The Challenge of Writing as a Form of Social Activism

A critic once compared Grace Paley's fiction to that of Isaac Babel--one of her heroes--noting that their "taut prose hits you in the face like seltzer." Indeed, in her short stories and novellas, Paley is a master (mistress?) of the terse phrase that reveals a world of fiercely contradictory emotion. When the young wife in Paley's 1959 story "An Interest in Life" states simply, "My husband gave me a broom one Christmas. This wasn't right," we are instantly invited into the complex world of a stubbornly disappointing marriage.

But this minimalist, suggestive style can easily lose power when used in the nonfiction essay. Many of the pieces in "Just As I Thought"--a collection that would have benefited from a far more ruthless editor--seem spotty. Paley's riffs on Christa Wolf and Kay Boyle, for instance, are confusing (if you don't know anything about these writers) or misleading (if you do); in either case, the pieces are simply too sparse to do justice to the complicated political, moral and (in Boyle's case) sexual lives of these women.

For decades, Paley has been an unflagging activist in the antiwar, anti-colonial, civil rights, feminist and environmental movements, and the mainstay of her activism is the firm conviction that these movements are inextricably entwined. (So are socialism and Judaism, she believes.) Precisely for this reason, the most fascinating piece in this collection is "Conversations in Moscow" (1974), in which Paley's belief in the organic nature of oppression is sharply challenged.

The article, alternately (and perhaps inadvertently) hilarious and heartbreaking, recounts Paley's visit to the 1973 World Peace Congress in Moscow. Along with other American radicals like Noam Chomsky and Daniel Berrigan, Paley distributes a statement condemning the Soviet government's persecution of dissidents while simultaneously calling on the dissidents themselves to speak out against such crimes as the right-wing coup in Chile. "We could not divide our concern for Russian poets and generals in madhouses . . . from our concern for political prisoners in all countries," Paley writes.