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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 151
like Arna Bontemps'
Black Thunder;
Langston Hughes. We read Ting Ling, we read Lu Hsun, we read the literature of protest that was beginning to be written in English out of South Africa; we read B. Traven; writers from every country. The thirties was a rich, an international, period.... And from whatever country or color this was considered to be part of our literature.
Being part of the Left milieu, then, gave Olsen, a working-class woman from Omaha, a sense of belonging to an international intellectual as well as political community.
The literary establishment of the Left was receptive to and supportive of the efforts of new, young writers like Olsen. The Communist party sponsored the development of cultural associations called the John Reed Clubs, established specifically to encourage young, unknown writers and artists.
16
And there were outlets for publication like the
New Masses
and the various organs of the local John Reed Clubs, including the
Partisan Review
in New York and
The Partisan
in San Francisco, in both of which Olsen published. Her work was well received and much admired. Joseph North, a respected Left critic, compared her ability to portray working-class life in ''The Iron Throat" favorably to Tess Slesinger's rendering of the East Coast intelligentsia in her first novel,
The Unpossessed
(1934).
17
Robert Cantwell praised "The Iron Throat" in
The New Republic
as "a work of early genius."
18
A number of editors and publishers sought her out after its publication, and eventually she made arrangements with Bennett Cerf at Random House for the publication of
Yonnondio
on its completion, although at the time she could not be reached because she was in jail for her participation in the dock strike, becoming something of a cause célbre. In New York, Heywood Broun chaired a protest meeting over her arrest, irritating her and her jailed comrades who had not published anything and were therefore not getting all this national attention.
After her release from jail, she visited Lincoln Steffens and Ella Winter, who had invited her to their home in Carmel, California. This was her first experience, she recalls now, with that kind of urbane, sophisticated literary atmosphere. Steffens encouraged her to write the other essay associated with
 
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the strike, ''Thousand-Dollar Vagrant," which describes her arrest in deliberately tough, colloquial language. The following year, she was invited to attend the American Writers Congress in New York, where she marched in a parade side by side with Mike Gold and James T. Farrell, Nelson Algren and Richard Wright, and where she was one of a very few women to address the assembly, which included most of the major writers of the day.
19
A drawing of her, a cartooned profile of a lean, intense young woman, was one of a few portraits of American women writers to appear among the myriad renderings of male literary personages in the May 7, 1935, issue of
New Masses
that reported on the congress.
20
Clearly, though Olsen's involvement in the Left as an activist, coupled with the other demands on her workermother life, took time, energy, and commitment that might in another milieu and another era have gone into her writing, and although her closest friends in the midwestern movement did not always understand her literary aspirations, the atmosphere of the Left as a whole did encourage her. The Left provided networks and organs for intellectual and literary exchange, gave her a sense of being part of an international community of writers and activists engaged in the same revolutionary endeavor, and recognized and valued her talent.
The second contradiction I will consider is closely related to the first and third; in using it as a bridge between them, I will turn first to the way in which Left critical theory validated and supported Olsen's subject and vision before suggesting how some of its tenets ran counter to and perhaps impeded the development of her particular artistic gift.
Literary criticism flourished on the Left in the thirties, and writers like Gold, editor of the
New Masses
and one of the most influential of Communist party critics, and Farrell, a leading critic and writer for the increasingly independent
Partisan Review,
as well as a novelist, hotly debated such issues as the role of the artist in revolutionary struggle, the applications of Marxist thought to American literature, and the proper nature and functions of literature in a revolutionary movement.
21
As Olsen's early journals indicate, she followed such discussions with intense interest. There was much in the
 
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spirit even of the more dogmatic, party-oriented criticism to encourage her own writing.
Left critical theory accorded an honored place to the committed writer, the writer capable of expressing the struggles and aspirations of working-class people or of recording the decline of capitalism. Critical debates often centered on the best literary modes for accomplishing this purpose. The dominant critical theory on the communist Left in the early thirties was proletarian realism, a theory which even nonsectarian leftists eventually viewed as far too limited. Nevertheless, its basic premisethat fiction should show the sufferings and struggles and essential dignity of working-class people under capitalism and allow readers to see the details of their lives and workencouraged young working-class writers like Olsen to write of their own experiences and confirmed her early perception that art can be based on the lives of ''despised people." This theory told writers that their own writing could and should be a form of action in itself; art was to be a weapon in the class struggle.
22
All of Olsen's published writing during the early thirties is consistent with this view of the functions of literature. Her developing craft now had an explicitly political content which grew out of her own experience and was confirmed by major voices in the Left literary milieu. All of it expresses outrage at the exploitation of the working class and a fierce faith in the transformative power of the coming revolution. One need only compare the poem, "I Want You Women up North to Know,
"
23
with the passage from her poetry cited earlier to see that the growing clarity of her literary and political convictions gave her work a scope and an assuredness that it had lacked earlier.
This poem juxtaposes the desperate situation of Mexican-American women workers and the families they struggle unsuccessfully to support with that of the "women up north" who consume the products of their labor. As Selma Burkom and Margaret Williams have noted, the poem faithfully constructs the details of their daily lives while its central metaphor "transforms the women themselves . . . into the clothing they
embroiderthey
become the product of their labor."
24
The poem is artful as well as polemical; its free-verse form is deliberately experimental, its subtler ironies woven into
 
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the fabric of diction and metaphor, its structure tight, its portraits clearly individuated. On one level, it is metapoetry, that is, poetry
about
art, for it specifically contrasts its own purpose and visionto document the realities of these women's lives and to offer a Marxist interpretation of the causes of and solutions to their sufferingwith the consciousness of the ''bourgeois poet" who would find in the movement of their hands
only
a source of aesthetic pleasure.
On the other hand, the polemicism of the poem, especially the didactic interpolations of the speaker, represented a kind of writing that Olsen herself gradually rejected. The same issues arise in her work on
Yonnondio,
her most important literary effort during the thirties. In the rest of this paper I will focus on that novel, for its evolution reveals with special clarity the contradictory nature of Olsen's experience in the Left.
Olsen's earliest journals, before she joined the YCL, speak of her wish to write about her family and people like them. After her year and a half of intense involvement, she begins to do so in a serious, disciplined way, writing in her Faribault journal as she works on the early chapters: "O Mazie & Will & Ben. At last I write out all that has festered in me so longthe horror of being a working-class child& the heroism, all the respect they deserve." Familiarity with the political and critical theory of the Left combined with and applied to her own experience gave her the coherent world view, the depth of consciousness, and the faith in her working-class subject essential to a sustained work of fiction.
Set in the 1920s, the novel's lyrical prose traces the Holbrook family's desperate struggle for survival over a twoand-a-half-year period, first in a Wyoming mining town, then on a farm in the Dakotas, finally in a Midwest cityOmaha, perhapsreeking with the smell of the slaughterhouses. In
Yonnondio,
as in Olsen's later work, the most powerful theme is the tension between human capacity and creativitythe drive to know, to assert, to create, which Olsen sees as innate in human lifeand the social forces and institutions that repress and distort that capacity. Olsen's understanding of those social forces and institutions clearly owes a great deal to her
 
Page 155
tutelage in the Left. The struggles of her central characters dramatize the ravages of capitalism on the lives of working peopleminers, small farmers, packing house workers, and their familieswho barely make enough to survive no matter how hard they work, and who have not yet learned to seek control over the conditions of their workplaces or the quality of their lives.
Unfortunately for all of us, she never finished the novel. Its title, taken from the title of a Whitman poem, is a Native American word meaning ''lament for the lost"; it is an elegy, I think, not only for the Holbrooks, but also for Olsen's own words lost between the midthirties and late fifties, for the incompleteness of the novel itself. The demands on Olsen already discussed would have been reason enough for her not having completed the novel in those hectic years; what she wrote, after all, she wrote before she was twenty-five, in the interstices of her activist-worker-mother life. Yet I suspect that she was wrestling with at least one other problem that made completion difficult. For although Olsen's immersion in the theory and political practice of the Marxist Left and her exposure to its literature and criticism gave her a sense of the importance of her subject and strengthened the novel's social analysis, the dominant tenets of proletarian realism also required a structure, scope, resolution, and political explicitness in some ways at odds with the particular nature of her developing craft.
What we have today is only the beginning of the novel that was to have been. In Olsen's initial plan, Jim Holbrook was to have become involved in a strike in the packing houses, a strike that would draw out the inner strength and courage of his wife Anna, politicize the older children as well, and involve some of the women in the packing plant as strike leaders in this essential collective action. Embittered by the length of the strike and its lack of clear initial success, humiliated by his inability to support his family, Jim Holbrook was finally to have abandoned them. Anna was to die trying to give herself an abortion. Will and Mazie were to go West to the Imperial Valley in California, where they would themselves become organizers. Mazie was to grow up to become an artist, a writer

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