Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles

NOTE ON THE TEXT

N O T E O N T H E T E X T Tillie Olsen’s handwriting was tiny and peculiar. With much practice and many magnifying glasses, I think I’ve learned to read it, but I apologize in advance for any mis-transcriptions. To ensure the coherence of quotations from her letters and journals, I have taken a few liberties: normalizing spelling and punctuation, except when the original oddities convey meaning: saying “enuf” for “enough,” capitalizing for emphasis, or eliminating all capital letters for de-emphasis. When I tried to replicate her habit of using spaces instead of punctuation, the result was so confusing that I substituted normal punctuation. While I have silently corrected most quirks of Tillie’s prose, I have preserved the oddities of writings by her parents and Rae Schochet to illustrate their often poetic efforts to learn English. Also, I have preserved Abe Goldfarb’s phonetic spelling of Yiddish English. I have mostly left these letters as they were written, sometimes inserting the intended word in brackets and on rare occasions have added “[sic]” to clarify that the error was in the original. The early and late years in Tillie Olsen’s life tend to blur together, and so I do not divide them chronologically. Between 1926 and 1989, however, each chapter spans a specific number of years; I separate the end of one year and the beginning of another with a line-break, mentioning the new year soon after the break. The letters and papers of Tillie Olsen form a vast archive in the Department of Special Collections at Stanford University that holds her diaries, writings, scrapbooks, and much more, including many letters to her, alphabetized by author’s name. The Tillie Olsen Papers are abbreviated here as TOP, with a box number indicating their placement. I read some of Olsen’s papers before they were deposited at Stanford, which are cited as “Tillie Olsen, private papers.” They too are now at Stanford but have not yet, I understand, been classified. Tillie’s brother Gene Lerner deposited various historical documents (including letters, records, and his own writings ) about the family at Stanford. They are identified as “Lerner Papers.” Letters to the author are abbreviated as “to PR.” All correspondence to and from Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer of Random House Publishers (including letters from Tillie Lerner, xiii William Saroyan, and Sanora Babb) are from the Random House Collection , in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University. The Berg Collection of the New York Public Library holds early drafts (or “makings”) of Yonnondio, the 1928 school reprimand signed by Sara Vore Taylor, and Tillie’s letters to Nolan Miller. Blanche Knopf’s memos and letters about Tillie Olsen and Olsen’s letters to Knopf are in the Knopf files at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. The Humanities Research Center also holds Anne Sexton’s papers, including Tillie’s letters to Sexton, Sexton’s copies of Tillie’s “copy-outs” (transcriptions of and notes on important passages), and a transcription of Tillie’s 1963 talk at Radcliffe. Tillie’s letters to Malcolm Cowley are in the Malcolm Cowley Papers (Box 49, Folder 3018), Newberry Library, Chicago. The Seymour Lawrence Collection at the University of Mississippi holds Tillie’s letters to Lawrence and his to and about her, including correspondence with her agents. Tillie’s letters to Jerre Mangione are in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections of the University of Rochester Library. Tillie Olsen’s letters to Richard Elman are in the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. Olsen’s many Guggenheim applications are property of the Guggenheim Foundation; permission to quote from these materials is granted by the Guggenheim Foundation and G. Thomas Tanselle, vice president. I thank Robert Coles for permission to use some of my article on Tillie Olsen from DoubleTake Magazine (Spring 2000) and Leonard Greenspoon for permission to use some of my article from Studies in Jewish Civilization 18. Permission to quote from the Tillie Olsen Papers and the Lerner Papers is courtesy of Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries. Permission to quote from the Anne Sexton and Alfred A. Knopf papers is thanks to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin. Permission to quote from the Seymour Lawrence Collection is thanks to Archives and Special Collections, J. D. Williams Library, University of Mississippi, and to Sidney...