To Grace: Goodbye and Good Luck

I read about Grace Paley's death in yesterday's New York Times online. I've been a fan of her stories for many years. They inspired my own short stories, although I can't approach her in wit and style. My friend Larry introduced me to "A Conversation with My Father" in her collection "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute." It's what the title says -- a conversation with her dying father -- and it has some real gems. Her 86-year-old father asks the narrator (obviously Paley) to "write a simple story once more... Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next."

Paley's response to herself is that she could try to write such stories but can't stick to the old idea of plot, "the absolute line between two points that I've always despised... Everyone, real or imagined, deserves the open destiny of life."

That's the admirable trait of her stories. They plop you into people's lives and their language captures you. There is no escaping. Most of the characters are New York City women caught in humdrum relationships or assorted bad situations. Some are political activists like Paley. Others are single mothers trying to get by, such as Virginia in "An Interest in Life." This story has a boffo opening: "My husband gave me a broom one Christmas. This wasn't right. No one can tell me it was meant kindly." The husband leaves her and their four kids. She borrows money from relatives, goes on welfare, and then her landlandy's married son starts dropping by. In someone else's hands, this could be a morose tale. In Paley's, it's funny. The writer's a radical so there are messages among the humor. But Paley has an interest in her characters and she knows their ways and their speech patterns.

There are other tales she tells. "The Little Girl" is told from the P.O.V. of a black man and is the story of a brutal rape and murder. Paley was criticized for this one. It also incited some lively debate in one of my grad school classes. Should a white Jewish woman be writing in an African-American P.O.V.? My answer: yes. I say that because I've had the affrontery to write from the point-of-view of women and Japanese-Americans and Native Americans and others. I wouldn't be much of a fiction writer if I stuck to my own second-generation Irish-American self.

As the New York Times notes, Paley's literary output "was modest." That's because she spent a lot of time in politics, both locally and globally. A noted anti-Vietnam War activist and, most recently, anti-Iraq War activist, she dove into those things that interested her. She taught and she spoke all over the world. She was poet laureate of Vermont and held some sort of offical poetry post in NYC. She was a citizen-poet or, if you prefer, a poet-citizen.

So, for Grace, as one of your story titles says so well: "Goodbye and Good Luck."