It’s August 6 in Thetford Hill, Vermont, and before the sun has dried the mist on the Green Mountains, Grace Paley is out at a Hiroshima Day vigil. Friends, family, and neighbors are there, too. So are a couple of dozen kids from a nearby camp. The protesters turn handmade peace signs toward passing cars and trucks. Some toot hello while others work hard not to notice. “We used to be very strict and yell at people if they laughed,” Paley tells one of the campers. But when a trucker honks and waves, she says brightly, “Maybe the world will change.” From her home in Vermont, her principal residence for the past several years, Paley maintains a busy schedule. At seventy-five, she lectures at schools and colleges, she gives literary readings, and she pursues her political activities both here and abroad. In July, she returned from Antwerp, where she attended a meeting of Women’s World, an organization of writers, publishers, and editors working to end censorship. Her newest book, Just As I Thought brings together reports and memoirs written over the past thirty years about peace and feminist activities in Vietnam, China, and Russia, as well as the United States. It will be out early next year. Paley became famous for short stories set in Greenwich Village. Her first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), was followed by Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985). Other works include Long Walks and Intimate Talks (1991) and New and Collected Poems (1992). In 1994, The Collected Stories appeared. Paley is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards. In 1989, New York’s Governor, Mario Cuomo, named her the first official New York State Writer. After the vigil disbands, she heads home with her husband, writer Bob Nichols, and local friends. She scrambles up some eggs to go with a platter of herring, a loaf of bread, a block of cheese, and a big pot of coffee—all set on an outside table. After a leisurely breakfast, the friends depart, the sun arrives, the sweaters come off, the hats go on . . . and we talk.
Q: When did you start writing?
Grace Paley: When I was a kid, a teenager, I wrote poetry. I hardly ever sent anything out. When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write stories in my mid-thirties. My kids were still little, and they were in school and day care, and I had begun to think a lot about wanting to tell some stories and not being able to do it in poetry. I had been spending a lot of time in the park with all these women. There were things I didn’t like. I didn’t like a lot in the relations between the men and women that I knew. And I really knew some very nice guys. Many of them were the boys I knew when I was in my late teens, among them my former husband, Jess, to whom I was married for twenty-five years. But there was something wrong all the time. And in the park I met other women and I started to get interested in their lives. I developed a lot of pressure to talk about women’s lives, and children’s lives, too. Children interest me tremendously, and I didn’t see a lot of literature about children, or women and children. I had a kind of resistance to writing those stories. I felt the stuff was probably pretty trivial. But I had a great pressure to tell these stories. I started to write. I was not naive about what I wanted to do or the level at which I wanted to do it. I didn’t intend to become a short-story writer. I became one because I finished a couple of short stories and realized that’s what I wanted to do and could do with children and with all the other things in my life. I set out to write a couple of stories and maybe do more with prose but . . . there I was.
Q: Had you intended to become a poet?
Paley: I didn’t intend. The word “intend” is the wrong word for what I do. It’s just that it’s something you do, and you can’t not do. If you want to do it, and you don’t intend to, you do it anyway. The word “intend” is wrong. The word “pressure” is right. It’s like any art form.
Q: Did anything like a writers’ group exist?
Paley: I didn’t know of any. I remember going to NYU and I took a short-story writing class—this was before I had kids—and the guy told me he didn’t think I could really write. And I assumed he was right. I didn’t even worry about it too much. I said, “Well, wrong direction.” Many years later, after I’d begun to write stories, I was afraid I would stop writing stories so I took a course at the New School where I met a writer named Ellen Currie, a wonderful writer. The teacher, whom I liked a lot and was a very good guy, told me to “get off my Jewish dime.” This was when Bellow and Roth were writing, and the Jewish dime was about to become a quarter.
Q: Who influenced you?
Paley: I read a lot. I liked a tremendous number of poets and writers. The person whose work I liked the most was Joyce. Kids like us in the Bronx, we went to libraries all the time. And when you think of things that influenced your life, Mother Goose influenced more people than almost any other thing, the rhythms of those poems. Everything after that was a bare imitation of some of those mysterious and materialistic poems. Our families encouraged us. My family were Russian Jews. They got you to read as soon as you could. And then assumed you would read a lot. People didn’t really tell stories but they were good talkers. That’s important for a writer, to hear speakers.
Q: What’s a “good talker”?
Paley: Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.
Q: What was your family like?
Paley: I come from a socialist family. They were very anti-communist from the beginning. My father was a political person. They all were. They left Russia in 1905, running from the terrible pogroms of the period, and my father had been in prison in 1903-1904 when he was just a kid. It was before the 1905 Revolution. He was in one prison and then he was sent to Siberia. But he wasn’t there for too long because the Czar had a son and everybody was freed who was under twenty-one years of age. He got out then. And very quickly people raised money for him and my mother, who was also arrested and freed and was his girlfriend at the time, to come to America. My grandmother came then, and so did my aunts. The first thing my father did when he came here was learn English. He became a big reader of history, of literature, of everything. They all learned English, except for my grandmother, who never learned. The women went to work. My father also worked, in a photography place, and then he went to medical school and they supported him while he went to medical school. Then he got out and became a doctor and he supported them. They didn’t do much politically once they came here. They worked hard. They had children right away. They got their newspapers. They had friends who were more active than they were. They were social democrats. I had one aunt who went to Palestine. In the late 1920s she came to visit my parents and was utterly disgusted at their non-politicalness. Her family was heavy socialist Zionists. My mother went to demonstrations. I remember her going to a big demonstration for Earl Brower and she came home crying and said the Communists were very mean and booed their people. I remember feeling sad at her feeling sad. But they went to Norman Thomas events and stayed socialists. I thought well of my parents. I disagreed with them about a lot of things because—they were right, of course, to be anti-communist—they didn’t like my being in the student unions. Even if they weren’t communist organizations, they certainly were influenced. We didn’t have terrible quarrels, but after admiring them a lot, I was angry. I thought, “They are so middle class.” I thought, “Who are they?” Of course, my mother had continued to go to things, but I didn’t recognize it. And they were right about many things in the end. But I was also right about many things.
Q:Where did your parents settle when they first arrived?
Paley: The Lower East Side. They took the route of all Jews. They moved from the Lower East Side to Harlem and then to the Bronx.
Q: What was the community like where you grew up?
Paley: I lived in a house in the East Bronx, a totally Jewish neighborhood on East 172nd Street. You didn’t see Christians much, although one lived next door. We thought they were kind of a minority. My memory of that place is of the Depression. In what had been a solid, working-class neighborhood, there was no work at all. I remember people’s fathers were out of work for years.
Q:Was your family seriously affected?
Paley: Not really. My father didn’t ask people for a lot of money but he was a neighborhood doctor. We did have a car, and we had help in the house. It was a big house. In those days, you had the office in the house and the office was downstairs, and the family was upstairs. That included my aunt and my grandmother, too.
Q: One of the themes that recurs in your stories is luck.
Paley: This idea of luck is not luck so much but that I have a pretty good sense of having been born at a certain historical time when I could really write about women’s lives. The women’s movement was coming, but I didn’t know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write. But it’s not luck because you could be born at that time and have other things on one’s mind. Still, because of what I was interested in, it was a big luck for me. I was born into a certain kind of family which was very nourishing and I was well cared for. And that’s class. I always say that my brother and sister had working-class parents and I had middle-class parents. I came when people had time for me. They liked it that I read. I was fortunate that by the time I was born, there were a lot of comforts and at the same time I lived in a neighborhood where it was brought to my eyes every single day that people didn’t live like me. Every day I knew that many of my friends “got relief.” That was important in my thinking about the world, thinking that not everybody lived that way. When I say luck, I’m using a cheap word for very expensive things like ideas.
Q:There’s also the person Faith.
Paley: I don’t know why I ended up with Faith. It had nothing to do with me. I had this very funny idea that I was going to write this family thing, and there would be three children named Faith, Hope, and Charlie. And that was the joke in my mind when I named her Faith. People won’t believe that, but it’s true. In “The Long Distance Runner,” she talks about Charlie her brother, but he never comes up again. Those names are just inventions, but names are important. People get ideas from them even if you didn’t intend it.
Q: Your involvement in peace activities spans decades. What changes have you seen in that time?
Paley: When you have a peace movement that has an actual war, it’s different from one that has wars that our country is not totally involved in. During the war in Vietnam, and to a lesser degree the wars in Central America where our country was directly involved, it was easier to organize. When the United States supported Mobutu, it was much more subtle. That’s something people didn’t know as well. It’s harder to organize around that kind of imperial action than it is around the Vietnam War, where people’s children were going, or Nicaragua and El Salvador, where we were able to send many witnesses. Now the Gulf War, that was one of the smartest wars the United States ever fought. Somebody figured out how to do it very fast, get in and out and make a lot of people miserable without anybody else knowing about it. If that had gone on any length of time, we would have had tremendous opposition to it. Even at the war’s prime, when yellow ribbons were supposed to be the greatest thing in the world, we were able to have vigils in most of the towns around here. You had enough response that people knew the war wasn’t so hot.
Q: So without a war is it harder to get people involved?
Paley: It’s harder to mobilize people. But just look at the letters to the editor in the local newspaper about the land mines. It’s probably getting plenty of support out of Wall Street and the defense industry but I don’t see any support of that in the local papers. I see editorials saying, “What’s going on here?” As soon as you have people writing back and forth, you know that you can do something. People are learning more and more about the American arms trade, which I think is one of the most horrendous things that is happening right now. They are learning about the defense industry contracting out to other countries where the wages are low but they are still American companies. I can hardly believe the hideous ideas of our government or of President Clinton—going out and looking for business. Right now I think we are running about 60 percent of the arms trade. Hanford, the plutonium center in Washington, was supposed to be closed down and then it received orders from the Energy Department not to close it down. To me, you can’t say that anything is more horrifying than this resumption. As far as militarism is concerned, we’re in a very scary situation, a very bad one.
Q: How different is it for you to live here in Vermont instead of in Greenwich Village?
Paley: I live pretty much the same. If I miss anything, it’s being able to hang out in the city of New York meeting people and talking to them on the corner. There are two places to meet people here, to just hang out—the recycling center and the lake. And this town has a piece of beautiful beach on one of the many beautiful lakes. You go there and see some of the people and talk to them. I do it as much as I can. I like going with the kids. For me, it’s like going to Washington Square Park. You see all the young mothers with their children. It’s not so different. This is also a gift that has been given me, that of rural life, because it’s not like living in the suburbs. It’s really living in a place full of small towns, and even living outside of those small towns. Even though in 1979 I helped organize a conference called Women and Life on Earth, it wasn’t until I lived in the countryside that I began to understand the life of the countryside and the people in it and trees and water. Just learning about water is an education for a city person.
Q: Has living in Vermont affected your writing or what you write about?
Paley: Not really. I write more poems about this. They’re not sweet poems necessarily. You always have to invent the voice. You’re always inventing language—an older woman in the generation preceding, some guy, an Irish voice, or a black voice. I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices. That’s one of the acts of sisterhood or brotherhood, to say, “Oh, this is how life is for the other one.”
Q: Is that a form of empathy?
Paley: It’s more than empathy. Empathy can become psychological or sentimental. But it really is a way of trying to know what’s going on in another head and that’s different than saying, “Oh, this guy’s a good guy.” You don’t do it in order to say, “This guy’s a good guy.” You do it in order to understand. You might find terrible evil in that head. There is evil in this world.
Q: When you’re teaching young people who want to be writers, what do you hope to accomplish?
Paley: That they show a lot of feeling for language. Sometimes before people know what they’re saying, they already love the language. I think I was like that. Even if they seem mixed up, if they’re using the language, I like that. Some are very self-centered. Some are less so. You can’t push them too much except by giving them assignments, making them write from other points of view. That helps a lot. But they do have to be interested in paying attention to the life of their world. What I’m mostly interested in is that they should really want to get it right. Not settle for the easiest idea or the trendiest idea or the easiest word. They should always push themselves, if they’re serious. My job is to get people to write something truthful, something about truth and beauty—wherever they are—and to understand how literature is made. And then if they become great writers, that’s great, and probably has nothing to do with me. I am very interested in people trying to write because I don’t have a big academic background at all. In fact, I don’t have any degrees. I went to Hunter College one year and New York University another year. It’s just on the basis of my books that I’ve been hired at any of the places I’ve been. I felt that I had been foolish not to go to school more. I liked the education. I liked people learning things all around me and I liked going to people’s classes. At Sarah Lawrence, I liked the two-generational aspect of it. I hate single-generational things.
Q: It seems that you teach wherever you are. You don’t need a classroom.
Paley: As an older person, I do feel an obligation to tell the story about what was really happening in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, as I saw it. I’ve been asked to talk about these things in high schools, here and in other places, and I’m always glad to. I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.
Q: What is your old age like?
Paley: I am fairly healthy, I live with a man I admire and really love a lot, and my children are good people. There are very sorrowful things that have happened that you can’t run away from. A lot of sad things have happened to my friends’ children, people you knew as babies. They’ve been killed or become crazy or all kinds of tragic things. There are some people whose children haven’t talked to them in fifteen years. There’s all kind of meshugaas in this world. People say, “Why do you call your kids up, why do you worry like that?” And I say, “I was raised like that.” My grandmother looked at my father with the same eyes when he was sixty and she was eighty-five. So you think, what is old age? Old age is not a good thing. It can be really hard, and those of us who have it a little easier should keep in mind that there are hundreds of thousands of people who are not as well off. I’m seventy-five now. I also have the peculiar luck of having a sister and brother who are fourteen and sixteen years older than me. Their health is not good. It couldn’t be at that age. But their spirits are. Both my brother and my sister are an example to me. If you’re old and you’re healthy and you’re active—I don’t mean you have to be politically active—if you remain interested in other people and the world, then you live as well as your health will allow. If you’re poor, you probably won’t have that health. Old people can lead terrible lives in this country. It depends. You simply don’t know how things are going to turn out.
Q: For all your accomplishments, how do you maintain your modesty?
Paley: To be modest means that you have something to be modest about. I don’t feel particularly modest but I don’t feel particularly show-offy, because of this luck. I know I’ve done good work. I’ve been very serious about my writing, and I’ve done the best that I could. But I don’t feel that I’ve done more than I should have. In fact, I’ve done less than I should have.
Q: What should you have done more of?
Paley: I should have written more. I should have written more during the period when I just liked so much doing the political work in the streets. I did write a number of reports on my political experiences, but there were many omissions, and I feel bad about that because it was work that was interesting and had I written more about it, it could have been useful. Still, I loved the comradeship of the sixties and the seventies, and I still maintain friendships with the people I worked with then—the ones that are still alive. That’s one of the great gifts of our political movements, great friendships . . . and also a few enmities.
Phyllis Vine, a historian and journalist who lives in New York, first met Grace Paley when they were both teaching at Sarah Lawrence College.