Anger does for Grace Paley what love did for Dante's Beatrice; it makes her speak. But Paley's anger, at its best, is no more a rant or preachment than Beatrice's love was a burble. A few of these "Collected Stories" are thinly didactic with only one or two relieving grace notes; a few others are gnomic to the point of clenching and evaporating.
These are slips of a chisel that channels through hard rock. The channels gleam. Paley, now 71, is a feminist going back to the '50s when she started writing. Many of her stories evoke a radical New York Jewish milieu where the talk, no doubt, was of great things but the women, joining in, were still expected to tend infant male bottoms and full-grown male egos. The women in Paley's stories are partway along in revolt.
They have divorced once or twice, taken lovers, struggled to support themselves and their husband-less families, and fought in activist causes--while still cherishing their children, the men they live with, and their old and sick parents. They are the burdened rope bridges between two certainties: a past and traditional female generation and a younger, feminist generation on which the past weighs hardly at all. This is precarious; on the other hand, the view from a rope bridge is unhampered. Swaying, furthermore, is rather like flying.
Paley's characters, refusing to detach entirely from any part of their contradictions, are in a sense imprisoned by them. Some of Paley's writing is immured in realistic quandary, but often her voice, like a small dynamite charge, breaks jail. It is an eclectic voice, by turns disruptive and lyrical.
Her older generation speaks warm and sharp, in tones finely inflected by immigrant Russian and Yiddish. Her contemporaries, moving with her from their 30s to their 60s (Faith, a recurring character, is Paley's alter ego and even looks like her), speak in the nervy patterns of the present-day educated classes. Under stress, the patterns distort into the kind of hyper-real connections and disconnections that Donald Barthelme and William Gaddis were experimenting with at roughly the same time.
Paley has a gift for uniting a far-out image with highly local pain and anger. In an early story, set perhaps in the 1920s and more folkloric than the author's later work, Rosie, the heroine, persists in her scandalous and ultimately successful attachment to a married star of the Yiddish theater. Phrases tumble out that begin with amiable comedy and intensify into something quite different.
"I am a samovar already," says Rosie, refusing more tea. Told that her actor's mother nursed him until he was 6, she protests: "She must have had shredded wheat there, not breasts, poor woman." And when, in middle age, her conformist sister condescends to her, she bursts out: "If there was more life in my younger sister, she would know my heart is a regular college of feelings, and there is such information between my corset and me that her whole married life is a kindergarten."
In "The Loudest Voice" a Jewish husband and wife ruminate and complain about a Christmas play at the public school. These are pre-activist years; the tone is a mixture of pain and acceptance. But for the daughter, chosen over the mumbling Gentile children for her piercing delivery, there is exultation, a determination to prevail. "I expected to be heard," she tells herself. "My voice was certainly the loudest."
As Paley's writing moves from sharply focused social and psychological pieces to ones that are more complex and diffuse, it is still the blinding and revealing phrase that pulls us in. In "Two-Part Story," Faith, once or twice divorced--her particular circumstances shift somewhat through half a dozen stories--lives with a lover who tries to be friends with her two sons. He roughhouses so ineptly with them that they all get slightly hurt. He blames her; she throws an ashtray, taking a bit off his ear.
Later her smallest son, Tonto, wants to snuggle: "I love you, Mama," he says. "Love," she answers. "Oh love, Anthony. I know." She has had plenty of love, what she needs is a life. Yet, watching the light come through the blinds, she thinks: "Through the short fat fingers of my son . . . my heart lit up in stripes."
That is not reconciliation. There is nothing reconciled about this striped writer who rages at the way women have been victimized by their instincts, and refuses to deny the instincts or abstract them. Not explicitly erotic, her stories about Faith and her friends are as full of sex as they are of politics and protest. Sometimes her women succumb, sometimes they are the instigators. In one story, the Faith-character acquires a cabdriver, much younger, and a pregnancy. Instead of letting him move in, she turns her apartment into a commune for pregnant girls, and allows him to visit.
