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 11  Great Value as a Writer 1956–1961 There is no Tillie Olsen. [Your stories are] the only identity you’ll ever have. —Nolan Miller to Tillie Olsen, 19 November 1957 After a tearful leave-taking, Tillie remained haunted by images of Ida’s shrunken frame propped up on pillows, her blue eyes still steely but her voice almost silenced. Harry wrote that Ida had revived only enough to ask “very pointedly” if Tillie had written. Otherwise, “mother has visibly weakened since you left, and seems resigning herself.” Vicki visited, as did Lillian, who wrote Tillie that Ida was “too tired to talk to me, only once she said my name.” Tillie returned to Stanford to greet Malcolm Cowley, now teaching her writing seminar. He had published her “Thousand Dollar Vagrant” in the New Republic in 1934 and had been a prominent figure in leftist intellectual circles. Now a senior editor at Viking Publishers, he had started its “portable” series, including the Portable Faulkner and the Portable Hemingway. Editing a novel by Jack Kerouac, Cowley was on the lookout for other unconventional writers. “Help Her to Believe” appeared in Stanford Short Stories, with a note on its composition and in Pacific Spectator.1 Scowcroft sent it to his agent, Diarmuid Russell, who asked to see more of her writing. Tillie did not respond. On 29 January 1956, Ida Goldberg departed her passionate and frustrated life.2 She had insisted on having no ceremony, Jewish or otherwise. Of her six children, only Harry attended her burial. Tillie wrote her siblings that when she had last seen their mother, Ida had asked for her jewelry box and indicated that Jann should have her wedding ring, Clare should have carved 204 great value as a writer 205 ivory pieces Harry had sent from India, and Tillie could have whatever she wanted. This story presented ample grounds for embellishment: the sacri- ficial Tillie, who took only “single earrings for the kids to play with”; the fabricating Tillie, who told Ida she “would have lots of occasions to wear jewelry”; and the deserving Tillie who could have any of Ida’s jewelry.3 Riding the bus to Palo Alto, Tillie was surrounded by cacophony of voices, young and old, black and white, Asian and Hispanic, rich and poor. Eavesdropping, she noted that such a lively mix of people would be criminal in the American South. In Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks was in jail just for sitting at the front of a bus. Now a bus boycott, led by young Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., challenged Montgomery’s white middle class to choose between prejudice and profit. The early 1950s façade of conformity, propriety, privilege, and prejudice had cracked. Teenagers listened, not to elders who called Elvis Presley obscene, but to Elvis singing songs like “You Ain’t Nothing but a Hound Dog” on their own transistor radios.4 Tillie loved Elvis for his sexy rhythms and crossover songs that promised an interracial harmony now lost to Kathie and Josie. In her grandparent story, Tillie made David and Eva near stand-ins for Sam and Ida, their children stand-ins for her brothers and sisters: Jann became the frustrated Clara; Harry and Clare became Paul and Nancy, who live near the old couple and entertain them on Sundays; Gene became Sammy, who is a smart-aleck; Lillian and Joseph Davis became the affluent Hannah and Phil; and Vicki became Vivi, who lives in Ohio and has four children. In her last stories, Tillie had based Helen and Lennie on herself and Jack. In this story, Helen vanishes, and Lennie becomes the son of Eva and David. Tillie added a son, Davy, who died in World War II. In her narration of the old couple’s visits to their children, she injected such animus that Cowley told her to show “warmth to someone.”5 Though Tillie did not criticize others in class, over coffee she counseled young Dick Elman to show more “social perspective” in his writing.6 Sometimes Hannah Green drove Tillie home, up route 82, hearing about her struggle to come to terms with her mother’s death and to write her grandparent story. Though feeling poorly, thanks to “absence of Mother,” Sam set out on the journey originally planned for Ida. He went to Jann’s, to Lillian’s, and with Harry and Clare to Vicki’s. He remained in Omaha after Harry and Clare left, reclaiming his prominence in...

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