Village its very village voicey2/19/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() When I was in my early thirties and I wasn't doing my work I was worried because what I was most interested in were the lives of the women around me and our various relationships. I didn't know what to do about it, except keep at it. I worked at it for years and years but I was never a great poet. "I learned whatever I know about language and craft from writing poems. "I really went to school on poetry," she says. Auden at the New School for Social Research in the '40s. Her real university was an immersion in poetry. She married a movie cameraman, Jess Paley, when she was 19 and had two children with him, Nora and Dan, now 35 and 33. She studied at Hunter College and New York University but not long enough for a degree. "I loved to listen and soon I loved to talk and tell." "When I was little I loved to listen to my parents' stories, all the talk that went on," she says. Paley's mother took care of the house - Paley herself often escapes to sweeping and washing when her stories won't come unstuck. In New York, Goodside helped teach himself English by reading Dickens. Goodside had been exiled to Siberia and Ridnyik to Germany. When they were young in Russia they had been Social Democrats opposed to the czar. Her parents, Isaac Goodside and Manya Ridnyik, left Russia around 1905 and settled in New York, first on the Lower East Side, then in the Bronx. Paley's background is richer than just the block. Take "here" to mean New York, and that is true. "I've been here almost forever," she says. Bookshelves crammed with Babel and Chekhov and Marx, records piled into a Hellman's mayonnaise box, a sad rag rug, artifacts of politics, woolly pillows strewn on the floor, three empty light sockets in the ceiling. Paley's second-floor living room is vintage Village. In the words of her neighbor and colleague in fiction, Donald Barthelme, she is a "wonderful writer and troublemaker." But Paley is a genuine article, unpretentious, funny and wise. The city is filled with so many people like Grace Paley, would-be writers who wear their concerns like sandwich boards, who struggle for a quiet eccentricity in a city where difference is merely a given. She seems to be of a type, a New York type, ready for lampooning. As Philip Roth has said, Paley's stories display "an understanding of loneliness, lust, selfishness, and fatigue that is splendidly comic and unladylike." But nearly all of them are remarkable for their clarity, their sense of place, their sympathies. The stories come when they come."Īt the age of 62, Grace Paley has published just three collections of stories, a total of 45 tales. "There have been long periods of my life when I was bringing up my two kids and playing with them at the playground or working on political things and the stories had to wait. "I can't work like that and never have," Paley says. I have no discipline." Certainly not the steely discipline of a Joyce Carol Oates or an Anthony Burgess, the sort of literary industry that produces bulging books in and for all seasons. With all her notes and effluvia scattered around her, she says, "I can't even keep a journal. She has the friendly aspect of a TV grandmom. Her living room is filled with rays of sunlight that make a crazy corona of her wild gray hair. "I wrote poetry for years before I ever wrote a story. "I'm always making little notes, false starts, beginnings," Paley says, curling her doughy self into an old rope chair. Her new book of stories, "Later the Same Day," took more than a decade to cultivate. And once in a very great while, the voices and smells, the emotional strength and overheard conversation will flower into lines, then literature. Sometimes she will do her best observing while handing out protest literature on the corner of 11th and Sixth. Vincent's Hospital, the leathery weirdness blooming around the Ramrod, the good smell of bread rising in Zito's and the pizza cooling in Ray's. She works slowly, noting the flattened consonants and the political yarns heard on the benches of Washington Square Park, the eternal kvetching in the coffee shops of Bank Street, the playground yelps on West Fourth, the spoken critiques of Ronald Firbank's novels on Christopher Street, the sirens approaching St. Her short stories are a kind of New York chamber music in which the instruments are the voices of the city - more specifically Greenwich Village, more specifically 11th Street between Sixth and Seventh. Grace Paley hardly exists west of the Hudson or east of Fifth Avenue. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |