Käthe Kollwitz, Pietà (Mother with dead Son), 1937-1939, bronze, Seeler 37 II.B.1., Cologne Kollwitz Collection © Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln
Scott calls the short stories in this collection “lyrical bulletins of working class family life” but I found them to be much flintier. At that time I was living in New York, having published my first novel; as I tried to find my place as a writer, I became aware of how segregated the city seemed, with the fiction reviewed by the NYT written largely by white middle and upper-class men—Updike, Cheever, Spackman, Salter—about well-off white men dealing with the woes of the well-off: divorce, heartbreak and so forth. The lives of women and of the working class were as invisible in literary works then as they are today, and so the surprise and pleasure of finding that Tillie Olsen knew that life from the core was a revelation as it remains today. I doubt if anyone else has ever written a story called “As I Stand Here Ironing.”
This story of poverty and hardship is told by a hard-pressed mother trying to explain why she gave up custody, temporarily, of her infant daughter. It is powerfully compacted into just ten pages. Women write short stories and essays because there is no time in the lives we lead to write three or four hundred pages, and the result is a miracle of compression.
Olsen’s other stories are full of the fire of rage, struggle, and disappointment: a couple tries to find to find a place in their heart and crowded home for a difficult family friend, or two little girls, one black, one white, discover that their friendship is compromised by a sort of “racial sorting.” This story particularly haunted me because my then ten-year-old son had become close friends with the only African-American student in his private school class; taking him up to Harlem for an overnight visit revealed a painful divide that ultimately doomed their companionship.
For me, though, the importance of Tell Me A Riddle was overshadowed by Olsen’s later book, Silences, published in 1978—a series of reflections and quotations about why so many talented women writers do not continue to publish after their first books.
Olsen titles a section, “Writers, Mothers: It is humanly impossible for a woman who is a writer and a mother to work on a regular teaching job and write”—particularly cogent because for most writers, then and now, teaching as an adjunct professor (pay around three thousand dollars a semester) is the only job available. And I know from experience both how rewarding and how draining that job can be.
Still, it gave me a chill to find that Olsen had quoted something I wrote about the conflict I was feeling in the early seventies between mothering my three sons and writing: “My work is reduced to five or six hours a week, always subject to interruptions and cancellations; and yet I do not regret the shape my life has taken, although it was not the one I would have chosen ten years ago.”
Olsen comments, “Sallie Bingham, author of the memorable The Way It Is Now, 1972—and no book since.”
The Way It is Now was my third book and second collection of short stories. It was followed by twenty-five years of silence, except for short stories published in magazines and anthologies, most of them now lost and forgotten.
Olsen also quotes German artist Käthe Kollwitz, from a diary entry written when she was in her fifties: “Again I feel as I used to when the children were sick, after the cause for real anxiety had passed and I stayed close by them, did everything for them, did not even think about my own work…” Kollwitz’s youngest son, Peter, was killed fighting in World War One; she is as far as I know the only artist who lost a child in war and used the sculptures she created and her work as a pacifist to try to alert the rest of us to the horrors war perpetuates. This is another lost topic.
Olsen also quotes Jane Lazarre, author of The Mother Knot, 1976. The later book that brought her recognition after a long silence was The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter, a memoir published in 2017.
Lazarre quotes from Adrienne Rich’s Of Mother Born in which Rich self-prescribes what she must do as a mother of three sons to continue to write: “I must not accept any social engagements. I must not do anything but work when not with the children. I must learn to sleep less.” Trying to adopt this schedule, Lazarre feels a “physical and emotional crampedness”—familiar to all of us who continue to write.
It is not a coincidence that this “crampedness” is seldom written about even now in what is published, nor is working-class life, or the profound questions raised by the far left, and particularly by Communism, as misunderstood and feared as Socialism with which it is usually confused. Nor do we hear from the writer mothers who have lost children in our wars.
So why do I call this post “Jump Start”? Tillie Olsen, for me, is a startlingly loud call to continue to work, no excuses allowed; my sons are adults and I do not have to teach to make a living. Yet the constrained life Rich describes and that Lazarre found so cramping is still a hard choice. I must remember this as many distractions become possible again with the easing (not the erasure) of the pandemic—friends calling, restaurants beckoning, travel, theater, music, movies all once again possible—that in order to write I must control these frivolous uses of my energy.
After all, writing is a privilege impossible for most women who are mothers to pursue, and I will continue to honor and cultivate that privilege.
Thank you for this, dear Sallie. Tillie Olsen’s writing had a profound influence on me, as well, early in my writing career. She holds a special place in my heart.