Tell Me a Riddle (37 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 148
evidence, verification of what was latent in the working class. It's hard to leave something like that.
For Olsen, then, the relationship between the intellectual and the working class was far more than an academic question, for she herself belonged to one world by birth and commitment and was drawn to the other by her gift and love for language and literature. Both the ''intellectual" activities of reading and writing and the struggles of working people to improve the quality of their lives were essential to her. The problem was how to combine them. "These next months," she wrote in her Faribault journal, at last with some free time before her,
I shall only care about my sick bodyto be a good Bolshevik I need health first. Let my mind stagnate further, let my heart swell with neurotic emotions that lie clawing inside like a splinterafterwards, the movement will clean that out. First, a strong body. . . . I don't know what it is in me, but I must write too. It is like creating white hot irons in me & then pulling them out. . . so slowly, oh so slowly.
In beginning to write
Yonnondio,
Olsen hoped to link her writing and her political commitment. But the chaotic years that followedthe moving back and forth, the caring and working for her family, and the political tasksgave her little opportunity for sustained literary work. Her most intense political involvement during these years centered around the San Francisco Maritime strike of 1934, which spread from San Francisco up and down the Western Seaboard to become the first important general strike of the era. She helped put out the Longshoremen's publication, the
Waterfront Worker,
did errands and relief work, and got arrested for "vagrancy" while visiting the apartment of some of the YCL members involved in the strike, going to jail for the second time.
Passages from her journal in these years include frustration at the amount of time required for housework and political work, agonized self-criticisms at not being able to write regularly in a more disciplined way, sometimes anger at the necessity to write specifically pieces on demand, often guilt
 
Page 149
because no matter what the choice of labor, something is always left undone:
Struggled all day on the Labor Defender article. Tore it up in disgust. It is the end for me of things like that to writeI can't do itit kills me ... Why should I loathe myselfwhy the guilt . . .
All the writing that Olsen did publish in the 1930s came out in 1934. That year two poems were published in the
Daily Worker
and reprinted in
The Partisan.
One was based on a letter in the
New Masses
by a Mexican-American woman from Texas, detailing the horrors of work in the garment industry sweatshops of the Southwest, and the other celebrated the spirit of the Austrian socialists killed by the Dollfus government.
11
''The Iron Throat," the first chapter of
Yonnondio,
was published the same year in
The Partisan Review,
12
as were "The Strike" and "Thousand-Dollar Vagrant," two essays based on her involvement in the San Francisco dock strike.
13
In "The Strike," one of the best pieces of reportage in an era noted for excellence in that genre, the conflict between her "writer self" and her activist self emerges strongly, here transformed into rhetorical strategy. The essay, in the published version, begins:
Do not ask me to write of the strike and the terror. I am not on a battlefield, and the increasing stench and smoke sting the eyes so it is impossible to turn them back into the past. You leave me only this night to drop the bloody garment of Todays, to cleave through the gigantic events that have crashed one upon the other, to the first beginning. If I could go away for a while, if there were time and quiet, perhaps I could do it. All that has happened might resolve into order and sequence, fall into neat patterns of words. I could stumble back into the past and slowly, painfully rear the structure in all its towering magnificence, so that the beauty and heroism, the terror and significance of those days, would enter your heart and sear it forever with the vision.
14
Toward the end of the essay, the writer explains that she was not on the literal battlefield herself, but in headquarters,
 
Page 150
typing, ''making a metallic little pattern of sound in the air, because that is all I can do, because that is all I am supposed to do." The conclusion is another apology for her incapacity to do justice to the magnitude of the strike:
Forgive me that the words are feverish and blurred. You see, if I had time I could go away. But I write this on a battlefield. The rest, the General Strike, the terror, and arrests and jail, the songs in the night, must be written some other time, must be written later. . . . But there is so much happening now . . . .
15
The conflict here is partly between her role as a writer, in this case a reporter doing her job, and her guilt at not being on the real battlefield herselfbetween the word and the deed. But more important is the conflict between two kinds of writing: the quick, fervent, impressionistic report from the arena of struggle, and the leisured, carefully structured and sustained rendering of the "beauty and heroism, the terror and significance" of those daysa rendering that, ironically, would require for its full development a withdrawal from the struggle.
For a committed leftist in the thirties, political action, with all its demands on time and energy, had to take priority over intellectual work, yet the atmosphere on the Left did value and nurture literature in a variety of ways. Olsen would have been a reader in any case, but her friends in the YCL in Kansas City were among the many working-class people inspired by the movement to read broadly for the first time. And Olsen's own reading, eclectic though it was, was to some extent guided, extended, and informed by left-wing intellectual mentors such as the critics of
The Liberator,
the
New Masses,
and the
Modern Quarterly.
She recalls today that the Left
was enriching in the sense that . . . in the movement people were reading like mad. There was as in any movement a looking for your ancestors, your predecessors . . .
There was a burst of black writers. ... I knew about W. E. B. DuBois before, but because the movement was so conscious of race, of color, we were reading all the black writers, books

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