An ode to Grace Paley: the writer who reminds us why literature matters

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I first started reading Grace Paley in the weeks after my second novel was published, as I sought refuge from refreshing Goodreads, from waiting for the Booker Prize Committee to phone. Reading the five-page piece “Love,” and rereading it many times after, tears sprung into to my eyes—this was a perfect portrait of tenderness, of something ineffable and true and strange and small and enormous.

My first reading of the story ended with me remembering, in a jolt, why I write. There is some ego in the mix, of course, but ultimately, the egoic drive alone is not enough to propel me forward through years and years of working on a novel, which I am so proud of, and which was not shortlisted for the Booker Prize, nor did it cause Goodreads to spontaneously combust into sprinkles of fairy dust. I write, as Paley wrote, because I am in love with people, because I am fascinated by language, because I want this world to be a little more gentle and a little more just; I write to chisel toward the mystery, I write to play, I write to grieve, I write to be in conversation with ancestors.

I write, as Paley wrote, because I am in love with people, because I am fascinated by language, because I want this world to be a little more gentle and a little more just.

And discovering Grace Paley’s work was like discovering an ancestor. In an interview with the Paris Review, Paley spoke about how her work was often compared to Isaac Babel.

People say I write like Isaac Babel, but it’s not that he influenced me. I hadn’t read him before I wrote. It’s our common grandparents who have influenced us both… in terms of inflection and what one pays attention to. It’s not a literary influence so much as a social influence, a linguistic influence, a musical influence.

I hadn’t read Paley before or during the process of writing my second novel, but when I did read her work, I heard our common grandparents singing in it, as they’d sung to me, their voices a bit more muddled over the passing generations, but present still in my work, palpable still. One of the major projects of my novel is to rail against the smarmy practice of backshadowing history, to borrow a term from historian Tony Michels, that is, of writing characters who “should have been knowing what we now know,” whose entire lives are summarized by the facts of their eventual horrific deaths.

I didn’t want to write a shtetl in which every moment was defined by the fact of mass murder yet to come; I didn’t want to write Yiddish speakers whose only valences were nostalgia and tragedy. I wanted Yiddish sexiness, and Yiddish queerness, and Yiddish poetics, characters who make out and hide farts and argue about politics and create weird art and don’t know a thing about what they should have been knowing in the kumendike tzayt, the yet-to-come future, in other words, people who are fully alive, despite or alongside their being fictional. And in this, Paley, too, is my ancestor, my predecessor, my “somewhat combative pacifist” comrade and teacher: One of Paley’s narrators, in the story A Conversation with my Father , explains that she despises “the absolute line between two points” commonly known as plot. “Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”

This, too, brings me to another aspect of Paley’s work and life that I so admire: her commitment to political activism, and her understanding that the projects of creative writing, that is, art making, and political activism are linked, but distinct, but also that a person is not a Twitter bio, a person need not choose between the two projects over the course of a life. Back to the aforementioned story, “Love,” in which the narrator and an old friend, Margaret, had a falling out; they had had “many years of political agreement before some matters relating to the Soviet Union separated us.”

So I turn and return to my teacher, my elder, my comrade, Grace Paley, to learn how to be an artist, a poet, a person, and how to be in love, most of the time.

That is good fiction writing, good art, in my book. The prurient, nosy, (online?) reader wants to know: but who believed what? And the fiction writer who is committed to using their fiction as merely a tool to score political points, will certainly want to say who was right; but sometimes, it is, it must be, just that: “We had many years of political agreement, before some matters relating to [fill in the blanks; today it’d perhaps be Palestine-Israel] separated us.” That is part of the Paley-ish project of fiction, to observe the world as it is, and people as they are. But that doesn’t mean that Grace Paley’s fiction always avoids taking uplifting political and ethical positions—far from it—or that she saw the artist’s lens as the only correct one with which to view the world.

Alongside her writing fiction, over the decades, Paley was jailed for civil disobedience, arrested at sit-ins, spent time picketing outside the draft board, protesting against atomic testing; she traveled to El Salvador and Nicaragua to meet with mothers of the disappeared; she co-founded the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. According to Alexandra Schwartz, just three months before Paley died of breast cancer, in 2007, she traveled to attend a protest against the American War on Iraq.

So often, it is framed as a choice, an American either/or: either you are an activist, or you are an artist. But that is a choice I don’t want to make in my life; I am deeply committed to some of the same political causes for which Paley struggled, pacifism, antiwar activism, racial and gender and sexual equality, an end to the occupation, a world that supports and uplifts children and young people—”it’s one of my beliefs,” says the narrator of The Long-Distance Runner, “that children do not have flaws, even the worst do not”—and onwards, and I am also committed to making art that is truthful and beautiful and strange and slippery, that knows that none of us really knows anything, that is allegiant to something deeper than polemics or scoring political points. Which brings me, finally, to the question of genre, and specifically, here, of poetry.

In the American artistic sphere, so often writers are encouraged, subtly and not-so-subtly, to “stay in their lanes,” whether politically—”are you an activist or an artist”—or in terms of style and genre—”Are you a fiction writer, or a playwright, or a poet?”

This question, too, is one that Paley refused to bow down to. I recently came across a poem, “Responsibility,” in which Paley deliberately and subtly and explicitly refuses all of these choices: Poet or fiction writer. Activist or artist. Leafleteer or literary practitioner. Man or woman. Hopeful or hopeless. Happy or heartbroken: “It is the responsibility of society to let the poet be a poet,” writes Paley. She continues:

It is the responsibility of the male poet to be a woman

It is the responsibility of the female poet to be a woman

It is the poet’s responsibility to speak truth to power

as the Quakers say

It is the poet’s responsibility to learn the truth from the powerless.”

It is the responsibility, I might continue, of the poet—broadly defined—to read and keep reading Grace Paley. It is the responsibility of the poet not to be boxed in by ideas of what a poet, an artist, can and cannot do, not to limit herself because society says she ought to. It is the responsibility of the poet to be mischievous and stark, mesmerized by the world, heartbroken by it, awake to the strangeness of it all, to find ways to love and be in love with people and this world we live in, as Paley wrote, in another poem, entitled “Proverbs”:

A person should be in love most of

the time.

And so I turn and return to my teacher, my elder, my comrade, Grace Paley, to learn how to be an artist, a poet, a person, and how to be in love, most of the time.