John Leonard on Tillie Olsen
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070122/tillie_olson
In Praise of Tillie Olsen by JOHN LEONARD
[posted online on January 5, 2007]
It’s been more than forty-five years since Tillie Olsen
radio studio at KPFA in Berkeley, California, to record two stories
from her Tell Me a Riddle collection: “I Stand Here Ironing” and “Hey
Sailor, What Ship?” A third, “O Yes,” needed at least a gospel
chorus, not in our budget. And I couldn’t imagine how to do the
fourth, the title novella, without a Greek theater and a Bach Mass
and a Russian Revolution: Somewhere coherence, transport, meaning. If
they would but leave her in the air now stilled of clamor, in the
reconciled solitude, to journey on… There are some stories that
don’t translate into any other medium. They should stay in their
books to surprise us, leaping from ambush. When she wrote Tell Me a
Riddle, Tillie Olsen, like William Blake, covered paper with words
“for the angels to read.”
At the time, I was too young to know anything important about poor
people, black people, women or history. But we enter into books as if
into a conspiracy: for company, of course, and narrative, and
romance; for advice on how to be decent and brave; for a slice of the
strange, the shock of the Other, the witness not yet heard from,
archaeologies forgotten, ignored or despised; and also for radiance
and transcendence, that radioactive glow of genius in the dark. How
dark it was, how dark. I could feel the darkness with my hands….
and as I journeyed upward after him, it seemed I heard a mourning:
“Mama Mama you must help carry the world.” The rise and fall of
nations I saw. And the voice called again Alva Alva, and I flew into
a world of light, multitudes singing, Free, free, I am go glad.
Suddenly, we hear a different music.
There was a lot of this music around in the early ’60s, especially at
Pacifica radio, where so many of us went instead of graduate school
to play with our politics and microphones, such a plenitude we took
for granted, so many books so splendid, so savage and so nourishing,
that they seemed to fall from some giant banyan–a Tin Drum and a
Golden Notebook, a Catch-22 and The Fire Next Time, Flannery O’Connor
and Chinua Achebe, Herzog and V–and we’d never again go hungry for
meaning. Wised up, unriddled, we went away from Berkeley into the
civil rights and antiwar and women’s movements, after which we would
pedal the tricycles of our careers. And then, there was the oddest
thing: After the whole culture has turned into a soapbox, a pillbox,
a fire alarm and an icepick in the ear, there some of us were,
pretending to be adults, fathers with our own kids to worry about,
chairing some panel or other at the National Endowment for the Arts,
and Tillie Olsen needed a grant. Or there some of us would be, sunk
in the booze and discrepancies, sitting on the admissions committee
for a writers’ colony, and Tillie Olsen wanted a cabin in our woods.
Yes. Of course! Who else?
I am three times the age I was when she walked into that studio, and
the older I became, the smarter she got, and I still can’t answer
those questions the white child Carol asks in “O Yes,” after her
friendship with the black child Parialee, Alva’s “jivetalk” daughter,
has been “sorted” and “celerated” out of existence at the junior high
school; after the scary humming in the black church, “so high up and
forgotten the waves and the world, so stirless the deep cool green
and the wrecks of what had been”: Oh why do I have to feel it happens
to me too? Why is it like this? And why do I have to care?
As well as radiance, she gave us scruple. Looking back, it’s easy to
deconstruct Tell Me a Riddle as a nest of prophetic texts on race
war, class animus and feminism. From a sensibility formed in the
Great Depression, in stories published in ’50s magazines you’ve never
heard of, Olsen reported to the sassy ’60s on where we had been
before America, and on those our steerage left behind; what blue-
collar work was really like on the night shift or at sea; who lost
out in claustrophobic marriages, and how it felt to be broke,
trapped, female and speechless; on unions, radical politics, the
immigrant experience, children lost and children sold, winter rage.
To his grandmother Eva, who is dying of cancer, Richard explains the
rocks. There are three kinds, he tells her: “earth’s fire jetting;
rock of layered centuries; crucibled new out of the old (igneous,
sedimentary, metamorphic). But there was that other–frozen to black
glass, never to transform or hold the fossil memory.” And Eva, who
was a revolutionary in Russia before she was a mother in America, who
“can no longer live between people” because she was “nuzzled away”
and “devoured” by seven “lovely mouths…drowning into needing and
being needed,” sees herself as black glass. Which is why, out of
Tolstoy, Chekhov and Victor Hugo, the native Samoan dance of a young
Marine and a child’s cookie cut from some Mexican Bread of the Dead,
the Book of Martyrs and a girlhood memory, she will sing herself to
death.
But see how it’s done: First what Cynthia Ozick calls “a certain
corona of moral purpose.” And then the prose that lashes like a whip,
that cracks and stings. And then the judgment coming down like a
terrible swift sword. And then a forgiving grace note, like haiku or
Pascal. Memory, history, poetry and prophecy converge. Reading her
again, and again, and again, I find that when you love a book, it
loves you back.