742 The American Century: Literature since 1945she added, “it is all the old manuscripts – no rewriting, no new writing.” And it was
finally published in 1974 as Yonnondio: From the Thirties. Before that, in the 1950s,
Olsen had already begun writing again: a series of stories, Tell Me a Riddle, that were
published in 1962. Originally conceived as part of a novel about three generations of
a Russian Jewish family, these stories retrieve not only the particular sufferings and
triumphs of individual characters but the meaning of entire decades of the national
experience, intensely lived but barely recorded. They were clearly inspired by what
Olsen called, in her critical work Silences (1978), her “hatred for all that, societally
rooted, unnecessarily lessens and denies” creative acts of consciousness and that
“slows, impairs, silences writers.” And what they tell is a kind of secret history.
The title story of Tell Me a Riddle is typical. With the density and force of a
novel, as if the long silence of its author had pressed its subject into fiercely
condensed form, the story concerns the life and death of an immigrant woman,
Eva. The narrative present is the close of her life. That narrative, however, dips
back in memory, voice, and consciousness to recover 47 years of subordination in
marriage, long, anxious years of poverty and child rearing. As a child and young
woman, Eva had been part of a movement for change. Full of optimism, she had
known “transport, meaning, community.” As a wife and mother, however, she had
had to live “for” and not “with” others. Now old, her children grown and gone, she
relishes the chance “never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others.” H e r
husband, meanwhile, unnerved by the absence of social relations and appalled by
his wife’s delight in the solitude of an “empty house,” wants to sell up and retire to
a “haven” for pensioners. “Tell Me a Riddle” is a touching, telling account of the
loving war that is marriage. It is also a revelation of the real cost of the sexual
division of labor. The husband, David, having lived “with” people, has made his
peace with modern America. He has abandoned the “holiest dreams” he and his
wife had shared in their radical youth; alone, on the other hand, Eva has stored up
these dreams. Eva has seen her husband and her children make their compromises,
bury themselves in making do. But with her, we are told, it is as if “for seventy years
she had hidden a tape recorder, infinitely microscopic within her, that it had coiled
infinite mile on mile, trapping every song, every melody, every word read, heard,
and spoken.” At last, as she lies dying from cancer, all the coiled tape is played back,
the dammed speech is released. On her deathbed, the silence of Eva is broken. In a
lyrically disjunctive prose, Olsen recreates her protagonist’s recovery of all that has
been repressed: Eva’s fear of nuclear annihilation, her anger at the waste of human
potential, her unextinguished belief in the possibility of progress and revolution.
“Death deepens the wonder” are the final, dedicatory words in this story. The
wonder is for an indomitable woman, an uncornered spirit. It is for human,
particularly female continuity, since Eva passes the secret of the “riddle” of life –
which is hope, and the speaking of hope – on to her granddaughter. It is also for a
tale that, while figuring what are called “the monstrous shapes of what had actually
happened in the twentieth century,” still has time to celebrate all that grudgingly,
lovingly David perceives in his wife. As he gazes at the broken body of Eva, he sees
there what he has lost but what, even in dying, she still possesses: “that joyousGGray_c05.indd 742ray_c 05 .indd 742 8 8/1/2011 7:31:42 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 42 PM