Rick Simonson

Enormous Changes and Last Minutes
August 29, 2007

The news came across very quietly, in a late August word getting out way, that Grace Paley died last week, on August 22. She was 84. The cause was breast cancer. A few newspapers and email dispatches made mention. In time, literary journals given to reflection and perspective will no doubt offer such. There was another reminder of Grace Paley and who she was in the world, also in the news these past weeks. Of that, more .. at the end.

For me as a reader, Grace Paley was formative in all kinds of ways. I was just coming to an awareness of how books were published, the way one encountered reviews and how those might lead one to books, and vice versa, when her second book of short stories, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute was published to much fanfare and anticipation. That was 1974. I was curious: here was a writer who had done one other book of stories (stories! weren't novels supposed to be the Great American Task?), and that, The Little Disturbances of Man, had been fifteen years before. One book in fifteen years? I was, then and at that age, rather aware of writers' ages, of their beginnings, ascendancies, declines, trying to see how it all looked. Here was this writer whose first book had come at the rather mature, stately age of 37; and now her second (again, stories) at fifty-two.

Then, reviews having led to the water's edge, I came to the books. What stories, what voice. I was emerging from Thomas Wolfean exclamated exuberance, from Hemingway sonorous distillation, Kerouac-ean questing to be on the road, away from anything too close, too constant. 

Here was a human voice, in place (this was before I had ever gone to New York), in time, in being. The stories both came from every day, in-your-face, gossiped-about life - and from some quiet-enough inner place. They felt hand-in-hand in spirit, the living embodiment of some other formative reading I was doing then: Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Dimly aware I was that both evoked New York City's Greenwich Village, I later gauged they must have known each other, should have known each other, as each was also politically active in the same spheres. Jacobs was so adamantly against the Vietnam War she and her family would move to Toronto. The eyes on the street, the vitality of urban neighborhoods of mixed uses, different generations, a right amount of density that Jacobs wrote of felt like the very world, voiced, that Paley rendered.

One thing I remember, perhaps it was on the jacket copy of Enormous Changes, or in some article at the time, but it was posed to Paley as to why it was all stories and no novels. (She did write and would publish numerous poems over the years, and some essays, in time.) There was this pithy quote, paraphrased, about 'art being too long and life too short.'

Eleven years after Enormous Changes, Paley's third and last major collection, Later the Same Day, came, as its predecessor had, from Farrar. It was just before the day of authors going on tour. I can only imagine that voice in Elliott Bay's little brick- and cedar-shelf-lined basement room. If someone had stumbled in, wanting to borrow some eggs or a cup of milk, I don't think it would have felt out of place. 

There would be other publications, including 1994's release (and National Book Award-nomination) of The Collected Stories. I can recall only one Seattle appearance, an evening in which she and Annie Lamott shared the stage for Seattle Arts & Lectures. I had a conflict - but heard it not did play well, it wasn't the right mix, wonderful as both writers are. Somewhere along the way - some conference, maybe an ABA when she might have been around for one of her small press books - I know I got to shake her hand and mutter some thanks and appreciation for her work and what she did.

What she did, besides to write these marvelous stories, was also live fully in the world, not only as any of us might, as family members, as neighbors, but also as citizens - of the block, the city, the region, the nation, the world. Grace Paley was always on the front lines, in a way that inspired and reminded.

It was also my last 'memory' of her while she was alive, in a way, again instructive, and which I think she would have appreciated. It was the week before she died, and Countdown with Keith Olbermann was on the television (one of the few plausible reasons I know to turn one on). There was a segment as to whether a military draft might be resumed, given the U.S. military's shortage of recruits and the present government's colossal overreaching. As the prospects were discussed, there was talk of likely resistance to this, overt resistance - and a series of black-and-white images from 1960s demonstrations against the draft and Vietnam War were flashed. Most centrally these were ceremonies of draft-card burning. The image that held the longest was one that involved a group of individuals. Front and center among them, one Grace Paley. No citation, no saying, as I did to the television, 'hey, it's Grace.' Just these unnamed citizens, acting from principle and belief, no matter the odds against them. 

That could all be well enough left there, except that this story, of seeing Grace Paley like this on tv, and then of her passing away, became their own anecdotal bits of conversation, talking with a dear writer friend back east about all of this. She was getting ready to go meet her Congressman about impeachment of our present president and vice-president, the principles by which it should be pursued. Not that such proceedings would get far, not that she would add much voice to this, but that she would be there, her presence to count for. We agreed it was a meeting Grace Paley would have attended. Yes, all the more necessary.

Grace Paley was one whose presence was to count for. She, in that, will be missed. But that voice, those stories - The Little Disturbances of Man, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Later the Same Day, The Collected Stories - may that and those always be with us.

Posted by Rick Simonson on August 29, 2007 | Comments (2)