Paley, Grace 1922–

PERSONAL: Born December 11, 1922, in New York, NY; daughter of Isaac (a doctor) and Mary (Ridnyik) Goodside; married Jess Paley (a motion picture cameraman), June 20, 1942; married second husband, Robert Nichols (a poet and playwright); children: (first mar-riage) Nora, Dan. Education: Attended Hunter College (now Hunter College of the City University of New York), 1938–39, and New York University. Politics: "Anarchist, if that's politics." Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES: Home—126 West 11th St., New York, NY 10011; and Thetford Hill, VT 05074. Office—Box 620, Thetford, VT 05074.

CAREER: Writer. Teacher at Columbia University and Syracuse University during the early 1960s; later a member of the literature faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY; writer-in-residence, City College of New York; secretary and founding member, Greenwich Village Peace Center, 1961; founding chair, Women's World Organization for Rights, Literature, and Development; former columnist for Seven Days.

MEMBER: National Institute of Arts and Letters, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

AWARDS, HONORS: Guggenheim fellowship in fiction, 1961; National Council on the Arts grant; National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for short story writing, 1970; Edith Wharton Citation of Merit, 1989; named first official New York State Writer by Governor Mario Cuomo, 1989; Rea Award for the Short Story, 1993; Vermont Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, 1993; National Book Award nominee and Pulitzer Prize finalist, both 1994, for The Collected Stories; Jewish Cultural Achievement Award for Literary Arts, 1994; Lannan Foundation Literary Award for fiction, 1997; named Vermont's 5th State Poet, 2003.

WRITINGS:

The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Women and Men at Love (short stories), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1959, published as The Little Disturbances of Man, with a new introduction by A.S. Byatt, Virago (London, England), 1980.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (short stories), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1974.

Later the Same Day (short stories), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1985.

Leaning Forward (poetry), Granite Press (Penobscot, ME), 1985.

365 Reasons Not to Have Another War, New Society Publications/War Resisters' League (Philadelphia, PA), 1989.

Long Walks and Intimate Talks (stories and poems), paintings by Vera Williams, Feminist Press at The City University of New York (New York, NY), 1991.

New and Collected Poems, Tilbury House (Gardiner, ME), 1992.

The Collected Stories, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1994.

Conversations with Grace Paley, edited by Gerhard Bach and Blaine H. Hall, University Press of Mississippi (Oxford, MS), 1997.

Just As I Thought, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1998.

Begin Again: Collected Poems, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2000.

Contributor of essays to In the South Bronx of America, by Mel Rosenthal, Curbstone Press (Willimantic, CT), 1998. Author of forewords to At His Side: The Last Years of Isaac Babel, by A.N. Pirozhkova, Steerforth, 1996; After Sorrow: An American among the Vietnamese, by Lady Borton, Kodansha, 1996; and Serious Kissing, by Barbara Selfridge, Glad Day (Warner, NH), 1999. Author of introduction to The Author's Dimension: Selected Essays by Christa Wolf, edited by Alexander Stephen, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1993. Contributor of stories to Atlantic, Esquire, New Yorker, Ikon, Genesis West, Accent, and other periodicals.

SIDELIGHTS: With her first two books of short stories, Grace Paley established her niche in the world of letters. Her distinctive voice and verbal gifts have captured the hearts of critics who praise her vision as well as her style. In short and sometimes plotless tales, she plumbs the lives of working-class New Yorkers, mapping out what New York Review of Books contributing critic Michael Wood called "a whole small country of damaged, fragile, haunted citizens." Rather than action, Paley relies on conversation to establish character, reproducing Jewish, Black, Irish, and other dialects with startling accuracy. In addition to her story collections, Paly has also produced several volumes of critically acclaimed poetry. According to Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Charlotte Zoë Walker, "Few other fiction writers in late twentieth-century American letters have had so great an influence as Grace Paley on the basis of so few books in a lifetime of work." Walter Clemons's assessment was even more generous; in a Newsweek review he proclaimed her "one of the best writers alive."

The daughter of Russian immigrants who arrived in New York around the turn of the century, Paley was raised in the Bronx. At home, her parents spoke Rus-sian and Yiddish, and Paley grew up within two cultures, influenced by the old world as well as the new. From her surroundings, she gleaned the raw material for her short stories, and both her Russian-Jewish heritage and her perceptions of New York street life pervade her work. With the publication of The Little Disturbances of Man, Paley began to attract critical attention. Initial sales were modest, but the collection drew a loyal following and good reviews. The New Yorker assessed Paley's writing as "fresh and vigorous," noting that "her view of life is her own." The ten stories that comprise the volume focus on the inhabitants of a boisterous city neighborhood where, to use Paley's words, "dumbwaiters boom, doors slam, dishes crash; every window is a mother's mouth bidding the street shut up, go skate somewhere else, come home." Ordinary people in unexceptional circumstances, these characters demonstrate the way man deals with the "little disturbances" of life. In her introduction to the Virago edition of this volume, A.S. Byatt pointed out that "we have had a great many artists, more of them women than not, recording the tragedies of repetition, frequency, weariness and little disturbances. What distinguishes Grace Paley from the mass of these is the interest, and even more, the inventiveness which she brings to her small world."

In "An Interest in Life," the set piece of the collection and the story from which the book's title is drawn, Paley's mode becomes clear. Initially the story of a husband's desertion of his wife and four children, it begins: "My husband gave me a broom one Christmas. This wasn't right. No one can tell me it was meant kindly." In a Partisan Review article, Jonathan Baumbach explained how "the matter-of-fact, ironic voice of the protagonist, Ginny, distances the reader from the conventions of her pathos, makes light of easy sentiment, only to bring us, unburdened by melodrama, to an awareness of the character as if someone known to us intimately for a long time. Ginny, in a desperate moment, writes out a list of her troubles to get on the radio show Strike It Rich. When she shows the list to John Raftery, a returned former suitor unhappily married to someone else, he points out to her that her troubles are insufficient, merely 'the little disturbances of man.' Paley's comic stories deal in exaggerated understatement, disguise their considerable ambition in the modesty of wit."

Unlike her later fiction, Paley's first book features several conventionally crafted stories that are narrated by a speaker who is not the author and built around a series of incidents that comprise the plot. "The Contest," "Goodbye and Good Luck," "An Irrevocable Diameter," and "A Woman Young and Old" belong to this category. Paley's other approach is more open and fragmentary and can be seen in "An Interest in Life" and "The Used-Boy Raisers," stories narrated respectively by Virginia and Faith, two women not unlike the author. Explained Byatt: "Faith and Virginia both appear elsewhere in Grace Paley's work, with their dependent children, their circumscribed lives, their poverty and resourcefulness, their sexual greed and their consequent continuing openness to exploitation by, and readiness to exploit, men. Their tales have no beginnings and ends, in the sense in which 'An Irrevocable Diameter' has, or, best of the 'well-made tales,' 'In Time Which Made a Monkey of Us All.' But they have beginnings and ends verbally, and they are brilliant, as the choice of the parts that make them is brilliant."

Another six years passed before the appearance of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Paley's second collection of short stories. During the interim, Paley gave herself to the roles of wife and mother. In addition to her homemaking concerns, Paley submerged herself in political activities—distributing antiwar pamphlets, marching on the Capitol, and traveling overseas to protest American involvement in Vietnam. "I think I could have done more for peace," she told People, "if I'd written about the war, but I happen to love being in the streets." Her later commitments were the women's movement and antimilitarist groups, including the Women's World Organization for Rights, Literature, and Development.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute not only plays off the title of Paley's first volume (The Little Disturbances of Man), but also features the same setting and several of the same characters. Faith reappears with her boys Richard and Tonto, and so does Johnny Raftery—his love affair with Ginny recounted this time from his mother's point of view. Plot figures in these stories almost as an afterthought. The tales are openended, fragmentary, and sometimes devoid of action. In a story called "A Conversation with My Father," Paley explains why. The piece begins with an ailing father's request to his daughter: "I would like you to write a simple story just once more … the kind de Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov, the kind you used to write." Though she would like to please him, the daughter reveals that she has always avoided plot "not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone real or invented deserves the open destiny of life."

In the eyes of Michele Murray, however, Paley disregards her own requirement. "Even with the glitter of its style, over which Paley skates like some Olympic cham-pion of language, Enormous Changes is a book of losses and failures," Murray wrote in the New Republic. "It's not tragedy that weighs down these stories, it's no more than despair and repetition. Tragedy suggests depths and alternatives and is built into a world of choices. Paley's world … is severely limited, the world as given, without any imagined alternatives, only endless vistas of crumbling buildings, bedrooms opening onto air shafts, and a phalanx of old people's homes."

But Burton Bendow argued that Paley "is right to avoid looking tragedy in the face; she knows where her talent lies. It is, if not for comedy exactly, for virtuoso mimicry. I would guess," he continued in the Nation, "that the first thing she has in mind when starting work on one of her better stories is a voice. Definitely not a plot which would keep her to the straight and narrow and cramp her digressions, or a situation or a point of view or even a character, but a voice with a particular ring and particular turns of phrase." Paley herself told Ms. interviewer Harriet Shapiro that she "used to start simply from language…. I would write a couple of sentences and let them lay there. Not on purpose, but just because I couldn't figure out what was going to come next. I've always worked very blind."

Paley's technique may explain what academics sometimes called the "unevenness" of her writing. As Vivian Gornick wrote in the Village Voice: "Her successes are intermittent, unpredictable, often unshapely and without wholeness; there is no progression of revelation, the stories do not build one upon another, they do not—as is abundantly clear in this new collection—create an emotional unity. On the other hand: Paley when she is good is so good that she is worth ninety-nine 'even' writers, and when one hears that unmistakable Paley voice one feels what can be felt only in the presence of a true writer: safe."

Though she acknowledged that Paley's technique of writing is indeed "chancy," Time's Martha Duffy concluded that "the stories—whether two pages or twenty—run their courses as cleanly and surely as arrows flying in air." Newsweek's Walter Clemons summed up his reaction this way: "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute was worth the wait."

Several characters from her first two collections, notably Faith, reappear in Paley's third, again much-delayed, collection, Later the Same Day, published in 1985. And another decade on, The Collected Stories appeared, earning a nomination for the National Book Award. Though the sum of Paley's oeuvre in the short-story genre totaled a mere forty-five stories in 1994, when Collected Stories was published, she is nonetheless considered a seminal American short-story writer of the twentieth century. She has also published several volumes of poetry, however, a genre she has favored since her earliest days as a writer, and in which she displays many of the same virtues as those that have made her famous as a short-story writer. Of Leaning Forward, Long Walks and Intimate Talks, New and Collected Poems, and Begin Again, Carolyn Alessio wrote in American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, "Throughout, her poetry has tended to be more baldly political than her fiction and sometimes more limited in scope. Critics, and Paley herself, have downplayed the significance of her poems; she has pronounced them 'mostly about flowers' and 'too literary.' But some of them display the verve and innuendo that energize her fiction."

"What marks Grace Paley's Begin Again,… apart from its lyricism and close observations of life (human and natural), is the humility and humanity of her voice," remarked Kate Moos in Ruminator Review. Begin Again collects work from throughout Paley's writing life, providing a kind of autobiography in poetry, marking her days as peace activist, feminist activist, her years of mothering, and her experience of grandmotherhood, of living in New York City and of Vermont. "This radiant volume is alive with Paley's wise humor and free-flowing empathy," declared Donna Seaman in Booklist. A contributor to Publishers Weekly compared Paley unfavorably with the poet Adrienne Rich, however, for Paley's failure at the type of well-made poems, finely honed language, and subtle or complex metaphors at which Rich excels. Still, "fans of the fiction will want these unguarded looks at the illimitably appealing Paley persona," this critic added.

Some of Paley's poems are included in her collection Just As I Thought, along with essays, reviews, and speeches written over the course of thirty years. Here, more so than in the short-story or poetry collections, Paley's political opinions take center stage, bearing the brunt, occasionally, of critical attention the book was paid. Thus, for example, John Kennedy, reviewing Just As I Thought in the Antioch Review, called Paley "extremely leftist," and remarked that the author "provokes misunderstanding," and "controversy" by refusing to take into consideration the views of the opposition in some of the pieces collected in the book. But for Iain Finlayson, writing in the London Times, the voice displayed throughout this volume "cherishes a flawed world that should be grateful for her tough, passionate love."

In an interview with Eleanor Wachtel, published in Conversations with Grace Paley, the author was asked if she was conscious of apportioning time to her political causes. Paley, a founding member of the Greenwich Village Peace Center, replied, "No, I'm just pulled one way or another: writing, politics, house, and family. That's all right. It's an idea of life." Paley continued, "I'm a writer but I'm also a person in the world. I don't feel a terrible obligation to write a lot of books. When I write, I write very seriously and I mean business. I write as well and as truthfully as I possibly can."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Arcana, Judith, Grace Paley's Life Stories: A Literary Biography, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1993.

Bach, Gerhard, and Blaine H. Hall, editors, Conversations with Grace Paley, University Press of Mississippi (Oxford, MS), 1997.

Baxter, Charles, "Maps and Legends of Hell: Notes on Melodrama," in Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction, Graywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), 1997.

Benbow-Pfalzgraf, Taryn, editor, American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2000, pp. 247-248.

Binder, Wolfgang, and Helmbrecht Breinig, editors, American Contradictions: Interviews with Nine American Writers, Wesleyan University Press (Hanover, NH), 1995.

Brown, Rosellen, "You Are Not Here Long," in Letters to a Fiction Writer, edited by Frederick Busch, Norton (New York, NY), 1995.

Charters, Ann, editor, "A Conversation with Grace Paley," in The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction, 4th edition, Bedford Books (Boston, MA), 1995.

Contemporary Popular Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1997.

Criswell, Jeanne Sallade, "Cynthia Ozick and Grace Paley: Diverse Visions in Jewish and Women's Literature," in Contemporary American Short Story, edited by Loren Longsdon and Charles W. Mayer, Western Illinois University Press (Macomb, IL), 1987.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 28: Twentieth-Century American-Jewish Fiction Writers, 1984, Volume 218: Short-Story Writers since World War II, Second Series, 1999.

Gelfant, B. H., "Grace Paley: A Portrait in Collage," in Women Writing in America, University Press of New England (Hanover, NH), 1984.

Isaacs, Neil David, Grace Paley: A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1990.

Klinkowitz, Jerome, editor, Structuring the Void: The Struggle for Subject in Contemporary American Fiction, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1985.

Mickelson, Anne Z., Reaching Out: Sensitivity and Order in Recent American Fiction by Women, Scarecrow Press (Lanham, MD), 1979.

Parini, Jay, American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, Charles Scribner's Sons (New York, NY), 2001, pp. 217-233.

Rosen, Norma, Accidents of Influence: Writing As a Woman and a Jew in America, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1992.

Short Stories for Students, Volume 3, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Taylor, Jacqueline, Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark Lives, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), 1990.

Todd, Janet, editor, Women Writers Talking, Holmes & Meier (New York, NY), 1983, pp. 35-56.

PERIODICALS

American Poetry Review, March, 1994, p. 19.

American Studies International, October, 1997, p. 102.

Antioch Review, winter, 1999, John Kennedy, review of Just As I Thought, p. 108.

Booklist, March 1, 1998, p. 1086; February 1, 2000, Donna Seaman, review of Begin Again, p. 1005.

Chicago Tribune, April 21, 1985, pp. 54-58.

Commentary, August, 1985.

Commonweal, October 25, 1968; May 20, 1994, p. 33.

Delta, May, 1982, Jerome Klinkowitz, "The Sociology of Metafiction," p. 290.

Entertainment Weekly, July 30, 1999, review of Just As I Thought, p. 65.

Esquire, November, 1970.

Forward, April 15, 1994.

Genesis West, fall, 1963.

Guardian (Manchester, England), August 21, 1999, Isobel Montgomery, review of The Collected Stories, p. 11; December 4, 2000, James Hopkin, "Genre: Grace x 3," p. 22.

Harper's, June, 1974.

Hudson Review, autumn, 1985, Clara Claiborne Park, "Faith, Grace, and Love," pp. 481-488.

Journal of Ethnic Studies, fall, 1983, Rose Kamel, "To Aggravate the Conscience: Grace Paley's Loud Voice," pp. 29-49.

Library Journal, February 15, 1998, p. 143.

London Review of Books, August 19, 1999, review of Just As I Thought, p. 32.

Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1985.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 19, 1985.

Massachusetts Review, winter, 1985, Peter Marchant and Earl Ingersoll, "A Conversation with Grace Pa-ley," pp. 606-614.

Melus, spring, 2000, Ethan Goffman, "Grace Paley's Faith," p. 197.

Milwaukee Journal, May 5, 1974.

Ms., May, 1974, Harriet Shapiro, "Grace Paley: 'Art Is on the Side of the Underdog,'" pp. 43-45.

Nation, May 11, 1974, Burton Bendow, "Voices in the Metropolis," pp. 597-598; May 11, 1998, p. 38.

New Criterion, September, 1994.

New Republic, March 16, 1974; April 29, 1985, pp. 38-39; June 29, 1998, p. 35.

New Statesman, March 14, 1980.

Newsweek, March 11, 1974; April 15, 1985; April 25, 1994, p. 64.

New York, April 11, 1994, p. 64.

New Yorker, June 27, 1959.

New York Review of Books, March 21, 1974; August 15, 1985, pp. 26-29; August 11, 1994, p. 23.

New York Times, March 23, 1968, p. 29; February 28, 1974; April 10, 1985, p. C20; November 14, 1986.

New York Times Book Review, April 19, 1959, pp. 28-29; March 17, 1974; April 14, 1985, Robert R. Harris, "Pacifists with Their Dukes Up," p. 7; September 22, 1991; April 19, 1992, p. 10; April 24, 1994, p. 7; May 3, 1994; August 11, 1994; April 19, 1998; June 21, 1998; February 27, 2000, Adam Kirsch, "Lover of Justice, All Kinds," p. 22.

Observer (London, England), January 17, 1993.

Paris Review, fall, 1992, "The Art of Fiction."

Partisan Review, spring, 1975, pp. 303-306; Volume 48, number 2, 1981, Marianne DeKoven, "Mrs. Hegel-Shtein's Tears," pp. 217-223.

People, February 26, 1979, Kristin McMurran, "Even Admiring Peers Worry That Grace Paley Writes Too Little and Protests Too Much."

Poetry, April, 1994, p. 39.

Progressive, November 1, 1997, p. 36; December, 1998, p. 41.

Publishers Weekly, April 5, 1985, pp. 71-72; June 18, 1991; October, 1991, review of Begin Again, p. 58.

Regionalism and the Female Imagination, winter, 1979, E.M. Broner, "The Dirty Ladies: Earthy Writings of Contemporary American Women—Paley, Jong, Schor, and Lerman," pp. 34, 41.

Ruminator Review, fall, 2001, Kate Moos, "Forms of Invention," p. 49.

Saturday Review, April 27, 1968, pp. 29-30; March 23, 1974.

Sewanee Review, Volume 81, 1974, William Peden, "The Recent American Short Story," pp. 712-729.

Shenandoah, Volume 27, 1976, Donald Barthelme, William Gass, Grace Paley, and Walker Percy, "A Symposium on Fiction," pp. 3-31; Volume 32, 1981, Joan Lidoff, "Clearing Her Throat: An Interview with Grace Paley," pp. 3-26.

Studies in American Jewish Literature, Volume 2, 1982, Adam J. Sorkin, "'What Are We, Animals?' Grace Paley's World of Talk and Laughter," p. 144; spring, 1988, Minako Baba, "Faith Darwin As Writer-Heroine: A Study of Grace Paley's Short Stories," pp. 40-54.

Studies in Short Fiction, winter, 1994.

Threepenny Review, fall, 1980, pp. 4-6.

Time, April 29, 1974; April 15, 1985; January 27, 1986, pp. 74-77.

Times (London, England), November 7, 1985; September 26, 1987; July 22, 1999, Iain Finlayson, "A Fight for Peace," p. 45.

Times Literary Supplement, February 14, 1975; November 22, 1985.

Vanity Fair, March, 1998, p. 220.

Village Voice, March 14, 1974.

Voice Literary Supplement, June, 1985, pp. 9-10; September, 1992, p. 5.

Washington Post, April 14, 1985, David Remnick, "Grace Paley: Voice from the Village," pp. C1, 14; November 15, 1986.

Washington Post Book World, April 28, 1985, p. C1.

Women and Language, spring, 2000, LaVerne Harrell Clark, "A Matter of Voice: Grace Paley and the Oral Tradition," p. 18.

Writer, November, 2002, Kim Chase, "In Praise of Loose Ends," pp. 21-23.

Yearbook of English Studies, 2001, Judie Newman, "Napalm and After: The Politics of Grace Paley's Short Fiction," p. 2.

ONLINE

New York State Writers Institute Web site, http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/ (August 10, 2004), "Grace Paley."

Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/ (1996) Wendy Lesser, "Writing with Both Ears," conversation with the author; (October 26, 1998) A.M. Homes, "All My Habits Are Bad," author interview.

Women's World Organization for Rights, Literature, and Development Web site, http://www.wworld.org/about/board/ (August 9, 2004), "Grace Paley."