Eighty years ago this summer, when San Francisco still thrived on the sea trade, the streets of the city teemed with men on strike. Fed up with humiliating working conditions, the longshoremen had called for a halt to labor on the docks. They rallied in public spaces, crammed into the Civic Center, and organized a march down Market Street. In early July, things quickly turned violent. The police cracked down, attacking the unarmed protestors. On a day that became known as “Bloody Thursday,” two strikers were shot and killed, as was one bystander, and hundreds more were hospitalized or injured. Journalists documented the violence, and the city shut down.
Among those who witnessed the chaos of the summer was a young radical writer and organizer, Tillie Lerner. Charismatic and impetuous, Lerner was just twenty-two that summer, but she had already fallen in love many times—with books, with revolutionary causes, and with bookish, activist men. She eloped with one of these men, Abe Goldfarb, after her high-school graduation. Though she devoted herself to politics, she also had literary ambitions (at sixteen, she placed a photo of Virginia Woolf on her desk and practiced writing like Woolf and Gertrude Stein). At the time of the strike, she was living in San Francisco with Abe and their young daughter. The couple was growing apart, though, and Lerner kept herself busy planning the strike’s actions. She became close to one of the leaders, Jack Olsen, whom she later married. (She would take his name, becoming Tillie Olsen.) She also reported on the strike, but she wrote about it in a strange way. “The Strike,” published in the Partisan Review, discusses the longshoremen’s labor in relation to her own work—her work as a writer. “Do not ask me to write of the strike and the terror,” her essay begins.
The essay continues in this manner, juxtaposing violent images of the protests with the author’s internal turmoil. “I am feverish and tired,” she writes near the end. “Forgive me that the words are feverish and blurred.” Such stream-of-consciousness writing is well suited to modernist fiction, but it’s far from the plain style prescribed for proletarian literature.
In writing this way, Olsen was pushing her creative process into the foreground. The challenges of literary composition become part of the strike’s story. (“But I hunch over the typewriter, and behind the smoke, the days whirl confused as dreams. Incident leap out like a thunder and are gone.”) The writer struggles alongside the longshoremen and then struggles again, later, alone.
Just what kind of worker is a writer? This was a fraught question for many of Olsen’s contemporaries. Like all Americans, writers had been hit hard by the Depression. Book sales were down; the steady stream of newspaper assignments had dried up. Destitute and frustrated, some writers joined artist unions, others picketed newspaper offices, and still others, on the recommendation of the New Masses editor Granville Hicks, gave up writing entirely in order to better become true “member[s] of the proletariat.” The League of American Writers, founded in 1935, included everyone from Malcolm Cowley to Theodore Dreiser, Meridel Le Sueur, and Richard Wright. At their first conference, Cowley proclaimed that “literature and revolution are united not only by their common aim of liberating the human but also by immediate bonds of interest.” Olsen was in the audience.
The politics of the moment influenced some writers’ creative practices. During the nineteen-thirties, John Steinbeck, Jack London, and James Agee all turned their attentions to the country’s most hardworking and most desperate people. They wrote about Dust Bowl farmers, cotton tenants, and itinerant seaman. Though they hoped that their accounts of workers’ lives would aid revolutionary efforts, they often approached these projects with ambivalence. Agee, for one, feared that he was exploiting his subjects, and he called the product of his collaboration with the photographer Walker Evans “curious,” “thoroughly terrifying,” and “obscene.” These writers worried either that they were getting too close to the working classes, and co-opting workers’ causes, or that they were not getting close enough.
Olsen’s writing presents a different set of anxieties. Unlike Agee, who was profitably employed by magazine mogul Henry Luce, or the sixty-six hundred employees of the Federal Writers Project, Olsen always depended on the wages that she earned from various jobs: an organizer, a community educator, a copywriter, and a stenographer. After work, she would come home to what we now call the “second shift”—cleaning, cooking, and childcare. Though Jack helped to care for the four children, he was away from home during the Second World War, and he later had is own demanding job, as a printer. When Olsen was in high spirits, she handled her commitments with ease, and she even devised housework games for her daughters. When she was ill or exhausted, as she often was, each task (or child) seemed an insurmountable obstacle standing between her and her time at the typewriter. She expressed her frustration in her journal:
The discontinuities of “The Strike” reappear in these journal pages. Here, though, Olsen isn’t talking about other people’s working conditions but, rather, about her own. All of her writing is like this: short, fragmentary, and elliptical. A Jones fellowship, which supported two seminars in Stanford’s Creative Writing Program, gave her just enough time to shape some of these fragments into four short stories. They represent her only complete, published works of fiction.
“Tell Me a Riddle,” Olsen’s story collection, came out in 1961. It sold poorly but received critical praise; Time listed it among the “Year’s Best,” and one reviewer called the four stories “delicate as a fugue.” The reviewer wasn’t wrong—the stories are indeed finely wrought. (The title story, in which an aging immigrant couple remembers a radical past, is especially poignant.) But beneath these exquisite surfaces lies a powerful political consciousness and bitter rage.
“I Stand Here Ironing,” perhaps Olsen’s best-known piece of fiction, brought these thoughts and feelings to the fore. A woman recalls caring for her children during “the pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the Depression,” while she irons her oldest daughter’s dress. “She was a child seldom smiled at,” the narrator reflects. “We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth. I was a young mother, I was a distracted mother.” The daughter has demonstrated a comic gift, but the family has neither the “money or knowing how” to nurture it. “So all that is in her will not bloom—but in how many does it?” the narrator asks at the end of the story. It’s a statement of resignation, designed to console as well as to indict. It’s something we might imagine Olsen asking herself.
“It is no accident that the first work I considered publishable began: ‘I stand here ironing,’ and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron,” Olsen said, in talk she delivered at Radcliffe College, where she was on fellowship in 1962. On the strength of her stories, Olsen had earned a residency in the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe. Founded just two years earlier, the Bunting Institute provided female artists and scholars with offices and small stipends. It aimed to free these women from the housework that often got in the way of their intellectual work. (They weren’t, however, to be freed entirely—the Institute’s founder, Mary Ingraham Bunting, reassured skeptics that “studying, in appropriate doses, mixes wonderfully with homemaking.”) Olsen had no plans to mix the two—although her family followed her East, she spent most of her time in her office. These years marked the beginning of her gradual distancing from family life.
Olsen had intended to use her time at Radcliffe to write the “proletarian novel” that she’d begun decades earlier. She failed to finish this novel, but she instead produced a short piece of writing that had a surprisingly widespread effect. As part of the fellowship, each woman was required to give a talk about her work. Olsen chose to talk about how hard it had been for her to write. Her talk, “Death of the Creative Process,” strung together questions, quotations, and observations about obstacles. The poet Anne Sexton said, years later, “Tillie’s seminar probably changed my writing as much as anything…. I couldn’t speak afterward. I was in a state of shock. Tillie’s seminar went way overtime, but if anyone had stopped her, I would have chopped their head off.” The lecture was later published in Harper’s, under the title “Silences: When Writers Don’t Write,” and it served as the basis for a scrapbook, “Silences,” which appeared in 1978. Today, if people know Olsen, they likely know her because of this book, which changed the teaching of college English.
Her insight in “Silences” is that who you are—that is, where and how you are born—often determines where and how you work. It can also determine whether or not you write. In the title essay, she catalogues writers who lapsed into literary silence. Riffing on the poet Thomas Gray, she mourns “the silences where the lives never came to writing … the mute inglorious Miltons: those whose waking hours are all struggle for existence; the barely educated, the illiterate; women.” She then describes how her writing happened: on buses, in the office of a dairy-equipment company, and at home late at night, “after the kids were in bed, after the household tasks were done, sometimes during.” Olsen knew that she was far from alone—she compared her struggles to those of Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and by innumerable anonymous women who, swamped with housework, let their creative projects fall by the wayside. These women may not have been machinists or sharecroppers, but they were still a class of workers whose problems required redress.
Olsen had her own ideas about how to do this. Elsewhere in “Silences,” she suggests increasing financial support for female artists, adding more women writers to college syllabuses, and founding presses that would publish out-of-print writing by women. Her words galvanized female professors, who were mostly teaching work by white men (and who were usually doing so for less pay than their male colleagues). They also inspired writers like Alice Walker, Sandra Cisneros (who called Olsen’s book “the Bible”), and Margaret Atwood, who praised the “Silences” on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. The ideas put forth in “Silences” soon took hold. By the mid-nineteen-eighties, more college students were reading writing by women. This development wasn’t without controversy—the so-called canon wars raged into the twenty-first century—but the new reading lists are here to say. We’re now removed from the moment when creativity seemed like an attribute that belonged solely to men.
In some ways, Olsen was far luckier than the men and women she championed. She had a steady income and a supportive husband. Her jobs were draining but not dangerous. She received a slew of grants and fellowships toward the tail end of her career, though she claimed that these gifts came “too late.” Far from anonymous, she became a public figure, beloved by many. But, in “Silences,” she speaks for those who never had these advantages. Though access to education has improved for women and for members of the working class (categories that intersect) the lessons of “Silences” still resonate. Women still perform more housework; colleges still favor the economically privileged. We may wonder about the literature that could be made by “silenced people,” who, in Olsen’s words, are “consumed in the hard everyday essential work of maintaining human life.” Writing, Olsen reminded her readers, takes time, education, energy, and resources, and these things are unevenly distributed. She encouraged us to attend to unorthodox writing produced in unfavorable circumstances—letters, diaries, scrapbooks like her own—and, in doing so, to question what counts as literature.
