Tormented Alienation Dramas
WIEGAND, WILLIAM
Tormented Alienation Dramas TELL ME A RIDDLE By Tillie Olsen Lippincott. 156 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by WILLIAM WIEGAND Instructor in English, Harvard University; author, "The Treatment...
...A scene or a series of scenes is played out in the immense and immediate foreground...
...For in all their troubles, Mrs...
...Things are "talked about," as a character says in one of the stories, "after instead of before...
...could almost be Dos Passos...
...in "Tell Me A Riddle," between husband and wife...
...Olsen identifies a particular problem almost at once in a single, striking tableau and thus the characters seem better able to deal with it...
...At first the old woman seems a character of the most limited perspective—bitter, involuted, selfish...
...The response of the characters, however, is unusually tormented...
...In "Hey Sailor," it is the pride of a drunken seaman...
...The predicaments they face seem never to have been foreseen by them...
...While they focus narrowly, almost hypnotically, on their central characters, these characters have recollections of a world where there were strikes, the WPA, money worries, racial conflicts and immigrants in steerage...
...The title story was cited as the best of the year in the 1960 O. Henry collection...
...But none of the stories are softened...
...But their special quality is, without doubt, a great intensity...
...Unlike so much contemporary short fiction, they have a sense of history, especially of social history...
...author, "The Treatment Man" The remarkable stories of Tillie Olsen—all four of them constituting the sum total of the fiction she has written so far—are now collected in a single volume...
...Hey marinero, what ship...
...The theme is familiar, and common enough...
...Behind that, what is happening and what has happened needs, to use the author's word, an "understanding...
...Alienation comes partly because of pride...
...Olsen's characters maintain dignity...
...Understanding comes, if it comes at all, only at the expense of pain...
...In "Hey Sailor, What Ship...
...Olsen can hold on to the technique longer and make it work for a whole story instead of just a few paragraphs...
...The stories are notable for their astonishing technical range...
...But in "Tell Me A Riddle,' the full problem is revealed only gradually and the reconciliation that comes from "understanding" is denied...
...Her stories recall the '30s for still another reason...
...in "O Yes," the pride of a child...
...Of the four stories, "Hey Sailor, What Ship...
...and in "O Yes,' it is the alienation of close friends...
...Thematically, the stories are about alienation...
...One is reminded of the fiction of the 1930s which had that kind of pride and dignity: Tom Joad, Harry Morgan, the characters in "The Bear...
...In the agonized drama of her dying, we come to see her, and are meant to see her, as a hero of her time (not a heroine, but a hero), bitter because she is more idealistic, braver, more stubborn, more believing than anyone else in her family...
...Each has attracted attention in earlier printings and reprintings...
...Unconscious dignity it is, along with a half-inscrutable pride...
...They have moved on from the '30s, of course—their idiom and the rhythm of their lives is absolutely of today—but the past has made them what they are and has given them their strengths and weaknesses...
...is the most perfectly realized...
...All these things have a personal immediacy for the characters...
...In the title story, it perhaps does not come at all...
...In "I Stand Here Ironing," it is alienation between mother and daughter...
...and of a world where there is a bomb that kills "78,000 in one minute...
...The situations are domestic in nature and the characters intelligent and functioning members of the lower middle class...
...One wants almost to reject the story because of the old woman's pride, and because her death is not softened...
...But "Tell Me a Riddle" is the most dazzling, as well as the most difficult in its effort to connect past and present...
...This is what first meets the eye—a raw and jagged expressiveness that comes partly from the terrible vulnerability of the consciousness which presides over each story, and partly from the "conscience" that moves startled and frightened along the way...
...In the other stories, Mrs...
...Even the way the characters are seen reminds one of the '30s— particularly of John Dos Passos and the old Camera Eye interludes with their fragmentary recollections, their counterpoint of poetic and rhetorical eloquence, and their little interpolated refrains...
...the beat is only somewhat less harsh and inexorable in the other three...
...Seldom in short fiction has there been so ambitious an attempt to project the fate of a generation in the fate of a single character: an old Jewish woman, mother and grandmother, who is dying of cancer...
...What is uncommon is that the characters involved seem a throwback to a different kind of people than we are used to...
...Hey sailor, what ship...
...Moreover, Mrs...
...yet the situation, when understood, had a perfect kind of inevitability from the start...
...By that time, it is too late to do anything about what has happened...
...It is frightening to watch her die since she is not dying for much of anything...
...Because these are stories about families, they are naturally dramatic...
Vol. 45 • February 1962 • No. 3
