Tell Me a Riddle (28 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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real needs, that one feels them as one's own (love, not duty);
that there is no one else responsible for these needs,
give them primacy. It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity, spasmodic, not constant toil. The rest has been said here. Work interrupted, deferred, relinquished, makes blockageat best, lesser accomplishment. Unused capacities atrophy, cease to be.
When H. H. Richardson, who wrote the Australian classic
Ultima Thule,
was asked why shewhose children, like all her people, were so profoundly writtendid not herself have children, she answered: ''There are enough women to do the childbearing and childrearing. I know of none who can write my books." I remember thinking rebelliously, yes, and I know of none who can bear and rear my children either. But literary history is on her side. Almost no mothersas almost no part-time, part-self personshave created enduring literature . . . so far.
If I talk now quickly of my own silencesalmost presumptuous after what has been told hereit is that the individual experience may add.
In the twenty years I bore and reared my children, usually had to work on a paid job as well, the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist. Nevertheless writing, the hope of it, was "the air I breathed, so long as I shall breathe at all." In that hope, there was conscious storing, snatched reading, beginnings of writing, and always "the secret rootlets of reconnaissance."
When the youngest of our four was in school, the beginnings struggled toward endings. This was a time, in Kafka's words, "like a squirrel in a cage: bliss of movement, desperation about constriction, craziness of endurance."
Bliss of movement. A full extended family life; the world of my job (transcriber in a diary-equipment company); and the writing, which I was somehow able to carry around within me through work, through home. Time on the bus, even when I had to stand, was enough; the stolen moments at work, enough; the deep night hours for as long as I could stay awake, after the kids were in bed, after the household tasks were done, sometimes during. It is no accident that the first work I considered publishable began: "I stand here ironing,
 
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and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.''
In such snatches of time I wrote what I did in those years, but there came a time when this triple life was no longer possible. The fifteen hours a daily realities became too much distraction for the writing. I lost craziness of endurance. What might have been, I don't know; but I applied for, and was given, eight months' writing time. There was still full family life, all the household responsibilities, but I did not have to hold an eight-hour job. I had continuity, three full days, sometimes moreand it was in those months I made the mysterious turn and became a writing writer.
Then had to return to the world of work, someone else's work, nine hours, five days a week.
This was the time of festering and congestion. For a few months I was able to shield the writing with which I was so full, against the demands of jobs on which I had to be competent, through the joys and responsibilities and trials of family. For a few months. Always roused by the writing, always denied. "I could not go to write it down. It convulsed and died in me. I will pay."
My work died. What demanded to be written, did not. It seethed, bubbled, clamored, peopled me. At last moved into the hours meant for sleeping. I worked now full time on temporary jobs, a Kelly, a Western Agency girl (girl!), wandering from office to office, always hoping to manage two, three writing months ahead. Eventually there was time.
I had said: always roused by the writing, always denied. Now, like a woman made frigid, I had to learn response, to trust this possibility for fruition that had not been before. Any interruption dazed and silenced me. It took a long while of surrendering to what I was trying to write, of invoking Henry James's "passion, piety, patience," before I was able to reestablish work.
When again I had to leave the writing, I lost consciousness. A time of anesthesia. There was still an automatic noting that did not stop, but it was as if writing had never been. No fever, no congestion, no festering. I ceased being peopled, slept well and dreamlessly, took a "permanent" job. The few pieces that had been published seemed to have vanished like
 
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the not-yet-written. I wrote someone, unsent: ''So long they fed each othermy life, the writing;the writing or hope of it, my life-; but now they begin to destroy." I knew, but did not feel the destruction.
A Ford grant in literature, awarded me on nomination by others, came almost too late. Time granted does not necessarily coincide with time that can be most fully used, as the congested time of fullness would have been. Still, it was two years.
Drowning is not so pitiful as the attempt to rise, says Emily Dickinson. I do not agree, but I know whereof she speaks. For a long time I was that emaciated survivor trembling on the beach, unable to rise and walk. Said differently, I could manage only the feeblest, shallowest growth on that devastated soil. Weeds, to be burned like weeds, or used as compost. When the habits of creation were at last rewon, one book went to the publisher, and I dared to begin my present work. It became my center, engraved on it: "Evil is whatever distracts." (By now had begun a cost to our family life, to my own participation in life as a human being.) I shall not tell the "rest, residue, and remainder" of what I was "leased, demised, and let unto" when once again I had to leave work at the flood to return to the Time-Master, to business-ese and legalese. This most harmful of all my silences has ended, but I am not yet recovered; may still be a one-book silence.
However that will be, we are in a time of more and more hidden and foreground silences, women
and
men. Denied full writing life, more may try to "nurse through night" (that parttime, part-self night) "the ethereal spark," but it seems to me there would almost have had to be "flame on flame" first; and time as needed, afterwards; and enough of the self, the capacities, undamaged for the rebeginnings on the frightful task. I would like to believe this for what has not yet been written into literature. But it cannot reconcile for what is lost by unnatural silences.
1962
 
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TILLIE OLSEN
Personal Statement
(Accompanying an Exhibition of Books and Manuscripts by
Writers from the Stanford University Creative Writing Program)
This is about sources, wellsprings, and the enabling gift of circumstances in the eight temporal, infinite, Stanford months when I ''made the mysterious turn and became a writing writer." And something of these accompanying scraps, notings, mss. pages.
I did not come to our writing class that late September day in 1955 as the others came. I was a quarter of a century older. I had had no college. I came from that common, everyday, work, mother, eight-hour-daily job, survival (and yes, activist) world seldom the substance of literature.
I came heavy freighted with a lifetime of ever-accumulating material, the sense of unwritten lives which cried to be written. I came from a twenty-year silence "when the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist. . . . . Nevertheless there was conscious storing, snatched reading, beginnings of writing, and always the secret rootlets of reconnaissance."
I came as stranger; of the excluded. I came as the exiled homesick come homemy home, where literature, writers, writing had centrality, had being. I came to Dick and Ann Scowcroft, the Mirrielees sisters, my to-be first and dearest
From First Drafts, Last Drafts: Forty Years of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford. Prepared by William McPheron, with the assistance of Amor Towles (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Libraries, 1989), 63-66.
 
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writer friend, Hannah Green; to the hovering presence of Stegner (then on leave), and to unnamed others who embodied that centralityand remain living sustenance to this day.
I came to circumstanced time.
We met two afternoons a week in the Jones Room, around an oval, an egg-shaped table (shape of new life in creation) encircled by walls solid with books. A writer's library, carefully gleaned, gathered together as if to concentrate for us, incite us to what makes our medium incomparable. The imperishable, the good, side by side with letters, lives, journals of their creatorsilluminating, intertwining, the ways of their begetting, the joys . . . labor of their creation.
Encircled, bulwarked so, we practiced writing companionship: read what we had written, listened to each other, talked writing, vivified. Or so it was for me. Enormous had been my morningwith books and notebook in the library, or with the Jones Room books; enormous and yielding would be my late afternoon and evening for I would stay until the last train. When it was possible, I rode from home (San Francisco) with my new friend, Hannah Green, and for the first time had occasion to read aloud, hear in my ears, sounds, rhythms, silences of the written. I read what I had long loved or just come to love: from Verga's
Little Tales of Sicily
to which Hannah had introduced me; all of Cather's ''Wagner Matinee," Glaspell's "Jury of Her Peers," Chekhov's "Gusev," "Rothschild's Fiddle," "Ward #6"among other treasures. And I was in a frenzy, a passion, of starved intense reading, copying; observing, noting, putting together; reremembering;
writingin
this vast strange freedom of wholly my-own time.
In those circumstanced months, in that writing air, in the comradeship of books and writing human beings; in that freed time (for all that there was still full family life, responsibilities)in contrast to the years it took for the writing of "I Stand Here Ironing", the first "Hey Sailor, What Ship?"I came to facility. I made "Hey Sailor" publishable. I wrote all of "O Yes." I began, finished, the first third of "Tell Me a Riddle." Although I did not know it then, I was also gathering, even writing, what would later become substance and actual page after page of
Silences
("this book was not written, it was har-

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