Just As I Thought

by Grace Paley

  I think it was the May Day demonstration of 1973. Barbara and I were among about fifteen hundred people who were arrested protesting the continuing, seemingly endless war. We were, in our group, the first to step into the street to stop the Washington traffic as it moved, continuing, we believed, the business of war. Thanks to the decision of a dozen enraged drivers not to kill us for some reason, we were simply arrested. Then gathered into police buses and distributed here and there. We were dropped off in an old football field (why old?), where a number of young people, declared anarchists, proved the virtue of undominated organizing by digging a latrine at once and creating a tarpaulin shelter with some tarps lying around the field. It began to rain. God’s little rain. Then it stopped and became quite cold.

  There were several hundred people who began, for warmth, to huddle in the edges of the shelter or lean into one another. Many of my students were there and naturally had forgotten their sweaters or by now lost them. To keep warm, Barbara and I walked arm in arm and talked and talked. Meanwhile, concerned helicopters flew over us and probably radioed information to other responsible means of transportation, which soon brought members of Congress into our football field. They seemed to worry most about the young people and the old people. At that time Barbara and I were somewhere in between and did not attract attention.

  Then our own tough New York congresswoman Bella Abzug appeared and came to speak to us. She wanted to know if we were okay, had there been any trouble? No, we were fine, just talking one of our first long personal talks.

  But it was getting cold. She gave us a rather long look. Barbara and I had had political differences with Bella—better to say differences about strategy or belief in electoral processes, and we were equally firm in our different views of civil disobedience as an appropriate, realistic response to the continuing war in Vietnam.

  Well, she gave us, the mud, and the rain a grinning look and said, “I guess you’re where you want to be and I’m where I want to be.”

  I’ve often told this story and learned with some amusement that she has, too.

  I’ve included Claire Lalone, my husband’s mother, and my conversation with her. There’s a painting of her in what I call our middle room (to get to any other room you have to walk through it). A young handsome woman of the 1920s, a French Canadian working-class girl who had a hard time and assumed she was supposed to. Who can forget her generosity, her lack of bitterness, her pleasure when, dying, she imagined the transformed lives of younger women?

  The Value of Not Understanding Everything

  The difference between writers and critics is that in order to function in their trade, writers must live in the world, and critics, to survive in the world, must live in literature.

  That’s why writers in their own work need have nothing to do with criticism, no matter on what level.

  In fact, since seminars and discussions move forward a lot more cheerily if a couple of bald statements are made, I’ll make one: You can lunge off into an interesting and true career as a writer even if you’ve read nothing but the Holy Bible and the New York Daily News, but that is an absolute minimum (read them slowly).

  Literary criticism always ought to be of great interest to the historian, the moralist, the philosopher, which is sometimes me. Also to the reader—me again—the critic comes as a journalist. If it happens to be the right decade, he may even bring great news.

  As a reader, I liked reading Wright Morris’s The Territory Ahead. But if I—the writer—should pay too much attention to him, I would have to think an awful lot about the Mississippi River. I’d have to get my mind off New York. I always think of New York. I often think of Chicago, San Francisco. Once in a while Atlanta. But I never think about the Mississippi, except to notice that its big, muddy foot is in New Orleans, from whence all New York singing comes. Documentaries aside, my notions of music came by plane.

  As far as the artist is concerned, all the critic can ever do is make him or break him. He can slip him into new schools, waterlog him in old ones. He can discover him, ignore him, rediscover him …

  Apart from having to leave the country in despair and live in exile forever—or as in milder situations, never having lunch uptown again—nothing too terrible can happen to the writer’s work. Because what the writer is interested in is life, life as he is nearly living it, something which takes place here or abroad, in Nebraska or New York or Capri. Some people have to live first and write later, like Proust. More writers are like Yeats, who was always being tempted from his craft of verse, but not seriously enough to cut down on production.

  Now, one of the reasons writers are so much more interested in life than others who just go on living all the time is that what the writer doesn’t understand the first thing about is just what he acts like such a specialist about—and that is life. And the reason he writes is to explain it all to himself, and the less he understands to begin with, the more he probably writes. And he takes his ununderstanding, whatever it is—the face of wealth, the collapse of his father’s pride, the misuses of love, hopeless poverty—he simply never gets over it. He’s like an idealist who marries nearly the same woman over and over. He tries to write with different names and faces, using different professions and labors, other forms to travel the shortest distance to the way things really are.

  In other words, the poor writer—presumably in an intellectual profession—really oughtn’t to know what he’s talking about.

  When people in school take their first writing classes, it is sometimes suggested to them that they write about their own experience. Put down what you see. Put down what you know. Perhaps describe a visit you have just had with a friend.

  Well, I would suggest something different. I would say, Don’t knock yourself out. You know perfectly well what happened when your friend Helen visited last Friday. This is great practice for a journalist and proper practice for a journalist. As for an inventing writer, I would say something like this:

  Now, what are some of the things you don’t understand at all? You’ve probably taken all these psych courses, and you know pretty well what is happening between your mother and yourself, your father and your brother. Someone in your family has surely been analyzed, so you’ve had several earfuls as well as a lot of nasty remarks at dinner. Okay—don’t write about that, because now you understand it all. That’s what certain lessons in psychology and analytical writing effect—you have the impression that you know and understand because you own the rules of human behavior, and that is really as bad as knowing and understanding.

  You might try your father and mother for a starter. You’ve seen them so closely that they ought to be absolutely mysterious. What’s kept them together these thirty years? Or why is your father’s second wife no better than his first?

  If, before you sit down with paper and pencil to deal with them, it all comes suddenly clear and you find yourself mumbling, Of course, he’s a sadist and she’s a masochist, and you think you have the answer—drop the subject.

  If, in casting about for suitable areas of ignorance, you fail because you understand yourself (and too well), your school friends, as well as the global balance of terror, and you can also see your last Saturday-night date blistery in the hot light of truth—but you still love books and the idea of writing—you might make a first-class critic.

  What I’m saying is that in areas in which you are very smart you might try writing history or criticism, and then you can know and tell how all the mystery of America flows out from under Huck Finn’s raft; where you are kind of dumb, write a story or a novel, depending on the depth and breadth of your dumbness. Some people can do both. Edmund Wilson, for instance—but he’s so much more smart than dumb that he has written very little fiction.

  When you have invented all the facts to make a story and get somehow to the truth of the mystery and you can’t dig up another question—change the subject.

  Let me give you a very personal example: I have published a small book of shor
t stories. They are on several themes, at least half of them Jewish. One of the reasons for that is that I was an outsider in our particular neighborhood—at least I thought I was—I took long rides on Saturday, the Sabbath. My family spoke Russian, but the street spoke Yiddish. There were families of experience I was cut off from. You know, it seemed to me that an entire world was whispering in the other room. In order to get to the core of it all, I used all those sibilant clues. I made fiction.

  As often happens when you write something else, a couple of magazines asked to hear from me. They wanted a certain kind of story—which I’d already done—

  But the truth of the matter is, I have probably shot my Jewish bolt, and I had better recognize that fact and remember it. It’s taken me a long time, but I have finally begun to understand that part of my life. I am inside it. I could write an article, I imagine, on life in the thirties and forties in Jewish New York, but the tension and the mystery and the question are gone. Except to deceive my readers and myself, in honor I could never make fiction of that life again. The writer is not some kind of phony historian who runs around answering everyone’s questions with made-up characters tying up loose ends. She is nothing but a questioner.

  Luckily for my craft—for my love of writing—I have come up against a number of other inexplicable social arrangements. There are things about men and women and their relations to each other, also the way in which they relate to the almost immediate destruction of the world, that I can’t figure out. And nothing in critical or historical literature will abate my ignorance a tittle or a jot. I will have to do it all by myself, marshal the evidence. In the end, probably all I’ll have to show is more mystery—a certain juggled translation from life, that foreign tongue, into fiction, the jargon of man.

  —mid-1960s

  Some Notes on Teaching: Probably Spoken

  A woman invented fire and called it

  the wheel

  Was it because the sun is round

  I saw the round sun bleeding to sky

  And fire rolls across the field

  from forest to treetop

  It leaps like a bike with a wild boy riding it

  Oh she said

  see the orange wheel of heat

  light that turned me from the

  window of my mother’s home

  to home in the evening

  Here are about fifteen things I might say in the course of a term. To freshmen or seniors. To two people or a class of twenty. Every year the order is a little different, because the students’ work is different and I am in another part of my life. I do not elaborate on plans or reasons, because I need to stay as ignorant in the art of teaching as I want them to remain in the art of literature. The assignments I give are usually assignments I’ve given myself, problems that have defeated me, investigations I’m still pursuing.

  1. Literature has something to do with language. There’s probably a natural grammar at the tip of your tongue. You may not believe it, but if you say what’s on your mind in the language that comes to you from your parents and your street and friends, you’ll probably say something beautiful. Still, if you weren’t a tough, recalcitrant kid, that language may have been destroyed by the tongues of schoolteachers who were ashamed of interesting homes, inflection, and language and left them all for correct usage.

  2. A first assignment: To be repeated whenever necessary, by me or the class. Write a story, a first-person narrative in the voice of someone with whom you’re in conflict. Someone who disturbs you, worries you, someone you don’t understand. Use a situation you don’t understand.

  3. No personal journals, please, for about a year. Why? Boring to me. When you find only yourself interesting, you’re boring. When I find only myself interesting, I’m a conceited bore. When I’m interested in you, I’m interesting.

  4. This year, I want to tell stories. I ask my father, now that he’s old and not so busy, to tell me stories, so I can learn how. I try to remember my grandmother’s stories, the faces of her dead children. A first assignment for this year: Tell a story in class, something that your grandmother told you about a life that preceded yours. That will remind us of our home language. Another story: At Christmas time or Passover supper, extract a story from the oldest persons told them by the oldest person they remember. That will remind us of history. Also—because of time shortage and advanced age, neither your father nor your grandmother will bother to tell unimportant stories.

  5. It’s possible to write about anything in the world, but the slightest story ought to contain the facts of money and blood in order to be interesting to adults. That is, everybody continues on this earth by courtesy of certain economic arrangements; people are rich or poor, make a living or don’t have to, are useful to systems or superfluous. And blood—the way people live as families or outside families or in the creation of family, sisters, sons, fathers, the bloody ties. Trivial work ignores these two FACTS and is never comic or tragic.

  May you do trivial work?

  WELL

  6. You don’t even have to be a writer. Read the poem “With Argus” by Paul Goodman. It’ll save you a lot of time. It ends:

  The shipwright looked at me

  with mild eyes.

  “What’s the matter friend?

  You need a New Ship

  from the ground up, with art,

  a lot of work,

  and using the experience you

  have—”

  “I’m tired!” I told him in

  exasperation,

  “I can’t afford it!”

  “No one asks you, either,”

  he patiently replied, “to venture

  forth.

  Whither? why? maybe just forget it.”

  And he turned on his heel and left

  me—here.

  7. Luckily for art, life is difficult, hard to understand, useless, and mysterious. Luckily for artists, they don’t require art to do a good day’s work. But critics and teachers do. A book, a story, should be smarter than its author. It is the critic or the teacher in you or me who cleverly outwits the characters with the power of prior knowledge of meetings and ends.

  Stay open and ignorant.

  (For me, the problem: How to keep a class of smart kids—who are on top of Medieval German and Phenomenology—dumb? Probably too late and impossible.)

  Something to read: Cocteau’s journals.

  8. Sometimes I begin the year by saying: This is a definition of fiction. Stesichorus was blinded for mentioning that Helen had gone off to Troy with Paris. He wrote the following poem and his sight was restored:

  Helen, that story is not true

  You never sailed in the benched ships

  You never went to the city of Troy.

  9. Two good books to read:

  A Life Full of Holes, Charhadi

  I Work Like a Gardener, Joan Miró

  10. What is the difference between a short story and a novel? The amount of space and time any decade can allow a subject and a group of characters. All this clear only in retrospect.

  Therefore: Be risky.

  11. A student says, Why do you keep saying a work of art? You’re right. It’s a bad habit. I mean to say a work of truth.

  12. What does it mean To Tell the Truth?

  It means—for me—to remove all lies. A Life Full of Holes was said truthfully at once from the beginning.1 Therefore, we know it can be done. But I am, like most of you, a middle-class person of articulate origins. Like you I was considered verbal and talented, and then improved upon by interested persons. These are some of the lies that have to be removed:

  a. The lie of injustice to characters.

  b. The lie of writing to an editor’s taste, or a teacher’s.

  c. The lie of writing to your best friend’s taste.

  d. The lie of the approximate word.

  e. The lie of unnecessary adjectives.

  f. The lie of the brilliant sentence you love the most.

  13. Don�
��t go through life without reading the autobiographies of Emma Goldman

  Prince Kropotkin

  Malcolm X

  14. Two peculiar and successful assignments. Invent a person—that is, name the characteristics and we will write about him or her. Last year it was a forty-year-old divorced policeman with two children.

  An assignment called the List Assignment. Because inside the natural form of day beginning and ending, supper with the family, an evening at the draft board, there are the facts of noise, conflict, echo. In other years, the most imaginative, inventive work has happened in these factual accounts.

  For me, too.

  15. The stories of Isaac Babel and the conversation with him reported by Konstantin Paustovsky in Years of Hope. Also, Paustovsky’s The Story of a Life, a collection of stories incorrectly called autobiography.

  Read the poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” by William Butler Yeats.

  * * *

  Students are missing from these notes. They do most of the talking in class. They read their own work aloud in their own voices and discuss and disagree with one another. I do interrupt, interject any one of the preceding remarks or one of a dozen others, simply bossing my way into the discussion from time to time, because, after all, it’s my shop. To enlarge on these, I would need to keep a journal of conversations and events. This would be against my literary principles and pedagogical habits—all of which are subject to change.

  Therefore: I can only describe the fifteen points I’ve made by telling you that they are really notes for beginners, or for people like myself who must begin again and again in order to get anywhere at all.