JUST AS I THOUGHT
By Grace Paley
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 332 pages, $24
On a winter night during my freshman year in college, I sat in the chemistry lecture hall of a large Midwestern university, waiting to hear a fiction reading by an author I imagined as gaunt, bedecked in scarves and reeking of clove cigarettes. I was 18, and this was what I expected of a famous New York writer and activist. The auditorium was especially full for a Friday night on the frozen tundra, and the rows between the seats were so narrow that I had to slant my knees sideways. I remember squirming and staring at the periodic table chart plastered on the side wall, wondering what chemistry had to do with fiction.
When the author took the stage, at first I assumed there’d been a mistake. Instead of the frail, tortured vessel of art I’d envisioned, here was a robust woman in her 60s, with disobedient white hair and an animated face. She modestly acknowleged the gracious introduction and commenced reading a story, her fast, Bronx-accented voice quickly transforming into the narrator’s: “My husband gave me a broom one Christmas. This wasn’t right. No one can tell me it was meant kindly.” The words emerged from her mouth like ions, electrically charged and invisible but essential to effecting change.
Social change and gender roles have long been concerns in Grace Paley’s superior stories, from “The Little Disturbances of Man,” published in 1959, through “The Collected Stories,” a finalist for the 1994 National Book Award for Fiction. Paley’s short stories focus on politics and social responsibility but rarely devolve into polemics because her sense of dialogue and narrative is so natural and conscientious. Her witty, economical prose often leaves a reader with the feeling that there’s a hidden appendix, transcripts of long, dynamic discussions with neighbors, relatives and fellow activists.
In “Just As I Thought,” a collection of occasional writings, at last we find the forthright accounts of Paley’s life as an author, mother and teacher passionately committed to humanist causes including civil rights, women’s rights and nonviolent protest of many of the wars in her time–Vietnam, El Salvador, Persian Gulf, even the threat of nuclear war. She recounts being jailed more than once during her forty-some years of participating in “civil disobedience,” but never displays self-pity or vanity, the other extreme sometimes associated with conduits of social reform.
Paley relates her fact-finding missions to Hanoi, Moscow and Latin America with probity, arriving at no facile conclusions. Famous figures such as Andrei Sakharov and writer Donald Barthelme filter through these essays and articles, but Paley avoids name-dropping by reporting humorous encounters: Once, in 1973, she was arrested in Washington during a May Day war demonstration, and the late New York congresswoman Bella Abzug visited the cold, muddy football field where the protesters were being held. Abzug approached Paley and a fellow activist and asked them if there had been any trouble. They were fine, Paley assured her, “just talking.” Abzug looked them over, grinned and said, “I guess you’re where you want to be and I’m where I want to be.”
Equally political (and ironic) poems and brief stories also emerge occasionally in this collection, further emphasizing Paley’s tendency to ponder in writing the social interactions and injustices she observes first-hand. In the short story “Demystified Zone,” she sends Faith, a recurring character from her short fiction, as a PTA representative to Puerto Rico, where she sees what she perceives to be undue U.S. influence. She comes home, eager to discuss her epiphany, and when asked by a reporter for the community newspaper what she thinks of Puerto Rico, answers, ” `I think: first, around 1900 we stole their language from the people. The U.S. commissioners decided the Puerto Ricans should be educated in English–just the way the French did with the Vietnamese. Then, around the time the schools and the children were freed finally into their native Spanish, our cities needed new cheap labor, and the people were stolen from their language. That’s what I think.’ ” Later, when Faith visits her parents at the Home for the Golden Ages and proudly informs them of the interview, her father says, ” `I hope you didn’t make a fool of yourself.’ “
Family members and neighbors in Paley’s work rarely hesitate to speak their minds, in speech often influenced by the cadences of Russian and Yiddish. Born in 1922 in the Bronx to Russian emigres, Paley grew up as a “typical socialist Jewish child,” speaking Russian, then English, but also hearing Yiddish spoken in her neighborhood. Such a sense of another language and way of life, she says, piqued her curiosity and allowed her to develop her imagination. Later, in her first short story, “Goodbye and Good Luck,” she would write about a young woman and her lover, Volodya Vlashkin, the heartthrob lead of Yiddish plays at the Russian Art Theater of New York’s Second Avenue.
Though Paley now resides in rural Vermont, volubly debunking the myth of dull country life, her work remains fervently linked to New York City, to the neighborhood cooperatives and parks where smart, wry women watch their children playing, or walk arm-in-arm while pondering the philosophical. But Paley also exalts New York’s active political environment and traditions of public demonstration.
If there’s a flaw in this spirited collection, it’s that Paley offers us tantalizing glimpses of her life but never quite provides us with straight autobiography. She honors the words of others as much as or more than her own. One of the final pieces in “Just As I Thought” is a short story by Paley’s father, a Russian physician who spent years making house calls to the neighboring Bronx tenements. When her father’s narrator becomes a political prisoner in a Russian city, it’s not difficult to detect the familial traditions that have influenced Grace Paley’s own life and work. And of course, there’s also the unexpected, mitigating wit when the narrator says, “I wasn’t incarcerated for rape, mayhem, misfeasance, malfeasance, or some other feasance, the prefix of which escapes me at the moment.”
