Tell Me a Riddle (23 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 91
lence has been true of most black writers; only eleven in the hundred years since 1850 have published novels more than twice.
*
There is a prevalent silence I pass by quickly, the absence of creativity where it once had been; the ceasing to create literature, though the books may keep coming out year after year. That suicide of the creative process Hemingway described so accurately in ''The Snows of Kilimanjaro":
He had destroyed his talent himselfby not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, by snobbery, by hook and by crook; selling vitality, trading it for security, for comfort.
No, not Scott Fitzgerald. His not a death of creativity, not silence, but what happens when (his words) there is "the sacrifice of talent, in pieces, to preserve its essential value."
Almost unnoted are the foreground silences,
before
the achievement. (Remember when Emerson hailed Whitman's genius, he guessed correctly: "which yet must have had a long
foreground
for such a start.") George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Isak Dinesen, Sherwood Anderson, Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, A. E. Coppard, Angus Wilson, Joyce Caryall close to, or in their forties before they became published writers; Lampedusa, Maria Dermout
(The Ten Thousand Things),
Laura Ingalls Wilder, the "children's writer," in their sixties.
**
Their capacities evident early in the "being one on whom nothing is lost"; in other writers' qualities. Not all struggling and anguished, like Anderson, the foreground years; some needing the immobilization of long illness or loss, or the sudden lifting of responsibility to make writing necessary, make writing possible; others waiting circumstances and encouragement (George Eliot, her Henry Lewes; Laura Wil-
* Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America, 1958.
**Some other foreground silences: Elizabeth (Mrs.) Gaskell, Kate Chopin, Cora Sandel, Cyrus Colter, Hortense Calisher.
 
Page 92
der, a writer-daughter's insistence that she transmute her storytelling gift onto paper).
Very close to this last grouping are the silences where the lives never came to writing. Among these, the mute inglorious Miltons: those whose waking hours are all struggle for existence; the- barely educated; the illiterate; women. Their silence the silence of centuries as to how life was, is, for most of humanity. Traces of their making, of course, in folk song, lullaby, tales, language itself, jokes, maxims, superstitionsbut we know nothing of the creators or how it was with them. In the fantasy of Shakespeare born in deepest Africa (as at least one Shakespeare must have been), was the ritual, the oral storytelling a fulfillment? Or was there restlessness, indefinable yearning, a sense of restrictions? Was it as Virginia Woolf in
A Room of One's Own
guessesabout women?
Genius of a sort must have existed among them, as it existed among the working classes,
*
but certainly it never got itself onto paper. When, however, one reads of a woman possessed by the devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a remarkable man who had a remarkable mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, or some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor, crazed with the torture her gift had put her to.
Rebecca Harding Davis whose work sleeps in the forgotten (herself as a woman of a century ago so close to remaining mute), also guessed about the silent in that time of the twelve-hour-a-day, six-day work week. She writes of the illiterate ironworker in
Life in the Iron Mills
who sculptured great shapes in the slag: ''his fierce thirst for beauty, to know it, to create ii, to
be
something other than he isa passion of pain"; Margret Howth in the textile mill:
There were things in the world, that like herself, were marred, did not understand, were hungry to know.... Her
* Half of the working classes
are
women.

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