Tillie Olsen.

• Author: CUSAC, ANNE-MARIE
• Position: Interview

`I haven't published a lot of fiction. I haven't published a lot of anything. But it does go on, it's taught, anthologized. That's very dear to me, and dearest of all are the people whom it has affected.'

Tillie Olsen, the beloved fiction writer, is self-effacing in person. "I haven't published a lot of anything," she says. And she's partly right. Her output has been relatively small. But she makes up for that in quality. Most famous for the short-story collection Tell Me a Riddle (Dell, 1961), Olsen has the ability to imply whole lives in a few sentences.

Here the speaker of "I Stand Here Ironing" looks back on the difficulties of young, single motherhood: "She was a miracle to me, but when she was eight months old I had to leave her daytimes with the woman downstairs to whom she was no miracle at all, for I worked or looked for work and for Emily's father, who `could no longer endure' (he wrote in his good-bye note) `sharing want with us.'

"I was nineteen. It was the pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the depression. I would start running as soon as I got off the streetcar, running up the stairs, the place smelling sour, and awake or asleep to startle awake, when she saw me she would break into a clogged weeping that could not be comforted, a weeping I can hear yet."

Olsen says she was born in 1912 or 1913 in Omaha, Nebraska. Her parents were working class Russian Jewish immigrants and were deeply involved in the Socialist Party, which her father served as state secretary. Once, Eugene Victor Debs, head of the Socialist Party, came to Omaha in celebration of his release from prison (he was incarcerated for protesting World War I). Olsen and her sister presented him with red roses--an event she recalls fondly.

She showed early promise as a writer--part of what became her novel, Yonnondio (about a working class family in the 1930s), was published in 1934 in Partisan Review to high praise. But she spent much of her life working full-time jobs and raising four children. Among other things, she was a pork trimmer in meatpacking houses, a hotel maid, a laundry worker, a jar capper, a waitress, and a solderer.

In 1955, Olsen won a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, which allowed her to do her first sustained writing in twenty years. She published Tell Me a Riddle when she was fifty. That book includes the much anthologized "I Stand Here Ironing" (a mother's reflection on her daughter, raised during years of poverty and anxiety), "Oh Yes" (the story of a threatened friendship between two young girls, one white and one black, who are entering the stratified world of junior high school), "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" (the tale of a seaman and unionist who returns to San Francisco on a drunken binge and finds only cautious acceptance from his former comrades), and "Tell Me a Riddle" (the story of the death of a Russian Jewish immigrant and revolutionary). In 1974, after setting aside Yonnondio for forty years, she finally revised and published it (Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence).

From personal experience, Olsen came to realize the obstacles in the way of many writers not born to luxury. "In the twenty years I bore and raised my children, usually had to work on a paid job as well, the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist," she writes in Silences (Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1978), her book on the economic and social reasons writers fail to produce, and why many do not come to writing at all. Here is her dedication to that book: "For our silenced people, century after century their beings consumed in the hard, everyday essential work of maintaining human life. Their art, which still they made--as their other contributions--anonymous; refused respect, recognition; lost."

An activist most of her life, Olsen was jailed twice: "First in Kansas City, winter `32." She was distributing leaflets to the meatpackers. The charge was "making loud and unusual noises." There she "languished five or six weeks--no money for bail--and got pleurisy, then incipient TB," she writes in her essay "The `30s: A Vision of Fear and Hope" (Newsweek, 1994).

Her second arrest occurred just after the' San Francisco General Strike in 1934. In response to the murders of several striking longshoremen, 100,000 marched down Market Street to protest. "No one spoke," wrote Olsen. "The only sound was the beat of our feet. Then came `The Terror'--bloody crackdowns by vigilantes who, the police giving them the power to arrest, wrecked encampments and beat strikers and `sympathizers.'"

At the time of the General Strike, Olsen was a single mother. She met Jack Olsen (a fellow Young Communist League member) that year and had three more children with him, marrying him in 1944 before he went off to war. They lived together until 1989, when he died.

Before our interview, Olsen and I ate lunch together at an Italian restaurant a few blocks from her home in Berkeley, California. After making sure the busboy got his own tip, she suggested we walk back the long way and took my arm firmly in hers.

Just before we reached her house, she pointed to a third-floor window. "That hat is always there," she said. I looked up. Visible in the window was the back side of a bureau mirror. A straw hat and a scarf were slung from the top. "Sometimes the scarf is gone," Olsen said. "And then it is back as though it never moved." We turned toward her house. "You have to ponder the little mysteries," she said.

Until about eight months ago, Olsen lived in St. Francis Square, a three-block, working class, multi-ethnic cooperative in San Francisco's Fillmore district. She now lives in a small house directly behind the home of her youngest daughter, Laurie. We sat on her sunny porch and--while hornets darted in and out of her open door--talked for several hours.

Q: Why do you write?

Tillie Olsen: Because I'm a human being and human beings have a need to express themselves. Also, I stuttered. So I listened a lot, and there was a lot to listen to in my neighborhood. And there was the wonder of the black church, fight around the corner. I loved that music so much, sometimes I'd go sit on the stairs. Once one of the women said, "Why don't you come up and sit in a real chair?" So I went in and came every Sunday I could.

I also had luck because I was proud of my class--because of growing up with Socialist parents and having sat on Eugene V. Debs's lap and given him red roses. And hearing him. I remember how he said passionately...