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Noted poet, peace activist Grace Paley dies
Politics in the family
Born Grace Goodside in New York in 1922, she was one of three children of Russian Jews. Her family spoke English, Russian and Yiddish, but politics proved the universal language. Her parents had opposed the czar in Russia and were supporters of the New Deal. The bitterest neighborhood feuds were not among drug dealers, but between Trotskyites and Stalinists.
“I thought being Jewish meant you were a Socialist,” Paley said. “Everyone on my block was a Socialist or a Communist. ... People would have serious, insane arguments, and it was nice. It makes you think the rest of the world is pretty bland.”
She started writing poems early and continued to do so even as she married a movie cameraman, Jess Paley, had two children, worked part time as a typist and became involved in community affairs around Greenwich Village.
Paley began writing prose in the 1950s.
Novels seemed too long — she never wrote one — so she turned to short stories. Although many of her pieces were rejected by magazines, an editor at Doubleday learned of her work and her first collection, “The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Men and Women at Love,” was published in 1959.
“I felt some of these stories, writing about women and writing about children, I had a reluctance to write for a while because it seemed to me it was not interesting,” said Paley.
The new book, tentatively titled “Fidelity: A Book of Poems,” will be published early next year, Galassi said.
Careful attention to stories
Paley’s fiction set an easy, informal tone, but was developed out of weeks and months of careful refinement, all sentences read aloud before being committed to paper. Many stories were not so much “stories” as conversations overheard, with fitting titles such as “Listening” and “Talking.”
Like longtime neighbors, Paley’s characters become familiar faces, especially the compassionate Faith Darwin. It was typical of Paley that she did not look upon Faith as an alter ego but as someone who might have been a “good, close pal.”
At the same time, Paley was a self-described “combative pacifist” who joined the War Resisters League in the ’60s and visited Hanoi on a peace mission. She was arrested in 1978 during an anti-nuclear protest on the White House lawn and for years could be found every Saturday passing out protest leaflets on a street corner near her New York apartment.
“I happened to like the ’60s a lot. I thought great things were happening then and I was glad my children were part of that generation. As an older person in the peace movement, I learned a lot from it. I mean I learned a LOT,” Paley said.
“So, I don’t know where things went wrong, except, whatever happens in society, the society corrupts, eats up and takes over. ... But at the same time there’s always this really small little hill of hope that’s right in the middle of this. You see people from that period doing wonderful things, all the things they meant to do.”
Paley married Nichols in 1972. In the late 1990s, they formed Glad Day Books, which publishes political fiction and nonfiction.
She never let fame or politics obscure her devotion to family, her stepson said.
“A lot of well-known people are hard to access,” Duncan Nichols, of Thetford, told the Valley News of Lebanon, N.H. “She was just the opposite. She was just a very family person. I think it’s absolutely true that she would give someone the shirt off her back. She was just very, very generous that way, a people person rather than a reclusive artist type.”
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