Fiction and the Vise of Politics

Probably the best thing ever said about the late Grace Paley (1922–2007) was the critic John Leonard's observation that "she is a wonderful writer and troublemaker."

Paley, the youngest daughter of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who prospered in their new world, grew up as Grace Goodside in a New York City that would become an arena for her antiwar, antinuclear, and profeminist activities; her own phrase for her tireless crusading was "pacifist anarchism." Paley knew and marched with many of her most ardently political contemporaries. She worked to mold young minds whenever she managed to teach a semester or more at Columbia University or Sarah Lawrence. She joined and organized protest marches, got herself arrested when it seemed the right thing to do, went wherever she saw a need to go—for example, to Hanoi during the height of the Vietnam debacle and debate and to the White House lawn to speak against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

She wasn't a fiction writer until she was thirty, having initially written poetry as a sometime student at Hunter College, New York University, and the New School for Social Research, where she was advised and encouraged by W. H. Auden. Though she never found time to write a novel, her smart, savvy, punchy short stories—"little disturbances" (in her memorable title phrase) of the prevailing sociopolitical order—kept cropping up in little magazines, then in her acclaimed collections: The Little Disturbances of Man (1959); Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974); Later the Same Day (1985), which earned the PEN/Faulkner Award; and Collected Stories (1994), which was nominated for the National Book Award.

Her terse, argumentative snapshot-portrayals of domestic challenge and turmoil, embattled and moribund marriages, truculent idealism and stubborn mastery of survival skills, have never lost their confrontational chutzpah, or their insistent relevance. In her best stories (a short list must include "Faith in a Tree," "A Subject of Childhood," "In Time Which Made a Monkey of Us All," "A Conversation with My Father," and at least two dozen others), Paley mobilized the mode, made it a vehicle for instruction, awareness, and commitment, and deployed it in the service of continuing need and unshakeable faith in the conviction that hardworking people really can change things for the better.

Whenever asked why she hadn't written more, she explained, "Art is too long and life is too short." She wrote on the run, because there were always, would always be, too many other things to do. Grace Paley needed more than the eighty-four years which she was given, and which she dutifully, assiduously filled to the brim. Do any of us, her beneficiaries one and all, doubt that she made the most of them?