Tell Me a Riddle (36 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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The rich things I could have said are unsaid, what I did write anyone could have written. There is no Great God Dough, terrible and harassing, in my poems, nothing of the common hysteria of 300 girls every 4:30 in the factory, none of the bitter humiliation of scorching a tie; the fear of being late, of ironing a wrinkle in, the nightmare of the kids at home to be fed and clothed, the rebelliousness, the tiptoe expectation and searching, the bodily nausea and weariness ... yet this was my youth.
8
Late in 1932, Olsen moved to Faribault, Minnesota, a period of retreat from political and survival work to allow her recovery time from the illness that by now had become incipient tuberculosis. It was there at nineteen that she began to write
Yonnondio,
the novel that for the first time would give full expression to ''the rich things" in her own and her family's experience. She became pregnant in the same month that she started writing, and bore a daughter before her twentieth birthday. In 1933, she moved to California, continuing her connection with the YCL in Stockton, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. She also continued to writepoems and reportage and more of the novel that would become
Yonnondio.
In 1936 she began to live with her comrade in the YCL, Jack Olsen, whom she eventually married; in the years that followed, she bore three more daughters and worked at a variety of jobs to help support them. Gradually she stopped writing fiction, concentrating on raising the children and working, but remained an activist into the forties, organizing work related to war relief for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), serving as president of the California CIO's Women's Auxiliary, writing a column for
People's World,
and working in nonleftist and nonunion organizations related to childcare and education, including the Parent-Teacher Association. During the late forties and fifties, she and her family endured the soul-destroying harassment typically directed at leftists and thousands of suspected leftists during that period. It was not until the midfifties that Olsen began writing again, her style less polemic, more controlled, her vision deepened by the years, her consciousness still profoundly political. In the years that followed, she
 
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produced the works which most of us know her for today: the stories in
Tell Me a Riddle; Yonnondio,
finally published in 1974, polished and organized, but not substantially rewritten; and the essays gathered and expanded in
Silences.
As Elinor Langer has remarked, when Olsen began to write again in the fifties, it was not as a woman who had lived her life as an artist but as an artist who had lived her life as a woman.
9
Yet in those turbulent years of the early to midthirties, Olsen lived fully as artist, as activist, as worker, and as woman/wife/mother, though often suffering from the conflicting demands, always having to give primacy to one part of her being at the expense of another.
10
In examining the political contexts of Olsen's life in the Left in the thirties, I will consider the ways her participation both limited and nurtured her as a woman and an artist. I will focus on three basic contradictions confronting her as an activist, a writer, and a woman in the Left in those years.
First, the Left required great commitments of time and energy for political work, on the whole valuing action over thought, deed over word; yet it also validated the study and production of literature and art, providing a first exposure to literature for many working-class people, fostering an appreciation of a wide range of socially conscious literature, and offering important outlets for publication and literary exchange. Second, although much left-wing criticism, especially by Communist Party writers, was narrowly prescriptive about the kind of literature contemporary writers should be producing, it also inspiredalong with the times themselvesa social consciousness in writers that deepened their art. Third, for a woman in the thirties, the Left was a profoundly masculinist world in many of its human relationships, in the orientation of its literature, and even in the language used to articulate its cultural criticism; simultaneously, the Left gave serious attention to women's issues, valued women's contributions to public as well as to private life, and generated an important body of theory on the Woman Question.
The first contradiction, of course, affected both male and female writer-activists on the Left. Then as now, the central
 
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problem for an activist trying to be a writer was simply finding the time to write. In the section of
Silences
called ''Silencesits Varieties," Olsen has a brief entry labeled
Involvement
under the larger heading, "Political Silences": "When political involvement takes priority, though the need and love for writing go on. Every freedom movement has, and has had, its roll of writers participating at the price of their writing" (9). Olsen has spoken little of these silences compared with the fullness of her analysis of other kinds of silencesnot those freely chosen, but those imposed by the burdens of poverty, racial discrimination, female roles. Partly this disproportion exists because, in her own life, and the lives of so many others, the compelling necessity to work for paythe circumstance of class, and the all-consuming responsibilities of homemaking and motherhoodthe circumstance of gender, clearly
have
been the major silencers, and if I do not speak of them at length here, it is because Olsen herself has done so, fully and eloquently. Partly also, I suspect, she has not wanted to be misread as encouraging a withdrawal from political activism for the sake of "art" or self-fulfillment. Yet this little passage could well allude to her own dilemma in the thirties.
The dilemma, as she points out now, was sharper for her as a working-class woman and a "grass roots" activist involved in daily workplace struggles than for those professionals who were already recognized as writers, who participated in the movement primarily by writing, and whose activity as writers was sometimes even supported by federally funded projects like the Works Projects Administration. Except for the interlude in 1932 in Faribault and another withdrawal from political activity in Los Angeles in 1935, another "good writing year," Olsen's political work came first throughout the early and midthirtiesalong with the burdens of survival work and, increasingly, domestic work; and it required the expenditure of time and energy such work always demands. As a member of the YCL in the Midwest, she wrote and distributed leaflets in the packing houses, helped organize demonstrations, walked in picket lines, attended classes and meetings, and wrote and directed political plays and skits. In high school, she had written a prize-winning humor column called "Squeaks"; in the YCL, she recalls, she was able to use her
 
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particular kind of humor and punning to great effect with the living audiences who came to the league's performances.
The nature of Olsen's commitment in the early thirties emerges with particular clarity in a letter she received from a fellow YCL organizer and close friend, as she recuperated from her illness in Omaha, ostensibly on leave for two months from league duties. The letter praises her growth as an organizer, but reprimands her for being ''too introspective." It is full of friendly advice and firm pressure:
Read. Read things that will really be of some help to you. The Daily Worker every day ... the Young Worker. All the new pamphlets ... and really constructive books.... You'll have time to now, and you've got to write skits and plays for the League. This you can do for the League, and it will be a great help ... have only one thing in mindrecovery, and work in the League, and if you pull thru, and are working in the League again in a few months, I will say that as a Communist you have had your test.
The letter concludes by asking her how the play is coming, and urging her to rush it as soon as possible, then adds a postscript: "How about a song for the song-writing contest?"
Reflecting on this letter in her journal, Olsen attributes to its author "full understanding of what it means to me to leave now." She goes on to condemn herself for "the paths I have worn of inefficiency, procrastination, idle planning, lack of perseverance," adding, "Only in my League work did these disappear, I have that to thank for my reconditioning." She expresses her wish to write in a more disciplined way, but adds: "I must abolish word victories ... let me feel nothing till I have had actionwithout action feeling and thot are disease. . . ." The point is not, then, that insensitive and rigid communist bureaucrats imposed unreasonable demands on party members, but rather that rank-and-file communists made these demands on themselves, because they believed so deeply in the liberating possibilities of socialism; the necessity for disciplined, organized action; and the reality of the revolutionary process, in which their participation was essential. The times themselves instilled a sense of urgency and pos-
 
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sibility: a depression at home, with all its concomitant anguishes of hunger, poverty, unemployment; the rise of fascism in Europe with its threat of world war; the example of a successful revolution in the Soviet Union and the feeling of connection with the revolutionary movements there and in other countries, such as China. Like many progressive people, Olsen felt herself to be part of a valid, necessary, and global movement to remake the world on a more just and humane model. If the Left in those years, especially the circles in which Olsen moved, tended to value action over thought, deed over word, there were good reasons.
Olsen's comments today about the author of this letter and her other movement friends suggest both the depth of her commitment to them and the feelings of difference she sometimes experienced as an aspiring writer. What becomes clear in her comments is that for her, political work with such women was a matter of class loyalty. She could not, then or later, leave the ''ordinary" people to lead a "literary" life.
They were my dearest friends, but how could they know what so much of my writing self was about? They thought of writing in the terms in which they knew it. They had become readers, like so many working class kids in the movement, but there was so much that fed me as far as my medium was concerned that was closed to them. They read the way women read today coming into the women's movement who don't have literary backgroundreading for what it says about their lives, or what it doesn't say. And they loved certain writings because of truths, understandings, affirmations, that they found in them. . . . It was not a time that my writing self could be first. . . . We believed that we were going to change the world, and it looked as if it was possible. It was just after Hindenberg turned over power to Hitlerand the enormity of the struggle demanded to stop what might result from that was just beginning to be evident. . . . And I did so love my comrades. They were all blossoming so. These were the same kind of people I'd gone to school with, who had quit, as was common in my generation, around the eighth grade . . . whose development had seemed stopped, though I had known such inherent capacity in them. Now I was seeing that

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