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Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1989 Grace Paley: Life and Stories Judith. Arcana Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Arcana, Judith., "Grace Paley: Life and Stories" (1989). Dissertations. 2633. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2633 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1989 Judith. Arcana GRACE PALEY LIFE AND STORIES by JUDITH ARCANA A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Loyola University of Chicago in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 1989 ( {c) 1989 Judith .Arcana) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work owes an unusual debt to its subject, Grace Paley, who gave many hours and days of her time, over a period of four years, to its author. Additionally, this work has been nurtured from its conception by Professor Joyce P. Wexler, whose support, editing, advice, and criticism have been invaluable. Professor Suzanne S. Gossett contributed critical readings and discussion, translation, and an ongoing analysis of the methods of the author. Professor Paul Jay assisted with thoughtful readings and criticism. Other Loyolans--faculty, students and staff--have given much assistance throughout the research and writing of this text. They include Gloria Conforti, Allen J. Frantzen, Carole Hayes, Patricia Lorimer Lundberg, Janice Mouton, Lorna Newman, Jill N. Reich, James E. Rocks, Judith Wittner, and Nancy Workman. The women of Northwestern University Library's Special Collections were of great help. Jonathan Arlook provided extraordinary support of almost every conceivable kind, from emotional sustenance through financial aid to technological instruction. Many others, friends, colleagues and relatives of Grace Paley and Judith Arcana, have also offered support, assistance and criticism ii throughout the years devoted to this project. These include interview subjects Karl Biesinger, Sybil Claiborne, Jane cooper, Victor Goodside, Bob Nichols, Danny Paley, DebQie Paley, Jess Paley, Laura Paley, Nora Paley, and Jeanne Tenenbaum; as well as Cathryn Adamsky, Daniel Arcana-Pildes, Peaches Blessington, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, Omie Daniels, Flora Faraci, Susan Koppelman, Susan Korn, Stuart Leven, Donna Lachman, Lois Nowicki, the late Nan Nowik, Stephanie Riger, and Jody Speckman. iii PREFACE We often read and write to discover what is unknown to us and apparently different from ourselves. But just as often we seek familiarity, similarity, a kind of homeground. As readers--Dorothy Parker's "constant" readers, Virginia Woolf's "common" readers--and as scholars and writers, we ask, what about me? Where in literature are reflections of my experience, my sensibilities, my world view, my politics? When I analyze and write about John Keats, or D.H. Lawrence, or Beowulf, as I have done recently, I am ranging far off, studying the history and possibilities of a distant "other" juxtaposed in contrast to myself. But when I study she who is most like me, I learn what has been--and might be-­ possible for myself.l This has always been true for readers of fiction.) 1. "There is something insidious about Historians and Biographers and the ways in which they make women of achievement seem so different from the rest of us that we are unable to think of ourselves as emulating them. They are not different--at least not in ways that make their lives and achievements something we cannot use for models." (Susan Koppelman, in rev of Between Women [Ascher, et al] The Women's Studies Review, 8.1. (Jan/Feb 1986) 10-12. iv scholars need to allow for a variety of perspectives and genres in criticism; we need to write and read different voices in our research as well as in the texts we present to our students. If critics are female, Black, Hispanic, Asian-American, working class, gay or lesbian, but write in the voices of those who are not, taking on the dominant critical voice--which remains singular despite its apparently diverse ideological bases--their own identities are lost; they are effectively excluded, just as the stories of their people, written in their true voices, have been excluded. Since 1985 I have visited with Grace Paley many times, a Boswell to her Johnson at readings, meetings, and kitchen tables. Though we drink more tea than coffee, and probably won't tour the Hebrides, we have managed to walk, talk and eat together in New York, Vermont and Illinois. Like our gentlemen predecessors, we have grown into mutual respect and affection, but we have gone beyond Boswell's memory and stenography by taping many hours of formal interviews as well. So this book is written by a woman who knows Grace Paley personally, a woman who has become her friend. Consequently, I write about her as "Grace."' After serious deliberation, I have decided that the distance defined and implied by the traditional scholarly use of the subject's last name is inappropriate here. That usage rings V false for a woman whom everyone calls Grace--including her daughter, her son and daughter-in-law, and her undergraduate students, as well as friends and colleagues. I am aware of the concern of other feminist scholars, reacting to the condescension of critics who minimized and patronized the few women authors they bothered to mention by writing and speaking of one "Emily" or another, and of "Charlotte," "Jane," and "Virginia." The subsequent choice--to write and speak of the women who are our subjects by their full or family names--is made in defense, in the spirit of reparation and homage. That posture is a useful one, especially in the academic world, but it has by no means calcified, and is not always necessary. In this book, which offers Grace Paley as a character as well as a subject, the use of her first name-­ and the first names of others as well--suits the text in both purpose and spirit. Additionally, accepting James Boswell's precedent, I do not intend to address the issue of scholarly objectivity--its elusiveness, its dubious value as an ideal; instead I offer the results of a self-conscious struggle toward an analysis and explication of Grace Paley's lifework. When she learned to drive--around the age of fifty-­ Grace Paley loved driving so much she thought she would vi become a New York City taxi driver. Probably the only reason she didn't was that her schedule couldn't accommodate another commitment. Her daily mail looks like the postal carrier's load for a whole route, her calendar like an intricate puzzle with no clues. Her schedule might prompt an observer to ask what the major political commitments and priorities are, in all that flurry of variegated action. And she'd answer, "When you say 'major things, important things'--and ask where most of my thought and energy is now--there's such a strong connection [among them all] that you really can't separate" one issue from another. And if the observer should remonstrate, "But you can't do it all, really," Grace Paley says, "Well, you ~ .... You can do a great deal of it. There's no reason why you can't think about several things and work on several things,2 "Some people~ totally interested in Central American work, and that's real good. First of all, all of our money is going there. When we pay taxes, that's where the money is going: Central American militarization .... Then in some states, like Vermont, there's ERA stuff still. And all the stuff about women's reproductive rights. That's absolutely key. There's nothing that isn't terribly 2. Throughout this text, all quoted material which is not otherwise cited has been taken from my own interviews. vii important. I mean, how can a woman think that their attack on our bodies is not a real attack? For me, my feminism is getting stronger all the time." To get a sense of how she does what she does, I asked her, one day in the fall of 1987 in her Vermont home, to tell me her work schedule for the coming week. Teaching wasn't on the list that week, and we didn't include sweeping and laundry, or cooking, grocery shopping and washing dishes, or attending meetings and visiting with friends and family. That week she had three major commitments: "The writing that I get done will be non-fiction, so to speak. I have to give a talk on Monday on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, in our local library. ,It'll be a small group of people probably, and I could have taken Edith Wharton. But I chose Freeman because I figured everybody reads Edith Wharton." "And this way they'll have to read Freeman," I say, and she says, "Yeah, if they want to. If they want to talk to me on Monday, they'll have to read Freeman. So I use my local reputation to get people to read Freeman. Okay, so I have to give that little literary talk. No big deal, not too many people." I ask her to tell me, in each case, what her purpose is, what it's for. "My purpose?" she echoes, and I think she's indignant. "They asked me." I point out that a lot of people ask her to do things.

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