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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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BOOK: Tell Me a Riddle
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Page 5
can socialism. . . . Woven into Olsen's young consciousness . . . was . . . her parents' immigrant identity, the Yiddish ideal of enlightenment they embodied, and a spirit of hope, for freedom and justice that had imbued their lives in Russia. (23)
The second of six children, Tillie Lerner left high school after the eleventh grade to earn a living. She took a series of jobstie presser, mother's helper, hack writer, model, ice-cream packer, book clerk, waitress, punch-press operator. Today, she points out to those who speak of her as a high school dropout that she received more education than most of the women of this era. In
Silences,
she notes that ''two-thirds of the illiterate in the world today are women," and asks: "How many of us who are writers have mothers, grandmothers, of limited education; awkward, not at home, with the written word, however eloquent they may be with the spoken one? Born a generation or two before, we might have been they."
4
Olsen's love of learning began early and persisted; she read voraciously in Omaha's Carnegie Library, especially fiction, and like other working-class readers, she found a world of literature and social thought in the Little Blue Books, inexpensive miniature editions of authors ranging from Plato to Marx, their contents shaped by the socialist background of Kansas publisher Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. Harriet Monroe had begun publishing
Poetry
in 1912, and Olsen was introduced in its pages to the work of midwesterners and modernists like Sandburg, Stevens, Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, and Lowell. Both her formal schooling and her informal learningnot just her reading, but her attendance at local events like visits from poet Carl Sandburg or Eugene Debs, the eloquent leader of the Socialist Party; her absorption of the discussions about politics and history in her home, her attentiveness to the nuances of voice and experience in the world about herinformed her use of language and shaped her consciousness.
It was a surprisingly diverse worldnative-born and newly immigrant midwestern workers, visiting socialist activists and intellectuals, black families in the Lerner's integrated neighborhood. The young Tillie Lerner seems to have been, very early, "one on whom nothing is lost," a favorite phrase of hers from Henry James
(Silences
62, 147); her ability to recall
 
Page 6
and inscribe the rhythms of languagethe cadences of Black sermons, the multiethnic exchanges of factory workers, the inflections of Yiddish-influenced Englishmake her prose a particularly rich evocation of multicultural America. Olsen's democratic use of language, as Constance Coiner argues in her essay in this casebook, expresses an inclusive social vision that insists on dignity and equality for all human life. Olsen sees her work as part of a ''larger tradition of social concern," which included for her as a young reader writers ranging from Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Victor Hugo to Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and Walt Whitman. In the Notes for her essay on Harding Davis's
Life in the Iron Mills
(1861, reprinted by The Feminist Press in 1972), Olsen tells how at fifteen, her encounter with the story, published anonymously in
The Atlantic Monthly,
reminded her, "'Literature can be made out of the lives of despised people," and "You, too, must write.'"
5
Olsen's commitment to writing and her social engagement unfolded simultaneously. Responding to the struggles for survival of those around her, and influenced by the socialist ideals of her parents, Olsen became a political activist in her teens. She joined the Young People's Socialist League and in 1931 the Young Communist League. In the 1930s, when America was in the midst of a devastating depression, communism seemed to many to offer a more humane, and more socially successful, vision than the laissez-faire capitalism of the pre-New Deal United States. Her work took her to Kansas City, where she was jailed for helping to organize a strike in a packing house. She contracted pleurisy while working in a tie factory; in jail, she developed incipient tuberculosis, and she went for a period of recovery to Faribault, Minnesota. There, she became pregnant and began work on the novel that would become
Yonnondio.
As Pearlman and Werlock put it, "When Olsen left Minnesota for California in the spring of 1933 ... she took with her the commitments of a political activist, a writer, and a mother" (18-19).
In California, Olsen remained politically engaged throughout most of the thirties. She also met and eventually married Jack Olsen, himself a YCL activist. Both participated in the great union-building efforts of those years, and in 1934,
 
Page 7
they were arrested for taking part in the San Francisco maritime strike, one of the most important strikes of American labor history. In the same year, Olsen had published ''The Iron Throat," part of the opening chapter of
Yonnondio,
in
The Partisan Review;
its power won her immediate recognition, and she responded to the encouragement of Lincoln Steffens by producing accounts of the strike ("The Strike") and of her arrest ("Thousand Dollar Vagrant"). Also in 1934, she published two poems, "I Want You Women up North to Know" and "There Is a Lesson," the first protesting the exploitation of women workers in the sweatshops of the southwestern garment industry; the second castigating fascist massacres in Austria and prophesying revolution.
In her thirties writing, Olsen voices the angers and longings, the hopes and capacities of working people-men, women, and children. The perspectives and experiences of women are particularly significant in her work: in
Yonnondio,
as I maintain in my essay here, she brings to the masculinist world of the left proletarian novel an account of familial life only rarely articulated in the genre.
Yonnondio
tells the story of a working-class midwestern family, the Holbrooks, who struggle to survive by moving from a mining town in Wyoming, to a farm in South Dakota, and finally to the slaughterhouses of a city much like Omaha, Nebraska. The novel creates in Mazie Holbrook, the young daughter, and in her mother Anna a figure who reappears throughout Olsen's work, both fiction and criticism: a woman potentially an artist/activist, silenced by poverty, by the willingly assumed burdens of caring for others, and by the expectations associated with her gender.
As the decade wore on, and Olsen bore her second daughter, she became increasingly absorbed in the balancing act of mothering her family and working for pay, though she did not relinquish her activist commitments. She left off work on
Yonnondio,
putting aside the completed chapters, not rediscovering them and preparing them for publication until the 1970s. In the forties, she bore two more daughters. Her experiences as a mother have made her one of motherhood's most powerful and influential chroniclers; few other writers have rendered so fully the profound contradictions of maternality:
 
Page 8
its calling forth of all one's love, patience, humor, and sometimes, when the resources for furthering growth are nonexistent, despair; its absorption of one's attention, time, thought; its transformation of one's creative capacities from the boldly visionary to the carefully nurturant. This theme resonates in
Yonnondio
and is central to the stories of
Tell Me a Riddle.
It receives its most devastating articulation in
Silences:
''And indeed, in our century as in the last, until very recently almost all distinguished achievement has come from childless women" (31). Yet motherhood also deepened Olsen's passion for a society that would nurture rather than inhibit human growth.
It was not until the 1950s that Olsen began to write fiction again. The 1950s were a time of relative material prosperity for many, but it was also an era haunted by the memory of the terrible holocausts of World War II and by the pervasive threat of nuclear annihilation. The Cold War against the Soviet Union provided the context in which the anti-Communist inquisitions of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his ilk could flourish. Congress, the courts, businesses, most labor unions, the entertainment industry, the academic worldall collaborated in the vigorous repression of the left activist politics and culture of the previous decades. Jack Olsen was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he asserted his intention to "resist with all of my power efforts of this committee to curtail our freedoms."
6
He was blacklisted from his work in the Warehousemen's Union, and began all over again as a printer's apprentice. The FBI followed Tillie Olsen from job to job; she was fired after each of their appearances.
Ironically, this was also a time of passage from Olsen's busiest mother-work-activist years, when "the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist," to the moment when, her youngest child in school, she was able to snatch the necessary moments to write. In 1954 she enrolled in a writing class at San Francisco State University, almost finishing one story, "I Stand Here Ironing," and completing the first draft of a second, "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" On the basis of this work, she received a Stegner Fellowship in creative writing to Stanford, and there, "as the exiled homesick come home," she
 
Page 9
found ''the comradeship of books and writing human beings."
7
In her eight months of "freed time" at Stanford, she completed "Hey Sailor, What Ship?", wrote "O Yes," and finished the first third of "Tell Me a Riddle." She describes this period in both personal and social terms in the passage from
First Drafts, Last Drafts
and the excerpt from
Silences,
both included here.
Olsen continued to struggle with the circumstances imposing silence in her own writing life: the need to work for pay; the interruptions occasioned by family life; the loss of the habit of writing, of the feeling of being "peopled" by her characters. She seems to have suffered, too, from what she calls in
Silences,
quoting Louise Bogan, "The knife of the perfectionist attitude in art and life"; "woman, economic, perfectionist causesall inextricably intertwined," she writes (9). "Requa I," published in 1970, was her first story in almost ten years, and its linguistic density suggests something of the perfectionist labor that created it. A stylistically complex work set in the depression era, "Requa" narrates a thirteen-year-old boy's slow recovery from the devastating loss of his mother. Though "Requa" is literally the American-Indian place-name of the North Pacific town where the boy, Stevie, comes to live with his clumsily nurturant uncle, a worker in a junkyard, the word also connotes a requiem, a commemoration of the dispossessed and forgotten. Written, as Blanche Gelfant puts it, "after long silence," "Requa" implies, in its simultaneous difficulty and beauty of form, an order won from disorder. Its final coherence, wrought from a chaos of fragments, blank spaces, catalogues of junkyard sounds and implements, ultimately draws a parallel, as Gelfant suggests, between "a child's renewed will to live" and "an artist's recovered power to write."
8
Silence, or rather, the reclamation of lives and words from silence, from silencing, becomes Olsen's greatest theme, enacted in the rhythms of her life, documented in her essays on the lives, work, and words of others.
Yonnondio: From the Thirties
was reclaimed from silence, pieced together in 1972-73 from manuscripts written in the thirties, by the older writer, "in arduous partnership" with "that long ago young writer."
9
The novelactually the opening section of what
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