I've said this before, but here it is again: A REALLY good reason for joining in with online book clubs is that you're pushed to read things you'd never have thought of reading otherwise...

I had never heard of this book until Haley Larsen suggested it as a close read.

By Tillie Olsen (1912-2007), it was published as a novel in 1974, but -- as the subtitle (From the Thirties) indicates -- it was actually begun in 1932, and worked on intermittently until 1936/7. It remained incomplete. As Olsen says in the Afterword: "Unfinished, it yet bespeaks the consciousness and roots of that decade, if not its events." It was pieced together from fragments, and was difficult to assemble, since any given section could sometimes have many versions: "In this sense -- the choices and omissions, the combinings and reconstruction -- the book ceased to be solely the work of that long ago young writer and, in arduous partnership, became this older one's as well. But it is all the old manuscripts -- no rewriting, no new writing."

The title, Yonnondio, comes from the Walt Whitman poem of the same name that forms the epigraph. It's essentially a lament for the impending erasure of America's first inhabitants: "[The poet] seeks to embed Native Americans in the evolving poem of America even while he laments what he sees as their inevitable disappearance from the American future."

I am guessing that Olsen wants to highlight the way these people were steamrollered in the cause of the American Dream of development and prosperity, just as this same pursuit rolls over the people she is about to describe.



The book opens in the 1920s in a Wyoming mining town, and we start to get to know the Holbrook family, whose fortunes we will be following. The point of view changes -- this is very much a modernist text -- but we particularly hear from Mazie, who's six and a half when we begin. She's old for her years, required to process way more than most children have to: "The whistle blows. Poppa says it is the ghosts laughin 'cause they have hit a man in the stummy, or on the head. Chris, that happened too. Chris, who sang those funny songs. He was a furriner. Bowels of earth they put him in. Callin it dead. Mebbe it's for coal, more coal. That's one thing I'm not a-knowen. Day comes and night comes and the whistle blows and payday comes."

Her parents are Jim (frustrated, often violent towards his wife and children, and prone to drink whenever there's money) and Anna ("bitter and brutal" -- we soon understand why). Her siblings are Will, Ben, and the baby (Jimmie).

The mine is a terrible environment. Danger lurks everywhere, partly because that's the nature of mining, but also because the people who are supposed to take care of safety don't.

When Mazie narrowly escapes the clutches of a mentally ill man who wants to throw her down the mineshaft as a sacrifice, Jim decides enough's enough, and they have to get out.

They're going to try farming, promising themselves "a new life in the spring".

Before that day comes, Jim is buried for five days after an explosion: "(Dear Company. Your men are imprisoned in a tomb of hunger, of death wages. Your men are strangling for breath -- the walls of your company town have clamped out the air of freedom...)"


From Harry Sternberg's depression-era Coal and Steel collection

Eventually, though, they set off for South Dakota, full of hope and optimism. They're briefly happy. We so rarely see them happy. They love the beauty of the countryside, and the work of the farm.

But the worm is in the apple... Old Man Caldwell, a kindly oldster who befriends and tries to educate Mazie, can't help but be pessimistic: "When I came out, a man had some chance. The only thing against him was nature, locusts and drought and lake frost. You took your chance. That was all you had to fight. But now that hardly matters. There's mortgage, taxes, the newest kind of machinery to buy so you do as good as the other fellow, and the worry -- will it get a price this year."

But the Holbrooks carry on. The children get some schooling, which Anna sees as the ultimate promise for the future.

Caldwell's right, though, and soon Jim is angry: "They're taking all of it, every damn thing. The whole year slaved to nothing... I owin THEM after workin like a team of mules for a year."

The household friction that had lessened for a while is back again in full force. And Anna is pregnant with Bess.

There's no remedy but to give up the farming, and Jim goes to work at a slaughterhouse in the city.

Another hell-like vision: "Myriad and drumming, the feet of sound move always through these crooked streets, trembling the shoddy houses, jerking the skeleton children who scream and laugh so senselessly to uneven rhythms they themselves know not of. Monster trucks shake by, streetcars plunge, machinery rasps and shrieks. Far underneath thinly quiver the human noises -- weeping and scolding and tired words that slip out in monosyllables and are as if never spoken; sighs of lust, and guttural, the sigh of weariness; laughter sometimes, but this sound can scarcely be called human, not even in the mouths of children. A fog of stink smothers down over it all -- so solid, so impenetrable, no other smell lives beside it. Human smells, crotch and underarm sweat, the smell of cooking or of burning, all are drowned under, merged into the vast unmoving stench."

The family lives in a slum. And again we see the death of the American Dream: "The children can lie on their bellies near the edge of the cliff and watch the trains and freights, the glittering railroad tracks, the broken bottles dumped below, the rubbish moving on the littered belly of the river..."


These stories of labour commodification played out in so many places, including in the heartlands of the Industrial Revolution. This is Belper, 2020

Just as Caldwell provided a glimmer of warmth and humanity in the previous stage of their journey, so Alex and Else Bedner do in this one. Once again we get one of the so rare glimpses of family happiness, and yet there's always something tragic floating not far beneath the surface: "From the opened window, the sweet intoxicating smell of spring floated in; the lamplight made soft lakes of light, shadows bending over, gentle. They sang and sang, and a longing, a want undefined, for something lost, for something never known, troubled them all." This inchoate longing is reminiscent of the "hungry" korl woman from Life in the Iron-Mills.

But there's another turn of the wheel. They've been laying off at the stockyards, so Jim is now doing sewer work. Anna is not well; family life is chaotic; and once again they're terribly poor.

You have to be young and naive to still believe in a better future: "Tracy was young, just twenty, still wet behind the ears, and the old blinders were on him so he couldn't really see what was around and he believed the bull about freedomofopportunity and a chancetorise and ifyoureallywanttoworkyoucanalwaysfindajob and ruggedindividualism and something about a pursuit of happiness." It doesn't work out for Tracy either, though...

The language becomes more surreal as we move through the book. None of the family is totally in touch with reality, what with nostalgia and hunger and worry.

There's another pregnancy, but Anna miscarries. The previous baby is sick, too. Rickets, thrush, dehydration... The doctor tells the family Anna needs rest, and good food, and medical attention. Like that's going to happen...

We're not surprised when she really struggles to get well, and we feel, viscerally, her lassitude and depression and dizziness, her sudden spikes of energy that rapidly peter away again into the sand. She looks at all there is to be done, and all that's lacking. And she's just overwhelmed: "It was that she felt so worn, so helpless; that it loomed gigantic beyond her, impossible ever to achieve, beyond any effort or doing of hers: that task of making a better life for her children to which her being was bound." She's driving herself crazy. But Jim -- who sometimes, though not often, does the right thing -- tries to calm her. He attempts to comfort her, humour her, "stroking and kissing her hair, silently making old vows again, vows that life will never let him keep".

Anna still preserves her reverence for books, and her longing for her children to be educated: "That's what books is: places your body aint ever been, cant ever get to go. Inside people's heads you wouldn't ever know." You're so right, Anna...


Harry Sternberg's 1939 mural: The Family, Industry, and Agriculture

It does grind you down somewhat, this book. So the respites are welcome. It's the school holidays, and the children are colonizing the dump: "Children -- already stratified as dummies in school, condemned as unfit for the worlds of learning, art, imagination, invention -- plan, measure, figure, design, invent, construct, costume themselves, stage dramas; endlessly -- between tasks, errands, smaller children to be looked after, jobs, dailinesses -- live in passionate absorbed activity, in rapt make-believe."

For a while now, Jim has been working at the meatworks. And the combination of hellish heat and the processing of the carcases offers us a new level of dystopia.

We end with "heat delirium and near suffocation". But then Bess starts banging a fruit jar lid in a display of the "human ecstasy of achievement". They all laugh. The misery is transcended for the time being.

They hear a radio for the first time. Anna says: "The air's changing, Jim. I see for it to end tomorrow, at least get tolerable."

And then we cut to Olsen's explanation of the truncated narrative: "Reader, it was not to have ended here..."

***

The cutting off in media res was discussed by a number of fellow-readers. We generally agreed that -- though it was frustrating not to know what happened to the Holbrooks -- this state of affairs was actually very realistic. There's not going to be a neat narrative arc. Things are just going to bump along as they always have done, from crisis to crisis. No-one is going to ride to the rescue.

As I have said, the impression is bleak. Poverty, lack of opportunity, domestic violence of all stripes, illness, rape, bereavement -- it's all here. But the thing is that it WAS all there. From what I know of my grandmother's life, I'm sure she would have been familiar with many of Anna's experiences. Even more depressingly, there are plenty of people today who are living this life.


Self-portrait of Harry Sternberg

***

If we worried a little about Rebecca Harding Davis's credentials as a spokesperson for the working class, we need have no such concerns with Olsen, as Jane Lazarre explains. Quoting two of her daughters, she records how "Tillie Olsen was born Tillie Lerner 'in a tenant farm in Nebraska, the second of six children of Russian Jewish immigrants who left their homeland after involvement in the failed 1905 revolution. She grew up in Omaha, where her father worked as a painter and paperhanger and served as state secretary of the Nebraska Socialist Party... In 1929 she embarked on what would be thirty years of low paying jobs (hotel maid, packinghouse worker, linen checker, waitress, laundry worker, factory worker, secretary)." She dropped out of school at the age of 15.

Katherine Arnoldi explains "how [Olsen] discovered in a rummage sale bin an Atlantic Monthly magazine from April 1861 that contained Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron-Mills, which opened up the idea of writing from her own working class life". As part of her broad-spectrum activism, she was instrumental in having Davis and other women writers republished at the Feminist Press.

Olsen's struggle to find time to write typifies that of many women whose labour, in various spheres, is unremitting. How much literature, we wonder, is sacrificed on the stove and the ironing board... Talking to Anne-Marie Cusac in 1999, Olsen recalls: "I'd published the first part of Yonnondio in Partisan Review -- it was the second issue ever of Partisan Review. It had been reviewed in The New Republic by a man called Robert Cantwell, in which he wrote, 'Of all the fiction published in a little magazine, this is unmistakably the work of early genius.' He was exaggerating." He probably wasn't, and yet Olsen was unable to carve out enought time to finish the book. The dilemma is illustrated in her heart-rending short story, called I Stand Here Ironing, which dissects the agony of a single mother forced to neglect her first child simply because she has to put food on the table for them both.


Olsen and her daughters

***

I was very grateful for Larsen's introducction to the characteristics of modernist texts: A collage-like style; a stream-of-consciousness delivery; a willingness to experiment (here, for example, with fragmented sentences, disrupted chronology, the attempt "to mimic the chaos of the human mind and its untidy organization of impressions, memories, fears, anxieties, and feelings"); and a readiness to problematize old scripts.

I also loved the contextualization she offers. She compares Yonnondio with Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (which I read at a rather difficult period in my life, so my diary has almost nothing to say about it, beyond that it was comforting to be thinking about other people's misery rather than my own...). Both books, says Larsen, "traffic in the tension of human dreaming". Humans mostly can't stop themselves hoping... Whether that's necessarily a good thing is brilliantly explored in a poem by Langston Hughes, called Harlem, which answers its own question -- "What happens to a dream deferred?" -- with various possibilities (including explosion).

Class-oriented literature must also be read in the context of race: "Working-class literature is rife with questions about who deserves a good life? Who deserves wages for their labor? Who requires a wage in order to survive? Whose labor was, from the forming of the United States as a nation, presumed to be free and mandated the violent enslavement of an entire population? And whose labor was, then as a result, implicitly elevated as more valuable than the labor of the 'free' (read: enslaved) laborers?"

All in all, this was a most illuminating read. My thanks to Larsen, and all those who contribute to the Closely Reading discussion.