the where of it

why i miss grace paley

• Posted by Summer Wood on February 27th, 2009 filed in books, craft of writing, places
• 2 Comments »

We lost a great writer last year.  As the remembrances and assessments of Grace Paley continue to roll in, I’m taken aback by the degree to which they focus on her activism and her positive human qualities.  They paint a portrait of a woman beloved for her kindness and conviction, for her good-heartedness and generosity.  This is the  Grace Paley whom Donald Barthelme once called, with respect and affection, an essential “troublemaker”.  Combined, they form a eulogy of love.

I don’t miss Grace Paley because I loved her (although I did, and deeply).  I miss her because her passing means I’ll never get to read a new Grace Paley story.  And that thought cuts to the quick.

Of all the writers whose work has influenced my own, Grace Paley stands head and shoulders above the others for one primary reason:  she captured the human voice so accurately and so unflinchingly that it made me want to abandon all other occupations and try my hardest to hear – and to collect – as well.  Her ear was exquisitely tuned to the nuances of the heart as expressed in the music of our language, and her success at capturing both takes my breath away.  Open any story to any page – to any line – and you’ll find poetry of a level we haven’t seen before in narrative.  (In “story”, as Grace insisted it be called.  There was nothing precious about her view of literature.  She wanted, I believe, to tap in to the unruly river of generations – millennia – of stories, not to be trapped in the ghetto of “fiction”.)

Take, for instance, this, from “Faith in the Afternoon”:

As for you, fellow independent thinker of the Western Bloc, if you have anything sensible to say, don’t wait.  Shout it out loud right this minute.  In twenty years, give or take a spring, your children will be lying in sandboxes all over the world, their ears to the ground, listening for signals from long ago.  In fact, kneeling now on the great plains in a snootful of gray dust, what do you hear?  Pigs oinking, potatoes peeling, Indians running, winter coming?

Faith’s head is under the pillow nearly any weekday midnight, asweat with dreams, and she is seasick with ocean sounds, the squealing wind stuck in its rearing tail by high tide.

That is because her grandfather, scoring the salty sea, skated for miles along the Baltic’s icy beaches, with a frozen herring in his pocket.  And she, all ears, was born in Coney Island.

It is only with great difficulty that I can stop excerpting from a story I rank among the very best work of any time.  She tempered a smart-alecky attitude with enormous depth and sensitivity, harnessing the techniques for such that we’ve come to take for granted (but rarely see applied with such finesse):  launching into the middle of the conversation; granting broad freedom to a shaky narrator; flinging language like paint splats that require standing in the middle distance to perceive the picture as a whole.

Grace Paley builds a world.  It is the New York City of the late(r) twentieth century, when social patterns were shifting, men and women were redefining their relations to one another and to their parents and to their children, and it is never far from the old country that spit the ancestors – like watermelon seeds from the curled tongue of a willful child – to this continent.  More than any other writer I know, she captures the essence of a place as the combined dreams and loves and failures of its people.  She will not walk away from the hardest things:  from rape, from murder, from racial violence, from the backhanded brutality we inflict on one another.  But neither will she deny the strength of love or the astonishing things that can happen to bind us together.  That is her place, those are her themes – and I think they’re so large, so compelling, that they interfere with our ability to adequately assess her technical contribution to the literature of our age.

But let’s just take a quick look at a few of those technical accomplishments.  She flaunted quotation marks and mastered dialogue that was simultaneously pitch-perfect and loaded with multiple meaning.  She was funny – no, she was hilarious! – in her dry manipulation of the power inherent in compact poetic contradiction.  She managed a sustained omniscient voice that sparkled with brilliance at the same time that it ducked low enough to let the individual voices and peculiarities of the characters to shine through.  And, indeed, she hosted a whole slew of characters in each story, captured each one succinctly, and generously gave even the most minor the opportunity to knock us off our feet.

As a young writer, I was dazzled by the music of her language.  I’m still dazzled.  And I’m still learning.  Yes, she was a grand lady; the one time I met her in person I was overwhelmed with her warmth and kindness toward me.  For that I love her.  But for her stories, I thank her – and now that there will be no more, I miss her dearly.