State of Grace
THERE are career writers, authors whose every move seems to further their art or their marketability. Then there are the others -- writers whose haphazard publications indicate the existence of equally important identities. This past Mother's Day, in South Strafford, Vt., Grace Paley, the 84-year-old poet, short story writer, activist, feminist, mother and grandmother, is a poster girl for the latter path.
The town green is resplendent: dogs, jonquils, babies in bonnets, girls and boys on stilts, butterflies. Small children careen around the perimeter on bicycles. Behind the green, with its podium set up for speakers, the town hall rises with its high windows and gleaming white steeple. Most striking are the dozens of women well over 50 in skirts and shawls, their gray and white hair tucked under straw hats, many dressed in shades of lilac.
Dressed in a plaid flannel shirt, with her short gray hair and fierce brown eyes, Paley struggles, when it is her turn to speak, to keep a loose sheaf of poems from blowing away in the wind. She addresses the wind directly: "Oh! Have them!"
"Here's a totally apolitical poem," she says a little later, chuckling into the microphone.
"Here's one with a lot of Jewish stuff in it," she introduces another. "I think you've figured out by now," she says conspiratorially, "that I'm Jewish."
The Strafford green seems light years away from the Bronx where Paley, the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, was born in 1922. Since the early 1970s, when she married Robert Nichols -- a writer, activist and landscape architect who is the son of Canadian and New England Protestants -- Paley has lived in New York and Thetford, Vt., though she makes no secret of the fact that New York is where her heart is. The house that Nichols and Paley share is at the end of a dirt road, up a hill. There is a garden full of large squash leaves and, as Paley wrote in an early story, "a homeful of rooms."
Nichols is 88 and bears a striking resemblance to Captain Ahab. (Perhaps it is the low, Amish-style round beard and the enormous dark eyebrows.) The Feminist Press has just published a collaborative volume of selected stories and poems by Nichols and Paley, called "Here and Somewhere Else" (148 pp., $12.95 paper). Paley's "The Collected Stories" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 386 pp., $17 paper), meanwhile, has been recently reissued, as well. The couple's kitchen table in Thetford is covered with mail and books and notices for upcoming events.
