GRACE PALEY

Born: December 11, 1922

Birthplace: Bronx, New York

Died: August 22, 2007

Place of death: Thetford Hill, Vermont

Other literary forms

In addition to her short fiction, Grace Paley published the poetry collections Leaning Forward (1985), New and Collected Poems (1992), Begin Again: Collected Poems (2000), and Fidelity (2008), and the nonfiction work Just as I Thought (1998). She also contributed short stories to The New Yorker and essays on teaching to various journals.

Achievements

Grace Paley received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a National Council on the Arts grant, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for short-story writing. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1980, and in 1988 and 1989 she received the Edith Wharton Award. In 1993, she was awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Vermont Governor’s Award for excellence in the arts. In 1994, she was a nominee for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1997, she was awarded the Lannan Foundation Literary Award.

Biography

Grace Paley, whose maiden name was Grace Goodside, was born and raised in New York City. Her Russian immigrant parents, Isaac Goodside, a physician, and Mary (Ridnyik) Goodside, were political exiles in their early years and passed on their political concerns to their daughter. At home they spoke Russian and Yiddish, as well as English, exposing their daughter to both old and new cultures. She studied in city schools and after graduation attended Hunter College in 1938 and later New York University. Paley, however, was not interested in formal academic study and dropped out of college. She had begun to write poetry and in the early 1940’s studied with W. H. Auden at the New School for Social Research. In 1942, she married Jess Paley, a motion-picture cameraman. The couple had two children and separated three years later, although they were not legally divorced for twenty years. In the 1940’s and 1950’s, Paley worked as a typist while raising her children and continuing to write. At this time she began her lifelong political involvement by participating in New York City neighborhood action groups.

After many rejections, her first collection of eleven stories, The Little Disturbances of Man, was published in 1959. Even though the book was not widely reviewed, critics admired her work, and Paley’s teaching career flourished. In the early 1960’s, she taught at Columbia University and Syracuse University and also presented summer workshops. She also began writing a novel, a project which she did not complete. She increased her political activism, participating in nonviolent protests against prison conditions in New York City and the government’s position on the war in Vietnam. A prominent activist in the peace movement, Paley was a member of a 1969 mission that went to Hanoi to negotiate for the release of prisoners of war. In 1973, she was a delegate to the World Peace Conference in Moscow. In 1974, her second collection of stories appeared. It received sporadic condemnation from reviewers, partially because of her political views but also because the writing was deemed uneven in quality.

In the 1970’s and 1980’s, Paley continued her political activities, as well as her writing and teaching. She joined with other activists in condemning Soviet repression of human rights, and was a leader in the 1978 demonstrations in Washington, D.C., against nuclear weapons. In 1985, along with campaigning against American government policy in Central America, she visited Nicaragua and El Salvador. Her stories appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, Accent, and other magazines. Paley settled in Greenwich Village in New York City, with her second husband, poet, playwright, and landscape architect Robert Nichols. In the 1990’s, Paley continued to teach in the New York City area, particularly at Sarah Lawrence College, but she retired by the end of the decade. She divided her time between her home in Vermont and the Greenwich Village apartment that was so often a backdrop for her fiction. Paley died from breast cancer on August 22, 2007.

Analysis

Despite her small literary output, Grace Paley’s innovative style and the political and social concerns she advocates in her work enabled her to generate significant critical attention. Her stories treat traditional themes, focusing on the lives of women and the experiences of love, motherhood, and companionship that bind them together. She presents these themes, however, in inventive rather than traditional structures. Her stories are frequently fragmented and open-ended, without conventional plot or character development, structural innovations that make her work more true to life. The stories gain their vitality by Paley’s use of distinctive language—the voice, idiom, tone, and rhythms of the New York City locale. She writes best when rendering the razor-tongued Jewish American urban female, with an ironic wit, who does not hesitate to voice her opinions.

To speak out is a basic theme in Paley’s stories, and it reflects her own life and political principles. The women in her stories are like her; they are political activists who speak on nuclear energy, on the environment, and on all conditions that affect the world into which their children are born. This intermingling of politics and art brought Paley mixed reviews, but she continued to stretch the limits of the short story, in both form and content.

The Little Disturbances of Man

“Goodbye and Good Luck,” the first story in Grace Paley’s first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man, shows her characteristic style and theme. The story begins, “I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rose. I wasn’t no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh.” Aunt Rose knows what her sister—Lillie’s “mama”—does not, that time rushes by relentlessly, that the old generation is quickly forgotten as the new generation supplants it, and that mama’s life of stodgy domesticity (the “spotless kitchen”) has meant little to her or anyone else as her life slips away. Mama, however, feels sorry for “poor Rosie” because Aunt Rose has not married or led a virtuous life.

As a young girl, Rose cannot stand her safe but boring job in a garment factory and takes instead a job selling tickets at the Russian Art Theatre, which stages Yiddish plays. The man who hires her says “Rosie Lieber, you surely got a build on you!” These attributes quickly gain the attention of the Yiddish matinee idol Volodya Vlashkin, “the Valentino of Second Avenue.”

Although he is much older than she and has a wife and family elsewhere, Vlashkin sets Rose up in an apartment. Their affair continues on—and off—over the years while he has many other lovers, but Rose is not lonely herself when he is gone. She never complains but worships him when she has him and is philosophical about his infidelities: An actor needs much practice if he is to be convincing on the stage. While she never asks anything from him, “the actresses . . . were only interested in tomorrow,” sleeping lovelessly with wealthy producers for advancement. They get their advancement: Now they are old and forgotten. Vlashkin himself is old and retired, Aunt Rose fat and fifty, when his wife divorces him for all his past adulteries. He comes back to Rosie, the only woman who never asked anything of him, and they decide to get married. She has had her warm and love-filled life, and now she will have a bit of respectability, a husband—and, “as everybody knows, a woman should have at least one before the end of the story.”

The theme is seen most clearly when Rose contrasts her life with her own mother’s. Her mother had upbraided her when she moved in with Vlashkin, but her mother had “married who she didn’t like. . . . He never washed. He had an unhappy smell . . . he got smaller, shriveled up little by little, till goodbye and good luck.” Rosie, therefore, “decided to live for love.” No amount of respectability, no husband, advancement, or wealth will save one from imminent change, decay, and death; so live for love, Aunt Rose would say, and you will have the last laugh.

The characters and tone may change in other stories, but the theme remains the same. In “The Pale Pink Roast,” Anna sees her former husband and asks him to help her move into her new apartment. He is in “about the third flush of youth,” a handsome, charming, but “transient” man. In the midst of hanging her curtains, he stops and makes love to her. Then, admiring her fancy apartment and stylish clothes, he asks archly who is paying for it. “My husband is,” she responds. Her former husband is furious with her. The new husband, she tells him, is a “lovely” man, in the process of moving his business here. Why did you do it, then, her former husband wants to know: “Revenge? Meanness? Why?” “I did it for love,” she says.

Over and over the female characters must choose between the safe but boring man and the charming but worthless lover. In “An Interest in Life,” the girl has her secure but dull boyfriend yet dreams of the husband who deserted her. In “Distance,” Paley tells the same story over again, but this time from the point of view of another character in the story, a bitter old woman full of destructive meanness. She was wild in youth, but she then opted for the safe, loveless marriage, and it has so soured her life that she has tried to force everyone else into the same wrong pattern. Her own very ordinary son is the analogue of the boring boyfriend from “An Interest in Life.” At heart, the bitter old woman understands the young girl, and this is her redeeming humanity.

In a slight variation of theme, “Wants” demonstrates why the love relationship between man and woman must be transitory. The desirable man wants everything out of life; the loving woman wants only her man. “You’ll always want nothing,” the narrator’s former husband tells her bitterly, suggesting a sort of ultimate biological incompatibility between the sexes. The result assuredly is sadness and loneliness, but with islands of warmth to make it endurable. In “Come On, Ye Sons of Art,” Kitty is spending Sunday morning with her boyfriend (“Sunday was worth two weeks of waiting”). She is pregnant by him and already has a houseful of children by other fathers. She takes great pleasure in the fine morning she can give her boyfriend. The boyfriend, a traveling salesman, delights in his skill as a salesman. He only regrets that he is not more dishonest, like his sister, who, ignoring human relationships, has devoted herself to amassing an immense fortune by any means. Kitty’s boyfriend wistfully wishes he too were corrupt, high, and mighty. They are listening to a beautiful piece of music by English composer Henry Purcell on the radio, which the announcer says was written for the queen’s birthday; in reality, the music was not written for the queen, but rather for Purcell’s own delight in his art, in the thing he did best, and no amount of wealth and power equals that pleasure.

In her later stories, Paley was striking out in new directions, away from the inner-city unwed mothers and the strongly vernacular idiom, to sparse, classical, universal stories. The theme, however, that there is no safe harbor against change and death, and that the only salvation is to live fully, realistically, and for the right things, has not changed. “In the Garden” has, essentially, four characters who appear to be in some country in the West Indies. Lush gardens of bright flowers and birds surround them, suggesting a particularly bountiful nature. One character is a beautiful young woman whose children were kidnapped eight months earlier and now are certainly dead, but she cannot face this fact, and her talk is constantly about “when they come home.” Her husband is a rich landlord, who did not give the kidnappers their ransom money; he shouts constantly in a loud voice that everything is well. There is a vacationing Communist renting one of the landlord’s houses, who, out of curiosity, asks the neighbors about the case. He learns that the landlord had once been poor but now is rich and has a beautiful wife; he could not believe that anything had the power to hurt his luck, and he was too greedy to pay the ransom. It is known that it was “his friends who did it.” There is an elderly neighbor woman who is dying of a muscle-wasting disease. She had spent much time with the beautiful woman listening to her talk about when the children would return, but now she is fed up with her and cannot stand the husband’s shouting. For a while, since she is too wasted to do much more, she follows with her eyes the movements of the Communist, but “sadly she had to admit that the eyes’ movement, even if minutely savored, was not such an adventurous journey.” Then “she had become interested in her own courage.”

At first it may appear that nothing happens in the story, but it is all there. The garden is the world. The young woman with her beauty has won a rich husband; the landlord, through aggressiveness, has clawed his way to the top. Both these modes—beauty and aggressiveness—have succeeded only for a while, but inevitably whatever is gained in the world is lost because human beings are all mortal. The Communist—by being a Communist, “a tenderhearted but relentless person”—suggests someone who will try to find a political way to stave off chance and mortality, but in fact he merely leaves, having done nothing. The old woman, who realizes the fecklessness of trying to help, and who has found mere observation of process insufficient, becomes more interested in the course of her own courage in facing up to inevitable change. She and her husband are the only ones who admit to change, and this seems the right position, the tragic sense of life which makes life supportable.

The Collected Stories

The Collected Stories gathers more than thirty years of stories from Paley’s previous collections, allowing the reader to track the development of Paley’s feminism and pacifism, as well as her depiction of urban family life. The Collected Stories also brings with it an opportunity to examine one of Paley’s most enduring fictional characters, a major figure in thirteen stories, and a minor figure in several more. This character, Faith Darwin, first appeared in the “The Used Boy Raisers,” where it was clear that she served as her author’s alter ego, so that Faith, like Paley, is of Jewish descent, lives in Greenwich Village, has married, divorced, and remarried, has two children, and is also a writer.

In addition to paralleling Paley’s own life to some degree, the Faith Darwin stories track the various political movements in which Paley was involved. For instance, in “Faith in a Tree,” Faith’s personal life is refrained in the light of her political principles, indicated by a demonstration against the war in Vietnam. In “Dreamer in a Dead Language,” Faith’s father, whom she had loved and admired uncritically, is critically reassessed in the light of her growing feminism. In later stories, however, Faith herself is subjected to criticism and revaluation. In “Listening,” Faith is confronted by her lesbian friend Cassie, who accuses her of ignoring her in her fiction. Faith is also criticized by other characters in “Friends,” “Zagrowsky Tells,” and “Love,” the last story detailing the breaking up of friendships over disagreements concerning the Soviet Union.

In these later stories, Faith must deal with changing times. In “The Long-Distance Runner,” Faith faces her own aging process by returning to the old Jewish neighborhood in which she and her parents once lived and which is now populated by African Americans. When Faith decides to live in her old apartment for three weeks with four African American children and their mother, Mrs. Luddy, she discovers that, despite their differences, they share a sense of sisterhood because they are both women and mothers. The centrality of motherhood in the life of women is a continuing theme in the Faith Darwin stories, beginning with “The Used Boy Raisers” and emerging again in such stories as “The Long Distance Runner” and “The Exquisite Moment.”

Stories such as “The Long-Distance Runner,” with its African American family, and “The Exquisite Moment,” involving a Chinese houseguest, also remind the reader of the multicultural element in Paley’s fiction. Faith’s own neighborhood—a Greenwich village community of artists, left-wing political activists, and people from minority ethnic and racial groups—is different from what is considered mainstream America, but at the same time it reminds the reader that this world, too, is part of the American scene. This urban community, which blends and mixes ethnicities, religions, and radical politics, along with Faith’s role as a fictional version of Paley herself, makes Faith Darwin’s stories a particularly representative aspect of Grace Paley’s collected work.

Bibliography

Aarons, Victoria. “Talking Lives: Storytelling and Renewal in Grace Paley’s Short Fiction.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 9 (1990): 20-35. Asserts that Paley empowers her characters through their penchant for telling stories. In recounting their stories, her characters try to gain some control over their lives, as if by telling they can reconstruct experience.

Arcana, Judith. Grace Paley’s Life Stories: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. A biography of Paley which includes a bibliography and an index.

Arons, Victoria. “An Old Discussion About Feminism and Judaism: Faith and Renewal in Grace Paley’s Short Fiction.” In Connections and Collisions: Identities in Contemporary Jewish-American Women’s Writing, edited by Lois E. Rubin. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. Argues that Paley’s “preoccupation” with equality, combined with the Jewish people’s centuries of historical and current oppression, results in a fusion in her short fiction of Judaism, feminism, and political activism.

Bach, Gerhard, and Blaine Hall, eds. Conversations with Grace Paley. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. A collection of interviews with Paley from throughout her career as a writer, in which she comments on the sources of her stories, her political views, her feminism, and the influences on her writing.

Baumbach, Jonathan. “Life Size.” Partisan Review 42, no. 2 (1975): 303-306. Baumbach approaches Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by concentrating on the innovative narrative voice and how it enhances the themes that run throughout the stories.

Charters, Ann. “Grace Paley.” In A Reader’s Companion to the Short Story in English, edited by Erin Fallon, et al., under the auspices of the Society for the Study of the Short Story. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Aimed at the general reader, this essay provides a brief biography of Paley followed by an analysis of her short fiction.

DeKoven, Marianne. “Mrs. Hegel-Shtein’s Tears.” Partisan Review 48, no. 2 (1981): 217-223. Paley wanted to tell about everyday life but in story forms that were not the traditionally linear ones. DeKoven describes how innovative structures enable Paley to achieve uncommon empathy with her subjects.

Gelfant, Blanche H., ed. The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Includes a chapter in which Paley’s short stories are analyzed.

Heller, Deborah. Literary Sisterhoods: Imagining Women Artists. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005. A feminist literary critique, in which Heller examines the works of Paley and other women writers during the past two centuries to determine their varying treatments of the challenges of being both a woman and an artist. Describes how these women create female characters who are on quests for self-expression.

Iannone, Carol. “A Dissent on Grace Paley.” Commentary 80 (August, 1985): 54-58. Iannone states that Paley’s first collection of stories reveals talent. Her second, however, written when she was deeply involved in political activity, shows how a writer’s imagination can become trapped by ideologies, not able to rise above them to make sense of the world. Iannone’s comments on the intermingling of politics and art result in interesting interpretations of Paley’s stories.

Isaacs, Neil D. Grace Paley: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1990. An introduction to Paley’s short fiction, providing a strong summary and critique of previous criticism. Also contains a section of Paley quotations, in which she talks about the nature of her fiction, her social commitment, and the development of her narrative language. Emphasizes Paley’s focus on storytelling and narrative voice.

Marchant, Peter, and Earl Ingersoll, eds. “A Conversation with Grace Paley.” The Massachusetts Review 26 (Winter, 1985): 606-614. A conversation with novelist Mary Elsie Robertson and writer Peter Marchant provides insights into Paley’s transition from poetry to short stories, her interest in the lives of women, and the connection between her subject matter and her politics.

Meyer, Adam. “Faith and the ‘Black Thing’: Political Action and Self-Questioning in Grace Paley’s Short Fiction.” Studies in Short Fiction 31 (Winter, 1994): 79-89. Discusses how Paley, through the character of Faith Darwin, examines someone very much like herself while distancing herself from that person’s activities.

Paley, Grace. “Grace Paley: Art Is on the Side of the Underdog.” Interview by Harriet Shapiro. Ms. 11 (May, 1974): 43-45. This interview about Paley’s life and politics succeeds in presenting her as a unique personality.

Schleifer, Ronald. “Grace Paley: Chaste Compactness.” In Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, edited by Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985. As Schleifer puts it, “Both little disturbances and enormous changes are brought together at the close of [Paley’s] stories to create a sense of ordinary ongoingness that eschews the melodrama of closure.”

Taylor, Jacqueline. Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark Lives. Austin: University of Texas, 1990. Taylor focuses on what she calls Paley’s “woman centered” point of view. Asserts that “Conversation with My Father” allows discussion of many of the narrative conventions her fiction tries to subvert; this story reveals the connection between Paley’s recognition of the fluidity of life and her resistance to narrative resolution.

Norman Lavers

Louise M. Stone

Margaret Boe Birns