Quarterlies

Now celebrating its fiftieth year, the Massachusetts Review devoted the winter issue for 2008 (vol. xlix, no. 4) to the life and work of Grace Paley. Varied, generally substantive, and always heartfelt, the Paley tribute is not without padding: several poems and pieces of prose by writers laboring under the influence of Paley’s inimitable style; one or two anecdotes that amount to little more than sightings; and the transcripts of too many interviews and writing workshops—seldom ideal forums for a writer as intuitive as Paley.

On the level of testament rather than tribute, the issue succeeds. One can hardly fail to be impressed and touched by just how much Paley meant to a whole generation of women who thought of her as mother, sister, friend, mentor, fellow activist, and source of inspiration. Many of those women were no doubt indignant when Joyce Carol Oates saw fit to refer to “the miniaturist art of Grace Paley.” Oates was ignoring Flannery O’Connor’s essential distinction between short and slight: “A good short story should not have less meaning than a novel, nor should its action be less complete.” I would wager that Paley’s modest and often funny body of work will, like O’Connor’s, long outlive Oates’s dead-weight opera. While Oates was holed up at Princeton manufacturing little big books, Paley was out on the streets of the world fighting injustice, sustaining the victimized, telling the truth, and making trouble for big shots.

In her stories Paley always seemed to me the most womanly of writers (I even like to imagine a filamentous affinity with Colette), so let us trust that she has had, through her women admirers, a salubrious effect on men as well. For it is impossible to think of a male writer who had comparable value for any recent generation of American men. Judging by male college students I’ve known, I fear that Charles Bukowski may be the closest equivalent. Or, for gay men, Armistead Maupin’s San Francisco tales. The gender gaps are not yet closed.

Very few stories—very few sentences—are as fully alive as the best of Paley’s. Inevitably Pascal’s famous (gender-adjusted) aphorism comes to mind: “When we encounter a natural style we are always surprised and delighted, for we thought to see an author and found a woman.” In addition to three of Paley’s stories, the guest editors have included an especially moving excerpt from a book-in-progress by Kate Bernheimer, who acknowledges a debt to Paley but who clearly has her own voice. And in “Moving Bodies” Karen Volkman skillfully places Paley’s poems and stories in larger contexts. All in all, several dozen writers have contributed to this issue, and most of them mention one or more of Paley’s stories; several stories get mentioned several times; and three stories (“Wants,” “Faith in a Tree,” “The Long-Distance Runner”) are considered closely. Had the issue gone to press a bit later than it did, surely someone would have recommended “Come On, Ye Sons of Art,” a typically clear-eyed, typically “local” (NYC) Paley story that speaks directly to our present moment, early 2009. The story offers no solutions, for Paley might well have regarded that as presumptuous. It does, however, like many of the stories, offer sound counsel drawn from a life well lived.