'Yonnindio from the Thirties' by Tillie Olsen (1974)

Fonts can be like hairstyles sometimes; they can be the hallmark of a decade. It was the font on the cover of YONNONDIO FROM THE THIRTIES by Tillie Olsen that attracted me to the thin book on the shelf of a used bookstore in Chicago called The Armadillo's Pillow.

"This was published in the 70s," I thought at a glance. I don't know what the font is called but something about its curlicues and the swollen letters signaled it was from the era of "Smokey and the Bandit." So I flipped to the copyright page and, sure enough, it was published in 1974.

Immediately I was endeared to the book for proving my instincts accurate. I suspect if it had been published in the 60s or 80s, I'd've put it back on the shelf, disgusted with its deception.

The other intriguing element to this book that struck me is a bit of a contradiction I noticed between a quote on the front and one on the back. Across the top of the front, above the title, is a quote that declares: "Everything she has written has become almost immediately a classic!" But then on the back, in an excerpt from the "New Republic," we learn, "Of the major living American writers, Tillie Olsen is the least prolific," by which they mean really not prolific considering she had published only one other work of fiction, a collection of short stories titled Tell Me a Riddle. I don't know if you can write "everything she has written" when "everything" amounts to two books.

What's more, if Yonnondio is a classic, I'm arrogant enough to think I would have at least heard of it. And who the heck is Tillie Olsen?

So I bought it for a buck, which proved well worth it because I was in store of a couple of surprises.

The first surprise was learning that Olsen actually wrote the book in the 1930s. It just wasn't published until 1974. The second, and most startling surprise, I didn't learn until the end: Olsen wrote the thing when she was 19, a stunning fact I never saw coming.

Yonnondio, a word taken from a Walt Whitman poem by the same title, means "lament for the lost," and a lament the novel surely is and lost in a stark world permeated with poverty and despair Olsen's characters assuredly are. From the outset, Olsen paints a desperate picture of 6-year-old Maize Holbrook's life in a mining town in Wyoming where death deep underground is a daily threat. Her father Jim is an abusive alcoholic and her mother is a strong but exhausted and fearful caretaker.



The lyricism of Olsen's writing contrasts sharply with the violent, harsh and coal-coated life of the mining town. Her beautiful language depicts horrific conditions, shown to us through Maize's innocent eyes:

"I would be a-cryen," she whispered to herself, "but all the tears is stuck inside me. All the world is a-cryen, and I don't know for why. And the ghost may get daddy. Now he's goin' away, but he'll come back with somethin sweet but sicklike hangin on his breath, and hit momma and start the baby a-bawlen. If it was all a dream, if I could only just wake up and daddy'd be smilin, and momma laughin, and us playing. All the world a-cryen and I don't know why ..."

The Holbrooks eventually pick up and move to a farm in North Dakota where life is clean and open and they experience an idyllic respite, but it is only for a season. They are tenant farmers and at the end of the harvest, despite long days of backbreaking work, Jim doesn't earn dime; instead, he ends up owing the banks. They haven't escaped poverty at all.

They leave the farm for the city where Jim gets a job in a slaughterhouse and the family lives in a ghetto. The living conditions are even worse than the mining town; the persistent cloud of coal dust has been replaced with an overpowering stench that almost makes even sleep impossible. Sickness and fever plague the family. The scenes set in the sweaty and bloody slaughterhouse evoke Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. But Jim Holbrook needs the job and what else is he going to do? He does not live in a reality that offers a wide range of options or opportunity.

As Olsen writes, "'Life,' heavily from Ellen Burgun. 'Life's no bottle of perfume. I'm tired enough to die.'"



In addition to exploring the inescapable whirlpool of poverty and the exploitation of the working class, Olsen presents a powerful portrait of motherhood, embodied by Maize's mother Anna, who emerges as the sole hero in the book. Her will is indomitable, her spirit unbreakable ... nearly. "O Jim," she says, "the children. Seems we can't do nothing for them in this damn world."

Tillie Olsen, 1940s

Olsen's oppressive and depressive depiction of the 1920s is a brutal counterpoint to the more popular novel most often associated with the decade: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. You can't help feeling Olsen's unblinking account is the truer reality, and as it turns out, much of the novel is based on her childhood experiences.

Yonnondio was Olsen's first attempt at a novel. Born in Nebraska,
she lived most of her life in San Francisco, where she was a union organizer and political activist. She is often associated with the first generation of American feminists. I didn't know it going in, but it becomes clear fairly quickly that Olsen has a definite and passionate political position on the state of poverty and the disenfranchisement
of the working class. She was, in fact, at one time a member of the Communist Party. The title story in her short story collection Tell Me a Riddle won the O. Henry Award for Best American Short Story of 1961. Olsen died in 2007.

By the way, there is a third surprise that comes at the end of Yonnondio, but I will leave that for the next reader to discover on their own.

** If you'd like to be the next reader of YONNONDIO FROM THE THIRTIES, send me an email in the message box above. I'll randomly select a reader to send the book to on Sept. 14. Remember, if you want to read the book, that's great, but you have to be willing to send it on to another reader when you've finished. And if you feel the urge to share with me your experience with the book in a comment on this blog, that'd be terrific.