Yonnondio: From the Thirties Read online

  © 1974 by Tillie Olsen

  Introduction © 2004 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Olsen, Tillie.

  Yonnondio: from the thirties / by Tillie Olsen; introduction by Linda Ray Pratt.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-8621-4 (paper: alk. paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-8628-3 (electronic: e-pub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-8629-0 (electronic: mobi)

  1. Rural families—Fiction. 2. Tenant farmers—Fiction.

  3. Poor families—Fiction. 4. Depressions—Fiction.

  5. Coal miners—Fiction. 6. Nebraska—Fiction.

  7. Wyoming—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3565.L82Y66 2004

  813’.54—dc22 2004011000

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  A Note about this Book

  Back Cover

  LINDA RAY PRATT

  Introduction

  The Great Depression is often remembered in the American imagination as “hard times” when suffering and struggle brought out the best in people. In John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath the suffering of the Joad family climaxes in a symbol of transcendence. In that mythic story, the poor shared what they had, even in the Hoovervilles, and the hope of reordering the world was embodied in idealistic and brave men like Jim Casey and Tom Joad, who spoke for the common people. Even in Studs Terkel’s nonfiction collection of interviews Hard Times many real people remember the thirties as a time of intense meaning when the sense of community was vital and the causes were noble. Surviving was about endurance and dignity. Memory thus softens the terror of hunger and need; sentimentality muffles the brutality of fear that often resulted in psychic and social violence.

  Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio: From the Thirties makes the desperation and cruelty of poverty vivid again. Like Walt Whitman’s poem “Yonnondio,” from which it takes its title, this book is a dirge for the lost, for those people pushed so far to the edge of society that their lives are recorded in “no picture, poem, statement, passing them to the future.” Olsen’s original draft was written between 1932 and 1936 but remained unpublished until 1974, after it was discovered in some old files in 1972. The novel was incomplete in form, and the published version we have today is a piecing together of the many drafts done by Olsen some forty years after she wrote them. The first four of the eight chapters were in final or near-final form, but much of the rest is an arrangement of parts from the different drafts done over several years. In addition to the version compiled and published in 1974, Olsen has since released several other fragments. Still other parts are in the archives of the New York Public Library and Stanford University. Because the draft was the work of a young woman between the ages of nineteen and twenty-four in the first creative burst of her writing life, the older writer who arranged the manuscript in her early sixties felt she should not attempt to rewrite a story that so vividly reflected another time in her imaginative life. Critics have given these fragments a good deal of attention, but it seems to me that the experience of the novel as a powerful piece of literature gains little from pursuing them. They are useful in showing us how the mind of the young Tillie Olsen conceptualized a much longer novel with a radical political intent, and they provide a sketch for the curious reader who may want to know what happened next in the “lives” of the characters beyond the last page of the book. However, the only life the characters have after the last page of the book that really matters to us is the persistence they may have in our memory. The Holbrooks of Yonnondio will haunt the reader with the tragic loss of human potential closed off by the exigencies of survival, when securing food and shelter are daily concerns and the future beyond the hope of planning.

  The passion and empathy Olsen brings to this story are based in the experiences and places of her own life, though she does not present them in a simple autobiographical mode. Like the Holbrooks, who move from a mining town to a farm and then into a meatpacking city “like Omaha,” Olsen’s own large family of six children first settled on a farm some twenty or so miles outside Omaha, Nebraska, sometime after 1908. Unlike the Holbrooks, Olsen’s parents, Samuel and Ida Lerner, were Socialist Jews who left Russia after the failure of the 1905 Revolution in which they were participants. Tillie Lerner was born on the farm in 1912 or 1913. By about 1917 the failure of the farm drove the Lerner family to “North Omaha,” an area of Omaha in which Jews and Blacks were concentrated in the 1920s and where the Olsen’s lived for many years on 2512 Caldwell Street. The Omaha city directory first lists Samuel Lerner in 1918 at the Caldwell Street address. His occupation was listed as peddler. Between 1920–23 he worked at the Silver Star Confectionary at 1604 North 24th Street. Tillie, like the child Mazie in Yonnondio, remembers working in the confectionery shelling almonds for the candies. Her family had a long history in Omaha as participants in Socialist Party activities and were founding members of the first Omaha Workmen’s Circle, a social and political organization for Jews whose religious views distanced them from the life of the synagogues.

  At Omaha’s Central High School, Tillie Lerner was a brilliant but rebellious student. To the sorrow of her family, she dropped out of high school before graduating and became a member of the Young Communist League, thus separating herself from the family’s Socialist affiliation. In 1931 at age eighteen she went to Kansas City, where she worked in a tie factory and participated in Communist Party activities. She recalls being briefly jailed for leafleting packinghouse workers, and upon her release, she returned to Omaha. The February 6, 1932, front page of the now defunct Omaha Bee–News pictures her “shouting” as part of a demonstration by the “Omaha Council of the Unemployed” (more accurately, the organization was the Communist-led Unemployed Council). To save her family from embarrassment, Tillie Lerner often used aliases with the initials “TL,” and she is identified in this picture as “Theta Larimore.” In 1933 Tillie moved to Faribault, Minnesota, where she was ill and pregnant with her first child. It was during her confinement in Faribault that she first drafted a substantial part of Yonnondio.

  By 1934 Tillie Lerner had moved to San Francisco, California, where she has lived ever since. She married Jack Olsen, a printer and comrade, in 1944. She and Jack were active in the Communist Party for many years and were harassed during the McCarthy years. Olsen worked at many kinds of jobs and raised four daughters in the late 1940s and 1950s. In 1953, with the youngest of the girls in school, Olsen took a creative writing course at San Francisco State University that led to a reviving of her life as a writer. She won a Wallace Stegner Fellowship to Stanford University in 1955–56 and a Ford Foundation grant in 1959. In 1962 she published her most famous work, Tell Me a Riddle, which won critical praise. Her short stories and novellas have been widely anthologized, and an Oscar-winning film of “Tell Me a Riddle”was released in 1981. In 1978 she published Silences, a personal account and commentary on the obstacles women writers face. It has become a classic text in the history of women’s literature. Silences is a poignant and powerful statement of how the demands of motherhood, patriarchy, and the publishing world have historically silenced the voices of women who wan
ted to write. Olsen’s work embodies both the constraints of time and the distractions women have faced as writers and the triumphs that have often emerged despite conditions that could silence them. Although she found it very difficult to write during the years in which she was rearing her family, Olsen’s fiction has been an influential part of the new feminist writing that has opened new understandings, appreciations, and avenues for the work of literary women.

  The early 1930s were difficult for Olsen, and she has spoken less openly to scholars about this time than about later years. Yet it is out of this painful time that Yonnondio arises. The novel tells the story of the Holbrook family. Poor and without “edjication,”they leave the life-choking conditions of a Wyoming mining town for a naive dream of pastoral plenty on a South Dakota farm only to find themselves both starving and suffocating in the filth and stench of a packinghouse city which is clearly based on the geography and scenes of Omaha. “Conceived primarily as a novel of the 1930s,”according to Olsen’s note to the first edition, the story covers a little more than two years in the life of the Holbrooks. A prefatory note to the text, “The time at the opening of this book is the early 1920’s,”may be a typographical error (as Olsen once suggested in conversation), but the contradictions among the title and these notes point to the vagueness about settings and history and the two lands of stories Olsen wants to tell. One story is that of an imaginative child who is both metaphorically and physically shoved to the pavement by the unmerciful roughness of the world around her; the other is that of the workers hungry for work and ravaged by the exploitive conditions under which they labor when they find jobs.

  Olsen was Mazie’s age of nine or ten in the early 1920s, and this novel “from the thirties” mixes the two decades. The movies that Mazie’s twelve-year-old friend Jinella apes but has never seen apparently date from 1919 to 1931. The economics of the Depression and the workplace scenes of the meatpacking houses reflect Olsen’s early political activism in 1931–32. In the unincorporated fragments of the novel Jim leaves the family in the winter, and Anna, facing an eviction in February and “trying to figure out” where they will go, wonders if there will even be room in “Hooverville,” the Depression-era shanty towns in “honor” of the President. If the internal signs of the times are sometimes inconsistent in the novel, its portrayal of the way poverty and exploitation can shatter lives is timeless.

  In the character of Mazie, Olsen incorporates memories of herself when she was a “star-gazer” child. Mazie’s experiences with her mother, the life on the farm, and the harshness of life in the meatpacking city reflect Olsen’s own. For Mazie, “all the world is a-crying, and I don’t know for why.” Her father calls her “Big Eyes,” and indeed she sees more than she should or can understand. But she feels the sadness and fear in her parents, and they can do little to protect her from the invasions of a hostile world into her childhood. The demented Sheen McEvoy senses her child like purity of heart and tries to toss her into a mineshaft to appease the gods of the dark pit that torture his mind. She is wakened into the nightmare of helping her mother have a baby, tending the kettle and the fire with nausea gathering in her throat. In Omaha her wondering eyes must shut out the sight of the city if she is to manage the odor from the packinghouses and the drabness of working-class neighborhoods. Mazie tries to walk in a dreamlike memory of the loveliness of the farm, but when she is pushed to the sidewalk, “the pavement grated against her” and a “blob of spit” dampens her cheek, and when she “moved her hand over the walk,” she knew it was real. “As for the first time she saw the street and people, and it entered into her like death.” To translate that feeling into something that will not overwhelm her, Mazie and the other children take to the streets for excitement. It is their only source of vitality. Her mother sees them “running, shrilling out laughter … flushed, hostile, excited … A lust for sensation, for the new was on them, a lust for the streets.”The children reject even books, which her mother promises are keys to a better life. For Mazie and Will they are symbols of the disrespect they experience at school, where they are considered “dumb.”

  The radical political vision at the heart of the novel—a condemnation of the oppression of the working class by the capitalists—is voiced through Mazie, not her father Jim. When Mazie first asks her father why the boss man “aint livin like we do,” Jim is puzzled and can only explain that he is a coal operator. After losing the farm, Jim is outraged that after a year of work “I owe them … Batten on us like hogs. The bastards. A whole year—now I’m owin them.” Work in the sewers and packinghouse deepens his solidarity with the other workers and his outraged sense that he is “geared, meshed” into a killing machine. Still, he voices no understanding of the capitalist system that consumes his labor for someone else’s profit. When Mazie rises from that pavement, she sees “A-R-M-O-U-R-S” spelled out before her on the packinghouse. The violence of the streets, the odor of vomit that hangs in the air from the meat processing, the abuse at home, the contempt at school, the “blackness of terror” her daydreams cannot shut out: all come together in the name of the packinghouse that pollutes the air and sets the terms of their existence. “Armoursarmours-armours” she murmurs to herself over and over.

  Some of Olsen’s most effective writing in Yonnondio is in her descriptions of work in the packinghouses. In the 1920s and 1930s Omaha was the third largest meatpacking city in the United States behind Chicago and Kansas City. Longtime residents can recall as late as the 1970s the nauseating odors, a combination of the rendering plants and the stockyards, emanating from “South Omaha,” the packinghouse section. Ethnic workers like Mr. Kryckszi made up the “furriners,” many from Eastern Europe, who came to Omaha looking for jobs in the plants. Black workers from the South also came to Omaha to work in the packinghouses, though they make scant appearances in the novel: Packers such as Armours, Swift, and Cudahy had succeeded in breaking the unions in the nationwide strike of 1921–22. Though she was only Mazie’s age at the time of this strike, Olsen has some memories of it because it was a significant event for her working-class Socialist family. In Yonnondio Jim and his fellow workers were without a union and thus at the mercy of their bosses. The hellish scenes in the one-hundred-degree-plus August heat reveal unbearably oppressive working conditions in which the extreme heat, the speed-up on the line, and “the excrement reek of offal, the smothering stench from the blood house often force its workers into a state of collapse.” Yonnondio graphically gives us the work world that drove people like Jim to organize unions or join radical groups, although the novel does not take that political step itself. Jim and his fellow workers can only conspire to spell the people on the shift who are nearest to collapse. Without a thought of how to fight Armoursarmoursarmours, the characters remain victims, lost in the pathos of their misery, more likely to strike out at each other in frustration and fear than at the great “hog” of an industry that processes them much like it does the cattle on the killing floor.

  One of Olsen’s strengths as a writer is her portrait of mothers. As Mara Faulkner has noted in Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen (University Press of Virginia, 1993), many women authors avoid the subject of motherhood because it is an undeniable marker of gender that can hinder a woman’s success as an author. In Olsen’s fiction a mother’s love is real and enriching but also draining and costly for her. Anna Holbrook loves her children, but she is also exhausted by the effort to care for them and ill from the repeated pregnancies that have depleted her physical strength. During the winter she is pregnant in South Dakota, she moves in a lethargy that is a “dream paralysis,” not cleaning the house, hardly cooking, paying little attention to her husband or the kids. Jim, frustrated and pent up, resorts at times to beating up on the children, but Anna “scarcely seemed to hear or care.” The chaos and horror the family suffers as a result of Anna’s disengagement with anything other than her body is captured in the episode in which the baby chicks Jim had left in her care to keep w
arm in the oven are incinerated because of her forgetful neglect.

  The terrible life poverty imposes on Jim and Anna acts out its psychic consequences in the violence between them. Though there is love in the marriage and Anna and Jim have occasional moments of caring for one another, she taunts him with his failure to provide for the family and he exercises in physical and sexual force the power he lacks in any other space of his life. The climax of this abuse comes when Jim rapes his sick and exhausted wife. Mazie hears this assault without full understanding, but the brute sounds of that night stay with her as the signature violence of sexuality. For Anna, who miscarries as a result, this episode in her marriage is the “culminating vision of hostile; overwhelming forces” that surround and break her. After that Anna retreats into an inner remoteness that only once leaves her: on a long walk out of Omaha beyond the suburbs, where the fresh air and nectar from the catalpa trees revive the vision of nature’s beauty, Mazie sees once again a look of happiness “and selfness” in her mother’s face.

  Though the class and gender issues remain out of analytical focus, the details of the lives of the characters speak in significant and iconoclastic ways in the traditions of American fiction. The novel’s proletarian point is muted by the lack of political understanding any of the characters attain, but its portrait of the misery of poverty and the difficulties of motherhood jolts readers out of their comfort zone. Anna, depleted by the birth of five children in a matter of seven years, is no Ma Joad. Jim, exhausted from work and abusive at home, is no leader of the proletariat. Their children are not exceptional but instead devise contrary play and engage in childish violence to relieve the fears and anxieties they absorb from the world around them, both at home and on the streets. Their daydreams are not rich in the lore of books but spun out of the pop culture of movies, junk food at the corner grocery, and the glittering shards of trash from the dump. The pathos is that all of them know isolated moments of tenderness and beauty and can dream of better lives. Each is absorbed in his or her own fears and misery and often blind to the sickness and fear in the others, or too tired or weak or young to address effectively what is only dimly seen.