Grace Paley: In Memorium

Grace Paley, whose short stories and poems are really wonderful, died yesterday at the age of 84. I have read a lot of her work and once saw her read and answer questions in person at a small auditorium in Oakland on the campus of Mills College. She was full of life and very funny, intelligent, humble and inspiring. I've always loved her story "Wants" which is quoted from below.

Here's an excerpt from today's New York Times article by Margalit Fox:

A self-described “somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist,” Ms. Paley was a lifelong advocate of liberal social causes. During Vietnam, she was jailed several times for antiwar protests; in later years, she lobbied for women’s rights, against nuclear proliferation and, most recently, against the war in Iraq. For decades, she was a familiar presence on lower Sixth Avenue, near her Greenwich Village home, smiling broadly, gum cracking, leaflets in hand.

Ms. Paley, who taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence and the City College of New York, was also a past vice president of the PEN American Center.

Some critics have called Ms. Paley’s work uneven, but what they really seemed to mean is that it was too even: similar people in similar situations in similar places. But the stories that worked — and many did — were so blindingly satisfying that the lesser ones scarcely mattered. In her best work, Ms. Paley collapsed entire worlds into a few perfect paragraphs, as in the opening of “Wants,” from “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute”:

“I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.

“Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.

“He said, What? What life? No life of mine.

“I said, O.K. I don’t argue when there’s real disagreement. I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them.

“The librarian said $32 even and you’ve owed it for eighteen years. I didn’t deny anything. Because I don’t understand how time passes. I have had those books. I have often thought of them. The library is only two blocks away.

“My ex-husband followed me to the Books Returned desk. He interrupted the librarian, who had more to tell. In many ways, he said, as I look back, I attribute the dissolution of our marriage to the fact that you never invited the Bertrams to dinner.

“That’s possible, I said. But really, if you remember: first, my father was sick that Friday, then the children were born, then I had those Tuesday-night meetings, then the war began.”

Her other books include a collection of essays, “Just As I Thought” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), and three volumes of poetry, “Leaning Forward” (Granite Press, 1985); “New and Collected Poems” (Tilbury Press, 1991); and “Long Walks and Intimate Talks” (Feminist Press, 1991). A film, “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute,” based on three stories in the collection and adapted by John Sayles and Susan Rice, was released in 1983.

In an interview with The New York Times in 1978, Ms. Paley put her finger on the grass-roots sensibility that informed her work.

“I’m not writing a history of famous people,” she explained. “I am interested in a history of everyday life.”

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