The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  Olsen herself was as different from Sexton as bohemian San Francisco was from a stuffy Boston suburb. Sexton was a glamorous woman who wore makeup and matching jewelry. Olsen dressed in wash-and-wear slacks and had worked since she was eighteen. Sexton’s only work experience had been the small jobs she held during the early years of her marriage; then, if she and Kayo were ever a little short on funds, her mother helped out. Sexton was born into money, a homebody who stayed in the Boston area all her life, while Olsen was a first-generation, working-class American, an itinerant, and an agitator.

  But she was also, like Sexton, a writer, although writing had frustrated her for much of her life. At the time she received Sexton’s letter, Olsen had just gotten back into writing after twenty years. She had been something of a literary celebrity in the 1930s. Back then, she was a good-looking and energetic activist, a woman who prompted comparisons to the Marxist theorist and activist Rosa Luxemburg. Two men had fought for her affections: Abe Goldfarb, with whom she had her first daughter (Karla, after Karl Marx), and Jack Olsen, her eventual husband, with whom she had three more girls. Two different publishing houses, Random House and Macmillan, sparred over the right to publish her first novel. She befriended leftist literary figures like Jack Conroy, Nelson Algren, William Saroyan, and Sanora Babb. For a few years, she was, according to a local San Francisco paper, the “most sought-after writer in the United States.”

  By 1960, those years felt like another life. Olsen had spent the 1940s and 1950s raising four children, doing community organizing, and working a bunch of day jobs to support her family. She wrote when she could—on the bus home from work, at night after her children were asleep—but she struggled to complete any works of fiction. It was only within the last five years that she’d managed to write and publish a few short stories. At the time she published “Tell Me a Riddle,” she was overworked, underpaid, and nearly fifty years old. She was afraid that she’d missed her chance at becoming the great proletarian writer she had long hoped to be.

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  As far as she could remember, Olsen had always wanted to write. Born in 1912 in Omaha, Nebraska, Tybile “Tillie” Lerner was something of an organic intellectual. She placed a portrait of Virginia Woolf on a desk in her childhood home; she modeled her adolescent writing on Woolf and Gertrude Stein. She read John Dos Passos and Willa Cather. When she was in high school, she wrote a column for the student newspaper called “Squeaks” that satirized schoolteachers and the mandatory Shakespeare requirement.

  Tillie was as passionate about politics as she was about literature. Her parents were Yiddish-speaking Russian Jews and avowed socialists—Sam Lerner, her father, was a fan of Eugene Debs—and they were suspicious of communists. In 1930, however, the Communist Party had enormous appeal for young, idealistic Americans who believed that the social order could be radically transformed. Across the nation, Communist Party organizers gathered. John Reed Clubs—organizations of Marxist artists and intellectuals—launched in major cities. Towns big and small crawled with members of the Young Communist League, who cast off bourgeois notions of sexual propriety and thrived on a mix of romance and revolution. Tillie joined the class struggle, dropping out of high school and hopping from boxcar to boxcar as many underemployed people did in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, organizing labor power.

  She and Abe, whom she’d met at eighteen, eventually made their way west and settled in Stockton, California, in the Central Valley. Tillie merged her literary and political interests and began writing for the Communist Party publication The Daily Worker and a new magazine called Partisan Review, published out of New York’s John Reed Club. In 1934, Partisan Review accepted half of the first chapter of her prospective novel about life in the Wyoming coal mines. The editor, Philip Rahv, was eager to publish the voices of the proletariat; he accepted Tillie’s excerpt immediately and gave it the title “The Iron Throat.” The piece, published later that year, was remarkable. Tillie married the kind of stream of consciousness used by Woolf and James Joyce to the socialist realism demanded by the 1930s political Left.

  Tillie Olsen as a young woman

  Tillie aimed to live the same political ideals she advanced in her fiction. In 1934, Tillie and Abe moved to San Francisco to support a strike by the city’s longshoremen. During the strike, Tillie met a union leader named Jack Olsen. He was strong, handsome, and energetic, the kind of man who spoke easily at rallies. Together, they took on a slew of projects—leafleting, organizing, and registering voters. (In his later years, Jack befriended all the sex workers who walked his neighborhood streets in San Francisco; he registered each of them to vote and talked over every ballot issue.) Tillie took to sleeping at Communist Party headquarters in downtown San Francisco. She wanted to stay close to the action—and to Jack. Her interest was reciprocated, though the two did not marry until they reconnected in 1936, by which point she had left Abe. They had three daughters together: Julie, born in 1938; Kathie, born in 1943; and Laurie, born in 1947. According to Olsen’s biographer, Panthea Reid, Jack’s co-workers teased him about having “nothing but girls.”

  While she was organizing in the 1930s, Olsen found, to her delight, that her literary reputation was growing. “The Iron Throat” was praised in The New Republic as an example of “early genius.” Publishers, looking to showcase a woman’s angle on Depression-era America, besieged Rahv for Olsen’s contact information. Both Bennett Cerf of Random House and the renowned writer and editor Malcolm Cowley, then at The New Republic, reached Olsen and requested to see more writing; other editors expressed interest as well. Olsen thrilled to these overtures, but at the time she received them, her hands were tied; she had been arrested for her involvement in the strike and imprisoned. A lawyer facilitated her correspondence with editors and publishers. After the investigative journalist Lincoln Steffens helped pay her $1,000 bail and got her released from jail, her first priority was the completion of her report on the summer’s many strike activities. Her piece, titled “The Strike,” which ended up the cover story of Partisan Review’s 1934 summer issue, began,

  Do not ask me to write of the strike and the terror. I am on a battlefield, and the increasing stench and smoke sting the eyes so it is impossible to turn them back into the past. You leave me only this night to drop the bloody garment of Todays, to cleave through the gigantic events that have crashed one upon the other, to the first beginning. If I could go away for a while, if there were time and quiet, perhaps I could do it…I could stumble back into the past and slowly, painfully rear the structure in all its towering magnificence, so that the beauty and heroism, the terror and significance of those days, would enter your heart and sear it forever with the vision.

  Olsen told of the “heroism, the terror and significance” of the longshoremen, but she also told of her own terror and her own literary role. The piece was as much about her own struggle as a writer as it was about workers’ rights. It described the value of time and quiet for the working writer; attaining both would prove to be elusive for her for years to come.

  By 1961, these heady days of bidding wars and literary parties were long in the past for Olsen. The optimism of the Popular Front, the coalition of leftists and liberals that had come together to fight fascism, had given way to the paranoia of the McCarthy era. Throughout the 1950s, the Olsens were often near broke or on the edge of poverty. (Jack was apprenticing as a printer, and Olsen picked up odd jobs and occasionally borrowed money.) Instead of writing, Olsen worked as a community organizer, a typist, a secretary. “She worked, she had a job, just like my father had a job,” her second daughter, Julie, recalled. “They weren’t careers.” Most of the time, Olsen worked not for her own fulfillment but simply to earn a living. While some of her work, such as her political organizing, accorded with her values, much of it did not. She sheltered her daughters from the worst of anticommunism and conformity; she saved up for
their birthdays and showered them with as many books as she could afford. She even handled surprise visits from FBI agents—who kept a file on Olsen until 1970—with humor and grace.

  Still, Olsen churned with discontentment. She had a bunch of ideas for stories, including one about her eldest, Karla, but she had so little time to write. Jack was still making apprentice wages, which forced Olsen to pick up modeling jobs for print advertisers and to get creative about maintaining a household of six on a strict budget. She loved her daughters—in 1954, they were twenty-two, sixteen, eleven, and seven—but she had been mothering for many years now, and she was far from done.

  She described her frustration consistently in journal entries from these years. Olsen rarely had a notebook; instead, she typed out her thoughts in incomplete sentences on scrap paper, and she usually forgot to write the date. “Not a moment to sit down and think,” reads one such entry. “That death of the creative process…I am being destroyed.” In another: “I don’t even know if I could still write…Life (the job that takes so much of me, the family that takes somuch [sic] of me) has its own anaesthesia. I am so weary physically at night I sleep well and dreamlessly.” Elsewhere, she powerfully described her craving for time and space:

  Pushed by the most elementary force—money—further more impossibly away from writing…Compulsion so fierce at night

  brutal impulse to shove Julie away from typewriter

  voices of kids calling—to be able to chop chop chop like hands from the liveboat to leave me free…My conflict—to reconcile work with life…Time it festered and congested postponed deferred and once started up again the insane desire, like an aroused woman…conscious of the creative abilities within me, more than I can encompass…1953–1954: I keep on dividing myself and flow apart, I who want to run in one river and become great.

  This was Olsen’s rendition of the acrobatics Kumin had described to her mother. It was her way of pacing like a caged tiger, as Sexton had put it. But unlike Kumin or Sexton, at the time she wrote these words, Olsen had the additional burden of wage earning. (Kumin worked, too, but she didn’t face the same economic pressure as Olsen.) She was split in more directions than either of the poets could have imagined.

  Olsen could never clear enough time and space to work in the way she liked: slowly, meticulously, and with numerous revisions. In 1954, thanks to a strange twist of fate, she found the time she needed: ulcerative colitis landed her in the hospital, and she received six weeks of disability granted by government-funded insurance, weeks she used to write. (She called the disability leave her “Dr. Raimundi fellowship.”) She finished a story she had been working on for nearly a year, a dramatic monologue delivered by a working-class woman, “a young mother…a distracted mother,” struggling to care for her children while holding down multiple jobs. The unnamed narrator feels guilty that she cannot afford for her children “the soil of easy growth.” Her remembrances of earlier years are interrupted by the demands of the day: ironing that needs to be finished, a baby crying who needs to be changed. The story ends with a kind of secular prayer, a plea to someone—perhaps to the teacher, to whom the monologue is addressed, or perhaps to the reader, who is witness to this private suffering—to help her eldest daughter believe that she is “more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.”

  When she finished the story, then titled “Help Her to Believe,” she sent a copy to Arthur Foff, her eldest daughter Karla’s creative writing instructor at San Francisco State. She also described to him some of her challenges in balancing writing with motherhood. For instance, she had just taken Kathie, now in junior high, to a clinic for a serious ear and throat infection and then spent weeks caring for her as she recovered. Foff, who had seen an early version of the story and had at that point agreed to let Olsen sit in on his class, encouraged her to apply for a real fellowship, one that would give her time away from work and from family obligations. Olsen mailed “Help Her to Believe,” along with a recommendation from Foff, to Stanford’s Creative Writing Program. A few weeks later, in April 1955, she answered the phone to hear a strange man’s voice. He claimed to be the eminent novelist Wallace Stegner, Kumin’s former teacher, who had left Harvard to found the Creative Writing Program at Stanford. Stegner offered her one of three Jones fellowships (later renamed for Stegner) for the coming academic year. Olsen was speechless.

  From the fall of 1955 through the spring of 1956, Olsen rode the bus south twice a week to Palo Alto to study. The sprawling, luxurious Stanford campus, with its Spanish ranch-style architecture and palm trees, seemed a world away from the crowded, chaotic Mission District where the Olsen family lived. Bougainvillea and cacti lined the paths that took her to a red-roofed building where her workshop was held. The social novelist Richard Scowcroft taught the fall section of the course, and her old correspondent Malcolm Cowley, now an editor at Viking, taught in the spring. At Stanford, Olsen offered encouragement to her classmates and worked on a story about a sailor who was down on his luck. She was nervous that she would be the oldest student, or that she wouldn’t be good enough, but she fit in better than expected. The other students had heard of her success during the 1930s, and they admired the writing she presented. By the end of the spring semester, she had three new stories.

  Olsen hadn’t published anything since before World War II; within a year, she placed three stories in different magazines. “Help Her to Believe,” the piece that had restarted her writing career, appeared first in Stanford Short Stories and then in The Pacific Spectator. A story about race relations called “Baptism” was published in Prairie Schooner. “Hey Sailor” appeared in Nolan Miller’s New Campus Writing No. 2. These were little campus magazines, not the prestigious magazines that had published her during the 1930s, but this was still progress. What’s more, the Olsens finally had the money for a washing machine (up to this point, Olsen had used a device with a hand crank that could be turned to squeeze out soap rinse—a very labor-intensive process). Olsen was exuberant.

  Still, she craved more time to write. Family and work obligations reduced her writing time to a sliver. In the years leading up to and during her Stanford fellowship, she had taken on additional responsibilities: she had supported her mother-in-law when the latter’s husband died; she had hosted for a period of months T. Mike Walker, a young man from a troubled family who had befriended Julie, now a student at Mission High. Olsen had managed to use many of these familial obligations as inspiration for her work. She took notes on the friendship between the adolescent Kathie and an African American classmate and used them to write the story “Baptism.” Another visitor, Whitey Gleason, served as the inspiration for “Hey Sailor.” But she struggled to find the time to transform her notes and scraps into stories. It seemed that there would never be a time of ease for her, a time when she could write freely and without worrying about neglecting her household tasks. “Last night—be honest—wanting—needing a different life,” she wrote in her journal. She made a list of the features of this “different life.” The first thing on her list was “solitude.”

  And then there was the matter of money. Unlike the stereotypical (though far from universal) mid-century nuclear family, the Olsens couldn’t rely on a single male breadwinner. Thus, when her fellowship at Stanford finished, Olsen returned to secretarial work. Some days, there was no one in the office, and Olsen could use the time to write. Other days, she resented the ways that what she called “business-ese” and “legalese” adulterated her prose. If work was stifling, home could be chaotic. She won another writing grant, from the Ford Foundation, but like the Stanford fellowship, it too had an expiration date. Wage labor always loomed.

  And so, when Olsen and Sexton connected in the spring of 1961, they were moving in opposite directions. Sexton was surging. She’d published her first book, Bedlam, and was beginning work on a second project. Her daughters, now eight and six, were often in the care of others. Olsen,
though, was like a rock climber clutching a precipice; she needed to use all her strength and concentration to keep from falling. Though she was about to publish a book with the small press Lippincott—a collection of four short stories called Tell Me a Riddle—she was far less optimistic than Sexton. She was further along in life: she was now forty-nine, silver-haired, striking but no longer young, in her own words “substantial…sze. 14 clothes; 9-Cwidth clodhoppers; stubby, clumsy hands.” She’d been living with her writing ambitions for decades—Sexton had harbored them for only a few years—and she knew all too well how easy it was to get caught up in work and family and to let go of writing time.

  While both women were passionate about writing, they approached the craft differently. Sexton had a tremendous work ethic and a knack for getting her poetry in print. (“Jesus God! You’re publishing everywhere!” her mentor Snodgrass once remarked.) Sexton might revise a poem six or seven times, but eventually she would send it out, even if she weren’t fully satisfied. Olsen worked more slowly. She was a perfectionist who rarely let anyone see her work prematurely—not teachers, not editors, not even prospective agents. When she saw proofs of a story prepublication, she’d insert a number of changes. She even revised material that was already in print, making notes on her own copies and sometimes even requesting changes post-printing. Some, including Cowley, saw her perfectionism as a bad habit to be defeated; others, like Miller, defended Olsen’s process. “I suppose some would say she has the fault of being too slow a producer,” Miller once wrote. “These must be impatient people…who are as well satisfied with synthetic diamonds as real ones.” But it was nonetheless true that Olsen had lost many opportunities because she’d lingered over stories or refused requests to show someone her writing. Her perfectionism hampered her as much as her jobs and mothering duties did; it wasn’t clear that doing away with the latter would improve the former. Scowcroft once accused Olsen of being most productive when her conditions were hardest.