Keeping the faith

Grace Paley was born in the Bronx of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Her first act of defiance was signing a school petition against the second world war. In the 60s and 70s there was Vietnam - she was sent to jail for civil disobedience - and feminism. And she wrote, publishing a collection of stories every decade. Now 81, she is still teaching, writing and fighting.
Grace Paley for Review
Grace Paley: find your own voice; above all, be truthful Eamonn McCabe/Guardian

When she was 17 and working six days a week at a lift-repair company, Grace Paley showed WH Auden some of her poems. She was taking a night class at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, where Auden was then teaching, and she was "crazy" about his work. They met in a nearby café, where he read through a handful of poems and then asked: "But do you really use these words, Grace?" Which words, she asked. "Well, 'subaltern', for instance." Yes, she lied, sometimes. "And 'trousers', not pants?" Oh yeah, she said, we say trousers, too. Auden was friendly enough, even encouraging, but Paley went away feeling embarrassed. She had learned her her first lesson as a writer: don't imitate (they both knew she'd been trying to write "in British"); find your own voice; above all, be truthful.

It was another 20 years before Paley was published; her first collection of short stories, The Little Disturbances of Man , appeared in 1959. In the meantime, she married, had two children, wrote 100 poems and worked on her writing voice, steering it away from Auden's England and rooting it more firmly in the Bronx where she grew up. Her poetry and prose, remarkablyconsistent through five decades of work, are tough and funny, exuberant and experimental, written to be read aloud. Above all, hers is the language of the women, men and children she grew up with - poor immigrants from the old world who were learning to get along in the new.

If she has not published as much as she might have, it is only because, she has said, "Art is too long and life is too short". There have been three collections of short stories, published at intervals of 10 years or more, three volumes of poetry, and a book of essays, articles and lectures, Just As I Thought (1998). But at the same time, there has been a lot to distract her: husbands (two), children, students, the feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s, the Vietnam and Iraq wars. For the past 50 years she has been as committed to her political life as to her writing, and describes herself as "somewhat of a combative pacifist and a cooperative anarchist".

The author Ali Smith, who cites Paley as a "definite" influence on her own short stories, believes that if she does not get the recognition she deserves outside America it is because "she is about things that do not suit a high profile: the short form, the political everyday, the small survival (which is, actually, epic), the playful potential, the unsentimental hope. Like all great, great writers, she is uncategorisable. Her stories are specially compacted, primed to resonate, disconcert, and then force you, in a way that's somehow both gentle and extraordinarily tough, to be intelligent. They don't haunt; they preoccupy."

For AS Byatt, who wrote introductions to two Virago editions of Paley's short stories: "She is one of a kind. The only writer I ever compare her with is Alice Munro, who puts her stories together in the same way, crafting them from a mass of recollected and rearranged material into a form. But they are quite different. I do not think I have ever laughed so much over the joy of the inconsequential as I do listening to Grace in her writing. She reminds me also of my mother at her best, who told terrible stories deadpan, ironing out the awful and the banal into one string of story."

Paley, now 81, lives in the village of Thetford in Vermont, a perfect piece of New England where everyone votes Democrat and recycles. The home she shares with her second husband Bob Nichols, a writer and former landscape architect, is a wooden house on a hill surrounded by silver birch forest. The living-room floor is stacked with poetry quarterlies, feminist and pacifist monthlies, and Paley's grandchildren's paintings. Nichols hammers away on a typewriter upstairs, while Paley, small and dressed in an oversized man's check shirt, makes soup in the kitchen. Earlier this year, she underwent radiation treatment for breast cancer and for some months was too weak to work; but she is now back at work, making frequent trips to New York and Washington DC, where she lectures and teaches creative writing.

At 17, Paley never thought of herself as a writer. She had been writing poems since she was nine, but never imagined that what interested her might interest anyone else. Besides, she says, it was the 30s and her mind was on the Spanish civil war and the rise of fascism. "I didn't give the future five minutes." To her parents' frustration, she dropped out of school at 15 with no real plan. "I couldn't see myself doing anything, except hanging out, reading books, talking to people. I loved my two English classes and I wouldn't miss one for anything, but I was bad at math, stupid at economics. I just wanted to be on my own. At the same time I was crazy about children, and I wanted to run with the boys."

She married at 19, in 1942. Her husband Jess was in the army, and for the first two years of their marriage they lived in army camps. She loved it; he hated it. Then he was posted overseas and for two years they saw very little of each other. After the war he trained as a film cameraman and the couple had two children, Nora and Daniel. (Nora is now a physiotherapist, and Daniel a schoolteacher.) Family life was hard work, and there was little time for writing.

Then, when she was in her early 30s, Paley had what she calls "the first of two small lucks" as a writer. She caught a bad flu, which meant that the children had to be looked after between school and dinner for several weeks, but was well enough to sit at the kitchen table and write; in those weeks she completed two stories. Then, after the children came back, a third. The second "small luck" came some months later. Writing in the introduction to her Collected Stories (1994), Paley recalls: "One dark day in our dark basement apartment, a father slumped in our fat chair, waiting to retrieve his two kids, my children's friends. Just before leaving with them, he looked at me. He said that his former wife, the mother of his children, had asked him to read my stories. I probably said, Oh you don't have to bother. But he did..." The father, an editor at Doubleday, came back and said that if she wrote seven more stories like the three he'd read, he'd publish the book.

When The Little Disturbances of Man came out in 1959, the New York Times welcomed "a newcomer possessed of the comic vision". Philip Roth went further, seeing in the collection an "understanding of loneliness, lust, selfishness and fatigue that is splendidly comic and unladylike. Grace Paley has deep feelings, a wild imagination, and a style [of] toughness and bumpiness." Paley knew the stories were good - she had taken the trouble to write them "as truthfully and beautifully as I could" - but she didn't expect them to find an audience among writers and critics so readily. The Beats were big at the time, as was Henry Miller - male writing, which didn't spare a lot of thought for the daily concerns and experiences of poor immigrant women.

As a collection, Little Disturbances is characterised by its great humour and energy. All life is here, and all life is speeded up: a couple might meet, marry and divorce in a sentence - and not, you feel, for rhetorical effect but because life moves that fast. Alternatively, a conversation might last 30 years. In "The Pale Pink Roast", a woman seduces her philandering ex-husband after meeting him in the park. When he realises that she has re-married, and that her husband is expected home any moment, he accuses her of seeking revenge. Honest to God, she says, I did it for love: "'Love?' he asked. 'Really?' He smiled. In no time at all his cheerful face appeared at the door of the spring dusk. In the street among peaceable strangers he did a handstand. Then easy and imperious, in full control, he cartwheeled east into the source of night."

But along with this sense of the abundance of human life, there is a recognition that it is these same things - love, lust, marriage, children - which trap us. In "Two Short Sad Stories from a Long and Happy Life", a mother begs her young son to go outside and play and so give her five minutes' peace, but the more she pleads, the tighter he clings. Giving in, she realises that this is what her love for him is - a kind of prison: "I closed my eyes and leaned on his dark head. But the sun in its course emerged from among the water towers of downtown office buildings and suddenly shone white and bright on me. Then through the short fat fingers of my son, interred forever, like a black-and-white-barred king in Alcatraz, my heart lit up in stripes."

Paley was born Grace Goodside in the Bronx. Her parents had emigrated to New York from Ukraine in 1905 (the family name, anglicised on arrival by immigration officials, was Gutzeit). In New York, Paley's mother, Manya, worked for a photograph retoucher, and her father, Zenya, a doctor, ran his own practice below their flat. In Russia, her parents had been committed anti-tsarists: her father had been imprisoned and sent into exile in Siberia, as had her mother. Paley's uncle, her father's brother, was killed at 17 for carrying the red banner of the working class at a demonstration (Paley recalls being told by her aunt never to carry a red flag at demonstrations). She grew up surrounded by Russian, Yiddish and American voices.

Her mother died when she was 23, having been ill with cancer for more than 10 years. In an essay called "Other Mothers", Paley recalls overhearing adults talking about her mother's illness, agreeing that Grace should not be told. "Thereafter," she writes, "I devote myself to not having received that knowledge. I see that my mother gazes sadly at me, not reproachfully, but with an anxious look, as I wander among the other mothers, leaning on their knees, writing letters, making long phone calls. Then, for several years, we are afraid of each other. I fear her death. She is afraid for my life."

The Goodsides were agnostic Jews, as were most of their neighbours. Paley remembers pitying a schoolfriend who wasn't Jewish, for being excluded from so much community and language. Later, she came to read Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian novelist, Isaac Babel, Kafka, Mordechai Richler, Carl Friedman, all of them Jewish, and realised that here were greater resonances than she found with American writers: she had been "writing in Jewish" all along. (Lispector's family, she discovered, had emigrated to Brazil from a village close to her parents' in Ukraine.)

As a teenager in the late 30s she was only distantly aware of American anti-semitism. She recalls her mother sitting at the kitchen table reading a newspaper and saying to her father: "Zenya, it's coming again." Today, she describes herself as a believer in diaspora and not nationhood - "I was never a Zionist."

She remembers her parents as tremendously brave, even heroic, though her mother was shy. They were socialists, but at the same time "wildly anti-Russian. They loved the revolution but not what followed it". Her mother was often embarrassed by what she saw as her daughter's refusal to conform: both parents were angry when she was suspended from school for signing a pledge against the second world war. "In this country, they seemed to believe, education, once struggled for, came first - then socialism."

She was a political child in a political family, but Paley says she became a committed activist around 1954, first within the anti-Vietnam war movement, and then the women's movement. There were marches and petitions and sit-ins, and in the 60s - Paley forgets which year - she spent six days in the Women's House of Detention in Greenwich, charged with civil disobedience at a military parade. (She had sat down in front of a horse.) Her cellmates, most of them prostitutes, were outraged that a five-foot-nothing housewife should be locked up for having political beliefs. But in an essay called "Six Days: Some Remembering", Paley writes that she only wished she had been allowed a pen and paper so she could write everything down.

In 1969, she went to North Vietnam as part of an American delegation invited to accompany three PoWs home. The trip was a series of shocks: the Vietnamese delegates who said: "It is not your per sonal fault, we know the great American people would not allow it if they had the power" and quoted Whitman and Emerson at her; the American PoW who told her over dinner: "Gosh Grace, to be truthful, I really liked bombing."

In 1974, she made her first trip to Russia as a delegate to the World Peace Congress. It was an emotional visit - "surrounded by the conversation of my childhood, three times a day in the dining room my bones nearly melted" - but the Russian delegates were hostile to Paley's insistence that they issue a blanket condemnation of American foreign policy. They did not have the same access to information, they explained, or freedom of political expression. But in an essay about the trip, "Conversations in Moscow", Paley wondered what the First Amendment ever did for America: "It has been pleasing to stand on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue and hand out informational pamphlets, leaflets of protest, to assemble in rage a couple of times a year with tens of thousands of others. The elected or appointed leaders of our country have often applauded our enactment of these freedoms. They were then able (with clear consciences) to undertake and sustain the awful wars we spoke and assembled against for 10 years."

Throughout the 50s and 60s, Paley was also trying to raise a family and write a second volume of short stories. Her publisher wanted a novel, and for two years she tried and failed to write one. "It was so pedestrian," she says. "I mean, it was OK, but there were so many things I couldn't figure out." She finds the idea of plot difficult. In the story, "A Conversation with My Father" (1974), the narrator argues against "plot, the absolute line between two points which I've always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life."

The author AM Homes, a former student of Paley's at Sarah Lawrence college, says, "Grace is simply not a novelist. Not everyone is, and we're crazy to value the one over the other. Do we get mad at poets for not producing novels? Like Ray Carver, her work is so finely tuned it would be impossible to push into novel form."

By the late 60s, Paley's marriage was over, although she says now she can't remember why. "My husband was really a very nice guy." When they separated she remembers saying to a friend: "'Mary, what was I so mad about?' and she said, 'Sit down Grace and let me tell you.' But even now I forget." Although it was not a factor in their break-up, he was less enthusiastic about children, and Paley has written about the (then illegal) abortion she had when her two children were small - mainly because she was exhausted, but also because children were "very low on his list of priorities. He was just beginning his career." The abortion was "a very clean and decent affair" at a doctor's office in Manhattan, and Jess went with her. The doctor was arrested within the year and went to jail. Two years later she became pregnant again: this time she wanted the child. and Jess didn't. "It was very hard; I didn't know what to do. I was kind of in despair." No doctor would perform an abortion. Then, in her second trimester, she bled for four days and finally found a doctor who was prepared to help her. In the late 60s, Paley helped organise one of the first "abortion speak-outs" in New York and has always been frank about her own experience.

In 1972, she married Robert Nichols, whom she had met through the Greenwich Peace Center. Two years later she published her second collection of stories, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute . Again, they were dense, funny, passionate - and this time, more explicitly political. Faith, the single mother Paley created in the 50s and who is often - Paley says mistakenly - taken for an alter-ego, was back, along with her two sons, Richard and Tonto. But there was more war, more disturbing news from beyond the domestic sphere. In the story "Faith in a Tree", a group of mothers and children sit talking in the park when a Vietnam war protest comes by, carrying placards showing photographs of napalmed babies. In "Samuel", one of two stories based on real events, a boy dies on the subway, falling between carriages after someone pulls the emergency chord. In "The Little Girl", the most shocking of Paley's stories, a man narrates how a friend rapes and beats a 14-year-old girl in his room; afterwards she either jumps or is thrown down an air shaft and left to die. The story is also true, and was told to Paley by the narrator, a friend she met through the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in the 50s. "There were a lot of runaways then," she says, "and sometimes he would bring these girls to me and say, 'Put some sense in her head'." It is the one story she will never read aloud: "I was driven to write it, but there are enough hard stories out there."

Not everyone welcomed the new seriousness in Paley's work: the New York Times critic saw signs of "carpentry" in the stories, particularly the shorter ones, and blamed the "change in American life between the 1950s and 1960s". The 60s had been a noisy decade, he wrote, a time for action rather than the imagination, which did not suit "socially committed artists like Mrs Paley".

But this distinction has always been a bogus one for Paley. "The domestic and the political are the same thing for her," says Smith. "The political is also domestic, part of the everyday work." This is not to say that the pull of one is not sometimes greater than the other. In the short story "Midrash on Happiness", Faith sets out the following conditions for happiness: "She meant having (or having had) (or continuing to have) everything. By everything she meant, first, the children, then a dear person to live with, preferably a man, but not necessarily." She wants close women friends, long walks and intimate talks, a political life, work, food on the table, to be in love - "the acuteness of the heart at the sudden sight of a particular person". When her friend Ruth reminds her that the world is full of "boom-boom bellicosity" and no revolution, she says: "I know all that. I do, but sometimes walking with a friend I forget the world."

Paley's feminism grew out of her own experiences as a wife and mother. To start with, there was the fearlessness she learned from her grandmother, mother and older sister. But it wasn't until she had children that she really began to live among, and write about, women. "I was pained by the peculiar life of the women my age - in their 20s and 30s," she writes in Just As I Thought , "a lot of them with kids and a lot of them alone already, objects of considerable contempt but kind of tough, ironic, becoming angry; I'd begun to educate myself without knowing it." In an untitled poem from the 80s she sends up this dichotomy between the lives of men and women:

   The women let the tide go out
   which will return
      which will return
   the sand, the salt, the fat drowned babies
   The men ran furiously
   along the banks of the estuary
         Come back you fucking sea
   right now
      right now

Paley has been criticised by some feminists for putting motherhood, what she calls "the mommy-and-daddy business", so squarely at the centre of her work and world view. Reviewing Just As I Thought in the New York Times, the critic Ellen Willis argued that "this brand of feminism - and humanism - works better as literature than politics; I don't believe that by virtue of our child-bearing capacity we have a special responsibility for children, a special talent for nurturance, a special connection with the earth or a special penchant for non-violence." Paley would counter that she writes from her own experience and is not making a universal case. She also reserves the right to change her mind, and says now that the importance society places on fatherhood is one of the great advances of our age. "Fathers are more mothering these days, which is a wonderful thing," she says. "They can enjoy their children, they are not so burdened by the responsibility." Homes says, "She is the best kind of feminist - she loves men. And that's a wonderful example of how to believe in women, to support them, and to make a wonderful, happy life with a man."

Paley published her third collection of short stories, Later the Same Day, in 1985. Faith is here again, although older and tougher, fighting battles with her father in his retirement home, and with her teenage sons, who have grown up cynical. The collection is funny, but also full of non-specific anxiety: how do you protect those you love, how do you keep the young from the more horrible truths, from "falling onto the hard floor of man-made time", how do you bear the death of friends?

The exuberance of Paley's early work is countered by a greater sense of the responsibilities of life, and of the writer. In "The Story Hearer", she writes: "I am stuck here among my own ripples and tides. Don't you wish you could rise powerfully above your time and name? I'm sure we all try, but here we are, always slipping and falling down into them, speaking their narrow language, though the subject, which is how to save the world - and quickly - is immense."

For the past 20 years much of Paley's time has been taken up with lecturing and teaching. As a teacher she says her aim is to keep her students "dumb", to encourage them to write about those things they understand the least. Homes remembers taking Paley a draft of her story "Looking for Johnny" from The Safety of Objects . "I couldn't figure out how it should end - a tale of a kidnapped boy. Grace read it, pushed it back across the table and said, 'Well obviously the kidnapper brings him back - he's not the right kid.' It was brilliant and dead on - she's not afraid to give her ideas, thoughts; she taught me to keep working on a story until I got it right."

Earlier this year Paley was too ill to work, but now her desk is covered in drafts and notes; there is a poem about her mastectomy and on the wall a note: FOR THE NIGHT COMETH WHEN NO MAN CAN WORK. There is much about getting older that depresses her, she admits: she will never know how people will grow up or how certain world events will play out. She is perhaps less optimistic about life and human nature than she once was, although she has been encouraged by the scale of protest against the war in Iraq.

When Paley was made New York State's first official author in 1986, Raymond Carver was on the selection panel. She is a great admirer of his work, but points to an important difference between them. "I sometimes think he doesn't give his characters a chance. The stories cut off too soon and you feel that if he had given them one more day things might have turned out alright." She has tried to give her characters that extra day, that last chance. "Her stories give out such a sense of formal hope, potential, openness and dialogue," says Smith. She has worked to spread the good news and to complain, loudly, about the bad.

Grace Paley Born: December 11 1922, New York.

Educated: 1938-39 Hunter College, New York,'39 New York University.

Married: 1942-1970 Jess Paley (one son, Daniel, one daughter, Nora); 1972 Robert Nicholls.

Career: 1966-88 Sarah Lawrence College; also Syracuse and Columbia universities, and City college, New York.

Some books: 1959 The Little Disturbances of Man; '74 Enormous Changes at the Last Minute; '85 Later the Same Day; '91 Long Walks and Intimate Talks; '92 New and Selected Poems; '93 Begin Again: Collected Poems; '94 The Collected Stories; '98 Just As I Thought.

Some awards: 1961 Guggenheim fellowship; '70 National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for short story writing; '80 Elected to National Academy of Arts and Letters; '89-91 First New York State author.