Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles

15. Image Control: 1981-1996

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Image Control 1981–1996 Hoping naturally with my particular brand of egotism that I would be speaking for many more than myself. —Tillie Olsen, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, spring 1982 At the beginning of 1981, images of Tillie Olsen formed an odd palimpsest of positive and negative impressions. The day after Lee Grant appeared on the Merv Griffin talk show promoting the movie Tell Me a Riddle, a blur of calls and visits celebrated Tillie’s fame and her sixty-ninth birthday. Fame brought a request from Leonda Finke, who had sculpted busts of Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson, to do Tillie Olsen’s portrait. It also brought some local kids, thinking her rich, to break into the Olsens’ San Francisco apartment. Finding little valuable among a clutter of books, papers, photos, clothes, and undistinguished furniture, they piled papers on the stove and turned it on. Smelling smoke, Eno and Edna Herbert, an African-American couple living below, broke in and extinguished the fire but could not undo the smoke damage. When Tillie heard, she made a rare call to Jann, who wrote Gene: “Til phoned me today to tell me she had been in the hospital and that their apt. in San Francisco had been broken into and set on fire. Her papers were spared, everything else ruined.” Tillie may not have been in the hospital but illness added to her victimized image. Her papers were spared because she had them with her in Soquel. Insurance paid for repairs and two months in the classy Hotel Miyako. “Felled” by the tally of offenses she had received from Gene Lerner, Tillie returned $500, insisting that she had gotten only $25,000 from Godmother. He was grateful for the twenty-two-year-overdue $500 but not for the patronizing tone in Tillie’s offer to “strengthen, sustain” him. She proposed coming to Rome so he told Jann he would promote “diplomatic relations” if 290 image control 291 Tillie would let herself be “just a plain sister, not a legend, a self-promoted deity and downright fraud.” Tillie’s double-edged introductions of women writers at her party for Alice Walker had suggested to Dorothy Bryant that a party would be “a good set-up for an old-fashioned murder mystery” about new-fangled feminist infighting. Bay Area women writers attended a party in Berkeley and agreed to be photographed for the cover of her mystery novel. The legendary Tillie was photographed talking, hugging, laughing, singing, and signing autographs. For a Los Angeles Times interview, though, Tillie played the victim: “As a writer, her work was limited by class and sex and she lived in a kind of exile, never treated with respect,” a complaint that insulted Lawrence and the agencies whose respect had given her the means to write.1 Peggy McIntosh had attended the informal seminar Tillie, Hanna Papenek, and Sister William had given at Radcliffe back in 1963. Now a faculty member at Wellesley College, she invited Tillie there for a conference and introduced her saying that “asking Tillie Olsen to speak on a panel is like trying to fit the Pacific Ocean into a teacup,” words confirmed as Tillie way overflowed her allotted time limit.2 When she autographed Silences, “To Peggy whom I have learned to love honor but NOT obey (Time),” Tillie established that she consciously refused to obey time limits when talking about the waste of women’s talents, but she did not acknowledge that her garrulousness wasted the talents of the other panelists. The next morning she left the secluded Wellesley Club for a walk around the campus lake. When she returned, she found under her door an envelope with a poison pen note inside. McIntosh asked Mary Anne Ferguson to stay with a very shaken Tillie. McIntosh, who adored Tillie, did not see the note, but she assumed some outsider had tracked Tillie down to ask, “You dirty commie, why are you still hanging around?” Mary Anne Ferguson, by this time realistic about Tillie, thought it was from a fellow panelist, saying, “You narcissist, what right do you have to confiscate everybody else’s speaking time?” While Tillie thrilled students with her personal response to their work on nineteenth-century women writers, she alienated her fellow adult panelists.3 After her reading at Columbia, Dick Elman wrote: “You’re a great writer, but you’re not being great when you read for 2½ hours.” That letter...