Tell Me a Riddle (41 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 163
and their future.... Send one who is not a pompous liberal, but a man of the street. ... Send us a man fit to stand up to skyscrapers.... Send no saint. Send an artist. Send a scientist. Send a Bolshevik. Send a man.
32
Gold's worst insult to a writer was that he was a pansy, his art, effeminate.
33
Gold, of course, was an extreme example of working-class male chauvinism, but he was not atypical. Even as late as 1969, when Joseph North edited an anthology of
New Masses
pieces, masculinity predominates. North's Prologue praises the
New Masses
for capturing the essence of American life in its portrayals of the industrial proletariat, in its emphasis on the ''day of a workingman," that of a miner, a locomotive engineer, a weaver. "Its men," he said, "its writers and artists understood this kind of a life existed."
34
In spite of his once-favorable notice of Tillie Lerner's work, he does not mention its women.
When women writers on the Left did write about explicitly female subjects from a woman's perspective, they were sometimes criticized outright, sometimes ignored. Le Sueur has remembered that she was criticized for writing in a lyrical, emotive style about sexuality and the reproductive process.
35
I have already noted Chambers's attack on her for writing about the conditions of women on the breadlines without building in a revolutionary dialectic. Elinor Langer, having worked for several years on a biography of Herbst, believes that one of the reasons Herbst's impressive trilogy of novels failed to win her the recognition she deserved was that she was a woman and the central experience in two of the three novels is that of female characters.
36
Not that the scorn or neglect of male Left critics was reserved exclusively for women writers. The more dogmatic of them viewed any literature concerned primarily with domestic and psychological subjects as suspect. One novel focusing on the experience and perceptions of a child of the working classes, Henry Roth's
Call It Sleep (1935),
which Olsen read and admired during the later stages of her work on
Yonnondio,
was one of the more intricate, imaginative works in the proletarian genre. Yet the
New Masses
dismissed it in a paragraph, concluding, "It is a pity that so many young writers drawn from the proletariat can make no better use of their
 
Page 164
working class experience than as material for introspective and febrile novels.''
37
In writing
Yonnondio,
Olsen was consciously writing class literature from a woman's point of view, incorporating a dimension that she saw ignored and neglected in the works of most contemporary male leftists. All of Olsen's work, in fact, testifies to her concern for women, her vision of their double oppression if they are poor or women of color, her affirmation of their creative potential, her sense of the deepest, most intractable contradiction of all: the unparalleled satisfaction and fulfillment combined with the overwhelming all-consuming burden of motherhood. Indeed, her writings about mothering, about the complex, painful, and redemptive interactions between mother and child, have helped a new generation of women writers to treat that subject with a fullness and honesty never before possible in American literature.
In
Yonnondio,
Anna as mother wants for her children what she can no longer dream for herself: the freedom to live fully what is best in them; to the extent that the circumstances of their lives prevent this, her love is also her despair. Anna has a special kinship with her oldest daughter, Mazie, in whom her own intelligence and early hunger for knowledge are reincarnated. Mirroring each other's dreams and capacities, the two mirror also the anguish of women confronting daily the poverty of their class and the assigned burdens of their sex. At times they protect one anotherAnna, Mazie's access to books, to literature; Mazie, Anna's physical wellbeing, she herself becoming temporarily mother when Anna lies unconscious after a miscarriage. Mazie's painful sensitivitythe sensitivity of the potential artistmakes her as a child deeply susceptible to both the beauty and ugliness around her; overcome at times by the ugliness, it is to her mother that she turns for renewal. For example, one of the gentlest, most healing of
Yonnondio's
passages is the interlude of peace when Anna and Mazie pause from gathering dandelion greens, and Anna is transported by the spring and river wind to a forgetful peace, different from her usual "mother look," the "mother alertness ... in her bounded body" (120). Absently, she sings fragments of song and strokes Mazie's body:
 
Page 165
The fingers stroked, spun a web, cocooned Mazie into happiness and intactness and selfness. Soft wove the bliss round hurt and fear and want and shamethe old worn fragile bliss, a new frail selfness bliss, healing, transforming. Up from the grasses, from the earth, from the broad tree trunk at their back, latent life streamed and seeded. (119)
The transformation here is not the political conversion that was to have taken place later, but one based on human love, on the capacity to respond to beauty, and on the premise of a regenerative life cycle of which mother and daughter are a part.
To be sure, Olsen wanted to weave this emphasis on ''selfness," and this image of a regenerative life cycle that prefigures, but does not itself constitute, social and economic regeneration into a larger structure that would incorporate both personal and political transformation. Yet the hope
Yonnondio
offers most persuasively, through its characterizations, its images and events, and its present conclusion, is less a vision of political and economic revolution than an assertion that the drive to love and achieve and create will survive somehow in spite of the social forces arraigned against it, because each new human being is born with it afresh.
It is with this "humanistic" rather than "Marxist" optimism that the novel now ends. In the midst of a stifling heat wave, Baby Bess suddenly realizes her own ability to have an effect on the world when she makes the connection between her manipulations of the lid of a jam jar and the noise it produces, so that her random motions become, for the first time, purposeful: "Bang, slam, whack. Release, grab, slam, bang, bang. Centuries of human drive work in her; human ecstasy of achievement; a satisfaction deep and fundamental as sex:
I can do, I use my power; I! I!"
(153). And her mother and sister and brothers laugh, in spite of the awesome heat, the rising dust storms. Then for the first time the family listens to the radio on a borrowed set, and Mazie is awed at the magic,
"transparent meshes of sound, far sound, human and stellar, pulsing, pulsing"
(153). This moment of empowerment and connection
is
linked to the revolutionary vision, and Anna's final, "The air's changin', Jim. I see for it [the heat wave] to
 
Page 166
end tomorrow, at least get tolerable'' (154), certainly hints at the possibility for greater change. Still, there is a great gulf between socialist revolution and the temporary individualized relief of this final passage. Yet the end seems right; indeed, today, the novel hardly seems unfinished, because it offers in its conclusion the affirmation most fully embedded in the texture of the novel as a whole: an affirmation of human will, familial love, and, at least in the child not yet deadened and brutalized by the struggle for sheer survival and the corrupt influence of social institutions, the drive toward achievement and creation.
To say this is not to diminish the power of
Yonnondio
as an indictment of society; Olsen makes it clear that the Holbrooks do not merely sufferthey are oppressed, in quite specific ways, as a working-class family in a capitalist system. The whole fabric of the book deals with how poverty, exploitation, and what today we would call sexism combine to extinguish gradually the very qualities Olsen values most. The loss of creative capacity is not, as Wordsworth would have it, the inevitable price of growing up, but rather the price of growing up in a society
like this one.
In according that creative capacity especially to women and children, as in detailing the impact of social circumstance on the dailiness of family life, Olsen added a significant dimension to the largely masculine and public world of the proletarian novel. Women's work in preserving and nurturing that creative capacity in the young is shown in
Yonnondio
to be an essential precondition to social change.
Although in this regard, Olsen's work was deliberately oppositional to the androcentrism of the Left literary milieu, and although the tenets of proletarian criticism would not have validated this feminist and humanist dimension without the projected Marxian resolution, Olsen's affiliation with the Left undoubtedly encouraged and informed her writings about women in at least two ways.
First, there was the fact that in spite of the sexism of the Left milieu, the existence of serious analysis of women's status and roles meant that, in Olsen's circles at least, women's capacities were recognized and supported, however inconsis-

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