Panthea Reid penetrates riddles of the troubled yet creative Tillie Olsen

One Woman, Many Riddles

By Panthea Reid

Rutgers University Press.

449 pp. $34.95 nolead ends nolead begins

Reviewed by Judith Fitzgerald

Welcome to Tillie Territory, smack-dab in the land of the free and the home of the brave Tillie Olsen (née Lerner), one of the most influential prose stylists to emerge during the latter half of the 20th century.

Olsen still elicits an impressive spectrum of contradictory reactions among those who revere (or revile) her. Olsen and Alice Walker fell into friendship - then out of it; Jayne Anne Phillips worships Olsen; and Margaret Atwood curiously yet eloquently defends her by citing the "gruelling obstacle course" a woman writer/wife/mother must navigate. For Atwood, Olsen deserves not only unqualified respect but also unconditional reverence.

Panthea Reid, author of Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles, acknowledges the riddles and manages to solve most of them. Described by Elaine Showalter as "a biographical bombshell," this exposé will astonish, dismay, and astonish again. Reid, a professor emerita of English from Louisiana State University, has grown a career out of illuminating difficult (read: decisively and decidedly strong-willed) literary lives. She's the author of Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner: The Abstract and the Actual.

In Tillie Olsen, Reid brings her extraordinarily complex and endlessly perplexing subject to vitally disarming life in her chronological account of a deeply troubled, depthlessly creative woman. Reid's book provides substantively more for Olsenites than any previous attempt. Introducing her subject in the book's prologue, Reid neatly summarizes Olsen's various roles, rhymes, crimes, and reasons:

At 18, Tillie wondered to her diary: "With dozens of selves quarreling and tearing at each other - which then is the natural self?" She concluded, "None." She was a "hell-cat" in the 1920s, an earnest revolutionary during the entire 1930s, the "most sought-after author" in America in the mid-1930s, a war-relief patriot during World War II, a crusader for equal pay for equal work in the mid-1940s, a stay-at-home with a baby-boomer during the rest of the 1940s, a victim of FBI surveillance in the 1950s, a storyteller who foregrounded the struggles of mothers and ordinary men and women in the late 1950s, a figure in the Civil Rights, feminist and antiwar protests of the 1960s and 1970s, a feminist icon in the 1980s and 1990s and in her twilight years a beloved model well representing the way in which one woman's determination can (and does) locate enough power to change the world.

(That comprises as fine a snapshot of her method and alleged madness as the Omaha-born firebrand will likely ever receive.)

In light of how little she published, it's amazing Olsen remains as influential and as much-read as she does. Throughout her life of bluster, braggadocio, and financial manipulation, the twice-married mother of four girls completed but one slim collection of fiction, Tell Me a Riddle, in 1971. Its title novella and three tales - "I Stand Here Ironing," "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" and "O Yes" - combine to create one potent portrait of a trailblazing pioneer. (As a stand-alone tale, "Tell Me a Riddle" had snagged the 1961 O. Henry Award for Best Short Story of the Year.)

Olsen also published the story "Requa I" (included in 1971's Best American Short Stories) and a mishmash "novelette" she began at 19 and never properly completed but allowed to go to press under the Whitmanesque title Yonnondio in 1974. A memoir, Silences, appeared in 1978.

Not surprisingly, Olsen's small body of writing has been defended on four main fronts: She was a mother; she was poor; she had to work; and she was a woman. As Atwood avers, "She did not write for a very simple reason: A day has 24 hours. For 20 years she had no time, no energy and none of the money that would have bought both."

In one view, Olsen expended huge stores of time and energy conning her family, lovers, friends, partners, institutions, and publishers, plying them with unfulfilled promises - and a fair number of bald-faced lies - solely to support the lifestyle and celebrity status to which she felt entitled. A tad one-sided? Perhaps, but such an observation contains a fair degree of truth and an even greater degree of proof. Reid reports on Olsen's machinations faithfully and without judgmental comment. Olsen, "genius author" and "iconic feminist," lied mostly to herself in her copious journal entries, hysterical telegrams, and endless letters angling for financial assistance.

For much of her life, instead of completing the novel she always swore she had going (under contract to Random House), Olsen invented illnesses and embellished her children's maladies to obtain funding from the Ford, Lannan, Stegner, and Guggenheim Foundations.

She earned plenty on the lecture circuit. Not unlike Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Meridel Le Sueur, Olsen enjoyed the literary spotlight for many glorious years. In spite of her frequently expressed belief that she'd die before 50, she was 95 when she passed away in 2007.

What of the "she was a woman" argument, which stresses the troubles of battling a patriarchal literary world? Again, somewhat biased - yet, without diminishing her achievement, this view also has its points. Tillie Olsen is a highly engrossing read for anyone wishing to understand why women haven't really "come a long way, baby," why there's still more to do both in the literary world and well beyond it.

Reid neither pulls punches nor pushes any particular agenda. She confesses she cannot say she loves her "gorgeous," contradictory, confounding, prevaricating, and coyly wheedling megalomaniacal woman-child - but she does admire her immensely. It shows, particularly in the work's autobiographical penultimate chapter, "Enter Biographer":

"By the time we walked back to Tillie's place and I settled her in, I had to call and tell Alice Walker that I would be late. After narrating various stories about Tillie befriending her and then colonizing her and others, Alice Walker ended graciously by saying that Tillie 'has a good heart.'

"Walker warned, 'What a job you've got to do.' I agreed. When we parted, she said, 'It's going to be rich.' "

Walker was right on that count. Tillie Olsen is rich - and riddled with answers.