A passion and a purpose inform its pages: love for my incomparable medium, literature; hatred for all that, societally rooted, unnecessarily lessens and denies it.
—Tillie Olsen, preface to Silences, 1978
As 1975 began, Tillie invited Candace Falk to walk with her. Falk expected to meander along picking up shells or admiring the sunset, but Tillie would don her grand cape and march, undaunted by wind or spray. Trooping toward the Natural Bridges State Beach, Falk once remarked on some tacky little houses they passed. Tillie halted, looked Falk in the eyes, and pronounced that these houses were owned by working-class people without time or money for good taste. She would marvel at the Monarch butterflies, almost covering the park’s eucalyptus trees, and then set off again. Because Falk was writing her dissertation on Emma Goldman, Tillie bombarded her with information on communism, labor history, and radical women authors. When they returned, she would dart into the house, leaving Falk feeling she had been sucked up and spit out by a tornado.
Since 1972, when Congress had passed the ERA and the Feminist Press brought out Life in the Iron Mills with Tillie’s perceptive “Afterword,” many books by and about women had been published, and thirty-three states had ratified the ERA. Still, some argued that, thanks to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the ERA was unnecessary. Others argued that it was dangerous. Phyllis Schlafly gained fame by claiming that the ERA would draft women into battle, force them into men’s bathrooms, and rob them of husbands’ support. On 16 January, two days after her sixty-third birthday, Tillie gave her talk on “Denied Genius” for the UCSC women’s voices group, relating the suppression of nineteenth-century women to the coddling Schlafly claimed modern women needed. Schlafly was, however, taking a toll on even such an ardent feminist as Tillie. She objected to having her work “increasingly ghettoized as Women’s Studies, women’s stuff only, not literature to be taken seriously.” When the Woman Today Book Club chose Tell Me a Riddle and Yonnondio as selections, ordering one thousand copies of each book, Tillie protested to Lawrence that a woman’s book club was “another residue of sexism.”
That spring, two awards gave Tillie the support she craved. The American Academy and the National Institute of Arts & Letters recognized her literary achievement with $3000 and the Guggenheim Foundation, despite her confused and late explanation, finally awarded her a fellowship of $12,000.1 She filled in her Guggenheim budget form as a still needy Tillie: “married, although living apart,” with a husband “off social security,” and a father “always partially dependent upon my help,” the last a definite untruth.2
Instead of settling down to write her promised “great yield,” Tillie diverted herself writing notes to almost every promising young woman writer, addressed as a “dear true” writer, “bloodkin, heartkin,” or “beloved equal younger sister—writer, [of a ] beloved future.”3 They were thrilled to receive such tender notes from the iconic Tillie Olsen. Alice Walker even clasped one like a talisman against the notoriously sexist Ishmael Reed. Walker revered Zora Neale Hurston as a lost mother-figure and hoped Tillie could be a living literary mother-figure.4 Annie Dillard more skeptically supposed that Tillie was “rounding us all up” to secure their loyalty.5
Traveling like an itinerant preacher was not only diversion but avoidance. Tillie flew to New York for the American Academy ceremony, and Edith Konecky met her at Kennedy airport, settled her into Hannah Green’s apartment, and entertained her with the increasingly wacky Maeve Brennan. Tillie began buzzing in and out of the city for a sojourn at the Yaddo Artists’ Colony and various talks and readings.6 Though Konecky now found Tillie “a bit of a prima donna,” she taxied her back and forth to airports.7 After Tillie read at SUNY Buffalo, the news arrived that the United States was evacuating Saigon. At a reception, Tillie took the floor. Though she credited students and faculty, “You did this,” she appropriated the event to herself: “You must not let them take your history from you, the way they did with my generation, the generation of the thirties.”8 She meant the suppression of leftist voices during the McCarthy era, a remark that fit her heightened concern for silenced people. The American Academy held a ceremony on 21 May. Its citation praised her “poetic fiction” that “very nearly constitutes a new form for fiction.” Later, Tillie marked up a copy with what even she called “snotty revisings.” She crossed out “very nearly” and wrote “why qualify?” Such revisions were, if not “snotty,” arrogant.9 She felt her superiority justified her impositions. She wrote Mary Anne Ferguson, “Dear One: you must not complicate your too-demanded time” but then suggested “meeting the plane, having dinner, seeing me off on the bus, even driving me up” to MacDowell. Ferguson met her at Logan Airport on 20 September, took her to dinner, housed her overnight, drove her to MacDowell, and loaned her a box packed with electric blanket, linens, thesaurus, dictionary, and soup pot.
Once settled in, Tillie had the peace, solitude, and now the financial support she had craved. With Guggenheim money arriving in quarterly $3000 payments, she could write the novel she had been promising since 1959, or Requa, or her woman book. She decided on the latter, as the simpler, though her copy-outs and notes sometimes seemed “masses of inchoateness, wellings up, dischargings, addings to the years’ now hopeless disordered accumulations.” Facing written gems and detritus, Tillie almost gave up: “it is fragments, reader—if they live enough in you, you will write it in your head yourself.”10
As fall became frigid winter, Tillie began to yearn for the “isolation, health” back in Santa Cruz. She left MacDowell, depositing a duffel bag of scarves and warm clothes and Ferguson’s box of supplies in Peterborough with Rosellen Brown.11 She was in San Francisco for holiday parties, gift-giving, and the yearly MLA meeting, held there in 1975. The MLA Commission on the Status of Women could celebrate many successes, but it had not impacted a large session on the “Jewish American Writer.” Tillie was so angry that only male writers were discussed she lowered her reprint fee to $500 so that “Tell Me a Riddle” could appear in an anthology of Jewish American Fiction. She insisted to Scott Turow that there was more Jewishness in Yonnondio and one Malamud novel than in all the touted male “Jewish novelists.”12
By year’s end, Tillie had been recognized by the American Academy, the Guggenheim, the MLA, Ferguson in her anthology Images of Women, Blanche Gelfant in the Massachusetts Review, and Robert Coles in the New Republic. He said: “Everything she has written has become almost immediately a classic. . . . She offers an artist’s compassion and forgiveness but makes plain how fierce the various struggles must continue to be.”13 Despite all this acclaim, Tillie had written no more fiction. Her woman book defied organization. Only one more state had ratified the ERA in 1975.
The New Year began poorly, as Tillie turned sixty-four on 14 January 1976. She was in debt to Faber and Faber because English sales for Yonnondio had not matched advances. With only two Guggenheim payments left, she asked for an extension, which was against Guggenheim policy, as its procure explained. She further distracted herself by marking up the Delta Tell Me a Riddle for a corrected Laurel paperback. Then, on 18 February, she heard from Harry that Sam Lerner, aged ninety-one, had died at the Workmen’s Circle home. Tillie sent her corrected Delta edition to Lawrence, saying “my father died and I am in a mourning time.” Gene Lerner was in New York and traveled with Lillian to Bethesda for the funeral. When the rabbi asked the congregation to stand, Gene and Lillian did not, but Jann, Harry, and Vicki did, and Harry recommitted himself in Sam’s memory to preserve Yiddish literature. Mary Anne Ferguson recalled that Tillie had “all sorts of guilt feelings” about seeing her father so rarely in the retirement home. Tillie sought to make amends by suggesting that Jann move to Santa Cruz.14
When Jann Lerner Brodinsky moved into an efficiency apartment on Cliff Street, Julie and Rob Edwards, Kathie Olsen Hoye, and Tillie welcomed her; her landlord let her borrow an old record player, and Tillie sent her a check, which Jann used for yoga lessons.15 Harry wrote Tillie he was “really relieved” by “the warm reception you gave her.” Jann had never asked for financial help from their father, but she had no job, no permanent home, and only the $1000 Harry advanced her from Sam’s estate for moving costs. After funeral and tombstone expenses, Sam’s estate left $1417 for each child so Harry proposed that the other siblings waive their shares, which left $6083 for Jann. The siblings agreed, though Tillie asked for $100 for each daughter.
Tillie often blamed presses and anthology editors for “violating” her image.16 She needed to mold decades of inchoate notes on her reading and speaking into a work of transformative nonfiction, but the messier her organization, the more imperious she became. She sent portions to Delacorte demanding that someone else change every “his” to “her” and check quotations for accuracy and copyright status, even while only she could “make changes in the work.”
When Tillie and Alice Walker spoke at a symposium in Portland, Oregon, organizers cut off Tillie’s meandering talk so that others could speak. The event went, in Walker’s words, “all wrong,” but Tillie excused herself by saying she was mourning her father. Walker now found Tillie narcissistic; Tillie thought Walker prideful; their disagreement echoed a quarrel between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass. Though the two had worked together for abolition, Stanton patronized the former slave and then resented that black males got the vote before white women, as Tillie patronized Walker and then resented her fame. Tillie had always objected to quarrels among supposed allies: dividing Socialists from Communists, the CIO from the AFL, the ILWU from the Teamsters, and now pro- and antimotherhood and pro- and antilesbian feminists.17 Yet ignoring Walker’s request to endorse her novel Meridian divided Tillie from Walker.
Having promised Lawrence to complete the woman book by April 1976, on 1 May, Tillie used a card saying, “I NEED MORE TIME AND I PROBABLY ALWAYS WILL” to say “Sorry, dear Sam. But it will be worth it.” She now agreed with him to title the woman book Silences. She invited Bay Area women writers to a party on 25 May for visiting Norwegian scholar Pers Seyerstad. She was mugged by young black women. She excused another delay by describing a Yosemite family holiday as an obligatory “3 week all year planned seemingly unpostponable ungetting-out-of family camping time.” When the Olsens left the mountains, they found that the Democratic presidential nominee was Jimmy Carter. Tillie sought out the “curl and indifference of the sea” and moved alone into the Santa Cruz garage apartment formerly occupied by Candace Falk, supported by her last Guggenheim installment.
Disorganized Tillie kept rewriting, reordering, and adding selections, sending different versions to Merloyd Lawrence, nonfiction editor for Seymour Lawrence Inc. Even to Tillie, assembling Silences seemed “one fiasco after another.” She told the Lawrences she could not even recall what sections she had already sent. Finding the manuscript, as they politely wrote, “difficult to follow,” they asked her to prepare, at their cost, “a finished and complete manuscript, clearly typed, without written notations.” They begged “please endeavor to make one clean cohesive copy that can be easily understood by a printer.” While Tillie drove her publishers nearly mad with her muddled texts and peremptory demands, her loyal coterie thought her beyond criticism. Even when reviewing Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, Annie Gottlieb put in a plug for Tillie for dignifying the “uniquely female experience as a source of human knowledge.”18 Theatre teacher Bobbi Ausubel staged “I Stand Here Ironing” in New England and wanted to film “Tell Me a Riddle.” Mindy Affrime and Rachel Lyon, founding a film company named Godmother Productions, wanted to make “Tell Me a Riddle” their first production.
Tillie had faulted Gerald Ford for pardoning Nixon and was glad that Ford was defeated on 2 November. Like other West Coast lefties, though, she was uneasy that he was defeated by Carter, a Southern Baptist and former Georgia governor. She was worried that no further state had ratified the ERA, and she was distressed by a second request from the Guggenheim Foundation for a progress report. She wrote that “the term was given over mostly to the work of imaginative fiction, novel length, long in the often-interrupted making. It is nearer to its conclusion as a result of my Guggenheim year.”19 More honestly, she said: “Because of the urgency of its content, I also worked on the preparation of a book of essays and source material, now in the hands of the publisher (Delacorte).”20 At year’s end, Tillie suffered a concussion. Her daughter Kathie later said she fell on one of her “mighty walks.” Tillie wrote friends vaguely that her concussion came from “holiday injuries.” Exactly what happened remains a mystery.21
The concussion sucked her into what she called the “vortex of the personal,” oppressed by knee pain, back pain, confusion, a sense of failure, and paranoia. She attacked Bobbi Ausubel for a “truncated” version of “I Stand Here Ironing.” Early in 1977, Lawrence returned Silences, begged her yet again to simplify, cut instructions, and send a “final and complete” version “ready for standard copyediting.” Tillie replied, “You sent it back [at] a wrong time. I could not work on anything.” As she turned sixty-five, Tillie feared that she had “lost language.” In mid-February, she remailed Silences to Lawrence and enlisted Mary Anne Ferguson to proofread it. She recovered enough language to promote herself to Carmen Callil and Lennie Goodings, of the English women’s press Virago.22
Supposedly finished with Silences, Tillie flew into Boston where she met her youngest sister in an airport café. Tillie “got weepy,” as Vicki said she always did when talking about their parents, and would not explain a terrible bruise.23 At Amherst College’s week-long colloquium on Family Life in America, Tillie read all of “Tell Me a Riddle” and gave some scheduled but vague “Musings,” for which she later apologized to Alice Walker. She read, taught, and lectured in Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.24 At George Washington University, she charmed creative writing faculty and students by offering Forum, the school’s literary magazine, selections from Silences.25 She had earlier offered her Harper’s and College English essays to Alta, the one-named, bisexual founder of Shameless Hussy Press.26 After Lawrence vehemently protested such violations of her publishing contract with him, Tillie withdrew her essays from Alta, citing her concussion and what she called a “kind of breakdown” as excuses. Following Alta’s accusations of “opportunism, stupidity, dishonor, possible senility,” Tillie wrote a two-page, single-spaced reply that came off as unresponsive and self-exculpatory. Her ongoing excuses and complaints, often in collect calls to publisher, editors, and agents, exasperated Harriet Wasserman, who decided it was now “impossible for me emotionally to work effectively with you by phone.” Tillie quickly fired Wasserman and signed with agent Elaine Markson instead.27
Though Tillie described herself as “incapacitated ill most of the time,” in late July through mid-August, she joined the family for a camping trip to the Canadian Rockies, telling young writer Marge Piercy it was “my first vacation in 3 years.” Rachel Lyon, Mindy Affrime, and Susan O’Connell had raised $50,000 to form Godmother Productions and now courted Tillie with plans to make a major film of her novella. Novelist Joyce Eliason would write the screenplay. Lee Grant, a four-time Academy Award acting nominee and survivor of Hollywood blacklisting, would make her directing debut. Aged Melvyn Douglas, prominent in 1930s leftist movements, would star as David, while the Oscar-winning actress Lila Kedrova would play Eva. Thanks to shared leftist and feminist politics, Tillie gave Godmother permission to make “Tell Me a Riddle” into a movie.
In the fall, the MacDowell Colony assigned Tillie its grandest studio, the Watson, a neoclassic building featuring Doric columns and portico. Another colonist, Elinor Langer, Josephine Herbst’s biographer, was delighted to hear Tillie’s memories of Herbst from the 1935 Writers’ Congress but irritated by Tillie’s instructions to emphasize Herbst’s communism.28 Late in October, despite the “$$$$$,” as she wrote to Konecky, Tillie flew from the tiny airport in Keene, New Hampshire, into New York. In Greenwich Village, Alix Shulman steered her and Hannah Green to Eighth Street, where a dry cleaner’s window was filled with old flat irons, provoking Tillie to hold forth on paintings by Degas and Picasso, both titled Woman Ironing, and on toy flat irons readers frequently sent her. On 26 October, she read at Queens College, Flushing, where a young professor named Joe Cuomo had arranged for limousine transportation from Hannah’s, a five-hundred-dollar payment, and an interview.29 Howard Meyer showed up at her reading to report that, as Tillie had instructed him in a “white-hot” letter, he had debunked the giddy portrait of Emily Dickinson in the popular play The Belle of Amherst.30
The Lerner siblings had circulated a laudatory New York Times article about Gene Lerner and Hank Kaufman’s plans for a Broadway production based on the life of their friend Josephine Baker, the first African-American movie star. Before Baker died in 1975, Lerner and Kaufman had bought the rights to her story; in 1977, they took an apartment on West Fifty-fifth Street and hired theatre greats to work with them. Though they still needed more than a million dollars, Lerner and Kaufman hoped to open on Broadway on 9 April 1978, the anniversary of Baker’s last Paris opening.31 Flushed with her success at Queens College, Tillie called Gene, and he agreed to make time to see her one midafternoon. She made him wait until 7:30. She greeted him with “I’m sorry.” He replied, “as usual—your family is always last.” When she came in, he asked, “‘Tillie if you had to choose between your writing and Jack, what would you choose?’ and without a pause, she said, ‘I’d drop him in a minute.’ She said it just like that, like a sword in your heart. How could she be so unfeeling?”32 Whether he recalled the comment accurately, Tillie seemed indeed to have dropped Jack. She had a habit of embracing and then dropping people no longer useful—like Nolan Miller—or no longer needful—like Alice Walker.
Forever grateful to Tillie for inspiring the Feminist Press, Florence Howe gave a party for her, with much laughing, hugging, toasting, and celebrating. If the guests wanted to talk about the Iranian Revolution or crippling inflation, they had little chance. Tillie monopolized conversation with a geyser of talk about history, literature, feminism, and women writers. Shulman now called her a talking Bartlett’s Quotations. Though she dazzled admirers with her fantastic memory of women’s writings, Tillie sometimes fell back on gender stereotypes. She denounced Daughters Press for acting like a “reprehensible male establishment publisher,” conveniently forgetting how patient and generous her male publishers were. At Vassar, after reading “Tell Me a Riddle,” she spoke of Ida as if she were one of the “peasant women with ‘worn bodies’ used ‘as tools by life’” and “abused by a conventional male society.” Recalling the only image that ever moved her deeply, Tillie told a new story, saying that in her dying days, Ida had on Christmas Eve a vision of three wise men who turn out to be women.33
Tillie picked up galley proofs of Silences at the Delacorte offices before returning to MacDowell and, on 5 November, promised immediately to check them. Instead, she procrastinated until Thanksgiving. She returned the galleys on 2 December, furious over what she called errors and whole “problem pages.” Though she had created the very “headaches and penalties” Lawrence had begged her to avoid, Tillie expected him to get corrected galleys and “problem” pages back to her immediately. She wanted the book published in March and “not only identified with Women’s Studies or the feminist movement” but marketed to a “broad general” audience. She sent a long list of recipients for free copies. Meanwhile, Delacorte editors took Silences out of their schedule.
In “almost 1978,” Tillie marked up a copy of “Tell Me a Riddle” to indicate what Ausubel should emphasize in staging it, markings which emphasize Eva’s hunger for belief. Tillie now elaborated on her remarks at Vassar with a new version of her last visit with Ida, who responds to “a knock at the door”:
Why do you come to me? I am not religious. I am not a believer. And they said O we didn’t come to talk with you about that, we wanted to talk with you about books, about ideas . . . Come in, come in then she said, but as they began to talk, she saw that they were not men but women, that they were not dressed in splendid jewel-encrusted, robes, but in the everyday coarse woven shifts and shawls of the peasant women of her native Russia . . . . They drew closer against the cold, began to sing, and she too began to sing, the clouds of their breaths shining in the air, [they] knelt, the beasts too kneeling, she kneeling.
In 1955, when she last saw her mother, Tillie had neither said nor written anything about Ida having such a vision. Now she said she had seen Ida “but twice in my adult life, separated by the continent, by needs of my own four children, by lack of means.” She meant the family’s 1954 visit to Washington, D.C., and her 1955 visit alone, omitting times when she dropped off her daughters in Omaha and Ida and Sam’s 1947 visit to the Olsens.34
Indiana became the thirty-fifth state to ratify the ERA, but equal rights were not established in academia, as Americanist Annette Kolodny found when the University of New Hampshire denied her tenure and promotion. (Always responsive to anti-feminism, Tillie sent Kolodny a generous check to help with legal expenses.) Tillie had always finagled extra time at MacDowell, so she was appalled when the Colony insisted she vacate the Watson Studio by 29 December. She felt “in turmoil in a defenseless time—leaving here, leaving my work; an accumulation of humiliations, mis-timings on Silences.” She was so addled that Edith Konecky offered to drive her to Logan airport, but, when Konecky came by, Tillie had not packed. She said she wanted to give Edith one last chance to see the photos and quotations she had taped up. Barely keeping her irritation in check, Konecky threw Tillie’s things into bags, boxes, and cases. She broke the speed limit racing to the airport, arriving barely in time for Tillie to get curbside check-in and make her plane.35 Perhaps Tillie had lost her grip on reality. At any rate, her neediness was useful in extorting favors.
By 6 January 1978 she was at her Santa Cruz retreat, aggravated by an abscessed tooth and a letter from Rachel Klein, lead Delacorte copy-editor, explaining that Silences’ publication was delayed thanks to numerous, involved, undecipherable, and extensive author’s changes. Klein and her staff were making the changes Tillie requested and also correcting her errors, as when she quoted passages inconsistently; they were left with the time-consuming task of checking each quotation against the original.
Demanding that her book be published immediately was a function of deepening paranoia about money. She lamented to Lawrence: “I am back to the marginality of my pre-M.I.T., pre-Guggenheim earning & saving years. I did not have the rent for this workplace down here this month.” Blaming “economic terrors,” Tillie could hardly refuse speaking invitations, which came frequently because of pressure to have women on programs. (Pulitzer Prize–winning author Annie Dillard got more invitations than Tillie but, unlike Tillie, turned them down so she could write.36) In a single week Tillie made six impassioned speeches in the East and in the next week several more at the University of “Hawaii!!” (as she marked it on the calendar). She took Jack to Hawaii, but he was not a presence in her letters, an arrangement that sparked rumors of their permanent separation. Tillie called Rachel Klein from Hawaii to insist, in a two-hour collect call, that Silences appear in May. Klein countered that an error-ridden book would credit neither of them.
Lawrence wrote that he was doing his “best to preserve ‘a national resource,’” but Tillie was preserving neither herself nor her writing. On her 1978 wall calendar, she began scribbling in authors’ death ages, circling dates and writers who had died younger than she, now sixty-six.37 Lawrence admitted to Delacorte editors that he was “having serious problems” with her, but he wanted “to keep Tillie Olsen as an author and to keep her calm. She is in the middle of a long work of fiction which we don’t want to lose.” He asked them to work overtime to bring out the hardcover Silences in June or July 1978. By this time, Lawrence himself had doubts about the “long work of fiction” no one had seen. In late March, Delacorte sent out copies of what Tillie called “still messed up” bound galleys. A review in the May New Leader criticized her for showing, not empathy, but “an indiscriminate sympathy for her own gender,” for assuming a “messianic” role, and for “crying over her lack of productivity.”38
Tillie was so scattered Alice Walker heard that she had had a “sort of break-down.”39 Nevertheless, Tillie went back on the speaking circuit. At a Conference on Motherhood in Columbus, Ohio, she argued that, as the “most fleshly sensual perhaps profoundest of experiences,” motherhood shapes society. The thirty-plus-page transcript, made from her taped remarks, records her saying “I had a kind of mini-breakdown after the workshop this morning, perhaps occasioned by fatigue.” Her internal dam against chaos was weakening, but she blamed the rupture, not on speaking and traveling and stress, but “a lifelong agony . . . my daughterhood and my motherhood,” a comment out of sync with her panegyric to motherhood. Another cause of her mini-breakdown was the appearance of a tall woman with silver glints in her raven-black hair. When she said, “Hi Tillie, I’m Jeanette Gray,” they fell into each others arms, weeping. Gone were rivalries over who was the better poet, the better Communist organizer, or the better lover of Eugene Konecky. Calling Tillie the “Shakespeare of short stories,” Jeanette soon added pressure on Tillie: “I am sure you have it in you to become the greatest and finest woman author of our times and I am so glad that you are working now.”40
On 26 June, Sam Lawrence arrived in San Francisco and drove to Santa Cruz to present Tillie with an advance copy of the hardcover Silences. The book jacket was bone-colored with “Silences” dramatically calligraphed in a shade of apricot and the words “Tillie Olsen” in black swirling letters, and she was gratified by the book’s appearance. The next day, however, she wrote “accident” on her calendar, though not what happened. She occasionally noted “Jack” when he visited or “City” when she went home. Her calendar’s fragmented notes suggest she had not yet recovered from her “mini-breakdown.”
In July, Tillie led an exhausting daylong meeting with UCSC’s Women’s Voices group, using her advance copy of Silences. With this protective audience, her personal magnetism excused failures in clarity.41 Also, talk about the ways women’s talents are silenced carried special urgency, when some states threatened to retract their ratifications of the ERA. Women petitioned, boycotted, lobbied, and marched on Washington, demanding that Congress extend the deadline, which it did, until 1982.
Reconciling himself to Tillie’s absence, Jack and six retired labor activists founded the “Fort Point Gang,” which walked once a week to Fort Point near the Golden Gate Bridge. He loved telling stories, talking politics, and reviewing labor history with the gang. He organized and taught in labor education programs at City College. He often drove a pickup truck with a hooded back into the hills to camp with his buddies.
On Lawrence’s letter saying that the paperback Silences would be out in August 1979, in large black letters Tillie printed the word “Betrayal.” As she escalated quarrels, he begged her to “conserve your energy and not dissipate it on messages and phone calls to our publicity people.”42 Replying on a postcard picturing a fire-breathing dragon, she insisted that, if she had “dissipated” her energies, it was her publisher’s fault. The evidence tells another story.43
The hardcover Silences officially appeared on 24 July.44 It includes her Harper’s essay and her 1971 MLA talk, as printed in College English, her 1972 “Afterword” on Rebecca Harding Davis, long “aftersections” on “Silences” and on the “Writer-Woman,” and expansions of nearly fifty years of copy-outs. Tillie admitted that Silences is not “orthodox academic scholarship.” She said that it was written “with love for my incomparable medium, literature; hatred for all that, societally rooted, unnecessarily lessens and denies it; slows, impairs, silences writers.” She dedicated the book: “For our silenced people, century after century their beings consumed in the hard, everyday essential work of maintaining human life. Their art, which still they made—as their other contributions—anonymous; refused respect, recognition; lost.”
Tillie was, as Lawrence said, “a good adman. Adwoman. Adperson.” She asked Harry Lerner to supply names and addresses of long-lost cousins to be sent publicity. Doing so, he told of a service for “the 24 Yiddish poets and writers that Stalin murdered 26 years ago,” a reminder that his politics were not hers. He did not comment on Silences; she infuriated her sisters and brothers with her complaints about deprivations and victimhood. Gene reminded her that she had not written fiction after “The Iron Throat” in 1934 by choice.45
After shielding her from the condemnatory New Leader review, Lawrence was glad to share novelist Margaret Atwood’s review. She set a precedent of praising Silences for its message about the ways art can be “subverted,” while faulting it for its “scrapbook” form, which John Leonard called a “hodgepodge” and Diana Loercher a “pastiche.” Joyce Carol Oates faulted Olsen for “numerous inconsistencies and questionable statements offered as facts.” She assumed that Olsen’s sloppy prose betrayed “an editor’s indifference,” an infuriating remark to editors who had struggled to correct and clarify Tillie’s prose. Joan Peters faulted Tillie for a “standard romantic portrait of the artist as mad recluse.” As an argument, Peters declared Silences “weak.” After Doris Grumbach called Silences “useless,” Lawrence complained to Katherine Graham, owner of the Washington Post, who printed an exchange between Thomazine Shanahan and Grumbach, who said loyalty made Shanahan “overlook the weaknesses, carelessness, and plain failure in both reason and style in Silences.” Rather than use such remarks as occasion for introspection, Tillie responded with angry letters to Peters, Grumbach, and perhaps Leonard. In response, Grumbach praised Tillie’s fiction but faulted Silences for including self-described “unwritten speeches” in a “paste and clipping book, put together rather than written.”46
Despite such criticism, the New York Times Book Review named Silences an editor’s choice. Two book clubs chose Tillie’s books for their lists, and Lawrence ordered a third printing of Silences. Tillie reacted to her success melodramatically: “for a while at least now, there is enough for rent & food necessities,” the sort of remark that provoked both Blanche Boyd and Rosellen Brown to caution her against self-pity.47 After Tillie wrote NPR’s Susan Stamberg praising her interview with Rosellen Brown, Stamberg asked to interview Tillie. She was so obsessed with complaints about “unforgivable” errors in the hardback Tell Me a Riddle, she hardly noticed when Jimmy Carter, Israel’s Menachem Begin, and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David Peace Accord.48
After her concussion, “sort of breakdown,” and “minibreakdown,” Tillie jotted down names: Hannah Green (who was mysteriously ill), Pablo Neruda (who died at the age of sixty-nine), and Alice Munro (who had written “Executioners”). Then Tillie wrote the word “Jonestown,” where an entire religious commune died, by mass suicide or murder. The assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and the openly gay city supervisor Harvey Milk further distressed Tillie.49 She turned to reflections on death from Thomas Hardy and others, thinking of making them into an anthology, to be called a “Death Treasury.”50 In December 1978, reading again at Queens College, Tillie responded to applause as if she were a soprano called back for an encore. As “after reading remarks” she read “Dream Vision,” a version (sometimes hyphenated as “Dream-Vision”) of “My Mother’s Dying Vision.”
When the University of California/Berkeley hired Alice Walker to teach creative writing and African-American Studies, Tillie found an apartment for Walker in St. Francis Square. Walker hoped that proximity and mutual admiration would blossom into honest, helpful conversations about women, race, and writing, but she feared Tillie’s mothering might be smothering. Walker treasured pictures taken by an itinerant photographer of her parents in the 1930s when they were sharecroppers in Georgia. In one, Alice’s mother, Minnie Lou, wears beads and a straw hat, her Sunday best, and stands in the middle of a dirt street. Tillie called that picture “beautiful” but also pronounced “I want” someone to write the “autobiography” of the Harlem Guild.51 Her “I want” confirmed Walker’s suspicion that Tillie was trying to “appropriate” black writers, herself included.52
From the tape of her recent reading at Queens, Markson had Tillie’s memoir of Ida phoned in to the New York Times “Op Ed” page, as a gloss on the Christmas story, which the Times did not print. Markson then began shopping it around for another buyer.
As 1979 began, Tillie saw clips from Godmother’s film Tell Me a Riddle. Eliason had enlarged Jeannie’s role to make a more positive and accessible ending, offending Tillie, who insisted that Rachel Lyon restore the novella’s “international character, the songs they sing, and on the woman part of Eva’s life, the mother part.” As she turned sixty-seven, Tillie both requested a schedule of Godmother’s payments to her and attacked it for having “little understanding” of “the ways in which the content of TMAR can be realized, transformed” in film. She even hired a lawyer, who told her that she had no grounds for suing Godmother for departing from her novella.
Tillie gave a party on 18 January 1979 for an apprehensive Alice Walker. Dressed in a flowing blue robe, Tillie drank little cups of sake and held court. She was, Moffat remembered, “in fine form.” Clinging to one guest at a time, Tillie recited her accomplishments, giving what Dorothy Bryant described as “mischievous, double-edged compliments.” No one dared make double-edged compliments about Tillie’s nine years without publishing fiction.53 Lawrence urged “please finish REQUA.” She did not reply.
Back in Santa Cruz, Tillie hired an assistant in a “desperate” but “unsuccessful effort to do something about a crushing weight of ever-accumulating, unanswered correspondence.” One letter was from English Professor Deborah Rosenfelt, who wanted to publish “Tell Me a Riddle,” along with critical essays on it. After her assistant quit, Tillie invited Rosenfelt to help organize files in turn for Tillie’s help with the edition.54
At Humboldt State University, near Eureka, California, Jayne Anne Phillips, another Lawrence author, invited writers her students were studying to give readings. Tillie was first, to be followed by Rosellen Brown and Annie Dillard.55 Since Lawrence was in the West, Phillips invited him to hear Tillie. Unexpectedly, he hired a pilot and two-seater plane to fly to northern California, near the setting of Requa. In pouring rain, Phillips drove Tillie to the local airport, where they stood under umbrellas on a rain-swept runway listening to the throbbing of an engine circling above purple massed clouds. Soaked and frightened, remembering Amelia Earhart’s vanishing into the Pacific, they almost wept when a small break opened and a toylike plane darted through clouds, landed on the shiny tarmac, and taxied up to them. Later at dinner, Sam calmed his nerves with considerable wine, while Tillie, as usual before a performance, ate little or nothing. Then she read “Requa I” on and on, with her publisher sleeping in the front row.
The day after the Humboldt symposium ended, Tillie joined a more theoretical symposium of women academicians at Reed College. When Patricia Meyer Spacks, an authority on eighteenth-century literature, observed that women’s memoirs and autobiographies show them using disadvantages and turning passivity into power, Tillie rose to protest, as if she had been attacked personally.56 She was consoled by Elinor Langer’s introduction: Tillie Olsen was “not a woman who lived her life as an artist, but an artist who has lived her life as a woman.” Calling Langer’s words one of her “proud-joy” testimonies, Tillie instructed Lawrence to “take time to read it.” Langer, however, soon began to shy away from “a feminist pat on the head” from Tillie Olsen.
Meanwhile, Elaine Markson’s efforts on behalf of Tillie’s “Dream Vision” took an odd twist. A television show called Turnabout, which dealt comically with the paranormal, bought it perhaps for its initial episode about a statue with magical powers, that presumably enables an old dying woman to see three wise men (or women).57 Harry and Clare Lerner happened to see it, with a credit line to “Tillie Olsen,” and Clare fired off what must have been a scathing denunciation and refutation, calling Tillie’s vision “a combination of imagination, poetic license & emotion.” The old woman was “unidentifiable,” her seemingly Christian vision a lie.
Tillie did not know of her sister-in-law’s response, for she was lecturing and reading in the east, gathering more disciples. One wrote “whether you are at your most scattered or whether you are entirely present and eloquent” it was “a gift” to hear her. Tillie continued telling women to send her their work, critiquing their stories, recommending them to each other and to grant agencies, and sending notes, calendars, and tiny gifts to them. Her devotees saw her as an ideal but distant godmother. Hannah Green adored her, though her husband was beginning to find Tillie irritating. Though Alix Kates Shulman reviewed Silences positively, privately she and Green speculated about Tillie’s lack of discipline and productivity. Green fervently believed Tillie was writing; Shulman no longer did.58
Lawrence disliked Tillie’s self-presentation as a caring mother-figure, when to editors, filmmakers, agents, and publishers she was a dominating harridan, to strangers a queen bee, and to friends a dependent child. She sometimes dined out without money or credit card, making inadequate gestures to repay whoever paid her bill. She forgot the linens, soup pot, blankets, and books she had borrowed from Mary Anne Ferguson four years before, until Rosellen Brown asked, “Who and where is Marian Ferguson, who is supposed to receive your duffel bag of scarves and so on?”
Tillie read and lectured at five or more eastern colleges that spring. Among the piles of letters and papers awaiting her in late March back in Santa Cruz was Clare Lerner’s letter denouncing the television version of Ida’s last days. In a long reply, Tillie said that she “refused to listen to, see that program, the whole experience [so] nightmarish” that she told only a few family members about it. Though Harry could “feel that nothing mother on TV was ‘a stranger,’” Tillie insited that “the dream is true.” She even said that she had heard some of it from Clare “though [Ida] had said she dreamed the night before of the three wise men dancing, her delight in their dancing and in how beautiful the colors, how they were dressed, and your eerie feeling because it was on Christmas Eve she had dreamt it.”
There are several problems with this defense. First, Tillie had not been at Harry and Clare’s on Christmas Eve or Christmas but had arrived late on 26 December. Second, Susan Lerner has a distinct memory that when her family celebrated her grandfather’s birthday on the first light of Hanukkah in 1955, near Christmas time, her grandmother was barely able to speak, much less to describe an elaborate vision. Third, at that time, and for nearly the next twenty years, Tillie had said nothing about any vision Ida described to her. And fourth, Ida’s distrust of Christianity was probably too deeply rooted for even her subconscious to produce a Christian vision. Near the end of her long screed, Tillie replied, “Tell Susan I did not assent to Turnabout ‘to sell books.’”59
When Jack was “discovered ill—at times could not lift a cup to his lips,” Tillie left Santa Cruz for San Francisco and subleased an expensive studio on Gough Street, still complaining about being kept from writing. Then an impressive vellum envelope with the embossed logo of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln arrived. It contained the startling announcement that Tillie Olsen would receive an honorary Doctorate of Letters at a ceremony on 12 May. She found that Linda Pratt, an English professor, had nominated her. She sent Harry the news and told him to tell Gene, who then told Harry he had sold the Josephine Baker project. When she donned academic gown and mortar board and was hooded in university colors, Tillie remembered how Woolf, in Three Guineas, pokes fun at the “ornate clothes” judges, priests, soldiers, politicians, and academics wear. To Lawrence, she bragged that as a woman she had marched “Not as in Three Guineas—at the end—but the beginning of the procession.”
Harry had flown in for the occasion, and he, Vicki, and Tillie, with a reporter, returned to the old Omaha neighborhood. The Caldwell Street house had been torn down but other old houses were standing. A blind African-American sitting on her porch swing recognized them by their voices, causing Tillie to reflect that, though the woman’s daughter was called “colored,” Omaha was not as “ghetto-ized” in the 1920s as it was in the 1970s. She observed that, in the 1920s, people faced “death on the job, death from diphtheria or scarlet fever, accidents all the time” but did not “give in to the fear of them.” With Vicki and Harry beside her, she acknowledged, as she usually did not, that she had married at age nineteen. When the Lerner siblings called on the Blumkin sisters and their mother, now one of the country’s wealthiest businesswomen, Rose Blumkin insisted that Sam Lerner could have been president of the United States. Posing together for Vicki’s camera, Harry and Tillie maintained warmth by not mentioning “Dream Vision.”60
At the time University of Omaha History Professor Bill Pratt, husband of Linda Pratt, had organized a dramatic exhibit memorializing Omaha’s darkest hour, the 1919 lynching of Willie Brown. With narration by local son, Henry Fonda, the exhibit included articles, testimonials, and photos of the courthouse mob and Brown’s burned body. Though she was horrified, Bill Pratt recalled Tillie expressed no sign of recognition.61
She had promised Lawrence to do nothing but write after her trip to Nebraska; by 2 June Tillie had different plans: “Three more weeks. (Sam I am breaking a promise to you; going to London with Jack for 15 days; thinking t better to have it over with; punctuating an end.)” By “have it over with” could she have meant ending her marriage with Jack? If not, what? Possibly, she meant settling hassles with Virago, which had rejected Silences in 1978 as too long and “a bit scrappy,” but now agreed to reissue it, along with Tell Me a Riddle and Yonnondio. Tillie and Jack spent a day or two in Paris and then flew to England. She imagined seeing innumerable literary sites and did at least visit the Brontë parsonage, Keats’s house, the Tate and the National Portrait galleries, and the memorial to Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery. There she and Jack posed together: he looked weary, Tillie revitalized. On 13 June, Carmen Callil introduced Tillie to an enthusiastic Virago staff and took her to dinner with several British women writers.62 After her return to Santa Cruz, Tillie created another publishing showdown by sending her three books, each full of inked-in corrections, to Callil, who replied that the changes Tillie requested in Silences alone would necessitate “drastic resetting” whose “exorbitant” costs a now unenthusiastic Virago staff refused to undertake.63
That summer, Jimmy Carter spoke presciently about the need for Americans to conserve energy and develop alternate energy sources. Some Americans thought the Marlboro Man image under threat by conservation, human rights, and feminism. “Ole boys” complained that women and minorities were hired and promoted over white male counterparts, hardly the experience of Annette Kolodny. College students encountered these issues in political science, women’s studies, and now in literature classes. Paul Lauter was editing the two-volume Heath Anthology of American Literature, which took space from white male literary lions to include diverse authors, more representative of America. Tillie wrote him, “what a difference this anthology will make.”
Tensions between Tillie and Alice Walker had simmered for years but boiled over when Tillie suggested that Walker write on Alice Smedley. Busy finishing A Zora Neale Hurston Reader and starting The Color Purple, Walker teased, “I’d rather write about you.” Tillie responded, “Don’t bother to write anything on me, Sweetie.” Walker’s reply on 18 July 1979 regretted that Tillie had not responded to two requests to write about Meridian and thus protect it from antifemale, antiblack reviewers. She accused Tillie of patronizing her as a black writer.64 Chagrined, Tillie immediately recommended Meridian to Virago and asked Bill Pratt for articles about the 1919 lynching.
Laurie’s 1970s wedding ceremony dedicated to young love and peace had not insulated her from divorce. She remarried Mike Margolis, a multitalented musician with left political leanings. Laurie passed her thirty-second birthday in the late stages of pregnancy. Tillie came up from Santa Cruz for the birth of Jesse Margolis on 26 July 1979. After writing Lawrence about having “it over with,” Tillie did not mention Jack for a time, but she told Hannah he was “functioning, able to care for himself. But [still] on dangerous prednisone.” She confessed to Hannah that she was “not writing.”
Traveling to Santa Cruz in August, Susan Stamberg was surprised by “how MODEST [Tillie’s] surroundings were for a woman of her age and literary stature.” Her place looked like a graduate student’s, except for the portrait of Dickinson on the wall and valuable books on the shelves. Tillie was so “wandering and unfocussed,” Stamberg stayed for more than two days, asking and reasking questions in hopes of getting clear answers. They went out to local spots for meals “on NPR’s dime” and Tillie “REALLY enjoyed her food,” as if eating out were a rare treat. Later, Stamberg and an NPR editor began honing the interviews toward coherence.65 Tillie reluctantly agreed to a much shortened list of revisions for resetting.
That summer Frank MacShane, a founder of Columbia University’s translation program, was teaching a translation workshop in Rome. Among his students was Sara Poli, an Italian academic and translator of technical texts. A Boston friend had given her a copy of Tell Me a Riddle, and MacShane encouraged her to translate it. Meanwhile, Gene Lerner and Hank Kaufman had sold their villa to help finance the Josephine Baker movie. Sorting letters and papers, Gene put Ida’s few letters and her school notebook in a drawer.
Tillie deplored colonialist intervention, whether in the Philippines, Cuba, Guatemala, Chili, or Iran, where the CIA had installed an America-friendly government so she saw justice when the Iranian Revolution deposed the Shah of Iran and even when, on 4 November 1979, Iranian revolutionaries took over the American Embassy and claimed fifty-two hostages. Most Americans, though, saw the hostage crisis as further proof of an ineffectual, feminized America. They worried that “ole boys’ clubs” were being replaced by a “helping circle” of women.66 Many were surprised to hear that, for the first time, a feature film was written, produced, and directed entirely by women. Tillie was queen bee when:
Godmother Productions invites you to our
Tell Me A Riddle Celebration
At Oz Atop the Hotel St. Francis
Union Square, San Francisco,
November 17, 1979, 5:30 – 8 P.M.
At the end of 1979, Tillie sent out a few New Year’s cards but apparently no letters.
She wrote that she had been “sometimes functioning, sometimes not—a flu that became a pneumonia,” which lingered into February 1980.67 She began assembling, with Julie’s help, a collection of writings on death. On 11 February, she assumed her peremptory persona, writing Lawrence: “About the Death Book. . . . Say yes or no” or she would find another publisher. Nine days later, she sent him the “Death Treasury” proposal.68 Markson wrote him: “Tillie and her daughter really want to do this although she does say she’s working on ‘her fiction’ (that’s a quote Sam).” Having no inkling of Markson’s skepticism about her fiction writing, Tillie officially ended her “demeaning” relationship with Harriet Wasserman. She hurled a long list of complaints at Lawrence and an even longer one at the Delacorte staff about royalties. Lawrence explained again that holding royalties on reserve against returns was standard procedure. Her books earned about $7000 for the last half of 1979.
After months of distilling, Susan Stamberg’s interview with Tillie Olsen aired on NPR’s “All Things Considered” on 3 March.69 Stamberg assured Tillie that the NPR staff had “felt inspired by your words,” but kind words could not save Tillie from a virtual tsunami of depression, illness, fatigue, anger, and fear over money and for her reputation. She besieged the Elaine Markson Agency with complaints that Yonnondio was being advertised in Germany to the “female market” rather than to a “class-conscious readership.” She forbade filmmaker Midge McKenzie from mentioning “I Stand Here Ironing” in promotions for her film Ironing, yet she demanded “50% of all” McKenzie’s “net proceeds.” She lost her Santa Cruz workplace and needed $15,000 by 18 April to close on a house in Soquel, California. She wanted an advance on the death book, Requa or on another “work of fiction,” presumably her long-jettisoned novel, a request that infuriated Lawrence, her publisher, not her banker. He now doubted such a novel existed.
On 30 March, the Washington Post ran an illustrated article that should have calmed Tillie with its descriptions of her novella as “one of the very best pieces of 20th-century American fiction and also one of the least known. Its author, Tillie Olsen, also fits that description.” Lee Grant said the script was so moving that “sometimes I’ve cried so hard I couldn’t say ‘Cut!’” She tactfully described Tillie’s desire for “more input into the screenplay” as a result of being “crammed, crammed, with much she wants to give, convey, communicate.” Proud of the film, she admitted that Tillie Olsen was not “jumping up and down” over it.70
Tillie went on another extensive, exhausting lecture tour, thanks again, as she told Edith Konecky, to “economic terrors/necessities.” When she read at William James College, a woman said she saw her aura: a “yellow white light around your entire body as you stood there on the stage. (It did not happen until you stood).” The aura also surrounded the copy of Tell Me a Riddle “you held in your hand.”71 Tillie was auraless when she complained about a “humiliating” Los Angeles Times interview, tried to keep an English scholar from introducing Silences, and tried to prevent Lynne Conroy’s film based on “I Stand Here Ironing” from being shown, though it had won a red ribbon for adaptation at the American Film Festival.72
The arrival of a letter from Sara Poli asking to interview Tillie began a summer buried under an “avalanche” of hopeful plans and disorienting hassles. Lawrence ordered a fourth printing of ten thousand paperbacks of Silences, and Tillie made the down payment on a modest two-story house in Soquel with a view of Monterey Bay. She asked Virago to schedule appearances in London, Cambridge, Oxford, and “Leeds or another working class” university,73 but not to overschedule her for “somehow I am in a 67–68 year old body.”
That summer Kathie Olsen conducted oral history interviews with Jack, who talked about labor history, not his marriage. The family moved Tillie’s accumulation of books and papers, in boxes and file cabinets, to her new home. Tillie signed change of address notices “Movingly.” In her victim persona, she described the move to Hannah Green as “a dreadful mistake.”74
Even during the move, Tillie kept up a vigilant correspondence about royalties, reprint rights, a trip to England, a possible one to Scandinavia, and Sara Poli’s audacity in translating “without realizing permission is necessary.” Virago notified Tillie it could not afford to bring her to England so she accepted a post of International Visiting Scholar at Norwegian universities, arranged by Pers Seyerstad. Then, the British Post Office announced that, along with a presentation pack of stamps picturing Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell, it was naming Tillie Olsen as one non-British woman writer continuing their legacy. Tillie took this recognition as “one of my few true honors—being linked the century after with these four writers I revere and—[who] in different ways—are, have been, life-giving to me.”75 Post Office publicity prompted Virago now to offer Tillie a one-week publicity tour, to coincide with its September publication of her three books and obligate her for two European tours.76
Hassles over the Italian translation continued. Tillie told Poli not to proceed; Lawrence told her to negotiate with Markson; then Markson asked for $2000 because the movie Tell Me a Riddle would “increase the commercial value” of her translation.77 Expecting to earn only $400, at most, Poli begged Gene Lerner to intervene. Tillie threatened to fly to Rome and negotiate with Poli herself. Lawrence felt he was “taking part in a bizarre comic opera,” which seemed more surrealistic after he and Markson settled on two contracts: the death book, offering Tillie “$25,000 with $7,500 for reprint permissions and $1,000 for photo permissions,” and her novella, offering her $35,000 but only when she completed it.
Tillie’s notes from this period are revealing: “Cast a Vote for the Human Race. There is only 1 earth. Creating your future. Let us Preserve it. Teach Peace or We Die. Arms are for hugging. We are the curators of humanity. An animal never accepted environment but changed it.” Perhaps for speeches in Scandinavia, these notes suggest her reliance on adlibs, slogans, personal commentary, and ultimately charisma to turn topics into stirring orations.78 They also suggest why her orations remained unpublished.
In August, Virago Press sent Tillie her busy English schedule. She wrote Sara Poli that she would not go to Rome but could meet her in Paris. Meanwhile, Gene Lerner showed Poli’s translation to Italian novelist Alberto Moravia, who found Poli’s Italian “elegant.” Tillie flew with Jack to London on 15 September and to Paris on 18 September. She failed to meet, as promised, Hannah Green and Jack Wesley. Nor did she call Sara Poli, who got to Paris on 19 or 20 September to find Tillie gone. In tears, Poli called Gene Lerner, who called Tillie in London and “cussed her out for how she treated Sara Poli.” He sent a long letter, hand-carried by a friend to London, detailing the ways she had insulted, not just Poli, but him and their family. He reminded her that she alone of the Lerners had not responded when he and Hank Kaufman needed funds for their Josephine Baker project. Furthermore, “it was I who sent you funds in December, 1955, which permitted you to come to Washington to see Mother. If I had not done that, you would have not seen her and there would not have been a TMAR. How much would you estimate my contribution to be worth in dollars and cents?” He had also loaned her $500 in 1959, but she had reneged on promises to repay him. He wanted reconciliation, given the “precious blood we share through the Mother who left me with the special mandate of ambassador to her children.” After reading this letter, Tillie relented, at least about Poli, who interviewed her at the Royal National Hotel, on Bedford Way, near the British Library.79
In the interviews Virago had arranged, jet-lag made Tillie even more scattered than usual. Reading (or reciting) was easier, so she read the entirety of “Tell Me a Riddle” for about three hours, an event Lennie Goodings and the Virago staff thought a “most astonishing event at a theatre above a pub in Hampstead.”80 Tillie and Jack left London for Moscow on 28 September for their first visit to the USSR, where they got a standard Soviet tour, weighted with propaganda about happy workers. On 1 October, they flew to Stockholm. Tillie’s talks at the universities of Trondheim, Bergen, Tromso, and Oslo allowed her little slack time, nor did her own return schedule; she flew to London on 15 October and to San Francisco the next day.81 She described herself to Hannah Green as “this driven creature,” sometimes too weary to smear on face cream. English sales were soon impressive, except for Silences. By the end of November, bookstores had returned so many copies that Tillie could buy them for 33¢ each. The Italian soap opera came to its finale when Poli’s translation of Tell Me a Riddle failed to sell to an Italian readership.
Jimmy Carter had won Tillie’s heart with his work for peace and conservation so she was distressed when he lost the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan. The Republican Party removed the ERA from its platform, and Tillie feared an upswing of antifeminism, censorship, red-baiting, and book-banning. She took the murder of former Beatle John Lennon, on 8 December, as an especially bad omen, given that he was killed probably for marrying an outspoken Japanese artist and fellow peace advocate.82
Tillie Olsen had become an icon for feminism’s best, its inclusiveness and insistence on equal rights for all, regardless of class, color, creed, sex, or sexual orientation. There were, however, cracks in her iconic image, which her devotees refused to see. More objective observers noted her effusive but sometimes short-lived interest in them, her queenly roles and patronizing affect, her controlling talk, her reliance on charm and emotion rather than logic, and her failure to produce what she said she was writing. Tillie’s frequent screw-ups invited chauvinist arguments about women’s incompetence. Moreover, her complaints about disadvantages, after so many advantageous awards, encouraged a view of women as whiners, wheedlers, and victims. Tillie suspected that some now thought her a detriment to the very feminism she had inspired.