Pineda was a poor salesperson; she would have been a disaster at a Tupperware party or as a representative of Mary Kay. She was better with her fellow sculptors, like her husband, those with whom she could use technical shorthand. And it was her fellow sculptors who ended up speaking for this modest artist: Raymond Puccinelli, her instructor at Berkeley, who in his recommendation called her “one of the most remarkable persons that I have ever encountered” and praised her for keeping up her work through child rearing without “noticeable pause or lessening of vitality”; H. Harvard Arnason, the vice president of art administration at the Guggenheim Foundation, who named her “one of the most accomplished young sculptors working today”; and Hy Swetzoff, her gallerist, who, like Puccinelli, argued that Pineda’s sensitive, masterful work spoke for itself.
It was clear to Connie Smith and the rest of the selection committee that Pineda was an accomplished artist, a consummate professional who was respected by her peers. This was both her strength and her weakness as a candidate: the art history department faculty member who reviewed her application called her “a very strong candidate but not a new talent,” while a selection committee member noted that she was “well known already.” To give her a grant would be to reward a woman who started working from a position of strength: she came from a wealthy family, and her mother had consistently supplemented what money she and her husband earned. She was not desperate; this was not her last chance at a creative life. For her, a grant would not be a second chance, or an on-ramp to an abandoned career. Instead, it would be a reward for her achievements, for succeeding where so many female artists—so many women—had failed. Pineda would have to wait until the spring to learn whether she deserved it.
* * *
—
The spring of 1962 found Sexton churning with excitement. Her spirits had risen with the temperatures. All My Pretty Ones, her second book, was published by Houghton Mifflin in April. Its title poem—like “The Truth the Dead Know,” the poem she’d read in the Institute seminar—represented yet another effort to lay her parents to rest. At the end of “All My Pretty Ones,” the speaker, who has been perusing her parents’ scrapbooks and diaries, finally closes the books and places them on the shelves. “Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you,” she concludes, “bend down my strange face to yours and forgive you.” Sexton had sent a draft of “The Truth the Dead Know” to Olsen in November 1961, when her parents’ deaths were still quite present in her mind. Now the poem was bound between the covers of a book, like a body sealed in a coffin.
On May 3, before acceptances for the next academic year were officially announced, Sexton heard from Smith that the writer she was waiting on—the writer whose application she had encouraged, whose face she longed to see—would be among the new class of Institute fellows. Sexton raced to her typewriter to send the good news across the country. “Dear Friend and Happily AWARDED Tillie!” she typed. “You got it! You got it! You got it!” (She’d celebrated her own acceptance in these same words, barely a year earlier.) Sexton was giddy at the prospect of meeting her penpal in person. She trusted that they’d be able to overcome any shyness and have the same literary and intellectual exchanges that they’d been having for years in their letters. And altruistically, she was happy that her friend, a woman who wrote so well and who worked so hard, would experience a time of creative freedom.
Word somehow reached Olsen before Sexton’s letter arrived in the Bay Area. The Institute was offering $7,000 (nearly $56,500 today), more than twice as much as it promised its associate scholars. Olsen would be a full-time fellow. It was a professional salary for a professional writer. As the Harvard faculty member who reviewed her application noted, Olsen was a “candidate of unquestionable distinction” and “far beyond the stage of promise and into the realm of achievement.”
Here was her chance—maybe her last chance—at redemption. She would have a room of her own, a library full of books, a proper desk—things she never had when she was living and working in her busy, six-person household. Free from demands and distractions, she could finally write the great proletarian novel. She would not be a novelist manqué; she would not shirk the social responsibility of writing the story of class struggle. She resolved to finish the project she should have finished a long time ago.
Even as she resolved to focus on her writing, Olsen found herself enticed by the idea of studying at the nation’s best university. She would audit courses, she resolved; she thought about spending hours prowling the stacks of Widener Library. She decided to take advantage of all the concerts and lectures and readings that Harvard sponsored. A woman of great ambition and greater appetites, Olsen resolved to do it all: study, research, recreate, and write the novel she was born to write.
There were still a few problems to solve, though—mainly, the problem of mothering.
Who would care for her youngest daughter, Laurie? Would her husband, Jack, come with her? How would they find a place to live? Olsen had faced these same challenges a few years earlier, when she was on the Ford grant. Then she had secured a spot at the Huntington Hartford Foundation, a small artist colony in the Pacific Palisades, a coastal neighborhood in Los Angeles just south of the Santa Monica Mountains; she had known that in order to maximize her productivity, she needed to remove herself from the family home. But the commute was long. Jack missed her and called each night. Her children came to visit regularly. On one such occasion, Kathie, her third daughter, recorded her impressions: “I WISH THAT WE ALL COULD LIVE HERE…Mama is happy. We are happy, My mother looks really good.” Maybe the solution to the problems posed by the Institute was to do as Kathie suggested: move the whole family to the place where “Mama is happy.”
The first week of May, Olsen telegrammed her acceptance to the Institute: “JOYFULLY ACCEPT TRUST AND OBLIGATION OF TIME FOR WORK IN SUCH HALLOWED AIR.”
* * *
—
The rest of the acceptances went out in the mail, granting seventeen women access to the “hallowed air” that Olsen described. Their number included a printmaker from Cambridge, a musicologist from Newton, a mathematician from Princeton, and a scholar of medieval European literature from West Point. The sculptor Pineda was among the very few artists accepted. She was awarded a stipend of $1,900 (roughly $15,300 today), money that could pay for household help and child care; she was also awarded a separate fund for sculpting materials. She and her cohort would join fifteen women from the inaugural class who stayed on for a second year, including Swan, Sexton, and Kumin. Sexton and Kumin had applied for renewal together in January; they had proposed the compilation of an anthology of living American poets, to be used in secondary schools (“the poets” truly did everything together). Each poet won $2,000 for the coming year.
That summer, the new fellows did their best to prepare for the life changes ahead.
Olsen felt more anxious than most. She lived far from the nation’s historical center of higher learning, she had no BA, and she was not a faculty wife, like so many others. She craved the credibility that Radcliffe would offer, but she also feared the move away from the Bay Area, the place where she’d spent nearly all her adult life.
When she was nineteen, Olsen had fled Nebraska with little more than a notebook and a sense of righteous indignation. She’d jumped boxcars and hopped from state to state. Now a silver-haired matriarch, she found herself anxious about living elsewhere; she at once loved to live alone and couldn’t imagine such a life. At first, she resolved to leave Jack behind; she wrote to her mentor Dick Scowcroft that she would tell Jack, “I love you (that part no lie) [and will] come back, I’ll never leave you again—and try like hell to believe my lies.” After several weeks of negotiating with Jack, she agreed to let him come to Cambridge. Now, even as she readied herself for a spell of radical intellectual independence, she had to consider the needs of her family.
She peppered Smith with questions in a series
of letters: Could she get a work space in the library? Would she need any special accommodations to audit classes? Would the Graduate Center provide housing appropriate for a family? Where might her youngest go to school? Smith, generous as always with her time and knowledge, pulled strings to make the move easier: she helped the Olsens find a place to live that was within walking distance of Institute headquarters; she also arranged for Laurie, then fourteen, to attend the Putney School, a boarding school in Vermont. Kathie, eighteen and a recent high school graduate, worried for her younger sister; boarding school seemed so unnatural, and wouldn’t Laurie feel alienated, surrounded by so much wealth? She decided to quit her job as a stenographer and, sometime in the winter, follow her parents to Cambridge. Julie and Karla, Tillie’s oldest daughters, were mothers themselves at this point; they would not travel to Cambridge. Julie, who was used to knowing Olsen was in the same city, would feel her mother’s absence acutely. “I was furious. I was like, ‘How could you go off to the other side of the country when I have a new baby?’ ” Julie remembered years later. “On the other hand, I was incredibly proud of her. I used to carry…the best American short story book she was in around with me and hand it to people, and I was thrilled she was writing.” Later, as she faced her own challenges as a mother and a scholar, she realized how important her mother’s work had been.
That summer, as Ivy League men across the Northeast walked through wrought-iron gates and out into the postcollege world, the members of the Olsen family readied themselves for a cross-country move. It was a big decision, one they had not made lightly. They sold the house on Swiss Avenue, paid off their debts, and spent $500—a donation from Cowley—on a U-Haul trailer, which they crammed with their belongings. Jack, a true egalitarian, would follow his wife wherever her career took her—something few men did in an era of male breadwinners and masculine dominance. (Sympathetic husbands were a fixture in the lives of the fellows: “Marianna’s generation…was still, ‘whither though goest, so will I,’ ” Tovish reflected in 1974. “Very convenient for the male…Not so hot for the woman.”) Olsen was about to take a leap of faith, and Jack decided he would jump along with her.
Olsen, Jack, and Laurie set off for Boston, stopping along the way to see Olsen’s siblings in Nebraska and Pennsylvania. The plan was for the three of them to live in an apartment close to the Institute; Jack would find a printer job, and when the school year started, the two parents would drive their youngest daughter up to Vermont.
All of the Olsens felt a bit nervous: their lives were about to change dramatically. Olsen, who often tried to alleviate anxiety with bouts of activity, injected joy and play into this trip: the family camped outdoors as they traveled cross-country, and Laurie and Olsen performed impromptu concerts for the family members they visited. Laurie played the fiddle, and Olsen sang folk songs in a high voice that sounded younger than her fifty years.
Such jubilance simultaneously spoke to Olsen’s excitement and masked her anxiety. As the Olsen family barreled east, U-Haul trailer bumping along behind them, Olsen, a California dreamer, wondered what, and whom, she would find waiting for her on the nation’s other coast.
CHAPTER 9
The Equivalents
ON FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1962, Olsen sat at the Institute’s first formal tea and waited, nervously, to introduce herself. She didn’t feel as though she fit in. For one thing, all these women seemed to be from the Boston area, or at least from the East Coast, whereas she was a transplant. She and Jack had only just settled in their third-floor apartment at 187 Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge. For another, these women had such impressive credentials! They had PhDs, publications, famous husbands. Some of them, the ones returning for a second year, just seemed so comfortable in this space, as if they’d always been there.
When it was her turn to introduce herself, Olsen stuttered, as she often did when nervous. She shared what felt to her like meager credentials: four daughters, many jobs, four short stories. No impressive degree; no famous husband. She wondered if she would ever feel at home at the Institute.
Later, she moved into her office at 78 Mount Auburn. Sexton stopped by as Olsen was setting up. Glancing around the room, she noticed the portraits Olsen had pasted on the wall: these were the same portraits the latter had put up in her prior work spaces, and they included that photo of Sexton from the book jacket. Sexton was pleased to see herself in such impressive company. The two women took a walk along the Charles River—Sexton barefoot, Olsen shod—and talked about poetry.
That same evening, Sexton sat down to write Olsen a letter, just as she had done so many months earlier. It was raining, and Sexton, enclosed in her study, imagined she was living in a solitary cabin, maybe somewhere in the woods. She must have felt a little foolish, writing to a woman who now lived near the Institute’s yellow house and whom she could call, just as she did with Kumin, because long-distance charges wouldn’t be applied. Even though she was a performer, Sexton was often shy with strangers, and especially shy in groups. (Both Sexton and Olsen expressed themselves more fluidly on the page.) She chided herself for muffing a few quotations in conversation earlier. Her letter gave her a chance to introduce herself again, in better form, and to recall to her friend the bond that they already shared.
“Meeting you and being with you!” she wrote excitedly. Olsen had given Sexton a work by Kafka, and Sexton reported that she’d already read the entire thing and had loved it. She then corrected a quotation that she’d shared earlier. It was from Saul Bellow’s Herzog, a novel about a twice-married and twice-divorced Jewish intellectual who has taken to writing angry letters—to the president, to his psychiatrist, to The New York Times—as a way of venting his spleen. The novel wouldn’t be published until the fall of 1964, but somehow Sexton already had a copy of the manuscript, or at least the section she quoted from, in which Herzog prepares to leave his New York City apartment for a week of rest at a country house. “With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. ‘Don’t cry, you idiot!’ Live or die, but don’t poison everything!’ ” Sexton shared very little with Bellow’s aging, misanthropic protagonist, but she nonetheless found this little bit of stern self-talk inspiring; she’d posted the quotation above her desk at home (for her, Herzog made for a sterner judge than Olsen’s Tolstoy). She now copied out the quotation verbatim for her friend. “Live or die”—the phrase reverberated through Sexton’s mind: it reminded her that she always had a choice.
Sexton had chosen life—for now. After being with Olsen, she felt newly inspired. “Having been with you today, I feel like a writer again,” she wrote. “A creator, a solitary but never poisoner, maker of something.” The older writer, a woman who was at once childishly optimistic and worldly wise, recognized something in the younger writer; she confirmed its existence simply by speaking of literature past and present, of writers living and dead. Like the self-admonishing Herzog, Olsen reminded Sexton who she was and what she could choose to be. Validated, and newly hopeful, Sexton signed her letter with love.
* * *
—
Like all of the scholars and writers associated with the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, Olsen had come seeking solitude. She thrilled to the idea of a quiet, book-lined carrel; she eagerly imagined occupying a room of her own. And yet what she found in Cambridge was not quiet but community. She’d come hoping to be Virginia Woolf—she’d recently read A Room of One’s Own—and wound up in a Bloomsbury group.
The first time Kathie visited her mother’s office in the old, creaky house at 78 Mount Auburn Street, the young woman could swear she felt electricity rippling between rooms. Moving into the main seminar room, she caught snatches of conversation. “What are you working on?” the fellows asked one another. “Where are you stumbling?” They were versions of the question, What can I do to help? She heard women recommending resources: pick up this book at Widener; send the pro
posal to this editor at that press. She watched fellows pour cups of tea and sit down to talk about the economics of publishing. As a young woman just starting out in the working world, Kathie couldn’t believe how invested these women were in each other’s work, how seriously they took each other’s intellectual ambitions, no matter how idiosyncratic or unfamiliar. Their intensity and focus coexisted with, and amplified, the general sense of delight. “The atmosphere there was one of absolute joy,” Kathie said later. “Absolute seriousness and joy both.”
The Bunting fellows in conversation; Olsen is fourth from left
Photograph by Olive Pierce
It might have felt like something of a miracle. It was a world in which women’s society tended to take few and limited forms: in the short-lived community of the Seven Sisters or the solidarity developed between shifts on some factory floors. Women of the fellows’ age might have been asked—at cocktail parties, or at their husbands’ company Christmas gatherings—to keep it light or to stay quiet.
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