Tillie Olsen, Unfinished (Slow Writing from the Seventies)

How do we reevaluate the status of Tillie (Lerner) Olsen’s Yonnondio: From the Thirties as an unfinished novel? Published in 1974 by Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, the standard story of its printing goes like this: Olsen first released portions as “The Iron Throat” in the Partisan Review in 1934, portions that were later republished in the 1935 anthology Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology. Members of the Popular Front immediately praised her vivid depictions of the working-class Holbrook family and their hardscrabble existence in a rural Wyoming coal mine town during the 1920s. Then came the first of four children with her husband Jack. Then the work-in-progress languished. Then it was dropped.

Three-and-a-half decades later, we are told, Olsen and Jack would discover partial drafts of the text in the early 1970s. In the late fall of 1972 and the early winter of 1973, Olsen reassembled and compiled these drafts thanks to a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. She changed nothing in the original manuscripts, and she titled it Yonnondio: From the Thirties. The published novel thus had no proper ending, and it was presented as unfinished to the public. Readers would learn that the Holbrooks moved from Wyoming to a Dakota farm to an unnamed Great Plains meatpacking district as their hardships became ever more severe, though they would never learn the final fates of Jim and his wife Anna, or their children Mazie, Ben, and the newborn Bess. Soon after the publication of these inconclusive pages, Yonnondio became a classic of 1930s Old Left/Depression-era fiction, and a cornerstone of modern feminist U.S. literature. The Berg Collection at the New York Public Library now houses Olsen’s original drafts, replete with her handwritten commentary in the manuscript’s margins.

As my overview suggests, this story of Yonnondio is as famous as Yonnondio’s story—perhaps even more so. Over the years, the well-rehearsed tale of its delayed and incomplete publication has taken on almost mythological overtones. The reasons for its holdup are several, and they were noted by reviewers upon the novel’s release and intuited by critics shortly thereafter. Catherine R. Stimpson, in a review essay for The Nation, stressed that “acute self-doubt, the responsibilities of raising four children, [and] the need to hold a full-time job” prohibited Olsen from ever completing the manuscript.¹ In one of the first extensive overviews of Olsen’s biography and oeuvre, Deborah Rosenfelt highlights Olsen’s “class loyalty” to emphasize that “the chaotic years that followed— the moving back and forth, the caring and working for her family, and the political tasks—gave her little opportunity for sustained literary work.”² Such claims echo those made by Nora Ruth Roberts, who suggests that Olsen, buried by the demands of daily life, shunned “more lucrative prospects” and “the seduction of ‘bourgeois’ success” to reinforce an affiliation with working-class struggle.³

Given this stacked-deck biography, it comes as little surprise that critics tend to view Yonnondio’s incompletion as a loss, as a failure, as an “if only” wish, and as a thwarted revolution for the working-classes from the beginnings of Olsen criticism up until the present day. Rosenfelt writes that “unfortunately for all of us, she never finished the novel,” and asserts that “it is an elegy, I think, not only for the Holbrooks, but also for Olsen’s own words lost between the midthirties and the fifties, for the incompleteness of the novel itself.”⁴ Another scholar bemoans that “if Yonnondio had been completed, Mazie would have become radicalized because of the lessons she would have learned during the Depression”—but, regrettably, the young child was not.⁵ And Roberts emphasizes what the manuscript could have become but, sadly, didn’t: “as originally intended, the novel would be a conversion novel, a genre familiar in the thirties, tracing the path of the radicalization of a young worker-intellectual, in this case female.”⁶

Regardless that these accounts of Yonnondio and Olsen’s stifled craft obscure...