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Houdini

“What are all his escapes for?”: Making Sense of Muriel Rukeyser’s Houdini

March 5, 2022 by Jackie Campbell 2 Comments

Dear Reader,

In what follows, I have tried to offer a careful reading of Muriel Rukeyser’s 1973 version of Houdini: A Musical, published by Paris Press in 2002. This is the version new audiences will soon encounter together during the four public Houdini events sponsored by the Eastern Michigan University Center for Jewish Studies and the English Department this spring. My goal was to strike at some of the play’s most central questions, to pick up on some of the ambiguities and ideas that might appeal to new and not-so-new readers alike. My own reading grew from the question Marco Bone asks in the play’s final scene: “What are all his escapes for?” We might also ask: What is art for?

At the end of this essay, you will find a few questions intended to spark conversation as well as a find from the archive. There must be many more questions I’m missing––I hope you’ll tell me about them.

Cheers, Jackie

*

Houdini is an odd play. Serious and silly, bawdy and surreal, this loosely biographical musical about the life of the great American escape artist seems to wink at its audience, asking us to join in on a joke we don’t always get. Over the course of two acts we watch Harry Houdini rise from poverty, find love, master his craft, and gain international acclaim. We see him break locks, escape trunks, evade death in a frozen river, and testify against fraudulent mediums in a congressional hearing. He exerts perfect control over his body and all his fears. Then, when Houdini appears at his most unstoppable, this self-made man suddenly dies, punched in the gut by a trio of medical students. When he speaks from beyond the grave in the play’s final lines, he commands the audience to liberate themselves, to “Open yourself, for we are locks / Open each other, we are keys”––right before making what might be an innuendo (“Touch yourself as I touch myself”). Is this a hero’s journey? A love story? A farce? 

Houdini is a story about art. It is an exploration of the role artists play in society, an examination of the artist’s power to change their audience and the conditions of our shared world––and the limits of that same power. I know that sounds like a bit of a stretch. Isn’t this a story about a magician? More importantly, isn’t this a story about self-liberation, a story that can inspire us to free our bodies, psyches, and imaginations? The answer is: Yes, Houdini is all of those things. But it’s essential to step back and ask why a magician might be qualified to teach us anything about how to live in the first place, and I want to suggest that the play is uniquely aware of that strange tension: the delightful and sometimes untenable absurdity of calling a showman an artist. Even if you can accept that Houdini is an artist and not just an entertainer, a more troubling possibility remains: the possibility that even artists can’t do much to change a world riddled with injustice and inequality. Houdini does it anyway.

What makes Houdini’s performances an enduring art––not just fleeting entertainment? We can begin by looking at the play’s ambiguous setting and time. Rukeyser’s final 1973 version of the play, published by Paris Press in 2002, includes the following notes: “The time is the legendary past of circuses, carnivals, and magic acts. Historically, the first quarter of the twentieth century, slides to the present time.” The real Erik Weisz was born in 1874 and died in 1926. If the “present time” denotes 1973, the year the play was staged by the Lenox Center for the Performing Arts, then it is clear that even “historical” time is not quite historical here. The world of Houdini is curiously devoid of the major events and crises of the 20th century: There are no World Wars, economic booms or busts, protests, or unrest. Even the congressional hearing in Act Two, Scene Three, which includes material taken directly from Houdini’s Testimony Hearing on House Resolution 8989, seems to float unhinged from the events of the day. While many contemporary readers remember Rukeyser as a Thirties documentarian, this play, completed toward the end of her life, is explicitly not a documentary about the life of Erik Weisz. Rather, Rukeyser sought to create a mythic, “legendary” world that could endure beyond Houdini’s lifetime and her own––even if the details are not entirely true. 

Freed from the confines of historical accuracy, the play strives to reveal some other kind of truth: a truth that only Houdini can show us. In the first scene, Houdini and Bess share their first date. They are walking along a Coney Island beach full of lovers, tourists, tricksters, and grifters when Houdini lets his future wife in on a secret: how to pick up needles with your eyelids. “You control your muscles,” he explains, “And you control your fear. Now you know all.” Suddenly Bess sees Harry as much more than a skilled entertainer:

          You could do anything.
          (The people on the beach are still for a moment.)
          Look––they’re stones, they’re statues of themselves. 
          You can see what they need.
          Look––we could have a mind-reading act.
          Harry––if you bend over me, they’ll think we’re kissing.
          Look––if you could stand up now and say to them:
          “My fear––look what I do with it!”

“Somebody like you,” she tells him, “you could lead them along.” What Bess sees in Houdini is not just the ability to stage a great act, but to “lead them along”: to teach audiences how to be human. Without Houdini the people on the beach are just “stones” and “statues of themselves.” They are not living––or at least not living in a meaningful way. Yet for Houdini the meaningful life is an autonomous one. Through the practice of intense personal discipline, through mastery over his own body and emotions, Houdini transforms his fear into power. He submits to no authority other than his own. Audiences, Bess believes, can learn to do the same. 

Yet the play also casts some deep doubt on the extent of Houdini’s powers. In Act One, Scene Three, Houdini performs his first big lock-breaking act: He opens all the locks in the “city jail,” ushers the prisoners out of their cells, then locks each man into a new one. Throughout the stunt, Houdini asks what kind of crime each man has committed. One prisoner answers, with an odd nonchalance: “Child-knifer… Cop-killer. Mass-rapist. Nothing much.” When the momentarily freed Fourth Prisoner asks Houdini “Can you get me out of here?” Houdini, “looking at him in despair,” only answers “No.” When the trick is done, Houdini turns to the prisoners and says, “Forgive me.” The jail scene ends with a song, “Hostility,” sung by the prisoners, who are divided into the “Black Prisoner,” the lead singer, and “Prisoners,” the ensemble. The “Black Prisoner” sings:

          The man who opened my prison door
          Has put me back in jail.
          No chance to plead my innocence,
          Or get out of here on bail.
          Someone showed me free,
          And drove me deeper in my misery.

These characters do not reappear in the play, and Houdini never again apologizes to anyone involved in his act. The jail scene marks a strange divergence in what is otherwise a story of triumph. Confronted with systemic racism and mass incarceration, Houdini’s powers of self-liberation seem to have reached a hard limit. Perhaps these are conditions of confinement that cannot be overcome. 

At the outset of Act Two, Scene Two, as Houdini prepares to take the stage, his assistant Marco Bone and his wife Bess sing his opening act, a song called “What the King Said”:

          Today your ambassador said in fun,
          “Things are tough in Washington––
          Let’s go see what Houdini has done.”
          With all the forms of American rape,
          We need a good all-purpose escape,  
          An all-purpose good economy escape…
          Every president and king
          Must be able to get out of everything… 

“What the King Said” may be a satire, but the song still raises the possibility that Houdini’s act is futile––and maybe even counterproductive. When viewed by people in positions of power, Houdini’s illusions are entertainment and escapism at best (“Things are tough in Washington–– / Let’s go see what Houdini has done”). At worst, they offer a lesson in how to deepen injustice and inequality (“Every president and king / Must be able to get out of everything.”). Lying, fraud, negligence: These are all forms of “escape,” too. The song’s second verse imagines a king speaking to “Houdini the Great,” saying, “You can have all your locks and clocks / As long as I’m in the royal box.” Just as the prisoners can’t use Houdini’s message of self-liberation to actually get out of their cells, so too are the “ambassadors” in Washington and the king in his court unchanged by the performance. For those in the lowest and the highest positions of power, life goes on just as before. Perhaps artists are only free to create so long as they make sure not to threaten the dominant power structure. 

Again and again, the play pushes against the limits of freedom, only to suddenly sweep those limits away, suggesting that anything is possible. We might wonder if the play truly believes its own message. Take, for example, Act One, Scene Four, when Houdini sings “Chains, Freedom, Keys,” the play’s most memorable expression of his belief: that freedom is accessible to everyone, everywhere. Moments before a shackled Houdini is lowered beneath the frozen surface of the East River, about to perform the most dangerous escape of the play, he sings: 

          There are chains––
          There is freedom––
          There are keys––
          And of these, chains are strong
          Freedom’s endless, keys are great
          And we
          Are the greatest of these,
          The greatest 
          Of these.

In the world of Houdini, individuals have the ability to free themselves from suffering––if not from the structural conditions of suffering (like being incarcerated or impoverished), than from the psychic ones (like feeling weak or afraid). No longer reliant on supernatural authorities like God or the spirits of the dead, and perhaps powerless to intervene in the workings of the state, individuals can essentially make the best of what they’ve got: their own bodies, minds, and emotions. This way of thinking might reflect the therapeutic language of self-help, the corporatized technospeak of self-optimization, or even the alienating consequences of capitalism itself. Yet Houdini’s claims about personal autonomy might also stake out a powerful bid for individual agency in a world that would otherwise render its inhabitants completely powerless. The play’s persistent ambiguity won’t let us say for sure.

When Houdini’s claims cross over into the unbelievable, it’s often the wry assistant Marco Bone who plays the naysayer. After the second verse of “Chains, Freedom, Keys” concludes, “There are keys–– / And the greatest of these / Can free the world,” Bone cuts in with a skeptical accusation: “You’re telling them something they want to hear.” Why should anyone trust a promise of world liberation made by an entertainer, by someone who tells audiences “something they want to hear” and gets paid for it? We can read Bone’s skepticism as part of the play’s larger pattern in which claims about art’s power to transform society are constantly met with flashes of doubt and resistance. Yet this pattern is also marked by the swiftness––the sometimes baffling and even awkward speed––with which those doubts are cast aside. When Houdini replies, “I’m just doing it,” Bone is instantly convinced (“You’re saying it. With yourself!”) and the scene shifts to the news of Houdini’s mother’s death. The point is not to say that Houdini is inconsistent, but that the play’s constantly shifting tone forces its viewers to continually ask ourselves what we’re willing to believe. Can self-liberators really “free the world”? Are Houdini’s promises true, or are they just the rhetoric of the ultimate showman? And why does the play so playfully avoid answering its own questions? 

Houdini refuses to pin down the precise meaning of freedom or the function of art. Yet there is one thing the play might know for sure: That artworks, regardless of what they do or what they’re for, endure. In the play’s final scene, just before Houdini dies, he promises Bess, “I’ll come back to you. I’ll make a way. I’ll come back.” Here Marco Bone, the skeptic, makes his final interjection:

Read your newspaper. The law against fortune-tellers? Of course, it did not go through. Tell your fortune, ladies and gentlemen? What are all his escapes for? What did he make his stand for? Go further, you say? Does Houdini go further? Breaking out forever? 

Beatrice waits for a word from Harry.

Bone finally asks the play’s central question: “What are all his escapes for?” It’s important to note that this question comes in the midst of Houdini’s failure to enact tangible political change. Houdini’s efforts to pass “the law against fortune-tellers,” the crusade against false mediums that occupied the majority of Act Two, “did not go through.” Here the play reaches a tipping point: If we are to believe that Houdini’s “escapes” matter, that they will make an impact on society regardless of what’s written into the law, then he needs to achieve immortality through some other means. One way out of this conundrum is to prove that Houdini does in fact have supernatural powers. “Breaking out forever,” the escape from death, would be Houdini’s biggest stunt yet. Yet the fact that Houdini even raises the possibility of a ghostly return seems to contradict his entire life’s work. Why would he promise a supernatural intervention if he believed that spiritualists were frauds? 

As “Beatrice waits for a word from Harry,” the stage directions tell us that “something does come, a message in the form of a song.” Houdini then reappears on stage beside his wife and sings a fragment of an earlier song, “Let Me See, Let Me Feel”: “Let me see, Let me feel, / Let me know what is real, / Let me believe––” An ensemble of naysayers raise their final doubts: “If you believe that, you’ll believe anything. / It didn’t even sound like his voice.” Is this song sung by a ghostly voice, or is it just a memory in Bess’ mind? Did Houdini really escape death, “breaking out forever”? The stage goes dark. When Houdini emerges again, this time the stage directions make clear that he is about to break the fourth wall and address the audience directly: “Singing, crowing, laughing, a chaos of noise. HOUDINI steps out of the blackness to the point closest to the audience.” It is at this point in the play––the point when we are asked to believe the impossible––that Rukeyser subtly reminds us that we are watching a play. Erik Weisz was a man, but Harry Houdini was a character he played, and Houdini is a character in this play. He is on a stage. In front of an audience. If he is alive after death it is because the play itself is giving him life––or a particular view on a life, shaped by the vision of Muriel Rukeyser. Whenever the play is staged, they both, in a way, return. The play itself is the “actual magic.”

Perhaps what Rukeyser wants us to see is that the encounter with art––with music, poetry, theater––is very much like the supernatural. Perhaps artworks cast a spell so powerful we cannot fully know or explain how they work. We should certainly try. But just as we cannot know exactly why poems or songs or even musicals move us exactly the way they do, we also cannot predict what their effects in the world will be. The work of artists might be ignored or lost. These works might be co-opted and abused by the powerful, or they might offer consolation and inspiration for the powerless. They might change one person’s life or society at large––for better or for worse. The artist’s desire to create goes on regardless, but why? Houdini’s playfulness, irreverence, and sheer strangeness speak to the unanswerable nature of these questions. Rukeyser would have wanted us to keep asking them anyway.  

*

Questions to consider:

  1. How would you describe the experience of reading, hearing, and seeing Houdini? I have used words like “strange,” “surreal,” “inconsistent,” and “ambiguous,” but these are my responses and interpretations. Which words would you choose? 
  2. Houdini continually asks its audience to question what they are and are not willing to believe. Which moments in this play feel impossible to you? Do you find these moments intriguing, exciting, frustrating, confusing? Why? 
  3. What really happens in the play’s final scene? Does Houdini return? Whose voice does Bess hear? Why does it matter?
  4. At the end of this essay, I suggest that “the play itself is the ‘actual magic’.” But is art really magic? Or like magic? And what does “actual magic” really mean?
  5. Attached to this post you will find a letter Rukeyser sent to an unnamed recipient, likely Lyn Austin (Houdini’s Producer) and André Gregory, on August 1, 1973. After the initial production of Houdini in July 1973, Austin and Gregory requested that she rewrite the play’s second act in anticipation of an additional (though never staged) production in 1975. Here you can find Rukeyser’s notes on Act Two, including some uncertainties and possible revisions. How do these notes affect your understanding of the play? For example, why does the shift in music after “What the King Said” matter so much? Why are the “storm of light” and the “yellow curtain” called “big clues”? Why should the words “SELF-LIBERATOR” remain unsaid?

Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Library of Congress, Box II:13, Folder 11, Plays, Houdini, 1944-54, 1969-74, n.d. Posted with permission of William L Rukeyser.

Jackie Campbell is a PhD candidate in English at Princeton University. Her dissertation, Preparation for Action: The Poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, explores the social function of poetry in the thought and writing of 20th century poet and political activist Muriel Rukeyser. 

Filed Under: Ruke Blog Tagged With: Houdini, Muriel Rukeyser

A Conversation about Muriel Rukeyser and Harry Houdini

February 20, 2022 by Elisabeth Daumer Leave a Comment

Between

Carolyn S. Stroebe, Ph.D., Licensed Psychologist (#PSY11564) in Berkeley & author of Muriel Rukeyser, Strength and Weakness.

And

Elisabeth Däumer, Professor of English and Women’s & Gender Studies and Administrator of  Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive at at Eastern Michigan University.

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-80)/ Harry Houdini (1874-1926)

Important Note: Passages taken from Dr. Stroebe’s book, Muriel Rukeyser, Strength and Weakness and from unpublished interviews or other material are in quotes and italicized. The primary interview featured here was with Muriel Rukeyser (and Professor Frank Barron) at a private home on Union Street in San Francisco, California, on the afternoon of 30 July 1979.

CS:  Professor Däumer, Elisabeth – Congratulations on producing Houdini!  And soon!

And thank you!

ED:  Yes, it’s happening! Thanks to a generous grant from Michigan Humanities–an affiliate of the National Endowment of the Humanities–as well as EMU’s Center for Jewish Studies (which means my colleague Marty Shichtman) and the English Department. (http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/locks-keys-freedom-muriel-rukeysers-houdini-and-the-public-role-of-poetry/)

CS:  I found the New York Times article announcing the first and only earlier production in 1973 starring a 30 year old Christopher Walken.  So this production of yours – a celebration as we near its 50th anniversary?  Half a century.

ED: Yes…we’re doing four staged readings of the play, or rather musical. And a virtual conversation, via zoom webinar, on Rukeyser and Houdini with two terrific speakers: Jan Freeman, who edited and published the play in 2002, and Stefania Heim who is the first to analyze the composition of the play.  They are going to be joined by Houdini expert Matthew Solomon, who has written on Houdini and the new magic of silent movies.

CS: That’s great!  Let me calendar all of those immediately!

ED: This webinar will take place at 11am on March 20 and should be of special interest to Rukeyser aficionados, since Houdini has garnered too little attention—so far! So we’re very excited and hope lots of people will attend the staged reading (we’re planning to live stream the first on March 20, 2pm) and the zoom webinar.

CS:  If it weren’t for my extreme Covid cautiousness I would fly out for the opening performance.  I have lots of questions for you about the play and what it suggests about Muriel. I am so grateful that we are an interdisciplinary team.  You are the Literature and Women’s & Gender Studies Professor and I, a Clinical/Personality Psychologist, albeit one blessed to have interviewed Muriel shortly before her death. And what we do we have in common?  We are both in love with Muriel!

ED: Carolyn,  since you are in such a unique position and of interdisciplinary status – could you introduce yourself a bit more – for example, how  did you come to interview Muriel Rukeyser?

CS: Muriel participated in a study of creative writers in 1958 at the University of California, Berkeley.  Professor Frank Barron, my mentor and dissertation chair in graduate school, in 1979, at UC Santa Cruz, was in charge of the files of these writers. Each student in Frank’s 1979 Graduate Personality Assessment Seminar chose a writer upon whom to focus.  Hearing Muriel’s name, I recalled a favorite poem written by her, so guess who I chose?

ED: Muriel, of course!

I’d love to know more about Barron and the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research in Berkeley.  Another time!

CS: Deal! I dedicated my 2021 book to the memory of Muriel and Frank – stars of creativity in both the 20th and 21st centuries.  Anyway, Muriel just happened to be visiting San Francisco in the summer of 1979 and Frank arranged for the two of us to interview her; that interview, the 1958 case files, and other material formed the basis of my Master of Science Thesis on route to the Ph.D.  Then, as you know, Muriel died in early 1980. I had been considering other topics for my doctoral dissertation, but it seemed timely to continue studying Muriel by interviewing people who knew her well, while they were still alive.  And so I did, mostly in New York City.  I recently published the 1982 dissertation – forty years later as an e-book and paperback – hard cover on the way! I was then a Personality Research Psychologist.  I didn’t  become a clinician until retraining years later.  Currently I am a Licensed Psychologist with three decades of experience – and I now come to the case of Muriel, much more prepared to understand this complicated woman; although as we’ve discussed, Muriel is a mystery to some degree, to everyone who encounters her.

ED:  Yes, she certainly is!  By the way, I tend to think of and refer to her as Muriel Rukeyser; I’ve noticed you refer to her as Muriel, relatively informally. 

CS: Hmm.…a thought-provoking observation!  I hadn’t even realized that, but it’s true. Thank you because I pride myself on having good professional boundaries and being polite, respectful and appropriate.  Let me think….

First, I may be wrong but it might be that Psychologists tend to be comparatively less formal, and certainly we were in Santa Cruz.  I addressed Professor Barron as Frank and he called me Carolyn.  By 1979, Muriel and Frank had known one another for over 20 years, so they were on a first-name basis.  There was no suggestion on anyone’s part to do otherwise. In fact, at the end of the afternoon, Muriel and Frank, and Muriel and I exchanged a hug and a kiss.  After Muriel died and I began doing interviews with family and close friends on very personal, psychological topics, this informal style continued. Actually, I ‘m now referring to Houdini as Harry; maybe informality in a Muriel context is as contagious as Omicron.

ED:  Thanks for this explanation. So, what do you see as the clearest connection between Houdini and Muriel and what’s your take on why she chose to write this play?

CS: Well, I think the most dominant theme you and I have discussed is Muriel’s and Houdini’s shared fascination: becoming captive with the challenge of escaping, combined with an eventual successful escape.  I know the topic came up when I asked Muriel about her “jail time” during my 1979 interview.  What do you think, Elisabeth?

ED: I think the idea of IMPRISONMENT is an important context – one that Houdini and Muriel had in common.  Muriel felt imprisoned in her home, family, even country. 

CS: Wow.  Even country…

ED: Here’s a line from “This House, This Country” written in 1935:  “I have left forever / house and maternal river / given up sitting in that private tomb / quitted that land   that house   that velvet room.”  

CS:  Tell me more about her feeling imprisoned in her country.

ED: Well, “land” could mean a number of things in this poem, but if we take it as referring to the United States of America, a country that Rukeyser also had fervently idealistic feelings toward, I think of her experiences as a left-leaning, rebellious, young, queer, and Jewish woman, eager to spread her wings, to challenge political and aesthetic orthodoxies, to find her vocation, her voice—and that’s what she did when she went to Spain in 1936.

CS: So Interesting.  And what of Muriel’s fascination with Houdini, the man? In psychological terms I believe she identified with him. It might easily have been the other way around but Harry was born first and died when Muriel was only 12!

CS & ED: (Laughter!!!!). 

CS: Yes, Harry died in 1926 –  but there was so much Houdini activity in the New York City in which Muriel grew up. And what a legend he created – that lasted through her lifetime.  

So, identification – in personality and poetry – what else about Muriel’s interest in Harry?

ED: She could have mentioned him in “Waterlily Fire,” with Gyp the Blood, perhaps—but she doesn’t! The first written evidence of Muriel’s interest in Houdini came in in 1939, in a poem entitled “Speech for the Assistant, from Houdini.” None of the lines from that poem show up in the play, but I think it points us to an important historical and emotional context for Rukeyser’s Houdini fixation–the rise of fascism, the persecution of European Jews and other people declared ‘subhuman’ for reasons of race, sexuality, religion.  So, in my mind, Rukeyser turned to Houdini as a Jew who overcame his impoverished immigrant background and became a celebrity, a superhero challenging institutional authority and fighting the forces of fascism. 

CS: I love that superhero image – subhuman to superhero.

ED:  You make me curious about the 70s context of Rukeyser’s interest in Houdini as well.

CS: Well… I’m looking at Louise Kertesz’s pathbreaking The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser, specifically at her chronology – and I see what surrounds the 1973 production of Houdini: Muriel had gone to jail for protesting in Washington DC in 1972  and published her book of poetry, Breaking Open, in 1973.  Two years later she traveled to protest imprisonment of Kim Chi-Ha in Korea.  And, then, of course there was Scottsboro back in 1933 – so throughout her life, this theme.  Elisabeth– Do we know when Muriel actually wrote Houdini?

ED: Archival evidence suggests that she worked on the play, on and off, for three decades.

CS: I guess the legend DID last a lifetime!

ED: The version that got published by Paris Press in 2002 is based on revisions she made after the Lenox production in 1973.  Allen Hughes, reviewing the performance on opening night for the New York Times found the musical “pointed and forceful in the first act, aimless and weak in the second.”

CS: Did she make many revisions and what kinds of  revisions did she make?

ED: That I don’t know yet—but I am eager to find out.  The archive will tell us!  Fortunately, we’ll have Stefania Heim and Jan Freeman as webinar speakers on March 20.  They’ll enlighten us!

CS:  Wonderful!  So . . . Related to the themes of imprisonment and breaking free in Muriel’s life and work and in the play . . . Shall I read some from my 1979 interview that involves these?

ED: Please do.

CS:  Ok.  I had asked Muriel to tell me about the experience of prison in Washington D.C. in 1972.  Here is her reply:

[Muriel] “…Well in the beginning it was a refusal to do anything else; the judge wanted me to pay instead of going to prison.  And I said that there wasn’t anything that money could do.  It wouldn’t say what I wanted to say, and that it would be better if I went to prison.  And I was handcuffed then, and taken across the street to the jail and put in with . . . a lot of women . . . Mostly a black jail, with black guards . . . And I came in under very favorable conditions, because I hadn’t been taken into jail the day that I appeared.  They weren’t ready for me.  And they hadn’t prepared the papers. So, they said to come back the next day.  And I went to the motel, and I stayed there.  I didn’t phone people, or anything.  Because I was supposed to be in jail.  And they had run a story on the front page of the STAR about me pulling some lines from the Scottsboro poem.  And it was that that saved me because that reached the jail before I got there.  And when I got there they asked me “Was (that?) you the poet?” . . . mostly negro women.  It was a jail for prowlers and for whoring.  Those were the main crimes.  And there were a few white women, two white women, mostly in jail for absconding with funds . . . and they tried to break me into the con game.  They said I’d be good.”

CS:      The three of us had a good laugh about this  – and then she continued…

            [Muriel]“…and I was flattered that they were willing to break me in.” 

CS:      And when asked if she had been in jail before Muriel responded:

            [Muriel} “That’s one of the questions that I can’t answer “yes” or “no” to, because I was arrested when I was nineteen at Scottsboro.  And there wasn’t any room in the jail because it was full of Scottsboro boys.  I wasn’t in jail but I should have been.”

CS:      So, Muriel seems to feel she deserved to go to jail and also to really have wanted to go to jail – and she seems to have welcomed the handcuffs as an honor . . . just as Houdini – in the play – according to Beatrice, in Act One/Scene Two, Harry … “LIKES BEING LOADED DOWN AND CONFINED. HE LIKES EVEN MORE TO BREAK OUT.”

            And as with Muriel and those who wanted to break her into the con game, Whitsun in the play wants to teach Beatrice to become a pick pocket. He says  “TO BE AT THE TENT FLAP WHILE THE CROWD IS COMING IN. SOMETIMES THERE’S QUITE A BIT OF CASH…”. And Epictetus suggests “WELL,THEY’VE GOT POCKETS–? LOVELY AND DEEP.”

ED: That’s marvelous! I love these passages from your interview! But the reference to Scottsboro is also perplexing.  I thought she contracted typhus while in jail! So, what are we to believe?

CS: Excellent question!  Remember I am a scientist. Psychological data is always tricky but exponentially so with our Muriel!  As one of my interviewees said “you could have chosen much easier characters to study . . . there are so many inconsistencies and contradictions in the things I am saying to you because that was the way she was . . . some things about her were impossible to explain.”  

Can you say more about Houdini and your changing view of his complexity that you have mentioned?

ED: The more I read about Houdini, the more complex he becomes—not just his relationships to his mother and Bess, and in Rukeyser’s play to his assistant (who I assume is pure invention on Muriel’s part)  but also his vendetta against spiritualism and his simultaneous promise to Bess that if he found a way through from death, he’d let her know (so she held annual séances for ten years after this death). I wonder if Muriel’s own complexity expresses itself through all the characters. She is both Houdini and Bess, perhaps? And Volonty? Perhaps Volonty is who she’d like to be? A high wire artist not constrained by gravity–a sort of female Houdini? Her name, in French–volonté–means “will,” “will power” or “persistence, and also “wish” or “desire.”

 CS: Thank you for hearing Muriel as at least three voices in the play.  In my 1979 interview with Muriel I brought up one of my favorite poems “Effort at Speech Between Two People.” I asked if it was intended to be a monologue or a dialogue. She answered ““Well I think they’re two real voices… but of course they’re both my voice.”  So here is Muriel making actual voices – three or more – in the writing of this play.

ED: Yes.  So, how do you see Muriel’s identification with Houdini?

CS: First, I use the term identification very loosely as a largely unconscious process when one associates oneself closely with another’s characteristics, profession, points-of-view and/or  behaviors. Beyond what we’ve already discussed – that both Muriel and Harry were European Jews, and escape artists, entertainers and illusionists, here are a few more commonalities. Both were leaders–organizers–presidents! Harry for the Society of American Magicians and Muriel for American P.E.N.  Curiously both were interested in aviation–in the early 20th century!  Hmm . . . I think of your earlier words about the high wire artist . . .

ED: Yes–Volonty –“not constrained by gravity.”

CS: That’s it!

ED:  It’s interesting to think of Rukeyser as an “escape artist” and an “illusionist.” Perhaps artists, by nature of their craft and passion, become experts at escape? In my mind Rukeyser wasn’t interested in escapes from reality—on the contrary, her art compels us to experience what’s real in a heightened, visceral, and imaginative way. Houdini’s escapes strike me as very down to earth—how to get out of handcuffs, a prison cell, a locked box, a milk can, a straight jacket. These are confines that the people who watched him recognized and perhaps identified with.  I know he was also an illusionist, but in her play Muriel seems more interested in his passion for first locking and then freeing himself.  And this makes me wonder—Rukeyser was often intrigued by the sorts of conventions that can lock us in, as women, above all marriage and motherhood.  She got out of her one marriage after only a few months, and she refused to be limited, in her creative life, by motherhood. That’s quite a feat!

CS: Indeed, Muriel was a superhero! Both Muriel and Harry strike me as strong, high energy people.  Neither fit society’s physical ideal as Muriel was heavy and Houdini was short for a man – but they certainly made up for these superficial qualities by being STRONG.  Harry was very fit and strong physically, as well as in character. And, of course, I see strength in multiple ways as central to Muriel: I titled the book Muriel Rukeyser, Strength and Weakness for a reason!

They were both STRONG: courageous, daring  and rarely if ever outwardly fearful, as well as persistent, persevering and determined — even stubborn.  And, Both were energetic: physically – active, engaged , alert– and energetic emotionally – as enthusiastic and deeply  passionate people. Both were independent – fierce individuals, very intelligent  and highly competent.

ED:  What about weakness?  I know you discuss weakness in Muriel – but how about Houdini?

CS:  A critical question, Elisabeth, for despite all these strengths, their weakness-in-common was their failing to realize they were not 100% superhero – but HUMAN.  Both neglected their health and this played a role in both of their deaths—which were early deaths —  Muriel at age 66 and Harry at 52.  According to some of my dissertation interviewees, Muriel had many health concerns which she ignored. She refused to do what her doctors advised and actually fired some who wanted her to do what she did not wish to do. For example, she failed to take proper care of her diabetes including refusing to take insulin. She would attend events and travel when it was ill advised.  One such occasion was “A day in honor of Muriel Rukeyser” at Sarah Lawrence: she attended when she should have been resting and collapsed at the end of the day and had to be hospitalized.   

ED:  I’ve heard about that and there was a similar situation for Houdini who could not complete his last performance.  I know he died of an appendicitis or its complications.

CS: Exactly. Peritonitis or an inflamed abdomen, secondary to a ruptured appendix.  Harry had developed excruciating pain but insisted on going “on with the show” and refused to see a doctor. When he finally did, he was diagnosed with an acute appendicitis and advised to have surgery immediately. Ignoring this,  he went on,  struggling, with a fever of 104 degrees. By the time the surgery was finally done, his appendix had ruptured and complications which killed him had arisen.

ED:  Since for both of them the body played such a crucial role, it’s puzzling that they did not ‘listen’ to it more . . .

CS:  Sadly so . . .

Returning to the lives of these strong – and weak characters, Elisabeth – could you say more about complexity?  Earlier you said you see Houdini as more complex, the more you learn.

ED: Perhaps a better word than complexity is contradictions.  By all accounts, Houdini was an incredible showman with a gigantic ego and given to hyperbole. He did not just re-invent himself when he morphed from Ehrich Weiss, a poor Hungarian Jewish immigrant, to Harry Houdini. He also invented stories about himself and his exploits—there’s a photo of him as a young man, which shows him with a whole barrage of athletic awards.  Only one of these awards was actually his own. You might say he was a liar. 

CS:  Hmmm . . . a complex relationship to the truth . . .

ED: At the same time, he was intent on exposing mediums and séances as fraud—regardless of the fact that he himself had worked as a medium, which is, of course, how he knew they were fraudulent. The full extent of these contradictions may not have been known when Rukeyser began working on Houdini—or they did not interest her. The contradiction in Houdini’s character that does interest her, very much, is his skill at getting himself out of tight places and his utter inability to break the hold on him of his father and, especially, his mother Cecilia.

CS: I didn’t know his father had a hold on him as well.  Maybe we can take this up in a Part II of this blog? 

        Now I would like to discuss our complicated Muriel.

ED:  Yes.

CS: On our Zooms, you and I look at one another and smile when we think of our woman of mystery, Muriel, and her complex and contrasting selves. Muriel could be a performer – even somewhat exhibitionistic–  but she could also be very shy and as if hiding. Muriel and Harry – both illusionists – making an audience believe in magic when there was none really. Making what was but natural look supernatural. The disappearing Elephant was an illusion created with mirrors.  Apparently, the locks on trunks had removeable hinges.

ED: This is a fascinating topic! Houdini insisted he did not have supernatural powers; and he sometimes revealed how he did some of his ‘illusions.’  He insisted that it was all a matter of knowing something about human perception.  I do think there’s something magical about art (and both MR and Houdini were artists), especially its ability to make the imaginary seem as, or even more, real than anything else.

CS: Interesting.

        Well both of them certainly knew how to draw attention to themselves. Let me read from my book:  “Muriel’s habit of and ability to shock and surprise people is the most unusual and mysterious feature in her behavioral repertoire. . . .” During the 1958 study, a psychologist who administered some psychological tests, suggested that Muriel “seeks to surprise people and throw them off balance.” 

        According to my interviewees who knew Muriel well, she would “set up shocking situations so she could sit back and watch the reactions” and “she enjoyed shocking . . . there was a kind of gleam in her eye when she did some of these things. . . .”

ED: Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. She was a modernist, after all! Modernist art sought to shock viewers out of their complacencies, whether ethical or aesthetic—or political!

CS: Oh . . . I see. 

        I have a few stories, circa early-mid 1970’s, about Muriel disappearing into a bathroom or back room in the middle of small dinner parties with another person – apparently for sex.  To add some historical perspective, I used the word “person” in my 1982 work, instead of woman, not wanting to “out” Muriel or her still living, more conservative partner as QUEER: back then, when QUEER was still considered literally queer.  However, two women disappearing for sex in the middle of a straight dinner party would have, unquestionably, been a shock – now nearly a half century ago.

ED:  And you are going to write more, are you not? Forty years later, now a clinical psychologist, about Muriel’s being queer?

CS: I hope to, yes. 

Oh, I wanted to add that Muriel’s surprises were also positive, and were used to make people feel special. During the interview, Frank and I believed she was telling us secrets; these were not  widely known but were not complete secrets either –or something she had not revealed to anyone else.  Apparently because we were psychologists, Muriel said to us “You’ve had the truth all along.  You’ve wanted the truth.”  She spoke of us to her partner who was there that day, as not ordinary, not from a magazine: we were different! Indeed, Frank and I felt very special when we left that afternoon!

ED: I am so intrigued by that. It seems she offered her stories like jewels–special, even intimate, gifts designed to make the recipient feel special and well disposed toward her.

CS:  Yes. 
Before we wrap up, I wanted to share a part in the play which I absolutely love. In Act Two, Scene One, Beatrice asks “What would happen If one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.”

And Harry, a true feminist, at least in Muriel’s play, suggests “It has. Now I’m going after it –all pieces.”

This is a man – although created by a woman – who gets it. And, I love the reappearance of what has become a well-known quote of Muriel’s. Did you know Hillary Clinton uses it in her post 2016 election book, What Happened? (on Page 146).

ED:  I had no idea, but I am not surprised. I think all of us can identify with it.  There is still so much we don’t say about our lives—perhaps don’t know how or don’t dare to say! It’s curious though, isn’t it, that this important comment comes from Bess, whose role in the play pales besides Harry’s—until that one moment, at the very end of Act One, where she let’s loose and gives him a piece of her mind—“What are you trying to do—God Jesus! Killing everything—And the goddamn fucking sun, what about the sunlight?  And me and me?” I look forward to delving into the play’s feminist and queer subtext a bit more in future conversations with you, and with Jan and Stefania—and the audience!

CS: I can’t wait!  And, a perfect note upon which to end.  Thanks so much, Elisabeth, for making this conversation – and this play – possible! 

Please cite this conversation and the quoted material as: Stroebe, Carolyn, and Elisabeth Däumer, “A Conversation about Muriel Rukeyser and Harry Houdini,” http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/2022/02/20/a-conversation-about-muriel-rukeyser-and-harry-houdini-between/.

.

Filed Under: Ruke Blog Tagged With: Carolyn Stroebe, Frank Barron, Houdini, Institute of Personality Assessment and Research, Muriel Rukeyser

Ecstacy of a Woman Detective

February 7, 2022 by Elisabeth Daumer Leave a Comment

Published in Houdini (2002)

     I love using what I’ve got
     Love not being what I’m not—
After a long time of one kind of living,
And it was all right, it was really partly good,
Full of one-sided things,
And disturbing . . . and absorbing . . . almost
     Every day . . . 
But
Then the new life came along, bringing
The joy of reaching, of stretching, of being
     Effective—
This is another place, this is another way,
The ecstasy of a woman detective—
And what I detect, what I really find
Is your body-and-mind and your life and my
     Life and
My body-and-mind;
The joy of being me, a detective,
The joy of thinking new, like being
     Unbelievably bare,
Finding something of myself that has never
     Been aware—
The ecstasy of feeling for what’s there!

Filed Under: Poetry, Writings Tagged With: Houdini

Yes

February 4, 2022 by Elisabeth Daumer Leave a Comment

Published in Houdini (2002)

It’s like a Tap-Dance
Or a new pink Dress,
A shit-naive Feeling
Saying Yes.

Some say Good morning
Some say God bless –
Some say Possibly
Some say Yes.

Some say Never
Some say Unless
It’s stupid and lovely
To rush into Yes.

What can it mean?
It’s just like Life,
One thing to You
One thing to your Wife.

Some go Local
Some go Express
Some can’t wait
To answer Yes.

Some complain
Of strain and Stress
The answer may be
No for Yes.

Some like Failure
Some like Success
Some like Yes Yes
Yes Yes Yes.

Open your Eyes,
Dream but don’t guess.
Your biggest Surprise
Comes after Yes.

Filed Under: Poetry, Writings Tagged With: Houdini

Beer and Bacon

February 4, 2022 by Elisabeth Daumer Leave a Comment

Published in Houdini (2002)

When you see a woman riding the air
Well, you see a woman playing with fire,
A woman made of storm and desire
And she loves the whole damn zoo.
But you can be sure, whatever I do,
That I need my beer and bacon too.

I wake every night at 4 A.M.
And I tell my dreams to the man who is there,
Dreams of animals not like him—
A woman who rides on fire and air
Loves to dream with the whole damn zoo
But I need my beer and bacon too.

My dreams ride out from the highest wire
Bodies like bubbles of color down there,
The feel of people of flesh and fire
Streaming toward me along the air—
But I make it clear, whatever I do,
That I need my beer and bacon too.

Filed Under: Poetry, Writings Tagged With: Houdini

Chains, Freedom, Keys

February 4, 2022 by Elisabeth Daumer Leave a Comment

Published in Houdini (2002)

There are chains—
There is freedom—
There are keys—
          And of these, chains are strong
Freedom’s endless, keys are great
And we 
Are the greatest of these,
The greatest 
Of these.

There are chains—
There is freedom—
There are keys—
          And of these,
There are those I have seen
I have heard
And I know
I have seen
I have heard
And I know—
There are chains—
There is freedom—
There are keys--
And the greatest of these
Can free the world.

Filed Under: Poetry, Writings Tagged With: Houdini

I Make my Magic

January 27, 2022 by Elisabeth Daumer Leave a Comment

Published in Houdini (2002)

 I make my magic
 Of forgotten things
 Night and nightmare and the midnight wings
 Of childhood butterflies—
 And the darkness, the straining dark
 Underwater and under sleep—
 Night and a heartbreak try to keep
 Myself, until before my eyes
 The morning sunlight pours
 And I am clear of all the chains
 And the magic now that rains
 Down around me is
 A sunlight magic,
 I come to a sunlight magic,
 Yours. 

Filed Under: Poetry, Uncategorized, Writings Tagged With: Houdini

Muriel Rukeyser and Other Writers

May 19, 2014 by mthunter22 Leave a Comment

Posted on May 19, 2014 by Catherine Gander

 In just a few days, I will have the pleasure of chairing a panel at the American Literature Association’s annual conference at Washington, DC. The panel, organised by Elisabeth Däumer (herself a force of intellectual connectivity of the sort Rukeyser celebrated) will bring together five established and emerging Rukeyser scholars including myself and Professor Däumer: Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, whose diligent scholarship recently brought Rukeyser’s ‘lost novel’ Savage Coast to light and publication; Laura Passin, whose work on the politico-aesthetic strains of contemporary American poetry traces valuable lines of influence to the lyrical, subjective voice of earlier confessional verse, and Stefania Heim, whose attention to Rukeyser’s mythic historicism has uncovered illuminating points of contact with the experimental hybrid writings of (to my mind) one of the greatest living literary innovators, Susan Howe.

As Däumer has explained, this wonderfully diverse and interconnected panel is assembled in response to Rukeyser’s own multivalence. Resisting classification into any strict subset of writer, scholar or activist, Rukeyser embodied and espoused a pluralism that at once related her to, and set her apart from, most of her peers.  As the majority of scholarship on Rukeyser (including my own) addresses in some way the elements of her temporal and ideological dislocation – enforced most strongly by her being a lion-hearted, strong-voiced woman as well as a Jew – I will not linger on the matter here. The panel, and the work that runs into and out of it, intends to celebrate and explore the rhizomatic nature of Rukeyser’s work in all of its pragmatic inclusivity.

I use the word ‘pragmatic’ because it strikes me that Rukeyser’s legacy is one to be used. Rukeyser’s richly original and intellectually provocative text, The Life of Poetry, emerged in 1949 as a meeting-place (I employ Rukeyser’s term to avoid the word ‘collection’ due to the book’s overriding dialogic spirit) of ideas, lectures and essays previously gathered under the title ‘the usable truth: communication and poetry’. I have written elsewhere about Rukeyser’s commitment to the use-value of poetry, her tireless crusading for the overcoming of the fear of it, embedded in the conviction that the systems of the social can be addressed at root in the workings of the individual; that the failures of democracy can be located in the fears of the unconscious self. In a 1941 essay for Poetry magazine entitled ‘The Usable Truth’, Rukeyser bemoaned the fact that despite its pragmatic tradition, American education retained an attitude to poetry that located it as something ‘to be memorised and stored…[but] not to be used’:

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.[i]

Rukeyser’s words here connect strongly with Heim’s understanding of her living legacy in Howe. If ‘whole ages are given to us’ through poetry, we are, according to Rukeyser, able to live and learn through the biographies of our ancestors, absorbing and using their words and lives to educate and inform our own.  As Heim rightly acknowledges, Rukeyser blends myth and history, shaping the lives of representative others into symbols and paths for present and future generations. Rukeyser’s poetic biographies – her series of ‘Lives’ that include Anne Burlak, Käthe Kollwitz, Akiba and Albert Pinkham Ryder – are such symbols and sign-posts; as are her prose biographies on Wendell Willkie, Willard Gibbs and Thomas Hariot.  Heim connects Rukeyser’s aim towards ‘collecting the lives of the dead’ with Howe’s invocation, after Creon in Antigone, to ‘go to the dead and love them’; her approach sets Rukeyser’s neglected play Houdini alongside Howe’s The Liberties (1990) to explore the ways in which, in Heim’s words, ‘these two texts attest that biography has as much to do with the life of the communal imagination, myth, and mind, as it does with the lived lives of the individuals in question; as much to do with the stories we make up and tell each other, as with what has taken place.’ In this way, then, Rukeyser’s own exemplary life joins the host of known and anonymous dead, the ‘packed and leafdrift earth of centuries of falling lives, fallen under our feet’[ii] that constitutes the grounding of all future imaginative experience.

Currently working on a separate (albeit related) project involving pragmatism and intermedial artworks, I can see how Rukeyser’s deeply pragmatic stance to the life of poetry aligns with what Richard Shusterman, in the tradition of John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, has termed ‘somaesthetics’: ‘a critical, meliorative study of the experience and use of one’s body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation and creative self-fashioning’ that impacts on the self’s relation to society.[iii] Much of Rukeyser’s poetry stems from the memory or documentation of her on-site experience of social realities. As Jane Cooper has noted, ‘she wanted to be there. One way of witnessing was to write. Another was to put her body on the line, literally.’[iv] Forging a meeting place of practice and imagination, site and sight, Rukeyser dismantled traditional mind/body dualisms just as she demolished established binaries of art and science, poetry and prose, myth and history. Like the revisionary, feminist and repossessed voice of the poem ‘Absalom’, Rukeyser spoke an embodied and empowered poetry: ‘I have gained mastery over my heart/I have gained mastery over my two hands… I open out a way.’  Through her work, as Heim attests, Rukeyser reveals the ‘potential for enacting knowledge beyond the borders of the strictly aesthetic’; more than this, Rukeyser resituates poetry as a site and enactment of all human experience, understanding the inextricability of art from the practice of everyday life in a manner championed by Dewey as the key to individual and social improvement (Art as Experience, 1934).

Deweyan pragmatism (Rukeyser was an avid reader of both Dewey and William James) involves a blending of the immediate moment with past experience:

The process of living… is an everlastingly renewed process of acting upon the environment and being acted upon by it together with institution of relations between what is done and what is undergone. Hence experience is necessarily cumulative and its subject matter gains expressiveness because of cumulative continuity.[v]

Rukeyser’s approach to poetry, which is also her approach to being-in-the-world, is Deweyan at core. The reason for this is related to her strong conviction, also shared with Dewey, that our tendency to separate the experience of everyday human existence from the discourse of art and aesthetic experience creates a dangerous isolationism that locks art away in institutions, ossifies poetry, and disables us from treating life artistically. When I read Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics, steeped as they are in the importance of positive valence in emotive responses to the world, I am reminded always of Rukeyser’s imperative to strip the fear from the experience of poetry: ‘Art throws off the covers that hide the expressiveness of experienced things; it quickens us from the slackness of routine and enables us to forget ourselves by finding ourselves in the delight of experiencing the world about us in its varied qualities and forms.’[vi]  Rukeyser’s life’s works are what Dewey calls ‘cumulative continuity’, continually enacting her dynamic interaction with her environment and others, and constituting a lesson in living and a celebration of it that extends to a renewed relation with the reader – or, to use Rukeyser’s preferred word, the witness.  Her writing is profoundly informed by immediate and by past experience, and although she was, in her own words, an ‘axiom-breaker’, she was also profoundly concerned with the vitality of tradition, with the lives of the ‘many-born’ who ripple through oceans of time, and charge ‘our latest moment with their wave.’[vii]

Rukeyser argues in The Life of Poetry that freedom (a human right) involves the ability to ‘choose a tradition,’ and select representatives of that tradition.[viii] 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.’[ix] Her position chimes with Martin Buber’s, whose writings Rukeyser also read and absorbed. Buber argued 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.’[x]  Rukeyser’s commitment to renewing and choosing a tradition – an ancestry – relates her in many ways to T.S. Eliot, with whose poetics she had a complex relationship. Elisabeth Däumer’s paper addresses Rukeyser’s readings of Eliot, tracing his rhythms and resonances in her writings, and exploring her reformulations of his criticism, including his attention to ‘the place of tradition, the limitations of art, and his theory of emotion.’ Däumer’s scrutiny falls particularly on this latter aspect, rethinking standard critical responses to Eliot’s objectivism by reading his interest in the affective agencies of poetry in the light of Rukeyser’s ‘concept of total response.’

Affective and somatic aesthetics in the context of tradition also provide pathways into Rowena Kennedy-Epstein’s and Laura Passin’s papers. Kennedy-Epstein focuses on the cross-currents between the lives of Rukeyser and Virginia Woolf, tracing the lines of connection through shared fields of ‘textual, sexual and political radicalism’ and aligning both women’s treatments of the experimental novel as an arena for the espousal of new ways of thinking about war, nationalism and art in times of social upheaval.  Rukeyser’s Savage Coast and Woolf’s The Pargiters – daring works of genre hybridity and radical thought, documenting ‘the lives of women in contexts of war, nationalism, education and sexual subjectivity’ – were both ultimately abandoned by their authors, their ideas unpicked and rewoven into the fabric of other, more publishable works (Woolf’s Three Guineas, Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry and several poems). Kennedy-Epstein explores the position of the female experimental writer as offering vital (yet largely ignored) perceptions of state violence and sexual hierarchies.

Passin’s perspective on Plath returns us to feminist revisions of mythology in which Rukeyser advocates a strong female voice arising out of the maternal body (see ‘Absalom’ in its entirety, for example). Critics have tended to position Plath and Rukeyser at opposite ends of the somatic spectrum when it comes to creative impulses, particularly in relation to motherhood. Louise Kertesz, for example, has noted how Rukeyser’s attentions to the subject are ‘quite different’ from the ‘horror’ and ‘lost belief in the value of living’ that accompanies the ‘motherhood poems’ of Plath and Anne Sexton, quoting a line from Rukeyser’s ‘Breaking Open’ to reinforce her point: ‘I’d rather be Muriel than be dead and be Ariel.’[xi] Passin, however, wishes to recontextualise Rukeyser’s responses, addressing her ‘suicide poems’ in particular, and arguing that through these poems, Rukeyser ‘frames and revises the cultural narratives around Plath.’

Both Kennedy-Epstein’s and Passin’s approaches can be said to examine Rukeyser’s Deweyan commitment to art as experiment and experience, her proclivity for embodying and questioning the multiplicity of social selves that one’s interaction with the world requires and enables.  Reference to the act of suicide becomes, conversely, an act of creation for Rukeyser, for her reimagining connects to her wider understanding of the poem as a continually renewing process: as an ongoing event, not a finished object.  The interconnected variety of the ALA panel brings me, therefore, to another unfinished project of Rukeyser’s, and one that – one day – I hope to be able to bring to light in a more accessible form. In the Rukeyser archives at the Library of Congress is a work, suitably in-progress, entitled In the Beginning. The proposed book is, according to Rukeyser, ‘an anthology of creation’, bringing together extracts of works from a wealth of writers, thinkers, scientists, filmmakers and artists. Rukeyser explains the importance of humankind’s ‘glimpses of understanding’ of the nature of creation:

Whether it is the root in fire or in word, in the lightning flash or the great dreaming and active cycle that springs out of central rest, whether we see it reflected in the act of love or the entrance of birth, it illuminates the world and ourselves to us.[xii]

In the end, In the Beginning allows us our own glimpse of what the ALA panel will no doubt bring into more sustained focus: that the way to understand and illuminate ‘the world and ourselves to us’ is not through aesthetic enclosure or the possessive grasping of knowledge, but through active, intersubjective experience, and the forging of new, creative paths that share our lives with the living words and images of others.

 

 



[i] Rukeyser, ‘The Usable Truth’, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 58 (July, 1941), 206-209, 206.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, second edition (Roman and Littlefield, 1992; 2000), 267.

[iv] Cooper, ‘And Everything a Witness of the Buried Life’, in How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, eds. Herzog and Kaufman (New York, 1999), 3-16, 7.

[v] John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934) (Perigee Books, 2005), 108

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, eds. Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 182.

[viii] The Life of Poetry (1949) (Ashfield, Massachusetts: Paris Press, 1996), x.

[ix] Ibid, x; Rukeyser, ‘Under Forty’, Contemporary Jewish Record, VII (February, 1944), 4-9, 8.

[x] Buber, ‘Teaching and Deed’, in Will Herberg, ed., The Writings of Martin Buber (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 317-324, 318.

[xi] Kertesz, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 225, 344.

[xii] MR Papers, Library of Congress, 1:21.

Filed Under: Ruke Blog Tagged With: Houdini, Muriel Rukeyser, Savage Coach, Sylvia Plath, T. S. Eliot

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