Goodbye and Good Luck:In Memoriam, Grace Paley
The amazing and irreplaceable Grace Paley died this week. Grace would certainly scoff at being called irreplaceable, but so be it; she was and is.
I never studied with Grace, though I attended Sarah Lawrence College (where they are hosting a memorial page for Grace) as an undergrad where I got to know her and she became my teacher in so many ways. We struck up a friendship back then more over debating politics and Jewish identity and Israel than over writing, though in those days I was writing poetry and Grace was an amazing reader of the stuff. Each short story was a prose poem and her own poems always cut immediately to the essence.
We didn't really agree politically--she called herself a "combative pacifist" and I never understood how pacifism could hold up as an overarching ideology, but we shared a belief in fighting for a better world and in using the power of words to make that happen.
Plus, she showed me, especially when I was just out of college, in my first year of work when I was employed at her publishing house, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the power of politics and art when they intersect. And the need for communications to make a political dent.
I recall when she and her War Resisters' League colleagues staged their form of performance art. It was still during the height of fighting to end nuclear proliferation and a group of WRL protesters unfurled a banner in Red Square (when there was still a Red Square) at the same time that Grace and her comrades were on a tourists' tour of the White House where they stepped over the line and onto the lawn to unfurl an anti-nuke banner. It was very simple theater, done with old sheets and large ink pens. They were silent, too; they let the banners speak for themselves. For that, they were slapped with arrests.
Some other SLC alumn and I organized a huge event with nearly 1000 in attendance in Greenwich Village, coordinated and co-sponsored with PEN, to raise money for the anti-nuke defendants. It was a steller cast of readers from Edgar Doctorow, Susan Sontag, Muriel Rukeyser , Donald Barthelme, and more. With mentions in the tabloid gossip columns, we, young poets turned political activists, got our first whiff of cultural organizing. We figured out, through this event, that you can use a literary happening as a way to spread a political message, not to mention, raise needed funds.
This was a time in NY when writers of substance took active political stances and when Grace stood on her W. 11th Street street corner handing out leaflets and tabling for signatures where today, I suppose all this gets done on facebook and through blogging.
The internet connection that this space and others fosters is truly amazing and powerful, but sometimes human contact can make all the difference...tpmcafe readers should get familiar with the writings of this amazing woman. The world is a worse-off place without her. Goodbye to Grace and goodluck to the rest of us.
I never knew much of her sociopolitcal activities beyond seeing something here or there in passing.
All I knew was that she was the most astoundingly talented writer. A friend handed me Enormous Changes at the Last Minute sometime in the late 70's and said "you must read this" and I found it to be can't-put-it-down pure joy.
August 25, 2007 12:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
I didn't want to leave ArtA alone in appreciating Paley, although I'm not sure what to add. After all, this is the kind of site for debate rather than declamation, which lit crit would tend to be. But she was a favorite, and when in the best books of 25 years last year in the Times stretched its date rules to include Carver's great stories, I wished they had for her slim one volume based on three even slimmer books.
The articles remembering her that I've seen have disappointed met. They focus on the tone of many characters, born in a culture at once insular and actively engaged, quick witted and whining. I often felt it produced a limited view of her, too immersed in, let's say, the Upper West Side (the world that, as with The Emperor's Clothes, the young, smart, and successful literary types who work for the book review section identify with, as if any other aspiring writers and editors actually made money), too shrill, and too divorced from her individual characters and her concern for writing itself.
It wouldn't have room for the sadness, loneliness, independence, caring, and far from anonymity of one running character and authorial alter ego, Faith. It wouldn't have room for my favorite story by far, "A Conversation with My Father," written in the first person. Maybe I just like metafiction, and it's about the impossibility of telling a story, and it's wildly funny. The unidentified narrator, perhaps the real author, is asked by her father to finally tell a real story, and then you just have to see her efforts, which become at once a parable of literature, a reflection on her art, a dual of wits with the father (well, he says, number one you have a sense of humor), and a reaching out to humanity. And the description of the pulse of life still running through her dying father, far more vigorous than the dryness of her replies or stories within the story but also conveyed lyrically by her in the real story, is an emotional center. It's like it's too important to the core of carrying on life or letters for the author as character to compromise and too important on that score, too, for the author not to hope to convey more.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
August 27, 2007 11:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
From this week's Forward.
August 30, 2007 11:01 AM | Reply | Permalink