The highest art appears to contain an entire world in miniature: entering it, one experiences the illusion of entering into the very center of the human cosmos, penetrating immediately the depths of the human imagination. If the most perfect forms of art have the quality of being "static"—in Joyce's sense of the term—it is because they are beyond and above time. Of course they exclude a great deal, and yet they give the impression of excluding nothing. They are complete; they point to nothing outside themselves; one grasps them as esthetic wholes, moved by their authority.

There is no more powerfully moving a piece of fiction in recent years than Tillie Olsen's long story "Tell Me a Riddle," which was first published in New World Writing in 1960, and reprinted as the title story in Tillie Olsen's first book, in 1969. Forty-seven years of marriage, hard work and impoverishment and the dizzying passage of time, an old woman's death by cancer, a frightened old man's realization of love: bitter, relentless, supremely beautiful in its nuances, its voices and small perfect details: and certainly unforgettable. All of the stories of Tell Me a Riddle are superb but the title story is the one that remains most vividly in the mind. It will withstand repeated readings—and the sort of close, scrupulous attention ordinarily reserved for poetry.

Tillie Olsen tells us in her new book, Silences, that her fiction came very close to never having been written. The mother of four children, she was forced for many years to work at low-paying jobs in addition to her ceaseless labor as a wife and mother "without the help of the technological sublime." Since women are traditionally trained to meet others' needs before their own, and even to feel (in Olsen's words) these needs as their own, she was not able to write for 20 years, and did not publish her first book until she was 50. During this time she was haunted by the work that demanded to be written, which "seethed, bubbled, clamored, peopled me."

Some stories died. Deprived of the time and energy to imagine them into being—for writing requires not simply passion and self-confidence but periods of solitude that will allow for the slow maturing of work—Tillie Olsen lost them forever. The present book, Silences, is partly autobiographical, and partly a wide-ranging discussion of the phenomenon of "unnatural" silences in literary history. Its main focus is a feminist concern, and anger, with the enforced silences of women, but it also deals—in an informal, conversation, and frequently scattered way—with the "silences" of such disparate writers as Hopkins, Melville, Rimbaud, Hardy, and Baudelaire. Virginia Woolf is ubiquitous: in fact her voice seems to compete with Tillie Olsen's own. And there is a consideration of the meaning of certain statistics (as gauged by appearances in 20th-century literature courses, required reading lists, anthologies, textbooks, etc., there is only one woman writer for every 12 men) in terms of our patriarchal society.

A miscellany of Olsen's speeches, essays, and notes, written over a period of approximately 15 years, Silences is necessarily uneven, and it is certainly not an academic or scholarly study. It was written, as Olsen states in her preface, out of passion: love for her incomparable medium, literature, and hatred for all that, societally rooted, lessens and denies it. Most of its content consists of excerpts and quotations from other writers who have experienced the agony of being, for one reason or another, unable to write; and there is a complete section on the relatively unknown American writer Rebecca Harding Davis, whose "classic" Life in the Iron Mills was published in 1861 (and more or less forgotten until its reissue in 1972). Olsen's sympathy with her numerous subjects is evident, though one might wish that she had concentrated more on her own experiences, which would have been of great interest, and less on a recounting of familiar situations (Melville's fate of being "damned by dollars" and his subsequent silence, for instance). Admirers of Tillie Olsen's fiction will be rather disappointed to discover in Silences dozens of extremely familiar passages from Virginia Woolf, a lengthy excerpt from The Life of Thomas Hardy (ostensibly by Florence Emily Hardy), parts of numerous poems by Emily Dickinson, and scattered quotations by artists as unlike as Van Gogh, [Joseph] Conrad, Katherine Anne Porter, Isaac Babel, Charlotte Brontë, and Henry James … and nothing but the most cursory and summary of remarks about Olsen's own life. (Yet the book is being advertised as "astonishingly autobiographical.")

The book's strengths lie, however, in its polemical passages. Olsen asks why so many more women are silenced than men; she asks why there is only one woman writer "of achievement" for every 12 men writers; why our culture continues to reflect a masculine point of view almost exclusively. She quotes disapprovingly Elizabeth Hardwick's remark (about Sylvia Plath's suicide), "Every artist is either a man or a woman, and the struggle is pretty much the same for both," and Cynthia Ozick's "The term 'woman writer' … has no meaning, not intellectually, not morally, not historically. A writer is a writer."

She notes the distressingly low earnings of "established" writers, men and women both, and the current unhealthy publishing situation, in which more and more publishing houses are owned by large conglomerates. She speaks critically of the literary atmosphere that sets writers against one another, breeding an absurd spirit of competition. One of her chapters lists the proportion of women writers to men writers in 20th-century literature courses (six percent women, 94 percent men), in critical studies (seven percent women, 93 percent men), in interviews (10 percent women, 90 percent men), in anthologies and textbooks (nine percent women, 91 percent men), in terms of various prizes and awards (the National Book Awards, for instance, in the years 1950–73, were given to 52 people, only six of them women). The figures are often rounded off, the estimates rough, but the message is certainly clear.

Norman Mailer is quoted and allowed to make a fool of himself once again ("I have a terrible confession to make—I have nothing to say about any of the talented women who write today…. I do not seem able to read them."); the English critic A. Alvarez speaks condescendingly toward Sylvia Plath ("… No longer a housewifely appendage to a powerful husband, she seemed made solid and complete. Perhaps the birth of a son had something to do with this new confident air."); Auden is quoted in one of his sillier passages ("The poet is the father who begets the poem which the language bears…. Poets, like husbands, are good, bad, and indifferent."). Books like Silences are enormously strengthening in that they polarize attitudes, freezing people into one camp or another, suggesting unlikely sisterhoods (Virginia Woolf, who wrote so many novels, and that marvelous Diary, and those essays and reviews—and those letters!—a sister to a woman writer who, thwarted by family responsibilities and lack of freedom, has never managed to publish a single word?) and bizarre bedfellows (Hopkins, Rimbaud, Scott Fitzgerald—who "sacrificed" his talent by writing too much, in order to live out his sophomoric notion of the Good Life).

One feels the author's passion, and cannot help but sympathize with it. Certainly women have been more generally "silenced" than men, in all the arts. But the book is marred by numerous inconsistencies and questionable statements offered as facts. Why, for instance, are Elizabeth Hardwick and Cynthia Ozick wrong? Their views differ from mainline feminist views but are not, surely, contemptible for that reason. Why are men in general the enemy, but some men—perhaps weaker men—welcomed as fellow victims, and their "unnatural silences" accorded as much dignity as that of women? Does Baudelaire's "silence" as a consequence of syphilitic paralysis have anything at all to do with Tillie Olsen's 20 years of "silence"? I see no connection, yet the book ends with excerpts from My Heart Laid Bare, as if they somehow summarized Olsen's position. And why are men who exploit women criticized on the one hand, and Rilke, who kept himself aloof from responsibilities to his family, admired, on the other hand, for being shrewd enough to guard his creative energies against emotional entanglements …? We are told that women are not to be trapped into the role of being women writers; yet it turns out to be quixotic, and halfway traitorous, to "proclaim that one's sex has nothing to do with one's writing." Feminist homiletics are always troublesome not only because they are often self-contradictory but because they never seem to apply to anyone of originality or stature.

An angry book must stir anger. Hence there is little or no mention of successful women writers of our time—among them Doris Lessing, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Isak Dinesen, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Jean Stafford, Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Muriel Rukeyser, Penelope Mortimer, Joan Didion, Edna O'Brien, Margaret Drabble, Anne Tyler, May Swenson, and innumerable others. Tillie Olsen must have felt justified in subordinating—or silencing—her own considerable artistic instincts during the composition of Silences, and I would not quarrel with her decision. It was a generous one: she wanted to reach out to others, to the living and the dead, who have, evidently, shared her own agony. One must respect such an impulse. But the thinking that underlies Silences is simply glib and superficial if set in contrast to the imagination that created Tell Me a Riddle and Yonnondio, Olsen's novel. Unexamined, unverified, and indeed unverifiable statements are offered as facts again and again. For instance, someone at a national conference on creativity in 1959 said, "Creativity was in each one of us as a small child. In children it is universal. Among adults it is nonexistent"—notonly a doubtful proposition, but sheer malarkey—and Olsen quotes it with approval.

She never confronts the most troublesome question of all: What has "creativity" as such to do with "art"? Are all silences equally tragic? On what basis can a writer resent his society's indifference to his art, so long as society is free to choose its values? I was reminded of that cruel but witty passage in the chapter "Economy" in Walden, in which Thoreau speaks of an Indian who has woven straw baskets no one wants to buy, and who is amazed and resentful at the world's indifference. He had not discovered, Thoreau says, that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other's while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so. And there is Flannery O'Connor's sardonic response to a question put to her at a reading, about whether universities stifled writers. O'Connor replied: "They don't stifle enough of them." (Which is one of the reasons, I suspect, that O'Connor cannot be taken up by feminist critics with much comfort.)

A final comment on the book's editing, or lack thereof. Since the various chapters were published at different times there are many, many repetitions of key phrases and quotations. And nearly every page is marred by small, inconsequential footnotes that qualify or update statements made in the text. In practically every case these footnotes should have been incorporated into the text or eliminated: their busy, gnat-like presence is injurious to the reading experience, and in most instances their nature undercuts the seriousness of the book. For instance, in the chapter "One Out of Twelve: Writers Who Are Women," Olsen quotes Hortense Calisher with disapproval, and then admits in a footnote that her remarks are unfair, because the copy of Calisher's essay she read had an important (and unnoticed) page missing. "My abashed apologies," Olsen says. Yet surely it would not have been too much trouble to type over a single page and eliminate the negative reference to Calisher …? These are signs of haste, and of an editor's indifference. In a book that sets itself up as a literary manifesto of the women's movement, one which has been eagerly anticipated by a considerable number of readers, offenses such as these are saddening, and inexplicable.