Tillie Olsen by Mickey Pearlman, Abby H. P. Werlock (review)

Reviews Tillie Olsen. By Mickey Pearlman and Abby H. P. Werlock. (Boston: G. K. Hall, Twayne Publishers, 1991. 159 pages, $19.95.) For readers unfamiliar with Tillie Olsen, this carefully detailed and docu­ mented study provides an introduction to the woman and her work. As the biographical sketch and the interview indicate, Olsen was deeply committed to the cause of America’s working women and men, with whom she shared a daily struggle to make a living. She was a working-man’s wife and a working mother. She aspired to be a writer. When she wrote, she described ordinary people trying to survive in an economic system that required their labor but considered them—if it considered them at all—expendable. She set out to show the value of seemingly expended lives and the transformative powers of love which could turn waste into beauty. As she gained prominence, she encouraged the recovery of forgotten women writers, mainly of the thirties, who had also described ordinary working people, an underclass that, like the writers themselves, were the forgotten figures of American history. Why Olsen’swriting was sparse and sporadic, a question always raised about her enigmatic career, may be explained in part by her need to support her family. What remains inexplicable is why Olsen did not write, or write more productively, during the interims in which she was supported by prestigious national fellowships and grants to artists’ colonies. As we know, silence—the silencing of potential writers—has become Olsen’s terrible, cautionary theme. The study shows, even if it cannot explain (perhaps no one can), how Olsen herself personifies the writer who has somehow been silenced and, miraculously though only intermittently, recovered her powers of speech. That these powers are compelling and formidable the study demonstrates by moving chronologically through Olsen’s writings, summarizing the plots of her fiction and the themes of the diverse pieces in Silences. Reading plot summaries with their litany of loss, waste, suffering, and death—and valiant lastminute gestures towards recovery—I wonder if uninitiated readers will be attracted to Olsen. So much bleakness emerges that readers may not be reas­ sured by tributes to Olsen’s art and resilient spirit. The spirit emerges in a daughter (or granddaughter) whose life promises a fulfillment denied her mother; the art, in detailed analyses of recurrent images that form complex and interlacing aesthetic patterns. Reviews 237 The chronological approach to Olsen’swriting places emphasis upon each individual text. I would welcome more context. Olsen’s life may help explain her art, but biography is one context among others—historical, cultural, and literary—which raise questions worth pursuing. For to ask how the Communism of the thirties influenced Olsen’s themes places them within a perspective that enhances their significance. To ask how modernism affected the fragmented form of her fiction presupposes a place for Olsen within literary history. And to ask which writers, specifically, she has influenced accepts the claim that “[e]very woman now writing in America has felt the subtle effects of Olsen’s groundbreaking insights.” Though other women have written as well as Tillie Olsen, and written more, few are as venerated. Ifveneration has turned Olsen into an “icon,”it has not dispelled the mysteries still surrounding this enigmatic figure. BLANCHE H. GELFANT Dartmouth College Steinbeck’s Literary Dimension: A Guide to Comparative Studies, Series II. Edited by Tetsumaro Hayashi. Introduction by Reloy Garcia. (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1991. 180 pages, $22.50.) Here is a sequel to Professor Hayashi’s first Literary Dimension volume, published in 1973. Like numerous other collections by the indefatigable Hayashi, this anthology has a predictable air. Typically, Hayashi gathers around a focal concept articles mostly from his Steinbeck Quarterly, engages a Steinbeck Society member to write a praiseful introduction, and provides a minimalist preface himself to the whole lot. In the early days of the revitalized Steinbeck movement, this publishing formula was useful and stimulating. Now, however, we are accustomed to ask a good deal more from critical collections than mere handiness. These essays view Steinbeck from a comparative angle: Steinbeck “juxtapose [d] against another important literary figure, the better to see them both,” editor...