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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 136
ject are rooted in an earlier heritage of social strugglethe communist Old Left of the thirties and the tradition of radical political thought and action, mostly socialist and anarchist, that dominated the Left in the teens and twenties. Not that we can explain the eloquence of her work in terms of its sociopolitical origins, not even that left-wing politics and culture were the single most important influences on it, but that its informing consciousness, its profound understanding of class and sex and race as shaping influences on people's lives, owes much to that earlier tradition. Olsen's work, in fact, may be seen as part of a literary lineage so far unacknowledged by most contemporary critics: a socialist feminist literary tradition.
Critics such as Ellen Moers and Elaine Showalter have identified a literary tradition of women writers who read one another's work, corresponded with one another about everything from domestic irritations to the major issues of the day, and looked to one another for strength, encouragement, and insight.
5
Literary historians like Walter Rideout and Daniel Aaron have traced the outlines of a radical literary tradition in America, composed of two waves of twentieth-century writers influenced by socialism in the early years, by communism in the thirties, who had in common ''an attempt to express a predominantly Marxist view toward society."
6
At the intersections of these larger traditions is a line of women writers, associated with the American Left, who unite a class consciousness and a feminist consciousness in their lives and creative work, who are concerned with the material circumstances of people's lives, who articulate the experiences and grievances of women and of other oppressed groupsworkers, national minorities, the colonized and the exploitedand who speak out of a defining commitment to social change.
In fiction this tradition extends from turn of the century socialists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Vida Scudder, and Susan Glaspell, through such thirties Old Left women as Meridel Le Sueur, Tess Slesinger, Josephine Herbst, Grace Lumpkin, and Ruth McKenney, to contemporary writers with early ties to the civil rights and antiwar movements and the New Left: Marge Piercy, Grace Paley, Alice Walker, and others. Although the specific political affiliations of these writers
 
Page 137
have varied from era to era and from individual to individual, the questions they raise have been surprisingly consistent. These range from basic questions about how to survive economically to more complex ones, such as how to understand the connections and contradictions between women's struggles and those struggles based on other categories and issues, or how to find a measure of emotional and sexual fulfillment in a world where egalitarian relationships are more ideal than real. Sometimes as in Gilman's
Herland,
published serially in
The Forerunner
in the midteens, or Piercy's
Woman on the Edge of Time,
these writers try to imagine socialist feminist utopias. More often, as with the women writers associated with the Left, especially the Communist party, in the 1930s, their work constitutes a sharp critique of the present. Sometimes, as in Agnes Smedley's
Daughter of Earth,
Slesinger's
The Unpossessed,
Piercy's
Small Changes,
much of Alice Walker's fiction, and, implicitly Olsen's
Tell Me a Riddle,
that critique includes a sharp look from a woman's point of view at the sexual politics of daily life in the political milieus with which these authors were associated.
Olsen's relationship to her political milieu in the 1930s most concerns me here, for this paper is not so much a literary analysis of Olsen's work as it is a study of her experience in the Left in the years when she first began to write for publication. I will first give a brief overview of Olsen's background and life in those years, focusing on the roots of both her political commitment and her creative work, and then identify a series of central contradictions inherent in her experience. In thus imposing a paradigmatic order on Olsen's individual experience, I have tried, not always successfully, to maintain a balance between fidelity to the idiosyncracies of the individual life and the identification of patterns applicable to the experience of other women artists in leftist movements then and now.
Tillie Olsen's parents, Samuel and Ida Lerner, were involved in the 1905 revolution in Russia, fleeing to the United States when it failed and settling in Nebraska. Her father, in addition to working at a variety of jobs, including farming, paperhanging, and packing house work, became state secretary of the
 
Page 138
Nebraska Socialist Party, running in the midtwenties as the socialist candidate for the state representative from his district. Tillie Lerner, second oldest of six children in this depression-poor family, dropped out of high school in Omaha after the eleventh grade to go to workalthough, as she is careful to remind people who today take their degrees for granted, this means that she went further in school than most of the women of her generation. Given the radical political climate of her home, it is not surprising that she too would have become active, first writing skits and musicals for the Young People's Socialist League, and subsequently, at seventeen, joining the Young Communist League (YCL), the youth organization of the Communist party. During most of her mid and late teens, she worked at a variety of jobs, took increasing responsibility as a political organizer, and continued to lead an ardent inner literary and intellectual life, in spite of the interruption of her formal schooling. In the draft of a letter to Philip Rahv, editor of the
Partisan Review,
apparently in response to his request for biographical information, she later drew a swift self-portrait:
Father state secretary Socialist party for years.
Education, old revolutionary pamphlets, laying around house,
(including liberators), and YCL.
Jailbird-''violating handbill ordinance"
Occupations: Tie presser, hack writer..., model, housemaid,
ice cream packer, book clerk.
To this catalogue of occupations she might have added packing house work, waitressing, and working as a punch-press operator.
Although essentially accurate, this self-portrait does reflect some irony, some self-consciousness in the delineation of the pure working-class artist educated only in revolutionary literature and the "school of life." In fact, even as a young woman, Olsen was an eager reader, regularly visiting the public library and second-hand bookstores in Omaha. She recalls today that she was determined to read everything in the fiction category in the library, making it almost through the M's. She also borrowed books from the socialist doctor who took care of
 
Page 139
the family and from the Radcliffe graduate for whom she worked for several months as a mother's helper. Olsen's earliest journal, written when she was sixteen, in addition to recording the more predictable emotions, events, and relationships of adolescence, shows a familiarity with an extraordinary variety of literaturepopular fiction, the nineteenthcentury romantics, contemporary poets ranging from Carl Sandberg to Edna St. Vincent Millay. Although remarkably eclectic, her reading was predisposed toward what she calls ''the larger tradition of social concern"American populists like Walt Whitman; European social critics like Ibsen, Hugo, the early Lawrence, and especially Katherine Mansfield; black writers like W. E. B. DuBois and Langston Hughes; American women realists like Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Willa Cather, and Ellen Glasgow; as well as leftists like Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Mike Gold, Guy Endore; and socialist feminists like Olive Schreiner, whose
Story of An African Farm
she refers to in the journal as "incredibly
my
book," and Agnes Smedley, whose
Daughter of Earth
she would later bring to the attention of the Feminist Press and a new generation of readers.
As she explains in her notes to The Feminist Press edition of Rebecca Harding Davis's
Life in the Iron Mills
(1972), she first read that work in a volume of bound
Atlantic Monthly's
bought in an Omaha junkshop when she was fifteen. Davis's work, she writes, said to her: "Literature can be made out of the lives of despised people," and "You, too, must write." Olsen's journals indicate that from a very early age, perhaps even before she read
Life in the Iron Mills,
she consciously and carefully apprenticed herself to the craft of writing. Her early journal is filled with resolutions for a future as a writer, expressions of despair at her own inarticulateness, and frequent humorous deprecations of her own attempts at poetic prose: "PhooeyI was just being literary."
Several passages show her grappling too with the critical and social issues raised by the journals of the Left:
I read the
Modern Quarterly
today, and all the while I was thinkingChrist, how ignorant, how stupid I am. Paragraphs I had to read over, names as unknown to me as Uranus to
 
Page 140
man; ideas that were untrodden, undiscovered roads to me; words that might have been Hindu, so unintelligible they seemed ... But there was an article substantiating my what I thought insane conclusions about the future of art.
She does not elaborate on her ''insane conclusions" but the
Modern Quarterly
at the time was a nonsectarian Marxist journal, with a manifesto that, in Daniel Aaron's words, "denied the distinction between intellectual and worker and between pure art and propaganda and committed the magazine to Socialism." Its editor, V. G. Calverton, boasted that he printed "almost every left wing liberal and radical who had artistic aspirations";
7
the several references to the magazine scattered through Olsen's journal indicate that she was a regular reader, as she had been even earlier of
The Liberator,
the eclectically socialist journal of art and politics edited by Max Eastman. In another passage, the sixteen-year-old Olsen urges herself to take a stand on an almost comical array of global issues-issues, however that would continue to occupy her throughout her life:
Have been reading Nietszche &
Modern Quarterly.
I must write out, clearly and concisely, my ideas on things. I vacillate so easily. And I am so-so sloppy in my mental thinking. What are my
true
opinions, for instance, on socialism, what life should be, the future of literature, true art, the relation between the sexes, where are we going. ... Yes, I must write it out, simply so I will
know,
not flounder around like a flying fish, neither in air or in water.
Later: That's quite simple to say, but there are so few things one can be sure and definite about-so often I am pulled both ways-& I can't have a single clear cut opinion. There are so few things I have deep, unalterable convictions about.
The clear opinions and deep convictions would come a year later through her disciplined work and study in the Young Communist League. Her own writings before that timesome stories and many poems-are not on the whole political. The poems I examined, some interspersed in her journals,
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