Anxiety

GRACE PALEY
1985

INTRODUCTION

Grace Paley's short story "Anxiety" was originally published in her third collection of short stories, Later the Same Day, in 1985. More recently, "Anxiety" was included in a compilation of her short stories, Grace Paley: The Collected Stories, published in 1994. Paley's short stories depict the lives and experiences of men and women living in New York City. Initially Paley's work captured the experiences of Russian- and Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants and the language of the community in which she was raised. Her later work was more feminist in tone and reflected Paley's commitment to the equal rights movement. As she became more feminist, Paley focused more on depicting the conflicts and trials of ordinary women trying to survive in a world designed for men's successes. The stories in Later the Same Day begin to move away from feminism and focus more clearly on Paley's antiwar interests, her pacifism, and her concerns for the future of the world. "Anxiety" fits well into Paley's later literary tradition of protest literature. The story's protagonist is a woman who worries so much about the possible destruction of the world that she accosts people walking on the street to warn them that the danger they face is so severe that they cannot ignore it even long enough to enjoy a moment of happiness. Paley's work, then, reflects the social shift from the 1950s ideal of women supporting a man's world to the women's movement of the

1970s, and finally to the image of women as voices of caution and warning about the dangers that the world faces.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Grace Paley was born Grace Goodside on December 11, 1922, in New York City. Her father, Zenya Gutseit (later changed to Isaac Goodside), was a Russian Jew who immigrated to the United States in 1905 in the wave of Eastern European and Russian Jews who came to the United States at the turn of the century to escape the ethnic violence that plagued the Jews of that region. Paley's father attended medical school and became a doctor, while her mother, Manya (later changed to Mary), worked as a photography retoucher and managed her husband's medical practice on the first floor of the family home in the Bronx. Paley grew up in the same building that housed her father's medical office. She was part of an extended family of aunts and grandmothers, consisting of multiple generations, all under the same roof. She was also raised in the family tradition of socialists and anarchists, many of whom had died in Russia for their beliefs. Those who survived and came to the United States brought their willingness to protest. Paley was the youngest of three children, all of whom grew up speaking Russian, Yiddish, and English in a household with two cultures, the old and the new. Paley attended Hunter College (1938-39), and at age nineteen, she married Jess Paley, who was then sent overseas to fight in World War II. After he returned from the war, they had two children, Nora in 1949 and Daniel in 1951. Paley attended New York University briefly in the late 1940s but never completed a program of study. Paley also studied poetry with W. H. Auden in the early 1950s.

Paley began writing poetry and fragments of stories as a small child, but her first completed stories did not emerge until the 1950s. An initial three stories were shown to a family friend and editor, who asked Paley to write more stories, which he would later publish as her first collection of short stories, The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Women and Men at Love (1959). These first stories were considered significant enough that Paley was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961 and a National Endowment for the Arts Award in 1966. After the publication of this first slim volume of stories, Paley turned her attention to the Vietnam War. As the youngest child by fourteen years, she had grown up in the company of adults. Paley absorbed her extended family's commitment to social concerns and was arrested several times as she protested on behalf of the antiwar organizations to which she belonged, including the War Resisters' League, Resist, the Women's Pentagon Action, and the Greenwich Village Peace Center. Paley and her husband divorced in 1971. In 1972, she married poet and playwright Robert Nichols.

A second collection of Paley's short stories, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, was published in 1974. Her third collection of stories, Later the Same Day (1985), in which "Anxiety" first appeared, earned Paley the honor of being named the first State Author of New York in 1986. In addition to the three books of short stories, Paley was also writing poetry, and in 1985, her first collection of poems, Leaning Forward, was published.

Paley was honored with the Edith Wharton Award in 1983 and a National Endowment for the Arts Senior Fellowship in 1987. She was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1989, Paley retired from Sarah Lawrence College, where she had been teaching writing since 1966. Long Walks and Intimate Talks, a collection of short stories and poetry, followed in 1991. In 1993, Paley received the Rea Award for the Short Story, considered to be the highest honor awarded to short story writers. Throughout her writing career, Paley frequently published short pieces in magazines, in newspapers, and in the occasional newsletter. A collection of these short essays and columns was published as Just as I Thought in 1998. Paley died August 22, 2007, at her home in Thetford Hills, Vermont, of breast cancer.

PLOT SUMMARY

"Anxiety" begins with a woman's observance of two fathers waiting for their children to emerge from school at the end of the day. The setting is spring, and the woman who watches the two fathers mentions that her window box contains greenhouse marigolds. The woman is so anxious for spring that she has planted the first hothouse blooms of the season at her window. It is also one of the first days nice enough to open a window and watch people walking along the streets. The window box partially hides her face, as she watches "through the ferny leaves."

When the bell rings the children rush through the doors to their waiting fathers. When one of the two fathers lifts his daughter to his shoulders, the watching woman notes that the child appears to be Chinese, or at least "a little" Chinese. The father was earlier described as having curly hair, which suggests that the little girl is of mixed heritage, since Asians do not often have curly hair. Paley uses this subtle piece of information to remind her readers that New York City is a mixture of different ethnicities. The second father also lifts his child, a son, onto his shoulders, but Paley has provided only a minimal description of this father, stating that he is physically similar to the first father. His child is not described at all.

As the two fathers and children begin walking away from the school, they pass under the window of the woman who has watched them walked from the school. She observes that the father of the little girl appears to be struggling with his daughter. He is slight and perhaps too frail to carry his daughter on his shoulders. The little girl wiggles and the father's discomfort leads him to tell the child to stop her wiggling. The child responds with "Oink oink." When challenged, she repeats the two words. The father, now clearly angry, grabs the child and sets her on the ground. The movement is hard enough that the little girl rubs her ankle, which now hurts. When she asks what she has done to anger him, he yells that she is to hold his hand.

At this point, the woman ceases to watch from between the leaves and now leans out the window and interjects herself into the tableau unfolding on the street. She echoes the man's agitation as she yells at him, "Stop! Stop!" It is not clear if the woman wants the man to stop yelling at his daughter or to stop walking. Perhaps she means for both to happen. The man quickly turns around to look up at the speaker and ask who she is. The suggested meaning of his words is to ask who she is to yell at a complete stranger. In response, she finally moves the flowers that have hidden her and emerges to be clearly seen by the walkers below.

Once the father can see her, the woman invokes the tradition of tenement women, who have lived in similar buildings in generations past. These women have leaned out their windows and supervised their children below. Her memories of this tradition make her brave enough to tell the young father that the history of mothers in this building enables her to lean out the window and give him the traditional wisdom of mothers, who have always leaned out their windows to advise and chastise. The young father is a bit embarrassed to be called out by this older woman, and he jokes with his friend about the old gray-haired woman leaning out the window.

She asks him his age, and he replies that he is thirty-three. In response she tells him that he is a generation ahead of his father in his relationship with his daughter. His father's generation is a generation of fathers who worked to provide for their families and did not walk to school to pick up their children. These fathers saw a clearer division of male and female spheres. In this earlier generation, mothers cared for their children, and fathers worked to support their family. The lines that defined parenting roles were more clearly drawn.

The narrator knows that complimenting the father is one way to begin the conversation and put him at ease. She has more that she wants to say to him, so she leans even farther out the window to caution him about the danger that all humankind face. The gravity of her words is first illustrated by her need to lean farther out the window. She wants to get as close to the young father as is possible when she tells him that "madmen intend to destroy this beautifully made planet." She warns him that the risk to his child and to other children needs to be a concern for all fathers. These words reflect a growing awareness that nuclear weapons, environmental pollution, and terrorism have the potential to destroy the world. At first, the father greets the woman's warnings with mockery, but he soon admits that he is also concerned about the future.

Now that she has the father's attention, the woman asks why he became so angry with his daughter that he slammed her to the ground. Once she is able to get the father to admit that it was the words "oink oink" that angered him, the old woman elicits the confession that hearing those two words reminded him of a time when he protested against the authority establishment and used those words. Now when those same words are directed toward him, he is reminded that he is over thirty and part of the establishment that he once held in derision. This realization defuses the young father's anger, as he recalls that, while he never wanted to be an authority figure, it has happened anyway. Fatherhood has made him a responsible member of society. The woman next suggests that the father should begin the walk again by returning to the school yard and pretending that he never lost his temper with his daughter.

Both fathers begin to pretend they are horses giving their children rides home. The little girl's father forgets his frailty, as his daughter cheerfully kicks his chest and screams, "giddap giddap." The fathers and children enjoy the moment of play as they gallop toward their homes. Only the old woman is not happy. She notices that they are galloping toward a very busy intersection and worries that they will not make it safely to their homes. After she closes the window, she sits and wonders how she can make sure that they will arrive home safely, with so many large cars, created as the "bulky dreams of automakers," putting their lives at risk. If they arrive home safely she would like to be certain that the children have a healthy snack of juice, milk, or cookies. The final brief paragraph of this short story serves to define the title "Anxiety." Readers finally grasp that this woman sees risk from her windows. She is like mothers everywhere who would like to protect all children from the risks they face in what has become an increasingly dangerous world.

CHARACTERS

Ken

Ken is one of only two characters whose names are mentioned in "Anxiety." His role is a minor one. He meets his son at school and carries the child on his shoulders until they are stopped by the woman's voice. Ken and his son accompany the other father and his daughter on the journey home. He has no important position in the story.

Rosie

Rosie is the child whose father is chastised by the woman watcher. Readers only learn of the child's name near the end of the story; for most of the story, she is identified as a giggling, playful child who wiggles too much. The first image of the child is one of happiness and joy, and thus the father's irritation that she is too playful is at first a bit surprising. His subsequent anger at the little girl's chanting "oink oink," which results in the child being forcibly set on the ground, is shocking. His anger seems to be an inappropriately severe reaction to the child's behavior. When the father finally admits that he was angry at the child because she was treating him as if he "was a figure of authority," his anger is defused and child's happiness is restored. The ease with which Rosie's mood is so quickly returned to joy suggests that the child's relationship with her father is filled with love. His momentary irritation is quickly forgotten, and Rosie easily and happily climbs back on her father's back to pretend that he is a horse giving her a ride home. At heart, she is a happy child, and the father's irritation with her seems to be nothing more than a momentary bad mood.

Woman Watcher

The woman who watches from the window is the narrator of "Anxiety." The only description given of her is that her hair is gray, so readers know that she is not a young woman and not as young as the father she accosts. She is at least a generation older. Readers know what is happening only from her perspective. She is also the voice of caution, of warning, and of fear. She worries that the young father is not patient with his child. She also worries that he is not appreciative of the present and does not cherish his daughter enough, since the future is so filled with risk. At the end of the story, she worries that he cannot get his daughter home safely past the busy intersection or beyond and "across other dangerous avenues."

She is like many mothers, who never stop worrying about their children, no matter how remote the danger. At first the woman seems to be only a concerned citizen who wants to stop a father from being short-tempered with his daughter, but at the end of the story, her worry extends to concern that the father might not be attentive enough to cross a busy intersection without calamity. Worry about busy intersections would seem justified if the small children were walking home on their own, but they are not. They are accompanied by their fathers, so when the woman worries about "how to make sure" that they will arrive home safely, she seems more inclined to worry than most mothers. She may also be lonely. Instead of being down on the street, she peeks out at the people on the street below, watching through the leaves of the plants in the window box. She is a watcher who observes life rather than participates in it.

The old woman is not given a name, although it is likely that she is Faith Darwin, who appears in many of Paley's stories. As she is unnamed, however, the woman becomes representative of a tradition of women who have leaned out of their tenement windows and watched their children at play on the streets below. From their windows, mothers could yell at their children to take care of a younger sibling or to come inside for dinner. Most important, these mothers could shout warnings to their children, just as the old woman now shouts at the young father who walks on the sidewalk below.

The streets used to be safer for children. There were fewer cars and the intersections were not so dangerous. There were also no threats from "the airy scary dreams of scientists," who create technologies that lead to environmental pollution or who create nuclear weapons and turn the world into a place where war threatens. Paley uses this woman's words as a way to remind readers that the world is not a safe place and that the future may be even more dangerous than the present.

Young Father

The young father is given no name, since he represents all fathers who need to be warned about the dangerous future their children face. This young father is described as being like other fathers. He and his friend are identified in the opening scene as identical. They both have curly hair and brown mustaches. They wait together, talking easily and eating pizza as they wait for their children to emerge from the school. He is like every other father who comes to the school to walk his child home. He assumes his own identity and individual characteristics on the journey home when he becomes upset with his daughter, who wiggles too much. At that point, Paley identifies him as frail. The wiggling child creates discomfort. He is uncomfortable enough with the child's weight on his shoulders that he becomes easily angered by the child's chanting "oink oink."

In response to being accosted by the woman in the window, the young father is a bit uncomfortable and embarrassed at having been caught being short-tempered with his daughter. Although he laughs at what the woman says, Paley describes him as doing so with a "little embarrassment." However, he quickly relaxes after the woman tells him that he is ahead of the previous generation in his treatment of his daughter. She is referring to the father's willingness to pick up his child from school. The previous generation of fathers did not do this; they worked at jobs all day, and mothers picked up the children.

The father's involvement with his daughter is a positive trait. By beginning with a compliment, the woman helps to diffuse the father's embarrassment and any anger he might feel at the woman interfering with his treatment of his child. The father does indicate that he is not completely accepting of what the woman tells him. He thinks the woman is being dogmatic and indicates this feeling when he tells her: "Speech, speech." However, he is interested enough in her remarks that he continues to stand and wait for her to continue speaking to him.

The young man's attentiveness validates the woman's concerns and indicates his own awareness of the precarious nature of the future of the world. He is clearly a concerned father who worries about his daughter's future. Paley makes the young man's concern evident when he turns a "serious face" to the woman and continues listening to her speak. The father also reveals a sense of humor when the woman contrives to force an admission from him that he had used "oink oink" to address policemen during a demonstration years earlier, which is why he reacted so strongly to his daughter's use of the phrase. As soon as the young father realizes the source of his anger, he is quick to try to make amends and suggests that he be the horse and his daughter be the rider on the way home. The father's love for his child is evident in the final scene of the two of them together, as they gallop off toward their home.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

• In previous generations, mothers would have been the parents most often waiting outside the school to walk their children home. When Paley is writing, however, fathers also share their children's walk home. Research the changes in women's employment since 1965. Look for statistics that reveal the number of women who were been employed outside the home in 1965, 1975, 1985, 1995, and 2005. Prepare an oral presentation that discusses the information that you have discovered. Be prepared to ask your classmates about their own home experiences and how their mother's employment is reflected in parenting roles in their homes.
• Artists are often inspired by writers to create some of the most beautiful art imaginable. For instance, William Blake was inspired by John Milton's poetry to create illustrations of the poet's finest work. Spend some time looking through art books in the library and try to select a picture or illustration that you feel best illustrates Paley' short story. Then, in a carefully worded essay, compare the art that you have selected to the images that Paley creates in her story, noting the similarities and differences between art and prose.
• Paley mentioned in interviews that as a child she was told stories, and as an adult she became the writer of stories. What do you see as the difference between telling stories and writing stories? Research the history of the oral narrative. Look for information about when the oral narrative was replaced by the written narrative and prepare an oral report in which you discuss the history of both narratives, what you think was lost and gained by the transition from spoken stories to written stories, and what you see as the essential differences between these two narrative styles.
• One of Paley's concerns in this short story is the destruction of the planet. Research the role of the group Greenpeace and write an essay in which you analyze this group's work. What successes, if any, can attributed to their attempts to protect the planet from environmental destruction?
• The narrator refers to a tradition of women who watched over their children from the tenement windows. Research life in New York City in 1915 and 1985. How did people live during these two periods? Where did they work? What did they do when they were not working? What were families like? Create a poster in which you list the similarities and the differences that you have found between these two eras.

THEMES

Anxiety

One important theme of Paley's short story "Anxiety" is taken directly from the title. Paley's protagonist is so anxious about the future that she sits and watches the world from her window. When she sees a father in need of a warning, she leans out of her window and speaks to him from the safety of her home. Initially it appears that the woman is only concerned about the father's harsh treatment of his daughter, but it quickly becomes apparent that the woman is mostly concerned about danger. The danger faced is not tangible or even defined. It is a vague danger in the future, with risks posed by madmen who "intend to destroy" the world. The woman warns the father that the risk for his child is sufficient that it should interfere with any pleasure that the father might be finding in his walk home with his daughter. Although her warning that they should not be finding any enjoyment in their lives seems excessive, even at this point of the narrative, the woman seems to be presenting reasonable fears about the dangers presented by war and the kinds of technology that creates weapons designed to destroy millions of people.

In the final two paragraphs, however, the true extent of her anxiety is revealed as a fear of the more vague possibilities of danger. As the children and their father leave to continue their journey home, she worries about the traffic at the intersection and then the intersections beyond the one at the corner. Finally, readers see that she even worries about the snack the children will eat when they return home, and she wishes that she could see that they are eating a healthy snack. Her anxiety about the world is severe enough that she needs to see that the children are safe and healthy. Of course, she cannot see them at their home, since like the hothouse marigolds, the woman is sheltered in her own home, safe from all the risks that lie outside her window.

Parental Love

Parental love is often described as unconditional and unlimited. Although children can occasionally test their parents' patience, most parents are able to quickly recover from momentary irritation, as the father in Paley's story does. Although the father becomes angry in the story, his love for his daughter is not in doubt. Because of his parental love, he seems to share the woman's concerns about the danger that children face when men try to "destroy this beautifully made planet." He also admits that he became angry because his child's words suggested that he was a figure of authority, which is not how he wants to be seen. Parental love is also about recognizing and acknowledging parental injustice. The brief conflict between the father and his child is resolved when he lifts her onto his back to continue their ride home. Both parent and child are enveloped in love as they alternate yelling "U-up" and "giddap" on their gallop home. In the face of an uncertain future, what this father can offer his child is evidence of his love for her.

Science and Technology

The warnings in "Anxiety" reflect the narrator's concern that humankind is not paying sufficient attention to the risks posed by science and technology. For example, the woman in the window warns the father that the futures of his child and of all children are in danger due to the actions of madmen, who are putting the world at risk. The exact risk is never defined. Making the risk vague allows Paley to encompass a wide variety of threats, such as pollution from too many large automobiles, ecological damage, weapons of war, or some as-yet-unknown technology. The woman warns that the risk of future destruction is so great that it should interfere with any pleasure that the father might experience as he walks with his child. The woman does not consider that her extreme warnings are excessive. Her fears for the future are so great that they propel her to warn strangers about the risks the world faces in a future where science and technology are not better controlled.

STYLE

First-Person Narrator

In a short story or novel, the term "narrator" is used to describe the person who tells the story, and a first-person narrator tells the story from his or her limited point of view. The woman is the first-person narrator in "Anxiety," and she is also the protagonist, the central character. She tells the story and interprets it for the reader. The reader learns something about the characters in "Anxiety" and almost nothing about their personal stories. This is because the other characters are filtered through the woman's eyes. The story is limited to the first-person narrator's experiences and observations. The woman lacks the omniscient view of a third-person narrator, in which the author serves as the narrator, offering all views. In some cases, authors use multiple narrators, in which several characters tell their stories. This gives the reader the opportunity to see the characters from multiple perspectives. Since Paley uses only one narrator, readers are limited in their understanding of characters' motivations and must simply interpret their actions. For example, when the father sets his daughter down on the ground so roughly that she rubs her ankle in pain, readers know that the man is angry at the child. This characterization through action is also clearly seen in the depiction of the woman's personality. She peeks out at the people on the street below, watching through the leaves of the plants in the window box, and readers understand that she is a watcher. Paley ultimately reveals to her readers the true nature of her narrator—she is so consumed with worry about the future that she does not participate in the present. She closes the window and sits and worries.

Protest Literature

Protest literature is writing that is designed to generate action. Authors who write protest literature hope to increase social awareness in their readers and thereby bring about change. Protest literature has a long history. Jonathan Swift, Charles Dickens, and Harriet Beecher Stowe used literature as a way to protest the treatment of the disenfranchised citizens of Ireland, England, and the United States, respectively. Paley embraces this tradition and uses her stories as a vehicle to promote her social activism. "Anxiety" reflects the author's concerns about war and the use of technology, which she worries might destroy the world. She refers to the "murder of our children by these men," who present an unnamed and undefined danger. This generalization provides a generic warning about the risk that children face in the future. At the end of the story, Paley labels "these men" as scientists and automakers. Most protest literature is more specific in its warnings, but Paley leaves room for interpretation.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Social Activism in the 1980s

Paley's writing was heavily influenced by her desire to create a better world. The early 1980s was a period in which wars were being fought in Afghanistan and in the Falkland Islands. The U.S. embassy in Iran was seized by terrorists, and the U.S. embassy in Lebanon was bombed. This was also a period in which scientists were trying to create more technologically advanced weapons, although there was briefly some hope that such weapons might never need to be used. By the mid-1980s, the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States was finally resolving, and it seemed that the long-time tension and threat of war that had existed between the two superpowers since the close of World War II would finally end. Although it appeared that President Ronald Reagan of the United States and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev of the U.S.S.R. might together bring peace to the world, Reagan continued to lobby for the creation of a Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed Star Wars, which would be capable of intercepting a missile launched by the Soviet Union. Work on the Star Wars program suggested that peace might not last, as so many people hoped.

The effects of industrial pollution led to worldwide acid rain that destroyed trees and plants. In response to worries about the destruction of the environment, a protest group called Greenpeace disrupted nuclear tests planned by the U.S. government. The success of these first protests led Greenpeace to begin working to save endangered animals. The accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, the toxic waste contamination in the Niagra Falls neighborhood of Love Canal, several oil spills throughout the world, and increased activities by terrorist groups, such as the Red Brigades and militant factions of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, are all events that fed Paley's concerns about the state of the world and her worry—voiced in this short story—that children born in the 1980s would not have a world in which to grow if people did not become more involved in protecting the environment.

The Changing Role of Fathers

Although Paley never explicitly refers to a time in which her short story is set, it is reasonable to assume that the setting is the mid- to late 1970s or early 1980s, a time of tremendous social change, especially in the way that families were constructed. This is a period during which women demanded greater equality in the workplace and in the home. Women began to work outside the home in larger numbers, a trend acknowledged by the events in "Anxiety." Paley's female narrator stops a young father walking on the street below her window, tells him that he is "about a generation ahead" in his "attitude and behavior" toward his child. Since Paley's narrator does not know this father, she is basing this comment on

COMPARE & CONTRAST

• 1980s: By the beginning of the 1980s, the effects of global pollution lead to warnings that the ice at the North and South poles will soon begin to melt. By the middle of this decade a hole in the ozone layer is discovered over Antarctica.

  Today: According to the New York Times, a 2007 United Nations study on global warming confirms that a warming trend is attributable to increased carbon dioxide levels created by humans. The study warns that sea levels could increase between 7 and 23 inches by the end of the twenty-first century due to the melting of the ice caps. Global warming is often considered to pose a significant risk to human life, especially for those who live near coastal areas.

• 1980s: By the beginning of this decade, there are several terrorist groups well established in Spain (the Basque Fatherland and Liberty group), Italy (the Red Brigades), the Middle East (militant factions of the Palestinian Liberation Organization), and the United Kingdom (the Irish Republican Army). These groups claim responsibility for bombings, sniper attacks, and mass murder, all of which are designed to terrorize the inhabitants of these areas.

  Today: Terrorism remains a problem throughout the world. In addition to the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001, there are terrorist attacks in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2003; Madrid, Spain, in 2004; and London, England, in 2005. There are also multiple terrorist attacks in Thailand and Indonesia during the first years of the twenty-first century.

• 1980s: The assassination or attempted assassination of political, religious, and cultural figures dominates the news during the first half of this decade. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, Indian Prime Minister Indira Ghandi, and musician John Lennon are assassinated, while U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II are wounded during assassination attempts.

  Today: The assassination of political figures has continued into the twenty-first century. Assassinated political figures include the prime minister of Serbia in 2003, the president of the Chechen Republic in 2004, a former prime minister of Lebanon in 2005, the mayor of Moscow in 2006, and the former prime minister of India in 2007. Numerous other minor dignitaries are also assassinated.

• 1980s: An oil crisis at the end of the previous decade causes consumers to buy smaller foreign-made automobiles in the first part of the 1980s. U.S. automakers are unprepared for the increasing popularity of smaller cars and face serious economic problems with the decline in sales of large U.S.-made vehicles.

  Today: The increase in the price of oil in 2008 results in increases in food and transportation costs. The oil crisis also leads to an increased demand for hybrid cars that use less gasoline and a decreased demand for large vehicles, which in turn leads to economic problems for U.S. automakers, who have depended on the sale of large vehicles to make a profit.

• 1980s: Soviet troops invade Afghanistan, beginning an occupation of that country that will last more than eleven years. The United States provides supplies, including weapons, to help the Afghan guerrilla troops resist the Soviet troops.

  Today: After the terrorist attacks in the United States in September 2001, U.S. troops invade Afghanistan in an effort to capture or kill the group funding and directing terrorist activities against the United States.

what she observes—two fathers who wait for school to end so that they can walk their children home. She has no other information about either the fathers or their children, but clearly her perception is that fathers in the 1980s are becoming more involved in their children's lives than were fathers in previous generations. Traditionally, fathers in earlier generations were the financial providers. Most women assumed responsibility for housekeeping and child care. According to Department of Labor reports, only 17 percent of women with children worked outside the home in 1948, but by 1985, the number of working mothers had climbed to 61 percent. By the end of the 1960s, women began to enter the workforce in larger numbers. Since many of these women were now providing economically for their families, it was expected that fathers would begin to fill the role of nurturer, rather than just provider. While "Anxiety" seems to suggest that this was occurring, some sociological studies challenge this perception. As reported by Ralph LaRossa in his study "Fatherhood and Social Change," a national survey conducted in 1981, just about the time that Paley was writing this story, fathers were spending only about five minutes more per day on average with their children than was reported in a 1975 study. The total time that fathers were spending with their children in 1981 was reported to be about 2.88 hours a week. Mothers reported spending 8.54 hours per week in child care. According to this national study, mothers were spending their time in caretaking, while fathers were spending their time primarily in play with their children. According to LaRossa, grandmothers and professional child care facilities began to fill the gap in child care. LaRossa argues that the perception that fathers were more involved in child care in the early 1980s, which Paley's narrator appears to share, was a folk myth. People wanted fathers to be more involved and simply chose to believe that they were.

Multigenerational Parenting

Paley's narrator is an older woman. The young father whom she accosts from her window refers to her as "that old gray head." In cautioning the father, she is fulfilling the traditional role of the mother, or in this case, the grandmother. The woman narrator even cites the tradition of women watching over the children below as her authority for yelling at him to stop and listen to her. Paley herself grew up in a multigenerational family and knows the importance of having more than two generations under one roof. The role of the grandmother in particular is one of augmenting child care and of passing along the wisdom of age. At the beginning of the twentieth century, new immigrants brought with them a tradition of housing extended families under one roof, just as Paley's family had done. With economic success, however, more families began to live in smaller units, without grandparents in the same household. A housing shortage after World War II led to a temporary increase in multigenerational families living together, but by the beginning of the 1950s, the typical residence once again consisted of parents and children, with only two generations in the same home.

Historian Steven Ruggles and Susan Brower point out that in 1850, 70 percent of the elderly lived with their children, where they were involved in family life and presumably in child care; by 1950, the percentage of elderly living with their children had dropped to 16 percent. Increasing mobility in the latter half of the twentieth century also meant that grandparents often lived a significant distance away from their grandchildren. By the 1960s more parents were divorcing, and by the 1980s, with the divorce rate reaching 50 percent, the family unit was no longer even defined as a father and mother living with their children. Sociologist Vern L. Bengtson suggests that multigenerational relations have once again become important in providing a more stable and nurturing family life for children. In a society with many divorces and the addition of stepparenting and sometimes multiple stepparenting, grandparents provide continuity in children's lives. They also serve as role models, as an economic resource and as a way to relieve the stress on overburdened parents.

Paley's narrator tries to assume the role of grandmotherly advisor and protector when a father is short-tempered and stressed. She cautions the father that he is being too hard on his daughter, and she warns him not to waste precious time with his child by scolding her so harshly. The narrator also worries whether the children are eating healthy foods. All of these concerns are in keeping with the role of the grandmother in a multigenerational family. By the early 1980s, when Paley was writing "Anxiety," the increasing divorce rate, combined with more women entering the workforce, meant that there was a greater need for volunteer help with child care. Paley's pseudo-grandmother suggests that older generations can provide extra help to parents who need guidance and assistance with child care.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

When Paley died in August 2007, there were many tributes to her work and to the contributions that she had made to the literary world. These tributes did not suddenly appear with her death, as they so often do after a notable person has died. Instead, these tributes most often echoed what was written during her lifetime. When Paley's third collection of short stories, Later the Same Day, was published in 1985, it was reviewed in several publications. In the New York Times Book Review in April 1985, book critic Robert R. Harris states that Paley is "one of the best short-story writers … because of her uncanny ability to juxtapose life's serious and comic sides" in her work. He points out that Paley's stories remain fresh and do not become dated. Harris believes this is because Paley's work "has an honesty and guilelessness" that succeeds with readers because of her "artfully intricate prose style," which continues to surprise the reader and results in "fiction of consequence." In her 1985 review of Later the Same Day, novelist Anne Tyler writes in the New Republic that Paley is "unique, or very nearly unique, in her ability to fit large-scale political concerns both seamlessly and effectively onto very small canvases." Tyler celebrates Paley's talents with language and her ability to create characters whose activism is personal and authentic without displaying the "self-righteousness" that can be offensive to many readers.

In another 1985 review, published in the Washington Post, staff writer David Remnick moves beyond reviewing Later the Same Day and instead focuses on her body of work. Remnick claims that nearly all of Paley's forty-five published short stories are "remarkable for their clarity, their sense of place, their sympathies." Paley, suggests Remnick, is different from other short story writers, who try to be eccentric New York writers. Paley is the "genuine article, unpretentious, funny and wise." She is a writer, says Remnick, who captures the authentic experience of living in the city and of what it means to be a "New York type."

It is worth noting that not all reviewers were as enamored of Paley as Harris, Tyler, and Remnick. In her review for Commentary, Carol Iannone claims that once Paley became involved in protesting the Vietnam War, her stories began to "openly celebrate activism." Iannone does not see Paley's activism as a positive force in her writing. Instead, she asserts, after Paley became focused on antiwar activities, her stories became "skimpy throwaways, poorly thought out and obscure little fragments" that suggest that the writer has her mind focused on other things.

Iannone's analysis of Paley's work has proven to be the minority view. In her Washington Post obituary titled "Acclaimed Short-Story Writer," writer Adam Bernstein refers to Paley as "a master of the short story." In the obituary printed in the Guardian, writer Mark Krupnick states that Paley "was able to create in her fiction a world of voices and an ethnic style that was uniquely her own." Perhaps the most important measure of Paley's legacy as a short story writer is the tribute written by Pauline Watts, dean of Sarah Lawrence College, where Paley taught writing for more than twenty years. In the tribute, posted on the Web site of Sarah Lawrence College, Watts refers to Paley as an "iconoclastic writer" and notes the important role that Paley played in establishing the writing program at Sarah Lawrence. Paley, says Watts, thought that teaching writing was "a way to introduce young people to the difficult, life-long task of telling the truth." Her ability to influence young writers was one reason that her classes at Sarah Lawrence were so popular and suggests that her legacy as a writer is as much about teaching as it is about writing.

CRITICISM

Sheri Metzger Karmiol

Karmiol has a doctorate in English Renaissance literature and teaches literature and drama at the University of New Mexico. She is also a professional writer and the author of several reference texts on poetry and drama. In this essay, Karmiol discusses the depiction of the Jewish mother figure in "Anxiety."

In Grace Paley's three collections of short stories, she has frequently depicted the life of one central character, Faith Darwin, as she ages throughout the series of stories. Although Paley never mentions the name of the woman narrator in "Anxiety," it is likely that the narrator is Faith since, in a subsequent story in Later the Same Day, titled "The Story Hearer," Faith refers to an encounter with the young fathers earlier in the day. Faith is a mother, and more importantly, she is a Jewish mother, whom Paley uses as a vehicle to explore the people and places of her own life. The stereotype of the Jewish mother as a manipulating, guilt-inducing, nagging woman has been so prevalent in twentieth-century literature, film, and culture that she is a readily identifiable stock character for audiences of Jews and non-Jews alike. By the 1950s, when Paley began publishing the first of her short stories, the Jewish mother had become a caricature of motherhood. Paley uses her story "Anxiety" as a way to present a more positive depiction of motherhood that counters the negative stereotypes that the term "Jewish mother" presents. Paley does not simply refute this stereotype; she recasts her woman narrator in the image of the strong immigrant woman who first leaned out the windows fifty years earlier.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

• The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Women and Men at Love (1959) was Paley's first collection of short stories. These first stories established Paley as a regional author whose characters were the people of her native New York City.
• Paley's second collection of short stories, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, was published in 1974. This collection of stories reflects the author's activism and her concern about social issues. Several of these stories continue the story of Faith Darwin, who appeared in Paley's first collection of stories.
• Paley's Long Walks and Intimate Talks (1991) is a collection of short stories and poetry. Paley's character, Faith, is also present in the prose selections that appear in this book. The poems are more political than the stories, and both stories and poems are complemented by the paintings of artist Vera Williams.
• Just as I Thought, published in 1998, is a collection of Paley's essays, columns, and brief newsletter reflections. The pieces in this collection are autobiographical, so they provide information about Paley's life as well.
• A Cynthia Ozick Reader (1996), edited by Elaine M. Kauver, is a collection of Ozick's stories and poetry. Ozick is often compared to Paley. Like Paley, Ozick's stories focus on the lives of women, especially Jewish women.
• The Woman Who Lost Her Names: Selected Writings by American Jewish Women (1980), edited by Julia Wolf Mazow, is a collection of short stories that depict Jewish women in roles that move away from the stereotypes that portray Jewish women as either the Jewish American princess or the Jewish mother.
• The Oxford Book of American Short Stories (1992), edited by Joyce Carol Oats, is a collection of stories by some of the best-known American writers. What makes this collection interesting is that the editor has chosen to include a selection of stories that are less familiar to readers.

For Paley, a Jewish mother is a positive image of motherhood. Paley's mother figure is not the comic stereotype that became a standard of Jewish comedians, nor is she the overpowering emasculator depicted by Jewish male writers like Philip Roth, who in his novel Portnoy's Complaint creates a Jewish mother in control of every aspect of her son's behavior. In an interview with Ellen Rothman for Mass Humanities newsletter, Joyce Atler, the Samuel Lane Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University, says that Paley has given readers a very different portrait of the Jewish mother. Atler claims that for Paley, "mothering was a central artistic concern" in her work that provided "innovative, positive models of Jewish matriarchs." Atler's studies of Jewish mothers has revealed a tradition of mothers "who raised their children with moderate, flexible methods, passing on their own morals and values." The need to pass on wisdom and moral values is what motivates the actions of Paley's narrator, who feels compelled to offer advice and even some warnings to the parents who pass outside her window. When Paley's woman narrator sees a young father obviously annoyed with his daughter, she feels compelled to intervene. Her authority to do so, she tells readers, is the long tradition of Jewish mothers, women like the narrator, who leaned out of their windows, often as high up as the fifth floor, and yelled instructions and warnings to their children playing on the sidewalk or in the street outside.

Paley's woman narrator is cast in the tradition of these women whose strength and guidance helped their families survive and thrive after they arrived in the United States. In an essay written in the late 1970s called "Other Mothers," Paley begins with a familiar image from life in the city's tenement buildings: "The mother is at the open window." She is an observer of life who calls her children home and who, according to Paley, keeps her husband "from slipping" back down the rung of the ladder that he must climb if he will find success in this new country. The mother in Paley's short essay is cast in the image of that immigrant mother, the model for Paley's narrator in "Anxiety," who leans out the window and watches the world unfold beneath her. Atler claims that the stereotypes associated with the Jewish mother reflect the tension that immigrants felt when they first arrived in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. The anxieties that were created in leaving their homes for a new country, says Atler, "were often written onto the Jewish mother," whose dual personality was both "nurturant and encouraging" and "materialistic and manipulative." The Jewish mother was not given the opportunity to escape from her immigrant status, as her sons were. Instead, the Jewish mother was turned into a caricature—a mother, according to Martha Ravits, who must die before her son can become a man. In her essay "The Jewish Mother: Comedy and Controversy in American Popular Culture," Ravits traces the social, historical, and literary traditions that took Jewish women from a representation of a strong, independent immigrant woman, who capably helped her husband and children succeed, to a role of derision and an object of ridicule for Jewish comics. According to Ravits, the image of Jewish mothers evolved into a depiction of women who were unable to "observe the boundaries between proper parental concern and overprotection." The Jewish mother in film, literature, and popular culture was defined by a voice that "overflows with unsealed emotion and verbal excess." The Jewish mother loves too much and criticizes too much, and it is her son who bears the brunt of all this too-motherly love. By making the parents outside the narrator's window fathers, rather than mothers, Paley is able to counter this image of negative motherhood consuming and devouring the male progeny of Jewish mothers.

According to Ravits, there was a well-established tradition of making fun of mothers already in place before the Jewish mother became such an important part of American culture. The stereotype of the Jewish mother is a woman who questions male authority, voices too many concerns, and does so too loudly and too aggressively. Fortunately, with the passage of time, that depiction of the Jewish mother has become balanced with a more positive image, in large part because of writers such as Paley, whose works create a more positive image of Jewish mothers. Ravits claims that by the 1990s, the Jewish mother had become transformed into just another mother. Ravits credits this to a more secure place in American society for Jewish Americans, in which their ethnicity is less of a factor impacting their place in society. Ravits notes that during the cultural transition, where Jews were becoming assimilated into American life, "the stereotype of the Jewish mother was constructed to signify and mock Jews' concerns about the process of Americanization." Having the mother represent the old, pre-immigrant lifestyle allowed her children the opportunity to claim that they were more truly American than their parents. Ravits also suggests that the Jewish mother helped to diffuse anti-Semitism since both Jews and non-Jews could laugh together at the Jewish mother, who in truth was not much different from the Italian mother or the Irish mother.

For Paley, mothers, especially her own, have an important function in her work. In her essay "Other Mothers," Paley begins with the mother at the window, but she quickly moves to remembrances of mothers from her past, including her own mother. These were strong, wise women, women Paley remembers from fifty years ago. The past, though, continues to be a part of who she is: the "daughter of mothers." The connection to her mother is never far from Paley's writing. In "The Outsider Within: Women in Contemporary Jewish-American Fiction," Victoria Aarons says that it is "the figure of the mother [who] provides a deep connection to the past." It is the mother whose knowledge of the past is used to filter knowledge of the future. In Paley's world, mothers sit on the stoop outside their tenement buildings or lean out of their windows, and they talk to their neighbors and to those who pass by on the street. It is the mother, according to Aarons, who "because of her garrulity and penchant for participating actively in the lives of her neighbors," becomes a source of information for her family. This is the tradition of mother as a source of caution and information that Paley depicts in her women narrator. This is a woman who has something to say about the world she inhabits. Paley imbues her woman narrator with knowledge and a social and ecological awareness that needs to be voiced. From her window above the street, she can see farther, and as Paley's narrator makes clear, she can also see into the future clearly enough to warn those who pass below of the dangers that await them.

There is no hesitation for the woman narrator in "Anxiety." She is quick to stop the fathers, to yell, "Stop! Stop!" She knows that she is needed to offer advice and to stop this father, who seems not to recognize his daughter as one of the "lovely examples of what may well be the last generation of humankind." This narrator knows that what she has to tell the father is important. In her essay "To Aggravate the Conscience: Grace Paley's Loud Voice," Rose Kamel asserts that Paley's women narrators exhilarate readers "with a jaunty confidence that they have something vital to say" and that they have an "authority to which we cannot help but pay close attention." Certainly it is obvious that the young father in "Anxiety" is attentive to the woman's warnings, since he turns "a serious face" to the woman. Kamel also claims that Paley's narrators have "a creative sympathy for all children." This sympathy invigorates these narrators and makes them brave enough to accost strangers, especially when the goal is to protect a child. The narrator in "Anxiety" does not intrude on the father and child to be nosy or argumentative. She does so to offer wisdom and knowledge that she hopes will help protect the child. Although it appears that the narrator yells "Stop! Stop!" because she observes the father being too rough with his child, the woman yells at the father because she has a more serious warning to pass on. In a short essay titled "One Day I Made up a Story," first published in the War Resisters Calendar in 1985, Paley writes about the creation of the story "Anxiety." She explains that "I imagined a wild old woman leaning on her elbows at her open window, next door to the schoolyard, making a speech to the street." The old woman did not do this just the one time, as readers witness in reading "Anxiety"; she does it repeatedly. Paley states that after the woman closed the window, she played the piano for a while, but then "she opened the window and shouted again: Stop! Listen!" The old woman functions as a sort of town crier, warning those who come into her line of vision of the danger that lies in their future.

Paley uses her imagination and her memories of Jewish mothers from the tenements to create characters and situations that incorporate the traditions of her youth, while taking the text somewhere new and different. The street is dangerous, but so is the world. It is not just the busy traffic, with those huge cars that pollute the environment, that concerns Paley's narrator in "Anxiety." The world presents a danger that can best be viewed from the windows above, just as it always was in the past. Ravits claims that the Jewish mother, who emerged from the old stereotypes, remains "a cautionary figure" who still warns about the dangers that her listeners face. Paley's woman narrator is not concerned that she will be thought pushy or obnoxious, and she is unafraid of the Jewish mother stereotype that might silence her. Instead, this woman sees herself as fulfilling an important role. This Jewish mother is a woman of strength and endurance whose responsibility to protect the future is always taken seriously.

Source: Sheri Metzger Karmiol, Critical Essay on "Anxiety," in Short Stories for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.

Kasia Boddy

In the following interview with Boddy, Paley shares her perspectives on being a Jewish woman writer.

… [KASIA BODDY]: This morning you said that you had been looking forward to a disagreement with Cynthia Ozick (who pulled out of the conference).

[Grace Paley]: We have political disagreements. She's a very strong Zionist. That's what she is, so, I'm not, and I never was. I wish Israel well. I have very good feelings towards it. I'm very upset now about [Ariel] Sharon and the way he's doing things—it really bothers me a lot: I think it's not only bad but stupid. Those would be our basic disagreements. I make a joke of it. She probably doesn't like that.

KB: Has she written anything about recent events?

GP: Well, I haven't read it. I haven't read a lot of stuff. I read a lot but I also miss a lot. I don't live in New York and a lot of things are happening that I miss. In a way it's good for me, but in a way….

KB: Do you regret not living there?

GP: I do somewhat. I'm so used to being in on everything and so here I am not in on everything. But I'm in on enough, I guess, for my age, so it's okay! Shouldn't complain.

KB: You were talking about Isaac Babel this morning, and I recently read Antonia Pirizhkovova's memoir of Isaac Babel, At His Side, and your foreword.

GP: Oh you did?

KB: It's fascinating. And Babel's own writing is being reprinted.

GP: But the new translations are not good.

KB: Can I ask a little about what you say in the foreword to the memoir?

GP: Yes.

KB: You say of Babel that ‘He didn't like literary talk. He didn't want to discuss his own work.’

GP: That's what he said: that's what she said he said!

KB: You've given, very generously, many interviews over the years. How do you feel about literary talk, about discussing your own work?

GP: I don't mind. I'm very much against mystification of anything. If people don't really know what's going on, I want them to know.

KB: How do you demystify the writing?

GP: I would be always glad to tell a class which little piece seems to me to have happened or that I heard and which piece is totally invented. People like to know that and I don't see why I shouldn't tell them.

KB: Do you get anything out of talking about your work, or is it always something you do for their sake?

GP: Sometimes talking about your work is very helpful, at a certain point in your life. I really don't need to talk about my work anymore. But sometimes you learn something—people ask you certain questions and you say, ‘Oh, so that's what they think I'm doing’. Maybe those questions didn't help me write better but they made me think better about what I thought I was doing.

KB: In relation to that, I want to ask you about something you mentioned today, and talk about quite a lot elsewhere—the importance of generations and generational differences. I really like your poem ‘People in My Family’—how different are the people born around 1914 from those born in 1905. How much do you think who you are, and what you believe, is determined by when, and where, you were born?

GP: That poem was really describing my sister and brother who are fourteen and sixteen years older than me and who were really born into the Depression. They have a slightly anxious feeling, which I never had. I was born into the War and so I was in a state of fury and so forth and so on. I became a pacifist, which they never did.

KB: Into fury and not fear?

GP: Well, I was in America and war was here; Europe was where people were suffering. I was married to a boy. I was very young then, and he went overseas. Before he went to the Pacific—both my husbands went to the Pacific—I lived on army camps. It was very interesting.

KB: Do you think that your writing is also shaped by your generation? By that moment?

GP: It must be. How could it not be?

KB: Your writing has had a big influence on several generations of writers (and critics) since you first published The Little Disturbances of Man in 1959. In the Sixties you were read as a metafictionist, in the Seventies as a feminist, now, within discussions of multiculturalism, perhaps the emphasis again is on Jewishness. Each generation picks out a different strand.

GP: What's interesting to me is that young people are interested in it, in such an old book! That's pretty thrilling! I'm sure some of them read me differently. The Women's Movement bloomed in the late Sixties and Seventies, but the women who made it were writing before that—not just me, Tillie Olsen,Muriel Rukeyser.

KB: Now though no one wants to talk about women's voices. They want to talk (here anyway) about Jewishness, about ethnicity.

GP: I'll tell you what happened at the Princeton conference a week ago. Similar discussions were being held. Morris Dickstein gave a talk that was about Jewish writers and power, and the power of the State. His point was that Bellow and Roth and even Malamud had held back from dealing with the power of the State and instead were dealing almost entirely with local affairs. But it was only about men. Suddenly a woman at the back got up and she asked what about Jewish women writers, and she mentioned my name and she mentioned two or three other names. And then Alice Hofstrucker got up very furious, and she said what about the poets, what about Adrienne Rich, and so on. He looked so appalled that I felt like comforting him later and saying there's still time for you, you're a young man, write your next chapter and put the ladies in! That's what Abigail Adams said when her husband was writing the Declaration of Independence; she said, ‘Remember the ladies’. It is hard to hear about these guys all the time as if they are the only people writing. It doesn't bother me so much because I'm really past all that stuff, but it bothers me for young women that they're going to have to repeat the struggle.

KB: There wasn't much today about young Jewish writers, the current generation.

GP: That's absolutely right. At Princeton there were some younger writers but they were in such a state. They were the children of survivors and they were in rage that it wasn't paid enough attention to. It was quite … yet I understood how they felt.

KB: Have you noticed your own influence on young writers?

GP: I don't think about it.

KB: But do people tell you about it?

GP: Yes, people tell me that ‘I couldn't have written this or that without you….’ It's nice, but there's a danger in leaning on that stuff and let[ting] it enter you. Too much work still to do.

KB: Gish Jen is one writer who's talked about your work, and who I've read you like.

GP: Yes, I like her. She was just at Dartmouth. She's a good friend of mine.

KB: I really like her. I teach her books.

GP: You do? I must tell her. She'll be so happy. She's such a doll.

KB: About four years ago she wrote an essay about being a judge for the PEN/Faulkner award in which she complained that multiculturalism had become both a ‘pigeon-hole and an albatross’.

GP: She would say that she doesn't want to write as a Chinese woman. On the other hand, most of her experience is as a Chinese woman. Her father is Chinese, her mother is Chinese, her brothers are Chinese—they're all of course married to white Americans, including her! But still, if you asked Cynthia Ozick if she wanted to be considered as a Jewish writer she would say no; she would say I am a writer, and she would be right. I say, yes I'm Jewish so therefore I'm a Jewish writer. But writing in Jewish is a whole different scene which I tried to make clear this morning.

KB: What does Gish Jen write in?

GP: She writes a little bit in Chinese I think. She read a story that could have been in sheer dialect: that could have been her mother.

KB: Oh yes, ‘Who's Irish?’

GP: Yes. It's very funny.

KB: Very funny story. So you don't think she had a genuine complaint about the literary world?

GP: She doesn't want to be pigeon-holed; I don't want to be pigeon-holed. Everybody wants to be in the mainstream. They don't realize that when you're not in the mainstream, it's glorious; you're free. The mainstream is just a sluggish river; it's got so many people in it already. Better to be in some river, stumbling over the rocks. It's better. That's how I feel.

KB: Is there as definite a sense of the mainstream now as when you started writing?

GP: That's funny. What they're talking about is exactly what was going on then. Roth's first book and my first book were published at the same moment practically and were reviewed together in a lot of magazines, and were equally praised. Then we were told to write novels. And he wrote novels. And I tried for two years to write a novel but I failed. So. It was so terrible, so pedestrian. I can't tell you.

KB: In your foreword to the Babel memoir you speak of his ‘small production’ and say that ‘for some reason I feel this must be answered’.

GP: And then I pointed out that he really did lots of other writing, he wrote a screenplay, lots of shift work.

KB: Did you feel you wanted defend him partly because you face the same issue: that people are always urging you to write more, write longer?

GP: No, I didn't defend him for that reason. I defended him for his own reasons! One, I thought he had done great literary work and two, he had to go off for the party and visit farms and do agricultural reports and stuff like that.

KB: Although you haven't had to do that, you've also done a lot of non-literary work.

GP: Yeah.

KB: In Amy Bloom's latest book, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, she has a story (‘Rowing to Eden’) in which a character promises to help her friend get a girlfriend with ‘Grace Paley's soul in Jennifer Lopez's body’.

GP: I saw it. That was so funny. The soul of me. That was so touching.

KB: What do you think she means?

GP: I don't know. I don't know if she meant something bad or good, but I'm sort of touched by it—by my having a soul at all!

KB: Can I ask a little about your poetry?

GP: Oh yes, do!

KB: Partly about the relationship between writing poems and stories. In ‘Two Ears, Three Lucks’ in The Collected Stories you talk of suffering ‘the storyteller's pain’ that led you away from poetry. Yet you continued, you continue to write poetry.

GP: I just find myself writing poems and feeling good about it.

KB: What makes you want to write a poem rather than a story (and vice versa)?

GP: Sometimes I don't know. Sometimes I begin by writing a couple of sentences that might go one way or the other. But I think that I'm just in the mode for writing poems right now. Actually my intention when I get home is to get to work on two stories that I have in mind. I can't wait; I'm very eager to do it. I don't have enough poems for another book but I will probably by the end of next summer.

KB: You have ‘A Poem About Storytelling’ and many stories with poems in them, so in a way maybe they're not so separate after all.

GP: Well, I think that short stories are very close to poetry. If you write poetry and you write novels you're doing two different things. If you write short stories and you write poetry then you're doing things not so far apart from each other.

KB: Edgar Allan Poe said that a short story had all the beauty of a poem but some of the truth of prose.

GP: I didn't know that! That's nice!

KB: Is there less truth in poetry?

GP: No, I don't think so. What he really means is events….

KB: Facts.

GP: Yes.

KB: The word you use, again about Babel's language, is density.

GP: A short story, like a poem, is something that you almost feel you could take in your hand and lift up to the air and the light—and have it all in one hand. With a novel it's like you're scrambling around and picking this up and that up and you have all this stuff in your arms.

KB: You said of Babel's technique that he would start with longer, looser sentences and then condense and condense until he achieved the right density of language. Is that your method too?

GP: Not necessarily. Sometimes I increase and increase! It depends. But I do think that I'm a pretty good cutter of the unnecessary.

KB: So you go through lots of drafts?

GP: Oh yeah. Let me show you. [she produces a folder full of typewritten and pen-amended pages and starts leafing through them] … Here's something I can't even get back to because it's long and it's complex and I haven't [been] able to work on all this. Partly I can't because there's not enough pressure on me to do it.

KB: Do you rotate between different manuscripts?

GP: I suppose I do, but once I start really working on something I stay with it.

KB: As a definition of the short story Leonard Michaels once quoted a line from Kafka, ‘A bird went flying in search of a cage.’

GP: That's really nice. And a definition of a long story might be ‘A man went looking for a prison cell.’

KB: So at least the short story has some flight! Is ending a story like closing the door of the cage?

GP: Sometimes I like to tie things up; sometimes I like to open it up. I don't have an opinion on what's the best way to do it. I don't like writers who cut their characters off when if they'd let them live another half day it would have all been different. It's manipulative and I don't like it.

KB: Do you think your stories ever operate as Kafka-like parables or lessons? The word ‘lesson’ does come up sometimes; one character teaching another something about life.

GP: Right. The story I'll read tomorrow is ‘My Father Teaches Me to Grow Old’.

KB: I read that in a magazine a long time ago.

GP: No, no, you must have read about two pages. It's now eleven.

KB: The Portable Lower East Side, wasn't it?

GP: Yeah, right. That's where it came from. I had it lying there until what? a half year ago. Now I finished it. I changed a lot of it, not an enormous amount, but I did a lot of cutting.

KB: I liked it a lot the old way!

GP: Well, I changed the title and added another nine pages.

KB: I look forward to hearing it. Other stories seem more arguments than lessons.

GP: Right. I do a lot of that, a lot of arguing. I write against things sometimes. Not in opposition so much, but leaning on the facts.

KB: Is writing in arguments a way of writing in Jewish?

GP: Very often, very often.

Source: Kasia Boddy, "An Interview with Grace Paley, 26 October 2001," in European Journal of American Culture, Vol. 21, No. 1, January 2002, pp. 26-33.

Vivian Gornick

In the following review, Gornick expresses admiration for Paley's voice in her stories, noting that this voice has become an important influence on the contemporary American short story.

I remember the first time I laid eyes on a Paley sentence. The year was 1960, the place a Berkeley bookstore, and I a depressed graduate student, leafing restlessly. I picked up a book of stories by a writer I'd never heard of and read: "I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rose. I wasn't no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh. In time to come, Lillie, don't be surprised—change is a fact of God. From this no one is excused. Only a person like your mama stands on one foot, she don't notice how big her behind is getting and sings in the canary's ear for thirty years." The next time I looked up it was dark outside, the store was closing, and I had completed four stories, among them the incomparable "An Interest in Life" and "The Pale Pink Roast." I saw that the restlessness in me had abated. I felt warm and solid. More than warm: safe. I was feeling safe. Glad to be alive again.

There have been three story collections in 35 years. They have made Paley internationally famous. All over the world, in languages you never heard of, she is read as a master storyteller in the great tradition: people love life more because of her writing. In her own country Paley is beloved as well, but it's complicated. Familiarity is a corrective. Limitations are noted as well as virtues. The euphoria is harder-earned. For many American readers, the third collection is weaker by far than the first. Scope, vision and delivery in a Paley story seem never to vary or to advance; the wisdom does not increase; the cheerful irony grows wearisome, begins to seem folksy. Oh Grace! the critically-minded reader berates a page of Paley prose, as though it were a relative. You've done this before. And besides, this, what you have written here, is not a story at all, this is a mere fragment, a little song and dance you have performed times without number.

Then suddenly, right there, in the middle of this same page refusing to get on with it, is a Paley sentence that arrests the eye and amazes the heart. The impatient reader quiets down, becomes calm, even wordless. She stares into the sentence. She feels its power. Everything Paley knows went into the making of that sentence. The way the sentence was made is what she knows: just as the right image is what the poet knows. The reader is reminded then of why—even though the stories don't "develop" and the collections don't get stronger—Paley goes on being read in languages you never heard of.

No matter how old Paley characters get they remain susceptible to the promise that someone or something is about to round the corner and make them feel again the crazy, wild, sexy excitement of life. Ordinary time in a Paley story passes like a dream, embracing the vividness of remembered feeling. Age, loss of appetite, growing children, economic despair, all mount up: "normalcy" surrounds the never-forgotten man, moment, Sunday morning when ah! one felt intensely.

Strictly speaking, women and men in Paley stories do not fall in love with each other, they fall in love with the desire to feel alive. They are, for each other, projections and provocations. Sooner or later, of course (mostly sooner), from such alliances human difficulty is bound to emerge, and when it does (more often than not), the sensation of love evaporates. The response to the evaporation is what interests Paley. She sees that people are either made melancholy by loss of love, or agitated by it. When agitated they generally take a hike, when melancholy they seem to get paralyzed. Historically speaking, it is the man who becomes agitated and the woman who becomes melancholy. In short, although each is trapped in behavior neither can resist and both will regret, men fly the coop and women stand bolted to the kitchen floor.

This sense of things is Paley's wisdom. The instrumental nature of sexual relations is mother's milk to the Paley narrator. She knows it so well it puts her beyond sentiment or anger, sends her into a Zen trance. From that trance has come writer's gold: the single insight made penetrating in those extraordinary sentences. Sentences brimming with the consequence of desire once tasted, now lost, and endlessly paid for.

Two examples will do: Faith Darwin—of "Faith in the Afternoon"—is swimming in misery over the defection of her husband Ricardo. When her mother tells her that Anita Franklin, a high-school classmate, has been left by her husband, Faith loses it:

…At this very moment, the thumb of Ricardo's hovering shadow jabbed her in her left eye, revealing for all the world the shallowness of her water table. Rice could have been planted at that instant on the terraces of her flesh and sprouted in strength and beauty in the floods that overwhelmed her from that moment through all the afternoon. For herself and Anita Franklin, Faith bowed her head and wept.

Now, the obverse. In "Wants," the Paley narrator runs into her ex-husband and has an exchange with him that reminds her

He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber's snake, could work its ways through the ear down the throat, halfway to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment.

These sentences are born of a concentration in the writer that runs so deep, is turned so far inward, it achieves the lucidity of the poet. The material is transformed in the sound of the sentence: the sound of the sentence becomes the material; the material is at one with the voice that is speaking. What Paley knows—that women and men remain longing, passive creatures most of their lives, always acted upon, rarely acting—is now inextricable from the way her sentences "talk" to us. She is famous for coming down against the fiction of plot and character because "everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life," but her women and her men, so far from having an open destiny, seem hopelessly mired in their unknowing middle-aged selves. It is the narrating Paley voice that is the open destiny. That voice is an unblinking stare, it is modern art, it fills the canvas. Its sentences are the equivalent of color in a Rothko painting. In Rothko, color is the painting, in Paley, voice is the story.

Like that of her friend Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley's voice has become an influential sound in contemporary American literature because it reminds us that although the story can no longer be told as it once was, it still needs to go on being told. The idiosyncratic intelligence hanging out in space is now the story: and indeed it is story enough. I felt safe in its presence in a Berkeley bookstore thirty years ago, it makes me feel safe today. As long as this voice is coming off the page I need not fear the loss of the narrative impulse. I need not, as Frank O'Hara says, regret life.

Source: Vivian Gornick, Review of The Collected Stories by Grace Paley, in Women's Review of Books, Vol. 11, No. 10/11, July 1994, pp. 29-30.

Wendy Smith

In the following essay, Smith discusses the political and social activism of Paley's short story characters.

Grace Paley has been a respected name in American letters for years. Her new book of short stories, Later the Same Day, confirms her as an utterly original American writer whose work combines personal, political and philosophical themes in a style quite unlike anyone else's.

Paley's characters, women and men who have committed themselves to trying to alleviate some of the world's myriad woes, usually appear in print as activists at demonstrations, marching with upraised fists. She has given them children, friends, lovers, aging parents, financial worries, shopping lists—in short, a private life to go with their public activities. Paley's work is political without being didactic, personal without being isolated from the real world.

This striking individuality accounts for the profound impact of Paley's writing, despite what is to her admirers a distressingly small body of work. Her first book, The Little Disturbances of Man, appeared in 1959; readers had to wait 15 years for the next one, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, and just over a decade for Later the Same Day. "I do a lot of other things as well," explains the author. "I began to teach in the mid-'60s, and at the same time there was the Vietnam War, which really took up a lot of my time, especially since I had a boy growing towards draft age. And I'm just very distractable. My father used to say, ‘You'll never be a writer, because you don't have any sitzfleisch,’ which means sitting-down meat."

Her father's comment is hard to believe at the moment, as Paley sits tranquilly in a wooden rocking chair in the sunny living room of her Greenwich Village apartment. A small, plump woman in her early 60s, with short, white hair framing a round face, she resembles everyone's image of the ideal grandmother (so long as that image includes slacks, untucked shirttails and sneakers). As she does every Friday, she is simmering soup on the stove in her large, comfortable kitchen; she regrets that it's not ready yet, as she thinks it would be good for her interviewer's cold. She has to content herself with offering orange juice, vitamin C and antihistamines. Many of Paley's stories express her deep love of children; meeting her, one realizes almost immediately that her nurturing instincts extend beyond her own family to include friends and even a brand-new acquaintance. It's this pleasure in caring for others that makes her activism seem so undogmatic and natural, a logical extension of the kind of work women have always done. It's more complex than that, of course—lifelong political commitments like Paley's don't arise out of anything so simple as a strong maternal instinct—but it helps to explain the matter-of-fact way in which the author and her characters approach political activity as the only possible response to the world's perilous state.

The direction of Paley's work is guided by similarly concrete considerations. One of the reasons she switched from poetry, her first love, to short stories was that she couldn't satisfactorily connect her verse with real life. "I'd been writing poetry until about 1956," she remembers, "and then I just sort of made up my mind that I had to write stories. I loved the whole tradition of poetry, but I couldn't figure out a way to use my own Bronx English tongue in poems. I can now, better, but those early poems were all very literary; they picked up after whatever poet I was reading. They used what I think of as only one ear: you have two ears, one is for the sound of literature and the other is for your neighborhood, for your mother and father's house."

Her parents had a strong influence on Paley, imbuing her with a sense of radical tradition. "I'm always interested in generational things," she says. "I'm interested in history, I'm interested in change, I'm interested in the future; so therefore I'm interested in the past. As the youngest child by a great deal, I grew up among many adults talking about their lives. My parents were Russian immigrants. They'd been exiled to Siberia by the Czar when they were about 20, but when he had a son, he pardoned everyone under the age of 21, so they got out and came here right away. They didn't stay radical; they began to live the life of the immigrant—extremely patriotic, very hardworking—but they talked a lot about that period of their lives; they really made me feel it and see it, so there is that tradition. All of them were like that; my father's brothers and sister all belonged to different leftist political parties. My grandmother used to describe how they fought every night at the supper table and how hard it was on her!"

As Paley grew older, there were family tensions. "My parents didn't like the direction I was going politically," she recalls. "Although my father, who mistrusted a lot of my politics, came to agree with me about the Vietnam War; he was bitterly opposed to it." Her difficulties with her mother were more personal. "One of the stories in the new book, ‘Lavinia,’ was told to me by an old black woman, but it's also in a way my story," she says. "My mother, who couldn't do what she wanted because she had to help my father all the time, had great hopes for me. She was just disgusted, because all I wanted to do at a certain point was marry and have kids. I looked like a bust to my family, just like the girl Lavinia who I'm convinced will turn out very well.

"There's no question," she continues, "that children are distracting and that for some of the things women want to do, their sense is right: they shouldn't have children. And they shouldn't feel left out, because the children of the world are their children too. I just feel lucky that I didn't grow up in a generation where it was stylish not to. I only had two—I wish I'd had more."

The experience of her own children confirmed Paley's belief that each generation is shaped by the specific historical events of its time. "I often think of those kids in the Brinks case," she says, referring to the surviving fragments of the SDS, who were involved in the murder of a bank guard during an attempted robbery in the early 1980s, after they had spent years underground. "If they had been born four years later, five years earlier…. It really was that particular moment: they were called. In one of the new stories ["Friends"], I talk about that whole beloved generation of our children who were really wrecked. I mean, I lived through the Second World War, and I only knew one person in my generation who died. My children, who are in their early 30s, I can't tell you the number of people they know who have died or gone mad. They're a wonderful generation, though: thoughtful, idealistic, self-giving and honorable. They really gave.

"The idea that mothers and fathers raise their kids is ridiculous," Paley thinks. "You do a little bit—if you're rich, you raise a rich kid, okay—but the outside world is always there, waiting to declare war, to sell drugs, to invade another country, to raise the rents so you can't afford to live someplace—to really color your life. One of the nice things that happens when you have kids," Paley goes on, "is that you really get involved in the neighborhood institutions. If you don't become a local communitarian worker then, I don't know when you do. For instance, when my kids were very little, the city was trying to push a road through Washington Square Park to serve the real estate interests. We fought that and we won; in fact, having won, my friends and I had a kind of optimism for the next 20 years that we might win something else by luck." She laughs, as amused by her chronic optimism as she is convinced of its necessity. "It took a lot of worry, about the kids and buses going through the park at a terrific rate, to bring us together. You can call it politics or not; it becomes a common concern, and it can't be yours alone any more."

Paley believes such common concerns will shape future political activism. "One of the things that really runs through all the stories, because they're about groups of women, is the sense that what we need now is to bond; we need to say ‘we’ every now and then instead of ‘I’ every five minutes," she comments. "We've gone through this period of individualism and have sung that song, but it may not be the important song to sing in the times ahead. The Greenham women [antinuclear demonstrators who have set up a permanent camp outside the principal British missile base] are very powerful and interesting. When I went there the first time, I saw six women sitting on wet bales of hay wearing plastic raincoats and looking miserable. It was late November, and they said that on December 12 they were having this giant demonstration. I thought, ‘Oh these poor women. Do they really believe this?’ Well, three weeks later, on December 12, they had 30,000 women there. You really have to keep at it," she concludes. "It's vast; it's so huge you can hardly think about it. The power against us is so great and so foolish."

Yet Paley has never despaired—she notes in the story "Ruthy and Edie" that her characters are "ideologically, spiritually and on puritanical principle" against that particular emotion. "People accomplish things," she asserts. "You can't give up. And you can't retreat into personal, personal, personal life, because personal, personal, personal life is hard: to live in it without any common feelings for others around you is very disheartening, I would think. Some people just fool themselves, decide they have to make a lot of money and then go out and do it, but I can't feel like that." Her voice is low and passionate. "I think these are very rough times. I'm really sorry for people growing up right now, because they have some cockeyed idea that they can get by with their eyes closed; the cane they're tapping is money, and that won't take them in the right direction."

Despite the enormous amount of time and energy political matters absorb in Paley's life, they remain in the background of her fiction. "I feel I haven't written about certain things yet that I probably will at some point," she says. "I've written about the personal lives of these people; I haven't really seen them in political action, and I don't know if I need to especially, for what I'm trying to do. There has to be a way of writing about it that's right and interesting, but I haven't figured it out. I've mainly been interested in this personal political life. But I refer peripherally to things: in ‘Living’ in Enormous Changes, where [the protagonist] is bleeding to death, she remembers praying for peace on Eighth Street with her friend; in ‘Zagrowsky Tells’ in Later the Same Day, he's furious because they picketed his drugstore. That's the way a lot of politics gets in, as part of ordinary people's lives, and that's really the way I want to show it, it seems to me now. What I want is for these political people to really be seen."

The people who aren't seen much in Later the Same Day are men: Jack, the live-in lover of Faith (Paley's alter ego among her work's recurring characters), is a fairly well developed presence, but the book's focus is strongly female. "It wasn't that I didn't want to talk about men," Paley explains, "but there is so much female life that has so little to do with men and is so not-talked-about. Even though Faith tells Susan [in "Friends"], 'You still have him-itis, the dread disease of females, and they all have a little bit of that in them; much of their lives really does not, especially as they get older. I haven't even begun to write about really older women; I've only gotten them into their late 40s and early 50s."

Is Paley bringing her characters along to her own current stage of life? "I'm very pressed right now for time to write; I just feel peevish about it," she says. "But I've always felt that all these things have strong pulls: the politics takes from the writing, the children take from the politics, and the writing took from the children, you know. Someone once said, 'How did you manage to do all this with the kids around? and I made a joke; I said, ‘Neglect!’ But the truth is, all those things pull from each other, and it makes for a very interesting life. So I really have no complaints at all."

Source: Wendy Smith, "Publishers Weekly Interviews Grace Paley," in Publishers Weekly, April 5, 1985, pp. 71-72.

SOURCES

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Bengtson, Vern L., "Beyond the Nuclear Family: The Increasing Importance of Multigenerational Bonds," in the Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 63, February 2001, pp. 1-16.

Bernstein, Adam, "Grace Paley: Acclaimed Short-Story Writer," in the Washington Post, August 24, 2007, p. B7.

Cohany, Sharon R., and Emy Sok, "Trends in Labor Force Participation of Married Mothers of Infants," Monthly Labor Review, February 2007, Vol. 130, No. 2, pp. 9-16.

Courtenay-Thompson, Fiona, and Kate Phelps, eds., The 20th Century Year by Year, Barnes & Noble, 1998, pp. 268-89.

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Harris, Robert R., "Pacifists with Their Dukes Up," in the New York Times Book Review, April 14, 1985, p. 7.

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Paley, Grace, "Anxiety," in Later the Same Day, Penguin, 1986, pp. 99-103.

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FURTHER READING

Antler, Joyce, You Never Call! You Never Write! A History of the Jewish Mother, Oxford University Press, 2007.

This book uses humor and scholarship to dispel common stereotypes. Antler presents a study of the history of Jewish mothers, of women, and of Jewish life, and paints a picture of the culture that was so important to Paley's writing.

Arcana, Judith, Grace Paley's Life Stories: A Literary Biography, University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Arcana uses conversations with Paley and with her family and friends as the basis for a biographical study that links Paley's life with her writings.

Bach, Gerhard, and Blaine H. Hall, eds., Conversations with Grace Paley, University Press of Mississippi, 1997.

This text presents a collection of the many interviews that Paley gave during her long career, beginning in 1978 and continuing through 1995.

Cangro, Jacquelin, ed., The Subway Chronicles: Scenes from Life in New York, Plume, 2006.

This book is a collection of twenty-seven essays and humorous stories about life under the streets of New York. Paley based her stories on the people she observed in New York, and this collection also attempts to reveal what life is like in the Big Apple.

Coltrane, Scott, Family Man: Fatherhood, Housework, and Gender Equity, Oxford University Press, 1997.

This book presents an in-depth study of the role of the male in the family, as father and husband, and considers how parenting practices and the division of labor are divided in families.

Cosby, Bill, Fatherhood, Doubleday, 1986.

Bill Cosby's television show The Cosby Show provided an example of involved fathering that led viewers to think that most fathers were taking an active role in parenting during the 1980s. This book is a humorous and semi-autobiographical account of Cosby's experiences as a father and includes common advice about parenting.

Dans, Peter E., and Suzanne Wasserman, Life on the Lower East Side: Photographs by Rebecca Lepkoff, 1937-1950, Princeton Architectural Press, 2006.

This book is a collection of photographs that depicts the changing street and community scene in New York during the period in which Paley was growing up.

Lopate, Phillip, ed., Writing New York: A Literary Anthology, Library of America, 1998.

This book is an anthology of stories, letters, poems, essays, memoirs, and diaries that celebrate living in New York City.

Lucke, Margaret, Schaum's Quick Guide to Writing Great Short Stories, McGraw-Hill, 1998.

This text provides an easy-to-follow guide for writing stories. There are many tips for where to find story ideas, how to develop a plot, and how to create memorable characters.

Newhouse, Alana, ed. A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of the Forward, W.W. Norton, 2007.

The Forward was a daily Yiddish newspaper with a circulation in 1920 that was greater than that of the New York Times. This book provides a visual examination of the world in which Paley grew up, the area where Jewish immigrants settled when they arrived in the United States early in the twentieth century.