Arts and Letters

There are rare moments in life when time halts for an instant in startled abeyance before a presence, and will not go on until that presence has been recognized and promised forever its vitality. When Carson McCullers brought Muriel Rukeyser one winter evening in 1945 to the brownstone house on East 87th Street where we lived, time waited until Muriel's presence was fixed changeless in my life. It may well have been close to Muriel's birthday; she was rosy-cheeked, dark-eyed, thirty-two that year, and although she was hesitant and shy, she radiated a singular warmth and joy. The Second World War was over, my husband was safely home from Europe, our children were young, and the house was filled with music. Muriel, whose work I did not know then, leaned eagerly forward as the children brought their puppets to her, and laid them in her lap.

Her poems came to me later, among them her poem to Käthe Kollwitz, which begins:

Held between wars
my lifetime
among wars, the big hands of the
world of death
my lifetime
listens to yours.

I feel certain Muriel never said that the meaning of a poet's work and the meaning of a poet's life are inseparable. She quite simply lived that truth. She was humanly, politically, and with great patience and gentleness, committed, and, as she wrote in those lines to Käthe Kollwitz, her life never ceased listening to the lifetimes of others. The “I” was always turned outward, on permanent vacation from the self, learning the speech of other people, eagerly open to new countries, new customs, to new betrayals of the humble. In translating the poetry of others, she was—in constant wonder and homage—translating as well the meaning of their lives. In these lines of Octavio Paz's which she put into English, one can hear her voice calling out with his:

…the interminable journey made still longer for Robespierre progressing inch by inch holding his shattered jawbone in his hands— …and the measured steps of Lincoln getting ready, that night, to go to theatre, the rattle in Trotsky's throat and then his moan of a wild boar… …the balls, the guts, the alases, silences, of the saint, the criminal, and the poor devil, graveyards of phrases and of those anecdotes that the old dogs of rhetoric scratch over…

The specific, always the specific, the secret of the great. Muriel once said: "…I think of a moment in Hanoi a few months ago, when they were talking about reading our writings. They like, for example, one writer of ours very much whom they spell Mao-Tuen (that's Mark Twain), and I said to one poet there, will you read one poem to me? And he said, drawing himself up, 'We do not read poems, we reclaim them.' And I think what we do in these translations is to reclaim them, as we do in our own poems, they're reclaimed from the same places perhaps."

Because Muriel was so fine a poet, I fear at times that her prose does not receive the recognition it deserves. Her stunning book, The Traces of Thomas Hariot, and her autobiographical The Orgy both dispense (as does her poetry)with any superfluous word, every worn and weary phrase, and bring women and men, castle and pub, water and mountain, grass and rock, history and autobiography to enduring life. Muriel's prose (again like her poetry) flashes its messages as rapidly as fingers and hands articulating the sign language to those who cannot hear. Her words are unencumbered, like nimble fingers spelling out swiftly all it is necessary to know in order to be no longer deaf, no longer mute.

Sir Walter Raleigh was one of Thomas Hariot's contemporaries, and Muriel writing of Raleigh's poetry discovers (always in homage and wonder) that it "makes him intelligible to us as none of the arguments of scholars, looking for prose logic, can." In her wide search for traces of the sixteenth-century Hariot, she finds that he and his work, and friends such as Marlowe, Raleigh, Spenser, are not for a moment imprisoned in the past. They, in her words, "go far through the roots of our own time." In The Orgy it is not only the tinkers, the bartenders, the customers bending the elbow at the bar, the people flocking from far countries to the yearly fair, or the children running through the green and gold of an island off the west coast of Ireland; it is not only all of these whose alien lives and voices become her own, but there is as well the slant-eyed, bearded goat, the traditional King of Puck Fair, who will stand for three days and three nights on his tower, lashed fast, crowned, and finally martyred, as was Raleigh, but both alive forever in Muriel's vibrant prose.

Muriel shared with Käthe Kollwitz "the revolutionary look / that says I am in the world / to change the world," and that is one portrait of her that I cherish. But it is only one of the many that compose the mural of her life. She is there in the packed Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, speaking her words of protest against the war in Vietnam, and she is moving in my garden in the sunlight, trying to walk with ease again. She is in a hospital room in New York, in a white hospital gown, her stricken hand seeking to hold to the West Indian nurse's arm; her unbroken smile, and the sound of her voice saying gently, patiently: "Please show me how to use the walker. Just show me, and I will be able to do it."

Years ago, she learned to speak again when the power of speech was stricken from her, and in the New York hospital room, she learned to walk again. In the nearly half a lifetime of her devastating illness, she was not devastated. Self-pity, that blight on a writer's work and on any individual's existence, was never present in her life, and her books stand as witness that there was no place for self-pity in her work. The public statement of her beliefs is there in the mural, beginning with her presence in 1932 at the trial of the nine Scottsboro youths, proceeds into the 1970s where she stands, leaning on a cane, on a platform with the Iranian poet, Rosa Baraheni, detailing to audience after audience the outrages of the Shah's murderous regime. One of the final portraits is of Muriel seated on the stones outside a prison in Seoul, South Korea, in solitary vigil for Kim Chi Ha. Because of his outspoken opposition to the totalitarian regime, this young poet is among the political prisoners still incarcerated there. In her poem "The Gates," she writes of him:

I lie in a strange country, in pale yellow,
swamp-green, woods
and a night of music while a poet lies in solitary
somewhere in a concrete cell. Glare-lit, I hear,
without books, without pen and paper.
Does he draw a pencil out of his throat,
out of his veins, out of his sex?
There are cells all around him, emptied.
He can signal on these walls till he runs mad.
He is signaling to me across the night.

In her book on Hariot, Muriel quotes a poem of Raleigh's, written when he was a prisoner in the Tower of London. Of his imprisonment, and his impending execution he writes of his separation from "a world of pilgrimage and creation," a world that was Muriel's world as well. Raleigh's words speak to me clearly of her now.

Knowinge shee cann renew, and cann create
Green from the grounds, and floures,
yeven out of stone,
By vertu lastinge over tyme and date,

Levinge us only woe, which like the moss,
Havinge compassion of unburied bones
Cleaves to mischance, and unrepayred loss.

Muriel was born in New York City in December 1913. She died in that city she loved in February 1980.