THIS WAS AWHILE ago, on Second Avenue across the street from the Israeli Consulate, right next door to National Public Radio. From the window of a bus, I saw they were demonstrating—something about the intifada. So I got out and walked around and met the New Jewish Agenda and there, of course, was Grace Paley. I wanted to tell her to go home and write another story. I would agitate in her stead. For decades, no matter where, every time I went to a demonstration, she was already there. I also knew that when I didn’t show up, she’d be there, anyway. Why not a bargain? Couldn’t she call when she felt a demonstration coming on? I’d go for her. She’d stay home and invent another report for her friends and her children on “the condition of our lifelong attachments.” I had nothing better to do with myself than a Grace Paley short story.
“Then, as often happens in stories, it was several years later.” And here we are, in this lovely building that’s not the least bit like the old Greenwich Village Women’s House of Detention where, after sitting down to impede some military parade, she spent six days reading William Carlos Williams, after which she wrote that if there must be prisons, “they ought to be in the neighborhood, near a subway—not way out in distant suburbs, where families have to take cars, buses, ferries, trains, and the population that considers itself innocent forgets, denies, chooses to never know that there is a whole huge country of the bad and the unlucky and the self-hurters, a country with a population greater than that of many nations in our world.”
I regret my presumption. And I’m glad I kept my mouth shut. Yeats said famously: “The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life or of the work.” He wasn’t happy about it, adding: “That old perplexity an empty purse / Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.” But it was a male chauvinist piggy thing to say. The Grace Paley who wrote the stories that I started reading in Berkeley, California, in 1960, on the recommendation of Tillie Olsen one afternoon at Pacifica Radio just after Tillie asked us: “Oh why do I have to feel it happens to me, too? Why is it like this? And why do I have to care?”—the Paley already telling us that she had looked “into the square bright window of daylight to ask myself the sapping question: What is man that woman lies down to adore him?”—this is the same Grace Paley who grew up Russian-socialist-Jewish-American in the East Bronx, wearing the blue shirt and red kerchief of a Falcon. Who fought before she became a pacifist in gang wars between the Third and Fourth Internationals. Who staged agitprop plays like Eviction! Who was suspended from junior high school, at age twelve, for signing the Oxford Pledge against war. Who would organize abortion speakouts and missile site sit-ins and protest marches on Shoreham and Seabrook. Who would face down signs that said: NUKE THE BITCHES TILL THEY GLOW. THEN SHOOT THEM IN THE DARK. Who’d go to Russia, and to Hanoi, and to Nicaragua, and even the Pentagon, “a kind of medium-level worker in one tendency in the nonviolent direct-action left wing of the antiwar movement,” before ending up at town meetings in Vermont. Who’s probably devoted more time to Peace Centers, Cooper Union lectures, Clamshell Alliances, War Resisters Leagues, and Madre than she has to a literature that seeks to oppose people made of blood and bone to connections made of oil and gold. Who tells her students to read Emma Goldman, Prince Kropotkin, and Malcolm X and the rest of us to read Christa Wolf and Isaac Babel. Who has explained not only that a tank uses up a gallon of gas every seventeen miles, but also that “If you’re a feminist it means that you’ve noticed that male ownership of the direction of female lives has been the order of the day for a few thousand years, and it isn’t natural.”
Meanwhile of course there were men and children: “I own two small boys whose dependence on me takes up my lumpen time and my bourgeois feelings.” But if “the world cannot be changed by talking to one child at a time, it may at least be known.” And equally, of course, the politics and the literature and the life converge. It’s a patchwork quilt of witness and example; of radiance and scruple; of astonishing art made out of the sibilant clues of the whispering world in the room next door; of a wild humor, a Magical Socialism and a Groucho Marxism, that subverts our weary ways of seeing: “Alongside him on one of those walks was seen a skinny crosstown lady, known to many people over by Tompkins Square—wears a giant Ukrainian cross in and out of the tub, to keep from going down the drain, I guess.” Or: “Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.” Besides: “It’s very important to emphasize what is good or beautiful so as not to have a gloomy face when you meet some youngster who has just begun to guess.” If she began by telling us what women really thought and felt, by rescuing the history of all our mothers for all our daughters, she ends with Mozart and horizons. Faith Darwin indeed, coming down from the trees. Or flying off, like a Stephanie Dedalus. “First they make something,” explains one of her stories, “then they murder it. Then they write a book about how interesting it is.” Not Grace Paley. She embarrassed me into being a better person than I’d have settled for. She has enjoined all of us, her wayward children: “Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.”