Tell Me a Riddle (22 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 89
Melville's stages to his thirty-year prose silence are clearest. The presage in his famous letter to Hawthorne, as he had to hurry
Moby Dick
to an end:
I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose,that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me. . . . What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the
other
way I cannot. So the product is a final hash . . .
Reiterated in
Pierre,
writing ''that book whose unfathomable cravings drink his blood . . . When at last the idea obtruded that the wiser and profounder he should grow, the more and the more he lessened his chances for bread."
To be possessed; to have to try final hash; to have one's work met by "drear ignoring"; to be damned by dollars into a Customs House job; to have only weary evenings and Sundays left for writing
How bitterly did unreplying Pierre feel in his heart that to most of the great works of humanity, their authors had given not weeks and months, not years and years, but their wholly surrendered and dedicated lives.
Is it not understandable why Melville began to burn work, then ceased to write it, "immolating [it] . . . sealing in a fate subdued"? And turned to occasional poetry, manageable in a time sense, "to nurse through night the ethereal spark." A thirty-year night. He was nearly seventy before he could quit the customs dock and again have full time for writing, start back to prose. "Age, dull tranquilizer," and devastation of "arid years that filed before" to work through. Three years of tryings before he felt capable of beginning
Billy Budd
(the kernel waiting half a century); three years more to his last days (he who had been so fluent), the slow, painful, never satisfied writing and re-writing of it.
*
* "Entering my eighth decade [I come] into possession of unobstructed leisure ... just as, in the course of nature, my vigor sensibly declines. What little of
 
Page 90
Kin to these years-long silences are the
hidden
silences; work aborted, deferred, deniedhidden by the work which does come to fruition. Hopkins rightfully belongs here; almost certainly William Blake; Jane Austen, Olive Schreiner, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Franz Kafka; Katherine Anne Porter, many other contemporary writers.
Censorship silences. Deletions, omissions, abandonment of the medium (as with Hardy); paralyzing of capacity (as Dreiser's ten-year stasis on
Jennie Gerhardt
after the storm against
Sister Carrie).
Publishers' censorship, refusing subject matter or treatment as ''not suitable" or "no market for." Self-censorship. Religious, political censorshipsometimes spurring inventivenessmost often (read Dostoyevsky's letters) a wearing attrition.
The extreme of this: those writers physically silenced by governments. Isaac Babel, the years of imprisonment, what took place in him with what wanted to be written? Or in Oscar Wilde, who was not permitted even a pencil until the last months of his imprisonment?
Other silences. The truly memorable poem, story, or book, then the writer ceasing to be published.** Was one work all the writers had in them (life too thin for pressure of material, renewal) and the respect for literature too great to repeat themselves? Was it "the knife of the perfectionist attitude in art and life" at their throat? Were the conditions not present for establishing the habits of creativity (a young Colette who lacked a Willy to lock her in her room each day)? oras instanced over and overother claims, other responsibilities so writing could not be first? (The writer of a class, sex, color still marginal in literature, and whose coming to written voice at all against complex odds is exhausting achievement.) It is an eloquent commentary that this one-book si-
it is left, I husband for certain matters as yet incomplete and which indeed may never be completed."
Billy Budd
never was completed; it was edited from drafts found after Melville's death.
*As Jean Toomer
(Cane);
Henry Roth
(Call It Sleep);
Edith Summers Kelley
(Weeds).

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