Little Disturbances of Woman Later the Same Day

By Patricia Blake

To residents of Greenwich Village, Grace Paley is the friendly neighborhood radical. Every sunny Saturday afternoon this year the diminutive grandmother has been on duty at the busy intersection of Sixth Avenue and Eleventh Street, buttonholing passersby on behalf of the Women's Pentagon Action. "Would you like to sign a petition against U.S. military intervention in Central America?" she asks. For the 37 years she has lived in the Village, Paley, 62, has engaged in countless curbside solicitations as well as rallies, demonstrations and sit-ins. Her causes have been as local as keeping traffic out of Washington Square Park and as global as U.S. nuclear policy.

But outside the Village, Paley has an entirely different reputation. Her first book of short stories, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), was lavishly praised by critics and by colleagues as disparate as Philip Roth, Donald Barthelme and Susan Sontag--but not for the book's political messages. In fact, the tales were devoid of exhortation. Their main concern was human --mostly female--suffering. Her second book, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), also evoked the anguish of women caught in what she called "the courts of kitchen drama." Wives were abandoned, mothers were overburdened by cherished babies, and grown children grieved for their parents fading away in institutions for the elderly.

In her third volume, Later the Same Day, the heroines have aged a few years. But the familial tragedies are much the same, and they are still leavened by the author's lively erotic imagination and her invincible ironies. Although Paley continues to skirt the political confrontations she elicits in life, her writing ministers to the walking wounded from the '60s. In "Friends," three women gather at the bedside of a dying companion. All have yet another cause for sorrow: a daughter found dead in a faraway rooming house. A boy vanished into California: "a son, a boy of fifteen, who disappears before your very eyes into a darkness or a light behind his own, from which neither hugging nor hitting can bring him."

Some of the fierce vitality of the sexual encounters in Paley's earlier stories have given way to more nostalgic couplings. In "Listening," a middle-aged woman driving south on Broadway sees a pedestrian whose "nice unimportant clothes seemed to be merely a shelter for the naked male person." She thinks, "Oh, man, in the very center of your life, still fitting your skin so nicely . . . why have you slipped out of my sentimental and carnal grasp?" Turning to a woman friend in the car, she says: "He's nice, isn't he?" The reply is vintage Paley: "I suppose so . . . but what is he, just a bourgeois on his way home."

Like her characters, Paley has recently tended to loosen some of her moorings. The lifelong New Yorker now spends six months of each year in Thetford, Vt., where her second husband, Robert Nichols, an architect and writer, has retired. The rest of the year she lives alone in a modest Greenwich Village apartment. Coiled up in an armchair in her workroom, the 5- ft. 1-in. author confides that she is not a disciplined writer. "But once I have a story, I keep revising, typing and retyping till I can't find anything wrong." Since one of Paley's gifts is an infallible ear for New York City speech--Irish, black and Jewish--it is scarcely surprising that her revisions are all made out loud as she talks to her typewriter.

Paley seems to welcome activities that intrude on her creative time. She regards her writing classes at Sarah Lawrence College and the graduate school of City College as a gift: "Teaching always puts you in contact with new historical experience--not just with people but with the nature of their lives." Her political activities continue unabated. Most recently, Paley participated in a sit-in on Wall Street and a reading of poetry and prose on Writers for Peace Day.

When she's not being an activist she "feels bad," she says. "It comes from my terrible sense about the world. When I'm doing something about it I can bear it somehow. It seems the citizenly thing to do." That activism began in the PTA, when her children Nora and Danny, now 35 and 33, were attending P.S. 41 in Greenwich Village. "Local action is female," she says. "When I think back on my political self, it was related to integrating the schools, saving the trees on the streets, trying to keep the buses out of the park."

Paley is a second-generation radical. Her Ukrainian-born parents were both Social Democrats who opposed the czarist autocracy. Her father Isaac Goodside was arrested several times for revolutionary activities while he was still in his teens; he and his wife Manya immigrated to the U.S. in 1905 and settled in the Bronx, where Grace was born in 1922. "They were a fabulous generation," she says, and some of her best stories, like "Faith in the Afternoon" and "Dreamer in a Dead Language," are celebrations of her parents. Followers of Paley's fiction know that Isaac Goodside was an "M.D., artist and storyteller" and that his wife kept house--an occupation that Ms. Goodside's feminist daughter has never scorned. When her writing is going poorly, she takes refuge in housework. "I notice that men writers mostly go out of doors," she says. "What I'll do is start sweeping." And when the work is going well? "Life keeps distracting me." Fortunately for Paley and her readers, the little disturbances of woman have a way of adding up to major work.