No Consolation: Navigating the Cliche in Grace Paley's ''The Hard-Hearted Rich''

Abstract

In a 1992 conversation, Grace Paley said of her prose, “I got my courage for the way I write stories from first writing poems” (Paley “The Art of Fiction” 188). Three years later, Paley explained that what she learned from poetry was “how to move language around, give it some zip” (Fromkorth and Opfermann 90). But this was not a unidirectional learning for, as she explained, the language of her poetry carried “that other language” that her prose taught her, “that language of family and street, that more human, daily language” (90). More specifically, it was a language that eschewed what Paley, in the same interview, referred to as the “too literary” quality of her earlier poetry, one which had made her reluctant to publish in that form until she had learned her “language of family and street.” Such a remark explains why Paley was known primarily as a short story writer of what Margalit Fox referred to as “pitch-perfect dialogue.” To put it another way, Paley's prose had achieved a fidelity to the daily language of the New York City of which she wrote – that of first generation middle- and eastern-European Jewish immigrants. These figures bring to the page what Deborah Heller calls their “poor but culturally rich backgrounds, revealing a verbal fluency, an exuberance, ease of impulse, and faith (at least while young) in the American promise of opportunity” (11). That faith was perhaps what underscored Paley's politics, particularly her opposition to the Vietnam War and her commitment to political art. Her politics ranged from the large-scale issues of war and violence against women to a deep commitment to the community. Indeed, Thomas Frank has suggested that this commitment puts Paley in the company of women writers who foreground the community (266). But Paley's deeper commitment, one that framed her politics, was to an alert relation to the world she constantly questioned. In her posthumously published Fidelity (2008), this language of the street, its orality, is palpable in first lines that stop us and pull us into a conversation that has already begun.1 The poet is the woman on the street who has understood that another pedestrian who has come alongside her is one who might listen, who might not be chased away by the intrusion of a stranger who turns to say, “you can't think without thinking something” (Paley, “you can't think without thinking something” 11), or “What a hard time / the Hudson has had / trying to get to the sea” (“Suddenly There's Poughkeepsie” 53), or “freedom has overtaken me” (Untitled 13). Or she is the woman who has opened her doors to more directly personal conversations that are also in progress and which, while maintaining a real boundary between her private life, family, and friends, entice a reader into the moral communality of political debate. This enticement to speak out on such subjects as the arms trade, labor policies, the trafficking of women, or the nervousness of nations or their rage also presumes an intimacy of social and political responsibility.