The Suppressed Side of Creativity

THE EYES on the bookjacket portrait look into yours and seem to know you. They are kind, sad, wearied eyes that might weep but for the hint of humor around the mouth. Passionate conviction mixed with despair rest for a photographic moment on her face, one side in shadow, the other exposed by the sunlight. Tillie Olsen has seen a lot.

Born in 1913, Olsen never attended college, and during 20 years of raising four children she worked as a transcriber in a dairy equipment company and then as a "Kelly Girl." She wrote in "the stolen moments," thinking while doing household chores "someone else's work, nine hours, five days a week," reading and writing into the dark hours. But she rarely found long, uninterrupted days for her work, and many of the potential works that "seethed, bubbled, clamoured, peopled me" went unwritten.

None of Tillie Olsen's work was published until 1962, when she was 49 years old, and when Tell Me A Riddle, a collection of stories, came out. Tell Me A Riddle was a critical, but not a popular, success; it was to be twelve more years before Olsen published Yonnondio: From the Thirties.

The long period of seeming quiet, of drought, was actually a time of turmoil for Olsen. During the silent years Olsen must have read in every spare moment, laboriously copying what mattered to her, especially the phrases, sentences and paragraphs relating to her own blocked aspirations. In the brief hesitations between typing and ironing, cleaning, mending, tending to and fending for she must have rushed occassionally to jot down in hurried bursts the flashes, the sparks of insight which, though not then able to mature, could, in later years when she did have time, at least suggest directions of thought. The depth of the three essays included in Silences, her latest work reflects the wisdom she gained over years of struggle and anguish.

Silences is in part a book of ifs. If I had had those years to observe and write and express what was in me... If the factory laborer with latent artistic talent didn't have to toil ceaselessly... If writers didn't have to shape their work to the demands of those who can pay them...

But Olsen manages to transcend her own personal frustration to empathize with all people whose creative efforts society thwarts. Silences is more than a memoir or a narrow feminist polemic. Though the book did grow out of her own "special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly mute at having to let writing die over and over again in me," Olsen eloquently and passionately documents a spectrum of circumstances, most beyond the control of the writer, that corrupt or destroy his art. (Olsen criticizes the language's invidious bias towards the male.)

Olsen's most significant contribution lies in her perceptive discussion of the environment that nurtures creativity, and of those which destroy it. Why is it that only one out of every 12 writers is a woman? Why, in the period between 1850 to 1950, did only eleven black writers publish more than two novels? Why don't more poor people write? In the first place, Olsen contends, the most fundamental prerequisite for sustained, flourishing productivity, "the even flow of daily life made easy and noiseless," is a luxury the vast majority cannot afford. For mothers whose lives are "distraction, not meditation... interruption, not continuity' spasmodic, not constant toil," the long peaceful hours when the mind can rove and wander, and the writer can then bring his mind's meanderings to paper, those hours simply do not exist. For the poor, the illiterate, the hungry, or even those who, though not poor, must work five days a week for a living, the fulfillment of a literary genius would almost certainly remain unrealized.

STILL AS OLSEN goes on to point out, writing requires much more than just this "homely underpinning." A "conviction as to the importance of what one has to say, one's right to say it. And the will, the measureless store of belief in oneself to be able to come to cleave to, find the form for one's own life comprehensions" is also essential. To have that kind of confidence, a writer needs to be taken seriously and appreciated. Here Olsen is at her best. She painstakingly identifies the societal attitudes and practices that leech away a person's strength and sense of self before he or she ever gets to the stage of being an artist, and again after he or she does, against all odds, become a creator.

In the preface to Silences, Tillie Olsen takes a sentence from Andre' Gide as her epigram: "I intend to bring you strength, joy, courage, perspicacity, defiance." It is in her discussion of the subtler, unspoken, often unconscious ways society has of grinding human beings down that she comes closest to inspiring hope in the reader. By asking the writer "questions" is this true? Is this all?" Olsen overturns values that too many repressed people unconsciously accept. Here she lists the insights stored up during her period of silence. Each is a revelation in miniature, liberating the reader from widely--held misconceptions, many of which seem obviously false but which are too-rarely challenged. War, and the lives of the well-born, are subjects worthy of literature; child raising and woman's drudgery are not. Women are "the personal, the intuitive, the sensuous" sex; men, the analytic. A woman will find ultimate fulfillment only if she has children.

A large portion of the book (137 pages mainly consisting of quotes from and about writers) is devoted to buttressing the statements made in the essays. Olsen largely overcomes the problem of disjointedness by carefully organizing and tying these quotes together. She cites famous authors who have suffered "silences"--among them Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, Willa Cather, and Jane Austen--as well as the less well-known, and the selections give on a good sense of the hell a lot of people have gone through for the sake of art.

IN THE LAST PORTION of Silences Olsen rescues from oblivion Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills by reprinting a larage part of it. Published in an 1861 Atlantic Monthly, this searing story was the first work of American fiction to focus on industrialization and its human cost. Davis's book work was also concerned with "ifs:" she tried to see her subject's lives as they might been not as they were. Tillie Olsen first read Life in the Iron Mills when she was fifteen after buying it "for ten cents in an Omaha junkshop." But the work published anonymously, and not until 1958, thirty years later, did she discover the author's identity. Having rescued Rebecca Harding Davis's voice from the permanent silence of a slow, crumbling junkshop death alone makes Silences a book worth reading.