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YGLESIAS, Helen

Born 29 March 1915, New York, New York

Daughter of Solomon B. and Kate Goldstein Bassine; married Bernard Cole, 1937 (divorced); Jose Yglesias, 1950 (divorced); children: Tamara, Lewis, Rafael

In her autobiographical sketch in Starting Early, Anew, Over, and Late (1978), Yglesias describes herself as the youngest in a family of seven children (four sisters and two brothers) growing up in a crowded New York apartment overflowing with relatives. Her father, a Jewish immigrant, was hard-pressed to provide for his family on the earnings from his neighborhood grocery. By the time she was sixteen both of Yglesias' parents were invalids and America was in the midst of the Great Depression. She began to write a novel hoping to save the family financially; her older brother told her nobody would be interested in what she was writing, and Yglesias destroyed the manuscript. She recalled that her mother, watching her, grieved, "What are you doing to yourself: you're killing yourself. Stop killing yourself."

It was almost 40 years before Yglesias was able to recapture the career she destroyed with her first unfinished novel. During those years she worked in a print shop, became a member of the Young Communist League, married a union official who became a photographer, and became a wife and mother. Divorced and remarried at thirty-four, Yglesias remained at home, caring for children and doing political work until she was well into her forties. Then, after a few unrewarding jobs, she became the assistant to the literary editor of the Nation. When he died, Yglesias took over the job and worked there for five years (1965-70) before leaving New York and moving to Maine to begin her writing career.

Her career was heralded by the publication of How She Died (1972), which won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. The novel chronicles the last days of Mary Moody Schwartz, a young radical activist who is dying of cancer. The book focuses not simply on the death of a single individual, but on the possibility of the death of a group—political death. More important, perhaps, than the dying Mary is her best friend, Jean, who becomes entangled in a love affair with Mary's husband. Jean watches while her friend becomes schizophrenic and is briefly incarcerated in an asylum. The object of her own children's neurotic needs, Jean tries, with the best will but with little effect, to make Mary's dying meaningful. Skillfully interwoven with the story of Mary's death is the story of the radicals who had tried to free Mary's mother from prison and who, during Mary's death-watch, try to free themselves from their own failures. Yglesias's first book, the one she said she had waited decades to write, is a densely packed novel with sharp attention to the minute, often-hidden, details of her characters' lives, a clear sense of place and politics, and the sympathy of one who has lived long for one who is dying young.

Her second novel, Family Feeling (1976), while disclaiming the representation of any real persons, has a distinctly autobiographical flavor. Anne Goddard, the youngest daughter of Jewish immigrants, lives her childhood beneath the Myrtle Avenue El and listens to her mother's stories. She is torn between trying to escape her immigrant past and trying to come to terms with the love her mother gave her so unstintingly. Family conflicts, especially with one son, Barry, who is determined to make it big in America, threaten to unravel the Goddards' lives, and the murder of Anne's husband, Guy Rossiter, sends her home to Fort Greene in search of the past she has tried to forget. The novel's climax, in Barry's penthouse office overlooking the lights of New York City, is Anne's attempt at reconciliation while still maintaining what she has won for herself.

Yglesias' third novel, Sweetsir (1981), uses a series of journalistic flashbacks to reveal the character of Morgan Beauchamp Sweetsir, a brutal, abusive husband who was fatally stabbed by his wife, Sally Stark Sweetsir, who is on trial for his murder. More important than just the story are the issues women face in their relationships with men. The questions of wife beating, the need many women have to stay with abusive husbands, and the roles women make for themselves in marriage are all painted with the deft hand of one who knows how to tell a story.

With The Saviors (1987), Yglesias returns once again to the questions of her own political past and to the issues of culture and ethnicity that filled her first two novels. The central question of the novel asks why people whose political goals are admirable are often less than admirable in their daily lives. Lionized by the political left for their life's work, Maddy Brewster Phillips and her husband, Dwight, are on their last political march. Maddy remembers her life with the Society of the Universal Brotherhood and with her lover, Vidhya, who has turned the principles of the society to his own ends. In one last effort to understand her life, Maddy says to her husband, "We're old, two old people. Death is right ahead of us, a step away. If we don't accept reality now, then when?" It is with this plea for reality that Maddy realizes only "love and faith and truth" matter to her, not the lies of her past or the myths the young make up about her.

Yglesias' nonfiction work, Starting Early, Anew, Over, and Late, not only reveals her own struggle to become a writer, but also chronicles the struggles of others who found their way at different stages in their lives. The first section, "Starting Early," features her son, Rafael Yglesias, a published novelist at age seventeen. "Starting Anew" and "Starting Over" focus on female and male ways of beginning again. "Starting Late" tells Yglesias' story and that of Helen and Scott Nearing, whose lives harmonized two central movements of the 20th century, socialism and ecology. Isabel Bishop (1988) is a vivid appreciation of the life and work of one of America's outstanding women artists whose compelling portraits of working women Yglesias had long admired.

In 1996 Yglesias published Semblant, followed by The Girls in 1999. Though starting late at the career she knew from her youth she was well suited for, this experience has given her an eye to see beyond the surface of people's lives into the essential truths of what it means to be human in the late 20th century. Now in her mid-eighties, she shows few signs of slowing down.