’s Life–by Constance Coiner Essay, Research Paper
Constance Coiner
Tillie Olsen’s parents, Samuel and Ida Lerner, who were never
formally married, were Jewish immigrants. They participated in the abortive 1905 Russian
revolution, and, after Samuel escaped from a Czarist prison, fled to the United States.
They settled first on a Nebraska farm; when it failed about five years later, they moved
to Omaha. Despite laboring long hours as a farmer, packinghouse worker, painter, and
paperhanger, Samuel Lerner became State Secretary of the Nebraska Socialist Party and ran
in the mid-twenties as the socialist candidate for state representative from his district
(Rosenfelt, "Thirties" 375). Ida Lerner, who was illiterate until her twenties,
was one of the people who inspired the highly acclaimed "Tell Me a Riddle." The
strong bonds she had with her mother, Olsen has said, "are part of what made me a
revolutionary writer" (Rosenfelt interview). Olsen’s conviction that capitalism
blights human development, which she has often expressed in relation to the enormous
potential evinced by young children, originated in the painful witnessing of her mother’s
deformation.
If you [could see] my mother’s handwriting, [in] one of the few letters she ever wrote
me … she could not spell, she could scarcely express herself, she did not have written
language. Yet she was one of the most eloquent and one of the most brilliant . . . human
beings I’ve ever known, and I’ve encountered a variety of human beings in recent
years, some of whom have a lot of standing in the world. (interview)
When Olsen was 11 or 12, Ida Lerner wrote the following letter to her English
instructor:
2512 Caldwell Street
Omaha, Nebraska
December 10, 1924
Dear Teacher:
I am glad to study with ardor but the children wont let me, they go to bed late so it
makes me tired, and I cant do my lessons. It is after ten o’clock my head dont work it
likes to have rest. But I am in a sad mood I am sitting in the warm house and feel
painfull that winter claps in to my heart. I see the old destroyed houses of the people
from the old country. I hear the wind blow through them with the disgusting cry why the
poor creatures ignore him, dont protest against him, that souless wind dont no, that they
are helpless have no material to repair the houses and no clothes to cover up their
bodies, and so the sharp wind echo cry falls on the window, and the windows original sing
with silver-ball tears seeing all the poor shivering creatures dressed in rags with frozen
fingers and feverish hungry eyes.
It is told of the olden days, the people of that time were building a tower, when they
were on the point of success for some reason they stopped to understand each other and on
account of misunderstanding, their hopes and very lives were buried under the tower they
had built. So as a human being who carries responsibility for action I think as a duty to
the community we shall try to understand each other. This English class helps us to
understand each other, not to feel helpless between our neighbors, serves to get more
respect from the people around us. We are human beings trying to understand, we learn
about the world, people and our surroundings. This class teaches us to understand each
other and brings better order in the every day life of the community.
IDA LERNER
Moreover, Ida Lerner "was very conscious of the situation of women." Olsen
remembers in particular a photograph of a statue–featuring a woman on all fours with an
infant "chained" to her breast–that her mother had clipped from a leftist
journal (interview).
In her adult life, Olsen saw her mother only three times. They were separated by a
continent, "by lack of means," and by Olsen’s jobs and responsibility to her own
children. Ida Lerner, who "had no worldly goods to leave," nevertheless left her
daughter "an inexhaustible legacy," Olsen writes, a "heritage of summoning
resources to make–out of song, food, warmth, expressions of human love–courage, hope,
resistance, belief; this vision of universality, before the lessenings, harms, divisions
of the world are visited upon it" (Mother 263-264).
Olsen’s birth was not recorded, although she has determined that she was born either
near Mead or in Omaha, Nebraska, in either 1912 or 1913 (however, her father once
declared: "You was born in Wahoo, Nebraska" [interview]). Olsen has compared the
harsh conditions on their Nebraska farm to those depicted in the film Heartland, which
was based on letters written by a turn-of-the-century woman homesteader, concluding,
"It’s difficult to conceive how hard those women worked" (interview). In her
family, as she reported to Erika Duncan, "economic struggle was constant. There was
never a time when she was not doing something ‘to help the family out
economically.’" As a 10-year-old, for example, Olsen had to work shelling
peanuts after school (209).
But the political commitment and activism of her socialist parents provided a rich
dimension to her upbringing. "It was a rich childhood from the standpoint of
ideas," she insists (quoted in Duncan 209). Like Le Sueur, Olsen was profoundly
influenced at an early age by the message and the rhetorical skills of socialist orators,
some of whom stayed in her home while attending meetings in Omaha (Duncan 209). Like Le
Sueur, Olsen particularly remembers admiring Eugene Debs. Both writers recall their
excitement as children when Debs gave them affection and when they were chosen to present
him with red roses at one of his speaking engagements.
The second oldest of six children, Olsen was burdened with the care of younger
siblings, and "she remembers from an early age that sense of never having enough
time" and solitude that "has haunted her most of her life, that sense of most
women and her own mother feeling starved for time" (Duncan 210). It was only because
she was often sick that she had any opportunity to read, although her parents could not
afford to buy books (Olsen first saw a home library when, as a teenager, she worked for a
Radcliffe graduate) (Rosenfelt interview). But she read "old revolutionary
pamphlets" and journals she found lying "around the house," including The
Liberator, a socialist journal of art and politics edited by Max Eastman; The
Comrade, which published international revolutionary literature; and Modern
Quarterly, a nonsectarian Marxist journal that "denied the distinction between
intellectual and worker and between pure art and propaganda" (Rosenfelt,
"Thirties" 376-377; Duncan 209; Aaron 323). The Cry for Justice: An
Anthology of Social Protest (1915), edited by Upton Sinclair and introduced by Jack
London, also influenced Olsen as a child. And she had access to the Haldeman-Julius little
Blue Books, which were published in Girard, Kansas, in the teens and ’20s on the premise
that "all the culture of the past … is the worker’s heritage" (interview).
Designed to fit into a worker’s shirt pocket, the five-cent Blue Books introduced Olsen to
modern poetry and to established writers such as Thomas Hardy, who became a lifelong
favorite. Novels by South African feminist Olive Schreiner, Story of an African Farm and
Dreams, also influenced Olsen. Determined to read all the fiction in the Omaha
Public Library, she would pick up a book, read a few pages, and, if she did not like it,
move on to the next (interview; Duncan 210-211).
Olsen was one of few in her working-class neighborhood to "Cross the tracks"
to attend an academic high school, where an exceptional teacher introduced her to
Shakespeare, De Quincey, Coleridge, and Edna St. Vincent Millay and made sure she was
present when Carl Sandburg came to Omaha to read his work. Olsen avidly read Poetry, a
journal edited by Harriet Monroe that was available in the school library. Although the
high school stimulated Olsen intellectually, it "crucified her socially, setting up
‘hidden injuries of class’" (Duncan 210). The necessity to work forced her to
drop out of school after the eleventh grade, although she is careful to remind
interviewers that few women in her generation enjoyed even that much educational
opportunity.
Olsen stuttered as a child, something she considers "part of [her] luck"
because the peculiar quality of her own speech made her curious about the
"intoxicating richness" of other speech patterns: "Just the music, the
varieties … of speaking . . . all had a magical tone" (quoted in Turan 56).
Listening attentively to immigrants who had to be creative with limited vocabularies, she
developed a keen ear for various dialects of "non-standard" English, a skill she
later used in her writing. Yet Olsen found that "not only the speech but so much of
the human beings around me was not in literature. Whitman’s indictment of the aristocratic
bias of literature was still true: Most of the people who wrote books came from the
privileged classes." She became "incited to literature," she says, adding
that the "factor which gave me confidence was that I had something to contribute, I
had something which wasn’t in there yet" (quoted in Turan 56).
Olsen became politically active in her mid-teens as a writer of skits and musicals for
the Young Socialist League. In 1931, at 18, she joined the Young Communist League (YCL),
the CP youth organization, and the next 18 months were a period of intense political
activity. She attended the Party school for several weeks in Kansas City, where she helped
support unemployed comrades by working in a tie factory. During this period Olsen was
jailed for a month for distributing leaflets to packinghouse workers and, while in prison,
was beaten up by one inmate for attempting to help another. She was already sick with
pleurisy, probably contracted as a result of the tie factory’s poor ventilation. Her
station was next to both the factory’s only open window and one of its few steam
radiators; "I got overheated and ‘overcold’ all the time," Olsen explains
(Rosenfelt interview). In jail she became extremely ill, and the Party sent her back to
Omaha to recuperate.
Olsen moved to Faribault, Minnesota, early in 1932, a period of retreat from political
work and wage-earning to allow for her recovery. She thinks of her illness, which had
developed into incipient tuberculosis, as a blessing. As a result of it she was bedridden,
and since she could not be politically active and was "in every way taken care
of," something women of her class rarely experience, she was free to write (Rosenfelt
interview). While in Faribault she began to write Yonnondio and completed its first
three chapters fairly quickly. She became pregnant, however, in the same month that she
started writing and bore a daughter, Karla, at nineteen. Olsen does not enjoy discussing
her personal life between 1932 and 1935; even the weary tone of her voice suggests that it
was a stressful period, financially and emotionally. "We were terribly, terribly
poor," she has said. "When you [couldn't] pay your rent you just moved."
The pregnancy had been unplanned. She had a "rough time of it," living only
sporadically with Karla’s father, who "left several times."
The reception of "The Iron Throat," a short story published (and titled) by Partisan
Review (April-May 1934), is especially relevant to Olsen’s biography. When Robert
Cantwell described his survey of 200 stories in 50 literary magazines (The New Republic,
25 July 1934), he singled out "The Iron Throat" as the best among them, "a
work of early genius." In a letter published in The New Republic on August 22,
1934, Cantwell drew even more attention to Tillie Lerner, who for some months had been
submerged in the politics surrounding the Maritime Strike. Cantwell recounts that after
his July 25 article appeared, the editors of two publishing houses wired him asking for
help in locating Tillie Lerner. They had read "The Iron Throat" when it first
appeared in Partisan Review and had tried to locate the author, but their letters
and telegrams had been returned. "There was, however, a good reason why the
publishers who wanted to see Tillie Lerner’s unfinished novel had trouble reaching
her," Cantwell explains in his letter.
She was in jail…. [and] meanwhile, two more publishers and a literary agent were
trying to locate her in order to see about publishing her novel . . . . I mention this
because I now feel that in my article I minimized the difficulties that impede the
progress of the young writers. To the difficulties of finding hospitable publishers must
now be added the problem of dodging the police. (49)
"The Iron Throat"’s literary promise and the publicity resulting from her
arrest caused Olsen to be "discovered," in her word, and she signed a contract
with Macmillan. But Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, founders of Modern Library and Random
House, were so impressed with "The Iron Throat" that they negotiated with
Macmillan to get her released from that contract. She then signed with Random House, which
offered her a monthly stipend in return for completing a chapter every month. In 1935 she
sent two-year-old Karla to live with her parents and moved to Los Angeles to write.
However, she felt uncomfortable in Hollywood Left circles, where as a bona-fide member of
the working class, she was "considered a curiosity," although she was befriended
by screenwriter Marian Ainslee and enjoyed literary discussions with Tess Slesinger
(Duncan 212; Rosenfelt interview). Unhappy at being separated from "her own kind of
people," she occasionally traveled to several California towns for three- or four-day
periods to help organize farm workers (Martin 10). The separation from Karla affected her
most of all. In 1936, although she "felt like a terrible failure" for not
leaving finished the novel, she forfeited her contract, moved back to San Francisco, and
brought Karla home. Nearly 40 years later, examining Yonnondio’s 11 rough drafts
and trying to figure out where she was when she wrote them," Olsen "realized
that most of her best writing was done" after her reunion with her daughter (Duncan
212-213).
In 1936 Tillie Lerner began to live with her YCL comrade, Jack Olsen (with whom she had
been arrested in 1934); they married in 1944, just before Jack entered the military (Orr
38, n36). Tillie had three more daughters–Julie, Kathie, and Laurie. Between 1936 and
1959 she worked at a variety of jobs–waitress, shaker in a laundry, transcriber in a
dairy equipment company, capper of mayonnaise jars, secretary, and "Kelly
Girl"–and, against tremendous odds, tried to keep her writing alive.
She copied passages from books she could not afford to buy and tacked them on the wall
by the kitchen sink for inspiration. She seized every moment she could:
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, and what you asked
me moves tormented back and forth with the iron." (Silences 19)
When the demands of Olsen’s life–which included wage-earning, mothering, political
activism, housework, and writing–resulted in her "having to give primacy to one part
of her being at the expense of another," the children came first (Rosenfelt,
"Thirties" 380). Silences memorably records Olsen’s experience and that
of many mothers:
More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being
instantly interruptable, responsive, responsible, Children need one now (and
remember, in our society, the family must often try to be the center for love and health
the outside world is not). The very fact that these are real needs, that one feels them as
one’s own (love, not duty); that there is no one else responsible for these needs, gives
them primacy. It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not