Review of Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur By Constance Coiner & Three Radical Women Writers: Class and Gender in Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, and Josephine Herbst By Nora Ruth Roberts

Authors

Linda Ray Pratt, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Date of this Version

Spring 1998

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2, Spring 1998, pp. 155-59.

Comments

Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

HARVEST SONGS AND ELEGIAC NOTES

"Writing about living subjects, especially those with whom one feels political and personal solidarity, is a touchy, even painful business," begins Constance Coiner in the introduction to her book on Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur. Contemporary directions in scholarship have recognized that interaction and opened up the personal voice in the scholarly study. Putting aside the dream of disinterestedness, the scholar herself may become part of the subject. The traditions of an objective scholarship are especially hard to fulfill, even to honor, when the research is done in cooperation with a living author who offers feminist support and friendship along with unpublished manuscripts and personal interviews. Much of the scholarly study of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur reflects the personal relationship of the critic with the writer, a similar political commitment, and an enthusiasm for the writer's work. The scholar hopes to please the author because of friendship and because she wants to be able to continue talking with her for future research. The author, pleased with the scholarly attention to her work after long years of neglect, wants to respond positively to what interests the scholar. The pull of personal and practical considerations can shape the project in unacknowledged ways.

This painful business of writing about living authors extends beyond the connection between artist and scholar to include the network of scholars who write about the same living authors. We know of each other, we know our subjects, and we know how our subjects work with us to reveal, release, and sometimes control what we can say and how much we can learn. In the cases of Le Sueur and Olsen, we are further bound by the gift of an extraordinary warmth and grace emanating from the authors, an affectionate interest in ourselves and our work that translates feminist ideals into friendship. In this network of associations, even a review partakes of the personal in ways that influence judgments about the work.

In the months after this review was commissioned, both Constance Coiner and Meridel Le Sueur died. Coiner was killed tragically, in the company of her young daughter, in the explosion of TWA Flight 800. Le Sueur died last winter at age 97, worn down at last by the adversities of her age, but within the circle of her family and community around St. Paul, her home for so many years. I heard about her death in a way that closes this circle of connections around me. Sitting at my desk one winter morning, I answered the phone: it was Tillie Olsen. She was calling to tell me that Meridel had died. Tillie didn't want me to read it cold in the impersonality of a newspaper account. I knew that Tillie had been devastated a few months before by the news of the TWA disaster. From within this circle of rich associations where knowledge is conditioned by sorrow and affection, there remained the "painful business" of writing a review.

The two books under review take as their ground the political life of their subjects. Since that life centered on the Communist Party USA, the focus of their studies poses yet another related problem. Coiner and Roberts have different visions of the Party and what it meant to be a member, and neither is, of course, "objective." Both Coiner and Roberts deserve praise for the degree to which they marshal the evidence and attempt a balanced interpretation of the authors as women writers on the left. These works try to assess the influence of Party membership by a detailed critique of CP attitudes on women's issues. Not surprisingly, they find a patriarchal structure in which issues of labor value and the empowering of the proletariat displaced women's liberation and the value of domestic and maternal "work." If their conclusions about ideological priorities are similar, their judgments of how much each author bent her imaginative creation to Party rule differ significantly.