A Mother for All of Us
Review - Short Stories and Poems by Grace Paley

By Amy Lilly

At 84, Grace Paley is now something of a national treasure. Born to Russian Jewish immigrants in the Bronx, she has dedicated much of her life to global pacifism, neighborhood activism, and feminism. In 1969 she traveled in a delegation to North Vietnam to negotiate the return of three prisoners of war; in 1978 she was arrested on the White House lawn for unfurling a banner against nuclear arms, one of many arrests in her lifetime. The next year she organized the first feminist environmental conference, "Women and Life On Earth." She has long spoken out against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and stood up for children's schools and parks at countless PTA meetings. When she moved to Vermont from Manhattan around the same time that the Bread and Puppet Theater (with whom she had marched) relocated here in the early 1970s, her activist-feminist-community-building energy seems only to have increased. Just read her essay on daily life in Thetford, Vermont, "Life In the Country: A City Friend Asks, 'Is It Boring?'" (Just As I Thought, 1998). The answer is no: there are too many meetings to attend, too many people to care about and advocate for.

In the midst of all this, she became a writer. Paley is the rare writer who has built a significant literary reputation almost entirely on short stories, and fewer than 50 at that. Even rarer, her fiction-witty, wry, strongly attuned to voice-manages to address passionate political beliefs without falling into didacticism. Edmund White recently chose her as one of a couple dozen writers to assess in his book Arts and Letters because, as this eminent writer and award-winning biographer of Jean Genet begins his essay, he thinks of Paley as "The Mother of Us All." He means, presumably, that her life of inextricably entwined activism, feminism, writing, and motherhood has engendered an ideal for all to follow. White cannot help adding a comment on her sheer "bonhomie and straightforwardness and kindness and radiant honesty." Anyone who has seen Paley read, usually at small community gatherings despite her fame, with that disarming cloud of white hair (recently reduced by cancer treatments) and that direct, open smile, will agree: she is a lovely Mother to have around.

Paley's Collected Stories, which was nominated for a National Book Award when it first came out in 1994, has now been reissued in paperback. The collection combines her three published volumes of short stories, which appeared in 1959, 1974, and 1985. She began writing in the mid-fifties, as the mother of two young children, and her subjects were from the start primarily women and children. Her early stories feature middle-aged Russian Jewish women of New York City with unforgettable voices. Aunt Rose in "Goodbye and Good Luck" opens the volume with just such a voice:

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.

Paley was writing these invisible females into being at a time when literary writing was dominated by the Beats, a group of mostly men writing about mostly male adventures. An interviewer in 1995 wondered at the "bravery" of such a choice of subject, but Paley responded in her adamantly modest way that, since she hadn't even thought of being published at the time, no bravery was involved. She was merely experimenting with writing stories (she had already written poetry under the tutelage of W. H. Auden) because her doctor had ordered long-term rest after a miscarriage. Publication came by accident, when Donald Barthelme, the father of her children's friends and a Doubleday editor, stopped by with orders from his ex-wife to look at Paley's writing. He liked the three stories she had written, requested seven more, and sent the whole thing directly into print.

Apart from unheard-of luck, the incident illustrates a major theme in Paley's fiction, that of women helping each other. "Politics," a story no more than three pages long, tells of a group of mothers from "our" neighborhood (democratically, there is never an 'I' in the story, and no one gets a name) lobbying for a fence around their children's playground by singing the Board of Estimates a song. To the tune of "some sad melody learned in her mother's kitchen," the leader sings about the children being "too / little now to have the old men wagging their cricked pricks at them." When she finishes, the other women of this "well-known tribal organization" rise around the room to sing "a lovely statement in chorus": "The junkies with smiles can be stopped by intelligent / reorganization of government functions." The result is twofold: the board is immediately won over, "murmuring ah and oh in a kind of startled arpeggio round lasting maybe three minutes," as if the women's tactic is catching. And a policeman, his ego apparently hurt, cuts a hole in the new fence and "injects" an inquiring woman reporter on the scene "with two sons, one Irish and one Italian, who sang to her in dialect all her life."

Paley escapes heavy-handedness by shifting between scenes of realism and unexpected, wry takes on ordinary human interactions. "Faith in a Tree," which is set in the neighborhood park, a public-space setting typical of many of the stories, is told from the unlikely point of view of the narrator, Faith, perched in a tree, while her children play on the ground. Faith (Paley's semi-autobiographical stand-in), her two sons, and a loose grouping of other mothers with children in the park watch a family march past in silent protest against the Vietnam War. The child protesters ring bells; the "grownups" carry three posters. The first depicts a businessman next to a small girl, and the question, "Would you burn a child?" The second shows the businessman stubbing out his cigarette on the child's arm, and the words "When necessary." The third poster "carried no words, only a napalmed Vietnamese baby, seared, scarred, with twisted hands."

The scene is a rare instance of Paley fictionalizing actual political marches, a staple of her own activism, but despite its power it doesn't weigh the story down, which takes another direction. Doug, the local policeman, drives the family out of the park, then turns to Richard, the older of Faith's sons, challenging him to be a real soldier someday, not "sissy like some kids around here." Faith and her friends use only wit to question Doug, but Richard reacts after he is gone by punching his mother in the arm, accusing her of being sissy-like, and grabbing his chalk to reproduce the poster words on the blacktop nearby "in a fury of tears and disgust." Boys learn violence from a very young age-and from men. The revelation is enough to startle Faith into finding her direction: to think "more and more and every day about the world."

Mothering-or, more accurately, the reality of raising small children without men to help - is the focus of several stories. In "The Used-Boy Raisers," Faith's sons' father and surrogate father come for a rare visit to be fed (unsatisfactorily; Faith's eggs make them sigh in unison) and visit the boys, who disappoint them by not being able to read well. At least their visit, in Paley's unsettling language, puts the boys "in use." In "A Subject of Childhood," a third man, another surrogate father, gets annoyed when the boys' horseplay turns to aggression and calmly names Faith responsible for the incident: she has clearly done a "rotten job" raising her sons. It is only after Faith turns directly to the reader to remind us that she "raised these kids with one hand typing behind my back to earn a living," that she can verbalize her fury to her male "friend": "'You don't say things like that to a woman,' I whispered. 'You damn stupid jackass. You just don't say anything like that to a woman.'"

Not all of Paley's fictional men need a clue; some have their witty say in voices as memorable as Aunt Rose's. "Come On, Ye Sons of Art" is narrated by Jerry Cook, whose "crooked" siblings, he fulminates to his wife or lover, Kitty, once worked for a suspiciously successful construction company:

Every penny they stole from the government. So? What's the government for? The people? Kitty, you're right. And Planit Brothers is people, a very large family. Four brothers and three sisters, they wouldn't touch birth control with a basement beam. Orthodox. Constructive fucking. Builders, baby.

Paley's use of voice-both in dialogue, mimicking the distinct speech patterns of her Russian- and Yiddish-speaking childhood, and her narrative voice, most often described as inimitable-has so impressed other writers that she has earned the reputation of being a writer's writer. A panel of writers from the New York State Writers institute, including Raymond Carver and Mary Gordon, who awarded Paley the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit in 1985, called that narrative voice "absolutely singular" in twentieth-century fiction. A few years ago, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs named their annual short story award The Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction. But unlike most writer's writers, Paley's style is emphatically democratic, as moving and funny to average readers as to her fellow crafters of language.

This year, Paley and her husband Robert Nichols (a second marriage for both) put out a joint collection of stories and poems, Here and Somewhere Else. Nichols, three years older than Paley, began as a community-oriented landscape architect in New York and went on to write plays and street theater (some for Bread and Puppet), poetry, and short fiction. He and Paley met while participating in anti-nuclear protests at the Greenwich Village Peace Center in 1960.

As multi-genre writers deeply involved in activism, Paley and Nichols are a perfect match for the Feminist Press's first volume in their new series, "2 x 2," which aims to put women and men writers in new perspectives by pairing them. The slim book is organized so that, after an introduction by Marianne Hirsch, Paley gets the first half and Nichols the second. I confess that my first instinct was to split the sections and compare their relative thickness from the top. Paley gets fewer pages, but her five stories and six poems bring more smarting to the eyes than Nichols' work which, being grounded more in ideas than character, serves to highlight Paley's interest in the individual personality and voice all the more.

Both Nichols' and Paley's lives have been lived "here and somewhere else," New York and Vermont, globally and locally, so it makes sense that their work is acutely conscious of the interrelatedness of people, however distant from each other. One of Nichols' three short stories hits on a surrealist device to make that point. "Reading the Meter" tells of a rural (probably Vermont) resident finding an extra charge on his utility bill one month: "8 people killed in the village of Jinoteca Nicaragua. Externalities $31." Musing that the figure seems low ("that would put the cost of exterminating the villagers at around $4 a person"), he is eager to put it out of his mind-until, a few months later, another charge shows up. While the system of electricity delivery is seen from Goss's eyes to be uncaring and inhuman-the meter man rarely acknowledges him, and even he is eventually replaced by technology-it is the customer whose inactivity is finally implicated in these tragic events happening around the world, as a direct result of his need for energy.

Goss is given little depth as a character. Meanwhile the story's counterpart, Paley's poem "Here," talks lovingly of "my old man across the yard [...] talking to the meter reader." In just a few lines Paley conveys the character of this endearingly passionate man, who finds it necessary to tell a stranger "the world's sad story / how electricity is oil or uranium / and so forth," while the poem's narrator is overcome with love for his "sweet explaining lips."

While Here and Somewhere Else does illuminate the twinned aims and varying methods of these closely collaborative writers, as well as offer a sampling of Paley's fiction and poetry together, it is also a necessary addition to The Collected Stories because it contains a previously uncollected story which should not be missed, "My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age". Paley's mother died when she was 28 - one of her most moving stories is "Mother" - but her father lived on and served as the basis for a number of stories. In one of these, "A Conversation with My Father" (The Collected Stories), the father judges the daughter as a writer, saying she has yet to write a serious, "simple" story with "recognizable people" in the vein of Chekhov or Maupassant. (Paley herself has often been compared to Chekhov.) Her problem, he says, is that her sense of humor prevents her from facing the reality of "historical" tragedy. The tragedy of his own impending death is acknowledged only in the narrative, when we learn of his oxygen tank toward the end.

In "My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age," the father tries to be deliberately funny, cracking jokes about trees that live longer because they're "godforsaken" and about the "overrated" idea of eating greens, which are only "helpful to God," then protesting that he's bringing in God merely because "he's very good for conversation." The daughter, barely managing to slip in the news that she is getting divorced, quickly finds that this is a one-way conversation. Her father needs to voice not so much the facts of old age, funny though they are, as the painful regrets of a man near death. Why didn't he try to find out what happened to his brother who was deported back to Russia in 1919, along with other Jews? What can he do now about the ghost of his sister in her hospital bed, whom he refused to take home to die? His last piece of advice to her-to research what happened to the deported brother in order "to have something you must do to take your mind off all the things you didn't do" in life-is also his last, unintentional stab at a joke. The story turns out to be a kind of answer to the earlier story: for Paley, the best way to confront tragedy-always the tragedy of failed relationships between people, rather than abstract, "historical" tragedy - is precisely through humor.

Today, after innumerable awards and recognitions from the literary world, Paley's critics still wonder at how she can be both political and literary, to the detriment of neither. Her hilarious story "Friends," about a group of older women, one with cancer, one with "him-itis," was chosen for The Best American Short Stories anthology of 1980; she wrote it in 1979, the same year she was arrested on the White House lawn. When her third volume of short stories, Later the Same Day, won the PEN/Faulkner Prize for fiction in 1985, she got to work on the mostly male organization and within a year had co-founded the Women's Committee of PEN.

The Mother of Us All continues to protest against war and to regale us with her stories equally. Readers new to Paley's fiction, and unaware of its power, might bear in mind this story from her life as they pick up her books: Marching down Fifth Avenue with the Bread and Puppet Theater in a huge demonstration in the late sixties, she saw a group of men with baseball bats break the police line and head toward the giant Uncle Sam puppet, apparently enraged at its anti-war message. Without a moment's hesitation, Grace Paley spread out her arms and moved toward them as if to embrace them. They faltered, her daughter Nora remembers, and then retreated. Prepare to be similarly disarmed by her stories.

Associate Editor Amy Lilly lives in Burlington, and has written on American short story writers Elizabeth Cullinan and Edward Newhouse for the Dictionary of Literary Biography.