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.

But the Russian dissidents certainly can. They like Nixon. They like American capitalism. They aren’t particularly interested in their Vietnamese brothers, and sisters in South African apartheid or in Chilean fascism. “Thank God for the United States,” exclaims Yelena Sakharov, much to Paley’s horror. The American leftists meet with the dissidents several times for impassioned discussions. “[W]e had three languages, German, Russian, and English, and two kinds of voices: public, discursive voices and private voices--for friendly or infuriated remarks,” Paley notes. Of course, the vast differences in experience, history and ideology cannot really be bridged. Paley knows that the Americans speak with “the typical arrogance of safe persons.” Still, she insists--notwithstanding her respect for the dissidents’ integrity, bravery and suffering--on “another analysis of events, another look at who the wardens are in this world and who the prisoners.” Despite Paley’s lack of introspection--despite, that is, her unwillingness to rigorously interrogate her own beliefs--”Conversations” is fascinatingly rich in political ambiguity.

Not surprisingly, Paley has some excellent and sensible things to say about writing and how to teach it. She posits that criticism grows out of knowledge, while fiction stems from mystery. The novelist attempts to explain life to himself, “and the less he understands to begin with, the more he probably writes. . . . In other words, the poor writer . . . really oughtn’t to know what he’s talking about.” To aspiring writers, Paley advises, “Stay open and ignorant.” More specifically, she proposes that in areas “where you are kind of dumb, write a story or a novel, depending on the depth and breadth of your dumbness. Some people can do both [criticism and fiction]. Edmund Wilson, for instance--but he’s so much more smart than dumb that he has written very little fiction.”

Finally, suggests this acute observer of the human condition, the writer should forget about herself--at least for a while--and watch others. “When you find only yourself interesting, you’re boring. . . . When I’m interested in you, I’m interesting.” And, despite the shortcomings of this collection, she always is.