In 1978 the writer Tillie Olsen published a book called Silences, “a landmark survey of disenfranchised literary voices and the forces that seek to silence them.” In 2003, the book was re-released.
This essay was photocopied from that book and appears to be its introduction.
Olsen wrote often about the political and social reasons why women have been prevented from writing. In our Sarah Lawrence College essay class back in the mid-1990s we usually passed around purely craft essays. But occasionally someone would pass around a political essay, which is kind of interesting since our professor, Susanne Gardinier, was a political poet. I’m actually surprised we didn’t cover more political pieces, just to, like, kiss-up to the teacher.
In the first part of this essay Olsen talks about creative silences in general, why artists may choose to go quiet.
“Literary history and the present are dark with silences: some the silences for years by our acknowledged great; some silences hidden; some the ceasing to publish after one work appears; some the never coming to book form at all….what are creation’s needs for full functioning?”
She talks about natural silences, those which represent a “necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation.”
But Olsen really wants to talk about unnatural silences, like for example Thomas Hardy ceasing to write novels and taking a religious vow that required he refrain from writing poetry. Or Arthur Rimbaud abandoning “the unendurable literary world.” Herman Melville’s needing to earn a living.
Akin to those silences are what Olsen calls “hidden silences: work aborted, deferred, denied,” censorship silences, self-censorship, “the knife of the perfectionist,” problems of focus or will-power, silences created by self abuse. Ernest Hemmingway is her example for this type. She borrows his own quote from “The Snows of Kilmanjaro”:
“He had destroyed his talent himself—by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, by snobbery, by hook and by crook; selling vitality, trading it for security, for comfort.”
She then talks about silences caused by long foreground periods. Walt Whitman is a good example here and writers who didn’t even start up until their forties, fifties, sixties (Laura Ingalls Wilder). Some writers had so many life demands, they needed “the sudden lifting of responsibility” or the “immobilization of a long illness” to carve out the time to write.
Rainer Maria Rilke was so possessive of his time, his need for “a great isolation,” that he refused to help support his wife and daughter at all, let alone feed the dog. (He didn’t even attend his daughter’s wedding). I’ve heard Mary Oliver suggest as much in an essay, that’s all is fair in love and war and writing. Emily Dickinson, in her own way, withdrew from the world.
I’m just gonna say I can’t live like that. I mean, I can hermit up as much as the next monk and I feel no great rush to publish, but I can’t refuse time to people. And honestly, I don’t feel I have to. Maybe this is because I was an administrative assistant for over ten years. I learned how to multi-task. Maybe because I’m obsessed with the idea of lost time I’ve learned how to hoard it.
I’m actually multi-tasking the writing of this blog today as we speak.
I’m pretty good at “time management.” That said, I have failed to carve out the time to write the novel and the short stories. But I’ve always considered this more of a challenge of will power and work-life balance; but hey, that excuse could just as well be a rationalization.
I’m sure I could produce out more if I worked at it nine to five or even 9 to noon. But, like Joan Didion, I didn’t want to teach (or write screenplays or finagle inheritances). So then…life choices.
But I’m having the dog. Between the dog and the novel, the dogs gonna win that battle.
Olsen says, “Most writers must work regularly at something,” if not teaching than something out in the big world. But “substantial, creative word demands time, and with rare exceptions only full-time workers have achieved it.” And here she mentions Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, who produced quantity while holding down other jobs. She quotes from Franz Kafka’s diary to illustrate his struggles finding time to write.
From 1911, “I finish nothing.”
From 1917 “the strain of keeping down living forces.”
This is especially true, Olsen says, of women. Many women writers see decades between books, and not due to “lying fallow” in order to fertilize ideas. Olsen compiles a long list of the most successful women writers of the past century, (I’m assuming she means 1800s), who either had no children or had servants to help with the children. Then she lists accomplished 1900s women writers who also had “household help or other special circumstances.”
She then rightly poo-poos the belief some hold that women don’t need to create because they can “create babies.”
(For the love of..)
I need to stop now…and seethe.
