symbolic figure of American heritage: the product of a coming together of opposites, the American land and the specifically ‘Atlantic’ sea that breaks against it.163 Rukeyser describes New Bedford, where Melville also lived a large portion of his life, as a meeting-place of the opposites of good and evil, Whose whaling port acknowledges the fearful content of evil and the swift-lit blessed light, Melville’s ‘latent horror of life’ in the whale water that Ryder, whose racecourse with its big horse Death runs round the brain, knew.164

By linking the swirl of ocean water in the ‘whaling port’ with the unending galloping of the figure of Death on a circular racecourse, Rukeyser compounds the art and biographies of Melville and Ryder, with obvious references to Moby-Dick and Ryder’s well-known painting. That both men knew ‘the latent horror of life’ is clear to Rukeyser from the evidential significance of their art. The phrase is a misquotation from Chapter 38 of Moby-Dick, in which life’s ‘latent horror’ becomes obvious to Starbuck as he stands in reverie on the deck at dusk, and at last understands through solitary contemplation the duality of the sea in terms of the illusory calm of its appearance on the surface, and the violence that lurks beneath (‘Oh life! ’tis now that I feel the latent horror in thee!’).165 By imagining Ryder as physically and mystically part of the land and of the seascapes he paints, Rukeyser in turn paints him as a type of Ishmael / Melville: both an observer of and participant in American experience. Melville is alluded to at other points within ‘Ryder’. Recalling the dramatic contrast of Ryder’s storm paintings, Rukeyser describes the violence of Ryder’s method and effect:

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And at the last slashed poker through the cloth, a knife of lightning, white as space, leaping white! out of darkness! Out black night leaping, rider to flame.166

Rukeyser again quotes Moby-Dick, albeit without quotation marks. The source is Chapter 119, ‘The Candles’, in which the Pequod encounters a tempest and Ahab refuses to listen to the advice of Starbuck to turn the ship back to safety, out of the storm and away from the whale. Rukeyser once more connects Ryder with his contemporary Melville, linking their art through allusion to the shared material of canvas, or ‘cloth’, which comprises both the surface for Ryder’s paintings and the sails of the Pequod. Ryder slashes his canvas to create ‘a knife of lightning’ similar to that which tears the canvas sail of the Pequod in ‘The Candles’, opening the sky to a flash ‘as white as space’. However, it is with the character of Ahab, rather than Ishmael, that Rukeyser now identifies Ryder. Ahab’s Shakespearean soliloquy in the candlelight of the deck, amid ‘sudden, repeated flashes of lightning’, is an oath of opposition and resilience: The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and ache . . . Oh, oh! Yet blindfold will I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! . . . Now I do glory in my genealogy . . . Leap! Leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!167

Identified with Ahab, Ryder is further established by Rukeyser as a man in whom contraries unite: a man created by the natural forces surrounding him. As Ahab glories in his descent from fire and lightning, Ryder, Rukeyser reminds us, was ‘made’ by the sea. However, Ryder is also created by the ‘black night’, fused with images of life and death, as the obvious homophony of ‘rider’ / Ryder recalls the spectre of death on a racehorse. Again, Rukeyser highlights the cyclical pattern of death and rebirth, and the identification that she establishes in the poem between Ryder, Melville, Melville’s characters and the reader creates a passage that may lead to a clearer understanding of the world and one’s place in it. By refiguring Ryder in connection with Melville, Rukeyser forges a meeting between American ancestors, as well as between her reader / witness and the lives she portrays. A usable truth is generated from this personal encounter. Elsewhere, Rukeyser maintains that, ‘if darkness leaps from light; even so, there is redemption, and it lies in the sympathy with another human being’.168 ‘Ryder’ also represents a meeting-place of documentary and narrative,

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or the epic and the lyrical. Between stanzas of psychological lyricism in which Melville is referred to twice, Rukeyser inserts an inventory of the contents of Ryder’s room: wreckage of boxes, propped-leg, easel, couch, ashes, coal-keg, shells, bronzed tarnished coffee-pot, books, paints, piled broken furniture, varnish drippings, matches, cans, newspapers stacked up, plaster falling with a scurrying like mice, paper bannering from the walls, the stains, the path cleared to the stuffed chair crammed with poems, money, checks, poems, the bathtub filled with clothes – 169

The inclusion of this passage in the poem has a similar effect to that created by the inventories and utilitarian descriptions in Moby-Dick, as well as calling to mind Whitman’s cataloguing of the visual proofs of American experience. By exploring the physical dimensions of Ryder’s intimate environment, Rukeyser opens another perspective on his life and work, which again extends to include the life of Melville, and both Ryder’s and Melville’s comprehension of the objects of reality. In 1956, the American Studies scholar John Ward wrote of Melville’s ability to extend the metaphysical meaning of an object so that ‘there can be no end to the amount of and the kinds of relationships established’.170 Claiming that much of Melville’s writing had the style of a ‘documentary report’, Ward proposed that, in the seemingly ‘digressive passages’, Melville was attempting ‘to arrive at an understanding of spiritual reality’.171 Chapters involving inventories, detailed descriptions of procedures, tools, and analyses of the whale were set against ‘the spiritual and cosmic points of view of the main characters and of the novel itself’. The effect, according to Ward, was ‘a wide view of life’.172 In ‘Ryder’, the relevance of Rukeyser’s list of objects enlarges the poem in terms of relation and meaning. Rukeyser stacks object upon object, layering them in a manner that evokes not only the crowded confines of Ryder’s room, but also the methods of his art. In the next stanza, Ryder stands in his cluttered studio, ‘layering the paint on / stacking color on’ as he builds an image.173 Several items listed reappear later in the poem: the ‘ashes’ are mixed with the ‘paints’ and spread into the ‘blackness’ on the canvas that in turn recalls the Pequod’s torn sails; the ‘shells’ summon up fragments of ‘coast-line’ (although the ‘shells’ of Rukeyser’s original source are eggshells); the ‘path cleared’ to the ‘poems’ is forged also by Rukeyser’s own poem to a usable, ancestral life.174 Rukeyser evidently took her information for the documentary description of Ryder’s room from F. N. Price’s Ryder: A Study of Appreciation (1932), which she acknowledged as source.175 Interestingly, this source is arguably the most lyrical that Rukeyser consulted. Price’s highly poetic

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prose, together with his eccentric use of punctuation, at times renders Ryder obscure. Additionally, Price does not adequately distinguish between his own words and those of Ryder, for example: So in the house of his friends he died March 28, 1917, nine days more than three score years and ten. : : : So live to make your dreams come true. : : : Not you the human document. : : : Short of your wish to grow resplendent, dominant, divine. . . . : : : He dreamed and dreamily dwelt with masters gone these centuries. : : :176

Rukeyser seems to have understood the more lyrical passages in Price to be quotations from Ryder, for in the last stanza of her poem she imagines Ryder uttering the words as he completes a canvas: ‘Not you,’ he cries, ‘the human document.’ These are not paintings for comfort hung on walls. Paint over it, paint. It is a monument cracking and supernatural, an obelisk at the sea . . .177

Many of Ryder’s paintings began to ‘crack’ only a few years after their completion due to his method of applying thick layers of paint and varnish without proper protection.178 Rukeyser’s instruction to ‘paint over it’ is directed at Ryder and at the modern artist / poet, who must understand that the ‘monument[s]’ erected by one’s ancestors should be metaphorically built upon, rather than exhibited as attractive artefacts, or ‘paintings for comfort hung on walls’. This merging of the documentary and the lyrical in ‘Ryder’ is an example of Rukeyser’s appreciation for what she understands as poetry of the meeting of opposites. Rukeyser recognised such poetry within Melville, and in Gibbs and The Life of Poetry she expands upon the idea as central to her own poetics.

Rukeyser, Melville and the meeting of opposites As I have discussed throughout this book, Rukeyser believed poetry to be the expression of connection and communication, seeing it as a meeting-place in which ‘form and content, relation and function, reach and merge’.179 Several critics have acknowledged Rukeyser’s insistence upon the necessity of unhindered relations between all things; what interests me here is the critical appreciation of her application of this theory in terms of formal method, and the extent of Melville’s influence in its formation.

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In the chapter of Willard Gibbs entitled ‘Three Masters: Melville, Whitman, Gibbs’, Rukeyser figures the three contemporaries as pioneers, each axiom-breaking, and representing different, connecting lines of American tradition. Invoking her earlier untitled ‘Lives’ poem, Rukeyser asserts that the three men ‘are the ancestors, they walk silent in our streets . . . they speak to us’. Similar to Matthiessen, Rukeyser reads the Pequod as a ‘symbol for the conflicting energies of existence’.180 Asserting that ‘the two energies of the captain and the whale are not single, but clusters of forces working against each other,’ Rukeyser links Gibbs’s theory of the phases of matter with Melville’s exposition of the whale chase in Moby-Dick: just as Gibbs proved that truth was an accord that occurred in process, Melville unrolled ‘the image of a system’, demonstrating that ‘[w]hatever triumph there is, does not arrive at the end, but moment by moment during the chase.’181 Ostensible opposites work in a relation of conflict that creates equilibrium but never finality, and Rukeyser posits that the ‘logic’ of their ‘balance’ ‘lies in analogy’. Observing that ‘Melville knew, as well as any scientist, how far language falls short of these recognisable truths,’ Rukeyser quotes Melville’s recognition of the connectedness between apparent contraries: ‘O Nature, and O Soul of man! . . . how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies.’182 By highlighting fundamental connections between physics and poetry, the scientific and the subjective, Rukeyser also draws connections between the past and the present, represented by Gibbs, Whitman and Melville, and their continuing legacies to the American mind. According to Rukeyser, Melville saw more than most the ‘truth’ of the human imagination, asking only that it be ‘usable . . . that it fit into a tradition, make itself at once plain to many’.183 By insisting on the communication of truth, Melville also represented ‘democracy, whose equilibrium depends to a great extent on the inclusion of opposites’.184 Melville’s ability to discern usable, communicable truth within himself and others, and to figure it as cultural artefact, aligned him with Gibbs and Whitman in their shared ability to ‘create the creative’.185 In The Life of Poetry Rukeyser provided a proper exposition of her poetics of meeting-places, supported by a close reading of Melville’s poetry from Battle Pieces.186 Stating that Melville’s prose ‘announces the problem of evil’ in terms of its ‘conflict’ with innocence, Rukeyser asserts that ‘in the poems’, for the first time in American literary history, ‘the oppositions turn to music’. Rukeyser relies on Melville’s poetry to speak for both the cultural state of America and her own poetics of connection, quoting from a draft of Melville’s poem, ‘Art’: ‘In him who would evoke – create, / Contraries must meet and mate.’187 Rukeyser

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relates Melville’s experience of war to that of the present generation’s, noting the inseparability of art, war and American cultural history: ‘simply, the line of culture was begun in America at a point of open conflict’.188 War is central to cultural heritage for Rukeyser, who considers Melville’s ability to ‘create’ from conflict inherently and edifyingly American, stating, ‘this country was begun in axiom-breaking’.189 Rukeyser also sees ontological conflict as an important catalyst for the expression and recording of a particularly American experience. Again, she attempts to strengthen attitudes to war or crisis via the utilisation of poetic documents, connecting Melville’s poem of sexuality and self-appraisal, ‘After the Pleasure Party’ (1891), with contemporary approaches to personal and social realities. Remembering Rukeyser’s belief that there are ‘two kinds of poems’, those of ‘unverifiable facts, based in dreams, in sex . . . and the other kind being the document, the poem that rests on material evidence’, we might view Melville’s poem as ‘unverifiable fact’, and her appreciation of it an example of her wish to join it to the documentable fact of war.190 The selfhood of Melville’s poet-narrator, established only through coupling with a ‘co-relative’ in the poem, is figured as ‘the human integral clove asunder’: Why hast thou made us but in halves– Co-relatives? . . . If these co-relatives never meet Selfhood itself seems incomplete.191

Via this poem, Rukeyser understands Melville as ‘a battleground of forces’; she sees his internal conflict ‘penetrate’ his work, and by so doing, infiltrate the mind of ‘America’.192 Whitman was also a poet who allowed his inner battles public exposure; carrying both halves of the human integral ‘within himself,’ he sought throughout his life to bring them together.193 Rukeyser posits that such examples of inner conflict and self-discovery constitute ‘the discovery of America’.194 The idea that tradition is not given to the people easily is voiced in Rukeyser’s 1944 article, ‘Under Forty’, in which she connects the idea of freedom with the ability ‘to choose one’s ancestors, to go with their wishes and their fight’.195 By heeding the lessons of their ancestors, Americans might follow them in the confrontation of present conflicts. Anne Herzog has suggested that Melville’s ‘reconciling poetics’ appealed to Rukeyser’s sense of the necessity of integration, due to her lifelong commitment to the connection of ‘high modernist aesthetic principles with the concerns of left-wing political activism’.196 Yet it appears that Melville’s ability to fuse ‘contraries’ in the meeting-place of

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art did not so much support Rukeyser’s poetics as inspire them. Cooper has persuasively argued that Rukeyser’s connective thinking stems primarily from her affinity with Whitman, citing a passage from The Life of Poetry to support her thesis, in which Rukeyser writes of Whitman’s rhythms, measured against ‘an ideal of water at the shore, not beginning nor ending . . . never finishing, always making a meeting-place’.197 However, ten years earlier, Rukeyser had employed precisely the same imagery to evoke the life of Ryder, through whose life she intended ‘Melville to be illustrated’. Rukeyser did not appear to refer to her art as ‘meeting-place’ before becoming involved with Melville’s work in the late thirties; additionally, the title of the collection in which ‘Ryder’ features may also have been influenced by Melville. Although the whirlwind became a motif in Rukeyser’s writing, a ‘turning wind’ is a powerful image in Melville’s poem ‘The Conflict of Convictions’, from which Rukeyser was later to quote in The Life of Poetry.198 Themes of tension between oppositions, and the perpetual process of nature are apparent in Melville’s poem, and Rukeyser’s choice of extract is illuminating: Forever the scheme of nature thrives; I know a wind in purpose strong – It spins against the way it drives.199

‘After Melville’ ‘After Melville’ (Breaking Open, 1973), dedicated to Bett and Walter Bezanson, whom Rukeyser met in New Haven while researching Gibbs, presents a more contemplative picture of Melville, who is evoked with his contemporaries Whitman, Hawthorne and Dickinson as an educator of a way of bearing witness to the truth of the world. The hiatus between this work and Rukeyser’s earlier use of Melville as poetic subject, coupled with the elegiac connotations of the poem’s title, seems to indicate both a return to previous poetic influences and a query into new points of cultural reference, after the ‘Melville revival’ had subsided. The sea and the ‘sea-coast’, images inseparable from the figure of Melville, establish a theme of recurrence and creation throughout the poem. Possibly drawing on Viola Meynell’s Introduction to MobyDick: Herman Melville (1925), which she quoted in Gibbs to support her belief that Americans must take Melville into their lives – ‘To know him is be partly made of him forever’200 – Rukeyser returns repeatedly to this phrase, connecting it to other ideas she noted regarding the sea as primordial metaphor for Melville himself: ‘It is as if we were creatures

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coming out of the sea, carrying the sea in us wherever we go. Melville is that sea.’201 In the poem, Melville is figured as both ‘the shore of the sea’ and ‘the sea we carry to our star’,202 understood by Rukeyser as not only a durable symbol of a usable past, but also the very substance of the origin of creation. The three sections of ‘After Melville’ correspond to the three stages of the development of Melville’s legacy, as Rukeyser imagines it. In each section, there is an exchange of looking. In section one, ‘the sea-coast looks at the sea,’ and we understand the ‘shore’ to be Melville, swept by ‘configurations of water’ to ‘the deep land’ of America.203 In section two, Melville and his contemporaries ‘come into our lives’ via their words, ‘telling us the sea / and the slow dance of the absence of the sea’. At the end of the section, ‘the sea’ is figured as modern American experience; by ‘diving the sea deeper’ than any other, Melville ‘swims our world’, thereby ‘revealing us, who are his afterlife’.204 In section three, Melville’s gifts to America are manifested in the lives of those who, by looking, enter a dialogue of reciprocal awareness. The four stanzas of the final section begin thus: ‘A woman looks at the sea’; ‘A man looking at the sea’; ‘The sea looking and not looking’; ‘A man and a woman look into each other.’ By teaching subsequent generations how to receive the reality of lived experience, Melville has created the creative, and his legacy will therefore live ‘forever’.205 Through recourse to a Melvillean meeting of opposites, Rukeyser weaves together the strands of her lifetime’s thought in her mature work. The last lines of ‘After Melville’ underscore a continuing adherence to and engagement with the documentary dynamic of looking and being looked at that first emerged in Rukeyser’s writing in the 1930s. They also represent the documentary methods practised by Melville in terms of blending an anonymous objectivity with a more personal lyricism in order to create what I would term a subjectively epic tale of America: Wars of the sea and land, wars of air; space; Against the corroded wars and sources of wars, a lake of being born. A man and a woman look into each other. One man giving us forever the grapes of the sea. Gives us marriage; gives us suicide and birth; he drowns for the sake of our look into each other’s body and life. Allowing the great life: sex, time, the feeding powers. He is part of our look into each other’s face.206

‘After Melville’ does not, therefore, advocate moving away from Melville to choose a new ancestral teacher, but demonstrates America’s continuing need to follow his example. Against a background of ‘wars’,

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a body of water, infused with Melville’s spirit, represents birth and renewal. In the last section, Melville is figured as ‘the reborn wave’, recalling Rukeyser’s initial ‘Lives’ poem in which she imagines the dead ‘charging our latest moment with their wave’.207 That Melville ‘drowns / for the sake of our look into each other’s body and life’ suggests an almost Messianic quality to him, echoes of which may be found in the poem’s titular reference to (American) existence ‘after’ his death. However, perhaps one of the most enduring images in Rukeyser’s poetry recurs in the last line, ‘He is part of our look into each other’s face.’ This visual exchange, enabled via the face-to-face encounter, recalls the ethical and ontological concern that I highlighted in Chapter 2 as central to Rukeyser’s understanding of documentary discourse and her own poetics. Through looking, the man and the woman in the poem become witnesses to the world, themselves and each other, entering into a visual relationship characterised by Rukeyser’s edict that ‘exchange is creation’.208 In this exchange, lives are bonded, and the self gives itself up to find itself again in the reception of the other. This concern for the reception of the other perhaps emerged most clearly in American Studies in the form of its recourse to anthropological and ethnographical discourse after the 1950s.

The anthropological turn in American Studies During the 1960s, American Studies became increasingly interdisciplinary, taking shape as ‘a specialised branch of cultural anthropology’.209 Literary works were understood as cultural artefacts, ‘studied historically (as opposed to critically) in the context of the groups which produced and responded to them’.210 However, although the primary impetus after World War II was to build a broad, contextual interpretation of American life, the dominant ‘myth and symbol’ school of American Studies tended to breed a ‘documentary and artefactual fundamentalism’ that denied more transnational, human science scholarship.211 Many advances made in the field of ethnic anthropology served to feed a post-war American exceptionalism that built upon earlier definitions of ‘civilisation’. In popular culture, anthropological approaches had already been made, as documentary practices drew on ethnographic methods of data-gathering and presentation to demonstrate the spectrum of American experience. Indeed, as Stott asserts, it was during the thirties that ‘America’s anthropologists first turned the method upon the natives at home’.212 Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict emphasised

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the subordination of national character to a general pattern of culture, and policy-makers were stimulated, especially post-war, to distinguish the American character from that of other nations.213 An emphasis on a defining ‘folk’ culture had emerged during the Depression, as New Deal Federal Arts and Writers’ Projects focused on amassing what became known as ‘American Stuff’: Americana in the form of recorded and transcribed folk songs and tales, photographs, ex-slave narratives, primitive art, and maps.214 The large compendium, American Stuff, and the WPA guide book series, the American Guides (both projects compiled 1937–41), are examples of such documentary projects. Archibald MacLeish, Librarian of Congress from 1939 to 1944, wrote in Fortune magazine in 1937, the year the National Archives opened, that the accumulated data represented ‘raw cultural material’ and thus enabled ‘new creative work – which is necessary to artists and particularly to artists in a new country’.215

Rukeyser and anthropology Kertesz cites the starting point of Rukeyser’s interest in anthropology as ‘her discovery as a young woman that “the fantasies that I was afraid to tell people and that I was afraid of in myself were not at all unique but were things that were common in many tribes” ’.216 Rukeyser’s attitude reflects the documentary ethos of the Depression. As Jerrold Hirsch has noted, the decade’s ‘pluralistic and egalitarian values led [officials and writers] to reject the use of nationality, race and culture as interchangeable terms. Instead they talked about “composite America” and “the Negro as American” and “introducing America to Americans” ’.217 Rukeyser’s interest in cultural anthropology is evidenced in both her published work and her papers from the early 1940s onwards.218 She read widely on the subject, making detailed notes from the works of Mead, Benedict and Paul Radin.219 In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser expresses an enthusiasm for documenting the rituals of the Navajo and North American indigenous tribes, whose chants she recognises as the original source of poetry, containing a ‘truth’ and ‘life’ that modern civilisation has ‘buried’.220 John Collier’s work with the Navajo especially interests Rukeyser, and she applauds the rhythm and action of the Navajo’s songs, not least because ‘the war proved them’.221 Collier’s observations that the songs promote ‘public spirit’ and ‘joy of life’, and ‘excel in art propensities, and in truthfulness’ reveal in them a quality that Rukeyser relates to usable truth.222 For the poet, their creation in the meeting of ‘intensity’ with ‘quietude’ situates them as lessons in

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living in the world, and awards them a particular ‘American’ quality, for she understands the origin of her country’s culture in the poetic ‘conflict’ of opposites. In Breaking Open (1973), Rukeyser translates Eskimo narrative songs, calling them ‘Northern Poems’.223 These song / poems tell of the concerns and taboos of the Eskimo: fishing, hunting, icy conditions, sex and incest. They represent Rukeyser’s wish to make available the culture of a different people, providing evidence of a largely unimagined portion of Northern American existence, and demonstrating a poetic integration of mind and body that, as I discussed in Chapter 2, Rukeyser correlated with a ‘primitive’ consciousness. Utilising original documentation by the Danish explorer, Knud Rasmussen, Rukeyser translated the songs with the help of Radin, whom she had befriended when teaching a poetry workshop at the California Labor School in 1945.224 She had met Radin in preparation for her projected biography of his teacher and mentor, the anthropologist Franz Boas.

Rukeyser and Franz Boas Franz Boas (1858–1942) was a teacher of Mead and Benedict, as well as Radin. Born in Germany and Jewish, Boas lived most of his life in America, becoming Professor of Physical Anthropology at Columbia University in 1899, where he established the first US anthropology PhD programme, and forged a strong friendship with John Dewey.225 Boas introduced a pragmatic, pluralist approach to anthropology, blending physical, linguistic and archaeological methods. His researches, coupled with his resolute promotion of the participant-observer method, made him ‘the most important single force in shaping American anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century’.226 Boas’s pluralistic methods of analysing culture must have appealed to Rukeyser’s similar way of thinking, and her description of his work as an ‘active . . . handling of lives’ indicates her understanding of him as a fellow proponent of ‘the unverifiable fact’: the reality that can only be ‘reported’ by a living person rather than by a material document.227 For most of her working life, Rukeyser planned to write his biography. Having read widely on Boas, Rukeyser placed an advert in a number of journals in the Summer of 1947, announcing her plans for a biography of Boas and requesting readers to send her any documents that might contribute to her project.228 Amongst those who responded was Mead, who pronounced that Rukeyser was ‘most particularly fitted to make this biographical study a matter of wide and general significance

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to the history of thought in the present age’.229 Mead located the projected biography within a developing intellectual cultural and historical discourse, and Rukeyser’s plans to write a scholarly biography of a leading American anthropologist represent a bridge between the cultural revivalism period and the later anthropological turn in American Studies. Rukeyser’s papers contain a letter dated December 1944 from Irving Lerner, chief film editor for the OWI, thanking her for an ‘outline on Boas’ for a ‘feature length film’, and alluding to ‘some very interesting nibbles from Hollywood’.230 However, despite Rukeyser’s efforts, neither the film nor the biography saw production. Initially planned for 1949, then 1958 publication (to mark the centenary of Boas’s birth),231 the biography would have been published alongside a ‘Boas Reader’, apparently ‘the first of several Boas volumes’.232 However, the Philosophical Society, where the bulk of the Boas papers are archived, fought against Rukeyser’s reader on the grounds of her ‘unscientific’ background, and she moved her attention to Boas’s letters, which she believed ‘would constitute the documentary material of the biography’.233 Citing Boas’s own belief that ‘popular writing’ in anthropology could be justified if ‘the documents were published at the same time’, Rukeyser once more wished for a confluence of the document and the unverifiable fact.234 Although Rukeyser conducted extensive research, she could not find a publisher for her dual project. Boas devoted much of his work to the comprehension of tribes in relation to their environment. In a document that Rukeyser intended to utilise for the biography, Ernst Boas explains his father’s interest in ‘the relation between the objective and the subjective world as expressed by culture’, and the underlying issue of ‘the shackles tradition has laid upon us’. Recognising that ‘perception’ is a culturally conditioned faculty, Boas senior opined: ‘if we are ever to understand human behaviour we must know as much about the eye that sees as about the object seen’.235 Boas’s approach appealed to Rukeyser’s own belief in the necessity of responsible, reciprocal witness. What might be called her lifelong poetic project of America was arguably informed partly by Boasian anthropological motives; she consistently sought both to comprehend and to reconstruct the usable tradition of her culture, whilst examining how its ‘truth’ allows an understanding of the self’s place in the world. By promoting an inclusive way of seeing, Rukeyser, like Boas, investigated the cultural evidence of relations between ‘the objective and the subjective world’. Rukeyser’s recourse to documentary methods and aesthetics aided her investigation, and her poetic theory relied on the dualism of scientific and personal ways of looking: a utilisation of ‘the document,

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the evidence itself’ and ‘the unverifiable fact’ that exists in imaginative and sensual experience. Boas’s first publication, The Central Eskimo (1888), marked the beginning of a lifelong professional interest in tribal behaviour and custom, and his work on the importance of folk tales in understanding the psychological foundations of a culture, reinforced by his insistence upon racial equality, in many ways provided a precedent for the cultural focus of 1930s documentary writing, although his stance against exceptionalism was supported by a minority. Boas sought to relate ‘the part to the whole’ via the comprehension of the similarity that resides in difference.236 In Anthropology and Modern Life (1928), a reworking of ideas first put forward in The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), for example, Boas refutes the myth of racial or ethnic superiority by demonstrating that humans have evolved differently but equally, turning to the development of folk tales to reveal that ‘identical tales are told over wide territories by people of fundamentally different types of culture’.237 By a process of ‘historical reconstruction’, Boas was keen to promulgate a message of racial tolerance and equality, and during the 1930s, he questioned the term ‘nationalism’, asking a number of universities to offer ‘courses on race theory’.238 Boas’s pioneering methods of active witness and site-specific observation (contrasting with the practices of his British contemporary, James Frazer, who relied principally on archival materials)239 foreshadowed documentary participant methods in the 1930s. In a memo on her project, Rukeyser wrote that the students of Boas were examples of ‘the finest representatives of the study of human gifts in America today’, whilst ‘his associates’ included ‘people engaged in making the findings which establish our ideas about language, heredity, art, immigration, civil rights, unknown countries, the “primitive,” and intellectual freedom, as well as dance, folk-tales, music, documentary film and striprecords, scientists as spies’.240 It is apparent from Rukeyser’s notes on the project that she considered Boas ‘an integrated man and a pioneer’ in ‘contemporary culture and the means of communication’.241

In the Beginning Rukeyser’s understanding of Boas as an instigator of modern documentary practices led to his inclusion in her proposed anthology entitled In the Beginning. In the early 1950s, Rukeyser worked extensively on a project that aimed ‘to present the materials of man’s endless search to explore the nature of creation . . . since the earliest time of records’.242

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Her plan was to co-edit with Dr Philip Morrison, Physics Professor at Cornell University, and Lloyd Mallan, editor at Fawcett Books, an anthology of texts and pictures that would document the scientific, artistic and imaginative processes undergone by ‘man’ in the ‘desire to search out his origins’.243 The ambitious scope of the proposal perhaps disallowed publication: the book was to be divided into at least four main sections, each containing extracts or short works from as many as fifty authors or artists from antiquity to the present. Rukeyser intended to structure the anthology around ‘the mythologies and the sciences, the philosophical and theological findings, the opening of consciousness by aesthetic and philosophical means, and the new images of creative power’.244 The ‘contributors’ to the book may helpfully be viewed as influences on Rukeyser’s poetics, given the fact that the projected anthology was to explore a governing paradigm of her work; they included Melville, Ryder, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Whitman, Coleridge, Keats, Blake, Einstein, Gibbs, Darwin, Newton, Boas, Radin, Buber, MacLeish, Hart Crane, Agee, Carlos Williams, D. H. Lawrence, William Faulkner, William James, C. S. Pierce, Freud, Jung, Navajo Indians, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh and Eisenstein, as well as quotations from the Bible and from her own poetry. It was to be a work of intricate integration, combining and levelling art, ‘creative writing and scientific materials as documents’.245 The project appears to have its own beginnings in the writings of Frank and Williams. In The Re-Discovery of America, Frank had insisted that the recovery of a ‘beginning’ would facilitate the understanding of American history as integrated multiplicity, arguing for an existential comprehension of the self’s place in ‘our America which is the paradigm of the world’.246 Frank had made similar claims in Our America, proposing that the ‘primitive’ – exemplified by the ‘buried culture’ of American Indian spirituality – represented the best example of the native American values he wished to see revived.247 Concluding his treatise, Frank singled out Williams’s In the American Grain as the most progressive work of the era ‘to forge an aesthetic image of our past’ in order to ‘make it usable’.248 In the American Grain was written out of the author’s need to locate himself within the multiple particulars of his own country. Motivated by his ‘mixed ancestry’ to ‘possess’ America, Williams remembered his conviction ‘that only by making it my own from the beginning to my own day, in detail, could I ever have a basis for knowing where I stood’.249 Williams’s quest was concerned as much with discovering the country as discovering himself, and as such, corresponded closely to Frank’s correlation between self-knowledge and knowledge of the

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‘whole’ of American experience. His comments are also notably similar to Kazin’s observation of the documentary drive ‘to chart America and possess it’,250 and its collection of narrative, historical and critical texts, transcripts and various other quotations render In the American Grain ‘an integrated whole’, with a distinctly ‘documentary character’ ahead of its time.251 Like Frank, Williams celebrated the American Indian as the true ‘average American’, whose spiritual attachment to the land served as lesson. His primary concern was to fuse past lives with the present, and the book represents an exercise in interrelation: ‘It is this to be moral . . . to marry, to touch – to give . . . to create, to hybridize, to crosspollenize [sic].’252 Joshua Schuster has noted the similarity between Williams’s poetic historicism and Boas’s anthropology. Contributing to critical discourse addressing Williams’s rejection of T. S. Eliot’s Eurocentrism,253 Schuster establishes a dichotomy between Eliot / Frazer and Williams / Boas. Although confined to Williams’s Spring and All (1923), his critique might also be applied to In the American Grain, whose relational investigation of American experience corresponds with Boas’s emphasis on ‘contact’ in the anthropological examination of cultural conditions.254 Rukeyser’s projected anthology, in which she planned to include unspecified extracts from Williams’s work, seems embedded in the Americanist tradition both Williams and Frank fought to build. In her proposal, Rukeyser, like Frank, notes her wish to unearth a ‘buried’ human history, beginning with ‘the primitives’, who, ‘in coming toward the unknown’, represent ‘a closeness with living scientists and children and poets’.255 Her belief that, by ‘moving toward a concept of creation, the human spirit moves toward self-definition’ recalls Frank’s similar argument for the creation of ‘the creative’ by means of imagination and self-knowledge.256 Additionally, her effort to encourage interdisciplinarity by anthologising several texts that had ‘not been used together before’257 echoes Frank’s reaction against the ‘tension between science and reason on the one hand and mysticism on the other’.258 Frank’s attention to ‘a law not empirically provable’ prefigures Rukeyser’s attention to the spiritual ‘unverifiable fact’, as well as her faith in the inseparability of art and science. Rukeyser’s promotion of her project as ‘the records of man’s desire to search out his origins’ also aligns it with Williams’s personal and national endeavour. Both believing in the necessity of a cultural and national rediscovery to reconnect the human spirit to a native ancestry, Williams decreed hybridisation while Rukeyser called for a ‘poetry of meeting-places’.259 However, although profoundly involved with the

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anthropological turn in American cultural studies that emerged during her working life, Rukeyser hoped to extend the document to encourage transnational awareness. In the Beginning was not, in the manner of In the American Grain, seeking for ‘a source in america for everything we think or do’,260 but promoting the understanding of common human existence by which, as Boas had hoped, the false barriers of ‘nationalism’ go down.

Conclusion Frank had envisaged that Williams’s text would ‘be carried on by others, in broader terms’,261 and Rukeyser’s projected anthology seems to have aimed at just that. The contents of the anthology originated from every continent, and although Boas and Williams are listed among projected contributors, so are Frazer and Eliot. In the end, In the Beginning represents an extension of Rukeyser’s application of the ‘usable truth’ to the ‘whole’ of human experience in the imaginative creation of the creative. However, if In the Beginning reveals Rukeyser’s interest in global cultures, the principle behind her project seems to have grown out of ideas developed in tandem and conjunction with American Studies. As I have suggested, Rukeyser’s entire œuvre can be regarded as a cultural epic of America, built over a lifetime, and her unfinished works may be added to this composite portrait. Rukeyser’s creation of a usable past allowed her a wide perspective on American experience that positioned her, in her own words, as a ‘poet trying an epic music with the world as hero, and knowing [her]self to be in a long tradition’.262

Notes 1. A representative selection includes: Huber, ‘A Theory of American Studies’, in Merideth, ed., American Studies: Essays on Theory and Method, p. 4; Ruland, The Rediscovery of American Literature: Premises of Critical Taste, 1900–1940, pp. vii–viii; Cheyfitz, ‘Matthiessen’s American Renaissance: Circumscribing the Revolution’, p. 342; Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger, p. xv; Gene Wise, ‘ “Paradigm Dramas” in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement’ (first published in American Quarterly, 31.3, 1979), reprinted in Maddox, ed., Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline, p. 177. 2. Emerson, ‘The American Scholar’, p. 68. 3. Ibid., p. 69.

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4. Letter from Emerson to Whitman, 21 July 1855, printed by Whitman in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass, in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, p. 637. 5. Ruland, The Rediscovery of an American Literature, p. viii. 6. Macy, The Spirit of American Literature, p. v. 7. Ibid., p. 8. 8. Ibid., pp. 4–5. 9. Sprague’s Van Wyck Brooks, The Early Years offers a concise biography of Brooks, as does Kazin’s On Native Grounds, pp. 173, 180. 10. Brooks, America’s Coming of Age, reprinted in Sprague, Van Wyck Brooks, The Early Years, p. 127. 11. Ibid., p. 86. 12. Ibid., pp. 128, 131. 13. Brooks, America’s Coming of Age, pp. 149–50. 14. Brooks, ‘On Creating a Usable Past’, reprinted in Sprague, Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Years, p. 220. 15. Ibid., p. 223. 16. Ibid., p. 225. 17. The magazine, founded by James Oppenheim and Frank, ran from 1916 to 1917. After The Seven Arts folded due to lack of funding, the majority of contributors moved to Dial. 18. Frank, Our America, p. 10. 19. Ibid., p. 9. 20. Ibid., p. 204. 21. Ibid., p. 195. 22. Ibid., p. 157. 23. Ibid., p. 230. 24. Williams, In the American Grain, p. 189. 25. ‘Introduction’, ibid., p. xx 26. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, 3 vols (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927, 1927, 1930). ‘Completed to 1900 only’ written on the flyleaf, vol. 3. Brooks, working at Harcourt, Brace, recommended publication. 27. Wise, ‘ “Paradigm Dramas” ’, p. 177. 28. Ibid., p. 171. 29. Ibid., p. 211. 30. Ibid., pp. 213, 218. 31. Ibid., p. 221. 32. Ibid., p. 240. 33. Ibid., p. 320. 34. Ibid., p. 324. 35. Wise, ‘ “Paradigm Dramas” ’, p. 178. 36. Matthiessen graduated from Yale in 1923, was a Rhodes scholar at  Oxford in 1925, and in 1927 was awarded a PhD in literature at Harvard. 37. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. xiv. Of the numerous texts that credit American Renaissance with establishing the legitimacy of American literature within the academy, the following are particularly useful: Sklar, ‘American Studies and the Realities of America’; Cheyfitz,

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38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary ‘Matthiessen’s American Renaissance: Circumscribing the Revolution’; May, ‘The Radical Roots of American Studies’; Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, pp. 355, vii. Kazin, On Native Grounds, p. 489. Carpenter, ‘William James and Emerson’. Cheyfitz, ‘Matthiessen’s American Renaissance’, pp. 343–4; Wise, ‘ “Paradigm Dramas” ’, pp. 184–5. Denning, ‘ “The Special American Conditions”: Marxism and American Studies’, p. 357. Ibid., p. 357. May, ‘The Radical Roots’, pp. 182, 185. Pease, ‘C. L. R. James, Moby Dick, and the Emergence of Transnational American Studies’, p. 142. Ibid., p. 142. Brooks, ‘On Creating a Usable Past’, p. 224. Several sources agree on this, e.g. Spark, Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival, and Sprague, Van Wyck Brooks. Ibid., p. 206. Mumford, Herman Melville, p. vi; Spark discusses Murray’s scholarship in Hunting Captain Ahab. Wise, ‘ “Paradigm Dramas”, p. 176. See Chapter 1. Mumford, Herman Melville, p. 164. Leyda, The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819–1891, p. xi. Biographical information taken from Michelson’s ‘Jay Leyda, 1910–1988’, pp. 12–16. Spark, Hunting Captain Ahab, p. 344. The Melville Log is dedicated to Eisenstein: ‘This book was begun as a birthday present for my teacher, Sergei Eisenstein.’ Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 150. Mumford, The Golden Day, p. 74. ‘On Creating a Usable Past’, p. 221. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century, p. 1. Ibid., p. 127. Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, p. xi. Leo Marx, ‘American Studies: A Defence of an Unscientific Method’, p. 80. Ibid., pp. 76, 77. Denning, ‘The Special American Conditions’, p. 357. Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger, pp. 20–1. Marx, ‘American Studies: A Defence’, p. 89. Ibid., p. 89. Kazin, On Native Grounds, p. 487; Sklar, ‘American Studies and the Realities of America’, p. 598. I discuss the documenting of American Stuff later in this chapter.

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71. Sklar, ‘The Problem of an American Studies Philosophy: A Bibliography of New Directions’, p. 254. 72. Frank, The Re-discovery of America, p. 318. 73. Kertesz, The Poetic Vision, p. 391. 74. Cooper, ‘Foreword: Meeting-Places’, LP, p. xviii. 75. Ibid., p. xix. Italics mine. 76. Kertesz has touched upon the connection between Rukeyser’s ‘belief in poetry as a process of sharing discovery’ and the Brooksian impulse of the twentieth century ‘to make an art to irrigate men’s spirits in an acquisitive society’, The Poetic Vision, pp. 45–6. 77. MR Papers, Box I:30, folder 1. 78. Letter dated 20 May 1965, MR Papers, Box I:9. 79. Letter dated 11 July 1963, MR Papers, Box I:9. 80. MR Papers, Box I:33, Box I:35; LP, p. 215. 81. The ‘Rukeyser Imbroglio’ is discussed in Chapter 2; correspondence dated December 1942 and October 1940, MR Papers, Box I:9. 82. ‘F. O. M.’ appears in Body of Waking (1958); CP, p. 343. 83. Our Native Land, ‘Proposal for a series of films’, MR Papers, Box II:15, folder 8. 84. All quotations are from Our Native Land proposal. 85. Rukeyser, Gibbs, p. 4. 86. Ibid., p. 428. 87. Jaffe, ‘Poet’s Biography of a Neglected Scientist’, p. 4; Clark, ‘The Mind Behind the Age of Plastics’, p. 461. 88. Barber, ‘ “The Poet of Unity”: Muriel Rukeyser’s Willard Gibbs’, pp. 1–15; Robertson, review of Virgin Spain, p. 484. 89. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left, p. 302. 90. Letter from Rukeyser to Louis Untermeyer, dated 25 June 1940, quoted in Exiles from a Future Time, p. 303. 91. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time, p. 304. 92. Ibid., p. 302. 93. Thurston, Making Something Happen, pp. 177–8. Cary Nelson also comments that Rukeyser’s ‘Gauley Bridge – Silicosis Town’ was printed and illustrated in The Daily Worker, 12 December 1937, section 2, p. 5: Repression and Recovery, p. 113. 94. Shulman, The Power of Political Art, p. 7. 95. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time, p. 304. 96. Rukeyser, Gibbs, p. 357; Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. 498. 97. Rukeyser, Gibbs, p. 358. 98. LP, p. 83. 99. Ibid., pp. 74, 75. 100. Two helpful examples are: James E. Miller’s ‘Whitman’s Multitudinous Progeny: Particular and Puzzling Instances’, in Folsom, ed., Walt Whitman: Centennial Essays; Adrienne Rich, ‘Beginners’, in Herzog and Kaufman, eds, How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet? 101. LP, p. 83. Anne Herzog has briefly mentioned Rukeyser’s appreciation for Melville in ‘ “Anything Away From Anything”: Muriel Rukeyser’s Relational Poetics’, in Herzog and Kaufman, eds, How Shall We Tell Each

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102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116.

117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133.

Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary Other of the Poet?, p. 42; Kertesz mentions Melville in The Poetic Vision, p. 189. Rukeyser was unhappy with both her publishers and her agent, and between 1950 and 1951 asked to be released from any outstanding contracts: MR Papers, Box II:5, folder 1. MR Papers, Boxes I:30, 33, 35. Lesson plans in MR Papers, Box I:30, folder 1. Rukeyser, ‘The Usable Truth’, p. 206. Stott, Documentary Expression, p. 131. Rukeyser, ‘The Usable Truth’, p. 206. MR Papers, Box I:43, folder 4. The folder contains the dated manuscript for the Vassar lectures, titled ‘The Usable Truth’. Rukeyser, ‘The Usable Truth’, p. 206. Ibid., pp. 206, 207. Ibid., p. 207. Ibid., pp. 207, 208. Ibid., p. 208. Rukeyser, Gibbs, p. 354. Ibid., p. 354. LP, p. 27. Rukeyser notes that the publishers were ‘Harper and Brothers’. In fact, Melville’s letters were not published by Harper and Brothers, who published Melville’s Battle Pieces and the Aspects of War in 1886. Melville’s letters were only properly collated and published in 1960, in The Letters of Herman Melville, edited by Merrell Davis and William Gilman. Before that, a selection appeared in Thorp, and Some Personal Letters of Herman Melville and a Biography by Meade Minnigerode in 1922. Hayford, ‘Melville’s Usable or Visible Truth’. Ibid., p. 703; the letter originally appeared in Julian Hawthorne, ed., Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife (Boston, 1884), vol. 1, p. 387. Ibid., p. 702. Hayford first wrote of the matter in his unpublished PhD dissertation for Yale. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, pp. 192–3. Davis and Gilman, The Letters of Herman Melville, letter 83; Letters has recently been republished under Herman Melville: Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993). Rukeyser, ‘The Usable Truth’, p. 208. Ibid., p. 207. Ibid., p. 208. Rukeyser, ‘Words and Images’, p. 142. A copy of the letter is in MR Papers, Box II:8, folder 12. Allison, ‘Muriel Rukeyser Goes to War’, p. 1. Ibid., p. 3. LP, p. 174. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time, p. 309. Letter to Louis Untermeyer, ibid., p. 303. Rich, ‘Beginners’, p. 68; Ware, ‘Opening “The Gates”: Muriel Rukeyser and the Poetry of Witness’, p. 297. R. S. P., ‘Grandeur and Misery of a Poster Girl’, ‘The Rukeyser Imbroglio (cont’d)’, p. 218.

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163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175.

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R. S. P.,‘Grandeur and Misery’, p. 473. Ibid., pp. 473, 472. Matthiessen in ‘The Rukeyser Imbroglio (cont’d)’, p. 217. Rosenthal, ‘Muriel Rukeyser: The Longer Poems’, in Laughlin, ed., New Directions in Prose and Poetry, p. 221. Kertesz, The Poetic Vision, pp. 160–2, 161. CP, pp. 609–10. Paul, ‘Introduction’, ibid., pp. xlii, xiv, xli. Ibid., p. xlix. Ibid., pp. 10, 5. Rukeyser, ‘Ryder’, CP, p. 187. Rosenfeld, Port of New York, pp. 16–17. CP, p. 185. Kertesz, The Poetic Vision, p. 160. CP, p. 185. Ibid., p. 187. Ibid., p. 185. Ibid., p. 187. Ibid., pp. 185–7. ‘Death on a Pale Horse’ or ‘The Race Track’ (1895–1910), Cleveland Museum of Art; CP, p. 186. CP, p. 186. LP, p. 26. Ibid. CP, p. 186. Rosenfeld, Port of New York, p. 16. MR Papers, Box 1:30, folder 3. Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale, p. 3. CP, p. 182. Leyda’s The Melville Log provides excellent illumination on this. More recent criticism on the subject of identity in Moby-Dick after that of the ‘myth and symbol’ school may be found in Mottram, ‘Grown in America: Moby Dick and Melville’s Sense of Control’, in Lee, ed., Herman Melville: Reassessments, pp. 90–115; and Kimball, ‘Uncanny Narration in Moby Dick’, American Literature, pp. 528–47. CP, p. 185. Ibid. Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 38: ‘Dusk’, p. 185. CP, p. 186. Melville, Moby-Dick, p. 551. LP, p. 73. CP, p. 186. Ward, ‘The Function of the Cetological Chapters in Moby-Dick’, p. 173. Ibid., p. 167. Ibid., p. 170. CP, p. 186. Price, a writer and friend of Ryder, lists ‘eggshells’ among the contents of his room in Ryder [1847–1917]: A Study of Appreciation, p. xiii. Ibid., p. xiii; CP, p. 610.

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164 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188. 189. 190. 191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199. 200. 201. 202. 203. 204. 205. 206. 207. 208. 209. 210. 211. 212. 213.

214. 215.

Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary Price, A Study of Appreciation, p. ix. CP, p. 187. Price, Rosenfeld, and Frank in Our America mention this. LP, p. 40. Rukeyser, Gibbs, p. 353. Ibid., pp. 353, 354. Ibid., p. 354. Ibid., p. 355. Ibid., pp. 356–7. Ibid., p. 357. Listed on the book’s ‘acknowledgements’ page. LP, p. 67. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 63. Rukeyser, ‘The Education of a Poet’, p. 226. LP, pp. 71–2. Ibid., pp. 74, 70–1. Ibid., pp. 74–5. Ibid., p. 75. Rukeyser, ‘Under Forty’, p. 8. Herzog, ‘ “Anything Away From Anything” ’, p. 42. Cooper, ‘Meeting-Places’, p. xxv, quoting LP, p. 78. LP, p. 69. Rukeyser quotes Melville’s ‘The Conflict of Convictions’, ibid., p. 69. Rukeyser, Gibbs, p. 353; Rukeyser took several notes from Meynell’s book: MR Papers, Box I:33, folder 35. Ibid. Rukeyser, ‘After Melville’, CP, pp. 500–1, 500. Ibid., p. 500. Ibid., p. 501. Ibid., p. 501. Ibid., p. 501. Ibid., p. 182. LP, p. 173. Sykes, ‘American Studies and the Concept of Culture: A Theory and Method’, p. 254. See also Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger. Kelly, ‘Literature and the Historian’, in Maddox, ed., Locating American Studies, pp. 91–109, 99. Berkhofer, Jr, ‘A New Context for a New American Studies?’, in Maddox, Locating American Studies, p. 281. Stott, Documentary Expression, pp. 164–5. Reuel Denney, ‘How Americans See Themselves’, in Kwiat and Turpie, eds, Studies in American Culture: Dominant Ideas and Images, pp. 16–26; Mead, ‘The Study of National Character’, in Lerner and Lasswell, eds, The Policy Sciences. Cole, ‘Amassing American “Stuff”: The Library of Congress and the Federal Arts Projects of the 1930s’, pp. 356–89. Fortune, May 1937, quoted in ‘Amassing American “Stuff” ’, p. 360.

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216. Kertesz, The Poetic Vision, p. 377, source unspecified. 217. Hirsch, ‘Cultural Pluralism and Applied Folklore’, pp. 49, 51. 218. Rukeyser’s papers at the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, and the Library of Congress reveal notes and plans concerning projects investigating anthropology dated from the mid-1940s. 219. Evidence may be found in both the MR papers in Washington and the Boas–Rukeyser papers in Philadelphia. 220. LP, pp. 44, 86–8, 91–2, 130, 7. 221. Ibid., p. 86. 222. Ibid., p. 86. 223. CP, p. 512. 224. Rukeyser’s endnote to the poems states her sources, CP, p. 631; Kertesz, The Poetic Vision, p. 369. 225. Cole, Franz Boas: The Early Years. 226. Stocking, Jr, Delimiting Anthropology: Occasional Essays and Reflections, p. 26. 227. ‘Franz Boas Notes’, in MR papers, Box I:16. 228. The Rukeyser–Boas papers, B.B61.ru, Box 3. Publications included Science, Science Illustrated, The Nation and Herald Tribune. 229. Margaret Mead to Harry Starr of the Lucius Littauer Foundation, 17 April 1951, Rukeyser–Boas papers, Box 3. 230. Letter dated 12 December 1944, MR Papers, Box II:18, folder 9. 231. Letter from Rukeyser to James Babb of Yale Library, 30 September 1956. Rukeyser–Boas papers, Box 3. 232. MR Papers, Box I:16, ‘Franz Boas notes’. 233. Rukeyser–Boas papers, Box 3. 234. ‘Memo on a Project’, no date, in Rukeyser–Boas papers, Box 3, my italics. 235. Rukeyser–Boas papers, Box 3, ‘Franz Boas: His work as described by some of his contemporaries’ by Ernst Boas (post 1946). 236. B. A. Botkin, ‘The Folk and the Individual: Their Creative Reciprocity’, English Journal 27 (1938), p. 125. 237. Boas, Anthropology and Modern Life, p. 165. 238. Boas in a letter to A. L. Kroeber at the University of California, dated 5  August 1935, Rukeyser–Boas papers, Box 2; Letter from Boas to Prof. Berle, New York City, dated 2 May 1934, Rukeyser–Boas papers, Box 1. 239. Schuster, ‘William Carlos Williams, Spring and All, and the Anthropological Imaginary’, p. 118. 240. ‘Memo on a Project’, no date, Rukeyser–Boas papers, Box 3. 241. MR Papers, Box I:16. 242. ‘Outline for an Anthology: In the Beginning’, MR papers, Box I:21. 243. Morrison’s and Mallan’s brief biographies are provided by Rukeyser on the back pages of her outline; Cover page of ‘Outline for an Anthology’. 244. Page 3 of ‘Outline for an Anthology: In the Beginning’, MR papers, Box I:21. 245. Memo in MR papers, Box I:44, folder 2. 246. Frank, The Re-discovery of America, p. 290. 247. Frank, Our America, pp. 18, 115. 248. Ibid., pp. 324, 320.

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249. Williams, letter to Horace Gregory, 1939, in Thirlwall, ed., Selected Letters, p. 185. 250. Kazin, On Native Grounds, p. 486. 251. Wagner, The Prose of William Carlos Williams, p. 66; Conrad, Refiguring America: A Study of William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain, p. 2. 252. Ibid., p. 121. 253. See Wagner, The Prose of William Carlos Williams, p. 66. 254. Stocking, Jr, The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911: A Franz Boas Reader, p. 268, quoted in Schuster, ‘William Carlos Williams, Spring and All, and the Anthropological Imaginary’, p. 121. 255. ‘Outline’, MR Papers, Box I:21. 256. Ibid. 257. In the Beginning, ‘Notes’, MR Papers, Box I:21. 258. Frank, The Re-discovery of America, p. 211. 259. LP, p. 20. 260. Williams, In the American Grain, p. 109. 261. Frank, The Re-discovery of America, p. 324. 262. Page 2 of ‘Outline’, MR Papers, Box I:21.

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Chapter 5

Landscape, Navigation and Cartography

Exploring and documenting the American landscape, topologically and historically, remained a priority for Rukeyser throughout her working life. By examining the ways in which Rukeyser became involved with and manipulated the forms and techniques of travel reportage and tour guiding – two closely related documentary genres that developed during the 1930s and pervaded writing and image-making well into the 1940s – this chapter will illustrate how she pioneered a poetic cartography that provided witness to both the past and the present. Throughout the chapter, I refer to Rukeyser’s visualisation and utilisation of the landscape as site of ‘cultural practice’. In using this terminology, I have drawn upon W. J. T. Mitchell’s ideas in Landscape and Power.1 Starting from the premise first stated by Raymond Williams that ‘a working country is hardly ever a landscape,’ Mitchell asks that landscape be considered ‘not as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as a process by which social and subjective identities are formed’.2 His critique relies on both Marxist and phenomenological discourses, and by understanding landscape as both ‘an instrument of cultural power’ and as marketable, habitable, workable ‘space’, he constructs the argument that ‘landscape is a dynamic medium’.3 In what follows, I hope to demonstrate the ways in which Rukeyser’s poetry figures the landscape as a ‘process’ of personal and social identification and as a site of cultural practice. Mitchell’s and Williams’s approaches to landscape have guided my own readings of Rukeyser’s use of the American landscape as both Marxian ‘social hieroglyph’ and phenomenological site of cultural activity.4

Travel reportage and the American Guides During the 1930s, a specific form of documentary expression dominated American non-fiction writing. Travel reportage, although doing little

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to challenge the political and economic status quo, had the effect of renewing a connection with the land in a time of a national restlessness. What Stott labels as the Depression era ‘I’ve seen America’5 books include Edmund Wilson’s The American Jitters (1932) and Travels in Two Democracies (1936), James Rorty’s Where Life is Better: An Unsentimental American Journey (1936), Nathan Asch’s The Road: In Search of America (1937) and Louis Adamic’s My America (1938): unillustrated texts promoting the notion that travelling the country equated to knowing it.6 Stott cites Waldo Frank’s message in Our America (1919) as a ‘metaphor’ made literal in the thirties: ‘We all go forth to seek America. And in the seeking we create her.’7 However, if the initial intention of the search had been to expose and criticise the state of the country in the wake of economic disaster, the radical element in travel reportage soon gave way to what Richard Pells describes as ‘a song of affirmation’. The writer’s journey became ‘existential’, ‘a form of homecoming’, resulting in a restored commitment to the land and the democratic instincts of the American people.8 Travel reportage thus became a method of dual examination: in seeking to encounter the country via conversation with its inhabitants, documentarians wished to gain a greater knowledge of their own cultural roots. One explanation for this meditative impulse is that, as David Peeler notes, many travel documentarians, including Sherwood Anderson, Agee and Caldwell, ‘came to their idiom from backgrounds in literature’.9 Asch’s The Road, for example, presented a highly introspective investigation of American character in which Asch set out to ‘see all of America’, hoping to fuse his discrete observations ‘into a clarifying whole’.10 His failure to do so was echoed by many travel documentarians, among them Rorty, who saw his travelling as symptomatic of an endemic rootlessness: ‘what profound failure of American life did this drift of human atoms signify and embody, and to what would it lead?’11 Rorty opined that, because America was ‘too big to report’, it was ‘too big to govern’,12 and located the problem in a lost equilibrium of possession and practice between the American landscape and its inhabitants: ‘The people had not possessed the landscape, nor the landscape possessed them. The balance was indeed broken.’13 Rorty’s choice of the word ‘landscape’ over ‘land’ connotes a dynamic of exchange between country and citizen that relies on visual interpretation and appropriation. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines landscape as ‘all the visible features of an area of countryside or land, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal’.14 By asserting that the country was ‘too big’ to ‘report’ or ‘govern’, Rorty argued that the American people were no longer able to view their landscape as a site of power exchange. His

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observation alluded to a displacement in a national way of seeing that included both aesthetics and ideology; for many travel documentarians, the American landscape became a focus for the formation of personal and national identity, represented in terms of its status as both sight and site. Consequently, as Kazin commented, ‘the camera as an idea affected documentary and travel reporters and served them as a prime symbol of a certain enforced simplicity and passivity of mind’.15 One reason that travel documentarians were unable to make their observations of America cohere was perhaps because the camera as instrument and metaphor reproduced a fractured reality without advancing a method by which such experiential fragments might be integrated. By describing the country in ‘words that sought to be pictures’, Kazin argued that writers reproduced a discontinuous ‘havoc of pictorial sensations’.16 Moreover, images were largely recorded from the road, as writers travelled across America by car (Rorty) or bus (Asch). Kazin described the stream of visual impressions documented as ‘a succession of pictures on the mind’, framed by a moving vehicle window.17 The passive, reproductive technique of the camera was extended to apply to oral communication in travel reportage. Believing that giving a voice to an otherwise ignored or silenced contingent of the American population would re-establish a sense of community that would extend to an individual and national relationship with the American landscape, travel documentarians often provided verbatim transcriptions of conversations held between the reporter and ‘the people’. Benjamin Appel’s The People Talk (1940), comprised almost solely of the transcribed words of people Appel conversed with or overheard as he toured the States, is perhaps the best example of what Peeler terms ‘word snapshots’.18 By such methods, American ‘folk’ were often romanticised, even mythologised.19 As Peeler has observed, while Depression intellectuals ‘repudiated’ ‘an urban-industrial American “civilisation” ’, they hoped that a more embedded rural ‘culture’ would survive it.20 Thus, guided by a Marxist impulse that sought unification and strength in the working masses, the ‘I’ve seen America’ books invariably focused on those Americans for whom a close relation with the land was a necessary part of life: agrarian workers, tenant farmers, migrant peapickers.21 However, such a focus relied upon an ethnographical gaze and a political practice that was largely imbalanced and performative.22 Writers such as Agee and Asch crossed class boundaries in order to see another way of living, but remained distant observers; Paula Rabinowitz contends that these crossings occurred ‘at moments of visual encounters between those whose lives were privileged to observe and regulate and

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detail the behaviours of others . . . and their subjects . . . the poor’.23 It is no wonder that such meetings did not often bring the fellowship for which Marxist travel documentarians hoped.24 However, although ‘an all-pervasive design’25 was sought in much of the travel reportage of the 1930s, it remained elusive, and writers despaired of the various states of America ever becoming united. Louis Adamic’s My America, which Malcolm Cowley had called ‘as loose and patched and formless as a tenant farmer’s overall’,26 concluded that the author was ‘a damn fool kidding himself with a convenient formula like Marxism’.27 A ‘pattern of patternlessness’ grew,28 perhaps nowhere more evident than in Sherwood Anderson’s Puzzled America (1935). Considered by Stott as the first of the thirties writers ‘to travel America and document what he found without trying to change it radically’,29 Anderson represented America as he found it – a bewildering, fragmented puzzle. When, in November of 1933, Anderson wrote to American Presidential Advisor Raymond Moley, suggesting that the President should address the American people at least weekly over the radio, Moley suggested a more reciprocal dialogue, sending the following reply: Go out through the states, as Walt Whitman used to, and talk to people and write what they say and what you think of what they say, in the form of letters to Today. We will print them. That is our way to promote ‘man-toman’ understanding.30

Anderson’s letters were eventually republished, slightly altered, in Puzzled America, whose unadorned prose, personal notations and direct address involved the reader without offering any lesson. Anderson’s apolitical composite portrait resembled the picture of America later assembled by the WPA American Guide series. During the late thirties, the Federal Writers’ Project arm of the WPA provided employment for American writers keen to contribute to the rebuilding of their culture and economy, via the exhaustive documentation of America in the ostensible interests of tourism. The first Guide, Idaho: A Guide in Word and Picture (1937), set the standard for those that followed: a collectively and anonymously written book-length survey of state history, geography, geology, racial make-up, climate, legend, folklore, industries, social life, culture, arts, religion and more, documented and catalogued alongside illustrations and FSA photographs.31 The fact that political address was prohibited in the Guides meant that they conversely wielded a large degree of ideological power. As Christine Bold has noted, ‘travel guides have the potential – via their taxonomic representation of landscape, their documentary status, and their trope of

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use – to intervene in fundamental processes of cultural perception and national self-consciousness’.32 The series aimed to represent America within a framework that linked ideology with place. By being shown their country’s landscape, American citizens might alter the way they saw themselves as individuals, as communities and as a nation. The Guides constructed historical and cultural narrative along a tour of each State or region, and the highway or road became the principal structuring device of the series. The ‘Tour’ section of each Guide often occupied over half the volume: a written route map which traced American tradition by using sights along the roadside as signposts to past events. By employing the trope of the open road, the Guides attempted to direct readers towards contact and communion with the American landscape as a cultural medium. The critic Harlan Hatcher commended the Ohio Guide’s use of a ‘network of roads as an organising unit’, to ‘tell the stories of the activities and occupations of its people, and pause at historic spots to connect the present with the past’.33 Bold has argued that, until the publication of the Guides, the road was a symbol of human displacement and rootlessness in Depression documentary, citing Lange’s iconic photographs of long, empty highways as the epitome of a pervasive symbolism that synonymised the road with an endless travelling ‘towards a receding goal’.34 As the Guide series grew, the road was renewed as a symbol of progress and pioneer heritage. In 1938, the first in a three-book mini-series, the Highway Route Series, was published. The mini-series grew out of the ‘Tours’ section of the original Guides, offering ‘mile-by-mile descriptions’ of different American highways, whilst discouraging deviation from a rigid route.35 Written explicitly for the motor age, the Route guides celebrated the car as a necessary commodity and a modern symbol of democratic access to America. Katharine Kellock, the series’ general editor, intended the guides to reassert a specifically American tradition of mobility and progress, arguing that, as many routes were developed by migrating hordes . . . the tour route is often a thread on which a narrative can be built, with history from the days of Indian occupation of the country to the present, told in geographical rather than topical or chronological sequence.36

Contemporary critics agreed with Kellock that the Guides helped solve the pervading sense of rootlessness engendered by the Depression. For Lewis Mumford, this new rendering of a pioneer tradition ‘needed to be done’, not least because ‘ “going places” has become the popular symbol of vitality and success’.37

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However, in a period when most Americans could not afford interstate travel, the Guides served primarily as a ‘contribution to American patriotism’.38 Reading more as history than tourism, they encouraged an intimacy with the landscape that paradoxically did not rely on travel. Henry Alsberg, national director of the FWP, wished the series to ‘eventually . . . affect the conception of America by Americans’.39 Mumford also recognised the Guides’ endeavour to rediscover national identity, citing them as ‘the first attempt, on a comprehensive scale, to make the country itself worthily known to Americans’.40 Robert Cantwell dismissed the books’ ostensible status as touristic guides altogether, arguing that they had set a precedent in documenting American history ‘in terms of communities’ rather than ‘its leading actors’, and concluding that they would ‘revolutionise the writing of American history and enormously influence the direction and character of our imaginative literature’.41 Thus the series was critically received as an extended documentaryhistorical treatise: ‘a repository as well as a symbol of the reawakened American sense of its own history’.42 Pioneering a new methodology in historical writing, the Guides themselves became the subject of historiographical discourse; Mumford predicted they would one day contribute to a usable past, offering to ‘future historians’ a vital understanding of American cultural and literary history.43 The WPA published 378 books and pamphlets, and the series is in many ways the apotheosis of the documentary genre as technique, aesthetic and phenomenological concept: as Kazin argued, ‘an extraordinary contemporary epic’ that ‘set the tone of the period’.44 Largely ignored by historians and cultural theorists after the mid-forties, the Guides regained recognition during the 1970s, in the anthropological turn in American Studies toward cultural self-definition and historiography. Among more modern appraisals, Petra Schindler-Carter has argued that the ‘narrative of the nation is a concoction and a fabulation, a myth and an epic’,45 and Stott contended that ‘memory’ and ‘myth counted as much as fact’46 in the Guides’ presentation of America. Yet the epic, impersonal quality of the series as a whole had been the intention of the WPA editors, whose vast project had, according to their memorandum, ‘tended to counteract impulses arising from blind personal interests’ and served to create ‘a sense of community growth’.47 As Bold has argued, the Guides were marked by a tendency to naturalise social difference as ‘local colour’; the official FWP American Guides Manual instructed the compilation of ‘the complete, standard, authoritative work on the United States as a whole and of every part of it’.48 Such standardisation fostered credence in a unity of typical Americans, who populated a landscape contrived as harmonious and defined as ‘the nation’.49

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The American Guide series therefore addressed a profound need during the Depression to discover where Americans stood, both literally and figuratively. One contemporary critic astutely noted that the books awarded a puzzled America both spiritual and geographical guidance: ‘We do not know where we are or why we are so confused; and in the absence of firm counsels for present and future we go back to our roots, trying to discover how we got that way.’50 By joining the national to the local, the Guides pioneered a geo-cultural discourse that mapped American national identity on to the landscape. Their accumulative endeavour represented the collusion of various ideological interests and a collective, collaborative picture of America took shape. Additionally, by reasserting the road as a symbol of democratic progress, the Guides both reinforced American pioneer mythologies and alluded to a literary tradition of poetic cataloguing first established by Whitman.

Rukeyser, travel reportage and the American Guides Rukeyser’s interest in domestic and international politics influenced her poetics from the outset of her career, and her ‘poetry of meeting-places’ involved the convergence not only of formal and stylistic opposites, but also of diverse ideological themes, guided always by the emotional and physical act of witness. In 1933, Rukeyser was arrested in Alabama while covering the controversial ‘Scottsboro Boys’ trial for the Leftist Vassar Student Review, later recording the experience in the poem, ‘The Trial’ (Theory of Flight, 1935).51 In 1936, Rukeyser and Nancy Naumburg travelled to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, to report on an industrial disaster that was claiming the lives of hundreds of miners through occupational silicosis. According to Tim Dayton, Rukeyser had planned ‘a multi-media assault on the issue’, of which her 1938 poem series, The Book of the Dead, was the only resultant part.52 In 1940, the journal Films published ‘four sequences’ of Rukeyser’s, which she described as ‘notes for a treatment of the story of Gauley Bridge, West Virginia’.53 No film was made, and archival evidence reveals that Rukeyser was still pursuing the film project via Paul Rotha in the early seventies.54 In 1936, Rukeyser also travelled to Barcelona to document the anti-fascist Olympics at the start of the Spanish Civil War for Life and Letters Today. Fighting broke out on the day Rukeyser and the teams landed in Spain, and the Catalonian government ordered all foreigners to leave the country for their own safety.55 The evacuation to France, made in a small boat overfilled with around five hundred people, made

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a lasting impression on Rukeyser. The poem ‘Mediterranean’ (U.S. 1) explicitly addresses the boat journey, and goes some way to revealing how personal witness of social realities shaped Rukeyser’s aesthetic. As discussed, Rukeyser’s poetics and politics relied heavily on the idea of responsible witness – a term she chose for its implications of ‘seeing or knowing by personal experience, as well as the act of giving evidence’. The Life of Poetry begins with a description of the evacuation: huddled on the boat, the evacuees spoke of their ‘responsibility’ to ‘go home and tell your peoples what you’ve seen’.56 Sailing away from Spain, Rukeyser experienced her own ‘moment of proof’.57 She was asked on the boat, ‘among all this – where is there a place for poetry?’ In answering, she gave testimony to her burgeoning poetics of connection: ‘Then I began to say what I believe.’58 A poetics of witness necessitates travel. In the early seventies, Rukeyser addressed the war in Vietnam with the same vigour and belief in the communicative power of poetry as she had shown during the Spanish Civil War. Having suffered a series of strokes, and ill with diabetes, Rukeyser travelled to Hanoi in 1972 on behalf of the Committee for Solidarity, to demonstrate for peace.59 She was arrested and jailed briefly the same year for lying down on the floor of the Senate in Washington in protest against the war.60 Three years later, she flew to Korea to protest against the incarceration of poet Kim Chi-Ha by standing all day outside the prison doors.61 Her experiences during her travels informed her poetry, and Breaking Open (1973) and The Gates (1976) constitute her poetical testimony to the truths she had witnessed. Rukeyser’s relationship with travel reportage is inseparable from her theory of poetic witness, and as her career developed in the thirties, she was able to foster her poetics in a particularly fertile climate of opinion. Rukeyser’s enduring engagement with documentary fed her own aesthetics via the social and poetic vitality of experiential ‘moments of proof’. Both Susman and Stott have noted that ‘the 1930s was the decade of participation and belonging,’62 in which the Whitmanian stance of ‘being there . . . able to see, incorporate, and give voice to all human experience’ was essential to notions of authentic expression.63 Rukeyser’s approach, then, was typical of the times, as much of her poetry originates from the memory or documentation of her on-site experience of social realities. Cooper has noted that Rukeyser ‘wanted to be there. One way of witnessing was to write. Another was to put her body on the line, literally.’64 By forging a poetics that advocated the communication of responsible witness, Rukeyser sought to create a meeting-place of practice and imagination, site and sight. Although not directly involved with the WPA’s American Guides

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series, there is strong evidence that Rukeyser was aware of their existence. Her second poetry collection, U.S. 1, bears the same name as the first Highway Route Guide, and was published in the same year, 1938. Although the fact that the two books were published within a month of each other excludes the possibility of Rukeyser appropriating the name of the Guide, their close publication indicates the ideological confluence of Rukeyser’s work with the project, and Rukeyser’s U.S. 1 in many ways reflects the Guides’ documentary structure and style.65

U.S. One: Maine to Florida As national tours editor, Kellock chose U.S. One to be the first highway of the series due to it being the oldest and busiest in the country, linking twelve of the original thirteen colonies and stretching the length of the eastern shore.66 The book offers a mile-by-mile account of the highway, documenting a collection of facts, folklore, legends, and cultural and economic history under each place name along the route. Kellock believed that ‘a well-written tour provides a guide to the rise of civilisation in the country through which it passes,’ encouraging all writers to read Charles and Mary Beard’s Rise of American Civilisation before taking to the road.67 Infusing the Guides with a colonising, pioneering spirit, Kellock suggested that they both reminded Americans of their cultural and social history, and revealed a previously ‘undiscovered’ portion of America that ‘lay in the smaller towns and communities along the way’.68 U.S. One begins with a page directing the reader / driver on how to use the book, and an introduction explaining a little of the route’s history. Remaining since ‘Colonial and early Federal days the chief line of communication between the centres of the Atlantic Seaboard States’, U.S. One is ‘intimately bound up with important events’. The first settlements were ranged along the route, and the highway was ‘closely bound up with the Civil War’.69 Although the Guide specifies that ‘the chronicle of U.S. One is directly related to the history of transportation in America,’ no alternative method of transport to the car is considered for the tourist, and reviewers noted that other travel information was ‘ignored’ by the Guides.70 Several photographs in U.S. One feature views of the highway, invariably populated by motorcars. ‘U.S. One, Stretch of New Jersey’ depicts a view of the open road from the enclosed space of a moving car. The highway recedes in front of the motorist, whose right hand we see gripping the steering wheel. Bold has noted the stark contrast between

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the indication towards ‘civilisation’ and progress in this picture, and Lange’s image of an empty American highway seen from beside a farmer driving a horse and buggy.71 The sides of the motorway in ‘U.S. One’ are punctuated with road signs and buildings; the image itself, taken from within the protected space of the car’s interior, reveals the limited perspective of the driver, whose vision of the road ahead is framed by the windscreen. In accordance with WPA guidelines, U.S. One is written in a descriptive style, devoid of imperatives, which renders it more a historical handbook than a guide. Readers are not told to follow a particular path; rather it is assumed they will do so, and as a consequence, although most reviewers welcomed the book, some – for example, Bernard De Voto – saw room for ‘considerable improvement’. Confused as to the actual purpose of the Guides, De Voto argued that the writers should stop assuming ‘tourists are principally interested in gathering material for theses in the social sciences’.72

U.S. 1 Researching her second poetry collection, Rukeyser obtained a 1927 press release from the U.S. Department of Agriculture on ‘United States Route No. 1.’73 The short publication described the route’s importance to American industry and tourism, and Rukeyser’s copy reveals marginalia indicating her interest in the route’s geological and historical status as ‘the ancient shoreline of the continent’.74 U.S. 1 is comprised of three sections: the poem series The Book of the Dead; a collection of short poems under the title Night Music; and two long poems (‘The Cruise’ and ‘Mediterranean’) under the title Two Voyages. In an endnote to the first printing, Rukeyser confusingly refers to ‘a planned work, U.S. 1’, and the editors of The Collected Poems have noted the possibility of Rukeyser’s working toward another, ‘larger work, which she intended to call, once again, U.S. 1’.75 Yet it is equally possible that Rukeyser anticipated extending her original book in the manner of Whitman’s repeatedly enlarged poetic project, Leaves of Grass. Rukeyser noted that the planned work would be: a summary poem of the life of the Atlantic coast of this country, nourished by the communications which run down it. Gauley Bridge is inland, but it was created by theories, systems and workmen from many coastal sections – factors which are, in the end, not regional or national. Local images have one kind of reality. U.S. 1 will, I hope, have that kind and another too. Poetry can extend the document.76

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In fact, U.S. One does not pass through West Virginia at all. Rukeyser’s understanding of the industrial disaster at Gauley Bridge required that she create a diverted route from the original track, extending the document both in terms of bringing archival evidence of a hushed social injustice to a larger audience and in terms of enlarging a historical route by remapping the local in connection with the national. Martin Cherniack’s The Hawk’s Nest Incident (1986) provides the only detailed analysis of the disaster, which is now considered to be one of America’s biggest industrial tragedies. According to Cherniack’s conservative estimate, close to eight hundred men lost their lives as a direct result of working on the site. In March 1930, work began on the construction of a tunnel that was to run under Gauley Mountain, diverting water from a river to a hydroelectric power station. The electricity and the excavated rock would serve a nearby metallurgical plant in a town called Boncar, later renamed Alloy. When core samples of the rock revealed silica at a concentration of between 90 and 96 per cent,77 the tunnel was widened to mine this valuable compound, essential to the production of an alloy used in the electro-processing of steel. Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation was in charge of both projects, and had contracted Rinehart and Dennis Company of Virginia to complete the tunnel within two years.78 However, attempting to cut costs and time, the executives at Rinehart and Dennis did not equip their workers with adequate safety apparatus. The rock was drilled dry, instead of wet, causing large amounts of dust. Working long shifts without masks, the majority of workers contracted fatal silicosis.79 When Rinehart and Dennis became aware of the deaths, they made several attempts to underplay the severity of the issue, supplying company doctors who deliberately misdiagnosed the silicosis as pneumonia. During the trial it emerged that the company had paid a local undertaker fifty-five dollars a head to bury the unclaimed dead in a nearby field. When the Appalachian corridor was being constructed through West Virginia in 1972, contractors identified sixty-three potential grave sites, forty-five containing coffin and skeletal parts.80 Various news and media coverage of the disaster began in 1935, when legal proceedings were already under way. By 1936, movie newsreels were also showing footage of the trials.81 Rukeyser wrote that her material was sourced primarily from congressional records and court typescripts.82 She was able to compound these documents with her own visual witness of the site and its inhabitants.

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The road: mapping and touring In recent years, Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead has received strong critical attention, culminating in Dayton’s 2003 monograph.83 Whilst scholars have rightly acknowledged the book’s debt to documentary styles and conventions of the 1930s, the ways in which Rukeyser represented the American landscape as site of historical and present-day cultural practice have gone largely unexamined. Walter Kalaidjian has called The Book of the Dead ‘a kind of poetic travelogue’, understanding it as a re-articulation of ‘the Depression era’s regional diversity as the occasion for a specific cultural critique’.84 Michael Davidson has noted that Rukeyser ‘figures herself as the engaged spectator driving through a landscape marked (and often scarred) by history’.85 Astute in his observation that Rukeyser ‘takes literal and figurative back-roads into America’s industrial and political landscape’, Davidson decides not to examine Rukeyser’s own topographical methods of mapping American history on to such landscape.86 Intriguingly, whilst the book’s documentary tropes of the camera eye, editing and partisan reportage have provoked much critical interest, the structuring motif of the road has been largely overlooked. The Book of the Dead, and therefore U.S. 1, begins with the poem, ‘The Road’. From the outset, Rukeyser figures the road as a path of investigation: These are roads to take when you think of your country and interested bring down the maps again, phoning the statistician, asking the dear friend, reading the papers with morning inquiry.87

Within these initial lines, Rukeyser establishes a subtle and complex communication between poet, poem and reader. The determiner ‘these’ implies Rukeyser’s own familiarity with the ‘roads’ to which she directs her reader / witness, and the direct address both engages us and imparts a sense of patriotic responsibility. That Rukeyser writes ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ virtually disallows the reader the choice of inaction; indeed, the continuous form of the following three verbs connotes our engaged activity. The lines seem to become instruction by example; we are led to conjecture that they indicate the figurative paths taken by the poet in the process of putting together the poem at the same time as we are led along them. The direct address continues throughout, and Rukeyser imagines her reader / witness as both native and tourist, seated ‘at the wheel’

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whilst ‘the headlights // indicate future of road’. The poem’s perspective changes within the first three stanzas from the open space of the roadside to the enclosed space of a car, where ‘gas gauge and clock’ are all that are illuminated other than the ‘well-travelled six-lane highway planned for safety’. This image of privileged travel recalls not only the bourgeois rhetoric of the American Guides but strikingly corresponds to the above-mentioned ‘U.S. One’ photograph. As the poem progresses, a syntactical shift occurs, changing the status of the driver to driven. Once ‘outside’ her own city, the poet / reader enters into a relationship with the landscape that allows the roads directional control, and Rukeyser’s address similarly assumes more authority: These roads will take you into your own country. Select the mountains, follow rivers back, travel the passes. Touch West Virginia where the Midland trail leaves the Virginia furnace, iron Clifton Forge, Covington iron, goes down into the wealthy valley, resorts, the chalk hotel.88

The successive imperatives indicate that the reader is being instructed to follow a route already trodden by the poet, and the list of sights following the word ‘where’ further gives the impression of prior visual witness, helping to create a guided tour of the area reminiscent of the cataloguing techniques of the American Guides. Being told to ‘follow rivers back’ and ‘travel the passes’, the reader is directed away from ‘the well-travelled six-lane highway’ into a less civilised landscape whose strong link to the past is connoted by the fact that one must go ‘back’ to reach it. It is via this more natural route that Rukeyser believes one can ‘touch West Virginia’, although the natural setting soon gives way to a series of urban-industrial accomplishments. Littered with ‘pillars and fairway’, a ‘spa’ and an ‘airport’, the landscape is peopled with ‘gay blank rich faces wishing to add / history to the ballrooms, tradition to the first tee’.89 However, the pastimes of the people are unlikely to make a significant mark on the historical landscape, and their ‘blank’ faces contrast with the country’s ‘fierce’ natural features. Whilst the rich employ the landscape as passive background to their bourgeois activities, Rukeyser views it as site and component of cultural practice. At the close of the poem, Rukeyser figures ‘the photographer . . . surveying the deep country’ from the promontory of Hawk’s Nest. The poet indicates to the reader the last road towards her destination:

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you to its meanings: gorge, boulder, precipice. Telescoped down, the hard and stone-green river cutting fast and direct into the town.90

A strong relationship between the reader and the landscape is finally established. With possession (‘your road’) comes unavoidable responsibility, and the reader, who is now also a traveller, must connect with the road whilst accepting its status as dynamic medium. Furthermore, the road is now perceived as an organic, rather than a man-made path; the road is the landscape. The motif of the road enables Rukeyser to navigate through shifting dynamics of power and control between the American landscape and American citizens. John Lowney, in the only critique of The Book of the Dead to note the importance of Rukeyser’s ‘verbal mapping’, has astutely argued that, by appealing to the model of the route tour, Rukeyser ‘accentuates those texts that authorize national unity’ (e.g. the map), whilst simultaneously emphasising ‘the social differences that contradict such unity, especially the class differences’.91 Rukeyser certainly addresses tensions between the poet, the reader, the social subject(s), and the poem as location, and by initially structuring the road as a dynamic medium – continually changing in shape and direction – she formulates a network of meanings and relations that may be returned to and built upon throughout the course of the poem series. Following these paths of movement and communication, the reader is provided with various points of entry into the landscape’s multiple historical and cultural meanings.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: the rhizome These manifold points of entry can be illuminated by an understanding of how Rukeyser’s poetics of connection figure structurally, politically and aesthetically in The Book of the Dead. Application of the relational theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari aids such understanding. Although the essay to which I refer was written in 1980 and translated into English in 1987, Deleuze and Guattari’s manifesto on the principles of connection serves to enhance appreciation of the complexity and innovation of Rukeyser’s text. Deleuze and Guattari’s book A Thousand Plateaus begins with the chapter, ‘Introduction: Rhizome’.92 In it, the two theorists postulate that their book may be approached as a collection of texts that,

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although seemingly disparate in terms of style and subject matter, are intrinsically linked. Employing botanical terminology to expound their theory, Deleuze and Guattari argue for the advantage of the ‘rhizome’ as opposed to the ‘root’ or ‘trunk’ as a model of knowledge and perceptual organisation.93 They contend that traditional arboreal systems of knowledge have ‘never reached an understanding of multiplicity’94 by dint of their reliance on a dominating central structuring device.95 The rhizomatic structure, however, fosters multiplicity on an equal scale, having no centre but rather a network of branches and roots, all segments of which are fertile: ‘any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order.’ In nature, rhizomes are weeds, couchgrass, burrows, and animals that move in swarms.96 Deleuze and Guattari apply this model to literature. Asserting that Western thought has never broken with a subject / object ‘dualism,’ the authors argue that such binary thinking has resulted in unity being ‘consistently thwarted and obstructed in the object, while a new type of unity triumphs in the subject’.97 Highlighting the literary innovations of writers such as James Joyce and William Burroughs as examples of Western rhizomatic anomalies, Deleuze and Guattari emphasise ‘principles of connection and heterogeneity’, according to which even ‘the most resolutely fragmented work can also be presented as the Total Work or Magnum Opus’ if it does not begin from and return to a fixed point or order.98 A rhizome establishes connections between ostensibly separate fields of philosophical inquiry partly through its independence from a prescribed linguistic model. Believing it possible ‘to make a radical break between regimes of signs and their objects’, the authors advance a theory that the rhizome can act as an ‘abstract machine’, establishing ‘connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles’. Tuber-like, a semiotic chain agglomerates ‘diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialised languages’. Hence, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the ‘method of the rhizome type’ is ‘a method for the people’. When applied to linguistic analysis, the rhizome allows language to be understood by ‘decentring it onto other dimensions and other registers’.99 Deleuze and Guattari suggest ways in which the rhizome may be applied to ‘the principle of cartography’.100 The limiting model of the ‘tree’ is an example of a ‘tracing’: a ‘ready-made’ structure whose goal is to ‘describe a de facto state’. In contrast, the rhizome is ‘a map’,

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distinguishable in that ‘it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real’: It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages . . . it is itself part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification . . . It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways . . . A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to a tracing, which always comes back to ‘the same’.101

A map / rhizome, according to Deleuze and Guattari, differs from the typical road or contour map, which situates the viewer in a position of visual privilege. Wishing to avoid the dualism they had derided earlier, the authors are careful not to set the principles of ‘tracing’ and ‘mapping’ in opposition, but rather explain their relationship in terms of method: ‘the tracing should always be put back on the map’. A tracing reproduces what is already mapped by means of selection and isolation, ‘like a photograph or an X-ray’.102 By organizing fragments of the rhizome into fixed, stabilised images which afford a hierarchical point of view, the tracing breaks and blocks the rhizome. This is why ‘it is so important to . . . plug the tracings back into the map, connect the roots or trees back up with a rhizome.’103 Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the rhizome / map is constructed of ‘plateaus’, or ‘multiplicities’, and ‘lines of flight’, which pass between the plateaus, constantly fostering new connections. ‘Lines of flight’ are routes which grow from ruptures in the more stratified ‘segmentary lines’, and due to the fact that both types ‘always tie back to one another . . . one can never posit a dualism or dichotomy’.104 It is this growing between that Deleuze and Guattari insist is the ‘only way out’ of an allegedly civilised method of organising thought. As noted above, the rhizome is ‘the weed’, existing ‘only to fill the waste spaces left by cultivated areas’.105 Although they believe that Western literature has suffered considerably for its dependence on the limiting arboreal structural method, Deleuze and Guattari argue that ‘America is a special case.’106 Citing Jack Kerouac’s ‘search’ for ‘his ancestors’ (presumably in On the Road (1957)), the authors argue that American literature is ‘not immune from domination by trees or the search for roots’; however, the most important events in America’s literary history are characterised by the rhizome, owing to the fact that in America, ‘[t]he conception of the book is different.’ Deleuze and Guattari refer to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as the epitome of rhizomatic rule and method: a proliferating, connect-

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ing, expanding poetry that spreads its lines of flight outwards instead of seeking to establish roots in one place. Important to this nomadic principle is the American Indian, the original American ‘without ancestry’, who represents ‘the West’, and whose ‘ever-receding’ frontier is the likely cause of a literature that reflects its country’s ‘shifting’ lines of ideological and geographical stratification.107

Poetics of connection: Rukeyser, Deleuze and Guattari Rukeyser’s theories of communication and ‘meeting-place’, her refusal to accept the ‘static mechanics’ of critical dissection, and her distaste for restrictive methods of linear thought correlate with Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of rhizomatic contact outlined above, as well as owe their formation to the methods and aesthetics of documentary.108 Her manifesto in praise of connection and relation, The Life of Poetry, was written forty years before the English translation of A Thousand Plateaus was published, and although Rukeyser does not develop a model as specific as the rhizome, the principles guiding her book are largely the same as those represented by Deleuze and Guattari. Additionally, as I have argued earlier in this book, Rukeyser’s collected works, although seemingly disparate in method and style, are each linked to one another, connected by Rukeyser’s enduring, governing belief in the connective power of poetic witness to communicate truth. Each of Rukeyser’s texts feeds back to those that came before it at the same time as anticipating what might come after. If one applies Deleuze and Guattari’s model of the map to Rukeyser’s œuvre, one might see each text as a ‘plateau’, between which proliferate connecting lines of thought. Such thought is characterised by its rhizomatic nature: it fosters multiplicities through multiple contact. The ‘lines of flight’ caused by ruptures in the ‘segmentary lines’ in Deleuze and Guattari’s map find their analogue in Rukeyser’s ‘moments of proof’, when repressive, segregating patterns of seeing and documenting the world are broken away from, and new paths of communication between fields are formed. Hence, throughout Rukeyser’s works, several experiences, memories, images and representative figures are referred to and returned to often. The importance of the document and the ‘unverifiable fact’ in poetry; Rukeyser’s journey away from Spain; her experiences as a travel documentarian; the rhythms of filmic montage; the phase rule; the figures of Gibbs, Boas, Whitman, Melville and Hariot – all figure regularly in Rukeyser’s imagination. Yet Rukeyser’s is a method of connection based on resonance rather than repetition; the message or meaning passes between texts or ‘plateaus’,

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linking them at the same time as expanding their influence. Considering Rukeyser’s collected works in this way also offers a counter-argument to those critics (principally her contemporaries) who argued that Rukeyser could not commit to a central political structuring ideology or adopt a specific poetic style. Rukeyser’s texts as ‘plateaus’ are built upon a model of relation: ‘[e]ach plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau.’109 Rukeyser’s poetics might be further linked to the concept of a rhizomatic connection via anthropological discourse. Admitting their indebtedness to the anthropologist Gregory Bateson for the word ‘plateau’, Deleuze and Guattari note his employment of the term in his work on ‘Balinese culture’.110 It would seem the authors are referring to Balinese Character, the photo-text that Bateson wrote in collaboration with Margaret Mead in 1942. Bateson’s use of the word to describe a region ‘whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’ informed Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the rhizome as literary, philosophical and cultural principle.111 Remembering Rukeyser’s recourse to the writings of Bateson and Mead, and her profound interest in American cultural anthropology, this aspect of the ‘plateau’ appears additionally significant to her poetics. Furthermore, Bateson’s ‘region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point’ corresponds with Rukeyser’s idea of ‘clusters’ or ‘constellations’. These, we remember, are arrangements of poetic ‘elements’: images, emotions or meanings, whose ‘truth’ (recalling Gibbs) is resident not in their beginning or their end, but in their continual process and growth.112 The Life of Poetry is also structurally similar to A Thousand Plateaus. Rukeyser’s book is split into ‘parts’; each part has several chapters; each chapter is an arrangement of sub-headed sections. Although Rukeyser does not advise her reader that the book may be entered at any point, this is arguably the case; the message of each chapter or section does not depend on its position in a linear narrative in order to be understood. The rhizomatic structure of The Life of Poetry enables each section to be linked to the others via common threads of meaning, supported by Rukeyser’s belief that people (especially Americans) must not ‘become experts in some narrow “field” ’, but open lines of connection between areas of thought and practice.113 Deleuze and Guattari intended a similar model: ‘We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus.’114 Rukeyser’s life-long relational poetics are also similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s connective semiotic theory. Understanding that the way we see and organise things ideologically is inseparable from the way we describe

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things in words, Rukeyser sought a new system of telling: ‘I needed a language of transformation. I needed a language of changing phase for the poem. And I needed a language that was not static, that did not see life as a series of points, but more as a language of water. . . .’115 Similar to Deleuze and Guattari, who note the necessity of making ‘a radical break between regimes of signs and their objects’, Rukeyser noted that ‘the use of language involves symbols so general, so dense emotionally, that the life of the symbols themselves must continually be taken into consideration’.116 Positing a poetic theory of language that takes as its starting point language ‘as a process in which motion and relationship are always present’, Rukeyser employs the image of a river.117 Rukeyser’s organic image of language as fluid, changeable process correlates with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘collective assemblages of enunciation’.118 Language for the two theorists is a ceaselessly connective plurality of ‘languages’, characterised by movement, which does not ‘plot a point’ or ‘fix an order’ on the life it translates. This ‘assemblage’ is similar to Rukeyser’s image of the ‘cluster’, which denotes connection and relation between words and images. According to Rukeyser, ‘clusters and combinations’ are in contradistinction to traditional methods of thought that depend upon the linear narration of ‘single points of knowledge’.119 The water image is deceptive in Rukeyser, for she argues against a hierarchical system of a central river and branching tributaries in the manner that Deleuze and Guattari argue against the arboreal structuring device in philosophy and literature. For Rukeyser, ‘truth is . . . not a stream that flows from a source, but an agreement of components. In a poem, these components are, not the words and images, but the relations between the words and images . . . The arrangement is the life.’120 Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, then, fostering relations ‘between things’, provides an excellent model with which to examine Rukeyser’s writing, not least because it seems a natural extension of Rukeyser’s thought, despite there being no evidence to suggest that Deleuze and Guattari read Rukeyser’s work.121 That the French philosophers submitted their theory forty years after Rukeyser had argued hers serves to demonstrate the innovative nature of Rukeyser’s poetics.

The Book of the Dead as rhizomatic map Although one could argue that Rukeyser’s overall title, U.S. 1, alludes to a trunk-like channel stretching the length of the east coast, my analysis has hopefully begun to demonstrate how Rukeyser utilises the familiar route’s name to propose a wholly new way of touring and viewing the

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landscape. Whereas Kerouac’s On the Road represents, for Deleuze and Guattari, an example of arboreally structured searching, Rukeyser’s quest in The Book of the Dead is similar in form to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: an interconnected series of plateaus, or poems, which represent experience of the land and its people both on and, perhaps more importantly, off the road. Rukeyser saw poetry as a process of ‘meeting-places where the false barriers go down’.122 In The Book of the Dead, she constructs an intricate map of the American landscape via a rhizomatic network of ‘meeting-places’. Having explored the ontological and poetical implications of this motif, I now discuss it in cartographical and topographical terms, with specific regard to what Rukeyser meant to communicate by the term ‘place’. Rukeyser employs the road as linking device in The Book of the Dead. After the initial poem, ‘The Road’, the reader is taken on a concise tour of the State in ‘West Virginia’. The style of this poem is close to that of the WPA Guides as Rukeyser moves swiftly through the landscape, indicating visual markers that evoke historical memory along the way. The rhythm varies, shifting from the enjambed lines of a fluid historical narrative to the staccato listings of war sites. Forty-five lines long, the poem condenses a great deal of American history, from the English settlements in the seventeenth century, which ‘left a record to our heritage’, through the Civil War to the present day.123 The ballroom ‘pillars’ in the previous poem are here transfigured into the giant ‘forest’ trees of the New World, ‘pillars of God’ in a land as yet unspoilt by human ‘civilisation’. Rukeyser’s tone is both patriotic and apologetic in ‘West Virginia’. She appears to celebrate the founding of America by the first settlers, heralding their arrival with exclamation, a vocabulary of ‘hope’ and short lines of breathless verse: They saw rivers flow west and hoped again, Virginia speeding to another sea! 1671 – Thomes Batts, Robert Fallam, Thomas Wood, the Indian Perecute . . . .124

However, the ‘Indian’, whose land will eventually be figured as a ‘frontier’ for the English, and whose race will eventually be displaced by them, features in the poem as both guide (Perecute was a guide to Fallam’s troupe) and original American ancestor.125 Remembering Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the American Indian as representative of ‘the rhizomatic West’, one might read ‘West Virginia’ as a lament at losing a connective association with the land that began when New World settlers forged an arboreal path through its wilderness. This image is strengthened by Rukeyser’s evocation of the Indians’ fields

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of ‘found-land / farmland, the planted home’ in juxtaposition with a society ‘war-born’: The battle at Point Pleasant, Cornstalk’s tribes, last stand, Fort Henry, a revolution won; the granite SITE OF THE precursor EXECUTION sabres, apostles OF JOHN BROWN LEADER OF THE War’s brilliant cloudy RAID AT HARPER’S FERRY Floods, heavy wind this spring, the beaten land blown high by wind, fought wars, forming a state, a surf, frontier defines two fighting halves . . . .126

The poet takes the place of the Indian guide, treading the same path as the ‘first whites’ and leading the reader on a similar journey of ‘discovery’. ‘Coming where this road comes’, the reader is transported to sites of ‘two fighting halves’: of elemental and human meeting and conflict.127 Lowney has argued that Rukeyser’s use of local history situates her appeal against the injustices of corporate politics in a historical setting, her capitalisation of the monument to John Brown revealing her insistence ‘that a Marxist revolutionary politics in the United States is also a radical politics’.128 Whilst Lowney’s evaluation is persuasive, it is the natural landmarks, over man-made monuments, that bear the weight of Rukeyser’s political poetics. The river figures throughout The Book of the Dead as path and poetic metaphor. ‘The Road’ closes on the present-day image of the river ‘cutting fast and direct into the town’; ‘West Virginia’ opens with an evocation of the original settlers’ response to the same river, whose pluralisation alludes to the traditional connective propensities of the American land and its people: ‘They saw rivers flow west and hoped again.’129 Throughout the poem series, roads and rivers perform the same function, leading the reader ‘back’ to the landscape, and forging paths of cultural and visual witness. Created by nature, the river also represents an extension of the sea, by means of which America became colonised. Connecting ‘fields’ both above ground and subterraneously, the ‘rivers’ of West Virginia are a constant, rhizomatic force: But it was always the water the power flying deep green rivers cut the rock rapids boiled down, a scene of power. Done by the dead. Discovery learned it. And the living?

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Live the country filling west, knotted the glassy rivers; like valleys, opening mines, coming to life.

Rivers are vehicles of movement and connection throughout the landscape of ‘West Virginia’ and The Book of the Dead. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘lines of flight’, which evolve ‘by subterranean stems and flows, along river valleys or train tracks’, Rukeyser’s rivers run through and between scenes, connecting the past to the present, the dead to the living, the landscape to the witness.130 Too powerful to be blocked, the ‘rivers cut the rock’. Elsewhere in the poem they feed the Kanawha Falls, whose cascading waters represent ‘the rapids of the mind / . . . spilling west’.131 The rivers are documentary channels, metaphors for poetic imagination and probing investigation, both of which drive the poet on her journey of witness. Providing ‘multiple entryways’ into the landscape as site and memory, Rukeyser’s poetic lines correspond to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘lines of flight’, as well as to the ‘knotted’ rivers of West Virginia, creating connection by ‘opening’ and ‘coming to life’. By beginning The Book of the Dead in this way, Rukeyser establishes a complex structural and epistemological map, in which the separate ‘plateaus’ of the landscape and the poems are linked by a governing, rhizomatic trope. The roads and rivers spread throughout The Book of the Dead, ‘tying // you to its meanings’ and creating an interdependence between separate poems in the series. This non-hierarchical structure challenges traditional systems of power and privilege associated both with objectivising methods of documentary discourse and with the capitalist social structures critiqued by the poems. The river / road is figured in ‘West Virginia’ as flowing through ‘a scene of power’. In the sixteenth poem in the series, ‘Power’, Rukeyser examines the power relations acted out both on and beneath the American landscape. Her method of entry is again to follow the river, as it ‘cuts sheer, mapped far below in delicate track’ towards the hydroelectrical plant.132 The plant represents what Deleuze and Guattari label a ‘bulb’: a place where language pools and stabilises, and from which the rhizome must spread via ‘lines of flight’ to establish new connections and avoid a hierarchy of control.133 Echoing ‘The Road’, Rukeyser tracks the path to the plant: This is the midway between water and flame, this is the road to take when you think of your country, between the dam and the furnace, terminal.134

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The river / road continues to run ‘midway’ and ‘between’, in the manner of the rhizome, although, unlike the rhizome, Rukeyser’s ‘road’ reaches ‘terminal’. The word presents a plurality of meanings, ‘shattering the linear unity’ of signs and their referents, according to Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking. Coming at the end of the poetic line and the sentence, ‘terminal’ semantically links those suffering or already dead from the incurable silicosis to the impressive workstation. The word also signifies the end of a path or journey, and, considering that The Book of the Dead addresses corporate culpability, it is possible that Rukeyser indicates where responsibility for the multiple deaths finally rested. The guide figure is reprised in ‘the engineer Jones’, the architect of the plant, who leads the poet / reader into its recesses via paths that assume epic, mythical dimensions: ‘the iron steps go down as the roads go down. // This is the second circle, world of inner shade.’135 Referring to both Dante and Milton in ‘Power’, Rukeyser has Jones quote from Paradise Lost: “ ‘Hail, holy light, offspring of Heav’n first-born, ‘Or of th’Eternal Coeternal beam May I express thee unblamed?’ ”136

As he negotiates a precipice by aid of a vertical ladder, Jones announces, ‘[t]his is the place. Away from this my life / I am indeed Adam unparadiz’d.’137 Kaufman and Herzog have noted that Rukeyser’s quotation of Milton ‘reinforces [her] framing of this industrial tragedy in epic terms’.138 It also serves to align the journey into the depths of the plant with the Fall of man, an analogue neatly underlined by Jones’s reference to the ‘unblamed’, and his ironic admittance that, for him, the dark tunnels are paradise. Here again, the image of the path performs the work of the rhizome, which ‘ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles’.139 By mapping a network of subterranean tunnels, Rukeyser creates meeting-places in ‘Power’ of the ‘art’ of epic poetry, the ‘science’ of the mechanistic workings of the plant, and the ‘social struggles’ between those who conduct abusive labour practices and those who suffer them. The plant, itself an ‘organisation of power’, cannot establish connections outside of its stabilised internal structure. It has been the controlling hub, the arboreal root, of a force that has terminated life. Thus, the poem ends, Down the reverberate channels of the hills the suns declare midnight, go down, cannot ascend, no ladder back; see this, your eyes can ride through steel,

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this is the river Death, diversion of power, the root of the tower and the tunnel’s core, this is the end.140

However, the rhizome is characterised by its ability to regenerate, to ‘start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines’.141 The river as a natural force is too powerful to be stopped, hence the subsequent poem, ‘The Dam’, negates the terminus of ‘Power’ and begins, ‘All power is saved, having no end.’ The river / road, having represented ‘Death’, now finds new life-force. It ‘repairs’, ‘retains’ and ‘spouts’ across the landscape; its sensual movements encourage (re)birth: it ‘turns in the gorge toward its release; . . . urging the hollow, the thunder, / the major climax’.142 In this poem, too, Rukeyser ‘establishes connections between semiotic chains’ via the rhizomatic image of the river. Michael Thurston has written insightfully that, in ‘The Dam’, ‘water (as subject) diffuses into an uncontainable proliferation of significance, just as water (as image, as metaphor) diffuses into uncontainable energy’.143 Noting that the poem contains ‘surpluses of meaning’, Thurston argues that Rukeyser yokes ‘thematic anarchy of water to the rhetorical anarchy of language’, juxtaposing ‘fragments drawn from physics, law, and finance . . . in a field of mutual interruption and destabilization’.144 Thurston’s point that the scene is constantly interrupted by passages of differing discourse reinforces my argument that her writing may be best understood as rhizomatic map. These discursive passages, or ‘lines of flight’, do not lead to separation or hierarchical relations between subject and object, but cultivate contact between fields. Importantly, Deleuze and Guattari see the rhizome as ‘composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion’.145 The thrusting motion of Rukeyser’s lines in ‘The Dam’ reveals the connective power of the river, which is able to be ‘born again’. Like the rhizome, this power ‘changes. It does not die.’146 Further linking Rukeyser’s poetics to Deleuze and Guattari’s lines of thought is their shared appreciation for the politically charged montage theory and technique of Sergei Eisenstein, whose influence on Rukeyser is discussed elsewhere in this book. In an interview in 1938, Rukeyser explained her intention to use montage over linear narrative in The Book of the Dead as a method of building ‘the story and the picture’: ‘I have tried to write a series of poems which are linked together as the sequences of a movie are linked together.’147 In ‘The Dam’, Rukeyser figures the cascade of water in explicitly filmic terms, playing on the phonic similarity of ‘river’ and ‘silver’: Blessing of this innumerable silver, printed in silver, images of stone

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walk on a screen of falling water in film-silver in continual change recurring colored, plunging with the wave.148

The river’s rapid motion is both means and message of the landscape’s status as site of cultural and historical practice. As discussed in Chapter 3, Deleuze, like Rukeyser, considered Eisenstein’s montage theory an important cultural development. In his 1986 book, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, he highlights Eisenstein’s methods of fusing the dynamic to the organic, applauding ‘a unity of production, a cell which produces its own parts by division, differentiation’.149 The parallels between the rhizome and the montage cell are evident, and both correspond to Rukeyser’s enduring belief in the far-reaching, proliferating life of poetry. A heterogeneous compositional method structures The Book of the Dead, which assembles different poetic styles, subjects and documents. Dayton has argued that the poems in the series may be grouped according to three ‘generic elements’: the lyric, which represents a ‘subjective’, ‘interior’ voice; the epic, which is comprised of ‘documentary . . . objective dimensions’; and the dramatic, tragic meditation of the disaster’s place in ‘the unfolding history of humanity’.150 Helpful, if a little reductive, Dayton’s categorisations demonstrate the internal diversity of the series. Rukeyser’s ‘spliced together’151 genres were remarked upon by William Carlos Williams, who, reviewing The Book of the Dead, appreciated Rukeyser’s ability ‘to select and exhibit her material’.152 These methods of selection and exhibition promoted Rukeyser’s idea that poetry could provide ‘a meeting-place between all the kinds of imagination’; the meaning of her poetry therefore relied ‘on the moving relations within itself’.153 The internal relations of The Book of the Dead map several diverse discourses on to the same plain, opening the ‘blockages’ (a word used by Rukeyser and Deleuze and Guattari) created by separatist methods of knowledge organisation and social hierarchy.154 The final poem, titled after the series, reveals once more a rhizomatic connection of the book’s themes of power, frontier, history, document, testimony and witness. ‘The Book of the Dead’ begins by reiterating an assertive and instructive refrain: These roads will take you into your own country. Seasons and maps coming where this road comes into a landscape mirrored in these men.155

The ‘seasons’ represent rebirth, change and the passing of time: history. The ‘maps’, directing the traveller through and ‘into’ the American

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landscape, have been reconfigured throughout the course of the book to guide the reader toward the status of responsible and engaged witness rather than impartial viewer. At this site of industrial tragedy, caused by capitalist machinations of power and neglect, the landscape is literally mapped on to the bodies of the men who breathed the deadly silica. Contributing to a frontier rhetoric that would culminate in the ‘myth and symbol’ school,156 Rukeyser connects ‘these men’ to the pioneer settlers of the country, who likewise ‘breathed-in America’ and forged new paths of discovery westwards through the landscape.157 Additionally, by re-employing direct address, Rukeyser extends the association, creating a further sense of communication and community that includes the reader: and you young, you who finishing the poem wish new perfection and begin to make; you men of fact, measure our times again.158

The reader has hopefully understood the responsibilities of witness, and is charged with taking steps towards the communication of truth via imagination. Rukeyser’s last address to ‘you men of fact’ is a warning and a recommendation. ‘Fact’, as Rukeyser wrote years later, can be ‘a trap of the documentary’. Used carelessly, it can be a type of ‘slang’ for a reality that remains half-hidden or ignored.159 The guide books should thus be rewritten; the landscape and the ‘times’ should be remeasured, remapped. The Book of the Dead was a demonstration of how this might be done. An interesting endnote to this section further reveals Rukeyser’s interest in the relations between documenting American culture, pioneering spirit and ‘map-making’. In the early 1970s, Rukeyser was in correspondence with Eric Mottram, an American Studies professor at King’s College London. Both Mottram’s and Rukeyser’s papers indicate that Rukeyser hoped to edit and introduce a collection of Mottram’s essays, stressing the pioneering attitudes and techniques of the authors about whom Mottram had written, in a project entitled Map Makers. Rukeyser’s list of such (American) persons includes those singled out by Deleuze and Guattari: William Carlos Williams and William Burroughs.160

Rukeyser’s road signs: The Book of the Dead The methods by which Rukeyser directs her reader / witness along the paths she forges are just as important to her documentary poetics as the

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cultural and historical locations that she signposts. Rukeyser’s poetry establishes connections between apparently diverse semiotic chains, whilst refiguring accepted documentary methods of investigation and representation. With the growth of interstate travel came the proliferation of the roadside sign. In 1938, Life magazine featured an article entitled ‘Speaking of Pictures . . . Road Signs’, alleging that the accumulation of signs along America’s highways had rendered roads unsightly.161 The highway under investigation was US One, ‘for three centuries America’s greatest artery of travel and trade’, yet ‘literally plastered with eyesores’.162 Margaret Bourke-White’s accompanying photographs portray a landscape littered with signs and symbols, from boards advertising Coca-Cola to church community signs warning of Christ’s impending return. The initial photograph in the sequence reveals a view of the highway through the windscreen of a moving car, the driver’s view of the landscape further interrupted by ‘one long clutter of ugly signs’.163 In the 1930s and 1940s, the roadside and its architecture came to represent an American micro-cosmos, attracting a great deal of attention from documentarians.164 Roy Stryker directed his photographers toward highway signs, wishing to capture a feeling of ‘highway as habitat’.165 A Fortune magazine article in 1934 commented that ‘the open roadside’ had replaced the town as site of commerce and entertainment, noting that because Americans were driven by an innate ‘racial hunger’ for ‘movement’, they were loath to deviate far from the highway for fear of being ‘slowed up’.166 In The Book of the Dead, Rukeyser inscribes many symbols on to the roadside or landscape for the purposes of direction and revelation. Examining the discrepancy in capitalist culture between the promise of the sign and the reality of its referent was for Rukeyser the first step towards reforging a connection between sign and signified. By employing symbols and signs throughout the book, Rukeyser addresses the larger documentary problematic of the truth-value of representation. The photograph, with its process of selecting, framing and arresting reality, is arguably the most challenged documentary method in The Book of the Dead. In ‘The Road’, Rukeyser places the photographer in a position of visual superiority as she stands upon Hawk’s Nest lookout, ‘viewing on groundglass an inverted image’ of the landscape and the town below.167 Both Walter Kalaidjian and Shoshana Wechsler have recognised the Marxist implications in Rukeyser’s use of the camera obscura image. In The German Ideology, Marx employed the camera obscura as pejorative metaphor in the critique of ‘false consciousness’, claiming that an

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inversion of material conditions and their social truths was the result of ‘historical life process’.168 Rukeyser’s utilisation of the image establishes at the outset of the book a trope that will highlight social injustices and allude to complex power relations in which the poet / documentarian and the reader are necessarily involved. The ‘groundglass’ template of the camera becomes a recurrent symbol throughout The Book of the Dead. In the poem ‘Gauley Bridge’, the camera serves as an initial framing device for the scene that unfolds. Placed ‘at the crossing’, the camera records the town from a privileged point of meeting and multiple divergence. The glass of the template extends to symbolise a plurality of meanings as ‘the camera eye’ tracks across the visual details of the town.169 It is figured in the ‘empty windows’ of the street; ‘in the commercial hotel’ as the owner keeps his books ‘behind the public glass’; in the ‘post office window’ behind which a ‘tall coughing man’ works; in the ‘April-glass-tinted’ waitress serving tourists on a bus tour of the highway, the ‘coast-to-coast schedule’ of which is displayed behind ‘the plateglass window’ of the café. Via the trope of glass, the quotidian workings of commerce, consumerism and spectatorship are brought to the surface of the reader / traveller’s consciousness. Glass becomes a symbol of reification and separation; the waitress is objectified by ‘one’s harsh night eyes’, the windows divide the townspeople, creating ‘a hive of private boxes’.170 The proliferation of glass at Gauley Bridge is a sign of both industrial progress and the dangers of social segregation that such progress might enforce. Rukeyser’s imagistic style in this poem is quietly photographic, recalling the austere compositions of urban decay of Walker Evans, whose influential collection, American Photographs, was published the same year as U.S. 1.171 Glass, wood, and naked eye: the movie-house Closed for the afternoon frames posters streaked with rain, Advertise ‘Racing Luck’ and ‘Hitch-Hike Lady.’172

The movement of ‘the camera eye’, highlighted by the repetition of the word ‘track’ in the poem, circles the town, returning to the ‘road’ which ‘flows over a bridge’.173 Yet Rukeyser would seem to imply that the gaze of the camera cannot encompass the social reality of the ‘onestreet town’. A ‘little boy runs with his dog’ to where a group of men are ‘mending the road for the government’. As he moves, he ‘blurs the camera-glass fixed on the street’.174 The boy’s motion, in contrast to the relative stillness of the rest of the scene, ‘blurs’ the distinctions between subject and object that the glass has created. Representing a new

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generation, the boy runs from the damaged town towards restoration and the forging of new paths. ‘[F]ixed on the street’, the ‘camera-glass’ is the transformed image of the mass of silica particles that Rukeyser imagined elsewhere in The Book of the Dead as having covered the surrounding landscape with white, ‘murdering snow’.175 Additionally, by fixing the camera and the glass / silica to ‘the street’, the poet erects a road sign which points to Alloy: The road flows over the bridge, Gamoca pointer at the underpass, Opposite, Alloy, after a block of town.176

The name of the town, Alloy, home of the hydroelectrical power plant, provides a metaphor for Rukeyser’s poetics of connection and fusion. In ‘Gauley Bridge’, the glass both provides a semiotic alloy for a multiplicity of referents and indicates the culpability of all those involved in systems of visual objectification. The poem is itself an alloy of photographic technique and effect, and an indictment of the reifying methods of documentary photography, in which the poet admits to being involved. Recognising photography’s tendency to objectify, Rukeyser argues for another way of seeing that none the less relies on recording visual witness. In the final lines of The Book of the Dead, she urges the reader to open up new lines of communication by extending the document: ‘Defense is sight; widen the lens and see / . . . new signals, processes.’177 ‘Gauley Bridge’ points the way to such processes by employing what Deleuze and Guattari label the ‘tracing’: that which reproduces reality by means of selection and isolation, ‘like a photograph or an X-ray’. However, by fixing the symbol of the ‘camera-glass’ to ‘the street’, Rukeyser lays the tracing ‘back on the map’.178 The poem, the glass, the photograph: all merge to create a multi-directional road sign on Rukeyser’s rhizomatic map. Rukeyser’s engagement in the documentary dialectic of the times between the reproduction of superficial appearance and the transmission of a deeper reality is manifested in the presentation of surface and subterranean landscape. The smothering silica dust renders the landscape ‘audacious’ in ‘Alloy’, due to its patent domination of the hills and fields, its flagrant disregard for human life, and its deadly beauty.179 The glass on the street of ‘Gauley Bridge’ envelopes the scene in a ‘field of glass’, rendering it a fetishised commodity, and an emblem of the social and cultural relations of ownership that it conceals. Images of industrial progression pollute the landscape in ‘Alloy’, described in short, rapid phrases that emphasise the plant’s heat and productivity.

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Hottest for silicon, blast furnaces raise flames, Spill fire, spill steel, quench the new shape to freeze, Tempering it to perfected metal.180

In ‘Power’, the poet moves ‘between the dam and the furnace’ to ‘the clean park, fan of wires, landscapers’.181 ‘Landscape’ becomes a verb; the corporation’s methods of controlling the natural environment extend to hindering its growth and manipulating its beauty to conform to standardised aesthetic notions. By cultivating the landscape in this way, the corporation is both signposting its possession of it, and creating an attractive superficial diversion from the reality of what lies metaphorically and literally buried beneath it. In ‘The Cornfield’, the poet visits the field where the workers’ bodies were buried clandestinely, without proper funeral or stones. She reprises the role of guide and guided: For those given to voyages: these roads discover gullies, invade, Where does it go now? Now turn upstream twenty-five yards. Now road again. Ask the man on the road. Saying, That cornfield? Over the second hill, through the gate, watch for the dogs. Buried, five at a time . . . .182

To locate the buried, one must know how to read and navigate oneself by the landscape’s natural landmarks; no man-made inscriptions indicate the bodies of the dead, and any epitaphs on the few wood stakes that served as grave markers have been ‘washed-off’.183 Forging a passage to the burial site, the poet / guide deviates from the touristic path. Directions to this site of historical importance will not be found in any WPA Guide; one must ask a local ‘on the road’. Several of the roads in The Book of the Dead ‘go down’.184 An underground network of tunnels stretches beneath the landscape of Gauley Bridge, providing passage for both the deadly silica and the life-giving water. The subterranean serves for Rukeyser as a symbol for the buried lives and truths of the miners. Indeed, the title of the poem series is taken from the collection of texts – spells, incantations, hymns, prayers – that ancient Egyptian scribes composed for the benefit of the dead. These texts, written on papyri and laid in coffins, carved on sarcophagi, painted in tomb walls, or inscribed on amulets that were then placed on or in the bodies of the dead, were believed to guide the departed through the underworld, in preparation for judgement by Osiris, God of the Dead.185 In ‘Absalom’, Rukeyser splices documents from a congressional

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hearing with documents from ancient Egyptian burial sites. Testimonies from workers and their families are juxtaposed with extracts from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, either verbatim or closely paraphrased. David Kadlec has argued convincingly that Rukeyser’s decision to utilise the Egyptian texts was influenced by her visit to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the Heart Amulet of Hatnofer was on display between 1936 and 1937, the years during which Rukeyser composed the poem series.186 The amulet, ‘vital to the judgment of the soul and to its eventual preservation after death’, would have been inserted into the eviscerated chest of a king or queen, bearing the typical text: ‘Heart of my mother, heart of my mother! Heart of my [present] form!’187 The Egyptian Book of the Dead includes a similar appeal: ‘My heart of my mother. My heart-case of my transformations. Let not one stand up to bear testimony against me.’188 The hieroglyphic amulets are symbols of protection against unfair judgement in the underworld; the various texts of the dead act as signs to direct them through the afterlife. Therefore, in Egyptian mythology, the role of guide belongs to both the scribe and the dead, ‘who open up the way, who act as guides to the roads [in the Other World]’.189 By interlacing the testimony of a mother who has lost her family to silicosis with quotations from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Rukeyser ties the themes of witness, guide, judgment, power and passage. Shirley Jones, the youngest son to die of the disease, asks his mother to ensure that his chest is opened after his death and the cause of his illness exposed. The insidious workings of the silica are written within the boy’s body, and whilst their inscription may not guarantee him safe passage through the underworld, it will hopefully allow his mother monetary compensation for her loss. Testifying at ‘the first in a line of lawsuits’,190 the Joneses act as spiritual guides to the living, and protectors of the dead. By reading and erecting the signs of the disease, Shirley Jones and his mother ‘open out a way’ to an inversion of the power relations set in place by Rinehart and Dennis. Both the boy’s body and the landscape in which he worked and is buried are now within his control. His influence extends to the river as conduit of communication: I have gained mastery over my heart I have gained mastery over my two hands I have gained mastery over the waters I have gained mastery over the river.191

Shirley Jones’s guiding ability to ‘open’ the way to the communication of truth via the opening of his own body associates him with the life-giving rivers first featured in ‘The Road’ and ‘West Virginia’. The

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‘power’ referred to in the latter poem as ‘done by the dead’ assumes new meaning in ‘Absalom’, and the spiritual ‘opening’ of Jones’s passage into the afterlife corresponds with the renewing energy of the paths cut by the rivers through the countryside, ‘like valleys, opening mines, / coming to life’.192

Rukeyser’s road signs: poetics and The Traces of Thomas Hariot Closing this chapter with a discussion of what I have labelled Rukeyser’s ‘road signs’ in relation to her broader poetics and œuvre will further demonstrate the connection between several of the sources of documentary in her work. Rukeyser’s last prose biography, The Traces of Thomas Hariot (1971), charts the life of the Elizabethan navigator, astronomer and mathematician who was friends with Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake, but about whom little is known or recorded. Hariot is best remembered for having written the first account in English of the New World, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, in 1588. Rukeyser’s investigation into his life proved arduous due to the paucity of material on him and the geographical distance between archived documents recording his achievements.193 The structure and style of the biography is a reflection of the process of its creation; Michele Ware has justly written that ‘The Traces of Thomas Hariot is a very messy book.’194 However, by constructing a non-linear narrative out of ‘traces’, Rukeyser creates a tour of Hariot’s life similar to her own journey of investigation and discovery. In the book’s epigraph, Rukeyser provides the OED definition of ‘trace’ as noun: The track made by the passage of any person or thing . . . Vestiges of marks remaining and indicating the former presence, existence, or action of something . . . A non-material indication or evidence of the presence or existence of something, or of a former event or condition; a sign, mark.195

The biography represents the ‘trace’ as both verb and noun. Tracking Hariot’s movements, the author reconstructs the paths of his life by reading and following the signs he has left by his passage. These signs provide witness of what Rukeyser here and in her poetry refers to as ‘the buried life’.196 They indicate a way towards an understanding of the present by signposting points of (buried) historical importance. In The Traces of Thomas Hariot, Rukeyser recalls her sudden comprehension

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of Hariot’s life through an examination of the documents he left behind. Recourse to artefacts of the past – the maps of the moon and of Virginia that Hariot had inscribed – allows Rukeyser to envision her subject: ‘An identity seemed to leap out before me from the maps.’197 The map as both image and idea remained an important element in Rukeyser’s poetics of connection. It allowed the inscription of lines of convergence and the juxtaposition of diverse fields of knowledge; it traced the past’s presence in modern-day life; it provided a guide to those wishing to witness a specifically American experience. In addition to the trace, Rukeyser also employs the metaphor of ‘patteran’ in the book, whose name provides the title for two of the biography’s four sections. Rukeyser’s papers reveal her research into the term, which is etymologically linked with another of her documentary projects, her investigation of the Irish pagan festival at Puck Fair. From the Irish patrín, a patteran is ‘a leaf, a trail, a sign’,198 specifically referring to the small bundles of grass or leaves that Gypsies would leave by the roadside to mark their path and guide those coming after them.199 Rukeyser uses the patteran to demonstrate her belief in the communicative power of the document to connect lives: [V]ery much may be deduced, projected backwards from the loose papers that have come down to us, part of the traces in his own hand, in many hands, in notes and fragments, signals for which the best term perhaps is that word used by the travelling people for the signs which tell where they have been and in what direction they are moving – ‘patterans.’ By these inscriptions and objects . . . we guess, and ourselves move leaving our patterans.200

The patteran is Rukeyser’s quintessential road sign, combining ideas of communication, travel, trace, witness and connection. Additionally, its composite, indexical nature recalls Galton’s compound portraits, which were used to trace the lineage of persons or races. As I argued in Chapter 3, Rukeyser’s own biographical ‘lives’, including that of Hariot, were traced and composed in a similarly accumulative manner, and her recourse to documentary imaging modalities infused her writing with an often photographic realism. Photographs, as Rosalind Krauss has suggested, are life traces ‘in a manner parallel to that of fingerprints or footprints’.201 Rukeyser also understood that traces – in the form of photographs, letters or other documents pertaining to one’s life – are imprints of the real, and as such might be read and tracked in the manner of ‘footprints’ along a path. In her notes for the Hariot biography, Rukeyser wrote that poems may also be considered as patterans. Therefore, Rukeyser’s entire poetical output may be read as a non-linear ‘tour’ through her life. Her works are patterans, traces left

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by her own encounters with persons or places. As such, they constitute both documentary artefacts and existential meeting-places of witness and communication for the poet and for those who read them. The French philosopher Paul Ricœur has written at length on the symbolic influence of the ‘trace’ in providing an evidential sign to a witnessed past or passage. In Time and Narrative, Ricœur notes his accordance with his contemporary Deleuze in what both philosophers consider ‘the apprenticeship to signs: signs of the social world, signs of life, signs of sensuous impressions, signs of art’.202 For Ricœur, the trace is a sign connecting the temporal perspectives of ‘passed’ and ‘past’.203 By signifying the ‘here’ in space and the ‘now’ in time, the trace ‘orients the hunt . . . the inquiry’; it constitutes ‘what history is’.204 Ricœur’s understanding is comparable to Rukeyser’s. Her hunt after documents by which to chart Hariot’s spatial and temporal passages cannot be separated ideologically from her own trail of signs of inquiry, left along the road in The Book of the Dead. The trace is, for both Ricœur and Rukeyser, a meeting-place in which ‘two systems of relations are interwoven’. Inviting deductions of ‘causality about the chain of operations constitutive of the action of passing by’, the trace also invites the isolation of those causal chains ‘that also carry the significance belonging to the relationship of vestige to passage’. The trace’s ‘double allegiance’, then, constitutes it ‘as the connection between two areas of thought, and, by implication, between two perspectives on time’.205 By figuring the trace as both spatial and temporal sign, Ricœur contends that it exists in the ‘ “overlapping” of the existential and the empirical’.206 Similarly, Rukeyser’s imaginative reconstruction of Hariot’s life from ‘traces’ is, in her own words, an ‘existential biography’.207 The book represents the trace’s ‘double allegiance’ in that, although a biography ‘is supposed to provide something fixed in the past and in evidence – every past is fluid, alive, in doubt’. Rukeyser contended with Ricœur that ‘all that is uncertain seems to me beautiful, allowing me to make relation with the uncertain and with the unknown’.208 The traces, or patterans, by which the biography is composed allow the ‘overlapping’ of existential contemplation and empirical documentary evidence. The trace / patteran is therefore the coming-together of what Rukeyser understood as the ‘two kinds of poems’: those ‘of unverifiable facts, based in dreams, in sex, in everything that can be given to other people only through the skill and strength by which it is given; and the other kind being the document, the poem that rests on material evidence’.209 Finally, the patteran / trace provides a symbolic ‘road sign’ that points to the convergence of the various elements of Rukeyser’s poetic mapping techniques as outlined in this chapter. Bundles of grass or leaves left

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along the roadside by Gypsy travellers, the patteran recalls the title and spirit of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a book of poems written largely from the poet’s experiences travelling the open road. In the poem, ‘Song of Myself’, Whitman describes the grass upon which he lounges as ‘a uniform hieroglyphic . . . Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones’.210 The ‘hieroglyphic’ nature of the grass explains its status as organic sign in which form and function are fused; the grass’s purpose is to proliferate and connect. Deleuze and Guattari’s botanical example of grass as rhizome, coupled with their reference to Leaves of Grass as archetypal rhizomatic map in poetic literature, further cements the connection between the multiple referents indicated by Rukeyser’s ‘road signs’. Moreover, the hieroglyphic inscriptions in the Egyptian Book of the Dead are themselves symbolic patterans in that they serve as proof of life and as guidance along the roads of the underworld. Rukeyser’s own life and œuvre may be viewed as a rhizomatic map through which run and converge several paths of inquiry. Each path is marked with traces, patterans – poems – that guide the reader and the poet, indicating meeting-places of science and art, practice and imagination. Rukeyser’s methods of mapping the American landscape do not render it a text to be read, but rather as sight and site of cultural practice. Situating herself and her reader within this site, Rukeyser not only figures the landscape as dynamic medium, but also recognises its cruciality to the creation of personal, national and social identity.

Notes 1. Mitchell first uses the term in ‘Introduction’, Mitchell, Landscape and Power, p. 1. 2. Ibid., p. 1. 3. Ibid., pp. 1–2, 2. 4. Mitchell, ‘Imperial Landscape’, ibid., p. 15. 5. Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America, p. 242. 6. Ibid., p. 251. 7. Ibid., p. 241. 8. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams, p. 199. 9. Peeler, ‘Unlonesome Highways: The Quest for Fact and Fellowship in Depression America’, pp. 185–206. 10. Asch, The Road: In Search of America, pp. 15, 195. 11. Rorty, Where Life is Better: An Unsentimental American Journey, p. 56. 12. Ibid., p. 10. 13. Ibid., p. 25. 14. The New Oxford Dictionary of English (Oxford University Press, 2001). 15. Kazin, On Native Grounds, p. 495.

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202 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary Ibid., pp. 496, 497. Ibid., p. 499. Peeler, ‘Unlonesone Highways’, p. 194. Ibid., p. 198; Stott, Documentary Expression, p. 249. Peeler, ‘Unlonesome Highways’, p. 194. Susman’s ‘The Thirties’, Peeler’s ‘Unlonesome Highways’ and Rabinowitz’s They Must be Represented are among them. Rabinowitz, They Must be Represented, p. 57. Ibid., p. 58. See also: Peeler, ‘Unlonesome Highways’, p. 198. Cowley, Think Back on Us, p. 387. Cowley, review, The New Republic, 8 June 1938, p. 135. Adamic, My America 1928–1938, p. 301. Stott, Documentary Expression, p. 253. Ibid., p. 244. Both Anderson’s and Moley’s letters were printed in Today, 2 December 1933, p. 3. In-depth discussion of the Guides is sparse, but valuable commentaries are: Birdsall, ‘The FWP and the Popular Press’, in Browne, et al., eds, Challenges in American Culture, pp. 101–11; Schindler-Carter, Vintage Snapshots: The Fabrication of a Nation in the WPA American Guide Series; Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935–1943; and Bold, The WPA Guides: Mapping America. Bold, The WPA Guides, p. 17. Hatcher, ‘The Historical Opportunities Offered Through the Writers’ Program’, p. 247. Bold, The WPA Guides, p. 65. ‘Notes on Use of Book’, U.S. One: Maine to Florida, p. ix. Kellock, ‘Summary of Tour Form’, 17 October 1938, quoted in Bold, p. 66. Mumford, ‘Writers’ Project’, The New Republic (20 October 1937), pp. 306–7, 306. Ibid., p. 307. Quoted in Bold, p. 7. Mumford, ‘Writers’ Project’, p. 306. Cantwell, ‘America and the Writers’ Project’, p. 325. Kazin, On Native Grounds, p. 501. Mumford, ‘Writers’ Project’, p. 307. Kazin, On Native Grounds, p. 501. Schindler-Carter, Vintage Snapshots, p. 10. Stott, Documentary Expression, p. 115. Memorandum (1940), quoted in Schindler-Carter, Vintage Snapshots, p. 39. The American Guide Manual (Washington, DC: GPO, 1935), p. 4. Bold, The WPA Guides, pp. 7, 11. Gannett, ‘Reading About America’, pp. 1818–19. Kertesz, The Poetic Vision, pp. 21–2. Nine African–American teenage boys were sentenced to be executed for the alleged rape of two young white women in 1931.

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52. Dayton, Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Book of the Dead’, p. 64. 53. ‘Gauley Bridge’, Films: A Quarterly Discussion and Analysis, 1.3 (Summer 1940), pp. 51–64, 51. 54. MR Papers, Box I:11. Correspondence between Rukeyser and Rotha, 26 September 1972. 55. Kertesz, The Poetic Vision, p. 121. 56. LP, p. 2. 57. Ibid., p. 26. 58. Ibid., p. 3. 59. Kertesz, The Poetic Vision, p. 329. 60. Cooper, ‘And Everything a Witness of the Buried Life’, p. 7. 61. Ibid., p. 14. 62. Susman, ‘The Thirties’, p. 205. 63. Stott, Documentary Expression, p. 36. 64. Cooper, ‘And Everything a Witness’, p. 7. 65. Reviews for Rukeyser’s U.S. 1 began to be published in February; reviews for U.S. One began in March. 66. Bold, The WPA Guides, pp. 70–1. 67. Ibid., p. 68. 68. Bold quotes Kellock in correspondence with Alsberg, ibid., p. 71. 69. Ibid., pp. xi, xii. 70. De Voto, ‘U.S. One’, Saturday Review of Literature, p. 8. 71. Bold, The WPA Guides, pp. 73–4. 72. ‘U.S. One’, p. 8. 73. ‘United States Route No. 1 is a Highway of History’ (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Office of Information Press Service, 9 October 1927), located in MR Papers, Box II:11, folder 4. 74. Ibid., p. 1. 75. CP, p. 604. 76. Ibid., p. 604. 77. Ibid., p. 41. 78. Cherniack, The Hawk’s Nest Incident: America’s Worst Industrial Disaster, pp. 12–16. 79. Ibid., pp. 47–8. 80. Ibid., pp. 59, 111. 81. Ibid., pp. 84–5. 82. Endnote, CP, p. 604. 83. Lowney, Wechsler, Minot and Hartman have each written strong essays on The Book of the Dead, which are compiled in Herzog and Kaufman, How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?; Kadlec, ‘X-Ray Testimonials in Muriel Rukeyser’; Thurston, ‘Documentary Modernism as Popular Front Poetics: Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” ’; Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations; Kalaidjian, ‘Muriel Rukeyser and the Poetics of Specific Critique: Rereading The Book of the Dead’. 84. Kalaidjian, ‘Muriel Rukeyser and the Poetics of Specific Critique’, p. 72. 85. Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations, p. 146. 86. Ibid., pp. 146–7. 87. CP, p. 73.

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204 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131.

Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 73. CP, p. 74. Lowney, ‘Truths of Outrage, Truths of Possibility: Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” ’, p. 201. Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Massumi. Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, pp. 3–28. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., pp. 6–7. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., pp. 13–14. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid. LP, p. 166. ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, p. 24. Ibid. Ibid. LP, pp. 19, 167. Ibid., p. 17. ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, p. 24. The Poet’s Craft, pp. 32–3. LP, p. 166. Ibid., pp. 166–7. ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, p. 8. Gibbs, p. 3. LP, p. 167. ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, p. 27. LP, p. 20. CP, p. 74. Ibid., p. 74. Kaufman and Herzog note that Rukeyser consulted Arthur Fallam’s A Journey from Virginia to Beyond the Appalachian Mountains (1671), in which the Indian Penecute (note different spelling) is listed as their guide, CP, p. 605. CP, pp. 74–5. CP, pp. 74, 75. Lowney, ‘Truths of Outrage’, p. 202. CP, p. 74. ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, p. 8. CP, p. 74.

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155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167.

205

CP, p. 96. ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, p. 8. CP, p. 97. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 98, quotation marks in original. Ibid. Ibid., p. 606. ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, p. 8. CP, p. 99. ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, p. 10. CP, p. 99. Thurston, ‘Documentary Modernism’, p. 76. Ibid., p. 76. ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, p. 23. CP, p. 102. ‘Radio Interview of Muriel Rukeyser by Samuel Sillen’, appendix to Dayton’s Rukeyser’s ‘The Book of the Dead’, p. 147. CP, p. 100. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, p. 33. Dayton, Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Book of the Dead’, pp. 23–4. Kalaidjian, ‘Muriel Rukeyser and the Poetics of Specific Critique’, p. 72. Williams, ‘Rukeyser’s US 1’, p. 141. ‘Note from the Author’, LP, p. xi. Deleuze and Guattari speak of the rhizome removing ‘blockages’ (p. 13). In the poem ‘The Disease: After Effects’, Rukeyser links the ‘blocked’ airways of the workers with corporate blocking of information and justice (pp. 102–4). CP, p. 106. Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 Frontier thesis was another favourite of the school. See Chapter 4 of this book. CP, p. 107. Ibid., p. 107. Rukeyser’s ‘Preface to the Reader’ from Collected Poems (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), reprinted CP, p. 597. MR Papers, Box I:34, folder 6; Eric Mottram papers at King’s College London, 5/210/1–28. ‘Speaking of Pictures . . . Road Signs’, Life, 27 June 1938, pp. 4–5, 4. Ellipsis in the original. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 4. Patton explores this in Open Road: A Celebration of the American Highway. Keller, The Highway as Habitat: A Roy Stryker Documentation, pp. 39–44. ‘The Great American Roadside’, Fortune, 10 (September 1934), pp. 53, 172. Patton contends that the ‘anonymous’ author is James Agee (Open Road, p. 238). CP, p. 74.

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168. Kalaidjian, American Culture Between the Wars, p. 167; Wechsler, ‘A Mat(t)er of Fact and Vision’, p. 234; Karl Marx, The German Ideology, in The Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, p. 414. 169. CP, p. 78. 170. Ibid., p. 77. 171. Evans, American Photographs. I refer specifically to the photo ‘Houses and Billboards in Atlanta, 1936’, photograph 47, part 1. 172. CP, p. 78. 173. Ibid., p. 78. 174. Ibid., p. 77. 175. Ibid., p. 95. 176. Ibid., p. 78. 177. Ibid., p. 110. 178. ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, p. 14. 179. CP, p. 95. 180. Ibid., p. 96. 181. Ibid., p. 97. 182. Ibid., p. 93. 183. Ibid., p. 93. 184. Ibid., p. 98. 185. The Book of the Dead: The Hieroglyphic Transcript and English Translation of the Papyrus of Ani, trans. Budge (1895). Rukeyser wrote that she used ‘various translations’ of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (p. 604); however, her papers suggest Budge’s translation was the most useful. 186. Kadlec, ‘X-Ray Testimonials in Muriel Rukeyser’, p. 32. 187. Ibid. 188. Budge, The Book of the Dead, p. 439. 189. Ibid., p. 361. 190. CP, p. 85. 191. Ibid., p. 85. 192. Ibid., p. 75. 193. Evidence in MR Papers (Boxes I:23, 24 and 25) suggest that Rukeyser travelled to Spain and England during the late sixties in search of archived material relating to Hariot. 194. Ware, ‘ “An Identity Seemed to Leap Out Before Me”: Muriel Rukeyser’s The Traces of Thomas Hariot’, p. 242. 195. Rukeyser, The Traces of Thomas Hariot, no page number. 196. Ibid., p. 87; ‘Waterlily Fire’, p. 110. 197. Rukeyser, The Traces of Thomas Hariot, p. 224. 198. MR Papers, Box I:30, folder 2. 199. See also Ellner, The Gypsy Patteran. 200. Rukeyser, The Traces of Thomas Hariot, p. 54. 201. Krauss, ‘Tracing Nadar’, October, 5 (Summer 1978), p. 34. 202. Ricœur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, p. 131. 203. Ibid., p. 119. 204. Ibid., p. 120. 205. Ibid., p. 120. 206. Ibid., p. 124.

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207

MR Papers, Box I:31, yellow daybook. Ibid. Rukeyser, ‘The Education of a Poet’, p. 226. Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’ from the 1891–2 edition of Leaves of Grass, in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, p. 30.

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Chapter 6

Conclusion

Rukeyser begins The Life of Poetry with a call to arms and an affirmation: ‘In time of crisis, we summon up our strength.’1 This ‘strength’, she asserts, may be derived from ‘every forgotten image . . . every memory that can make us know our power’.2 For Rukeyser, in a manner similar to that discovered by Francis Galton when conducting his experiments into language and mental imagery, the singular image of a boat generates and communicates a vast network of imaginative associations.3 Summoning the memory of her evacuation from Spain, Rukeyser writes simply, ‘I think now of a boat on which I sailed away from the beginning of a war.’4 The mental images triggered and retrieved in the introduction to The Life of Poetry provide the material and the motive for the book; their multiplicity and connectedness underline what Rukeyser understood throughout her life to be the guiding principles of poetry. Having arrived in Spain as an investigative journalist, Rukeyser recalls that she left the country determined to communicate what she had seen and felt, her resolve strengthened by a question posed by a fellow refugee: ‘ “where is there a place for poetry?” ’5 Rukeyser’s brief experience in Spain of a crisis both political and ‘of the spirit’ helped her to understand ‘our need for each other and our need for our selves’, and cemented her poetics in experiential witness and testimony. As this book has hopefully demonstrated, the governing ethos of Rukeyser’s writing may be understood to be essentially documentary in character, for, in basic terms, it advocates the interdisciplinary recording, reporting and representation of realities. Several aspects of Rukeyser’s varying poetic styles and methods reflect the documentary techniques popular during the late 1930s and early 1940s in America, as well as the proto-documentary characteristics of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. However, it is equally important to remember that the initial advocates of documentary, including John Grierson and Paul Rotha in film, and Roy Stryker and Arthur Rothstein

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in photography, stressed that the term signified ‘an approach’ rather than a formalistic technique. Described as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ (Grierson), ‘the creative presentation of facts as we find them in everyday life’ (Rotha), and ‘the desire to create active interpretations of the world in which we live’ (Rothstein), documentary as it took shape in the 1930s provided an opportunity and a means of transmitting objective reality from a subjective standpoint. The terminology Rukeyser employed throughout her life to describe her own approach to the world bears striking similarity and is at times identical to that used by documentarians of the thirties and forties. In her own words, Rukeyser wished to break the ‘false and artificial separations, not only between person and person, but between “field and field” and specifically between the document and the subjective’.6 Believing that such divisions were symptomatic of an over-riding ideological separatism that ultimately incited war, Rukeyser ‘worked to bring together’ these ostensible opposites by ‘making whole joinings of poetry’.7 Several times during her career, Rukeyser wrote or spoke of poems as ‘meeting-places’.8 As discussed, her belief in the power of poetry to connect and communicate relied on her understanding of two kinds of poetic ‘truth’: ‘the document’ (‘the poem that rests on material evidence’) and ‘the unverifiable fact’ (‘based in dreams’ and ‘the inner life’).9 By representing and exploring both types of reality in her writing, Rukeyser assumed a responsibility to ‘report’ the ‘evidence of the world’ that was ethical as well as ontological.10 Examples of her use of the ‘document’ may be found in the verbatim court testimonies included in The Book of the Dead; the quoted newspaper clippings and excerpted speeches in One Life; the mathematical statistics in Willard Gibbs; the collected ‘traces’ of her biographical subjects in the form of reports, maps, diaries and letters. Examples of the ‘unverifiable fact’ include the conceptual contents of such diaries and letters – the confessions and thoughts of the people whose lives Rukeyser was researching and representing; the corporeal rhythms within her poetry – of breathing, of travelling and of love; and the revelation of human identification and alterity in the photo-narratives, and in poems such as ‘Käthe Kollwitz’ and ‘After Melville’. In 1968, Rukeyser declared that ‘we live in a period of caring about the document’.11 Referring to the dual strands of evidential truth, she emphasised that she did ‘not believe that these are two separate parts of life’. The previous year, she had argued that ‘documents’ may be emotionally produced and received in order to ‘offer testimony of the world with ourselves not as spectators and readers, but more, as the ones doing the offering and accepting the offering, as witnesses’.12 Her affirmation reiterated an argument she

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had made twenty years before: that a poetic experience of the world is characterised by revelation and creative imagination. Her choice of the word ‘witness’ – employed throughout her life – further indicates the documentary nature of her approach. I have already discussed Rukeyser’s given reasons for her lexical choice. However, it is worth restating here that each of her reasons may be directly associated with the aesthetics and ideologies of the documentary movement of the 1930s as I have explored them throughout this book. Firstly, her assertion that the reception of poetry must include ‘the act of seeing or knowing by personal experience’ implicates the reader in a direct and active relationship with the poet and the poem, implying that the poem is a site of visual or emotional practice at which poet and reader meet.13 As I have noted, documentary promoted an authenticity that derived largely from on-site image-making and reporting. That the reader, listener or viewer had the sensation of experiencing what the documentarian had experienced was also of vital importance to the success of documentary and, according to Rothstein, ‘moved’ the public to take ‘action’ against reported social injustices.14 Secondly, Rukeyser’s contention that the word ‘witness’ involves ‘the act of giving evidence’ suggests the revelatory element to documentary in its exposure of social realities, as well as the objective nature of physical evidence and witness testimony at a trial, such as that of the Hawk’s Nest incident featured in The Book of the Dead.15 That the reception of a poem incorporates the ‘giving’ of ‘evidence’ implies its provocative nature, and opens a dialogue of visual and emotional exchange between poet and reader. Thirdly, as discussed in Chapter 2, ‘the overtone of responsibility’ that Rukeyser infers from the word ‘witness’ indicates the commitment to a democratic ideal that has been a driving force of documentary since Grierson’s ‘First Principles’.16 By extending the ‘responsibility’ of the documentarian / poet to include the actions and reactions of her reader, Rukeyser attempts to unite ‘the document and the subjective’ through a process of factual and emotional communication, which stands ‘as testimony to the truths of experience as they become form and ourselves’:17 The type of this is the poem; in which the poet, intellectually giving form to emotional and imaginative experience, with the music and history of a lifetime behind the work, offers a total response. And the witness receives the work, and offers a total response, in a most human communication. . . . Such action . . . is creation.18

Rukeyser’s contention that the ‘climate of excitement and revelation’ surrounding the word ‘witness’ gives ‘air to the work of art’ indicates

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the imaginative processes of documentary and poetry, and implicates the two in a relational, creative exchange. Such ‘creation’, according to Rukeyser, announces ‘that work is being done on the self’; by receiving the poem, the reader is called upon to look at his / her personal, social and cultural identity from a new perspective.19 For Rukeyser, the poem constituted a ‘meeting-place’, dissolving what Michael Renov has called the ‘series of intervals’ generated by documentary ‘between truth and beauty, truth and reality, science and art, fiction and non-fiction, constative and performative, self-representation and media coverage, history and theory’.20 Arguing for the importance of ‘the relationship between creative writing and scientific writing as documents’, Rukeyser attempted in her poetry to report the realities of the world by highlighting the fundamental need for imagination and human communication in all aspects of existence.21 Marsha Bryant has written that ‘[c]arrying cameras – or using them figuratively in their writing – documentary observers sought to establish contact across class and national boundaries.’22 Rukeyser both engaged with and challenged the politics and aesthetics of the Leftist documentarians of the 1930s, careful to avoid what she termed the ‘trap of the documentary’: the usage of real names and stylistic reportorial gimmicks to render a work ‘authentic’.23 None the less, establishing contact across boundaries was Rukeyser’s principal objective. Two years before her death, Rukeyser insisted that it continued to be her enduring theme: ‘It is that toward which my poems are reaching; and I believe that poetry can extend the document.’24 From U.S. 1 (in which she first noted that ‘poetry can extend the document’) onwards, Rukeyser repeatedly promoted the camera as primary instrument of proof, as well as armament in crisis: ‘Defense is sight,’ she wrote in ‘The Book of the Dead’, ‘widen the lens and see.’25 However, by creating a site of visual and emotional witness in the poem, Rukeyser carried the need for contact further by seeking to demonstrate that ‘class and national boundaries’ are constructs that reduce the communication of universal truths: ‘If we believe in the unity and multiplicity of the world . . . of man . . . then we believe too in the unity and multiplicity of imagination. We will speak across the barriers, many to many.’26 As I have argued throughout this book, although Rukeyser’s recourse to documentary methods and styles developed in the 1930s, it spanned her lifetime. Indeed, in what is apparently the last poem that she wrote and published before her death, several sources of documentary resurface as Rukeyser addresses issues of retrospection and renewal. It seems appropriate to conclude this book with a discussion of the poem.

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‘An Unborn Poet’ ‘An Unborn Poet’, dedicated to the African–American novelist Alice Walker, was published in American Poetry Review in the November / December issue of 1979, less than a year before Rukeyser died.27 It begins with the mapping of a road journey similar to that which begins The Book of the Dead, Early, before the reservoir, driving up to a work day you see the eleven trees28

and continues with an evocation of a young Walker, Rukeyser’s student at Sarah Lawrence College: a marvellous young woman, the daughter I never had, no poems yet, only the digging questions about the South, about love, about this moment.29

A graduate of Sarah Lawrence in 1966, Walker is figured in the poem not only as a daughter, but also as a young Rukeyser reborn or mirrored, driven by an investigative need for knowledge of different cultures, people and the forces that connect them. Elements of the photo-narratives and the ‘Lives’ projects resound through the eightstanza poem, beginning in stanza three, when Rukeyser and Walker ‘look through our lives at each other’.30 This face-to-face reception of another’s life through the placement and communication of one’s own history and corporeality comprised an important part of Rukeyser’s interpretation of documentary discourses, and the visuality of her ideology continues into stanza four, where she invokes the documentary photographer Berenice Abbott. A long time friend of Rukeyser, Abbott collaborated with her on the cover design for her biography, The Traces of Thomas Hariot, providing a close-up photograph of Rukeyser’s eye. In ‘An Unborn Poet’, images of stark visual encounter and biographical discourse combine to reveal a cluster of subjects: Walker, Abbott, Rukeyser herself and the black novelist and folklorist, Zora Neale Hurston, who had studied under Franz Boas and who was the subject of Walker’s dissertation. Addressing Abbott in the second person, Rukeyser lists a catalogue of ‘images / caught in your lens forever, Berenice’, and quotes the photographer on her need to invent ‘a camera that is a room, the child of / camera obscura’.31 That Rukeyser chooses to highlight Abbott’s wish to magnify the replicating and projecting capabilities of the camera (whose

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Latin roots link it with ‘chamber’ or ‘room’) underlines her own interest and engagement in processes of image reproduction and the aesthetic and ethical discourses surrounding them. Ways of looking pervade the poem, from an allusion to Walker’s ‘hurt eye’ through images of black and white ‘passing’ in relation to Hurston, to several references to the ‘lens’ of Abbott’s camera.32 In stanza seven, Rukeyser remembers a time of crisis, an unspecified conflict, during which she sheltered alongside a ‘woman with her lens’.33 In the poem the woman addresses Rukeyser: ‘You feel it, don’t you? The entire city vibrating, causing me to tremble, causing my picture and the world to tremble.’34

That the photograph has the capacity to make the world feel, both physically and emotionally, would seem to underline Rukeyser’s belief in the evocative, truth-telling nature of documentary images. The power of the image reverberates across history, and Rukeyser transports the photographer’s wish into the present moment of the poem: ‘And now, Berenice, / I feel it and we feel it, huge.’35 The importance of the truthful communication of social and subjective realities is felt by a collective ‘we’: Rukeyser and her contemporary female poets, ‘Grace’ (Paley) and ‘Denise’ (Levertov). However, it is to Walker that Rukeyser returns at the close of the poem, and by doing so, she turns also to herself. Alice, landscaper of grief, love, anger, bring me to birth, bring me back my poems. No. Bring me my next poem! Here it is, to give to all of you. To do what we mean, in poetry and sex, to give each other what we really are.36

At a reading of ‘An Unborn Poet’ at Sarah Lawrence College in 1979, Rukeyser clarified that the title of the poem referred to herself rather than to Walker. Admitting the poem’s long gestation due to illness and the publication of her collected poems (‘that book that holds back a big door’), Rukeyser confessed that it had been difficult to begin writing again.37 The close of the poem reveals her understanding that selfexpression relies on relation to the Other. By re-viewing personal and public images and by recalling memories of crisis and of love, through recourse to documents and to those ‘unverifiable facts’ that ‘must be given conviction only by what the reporter can give’, Rukeyser summons her strength.38 In so doing, she creates a meeting-place of lives and

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images to connect those who experience her poem and to document her own journey towards it.

Notes 1. LP, p. 1. 2. Ibid., p. 1. 3. Galton’s experiments, which began with the trigger phrase, ‘I want to tell you about a boat,’ are discussed in Chapter 3. 4. LP, p. 1. 5. Ibid., p. 3. This episode in Rukeyser’s life is discussed in Chapter 5. 6. Rukeyser’s note in MR Papers, Box II:10, folder 5. 7. Ibid. 8. Rukeyser in Packard, The Poet’s Craft, pp. 127, 132; LP, pp. 20, 213. 9. Rukeyser, ‘The Education of a Poet’, p. 226, projected foreword for The Speed of Darkness, MR Papers, Box I:23. 10. Ibid. 11. ‘Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact’, MR Papers, Box I:43, folder 8. 12. MR Papers, Box I:23. 13. LP, p. 175. 14. Rothstein, Documentary Photography, p. 34. 15. LP, p. 175. 16. Ibid., p. 175. 17. Ibid., p. 212. 18. Ibid., pp. 212–13. 19. Ibid., p. 175. 20. Renov, ‘Introduction: The Truth About Non-Fiction’, in Renov, Theorizing Documentary, p. 11. 21. Memo for a teaching course, MR Papers, Box I:44, folder 2. 22. Bryant, Auden and Documentary in the 1930s, p. 172. 23. Preface to the first Collected Poems, reprinted in CP, p. 597. 24. Ibid., p. 597. 25. CP, p. 110. 26. LP, p. 213. 27. ‘An Unborn Poet’ is reprinted in CP, pp. 591–3. Bibliographical information from Kaufman and Herzog, CP, pp. 635–6. 28. CP, p. 591. 29. Ibid., p. 591. 30. Ibid., p. 591. 31. Ibid., p. 591. 32. Ibid., pp. 591–2. 33. Ibid., p. 592. 34. Ibid., p. 592. 35. Ibid., p. 593. 36. Ibid., p. 593. 37. Rukeyser, quoted in CP, p. 636. 38. MR Papers, Box I:23.

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Appendix: illustrations

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Figure 1. Land of the Free (Da Capo, 1938), pages 8–9, text by Archibald MacLeish, image by Dorothea Lange for the FSA. Reprinted courtesy of Springer Verlag and the Library of Congress.

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Figure 2. ‘Worlds Alongside’, Coronet, October 1939, pages 84–5. FSA photograph by Dorothea Lange (left) reprinted courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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Figure 3.

‘Worlds Alongside’, Coronet, October 1939, pages 90–1. Photograph copyright unknown.

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Figure 4. ‘Worlds Alongside’, Coronet, October 1939, pages 92–3. FSA photographs by Dorothea Lange (left) and Arthur Rothstein (right) reprinted courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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Figure 5. ‘Worlds Alongside’, Coronet, October 1939, pages 94–5. Left: © The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld.

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Figure 6. Land of the Free (Da Capo, 1938), pages 30–1. Reprinted courtesy of Springer Verlag and the Library of Congress.

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Figure 7. ‘The Adventures of Children’, Coronet, September 1939, pages 26–7. FSA photograph by Mydans (right) reprinted courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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Figure 8. ‘The Adventures of Children’, Coronet, September 1939, pages 30–1. FSA photographs reprinted courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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Figure 9. ‘The Adventures of Children’, Coronet, September 1939, page 38. Copyright unknown.

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Figure 10. ‘Worlds Alongside’, Coronet, October 1939, pages 88–9. FSA photograph (top right) reprinted courtesy of the Library of Congress. Other copyright unknown.

226

Figure 11. unknown.

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‘Worlds Alongside’, Coronet, October 1939, pages 98. Copyright

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Figure 12. Käthe Kollwitz, Grave relief: ‘Rest in the Peace of His Hands’, Friedrichsfelde cemetery, Berlin. Photograph © Susanna Forrest.

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Sources Cited

Works by Muriel Rukeyser Books The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, ed. Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006) I Go Out, illustrations by Leonard Kessler (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961) The Life of Poetry (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, [1949] 1996) Mazes, photographs by Milton Charles (New York: Simon & Schuster children’s books division, 1970) One Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957) The Orgy (New York: Coward McCann, 1965) The Speed of Darkness (New York: Random House, 1968) The Traces of Thomas Hariot (London: Victor Gollancz, [1971] 1972) Willard Gibbs: American Genius (New York: Doubleday, 1942)

Articles, reviews and essays ‘The Education of a Poet’, in The Writer on her Work, ed. Janet Sternberg (New York: W. W. Norton, [1976] 2000), pp. 217–30 ‘Josiah Willard Gibbs’, Physics Today, 2.2 (February 1949), pp. 6–13 cont’d 27 ‘Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact’, Scripps College Bulletin, XLII, 4 (1968) ‘The Telephone Company’, Life (17 July 1939), pp. 56–63 ‘Under Forty’, Contemporary Jewish Record, VII (February 1944), pp. 4–9 ‘The Usable Truth’, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 58 (July 1941), pp. 206–9 ‘ “We Aren’t Sure . . . We’re Wondering” ’, review of Land of the Free by Archibald MacLeish, New Masses, 27 (26 April 1938), pp. 26–8 ‘Words and Images’, New Republic (2 August 1943), pp. 140–2

Forewords, scripts, interviews, individual publications of poems Abbott, Berenice, Photographs, ‘Foreword’ by Muriel Rukeyser (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1970) ‘Adventures of Children: A Portfolio of Photographs with a Narrative by Muriel Rukeyser’, Coronet (September 1939), pp. 23–38

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‘Akiba’, American Judaism (April 1961), p. 13 ‘Gauley Bridge’ (four scripted sequences), Films: A Quarterly Discussion and Analysis, 1:3 (Summer 1940), pp. 51–64 ‘Muriel Rukeyser’ (interview), The Poet’s Craft: Interviews from the New York Quarterly, ed. William Packard (New York: Paragon House, 1987. Reprint of The Craft of Poetry, New York: Doubleday, 1971) ‘Worlds Alongside: A Portfolio of Photographs with a Narrative by Muriel Rukeyser’, Coronet (October 1939), pp. 83–98

Archive material Eric Mottram papers, King’s College London Muriel Rukeyser papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC Rukeyser–Boas papers (B.B61.ru), American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia

Works about Muriel Rukeyser Articles, essays and books Allison, Raphael C., ‘Muriel Rukeyser Goes to War: Pragmatism, Pluralism and  the Politics of Ekphrasis’, College Literature, 33.2 (Spring 2006), pp. 1–29 Calmer, Alan, Salud! – Poems, Stories and Sketches of Spain by American Writers (New York: International, 1938) Cooper, Jane, ‘And Everything a Witness of the Buried Life’, in How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, ed. Anne F. Herzog and Janet E. Kaufman (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 209–23 —, ‘Foreword: Meeting-Places’, in Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, [1949] 1996), pp. xiii–xxix Davidson, Michael, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material World (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1997) Dayton, Tim, Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Book of the Dead’ (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003) Hartman, Stephanie, ‘All Systems Go: Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” and the Reinvention of Modernist Poetics’, in How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, ed. Anne F. Herzog and Janet E. Kaufman (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 209–23 Herzog, Anne F., ‘ “Anything Away From Anything”: Muriel Rukeyser’s Relational Poetics’, in How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, ed. Anne F. Herzog and Janet E. Kaufman (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 32–44 —, and Janet E. Kaufman, eds, How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet? (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999) Kadlec, David, ‘X-Ray Testimonials in Muriel Rukeyser’, Modernism / Modernity, 5.1 (1998), pp. 23–47 Kalaidjian, Walter, American Culture Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique (New York: Columbia Press, 1993)

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—, ‘Muriel Rukeyser and the Poetics of Specific Critique: Rereading The Book of the Dead’, Cultural Critique, 20 (Winter 1991–2), pp. 65–88 Kaufman, Janet, ‘ “But Not the Study”: Writing as a Jew’, in How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, ed. Anne F. Herzog and Janet E. Kaufman (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 45–61 Kertesz, Louise, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1980) Lowney, John, ‘Truths of Outrage, Truths of Possibility: Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” ’, in How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, ed. Anne F. Herzog and Janet E. Kaufman (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 195–208 Miller, James E., ‘Whitman’s Multitudinous Progeny: Particular and Puzzling Instances’, in Ed Folsom, ed., Walt Whitman: Centennial Essays (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994) Minot, Leslie Ann, ‘ “Kodak As You Go”: The Photographic Metaphor in the Work of Muriel Rukeyser’, in How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, ed. Anne F. Herzog and Janet E. Kaufman (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 264–76 Nelson, Cary, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) Novak, Estelle Gershgoren, ‘The “Dynamo” School of Poets’, Contemporary Literature, 11.4 (Autumn 1970), pp. 526–39 Perreault, Jeanne, ‘Muriel Rukeyser: Egodocuments and the Ethics of Propaganda’, in Tracing the Autobiographical, ed. Marlene Kadar et al. (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005), pp. 143–63 Porritt, Ruth, ‘ “Unforgetting Eyes”: Rukeyser Portraying Kollwitz’s Truth’, in How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, ed. Anne F. Herzog and Janet E. Kaufman (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 163–83 Rich, Adrienne, ‘Beginners’, in How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, ed. Anne F. Herzog and Janet E. Kaufman (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 61–9 Rosenthal, M. L., ‘Muriel Rukeyser: The Longer Poems’, in New Directions in Prose and Poetry 14, ed. James Laughlin, (New York: New Directions, 1953), pp. 202–29 R. S. P., ‘Grandeur and Misery of a Poster Girl’, Partisan Review, 10 (September–October 1943), pp. 471–3 ‘The Rukeyser Imbroglio’, Partisan Review, 11 (Winter 1944), pp. 125–9 ‘The Rukeyser Imbroglio (cont’d)’, Partisan Review, 11 (Spring 1944), pp. 217–18 Schoerke, Meg, ‘ “Forever Broken and Made”: Rukeyser’s Theory of Form’, in How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, ed. Anne F. Herzog and Janet E. Kaufman (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 17–31 Shulman, Robert, The Power of Political Art: The 1930s Literary Left Reconsidered (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) Thurston, Michael, ‘Documentary Modernism as Popular Front Poetics: Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” ’, Modern Language Quarterly, 60:1 (March 1999), pp. 59–83

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—, Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry Between the World Wars (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) Wald, Alan, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002) Ware, Michele, ‘ “An Identity Seemed to Leap Out Before Me”: Muriel Rukeyser’s The Traces of Thomas Hariot’, in How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, ed. Anne F. Herzog and Janet E. Kaufman (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 241–53 —, ‘Opening “The Gates”: Muriel Rukeyser and the Poetry of Witness’, in Women’s Studies, 22 (1993), pp. 297–308 Wechsler, Shoshana, ‘A Mat(t)er of Fact and Vision: The Objectivity Question and “The Book of the Dead”, in How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, ed. Anne F. Herzog and Janet E. Kaufman (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 226–40

Reviews of Muriel Rukeyser’s books and poems Barber, David S., ‘ “The Poet of Unity”: Muriel Rukeyser’s Willard Gibbs’, Clio, 12:1 (1982), pp. 1–15 Booth, Philip, ‘One Life, Many Americas: Review of One Life’, Saturday Review (3 August 1957), p. 12 Clark, Eunice, ‘The Mind Behind the Age of Plastics’, review of Willard Gibbs, Common Sense (January 1943), p. 461 Eberhart, Richard, review of One Life, New York Herald Tribune Book Review (28 April 1957), p. 4 Engle, Paul, review of One Life, New York Times Book Review (14 April 1957), p. 16 Jaffe, Bernard, ‘Poet’s Biography of a Neglected Scientist’, New York Herald Tribune Books (22 November 1942), p. 4 Kazin, Alfred, ‘Gibbs: Another Ancestor’, review of Willard Gibbs, The New Republic (7 December 1942), pp. 752–4 Kempton, Murray, review of One Life, New York Post (14 April 1957) Lechlitner, Ruth, review of Theory of Flight, Partisan Review and Anvil, 3 (March 1936), pp. 29–30 Maddow, Ben (as David Wolff), ‘Document and Poetry’, review of The Book of the Dead, New Masses, 26 (22 February 1938), pp. 23–4 Rolo, Charles, ‘An American Odyssey’, review of One Life, Atlantic (May 1957), p. 82 Wheelwright, John, review of U.S. 1, Partisan Review, 4 (March 1938), pp. 54–6 Williams, William Carlos, ‘Rukeyser’s US 1’, The New Republic (9 March 1938), p. 141

Other works cited Abu-Lughod, Lila, ‘Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?’, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 5.1 (1991), pp. 7–27

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Adamic, Louis, My America 1928–1938 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938) Agee, James and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (London: Violette, [1941] 2001) Ahlstrom, Sydney, ‘Studying America and American Studies at Yale’, American Quarterly, 22 (Summer 1970), pp. 503–17 Alexander, William, Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) The American Guide Manual (Washington, DC: GPO, 1935) Appel, Benjamin, The People Talk (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1940) Arvin, Newton, Herman Melville (New York: Viking, 1950) Asch, Nathan, The Road: In Search of America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937) Atterton, Peter, Matthew Calarco and Maurice Friedman, eds, Levinas and Buber: Dialogue and Exchange (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004) Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, [1981] 1993) Benjamin, Walter, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ [1933, 1955, trans. 1966], in Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1986), pp. 333–6 —, ‘A Short History of Photography’ [1931], printed in English in Artforum (February 1977), vol. 15, trans. Phil Patton; reprinted in Classic Essays in Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), pp. 199–215 —, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ [1936, trans. 1968], in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico Press, Random House, 1999), pp. 211–44 Berger, John and Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling (New York: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative Society, 1982) Berkhofer, Jr, Robert F., ‘A New Context for a New American Studies?’, in Locating American Studies, ed. Lucy Maddox (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 279–304 Birdsall, Esther K., ‘The FWP and the Popular Press’, in Challenges in American Culture, ed. Ray B. Browne, Larry N. Landrum and William K. Bottorff (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1970), pp. 101–11 Boas, Franz, Anthropology and Modern Life (New York: Norton, [1928] 1986) —, The Central Eskimo (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, [1888] 1964) —, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York: Macmillan, [1911] 1938) Bold, Christine, The WPA Guides: Mapping America (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999) Botkin, B. A., ‘The Folk and the Individual: Their Creative Reciprocity’, English Journal, 27 (1938) Bourke-White, Margaret, Portrait of Myself (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963) —, and Erskine Caldwell, You Have Seen Their Faces (New York: Viking, 1937) Brooks, Van Wyck, America’s Coming of Age (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1915)

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—, ‘On Creating a Usable Past’, Dial, LXIV [11 April 1918], reprinted in Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Years, ed. Claire Sprague (Boston: Northeastern University Press, [1968] 1993), pp. 219–26 Bryant, Marsha, Auden and Documentary in the 1930s (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1997) Buber, Martin, Between Man and Man, in On Intersubjectivity and Cultural Creativity, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992) —, I and Thou [1923, trans. 1937], in The Writings of Martin Buber, ed. Will Herberg (New York: Meridian, 1956) —, Moses (Oxford: Phaidon, 1956) —, ‘Teaching and Deed’, in The Writings of Martin Buber, ed. Will Herberg (New York: Meridian, 1956), pp. 317–24 Buck-Morss, Susan, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989) Budge, E. A. Wallis, ed. and trans., The Book of the Dead: The Hieroglyphic Transcript and English Translation of the Papyrus of Ani (New York: Gramercy, [1895] 1960) Burke, Kenneth, ‘Revolutionary Symbolism in America’, American Writers’  Congress, ed. Henry Hart (London: Martin Lawrence, 1935), pp. 87–94 Campbell, Russell, Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States 1930–1942 (Ann Arbor: Research Press, 1978) —, ‘Radical Documentary in the United States’, in Show Us Life: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, ed. Thomas Waugh (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1984) Cantwell, Robert, ‘America and the Writers’ Project’, The New Republic (26 April 1939), p. 325 Carlyle, Thomas, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (New York: John Wiley, 1861) Carpenter, Frederic, ‘William James and Emerson’, American Literature, 11.1 (March 1939), pp. 39–57 Cassidy, Donna, ‘Competing Notions of American and Artistic Identity in Visual and Written Autobiographies in the 1930s and Early 1940s’, in Writing Lives: American Biography and Autobiography, ed. Hans Bak and Hans Krabbendam (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1998), pp. 63–74 Chase, Richard, Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York: Macmillan, 1949) Cherniack, Martin, The Hawk’s Nest Incident: America’s Worst Industrial Disaster (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1986) Cheyfitz, Eric, ‘Matthiessen’s American Renaissance: Circumscribing the Revolution’, American Quarterly, 41.2 (June 1989), pp. 341–61 Cole, Douglas, Franz Boas: The Early Years (London: University of Washington Press, 1999) Cole, John, ‘Amassing American “Stuff”: The Library of Congress and the Federal Arts Projects of the 1930s’, Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, 40.4 (Fall 1983), pp. 356–89 Coleman, A. D., ‘Introduction’ (1977), in Archibald Macleish, Land of the Free (New York: Da Capo, [1938] 1977)

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Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (London: J. M. Dent, [1817] 1975) The Columbia Encyclopaedia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) ‘The Common Steel Worker Gets His Pay Raised to $5 a Day’, Life (15 March 1937), pp. 13–15 Conrad, Bryce, Refiguring America: A Study of William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990) Conroy, Jack, ‘The 1930s: A Symposium’, The Carleton Miscellany, 6 (Winter 1965) Cowley, Malcolm, Exiles’ Return: A Narrative of Ideas (New York: W. W. Norton, 1934) —, review of My America by Louis Adamic, The New Republic (8 June 1938), p. 135 —, Think Back on Us, ed. Henry Dan Piper (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967) —, review of You Have Seen Their Faces, New Republic (24 November 1937), p. 78 Critchley, Simon and Robert Bernasconi, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) Curtis, James, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989) Davidson, Michael, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material World (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1997) Davis, Merrell and William Gilman, eds, The Letters of Herman Melville (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960) Deleuze, Gilles, ‘Montage’, in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone, [1983] 1986) —, and Félix Guattari, ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, [1987] 2004) Denning, Michael, The Cultural Front: The Labouring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Verso, 1996) —, ‘ “The Special American Conditions”: Marxism and American Studies’, American Quarterly, 38.3 (1986), pp. 356–80 —, ‘Work and Culture in American Studies’, in The Futures of American Studies, ed. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 419–40 Denney, Reuel, ‘How Americans See Themselves’, in Studies in American Culture: Dominant Ideas and Images, ed. Joseph J. Kwiat and Mary C. Turpie (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960), pp. 16–26 Deutsch, Babette, ‘Meaning and Being’, Poetry (June 1938), pp. 153–6 De Voto, Bernard, ‘U.S. One’, Saturday Review of Literature (19 March 1938), p. 8 Dixon, Daniel, ‘Dorothea Lange’, Modern Photography (December 1952) Dos Passos, John, ‘What Makes a Novelist’, National Review (16 January 1968), pp. 29–32 Draaisma, Douwe, Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas About the Mind, trans. Paul Vincent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

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Index

Abbott, Berenice, 13–14, 32, 36, 212–13 Adamic, Louis, 168, 170 Agee, James, 24–5, 59, 77, 99, 130, 156, 168–9 ‘Akiba’, 79, 81, 106–13 Allison, Raphael, 33, 62, 137 Alsberg, Henry, 172 An American Exodus, 25–6, 37 American Guide series, 19, 50, 152, 167–76, 179, 186; see also Works Progress Administration American Philosophical Society, vi, 154 American Studies, 121–66, 172, 192 ‘American Stuff’, 152 Americanism, 74–80, 125, 138 Anderson, Sherwood, 168, 170 anthropology, 9, 38, 40–3, 50–3, 63, 86–7, 151–8, 172, 184 Appel, Benjamin, 169 Arvin, Newton, 74, 77, 126 Asch, Nathan, 168–9 Bateson, Gregory, 51, 184 Benedict, Ruth, 38, 151–3 Benjamin, Walter, 27, 54–7 Bible, 81, 87, 156 biography, 50, 64, 73–120, 126, 131–2, 153–4, 198–200, 212 Boas, Ernst, 154 Boas, Franz, 50–1, 79, 113, 153–8, 183, 212 Bold, Christine, 170–2, 175 Bourke-White, Margaret, 11, 17, 23–5, 30–4, 78, 127, 193 Brooks, Van Wyck, 75, 80, 83, 122–7, 130–5, 139, 141 Bryant, Marsha, 17, 211

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Buber, Martin, 40–4, 59, 107–11, 130, 156 Buck-Morss, 54–6 Burlak, Ann, 79 Burroughs, William, 181, 192 Caldwell, Erskine, 17, 23–5, 30, 52, 168 Cantwell, Robert, 172 Carlyle, Thomas, 75–6 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 13, 32–3 Chapman, John, 79 Chase, Richard, 126, 134 Cherniack, Martin, 177 Cheyfitz, Eric, 125 childhood, 35–6, 51–7 Clark, Eunice, 83, 131 Coleman, A. D., 30 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 105–6, 110, 112, 125, 156 Collier, John, 152 Communist Party, 5, 17, 132–3 Cooper, Jane, 130, 149, 174 Coronet, 13, 18, 32–4, 57, 59, 65 Cowley, Malcolm, 24–5, 38, 170 The Daily Worker, 133 Davidson, Michael, 16, 178 Dayton, Tim, 17, 101, 173, 178, 191 De Voto, Bernard, 176 Delano, Jack, 10 Deleuze, Gilles, 105, 180–92, 195, 200–1 Denning, Michael, 125, 129 Deutsch, Babette, 30 Dewey, John, 137, 153 documentary photography, 10–17, 26–66, 77, 87, 195 Dos Passos, John, 100, 130

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Index

245

Egyptian Book of the Dead, 102, 196–201 Eisenstein, Sergei, 3, 10, 27, 98–105, 127, 156, 190, 191 ekphrasis, 62, 92–7, 139 Eliot, T. S., 125, 131, 157–8 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 74–7, 80–1, 91, 113, 121, 124, 125, 131, 134, 156 Representative Men, 75–6 Empire Marketing Board (EMB), 4 eugenics, 87, 112 Evans, Walker, 10, 11, 13, 15, 24, 27, 29, 31–2, 59, 77, 88, 99, 127, 194

Hartley, Marsden, 81 Hawk’s Nest, 8–9, 177–9, 193, 210; see also Gauley Bridge Hebrew Poets, 106, 110–12; see also ‘Akiba’; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Herzog, Anne, 148, 189 Hieroglyphs, 12–13, 64, 102, 167, 197, 201 Hine, Lewis, 33, 88, 128 Hunter, Jefferson, 29–31, 45, 48–9, 60 Hurston, Zora Neale, 212–13 Hurwitz, Leo, 6, 7–9 hypericons, 62–3

Farm Security Administration (FSA), viii, 5, 7, 10–15, 23, 25–32, 37–8, 49, 51–2, 55, 62, 170; see also Resettlement Administration Federal Writers Project, 5, 170; see also Works Progress Administration film documentary, 3–10, 30, 39, 127 Soviet, 3–4, 100, 127 Film and Photo League (FPL), 5–13, 39 First International Photographic Exposition, 28 Flaherty, Robert, 3, 5, 7, 50 Fortune magazine, 10, 12, 23, 60, 78, 152, 193 Frank, Waldo, 74, 123–5, 129–30, 132, 135, 138–9, 141, 156–8, 168 Frazer, James, 155, 157–8 Frontier Films, 6–9, 12

imagism, 3, 8, 14, 102–3, 194 International Labor Defense (ILD), 133 Ivens, Joris, 6–9, 30 Ives, Charles E., 79

Galton, Francis, 85–90, 111–12, 199, 208 Gatti, Attilio, 50 Gauley Bridge, 8, 16, 173–7, 194–6; see also Hawk’s Nest General Post Office (GPO), 4 Gibbs, Willard, 64, 79–85, 90–2, 98, 101, 104, 131–3, 136–7, 146–9, 156, 183, 184, 209 Gingrich, Arnold, 33, 34 Graham, Martha, 39, 43, 49–51 Grierson, John, 3–7, 14–15, 50, 60, 127, 208–10 Guattari, Félix, 180–92, 195, 201 haiku, 102 Hardy, Forsyth, 3 Hariot, Thomas, 80–1, 106, 113, 183, 198–200, 212

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James, C. L. R., 128 James, William, 137, 156 Jewishness, 40–1, 79–81, 86–7, 106–12, 123–4, 130, 153 Kadlec, David, 197 Kalaidjian, Walter, 16, 178, 193 Kaufman, Janet, 41, 81, 108, 112, 189 Kazin, Alfred, 2, 24, 73–5, 77, 83, 113, 122, 125, 129, 157, 169, 172 Kellock, Katharine, 171, 175 Kerouac, Jack, 182, 186 Kertesz, Louise, 81, 101, 139–40, 152 Kollwitz, Käthe, 79, 81, 92–8, 104, 107, 109, 113, 209 Land of the Free, 29–32, 48–9, 59 landscape, 14, 37, 131, 141, 167–73, 178–80, 186–97, 201, 213 Lange, Dorothea, 7, 10–11, 17, 25–31, 37, 39, 45, 48, 78, 171, 176 Lee, Russell, 10, 29 Lerner, Irving, 6–8, 154 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 24, 59, 77, 99, 130 Levinas, Emmanuel, 39–52, 59–61, 82 Lewis, R. W. B., 128 Leyda, Jay, 6, 127, 134 Life magazine, 10, 11, 23, 33, 34, 59, 60, 78 Lipsitz, George, 129 Lincoln, Abraham, 74–5, 82 Lorentz, Pare, 5, 7, 9, 25, 30 Lynd, Robert, 38

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MacLeish, Archibald, 29–32, 47–9, 52, 58, 152, 156 Macy, John, 122 Maddow, Ben, 6, 8–10, 17 maps, 18–19, 26, 76, 121, 152, 171–83, 188–92, 195, 199–201, 209 The March of Time, 5 Marx, Karl, 125, 193–4 Marx, Leo, 128–9 Marxism, 2, 6, 17, 74, 125, 132, 137, 167–70, 187, 193 Matthiessen, F. O., 76, 80, 125, 128, 130–1, 133, 134, 136, 138, 147 Maxwell, James Clerk, 91 McCausland, Elizabeth, 28 Mead, Margaret, 51, 53, 151–4, 184 Melville, Herman, 18, 76, 79, 80, 122, 125–8, 133–8, 142–51, 183, 208, 209 Moby-Dick, 76, 127–9, 134, 142–5, 147, 149 poetry of, 136, 147–9 ‘Melville Revival’, 18, 125, 126–8, 149 Meynell, Viola, 149 ‘Migrant Mother’, 26–7, 29, 97 Miller, Perry, 124–5, 128 Milton, John, 102, 189 Mitchell, W. J. T., 62–4, 92, 94–5, 167 Moana, 3, 8, 50 montage, 6, 10, 16, 56, 60–2, 80, 97, 99–105, 183, 191 Moses, 87, 109, 112, 123 Mottram, Eric, 192 Mumford, Lewis, 124–8, 130–1, 171–2 music, 4, 5, 6, 41, 82, 93–6, 131, 147, 155, 158, 176, 210 Mydans, Carl, 10, 54, 56 ‘Myth and Symbol’, 52, 128, 151, 192 Nanook of the North, 3, 5, 51 National Film Board of Canada, 4 Naumburg, Nancy, 6, 8–9, 173 Navajo, 152, 156 New Deal, 5, 7, 10, 15, 52, 78, 129, 152; see also Farm Security Administration New Masses, 10, 30, 31, 60, 138 New Republic, 24, 30, 34, 80, 83 Newhall, Beaumont, 12–15, 77 newsreels, 5, 6, 9, 100, 103–4, 177; see also The March of Time Nichols, Bill, 2 Novak, Daniel, 87, 111

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Novak, Estelle, 17 Nykino, 6–7 Office of War Information (OWI), 13, 33–4, 58, 66, 137, 154 Olson, Charles, 127, 134 Parrington, Vernon Louis, 124–5, 130, 132, 134 Partisan Review, 74, 80, 138 Patteran, 199–201 Pease, Donald, 125 Peeler, David, 168–9 Pells, Richard, 2, 37, 168 photo-narratives, 34–66, 98, 209, 212 photo-texts, 13, 18, 23–36, 50–1, 58–9, 61, 66, 184 Pierce, C. S., 138, 156 Porritt, Ruth, 91, 92–6 portraits, 18, 24–31, 36, 39, 50, 52, 73, 75, 78, 85, 87, 93–7, 100, 104, 113, 125, 130 composite, 18, 85–93, 102, 111–13, 139, 158, 170, 199 Price, Frederic Newlin, 145–6 primitivism, 37–9, 43–58, 60, 62, 63, 64, 128, 152–3, 155–7 Puckett, John, 24, 31, 48 Rabinowitz, Paula, 2, 16, 25, 27, 169 Raeburn, John, 33 Renov, Michael, 2, 39, 211 Resettlement Administration (RA), 5, 23, 78; see also Farm Security Administration Rexroth, Kenneth, 1 rhizome, 180–91, 201 Rich, Adrienne, 137 Ricoeur, Paul, 200 Rorty, James, 168–9 Rosenfeld, Paul, 139–40, 142 Rosenthal, M. L., 138 Rosskam, Edwin, 10, 12–13, 37 Rotha, Paul, 4–9, 12, 15, 173, 208, 209 Rothstein, Arthur, 10–12, 31, 45, 56, 208, 209, 210 Rukeyser, Muriel and American Studies, 130–9 ancestry (poetics), 80, 83–90, 106–13, 123, 130–40, 144–50, 156–7, 186 and biography, 18, 50, 64, 73–113, 126, 131–2, 153–4, 198–200, 212

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Index and childhood, 35–6, 51–4, 56–8, 157 and documentary film, 7–10, 31, 58, 65, 100, 107, 173, 190 and documentary photography, 12–14, 16–17, 23–72, 179, 193–5, 211–13 document and unverifiable fact, 1, 79, 81, 84, 106–7, 108, 110, 111–13, 148, 153–5, 157, 183, 200, 209, 213 editing (film), 8, 10, 61, 178 and the human face, 31–2, 35–52, 57, 62, 63, 85–94, 97, 103, 107, 112, 131, 150–1, 179, 212 meeting-place (poetics), 1, 31, 40–4, 46, 48, 53, 59, 61, 64–5, 73, 82–3, 88, 90, 92, 106, 108–11, 143–50, 152, 157, 173–4, 183, 186–7, 189, 191, 194, 200–1, 209, 211, 213 montage, 10, 16, 56, 60–2, 80, 97, 99–105, 183, 190–1 pluralism, 13, 33, 38, 64, 73, 76, 83, 90, 94, 97, 99, 101, 133, 137–8, 194–5, 201, 208, 211 politics, 2, 16–17, 132–8, 173–4, 187–9, 211 poster work, 13, 33–4, 58, 92, 137–8 pragmatism, 62, 125, 136–8, 153 primitivism, 39, 43, 49–58, 62, 63, 64, 153, 155, 157 ‘Rukeyser Imbroglio’, 80, 115n47, 131, 138 spiral figure, 46, 62–4, 82, 105, 140–1 tradition, 48, 79–83, 106, 108, 110, 121, 131–9, 140–1, 147–8, 154, 157–8, 179, 185 trace, 88, 198–201 travel, 8–9, 16, 132, 173–4, 183, 199 witness, 36, 43–7, 52, 57, 62–4, 90, 94–6, 107–11, 132, 138, 140, 143, 144, 149, 151, 154, 155, 173–4, 177–9, 183, 187–8, 191–2, 195, 197–200, 208–11 works ‘Absalom’, 16, 196–8 ‘Adventures of Children’, 32, 36, 53–4, 56–7, 63–5 ‘After Melville’, 149–51 ‘Ajanta’, 62, 102 ‘Akiba’, 41, 79, 81, 106–13 All the Way Home, 8

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247

‘Alloy’, 195 Archival materials and notes (unpublished), 8–9, 13, 32, 65, 80, 84, 89, 92, 96, 98, 100–1, 105, 107, 130–1, 134, 142, 152, 154–7, 173, 177, 198, 199 The Book of the Dead, 9, 10, 16, 17, 55, 173, 176–80, 185–98, 200, 209, 210, 211, 212 ‘The Book of the Dead’, 55, 191, 195, 211 Breaking Open, 149, 153, 174 ‘The Cornfield’, 196 ‘The Dam’, 190–1 ‘F.O.M.’, 131 The Gates, 174 ‘Gauley Bridge’, 194–6 ‘Gibbs’, 79, 84–5, 90–2 I Go Out, 35 In the Beginning (unpublished), 155–8 ‘Josiah Willard Gibbs’, 83, 91 ‘Käthe Kollwitz’, 79, 81, 92–8, 104, 107, 109, 113, 209 The Life of Poetry, 7, 8, 13, 32, 34, 35, 41–4, 52, 53, 57, 59, 61, 64, 81–6, 89, 92, 96, 97, 100–2, 105, 108, 131, 133–7, 141, 146, 147, 149, 152, 174, 183–4, 208 ‘Lives’, 79–81, 84–5, 89, 90–4, 100, 106, 107, 112, 113, 130, 131, 139, 199, 212 ‘Lives’ poem (untitled introductory poem), 84–5, 89, 107, 112, 131, 147, 151 Mazes, 35–6 ‘Mediterranean’, 16, 174, 176 ‘Northern Poems’, 153 Notes (published), 58, 79, 113, 130, 176 One Life, 80, 98–106, 113, 209 Orgy, The, 9 ‘Out of Childhood’, 57 A Place to Live, 8 ‘Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact’, 107 ‘Power’, 188–90, 196–8 Review of Land of the Free, 31–2, 47–9, 52 ‘The Road’, 178–9, 186–8, 197 ‘Ryder’, 81, 138–46, 149 Speed of Darkness, 79, 80, 107, 111 ‘The Speed of Darkness’, 84, 107

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Rukeyser, Muriel (cont.) The Traces of Thomas Hariot, 80–1, 106, 198–200, 212 ‘The Trial’, 173 A Turning Wind, 79, 131, 139 U.S. 1, 9, 18, 58, 79–80, 174–5, 176–8, 185, 194, 211 ‘An Unborn Poet’, 19, 212–14 ‘The Usable Truth’, 134–7, 141 ‘Under Forty’, 108, 148 ‘West Virginia’, 186–8, 197 Willard Gibbs: American Genius, 64, 79–81, 83, 113, 131–4, 137, 146, 147, 149, 209 ‘Words and Images’, 34, 58, 80, 137–8 ‘Worlds Alongside’, 32, 36–40, 42–53, 59–64 Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 79, 81, 123, 130, 138–46, 149, 156 Sander, August, 27 Sarah Lawrence College, 212–13 Schindler-Carter, Petra, 172 Schoerke, Meg, 106 Schuster, Joshua, 157 Scottsboro boys, 8, 173 The Scottsboro Boys (film), 6 sculpture, 79, 92–3 Sekula, Alan, 87–8 Shahn, Ben, 10, 13, 31, 56 Smart, David, 33 Smith, Bessie, 79, 113 Smith, Henry Nash, 128 Steichen, Edward, 28 Steiner, Ralph, 5–6, 7, 13, 32, 127 Stieglitz, Alfred, 15, 88 Stott, William, 2, 15, 23, 25, 77, 151, 168, 170, 172, 174 Strand, Paul, 6–9, 13, 15, 32, 34 Stryker, Roy E., 10–12, 15, 26, 28, 29, 32, 38–9, 78, 193, 208 Survey Graphic, 10, 23 Susman, Warren, 2, 38, 174 Tagg, John, 11 Taylor, Paul, 7, 25 Thorp, Willard, 126, 134 Thurston, Michael, 2, 15–17, 133, 190 Time magazine, 5, 10, 98

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Tobing Rony, Fatimah, 58 Trachtenberg, Alan, 11, 14–15, 78 travel reportage, 9, 14, 18, 37, 167–76 Untermeyer, Louis, 113 U.S. One: Maine to Florida, 175–6, 177, 179; see also Highway Route Guide Series ‘usable past’, 121–30, 136, 150, 158, 172 Van Dyke, Willard, 6–7, 31 Vassar College, 6, 8, 130, 132, 134, 173 Vertov, Dziga, 3–6, 10, 61, 127 Vescia, Monique Claire, 15, 17 Wald, Alan, 132–3, 137 Walker, Alice, 212–13 war, 6, 13, 15–16, 18, 33–4, 58, 74, 75, 79, 82, 92, 97, 98, 104, 125–6, 132, 135–8, 148, 150, 151–2, 173–4, 186–7, 208–9 American Civil, 92, 175, 186 Second World, 6, 13, 125, 134–7 Spanish Civil, 6–7, 16, 132, 173–4 Ward, John, 145 Ware, Michele, 81, 137, 198 Weaver, Raymond, 126 Wechsler, Shoshana, 16, 101, 193 Whitman, Walt, 13, 35, 74–80, 121–3, 125, 129–30, 131, 133–4, 145, 147–9, 156, 170, 173–4, 176, 182, 183, 186, 201, 208 Leaves of Grass, 13, 75–6, 121, 134, 176, 182, 186, 201 Williams, Raymond, 167 Williams, William Carlos, 17, 74, 123–4, 139, 156–8, 191–2 Willkie, Wendell, 80, 98–105 Wilson, Edmund, 168 Winston, Brian, 2 Wise, Gene, 124–6 Wolfe, Charles, 6–7, 39 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 5, 14, 18, 50, 152, 170–6, 186, 196 You Have Seen Their Faces, 23–5, 43

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