The Survival of Tillie Olsen

IF YOU had been one of the people in the crowd which packed Longfellow Hall last Wednesday night, you would have seen a short woman with grey wavy hair who proudly wears the demeanor of a mother and a grandmother. Her hands, firm and full, told of the work that she has had to do in order to raise her family. You only would have needed to scratch the surface a bit to find the core of toughness and conviction that has fought long and hard for the independence and survival of her beliefs and the beliefs of others.

Her gentle voice was sometimes replaced by an incisive tone and wry with which were used to make her point. A man asked her if it was possible for women to have babies and write books (at the same time), to which she quipped, "It is a consummation to be divinely desired."

Her creative ability survived difficult circumstances, but her own success in writing does not free her from social conscience. She wishes to bring the freedom and spirit, which allowed her to write, to all the people; especially to women. Robert Coles said in a review of her book, Tell Me a Riddle, "She has been spared celebrity, but hers is a singular talent that will not let go of one; a talent that prompts tears, offers the artist's compassion and forgiveness, but makes plain how fierce the various struggles must continue to be."

To Tillie Olsen it is the natural need of the talented to express themselves. Social forces and norms create many barriers to the realization of talent. "Throughout the ages the greatest silencers have been: sex, race, and creed." She writes of the silences of ages past so that literature might be cracked open and the many missing experiences added to it. She ends her book Silences with a quote by Virginia Woolf which opens up literature to the realities and needs of everyone.

"Literature is no one's private ground; literature is common ground. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves."

Early in life Tillie developed the vision and the will that enabled her to bring personal experiences into the body of literature. As a child she "stuttered a lot and learned to listen." She had very little formal education and considers herself a "homemade scholar."

Literature fascinated her but she found that the literature of the time bore little relation to her experiences and needs. At 19 Tillie started Yonnondio, a book about a poor family in the 1930's that struggled to survive. The story is not autobiographical yet her portrayal of the family and the neighborhoods in which it lived belie an understanding which could only have been born of experience.

However, at the very beginning of her career she had to leave Yonnondio unfinished and stop writing for almost a generation due to the needs of her children. Tillie's creative spirit lay dorment for many years until it was rekindled by the bombing of Hiroshima. "I wrote I Stand Here Ironing in a certain light.... It was the light of the burning bodies.... I had to record, leave something of my time here on earth."

She recorded the feelings which are born of the incessant routines of motherly love. Her experiences were crystallized in poetry which comes through time: time of work, time of need, time of parenthood. Her words embodied a prayer which she went over again and again until these words could carry the need of her soul. She spent hours murmuring the words, praying the words which would support that motherly need to know that all she had done for her child had been for the best. Finally she wrote them down.

Tillie never questioned the validity of her experience or her ability. It was her vision which allowed her to work on her writing even when she was not putting pen to paper. In a biographical sketch of Rebecca Harding Davis. Tillie explains the state of mind that remains when a writer is silenced by circumstance. "She (Davis) must have had to use 'trespass vision'; eavesdrop, ponder everything, dwell within it with all the resources of intellect and imagination...each opportunity for knowing seized... And in the process the noting of reality was transformed into comprehension, Vision."

Much of Tillie's genius is in her strength of will, as is the case with many artists. She overcame or outlasted the obstacles which came across her path. During her silence she never lost faith. "I was always a writer, I never wrote myself off." More specifically she never fell prey to what she termed "the two great excuses": self doubt, or circumstance. "Some people say, 'If only I had gone to this school,' or, 'If only I hadn't gotten married...,' or even worse, 'Perhaps I was only kidding myself, I can't write.' Fortunately I never had these doubts which silenced so many others."

Everything in her life continued to be material for her writing. "I knew much more," she said, "when I was no longer a tourist to the world of work and the world of motherhood." Tillie stands among a handful of women writers who have taken motherhood and work as the central theme of their novels.

Her fiction reflects the many years of silence in which she considered every aspect of her words. The day to day worries and the routine chores which constitute the basis for so many lives are explored with clarity and precision. Her stories are precise and read like poetry; not a moment, not a character, not an action is out of place. She does not need to add fictional action of events, she merely orchestrates the feelings and experiences of everyday life which we usually see and then forget.

In Silences the struggle moves into the society and the act of creation becomes a right. After giving up so much of her life for the things she had to do, she now declares, "No one's development at the cost of others! Technology is advanced enough so that we can do this." The other important task of the time is to change the old, pointless images which hamper expectations and hopes. When we remove the stigmas which bar the realization of dreams, then the inner soul will flourish in a body of meaningful literature, regardless of sex, color, or creed.

In one of her speeches Tillie quoted the following remark from a conference on creativity. "Creativity was in each one of us as a small child. In children it is universal. Among adults it is nonexistent. The great question is what happened to this enormous and universal capacity? That is the question of the age." This same sentiment is reflected in her own words from As I Stand Ironing. "Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom, but in how many does it?"

In Tillie's life, the circumstances which silenced her were concrete demands on her time: motherhood and work. However, she also recognizes that social norms and institutions often silence people indirectly by molding or corrupting the individual's creative will. Often the ideals and dreams which we have as children never leave that childrens' world. Somewhere along the path to maturity they are lost, forgotten, or die from lack of attention.

"The power and need to create, over and beyond reproduction, is native both in women and in men. Where the gifted among women [and men] have remained mute, or have never attained full capacity, it is because of circumstances, inner or outer, which oppose the needs of creation." Tillie Olsen