744 The American Century: Literature since 1945school of middling reputation, beleaguered by middling parents and their middling
offspring,” the reader is told. “All of this was a surprise in his late middle age, but of
only middling size. He was used to consorting with the Middle.” Obsessed with the
breakdown of culture, Brill feels that he is trapped in a cannibal galaxy, a
“megalosaurian colony of primordial gases that devours smaller brother galaxies.”
He also sees shadows of the past looming through the tenuous and banal surfaces of
the present. The “innocent” American architecture of the school campus, for
example, with the buildings lined up symmetrically, takes on the ghostly contours of
the boxcars that took his family away from Paris to death in Poland. Like Rosa
Lublin, the protagonist of The Shawl, who treasures the shawl of her daughter killed
in a concentration camp, like a talisman, Brill is wrapped up and rapt in recollection.
Rosa equates America with the trivial, the “prevalent, frivolous.” So does Brill. She
has no time for millennial dreams: “Stella Columbus!” she declares contemptuously
of her niece Stella, “She thinks there’s such a thing as the New World.” Neither does
he. Lublin and Brill are fatally alike in their “secret cynicism,” that sense of only half
living in a banal limbo. Both of them end up married, which might suggest a kind of
making do and going on. But the suitor of Rosa is comic, and acceptance of him
grudging. And, after taking a wife, Joseph Brill retires to a middle-class existence in
Florida that sounds like a dire parody of the American dream. Neither has learned
much more than to sojourn as a stranger in the promised land.
Two writers of European immigrant families who, like Tillie Olsen, have been
more interested in giving speech to the silences, and hope or even release to the
desperate, are Grace Paley and Marge Piercy (1936–). Paley, whose work was
discussed earlier, is the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Russia; Piercy was born
to a Welsh father and a Jewish mother of Russian descent. Both were encouraged, as
Olsen was, to be politically active; and both have used their writing as a form of
activism – a means of resistance to, and rescue from, the potentially overwhelming
experiences of poverty and oppression, the fact of war and the threat of annihilation.
So, from the perspective of immigrant experience, the artfully fragmented tales of
Paley emerge as cultural kaleidoscopes, mosaics of different language and speech
patterns: a verbal and narrative equivalent of the mixed medium, the overlapping
cultures of old worlds and new, in which her characters have to navigate their way
and make their choices. The persona of Faith Asbury, a recurrent figure in these
stories, helps Paley articulate her own choices; she is also a source of intensification
and expansion. Faith enables Paley to intensify her own vision and voice, which are
engaged but quirky, serious but susceptible to flights of fantasy. And she allows her
creator, too, to expand her concerns beyond the local and the immediate, as Faith
meets and measures her bond with other women, often from other cultures, who
share her interests and anxieties. A similar feeling of female solidarity is notable in
the work of Piercy, particularly the poems collected in such volumes as To Be of Us
(1973), The Moon is Always Female (1980), My Mother’s Body (1985), and The Art of
Blessing the Day (1999), as well as such novels as Woman On the Edge of Time (1976),
Summer People (1989), The Longings of Women (1994), and Sex Wars (2005). In the
autobiographical poem “Putting the good things away,” for instance, Piercy revealsGGray_c05.indd 744ray_c 05 .indd 744 8 8/1/2011 7:31:42 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 42 PM