FEATURE ARTICLE
Amazing Grace: From diapers to demonstrations
by Seth Rogovoy(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., June 19, 1997) -- Grace Paley's address to the graduating class of '97 at Williams College the weekend before last was quintessential Paley: barbed political comments about Vietnam, the civil-rights movement and the CIA rubbed up against folksy recollections of moms and toddlers in Washington Square Park and stories about her forebears, her children and her grandchildren. Like Paley, her listeners that day were "pulled in all directions" in a kind of mental aerobics of wit, intelligence and old-fashioned kibitzing.
In her speech and in a phone interview from her home in Thetford Hill, Vt., the previous week, Paley advised that the best way to cope with the conflicting pressures of family, politics and work -- in her case, writing -- is not to think of it all in terms of a "balancing act."
"If you don't think of it as balance, you'll feel better," said Paley, who will read from her work at the Clark Art Institute on Saturday night at 7:30. "I never tried to keep a balance. I just got dragged every which way, pulled and pushed. It's not a bad way to live."
Balancing act or not, Paley has accomplished much in her 74 years. The youngest daughter of immigrants, she grew up in a household where Yiddish and Russian were spoken along with English, an influence that some say can be detected in the unique narrative voice of her stories.
After having studied poetry at Hunter College and New York University, she married in 1942, and soon after began her part-time career as a "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist." Her activism ranged from the concerns of her neighborhood -- opposing the building of a road through Washington Square, for example -- to those of the globe - - she was and remains active in anti-nuclear and anti-war causes.
While juggling diapers and demonstrations, Paley began writing short stories in the 1950s. Her first three stories appeared in little-known journals. It was not until her first collection, "The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Women and Men at Love," was published in 1959 that Paley garnered any significant recognition from her peers. Even then, it was not until the book was reprinted in 1968 that Paley gained the ear of a wider public.
Her second collection, "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute," was published in 1974, and her third, "Later the Same Day," appeared in 1985. In 1980, Paley was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her prizes and awards include a Guggenheim fellowship, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction Writers. She was named New York's first state author in 1986.
Paley has also published two books of poetry and one collection of poems and prose pieces, "Long Walks and Intimate Talks." In 1994, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published "The Collected Stories," which included all the stories in her first three books.
If Paley was never prolific, this was partly due to the push-and-pull of everyday life and politics that she spoke of at the Williams commencement. "I remember I was writing stories, and a lot of stuff was coming up at the time during Vietnam, and my mind simply went away from what I was doing, and that was all there was to it," she said. "I had to wait a couple of months until I could really wander off into that space."
Rather than fighting the external pressures that kept her from writing, such as politics and motherhood, Paley learned just to go with the flow. In the long run, she thinks it paid off. "If I hadn't gone to the park, which was like the center of my day with the children, I wouldn't have had the women to talk to," said Paley, "and I wouldn't have been able to make the relationships, the deep friendships that I made....I think I said at some point that the gift of that subject matter was made to me while I watched my kids."
Through her stories that appeared in the pages of the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly, among many other publications, Paley chronicled the lives of her contemporaries in the '50s and '60s through the ensuing decades -- smart women whose independence and intelligence rubbed up against conventional expectations in a manner likely to set off sparks.
These women had ideas, ambitions and urges of their own, and Paley gave voice to them as never before. Yet Paley's stories are not polemical; they are not essays in disguise. They are remarkably well-crafted, self- conscious works of fiction that serve the story's age-old task of entertaining as well as provoking the reader.
Professor Lawrence S. Graver, who has taught Paley's stories in several classes at Williams College since the 1980s, said, "I find that the best students are always enthusiastic about her work. They especially like the way she can be so ironical and tartly irreverent and yet at the same time idealistic, humane and wide open to feeling. Students connect with the savviness and receptivity to a certain kind of urban humor that they find very appealing."
Much has been written about Paley's unique voice and the undercurrent of irreverent humor referred to by Graver. Paley says she doesn't consciously strive to be funny in her writing. "If you're funny that way it's your nature," she said. "It's the way you talk. You can't try to be like that. You can't stop yourself either if you want to. Humor is another way of illuminating the facts of the case. So it's just one of my ways."
So too, says Paley, she is aware of what people refer to when they speak of her idiomatic voice, yet she can't quite pin it down. "I'm not sure exactly what it means, but as a teacher I had to talk about `voice,' so I had to figure out something about it," she said. "Language is so amazing. It can be put together in so many different ways and voices that you can almost tell who's talking....Voice is the kind of language used -- inflections....It's a mixture of literary and neighborhood sound. It's more a sound than anything else."
Although her stories are widely anthologized and included in college courses devoted to the study of writing and short fiction, Paley is still often grouped in with "women writers" or "Jewish-American writers,"instead of just being acknowledged as one of America's great writers.
Some, however, would even deem that too limiting. "To say Grace Paley is a great American writer is too specific; she's just simply great," said novelist Jamaica Kincaid, of Bennington, Vt. "Her prose is deceptively comforting. You are wired in to the most simple, everyday language, just enjoying it, and then you find yourself in the middle of enormous questions or strange territory."
As for Paley herself, she doesn't mind being categorized as a representative of a group. "I don't really care," she said. "A lot of people care. I understand why some feel like that, but I feel that everything I am enhances the word `writer.' It doesn't modify it. I feel being Jewish has been very important to my writing, being a woman has been extremely important to my writing -- all those things that I am have made me what I am and what I write about and how I write. So I'm not offended at all....But I think they should start calling them `male writers.' That would solve the whole problem. Nobody would feel bad, except the men."
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Grace Paley reads in the auditorium at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown on Saturday, June 21, at 7:30. The reading will be followed by a reception featuring desserts, beverages and a book signing with Paley and author Jamaica Kincaid of Bennington, Vt. Books by Paley, Kincaid and Isaac Bashevis Singer will be available for purchase at the reception. Tickets for the reading and reception are $25; tickets for the reading only are $15. Advance tickets are available at Toonerville Trolley Records and Water Street Books in Williamstown. This event is sponsored by Congregation Beth-El of Bennington, Vt.
[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on June 19, 1997. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1997. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
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