The work of Tillie Lerner is going to be the inevitable extension of the work of such writers as Dos Passos and all the other movement writers.
—William Saroyan to Bennett Cerf, 11 September 1934
By the beginning of 1934, federal agencies were getting people back to work (the Civil Works Administration alone employed four million workers), but the depression was too broad for a quick fix. However impoverished, half of all American families owned radios, and most gathered by them on Sunday evenings to hear President Roosevelt’s reassuring “Fireside Chats.” Almost everyone could sing along with Bing Crosby’s “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime.” Many took the song “Remember My Forgotten Man” as a sermon.1
With large-circulation magazines like Vanity Fair and the Saturday Evening Post still publishing fiction mostly about an untroubled middle-class, a host of new small magazines promised stories and poems about forgotten men and women. Proletarian novels presented horrid bosses, horrendous injustices, and heroes striking and demanding a workers’ paradise. Appealing to the ideologically committed, they were easily forgotten. Tillie’s proletarian characters Jim and Anna Holbrook have a smattering of education (what daughter Mazie calls “edjiccation”), toil doggedly, and want a better life. Tillie scoured the Stockton Public Library for articles about the misery of the American worker and the benefits for the Soviet worker. She even proposed emigrating to Russia, a notion that made Rae scold Abe for marrying someone “even more” radical than he. Rae argued that, when Roosevelt supplied Abe with bread, butter, and dollars, Tillie should not try to undermine his government. Tillie herself feared that domestic contentment kept her from overturning the system.
In the New Masses, she read a letter telling women who “buy embroidered children’s dresses labeled ‘hand made’ they are getting dresses made in San Antonio, Texas, by women and girls with trembling fingers and broken backs.” The author ended: “I want you women up North to know. I tell you this can’t last forever. I swear it won’t.”2 Though she had written skits and poems about other miscarriages of justice, only this picture of victimized women provoked a powerful poem. Borrowing cadences, phrasing, and actual names, she rewrote the letter as “I Want You Women Up North to Know.” In her rendition, the embroidered dresses are “dyed in blood, are stitched in wasting flesh.” The “bourgeois poet” might see a seamstress’s stitching as an “exquisite dance,” and the purist poet might depict her cough as “accompaniment for the esthetic dance of her fingers.” But this radical poet saw her as a victim of capitalist exploitation. Calling for a Soviet-style “heaven on earth,” Tillie sent the poem to The Partisan, the magazine of the West Coast John Reed club.3
Then on Valentine’s Day, their third anniversary, Abe’s CWA boss wrote “AJG” to “kindly advise your men” that they were out of work until Congress appropriated more funds.4 Only earning twenty-five cents an hour as a “lackey steno,” Tillie blamed her lost job on corrupting wealth “in the heart of Franklin Dealout Richvelth and his C. W. A.” Meanwhile, San Francisco longshoremen kicked union bigwigs out of their convention and chose an ordinary Australian dock worker named Harry Bridges as leader. Tillie and Abe attended a rally led by a strong handsome longshoreman who looked about Tillie’s age. His name was Jack Olsen.5
When Tillie read that the fascist Austrian government of Dollfuss slaughtered socialist rebels and closed schools “to keep children off the hazardous streets,” she no longer felt hampered by domesticity but fired up to write. In rapid order she turned out two anti-Dofuss poems and sent one, called “There Is a Lesson,” to the Daily Worker.6 A new magazine, the Partisan Review, called for fresh proletarian voices;7 so Tillie retyped her first chapter, signed it “T. Lerner,” and popped it in the mail to editor, Philip Rahv, who immediately accepted half of it, which he titled “The Iron Throat.” He asked T. Lerner for a self-description. Tillie replied to “Dear Comrade Rahv” with two proletarian self-versions:
Age, 21 (born 1912) Home state Nebraska. Y.C.L.’er on leave of absence to produce future citizeness for Soviet America—Karla Barucha. Or if you want to be more garrulous: Father state secretary Socialist party for years. Education, old revolutionary pamphlets laying around house (including the Liberators) and Y.C.L. jailbird—‘violating handbill ordnance’ Occupations; Tie presser, hack writer (honey and its uses in the home, etc), model, housemaid, ice cream packer, book clerk.8
Tillie was honest about being born in 1912, not about all the other details.
Rahv’s reply shows party intellectuals’ eagerness to connect their theory with working-class experiences: her actual “activity in the Y. C. L. and work in factories” proved that “proletarian literature isn’t growing in a vacuum.” In March, the Partisan printed “I Want You Women Up North to Know” and the Daily Worker printed “There is a Lesson,” which the Partisan reprinted in April. “The Iron Throat” appeared in the April/May Partisan Review. With four publications in just over a month, Tillie Lerner had made a sudden and sensational entrance onto the leftist literary stage.
“The Iron Throat” begins with the scream of whistles calling workers into a Wyoming coal mine. Dialogue shows the degrading effects of poverty, exhaustion, and hopelessness on Anna and Jim Holbrook. Tillie used what she had learned at Central High about Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness to delve into six-year-old Mazie’s mind:
“I am a knowen things. I can diaper a baby. I can tell two ghost stories. I know words and words. Tipple. Edjiccation. Bug dust. Superintendent. My poppa can lick any man in this here town. Sometimes the whistle blows and everyone starts a runnen. Things come a blowen my hair and it’s soft, like the baby laughing.” A phrase trembled into her mind, “Bowels of earth.” She shuddered. It was mysterious and terrible to her. “Bowels of earth. It means the mine. Bowels is the stummy. Earth is a stummy and mebbe she ets the men that come down. Men and daddy goin in like the day, and comin out black. Earth black, and pops face and hands black, and he spits from his mouth black. Night comes and it is black.”
Though she included some preachy addresses about capitalist exploitation, her descriptions were poetic, her interior monologues brilliant. Her most autobiographical elements, other than Anna’s “kike blood,” are Mazie’s precociousness and Anna’s bitterness. At her request, Rahv sent a copy to the Lerners in Omaha. Morris took “The Iron Throat” to Judge Sam Beber,9 who praised her “brilliant and original style” and “powerful sentences,” comments that vindicated Ida’s long-suffering belief in Tillie’s genius.
Without CWA jobs, Abe and Tillie briefly went south to organize farm workers in the Imperial Valley, leaving Karla with Sue, and Tillie began writing about the “100,000 homeless who trek up and down the valleys of California” during picking season.10 On 9 May, longshoremen coordinated strikes and closed two thousand miles of west coast shoreline. They protested working conditions, like trudging between hiring halls in predawn hours to beg to work twenty-four or more hours, nonstop.11 Tillie was rapturous: “there was a night in Stockton when I walked down the road for the paper when the sun lay dispersed, over the yellow stubble, and the wind in the dry weeds—and I lifted out the paper and over the page a headline streamed—STRIKE CALLED, STRIKE CALLED—and the fierce exultation beat up in me.” That fiery exultation melted Tillie’s secular redemption as mother and novelist. She vowed to join the San Francisco strikers, “health be damned.”12 She asked first Rae and then her youngest sister to come to San Francisco to care for Karla. Yetta had recovered from her infection to become a lively preteen who sang and danced to tunes like “Ah, But Is It Love?” and “Inka Dinka Do.”13 Though she made all As, Yetta cared for popularity and larks, which California might offer. An uncle was going west on 7 June, so Ida agreed to let her youngest daughter go along. Yetta wrote Tillie, “Goody!!”
Tillie and Abe got party transfers and took an upstairs apartment in a pretty little house with a Queen Anne window at 73 Diamond Street and soon got Nahman and Sue, who was pregnant, to join them in San Fran-cisco.14 Sue kept Karla when Tillie took the trolley to party headquarters, in a converted store at 27 Grove, a block from the Civic Center, where the party published the weekly Western Worker.15 Frenetic activities on Grove Street and on the docks created for Tillie “unbearable tension, when in an hour, years of events were packed, when people grew up overnight and blurred class lines reared sharp.”16 She promised to write about the strike for the Partisan Review’s 1 August deadline.17 Abe got a job with the State Emergency Relief Administration (SERA), which prompted Rae to joke “now he is the Capitalist and I might ask him for a loan.” When radical youth organizations declared Memorial Day 1934, National Youth Day, the YCL put Tillie in charge of some 250 kids, whom she led to a rally, where the police attacked them. When the San Francisco Examiner blamed unions and youngsters for police violence, Tillie, who was unharmed, had a rationale for yoking the children’s and longshoremen’s causes together in a great crusade against injustice.
One night when searchlights spanned the sky, she did try a purist description “Blue—the pure blue of a star, long fingers of light—I run to the kitchen window; suddenly they begin moving, suddenly the sky is mad. Falling, shifting, straightening, the tall slim stems weave over each other.” She pledged: “Yes, I shall be a writer. Descriptions every night. To write alone again, to live alone. To take my walks and see the city in day, in night. To closet this in me and feel it move.”18 The focus of these literary ambitions was less protest than the desire to be alone to write.
About two weeks after Youth Day, Tillie’s baby sister arrived in Oakland on the Union Pacific railroad and took the ferry across the bay, marveling at the stars’ reflection in the water. Yetta’s excitement quickly dimmed, though, because Abe, not Tillie, met her at the dock. She enjoyed trolley rides by tall skinny houses on the San Francisco hills, but was frightened to find she was sharing the Diamond Street apartment with Karla and Abe because Tillie had moved out. She “never saw” Tillie. The mysterious Abe “kept going in and out,” making her “uncomfortable,” especially after he made a pass at her.19 She knew no curses to replace “Goody!”
Tillie’s fellow crusaders included strike organizers Dave Lyon and Jack Olsen, each a year older than she. Lyon was a University of California graduate student in journalism, who had covered the Youth Day crackdown for the Western Worker.20 Olsen was the Communist Party candidate for the Fourteenth Senatorial District. He had been a U.S. citizen since his birth in 1911 and a California resident since 1929. In his statement of fitness for office, he said he had been “arrested many times for fighting for relief for unemployed youth and against war preparations. If elected I will carry these issues into the [state] senate.” The YCL paid his twenty-dollar filing fee. The party instructed him to memorize and then destroy messages.21
A mass meeting on 19 June jammed the Civic Auditorium with strikers, who rejected a strike-ending compromise. As tensions threatened to explode, Tillie called for women to petition the chief of police “to permit peaceful picketing on the waterfront.” Instead, the mayor called out the entire police force and hired extra men for a showdown on 5 July. Like Russian cossacks, police on horseback charged into the lines of placard-carrying men blocking the ports. In a union newsletter, Tillie wrote that the strikers “put up a great battle, without arms, against police bullets and tear gas bombs.” In the melee, two strikers and one bystander were shot to death, a hundred people were hospitalized, and countless others were injured on the day that would always be known in San Francisco as “Bloody Thursday.”
On the next Sunday, some forty thousand men and women marched behind a truck carrying coffins up Market Street. Tillie wrote about: “a longshoreman—a World War Veteran—and a dead man. ON STRIKE SINCE THE NINTH DAY OF MAY, 1934,” who was “A MARTYR TO THE CAUSE OF LABOR.”22 FDR and his “Brain Trust” advisors, fearing violence would jeopardize the country’s recovery, sent an assistant secretary of labor to mediate the strike. Uninterested in mediation, a transplanted Australian Communist named Ella Winter saw the strike as harbinger of the “coming Workers’ Revolution in America.”23
At the 1919 peace negotiations, as an assistant to American lawyer Felix Frankfurter, Winter had met the older muck-raking journalist Lincoln Steffens, whose The Shame of the Cities had branded public bribery, later called “pay to play,” as treason. Steffens had visited the Soviet Union and exclaimed, “I have seen the future and it works.” He and Winter married, had a son in 1924, and in 1927 bought a house in Carmel, California. Dubbed the “Getaway,” it had become a haven for reformist writers and artists. Through his 1931 autobiography, Steffens led many young people to communism.24 After the carnage of “Bloody Thursday,” he and Winter kept tabs on efforts to “Break the Shipowners’ Dictatorship” with a general strike called on 16 July. Tillie wrote a flier telling strikers not to mediate or arbitrate but to “SPREAD THE STRIKE” that crippled the city.
The Partisan Review’s third issue proclaimed that Granville Hicks’s The Great Tradition had launched a “revaluation of America literary history” to depict economic truths. Hicks’s dictum provoked the New Republic to assign Robert Cantwell (author of the ironically titled Land of Plenty) to see if the new magazines were avoiding or showing depression realities. Tillie soon got a surprise invitation from famous writer, editor, and former expatriate Malcolm Cowley, who asked her to submit a story to the New Republic. She was too caught up in spreading the general strike to respond.
San Francisco shopkeepers posted signs saying “Closed till the Boys Win,” and the unions controlled the delivery of essentials such as milk and bread; otherwise, they locked down the city.25 Union leaders struggled to coordinate the strike, prevent violence, and preserve appearances. (Photographer Dorothea Lange’s pictures show strikers wearing brimmed hats, suit jackets, and often ties.26) Tillie worked at party headquarters and in a makeshift haven on Ellis Street, sleeping on floors, eating irregularly, and typing into the night to produce the anonymous Waterfront Worker, countless bulletins with appeals like: “Graduates what now? Jobs? Relief? Peace? Join YCL, 37 Grove St., SF,” and skits, like one with ship owners singing: “They’ll say what ever I say, Betray when I say betray.”27 So much frantic activity almost completely repressed her writerly ambitions, her maternal feelings, and even her rampant sexuality, though she did harbor a yen for Jack Olsen.
National publicity about the strike alarmed Rae, who thought Tillie and Abe should quit working “under cover,” care for Karla’s “apendics,” and remember “the most deserving of all Tom. Do you correspond with him the poor sucker.”28 Tillie was not about to quit. She was exhilarated to be working with Olsen in a swirl of reform projects. Though his campaign literature said he was “forced to leave school,” he had graduated from Alden High School in New York State in 1928, moved to Los Angeles with his family, the Olshanskys, and had Anglicized his name to “Olsen.” Like Abe, he was a Communist of Eastern European Jewish descent and a handsome guy. But while Abe was a theorist, Jack was a laborer; while Abe could be explosive and arrogant, Jack was easy-going and sympathetic; while Abe thought of Tillie as the next Rosa Luxemburg, Jack saw her as herself, a political firebrand who was talented, beautiful, and passionate. She was also, of course, a married woman.
Under prodding from Rahv, Tillie wrote that she was in Stockton when “streaming headlines, Longshoremen out, Riot Expected; Longshore Strike Declared, made an exultant rhythm in my blood. And I stood there in the yellow stubble remembering Jerry telling me quietly, ominously” about strike plans. This “Jerry” was an amalgam of Abe (living with her in Stockton) and of Jack (loading “cargo five times the weight” others could carry and refusing to be hired “in a slave market begging for a bidder”). She titled this account “No Strike is Ever Lost” but abandoned it for the more urgent job of producing bulletins about workers’ demands and cutting stencils of songs like “Industrial Union’s Call” and “Chiselers’ Sorrow.” She learned “What to do if your mimeograph is Broken Up During a Strike.”29
In Europe, Hitler was on the march, Austria was convulsed in civil war, and Mussolini was mobilizing troops. In America, the west coast was paralyzed. As beholden to big money as the oligarchies Steffens had exposed, city officials condoned attacks on strikers and Communists because, as the 17 July Chronicle reported, “Reds Plotting Revolt.” After vigilantes beat “Communists’ furniture into matchsticks,” newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst’s Chronicle gloated “REDS TURN BLACK AND BLUE.” Tillie responded with a jingle “You may wonder where is Hearst/ you may wonder if he’s burst,/ with the hatred of the reds,/ you may wonder is he dead.” 30
Closed docks created such a downward business cycle that the general strike soon succeeded. By 19 July, maritime unions were recognized, “fink” hiring halls were eliminated, and 20,000 men were back at work.31 The Communist Party reopened its Grove Street headquarters. It claimed credit for procuring decent working conditions for longshoremen, launched voter registration campaigns for candidates like Olsen, and construed the strike’s success as the beginning of the end of capitalist exploitation.32 The landlady of the Ellis Street apartment fretted over the ongoing clack of typewriter keys and the rolling thump of mimeo machines. She called the anti-Communist police squad, which stormed the place on 22 July. Tillie gave a familiar alias, “Teresa Landale,” and listed the Grove Street address of the CP as her home. Sixty years later, she wrote: “no warrants, up the stairs, the thunder of their feet. Five of us jailed, I the only one of my sex.”33 On 23 July, the San Francisco Examiner reduced the conflict to “Americanism Versus Communism.”34 It saw “Divorcee Shoots and Blinds Fiancé in Love Quarrel” as less offensive than Judge Lazarus’s releasing “58 Held as Reds.” It praised Judge Steiger for taking prisoners with “asserted Communist connections” off relief rolls. The paper named unreleased arrestees David Lyon, Harold Johnson, Jack Olsen, and “Theresa Landale,” who “said she attended U. C. one year.”35 All demanded jury trials. Tillie was jailed with the socialite who attempted murder in a “love quarrel.” Male comrades were thrown in a pen a floor below.36 They sang up the pipes the “Internationale” and songs like “You ain’t done nothing/ If you ain’t been called a Red.”37 At Olsen’s suggestion, they also sang “Let me Call You Sweetheart.”
Lincoln Steffens wrote Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins (the first woman cabinet member): “there is hysteria here, but the terror is white, not red.” He blamed “the incredibly dumb captains of industry” for abusing workers and Hearst for fomenting hysteria and encouraging fascism at home.38 With prisoners “held as vagrants under $1,000 bail each,” the International Labor Defense sent attorney George Anderson to defend them. In Oakland, California District Attorney Earl Warren presided at a meeting decreeing that publications critical of capitalism or favorable to communism (like Ella Winter’s 1933 Red Virtue) should be taken off library and school shelves. Although police were exonerated in the “Bloody Thursday” killings, Steffens and Winter were put under surveillance and even accused of trying to “make pinks out of children” and of not disciplining their ten-year-old son.39
Under the title “To Face Jury,” the San Francisco Call Bulletin, on 25 July, ran a photograph of “Theresa Landale.” The photographer caught Tillie raising her hand to her mouth. Her remarkable eyes stare back at the photographer in defiance.40 With her hair cropped very short, she looked handsome but frightened. The same day that the Bulletin printed her picture, the New Republic ran Robert Cantwell’s article on “Little Magazines.” Among some 200 stories in 50 magazines, he said “there is one fragment (by Tilly [sic] Lerner) so fresh and imaginative that even a cautious critic can call it a work of early genius.” He praised her “metaphors distilled out of common speech [which] are startling in their brilliance.” Though he misspelled it, Cantwell equated the name Tillie Lerner with genius. (No wonder Cowley had asked her to send a story to the New Republic.) Cantwell, then sequestered with Winter and Steffens, had no idea that this “early genius” was incarcerated in a San Francisco jail cell.
Cantwell’s endorsement caught the attention of publishers who suspected that Hemingway’s tales of foreign adventurers and Fitzgerald’s of the decadent rich were out of touch, while Faulkner’s novels appeared bizarre, southern, and apolitical.41 In his U.S.A. trilogy, John Dos Passos addressed depression realities, but experiments with narrative form were costing both Faulkner and Dos Passos a wide readership. Lerner might be the one writer who could make the ravages of the depression accessible and affecting to a wide audience. With no Tillie Lerner in the Stockton phone book, publishers hounded Rahv, who shared the Diamond Street address with several publishers, including Donald Friede and Jerre Mangione. They telegraphed her, and Mangione also wrote: “I suppose you realize by this time that half the publishing world is on your trail. I blush to confess that I’ve been one of the bloodhounds.”42 He got no reply.
Tillie was stuck in jail with a cell mate singing “Keep Young and Beautiful If You Want To be Loved” and advising her to buy face creams to preserve her youthful complexion. More compelling were serenades from Olsen, Lyon, and other male prisoners. The right-wing press urged Roosevelt to deport “Reds,” but Secretary Perkins maintained that deportation was not a means to get rid of “alien agitators.” In Sacramento “28 Red Suspects” were charged with “Criminal Syndicalism” under a 1919 bill suppressing labor unions. San Francisco and Sacramento jails could well have been tools of a fascist state.43
When Attorney Anderson visited the San Francisco jail, he made the sensational discovery that Theresa Landale was Tillie Lerner. She gave him a letter to Cantwell, who spread the sensational news to Steffens, Winter, and Cowley that his “early genius” was the jailed “Landale.” Then Cantwell retold the tale for the New York World-Telegram. Steffens and Winter paid Tillie’s $1000 bail and set her up on Dolores Street, with instructions to write about her arrest. Tillie could stroll along a palm-lined boulevard down to Dolores Park for sunshine and supplies, but she was otherwise confined to her hide-away. Winter and Steffens shared this address only with Cowley and Bennett Cerf, of Random House.44
Back in 1925, Cerf and Donald Klopfer, at ages twenty-seven and twenty-three, had purchased the Modern Library from Horace Liveright. After making a huge success of its inexpensive editions of classics, the two young men launched Random House to publish fine books by contemporary writers, including James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Robinson Jeffers, Eugene O’Neill, and Marcel Proust. Cerf and Klopfer had just signed William Saroyan, a young San Franciscan with a sunny attitude toward America’s troubles. They were eager to add important authors of all political persuasions to their list.
Cerf wrote Tillie, and she replied on 6 August that publishers’ many overtures tempted her to cut her novel “into parts.” It was not set in a mining town but “wanders over South-Dakota farmland, western Nebr. beet fields, Sioux City packing house strike, a state detention home for children, and then settles down in the working section of a large mid-west city.” Her present tense implied that the novel was complete, though she admitted its second half had problems. Still, “if some miracle happened, and I can get three hours a day for writing, I could re-work it in two or three months easy.” Her Dolores Street address was “hot,” so he should next write to General Delivery. Cerf was elated: A woman’s perspective on so much of depression America was just what America and Random House needed.45
The Tillie Lerner story became an even bigger sensation when the New York World-Telegram printed Cantwell’s story. He said the “fire-eating” Judge Steiger had condemned her as a mental case (thanks, probably, to her stutter). The judge demanded to know if Tillie had rejected her American education for communism; Cantwell quoted her retort: “‘No,’ she said, ‘but I’ve become pretty well converted since my residence upstairs’—meaning the jail.” He said the police beat “up the four boys there and took them and the two girls—Tillie Lerner (Teresa Landale) and Marian Chandler—to jail.” He urged readers to write lawyer Anderson “that she is not a vagrant but a writer of high talent.”46 From New York, the Daily Worker featured stories of Tillie Lerner’s arrest and of African-American Langston Hughes’s being “driven” out of Carmel. Thanks to Steffens, it managed a phone interview with Tillie, who said she had “written since the age of 10, she says, ‘when I grinded out an Eddie Guestian ode for Eugene Debs who dandled me on his knee.’” She hoped to publish her novel “in a very cheap edition” so that poor people could “get a crack at it.”47 With competition intensifying, Friede telegraphed that he and his partner were Tillie’s “BEST PUBLISHERS” 48
Her first obligation was to tell the horrific story of her arrest so she explained: “It was Lincoln Steffens who commanded me to write this story. ‘People don’t know,’ he informed me, ‘how they arrest you, what they say, what happens in court. Tell them. Write it just as you told me about it.’” In isolation, she finished quickly and then described other prospective articles for the New Republic, which asked to see “the fragment ‘No Strike is Ever Lost’ and the one about the hysteria of the tie-factory girls.” Cantwell wired Cowley her arrest story.49
Tillie expanded “No Strike is Ever Lost” as if she were again chaffing under Steffens’s command: “Do not ask me to write of the strike and the terror.” Nevertheless, she told of the Youth Day and of events “crescendoing” to the Bloody Thursday “massacre” and the General Strike. Not on the “battlefield,” she had had to piece together “words of comrades, of strikers, from the pictures filling the newspapers.” Now on an unspecified battlefield, her words were “feverish and blurred.” She simplified her title as “The Strike.”
With both the arrest and the strike pieces finished, Tillie left the secret Dolores apartment around 10 August, bought a doll for Karla, and walked to Diamond Street. She recalled when “I came back” after her summer’s absence, Karla “woke from her dream, & seeing me standing there, began to weep, horrible, racking tears, & would not be caressed, even by the doll. Clutching me as if she were drowning.” Tillie experienced paroxysms of love and guilt. She tried to placate Yetta by dubbing her with the unethnic name “Vicki” and taking her to Carmel to meet Winter and Steffens, Robert Cantwell, William Saroyan, and Langston Hughes, who was not “driven” out of Carmel after all.50 When Tillie posted “The Strike” to the Partisan Review, on Monday, 13 August, she found at General Delivery a special-delivery letter from Bennett Cerf.
Cerf sent her a dozen Modern Library books free and offered to gamble a “$200.00 advance immediately against a 15% royalty on your novel.” On 14 August, the San Francisco News called Tillie Lerner, alias Teresa Landale, “the most sought-after writer in the United States.” It ran a sketch of a jailed demure young woman, supposedly Tillie.51 She, Abe, Karla, and Yetta then moved to a studio apartment at the back of a tall Victorian house on Broderick Street, an address Winter and Steffens kept secret from everyone but Cerf. When the New Republic sent a check for Tillie’s arrest story, Steffens wrote “Darling”: “Dont cash it yet—keep it for your trial and wave it under the nose of the DA.”52
Regardless of the Bill of Rights, the Examiner and the Chronicle justified mass arrests, book burnings, and vigilante attacks with the claim that strikes were “preparation for the armed insurrection.” Abe and Tillie, along with comrades like Rahv, Hicks, Lyon, and Olsen, preferred words to guns. After belatedly discovering that Tillie Lerner was one of the “vagrants” arrested in late July, William Saroyan called on lawyer Anderson. The son of long-suffering Armenian immigrants, only four years older than Tillie, Saroyan was a more assertive high school dropout. He pontificated that writers ought “to forget rules . . . , to spurn adjectives . . . , to learn typing for speed, and, above all, to live life to its emotional peaks.”53 He assured Cerf that Tillie would survive “the fascism unharmed.”
Her trial began on 20 August with Anderson using a barrage of supportive publications, letters, and telegrams to establish that Tillie Lerner was “a writer, not a vagrant.” The New Masses sponsored a New York rally for the “new genius T. Lerner,” at which Ethel Schochet showed off Tillie’s photo and conferred with Philip Rahv about a publisher for her.54 For once thinking like a capitalist, he said Tillie should sign with the firm that offered her the most money.
After a day at her trial, Saroyan took the streetcar home with Tillie, and they exchanged writing samples. Saroyan’s claim, in “Seventy Thousand Assyrians,” that there is only one race—babies, before they are taught language and difference—reminded Tillie of Ida’s insistence that there was only one race—the human. Still, she flirtatiously insulted him, wondering if he were a fake. Surprisingly, Saroyan said, “I probably was.” (He had just earned $100 from Vanity Fair for a glib story based on a cousin starving in Brooklyn. Saroyan told Cerf he sent the cousin $15.) Despite Tillie’s proposal that her novel be printed in “a cheap edition, fifty cents or so, so that it will reach the masses,” Saroyan advised Cerf that she would be a good investment because “she hates rather beautifully.”
In the New Republic Cantwell now described “Literary Life in California” as so repressive that Tillie Lerner (spelled correctly) spent time “dodging the police” rather than writing. The Examiner and Chronicle reported that, on 22 August, the jury hung in the case of “Mrs. Theresa Landale.” Still, she, like gangster Al Capone, could face jail. Then Judge Beber in Omaha appealed to a jurist in San Francisco, arguing that sentencing her would subvert justice, that literary genius required encouragement, and that the accused was his cousin. The retrial was cancelled and Tillie released, though Dave Lyon and other Reds remained jailed.55 She would say she was released as “a good mother with a good character record.” Rae knew better—Tillie should thank Judge Beber “for his help ha ha ha.”
When she returned to the Broderick Street apartment, Tillie found another special delivery from Bennett Cerf, who was publishing a one-volume edition of Lenin’s writings. With Lenin and Lerner on its list, “Random House should certainly win the attention of every radical in the country.” Meanwhile, a fellow SERA worker introduced Abe to Louis Freedman, west coast representative of Macmillan Publishers, whom Abe brought to Broderick Street. Random House’s gift of twelve books and its offer of $200 appealed to Tillie, but Freedman said Cerf and Klopfer were “just publishers of fine books and modern library—never had any real sales.” It would be “ruinous” to sign with Random House.
With Karla cuddling, Abe making love to her, and the country’s best publishers begging to sign her, Tillie’s mood was euphoric, until Sue Goldfarb gave birth to a stillborn baby after four days of agonizing labor. Tillie was saddened and guilty too, especially after Sue wrote her as “dear generous, thoughtful, thoughtless Tilda.”56 To compensate, she vowed to write “something of Sue, lying there in the hospital,” and “something of those other mothers.” She recalled her painful reunion with Karla and losing “that other one.” She lamented “my baby, my little baby, dont die, why did you die.”57
Saroyan wrote Cerf about Tillie: “the mob is supreme to her. To me one mob is as bad as another, and I hate them Communist, Rotarian, Presbyterian, Armenian, American, any cockeyed kind.” Still Saroyan promised to “run right down to her place and have another talk,” which he did on 27 August. He was there when Abe appeared with Louis Freedman, who offered Tillie an advance of $500 “to pay for her daughter Karla’s [hernia] operation, and to enable Tillie to get across the bay to Berkeley and have a house with a garden.” After Freedman and Abe left, Tillie confided in Saroyan that “she’d rather go with Random House.” He helped Yetta ready her bags for her return to Omaha and wrote Cerf that the whole Lerner family “is brilliant; six children, and all remarkable. Yetta was thirteen a couple of days ago but has more sense than three college graduates.”
Jail time had weakened Tillie’s stamina; then Karla’s hysterical greeting and Sue’s loss had upset her emotional balance; and now the tug of war between rival publishers further aggravated her weakened lungs. She ended up in St. Luke’s Hospital with a rattling cough and high fever. Meanwhile, Jack Olsen received more than eight thousand votes in the primary, hardly a challenge to the winner’s 171,000 votes or proof of capitalism’s downfall.58 On 29 August, the New Republic printed Tillie’s “Thousand-Dollar Vagrant.” She presented the judge as a benighted dullard, the policemen as racist beasts, who beat a “red bastard,” saying “we know you’re all Jews or greasers or niggers.” One promised to “take the whole bunch of you, pour oil over you, and burn you up like they do the niggers down south.” She included a perhaps teasing (certainly thoughtless) bit of dialogue with one “bull.” He asked, “‘ You married?’ I don’t answer. ‘You’re Jack Olson’s [sic] girl aren’t you? Aren’t you?’ I don’t answer.” Sue thought Abe was irritated by the “awful strain of Party work.” Actually, he was jealous over that reference to Olsen and Tillie’s camaraderie with Saroyan. Cerf wanted to “PERSUADE YOU TO COME WITH RANDOM HOUSE WHERE I CAN HANDLE YOUR BOOKS PERSONALLY WONT YOU WIRE ME COLLECT BENNETT CERF.”
When Morris Lerner wrote for the Weekly Omaha Jewish Press an article on Cantwell’s praise for “The Iron Throat,” he listed honors won by all six Lerner children, reminded readers of Tillie’s comic “Squeaks” column, claimed that her story appeared in the “Parisian Review” and was “living in San Francisco with her husband and their 8-months-old daughter.” (Citing Karla’s age as eight rather than eighteen months was a typo; renaming the Partisan Review as the “Parisian Review” was intentionally self-protective.59)
Morris also wrote a long articulate letter to Tillie; she regretted that her jail sentence would reflect badly on him, Yetta, and Karla and vindicate teachers who still considered Tillie “a liar, a cheat, a thief, a radical.” A published novel should acquit Tillie and prove that she was “working for humanity & at the same time for a beautiful child & a brilliant husband.” A Jewish English teacher planned to read Mazie’s soliloquy to her class as a superior “example of analytical thoughts running through a child’s mind,” but Sam Beber thought that, if she planned to make “Mazie a radical organizer in her later years & have her attempt to save the world,” it would be a “most mediocre & worn-out plot . . . which would be read only by your Communist friends.”60 Tillie could not think of another ending when she was ill and half a dozen publishers hankered to see a whole novel, immediately.
On probably 28 August, Cerf upped the ante: “WILL GIVE YOU FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS ADVANCE IMMEDIATELY AGAINST STRAIGHT FIFTEEN PERCENT ROYALTY ON YOUR NOVEL AND WILL SEND YOU MORE LATER IF YOU NEED IT PLEASE WIRE ME AT ONCE COLLECT AND IF SATISFACTORY WE WILL MAIL CONTRACT BENNETT CERF.” However tempting Cerf’s offer was, pressing hospital bills compelled Tillie to sign with Macmillan.61 Saroyan regretted that Random House had lost “my pal Tillie: really the swellest gal imaginable.” She and Abe used Macmillan’s advance to move to Berkeley, where they rented a basement apartment in a handsomely shingled house on Spruce Street.
The austere cover of the next Partisan Review carried the words “TILLIE LERNER, ‘THE STRIKE’” in large black letters in a broad red stripe on the cover.62 Rahv sent a copy to “S. Lerner” in Omaha. Rather than having her novel sold for fifty cents a copy, she now told Cerf that she wanted wealthy people to buy it at $2.50; poor people to read it in libraries. She said her arrest had provoked Abe’s firing.63 Though she had signed with Macmillan and taken its money, she told Cerf: “if you really think you’re the best publisher for me, I’ll take your word, and hope I’m not a sap.” She put the letter in her purse and took it with her the next day, 11 September, when she saw Dr. Ralph Reynolds. After hearing that her lungs were healing, she walked to Saroyan’s place.
They lunched, visited art galleries, sampled book stores, and walked in the park, where they could see piers erected for an amazing suspension bridge to be called “Golden Gate.” When Saroyan took her to dinner, all the while singing the praises of Random House, she showed him her unmailed letter.64 Thrilled that his “pal Tillie” might not be lost, he insisted she mail the letter to Cerf immediately. As soon as she took the ferry to Berkeley, Saroyan fired off an airmail letter informing Cerf that the battle was not over. Tillie’s book would sell even to “people who don’t give a God damn about the Communist movement.” He believed that “technique with her as yet is instinctive, subconscious; she simply writes, slam bang, and no fooling around: which is swell.” (He did not know that Tillie had written rapidly only when confined by pregnancy in 1932 and cloistered by Winter and Steffens in early August 1934.) Though she was “not easy to figure out,” Saroyan guessed that Cerf could “convince her Random House is her publisher.” He took up the gauntlet and wired Tillie that he could send the “necessary funds for you to repay Macmillan” its $250 with “no strings attached.”
Tillie wired Random House: “ACCEPT OFFER WILL EXTRICATE MYSELF IMMEDIATELY UPON RECEIPT OF MONEY LETTER FOLLOWS GLAD TO MEET KLOPFER.” (Donald Klopfer was on his way west.) Cerf recorded in his diary: “20 Sep Tillie Lerner wires acceptance of our terms” and sent another $250. She canceled her contract with Macmillan, splurged on a radio and a jar of her former cell-mate’s expensive face cream, waited for Klopfer, and worried that she might be pregnant. “The Strike” brought Tillie more fame; the Partisan Review quickly sold out; other magazines begged for stories and articles.65 Tillie had none, so she sent the New Masses one of her YCL pamphlets, thinking message should trump art, but the New Masses rejected it. Then a letter from Freedman, sent to “Mrs. A. J. Goldfarb” on Broderick Street and forwarded to Spruce Street in Berkeley, announced that Macmillan could not and would not release her.
As soon as Donald Klopfer arrived in San Francisco, he and Saroyan rushed across the bay. Tall, handsome, and only ten years older than Tillie, Klopfer treated the Goldfarbs to dinner, reassuring Abe and delighting Karla, whom he referred to as “Carla,” missing the Marxist connection. When he produced a contract, Tillie used his expensive fountain pen to sign her name in legible letters. She left the date blank. With some fatherly words, Cerf wired Tillie another $250. Returning Macmillan’s advance, she was $250 to the good. She felt like a successful capitalist—until Macmillan insisted she was still its property.
Tillie seemed like a tiny boat caught in the wakes of two ocean liners. Her affairs were “so bawled up” Saroyan considered recruiting “some new genius” like Dave Lyon.66 Then Freedman, as Tillie wrote Cerf, “sleuthed me down” in Berkeley and scolded her like a child for making a “ghastly mistake.”67 At Macmillan’s urging, Granville Hicks sent her a letter saying that, though Macmillan was a “rather stodgy house,” it still published his Great Tradition and would publish his biography of John Reed. Wanting nothing to do with stodginess, Tillie proposed to demand $1000 of Macmillan, which would force it to release her. Appalled, Cerf warned her that demanding more money than she had agreed to would make her seem “an insincere little bitch.” He suggested she plead poor health to Macmillan, as she did on 15 October, which was also the publication date of Saroyan’s The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories. After mailing Macmillan her excuse, Tillie spent the rest of the day celebrating with Saroyan. They chased about San Francisco and huddled, she wrote Cerf, in “an alley eating persimmons and having a fight because he tried to tell me poverty had virtues and shouldn’t be abolished.” He said that Tillie remained “very much” active in the Party but would be freed “for about six months after she reports some trials in Sacramento, or something: she hates to feel like a writer and is afraid her pals in the Party won’t like it if she stays away from them.” He had thought she was “not easy to figure out,” but he had succeeded. She had internalized the notion that, being individualistic, writing was elitist and isolationist. Then Cerf advanced on the “Lerner battlefront” by inviting Tillie to pose for a Random House jacket cover. Though flattered, she defiantly wore her YCL uniform for the photo, while meekly assuring Cerf “the arm band and hammer and sickle won’t show.” She promised to get the first half of her novel typed for Random House. Then she telegrammed: “THEY REFUSE TO RELEASE ME WIRE NIGHT LETTER WITH SUGGESTIONS.” She felt like the “first case of rigor mortis in a still alive and suffering being.”
She joked about her “almost collapsed body,” but then she did collapse after apparently another abortion.68 From her bed, she dictated to Abe a long letter telling Cerf that she had been assigned to cover criminal syndicalism trials “for the Party press,” but the job would delay her only “a few weeks” and give her “momentum to tackle that impossible second half.” She assured him Saroyan’s Young Man was selling “like hot-cakes.” Like a film treatment Billy Wilder sold as he fled Hitler and like Hollywood’s Stand Up and Cheer, Saroyan’s fiction distracted Americans from the doldrums.69 Tillie’s novel would compel them to understand causes and solutions to depression doldrums.
Tillie dictated a letter to Granville Hicks, with a copy to Cerf, saying she had had a 104° fever and needed “dough for the hospital, etc.” She also suggested that when she signed with Macmillan she had “no idea it was binding.” Her “frankly revolutionary” novel needed a smaller, less capitalistic publisher. Still bed-ridden, Tillie studied news about the upcoming criminal syndicalism (CS) trials of eighteen men and women. Defendant Martin Wilson, a lawyer for the International Labor Defense, out on bail, was making speeches connecting the “Vag” arrests of Tillie and others to the CS “Frame-Up” trials.70 She was appalled to read in the Western Worker that CS convictions would effectively outlaw strikes and finish the labor movement.71
As a teenager Tillie had been inspired by Upton Sinclair’s exposé of the meat-packing industry in The Jungle. Now his campaign for governor of California, under the slogan “EPIC”—“End Poverty In California”—proposed to give jobs to the unemployed, a formula challenging CP candidates. In the Young Worker, Jack Olsen wrote an article illogically branding Sinclair as a “cog in the same machine of the ship-owners, land corporations and industrial associations.” Both Tillie and Olsen saw Sinclair’s sin as converting from the Socialist to the Democratic, rather than the Communist, Party.72
Tillie’s promise to spend only “a few weeks” on the criminal syndicalism trials ignored her actual assignment: to send the International Labor Defense “all clippings” about the trials, to write articles for the Western Worker and the Young Worker, to send carbon copies of “every story you write . . . plus an article for” the December Labor Defender, and to make a pamphlet on the trials.73 She began pasting clippings into a San Francisco phone book and sent the second half of her first chapter to the Anvil: The Proletarian Fiction Magazine, which announced it would publish “‘Skeleton Children,’ a novelette by Tillie Lerner.”74 Already a famous novelist (without a novel), Tillie had been floating on publishers’ praise; now she was sinking under commitments to them.75
In a second letter to Hicks, with a copy to Cerf, Tillie opined that Random House authors Proust, O’Neill, Jeffers, and Stein were “guys that stink with decay,” while Saroyan was egotistical and ignorant of communism. (She advised Hicks to tutor him.76) Still, she preferred Random House to Macmillan. She reiterated a familiar distinction between art, being unsure “about the art of my book,” and message, being “sure [it] is propaganda.” She also made a startling admission: “I’m ashamed to say I haven’t been working on the book—as a matter of fact haven’t touched it since I wrote it a couple years ago.” She had started to work on it in Stockton just before she and Abe had “moved to Frisco which meant I could be active in the movement again—and I forgot about the book.” Though she had forgotten to be a novelist in the flush of being a revolutionary, publishers had convinced her to resurrect it during her three-month leave of absence from YCL work.
While she panned Gertrude Stein for stinking with purist decay, Cerf was entertaining Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas before their tour of the States.77 Still Cerf took time to tackle the “Tillie Lerner business” with a visit to New Masses offices on East Twenty-Seventh Street and a lunch with Hicks, who felt “rather full of The Strange Case of Tillie Lerner.” Reluctantly, he promised Cerf that, though Tillie’s contract was “legal as all hell,” if she broke it, he would keep Macmillan from suing her.78
On 3–5 November, in the rambling terraced Getaway overlooking the Pacific, Ella Winter and Lincoln Steffens entertained various notables and Tillie, Abe, Karla, and Sue Goldfarb. With Winter and Steffens providing a phone, Tillie took the dramatic step of placing a call across the continent. On 5 November, Bennett Cerf announced that Tillie Lerner was forsaking Macmillan to become a Random House author. In Controversy, Winter gossiped about movie stars and Tillie Lerner who had “wanted to walk on the beach, and to know whether great men always look great.”79 Steffens was, Winter wrote Tillie, “very fond of you and believes in you, and your gifts.” Winter warned: “so don’t squander.”
Before the election, Hollywood moguls had launched a campaign to smear Upton Sinclair as a Communist and coerced employees to contribute to his Republican opponent, who won handily. Communist candidates made hardly a showing.80 Democrats increased their strength in the U.S. House and Senate. On 6 November, while votes were being counted, Abe drove Tillie to Sacramento, where they arrived “just in time” to hear African-American Angelo Herndon, who had been jailed in Georgia in 1933 under an outdated law against slave insurrections. Out on bail and en route to visit Tom Mooney in jail, Herndon was telling people about his outrageous arrest and other miscarriages of justice. After the speech, Tillie and Abe discovered, she wrote Klopfer, that the “battered portable I’ve always used to click out my stuff on was heisted out of the car last nite along with the little radio I splurged on first thing I got your advance—and was so damn tickled about.”
In Sacramento, a sympathetic family offered Abe, Karla, and Tillie a room. She wrote Klopfer that Abe would transcribe eight chapters when she finished covering the trials. A year ago she and Abe and Karla had “bummed into Stockton” with “$6.75 in the world plus a typewriter, and nobody had ever heard of me.” She was giddy because 1934 had been “a lot better—dazzling in fact, except we don’t have the typewriter. By next year this time I’ll have a book out, and it looks like all sorts of other things.”
With Hicks on Random House’s side, Macmillan at last capitulated. On 9 November, Tillie wired Cerf: “OBTAINED MY RELEASE HORRAY.” He wired back “BEST NEWS WE HAVE HAD AROUND HERE IN WEEKS.” The contract between Modern Library Inc. and Random House and Tillie Lerner of Spruce Street Berkeley gave her a five-hundred-dollar advance and 15 percent of earnings, a sensational offer for a first novel and a promising moment for a democratic American literature. Klopfer announced “a great marriage between Tillie Lerner and Random House,” which encouraged Rae Schochet to claim kin and demand a free copy of “that book Ulises” [James Joyce’s Ulysses].
Back in August, Tillie had assured Cerf that if she had “three hours a day” she could finish in three months. Almost three months had passed, but Cerf and Klopfer had received nothing of the novel, and their telegrams were returned. Finally, she remembered to write that she was “with Jevons in Sacramento. Will send 8 chapters.” She covered a grand jury hearing for the Western Worker, making an odd equation of stuttering and lying: “Fake Witnesses Stutter Their Parts Despite Many Careful Rehearsals.”
While the Hearst papers continued to fulminate about a Red menace, leftist papers presciently described fascism’s threat, protesting Nationalist China’s forcing peasant rebels on a “Long March” to an outlying region. In Austria, Dollfuss was “Slain by Nazis,” and the Young Worker warned “World War Looms.” When Berlin was chosen site of the 1936 Olympic games, the Young Worker recognized that Hitler intended to make “Games a Fascist Tool” for the master race. The Western saw criminal syndicalism trials as harbingers of American fascism. The Young Worker predicted a German alliance with Japan “FOR WAR.” The Western saw that messianic leaders, like Huey P. Long and Father Coughlin, cultivated followings in hopes of becoming American Hitlers.81 Nobel Prize–winning novelist Sinclair Lewis ironically called his satire on Long and Coughlin It Can’t Happen Here.
Klopfer warned Tillie not to get “into a mess with the authorities,” but one night she skipped out on Abe and Karla with Mike (probably Mike Quin) to paint “Smash the Criminal Syndicalism Frameup” all over town. When the police approached, Tillie and Mike scaled a fence and hid in a Catholic school’s tubelike fire escape. After the cops left, Tillie began coughing. She confessed to Klopfer: “when it comes to painting slogans or plastering up stickers a madness overcomes me.” She went to Dr. Reynolds, who told her “absolutely not to go back to Sacramento.” Cerf and Klopfer were relieved; she could get back to her novel.
Word spread that Tillie had had an “attack” so Ella Winter invited her to Carmel to make party contacts.82 On Saturday, 17 November, Tillie (with Winter, Steffens, and Abe too) “went up to the city to meet Doletsky the head of Tass,” the Russian news and propaganda bureau, who invited Tillie to Moscow.83 She promised Cerf to spend “eight hours a day on” her novel; although the second part would be “tough to tackle,” she planned to finish by the end of February.
Relieved by illness from covering the trial, Tillie took Karla to Stockton, while Abe stayed on in Sacramento, perhaps taking over her journalism assignment. Resurrecting the frayed pages written in 1932, she had to admit to Cerf they now seemed “sorta childish.” She told Cerf it was “just as well” she had one more assignment and was “not working on the novel.” She belatedly realized that sending Cerf a copy of her letter saying major Random House authors “stink with decay” had been tactless. Cerf claimed he was “not the least bit peeved” by that remark, but he was irritated because she was “harder to keep up with than a Mexican jumping bean.”84 He quipped: “Donald says you are very good-looking. Is he on the level?” Her novel should be “item No. 1 on the Fall 1935 Random House List.” Tillie need not worry over “financial matters for the next two months.”
From Sacramento, Abe assured Tillie “remember, I am always your friend.” She tried to write an article for the Labor Defender but “tore it up in disgust.” She wrote the Defender a letter supposedly from Abe saying that his wife Tillie Lerner was too sick to write. Forging his signature, she admitted to him that she was a “liar.” She was being “good to” Karla and “making her things to eat.” She insisted, “I will be alright,” words which suggest how distraught she really was. She needed to feel “no have tos. Just the novel.”
Though Tillie told herself to “do the poverty & beet field chapters first,” she needed to “outline article.”85 She had gotten a letter from the county jail, which she used for a Young Worker article. Don Bigham wrote that his mother worked in a cotton mill and died of pneumonia. Tillie reworked the facts: “his mother, with the lint of the South Carolina cotton mill strangling in her lungs, coughed to death one night, leaving him an orphan.” He said he “worked in a bakery after school hours from the age of nine.” Tillie said he learned a “lesson in child labor when he was nine and earned his board and keep by greasing pie pans until the early hours of morning.”86 Printed as “Why They’re Trying Don,” her specific details and dramatic style created more empathy than any courtroom journalism could have managed.
Abe was husband, mentor, and always friend, but Tillie blamed her writing troubles on domesticity. Around 10 December, she left him for San Francisco, taking a room on Rhode Island Street. At 37 Grove, she was greeted as a jail bird who had established the brutality and bigotry of San Francisco police, the journalist who had exposed the injustice in the criminal syndicalism laws, the fiery speaker who could convert crowds, the novelist who would tell the proletariat’s story, and the most beautiful of Communist crusaders.
With Klopfer “itching to see those first eight chapters of the novel,” Tillie outlined: “The childhood. Hunted. Poverty, the drinking, swaggering father, but proud; Anna, hard, bitter, strong; the children, and their own bitter suffering. Migratory—the freight car boxed in from Portland to Minneapolis. The Hole Up.” Her sense of Anna’s bitterness was lifted from a surprise letter from Ida, who felt “so unlucky” to be unable to “control” written English, as Tillie could in “The Strike.” Ida insisted that Sam was “my tragade [tragedy].” He was so busy politicking for the Workmen’s Circle, Ida felt alone, and “I dont here mats [hear much] of Fame” (apparently Tillie’s fame). Though she had “somesadisfaksun” [some satisfaction], Ida felt “boren to be dad a lif” [born to be dead in life]. Tillie saw this bitterness as “the burden of being poor and a mother.”87
Sue Goldfarb had recovered enough strength to be “ready for Karla” so Tillie left her daughter with Sue and listened for her characters to resurrect themselves: “after the streetcars are quiet, the solitary footsteps, the voices that walked into my room and waited there for me to finish and start them.” She had to cope with unconnected pages, sloppy notes, and “gaps. Why didn’t I type it carefully, make carbons [and] put it away.”88 Looking over her typescript, she noticed that Abe had crossed out a talky query, “could you not make a cameo of this and pin it onto your aesthetic hearts?” Abe’s editing encouraged her to delete such comments and convey her message indirectly, in conversations, descriptions, and dramatized events.89 Tillie sent Klopfer two of the promised eight chapters; she said she had lost the rest.
On probably 17 December, after midnight, Tillie retyped jottings in her notebook as a frenzied meditation on writing: “Fever over the body, an unearthly glow, a burning. Faribault in late winter, in early spring. Such pain. Rae’s voice ‘lie still dont you know you came here to get well.’ But the words swollen big in me like a child. My people lashing about blindly. And suddenly I am writing. Blurred days, voices or warning; tears that drowned somewhere in the throat, and Joe York’s face, flaming and dissolving in a mist, urging me on like a flag.” Acknowledging the troubles of “my people” as catalysts for her writing, she vowed to “harness” herself into creativity. The next day she wrote Cerf a cooler letter saying that her Rhode Island Street address was good for three months, unless the party went “underground,” a clear admission that she was not devoting herself exclusively to writing. She said she was more mousy than good-looking but kept others “in a sort of daze so they never really get a good look.” Photographer Willard Van Dyke got a good look and produced exuberant pictures of Tillie in a cotton dress, bought at J. C. Penney’s at a “79¢ sale.”
Alone, Tillie wrote Abe “only forgive me.” Images of his love and kindness flooded over her, as she recalled “the Xmas walk” in Kansas City just before they eloped. Suddenly, she felt guilty and longed to see him.90 For Christmas, she sent Klopfer a bubble pipe from Karla and Cerf a “real literary classic” by Angelo Herndon, whose message was “You Cannot Kill the Working Class.” She took Karla back to the Stockton farmhouse, where she found birthday presents for Karla from Rae and the Lerners.
Since Cantwell’s article had thrust Tillie into the limelight, she had been arrested, jailed, and released, hospitalized with lung trouble, had collapsed after an abortion or miscarriage, campaigned for Communist candidates, covered the CS trials, and gotten sick again. She had spent weekends in Carmel, met the Soviet head of Tass, written time-consuming, feverish letters, involved herself in party agitations, and seesawed back and forth in her relations with publishers and Abe. Cerf and Klopfer were used to dealing with literary geniuses, but Tillie was zanier than most. She was undisciplined, high strung, full of excuses, and passionate. She might be an untutored genius who disdained apostrophes, but she wrote authentically from the working classes. Her prose achieved a beauty and power unmatched by proletarian writers like Jack Conroy and Josephine Herbst. She might put others in “a sort of daze,” but Cerf and Klopfer knew the ropes. Her novels should indeed become the “inevitable extension” of socially relevant work by Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, and John Dos Passos. She might even rival Dos Passos’s and Faulkner’s experiments with narrative form and thus conquer the divide between art and ideology. The year 1934 had been a turning point for the country and an annus mirablis for Tillie Lerner. She promised to send Cerf and Klopfer the first half of her novel early in the new year.