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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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whole thing, and a human could be a human for the first time on earth. (79)
This is the voice that concludes the chapter, too, as Jim Holbrook sits in the kitchen holding his daughter Mazie after Anna has had a miscarriage, bitterly condemning himself for not seeing her illness, bitterly aware that he has no access to the food and medicine and care the doctor has prescribed for Anna and Baby Bess:
No, he could speak no more. And as he sat there in the kitchen with Mazie against his heart ... the things in his mind so vast and formless, so terrible and bitter, cannot be spoken, will never be spokentill the day that hands will find a way to speak this: hands. (95)
In these interpolations, Olsen was deliberately experimenting with the form of the novel, not unlike Dos Passos, whom she had earlier read. Rachel Blau DuPlessis suggests that Olsen has appropriated certain modernist techniques here to turn dialectically against modernism.
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On the other hand, the prophetic irony of these passages, the imagery of hands and fists uniting in revolution, characterize much of the writing of the leftists during this period; this is the tone and imagery that appear at the conclusion of Olsen's two published poems and that predominate in ''The Strike." In any case, these passages add a dimension of "revolutionary elan" not present in the early events of the novel itself. The narrator sees more, knows more, than the characters, about the causes of and remedies for their suffering, and the voice is the device used to incorporate that knowledge into the novel.
Olsen's correspondence indicates that she was aware of a disjunction between that voice and the increasingly more lyric, less didactic tone and texture of the whole. In March 1935, John Strachey, whom she had met in Carmel and to whom she had sent the first three chapters of
Yonnondio
for evaluation and advice, wrote to her in Venice, California: "As to advice, personally I like both your styles of writing, and I am in favor of having the interpolations in the book." Their "agit-prop" quality was increasingly at odds with the direction
 
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in which Olsen's art was growing. It was developing gradually away from the didacticism that made the incorporation of ''revolutionary elan" relatively easy and toward a more lyrical, less explicit mode, at its best when lingering on the details of daily life and work, exploring the interactions between individual growth, personality, and social environment, and laying bare the ruptures and reconciliations of family life. As the novel progressed, as the characters acquired a life and being of their own, Olsen, I think, found herself unable to document the political vision of social revolution as authentically and nonrhetorically as she was able to portray the ravages of circumstance on families and individuals and the redeeming moments between them. She did not want to write didactically. She wanted to write a politically informed novel that would also be great art. The problem is that the subtlety and painstaking craft of her evolving style did not lend themselves readily to a work of epic scope, and she was increasingly unwilling to rely on shortcuts like the narrative interpolations to tell rather than show political context and change. In any case, she had trouble extending the novel in its intended direction. In a note on its progress from sometime in the midthirties, she writes: "Now it seems to me the whole revolutionary part belongs in another novel . . . and I can't put out one of those 800 page tomes."
I think that there was a tension, too, between two themes: the awakening class consciousness that was the central drama of her time, and her other essential theme, the portrait of the artist as a young girl-not an inevitable conflict based on inconsistent possibilities, for Olsen's own experience embraced both processes, but a writing tension, based on the difficulty of merging the two themes in a cohesive fictive structure. Yet the more "individualistic," subjective, and domestic concernsthe intellectual and psychological development of the young girl, the complicated familial relationships, the lyrical vision of regeneration through love between mother and childwould not have been acceptable to Olsen or the critical establishment of the Left without the projected Marxian resolution that showed working-class people taking power collectively over their own lives. In other words, Olsen had so fully internalized the Left's vision of what proletarian litera-
 
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ture could and should do to show the coming of a new society that she did not even consider then the possibility of a less epic and for her, more feasible structure. Nor could she be content simply to accord centrality to the familial interactions and the stubborn growth of human potential in that unpromising soil, leaving the tensions between human aspiration and social oppression unresolved. So
Yonnondio
remained unfinished, but the struggle to write fiction at once political and nonpolemical was an essential apprenticeship for the writer who in her maturity produced
Tell Me a Riddle.
The concerns I have called, for lack of better terms, more ''subjective" and "domestic," grew to a great extent out of Olsen's experience as a woman and a mother. Thus, my second and third contradictions overlap, for as we shall see there was little in Left literary criticism that would have validated the centrality of these concerns, except insofar as they touched on class rather than gender. The rest of this paper, then, will be concerned with the third contradiction: between the fact that the world of the Left, like the larger society it both challenged and partook of, was essentially androcentric and masculinist, yet that it also demonstrated, more than any other sector of American society, a consistent concern for women's issues.
The painful and sometimes wry anecdotes of women writers like Josephine Herbst, Meridel Le Sueur, and others amply testify to the sexual politics of life in the literary Left. For example, Herbst writes to Katherine Anne Porter about the "gentle stay-in-your-place, which may or may not be the home," she received from her husband, John Herrmann, when she wished to join him at a "talk fest" with Mike Gold, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, and others: "I told Mister Herrmann that as long as the gents had bourgeois reactions to women they would probably never rise very high in their revolutionary conversations, but said remarks rolled off like water."
29
Olsen herself remembers that at the American Writers Congress, James Farrell informed her that she and another attractive young woman present were "the two flowers there," compared with the other "old bags."
Because she was not really a part of the literary circles of the Left, their sexual politics had less impact on Olsen than
 
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on writers who were more involved, like Herbst and Le Sueur. If for Herbst it was her gender that prevented her from moving freely in the heady circles of the literary Left, for Olsen it was more the depth of her own class loyalties to the rank and file. The sexism she experienced in her daily life mostly reflected the structure of gender-role assignments in society as a whole, although she does recall some incidents peculiar to life on the Left, such as the pressure on YCL women to make themselves available at parties as dancing partners especially to black and Mexican-American men, whether the women wanted to dance or not. As a writer, though, Olsen was keenly aware of the male dominance of Left literature and criticism and the relative absence of women's subjects and concerns.
If one examines the composition of the editorial boards of Left magazines of culture and criticism, one finds that the mastheads are largely male; in 1935, one woman wrote to the
New Masses
complaining at the underrepresentation of women writers,
30
although a few women writers, like Herbst and Le Sueur, were regular contributors. The numerical dominance of men in the literary Left paralleled the omnipresence of a worker-figure in literature and criticism who almost by definition was male; proletarian prose and criticism tended to flex their muscles with a particularly masculinist pride. Here, for example, is a passage from Gold's famous
New Masses
editorial, ''Go Left, Young Writers," written in 1929:
A new writer has been appearing; a wild youth of about twenty-two, the son of working-class parents, who himself works in the lumber camps, coal mines, and steel mills, harvest fields and mountain camps of America. . . . He writes in jets of exasperated feeling and has not time to polish his work. . . . He lacks self-confidence but writes because he mustand because he has a real talent.
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1
An even more pronounced masculinism prevails in Gold's "America Needs a Critic," published in
New Masses
in 1926:
Send us a critic. Send a giant who can shame our writers back to their task of civilizing America. Send a soldier who has studied history. Send a strong poet who loves the masses,

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