Looking tragedy in the face
Anita Brookner
THE COLLECTED STORIES by Grace Paley Virago, £9.99, pp. 400 Grace Paley was born in New York in 1922, the child of Russian Jewish immi- grant parents. Incomers in the Twenties worked mainly in the garment industry; there was little formal education. As a child Paley was conscious of thinking in two languages: Yiddish and English. That she became outstanding not only as a writ- er but as a political activist is perhaps due to a spirit powered by eagerness and desire, yet neither quality is apparent in her droll, resigned stories, many of which reflect the incoherence of her childhood influences.
She produced a volume of short stories at long intervals from 1959, the date of The Little Disturbances of Man, to 1974 (Enor- mous Change at the Last Minute) to 1985 (Later the Same Day). All these stories are reprinted in the present volume. The col- lection is dedicated to Sybil Claiborne, 'my colleague in the Writing and Mother Trade. Such self-consciousness, thankfully, does not last but it no doubt announces Paley's eminence as both a feminist and a pacifist. Qualifications such as these are enough to turn one into a figurehead, or at least could do so in the 1970s. That moment has now passed. From being glob- ally aware, today's feminists are both ready for a scrap and given to writing novels about their rotten luck with men. This is the climate in which to celebrate the achievements of Grace Paley, university teacher, highly visible opponent of the war in Vietnam, and doyenne of women's short-story writing in a period perhaps bet- ter represented by men.
When I first read her stories in the late 1970s I thought them immensely sophisti- cated, dry, inconsequential, the product, one would say, of a brittle determinist out- look on the world. Now they appear lightweight, allusive, strangely insubstan- tial, and far less unified under their smooth surface than seemed previously the case. One is conscious, above all, of omissions. By contrast an early story like 'The Loudest Voice' reproduces the strangeness and the temerity of the immigrant voice, while con- veying a sort of homesickness which is gradually eliminated in favour of more orthodox concerns. 'My last girl was Jew- ish,' says a character in 'The Contest', another early story, 'which is often a warm kind of girl, concerned with food intake and employability.' It is hardly possible to envisage the feminist and peace activist from these beginnings. And it is even arguable whether the public and private selves ever coalesced, whether the vernacu- lar was ever truly displaced by the oracular.
These are artful stories about artless people, unemployed youths, beleaguered women with absconding husbands, carping onlookers, helpless mothers of clever children, unsuitable and flighty partners, all remarkably cheerful, buoyant, unsurprised. It is a downtrodden world of undefeated people. Men and women part almost gaily, rediscover each other years later on the steps of the library. There is not a hint of the glamorous, the enlightened, the uplifting, but Grace Paley's characters are indifferent to alternative worlds. They are inhabitants of some ruminative eternal present. Motive escapes them. They get along simply on native energy.
There is a calculated insouciance about these stories, together with a calculated East Side idiom which refers one back to Damon Runyon or the early Malamud. Only rarely do they come into focus, as when Faith (`Faithy) visits her parents in the Children of Judea retirement home.
She kissed Mrs Hegel-Shtein, because they had been brought up that way, not to hurt anyone's feelings, particularly if they loathed them, and they were much older.
Less difference is perceived between men and women as between the generations, the settlers and the emancipated. Not that emancipation takes them very far; they are beset with confusion, haplessness, which they appear not to recognise.
Above all no one is serious. Characters undergo routine tribulations without protesting, bright-eyed, ready to forgive those absconding lovers as if they were part of the human tide, as if the world were small and all its inhabitants known since childhood. This is the world of Grace Paley's background, when kinship was wide and acknowledged, before the process of growing up took place. What was newly acquired may have appeared inferior to what was never forgotten. Thus the experi- ence of reading these stories is lightly destabilising, reminding the reader of earli- er uncertainties, earlier innocence. It is noticeable that for all their sunny natures Paley's characters rarely encounter success. Fulfilment is not their destiny. They belong to a certain chapter in the history of America. Their function is to become American. This they manage, but with diffi- culty. The beauty of it is that this difficulty goes unnoticed.
In the later stories Paley moves to the park with the other mothers and becomes less interesting. These are the stories that made me once think her sophisticated; in fact they are disabused. Prowlers circle the playground, and innocence is lost. It comes back in the story called 'A Conversation with My Father' (a doctor in real life). He reproaches her with not writing a story in the tradition of Maupassant or Chekhov, a story about real life. She invents one for him, but he is still not satisfied. 'Tragedy! You too. When will you look 'it in the face?'
Maybe she did, and found it unmanage- able. This would account for the omissions. It comes through, but all too rarely. Yet what gets written isnever trivial. Hers is a distinctive voice, now perhaps out of date. Virago is to be congratulated on bringing it once again to our notice. It was once America's voice, now no longer to be heard.
`Of course there's a slight risk you might die eating it.'
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