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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 172
Yonnondio,
of course, is far more than ideology translated into fiction. Olsen wrote from what she had lived, what she had seen, at last incorporating ''the common hysteria" of factory work, the bodily nausea and weariness, along with the incessant demands of work in the home. But her understanding of those events, the nature of her protest, although in many ways going beyond Communist party theory and practice of the early thirties, could only have been deepened by the very presence in her milieu of theory and controversy on the Woman Question.
44
On the whole, in spite of the Left's demands on her time and energies, the prescriptiveness of its more dogmatic criticism, and the androcentrism or outright sexism of many of its spokesmen, there is no doubt but that Olsen's Marxian perspective and experience ultimately enriched her literature. In a talk in 1974 at Emerson College, in Boston, explaining some of the reasons why she is a "slow" writer, she discussed without using the terminology of the Left the differences between her own concerns and what a Marxist would identify as bourgeois ideology:
My vision is very different from that of most writers. . . . I don't think in terms of quests for identity to explain human motivation and behavior. I feel that in a world where class, race, and sex are so determining, that that has little reality. What matters to me is the kind of soil
out
of which people have to grow, and the kind of climate around them; circumstances are the primary key and not the personal quest for identity.... I want to write what will help change that which is harmful for human beings in our time."
45
In the fifties, partly out of a spirit of opposition to the McCarthy era, and blessed with increased time as the children grew up and there were temporary respites from financial need, Olsen began to do the work that gave us the serenely beautiful but still politically impassioned stories of the
Tell Me a Riddle
volume. Olsen's enduring insistence that literature must confront the material realities of people's lives as shaping circumstances, that the very categories of class and race and sex constitute the fabric of reality as we live it, and that litera-
 
Page 173
ture has an obligation to deepen consciousness and facilitate social change are part of her-and our-inheritance from the radical tradition.
Notes
1. To my knowledge, the connections between the contemporary women's movement and the Old Left have never been sufficiently explored, although its roots in the civil rights movement and the New Left are well documented, as in Sara Evans's
Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left
(New York: Random House, 1979). It would be interesting, for example, to look at the number of feminist leaders and spokeswomen with family or other personal ties to the Old Left.
2. The earlier version of this article was delivered at a session on Women Writers of the Left at the National Women's Studies Association convention in Bloomington, Indiana, June 1980. Olsen's comments on that version were made mostly during an eight-hour tape-recorded conversation in Fall 1980. I have quoted extensively from that discussion as well as from earlier interviews, without attempting to distinguish between them.
3. ''Tillie Olsen," "A Note About This Book,"
Yonnondio: From the Thirties
(New York: Dell, 1975), p. 158. All references are to this edition, and page numbers will be supplied in parentheses in the text.
4. Selma Burkom and Margaret Williams, "De-Riddling Tillie Olsen's Writings,"
San Jose Studies
2 (1976): 65-83. In spite of some inaccuracies, this important study is the best source of biographical and bibliographic information on Olsen outside of her own writings.
5. Ellen Moers,
Literary Women
(New York: Doubleday, 1976); and Elaine Showalter,
A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).
6. Walter B. Rideout,
The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1956), p. 3; and Daniel Aaron,
Writers on the Left
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961).
7. Aaron, Writers on the Left, pp. 336-37.
 
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8. From an unmailed letter to Harriet Monroe, apparently intended as a cover letter for poems Olsen was planning to submit for publication in Monroe's influential
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.
9. From Elinor Langer's transcription of her introduction to a talk given by Olsen at a Reed College symposium in Portland, Oregon, in Fall, 1978.
10. In ''Divided Against Herself: The Life Lived and the Life Suppressed,"
Moving On
(April-May 1980): 15-20, 23, 1 explored the theme of the "buried life" in women's literature, as it appears in the work of leftist feminist writers like Olsen and Agnes Smedley. In "Tell Me a Riddle," the buried life is Eva's engaged, articulate, political self, whereas in Smedley's
Daughter of Earth,
it is the maternal, domestic self. Both works testify to the pain of denying part of one's being, and both condemn the society that does not allow women to be whole.
11. Burkom and Williams reprint these poems in their article "De-Riddling Tillie Olsen"; "I Want You Women up North to Know," pp. 67-69, and "There Is a Lesson," p. 70.
12. Tillie Lerner, "The Iron Throat,"
Partisan Review 1
(April-May 1934): 3-9.
13. Tillie Lerner, "Thousand-Dollar Vagrant,"
New Republic
80 (29 August 1934): 67-69; and "The Strike,"
Partisan Review 1
(September-October 1934): 3-9, reprinted in
Years of Protest: A Collection of American Writings of the 1930s,
ed. Jack Salzman (New York: Pegasus, 1967), pp. 138-44.
14. Salzman, ed.,
Years of Protest,
p. 138.
15. Ibid., p. 144.
16. One of the best accounts of the importance of these clubs for young writers, in spite of his ultimate disillusionment with the Communist party, is Richard Wright's 1944 essay printed in
The God That Failed,
ed. Richard H. Crossman (New York: Harper, 1950).
17. This is Olsen's recollection: I did not locate the actual source.
18. Cited in Burkom and Williams, "De-Riddling Tillie Olsen," p. 71.
19. Among those who signed the call to the conference and/ or attended were Nelson Algren, Kenneth Burke, Theodore Dreiser, Waldo Frank, Joseph Freeman, Granville Hicks, Langston Hughes, Edwin Seaver, and Nathaniel West.
 
Page 175
20. Langer mentions this drawing in her talk at Reed College cited above. Olsen has a copy of the cartoon in her files, and Salzman includes it with twenty others in
Years of Protest,
p. 307.
21. The selections in Salzman's chapter on ''The Social Muse," in
Years of Protest,
pp. 231-307, are well chosen to represent various positions in this debate.
22. Rideout's discussion of the efforts of the Left to define the "proletarian novel" is particularly helpful and more detailed than I can be here; see
Radical Novel in the United States,
especially pp. 165-70.
23. Printed in
Feminist Studies,
7, no. 3 (Fall 1981).
24. Burkom and Williams, "De-Riddling Tillie Olsen," p. 69.
25. Rideout,
Radical Novel in the United States,
pp. 171-98. In only three of the many novels Rideout discusses do female characters play a major role: those by Josephine Herbst.
26. From an unpublished paper by Elaine Hedges, "Meridel Le Sueur in the Thirties," first presented at the Modern Language Association Convention in San Francisco, December 1978.
27. Mike Gold, "Proletarian Realism," reprinted in
Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology,
ed. Michael Folsom (New York: International Publishers, 1972), p. 207.
28. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in an editorial comment on this paper.
29. Elinor Langer, "'The Ruins of Memory': Josephine Herbst in the 1930s," unpublished; also in Langer, "If In Fact I Have Found a Heroine . .. ,"
Mother Jones
6 (May 1981), 43. Meridel Le Sueur has mentioned similar episodes in talks at a conference on women writers at the Women's Building in Los Angeles in 1972 and at the National Women's Studies Association Conference in Lawrence, Kansas, 1979.
30. Robert Shaffer, "Women and Communist Party, USA, 1930-1940,"
Socialist Review
45 (May-June 1979): 93, note. I am indebted to Shaffer's article throughout the final section of this paper.
31. Folsom, ed.,
Mike Gold,
p. 188.
32. Ibid., p. 139.
33. See, for example, Gold's "Wilder: Prophet of the Genteel Christ," in Salzman's
Years of Protest,
pp. 233-38.
34. Joseph North,
New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties
(New York: International Publishers, 1969), p. 24.
 
Page 176
35. Meridel Le Sueur, in talks cited above and personal conversations with her on those occasions; also see Hedges, ''Meridel Le Sueur in the Thirties," p. 7.
36. Langer, "The Ruins of Memory," p. 16.
37. In Rideout, Radical Novel in the United States, p. 189.
38. Peggy Dennis, The Autobiography of an American Communist: A Personal View of a Political Life, 1925-1975 (Berkeley, Calif.: Creative Arts Books, 1977), p. 294.
39. Shaffer, "Women and the Communist Party," pp. 94-96.
40. Ibid., especially pp. 104-107.
41. Ibid., p. 10.
42. Ibid., pp. 83-87. I am also grateful to historian Sherna Gluck for discussing Inman's work and the controversy surrounding it with me.
43. This version is from Barbara Sinclair Deckard's
The Women's Movement: Political, Socioeconomic, and Psychological Issues,
2d ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 234.
44. Olsen's concern with the Woman Question continued into the forties. She authored for a few months in 1946 a women's column in
People's World,
writing articles like "Wartime Gains of Women in Industry," and "Politically Active Mothers-One View," which argued like Inman that motherhood should be considered political work. Also in the forties she participated actively in some of the organizations targeted by the Communist party for mass work on what the party considered to be women's issues-health and education-work related also, of course, to her own deepest concerns.
45. From a tape transcription in Olsen's files.

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