Tell Me a Riddle (21 page)

Read Tell Me a Riddle Online

Authors: Tillie Olsen

Tags: #test

BOOK: Tell Me a Riddle
2.38Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 83
left the mute old woman poring over the Book of the Martyrs; went past the mother treading at the sewing machine, singing with the children; past the girl in her wrinkled prison dress, hiding her hair with scarred hands, lifting to him her awkward, shamed, imploring eyes of love; and took her in his arms, dear, personal, fleshed, in all the heavy passion he had loved to rouse from her.
''Eva!"
Her little claw hand beat the covers. How much, how much can a man stand? He took up the cards, put them down, circled the beds, walked to the dresser, opened, shut drawers, brushed his hair, moved his hand bit by bit over the mirror to see what of the reflection he could blot out with each move, and felt that at any moment he would die of what was unendurable. Went to press the buzzer to wake Jeannie, looked down, saw on Jeannie's sketch pad the hospital bed, with
her;
the double bed alongside, with him; the tall pillar feeding into her veins, and their hands, his and hers, clasped, feeding each other. And as if he had been instructed he went to his bed, lay down, holding the sketch (as if it could shield against the monstrous shapes of loss, of betrayal, of death) and with his free hand took hers back into his.
So Jeannie found them in the morning.
That last day the agony was perpetual. Time after time it lifted her almost off the bed, so they had to fight to hold her down. He could not endure and left the room; wept as if there never would be tears enough.
Jeannie came to comfort him. In her light voice she said: Grandaddy, Grandaddy don't cry. She is not there, she promised me. On the last day, she said she
 
Page 84
would go back to when she first heard music, a little girl on the road of the village where she was born. She promised me. It is a wedding and they dance, while the flutes so joyous and vibrant tremble in the air. Leave her there, Grandaddy, it is all right. She promised me. Come back, come back and help her poor body to die.
For my mother, my father,
and
Two of that generation
Seevya and Genya*
Infinite, dauntless, incorruptible
Death deepens the wonder
* Seevya Dinkin and Genya Gorelick, two activist immigrant women of Olsen's parents' generation. Genya Gorelick
was
an orator in the 1905 Revolution.
 
Page 85
Background to the Story
 
Page 87
TILLIE OLSEN
Silences in Literature
Originally an unwritten talk, spoken from notes at the Radcliffe Institute in 1962 as part of a weekly colloquium of members. Edited from the taped transcription, it appears here as published in
Harper's Magazine,
October 1965.
(Several omitted lines have been restored; an occasional name or phrase and a few footnotes have been added.)
Silences
Literary history and the present are dark with silences: some the silences for years by our acknowledged great; some silences hidden; some the ceasing to publish after one work appears; some the never coming to book form at all.
What is it that happens with the creator, to the creative process, in that time? What
are
creation's needs for full functioning? Without intention of or pretension to literary scholarship, I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me.
These are not
natural
silenceswhat Keats called
agonie ennuyeuse
(the tedious agony)that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot. In the old, the obvious parallels: when the seed strikes stone; the soil will not sustain; the spring is false; the time is drought or blight or infestation; the frost comes premature.
The great in achievement have known such silencesThomas Hardy, Melville, Rimbaud, Gerard Manley Hopkins. They tell us little as to why or how the creative working atrophied and died in themif ever it did.
From
Silences
(New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1978), 5-21. Introductory note and all footnotes are Olsen's.
 
Page 88
''Less and less shrink the visions then vast in me," writes Thomas Hardy in his thirty-year ceasing from novels after the Victorian vileness to his
Jude the Obscure.
("So ended his prose contributions to literature, his experiences having killed all his interest in this form"the official explanation.) But the great poetry he wrote to the end of his life was not sufficient to hold, to develop the vast visions which for twentyfive years had had expression in novel after novel. People, situations, interrelationships, landscapethey cry for this larger life in poem after poem.
It was not visions shrinking with Hopkins, but a different torment. For seven years he kept his religious vow to refrain from writing poetry, but the poet's eye he could not shut, nor win "elected silence to beat upon [his] whorled ear." "I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a poem which now I realised on paper," he writes of the first poem permitted to end the seven years' silence. But poetry ("to hoard unheard; be heard, unheeded") could be only the least and last of his heavy priestly responsibilities. Nineteen poems were all he could produce in his last nine yearsfullness to us, but torment pitched past grief to him, who felt himself "time's eunuch, never to beget."
Silence surrounds Rimbaud's silence. Was there torment of the unwritten; haunting of rhythm, of visions; anguish at dying powers, the seventeen years after he abandoned the unendurable literary world? We know only that the need to write continued into his first years of vagabondage; that he wrote:
Had I not once a youth pleasant, heroic, fabulous enough to write on leaves of gold: too much luck. Through what crime, what error, have I earned my present weakness? You who maintain that some animals sob sorrowfully, that the dead have dreams, try to tell the story of my downfall and my slumber. I no longer know how to speak.
*
That on his deathbed, he spoke again like a poet-visionary.
* A Season in Hell.

Other books

ZOM-B Baby by Darren Shan
Slide Rule by Nevil Shute
Bewitching You by Estrella, Viola
The Genuine Article by Patricia Rice