A Grace Paley Reader

by George Saunders

When photography arrived in the world, or so I’ve heard, painting had to reconsider itself. “What can I do that photography can’t?” painting asked itself in its alarmed French accent. “How may I yet be essential?”

The prime quality of literary prose—that is, the thing it does better than any other form (movies, songs, sculpture, tweets, television, you name it)—is voice. A great writer mimicking, on the page, the dynamic energy of human thought is as about as close as we can get to modeling pure empathy.

Grace Paley is one of the great writers of voice of the last century. There’s an experience one has reading a stylist like her that has to do with how rich in truth the phrase- or sentence-level bursts are and how quickly they follow upon one another. An image or phrase finds you, pleases you with its wit or vividness, shoehorns open your evolving vision of the fictive world, and before that change gets fully processed, here comes another. You find yourself having trouble believing this much wit is washing over you. A world is appearing before you that is richer and stranger than you could possibly have imagined, and that world gains rooms and vistas and complications with every phrase. What you are experiencing is intimate contact with an extraordinary intelligence, which causes the pleasant sensation of one’s personality receding and being replaced by the writer’s consciousness.

Paley’s approach is to make a dazzling verbal surface that doesn’t so much linearly represent the world as remind us of its dazzle. Mere straightforward representation is not her game. In fact, she seems to say, the world has no need to be represented: there it is, all around us, all the time. What it needs is to be loved better. Or maybe, what we need is to be reminded to love it and to be shown how, because sometimes, busy as we get trying to stay alive, loving the world slips our mind.

I’d always thought of Paley as a realist, but immersing myself again in her work I find that she is actually a thrilling postmodernist, in cahoots with her pal Donald Barthelme to remind us that, yes, there certainly is a World, and there is the Word with which to describe it, and normally World and Word seem like two separate things, but with sufficient authorial attention, Word and World can be made to pop back into their proper relation, which is unity.

What I mean by this is that, as you read a Paley story, you will find that it is, yes, set in our world (New York City, most often) and that, O.K., it seems concerned with normal enough things (love, divorce, politics, a day at the park) but then you will start to notice that the language is … uncommon. Not quite of this world.

Here is a character in “An Interest in Life,” speaking (at a normal-enough kitchen table) of his relation to the Church: “You know … we iconoclasts … we freethinkers … we latter-day Masons … we idealists … we dreamers … we are never far from our nervous old mother, the Church. She is never far from us … Wherever we are, we can hear, no matter how faint, her hourly bells, tolling the countryside, reverberating in the cities, bringing in our civilized minds the passionate deed of Mary. Every hour on the hour we are startled with remembrance of what was done for us. FOR US.”

Not your normal post-breakfast speech.

Well, yes and no.

Like her hero Isaac Babel, the great Russian, Paley understood that just because such language doesn’t normally get spoken aloud in the so-called real world that does not make it unreal, or contrived. On the contrary: language like this is the real language going on in the head of man all the time, whether he can articulate it or not. I find a Shakespearean quality in Paley; the people are very real there on the stage, in their faded coats and crooked hair bows and so on, but their talking is coming from a higher realm, and it has been elevated like that in order to parse and contemplate the big questions with maximal efficiency.

But all this is done with a wondrous ear and a love for the vernacular. Have we had another American writer better at celebrating the poetry in which we Americans think, and into which we sometimes erupt? “You see I can crack a little joke because look at this pleasure,” for example. Or: “No reason to worry about me, I got a lot of irons in the fire. I get advanced all the time, matter of fact.”

Another writer might say, of a group of teachers just pre-Christmas, “They, each of them, were remembering some happy incident from their own childhood holidays and this made them happy.” (Very nice.) Paley says: “The teachers became happier and happier. Their heads were ringing like the bells of childhood.” (Boom.) Instead of simply knowing that the teachers were happy pre-Christmas, we are, for that split second, happy teachers, pre-Christmas. (We smell the pine from the crookedly hanging wreath near the bulletin board, which will be brown by the time school resumes in January.) Another writer might have a character tell her mother to keep her opinions about men to herself; Paley has the narrator of “A Woman, Young and Old” advise dear mother to “keep your taste in your own hatch.” Which of us, trying to communicate to our sister that we feel she somewhat underestimates the extent of our worldliness, would think to tell her, as Aunt Rose does in “Goodbye and Good Luck,” that our “heart is a regular college of feelings and there is such information between my corset and me that [your] whole married life is a kindergarten.” Well, take that, sister.

“You’ve used me in a bad way. That’s not cool. That smells under heaven,” says Dennis the cabdriver/lover/songwriter par crapamundo in “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.”

Or how about this, from “Ruthy and Edie”: “If you said the word ‘city’ to Edie, or even the cool adjective ‘municipal,’ specific children usually sitting at the back of the room appeared before her eyes and refused to answer when she called on them.”

This is what I mean by the unity of Word and World: something about the arrangement of the words, read in the context of the story, will not (will no longer) let us experience these sentences as mere words on a page. The words sort of recede as you read them, or, maybe, our attention diverts from their wordness to the “image” that appears in our head (although “image” is not quite right; it is something else going on up there) and suddenly—are we reading, or living “there” in that fictive moment?

Yes.

All these agitated manic New York voices explaining themselves! You feel the stress and pace and wild aspirations of the City as it was. And is. The City is the energy coming off a million hustling souls who have both forgotten they will die soon and are very actively feeling that, ah God, they most definitely will. So what do they do? They talk. They protest, explain, beg to differ. In Paley you hear America singing, yes, but also: bellyaching, kvetching, teasing, advocating, disowning, politicizing, explaining the states of their bodies, assessing friends, lovers, and their children with both clinical distance and aching love, sometimes in the same sentence. When I think to myself, “What was the world of American adults like, back before I was one, in the 1960s and 1970s?” my mind turns to Paley’s stories. All those desirous, active souls, with one foot in hippiedom/free love (singing crazy songs by bands named The Lepers—formerly The Split Atom, possibly soon Winter Moss), and the other in the Depression, dusty old progressive dreams in their heads (of Guthrie, of the Wobblies), so alive with the tremendous energy that generation expended to make things better (“the vigiling fasting praying in or out / of jail their lightheartedness which floated / about the year’s despair”). However, as you will see in this book, these firebrands were sometimes depressingly human in their desire to wring the most out of life and one another. And now those people are old, going, or gone. But here, in these pages, they are alive again, to remind us that our present vitality—our sense of being the first humans ever, and permanent—will too someday seem historical, and will have passed. But, as made by Paley, in her particular, larger-than-life way, these people will live forever: particularized receptacles of the eternal.

Any object, any human gesture, contains an infinity of language with which it might be described. But through habituation, or paucity of talent, or lack of originality, most of us, writing, reach for the most workaday speech-tools, and in this way the world is made dull. Here comes Paley: seemingly incapable of a banal sentence, a loose observation, or a distracted fictive moment.

Paley is, for me, a kind of secular saint. What is a saint? Someone particularly attentive to things as they are and extraordinarily accepting of them. Paley honors every person and thing she creates by presenting them at their best, or at least their liveliest—which may be the same thing.

This quality of simple, accepting, energetic seeing makes Paley’s world feel particularly egalitarian. I think of the family, for example, in “A Woman, Young and Old.” They seem, well, working class (in the general mayhem of their lives, and the way their collective eye keeps sliding over to questions of livelihood), but because the Paley-narrator does not hang that sign around their necks, the world they live in seems immense and mutable. Who are these people and of what social class? Paley won’t say, exactly. That would be rude. Also, not interesting. And reductive and freedom decreasing. Rather, she just shows them acting and talking and choosing happily enough within their limitations. They have autonomy, agency, desire, a right to their own feelings and flavor of understanding. “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life,” she wrote, in “A Conversation with My Father.” This results in a fresh angle on things like “gender” or “class”—to the point of destabilizing them and giving the people trapped inside these constructs liberty and a voice. In this sense, Paley is a Whitmanesque writer: she loves what she sees, just as it is, and is in favor of it being even more itself. How do we know she loves it? By how precisely she describes it. (“I am right next to the pickle barrel. My pinky is making tiny whirlpools in the brine.”) Also, there is an extraordinary quality of freedom in these narratives. Her people do not merely behave like people in stories, but they also do not behave merely like people in the real world—they behave, satisfyingly, like people in a spectacularly mindful artistic purification of the real. An average writer writes toward a familiar vision, be it shocking or comforting; a genius like Paley creates an entirely new world by leaping from stone to stone, these “stones” being distinct, vivid, fictive moments—vivid in language, vivid in import. The route is not, it seems, planned or pre-vetted, but is continuously creating itself by asking the question: “Where is the life here?” which she answers with an essential sub-question: “Where does the language come most alive?” The resulting structure has the effect of startling and refreshing us; or, maybe, refreshing us via startling: the freshness of the world mimicked in the freshness of the shape of the story, the reader reminded of her susceptibility to, and yearning for, freshness.

I’ve written mostly here about her short stories, because short stories are what I understand best. But I think you will find that Paley was a master of all three genres included here: stories, essays, and poems. In each, she operates in a slightly different mode (the essays more direct and political, the poetry at times unbearably moving and emotionally blunt), but all of her work is marked by heart, precision, and concern for others, and surges with real, messy life, and the way life, lived, actually makes us feel: outgunned, befriended, short on time, long on regret, so happy we can’t stand it, so in love we become fools. Moments in her stories, often her endings, cause me real sorrow, and, perhaps acclimated to the contemporary tendency toward compensatory lyrical updraft, I feel myself mentally looking over at the author, for, maybe a conciliatory little suggestion that all will be well? But no. She just shrugs. “It’s like that sometimes,” she says. I love her for this. She’s not big on bromides. Her vision of things is complex, by which I mean: she knows that a person can feel irritated and happy at once; despairing and lucky; pleased to be a mother and sick to the core of being a mother. And she is O.K. with all of that.

Her stories, like all great stories, lead us into that uncomfortable holy of holies, ambiguity. How are we to feel, ultimately, about the intermittently racist Iz of “Zagrowsky Tells”? Or the fourteen-year-old who beds a soldier in “A Woman, Young and Old” and the soldier who beds her right back? About all of these callow, absent husbands, who show up late and immediately start advising? Well, we feel fully about them, that’s for sure. We walk away from her stories feeling, not, “Oh, he got his, or will,” but, rather, “Yes, that’s how it is in this world.” We see them through the lens of her total acceptance of, and fascination with, them. (Reading Paley will, I predict, make you better understand the idea that love is attention and vice versa.)

I love too her extraordinary happy frankness in all things; that is, her courage. She is unafraid, for example, to cry fraud re. that particular flavor of grinding American optimism. We Americans are addicted to the happy lie and to the associated notion that to critique something—to call it what it is—is a form of negativity; a defeatist buzz-kill. Paley (happily, fearlessly) doesn’t buy it. A character tells a dying friend, in “Living,” that, well, “Life isn’t all that great … We’ve had nothing but crummy days and crummy guys and broke all the time and cockroaches and nothing to do on Sunday but take the kids to Central Park and row on that lousy lake”—and we have to agree with her. “I want to see it all,” the dying friend replies, and we agree with her too. Paley, like her spiritual predecessor Chekhov, likes to have it both ways.

“Art does not have to solve problems,” Chekhov said. “It just has to formulate them correctly.”

“I’m artistic,” says a character in “A Woman, Young and Old,” “and I sometimes hold two views at once.”

Grace Paley has been gone for ten years now. As one of her characters might say: this—this I find hard to believe. I only met her once but have always felt her to be a dear friend. How can that be? Well, I have done with her what we do with the greats among us: I have taken credit for her, by finding herself within me. There is a Grace Paley inside each of us, thank God. That inner Paley is funny; sharp; engaged; worldly; kind but no sucker; weary, but then suddenly not, if there’s some fun around; and, always: trying, hoping, questing, going off on some adventure. Then, when we read Paley, we get a shock of recognition: Ah, we feel, I know her. I know her as part of myself; how interesting that she has materialized. David Foster Wallace had this same quality; his particular set of virtues (the crazy-precise loquaciousness; the extreme analytical tendency that moved into and then back out of comic neurosis; the manic introspective tendency that we feel to be a form of positive aspiration) seemed to have emanated from inside us, which is to say: Paley and Wallace were both very special human beings, composed of mostly primary qualities, with very little of what we might call banal/normalized pollution.

What does a writer leave behind? Scale models of a way of seeing and thinking. Those of us still down here are always in need of these models, especially in times of trouble (and all times are times of trouble). We have, most of us, yet to find a way of seeing and thinking that works—that allows us to live comfortably and positively in all of this beautiful mess—but our writers, our dear passed writers, have put forth some pretty good models, so that we might suffer less, or at least suffer within some beautiful context. Faith, in the story “Friends,” says something about the act of tutoring children that is also true of the conversation between reader and writer: “Though the world cannot be changed by talking to one child at a time,” she says, “it may at least be known.” A writer as good as Paley helps us (at least) know our world by modeling a certain stance toward it that is so pure and distinctive that it makes us go back into the world and take a harder, fonder look at it.

Paley’s model advises us to suffer less by loving more—love the world more, and each other more—and then she gives us a specific way to love more: see better. If you only really see this world, you will think better of it, she seems to say. And then she gives us a way to see better: let language sing, sing precisely, and let it off the tether of the mundane, and watch the wonderful truth it knows how to make.

To see better means more joy, less judgment. There is a roof on our language that holds down our love. What has put that roof there? Our natural dullness, exacerbated by that grinding daily need to survive and grunt instructions back and forth in order to do so, helped along of late by the slow, happy spread of all-purpose materialism, and corporations, and pragmatism, and televisions and computer screens all across the land speaking in cahoots with the corporations, which are, in turn, speaking in cahoots with the military (as much a problem in our time as hers), a military that is (still) doing service for materialism, by metallically communicating the notion that goodness can be attained by killing-to-win.

They have all conspired to stupidify our language and make it more businesslike and brutal. A writer like Paley comes along and brightens language up again, takes it aside and gives it a pep talk, sends it back renewed, so it can do its job, which is to wake us up.

How can we dislike ourselves when she loves us so? Why should we be afraid of suffering when she has used her own suffering (and joy, and confusion, and pleasure) to make such a glorious thing as the book you’re now holding? You will close this book, I predict, with a revived concern for other people’s suffering and in their pleasures. What we might have looked past, she makes us see. That is a beautiful life’s work. Grace Paley lives, in the minds of the readers she has moved, and in the minds of those she will yet move. As long as there are human beings wondering who they are, and how they can be better—looking for a more full-hearted way of being in the world—there will be readers for the great, beloved, much-missed Grace Paley.