There’s a case to be made that Grace Paley was first and foremost an antinuclear, antiwar, antiracist feminist activist who managed, in her spare time, to become one of the truly original voices of American fiction in the later twentieth century. Just glance at the “chronology” section of “A Grace Paley Reader” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a welcome new collection of her short stories, nonfiction, and poems, edited by Kevin Bowen and Paley’s daughter, Nora. 1961: Leads her Greenwich Village PTA in protests against atomic testing, founds the Women Strike for Peace, pickets the draft board, receives a Guggenheim Fellowship. 1966: Jailed for civil disobedience on Armed Forces Day, starts teaching at Sarah Lawrence. 1969: Travels to North Vietnam to bring home U.S. prisoners of war, wins an O. Henry Award.
Such political passion may seem in keeping with those times, but Paley didn’t slow down once the flush of the sixties faded. In the mid-seventies, she attended the World Peace Congress in Moscow, where she infuriated Soviet dissidents by demanding that they stand up for the Asian and Latin-American oppressed, too. In the eighties, she travelled to El Salvador and Nicaragua to meet with mothers of the disappeared, got arrested at a sit-in at a New Hampshire nuclear power plant, and co-founded the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. And that’s not the half of it. She called herself a “somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist.” The F.B.I. declared her a Communist, dangerous and emotionally unstable. Her file was kept open for thirty years.
Paley was an archetypal Village figure, the five-foot-tall lady with the wild white hair, cracking gum like a teen-ager while handing out leaflets against apartheid from her perch on lower Sixth Avenue. She also lived in Vermont, where her second husband, Bob Nichols, had a farmhouse. In May, 2007, they drove to Burlington to protest their congressman’s support for the Iraq surge. Paley was eighty-four, undergoing chemo for breast cancer. Three months later, she was dead. “My dissent is cheer / a thankless disposition,” she wrote in her poetry collection “Fidelity,” published the following year. That incorrigible cheerfulness carried her to the very end. No one was more grimly adamant that the world was in mortal peril, or had more fun trying to save it from itself.
Through it all, Paley wrote, or didn’t. She published only three slim collections of her wry, chatty, alarmingly wise short stories: “The Little Disturbances of Man” (1959), “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” (1974), and “Later the Same Day” (1985). Her “Collected Stories” appeared in 1994, as if to confirm that the well had run dry. (“Just As I Thought,” a collection of memoir, speeches, and reportage, from which the essays in the “Reader” are culled, followed in 1998.) This is a great shame, if not so surprising. Activism, like alcoholism, can distract a writer from the demands of her desk. Actually, Paley didn’t even have one. She liked to type at the kitchen table, right in the messy heart of family life, rather than cloister herself in a Woolfian room of her own, though her characters often long for the luxury of a closed door. In her early stories, they are immigrants’ children, Jews mixing with the slightly more established Irish, Poles, and Italians in the tenements and row houses of Coney Island or the Bronx, where “every window is a mother’s mouth bidding the street shut up, go skate somewhere else, come home.” Privacy is out of the question. Brothers, sisters, cousins, neighbors crowd around; lurking everywhere are adult “spies,” like Mrs. Goredinsky, with flesh “the consistency of fresh putty,” who stations herself in front of her building on an orange crate, or the palsy-handed “Mrs. Green, Republican poll watcher in November,” who spends the rest of the year scanning the street for kid trouble.
Then the kids grow up and find that they are under siege from their own children and from the childish men who inconsistently love them. In “The Little Disturbances of Man,” Paley introduced Faith Darwin, an alter ego who returns, like a friend, in each subsequent collection. When we meet Faith, she is in her cramped apartment, dealing with not one husband but two: her ex, the father of her two young sons, a boastful charmer who has dropped by for a brief visit before vanishing again on one of his vague adventures, and her limp, dreamy current mate. (She nicknames them Livid and Pallid, a small act of fond revenge.) The men are men. They drink the coffee Faith has brewed, complain about the eggs she’s cooked, rootle around in her cupboards for booze, grandly discuss lust, women, and Faith herself. She keeps mostly quiet, while mentally whittling them down to size. Here is Livid, greeting his sons, Richard and Anthony, called Tonto:
The scene pours forth with sparkling immediacy, as if transcribed in a single bubbling rush. Everything is comic, down to the undignified string of Livid’s pajama pants and the verb “harassed,” with its tart note of household martyrdom and manipulation. Notice how Faith claims the sort of objective authority you’d expect to find in third-person narration. She doesn’t say that Livid might have been dreaming of Eton; she says that he was. This is the omniscience not only of a writer but of a wife. It’s the least she can do to have a laugh at his expense, though later, in a moment of rare solitude, her mood turns melancholy. “I organized comfort in the armchair, poured the coffee black into a white mug that said mama, tapped cigarette ash into a ceramic hand-hollowed by Richard. I looked into the square bright window of daylight to ask myself the sapping question: What is man that woman lies down to adore him?”
Into the dough of domestic life Paley folds the Bible (like Cain, Tonto “raised up his big mouth against his brother,” in Paley’s wonderful mixed metaphor), politics (there is a brief discourse on the benefits of the Diaspora over Zionism), philosophy (what is man that woman lies down to adore him?), and Eros (and yet she does). The story’s title, “Two Short Sad Stories from a Long and Happy Life,” assures us that all will end well—if Faith can hang on until then. Paley leaves her at the window, Tonto snuggled in her lap, nourished and imprisoned by the bonds of maternal love: “Then through the short fat fingers of my son, interred forever, like a black-and-white-barred king in Alcatraz, my heart lit up in stripes.”
Paley was often asked about the connection between her politics and her fiction. Sometimes she said that her subject matter turned out to be inherently political. People like Henry Miller and Saul Bellow were not writing about the lives of people like Faith Darwin. Paley initially suspected that her work would be considered “trivial, stupid, boring, domestic, and not interesting,” but she couldn’t help it: “Everyday life, kitchen life, children life had been handed to me.” Another answer had to do with justice, the quality that Paley saw at the root of her literary and political endeavors. In a 1985 “Fresh Air” interview, she told Terry Gross, “When you write, you illuminate what’s hidden, and that’s a political act.”
The remarkable fact is that her fiction, peopled by the politically minded, doesn’t do the things that politically infused writing typically does. It doesn’t preach; it doesn’t demonize or lionize; it doesn’t nobly set out to illustrate a set of beliefs or ideals. Indeed, it often undercuts them with sly self-awareness. “We hoped we were not about to suffer socialist injustice, because we loved socialism,” one of Paley’s narrators says, on a trip to China. Paley’s unwavering trust in the power of the collective was essential for her activism, as her clear-eyed affection for the foibles and fallibility of the individual was essential for her art, and it is a delight to encounter both Paleys in a single volume, where they can usefully converse with each other across genres. Bowen, in his foreword to “A Grace Paley Reader,” says that he and Nora Paley wanted to put together a book “that would be a good companion.” They could not have known when they began their work, in early 2015, just how valuable its companionship would prove to be. You can take the “Reader” to a rally and feel galvanized by Paley’s conviction, or you can take it to bed late at night and find pleasure and comfort in her humane prose.
Paley was a natural storyteller, and short stories were her natural form. In “A Conversation with My Father,” from “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute,” she shows us why. The narrator’s father, eighty-six years old and sick in bed, asks her to entertain him with a “simple story . . . just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next.” She reluctantly produces the following:
Her father complains that she’s left everything out. For instance: How did the woman look? Who were her parents that she should end up like this? The narrator tries again:
On the branches of the bare first draft, life begins to bud. Before, the woman seemed delusional, pathetic. Now we see her goodness, her confused optimism, her protective love for her son. The narrator’s tone turns rueful, tender; a piece of gossip has become literature. Her father isn’t convinced. He pities the woman’s sad end. But it’s not the end, the narrator says. In fact, the narrator decides on the spot to make her the receptionist at an East Village clinic, beloved by the community, and prized by the head doctor for her experience as a former addict. Her father finds this absurd. The woman will backslide: that’s reality. His daughter, he says, doesn’t understand how to craft a proper plot. He’s right. She despises plot, that “absolute line” drawn between a beginning and an end: “Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”
Who were Paley’s parents that she should have ended up like this? In 1904, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia had a son. To celebrate, he freed political prisoners under the age of twenty-one, among them Isaac Gutzeit, a socialist who had been sent to Siberia, and his wife, Manya Ridnyik, exiled to Germany. Two years later, they immigrated to the United States, where they changed their name to Goodside and settled in the Bronx with Isaac’s mother, called Babushka, and his younger sister, Mira. Isaac became a doctor; he learned English by reading Dickens. He and Manya had a son and a daughter right away. After a fourteen-year gap, Grace, their third child, was born in 1922, the happy accident of her parents’ middle age.
Politics ran in Paley’s blood. Her childhood was “rather typical Jewish socialist” in that she believed Judaism and socialism to be one and the same. Isaac wouldn’t go near a synagogue, so Paley accompanied Babushka to shul on the holidays. Babushka, for her part, entertained Paley by recounting the heated arguments that had taken place around her table in the old country among her four children: Isaac the Socialist, Grisha the Anarchist, Luba the Zionist, and Mira the Communist. A fifth, Rusya, had been killed at a protest as he brandished the red banner of the working class. In the way that other children are warned not to play with matches, Mira repeatedly instructed young Grace never to be the one to carry the flag at a demonstration.
At nine, Paley joined the Falcons, a Socialist youth group, where she wore a red kerchief and belted out the “Internationale”—“with the Socialist ending, not the Communist one.” (So much for the F.B.I.’s suspicions.) To her delight, she was given a small part in the group’s play, “a kind of agitprop” musical about a shopkeeper’s eviction. As soon as Manya heard that her daughter would be singing onstage, she pulled her from the show. Grace was tone deaf, she insisted, and would make a fool of herself: “Guiltless but full of shame, I never returned to the Falcons. In fact, in sheer spite I gave up my work for Socialism for at least three years.”
Writing down this memory sixty-five years later, Paley finds in it a deeper meaning. To grow up the American child of Russian Jewish immigrants in the twenties and thirties was to live in a world of constant noise pierced by bewildering silences. Politics were debated with neighbors and friends, yet the private history of suffering went largely unspoken. Paley understood that her family had known hatred and violence in Europe, “that godforsaken place,” which she connected to the American racism she was learning about in the Falcons. Yet “despite its adherence to capitalism, prejudice, and lynching, my father said we were lucky to be here in this America.”
As a child, Paley found such contradictions perplexing. The same parents who had endured exile for their beliefs reacted with fury when she was suspended from school for signing an antiwar pledge. Socialism in America could wait, they felt; their daughter’s education could not. As an adult, Paley saw that heroic Isaac and Manya were also “a couple of ghetto Jews struggling with hard work and intensive education up the famous American ladder” until they reached the middle class. “At that comfortable rung (probably upholstered), embarrassed panic would be the response to possible exposure.” Hence Manya’s refusal to allow her to sing—or so Paley, at seventy-two, tells her eighty-six-year-old sister, who rejects her theory. Forget all the class analysis, her sister says. Manya had perfect pitch; it was torture for her to hear a wrong note. And so Paley’s account of her earliest years ends with two old ladies trying to make out the blur of their young mother, as powerfully enigmatic as ever.
Paley dropped out of high school at sixteen. She took classes at Hunter and at City College but never got a degree. (She also studied poetry at the New School with W. H. Auden, who did her the great service of encouraging her to write in her own voice.) At nineteen, she married Jess Paley, a soldier, and went to live with him at Army bases in the South and the Midwest before moving to a basement apartment on West Eleventh Street to wait out the war, supporting herself with a string of secretarial jobs.
Mainly, though, she worked as a housewife. “That is the poorest paying job a woman can hold,” Paley wrote later. “But most women feel gypped by life if they don’t get a chance at it.” Nora was born in 1949, followed, two years later, by a son, Danny. Motherhood elated and sustained Paley; as she got older, she spoke of children with an almost mystical appreciation. (“The child, you know, is the reason for life” is a typical Paleyism.) She was also overburdened, exhausted, and lonely. Jess was struggling with the transition to civilian life. (They separated in 1967, but stayed friends.) There was very little money. Paley had dreamed of having five or six kids, but when she learned that she was pregnant for a third time she went to West End Avenue for an abortion. Soon she was pregnant again, with a child that she wanted and Jess didn’t. She was agonizing over what to do when she suffered a miscarriage.
By the mid-nineteen-fifties, the accumulation of these experiences was “creating a real physical pressure” in Paley’s chest. “I was beginning to suffer the storyteller’s pain: Listen! I have to tell you something!” Her chance was a bout of sickness serious enough to keep Nora and Danny at an after-school program until dinnertime for several weeks. Freed from interruption, Paley wrote until she had her first story.
It’s called “Goodbye and Good Luck,” and it’s a triumph. Here’s how it begins: “I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rose. I wasn’t no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh. In time to come, Lillie, don’t be surprised—change is a fact of God. From this no one is excused. Only a person like your mama stands on one foot, she don’t notice how big her behind is getting and sings in the canary’s ear for thirty years.” No throat-clearing preamble, no careful, self-conscious framing of the kind that so often accompanies early work. Just a voice on the page, speaking high and proud, certain of being heard.
Paley grew up in three languages: Russian at home, Yiddish in the street, and English everywhere else, a blend that marks all her work. In this first story, you hear notes of Isaac Bashevis Singer; you hear Babel, a little Chekhov, some Joyce, all active influences, but above all you hear Paley inventing her own American English, one that clucks and sings. Like many a Paley creation, Rose is a ribald genius of home-brewed figurative language. “I could no longer keep my tact in my mouth,” she says. The source of the story’s title is revealed in Rose’s summation of her mother’s marriage to her father:
And so she does. Rose’s tale opens with her youthful days working as a ticket seller at the Russian Art Theatre, on Second Avenue. There she is courted over seltzer by Volodya Vlashkin, an older, married man and a charismatic king of the Yiddish stage. Rose eventually ends the affair, but she never marries; Vlashkin’s picture stays on her wall. Rose is pragmatic, vital, without self-pity. Still, we suspect that she is a sad case, a solitary old maid gabbing to her niece about happier times. The joke is on us. Vlashkin has finally retired, she tells Lillie. Mrs. Vlashkin couldn’t stand having him around all day and has divorced him. The lovers are back together, this time for good: “After all I’ll have a husband, which, as everybody knows, a woman should have at least one before the end of the story.”
Paley counted the publication of “The Little Disturbances of Man” as a stroke of luck. She had been rejected by more than a dozen journals before an editor at Doubleday whose kids were friends with hers asked to see what she was working on. The book made her reputation; she began placing stories in The Atlantic, Esquire, and—that small pond of big fish—New American Review. Still, fifteen years passed before “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” came out, and it might well have been more, had Donald Barthelme, Paley’s neighbor and friend, not badgered her into putting together the second collection.
In that time, the sixties came and went, and the women’s movement arrived. “The buoyancy, the noise, the saltiness” of second-wave feminism gave Paley a definitive framework for analyzing the world, and a community to survive it with. As she put it, she “required three or four best women friends” to whom she could “tell every personal fact and then discuss on the widest, deepest, and most hopeless level the economy, the constant, unbeatable, cruel war economy, the slavery of the American worker to the idea of that economy, the complicity of male people in the whole structure, the dumbness of men (including her preferred man) on this subject.”
Some critics have found this side of Paley cloyingly righteous. It’s true that in her political writing she could slip into the kind of Earth Mother holiness that she loved to ironize in her fiction. Some of the pieces in the “Reader” were written as speeches for meetings or protests, and their rhetoric matches the occasion. Wars are “violent games” played by men; women, on the other hand, “know there is a healthy, sensible, loving way to live.” In an article for Ms., Paley argued that the American adoption of maimed Vietnamese orphans amounted to war profiteering. (To her credit, when she republished the piece, in “Just As I Thought,” she included an exchange of letters with a furious reader, and a postscript reconsidering her position.)
But Paley’s sense of sisterhood was never complacent. Early on, she perceived the challenges posed by divisions of race, class, and sexuality to feminist solidarity, and to the broader American left. One highlight of the “Reader” is Paley’s essay about the six days in 1966 that she spent in the Women’s House of Detention, the old Greenwich Village prison, for trying to block a military parade. Paley is one of the few white women there, and the only inmate not booked for prostitution or drugs. She gets to know Rita and Evelyn, the tough tenants of a neighboring cell, and Helen, a Jew from Brighton Beach who used to hook with them. “Then one day along come Malcolm X and they don’t know me no more, they ain’t talking to me,” Helen tells her. “You too white. I ain’t all that white.” One woman has a child at Hunter High School; when she gets out, she’s going to clean up her act. Paley is deeply moved. Rita and Evelyn laugh at her naïveté. “Change her ways? That dumb bitch. Ha!!” Not everyone has equal reason to believe in the open destiny of life, a lesson Paley didn’t forget. When she was tasked with drafting the unity statement for the 1981 Women’s Pentagon Action, an antiwar feminist sit-in, she spoke of women, particularly incarcerated ones, who “were born at the intersection of oppressions,” a phrase that hadn’t yet gone mainstream. As for prisons, she thought they should all be in residential neighborhoods: easy to visit, hard to hide.
Paley was a feminist writer from the start, but in her first book women are preoccupied by their dealings with men. In the second, they suddenly have friends, too, other women to sit around the playground and discuss life with. Gone are Faith’s days of listening to her husbands natter on as she rolls her eyes toward the ceiling. She is hungry to talk, and so is Paley, whose language, already so fleet and free, now really begins to fly. In the story “Faith in a Tree,” one of Paley’s best, Faith perches like a Sibyl on the branch of a sycamore overlooking the playground and delivers a manic monologue on all the great Paley concerns—war, socialism, capitalism, class, parents, children, sex, love—while pausing to flirt with men, chat with women, argue with Richard and Tonto, and gossip about everyone she sees. “I digressed and was free,” Faith says, offering the perfect motto for her breathless, bravura performance. It’s as if she were trying to put the whole of her world into words before she, or it, vanished for good.
The disappearing world is Paley’s great topic, and not only when it comes to the threat of nuclear war. In “The Long Distance Runner,” Faith goes for a jog in Brighton Beach, where she grew up. Her block, once Jewish, is now black; she is an interloper, this out-of-breath middle-aged white woman in shorts, viewed with a mixture of curiosity and hostility. A Girl Scout shows her around her old apartment building, then becomes frightened of the “honky lady” and calls for help. Faith, “frightened by her fear of me,” pounds on the door of her old apartment until she’s let in. Here the story becomes surpassingly strange. Faith stays with the current tenant, Mrs. Luddy, a recluse, for three weeks. Is she there as a voyeur, peering, like Paley in prison, into a life that she’d never otherwise see? Faith has gone looking for the past. What she has found is the future—the lives that came after she grew up and took hers elsewhere.
The best way to read Paley’s fiction is still by way of the “Collected Stories,” where they echo and amplify and sometimes undercut one another, growing, like life, more complex and jagged with time. Different voices, black and Latino, appear, to testify to different experiences. Close friendships between women deepen or become strained with age. Some adored children, raised by parents committed to giving them a better world, are lost to drugs, or jail, or even to Weather Underground-type political extremism; others thrive. Adults are exasperated by their aging parents even as they fear for what will happen when they’re gone. Men and women keep driving each other crazy in bed and in the head, but with more mutual sympathy and gentleness. Political urgency rattles the soul. And then, like life, it all abruptly ends.
Why did Paley stop writing short stories? Signs of renunciation are everywhere in “Later the Same Day,” her last book of fiction. “I am trying to curb my cultivated individualism, which seemed for years so sweet,” she writes at the start of one story. “It was my own song in my own world and, of course, it may not be useful in the hard time to come.” These do not sound at all like the words of someone who still has another thirty years of joyful living left. They sound like an ascetic’s vow to renounce the self’s happiness for a higher cause. The end of the book is even more severe. Faith is driving a friend, Cassie, home from a meeting. As they stop at a red light, Faith turns to admire, at lustful length, a sexy man crossing the street. She thinks, “with a mild homesickness,” of the “everyday life” he is leading; hers has been subsumed by her political work. Cassie is scornful. The man, she says, is “just a bourgeois.” And what is Faith’s everyday life, anyway? “It’s been women and men, women and men, fucking, fucking. Goddamnit, where the hell is my woman and woman, woman-loving life in all this?” Faith is shocked. She asks Cassie’s forgiveness. “I do not forgive you,” Cassie says. That frightening, damning pronouncement is the last line of fiction Paley published. It is as if she had taken a knife and slashed through everything that had come before this unsparing final judgment.
This isn’t to say that Paley curbed her “cultivated individualism.” In the nineties, she turned again to poems, her first literary love. They are more plainspoken, politically and personally, than her stories, though often full of the same surprising humor and wit. Yet one wonders how Paley came to decide that the fictional imagination, which loves digression, inconsistency, and the beauty of the trivial, could no longer help her say what she wanted to about the world.
Recently, I’ve been thinking of one story in particular, “Anxiety,” also from “Later the Same Day,” which, though only about three pages long, isn’t included in the “Reader.” It is April, “the season of first looking out the window.” The narrator, an older woman, is gazing past her box of marigolds at a young attractive father who has picked up his little girl from the school across the street and set her on his shoulders. But the girl is wiggling too much, saying “oink.” Her father puts her down harshly, yelling at her. The woman leans out her window and calls after him:
The father is embarrassed, a bit surly, but he listens to what the woman has to say. She wants to know what could have happened to justify his anger at his child. He thinks. The problem was the word “oink”—he once said it to the cops, and he doesn’t want it said to him, as if he were some sinister authority figure. Very good, the woman says, why doesn’t he try again? He lifts his daughter up, and off they gallop like horse and rider. “I lean way out to cry once more, Be careful! Stop!” She is thinking of the busy intersection they are about to reach, of all the danger that she sees ahead. They are too far off to hear her warning. So she settles back down to imagine where they will go out to play on this gorgeous day while she sits alone with her precious, bitter knowledge. ♦
