feet slapping the pavement, digging humbly into carpets, squatting wide apart in front of chairs and the nojobnojob nothingdoingtoday buzzing in his ears; hugging the coffee--and, shuffling along, buddy (they made a song out of it) can you spare a dime, and the freights north east south west, getting vagged, keep movin, keep movin (the bulls dont need to tell ya, your own belly yells it out, your own idle hands), sing a song of hunger the weather four below holes in your pockets and nowhere to go, the flophouses, the slophouses, a bowl of misery and a last month's cruller and the crabs having a good time spreading and spreading (you didn't know hell would be this bad, did you?).
The subtitle of Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio is "From the Thirties," and what it has to say about the Thirties is that they sucked big time and were bad. The novel follows the Holbrook family--father Jim, mother Anna, daughter Mazie, siblings Jimmie, Ben, Will, and baby Bess--as Jim moves from job to job in the American plains, looking for work that will allow the family to survive and rise above the depredations of poverty. First, it's coal mining in Wyoming, then farming in South Dakota, and finally the slaughterhouses of Omaha. In each place, Jim finds himself owing more to his bosses than he is paid, thanks to the brutal policies of company towns, and he takes his anger and frustration out not on his bosses--one thing Yonnondio seeks to illustrate is how poverty and abuse don't necessarily translate into political awareness--but on Anna. Sickness, violence, and misery ensue.
I like Yonnondio more when I read in the postscript that it was written by Olsen when she was in her early twenties, put away unfinished, then rediscovered and published decades later. As a novel, it seems to have only a downward shape, like The Inferno, from one circle of Hell to another. Even though there are small and hopeful moments--the discovery of a beautiful field of dandelions, with their edible greens, in the middle of Omaha--Yonnondio shows how punishing life was for the poor during the Great Depression by punishing the reader.
But seeing it less as a novel than a collection of fragments, the poetic and impressionistic elements of Yonnondio come to the forefront. Olsen's language can be brutal and lurid, Gothic in imagery and sentiment, and filled with strange, bold choices (like the stretch quoted above). Less successful, I thought, were Olsen's attempts to capture the family's vernacular, which very well might be accurate, but doesn't sound like any human beings I've ever heard. Jim is a thoughtless brute, and Anna and Mazie mostly characterized by their suffering, which approaches madness at times. But some of the minor characters provide the most interesting moments: the coal miner, disfigured and addled by the explosion of a seam, who nearly drops Mazie into the mineshaft to appease the gods of coal he imagines are torturing him; the street urchin Mazie befriends in Omaha who patterns her personality after movies she's too poor to have seen.
Olsen, as I understand it, chose not to finish or rework any of the material she had written in her youth, when the Depression was not yet a memory. As a result, there's no cant here about the nobility of poverty, or of those who grind through the exploitation the Holbrooks experience. Poverty isn't ennobling, Olsen shows; in fact, one of its harshest consequences is that it breeds cruelty in its victims. For that observation alone Yonnondio remains powerful.
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