The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  Olsen was making up for lost time. She had never had access to such a rich library, nor had she ever had so much free time to read and think. She spent hours browsing the library stacks, making serendipitous discoveries. She was also keen to spend time with the creative women around her; she often dropped into their offices and studios to admire their works in progress.

  Jack—who thought his wife was brilliant and who supported her art—seemed disappointed that she wasn’t doing her “own work” while on this valuable Institute stipend. He was right: Olsen wasn’t really writing her long-overdue novel. She was researching historical context; she was making notes; she was reading for inspiration. But she wasn’t making the kind of progress that she’d promised to Cowley and to the Institute. At the end of the fall semester, she had more notes than she had polished pages of prose.

  But there was a logic to Olsen’s browsing. Sometime that fall or winter, while avoiding her messy notes for a novel, Olsen came across “old volumes, not taken out for years,” by Rebecca Harding Davis, a writer she’d long admired. Born in 1831, Davis had once been a celebrated pioneer of realism. Her novella, Life in the Iron Mills, first published anonymously in The Atlantic Monthly in segments throughout 1861, offered one of the first accounts of life among workers in industrial America. (In 1861, readers, struck by the sternness of the work, assumed the author was a man.) It became a sensation; years later, some compared Davis’s work to that of Zola, who was born nine years after her. But Davis never ascended to literary fame. After completing a novel, Margret Howth, she married, bore children, and wrote short fiction about her new life. Though she continued to write, Davis was all but forgotten by the time she died in 1910.

  Olsen had first stumbled upon Life in the Iron Mills when she was fifteen, in an Omaha junk shop. She’d spent a grand total of thirty cents on three old, stained volumes of The Atlantic Monthly. She read, amazed, the descriptions of people much like her. She felt that this tattered old story was giving her permission to strive, to want, perhaps even to write. “Literature can be made out of the lives of despised people,” Olsen wrote later, articulating the message she felt she received. “You, too, must write.” Olsen didn’t discover the identity of the author until 1958, when she was in the middle of writing the story that would become “Tell Me a Riddle.” A stray footnote in the letters of Emily Dickinson pointed her in the direction of Davis. Searching through the card catalog at the San Francisco Public Library, she could find no listing for the author. Davis had disappeared, like so many women writers in history.

  Now, in Cambridge, thirty-five years after her first encounter with Davis, Olsen brought the volumes down off the shelves and read again the novella’s opening pages. The narrator casts her eyes on the “stream of human life” making its way toward the mills:

  Masses of men, with dull, besotted faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes; stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body.

  Davis’s language rushed forward like the mass of teeming bodies, all moving in the same direction. And yet, Olsen noticed, Davis never denied the individuality of the workers; this is what made her so remarkable. Her achievement, Olsen thought, had been to make the working-class world real: to show the lives of industrial workers in all their complex humanity. Olsen wanted to do the same in what she imagined would be a work of world-altering fiction.

  Energized by what she’d read, Olsen felt herself pulled in two directions. Part of her wanted to dive into her novel and write as Davis had. But another part of her, the research-oriented part, wondered why Davis—an author of such talent—had disappeared from literary history. What granted some writers fame, and others not? What kind of writer left a legacy, and what writer never managed to get started? Were there other Rebecca Harding Davises buried in the annals of literary history? For Olsen, these questions were not merely intellectual but personal: as a mother of four who had long struggled to find the time to write, Olsen could not help noticing the way motherhood had interrupted Davis’s ascendant career. Just how many mothers were writers, she wondered, and how many writers were mothers? What had happened to other brilliant women like her?

  For weeks, Olsen spent her days in Widener, researching literary production—what enabled it, and what got in the way. Finding the time to write wasn’t just a problem for women, she realized. Many famous writers struggled to write. They were censored or self-censored; they lapsed into silence when life became too hard or turbulent to sustain creative work. Theodore Dreiser had taken eleven years to write Jennie Gerhardt, the novel he published after Sister Carrie. Isaac Babel and Oscar Wilde couldn’t write while in prison. Thomas Hardy gave up fiction, writing poetry alone during his final years. Melville burned his work. Rimbaud stopped writing entirely. She started to think of these gaps and omissions as “silences”—not the natural kind, the fallow period most writers need, but unnatural, brought on, metaphorically, by something like bad soil or a premature frost. Such “thwarting,” as Olsen called it, was both heartbreaking and, strangely, reassuring; Olsen saw that in her struggles to write, she was in esteemed company.

  There were, of course, the preternaturally productive writers: Balzac, who wrote with remarkable self-discipline and who described writing as “constant toil”; Rilke, who refused to get a day job to support his family and who preached the value of “unconfined solitude.” As she read their writing about writing, she tracked their prescriptions for creativity: no extra duties, no external communication, time, space, predictable schedules—what Conrad called “the even flow of daily life.” It must have struck Olsen that the conditions these writers lauded looked a lot like the structure of the Institute.

  Looking at who wrote consistently and who did not, Olsen began to notice some patterns. The productive writers were, for the most part, men. What’s more, the majority of them had wives: women who soothed them and kept away noisy children, who prepared the meals that the hardworking male writers ingested unthinkingly. To be sure, there were a handful of prolific women writers, but Olsen was struck by how few of these authors had had children of their own. The great nineteenth-century novelist George Eliot did not, and neither did Olsen’s contemporary Katherine Anne Porter. Instead, many of them had servants who took care of the daily domestic tasks. She marveled over a quotation from Katherine Mansfield, who, along with her husband, longed to become a great writer: “The house seems to take up so much time…I mean when I have to clean up twice over or wash up extra unnecessary things, I get frightfully impatient and want to be working”—that is, writing. And this from a woman who had no children!

  The spring semester started up, as did the weekly seminars. Pineda had delivered her seminar talk during the fall semester, in December 1962. She spoke about monumental art, which she argued was nearly impossible to produce in mid-century America, and asserted that figurative sculpture could only be appreciated fully when contrasted with the monument. It was a forceful, if idiosyncratic, discussion of art history, and though some of the scholars had pushed back on a few of Pineda’s claims, the talk had gone smoothly overall. Thus, by the spring, Olsen was the only one of the Equivalents who had yet to present her work to the group.

  * * *

  —

  As Olsen’s presentation date drew near, she began to panic. Back in the fall, when asked for a title for her seminar talk, she had promised a seminar “on writing,” just as the poets had spoken “on poetry.” (They would do so again in the spring.) This was common practice among the Equivalents and their fellow artists: use the seminar to introduce the scholars to the practice of their craft by discussing a work in progress. Swan, in January, had titled her second Institute talk “Some Aspects of Painting by a Practicing Painter.” Pineda, s
imilarly, had spoken in February on “some aspects of sculpture.” Olsen had planned to do the same.

  At this point, however, she’d almost totally forsaken her fiction writing for a research plan that combined literary history and self-help. She spent her days like an industrious magpie, compiling a heap of quotations and observations from Anglo-American authors from the last several centuries. Perhaps she could present this research in lieu of her fiction writing? Even as she entertained this idea, she wondered how her research, informal and associative, would appear to an audience of trained scholars—women who compiled literature reviews, and generated abstracts, and cited the appropriate authorities. Olsen had been accepted to the Institute as a creative, an “equivalent,” not a scholar or an intellectual. She felt herself at sea.

  The title for her talk changed weekly. She contemplated writing on Friedan’s “woman problem,” but as she kept thinking, she changed her mind. Her research suggested to her that the problem of creative inequality stemmed from more than just sexism. While combing through lists of successful authors, Olsen had noted the dearth of working-class writers in the canon, as well as the decade—the 1950s—when black writers seemed to emerge. She could not talk only of women, she decided, for that would be to ignore poor writers, and black writers, and, of course, the women who were themselves poor or black. Never one to narrow her parameters, Olsen decided she would talk about all of it: political censorship, illiteracy, poverty, absent mothers, Rebecca Harding Davis, her own missing novel, her near failure of a career. She gave Smith her final title.

  The Institute advertised her seminar as “Death of the Creative Process.”

  * * *

  —

  On March 15, just before 1:00 p.m., the Institute fellows gathered on the first floor of the yellow house for Olsen’s seminar presentation. By this time, many of the fellows had already presented, and the more shy among them were grateful to ride out the rest of the semester in the audience. It was a sunny, cold day in the mid-thirties; the women wore warm tweed or wool jackets over their blouses. Sexton found a spot where she would have a good view of Olsen; she wanted to offer her friend, who would surely be nervous, some visible support. It was going to be Olsen’s first public talk since her organizing days.

  Smith made her usual announcements and introductions, but she struggled to explain what Olsen would speak about that afternoon. “The reason Connie isn’t sure just what the topic is, is because it kept changing,” Olsen interjected. “When there was all the to-do about feminine mystiques, it was going to be Women.”

  Women in the room might have noticed the slight dismissiveness of that word “to-do” and wondered what was coming their way. On its face, her talk was about creativity: its ideal conditions, what enabled it, what thwarted it, and what kills it off. It was the start of an intellectual project that would consume the rest of Olsen’s working life. It was an entirely new take on the problem of the creative woman. And it was a working woman’s subtle, critical engagement with her institutional host.

  In Olsen’s view, Bunting had underplayed the conflict between child rearing and performing intellectual work, arguing that they interlocked perfectly, like puzzle pieces. Friedan, by contrast, had overplayed conflict and simplified the equation. She presented professional work as every woman’s raison d’être, and she encouraged former housewives to sally forth from their suburban homes and walk straight into offices—never looking back, with a pang of regret, at the children they were leaving behind.

  The fellows, used to friendly seminar talks about specific works in progress, were not prepared for the wide-ranging, impassioned, and overtly political two-hour talk that Olsen delivered—in associative fashion, entirely from notes. Her silver head bowed over her many papers, she spoke softly and hesitantly, stuttering at times, losing her place, circling back to points she’d made many minutes earlier. She read out long quotations, then spoke extemporaneously, ad-libbing and repeating key phrases. Listeners got the sense that she was articulating some of these thoughts for the first time.

  The impromptu nature of the talk didn’t hide the force of Olsen’s beliefs. Olsen was a Marxist and an organizer; she was comfortable talking class politics with the bourgeois. She started dramatically. “Because I so nearly remained mute, may yet never acquire that which is in me to be, because my whole writing history has been one of interruption, death and the beginning all over again, what it is that happens in others has a special fascination.”

  This was a crucial but under-studied problem: if we recognize that all children are creative but few adults are, then we must wonder what happens to adults, what strips them of their creative potential. Olsen implied that not many addressed this “revolutionary question” because it was, indeed, revolutionary: that is, it would require “re-ordering our whole society.” Olsen, a longtime revolutionary, was up to the task.

  Just as she pinned nineteenth-century authors over her desk, Olsen turned to the writers of the past in order to understand how to solve a problem in the present. She had copied out long quotations from writers’ memoirs and diaries, and she proceeded to try her audience’s patience by reading out these quotations in full. She wanted to describe the death of the creative process in the words of those who knew it best and intimately. Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, Arthur Rimbaud, Gerard Manley Hopkins: all were great writers, and all had something to say about how and why creativity atrophies. Hemingway believed he had “destroyed his talent himself,” while F. Scott Fitzgerald accused himself of being “but a mediocre caretaker of my own talent.” Others, like Isaac Babel, had been censored, made into an emblem of “political silences.” Still others were anonymous—quoting the eighteenth-century poet Thomas Gray, Olsen wondered about the “mute inglorious Miltons” who never found established positions from which they might write, or speak.

  She contrasted the words of silenced writers with reflections by artists who had found ways to sustain their creative work. Drawing on their self-reflections, she demonstrated that true mastery requires the kind of total focus impossible for most people. Henry James, Balzac, Rilke: all preached the value of immersion in work. Rodin spoke of “living in his work as in a wood” and warned the aspiring artist, “You should work and have patience. You must sacrifice all else.” These were the conditions demanded by the creative process—conditions that proved to be elusive for so many: the working class, the uneducated, people of color, women. “What feeds creativity only implies what kills it,” she explained.

  Listeners must have noticed that most of the writers Olsen quoted were men. There was a reason for this: few women had benefited from the conditions necessary to complete creative work. Those few were most likely from the upper class; they were the historical analogues for the Radcliffe Institute women, who could rely on financial security and household help (“servants” was the word she used throughout the talk). “Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes,” Olsen speculated—thinking, to be sure, of her own dulled brilliance.

  Now and again an Emily Bronte or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper. When however one reads of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs and doctoring, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, or some mute & inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor…crazed with the torture that her unused gift had put her to.

  Dashing out brains, walking into the water, putting one’s head in an oven—the number of women who had destroyed themselves rivaled the number of established female geniuses. Even those who had succeeded had suffered in ways that men could not understand. Perhaps this is why Olsen had initially thought to call the talk “Women.”

  Even among this short list of female creatives, one rarely found a woman who had written we
ll and who had also borne children. If creative work demands solitude and immersion, then, Olsen argued, it is no wonder that “no mother of children has written greatly.” Perhaps some balked at the stringency of her claim; Olsen, her gaze buried in her notes, would have missed the raised eyebrows and skeptical looks. She continued, presenting evidence for her point. Of the famous women writers in the last century, she suggested, most were spinsters, a few were married, and only a few of these had children; almost all of these women had household help. She claimed that little had changed in the twentieth century: most female writers were still unmarried, or were married and childless. Quoting Virginia Woolf, Olsen argued that a woman desperately committed to her craft would forsake having children for fear that they would distract her from her true calling. The Institute women, nearly all of whom were married with children, must have squirmed in their chairs.

  Of course, Olsen too was a mother: once young and distracted, like the anonymous narrator in her short fiction, she was now a silver-haired matriarch, worried that her second chance at a writer’s life had come too late. She pulled excerpts from her own diaries and read them aloud to show how motherhood threatened her creative life, how everything became stolen time. She described writing in “minutes on the bus” and spending nights “ironing and jotting down after children were in bed.” She spoke of a “brutal impulse” to push her daughter away from her typewriter. She recounted how she felt “divided” between her maternal self and her artistic self: “I who want to run in one river bed and become great.” Significantly, she acknowledged her love for her children, and the joy she took in caring for them, without modulating her frustrations and her sense of loss.