continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil…. Work interrupted, deferred, relinquished,
makes blockage–at best, lesser accomplishment. Unused capacities atrophy, cease to be. (Silences
18-19)
When Olsen learned she was pregnant with her second child she made an appointment with
an abortionist and then, at the last minute, walked out of his office. After Julie’s
birth, Olsen reports, she gave up her thwarted attempts to complete Yonnondio;
although she had "fragments for another 70 pages of the novel," she had to go to
work "typing income tax forms" (interview). Only her last pregnancy was
"voluntary" (Rosenfelt interview).
Yet Olsen insists that the demands of mothering four children did not fracture her
selfhood. Being female and an artist are complementary, not contradictory, she believes.
Certainly a woman’s experience is not antithetical to art, despite the view expressed by
Le Sueur’s editor at Scribner’s who rejected "Annunciation" for its
"ersatz" subject matter, and Olsen’s texts provide ample evidence that parenting
richly fed her writing. However, since writing requires time and solitude, the practical
question arises: Why did Olsen have as many as four children when she had the ambition and
talent "to be a great writer" (Rosenfelt interview)? The answer lies partly in
Olsen’s firm belief that motherhood is not only the "core of women’s oppression"
but an extraordinary source of "transport" for women as well (Silences
202). Children and art "are different aspects of your being," she told me.
"There is . . . no separation." A life combining meaningful work and motherhood
"could and should be" possible for women (interview).
Silences acknowledges that "the maintenance of life" (34)–an activity
not limited to mothers but including all who in myriad ways attend to caring for
others–is often an impediment to literary productivity. Significantly, however, Silences
also expresses Olsen’s hope that a "complex new richness will come into
literature" as "more and more women writers … assum[e] as their right fullness
of work and family life" (32). Reeva Olson, who was married for many years to a
brother of Jack Olsen and who has been close to Jack and Tillie for over 50 years,
indirectly spoke to this issue of "the maintenance of life" as both an
impediment and a benefit to writing. She acknowledged that Tillie’s "involvement with
people and with her children and with family . . . has, in many ways, kept her from
writing," On the other hand, Reeva added, Olsen’s experiences "with people are
what have made her the kind of writer she is. I don’t think that she could have written
the way she does sitting up in some ivory tower," removed from her characteristically
"deep, deep involvement" with others (interview).
During the ’30s and ’40s Olsen was aware of "a real difference between [writers]
who were ‘rank-and-file,’ so to speak, involved in struggles right around us," and
those who considered themselves cultural activists, were in some instances funded by the
Federal Writers’ Project, and had the mobility to visit other countries to report on
events (interview). This second category, although dominated by men, included such women
as Josephine Herbst, Anna Louise Strong, and Agnes Smedley. Largely because of her
children Olsen could not make her writing her activism, as these childless women did, and
writing could not be counted on to provide the steady income Olsen’s family required.
Moreover, the jobs Olsen took to support her children led naturally to a different form of
political activism, Union organizing, which in turn affected her daily life in positive,
practical, and immediate ways–with higher wages, better working conditions, and more
control of the workplace. As a parent, Olsen also became increasingly involved in
educational issues and in the activities related to the particular schools her children
attended.
Class was also a barrier to Olsen’s becoming a full-time writer during the ’30s. As
noted above, during her stay in Los Angeles from 1934-36, Olsen had felt awkward around
the sophisticated Hollywood Left (or "the cocktail set," as she put it) and
unhappy separated from "her own kind of people." She felt similarly out of place
in what she terms the "Carmel crowd" of writers, to whom she was introduced when
Lincoln Steffens and Ella Winter invited her to their home after her release from jail in
1934. Although Olsen was attracting a lot of attention at this time (as noted above), she
did not feel at home in urbane literary circles. She has asked herself why she
"didn’t move heaven and earth to become part of that [writers'] world," since it
was her ambition at that time "to be a great writer," and remembers feeling
"an intimidation and wonder," based not only on gender but also on her class and
"first-generation" background (Rosenfelt interview).
Class identification in a positive sense also contributed to Olsen’s choosing a
rank-and-file existence over a "literary" life. Olsen’s comments in 1980 about
her working-class comrades suggest both the depth of her loyalty to them and how different
from them she sometimes felt because she aspired to be a writer:
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 background–reading
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 Hindenburg turned
over power to Hitler–and 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
evidence, verification of what was latent in the working class. It’s hard to leave
something like that. (quoted in Rosenfelt, "Thirties" 383)
Clearly Olsen did not share the problem of the enlightened middle-class writer who,
like Meridel Le Sueur, contemplated in the ’30s how best to identify with the working
class. Hers was a different dilemma: Whereas our social system defines Olsen’s
intellectual and professional aspirations as middle class, her personal and emotional
identification remained, profoundly with the class of her birth. Olsen appreciated the
power of class origin, which, as I have argued earlier, Le Sueur unintentionally
trivialized in "The Fetish of Being Outside." Both "intellectual"
pursuits and the struggles of working people to improve their lives were crucially
important to Olsen, and how to live in both worlds remained her insoluble riddle.
While Olsens writing career was obstructed byher gender and class origin, and by the
demands of wage and domestic labor, the historic conditions of the ’30s also pulled her
from writing into activism. The Depression, the rise of fascism in Europe, the threat of
world war, and the apparent success of socialism in the Soviet Union instilled a sense of
urgency and possibility for radical change that competed along with everything else for
Olsen’s energies. "Every freedom movement has … its roll of writers participating
at the price of their writing," she comments in Silences (143). This was for
Olsen a period of collective effort in myriad forms–Party meetings, union organizing,
picket lines, demonstrations, leafleting–not the solitude necessary, for sustained
writing. About the threat of fascism in Europe, she says,
Sometimes [in conflict] with what needed to be done at home was an international sense
and an anti-war sense, the threat of war in the world…. We knew about Dachau very early,
we knew about the concentration camps, the Left press was full of it…. It made my kind
of book [Yonnondio] more and more difficult to write. . . . You remember how people
felt after Allende? You remember how people felt after things were not ending in Vietnam,
and you were so personally identified with it?… It was so much of one’s being…. You
lived with it in every room of your house… in every conversation whether it came up or
not. It was a living, actual presence and force. We had that kind of consciousness [during
the '30s], so many of us…. [It] made other concerns seem trivial by comparison.
(Rosenfelt interview)
Yet, as Rosenfelt points out, passages such as the following one from a ’30s journal
express Olsen’s frustration at the amount of time required for things that took her away
from writing, including political work and the necessity to write pieces on demand for
various political activities: "Struggled all day on the Labor Defender article. Tore
it up in disgust. It is the end for me of things like that to write–I can’t do it–it
kills me" (quoted in Rosenfelt, "Thirties" 384). "There came a
time," Olsen tells us in Silences, when the "fifteen hours of daily
realities became too much distraction for the writing" (20). But Olsen never entirely
gave the struggle to save her writing self.
Her determination to return to writing only deepened after the bombing of Hiroshima.
Olsen vividly remembers one article, in what had been a series of horrific ones in the San
Francisco Chronicle, that described "the ninth night," the first night
without moonlight after the holocaust. Even without moonlight, the newspaper reported, the
sky above Hiroshima had been eerily illuminated by bodies still burning from radiation. At
that moment Olsen pledged "to write on the side of life," although it would be
eight years before she could act on that resolve (interview).
Olsen remained politically active in the ’40s and ’50s, serving as head of the CIO’s
Allied War Relief program and as president of organizations as diverse as the California
CIO’s Women’s Auxiliary and the Parent-Teachers Association. In 1946 she authored a
women’s column in People’s World, "writing articles like ‘Wartime Gains
of Women in Industry’ and ‘Politically Active Mothers–One View,’ which argued like
[Mary] Inman that motherhood should be considered political work" (Rosenfelt,
"Thirties" 406, n44). In the late ’40s and early ’50s, Olsen was active in the
international peace movement that petitioned against governmental testing of nuclear
weapons. During the same period, she also worked within the PTA to oppose civilian defense
maneuvers, which sent school children scurrying under desks in the absurd "duck and
cover" exercises so effectively satirized in the film Atomic Cafe. Both
"I Stand Here Ironing" and "Tell Me a Riddle" include disturbing
references to a child’s innocent acceptance of this Cold War hysteria.
During the late ’40s and ’50s, like Le Sueur and her family, the Olsens were victims of
the harassment typical of the McCarthy Period. In June 1950, the night before Olsen was
going to attend a human relations workshop with a stipend she had been given as president
of the Kate Kennedy Elementary School PTA, she happened to turn on the radio during the
broadcast of a San Francisco Bay Area "I was standing here ironing …
literally," she smiles, when she heard the following: "Tillie Olsen, alias
Tillie Lerner, alias Teresa Lansdale [a name she had used when arrested during the '30s]
… is a paid agent of Moscow [trying] to take over the San Francisco Public School System
by tunneling in the PTA." Tillie and Jack believe that teamsters who were trying to
take over the Warehousemen’s Union paid the gossip-program host to "get at
Jack," the Union’s Educational Director, "through" Tillie (interview).
As a result of the broadcast, some of Olsen’s closest friends shunned her. Even a
"beloved" next-door neighbor to whom the Olsens had been especially close for
years, declared: "’I know about double agents . . . that . . . in these days . .
. they’re just everywhere’"(interview). Four people named Tillie to the House
Un-American Activities Committee (Jack was subpoenaed by the Committee, but neither he nor
Tillie testified). One of the four was Al Addy, a Warehousemen’s Union member whom Jack,
as the Educational Director, had schooled in writing and editing. Another of the four, Lou
Rosser, was a special friend of the Olsens, who had recruited him to the YCL. Tillie
compassionately explained that Rosser’s drug problem made him especially vulnerable to the
FBI, which financed his addiction in return for his information and would have prosecuted
him if he had refused to supply it. "We’re haunted by what happened with Lou, the
destruction of that human being," Olsen said sadly. During this period the FBI
systematically contacted Jack and Tillie’s employers, and they each lost a series of jobs.
One manager cautioned Tillie when he fired her that "one had to be like the grass and
be as inconspicuous as possible and bow with the wind" (interview).
When her youngest child entered school in 1953, Olsen was at last free of some of the
responsibilities of child care, and she enrolled at 41 in a creative writing course at San
Francisco State. Lois Kramer, a neighbor with whom Olsen could confidently exchange child
care, was also instrumental in her beginning to write again. "That tumult I had in my
head about what was going on with my kids subsided" because they felt as much at home
in the Kramer household as they did in their own (interview). An unfinished manuscript of
"I Stand Here Ironing" (at that point titled "Help Her to Believe")
won Olsen a Stanford University Creative Writing Fellowship in 1955-56, even though the
lack of a college degree had made her technically ineligible for admission, let alone
funding.
A favorite Olsen anecdote reveals how that important fellowship nearly eluded her. At
an initial screening intended to eliminate most of the applicants, one of the reviewers
for the competition, after reading a few pages of "I Stand Here Ironing," tossed
it in the wastebasket in disgust, muttering, "’Can you imagine? That woman went on
for pages just about ironing. Standing there ironing!’" Procedurally, at that
point the story would have been eliminated from the competition. However, Dick Krause, the
one person on the screening committee with a working-class background, happened to
overhear the remark and asked to see the piece; he was so moved by it that he delivered it
personally to Wallace Stegner, the director of the program. After reading the manuscript,
Stegner declared: "’Well, we have to have her"’ (interview). Although housework
and a full family life still required attention, for eight months Olsen did not have to
hold a wage-earning job: "I had continuity, three full days [per week], sometimes
more–and it was in those months I made the mysterious turn and became a writing
writer" (Silences 20).
Another silence closed in, however, when she had to return to a nine-hour work day. Two
years later, in 1959, a Ford Foundation grant "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….
Drowning is not so pitiful as the attempt to rise, says Emily
Dickinson. I do not agree, but I know whereof she speaks…. (Silences 21)
Even so, the grant allowed Olsen to finish and publish "Tell Me a Riddle,"
which won the prestigious O. Henry Award for Best Short Story of the Year (1961).