I first started reading Grace Paley a few weeks after her second novel was published, as I sought refuge from refreshing Goodreads from waiting for the Booker Prize committee to call. Reading the five-page excerpt “Love” and then re-reading it several times, I had tears in my eyes – it was a perfect picture of tenderness, of something indescribable and true and strange and small and huge.
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My first reading of the story ended with a jolt of remembering why I write. Of course, there is some ego in the mix, but ultimately, the motivation of ego alone is not enough to push me through years of work on a novel of which I am extremely proud, and which was not shortlisted for the Booker Prize, nor caused Goodreads to spontaneously combust into specks of fairy dust. I write, as Pelé wrote, because I love people, because I am attracted to language, because I want this world to be a little more gentle and a little more just; I write to move toward mystery, I write to play, I write to mourn, I write to commune with the ancestors.
I write, as Pelé wrote, because I love people, because I am attracted to 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 paris review, Paley described how his work was often compared to that of Isaac Babel.
People say I write like Isaac Babel, but it’s not like he’s influenced me. I didn’t read it before writing. It is our shared grandparents who have influenced both of us… in terms of change and what one pays attention to. It’s not so much literary influence as social influence, linguistic influence, musical influence.
I had not read Paley before or during the process of writing my second novel, but when I read her work, I heard our common grandparents singing in it, as they sang to me, their voices a little more muddled through the passing generations, but still present in my work, still clear. One of the major projects of my fiction is to speak out against the despicable practice of concealing history, to borrow a term from the historian Tony Michels, that is, to write characters who “should have known what we know now”, whose entire lives are summarized by the facts of their eventual horrible deaths.
I didn’t want to write an article in which every moment was defined by the fact of mass murder yet to come; I didn’t want to write about Yiddish speakers whose only meaning was sadness and tragedy. I wanted Jewish sexuality, and Jewish queerness, and Jewish poetry, characters who fart and hide and argue about politics and make weird art and know nothing about what they’re supposed to know in the kumendike tzayat, the future yet to come, in other words, people who are fully alive despite or alongside the fact that it’s fictional. And in this, too, is Pelé, my ancestor, my predecessor, my “somewhat belligerent pacifist” comrade and teacher: one of Pelé’s narrators in the story a conversation with my fatherStates that she hates the “absolute line between two points” commonly known as a plot. “Not for literary reasons, but because it takes away all hope. Everyone, whether real or invented, is entitled to life’s open destiny.”
This, too, introduced me to another aspect of Paley’s work and life that I greatly admire: his commitment to political activism, and his understanding that the projects of creative writing, i.e. art making, and political activism are connected but distinct, but also that a person is not a Twitter bio, that a person does not need to choose between two projects over the course of life. Going back to the above story, “Love”, there was a falling out between the narrator and an old friend, Margaret; They had “political understanding for many years before certain matters relating to the Soviet Union drove us apart.”
So I return to my teacher, my elder, my partner, Grace Peli, to learn how to be an artist, a poet, a person and how to be in love most of the time.
He In my book there’s good storytelling, good art. The sensual, nosy, (online?) reader wants to know: but who trusted whom? And the fiction writer who is committed to using his fiction only as a tool for making political gains will certainly want to say who was right; But sometimes, it happens, it has to happen, that’s all: “We had political agreement for many years before some matter related to (fill in the blank; today it would probably be Palestine-Israel) drove us apart.” It’s part of the Paley-ish project of the imagination, to see the world as it is, and to see people as they are. But that doesn’t mean that Grace Paley’s fiction always avoids taking uplifting political and moral stances – far from it – or that she sees the artist’s lens as the only true lens through which to view the world.
As well as his novel writing, for decades, Paley was jailed for civil disobedience, arrested for picketing, spending time picketing outside draft boards in protest of nuclear testing; He traveled to El Salvador and Nicaragua to meet the 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 Peli died of breast cancer in 2007, she traveled to participate in a protest against the US war on Iraq.
Often, it is framed as a choice, an American either/or: either you are a worker, or you are an artist. But this 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 fought, pacifism, anti-war activism, racial and gender and sexual equality, an end to the occupation, a world that supports and uplifts children and youth – “It’s one of my beliefs,” the narrator says. long distance runner, “Kids aren’t without flaws, even the worst kids aren’t” – and so forth, and I’m also committed to making art that is true and beautiful and weird and slippery, that knows that none of us really knows anything, that is dedicated to something deeper than controversy or scoring political points. Which finally brings me to the question of genre, and more specifically, the question of poetry here.
In the American artistic sphere, writers are often encouraged, subtly and not so subtly, to “stay in your lane,” 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 is also a question before which Peli refused to bow down. I recently found a poem, “Responsibility,” in which Pelly deliberately and subtly and clearly refuses all of these options: poet or fiction writer. worker or artist. Letter writer or litterateur. Be it man or woman. Hopeful or hopeless. Whether happy or sad: Paley writes, “It is the responsibility of society to let the poet remain a poet.” She continues:
It is the responsibility of a male poet to be a woman
It is the responsibility of a woman poet to be a woman.
It is the poet’s responsibility to speak truth to power
As the Quakers say
It is the responsibility of the poet to learn the truth from the powerless.”
I could continue that it is the responsibility of the poet – broadly defined – to read and continue to read Grace Paley. It is the poet’s responsibility not to be bound by ideas of what a poet, an artist can and cannot do, and not to limit himself because society says he should. It is the poet’s responsibility to be mischievous and tough, to be charmed by the world, heartbroken by it, awaken to its strangeness, to find ways to love and be loved by the people and the world we live in, as Paley writes in another poem, titled “Proverbs”:
a person should love the most
Time.
And so I return to my teacher, my elder, my partner, Grace Pelly, to learn how to be an artist, a poet, a person, and how to be in love most of the time.
