(1978)
Tillie Olsen’s is a unique voice. Few writers have gained such wide respect based on such a small body of published works: one book of short stories, Tell Me A Riddle, and the unfinished novel, Yonnondio: From The Thirties. Among women writers in the United States, “respect” is too pale a word: “reverence” is more like it. This is presumably because women writers, even more than their male counterparts, recognize what a heroic feat it is to have held down a job, raised four children, and still somehow managed to become and to remain a writer. The exactions of this multiple identity cost Tillie Olsen twenty years of her writing life. The applause that greets her is not only for the quality of her artistic performance but, as at a gruelling obstacle race, for the near-miracle of her survival.
Tillie Olsen’s third book, Silences, is about this obstacle course, this ordeal, not only as she herself experienced it but as many writers have experienced it, in many forms. It begins with an account, first drafted in 1962, of her own long circumstantially-enforced silence. She did not write for a very simple reason: a day has twenty-four hours. For twenty years she had no time, no energy and none of the money that would have bought both. It may be comforting to believe that garrets are good for geniuses, that artists are made in Heaven and God will take care of them; but if you believe, as Tillie Olsen does, that writers are nurtured on Earth and nobody necessarily takes care of them, society cannot be absolved from the responsibility for what it produces or fails to produce in the way of literature.
Though Tillie Olsen begins with her own experience, she rapidly proceeds to that of others. The second part of the book is a grab-bag of excerpts from the diaries, journals, letters, and concealed autobiographical work of a wide range of writers, past and present, male and female. They are used to demonstrate, first, the ideal conditions for creation as perceived by the writers themselves, and second, almost every imaginable impediment to that creation. The financial and cultural pressures that gagged Melville, the religious agonies of Hopkins, the bitterness of Thomas Hardy after the vicious reception of Jude the Oscure, Willa Gather’s feeling of nullity in face of the suave eastern establishment; political, cultural, sexist and sexual censor-ship; the denial of a voice to a race, a class, a sex, by the denial of its access to literature; breakdowns, abdications, addictions; all are cited. Reading this section may be hazardous if you are actually writing a book. It’s like walking along a sidewalk only to be shown suddenly that your sidewalk isn’t a sidewalk but a tightrope over Niagara Falls. How have you managed to do it at all? “Chancy luck,” Tillie Olsen replies, and in view of the evidence she musters, she’s probably—for all writers not white, male, rich, and from a dominant culture—quite right.
Tillie Olsen’s special concern is with how her general observations on silencings apply, more heavily and with additions, to women. Here, the obstacles may seem to be internal: the crippling effects of upbringing, the burdens of motherhood, the lack of confidence that may prevent women from writing at all; and, if they do write, their own male-determined view of women, the fear of competing, the fear of success. We’ve heard a lot of this before, but it’s invigorating to see its first expressions by women coming new to the problems: Virginia Woolf worrying about her childlessness, Katherine Mansfield having to cope with all the domestic arrangements while John Middleton Murray nagged her about tea. And, in contrast, quotations from men whose wives dedicated their lives to sharpening pencils and filling the inkwell for them. As Tillie Olsen points out, almost all of the women in the nineteenth century who wrote were childless and/or had servants. Her study of Rebecca Harding Davies, author of the remarkable Life In The Iron Mills, is a telling example of what happened to one writer who made the switch from solitude to biological fecundity.
In construction, Silences is a scrapbook, a patchwork quilt: bits and pieces joined to form a powerful whole. And, despite the condensed and fragmentary quality of this book, the whole is powerful. Even the stylistic breathlessness—the elliptical prose, the footnotes blooming on every page as if the author, reading her own manuscript, belatedly thought of a dozen other things too important to leave out—is reminiscent of a Biblical messenger, sole survivor of a relentless and obliterating catastrophe, a witness: “I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” The tone is right: the catastrophes do occur, daily, though they may not be seen as such. What Tillie Olsen has to say about them is of primary importance both to those who want to understand how art is generated or subverted and to those trying to create it themselves.
The true measure of a book’s success, for the reader, is the number of people she wants to give it to. My own list is already long.