A Literary Life

...And after all, I know that my pen will be strong enough to carry me," Rilke proclaimed...

...I can only surmise that the immoderation of her demands arises from the religious streak in her devotion to literature...

...The more secure the talent, the more likely that it will generate honest self-examination, and the more honesty will repay...

...She published her first book at 50 (in 1963), and her reputation is almost entirely based on its wracking, unforgettable title story, "Tell Me a Riddle," about the discord and closeness of an elderly Jewish couple in their last days together...

...Certainly perfectionism did not regulate the structure of this book, which contains the short title essay on general impediments to productivity...

...Writing and one's talent are among the most difficult things in the world to assess accurately...

...It is such prosaic, sanguine testimonials in Silences that convert us, between the lines of its devout ecstasies and passionate complaints, to the literary life...

...Her condolences persist, in the face of the cheerful reality that Balzac and Dickens worked hard to earn a livelihood, William Carlos Williams practiced medicine, and Shirley Jackson kept house for Stanley Edgar Hyman...

...Most rueful testimony of all comes from the author herself, who raised four children, held a full-time job as a transcriber in a dairy equipment company, and could only devote herself to her craft when she was on a bus or after her children were asleep...

...am, in short, in the thick of the greatest rapture known to me," confided Virginia Woolf...

...She intends, she says in the foreword to her new book of essays, "to rededicate" us to the literary calling and, like Andre Gide, to bring us "strength, joy, courage, perspicacity and defiance...

...The image of wives, mothers, sisters, housekeepers moves Olsen to instant regret: "But how many were of the silenced in the possible twelve...

...She contends that because motherhood means being instantly interruptible and responsive, "it is distraction not meditation that becomes habitual...

...I was never aware of the even flow of daily life," she chidingly quotes Joseph Conrad as saying, "made easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful, tireless affection...

...But that is because his gifts are so enormous to start with...

...Altogether, Tillie Olsen is not one to accept with good grace any constraints at all-of biology, family, or natural allotment of energy and high spirits —upon the writer's ambition, even though these very constraints might have spurred superior efforts...

...Melville was disheartened by lack of funds...

...Excess sympathy (as opposed to empathy) is Olsen's undoing, and an indiscriminate sympathy for her own gender does positive violence to the clarity and progression of her thoughts, as well as to her sense of proportion...

...One can imagine the remarkable tenor, Luciano Pavarotti, scrupulously listening to his own records in order to perfect them, and not in the least disconcerted by his mistakes...

...She remarks pityingly that Christina Stead (author of The Man Who Loved Children) had to work for a living in a bank, and despite the fact that the job equipped her to write a novel about world banking, speculates mournfully that if she had more time and more social mobility, "What rarest combinations of imaginative fiction might we not have had from her...

...spasmodic, not constant toil...

...In the course of grieving over her lack of productivity, she fell into her messianic preoccupation with writers' "silences...

...Gerard Manley Hopkins' powers atrophied during his seven-year Jesuit vow to abstain from writing poetry...

...But as Tillie Olsen must know from her own experience, the vocation of writing is a mundane one, and its pleasures are the normal lively ones of the real world...

...But perfectionism comes naturally to a confident artist, and only whets his ardor for his work...

...When accomplishment is not commensurate with talent, a better place to look for the causes than society's or life's oppressions is close to home, in some quirk of temperament or some unlucky Aristotelian flaw...

...On the other hand, recollecting the large number of major women writers who were childless, she muses discontentedly that had things been different, "Might there not have been other marvels...

...Thomas Hardy was plagued by the Victorian censorship of the magazines that serialized his novels...

...She is like some earnest abbess, ushering her novitiates into sanctified premises, forcing them to confront the prospect of sacrifice, solitude and celibacy, and consecrating them to their chosen calling...

...This tall order must have a lot to do with her own very odd career...

...The three essays that comprise this book rove with the incantational fervor of a requiem mass over the discouragements and barriers to achievement that have beset writers for centuries...

...The silenced creator could turn out to be at the mercy of eclecticism, vanity, love of diversion-many a foible too ignoble to rate an invitation to Olsen's high-toned lament...

...Self-educated, intense and unworldly, she stalks upon the scene like a Puritan, putting us into direct communion with the great writers and sparing us the intervention of academic pedantries and autocratic journals...

...If an artist does not spring to his work as a soldier to the breach, if once within the crater he does not labor as a miner buried in the earth, if he contemplates his difficulties instead of conquering them one by one, the work remains unachieved," wrote Balzac...

...But it is simply not in Tillie Olsen to relish the woman's role in providing moral support and a gracious ambience for male talent...

...a longer essay, "One Out of Twelve" (her comparative estimate of female to male authors published), on the "punitive" circumstances to which women writers are specifically subjected...

...interruption, not continuity...

...Without quite meaning to, she manages to designate men as the chief encumbrance to the creative woman, for whom she cherishes unlimited aspirations...

...Olsen's indefatigable patience for this grueling pair, and her intuition about their singular needs (a few last grains of privacy for the ailing wife and an education in the most primitive gestures of affection for the husband) are enough evidence of talent to make us wonder why she wrote so little...

...Though one can easily empathize with these hardships of a writer's life and with the countless adversities she has unearthed-Some fascinating, like Willa Cather waiting in vain for an encouraging letter from Henry James about her first novel-I believe that the real obstacles to creativeness hardly ever enter the sphere of Olsen's worries...

...Only one other book of hers is in print, Yonnondio, a novel written in the '30s when she was 19 but first published in 1974, less ideological and more poetic than most proletarian fiction of that era...

...I walk, making up phrases, sit, contriving scenes...

...and an attentive biographical account of an unknown novelist of the 1860s, Rebecca Harding Davis, that starts as a jubilant rediscovery and unwittingly hurtles toward a glum, familiar indictment of the woman writer's woes...

...I could manage only the feeblest, shallowest growth on that devastated soil...

...Reviewed by Isa Kapp Tillie Olsen's romantic passion for literature arrives as a wholesome, old-fashioned commodity in today's hard-headed literary marketplace...

...Tillie Olsen quotes, all too acceptant-ly, poet Louise Bogan's phrase, "the knife of the perfectionist attitude in art and life," as one more handicap...

...Finally, about 100 pages (out of 289), incredibly jumbled and chopped up, are devoted to appendices and miscellanies that house a formidable litany of feminist grievances ranging from lack of early outdoor exercise to sexual bias in reviewers, and go so far as to include a number of garish insults to women writers-not out of life, as might be expected, but from fictional characters in Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts-to prove how unalterably the cards are stacked against us...