The Collected Stories by Grace Paley

My father is eighty-six years old and in bed.  His heart, that bloody motor, is equally old and will not do certain jobs anymore.  It still floods his head with brainy light.  But it won't let his legs carry the weight of his body around the house.  Despite my metaphors, this muscle failure is not due to his old heart, he says, but due to a potassium shortage.  Sitting on one pillow, leaning on three, he offers last-minute advice and makes a request.

"I would like you to write a simple story once more," he says, "the kind Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov, the kind you used to write.  Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next."

I say, "Yes, why not?  That's possible."  I want to please him, though I don't remember writing that way.  I would like to try to tell such a story, if he means the kind that begins: "There was a woman..." followed by plot, the absolute line between two points which I've always despised.  Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away.  Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.

In the story "The Loudest Voice," Grace Paley describes three grade-school kids in a Christmas play as being "pasted to their beards."  I love that little inversion--really, of course, their beards were pasted to them, but it's Paley's little trick that brings life out of the moment.  It's the kind of thing that some authors would write, thinking it cute, then edit out, thinking it was too cute by half.  You know that old saying, write drunk, edit sober?  That phrase wouldn't make it past the sober editor.  But Grace Paley writes as if the sober editor never showed up.  The word that these stories call to mind, for me, is bravery--Paley writes as if she hardly cares whether the reader follows her along or not.  The result is stories that are dazzling and sincere.

It's that bravery, for example, that allows her to write a story in which a character's husband and ex-husband meet, though they are only referred to as "Pallid" and "Livid."  (The memorable first line of that story is: "There were two husbands disappointed by eggs.")  It's that bravery that allows her to write a story like "The Long Distance Runner" in which her alter ego, Faith, takes a quick run through her old Brighton Beach neighborhood and ends up staying with the black family that lives in her old apartment for weeks and weeks.  Does she change her clothes?  What does she eat?  Are her children worried?  Paley waves those questions away with her hand.  In one of her most famous and anthologized stories, "Wants," the protagonist meets her ex-husband on the steps of the library.  What's he doing there, and why does he bother following her inside to dredge up all the old griefs of their life together?  It doesn't matter; Paley wants him there, so he's there.  And in life sometimes people really do run into their ex on the steps of the library.  Life is so strange, Paley seems to be saying, why shouldn't stories be strange also?  In fact, reading all these stories in a row was a mistake--their weirdness and bravery can be so overwhelming.  I should have taken them one a day, like medicine.

That bravery also leads Paley to do some things I'm not sure any author would venture today.  There's the story "The Little Girl," for example, about a teenager who is raped and brutalized, then thrown out of a window to her death.  It's a shocking and violent story, rare in this collection, and apparently Paley maintained it was a story she was told by a friend--the same black friend who tells the story, or perhaps a version of that friend does, speaking in black vernacular English.  The thought of a white Jewish woman, even a political radical like Paley, writing in a black man's voice is almost inconceivable in 2019, and for good reason, but I don't think you can say the story doesn't work.  It helps that Paley, perhaps more than any other short story writer, has an ear for the way that people speak and a willingness to reproduce it.  "The Little Girl" is one of the most pointed and affecting of these stories, where issues of race and class are mostly dealt with obliquely, by depicting radical leftist New York culture rather than the issues themselves.

When Paley does deal with them head on, some of the best and bravest stories emerge, like "Zagrowsky Tells," in which an old pharmacist has an awkward run-in with a woman who once helped picket his pharmacy because he discriminated against black customers.  What's effective is that Paley tells the story from the racist's perspective, which I think very few writers would do these days.  Paley, like the woman in the story (who is also her alter-ego, Faith) manages to find empathy for the man despite his inveterate prejudice--but crucially, also maintains strongly that she was right to picket.  I found Paley's image of Zagrowksy's interiority to be compelling and believable:

Then this lady Queen of Right makes a small lecture.  She don't remember my Cissy walking up and down screaming bad language but she remembers: After Mrs. Kendrick's big fat snotty maid walked out with Kendrick's allergy order, I made a face and said, Ho ho! the great lady!  That's terrible?  She says whenever I saw a couple walk past on the block, a black-and-white couple, I said, Ugh--disgusting!  It shouldn't be allowed!  She heard this remark from me a few times.  So?  It's a matter of taste.

I like to use some of Paley's stories in my creative writing class for those reasons and more.  Look at these stories, I tell my kids, you really can do anything you want.  I'm not sure they find these stories inspiring the way I do; mostly, they find them weird and unsettling.  Reading this collection made me realize some things about Paley's stories I hadn't before.  For one, they're deeply embedded in the culture of Jewish New York.  Paley is a master mimic but the voice she's most comfortable with is the voice of Jewish aunts, parents, uncles.  Another thing I didn't realize: In her first collection, Paley has only one or two stories focusing on her alter ego, Faith, but in the two later collections she becomes nearly the sole focus of Paley's literary output.  As imaginative as these stories are, Paley seems to have given up pure imagination as she aged and focused on depicting the wildness and weirdness of her own life.  These stories tell a very loose narrative about Faith raising her two sons without a husband (a "used-boy raiser," as she puts it in one story), settling into a long-term dalliance with a man named Jack, and palling around with her friends and fellow radicals.  In the final story, a remarkable thing happens: Faith gets a ride with her friend Cassie, who appears in all these stories for the first time, and Cassie accuses her--why haven't you written about me yet?

Cassie, I finally said, I don't understand it either; it's true, though, I know what you mean.  It must feel for you like a great absence of yourself.  How could i allow it.  But it's not me alone, it's them too.  I waited for her to say something.  Oh, but it is my fault.  Oh, but why did you wait so long?  How can you forgive me?

Forgive you?  She laughed.  But she reached a cross the clutch.  With her hand she turned mt face to her so my eyes would look into her eyes.  You are my friend, I know that, Faith, but I promise, I won't forgive you, she said.  From now on, I'll watch you like a hawk.  I do not forgive you.

All these stories are impressions of a real life, but they rarely have anything like narrative shape.  As Paley says, "everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life."