Though the audio has a few technical glitches and rough patches given the age of the recording, Grace Paley’s story within a story, which she performs herself on stage in 1994 in Toronto (a story she calls “Oliver’s Story,” but which was published under the title “The Story Hearer,” as part her 1985 collection, Later the Same Day), has many of the hallmarks that made Paley one of the English-language’s most original and intelligent short story writers. Starting around a dining room table conversation as a married couple compare their time off before the “hard time to come” (and in an nearly perfect opening paragraph), Paley’s narrator dives into the retelling of her day, moving from the humour of her domestic duties to her roundabout quest to buy greens while referencing Artaud and Surrealist French Theatre with the neighbourhood grocer. This charming and at times oblique story seems to cry out for multiple listenings as, with many of Paley’s stories, new images, new words, new ideas and new comic lines reveal themselves each time.
Works by Grace Paley
The Little Disturbances of Man
Other Related Books or Materials
Grace Paley, the Saint of Seeing by George Saunders (link opens a New Yorker article)
Grace Paley’s Crowded World (link opens article in The Nation)
The Value of Not Understanding Everything: Grace Paley’s Advice to Aspiring Writers (link opens Brain Pickings article)
About the Host
Novelist Randy Boyagoda is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and principal of St. Michael’s College, where he holds the Basilian Chair in Christianity, Arts, and Letters. He is the author of three novels: Original Prin, Beggar's Feast, and Governor of the Northern Province. His fiction has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize (2006) and IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize (2012), and named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Selection (2012 and 2019) and Globe and Mail Best Book (2018). He contributes essays, reviews, and opinions to publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, First Things, Commonweal, Harper’s, Financial Times (UK), Guardian, New Statesman, Globe and Mail, and National Post, in addition to appearing frequently on CBC Radio. He served as President of PEN Canada from 2015-2017.
Music is by Yuka
From the Archives
Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA is the first series associated with the Toronto Public Library’s multi-year digital initiative, From the Archives, which presents curated and digitized audio, video and other content from some of Canada’s biggest cultural institutions and organizations.
Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.
Writers Off the Page: Episode 12
Grace Paley Saves the World
OPENING MUSIC SEGMENT (2-3 seconds)
RANDY: Welcome to Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA produced by the Toronto Public Library. I'm Randy Boyagoda. In this episode, American short story writer Grace Paley reads a short story that teases time, place, and the Old Testament, among other things.
TEASER: Don't you wish you could rise powerfully above your time and name? I'm sure we all try, but here we are, always slipping and falling down into them, speaking their narrow language. But the subject, which is how to save the world and quickly, is immense. "Goodbye, Treadwell," I said, "sadly, I've got to get some greens." The owner of our grocery was hosing down the vegetables. He made the lettuce look fresher than it was. Little drops of water stood on the broccoli heads among the green beady buds and were just the same size. "Orlando," I said. "Jack was walking the dog last week at 2:00 AM and I was out at 7:00 AM and you were here both times." "It's true. I was." "Orlando, how can you do that? How can you get to work? How can you live? How can you see your kids and your wife?" "I can't," he said. "Maybe once a week." "Are you alright?" "Yes." He put his hose... down his hose and took my hand in his. "You see," he said, "this is wonderful work. This is food. I love all work that has to do with food. I'm lucky." He dropped my hand and patted a red cabbage. "Okay," said Jack, "if you and Orlando are such pals, why aren't all these strawberries ripe?"
RANDY: In a 1992 “Art of Fiction Interview” with the Paris Review, Grace Paley took a casual shot at the hyper-masculine Great American Novel sweepstakes. As the interviewers tell us, Paley observes that she could do more in a short story than some of her long-winded colleagues could do in their novels. The observation immediately called to mind for me something said by one of the most brilliantly long-winded of long-winded American writers, William Faulkner, who thought the poem was the supreme literary form because it said the most in the least amount of words, with the short story coming in second, and the novel coming in third. Paley’s preferred form was the short story. She didn’t write much across the decades of her career, and she wasn’t particularly worried about how frequently she published. In fact, her editor, and also her friend and neighbour the fellow writer John Barthelme, would occasionally raid her Manhattan apartment, on West Eleventh Street, looking for stories stowed away in desk drawers and the like. Paley moved at a different pace than most, both in terms of how modestly, even indifferently she seemed to approach her public life as a writer, and also, even more wondrously, within the stories she wrote. You’ll discover as much in a moment, when you hear her share a story told in the first-person by an unnamed, exceedingly well-read and introspective housewife. In introducing it, Paley calls the story “slippery”, and that slipperiness has to do with the novel’s recurring, mysterious and mystifying question — “What did you do with your year off?” the narrator is asked, repeatedly, without really bothering to answer or explain the situation behind that year off, never mind from what. The slipperiness also has to do with its mordant, unsettling humour, in describing the kinds of thoughts and talks you have while grocery shopping. A lot of the story’s energy gathers around the word “comestible,” a top-shelf term for everyday stuff, and the narrator is bemused by her decision to use it and reflectively riffs, accordingly. But it’s more than just a single word, of course, that makes this story so slippery to hear and make sense of: wait, for instance, for the sweeping pronouncements the narrator makes about men and women, by way of a casual Biblical exegesis of the relationship between Abraham and Sarah thanks to the copy of the Old Testament the narrator keeps under her bed for late night perusals. Relatedly, follow the thinking and feeling that takes us from meditations on crying, on soup, on underwear, on ironing underwear, on abandonment. If you don’t know where things are going, you’re not alone. Paley herself explained in that same Paris Review interview I mentioned earlier that she only had a sense of how a story was going to end around its halfway point. Otherwise the action moves through a quietly exhilarated attentiveness to words and voices, what she called “the most powerful sounds” to her as sources of inspiration for her storytelling. All of this, as in this story you’re about to hear and many others, was of a piece with Paley’s brilliant capacity “to tease the time, the place, us.” Enjoy this taste of Grace Paley’s inimitable literary comestibles.
__
Grace Paley (GP): I am trying to curb my cultivated individualism, which seemed for years so sweet. It was my own song in my own world, and of course, it may not be useful in the hard time to come. So, when Jack said at dinner, "What did you do today with your year off?" I decided to make an immediate public accounting of the day, not to water my brains with time spent in order to grow smart private thoughts. I said, "Shall we begin at the beginning?" "Yes," he said, "I've always loved beginnings." "Men do," I replied.
[laughter]
GP: No one knows if they will ever get over this. Hundreds of thousands of words have been written, some freelance and some commissioned, still no one knows. What Cary said, "I also like middles." Oh yes, I know. I questioned him, "Is this due to age or the recent proliferation of newspaper articles?" "I don't know," he said. "I often wonder. But it seems to me that my father, who was a decent man, your typical nine-to-fiver, it seems to me he settled into a great appreciation of the middle, just about the time my mother said, 'Well, Willy, it's enough, goodbye.'"
[laughter]
GP: "'Keep the children warm and let him, me, finish high school at least.' Then she kissed him, kissed us kids, she said, 'I'll call you next week,' but never did speak to any of us again. Where can she be?" Now I've heard that story maybe 30 times and I still can't bear it. In fact, whenever I've made some strong adversarial point in public, Jack tells it to grieve me. Sometimes I begin to cry. Sometimes I just make soup immediately.
[laughter]
GP: Once I thought, "Oh, I'll iron his underwear."
[laughter]
GP: I've heard of that being done, but I couldn't find the cord. I haven't needed to iron in years because of famous American science which gives us wash and ware and one test tube and nerve gas in the other. Its right test tube doesn't know what its left test tube is doing. "Oh yes, it does," says Jack. Therefore, I want to go along with the story, or perhaps begin it again. Jack said, "What did you do today with your year off?" I said, "My dear, in the late morning, I left our apartment. The Times was folded on the doormat of 1A. I could see that it was black with earthquake war and private murder. Clearly, death had been successful everywhere, but not, I saw, when I stepped out the front door on our own block."
GP: "Here it was spring time, partly because of the time of year, and partly because we have a self-involved block-centered street association, which has lined us with sycamores and enhanced us with a mountain ash, two ginkgos, and here and there, because we're part of the whole, Ailanthus, city saver." I said to myself, "What a day. I think I'll run down to the store and pick up some comestibles." [chuckle] I actually thought that.
[laughter]
GP: Had I simply gone to the store without thinking the word, comestible would never have occurred to me.
[laughter]
GP: I would have imagined hungry, supper, nighttime, Jack, greens, cheese, store, walk, street. But I do like this language, wheat and chaff with this widening pool of foreign genes. And since I never have had any occasion to say comestible, it was pleasurable to think it.
[laughter]
GP: At the grocer's, I met an old friend who had continued his life as it had begun in the avant garde, but not selfishly. He had also organized guerrilla theater demonstrations and never spoken ill of the people. Most artists do, because they have very small audiences and they're angry at those audiences for not enlarging themselves.
[laughter]
GP: "But how can they do that?", I've often asked. "They have word-of-mouth, don't they?" Most artists previously will reply. Well, first, my friend and I talked of the lettuce boycott. It was a very old boycott. I told my friend whose name was Jim, all about the silk stocking boycott, which coincided with the Japanese devastation of Manchuria and the disappearance of the sixth avenue elevated into Japanese factory furnaces to be returned a few years later, sometimes to the very self neighbourhood, a shrapnel stuck in the bodies of some young New Yorkers of my generation. "Did that lead to Pearl Harbor?", he asked respectfully. He was aware that I had witnessing information of events that had occurred when he was in grade school. That respect gave me all the advantage I needed to be aggressive and critical. I said, "Jim, I've been wanting to tell you for years that I do not believe in the effectiveness of the way you had the Vietnamese screaming at those old demonstrations and I don't think the meaning of our struggle has anything to do with all that racket."
GP: "You don't understand Artaud," he said. "I believe that the theatre is the handmaiden of the revolution". "The valet, you mean?" "You ought to know more about Artaud", he said. "You're right, I should, but I've been awfully busy. [chuckle] Also, I may have once known a great deal about him. In the last few years, all the characters of literature run together in my head, sometimes King Ubu appears right next to Mr. Sparsit or Mrs. At this point, the butcher said, "What will you have, young lady?" I refuse to tell him. [chuckle] Jack, to whom, if you remember, I was telling this day-long story." "My God no, you didn't do that again." "I did", I said, "It's an insult. You do not say to a woman of my age who looks my age, "What will you have, young lady?" I did not answer him. If you say that to someone like me, it really means, "What do you want, you pathetic old hag?" [laughter] "Are you getting like that now too?", he asked. "Look Jack, face facts. Let's say the butcher meant no harm, Eddie. He's not so bad. He spends two hours coming to New York from Jersey, he spends two hours going back. I'm sorry for his long journey. I still mean it, he mustn't say that anymore."
GP: "Eddie", I said, "don't talk like that or I won't tell you what I want." "Whatever you say, honey, but what will you have?" "Well, could you cut me up a couple of friers?" "Sure, I will," he said. "I'll have a pork butt", said Jim. [cough] "By the way, we're doing a show at the city college this summer, not in the auditorium, in the biology lab, it's a new idea we had, and we had a fight for it. It's the most political thing we've done since scavenging." "Did I hear you say city college?", asked Eddie as he cut the little chicken's leg out of its socket. "Well, when I was a boy, a kid, what we called city college, you know, it was CCNY then, well, we called it 'Circumcised Citizens of New York.'" [chuckle] "Really?", said Jim. He looked at me. Did I object? Was I offended? "The fact that male circumcision doesn't insult me," I said, "however, I understand that the clipping of clitorises of young girls goes on to this day." Jim has a shy side. He took his pork butt and said goodbye. [laughter] I had begun to examine the chicken livers. Sometimes they are tanner than red, but I understand this is not too bad.
GP: Suddenly, Treadwell Thomas appeared at my side and embraced me. He's a famous fussy gourmet and I was glad that the butcher saw our affectionate hug. "Thought up any good euphemisms lately?", I asked. "Ha-ha-ha," he said. He still feels bad about his life in the language division of the Defense Department. A year or two ago, Jack interviewed him for a magazine called The Social Ordure, which ran five quarterly issues before the first editor was hired away by the Times. Here's part of the interview: "Mr. Thomas, what is the purpose of the language division?" "Well, Jack, it was organized to discontinue the English language as a useful way to communicate exact facts. [laughter] Of course, it's not the first or last organization to have attempted this, but it's had some success." "Mr. Thomas, is this an ironic statement made in the afterglow of your new idealism and the broad range of classified information that is made available?" "Not at all, Jack. It wasn't I who invented the expression protective reaction and it was Eisenhower, not I, who thought up while thousands of hydrogen bombs were being tucked into silos, not I who invented Atoms for Peace and its code name Operation Wheaties."
GP: "Could you give us at least one expression you invented to stultify or mitigate?" "Jack, I screamed, " stultify, mitigate, you caught the disease!" "Shut up," said Jack, and returned to the interview. "Well, I was asked to develop a word or series of words that could describe, denote any of the Latin American countries in a condition of change, something that would by its mere utterance neutralize or mock their revolutionary situation. After consultation, brain-picking and the daydreaming that is appropriate to any act of creation, I came up with "revostate." The word was slipped into conversation in Washington. It was just lingo for a long time. Even without seeing the monograph, the revolutionary peasant in Brazil today, even you pinkos use it, not to mention Wassermann's poetic article, "Rainforest, Stillwater and the Culture of the Revostate," which was actually featured in this journal. "Right on, Treadwell," as our black brothers joyfully said for a couple of years before handing that utterance on for our stultification or mitigation.
GP: Still, it's true. Thomas could have gone as far as far happens to be. In our time and generation, hundreds of ambitious jobless college students at the foot of his tongue on senior defense department recruiting day. But apart from cooking a lot of fish he has chosen to guffaw quite often. Some people around here think that guffawing, the energetic and the energetic cleansing of the nasal passage is the basic wisdom of the East. Other people think that is not true. Which reminded me, as we waited for the packaging, "How's Gussy?" "Gus, oh, she's into hydroponics. She got all this stuff standing around in tubs. We may never have to go shopping again." Well, I laughed and laughed. I repeated the story to several others before the day was over. I mocked Gussy to Jack. I spoke of her mockingly. And the fact is, she was already the wave of the future. I was ignorant. It wasn't my ocean she was a wave in. In fact, I am stuck here in my ripples and tides.
GP: Don't you wish you could rise powerfully above your time and name? I'm sure we all try, but here we are, always slipping and falling down into them, speaking their narrow language. But the subject, which is how to save the world and quickly is immense. "Goodbye, Treadwell," I said, "sadly, I've got to get some greens." The owner of our grocery was hosing down the vegetables. He made the lettuce look fresher than it was. Little drops of water stood on the broccoli heads among the green beady buds and were just the same size. "Orlando," I said. "Jack was walking the dog last week at 2:00 AM and I was out at 7:00 AM and you were here both times." "It's true. I was." "Orlando, how can you do that? How can you get to work? How can you live? How can you see your kids and your wife?" "I can't," he said. "Maybe once a week." "Are you alright?" "Yes." He put his hose... down his hose and took my hand in his. "You see," he said, "this is wonderful work. This is food. I love all work that has to do with food. I'm lucky." He dropped my hand and patted a red cabbage. "Okay," said Jack, "if you and Orlando are such pals, why aren't all these strawberries ripe?"
GP: He picked up a rather green eroded one. I invented an anthropological reply. "Well, Orlando's father is an old man. One of the jobs Orlando's culture has provided for his father's old age is the sorting of strawberries into pint and quart boxes. Just to be fair, he has to hide one or two greenish ones in each box." He said politely, "Ah." So we slept. His arms around me as sweetly as after the long day he had probably slept beside his former wife and by as well beside my etcetera, etcetera. I was so comfortable. Our good mattress and our nice feelings were such a cozy combination that I remember the song my friend Ruthie had made up about 10 years earlier to tease the time, the place, us. "Oh, the marriage bed, the marriage bed. Can you think of anything nicer? For days and nights, of years and years, you lie beside your darling. Your arms are hugging one another, your legs are twined together until the dark and certain day your lover comes to take you away, away, away."
GP: At about 3:00 AM, Jack cried out in terror. "That's okay, kid," I said. "You're not the only one. Everybody's mortal." I leaned all my softening strength against his skinny back. Then I dreamed the following in a kind of diorama of technicolour abstraction, that the children had grown all the way up. One had moved to another neighbourhood, the other to a distant country, that one was never to be seen again, the dream explained, because he had blown up a very bad bank, and in the dream, I was the one who told him to do it. The dream continued. No, it's circled itself widening into my old age. Then his disappearance made one of those typical spiraling descents influenced by film technique. Unreachable at the bottom, their childhood played war and made jokes. I woke. "Where's the glass of water?" I screamed. "I wanna tell you something, Jack." "What? What? What?" He saw my wide awake eyes, he said out, "What?" "Jack, I want to have a baby." "Ha-ha," he said. "You can't, too late, couple of years too late," and fell asleep.
[laughter]
GP: Then he spoke, "Besides supposed work, I mean suppose a miracle, the kid might be smart, get a scholarship to MIT and get caught up in problem-solving and God Almighty, and could invent something, more than any of us, worse than any of us, old dodos ever imagined," then he fell asleep and snored. I pulled the Old Testament out from under the bed where I keep most of my bedtime literature. I jammed an extra pillow under my neck and sat up almost straight in order to read the story of Abraham and Sarah with interlinear intelligence. There was a lot in what Jack said, because you know how that old story ends. Well, with those three monotheistic horsemen of perpetual bossdom and war, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. "Just the same," I said to softly snoring Jack, "before all that popular badness wedged its way into the world, there was first the little baby, Isaac. You know what I mean. Looking at Sarah, just like all our own old babies, remember the way they'd practice their five little senses?
GP: Jack, that Isaac, Sarah's boy, before he was old enough to be taken out by his father to get his throat cut, he must have just lain around smiling and making up diphthongs and listening, and the women sang songs to him and wrapped him up in such pretty rugs, right? In his sleep, which is as contentious as his waking, Jack said, "Yes, yes, but he should not have been allowed to throw all that sand at his brother." "You're right. You're right, Jack. I'm with you there." I
said. "Now, all you have to do is be with me."
__
RANDY: Grace Paley was born in 1922, in the Bronx, to Jewish parents of Ukrainian background and socialist commitments. Her first languages were Russian and Yiddish, and she began writing in the early post-World War II era, publishing her first collection of stories in 1959. Thereafter, she wrote short stories, taught at colleges and universities including Sarah Lawrence, Columbia, and Syracuse, and protested for peace, civil rights and women’s rights. She was State Laureate in both New York and Vermont, was twice married, and had two children. The 1994 edition of her collected stories was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Grace Paley died of breast cancer, in 2007.
Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA is a year-long podcast series that celebrates 40 years of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. It's produced by the Toronto Public Library. The Executive Producer is Gregory McCormick. This episode was produced by Gregory McCormick and me, Randy Boyagoda, with technical support from George Panayotou and Michelle De Marco, and marketing support from Tanya Oleksuik, and research support from Marcella van Run.
For more about Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA, visit writersoffthepage.ca where you will find links to the books mentioned in each episode and links to other relevant materials in TPL’s collections. For all of Toronto Public Library’s podcast series, check out tpl.ca/podcasts.
Music is by YUKA.
I'm Randy Boyagoda and we'll be back soon with another episode of Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA.