Grace Paley: Women with Men

From neighborhood to world, the fiction of Grace Paley (1922-2007) reveals an admirable internal sisterhood in the volume of her Complete Stories , which brings together her three unique and celebrated books dedicated to the genre. A sensitive record of a New York existence lived in the expansive heat of the second half of the 20th century, the compendium makes this wise, sparkling and luminous descendant of Russian Jews speak with renewed energy. She focused her writing on the closest human ties, projecting them against the backdrop of a vivid historical fresco that includes the postwar period, Vietnam and the Gulf War.

Home and street are the taut and ductile poles of a work and a biography that reveal a tireless activist vocation ( Paley declared herself a feminist, pacifist, anarchist), although the author takes care to separate pamphlet and art, dismantling any conviction in the conjectural banner of the story. This formal nobility further strengthens the political nature of her narrative, traversed by fights, arguments, ironies, contradictions, and dialogic paradoxes around the most diverse themes, in which love (a tone, a lightness, a heartbeat) always acts as a precious conciliatory substance. The story itself unravels as the voluminous compendium progresses, in the capricious alternation of brevity and length, in the delineation of erratic courses, in the sketching of fragmentary scenarios and situations of an open fabric that recreates the diluted chaos of life.

That Paley 's evolution as a writer accompanied, reflected, and even drove her own destiny as an emancipated woman is confirmed by the introduction, "Two Ears, Three Lucky Strikes," a late, first-person account of a fortunate foray into literature. An entry as casual and domestic as the imprint that would mark her work, beginning with an illness that allowed her time to write three stories in one sitting and show them to the father of some friends of her children, who was a publisher.

The commission for new stories thus gave rise to Love's Battles (1959), an anthology opportunely driven by the second wave of feminism in a decade marked by a predominantly male-dominated fiction. Here one finds talkative teenagers who run away after older men, remarried women who have furtive sex with their exes, abandoned wives who turn their male friend into their lover, and young women who submit to job interviews with grotesque employers. The complex and dialectical abyss between genders becomes, in fact, a crucial axis in the author's texts, in its own way an eloquent and minimalist inversion of the stark work of comrades like Saul Bellow or Philip Roth, who praised Paley's debut.

“I needed to speak imaginatively about what our lives, women's and men's, were like back then,” notes the writer, who, simultaneously with that groundbreaking discovery, says she developed a second ear that would forever accompany her in her inventive work. The mention of this extra organ is fundamental because it exposes the virtuosically oral quality of her stories, in which women and men of multiple generations, marital status, race, and social class engage in electric, clipped conversation.

There are almost no objects, sets, or landscapes in these tales of agonizing costumbrismo, set in a United States that serves as an abstract refuge for an exodus of European immigrants who left behind a dense, painful, and earth-shattering tradition. Only a few peripheral areas of Manhattan border the fictions (Brooklyn, Williamsburg, Queens, New Jersey), while a public park planted with sycamores serves as the allegorical center of the book, a place as conducive to the idyllic frolic of young mothers with their children as it is to hostile clashes with strangers or the outbreak of a boisterous anti-war demonstration guarded by the police.

The writing emanates a very subtle unreality in this sense, perhaps the greatest gift of any naturalist writer (“Real? Reality? Phew!” we read in “Amigas”), a trait that is reinforced by a disjointed core of characters who enter and exit like a revolving door between the great human comedy and the tragicomic sitcom sketch.

The writer Fe Darwin is the recognizable protagonist of this mutant and intermittent clan also composed of her sons, Richard and Anthony "Tonto," her ex-husband Ricardo and his mature partner Jack, her parents, friends, and neighbors. An alter ego never assumed by Paley , Fe first appears in the early and farcical "Two Short Sad Stories from a Long and Happy Life," from Love's Battles, where her character, at once compassionate and rebellious, tender and wayward, fragile and resilient, is already perceived. "From a technical point of view, I am against the State of Israel. I am disappointed that they have decided to become a State precisely during my lifetime." "Why does a woman kneel before a man to worship him?" or "I have had to raise these children with one hand while with the other I hit the keys of the typewriter to earn a living," are Fe's invectives before her two perplexed husbands and her unruly children.

For the rest, she will have to wait for the spaced out releases of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985) to develop her elusive middle-aged splendor.

In these consummately styled narratives, she is found having bittersweet conversations with her mother’s elderly neighbors (“Faith in the Afternoon”), dealing with the devastating deaths of friends (“Living,” “Friends”), interacting with her diverse community from a high branch (“Faith in a Tree”), portraying eleven single mothers living on welfare (“In the Northeast Park”), visiting her octogenarian father in hospitals or nursing homes (“Conversation with My Father,” “Dreamer in a Dead Language”), jogging toward her old neighborhood where she meets the Black woman who lives in her childhood home (“The Long Distance Runner”), scolding a racist Jew who forcibly adopted a dark-skinned grandson (“Zagrowsky Tells”), or sleeping with a Sinologist lover with whom she concocts committedly cheerful poems (“The Precious Moment”).

In that story, Fe also receives a visit from a Chinese woman, a mirror from the other side of the planet "whose life seemed more than strange to her, and who had experienced the limits of history," whom she takes on a tour of a New York in violent decline (which is reflected in terrifying stories like "Samuel," "In the Garden," and "The Young Girl" with their child deaths, kidnappings, and rapes). It is Grace Paley 's ultimate gesture in her progressive attempt to encompass a broad, discontinuous neighborhood, infinite in its nuances; a literary utopia made possible by the rebellion of having left home.

Complete Stories , by Grace Paley. Trans. Susana Contreras and others. Anagrama, 448 pp.