Tillie’s Gift
“Look at that front row,” said my mother. I’d been trying not to stare at the three queens of fiction. Both Margarets, Atwood and Laurence, sharing a private joke. Alice Munro on the edge of her folding chair — elbows on knees, face alight. A hush fell on the room as Tillie Olsen took the podium. In her late 60s, she had wiry gray hair, angular features and a weathered but resolute expression. She had been, among other things, a waitress, a factory worker, a hash slinger and a Kelly “girl.” All along she wrote, or tried to, but she had four children to raise and never enough time or money. She had published only three books — none long, all revered for their grit and power, as if they had been carved from granite, word by word, in moments stolen from the labor of survival.
The open book in her hands that night in Toronto must have been Silences, her revelatory essay on the forces that stop creators from creating. Wrong gender, wrong color, wrong social class. When Silences appeared in 1978, same year as The Stand and The World According to Garp, it had the impact of an ancient truth articulated for the first time. Margaret Atwood wrote in her review for the Sunday New York Times, “The applause that greets [Olsen] is not only for the quality of her artistic performance but, as at a grueling obstacle race, for the near miracle of her survival.”
I never missed the Times Book Review and paid particular attention to books by women writers. Of course I had to get my hands on Silences. And as an editor at a magazine, I could order a free copy from the publisher — the one perk of a job so low paid, my husband had been after me to move on. I’d come to Olsen’s reading from the office, with Silences tucked inside my purse like a talisman of something I couldn’t name. I hadn’t read past chapter one.
The scene fades to black, and then I’m at the party in Olsen’s honor. Adele Wiseman, the host, has invited her tribe of writers, among them my mother. Adele and my mother share a bond, both Jewish writers from the Winnipeg shtetl. “Landsmen,” as they say in Yiddish. I am no writer. Not the capital-W kind, anyway. As an editor at Flare, I deliver, to length and on deadline, whatever the magazine needs — four columns (books, travel, work and health), display copy, no small number of captions. I write snappy ledes that win praise from my boss, but the voice but isn’t mine. (“If sheer hard work and thoroughness could clinch an executive title, you’d see fewer women pounding a typewriter and more making a case in the boardroom.” “In the season of good cheer, it’s hard not to feel that life owes you one.”)
Adele’s living room on Marchmount Road teems with real Writers shop-talking and clinking glasses. Farley Mowat spills his drink — not a mere splatter but a drenching that briefly silences the room until a quip from Timothy Findley sets everyone at ease. My mother flirts and teases her way through the crowd, her big hat bobbing. What am I doing here, a nobody from Flare? I don’t belong.
I stake out a corner of the couch, hoping no one sees me. Someone does, though. She sits down beside me. Takes my hand. It’s Tillie Olsen. Tillie to me, from now on.
The party swirls before us as Tillie’s warm right hand rests on mine. The hand that labored, that stirred, that consoled, that wrote. I feel suddenly chosen. Maybe Tillie doesn’t care for working a room, no matter how distinguished the company. Maybe she’s tired of being an icon. But these things don’t explain her tenderness with me.
Tillie has raised four daughters. I am 30, a daughterly age. My favorite short story of hers, “I Stand Here Ironing,” is a mother’s meditation that pulses with love and regret for a daughter raised in hard circumstances, never enough time or money. The story could only have been written by a woman who lived that struggle and yearns to mend whatever broke along the way. The story is her lament, her battle cry, her song of pride in doing the best she could, even though it never seemed enough. Tillie’s narrator concludes, “Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom — but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to believe — help make it so there is cause for her to believe that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.”
On Adele’s couch I remember the story. How much of what is in me will bloom? I don’t aspire to be a writer, like my mother and sister. Let me be. I will find my own path as an editor, earning what I’m worth as head of the articles department for a bigger magazine than Flare. Writers suffer for their words. Editors whip other people’s words into shape. An easier calling. I have the chops; writers are a little afraid of me. I bat away the pesky longing to write in my own voice. It’s not as if I know what that is, or what on earth I would say.
Tillie and I don’t have much of a conversation. I have no words for the churning in me, but I ask her to sign my copy of Silences. She has the tiniest penmanship I’ve ever seen, and the most elegant. Her inscription breaks off mid-sentence, as if she’s been distracted by a racing thought. For all I know, she’s written much the same words in other rooms, to other young women searching for a voice. Yet I feel seen by her as no one else has seen me.
For Rona —
Be of those who fight unnatural silences — your own and that which causes others —
An affectionate pat —
Tillie Olsen
April, 1980 —
Toronto
***
Tillie Olsen died at 94 on New Year’s Day, 2007. I hadn’t seen her since she signed my book, which I never did finish. The inscription mattered to me more than the text, and every so often I’d take another look. Her words had changed through the years from a blessing to a challenge almost fulfilled, with my first book on its way to publication. Adele Wiseman, Margaret Laurence and Timothy Findley had died some years before. My mother too. While she lived, I could not have stepped out of her shadow to write My Mother’s Daughter.
In my late 50s, I had broken a silence. I asked a friend’s advice on the new business cards I would need for the launch. She wanted me to put the word “writer” front and center, but I wouldn’t hear of it. “I’m not a writer. I’m just someone who writes when she has something to say.”
My publisher called, sounding chuffed: Alice Munro had endorsed my book. I felt more anxious than excited. Everything I had to say, I said in My Mother’s Daughter. What if I never wrote another book?
The year I turned 70, I told my husband what I meant to do with my life. His expression said, “This is news?” My second book, Starter Dog, was lost in the woods for at least the nineteenth time, but I trusted the scrappy bugger to find its way home and eventually it did. I have more patience now than I did at 30, or even 50-something. And a whole lot more to say. I know what I know and don’t plan to take it all with me. Writing while old is a privilege I’ve damn well earned. I do it better now. With hiking and Pilates, it’s a struggle just to keep going. As for learning a new language, forget it. Thank all the gods ever worshipped for writing.
I no longer ask if I belong at the literary party. But instead of the center of things, I’d pick the couch, beside a hesitant young woman who asks me to sign her book. Whether she reads it is not the point.
